Syndicate and Hague

I’ve had a hard time writing lately. I’d say that it’s due to writing fatigue from school or politics fatigue post-election, but neither really seems correct. It’s more like I’m in a thought-induced writing hibernation.

It’s been a fed up kind of winter. And I’ve been struggling with answers for why things are, in actuality, so different from my perception of them. Much of this is about the fault lines a truly serious relationship has exposed.

When you’re gay, in between the time you first come out and decide someone is going to last long enough/is important enough that you want them to know your family (for better or worse) there are months or years in which people can pretend you’re not gay. They get kind of used to this.

As we know, a lot of us move away from our original homes during those years. We, as Dan Savage said in his podcast today, “find a better family” and create the world that “home” doesn’t necessarily provide. This doesn’t mean we don’t like our families or have relationships with them, but almost every gay person experiences some level of lasting isolation after they come out.

Straight people don’t get it. Even the lefty ones don’t get it completely, and I’m not criticizing you for it. It’s really impossible for someone who is not a part of a marginalized group to know every aspect of what kinds of daily abuses, large and small, we endure. This is true of white people and race, rich people and class, etc. It’s not your fault you can’t know everything, but it’s your responsibility to listen.

And I think it’s our responsibility to speak. Even though it sucks.

I don’t have the kind of relationship with my family to have shared much of my personal life. I forged my own life, with its accompanying confidantes and emotional support structures, so if a girl broke my heart it wasn’t something my family knew…just like they didn’t know about friendships gained and lost, the nitty gritty of emotional struggles. It wasn’t their role. It was the role of my family of choice.

Is, then, my impatience with them fair? Over a decade of being out but the strain of education is upon me yet again. Instead of suggesting I wasn’t finding a job right away out of grad school because people saw some glbt involvement on my resume, it’s that I should also edit my girlfriend out of her role around my grandma. It’s really the same thing - no matter how accepting things look on the surface (and I can’t complain about that, because it is), there’s this lingering concept that this is shameful, this is something that should be hidden at times.

Being who I am, I have no tolerance for that. If a straight person doesn’t have to edit themselves, I sure as hell don’t.

However, it’s not really this simple. Not in practice. Because we can steamroll things, we can say we won’t cooperate, but the fact of the request remains.

It’s not just me, of course. My experience is hardly traumatic compared to others I know. But all the abuses share the same traits. We are embarrassments to our parents. They interpret our status as gay as a testament to their failure. It’s in all the trite comments people hear: why do you have to flaunt it? why are you doing this to me? don’t tell your grandparents. is this because I had a bad relationship with my mother/father? — It’s all about them.

I’m honestly rather excited by the renewed energy the glbt community is showing. I think this could be a good year, though a hard year. I like the fact that we’re collectively losing our patience with the crap that has been foisted on us all these years.

So, what’s in a new year? Endurance, I hope. The willingness to be hurt by people we thought were on our sides and endure, endure, endure without becoming doormats. Enduring means pressing the issue, pushing it, forcing people to confront the homophobia they thought they didn’t have or to question the homophobia they feel justified in. Enduring doesn’t mean infinite patience, it means patience through struggle, and necessitates a core of positivity. We have to feel that we will change the world. Be positive and endure.

Other than that, I end yet another year grateful for my family of choice and the ever-growing constellation of people I’m lucky to call friends. And I am lucky, so ridiculously lucky, to have the love of the most perfect-for-me girl on this planet. Sigh.