The trouble with progress

A NY Times columnist recently commented on a Gallup poll indicating that, for the first time, the number of Americans who recognize gay and lesbian “relations” as “morally acceptable” has finally passed the 50% mark (at 52% +/- 4%). Yet what exactly is the milestone that has been passed here? Several aspects of the study are pertinent: Not only does the increase in “moral acceptability” occur in men more than women, the increase is also stronger among Catholics, independents, Democrats, and moderates (liberals didn’t have much room to improve since they have generally already been accepting). At the same time, however, 53% of Americans still oppose legalizing gay marriage and only 58% of Americans believe that gay and lesbian “relations between consenting adults” should be legal.

Even assuming that the 52% of people who believe that gay and lesbian relations are “morally acceptable” is a subset of the 58% who believe that such relations should be legal,* the very distinction between what should be legal and what is morally permissible both presupposes and refuses the neoliberal separation of the moral from the political. The latter supposedly admits a wider class of actions than the former (a vegetarian might find it morally reprehensible to eat meat but would not thereby legislate vegetarianism as a matter of law) insofar as the function of politics is both the regulation of interactions between individuals and the relationship of the individual to the state—i.e., that the state qua state must exercise restraint over individuals. And insofar as our state is democratic/republican, this also means that the state must resist allowing its operation to be usurped by any faction of individuals at the expense of others.

*Similarly we cannot assume that the 52% of those who find gay and lesbian relations morally acceptable are not among the 53% who oppose legalizing gay marriage.

Yet it is precisely this separation between morality and politics that is refused by the results of this poll. But, even worse, what is at stake is not only the existence of queer political visibility (i.e., the recognition of gays and lesbians as viable political and legal agents) but existence per se. As the NYT columnist points out, previous versions of this poll asked whether “homosexual” relations were acceptable and that the offending root word “sex” has been replaced by the less suggestive term “gays and lesbians”. Even granting that the word “homosexual” is problematic in itself, the tendency to inoculate the very idea of being queer with more palatable circumlocutions threatens to predicate such existence on the condition of being not too different—of being “just like everyone else”—of having a husband who just happens to be a biological female or a biologically male housewife. “Progress”, then, comes at the loss of identity, which is happily renounced for the sake of “acceptability” as long as we’re “straight acting”. The polarizing choice between being “flamboyant” and being “straight acting” serves the agenda of progress insofar as this means maintaining the status quo: men should act like men and women should act like women in just those ways these roles have been defined by the very social and cultural structures that also both define and condemn what it means to be queer: to be what is not normal but that should be. So, in the name of progress, the choice is either to blend in or to be loud and proud—when either choice jeopardizes what it means to be queer. Perhaps the question to be asked is why “acceptance” is the appropriate goal.

Otherworld

What if life were not a dream? Cypher’s fantasy in The Matrix of then returning to sleep would have to be recognized precisely for what it is and we would have to take responsibility for our frivolity. Cypher makes his deal with the Agents indulging in pleasures he “knows aren’t real” that he cannot but help enjoy. Such is the nature of all enjoyment having tasted of reality. What if life were not a dream? We would be freed of the burden to will ourselves to exist … but at what cost?

The recession has taught us to mortgage our enjoyment with apologies and excuses; but this has been no new lesson to those for whom enjoyment comes at the cost of the surreptitious glance and the retreat into faceless pictures and blending in with a crowd that simultaneously constricts the opportunities for our self-expression even as it adopts those models as its own. It’s ok to have great hair but always at the risk of potential suspicion; straight football players can sing showtunes but the gay kid is still one of the girls.

The two choices come to the same: either Lady Gaga sets the standard for your extravagance or you’re just “one of the guys”. Either you’re fabulous or you’re chill. And either way we purchase a moment of anonymity and steal into the dream where everything is ok.

But what if existence were not enough—to be in the same world as music, tattoos, soccer, ATVs, and underwear—because the world rebels against justice, just as enjoyment is blind to suffering. Laughter and passion are antithetical (not that we have any trouble living in contradictions): the former requires oblivion while the latter forgets nothing even as it turns its back on existence for the future. Yet for us—we who would succumb to the temptation to exist—a future world does not need to be dreamt but demanded.

No voice (2 December 2009)

Amidst another disappointment in the fight for equality, the question that should be asked is not whether gay marriage is a legitimate demand. The apologies issued by Senate Republicans about "wrong timing" effectively blind us to what the New York defeat signifies. What is at stake is not only the invisibility or inexistence of queer legal identity but the perversion of our political voice. At a time when the advocates of "gay rights" seem to be most vociferous, so too their opponents who consistently demonstrate themselves to be the more powerful voice. This is indicated not only in the fact that the bill was defeated despite the fact that the great majority of discussion on the floor was voiced by proponents of the bill but that our politics renders the legitimacy of our cause unintelligible. Queer identity is always beholden to heteronormative terms: it will never be "the right time". The injustice here is not that a recognizably legitimate demand has been denied but that the demand is not even recognized. What today's defeat signifies is that the demand itself cannot be heard, for justice is self-compelling to those who have ears to hear. When the very possibility of articulating the right of gay marriage is undermined as a "political risk", this constitutes not only a denial of that right but the impossibility of even recognizing that it is a right.

When the executive director of the New York State Catholic Conference says that today is "a victory for the basic building block of our society", we learn three things. First, that we still believe that the political can be derived from the biological--which is precisely the logic of European fascism. Second, that "the family" is baldly asserted to be among the conditions of economic reproduction--and that this fact should be not only a political but of a moral value. Third, that the fundamental values of our culture remain essentially anti-liberal--and that the avatars of this antequated moralism continue to patrol the border. The very articulation of our demands will always be on their terms: as long as marriage continues to be not only defined but thought heteronomatively, the very term "gay marriage" will remain, quite literally, unintelligible and we will never have a voice that is our own but always spoken through the voice of another.

Orbiting (14 August 2009)

Amidst the impossible dream of an origin that never returns, we stand on the shoulders of the ones who pull the image of revolution over our eyes. Gender revolution, sexual revolution ... permanent revolution. But such a revolution is none at all--the only upheaval left is the depression of a thought weathered by the storms of a city that simply said "no". The dream now orbits above, around, flung far enough to watch from afar but still close enough to mourn and to dip every once in a while to brush against the sky only to lose small pieces of itself each time that blaze all too briefly before being swallowed by the ocean.

Uncommon (5 August 2009)

(for J)

1. The old cliché claims that there is a fine line between madness and genius. In fact, there is no such line. In both cases we are confronted with the one who by definition cannot be recognized by those to whom s/he must speak. Who are the paradigmatic cases of such madness? The one who preaches heliocentrism, the one who complains of dropsy and buries himself in manure, the one who advertises the virtues of tar-water, who gets locked in the attic, who dresses only in white, who collapses at the sight of a flogged horse, the ones who suffer aphasia and synaesthesia. These are the ones who shape our world precisely by being excluded from it, just as the acceptable forms of behavior and psychic life are defined by what is not permitted outside the sanitoriums and hospitals (what is not written in the DSM).

We cannot aspire either to madness or genius. Some, however, between madness and genius, are fortunate (or cursed) to be faced with a choice: whether to be seen or whether to remain invisible. Whereas solitude is a necessary consequence of either madness or genius, it can also precede either as their condition.

We might try, however, to distinguish madness from genius by recognition, i.e., objectively, since both are marked by the "inner conviction" that s/he is absolutely alone in the world or that s/he is the first to have arrived (this is, in other words, the ostensive difference between "greatness" and "delusion"). But this difference is only apparent, on the one hand, for to whom must one appear as a genius other than precisely to those who, if they really understood what was being said, would be no different than the one who is to stand apart? The one who stands apart is precisely the one who is not understood, else s/he would simply be saying everyone already knows.

On the other hand, the real mark of inner conviction is not (self-)certainty but a constant disbelief--the refusal to believe that things really are as they are, that what is obvious remains invisible or unspoken, that injustice is acceptable. Sometimes this manifests as the opposite of certainty: as doubt or the feeling that nothing is quite right, that a word is out of place or a line is too oblique, that "I really am different".

By definition the mad cannot be the one who names himself and is able to exclude madness from the method of radical doubt. Ironically it is the madman who cannot be accused of solipsism. But who, then, is the one who names the madman or the genius? Who are the ones who must "take notice"? How many geniuses have remained unknown to us because we are the ones who did not have ears to hear?

2. At the sight of the slightest curve or the lurch of a rear-wheel drive every dude stammers "yeah, bro". Repeat. Ossify. Since "everyone wants...", "no one wants...". Be a part, sport the logo, be a fan. Be all you can be ... all you should be, as every DJ and news anchor says (all the nurses, teachers, authors, investors, and firemen agree).

Repeat. Find the secret buried amidst the power chords, snowboards, sandals, and weights. The secret is simply that there is no secret--it's all on the surface, inscribed in the very bodies that need no airbrushing because they have been sculpted by the hand of Capital itself.

Identify, be counted, be viewed -- the spectacle and the charlatan.

Or: Do. Laugh. Join. Create. What are the forces that you can release? Instead of wondering "to whom can I be seen?" the real question is: what are the possibilities that I can see? In this harmony, in this image, in this phrase, this spiral, this vertigo, in you? What is the life we can construct from the fragments we have been given--the fragments of this body, this identity, this world?

Characters II (3 August 2009)

There are some characters that we would like to be, but the more interesting question is who the characters are that we refuse to be. These are usually the ones we would like not to give a second thought: Barney the barfly, perhaps Nestor the old soldier, Willie Loman, Madam Rose, or even the ones who don't even have a name--the clichéd, forgettable ones: the fifty-year-old gym rat who never seems to make any headway, the man alone at the end of the bar, the groupie, or even the victim.

But then we are caught in a double-bind. We can't exactly "aspire" to be average, to win a walk-on role in a movie or to be a stunt double. It's by being beholden to the role cast by others that we are already part of the crowd and the value of a life will always be buried in the enjoyment parceled in paid time off, ounces, and dollars.

But any attempt to write our own character will also be confronted with another economy: our characters have meaning only insofar as they are recognizable within various types or genres. In other words, there will always be a general name for our characters since any non-Adamic language contains more than proper names: the heroic drag queen, the party monster, the pretentious bitch, the "best friend", the "perfect man", the "unique one".

Characters (30 July 2009)

By long and familiar use, sentences become unbreakable--we say things that cannot be taken back; we quote our favorite movies; we talk about "them". Clichés are to us what natal charts were to the astrologer. Just as our character is written in the constellations, so too we call ourselves by what we think we are: normal, sane, chill, jock, artist, dreamer. It is not our fate that is read from our resemblance to the stars but it is this resemblance that makes us worthy of having a fate which, by definition, we cannot know until we are forced to suffer it. And just as our fate is conditioned by character, so too our characters are conditioned by the very descriptions we use, i.e., by the way we are seen as characters: the drama queen, the token minority, the butch one. We cannot know what we are "looking for" without at the same time being able to see ourselves and others as such characters. -- But who writes these characters?

Traces (22 July 2009)

In unfinished sentences. In the one sentence that refuses to leave. "Like a handprint on my heart." In the icy curve of a bottle against your cheek.

"Herbie, why does everyone always leave? ... I had a dream. ... It wasn't for you... For me. ... For me."

But no--it was, and it always is. Always the same.

Shrugging Sisyphus:

The task has no point. The point is the task, the repetition, being willing to live again and again, eternally returning, returning eternally. No regret. Yes. Another step.

"I guess I did do it for me. ... To see you in mink. To see us."

They always leave traces. In words and lacerations. In images and memories. In scents pressed against your sleeve. In the spaces we refuse to visit by walking along the same paths and tracing the footprints that have been left behind.

Why? To see them fly and to let them be free, even if every freedom leaves a trace that cannot be forgotten.

Not just sticks and stones (20 July 2009)

Why should the term "metrosexual" be any more acceptable than "dandy" and "invert" were? Isn't this the same problem that confronts every attempt to name an otherness under a category (in this case the "beautiful man") without reducing its legitimate diversity to merely an abortive attempt to be "normal"? Against the gruff masculinity of those who live "closer to the earth" (or who at least always have dirt on their shoes) who are more attuned to the "natural order" of procreation and the diurnal rhythms that regulate our bodies, it's the weirdos sipping espresso and drinking cosmos instead of pounding beer who think it's acceptable for a man to pay attention to his cuticles.

But of course, there's no such thing as "natural beauty"--beauty is always a judgment; not every "natural object" is beautiful--do we really mean this term to apply to the twisted and the mutant? The aestheticizing rituals to which our homemakers have always been subject are precisely the attempt to add (or even replace) beauty to the natural. Hence the term "beautiful man" is doubly offensive. On the one hand, it is the man (or Diotima's "lover") who, while not himself beautiful, is that which pursues beauty, who provides for it, who creates it in his art or in the body of the one he is able to dress and pamper. But, then, what does it mean for such a man to himself be beautiful? Only insofar as he is then not a lover (perhaps only a lover "of himself") or a man. Instead we have the man who is "as beautiful as a woman".

Constellations (17 July 2009)

There is brilliance in the lines we draw and in the images that offer themselves to us. The imagination contains no forms and sets itself to work dissolving appearances to make room for a smile or a deep breath, a glimpse at the stars, a sip of pinot, the apogee of a leap. "What are your lines?" What might the world offer to the one who turns her face upward to the sky stretched across the space through which we fly? What fullness of time will saturate the moment before the next step that will propel us onward? What are the lines we draw between us?