Assimilation Lunch

Abby: The other day on the Huffington Post, I saw something about Kim Kardashian “outing” a U.S. Air Marshall on Twitter, and I wasn’t sure what an Air Marshall is, but I assumed he was some kind of military person or something, if it was a big deal to out him.  I read through the article and there was nothing about him being gay, and I realized that the author was using the expression to mean disclosure of any kind of private status. That’s part of what assimilation is; letting them take parts of our culture and use it to mean whatever they want.

Sloan: Yeah, and it’s not even close to the original meaning... In that Michelangelo Signorile book he talks about media silence about the sexuality of public figures who were openly gay, that the point of “outing” was at least in part to break the media’s silence about queerness and address their failure to report any facts that would reveal that somebody is gay, because gayness was not something to talk about in public.  The practice of outing was not always about shaming homophobic/hypocritical closeted gay people but initially was about the media making our lives invisible and unspeakable.  It was not just revealing something secret but pointing out homophobia.

A: Of course words always change meaning over time, but what this made me think about was gay marriage.  And how we seem to have only two choices: assimilate and let them take whatever they want from our culture, or refuse and continue to be treated as outcasts.  In my class the other day we were discussing Tiger Woods’ apology. Somebody insisted that all professional athletes cheat, and another student responded, “Not all of them- some of them are homosexuals.”  Students laughed at the idea of gay athletes. That statement almost makes me want gay marriage to be legal, because at least then straight people would have to acknowledge that our relationships aren’t so alien, or less important.

S: And the professor did nothing, right? So now we are in a position where we are supposed to choose between exile and execution, between being shunned and being acknowledged but suffocated. And just like in any subculture, there will always be people ready to relinquish their uniqueness in exchange for belonging, in order to feel fully human and end the pain of invisibility.  But it won't work.  If we keep trying to attain equality only through similarity and conformity, we'll just end up losing our identities but still being considered less than human.  Sarah Schulman talked about this at the Kessler Lecture, that we’ve mistaken tolerance for love and lost sight of what we actually deserve.