untying

Continuing with Sarah Schulman's Ties That Bind.

Again I have the experience from reading her books of seeing a truth I know re-affirmed from a very different angle.

I am often attracted to LGB people (and I don't mention Ts only by reason of limited experience) who I have found are idiosyncratic thinkers about life and society, in things small (what's a good book) and large (who's killing whom). Of course, there is no reason I shouldn't be, and I have the same attraction to free-thinking straights (by definition, not homophobes). But it's interesting to be a straight-ish man who's utterly pro-queer and whose best male friends are not straight, to look at some of his very close relationships with Ls and ask, not just why I've been close to them but also why have they been close to me?

The answer is that I really really like people who think things through. As a child I thoroughly, almost embarrassingly absorbed the conventions of my family and milieu, simultaneously thinking the world a very strange place to be living in. I have had to think a lot of things through in order for my world to be a place I can live in. And I think that a tremendous part of my liking for queers is that LGBTs have to think their way through quite a lot to make their world livable at all.

With the same simultaneous capacity, sometimes LGBTs are an us to me, and sometimes a them. It would be by no means a lie to describe myself as bisexual, but how true is it? I have had fun fooling around with men, I was certainly attracted to them when I was younger, during my twenties and thirties bi was the first word that I would use to describe my sexuality. However, and somewhat dismayingly, I found men less and less attractive over time while my attraction to women sustained. I had a lot invested in the queer-ness and cool of being bi. It was not easy for me to accept my non-central status on the Kinsey scale. But I really like telling the truth. And not only is my attraction to men near-invisible nowadays, I also think it would be arrogant for me to say "us" when talking gay. I haven't lived the life. As much as I can feel it and think it, I haven't lived the life.

The motto - It's a Black Thing. You Wouldn't Understand. - had a period of great mainstream circulation. A lot of white people resented it (and I won't even begin to analyze why because I do want this post eventually to come to an end). But I didn't. I've rubbed shoulders and more with black people, my reading is not circumscribed by race, I loathe racism and seek to root it out in the greater society and in myself - but I simply have not lived as a black American.

Anyway, I do tend to like the out Ls I meet, and when they like me in kind, I think it's because I realize they've had to think their way through to the place of relative sanity they're in, and my respect for that is evident. 

It's also true that most people, Ls, Gs, and even Ss, assume I'm gay when they meet me.

I tried to figure this out once. I had met a number of men at a new workplace who I assumed were gay and been wrong like, three times in a row. So I thought, what is this that's reading to me as gay? And the commonalities I saw were: well-spoken, courteous, non-primitive towards women. And if those are the things that lead people to class me as gay, I'm fine with that. (There's of course much more on an intuitive level going on.)

Usually I don't correct the assumption unless I feel the truth's at stake. When I do, my reasons are all the same and different: with Ls, because I know many straight men have weird agendas with lesbians and I don't want the relationship on a mistaken basis; with Gs, to let them know they're talking with a straight-ish comrade, maybe not one of them but unquestionably with them (there's that "them"); with straights, to let them (another "them" - exactly who is it that I really think I'm an "us" with?) know the truth, which includes being pro-gay or pro-queer, word-choice depending on which is going to do the most to push social freedom another fraction of an inch.

So here I've gone on and on. Why? Because from the moment I knew that I would be writing about Sarah and her books, I knew that I would not feel intellectually honest unless my particular wanderings across the spectrum were acknowledged here. For a number of reasons probably having to do more with the intimacies of NYC than anything else, I haven't been conversationally out to Sarah (hi, Sarah) as straight, gay, queer or other. It's not that I have to have a particular identity - but I do feel I have to be out as who I am.

That's not easy. Internalized homophobia is so pernicious. I was absolutely shocked to be reminded of this in a conversation I had at work yesterday, after writing and practically while revising the previous post. As I was talking with two fairly conventional male co-workers, I could see my mind take a sudden swerve to avoid a perfectly natural place to mention gay affiliation. (I won't be more specific because I'm horribly embarrassed and the kinship would suffer - the kin would be hurt - if I was.) What a motherfucker fear of shunning is! Maybe I was more vulnerable to the phobia because I had been thinking about it all morning, but it still was not my shining hour. There's another reason I hesitate to use "we" when I say gay - it's not an essential part of my sanity for me to show queerness in the conventional world - it only feels very urgently to be the right thing to do.

And here we are, where thought and feeling cross. The attractive quality I often see in queer folk, the one that I appreciate in myself, I've always described as thinking things through. I've often thought that every young adult who hasn't had to come out on some basis should be required to take a twelve-step program, whether addicted or not, just to make them, for once, think things through.

Because I think so much about thinking, it was a change of perspective for me to read in Ties That Bind:

The capacity for feeling, strong enough to overwhelm social expectation, is at the root of the homosexual identity. The transgression is what coming-out is all about. Without having experienced the coming-out process themselves, straight people often do not have a model for such a fierce level of resistance.

Feeling, says Schulman, not thought. Not the same as thinking. Something new for me to feel about.