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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: August 23, 2006 at 2:54 am by Eve Tushnet

2006-08-23T02:54:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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SHE THINKS I STILL CARE (lightly edited): OK, so ever since I read it, I’ve been obsessing over Disputed Mutability’s description of “moving past gay identity.” So. Why that is not how I am.

First of all, this is NOT criticism of DM or of her stance. It is solely a discussion of why I am where I am. There are really good reasons to be where she is, and I think she articulates them well, and I’m not disputing (ha) any of them. (And I really wish I could quote her entire paragraph on the subject here, but for some reason my mouse is wigging on me, so please do go here and read her discussion FIRST, just so you can see the degree to which I’m just riffing rather than actually “replying” to her post.) If I overstate, at any point, or say something you think is haring off in the wrong direction, please do let me know.

Second, this is really scattershot, and… I’m not sure how coherent it will be. So if something’s unintelligible, please do let me know about that, too.

So: Why do I “identify as” queer, or whatever?

Destroyed, my people are destroyed/For lack of knowledge: Dude, if I don’t, who will? Eugene Debs believed a lot of very dumb things, but I have never been able to shake his old catechetical formula: “While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it. While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” I’ve paid out a lot of hours listening to guys in US Army issue glasses talking about watching their friends die from AIDS. I can’t turn away from that. Because of where my experiences have led me, I can’t walk away from the situations/identity/whatever that shaped some of the bravest people I’ve ever met. And as long as those people are still getting messed with, growing up hating themselves, or any other kind of suffering, because of a sexual identity we share, well. “I am not free.”

And the only sound was the women in the chapel praying: I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it until somebody doggone listens (!): might not be Catholic if I weren’t queer. You got to dance with the one what brung you, yeah? As with the point above–I think I owe it to all the people I never got to thank in person. (And all the people who wouldn’t accept my thanks if it were offered.)

Oh, I still see sunny days; oh, I go that far: Before my baptism, I was really shaken by the idea of making such a serious break in my identity. I felt like I’d worked really hard for any sense at all of continuity of identity–a sense of a self, rather than fractured and unaccountable selves. It was actually reassuring to me to think that while the guilt of sin would be expunged through baptism, the tendency toward sin–and thus the past, the person I’d been until Easter 1998–wouldn’t be removed. Similarly–I know people say all these very intelligent things about how “coming out” is an individualist/Gnostic thing, and yeah, I see that. But I don’t think I can completely reject that experience of hearing the key turn in the lock, feeling like the world made sense, without rejecting wholesale my ability to recognize truth when it presents itself–and therefore rejecting my conversion, as well, a much more profound “coming out” experience.

And when I get excited…: a. I can’t shut up, anyway, about anything; and b. I kind of don’t think I should. A lot of other people in similar situations have excellent reasons for not being super hardcore about gay/queer identity. I don’t have any of those reasons. I’m out, self-employed, completely unable to keep from yapping about myself at every opportunity. (…And yes, you might say that last thing is one reason I should occasionally shut my cakehole. You wouldn’t be wrong. But…) Somebody has to talk about the joys of life as ye olde same-sexe-attracted Catholicke, and the various ways of handling troubles, and, well, the fact that I completely suck at it shouldn’t stop me! As Chesterton says, anything worth doing is worth doing badly…. (And as the Bagthorpes say, too much is never enough!)

Hay una discoteca por aqui?: I can’t think of any culture–possibly not even Jews! maybe not even Catholics!–that has provided as much joy in my life as gay culture. It’s been more than a decade since my first girlfriend gave me a tape with The Smiths up one side and Your Arsenal down the other, and I still remember why I’m here each time “Reel Around the Fountain” plays. Socrates, in the Philebus, is totally unhelpful: In this life, there are no unmixed pleasures. So we should honor joy and longing where we find it, even if it’s attached to other things we can’t hold on to.

Hang on to your ego: And finally, I suspect I am postmodern enough to take this whole category of “identity” both seriously and lightly. (Kafka: “A belief is like a guillotine: just as heavy, just as light.”) Seriously enough that it really matters to me, you can say “gay solidarity” and I won’t totally laugh (maybe just a little), it’ll always be a huge part of my True Hollywood Story. Lightly enough that I know my sexual orientation can’t and shouldn’t be more central than my identity as a woman or especially as an image of God. Plus, I believe we’re all double-tongued, subtle disloyalists, spies in our own hearts, our own enemies–we’re our own Nathan Hales and our own Kim Philbys–and I think that makes it easier for me to claim this admittedly unheimlich identity.

Dreaming of Mercy Street–
I swear they moved that sign….

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