Inchoate rage, perplexity, fear, joy, regarding Coming Out

I am supposed to be reading a Certain Classic Text of early modern literary scholarship, but since I am sick to bloody death of hacking away with a blunt hatchet at what I sincerely hope has been for some time a very dead new historicist horse, I instead choose to spend these precious moments pondering this date, designated (American) National Coming Out Day.

A friend just pointed out in another venue, which is quasi-private and so not going to be linked here, that “coming-out” is laden with some pretty serious issues about for whom and where coming out is a powerful thing to do, about how issues of visibility and legibility are fraught with all manner of consequences (and not just for those queers who are “at risk,” as the quaint political parlance has it). I’ve never actually thought about it that way — I’ve thought about the marriage debate, certainly, in terms of visibility and legibility issues, in terms of how marriage is one among many means of making a public, theatrical (not to say performative) gesture that aims to render queerness legitimate, not to mention transparent, to a straight audience and within a straight structure. One reason among many that the ardent desire in certain homonormative circles to continue carrying the marriage banner, to the detriment of many other issues, really makes the little angry mouse in me go ROAR. (Thanks in particular to Professor Revolutionary and Pretty Dyke Friend for being partners — or, in the case of Prof R, commanding officer — in my coming to possess the tools for seeking articulateness on the issue.)

But it never occurred to me to use those terms to describe the coming-out narrative. Which is odd, I suppose, because I tend to think of coming-out as a kind of forced performance. Forced, because I find that I am rarely in control of the terms of that coming-out to nearly the empowering extent one would suppose available on the basis of the “You go girl!!” attitude many LGB(T) communities tend to use to encourage coming-out. I feel generally fairly settled, comfortable, happy in the rudiments at least of my own queerness until I am faced with a straight medium in which communication is for me unnatural. How, for example, to boil down years of feminist awakening, of assessment and constant re-assessment of my sexual, erotic, and political alignments in a form comprehensible to the straight men I now find myself living with?

My response to a query from one of them as to why I was interested to know if there were any interesting, attractive women — no, no, not men, women – in Brit Uni’s physics program, in which they’re Ph.D. students, was, playful-smirkingly, as follows:

“… Uh, because I’m a big dyke.”

Hello. You could hear the crickets all the way from Liechtenstein. Well, I’m guessing you could, because I couldn’t hear much for all the contained laughter going on inside my head.

It worked fine in the moment, answered the question, shut down a discussion I didn’t want started, and was just puzzling and freaky enough to please the part of me that believes that queer women should always do their level best to make uncritically straight men as uncomfortable as possible.

But it said absolutely nothing about me to its immediate audience, except perhaps that I’m maybe just a little bit tougher than they thought I was. Oh, and that I’m sexually off-limits to them (insha’allah). It wasn’t meant as a coming-out, as a declaration, as a dis-closure or dis-covery: on the contrary, it was intended to mark off an impregnable border, to close an open route into my personal life and sexual identity. Despite my sometimes exuberant attitude, despite my occasional explosiveness, I am a fairly reserved person in many ways, and becoming more so. Sexuality and eroticism are no more private to me than are most other aspects of my life, but they are private, and I feel no particular joy at the continuing need — practical and political — to keep making them public, making them objects of strategy and Identity, rather than revealing them as I choose to those close to me, as continually unfolding layers, pieces of myself given as gifts in trust.

If this is slightly incoherent or internally contradictory, it’s because I’m still working these things out as I write this, using the writing as a way to work them out.

Just now it occurs to me that that moment of non-dis-closure was embedded in more privilege (I mean that in a simpler sense than it seems) than I had considered. It brings me back to a moment during the fall of my senior year in the Petri Dish, a period during which I was for the first time hanging out with queers of an older generation (who weren’t drum-circle-belonging, Starhawk-reading, Michfest-going, Catharine Mackinnon-worshipping witch-lesbians), whose radicalism I admired but who maintained a healthy awareness of a danger I’ve never had to sense. These were people more or less like me — Northeasterners, white, middle-class — and yet their experiences were totally alien to mine. What it must have been like to be coming out at tradition-laden universities in the early sixties, or seventies for that matter, I can’t possibly know. What it must have been like to come of age in a time and a place where coming-out was actively dangerous, had to be strategically considered, where complex (and hilarious, and powerful) devices had to be constructed to disguise one’s sexuality from a given Authority, I really just simply can’t know. Those same places are familiar to me now as relatively safe ground for queers.

Shamefully enough, it was only then that I realized that, for a lot of people in a lot of different positions (even within, say, white, middle-class Northeastern America) there might be more at stake in coming-out than there is for me.

I have not addressed communities to which I don’t in some way belong, and I won’t, because in this venue, from where I sit, it would be presumptuous at best, condescending and appropriative at worst.

The point is that this coming-out thing is damned complicated. If I had my way, National Coming Out Day would not be devoted to self-identification, but to ambush. Not coming out, but leaping out armed to the teeth (with words, in my case — very voluble words) not to explain ourselves to the straights but to cause a genuine chaotic ruckus. (My own personal ruckus would be a discursive one — I’m anti-violence, but then that’s mostly just because I’m diminutive, not physically fit, and unskilled with heavy arms. So.)

But coming-out is almost never about a ruckus. It’s about rendering queerness legible to straight people, about constantly framing, explicating, packaging and labeling queer identities so that straights can understand them, it’s about making straights feel comfortable with queerness. And all of that fills me with rage. But perhaps it’s changing — I see my friends changing it every day. We rage together, we light fires in each other’s eyes and send each other out into the world bravely. And we get more brave every day.

For the most part, it must be said, I just sit quietly somewhere out of the way and don’t talk to anyone who doesn’t demonstrate being worth talking to. I am not an activist by trade. But behind the stack of books, behind the quiet focus and the ink and the jargon, there is that fire.

It’s never been in any goddamned closet, and it’s not coming out, today or any other day, just to warm you up or make you smile. It has things to do (like burn a hole through the carcass of a certain dead horse, mentioned above), and you and your complacent tolerance are not on its list.

Unless, of course, you’re queer too — by which I mean you’re doing some good, hard thinking about sex and power and gender and eros and just exactly where you sit in the whole mess — in which case, fuhgeddabout the whole damn thing, let’s have a beer and laugh and maybe throw some shit. Or let’s just cuddle.

An amalgam of largely unrelated things

Snippets from the Life of Mouse, in the form of, you guessed it, random bullets of crap.

• On Wednesday, reader, your Mouse took the Graduate Record Examination. She will refrain from the rousing chorus of whatthefucks and oh-em-gee-this-is-so-effing-uselesses that has been bursting to get out of her for days. She will, however, share the unease that came to meet her as she stared at the computer screen at the end of the Examination. After the computer tauntingly asked her – twice – whether she was really sure she wanted to accept her scores, she was confronted with two three-digit figures that entirely flummoxed her. These figures were delightfully high. She had to suppress a gleeful giggle. She sighed with relief. Then a queasiness set in. These figures are meaningless, she thought to herself. They are empty. This test is worthless and measures precisely nothing. So why, she wondered, was she so proud of herself for having caused those delightfully high figures to appear on the screen? Why has she allowed herself to be trained to believe that ultimately arbitrary test results actually say something about her? Is she really this shallow? More importantly, is the academy really this shallow? Please, she silently prayed, let neither of these be so. And still…. is she… is she, maybe, a little bit, allowed to be pleased with herself?

• If nothing else, should the humanities fail her, at least her math score comforts her with the knowledge that she might have an alternative career in astroengineering waiting for her.

• Because, after all, something you may not know about your mouse is that she once harbored ambitions in physics. Until, that is, she ran across a series of genuine trolls in the shape of mathematics and physics teachers and professors. When she got to the Petri Dish, this mouse was prepared to give it one good go, and registered for courses in advanced calculus, chaos theory, and astronomy. She found, of course, a much comfier, if frequently awkward and sometimes antagonistic, home in her two literature departments, and was delighted to be fostered by a third, eccentric aunt sort of department. But from time to time she misses shapes and numbers, vectors and dimensional multiplicity.

• Which is why she is so glad to have found an unexpected source of mirth in the physicist partner of her friend Professor Lyrical. At every available opportunity, Mr. Lyrical good-naturedly teaches her something about the life of Johannes Kepler, or the origin of quantum physics, or the conception of the atomic bomb. When he sees a merry-go-round, he wants to talk about how to build one from scratch. He is happy that she knows things about the seventeenth century, because he likes to talk with due reverence about Isaac Newton. He has a theory that “life,” that thing humanists talk about with undue reverence and to which we accord such infinite abstract complexity, comes down to a physical surfeit of energy. This theory makes your mouse intensely happy.

• In this bullet, the relative coherence of the list falls apart and I stop talking about myself as a third-person anthropomorphic rodent, so that in the next bullet I can talk about how

• Last night, my dear friend the Conscientious Orientalist and a queer kid we knew in high school and I went to our suburban New England county’s only gay bar. As it turns out, the region has its redeeming qualities. I now know, for example, that there is at least one space in which a genuinely racially mixed group of people can gather in this intensely segregated county. A critical mass of queer Latinos and Latinas eliminate the threat of house music and replace it with the joys of salsa. White men dance with men of East Asian origin. Black butch dykes exchange surreptitious smiles with white, J. Crew-clad, femme faghags. All riddled with tension, to be sure, and the uneasy sense that the wife of the middle-aged white dude standing over there with his hand on a seventeen-year-old’s ass might employ the sister of the Latina standing at the bar as a housekeeper. Nevertheless, watching this peculiar safety valve of a social scenario at work, I found myself comforted. And comfortable enough, for the first time since my return from France, to cut loose and dance, and dance, and dance. When the DJ announced to the room at large that he would like to talk to the “white girl in the glasses in the middle of the dance floor,” I realized it was time to go. The CO and I left our former classmate, the self-identified Straightest Gay Man On The Planet, in the company of a dweeb in a blue button down shirt and Dockers and revelled all the way home in our discovery that, even in Stepford, two snarky, overeducated expat queers can have one hell of a fun night out.

My life as an autonomous lesbian sleeper cell

I hate coming out. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.

It’s not my closet. I’m not hiding anything. A given interlocutor has a closet in her head out of which I am obligated to wrest myself. It is the assumptions of others that dominate those conversations. It makes me fucking insane. This is likely because I was lucky enough to spend five years in a place where, generally, heterosexuality was not assumed, or not as vigorously as it is here in New Eden.

Now, I don’t read as queer, even to other queers, because I’m not butch. (Dispensing, for the nonce, with the rant about the supposed equation between dykeness and butchness.) I’m not femme, either (another rant about binaries hereby dispensed with), but I’m a fey little thing and will always be read as feminine, no matter how I present. Body language can do a lot — folks with good queerdar will pick me up pretty quickly after a few minutes of conversation. But, sadly, New Edeners tend not to come with the right software for such nuanced observation. (In high school and early college, I wore a rainbow belt — and even that wasn’t enough.)

Since presentation won’t do it for me, language has to carry the burden of proof. Unfortunately, I don’t have energy to explain my identifications fully, but I also hate identifying with a simple label for the benefit of the clarity of mind of others. And there’s always the which-label problem: when pressed, I identify as queer or as a dyke. I despise “gay,” and “lesbian” makes my skin crawl. “Sapphist” is a fabulous throwback, but illegible in most circles. Further misfortunes occur surrounding the fact that, in a place like New Eden, “queer” and “dyke” must carry with them an ungainly Queer 101 lecture that is likely to sound threatening to these sweet little straights.

Not that I mind threatening, but some of these sweet little straights are my coworkers and I must continue to get along with them, for my own peace of mind. I’m not fully out at work yet, and it drives me nuts. Worse, of course, than any of the dynamics of coming out is the horror of being read as straight. But I refuse to engage in the kind of PSA-style revelation of my so-called “sexuality” that dominates narratives of disclosure in this culture. So how do I maintain my integrity in a way that also allows me to continue to have healthy working relationships with my coworkers, about half of whom are probably homophobes?

Sex lives, or even romantic lives, are not a topic of conversation at New Eden Books. And I’m not currently partnered, so the “my girlfriend” drop is out. So I envision a scenario like this one:

“Hey mouse, have you read the new Joyce Carol Oates?”
“No, not yet. But I was reading that Sarah Wa–”
“Oh, but the Oates is so great! There’s a galley in the back – grab it before someone else does. Hey, will you shelve these for me?”
“Sure. Also, I have sex with women!”

Clearly not the way to go about things, but what’s a little dyke to do when nobody knows she’s a dyke?

That’s "fond" in the early modern sense

Oh, and: apparently being a “Teen Advisor” for a community-outreach abstinence-education group renders young women unable to write. Or think.

Yes, I’m saying I’m smart and (sometimes) articulate because I have good non-marital sex. With women. Deal.