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Thoughts on Pride Month from a suspected homosexual [1]
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Date: 2023-06-29
I posted this on Facebook at first. But I don’t have a huge friend circle, and after I hit “post,” I figured I wanted a potentially bigger audience. And I hope some people like this. It’s something I meant to write last year, but I made excuses not to. It feels like a high school “what Pride Month means to me” post in a way.
But I'm glad of the progress over the years and want to share what it means to me. And perhaps I make myself out as more of a Marty Stu than I was. But even if I'm an awful person ... I have certain rights. I didn't need to do anything to ask for them. And I now feel more comfortable asking for them. And this isn't a coming out of the closet post, but about general human dignity, even/especially for people who want or need to keep certain things secret. It's about not feeling guilty you're accused.
I'll start with a quote from Joseph Heller's Catch 22: "Communists suspected Major Major of being a homosexual, and homosexuals suspected him of being a communist." This was back in 1950. And it's not so much about communism working (it doesn't. Neither does aggressive capitalism. That's another lecture.) But I remember laughing at how ACCUSED poor Major Major must feel, how excluded he must feel, even though he may enjoy his time alone and seem normal on the outside ("a sickly Henry Fonda.")
I still remember my sister bringing home anti-gay jokes for my parents to laugh at. Maybe they didn't have any slurs. But I didn't laugh. Maybe it was just that I couldn't conceive of homosexuality as A Thing. I think my sister, mother and father all now feel themselves too sophisticated for anti-gay jokes. They're more likely to mock homophobic Trump voters as clueless. Hooray for that, I guess. Perhaps they even Appreciate What Gay Entertainers Bring To Their Lives, as if what matters is that we can entertain others. Yay Freddie Mercury! Yay Village People! And so forth. Indeed--but people deserve more.
I remember an article in the Guardian many years ago by a gay man. He absolutely hated Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Some of us, he said, just wanted to live our lives and not impress anyone. One should not be asked if we can be at least a fraction as funny as the QEftSG crew. And, yes, that is what human dignity is. Perhaps QEftSG allowed tolerance to gain a huge foothold, but all the same--it was only a foothold, and people deserved more.
So I feel this: it's good that there are Pride parades, but I really really don't want to go to one. Because I have my own story I'd like to share. I moved from rural Indiana to Evanston for 7th grade, and probably the last thing on my mind was dating a girl. My parents let me know Evanston meant opportunities--but really, nothing like dating. Why, they never dated in high school! They were busy with school, and Evanston was a better school than they went to, so I'd need to study more. (Their marriage? Hoo boy. Let's just say I look back and see the signs that it was awful. Incidentally, they went to the same high school a few years apart. I think they met at church.)
Anyway, being interested in math and chess I figured I wasn't going to get a lot of dates, and I was actually surprised a few girls gave me their number. Some of them were very nice indeed. I was touched when they popped up in my Facebook friend suggestions without me looking at *their* profile pages, but I never, you know, sent a friend request. They were good people, people worth knowing, dating or no. It's all a bit embarrassing. (Side note: I remember at some chess tournaments, players from the smaller schools would bring their lettermen jackets for "real" sports and sometimes their girlfriends would show up for support. I always expected they wanted to demoralize the hard-core chess players, which I find far far less harmful than homophobia. But it's a funny memory now, high schoolers finding silly ways to flex.)
It also occurs to me that a lot of gay-baiting went over my head. The worst of it was from people that I should have trusted, and I asked them to stop, and they would, for a bit, before bugging me again. "Come on, Andrew! These are questions you need to be thinking about!" In a way, yes. I've thought about these questions and know why they're so invasive now. Of course it annoyed me but I filed it under "stuff I need to put up with" or "stuff I'm being oversensitive about." And while it struck me that people were going to bug me that I'd done the wrong thing whether or not I answered, no matter what the answer was, I still felt sucked into the vortex either way.
I also remember guys who would talk about doing aggressively after women, and that always sat wrong with me, and I didn't know why. (Yes, I know why, now. It isn't about showing initiative but being horridly, awfully controlling. Which is bad, physically or mentally.) Boy Scouts was particularly bad. I wish I had found an excuse to quit the troop earlier because there were some real jerks a year or two ahead of me, but it was when two guys a year or two behind me went over the line that I gave up. One of the jerks behind me, the last I saw of him was at the athletic club. I was rehabbing my knee from surgery in college. He laughed at me for not using the arm machines, as if it was not macho enough. My explanations weren't good enough, just as explaining why I had enough to do in high school wasn't good enough to the more direct "U GAY DUDE" inquiries. And I was confused, too, about guys who claimed that pussy was very, very desirable, but apparently I was a pussy for not wanting pussy. (Note: these people don't confuse me any more. They show they are pretty awful. But I made the mistake of freezing up instead of even nodding and going along. Silly me.)
It took me a while to realize that, no, I hadn't actually asked for the harassment I'd gotten. There were some people who informed me that my physique wasn't the sort that attracts women, and then they'd tell me not to be desperate, then they wondered why I didn't even try, and I suspected they'd mock me if I really did try. But above all, though, when I thought of girls, for the most part I realized that anyone I asked on a date, I'd partially be doing it to show other guys, and that wasn't fair to her.
Nevertheless, this was the sort of thing that got me in trouble. That, and also, some people confiding in me about having sex with a girl, and I had to admit I could wait, or I felt I wasn't in very physically good shape or whatever, or she wouldn't want me, and besides, one thing I couldn't say is that my parents and sister would have been very, very nasty to any girl I had brought home. (Seriously. My sister could be vicious, and it's one reason I'm hiding this post from her.) I would have heard the whole line about how my parents didn't get to date in high school (implying everything turned out okay for them--it didn't,) and sure, we moved to Evanston for increased opportunities, but doesn't that mean studying instead?
So, yes, I remember the harassment. The questioning about if I was gay, with no good answer. Then the follow-ups, as if I'd given the worst possible answer, with no way to say "enough, already." A parent saying "Haha, looks like I'm not getting any grandkids from you." And there were the weird contradictions thrust on me. People who would ultimately tell me that I was not as desirable to women as they were, but I should still really, really want a woman, even though I would have to work harder than they did. It made me certainly not want to talk about women, understandably, and I think they just made up their own assumptions.
I leave with some positive thoughts. It's an apology form a famous person who had little to gain by their apology. I'm glad they did it, and it must mean a lot to a lot of people. I'm talking about Eddie murphy, who apologized for some of the anti-jokes that he made in the 1980s that got a lot of laughs. Of course, I heard his Raw album, and I was really confused by one thing he made fun of the awful stereotype that gays are flamboyant, but then again, he was wearing red leather pants and a red leather jacket on the cover of the album. It just didn't make sense to me, but I couldn't exactly explain that, could I? But it's weird, if I somehow ever met Eddie Murphy, it'd be weird to thank him for it. Even if his apology made me feel less crazy and upset. People won't be as persecuted or suspected, now, and that's a good thing. And--I remember sitting back and realizing I hadn't been harassed for a while now, or whatever, and feeling lucky, and it feels good to feel lucky--but it's something we all deserve, too.
Norms are different now. LAws are in place. Yes, people can still be jerks, and we can and should press back and not say "ehh, good enough." We can find paths to laugh at homophobia, or even at gay-baiting. Slang like "breeder" as a euphemism for heterosexual. Words like queer have been co-opted by groups once taunted by them. I felt pride voting, 20 years ago now, for Tom Tunney as alderman. He's since retired. Progress has been good. And I hope people keep fighting harder than I felt I had a right to.
[END]
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