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.

The Pregnant Man

I recently finished reading Labor of Love by Thomas Beatie and I highly recommend it.  Thomas tells a moving and important story of his childhood, coming out, falling in love, transitioning, getting married and having a baby.  Occasional sappiness aside, I enjoyed the book and found it surprisingly compelling.  The reason it surprised me is that I spend much of my life questioning and resisting the very ideas he supports in the book: marriage, family and normality.  Bringing marriage and normality into the queer world is alienating and horrifying to anyone who identifies with being Queer-- different, strange, unique, extraordinary.  Yet I respect Thomas, I respect what he has done and I respect his book.  My affection for him grew as I kept reading, even as I found more and more things that he and I see differently.  I intended to write here about loving this book and articulating these disagreements.

But before I started, I did a little research to find other reviews of the book.  What I found was disappointingly predictable.  Everywhere Thomas and Nancy’s life is discussed, words like “claim” and “apparently” are used.  This ties in directly to the transphobic idea that transgender people are deceitful, that they are eternally one gender and transitioning is just an effort to pull one over on straight people.  In very few places are any of the ideas or content of the book addressed.  People cannot get past Thomas and his life to actually look at his book.  A man got pregnant and had a baby, he is expecting again.  But the pregnancy is only part of the story. I want to discuss his full life story, the way he tells it, and the values and ambitions he expresses in the book.  I want to discuss the struggles he had finding support from the straight, queer and transgender people.  I struggle with finding support for my choices and share his disappointment!  Above all, I want to talk about his absolute insistence on being normal, on pursuing the american dream of home ownership, entrepreneurship and offspring.  But there are hardly any decent responses to the book to be found.  The book disappears in all the reactions to his gender and his pregnancy.

The internet is full of terrified cisgendered people insisting Thomas is not a man or stating he is really a “mutilated woman.”  This is from people who are confronted with a set of simple facts that contradict their ideas about gender, but instead of reexamining their ideas about gender, they refute the facts.  They also seem to rely heavily on typing in all caps.  Gender ideas are precious, so people stick their heads in the sand in order to not see Thomas as a man and not have to do the hard work of recognizing everything they believe about gender is wrong.  It is much less work to deny that Thomas is a man then to apprehend what his being a man suggests about the location of manhood.  The prospect of revising their beliefs about gender is so terrifying because of some really simple logic: If gender is not what we think it is, then we do not have to behave the way we do as regular men and women.... so how would we behave?  Who would we become?

In the queer press, there is mostly silence and some shit saying he is just looking for fame.  This is so embarrassing.  Is our homo world so narrow that we don’t have room for this man?  Does he make us feel self-conscious?  Is it because the HRC donors want to be accepted as regular men and women and consequently cannot allow people to think they are sympathetic?  If the queer community includes somebody like Thomas, does that mess up assimilationist gay and lesbian ideas about same-gender attraction? Or does including and supporting Thomas make so-called radical queers feel less cool, because we are so heavily identified with being outsiders and he is talking so earnestly about being a husband?  Or do we just feel too exposed by all the attention he got?  Or are we all simply mirroring the same oppression we experience?

I read Labor of Love and I found things I disagreed with and want to discuss.  One thing that stands out to me is the fact that I was able to finish a book that described marriage, pregnancy and childbirth, three topics I firmly believe are discussed to death in every last venue of our popular culture.  Maybe the reason I could read about these subjects, even when presented in such an earnest and sentimental way, is because for once, somebody quite similar to me is having the baby.  Thomas and I are in this together.  We are cut from the same cloth.  Can the queer community be big enough to contain us both? And would Thomas want it to be? 

Normality has been a driving force in Thomas’s life and in mine.  We are the same age.  Thomas’s insistence that he is normal, in a normal relationship, is a normal man having a normal life is what I found both frustrating and fascinating about the book.  We both experienced alienation from the expectations of female children and openly defied those expectations.  I had a remarkably similar experience to one of the stories he tells where a girl at school got a crush on him and then was infuriated upon learning that she had just experienced “same sex” attraction.  We both felt better when we moved the fuck away from home and cut our hair.  Yet at some point, there was a fork in the road around this idea of normality.  I had tried unsuccessfully to be a normal girl so when I reached that fork, I rejected normality forever.  My family was a site of pain, and I took a huge leap forward when I decided to follow a path of rejecting traditional family values, calling myself queer and starting to envision what I wanted my adult life to look like with a household of my own people. I imagined that my people would reject monogamy, materialism and gender roles; we would love justice, generosity and inclusion.

When Thomas reached that fork in the road, he chose normality, grabbed a hold of it and never let go.  His family was a site of pain so he decided to create a better one.  No matter what anyone told him about his identity, his life, his relationships, his transition, he insisted and continues to identify with normality.  He named his business “Define Normal.”  He referred to himself as not only a pregnant man, but a pregnant husband and a legal male.  Before transitioning he was a highly visible dyke activist for marriage rights, again relying on the idea that LGBT people are normal and deserve the same legal rights as other normal people.  He set his mind on creating a normal life and marriage and pursued it ferociously.  I set my mind on creating a healthy life and a tribe of unconventional friends and lovers.  How did our paths diverge so widely, perhaps even at same age?  Normal became his passion and mine too.  In the same year that Thomas was laying claim to marriage, across the country I was a founding member of a collective house of queer lovers and comrades.  When he was taking steps to become legally male, I was taking steps to improve the faltering health of my committed open relationship with two other women.  But the one thing Thomas and I were each doing in our own way was trying to create a relationship system for our selves, one that would be life and identity affirming both for us and for those who we care about. We have both made a life long pursuit of these works in progress.

But that’s where a major difference comes in: These are not two neutral positions.  Thomas wants to expand Husband to include him, and expand Family to include his family.  He takes pains to explain over and over how he is just living a regular life.  My ambition is to dismantle all the old roles like Husband because they are too limited by history, ownership and lovelessness.  My ambition is to form new, healthy ways for humans to relate to each other that do not have thousands of years of patriarchy and oppression built in, that do not alienate us from each other like the often trod husband and wife death march.  His ambition is to have a happy family for himself, his own wife and his own children.  This variety of self interest is entirely too normal. 

In this situation I might feel compelled to defend Thomas in public and argue with him in private.  Only we don’t actually know each other, and disagreements within the community have already been effectively silenced by the current obsession with marriage rights.  This is not a simple, one-issue movement but queers with more money, more access and more of a voice make it feel like one.   More than anything we need to have our full community visible, present and acknowledged.  I prefer not to have normalcy be a measure of my humanity or anyone else’s.  And this is not just a preference, this is a position that is more inclusive, healthy and life affirming for more members of our community.  Thomas Beatie is the first pregnant husband in the public eye because as he states, other pregnant trans men were not legally male and were not legally married.  But trans men without legal ID are no less men.  And Thomas only very minimally acknowledges the enormous advantage his wealth has been in his struggles with fertility doctors and clinics or even in having the ability to move to a new state and start over.

The point of the book is to tell his personal story, and to raise consciousness in the telling.  The book succeeds in this respect.  My fear is that by holding on to normality, it perpetuates the existing hostile environment for the majority of queers who exist even further away from that privileged center, whose stories are not about starting a nuclear family but about blowing up that model and starting over from scratch.  Or about being on their own, or about single parenthood or any multitude of other stories. We have had it with Normal and the pain, exclusion and hostility we have experienced around it.  Yet I am delighted that Thomas and Nancy’s story has been all over the media, reaching Oprah’s audience and the readers of People Magazine.  I am happy that this pregnant man confronted multitudes who had previously avoided thinking about gender.  And I am over the so-called radical queers who would turn their noses up at the Beaties and their story.  I am looking for more opportunities to engage in important conversations about how we can challenge oppressive gender norms... but when it comes down to it, I want to be part of a queer community that is large enough to include Thomas, Nancy, me and all the others who are far, far, far from normal. I am so proud of Thomas Beatie and his family!