Diseased Pariah News and Queer With Class

Somehow a copy of Diseased Pariah News found its way into my hands when I was a young emerging queer.  Fantastic luck!  The zine nourished my understanding of queer anger and it tapped right into the rage that was boiling beneath the surface of my entire life.  From my earliest awareness that queer people existed, I always thought being angry and being queer went together.  And was I ever angry...  I have a different relationship with my anger now.  Once I was entirely fueled by it.  It motivated my activism and my choices and it filled me with the energy I needed to persist in resistance to everything that was wrong.  Now I do my best to see it as a flashing neon sign, alerting me when something is going wrong, when something is not just, when some boundary is being violated or somebody is being fucked over or left out.  It is not the response anymore, it is more of an undeniable signal that I need to respond.  Well, maybe undeniable is not accurate.  I have certainly denied it at times, that’s when I go from being the angry lesbian to being the depressed lesbian.

At the time I found Diseased Pariah News I was super angry and I also had a stockpile of rage I had accumulated from growing up in the suburbs.  Mostly I had rage at imbeciles who looked down on me for not meeting their standards of femininity.  At morons who could not imagine a world any different from this one, a life anything other than the one right in front of them:  A job, a family, a house, getting ahead.  A car.  Always driving, never awakening yet always driving.  I too was driving around, aiming hate at them, aiming fury into their boring houses with their giant TVs blaring and their stupid car and lawn on display out front.  That anger at the pressure to conform readily translated into a larger anger at hetero-normativity.  The concept of homophobia provided a new framework for understanding why people treated me with hatred, fear and disgust.  I mirrored back all that hate for a good while there.  But something like Diseased Pariah News showed me more, it revealed pain and humor and self parody and pride.  I saved that zine all these years even though I can’t remember where I originally got it.  It taught me that queer culture is life affirming above all else, even through gallows humor, and subversive in every circumstance.  Like the Queer With Class story about a little girl who killed her parents because they were trying to induct her into some sick cult that turned out to be christianity.  I always resented having to go to church.  Finding these materials was like finding new friends who had so much to teach me about being queer, about the kind of world I was entering.  I found the Queer With Class book at San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore during one of my summer breaks from college, and have treasured it ever since.

But the idea of being a pariah really rang true to me. It matched up well with my experiences in the suburbs.  By the time I was in high school I was expecting rejection, waiting for it.   It helped make sense of all the mixed feelings I was having, going back and forth between wanting to be loved and being proud that the numbskulls of the world were rejecting me on a daily basis.  There was a boy in my high school who would always approach me in the hallway and flirt loudly for the amusement of his friends.  At least that was mostly why he was doing it.  I was an emerging pariah.  A pariah is an outcast, a scorned person.  I imagined that a pariah could almost be a holy person, somebody whose truth is unbearable for regular people, so they are scorned.  Pride can provide some consolation for the isolated.

The idea that queer people reveal unbearable truths is related directly to one of my fundamental theories of homophobia: You see me, a masculine woman who is not ashamed, making choices about who and how I love.  That means the rest of us can make choices too.  People want what they have been taught is attractive, they present themselves in the gender they have been taught to present.  Desire and gender norms are enforced partly by the assertion that these norms come naturally to everyone and are true everywhere.  My saying NO to regular gender and desire that suggests that it is not natural but constructed, not universal but learned.  That means any one of us can walk away at any time.  But then what would we do?  Scary.  This is precisely why the whole choice/born-this-way conversation about sexuality is so loaded.   And why some people feel just so icky and uncomfortable about me.

If I say I am born this way, then I am just like everyone else, following my true nature, just going down the path I was meant to follow, this is just how I am, etc.  This is a really popular narrative now that so much of the feminism has been sucked out of the gay movement and our culture at large.  When self determination and choice come into the picture, things get more screwed up and less simple.  If I was not born this way or any other way, then I am not just acting on my nature and maybe you aren’t either.  Maybe there is no nature.  Maybe seeking love and pleasure and connection is what is best for us.  Maybe we do not need to believe stories about nature when those stories serve to reinforce patriarchy starting from adam and eve right up to the bullshit emphasis on family during the televised portions of the 2008 political conventions.  Family, family, family, nausea. 

Maybe each of us needs to struggle along in the unknown to find what is best for us, what is healthy, what is life affirming.  If I walk away from the idea that who I desire is some inborn quality in me, I am suggesting that anyone can walk away too, or worse yet, get a surprise at some point and fall in love with some one of the same perceived sex or with more than one person.  This happens all the time anyway but we stick to our made up stories about monolithic sexual preferences and eternal love right in line with our patriarchal, capitalist, monogamous training.  As I read at a young age in Queer With Class, “Customers are required to reproduce in the interests of the market.”  I don’t even need to go back to the book right now to check the quote because those exact words have been ringing true since the first day I read it.  What fabulous teachers I had.

School, Part 2

Suzanne was one of the pre-teen smokers, not one of the popular girls.  She was a year older than me and constantly harassed and insulted me because of my queer boyishness, which was in her eyes just plain grossness.  I remember trying to ignore her, a failed strategy if there ever was one.  Finally came a day when she attacked me physically as well as verbally.  She came at me, not realizing that I kept the school library’s only judo book out for months at a time. When she put all her weight into shoving me, I grabbed her wrists, pulled hard and stepped aside.  She flew into one of the little bushes that lined the sidewalk leading up to the school entrance. 

Suzanne left me alone for a while after that, and then she went on to middle school a year ahead of me.  When I reached middle school, she resumed her usual insults and flinging of rubber bands from her braces at me on the school bus.  The school bus was always the site of the worst misery.  It was also where Suzanne applied her make up in the morning since I imagine her mom would not let her leave the house with as much eyeliner as she wanted to wear.  Does it ever suck to be an adolescent girl.

When I first arrived in middle school, there was no question in the mind of the average observer that I was a boy.  In my mind I was neither masculine nor feminine, but everyone else consistently read me as masculine.  I passed all the time, much to my chagrin, considering the resulting bullying, scorn, disapproval, ostracism and depression.  Around 1987, it got back to me that one of my classmates asked, “Who will want to marry a girl who looks like a boy?”  I barely knew what a lesbian was but people asked me if I was one.  I denied it, of course. I liked both girls and boys, but not too much considering that they were universally such a bunch of assholes. 

This was an enormously painful and lonely time. At recess one day, some one shoved me from behind.  I started to turn towards them, but then I got shoved much harder and knocked heads with this kid Jesse.  I got this strange greenish bruise on my cheek the next day, and it actually took me a while to figure out where it came from.  I must have been so shut down that the event did not immediately register.  Days later, I learned that the girl who pushed me was angry because she told her friend that she thought I was cute.  She was subsequently humiliated upon learning I was a girl.  I had been the object of a crush and revealed as a deceiver all without my knowledge or involvement.

I never talked to anyone about that experience until I was an adult.  It is very telling that I was so ashamed and never spoke of it, not to a parent, not to a teacher, not to anyone.  I thought somehow it was my fault.  My appearance had caused a series of tiny dramas: first attraction, followed by deception, then humiliation and finally revenge.  But my part in this soap opera only came in at the very end, for the revenge.  Too bad I could not understand at the time that none of this was about me, it was about the confusion, fear and anger (and a little bit of desire) other people experienced at the site of an adolescent butch girl.