Coming Out To Myself

Some people face a lot of hostility when they come out. They lose friends. Their parents disown them. They get beaten or killed.

I am not one of those people. All of my friends were super-cool; my parents were a bit weird at first (well, they still are sometimes), but they mostly got over it; I've been threatened, but never subject to physical violence. I've had the tremendous good fortune to live in queer-friendly communities.

I am very, very lucky. The biggest obstacle in my coming-out process was myself.

The hard part of coming out to myself was not actually figuring out my attractions. It was entirely clear to me quite early on that I did not want to have sex with boys and that I did want to have sex with girls. That, to be honest, was never in doubt.

That's why one older queer person's advice to me when I admitted my confusion about my sexuality – “Have sex with a guy and have sex with a girl, and see which one you like more” – was so profoundly unhelpful. Which one I would like more was definitely not the issue.

What was the issue – what I mean when I refer to “coming out to myself” – was deconstructing my internalized heterosexism.

By “internalized heterosexism,” I mean the deeply ingrained idea that straight is default and gay is Other. This idea pervades our culture like air, and is similarly taken for granted. I feel like a lot of straight people don't ever think about it.

Take my parents. They're good upstanding bleeding-heart liberals; they'd be horrified if anyone had ever suggested that they were homophobic. “We have gay friends!” they would say. “We'd never dream of saying there was anything wrong with being gay.” And of course they wouldn't; but they brought me and my brothers up with the assumption that we would be straight – that we would be like them. When we were small, they would talk about “one day when you get married,” “one day when you have kids.” My mother would give me unsolicited advice about dating men, which I would remember and be grateful for “one day.” And, sure, as we got older we were periodically told, “If any of you are gay that is totally okay,” but there was an almost dismissively hypothetically tone to it. If you were gay, we would be totally fine with that. But you're not, because being gay is something that happens to other people.

I honestly believed that. When I was a teenager, I would write shit in my diary like, “I'm not gay – I'm just homosexual,” because I couldn't be gay. Gay was Other; straight was default; to myself I am the ultimately default, and therefore I cannot be gay. The fact that I fit all the apparent criteria for being gay – 1. be gay; 2. oh wait that's it – was not sufficient for me to overcome the internalized heterosexism that told me I couldn't be gay. There must be some additional criterion, some test you had to take, some qualification you had to earn, some card you had to have… something that granted you gayness the way a power ring makes you a Green Lantern.

It took me a few years, but eventually I realized that there is no external criterion of gayness. There's no gay Guardians of the Universe, bestowing the quality of being gay on those who have proved themselves worthy. I had been unnecessarily problematizing my gayness by positing a false consciousness whereby the Otherness of “gay” required external validation before I could self-identify as such; but there is no difference between “I think I'm gay” and “I'm gay.” The only thing telling me there was a difference was my internalized heterosexism: the mechanism whereby gay was Other, and therefore Not Me. When I finally let myself participate in gayness – visiting websites for gay people, watching TV shows with gay characters, simply writing down “I am a lesbian” – I was able to dissolve that mechanism. Goodbye, internalized heterosexism. Hello, self-actualization.

It was tremendously freeing, letting all that deeply ingrained ugliness go like so much dust in the wind. Now I just have to figure out how to do the same thing with my internalized cissexism.

Prog-Rock Theology

When I was a child, I had a much easier time relating to people of my parents' generation than my own. Other kids were cruel and demanding, and half the time I had no idea what they were talking about.

Did you ever read that book About A Boy? With the nerdy twelve-year-old who listened to his mother's records and was isolated from his peers and their pop culture? When I read that book, also at age twelve, I identified with the protagonist to a painful degree. This was a text that understood how important pop-culture touchstones are: how, if your touchstones are completely different from those of the people around you, you might have a very hard time making friends.

The book ends with the nerdy kid declaring his hatred for his erstwhile favorite musicians and going off with his friends to, like, listen to Nirvana or something (it was written in the mid-nineties). I myself have never reached the point of disavowing the dad rock I grew up on – I adore the Who and Pink Floyd and Peter Gabriel and Rush, and I have no intention of ever apologizing for that ever – but I have discovered the value of generational touchstones.

I embarked on this process maybe seven or eight years ago, when I relinquished the shackles of parental indoctrination and started to take television seriously. Since then, I've been an unabashed pop-culture junkie, and (coincidentally or not) I've also found it a lot easier to make friends my own age.

Just because you're compensating for who you used to be, however, doesn't mean you lose continuity with that person; and sometimes you experience moments so thoroughly of your past that you have to pause and take stock of how you got from there to here.

I had one of those moments the other day, during a classmate's presentation on the religious element in Jethro Tull's Aqualung.

This classmate, being of my parents' age, spoke of the personal resonance of a record that came out at the very moment when she, as a young teenager, was beginning to seriously question the faith of her religious upbringing. At a time in her life when she was querying the assumptions she'd always taken for granted, and finding the institutional church frustrating and inadequate for her needs, Aqualung was a locus of meaning and a source of spiritual significance.

This makes perfect sense to me. I too began to question my religious upbringing at age eleven or twelve, and I too found enormous meaning, far beyond anything I could have hoped to articulate, in the music I loved at that age – specifically, in English prog-rock concept albums of the 60s and 70s:

Tommy

Dark Side of the Moon

The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway

Tales From Topographic Oceans

I don't know if I consciously made the connection at the time, but all of these records tackle explicitly religious or existential themes. They're fundamentally about the Big Questions, and, for a young teenager obsessed with Big Questions of identity and purpose and the nature of life, they provided a site of engagement with these questions in a way that the formal religion in my life at the time did not.

After I had spoken up in class to this effect, three other people of my own generation spoke in turn, and they all said that their experience had been the exact opposite. Church had been, for them, a haven of meaning and spiritual nourishment in the face of the relentlessly superficial pop music of their childhoods.

I realize that this sample is skewed. I'm studying at a seminary, so naturally there will be a higher than average proliferation of people who do ultimately have use for the institutional church. But it's still interesting to me that the prog-rock concept albums of my dad's record collection could provide a space for doing theology in a way that the bubblegum radio pop of the nineties and early aughts apparently could not.

Hello, Culture Shock, My Old Friend

I've undergone transcontinental relocation enough times to know better, but I honestly thought this time would be different.

This time, I was in my twenties – old enough to cope; not like when I was a child, trying to grow up at the same time as adjusting to new places.

This time, I was moving to from the UK to the US – a paltry cultural difference. Was I not a connoisseur of American TV/movies/internets? Had I not lived from the ages of one to seven in Alabama? Surely I was entirely prepared for all aspects of life in the States.

This time, the decision was wholly mine – not dictated by my parents (whose choices, admittedly, I don't recall ever objecting to, and sometimes actively encouraged). I'd never wanted anything more than I wanted to move 5000 miles west and take my rightful place as a grad student in ~California~.

And, of course, it really did seem that way at first. I instantly felt as though I fit in. School was everything I hoped it would be. New friends were abundant and wonderful. The weather was gorgeous. For about three months, it was like being ever so slightly drunk all the damn time.

For the past three months, though, it's been more like being ever so slightly hungover all the damn time. This is literally textbook culture shock, and it's really stupid that I wasn't prepared for it. I just... thought it would be different.

I thought it would be easy, because I was comparing it to the last transcontinental upheaval. That was when we moved from Kenya to Scotland, which is a hell of a cultural transition. That was when I was thirteen, which is a hell of an age. In comparison, this move should have been a cakewalk.

I thought it would be easy, because I imagined that I would be used to this by now. I am a third culture kid. Wanderlust runs in my veins. I crave new places. Not for me the desire to be settled. Not for me the need to feel from somewhere. Not for me the constant belittling comparisons of the new place with the vastly superior place where I last lived. Me, I positively revel in the fact that everywhere on Earth I am a stranger in a strange land. You can't feel homesick if nowhere is home.

I thought it would be easy. I was wrong.

Open The Book

“And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

Except they did say something to someone – we're reading it. By existing, the last sentence of Mark contradicts itself.

Mark's Gospel ends on the Greek particle gar. That's not grammatically sound. You don't end a sentence on gar. The sentence is not over.

They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid; then, evidently, because this text exists and you are reading it, they mastered their fear and said something to someone. Something: this text, Mark's Gospel, the empty tomb. Someone: you, the recipient of this text. You have to deduce the rest of the sentence – “then they mastered their fear and said something to someone” – for yourself. The ending of Mark's Gospel makes you finish the sentence. It makes you carry on the story.

If there's one message to be gleaned from all of Jewish and Christian scripture and tradition, it is this:

Keep interpreting.

Genesis opens with two non-identical creation accounts. The New Testament begins with four non-identical gospels. Throughout the Bible, as in rabbinic midrash and churches' teachings, there are doublings and recapitulations, glosses and rewrites, the same story told over again but differently. You can't reconcile the differences between alternate versions of the same story. You aren't supposed to.

The ambiguities, the discrepancies, the omissions: they're there so that you can interpret, and keep interpreting. What you must never do is stop. If you declare one particular interpretation to be singularly authoritative and let it rest there, you leave the text lifeless in the tomb. A text lives as long as you interpret it – as long as you read it and retell it and explore it and criticize it and learn from it. If you are afraid to let the text live – afraid to open yourself to the possibility that the text might change you – you will have nothing to say to anyone, and you may as well have left the book unopened.

Keep reading. Keep telling the stories. The stories will change, and the readers will change. This is good. This is the point. Keep interpreting.

Master your fear. Say something to someone.

Back To Green Gables

These days I don't reread; there are too many books and not enough time. When I was a child, though, it seemed to be the other way around, and my favorite books got revisited as often as my favorite albums and my favorite movies. Books that are in tatters on my shelf are engraved in my memory, as deeply and comprehensively as the events of my own life: His Dark Materials and the first three Harry Potters and The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler and Anastasia Krupnik and Matilda and The Phantom Tollbooth...

What makes rereading interesting is that you change. The words on the page might stay the same, but each rereading is a different textual encounter – you've changed, and so the text you read has changed too. This was abundantly clear to me in my devoted twice-yearly rereading of His Dark Materials throughout my teens (oh, what did you expect, “geek” is right there in the blog name), when each read-through was granted new depth by something that had happened to me in the preceding six months: some allusion brought to my awareness by my other reading, or some emotional resonance heightened by a personal experience. Every single rereading gave me a better understanding of both the book and myself, and I marveled at the apparent infinitude of meaning I could mine from the text.

In the same way, I marvel at the freshness of my most recent encounter with a beloved childhood book. I just finished rereading Anne of Green Gables, on a whim, for approximately the eight billionth time, and it was a remarkably new experience. I read this book literally dozens of times as a child, but I have never read it like this before.

The first thing I noticed is how completely female-dominated the story is. From the opening paragraph, focalized through the formidable Rachel Lynde, to the whole farcical setup of cohabiting siblings Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert accidentally adopting Anne instead of the boy they wanted, it's made quite clear that this a story of women.

There are maybe three male characters of any significance in the entire book, and they're all striking for what they are not. There's the schoolmaster, whom Anne hates and whose role is completely overshadowed by his replacement, Anne's passionately beloved teacher Miss Stacy. There's Matthew, whose quietness and passivity contrast strikingly with the active and opinionated women around him – Rachel Lynde, Marilla, Anne, Josephine Barry... Actually, it's possible to read Matthew as an explicit example of queer masculinity. Check out his response to Anne's asking him whether he ever went “courting”:

‘Well now, no, I dunno’s I ever did,’ said Matthew, who had certainly never thought of such a thing in his whole existence.

Queer as a fish. Welcome to the club, Matthew.

And then there is Gilbert Blythe. Ah, Gilbert Blythe. Can I just state for the record how hard I ship this particular OTP? I love that Gilbert doesn't get easily forgiven for being an asshole just by apologizing, but has to be ignored by Anne for a long time: he's the one at fault, so the reconciliation isn't on his terms. I love that Anne doesn't become friends with him after he saves her from the river, but (her own love of sappy romance stories notwithstanding) defies the “damsel in distress falls into her rescuer's arms” narrative. I love that she is at least his intellectual equal, if not his superior, and the first five years of their acquaintance are characterized by fierce academic competition.

What I'd forgotten, though, is the fact that the reconciliation takes place on the third-to-last page of book. The charming courtship and marriage I remember so fondly occurs entirely in later books. Throughout this book, Gilbert's presence is an absence. Anne refuses even to let his name pass her lips. She is far more concerned with her female friends, the “kindred spirits” – a phrase I'm still prone to using, much to the bafflement of people who never read this book growing up.

As a child, I naturally identified strongly with Anne. Although I certainly had none of her charm or popularity, I saw aspects of myself reflected in her prodigious imagination, her desire to be good but inability to control her temper or impulses, her constant getting into scrapes. Plus, you were supposed to identify with her. She was the protagonist, wasn't she? Her name was right there in the title.

Now, however, I'm struck by how much I relate to Marilla, the older single woman who takes it on herself to raise Anne right. (Matthew is told not to interfere, on the ridiculous premise that “Perhaps an old maid doesn’t know much about bringing up a child, but I guess she knows more than an old bachelor.”) Marilla is opinionated and judgmental; she doesn't know what to do with her emotions, and expresses affection by being kind of an asshole. All of this I can personally identify with, but I don't think it's just me. I think this is intended to be Marilla's story just as much as Anne's: the story of the transformation of her life brought about by Anne's presence in it.

After all, many of the mistakes Anne makes can ultimately be traced back to Marilla's own errors (the liniment cake, getting Diana drunk, the incident of the amethyst brooch), and by the book's end Marilla has grown and changed at least as much as Anne has. She has learned how to be – not a parent, that is made very clear, but – a person guiding and taking responsibility for another person, and growing in self-knowledge as she does so. Toward the beginning of the book, Marilla scolds Anne for her unconventional prayers and her deeply personal (“positively irreverent”) exegesis of a picture of 'Christ Blessing Little Children'. Toward the end, on Anne's departure for further education, she “wept for her girl in a passion of sobs that appalled her when she grew calm enough to reflect how very wicked it must be to take on so about a sinful fellow creature.” Her professed theology hasn't changed, but her lived theology – how she relates to other people – couldn't be more different. She is the same person, and yet she is changed beyond recognition: much like the adult reader returning to a beloved childhood book.

There's No Crying At Disneyland

“Disneyland [is] an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the artificial perimeter.”

– Baudrillard, Simulacra & Simulations

“There's no crying at Disneyland!”

– Parent/guardian to grizzling toddler in a Disneyland restroom, last Wednesday

I went to Disneyland this week, and I spent the whole time thinking about Baudrillard and marveling at the astonishing racism on display – thoughts that coalesced into a slight obsession with the question: Why do we go to Disneyland?

Baudrillard fingers Disneyland as the quintessential iteration of the simulacrum and the hyperreal: the artificial representation of reality that becomes more real than the real, to the point that reality as such no longer exists. (I had my most dizzyingly simulacrumtastic moment on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, when it occurred to me that I was on a ride based on a movie BASED ON THIS SAME RIDE.) We all know going in that Disneyland is thoroughly artificial, and from this knowledge we (falsely) extrapolate the converse: that what is not Disneyland is not artificial; that reality exists. Is that why we go to Disneyland? For reassurance, however false it may be, that reality is real? But if we know that this reassurance is false, why do we still go there?

Maybe I read too many dystopian novels as a child, but I find something profoundly creepy in the enforced cheerfulness of Disneyland. Enforced cheerfulness is sinister enough when it's enforced in pursuit of explicitly spiritual aims, but when it's undertaken on a massive scale for the sake of commodification, commercialization, and unchecked consumerism, it's flat-out sickening. It's sickening because it tells us to suppress our awareness of the exploitation and oppression that undergirds the Disney-industrial complex. “Don't think about sweatshops and pollution and racism,” it says; “you're in the most magical place on earth!”

How one could fail to think about the racism, at least, is beyond me. The Jungle Cruise is one of the most astonishingly racist things I have ever experienced (and I grew up in a more or less neo-colonialist environment in East Africa). The official website proudly describes it thus:

“Depart civilization from a forgotten Victorian loading dock. Crossing continents and oceans, you'll explore exciting rivers around the world — including the Amazon of South America, the Nile of Africa, the Irrawaddy of Southeast Asia and the Ganges of India.”

Cringing yet? There's the conflation of, like, all of Asia and all of Africa in some textbook-Orientalist mashup of ~the exotic~; there's the framing of the West as “civilization”, in implied opposition to the primitive/barbarian/uncultured/wild; there are some truly horrible (neo-colonialist) stereotypical representations of ~the natives~ (including some Unfortunate Implications so breathtaking, I'm flabbergasted no one involved in the design and creation of the ride noticed them). I mean, it's not as though I was unaware of Disney's slight racism problem; but, because most of the really blatant racism has been whitewashed out of Disneyland (which in itself is not unproblematic), the massive unconcealed racefail of the Jungle Cruise was particularly appalling to me.

And yet it's Small World that really encapsulates the Disney ethos, in all its (utterly clueless) obscenity. Once I'd gotten past the giggle fit induced by noting certain similarities, I realized that, at its core, the message of Disney is really: “Diversity lies in the external trappings, beneath which we are all as one [in our relentless desire to purchase Disney products].” That, I think, is the great philosophico-cultural lie of our time – that diversity is skin-deep, and underneath we're all the same. It's not that we don't all share a certain fundamental humanness – to deny that is just as bad – but to insist on (and commodify) the sameness is to reduce the differences, to fail to respect alterity, and ultimately to perpetuate the power differentials of the status quo. It's nothing more than a salve for the oppressor's conscience, a way of empathizing with others just enough so that we can kid ourselves the world isn't in need of radical change.

I'm not convinced that the simulacrum always and necessarily has to function this way, to make perpetuating oppression palatable to the oppressor's conscience. Even if it does, I believe that it is possible to deconstruct it and be aware of what's going on; but that involves always being on your guard, always fighting it. And is your resistance meaningful if it's only ideological? I gave Disney my money. I showed up. Does it matter that I spent the whole day thinking critically about the many awful things going on, if financially and physically I supported them?

This continued failure to put my money where my mouth is – is this just the kind of acceptable compromise with the kyriarchy that we all have to make all the time because we live here, or is it straight-up hypocrisy? Consuming stuff critically is better than consuming it uncritically, but either way I'm consuming, consuming, consuming. And perhaps I go to Disneyland to seek what I know to be a false reassurance that this is okay, because otherwise I couldn't live with myself.

Stay Angry

I'm obsessed with Trayvon Martin.

I don't understand why everyone isn't obsessed with Trayvon Martin.

This is so fucking fucked up.

I thought maybe, after a day or two, my rage might die down a little. But instead it's increased. And I'm glad of that.

We should all be absolutely furious. We should all be shouting our fury from the goddamn rooftops.

I'm glad of the white-hot anger that burns in me. Anger at Trayvon Martin's murderer, who gunned down a 17-year-old boy for the crime of being black. Anger at the entrenched systemic racism that has thus far kept the murderer from coming to justice. Anger at the entrenched systemic racism that made this murder possible in the first place. Anger at the people making excuses for this travesty of justice, and at the people standing by in silence, and at the people who participate, directly or indirectly, in the systems that perpetuate injustice. Anger at myself.

A common conservative argument against postmodernism is that it leads to moral relativism. Funnily enough, the more deeply I delve into postmodernism – as I deconstruct everything, including myself, to the point that I don't know which way is up any more; as my theology grows ever more convoluted, abstract, and self-contradictory; as I despair of ever finding any meaning in the text other than my own projections – in all this mess, my sense of right and wrong has never been clearer.

This is fucking fucked up.

God, keep us angry. It's all we have.