Abigail Ottoman

Sloan: How old were you when you came out?

Abigail: I was always attracted to boys and girls, and for a while I thought everyone was like that. At eighteen, I knew I was queer, but I only came out to a few people. I had my first girlfriend at nineteen and came out to my family. It was horrible; my parents cornered me and asked me lots of questions. My mom was really disappointed and things were tense for a while, but she and I have continued discussing sexuality for the last fourteen years, and she’s come a long way. Now I take her to queer film screenings and Gay Pride.

SL: What was it like to be queer then?

AO: Since I was under 21, I wasn’t able to go to gay bars.  The only other way to meet queer people was through activism, so I joined this social/political group at the William Way center call Grass Roots Queers. The people were at least a few years older than I was, so, I didn’t really make friends but everyone was very caring toward me. I usually ended up collecting tickets and doing this and that at events. They wouldn’t let me drink at the parties, so I was very conscious that they saw me as a kid, but they were very supportive.  There wasn’t any way to look for people my age who were queer except at school, and I went to a commuter college in the suburbs that was pretty straight, though I did meet my first girlfriend there.

SL: Coming out and becoming an activist are almost inseparable experiences for me too.  Was there a gay student organization at your college? 

AO: There was a listing for a gay organization in the campus directory, but when I tried to find out about meetings, I found out it was inactive.

SL: It was the same at my college.  There would be a table set up for the gay group at campus events, but no one would stand behind it or even near it.  How did you go from being a young queer activist to being a professional dominatrix?

AO: I was looking for some kink and glamor. I did it because I felt like it, and had no idea that I would continue doing it for so many years. It just seemed like something fun to try.

“How did you get into this?” is something that everybody has asked- clients and acquaintances alike. I think the question is more interesting than the pat story I’ve told hundreds of times, so I’ll spare you. While everyone’s origin story is unique, there are basically two types of story: I took up sex work from a place of empowerment and curiosity or I took up sex work out of desperation and powerlessness. People want to know which category my story fits into so that they can either comfortably ask for titillating details or feel scandalized and superior. It isn’t a neutral question.

SL: Good point.  Tell me about your shows at Charlie’s Dream?

AO: Charlie’s Dream was a sex emporium, where you could buy movies, magazines, sex toys in the front, then in the back you could see girls in a peep show, and there was a bar with a stage for sex shows, and then there was a theater where we did our show on stage.  It was small stage with theater seating.

Our shows were very dramatic, each one had a very specific role play theme and yet usually ended the same way, with some sort of dildo action whether they began as I would be wearing a diaper being baby sat by a mean babysitter or I would be a patient in some sort of sex hospital or what have you.  Office and school scenes were my favorites.  It was me and another woman who is still in the business and we did our show on Saturday afternoons for about six months.  Our last show was a vampire theme.  We used red lights and I was covered in fake blood and I drank all these shots of vodka before the show.

SL: I loved Charlie’s Dream. I will never forget that place. I think it was kind of my dream too.  But while that show lasted 6 months or so, you spent years doing sessions with clients in various venues.   What is something you learned from this larger experience?

AO: One of the most important- and least talked about- parts of sex work is doing consultations with prospective clients. For me, it involved walking into a tiny consultation room, sitting down across from a complete stranger, and starting a conversation that was intimate yet professional. I had a few minutes to find out (or figure out) a client’s fantasy and immediately match his enthusiasm for it, while expressing professional competence, confidence, and sexiness in a way that was calculated to appeal to that particular client. Being able to communicate well by listening, making eye contact, asking questions, and smiling is more important than knowing intricate bondage or how to use every piece of equipment possible. Expertise is important for maintaining a regular clientele, but you have to have communication skills first and foremost.

SL: What was the work itself like for you?

AO: I did dirty things all day and intermittently hung out with a bunch of other women who were into hanging out and doing dirty things.

I was just thinking about this today-- I collaborated with people on creating situations in which they could focus solely on sexual pleasure. I got to be with so many different people while they were having an orgasm, which is a really special time to have with people. I didn’t have to deal with any other aspects of their lives or emotions, just their desire for and expression of pleasure.

I was very choosy about the kind of clients and sessions I wanted, and I was lucky enough to make enough money that way.  I preferred some clients to others and some activities to others, but I was very aware of that. I was lucky in that I was able to be choosy enough to tell clients that I didn’t think I was right for their fantasy if I didn’t want to do what they wanted. Of course, it wasn’t always so simple; sometimes I needed to take clients I didn’t like or connect with, but I was careful about making compromises I could live with, which I imagine is part of every job. I got to sit down with people and talk about how to create the most fulfilling hour of their day, and then carry out the plan. To spend my workday that way was amazing.

SL: What kinds of things happened in your sessions?

AO: Fetishes, fantasy role-play, bondage, dominance and submission, etc.  I did things that are as weird, disgusting, sadistic, and humiliating as anything you can think of, but I was always focused on honoring my clients’ wishes as respectfully as possible.  Sometimes it also meant doing very silly or vanilla activities.

There are so many ways to explain what professional BDSM is. People always want to know if it’s prostitution, and every dominatrix says no, but it’s actually a really challenging question. There’s a judicial checklist of financial and physical situations that in various combination are illegal, but the items on the list are extremely vague, so one session you might be doing something that is considered prostitution and the next you may merely be committing tax evasion.

I could give you a long list of alternately titillating and disgusting activities, but I’d rather say that I worked with clients on negotiating and fulfilling their (often secret) desires. Feeling pleasure may be easy, but expressing the truth about what you desire- talking about what you want, how you want it, and what kind of person you want it to be with, can be very difficult for people. We’re taught that a very narrow range of feelings, thoughts, sensations, and activities are acceptable. Everybody is turned on by something that others might find strange.

ACT UP NEW YORK: ACTIVISM, ART, AND THE AIDS CRISIS 1987-1993

The exhibition chronicles New York’s AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) through an examination of compelling graphics created by various artist collectives that populated the group, including Gran Fury, Silence=Death Project, Gang, and Fierce Pussy. The exhibition also features the premiere of the ACT UP Oral History Project, a suite of over 100 video interviews with surviving members of ACT UP New York that offer a retrospective portal on a decisive moment in the history of the gay rights movement, 20th-century visual art, our nation’s discussion of universal healthcare, and the continuing HIV/AIDS epidemic. The exhibition ACT UP New York provides an opportunity to reinvigorate a debate around the realities of HIV/AIDS today, and about the links between visual art, political activism, health, and human rights.

In October I went to Cambridge and saw the unprecedented exhibition ACT UP NEW YORK: ACTIVISM, ART, AND THE AIDS CRISIS 1987-1993.   I took a lot of pictures in order to include them here as a treat for friends who are too far away or otherwise unable to make the trip.  I feel so grateful that I was able to visit and fortunate to know both co-directors of the ACT UP Oral History Project through my involvement with MIX NYC.  I am not sure that I would have been aware of the exhibit otherwise.

On the way to Cambridge I was thinking back to the time I called in to the Brian Lehrer radio show and talked to the woman who screened the calls that day, World AIDS Day.  I was not on the air, but I was telling her that Brian Lehrer has been talking for 20 minutes about whether or not the “stigma of AIDS” has decreased without once mentioning homophobia, without naming the fact that Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome was originally called Gay Related Immune Deficiency.  I was literally choking on the words, saying this was all wrong, historically inaccurate, an inexcusable omission.  Where else do we think that stigma came from?  She said she would let Brian know.  I am no expert on this history but at least I know what I remember...

A central theme of the exhibition is the intersection of art and activism, and much of the exhibit amounts to an archive of visual activism and oral history.  The exhibit spans two separate galleries. The first gallery contains the ACT UP Oral History Project and some large-scale visual art, including a fabulously wheat pasted women’s bathroom by Fierce Pussy.  The upstairs gallery has a timeline of milestones, films installed on a loop with a single bench to sit and watch, and a display of posters and stickers.  There are also some prints of the original posters available for visitors.  The film installation includes work by DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activists) and United in Anger: A History of ACT UP by Jim Hubbard, co-founder of both MIX NYC and the ACT UP Oral History Project.

Upstairs, I got totally caught up in the film installation and found myself watching it in its entirety.  One of the films included an expose on the biased media coverage of the 1989 ACT UP and WHAM! (Women’s Health Action and Mobilization) Stop the Church action at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Watching this transported me back in time.  It made me realize that even within the incredibly homophobic coverage of the action, enough truth squeaked through to have a powerful impact on my life’s direction.  This is no overstatement.  I was a kid and learned about the die-in from TV, but even with this very condemning media coverage I still identified with the protesters.  At 15 in my parent’s house, I came to life for that brief footage. It was one of those pivotal life moments.  

At the exhibit here in the present, I learned that the media got this footage from a participating activist, edited the hell out of it and excised reproductive freedom entirely from their coverage.  But even in that limited, incomplete footage, I had seen my queer future, and shivered in my suburban closet.  Through the haze of media disapproval and selective reporting, I saw not only the commitment and integrity of the protesters but also what they were up against.  I was an angry teenage girl seeing people stand up to those sexist old fucks in the church, confronting Cardinal O’Connor as nothing more than a creepy old man who had so much say over the stories we tell ourselves about sex.  He had so much say over what little conversation there was about HIV/AIDS.  Seeing Cardinal O’Connor step over bodies was the perfect non-metaphor for what was happening.  This action was more than symbolic, it was literally true.

For context, three years prior to the Stop the Church action, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote: “When civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase.”  I heard a portion of that statement in one of the videos, and I felt compelled to track down the exact quote and read it a couple times in an effort to understand the depth of the immorality we were and are up against. 

A time line covers a full wall in the upstairs gallery.  Reading it filled in some gaps in my memory and many more gaps in what I even knew about in the first place.  This history is hardly collected anywhere and certainly not taught to anyone.  Seeing the time line was more than informative, it was powerful.  One of many new things I learned was how in 1992, ACT UP held a political funeral in DC and a procession of 11 people scattered the ashes of their loved ones on the White House lawn.  This event was noted on the wall and there was film footage too, and it really blew me away.  I have been trying unsuccessfully to think of a comparable moment in history.  The only image that comes to my mind is the Memphis sanitation worker strike where some carried signs that read "I am a man."  In both cases people were demanding their humanity be recognized and thereby confronting the deepest roots of the specific injustice at hand.

1981

1991

I watched some footage of a group decision-making process in the midst of an action. A group of protesters at City Hall was trying to come to consensus about whether or not to block traffic to the Brooklyn Bridge.  Some were ready to go, others wanted to wait for more media to arrive to maximize coverage.  Showing even such a minor disagreement is critical to preserving a real history.  There was also some footage of non-violent civil disobedience training.  It was great to see this collaboration documented, to keep away the mythologizing of spontaneous demonstration when there is so much planning, training, debate, and plain old hard work that goes in to making art, protests and demonstrations.

Downstairs, the ACT UP Oral History Project is set up with 14 monitors each displaying a different set of full-length interviews for a total of 102 interviews, many over an hour long.  Each monitor is set up with 2 pairs of headphones and two seats.  The arrangement lends itself to listening with a friend.  The set-up itself seems to request that you share the interview and enter into a conversation, rather than passively listening or keeping what you hear to yourself.  It suggests not only learning but also engagement.

The interviews contain personal stories and the larger story of collective action making a difference.  In one interview I was watching, the person being interviewed recalls a specific action at a Republican fund raiser.   Off-screen interviewer Sarah Schulman, co-founder of both MIX NYC and the ACT UP Oral History Project, asks questions like, "Who else was there, what were their names?"  With this line of questioning, we are hearing not only one individual’s history but also learning our shared history, who we lost, what they did, what ideas they had, what art they made.  And we witness their grief.

The oral histories are now available to students to use in their research projects and available for scholarly study through Harvard University.  And I have some hope that the attention of this particular school has the potential to act as an intervention into academic amnesia about the HIV/AIDS crisis, or maybe even staunch the flow of our history from being drained away by the likes of national public radio.  Maybe amnesia is not the right word, it is more deliberate ignorance of both recent history and the current crisis.   The preservation of these oral histories is in direct defiance of the way our lives and realities are so often ignored. In this way, it seems to be a direct continuation of the work of ACT UP in demanding to be seen, acknowledged and recognized as people.

The protest posters and other art in the exhibit detail a clear connection between healthcare, AIDS activism and reproductive freedom.  The connection is rarely made explicit today, so it was very refreshing to see it plainly demonstrated that when the state attempts to control our sexuality through the restriction of any form of healthcare or information related to sex, we are NOT free.  One of my favorite aspects of the politics represented here is the refusal to compromise on how everything is connected to everything else.  The fact that so much of the art was created by collectives speaks to this sense of connection.  In many different ways the artists and activists declare that our lives, our bodies and our sexuality are deserving of respect, honor and care.  Not just some of us, not just the wealthy ones, not just the monogamous couples, not just those of us with kids.  This message of connection and inclusion could not be more relevant to the current healthcare legislation that would exclude funding for abortion. 

In the words of Gran Fury, “Corporate Greed, Government Inaction, and Public Indifference make AIDS a political crisis.”  ACT UP could have taken up any one of these strands to fight against, but chose to go after all of them and more, all the while exposing the racism, sexism and homophobia at the center of the crisis.  All the art and documentation in this exhibit points to the possibility of working on the details and the big picture all at the same time.  The group affected changes in both the law and the culture.  I was really struck by how the activists could see and define the roots of a crisis in real time, right as it was unfolding.  ACT UP took on not only the church, not only the government, not only the pharmaceutical industry, but also the belief systems in our culture that perpetuate and permit the deaths of huge numbers of people at the so-called margins.  All these documents, posters, interviews and stickers comprise a legacy, a legacy of values like responsibility, loyalty and commitment.


The feeling I took away from the exhibit was nothing less than a moral obligation to continue to work in the same way, by identifying the root causes of injustice and going after them while at the same time not losing track of the real world details that need to be addressed on a daily basis.  The feeling mirrored the time I saw the Stop the Church action on the evening news 20 years ago, but this time there was also a rare sense of external recognition of my cultural identity as queer person.  The disapproving lens was gone, temporarily lifted to reveal a space full of visible, audible expressions of who we are, what we do and how we love.  The exhibit provides a mirror where we actually show up as a community with some shared values and shared history, demanding to be fully recognized as human beings without any qualifications, without trotting out today's tired argument that we are fully human because of how similar we are to straight people, because we have jobs and go shopping, etc.  No "because" at all.  Just respect.

National Equality March

During the 1993 gay March on Washington, I was just finishing high school and knew I was queer but was years away from coming out. My history class had a trip to DC immediately after the march and I remember stealing furtive glances at all the queers who were still lingering around town. My class went to observe congress and I set off the metal detector with my steel toe boots. Jesse Helms was on the floor of the Senate and I already despised him, for his contempt for people with AIDS and for generally being a racist shit. At the time, it seemed like more than half of everything in the media about queer people were quotes from Jesse Helms, railing against Robert Mapplethorpe and fighting against funding for AIDS research. Those are the two things I remember from my high school class trip to DC, Jesse Helms and homos.

When the 2000 March came around, I was out of the closet and living in a queer household in Philly, preparing to move to NYC with my two girlfriends. The “Millennium March” was organized top-down by the conservative and assimilationist Human Rights Campaign. It was lacking a clear political agenda and had corporate sponsors out the ass. Notice how even the name “Millennium March” describes neither the people marching nor the reason for the march. The main event was a huge concert to raise money for HRC. There was no question in my mind that I would not be in attendance. I wrote and circulated a zine criticizing the whole thing as a distraction from our real movement, our local work, and the connections and intersections between queers and other marginalized people.

And now 2009, another gay Equality March on DC. HRC was just one of many participating group this year, so I briefly considered going. I even felt kind of guilty about not going. Maybe I missed something historic. From what I read in advance about the National Equality March there was a lot going on and even though HRC was present, lots of smaller groups were also hosting workshops and many individuals were scheduled to speak. The platform included multiple issues, and activists I respect were involved. So I felt favorably about the March, at least more than I had in 2000. Maybe it would have been inspirational and refreshing to see committed activists from around the country.

Then I saw seven pictures from the March featured in the NY Times. Two of them really hit me hard. The first shows marchers with home made signs bearing the message: “Just like you! Equality Now!” This depresses me because sameness should never be the qualifying factor for being considered equal. Equal does not mean identical. “We worship and parent. Just like you!” What if we don’t? I do not worship and I do not parent. “Just like you” is an inherently unfair and dehumanizing measure, like “normal” or “regular.” And who exactly is the “you” here? The “you” is some imaginary idealized person living in a fictional family structure that is a reality for only a tiny minority of people in this country, gay, straight or otherwise. The “you” is some person who only exists on TV, but hardly even there anymore. Liberals talk about valuing diversity, a word boils that down to diverse, as in diverge, as in differ, as in different as in NOT just like you. Respect for differences... A revised sign: Nothing like you! Equality now!

A second picture from the NY Times featured a guy with a sign that read “Obama- Where’s MY change?” This guy snapped me out of my anger at the people in the pictures and made me realize I was actually angry at the newspaper itself. The Times must have been searching for the single most asinine message at the March. When they found this guy, they took his picture and featured it as one of just seven images selected to represent the day. The Times has an enormous power in choosing which images are seen and thereby influencing how we are represented and perceived. They first chose a message of assimilation and followed it with a message of self-centered entitlement. The accompanying article was no better, quoting a few folks from the crowd, failing to mention the many workshops, caucuses and speakers at the event. I was taken in at first, falling into my routine critique of the mainstream LGBT movement for aiming low, for mistaking marriage for progress, for being exclusionary, self-centered, entitled.... Until I saw this picture and became severely pissed off by the media representation of my people! This time I am not buying it, I do not believe the closeted/apologist “Just like you” and I do not believe the narcissist “Where’s My Change” dude. Sure these folks are real, but the NY Times trivializes our larger struggle by spotlighting only the most superficial messages. The editors show queers their opinion of us through what they select and what they exclude from being fit to print, and we should hold them accountable for the absence of substance in their coverage of our movement.

Imagine that the Times had quoted Urvashi Vaid’s speech as the message of the March.Imagine that instead of the where’s-my-change guy, the Times used Urvashi’s words to represent us. Here is the movement I know and love: “I'm not just here to stand up as a lesbian. I'm here as a woman. I'm here as an immigrant. I'm here against racism. I'm here for health care for all. I'm here for freedom of expression. I'm here to change the status quo."

Considering Bruno

The film Bruno with Sacha Baron Cohen generated so much heated discussion. I saw it the day after it opened, and found it hilarious to see scare stories from my childhood made real. This was the perverted, unnatural, ungodly gayness I had been warned against, and it was portrayed with gusto. And I enjoyed the parody of our current celebrity magazine baby fascination too.

Many reviews have described Bruno as a stereotype, but that is not exactly accurate. He IS homophobia in the form of a sassy, sexualized man. Bruno creates a spectacle, a comedic nightmare of our deep fears, right down to a drawer full of gerbils. The movie functions like a catalog of our culture’s gay panic buttons, like the fear that gay guys will try to seduce straight guys by appearing naked in front of them, or emasculate them with questions and suggestions of cock-sucking lips, or adopt children and be atrocious parents. What we make of that spectacle is very revealing.

From the NY Times: “An early sequence that graphically shows Brüno and his lover exerting themselves in various positions and with the assistance of, among other things, a Champagne bottle, a fire extinguisher and a specially modified exercise machine, derives its humor less from the extremity of their practices than from the assumption that sex between men is inherently weird, gross and comical.” Whose assumption is that? For me, the sequence derived its humor from the joyous defiance of the kind of sex typically shown in movies and from the wild abandon demonstrated by the characters.

The NY Times article mentions 3 times that the humor in the film comes from laughing at people, people the reporter refers to as “dumb rednecks” and “dumb losers.” Who thinks who is dumb here? The Times shows its own various prejudices by publishing these terms as if they were unproblematic. The people in the movie were not merely “targets of the film’s humor” as the reviewer claims, but rather participants in a spectacle, witnesses to Bruno. Sure there is some reality-TV style humor in watching people in outrageous situations, but it is the Times calling them dumb, not Bruno.

In a statement from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation: "Some people in the gay community will be as troubled as GLAAD is that the movie doesn't decrease homophobia, but decreases the public's comfort with gay people.” On what basis were we looking for this film to increase the public’s comfort with us? Thus GLAAD reveals exactly how un-ambitious they are about gay rights. Comfort is antithetical to progress, we do not learn and evolve by becoming more comfortable.

More from GLAAD: “Scenes like that don't help America understand the hundreds of thousands of gay families who get up every day, do the carpool then rush home to make dinner and be with their children," And what has GLAAD done to help America understand the hundreds of thousands of queers who live in close affiliations, tribes, chosen families and intentional communities? How about the childless, the unemployed, the homeless, the single? The wealthiest among us may live this way but certainly not all of us. And certainly not all straight people live that way either.

The scene they were decrying showed sex. GLAAD is supposed to be against defamation, not sexuality. Their statement describing gay life reads a lot like an order, dictating how we are to be gay in order to make the public more comfortable. Carpools and children may be GLAAD’s picture of homosexuality, but they are going to have to take a deep breath and learn to tolerate different lifestyles. And I do mean styles of life, ways of living that are outside their narrow image of normalcy. Maybe the folks at GLAAD could use some diversity training.

Brad Luna, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, warns the movie should come with disclaimer. "We strongly feel that Sacha Baron Cohen and UNIVERSAL PICTURES have a responsibility to remind the viewing public right there in the theater that this is intended to expose homophobia." In this single sentence about a comedy, HRC is controlling, intolerant and condescending. Even more so than GLAAD, they want to control messages in the media about gays. They want the messages not only to depict us in a way that makes conservative people comfortable, but also to tell us directly how to understand what we are seeing. HRC has worked tirelessly to re-brand the queer liberation movement as a struggle for gay marriage, so it is no surprise that they want to re-brand Bruno. It seems that HRC gays do not think highly of gays or anyone else, at least not highly enough to allow us to form our own opinions. I wish GLAAD and HRC would consider that never in the course of history has telling people what to think been an effective strategy for change. Their dictation of monolithic lifestyles and opinions just breeds silence and resentment on all sides of the issue.

I have saved the best for last... On “The View”, Barbara Walters called the movie “almost as pornographic as any pornographic thing that I’ve seen,” adding that unlike porno flicks, you can catch this flick around the corner in your neighborhood movie theater. Walters: “I don’t like seeing close ups of anal sex.” I don’t remember any close ups, but Bruno certainly references anal sex. What is the one thing GLAAD, HRC and even the NY Times do NOT want you to think about when you think about gays?

ANAL SEX. One of our culture’s worst fears is getting pleasure from the business end; it’s the very definition of dirty. Castrated queers fit more comfortably into the culture. Better to do the carpool and rush home than to make jokes about getting fucked in the ass. Better to be seen as mocking heterosexuals, better to be seen as looking down on people than to be seen exuberantly fucking. Better to have national organizations that are supposedly fighting for our rights talk about making people more comfortable with us rather than talking about changing the status quo. Better to simply tell people the “right” interpretation of the film than let them experience it themselves. Bruno was certainly not a serious exploration of queer sex. It was just a silly comedy with a lot of jokes about queer sex. And I think that’s how it triggered the NY Times, GLAAD and HRC into showing us just how far they are willing to go in order to avoid acknowledging queer sexuality or as Barbara Walters so vividly and salaciously intoned: CLOSE UPS OF ANAL SEX.

A list of all the gay bars I have visited to date

Hepburn's
Sisters
Woody's
Key West
The Bike Stop
The Post
12th Air Command
Silent Legacy
Paradise
The Ice Palace
Cherry's
Libations
Club 505
Aut Bar
The Nectarine
The Lexington
The Stud
Meow Mix
Cattyshack
Henrietta Hudson
Cubbyhole
Ginger's
The Monster
Fat Cock 29
Daddy
The Hole
The Cock
The Phoenix
Nowhere
The Metropolitan
The Eagle
Rubyfruit
The Boiler Room
Crazy Nanny's
Don Hill's
Stonewall
The Urge
The Boy's Room
Mother

School, Part 3

In middle school, I was very conflicted between wanting to fit in and wanting to be myself.  I just wanted to wear military surplus clothes all the time but I feared the consequences of emphasizing my masculinity.  I was already butch enough that I could not get through a single school day without my gender being commented upon by someone.  I developed a crush on an older girl.  She had short hair, wore camouflage pants to school and still managed to have friends.  I didn’t see how it was possible.

At my mother’s insistence, I attended weekly religious classes at a Lutheran church.  The class was a miserable collection of pre-teens, every last one of us enduring the drudgery because of our parents.  I doubt there was a single kid in that class who actually believed in god.  At the end of a year of old testament education, one of the this boys in the class asked me with sincere curiosity, “So why did your parents give you a girl’s name?”  Sometimes I tried to make light of these situations.  And every time something like this happened, I wondered: Why is it that when somebody gets your gender wrong they are never the ones who look stupid? 

What I learned in middle school were rules and taboos.  There are rules for being a man and there are rules for being a woman.  And then there is this big fat taboo against ambiguity.  I understood that my gender issue was unspeakable because the pronoun accidents and misunderstandings were never addressed directly.   In a 7^th grade math class, a substitute teacher asked me, “Are you in the right seat?  A girl is supposed to be sitting there.” She was not apologetic, she simply moved on.  I was the one in the wrong, even though she had just broadcast to the class that she thought I was a misbehaving boy who had stolen the seat of some good girl.  Laughter ensued, and if I had my way, I would have smote her on the spot.  Instead, I grew out my hair.

These experiences solidified my belief that while I did not belong among regular people, I also did not want to belong among them.  In response to my gender, people proved to be incapable of permitting the slightest deviance from stereotypical gender roles.  Each time they opened their mouths to me, I could see their frustration and inability to understand who or what I was.  It made them angry and impatient.  I did not have these words at the time, but I knew I was failing their expectations and frustrating them.  I also knew there were only two gender options and somehow I was ill suited to both.  On top of that I observed how deviating from gender roles produces disgust in others, real physical revulsion.  It was inconceivable to the adult denizens of my childhood that I could be a butch girl, so instead they looked at me and saw either a boy, or a disgusting girl, or an immature tomboy who needed to grow up already. That was a lot for a kid to deal with, so looking back now I understand how I spent a few years being fairly well shut down and distant from everything.

A friend’s mother literally asked, “Couldn’t she try to be more feminine?” I alternated between sharing their disgust with myself and being filled with rage at the confinement.  Folks proved themselves to be severely limited in their imagination and limited in their ability to see gender rules as just rules.  All I could see were rules, rules I could not keep.  Seeing gender as a set of made-up rules was one of the pivotal understandings in my life thus far because it shone a bright light on all the other norms that are taken for granted in our culture.  And it wasn’t just that others pressured me to obey the rules, it was that no one else seemed to understand that the rules were rules.  I imagine they thought, “This is just the way things are and always have been and always will be.  Girls don’t act/look/think/talk/dress/walk/behave that way.”  Sometimes the messages were direct and sometimes they were subtle.  Yet there was such universal agreement to these rules that usually no one even bothered to write them down.  So it wasn’t just that I was disobedient of gender rules, it was that I didn’t make any sense.  Men are like this, women are like that, anything else does not compute.  Anything else evokes disgust.  Becoming queer was not a matter of declaring my attraction to women, but more a permanent disengagement from following a given gender track, the simplifications, the either/or choices, the rules.  It felt liberating to realize this, but it also felt disconcerting and alienating.  But once that light came on, liberating, disconcerting or come what may, there was no turning back.   And I could not help but see that when the rule keepers weren’t criticizing me, they were busy attempting to control the bodies and sexuality of other girls with a similar set of rules about who is a whore, who is a slut, no abortions allowed, who is too fat, etc.

Later on in high school, we periodically held pep rallies to celebrate our treasured sports teams.  At the last pep rally I attended, this boy spit on me from the bleachers above where I was sitting by myself.  I do not remember if any words passed between us.  I only remember realizing there was spit in my hair, the long hair I had been growing since eighth grade in order to stop being mistaken for a boy, in order to minimize my surface differences from other girls.  When I think about simply walking out of the school building at the start of each subsequent pep rally, I feel these quiet exits capture the essence of my high school experience.

My senior year, I was awarded a scholarship based on my standardized test scores.  The corporate sponsor of the scholarship was the company where my father worked.  There was a dinner to be held at a nice restaurant with the principal of my high school, my parents, and some people from my father’s office.  Ordinarily, my parents barely noticed or commented on my clothes.  My mom had taken me dress shopping a few times because I had to dress up for orchestra concerts.  I hated having to wear a dress and always wore what ever I wanted outside of my time with the viola.  When we were getting ready to leave for this scholarship dinner and I came out in a black blazer I had bought for myself in the men’s department at macy’s.  I thought I looked OK.  My father insisted that I wear a dress and he was so mean and angry about it that I don’t even think I objected.  I very well may have, because we argued all the time back then, but what stands out most in my memory is the clarity of his contempt.  He was disgusted by me and ashamed for his colleagues to see me.  Now I understand that this was his problem and not mine. But at the time I absorbed it and felt disgusted and ashamed of myself too.  I wore the dress.  I barely spoke at dinner.  Instead of refusing the shame, I had made it my own and believed that I deserved it. 

Recently I told this story about my father for the first time, over dinner with a married friend and sometimes mentor.  He was asking me why I do not want to marry my girlfriend and I was attempting to talk about my coming out process with the gender police and the confinements of normalcy.  I described how walking away from traditional family values was a commitment to myself to make the best life I could imagine.  But another detail slipped out in the telling, which I had not previously articulated to myself or anyone else:  Growing up, I never really knew for sure if I was going to make it.  It was interesting to me that this came out spontaneously in the conversation, because I have consciously been working on ways of talking my past and simply telling the personal stories I haven’t told before.  It came out of my mouth as an additional detail, an unsightly little mess that plopped onto the dinner table.  I felt like part of me left the table for a few minutes to observe what would happen next.  I had admitted to uncertainty about the prospects of my living to adulthood. 

One of the reasons for my uncertainty was a lack of options I could live with.  Living a regular life, with a regular relationship and a regular gender was unattainable, repressive and ultimately undesirable.  So I never sought to broaden or revise regular to include me.  I never wanted to redefine normal.  I just wanted more options.  Now I know queers need to live in this world, not in an imaginary perfect world.  People need to live in this world without their bodies and genders and relationships being questioned and scrutinized and criticized and examined constantly.  Or even debated...  It feels like shit to have the substance of your reality subject to debate.  Queers need rights and protections under the laws we have now, not just the laws we imagine in a revolutionized future.  And yet to this day there remains no clearer or more persistent theme in my life than the need for more options.   

A Gathering Storm

Part 1: That Dreadful Storm

Now I am no fan of gay marriage, but I am well aware that the self-appointed defenders of marriage hate the shit out of queers. The legalization of gay marriage in five out of fifty states motivated homophobes to create A Gathering Storm, a TV commercial that literally voices the fear of homosexuals.  Miss California, please. “No offense,” they claim, in an attempt to inoculate themselves against charges of being offensively hateful.  Opposition to gay marriage provides a convenient way for homophobes to oppose homosexuality without appearing to openly hate us; it allows them to shamelessly display, discuss and demonstrate their homophobia without literally stating it.  Through their opposition to gay marriage they can voice their opposition to gay lives but tell themselves and others that they are not bigots. They merely want to protect marriage. 

The National Organization for Marriage website further provides so-called facts to back up the dramatic statements in their commercial.  The explanations reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of rights.  In each fact presented, the group articulates an instance in which a religious organization or individual was attempting to discriminate against a homosexual, and ran up against some form of legal trouble.  Examples include a fertility clinic doctor who refused to treat a lesbian patient and a church that refused to host a gay marriage ceremony.  The so-called rights they are afraid of losing boil down to the “right” to engage in discrimination without any consequences.  Every example consists of people feeling entitled to treat us as less than human because of their flimsy morality, and by invoking parenthood and church they speak to institutions that conservatives want desperately to own.

The ad has some inherently hilarious elements, like the earnest delivery of the line “I am afraid,” and the reference at the end to forming “a rainbow coalition.” The seemingly earnest approach and bizarre special effects might seem dated or inept in the context of high production-quality media. But the heavy-handed approach speaks effectively to an existing audience with a message that resonates for those who feel threatened by queers and who do not give a damn about slick media.  A Gathering Storm was not intended for anyone who thinks the presentation of the message is lame. It was intended for people who already believe in the message and need just a nudge to be stirred into action.  Actually, the seemingly naive, hokey quality fits into that old family-values-versus-liberal-elite trope most recently voiced by Sarah Palin with her joe-sixpack and her you-betcha. 

By emphasizing fear instead of hate, they seek to cultivate the belief that straight people are the victims of homosexuals, that homosexuals are more privileged than straight people, and that homosexuals are invading their world.  Homos get put into the role of the liberal elite, versus the decent and moral god-fearing folks who made that commercial.  This mentality of fear is a fertile ground for hatred, in fact it creates the feelings of disempowerment and instability that help hatred to grow.  It is a mindset that lends itself to hatred.  The hate is real and its impact is real.  Imagined victimization at the hands of a supposedly powerful minority exceeding their social status helps motivate white supremacists, anti-Semites, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and homophobes alike. 

Part 2: The Witty Response

What a huge response A Gathering Storm has generated!  There are too many parodies to watch in just one sitting.  Who is making ALL these parodies?  From amateurs on You Tube to Steven Colbert, to a bunch of TV actors and Lance Bass, the parodies proliferate far beyond the gay community.  Everyone wants to get in on the fun and show support for gay marriage... maybe the parodies are even winning over more straight allies for gay marriage. Straight liberals enjoy being in on the joke when it comes to queerness, in the know, with it, etc.  Add to that the fact that no one wants to be the butt of the joke.  The studio audience was in a laughing fit over Steven Colbert’s parody of A Gathering Storm and his commentary.  We have managed to make homophobia un-cool in certain privileged social circles.  While that is a little something, it is not much and it is not unproblematic.

The ad and its response illuminate one of the major reasons that affluent straight liberals can really get into supporting gay marriage: They risk NOTHING in supporting it. In fact, supporting gay marriage helps them feel good about themselves.  With every plea for marriage, gays serve to reaffirm the consumer/hetero lifestyle of marriage, ownership and offspring.  Straight people can look to us and feel content that their life choices are Good and Correct, so much so that gay people are just begging to attain this same exact life.  Now, I love my straight friends and that is why I know we can do better than this.  We can and do have friendships and alliances based on mutuality, respect and empathy.  But for a lot of straight married folks it must feel somewhat affirming to know that all us homos want is to be more like them.  We’re not the promiscuous free-loving seducers, exuberantly skipping down Fifth Avenue in our underwear... we are the committed monogamous neighbors.  Gays become much safer for previously uninterested straight people to accept as long as we aspire to nothing more than a life just like theirs.  Straight liberals love the marriage movement message because it poses no threat to how they live or what they believe.  They can be good liberals and support gay marriage and enjoy the moral high ground without having to give up anything, rethink anything, or do anything differently. The gay right is going out of their way to assure straight people the way things are is good and everything is just fine (except for gays not being allowed to get married.)  Every time there is a media story about gay marriage, it comes without the voices of progressive queers, without feminist queers, and without all of us proud queers who do not believe we need to get married in order to be fully human. 

Our voices are left out because it serves the advancement of the gay marriage movement to affirm the status quo as something universally appealing.  Our voices are left out because they threaten the social order far more than gay marriage ever could.  The affirmation of marriage may even assuage some of married people’s internal discontent, the doubts and fears they have about their own choices.  The gay marriage movement reassures straights that the patriarchal nuclear family structure is the best and only desirable way to live.  These structures exist at the expense of people in open or unconventional relationships, single people, transgender people, single parents, extended families, tribes and communities.   Marriages attain their status and legitimacy in part from our exclusion.  The continued replacement of “gay rights” with “gay marriage” reduces both our movement and our humanity.  In fact, it reduces everyone’s humanity, because it makes it seem as though you need to be in a relationship to have any sexuality at all.

And at risk of taking ALL the fun out of watching the parodies: What exactly is so funny about people placing an ad advocating against the legal rights of a minority, against rights that do not even exist except in five out of fifty states?  Would this be funny if it were about any other minority?  Of course, we’re special, and I’m not being sarcastic, our identity and culture have lots to do with sex and sex is a source of fun and obsession for pretty much every living thing on earth.  And of course humor itself is a legitimate and often effective form of resistance, one of my personal favorites.  But I do not think that is all of what is happening here.  Homophobia is not being addressed in a way that would change any homophobe’s mind, it is being addressed in a way that mostly just affirms the self righteous self-image of gay marriage advocates.

Part 3: Being Proud is Not the Same as Being Self-Righteous

The best part of these parodies for gay marriage advocates, what ever their sexual orientation, is that they get to feel really good about themselves while laughing at homophobes. Consequently there is a very real self-righteous sense of superiority being affirmed in these parodies.  The parodies are funny, but not that funny.  The mirth is in sharing a laugh at the expense of homophobes who are voicing something seemingly ridiculous.  The mirth shares the same variety of ugly self righteousness that came up in public conversations after the passage of Proposition 8 that blamed black people, absolved straight white people, and erased black queers all together.  Those who are laughing at the parodies get to feel like they are better than the ignorant fools who made that commercial.

For queers, there is definitely some appeal to the idea of feeling superior to homophobes. Of course we want to feel good, better than the people who are constantly sending us the message we are crazy, diseased, perverted villains.  Part of our cultural legacy is a fierce desire to say we are not villains, not inferior, not to be looked down upon.  For straights, I imagine they must enjoy thinking of themselves as morally better and more cosmopolitan and progressive than those ignorant, prejudiced, hatemongering homophobes.  There is also power in the act of dis-identifying with homophobes, and sometimes we all like to affirm our identity by point out what we are not.  Of course the desire to be better-than is very human and makes a lot of sense!  Liberals of every sexual orientation want to be good people, want to be on the right side of things.  But what does this orgy of superiority really accomplish? Straight liberals get to go back to their state-sanctioned relationships with the knowledge that they are better than those ignorant homophobes, with no changes to their thinking, values or behaviors.  Queers get to be funny and charming and get acknowledged by straights. 

What is missing here are the actual challenges that queers face on a daily basis that have to do with accessing adequate safety and humanity, not with accessing privilege and conformity.  So we enjoy a bunch of parodies, feel confident that we are on the right side of things, and go back to what ever we were doing before. Conveniently, we all feel better without actually doing anything differently. 

Part 4: Alliances

With friends and foes like these, I am not sure where that leaves queer rights, let alone queer liberation.  Consider Sean Penn, speaking up at the academy awards on behalf of gay marriage. 

For those who saw the signs of hatred as our cars drove in tonight, I think that it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren's eyes if they continue that way of support. We've got to have equal rights for everyone.

On one hand, he made an excellent move by casting shame on homophobes.  Shame has long been used against queers, so it was thoughtful of him to invert that usual theme and use their very own weapon against them.  On the other hand, “equal rights for everyone?”  Not much to aspire to here.  “Equal rights” is an empty concept in an unjust society.  “Equal rights” are not going to end homophobia, nor are they going to teach kids to stop harassing other kids who are different.  So-called equality in a racist, classist, sexist society is not going to stop guys with baseball bats from beating Jose Sucuzhanay to death for walking arm-in-arm with his brother. 

The very next day after Sean Penn’s speech at the Oscars, the following quote appeared in the NY Times:

If we give the money to the widows, they will spend it unwisely because they are uneducated and they don't know about budgeting. But if we find her a husband, there will be a person in charge of her and her children for the rest of their lives.

MAZIN al-SHIHAN, director of a city agency in Baghdad, on his plan to pay men to marry Iraqi war widows.

Make no mistake about it, THIS is the very same institution we aspire to join.  We are kidding ourselves if we think a few homos getting married can alter or romanticize the fact of what marriage is: a legal institution that exists for the purpose of perpetuating male ownership and authority over women and children. 

And speaking of children, where exactly were all these advocates of gay marriage when Sakia Gunn and Lawrence King were killed? How about when Jaheem Harrera or Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover committed suicide? The comedic affect of all these parodies is pretty unimpressive when we consider how deeply homophobic our culture is, right now, today.  Queer children get killed or commit suicide while we take cheap shots at poorly produced advertisements. 

We have made it easier for straight people to like us, because instead of challenging the system that rejected us, we are asking to be let back in and promising to leave it relatively unchanged.  Instead of speaking up on behalf of our people who are harassed, bullied and killed, we are asking to be part of the family again.  Instead of asking for justice, we are asking for equality. Some of us have been seduced by the temptations of straight liberal approval and feeling superior to homophobes.  It all works out to support the status quo, and the hollow, oppressive nuclear family continues to dominate as the only legitimate social grouping by being propped up on the backs of all those who are excluded from it.  Gay marriage legislation addresses homophobia in an extremely superficial, marginal way.  So after everyone has a good laugh at the Gathering Storm parodies, maybe we can get on to the actual work of rethinking the way status quo gender and sexuality function in service of patriarchy, and start doing a better job looking out for those who are getting left out, crushed and even killed in the process.