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Literature, gay people, Pride [1]

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Date: 2023-06-02

I mean, poetry, and plays, novels. Why do we read poetry, plays, and novels about gay lives? Why is there such a thing as gay literature? The simplest answer is because there are gay people, but things go off the rail immediately. There may not be gay people. It may be that there are simply people who act gay and think gay but are in no central way different from anybody else. It may be that the only difference between me and the nearest straight person is that I have borne the stigma of being gay all of my life—have been set apart by my culture—and that other person hasn’t. This stigma is socially created. There is nothing biological about it. My difference—the sex I am attracted to—is only a random change in the human genome created by Darwinian biology. Humans have lived with this variation since sometime deep in the development of our branch of the descent of mankind. One egg was attracted to its same sex and another to its other sex. Or another sex. Aside from this random variation, no difference between me and everyone else walking on two legs has been discovered to explain my being attracted to a particular gender. What is interesting however is how we deal with the stigma we receive from our culture because of this random variation. Some of us hide, some of us suffer, some of us fight back, some of us become peacocks with gorgeous tails. What is interesting about us is the varieties of ways we act against our condition. Put that way, we are exactly the same subjects for literature as, say, Achilles struggling against his condition, or Agamemnon against his. Or Shakespeare against his two angels of comfort and despair. Or Oscar Wilde and his angels. Alan Turing struggling against the man he had met at the cinema. The 49 of us at Pulse. The five of us at Club Q.

What is essential about us—and interesting to see at any Gay Pride march—is how different our responses are to our stigma. The community seems to take the stigma as a given and then turn it into a flag—rainbow flag—as if to say, YES! AND AREN’T WE BEAUTIFUL! It’s the same message Queer Nation had a generation ago. We’re here! We’re queer! We’re fabulous! Get used to it! It doesn’t give a silly centimeter to the majority community. It just says, Oh, dude, see me! And the watcher at the parade sees them, all the multifarious multitudes of them, the banks, the churches, the women with pasties on their breasts, the politicians, the guys in black leather, parents with children, men and women with virtually naked and gilded bodies, drag queens carrying books, all the variety of us displaying ourselves in the middle of the street on Pride Day, hearing the continuous applause of the bystanders, who are cheering us and our very ordinary, flamboyant humanity, as we walk by.

We read books for the same reason we go to Pride—to experience ourselves in all our differences and in all our glittering colors, the living and the dead, Oscar Wilde, Alan Turing, Michael Kameny, Marsha P. Johnson, Charles Howard, Matthew Shepard, Jody Foster, Elton John, Bob Paris, and all of the rest of our gang. Histories try to determine the facts about me. The goal of poems and novels and plays and Gay Pride is to display my spirit—and be in your face.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/story/2023/6/2/2172991/-Literature-gay-people-Pride

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