Shit List Day 4: Family Values

Rather than go in to a critique of patriarchy, or the potential damage of bad families, I want to look at the idea of family as an exclusionary anti/social unit. Patriarchal families have been extremely bad for women and children, and that should always be named because it is infuriating and unacceptable. However right now I am primarily interested in having some conversations about how the family itself serves to obstruct a more supportive social system overall.

Families function to favor the set of people who are Blood Relations over the set of people who are Others. From the healthiest to the most oppressive, families all share a relationship to the question of who counts as family and who doesn’t. This way of dividing up the world has been completely exploited in the everyone-for-themselves capitalist system.  Economic oppression thrives in part on the idea that I don’t owe anything to anyone except my own flesh and blood. We can all do better. Queer people are here to do better. We are here to destroy family values.

When it comes to providing empathy and taking responsibility, our culture teaches us to prioritize family members over all the other humans to whom we are not related. Of course empathy and responsibility are not actually limited resources. But that is another conversation, because in our consumer culture we behave as though everything were a limited resource. So the idea of family enshrines care for a tiny set of people and diminishes responsibility for the rest. This fundamental aspect of family values is considered admirable because it is usually described as a form of loyalty.

The underside of family loyalty is a social order that lacks care for many, many, many, many people who need it. The system is set up to create a no-win situation where struggling families are simply not up to the multitude of challenges facing them, including emotional, economic, health challenges. Then the state and the community get to evade responsibility by pointing to some imagined moral failing of those same families.

In my birth family, two of the four of us were periodically hospitalized for mental illnesses and we certainly could have used some support from outside. But there we were, closed up in our suburban house, a family that offered little to its members and was unknown to others. We were not Family to anyone else. In other words, we were not in the set of cared-for people belonging to anyone capable of providing actual care.

So you say some families value empathy, healing, service, and caring for others? They are on their way to destroying family values and building new ones. Your family is a big household full of friends who chose to be together? Your family is tiny but made up of people who consider the babysitter a sister? You are building new family values. The old and the new live together side-by-side today, and sometimes you can feel the conflict happening. It doesn’t exactly help that we use the same word for both more open and more closed family systems. We all need a new normal. The default cannot remain the family that excludes. Right now many families straddle two worlds, waiting for the new to begin as the old passes away. We need to think carefully about what we wish to preserve from this contested territory.

On one hand, I want the new normal to question the ethics of valuing some people over others. The concept of family hinges on who is in and who is out. The conventional idea of family is based on the exclusion of the immoral, unwholesome other, in other words, the queer, the person who is with somebody the others do not approve of, the "illegitimate" child, etc. We have all had enough of that!

On the other hand, I want to note even the most loving family as currently constructed is still isolated and very often not up to all the work we expect from it. The family is inadequate to provide individuals with all the social, emotional and economic support that would make for healthier, flourishing human beings.

So the family is failing those it excludes, then under pressure it is failing those included as well. The family is failing, failing, failing. Can gay marriage be part of both the old and the new? It seems to me to hold too fast to the old. In the wrong hands, gay marriage serves to further de-legitimize our tribes and families of choice. NPR has provided some minimal coverage of conscientious objectors to gay marriage by inviting Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore on as a guest on at least 2 occasions. Recently there was coverage of the NY marriage decision, and the same interviewer who has spoken with Mattilda awkwardly brought up the fact that some gays think there is something “special” to preserve about gayness, separate and apart from marriage. A guy about to marry his long-time boyfriend responded, “Yes but we are tired of being second-class citizens.” Was he referring to the ability to marry, or is that what single people and unmarried lovers are? Or is that what people in relationships outside monogamy are? I found his response illuminating because it spoke on many levels regardless of whether the speaker would deny or confirm my reading. If anything, it is heterosupremacism that makes us second-class citizens, not the law in isolation and not the status of being unmarried. I wonder how single straight people felt hearing that interview.

The meaning of family may be contested but real families in the real world still kick out queer children and sometimes drive them to suicide. Real families still struggle and implode under pressures that are simply too great. We cannot rehabilitate that shit by simply demanding a place within it. Our presence alone will not do the trick. We need better values where care includes people who are neither your relatives nor connected to you by the rule of the state, and where a variety of relationships are respected. Before we jump to perpetuate a system that exists at our expense, we might consider whether we want to continue to even use the word “family.” But in the meantime, let’s preserve a practice well embedded in the queer community’s history and in our best present moments: caring for one another regardless of blood or law.

Shit List Day 2: Gays Aspiring to Marriage

The day after the NY marriage decision, the Michael Kors store had HRC logos all over their window. Behind the window was a display of wedding cakes topped with bride-bride and groom-groom decorations. At the dyke march I saw lots of great subversive signs, but right outside the Michael Kors store I saw somebody with “Cuomo-sexual” written on their back. The juxtaposition embodied much of what has been troubling me.

Could you be more of an unquestioning minion of the state? Could you more openly discredit the hard work our people did in favor of praising an opportunistic (and social service-cutting) governor? I could have grabbed this person by the neck, repeated “no” very firmly, and smacked them on the behind with a rolled up newspaper. Queer people! Please do not behave like lap dogs. We are not on this earth to form a market group or as a voting block for inadequately progressive politicians/corporate shills. Have some self-respect. We’re not here merely to vote or make campaign donations to Cuomo. I could have broken the window at Michael Kors and shit in their display.

Even as a child I wanted more relational options than the two I was taught: married or old maid. I realize that some of my more difficult feelings about gay marriage go all the way back to being indoctrinated to believe that if I didn’t get married then I would die alone. From my earliest memories, I rejected this dichotomy. I knew there had to be something better.

Some gay people want to get married, often for child custody, citizenship and/or healthcare, and sometimes for romantic reasons. Many of us do not want to get married. Of course our marriages should be recognized, but that still doesn’t make marriage something to aspire to. Nothing will convince me it is a good idea to force my most intimate relationships into more conventional frameworks; I am much too proud of how hard we work at breaking free from monogamy, jealousy, possession and patriarchy. I enjoy my queer relationships, writing, art, music, humor, fashion, films, house parties, political activism, made-up families, academic theory and counter culture. I love the queer culture boom happening right now. I hope a million new organizations, collectives and households form. Bottom line is that I like my friendships and love and culture as they are, totally queer. And I feel no less protective of this community than any other doberman would.

Shit List Day 1: Straight Homophobic Patriarchs

Four days after the NY Gay marriage decision, this guy on the train was yelling, “Civil rights are for people who are civilized. A woman letting another woman fuck her with a strap-on is not civilized. A man fucking another man up the ass is not civilized.” He was arguing loudly with a woman who was clearly offended and yelling right back. I went to another car.

But what I could have done was swipe the ugly little hat off his head. It was part of his ridiculous religious garb. I could have thrown it on the floor and crushed it with my boot. What I could have done was snap his head right off his shoulders and kick it down the length of the train to shut him up.

When I went back to my workplace after being laid off to turn in my final paperwork to Chuck in HR, he told me all about how he was leaving early to see his daughter’s recital. I minimally acknowledged what he was saying, as I had done the first time Chuck was introduced to a bunch of us and had attempted to build a rapport by talking about his family and football.

But what I could have done was smash all the framed pictures of his kids that he keeps on his desk. What I could have done was sit him down and talk about how the all straight-power high-fives make the workplace extremely fucking uncomfortable for people like me. So many good dads and committed moms there, trying to manage their work-life balance! Every check-in, every conference call, every meeting, people were constantly affirming their wholesome heterosexuality. It made me feel invisible and furious that the only way people could relate was through this hetero banter where I had never had anything to add. What the fuck do I have to say about your morning sickness or engagement or sleepless nights with the newborn? Holidays were the worst. The head of HR should know better, so I could force him to be educated clockwork orange style. Actually I am not even sure that would work. Even after all that I might have no choice but to beat him over the head with a giant dildo.

The law that now allows gays to marry in NY includes “exemptions” for religious organizations. Homophobic organizations are officially exempt from respecting the gay marriage law. In order for this to happen, a lot of people had to think it was reasonable to hate gays. It is considered a moral issue for churches and religious non-profits to discriminate against us. Their “right” to discriminate is written in to this law such that if it is ever taken away, the law is invalidated. The law that passed functionally legitimates the homophobia of the church. A lot of fuss was made by republicans about “protecting religious freedom,” conflating the desire to discriminate against queers with freedom of religion. (I am pretty sure freedom of religion was supposed to be freedom from state mandated religion.)

For this one, I could make some kind of breakthrough in astrophysics that would prove beyond any question that there is definitely no such thing as god. But that wouldn’t work because religious fucks are all about having faith despite evidence. Maybe I could call on the gods of Ancient Greece to smite them for their hubris. Or maybe there could be a god who appears on earth just to tell the fundamentalists of every religion that the only people doomed to hell are those dumb enough to take scripture literally. A fantasy that is really satisfying here would have to destroy both the church and the state, so maybe the fantasy is simply apocalypse. But you know some surviving asshole would immediately want to set up a church.

Pulling on the Marriage Thread

What is at stake for straight people in taking up the fight against homophobia? Now I am not talking about cheering from the sidelines or supporting gay marriage from the couch, checkbook or even the voting booth. In order to cultivate better friendships, I have to wonder what it will mean for straight people to really stand with queers. Some of my straight friends are very invested in this question too. Just a few times in my life, I have been asked with the utmost sincerity for help understanding homophobia. I deeply appreciate being asked. Connecting with the straight people I love around homophobia very much informs my understanding of this heterosupremacist culture where available explanations of homophobia have proven so inadequate. And seeing people willing to challenge their own hetero privilege is powerful and has strengthened me in my belief that it can be done. So what is the cost for those who authentically and sincerely desire to be with us in the struggle? And how is it connected to the fears of those who would do anything to stop us?

Injustice wouldn’t be so enduring if it weren’t benefiting anyone. To explore the question of what is at stake for straight people, we need to look for what they get out of the status quo. What do straight people stand to lose, for instance, if queer people get married? Why is marriage such an infuriating issue for homophobic people? Marriage is a loose thread I would like to pull and pull and see what falls apart. There are a million more issues to explore, arguably a million times more important that marriage. Yet no matter how hard most queer people try to have a vision of justice larger than matrimony, marriage comes up again and again (and again) as the singular issue that commands everyone’s attention. 

Gay marriage will secure some rights for some gays. It will not create real change for queer people and certainly will not convert marriage from a patriarchal ownership compact into a baggage-free expression of love. And yet there is such strong opposition and a lot of support and all kinds of emotion surrounding this issue. From both the support and all the opposition, it seems to me we are actually talking about marriage not only as a legal institution but also as a marker of moral righteousness. And this is illuminating because it reveals some of the underlying, unstated beliefs in this so-called debate. It’s illuminating because it suggests more of an explanation of why people are so worked up! If gays marry, it will spoil the congratulatory marriage discourse by making marriage less wholesome. Beyond the legal benefits, gift registry and reception expense, marriage is all about conferring moral goodness. Beyond Proposition 8 court battles are people’s concepts of good and evil.

For a long time I struggled to pinpoint the homophobia in people’s steady stream of marriage congratulations. Wedding talk has always been extremely stressful for me. I have never been able to authentically relate to the fuss over engagement and marriage, so I have observed the way people behave in order to be able to make some semblance of a socially acceptable response to engagement announcements. (I’m kind of like an anthropologist that way, or a sociopath.) Finally I realized it is not the couple or the displaying of the ring that scares me. It’s the fawning and more so the pressure for everyone to fawn. In order to be perceived as a moral person, or even as a person at all, I have to provide my compulsory approval for compulsory heteronormativity. I can’t bring myself to fawn, but I have trained myself to ask a few cursory questions about the proposal and wedding planning process. This banter is a form of social affirmation reserved for heterosexuals. It is more than simply being happy for somebody. It is congratulating them on joining the morally wholesome ranks of The Family.

Hi B,

I was thinking about our conversation yesterday, and about the part on how you don't want to NOT be happy for a friend who is engaged or expecting. And I assured you that is not what I want. Yet there is a grain of truth here- there will be a loss. On a personal level, I still want you to be happy. But the truth is that if straight folks start to really understand homophobia and how it functions in hetero social structures (including conventional gender roles) to exclude what is queer, it will be less fun to be straight. And you can't NOT notice anymore. If straight folks really start to understand how homophobia works, looks and sounds, well, it will be kind of deafening. It will no longer be unproblematic to participate in a hetero-reinforcing behaviors all the time. "Straight" won't easily mean honest and good anymore. People will start to notice when they are enjoying camaraderie that's about how men and women are supposed to relate. Everyone can still love their family but you won't be able to assume every human aspires to a life just like yours, or that it is totally natural, and you will have to think about how to love any current or future queer family member and how to include them. So queerness actually does jeopardize family values. It doesn't destroy them, it just shows how stuff people think is wholesome, natural, normal, universal is actually painfully exclusive when you are on the receiving end. (Dr. Laura was right to be afraid of us!) No seriously, it will be less fun. I didn't say no fun, just less fun.

For NY Times Liberals who passively support gay marriage, they maintain their moral superiority while allowing some of us to be superior too, at least those of us who want to live in monogamous couples and raise children. (In today’s baby-madness cult of motherhood, we have conveniently forgotten/erased the married straight people who do not want children.) Most liberals are willing to permit queer peoples’ entry into the realm of the morally good if we shape our lives along the same lines as theirs, substituting a “same sex” partner where an “opposite sex” partner would be. For them, marriage confers its moral superiority by collecting moral touchstones like the state, monogamy, permanence, romantic love and parenting into a super-set of moral goodness.  Queers can exist in relationship to that moral goodness as long as we accept all the other premises too. This conditionality might not be explicitly articulated, but instead manifests in beliefs like: Gays are just normal people like us! But some are really a little too “out there.” In this liberal assessment of queerdom, the vast majority of us are excluded, transgender people are consistently ignored and left out, and mainstream-minded gays are allowed to loudly insist they are representative. No substantive change occurs in the culture, no self-examination, just a small renegotiation of barriers. There is zero loss of privilege or moral superiority in the liberal framework, in fact, the life choices of liberals are reinforced by the idea that everyone really just wants the same things they want.

For Fox News Conservatives who oppose gay marriage, any entry of queers into marriage jeopardizes their moral dominance.  They cannot maintain their moral superiority if marriage becomes tainted, because unlike liberals who will still feel good about marriage and their liberal world, conservatives will no longer be able to feel good about their conservative world if gays are in it.  For them, marriage confers its moral superiority precisely through the exclusion of degenerate queers, and by collecting moral touchstones like the church, monogamy, purity, permanence, parenting, family values and heritage. Queers cannot exist in relationship to morality because by definition we are immoral, even if we are married and monogamous and conform to societal expectations in every single way but one. Clearly there is zero loss of privilege or moral superiority in this conservative framework, in fact, getting outraged by the gay rights movement bolsters their self-image as morally good. Protesters at the dyke march and gay pride clearly derive a great satisfaction from their own superiority. We can observe their pleasure at these events. In a more benign-seeming form, straight people who recommend civil unions may be responding subconsciously to the threat to their moral self-valuation. They are conflicted. They want to be fair but they don’t want to give up any of their own moral righteousness. The thing that makes marriage special for conservatives is the conference of morality, bringing the married couple up a level on the moral hierarchy. And the way to keep straight marriage moral is to keep queer people immoral.

Whether embedded in liberal tolerance or conservative intolerance, heterosupremacism as a persistent social structure will more than likely survive gay marriage unscathed. For me, the liberal version is still soul-crushing in how it seeks to diminish our uniqueness and sets normality as a gatekeeper to recognition. (I came out as a lesbian in my early twenties but I’ve always been queer and never been normal.) In the liberal version we still have to conform in order to be recognizable as human beings, and in the conservative version no matter how much we conform we can never be recognizable. Heterosupremacism wins whenever liberals tolerate our palatable differences and whenever conservatives condemn those same differences. Either way, being straight is central and being queer is marginal. Either way, most of us do not even get to be part of the argument.

Queer freedom requires dislodging heterosexuality from its central position. It will make heterosexuality less awesome… but will also open a whole world of human expression to queer and straight people alike, and everyone else too. Examples of how forced heteronormative conformity hurts straight people are everywhere. Dismantling heterosupremacism will require us to see more people as fully human, including more unmarried people, gender nonconforming people, childless people, sex workers, single parents, recluses, sluts, faeries, people with all different kinds of sexualities and life arrangements. More possibilities will open up for everyone when heterosupremacism is named and disputed and undermined.

With those expanded possibilities will come loss. A lot of people in many different places in society will enjoy less moral self-satisfaction, and that will be a loss for straight people regardless of what other privileges and/or forms of discrimination they face in terms of gender, race, class, age or anything. For liberals and conservatives alike, disrupting heterosupremacism will produce an uncomfortable sensation of the ground shifting underfoot. It may even be a devastating loss for some to realize that such a source of pride, the traditional marriage, is just one of many ways to arrange our love relationships. Heterosexuality and heteronormative lifestyles can no longer remain admirable in and of themselves. People are proud of their families. Part of that pride comes from feeling morally good, and getting admiration and acknowledgement. Part of that goodness, admiration and acknowledgement is rooted in being Not Queer, but normal and natural and wholesome. That’s the part needs to go. And it’s a big one. Maybe acknowledging the loss will help us move our energy forward instead of in this tiresome circular marriage conversation. We cannot tiptoe around heterosupremacism but we have to acknowledge that we are asking people not only to make an intellectual move but an emotional one too. The conversation I hope to have with straight people is not the tedious recitation of similarities and differences, but the difficult examination of all that is at stake in our solidarity.

Heterosupremacism

While often described as fear or hatred of homosexuals, homophobia can be more accurately and more literally be explained by the word heterosupremacism. Further it may be useful to introduce the word heterosupremacism into our conversations about homophobia, in order to break through some of the avoidance and denial that homophobia often seems to evoke. The word “homophobic” in particular seems to clam up straight people, at least in my experience. When straight people feel homophobia is being attached to them or their actions, they tend to shut down and stop listening. (If they are conservative, they shut down because they are angry at being held to an expectation they do not agree with. It’s nonsense! If they are liberal, they shut down because they are making a leap in their own mind from homophobia to being a bad person, and if there is one thing a liberal cannot tolerate, it is the suggestion that they are not a good person. It just can’t be!) My hope is that if we start a conversation about the social phenomenon of heterosupremacism, straight people will be able to stand to stay in the conversation.

A lot of radical queer discourse criticizes assimilation, but my current interests are the multitude of phenomena around straight people’s homophobia. I want to start using the word heterosupremacism to encompass and better explain all the homophobia I encounter. I am present in the straight world and I love my straight people. And while I am constantly disappointed with queers who aspire to little more than assimilation, my personal revolutionary impulse is to challenge our whole culture not just other queer people. Gays who want to blend in to straight culture and leave it more or less unchallenged perpetuate homophobia. But they didn’t invent it.

The word homophobia resists clear definition because almost every available definition fails to capture its scope. The word is used for everything from violence against queers to straight men’s fear of expressing their love for their male friends. Heterosupremacism better captures the enormity of the context in which so many permutations of homophobia flourish. Homophobia itself is an ever-expanding and self-sustaining set of harmful, violent, insidiously soul-crushing activities that arise from heterosupremacism. Heterosupremacy is a close collaborator with the behemoths patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy, and may in fact be considered a bloated appendage of patriarchy that has taken on a life of its own.

For the time being, here is a working definition of Heterosupremacism:

1. Belief in the moral superiority of heterosexual people, families and lifestyles, along with a corresponding belief in the moral inferiority or defectiveness of queers and all others who deviate from heteronormativity in expressions of gender, desire, and/or kinship arrangements.

• Politicians or other authority figures opportunistically positioning themselves with their families in order to be seen as morally good, upstanding and virtuous. He’s a “family man.”
• Congratulatory discourse characterized by heterosupremacist approval code words, such as “family values” and “Main Street.”

2. A worldview that does not include the queer and is perpetually startled, surprised, shocked, and/or disgusted by the appearance and presence of that which is queer. Failure to see or notice all that is queer, and statements of disbelief, skepticism or obliteration that separate the queer from the real.

• When people do not acknowledge sexual orientation, or say it does not matter, thereby literally diminishing the importance of your identity and simultaneously ignoring the differences you are expressing.

3. A form of sexism/patriarchy that applies specifically to valuing heterosexuality, praising it, lauding its various expressions as valuable in and of themselves, and treating it as universal and normal.

• Gay marriage as a normalizing movement where differences are denied, almost a form of “sexual orientation blindness.”
• The absence from public sight all the single parent families, communal living households, multi-generational households and families where there are no blood relations, all of which have existed throughout history and continue to exist and flourish.

4. Discourse that affirms traditional gender roles regardless of whether or not it specifically pertains to sexuality.

• The assertion that the patriarchal family is somehow “natural.”
• Retrograde explanations of gender-conforming behaviors in terms of biological functions designed to perpetuate the species, evolutionary biology, and/or references to oppressive behaviors as being “hard-wired.”

A straight friend told me about his homophobic mother. A lesbian couple moved in next door, and she got to know them. Eventually she came to think that they were nice and normal and not so bad at all. My friend cited this reduction in her homophobia, and noted the importance of becoming familiar in order to reduce fear and hate. Yet thinking the lesbians next door are normal does not decrease homophobia. She simply moved them from queer into not-queer. This change of heart does not move any actual beliefs or assumptions about those who are queer. It merely permits one set of (wealthy, white, Massachusetts married) lesbians into the concept of normal, and maybe primed that barrier for another homo to make a similar move in the future. If we understand homophobia as an activity of institutionalized heterosupremacism, it would be much easier for me to explain to my friend that sadly, this change of opinion is not so earth shattering as he believes. His mother’s exceptional neighbors drive home the reality of heterosupremacism. Heterosupremacism is so firmly in place that while these two women can change their status within it, the change does not dislodge the system in which our whole conversation is happening.

Heterosupremacism is hegemonic, and what I mean by that is it doesn’t have to be articulated belief in order to be present. In fact it derives some of its power from being unstated, from seldom being named. By not being named, it is perpetuated not as an ideology, but as simply the agreed upon “the way things are,” which provides it with protection from criticism and opposition. The uniqueness of our humanity is ignored when we frame everything in terms of heterosupremacist standards for our appearances, gender expressions, relationships, sexuality and identity. No one is spared from the pressure to conform, and gender and sexuality benefit from a world-wide voluntary police force maintaining the status quo (Your parents, teachers, neighbors, boss, etc.) We skip the step of forming an opinion about heterosupremacist standards because they have already colonized us all and set up shop in our minds and bodies. Consequently we have a responsibility to name this colonizing power as accurately and as often as we possibly can, in order to regain some of our freedom. Queer, straight and otherwise, humans will breathe easier when heterosupremacism can be named, discussed and diminished in its tight grip over how we understand each other and ourselves.

Justin Bond and the House of Whimsy: Re:Galli Blonde (A Sissy Fix)

The historical imagination of a myth of how queer people were cast out, became cursed, for helping a goddess of light escape from the subjugation of her grieving sister. Cursed to be strangers in our own families, etc. We were watching the re-enactment of our downfall without even realizing it... until it happened. Totally fucking brilliant.

Loved the ritual of sugar and spice, and snakes and puppy dog tails. And Barbie’s head.
Loved the ritual of the disco, the invocation of the houses of NYC, the re-imagined vogue.
Loved Pearl Lin’s sword dance.
Loved the skeleton castration scene.
Loved the kiddie pool communion ritual preceded by the sexiest dance ever.
Loved the dancing, set, music and costumes.

At the end of the mythological re-enactment was a healing ceremony where our pains were confessed and we were healed... it made me want to run up to the stage and get healed too! The people being healed were the actors in the play but their confessions of pain freed them from character as they described their personal experiences of discrimination, rejection, shunning and violence. I wanted Justin Bond to heal me. I wanted to confess how the spectre of the predatory lesbian has always kept me from touching and complimenting women, from expressing any form of admiration or from speaking any depth of love. It blocks me from acting on my desires. It chokes down the least impulse of tenderness and it keeps my hands strictly to myself. I fight back every chance I get. Sometimes I even win. It gets larger, it gets smaller, but it never goes away.

The confessional ritual contained a repeated litany of femme-phobia, homophobia, trans-phobia. Why not name misogyny? Or sexism? In the simplest of terms, part of the reason it is so bad to be a feminine man or trans woman or anywhere on the feminine spectrum is because it is bad to be a woman, period, and a person called male at birth who behaves in a way that is associated with women, well, that's demeaning. Patriarchy was named by one of the confessors, and patriarchy is a big daddy of the -isms that were named. A body with many heads. But I am still stumped over the absence of the word "sexism." Hatred of femininity is misogyny, so coining a new word here seems too small and a failure to make an easy connection.

Is it too much to expect queers to connect the dots between the hatred of effeminacy and the hatred of women? And if it is, isn’t that a problem for our movement? Feminism shouldn’t be news to queer people, and actually I imagine that everyone in the show would agree. The show was an awesome, gender-bending, beautiful blessing and really tapped the vein of all the is magical in our community, our movement, our history and our identity. The failure to articulate the link between women’s oppression and gay oppression created a conspicuous absence in an otherwise awesome work of art.

Number 19

One evening I started to develop intense pain on the left side of my jaw. I went to bed hoping I could sleep it off and woke up needing to see the dentist immediately. He took some x-rays and could not find anything wrong. He tapped on individual teeth with various instruments but everything hurt. He asked me if anything happened, if I fell or anything hit me in the face. Nothing like that happened. The dentist thought maybe it was just an infection so I got some antibiotics and hoped for the best.

A couple days later, I was back. Still no sign of tooth decay, and nothing wrong on the x-ray. My dentist sent me for a second opinion, to a specialist. I went to the specialist's office by the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge and she took an x-ray and examined my mouth. She said #19 was cracked and asked me if anything happened, if I got hit in the mouth or got into an accident or anything. I said no. She said, "Even a long time ago? Even when you were a little kid?"

Well, yeah, when I was little, my brother punched me in the face. But that must have been something like 25 years ago at this point. Was it on the left side? Fortunately fist fighting was not a regular occurrence, so I remember it clearly. I had my back against the inside of the front door of the house. My brother is left-handed, and I blocked 3 predictable lefts in a row, but he surprised me with a right to the jaw. That would be my left side. He is seven years older than me. I must have been around 10 or 12 years old at the most. I remember not feeling anything. My mom was there. She took me for a walk. She didn't prevent it from happening and she didn't discuss it with me afterward. We left my brother at home and went for a walk.

At some point during that walk I realized my mouth was throbbing. I didn't say anything. There was no doctor or dentist visit. My mom, brother and I acted as if it never happened. The privacy of the patriarchal household allows for an infinite number of atrocious events to go unseen and unregulated. Often I am sincerely grateful that things never got worse than they were, because there was absolutely nothing stopping them from escalating. The possibility was always there.

The second opinion dentist said I needed a root canal and more likely an extraction. She said some other things that didn’t register after the word "extraction," and put an x-ray into an envelope for me to bring back to my dentist. So I wandered out of her office back into Chinatown, thinking about all this personal history.  My own dentist couldn’t see me immediately, so I had some time to spare for walking and thinking. I walked further downtown to my dentist, whose office is near City Hall, and he still felt reluctant to drill because the x-ray didn't actually show anything. He said once we open the tooth, there is no turning back, and he couldn’t live with himself if he opened a live tooth. (Really, Dr. Chen is a great dentist and quite a perfectionist.) But after some consideration, we it was root canal time.

Drilling down, he found that the tooth was completely dead inside and had been for a very long time. When I got punched, #19 cracked down the center from front to back, which is why the crack didn't show on the x-ray. My dentist explained that when we are young, the body is very resilient. "Your tooth was broken, and your body created a seal around it. First the damage was contained and then the tooth died. It was still functional until getting this infection." I am convinced the infection happened now because at age 36 I finally have sufficient strength to allow this injury to see the light of day. The tooth had to be literally opened up and exposed in order to be repaired. So I have to open up too and acknowledge what happened. Christopher punched me in the face hard enough to break a tooth.

I learned that a root canal is a process and not a single procedure, so I was walking around for about a month with this old injury opened wide.  The dentist would check about once a week for whether the infection had cleared, each time putting some antibiotic powder into the drilled out tooth and covering it up with a bitter wax barrier.  Finally when the infection was gone, he sealed up the roots and the top of the tooth with care that the seal hold the two halves together. I’m almost grateful that I had to go around for a while, conscious of this opening, part of a history that needs to see the light of day in order to heal properly.  It’s still in question as to whether this tooth will last long enough to get a crown or whether it will eventually need to be extracted, but knock on wood, it’s doing pretty well right now.

When I told this story to my team at work, somebody asked light-heartedly if I was going to call my brother. I responded that he is in a residential mental institution. This is accurate but not a response to her question. The real response is that I won’t call because I no longer have a relationship with him. If he were out in the world today, I would similarly choose not to have any relationship with him, and in fact take measures to prevent him from getting my contact information. It was only when I was younger and living with my parents that I had no choice in the matter.  When I was in my early teens, him being institutionalized relieved me of the burden of having any relationship with my brother. I could attribute the lack of relationship to being institutionalized. But at this point it is my decision and I know it is the right one. I don’t need the mental institution as an excuse, and I don’t constantly worry about him potentially being released the way I did during his early years there.

My brother was hospitalized a number of times through out my childhood. Each time he was discharged from the mental hospital after a short stay, we didn’t talk about it.  He would be gone for maybe one or two weeks and my mom and dad and I acted as if nothing had happened when he got back.  I didn't get any explanation for why he was there and I didn't know what treatment he was getting and I didn't know what was expected to change as a result of the hospitalization. I heard terms like “brain damage, learning disability, manic depression.” Somehow I knew I wasn’t supposed to ask. There were always some topics that were taboo.

After these periodic hospitalizations, no one asked my brother what it was like and no one said welcome back. Nothing marked the event or encouraged any improvements in his mental health, nothing acknowledged what he experienced or ostensibly got out of the psychiatric care he was getting, nothing changed in anyone’s behavior or relationship to him. So surprise, his mental health did not improve. I only remember a sense of relief when he was gone. Years later, after he was gone and my mother was herself hospitalized for depression it was the same pattern again, no welcome home, nothing discussed.  But this time we met with the doctor and he said we should be “supportive.” I don’t think we knew what that word meant.  I was a teenager and honestly did not know what it looked, felt or smelled like to be supportive. I was literally puzzled over that word.

It’s not that I think talking about my brother or mom’s mental health would have made them better or would have made my life better. But I do believe banning talk of them made things worse. As a kid, I wanted to bring stuff up all the time but was threatened with trips to the psychiatrist myself whenever I tried. So I became very adverse to bringing up problems directly or asking for what I need in relationships, and this aversion kept me out of the psychiatrist’s office and kept me on the self-styled “sane” side of the family with my father.  This so-called sanity was characterized by silence, isolation and rugged individualism, all qualities associated with conventional masculinity. I became the strong/silent type, an unhealthy archetype if there ever was one.

The reluctance to speak came with me when I moved away from my parents.  And it became a strong contributing factor in two subsequent relational train wrecks: First when my ex-girlfriend brought a straight white monogamous male into our queer poly household and I did not take up the fact that his values and behavior were totally out of sync with the vision for our house. Second when she started to demonstrate values and behaviors herself that were in direct conflict with what was once our shared vision of queer utopian kindness, honesty and responsibility. Both times I waited until the situation was a total crisis to clearly and directly set limits and expectations for how I want my life to run, specifically for the way people can and cannot behave towards me. Since I grew up with somebody whose behavior was profoundly unacceptable, and my desire for things to be different was pathologized, it is no surprise that part of me believed I should just tough out other people’s mendacity. This undercurrent of silence is still present, but now a bigger and louder part of me is committed to dealing explicitly, even strategically, with the unacceptable shit in all areas of my life. Mendacity!

My brother was a minor the first time he was arrested.  He and my mom and I were eating at Burger King in the mall. The two of them were fighting and he flung everything off the table on to the floor and stormed out. I can't remember or imagine what I thought of the whole thing, but remembering this incident makes me also think about how the two of them fought constantly.  Something happened with the security guards and the police were called, the mall being outside the privacy of the patriarchal family home.  He spent the night in jail, and I don’t know exactly what happened but I know “resisting arrest” was one of the charges.  Within a few days he was briefly hospitalized and then released.

One event that stands out in my mind was a time he came home with broken glasses and a bloody broken nose. No explanation given. It turned out he had been to see a girl that night. What registered for me immediately was that a girl had prevailed in fight with him. Only on second thought did I consider the reason she resorted to hitting him that hard or more likely with some object. He often talked about what he wanted to do to girls. I cannot think of any other time in my life I have been so happy to see a person physically injured.

When my brother turned 18, my father kicked him out of the house.  My father had been very vocal about counting down the days and when it finally happened, I was so relieved. Shortly after my brother got his own place, he was arrested again.  He had some kind of fight with his landlady, a fight that resulted in her son calling the police on him. This time the court system did not release him and he was hospitalized instead. As far as I know, he has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Eventually he went to the institution where he resides to this day.  I don't know the name of it and I have never visited him and I do not plan to visit him. For years I felt like I couldn't tell anyone about this decision because they would think I was heartless, or maybe because I believed that I was heartless. The broken tooth gave me a reason to look back through adult eyes and really understand for the first time the reasons for my decision to end my sibling relationship entirely.