My father's gay. That gene skipped me, for which I am selfishly grateful; hard enough being a pervert in America without being homosexual, as well.
He never had a chance. Adopted by half-insane Catholics*, raised in an atmosphere of constant head-fucking and crushing guilt, he lacked even the words to conceptualize himself as anything other than diseased and damned. This was before queers had TV shows and media stars, before Stonewall... When his family and society told him what it meant to be gay, theirs was the only answer he had. He was a fag. A fairy. A half-man who could be beaten, tormented, and even raped without consequence.
It broke him. Internalized hatred twisted everything he touched, including our own relationship.
I wonder: had he another answer, would both of our lives be different? Even were it a matter of changing one stereotype for another, something so trivial as thinking, 'I'm gay, I guess I'm stuck in the cultural industry' instead of, 'I'm a faggot, I'm damned and worthless', who would we be today?
I'll never know.
Today is National Coming Out Day. Today is the day we flood our media channels and public squares with a new answer: being queer, trans, bi, or just plain kinked means that straight sex doesn't do it for you. And that's all it means.
Really. It doesn't mean you're better or worse than anyone else, it's not a pathology, it's not a sin. What two (or more) consenting adults want in bed should have nothing to do with which rights they are afforded under the law, their treatment in the community, or their status as human beings.
That's just true. That's my answer.
*Not an indictment of Catholics, but an indictment of -these specific people- whose madness happened to grow on a Catholic trellis.
11 October 2010
National Coming Out Day
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2 comments:
::claps solemnly::
Since I'm here to split hairs (mostly yours) I would like to point out that unlike the L, the G, and the B, T people aren't motivated so much by who they want to fuck, as who they want to be. I like to be unusually vocal about this merely to make the distinction between identity and orientation, as they are very seperate sometimes.
Thanks for this, though.
That's an excellent point, Beta. Thanks for adding it to the conversation.
My thoughts were, obviously, focused on orientation; I see how I've conflated it (explicitly, even) with identity, here. You're entirely correct that there is a distinction.
:after a moment's bleary reflection:
AH! By conflating the two, I undermine my own thesis, don't I? Well done, Beta. Thanks, again.
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