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Saturday, October 11, 2008

Today Is National Coming Out Day

I came out over twenty years ago, more or less to everybody I knew, more or less simultaneously, in what was very much a jumping into the deep end of the pool kinda sorta scene. That was fun. I can't say that I honestly feel I have suffered in any way as a consequence of that scene, not a single time in all the years since, although I guess it had its tense and histrionic moments. I frankly think I've gotten far more guff coming out as an ethical vegetarian a few years after that than I did coming out as queer, when I think back on it.

The American landscape for queer issues is very different from the way I imagined it would be by now looking forward back then. Given the disappointments of the Clinton Administration, the ugly foolishness of Don’t Ask Don't Tell and the "Defense" of Marriage, given the ongoing organized hysteria of Theocons in full-on gay panic through this long National nightmare of a Republican Administration forever pandering to the worst, most ignorant, most hateful impulses at the margins of our society, given the "Values Voter" scapegoating of lgbtq folks in the aftermath of Kerry's failure to regain the White House and so on, it is fairly breathtaking to contemplate the steady accumulation nonetheless of milestones and accomplishments toward real legal standing and a cultural embrace of queer folks in America over those twenty years.

I expect an Obama Administration will turn the page on the Queer as favored go-to prop for effective divisive Republican Culture Warfare just as surely as he will decisively undermine at long last and to the abiding benefit of us all the racist Southern Strategy. Whatever the inevitable skirmishings, I expect the way will be clear enough soon enough for marriage, adoption, open service in the military, and all the rest of that jazz, for even the most timorous lesbian and gay folks who want them.

White gay men for whom homophobia has mostly been a matter of their frustration at being denied the heady pleasures to which white racist patriarchal capitalism would otherwise "entitle" them, are doing fine, it seems to me, and are certain to do better all the time from here on… out.

I daresay the problems of queer folks who are vulnerable in their queerness through its imbrication with the irrational prejudices attaching to transgender and intersexual atypicalities, to the legacies of domestic violence, to the existential distresses of poverty and homelessness and transnational precarity, to the spiritual crisis of substance abuse and so on, since these connect to deeper structural problems associated with America's cruel and blinkered market ideology, its shaming and isolating hyper-individualist delusions, its disavowed but interminable bloody-minded racism, and appalling self-congratulatory anti-intellectualism will be longer, more painful, no doubt demoralizing struggles.

In the next twenty years, here's hoping more people "come out" as loud proud fighting liberals, as secular democrats, as social and technoscientific progressives, as cosmopolitan multicultural celebrants, and as peers, peer to peer.

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