The Other Other

Sitting around the Thanksgiving table last week, a friend was telling of his experience moving from New York to Southern California.  He said that he was shocked when in L.A. his Latino heritage became his defining identity when in New York it was being gay that defined him.  I thought this was fascinating because I realized that what makes me different from my family and from the society and culture in which I grew up is only that I am gay.  My otherness, in other words, comes from my sexual desire and not my race, ethnicity, class, or any other marker by which society classifies.   It is the gay part of my white, male, middle-class existence that makes me stand out from my family and my society.  This made me wonder whether this singular otherness made it more difficult for me to adjust, or whether those people who possess multiple points of otherness better understand the fluidity of identity, or if this was even the way to understand my relationship to the power structures that depend up sameness and otherness for their power.

When we meet people for the first time, most of us make instant judgments; it’s difficult for us not to since our society is predicated on the identity groups we each represent.   Before actually speaking with me, people I meet see that I’m a white, middle-age man, who dresses in a slightly conservative fashion, who is bald, and of average build.  With this basic information, most people make the assumption that I’m straight.  I say this not because I think I’m particularly butch (I don’t think of myself in that way), but because almost inevitably the new encounter will ask me about my wife, especially if this new person is a man.  Consequently, I have to tell this new person that I don’t have a wife but I do have a husband.  This moment is almost always uncomfortable for me and for this new encounter.  For me it feels like coming out of the closet over and over again.  For the new encounter, it is uncomfortable because he has to spend some time readjusting his assumption about what he first saw in me.

From listening to my friend at Thanksgiving, he has a similar experience with his ethnicity.  He doesn’t look Latino, whatever a Latino is suppose to look like.  Or, as he says, he’s a light-skinned Latino and so can pass in the way that we understand passing from Zora Neale Hurston as being seen as white when one isn’t.  My friend’s ethnicity is not transparent, nor is his sexuality.  So that when he encounters someone new he has these two points of otherness that must be negotiated. 

On the other hand, for people whose difference is readily apparent—for most women say—they have to contend with an entirely different set of assumptions that we apply to gender.  And if that woman also happens to be a lesbian and non-white, then these multiple categories constitute, I think, multiple ways of interpreting who she is.  What I don’t know is whether these multiple points of otherness make women or Latinos or underserved populations or anyone else who looks different better able to negotiate the different expectations that are placed on them, or whether these fluid identity markers make it harder to negotiate society, constantly having to worry about what identity you have to be in any given instance.

But maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way.  Our sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, gender are only markers that society has identified as significant categories—ones protected by the law.  But we are complex creatures who deploy different parts of our identity depending on the situation.  At work, I’m a Dean and this very official title codes me with a certain set of expectations that relate to the way people relate to power.  In this blog, I’m a writer who’s concerned with the question of gayness.  When I’m around my family, I’m a son and brother who is heavily coded with the events of my past.  To David, I’m a husband who, at times, drives him crazy but who also gives love and support.  To our neighbors in the small town upstate where we own a house, we are urbanites (or citiots as some of them like to say).  Each of us already possesses multiple points of otherness that we deploy in any given situation and which are encoded on us by society.  We pass and we stand out.  We hide and we make declarations. 

It seems too much to ask that we be taken as the sum of our complexities, or at least that we be given the space to allow for a certain amount of fluidity in our identities.  If it proves too difficult for us to see each other in the full accompaniment of our points of otherness, maybe we can at least acknowledge that no one is ever just what they appear to be.  Those primary traits that have come to define us are only the starting point of far more interesting people who lie beneath our surfaces.

Thanksgiving

It's Thanksgiving, again.  A few weeks ago, my mom asked if we were coming home to Indianapolis ... again.  We're not, of course.  Instead we're heading over to friends’ house to have Thanksgiving with other sons who won't be heading home to celebrate with their families.  On Thanksgiving Day, I'll talk to my mom and she'll joyfully lament that she cooked for 30+ people, which constitutes my immediate family—my brothers and sister and their children and now their grandchildren.  She'll talk gleefully of the 30lb turkey she cooked, and the large bowl of mash potatoes and the corn casserole, which is my favorite, and the canned cranberry sauce that nobody really likes but which she feels is important to set on the table, and the pies she has baked.  My mom is 81 and still she pulls out all the stops when it comes to Thanksgiving.

My absence will be noted by my mom, and maybe my dad, but my siblings will be too busy with their families to ask if I'm going to show up, or maybe they've come to assume that I won't since I haven't for so many years.

When my brother Mike was alive, we used to plan our trips back to Indianapolis together with the idea that we could support each other in confronting them.  Not a confrontation, really, but rather an uncomfortable presence.  We were so alien to them.  We lived on the East coast, a region they associated with liberalism and corrupt morals.  We lived, in their view, as bachelors without commitments or ties.  When the family gathered, Mike and I sat and observed as our siblings fussed with their children, telling them to play nice, correcting their bad behaviors, encouraging them to help with the clean up.  We had so little to do with their lives and they had so little interest in ours.  At least Mike and I had each other to make Thanksgiving seem less awkward.

With Mike gone, I feel less and less inclined to be the odd man out, to sit by myself and watch my family celebrate the idea of family, the primacy of their individual families. 

When my sister finally reconciled with the idea that I was gay, the one thing she felt most sorry about was that I'd never experience the joy of having children.  Even though many gay couples have children and there was nothing preventing David and me from having children if we wanted to, what she really meant was that I'd never have the kind of family that our family valued above all else.  My family is most thankful for the many blessings they've received in having children and I just didn't fit into this equation.  For them, this holiday is a feast of the family, and a recognition that their traditions will be carried on by their children and their children's children for generations to come.

When I first met straight couples who’d chosen not to have children, I was at first shocked—how could they not?—and then thankful that their choice helped me to dismantle that imperative to sire babies that was so much a part of my upbringing, and the cornerstone of my family’s value system.  It was a long time before I could value my life in and of itself, apart from the role of father that I was meant to play. 

I rarely go back to Indianapolis for the holidays; instead, I prefer to spend them with David and our friends, who are thankful for the lives we have made outside the confines of that much hyped nuclear family that has a hard time understanding the value of any other life.

The Center Cannot Hold

Last week in the New York Times there was an article titled, ‘Gayest Place in America’ written by Jeremy W. Peters.  I usually don’t like articles with question marks in their titles, a trend that allows the writer to make any proposition in order to grab a reader’s attention, but a proposition which you quickly realize holds no water: ‘Is the End of the World Neigh?’ – no, but read this article about insecticides anyway.  Peters’s article looks at the gay community in Washington, D.C., which, he claims, is the gayest place in America because its per-capita gay population is 10%, larger than the per-capita gay populations of such well-known gay urban centers like San Francisco or Chicago or New York.  The problem with this claim, of course, is that D.C. is so small compared to these other urban centers that the percentage is almost meaningless.

Never-the-less, D.C. is a pretty gay place as I experienced when I lived there in the late 80s.  Most of the gay population then was concentrated in the DuPont Circle neighborhood in much the same way that the gay population in San Francisco was located in the Castro, Chicago’s in Boystown, and New York’s in the Village. 

What I did like about Peters’ article, though, is his description of D.C. today when the gay population has spread beyond DuPont Circle and now inhabits most of the district, or at least the Northwest quadrant where most of the white professionals live.  Indeed, DuPont Circle—like the Castro, Boystown, and the Village—is overrun by arriviste and young mothers and recently relocated suburbanites who want to be at the center of the action.  Little do they realize, though, that the center of the super chic gay life has already moved on and moved out. 

As gays and lesbians become more and more accepted, our need to ghettoize has become less and less important.  We feel comfortable living anywhere.  (This is not necessary true, however, for our trans- members for whom the protection of the collective is still needed in order to protect themselves from society’s scorn and our neglect).  As the gay ghettos are dismantled the real question we have to ask ourselves is what is the fate of the communities that inhabited those ghettos.  In other words, what is the fate of the gay community? 

In large part we formed communities in the Castro and Boystown and the Village in order to affect political and social change.  And we’ve been really successful at affecting those changes.  Those of us old enough to have been part of the gay communities in the heyday always knew the danger of achieving our goals.  We wanted to be treated equally.  We wanted to be as much a part of the fabric of America as anyone else.  And once we did, we knew implicitly that the need for community, the need for the gay ghetto, would disappear.  This is what is happening all across America. 

Indeed, when I venture down into Chelsea these days, which is so rare, I feel incredibly out of place with the boys who walk around hand-in-hand.  I feel as if I’ve stepped back in time.  I feel so disconnected from the gay community that I don’t see its purpose anymore other than as a political action group that lobbies congress and our local governments to improve our lives through legislation.  But to live openly as gay … well, we can pretty much do that anywhere now.  Granted that some places are more hospitable than others, but a young gay kid today doesn’t need to live in a specifically designated area in an urban center to feel connected and/or protected.  They can live openly in many, many cities and towns and villages across America.

In researching his article on ‘the gayest place in America,’ Peters interviewed older gays.  These men recounted what it used to be like in D.C. where closeted gay men working in government were constantly looking over their shoulders to see who might spy them at J.R.s, the neighborhood gay bar that was just down the street from where I lived. 

In our fight to gain our rights, we must also recognize that those rights and that acceptance spells the end of the ghettos we built to survive and perhaps the communities we created in order to protect ourselves. I don’t think this is a bad thing. 

Next, however, I’m waiting for the reaction from within the gay community.  I’m waiting for that string of essays and memories and novels that romanticize the gay past in much the same way that so many conservatives romanticize that lost America that never really was.  I’m waiting for that ache to return to a moment in our history where we felt united against a common enemy, where we shared common goals of overcoming oppression, and where we gathered on the weekends in bars and discotheques to celebrate our uniqueness, our diversity, and our fabulousness.  A world that existed only for those few who lived and loved to live in the gay ghettos of San Francisco and Chicago and New York.  For the rest of us who never quite fit into those places, the dissolution of the gay ghettos feels less nostalgic and more necessary.

Building Narratives

I believe in the power of narrative.  The stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell others about ourselves have the ability to convey truths or perpetuate lies.  We build narratives in order to make sense of the world, of our pasts, and of our hopes.  But in creating these narratives, we necessarily must exclude events and peoples and other stories that cloud and distract.  What concerns me most are those elements we disenfranchise in our need to build narratives that are meant to conform.

I was trained as a literary critic, and as such I was taught to find those voices that were not represented or were suppressed in texts or in the standard readings of those texts.  In particular, I was interested in examining how accepted readings of Shakespeare—and other 16th & 17th century writers like the poet John Donne—ignored or actively repressed the homoerotic.  For example, in The Merchant of Venice the relationship between Antonio and Basssanio is highly homoerotic, a reading of the play we readily accept today but which throughout most of literary history critics have denied.  Instead, they have gone to great lengths to cast this relationship in purely platonic terms: they are just good buddies who really love each other.  My job has been to trace the way in which this narrative of the play developed and how it was perpetuated.  But my job has also been to show that the way we now talk about this play engages in a similar repressive tactic that earlier critics used. 

If you can bear with me in this didactic exercise for a few more sentences, I want to show you how a pro-gay reading of The Merchant of Venice acts as an exclusionary narrative.  When we say that Antonio and Bassanio are gay—or that Shakespeare is for that matter, or anyone else prior to the 20th century—we're not being honest.  The term 'gay' didn't exist to identify same sex desire before the 1950s.  Even if we were going to say that they were homosexual, that term didn't exist prior to the mid-19th century.  Nobody was gay or homosexual in the Renaissance.  You can argue that I'm engaging in a game of semantics, but by insisting that literary characters or historical figures are gay or homosexual, we are covering over a complex history and identity that allows for much more fluidity than our current narratives about Shakespeare or history or identity allows. 

The late French philosopher Michel Foucault is very famous for saying that 'the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.’  That is to say, before the 19^th century sodomy was a term used to describe a sexual activity, but via the rise of science, we turned sexual acts into identity markers.  In our modernity, we have insisted that personality traits or acts or physical features be categorized so that everyone can be easily understood via a set of presumptions and stereotypes.  Your ethnicity determines a set of characteristics you are meant to possess.  Your economic class another, along with your gender and your nationality and your physical appearance, etc.  And if you’re gay you are meant to fit within a set of expectations: effeminate, gym-fit, hypersexual, emotional, creative, etc.  These modern narratives act to categorize people, but also act to tell people how they should act.  For example, if you are gay not only do you wear the latest designer labels, but you are also expected to wear the latest designer labels whether you want to or not.  These are the cultural narratives that you are meant to conform to, and if you don’t you are ostracized. In other words, these modern narratives discourage or don’t allow for alternative narratives, for people to act differently than they are expected to act. 

                                                                                                       

This was certainly true for me growing up in the conservative culture of the Midwest where our social narratives dictated that boys act like boys, that they be athletic and outdoorsy and conformist and religious and, of course, straight.  But the great thing about narratives is that they can be changed.  They can be edited or rewritten or simply thrown away.  This is the personal project that I've been involved in for a number of years now. To rewrite the narratives that have informed my life, from those that others wrote for me to those that I write for myself.  I've been doing this mentally and literally for awhile now by teaching myself to think differently than I was taught to think, and by writing and publishing books and essays (and this blog) that are meant to put out there The Story of My Life (as written by me)—with apologies to that great musical team Bartram/Hill.  

So much of this project to build my own narrative involves being post-modern in the way I reject our need to classify and categorize everything and everyone.  To be post-gay in the way I understand the role my sexuality plays in my identity.  And to be, even, post-me in the way I want my personal narrative to be more flexible and fluid.