BEHIND THE CRICKET PAVILION AND THE BICYCLE SHEDS: I’d like to thank everyone who has offered commentary (whether critical, complimentary, or both) on my “Not Exactly Natural” post below. Here I will ramble through my thoughts on the various replies. This post will be both unusually theoretical and extraordinarily disorganized, because a) I don’t have time to organize it and b) I’m still trying to figure out what I think of all this. So, forewarned is half an octopus. Let’s go.
RASHOMONOLOGUE. In any life there are many possible narratives that could make sense of that life. The memories we dwell on are easier to remember; consequently they play a greater role in shaping our later lives; and so we assign them importance, in retrospect, that they perhaps did not hold at the time we experienced them. We build our selves through the stories we tell ourselves.
And so I think it is a perfectly valid question to ask why I choose to tell myself this story, the queer story, rather than other possible stories. Why not present my early sense of alienation as the alienation of a smart girl, or a lonely girl with a temper? Why Richard Ellmann’s biography of Oscar Wilde, rather than Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden? And really, why think about it at all, rather than Moving On?
Well… I can think of a few reasons.
First, most obviously and least interestingly, I chose all those florid metaphors of rhyming and lockpicking in the prior post for a reason. I read all kinds of stuff about other specific forms of alienation that I could also be said to share–but I only read those books once. (Well, I exaggerate. I never read anything once. But I didn’t return to them quite as obsessively.) I really couldn’t trouble myself to care too much about, or sit up nights thinking on, Meg Murry or whoever. (I don’t even rightly know who the relevant characters would be.) Whereas Dorothy Allison, Derek Jarman, even pop junk like Genet, all seemed handcrafted just for me, and I paid out countless hours obsessively turning their works over and over in my mind.
Then, too, the initial post (like the “mask of command” post) was prompted by thinking about my writing. I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways in which the specifically queer alienation has shaped the way I write–the things I notice, the themes I return to, the ways I talk around subjects. I don’t know that I can articulate any of the effects especially well. I haven’t figured a lot of it out yet. But I do know the influence is strong and lasting. And working out some of these effects (e.g. the ways in which I notice and respond to sensual detail, or the kinds of suspicion that come easily to me) has helped me understand my characters and sharpen my writing instincts.
And finally, all cultures, I suspect, idealize and prettify some forms of sin. But they pick different sins for different reasons. It’s worth exploring what SSA, in this culture at this time, feels like, in order to better understand a) the culture itself–why has it picked “homosexuality” to value? why has it taken these experiences and slapped this label on them?, and b) SSA itself–what about these experiences made them fodder for a political and cultural movement at this time and in this place? I don’t see this as especially different from trying to figure out what the courtly tradition of idealizing adultery tells us about medieval courts, about eros, and about marriage and adultery.
DOUBLE ENTENDRE. It’s also true that “homosexuality”/same-sex attraction/queerness serves as a code for other and deeper alienations. I think this is true of virtually everyone with a strong and early history of SSA. You come across the same scene over and over in the autobiographies (including, I note for the polemically inclined, Jonathan Rauch’s [in Gay Marriage] and Andrew Sullivan’s): Before there was any sense of sexual difference, there was a dug-in, abiding sense of exile, of aloneness, of having been cut off from some needed love. Rauch, Sullivan, and I later ended up linking this sense to our sexual and romantic attractions. I suspect that there is some reason for that–this was not merely a random coincidence on our parts. I also suspect that although this linkage was encouraged by our cultural context (including in the ways that culture tried to discourage and denigrate homosexuality), it was not as if culture was somehow imposing homosexual attractions that weren’t there.
But the sense of exile comes first. When I was little I had all these little knickknacks, china cats and clay unicorns and so forth, who lived on the top of my dresser drawer. They had their own village. One of them, a pale, yellowish plastic soldier, always stood at the very edge of the dresser, facing away from the village; for something he’d done (I think his crime changed now and then as I forgot what it was supposed to have been), he was never allowed to return to his hometown or even look back at it. (Yes, I read The Man Without a Country at an impressionable age, why do you ask?) He could only come home when a delegation from the village came out to retrieve and redeem him.
I hope it is obvious how this small plastic soldier relates to my willingness to believe in the Fall of Man. I hope it is at least becoming somewhat clearer how my “queer story” made it easier for me to understand that Christianity was true, that the world described by my Catholic friends (and by St. Anselm) is the world I knew. I was, of course, very resistant to a God Who told me I couldn’t do whatever I wanted to do; but I had always this reminder that I didn’t really trust my wants, and that I knew something had gone wrong. I began to suspect that the queer alienation could not be explained away as the results of “homophobia.”
So yes, homosexuality often serves as code or stand-in for other exiles. But it isn’t only that; it’s also itself. Even when it starts entirely as code (if it ever does), eventually the mask sinks into the skin.
WHATEVER YOU SAY, SAY NOTHING. El Camino Real has a response to my post with which I must say I can’t agree. Stuff in bold is ECR, stuff in plain text is me: “…But I’m beginning to think that, in the context of day-to-day living, it is a mistake to self-identify as someone with same-sex attractions.”
I would have a better sense of whether I agree with this if I knew whether we were using “identify” in the same way. I think of myself as a journalist. Also as a writer. Also as someone with a very vicious temper that needs to be checked. And also as bisexual. All of these are “identities” in very different ways, though. If I didn’t think of myself as someone with Wrath Issues, I suspect I’d be a lot worse about actually controlling my temper. Thinking about myself as “someone with same-sex attractions” isn’t like thinking about myself as a journalist (since it’s obviously a temptation to sin, whereas journalism is only a near occasion of sin!), nor is it like thinking about myself as someone with a violent temper (because queerness has shaped my life much more than anger has).
I don’t believe anyone should think of himself as essentially characterized by sin or tendency to sin. But I talk about things all the time that aren’t part of my “essential” identity (which would be what, really, other than “child of God”?).
More: “There are two primary reasons for this. First, homosexuality is not something that normal people should be thinking about on a regular basis one way or the other. It is especially not something children should be thinking about. It follows that forcing other people to confront one’s personal sexual disorders is probably not the most charitable way of interacting with them.”
Really, what is one to say to that? I am sorry that by writing a weblog I have forced y’all to confront my personal sexual disorder. (And is it worse for “normal people”–which are who, exactly? Which sins count as “normal” sins?–to think about other sins that don’t attract them? Should angry people never write about their tempers, since calm people might be reading?)
“Second, as has been discussed before in these pages, knowledge of homosexual temptations is a serious impediment to same-sex friendships. By self-identifying as someone with SSA, a person is severely limiting prospects for friendship with heterosexuals. Deep and lasting friendships do not require that one ever discuss what is best reserved to the confessional.”
I assume ECR is saying that widespread discussion of same-sex attraction makes it more likely that people with some minor degree of it would begin to notice that attraction and reinforce it. That’s almost indisputably true. But I wonder if he realizes that he’s ceding the entire cultural battleground to people with a radically false view of SSA. If the only people who get to talk about it are people who think it’s just dandy… isn’t that much more likely to lead to a reinforcement of SSA?
I’ll also note that I can’t really imagine a deep and lasting friendship in which matters for the confessional were never discussed. This rule would also preclude publication of e.g. St. Augustine’s and Dorothy Day’s autobiographies… not that I’m, you know, comparing myself to them! But still.
I think I have fewer problems with his last paragraph, so I won’t bother quoting it; you can of course find it here.
SHADOWS ON THE CAVE WALL: Finally, as the last tangle of yarn in this disorganized post, I should note an interesting issue that one of my readers brought up. He writes, “Is it possible that [pretty girls in their summer dresses] are just objectively beautiful, like a great painting, capable of being marveled at by persons of either sex? Of course you could claim that you react to them the same way a man would — but (a bit of throat-clearing here, not meant to be patronizing but probably coming off that way — sorry!) how could you know what that is, at the level of particularity necessary to make this a life-defining claim? I had male friendships sufficiently intense and exclusive that outsiders called us ‘gay’; we didn’t care, because we knew we weren’t, and we knew we weren’t because we knew our relationship, though emotionally intense (I’m talking age 13, 14 here), was not at all oriented toward guy-on-guy sexual expression. I totally join you in deploring the way ‘”real love” in this formulation is always sexual’ — but if a same-sex friendship is emotionally intense yet non-sexual, do people who experience them need to think of themselves as homosexual?”
There are a couple different issues here, but they all center on the question of how you know whether an attraction is sexual or not. There are, as he says, emotionally intense same-sex friendships that aren’t sexual–and some that are rightly characterized as “romantic” but not sexual. Intense, jealous, inseparable, prone to folie a deux, yearning, obsessive–all that good stuff–but not always, necessarily, sexual. Plus, as he rightly notes, girls = pretty! So how do you know that what you are experiencing is what is called “same-sex attraction,” rather than intense friendship or aesthetic appreciation?
This strikes me as basically a philosophy-of-language question. We learn what words like “sexual” and “romantic” and “lesbian” and “desire” mean through culture, through literature, through the entire complex matrix of language. Is what I feel like when I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes “the same” thing a man feels? Well, first off, which man? I think there are some guys, and some male authors, who have described similar feelings in ways that sound like descriptions of my experience; and others whose descriptions strike me as “interesting, but that’s not really how it is for me.” In my own fiction, as far as romantic life goes, I think I’m slightly more like Peter Ware (“Getting Fired”) than like Charles (“Judge Me, O God”)–but then, I’m not much like Laila or Suha (“Desire”) either.
But as to the phil.-of-lang. question, I can only know what name to call my experiences the same way everyone else does. How do “straight” men tell the difference between women who are “good-looking, but not my thing” and women to whom they’re attracted? How do people in general tell the difference between philia and eros? Well, we talk to other people, and we read books and listen to songs, and we discern the meaning of words. I don’t see that this process would be radically different for same-sex attractions.
CAULDRON OF ILLICIT LOVES: And now to your email. I’m just posting excerpts, which is why these will seem kind of choppy. Nothing that follows was written by me (except some brief stuff in brackets).
Reader #1: What gripped me was that [the initial post] resonated with my own high school experience — of being a CONSERVATIVE: the sense of isolation, pride tempered by apprehension of others’ reactions, and those Quentin-Crispian moments when you meet Another One….
From this phenemenon of isolation-plus-elite-recognition comes — you saw this a mile away — hardening of identity. Being a conservative becomes what one lives, breathes, is. Maybe this is why, as [mutual friend] once said, “the two groups most given to imitating their own stereotypes are conservatives and gays.” Thank God that Catholicism came along to provide me with an alternative platform from which I can judge conservatism itself.
Reader #2 notes the standard gay-activism contradiction: Invariably [my friend] would either say that his being gay was such an inconsequential part of his life that I shouldn’t care about it either way or that, conversely, his homosexuality was such a huge and intrinsic part of his nature that to hate it was to hate him.
Reader #3: What about people who don’t identify as “queer” but all the same do have sexual relationships with their own sex? I’ve known quite a few people like this–usually women. A one-time co-worker had many love affairs with women but resolutely insisted she was heterosexual. In fact, she never quite confessed to me, though she hinted. I heard it from one of her female lovers.
Do you think that any of this might have to do with the difference between male and female homosexuals, or even the difference between men and women? Camille Paglia thinks that male homosexuality may be the result of, not a gay gene, but an artistic gene. Masculinity is eroticized by artistic boys as they yearn for male acceptance. (Rejection by fathers doesn’t have to be part of this scenario, although
it often is.)
There is a very good piece on men, male violence, and the need for fathers, in an old edition of First Things. It’s by David Gutmann. Perhaps you know it already? Although it’s not directly concerned with homosexuality, it led me to think about the problem of the Absent Father and the sexual and emotional confusion it causes in men, and to a lesser degree in women.
[Eve says: Fascinating stuff. One quick comment: I suspect the homosexuality/artistry connection may work both ways, as sexual difference prompts heightened awareness of personal interactions and heightened introspection and fantasy life.]
Eve Tushnet
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