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<\/a><\/pre>\nWhat do John Howard Griffin<\/a>, Barbara Ehrenreich<\/a>, Timothy Kurek<\/a> and Rachel Held Evans<\/a> have in common? What do they have in common with Natalie Reed<\/a> and \u201cThomas,\u201d<\/a> an anonymous subject of Kristin Schilt\u2019s research on gender inequality in the experiences of transgender men in the workplace? What about with ex-fundamentalists like Libby Anne<\/a> and me? They\u2019ve all lived outside the privilege markers assigned to them at birth: some intentionally, for the sake of research or activism, and some in the course of living their ordinary lives. What interests me today is why these experiences have provoked such markedly different reactions.<\/p>\n First, here are some of the similarities that seem to run across the board:<\/p>\n Living outside one\u2019s assigned group is complicated, emotional, often dangerous, and controversial. As a daughter of the Christian patriarchy movement, I can relate to all of the five points above in my transition away from the fundamentalist life. But there are questions that aren\u2019t asked of me when I write about my journey but\u00a0are<\/em> asked of some of the others, especially questions about legitimacy. Here are some examples of the ambivalence of living and writing outside the group one is born into.<\/p>\n This week, the story broke of a straight, evangelical Christian who spent a year living publicly as a gay man<\/a>. His name is Timothy Kurek, and the result of his quest is a memoir titled The Cross in the Closet<\/a>. \u201cBeing\u00a0gay\u00a0for a year\u00a0saved my faith,\u201d Kurek says. As for his fundamentalist upbringing? Not so much. Kurek broadcasts the fact that he\u2019s left those prejudices behind to become an LGBTQ ally.<\/p>\n Suspicion<\/em>. That\u2019s an immediate and common reaction to Kurek\u2019s project, one that I felt instantly when I read the first news report this week. \u201cWhy do we need a straight guy to tell us what it\u2019s like to be gay? Shouldn\u2019t we be listening to gay men themselves?\u201d I thought.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t just me. Amy Lieberman writes on Feministing<\/a>,<\/p>\n Kurek totally admits that he only experienced a tiny portion of the discrimination that gay people face every day of their lives, and I appreciate that he realizes that. How much harder is it to face discrimination when you actually identify as a gay person? Instead of being an attack on who you\u2019re pretending to be (like in Kurek\u2019s case), it\u2019s an attack on who you actually are. \u2026\u00a0<\/em>I feel for the gay community of Nashville, and for every person who trusted Kurek enough to flirt with him, hang out with him, and confide in him about their lives. If I were in that community, I would feel so betrayed right now.<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Pamela Hogeweide<\/a>, who reviews Kurek\u2019s book on Amazon, shared a similar feeling of initial unease:<\/p>\n I have held the concept of this book at a distance since I first heard about it. Lying about being gay as a social experiment? I wasn\u2019t sure I could endure reading a book that retells the tale of lying about sexuality in order to make a point.<\/em>But then I read the book. And I discovered that Timothy Kurek was not conducting a social experiment, but was on a quest, a deeply personal quest to identify with a community of people he once abhorred and condemned<\/strong>. Perhaps in some ways it was also a quest of penance to redeem himself from his past homophobia. The stories he tells certainly thread together into a tapestry of renewed thinking and changed perspective.\u00a0<\/em>Even though I had my qualms about Tim concealing who he really was even to family and friends in his quest of discovering \u201cthe other,\u201d his storytelling reveals that he was experiencing what many gay citizens around us already know : that concealing who you are is detrimental to your soul.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Crossing a privilege boundary is paradoxical: at once intensely solitary and hopelessly embedded in community. You might lose all your friends and make new ones. Your family might abandon you or embrace you in your new identity. The common thread that seems to run through the critical responses to Kurek is this: What gives you the right to cross a boundary like that, deceive and betray the trust of people around you, when you aren\u2019t serious about your professed identity? In other words, if you\u2019re going to put your community through the hell of figuring out what to do with you, you\u2019d better\u00a0really mean it.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n But there\u2019s more to it than that. People who deliberately give up privileges for the sake of understanding their absence incur suspicion because, well, they had privileges to give up. Their difficulties are voluntarily assumed. They can pretty easily be discarded again. People who don\u2019t start out with those privileges can\u2019t just pack up and leave if they don\u2019t like their place in society. And then there\u2019s the privilege inherent in book-writing: why should the privileged classes need one of their own to translate the lives of the underprivileged before they start listening? Who authorized that impersonator to speak for the truly underprivileged? Doesn\u2019t the fact that the author\u00a0isn\u2019t<\/em> \u201cone of us\u201d only reinforce the tendency of power to dehumanize those with less of it?\u00a0<\/strong>Nobody wants to feel like a National Geographic \u201cpoverty porn\u201d<\/a> special.<\/p>\n I felt this way when I read Nickel and Dimed<\/a> by Barbara Ehrenreich as a working-class teenager paying the bills as a verbal abuse sponge at Wal-Mart. Why was I reading a book by a privileged adult white woman with a bank account and a writing job, when that book was about\u00a0my\u00a0life<\/em>?! Could a woman who periodically tapped into her emergency fund really understand the peril of never having had one? Could a woman who had previously had top-notch health insurance understand the pain and shame of decades of never seeing a dentist? How could she understand the accumulated heaps of debt that put cracks in our family relationships and layered callouses on our hearts from loss after loss of home, pets and property? How could she understand the point where worry stops and an indifferent numbness sets in? When apology breaks down and a primal rage takes its place? She might be able to crunch the same numbers we did, but she was never really living in\u00a0our world<\/em>. So how dare she be our<\/em> spokesperson!<\/p>\n It\u2019s been years since I\u2019ve read that book. Although my thinking has become more complex, it\u2019s hard to shake that gut reaction. It\u2019s tough to accept that books like these have a role to play but that\u00a0I am not their target audience<\/em>. At least not when they\u2019re about experiences I\u2019ve had. Books like Ehrenreich\u2019s and Kurek\u2019s aren\u2019t for<\/em> poor people or gay people. They\u2019re for everybody who doesn\u2019t understand poor people or gay people. And, well, it\u2019s a bitter pill to swallow when you realize that \u201ceverybody\u201d might never listen to you without a mediator from their own midst.<\/strong><\/p>\n Timothy Kurek\u2019s saving grace, according to Ms. Hogeweide, is his humility. In this case, humility means knowing that the book you write isn\u2019t objectively \u201cabout\u201d the people you encounter, but about your reaction to them. Kurek writes about his own change of heart, the eradication of his prejudice \u2013 in the same way that I tried to do in my homophobia series<\/a>. Neither he nor I deserve gold stars for learning to overcome our prejudiced programming (come on, where\u2019s my \u201ccongratulations on being a decent human being!\u201d card?!). Both of us hoped, though, that talking about the opening of our minds would help other people learn to open theirs, or at least offer some handy tips to people on the front lines who are trying to open the minds of others.<\/p>\n\n