national coming out day
Although I'm out in my day-to-day life, it occurs to me that I've never posted anything here that has anything remotely to do with my being queer. I've never given that fact much thought, but suddenly I wonder whether I've deliberately avoided the topic.
What could I be afraid of? Rejection, I suppose, is the easy answer -- but what a ridiculous fear given the overall friendliness and open-mindedness I've encountered in this corner of the blogosphere, and especially given the powerful presence of transdada just a link away. Perhaps it has to do with the expectations that go along with a label like "gay" or "queer" -- that I should be witty, lighthearted, neat, fashionable, a good dancer in both literal and metaphorical senses of the word; that I should, like every gay male poet or writer that I've ever been in a workshop with, forgo the philosophical for the pragmatic and write in narrative. (And why does it seem that queer women do all the cool stuff like make experimental art, talk theory, and form punk rock bands?) Maybe it's a fear that someone out there will think I'm trying to play the "victim" card (if such a card even exists outside of reactionary fantasies) -- i.e, that my writing and ideas just plain suck but that I hope to get them noticed by calling myself queer.
And then I'm thinking back to a recent post on Eduardo C. Corral's blog consisting of quote from Langston Hughes which equated a young author's desire to be considered "a poet" instead of "a Negro poet" with a subconscious desire to be white. Does my fear of being pinned to a label such as "queer" feed off of an analagous self-hatred?
Lest that be the case, consider me out. Here's a history of National Coming Out Day, from the HRC website.
7 Comments:
welcome...
I think there are many difference between being an activist, and identity, and activist writer, a writing that incites, and something not that but queer... if you go back to the kinsey report... many many more folks are queer...
I am gender queer, I am trans something or other... I also happen to write, and I am an activist and I try to incite...
peace now.
k
kari,
thank you so much - for your kind words to me, for your queer/gender-queer words, for your poetic words, your activist words, your inciting words, your words . . .
in my own writing/life i think it will be awhile before i learn to put it all together (or take it all apart), but knowing that it's been done (being done) makes it seem so much less remote of a possibility . . .
jay
Jay,
I totally forgot about National Coming Day. It used to be a big part of my life in college. Our campus GLBT group had a pink door & frame that we would pluck on the lawn of the library every NCO day. We would take turns walking through the pink door. O, silly days of youth...
Thanks for your comment, Eduardo. Our campus LGBT group had a door as well and we, too, set it up in a public place for people to walk through. (I wonder how widespread this practice is!) I recall the question of "who gets to keep the door until next year" as quite divisive . . .
When I hear somebody defining somebody else's being ("poet", "queer", "straight", "sportive", any adjective really), I cannot help thinking of Sartre's concept of consciousness: "Consciousness is a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of nothingness
of its being". All adjectives should refer to behaviours rather than 'essence'. There is not a poet, there are poems, there is not a 'queer' there are behaviours defined as 'queer'.
... so when yous say "Does my fear of being pinned to a label such as 'queer' feed off of an analagous self-hatred?" my interpretation is that your reluctance has to do, perhaps, with the awareness that the preoccupation of crystallizing behaviours in essences has something dubious.
Perhaps, the desire to claim an essence or identity and so on, is an undue tribute paid to the prejudices against homosexual behaviour. On one hand, one establishes a form of unnecessary 'justifying' determinism ("the homosexual behaviour is acceptable because there is an 'essence'"). On the other hand, by accepting the idea of essence, a 'queer army' can be formed to claim rights from the 'straight ones'.
All the 'labels' appear to respond to a logic of finding justifications for free acts as if freedom needed a justification. But the fact that an act is free, does not make it wronger than a determined act. An act 'becomes' wrong only with reference to a system of values.
The definition of essences ('poet', 'queers', 'straight', 'sportive', 'rocker', whatever) is perhaps meant to reassure the community against the unpredictable outcomes of the unknown, the non-determined, and to claim a right that is not accorded to freedom but to determinism.
A reassurance against freedom. If we know we are determined, then the future opens itself with a less dreadful amplitude of possibilities. Also, if we know we are determined, then we can have an alibi for immobility.
Thanks very much for your thoughts, Joe. Don't have time to respond in any detail right now, but will get back to you. Those are very good questions . . . though I don't think they describe the whole picture (i.e., it's true that identity politics can become stifling and re-enforce the kind of thinking that produces irrationally prejudicial value systems, but I think there are other interpretations one can give to such self-labelling gestures).
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