Child Molester

     Scenario (With Notes and Script):  I have just walked into a McDonald's restaurant in New York City which is rather crowded. Shortly after entering the restaurant, a boy who looks no more than fourteen or fifteen locks eyes with me and looks at me with intensity.  He is blond, but with large brown eyes.  He is sure and confident and tall and boyish, but the kind of boyish in which one sees a manliness already in the visage. He has hairy legs.  He is holding a baby girl in his arms, and this is what throws me at first. This, and the fact that I am never ready when these children  make their move.  While still looking at me in a quite confident and serious way, but without smiling and with a touch of the mesmerized stare of one who wants to be sure to convey attraction  to another, he hands the baby over to a woman.  The array of persons he is with and their ages and interactions lead me to guess that the baby is his sister, and that one of the women is his mother.  He nods confidently toward the back of the restaurant while still staring at me, then walks in the direction toward which he nodded. 

       Family: [Exeunt]

       I am flabbergasted, caught off guard as always, and bewildered - bewildered  by his beauty, and by the suddenness and boldness of his salvo against the lie that is heterosexist society and its proprieties.  In this bewildered state, and intimidated by his boldness, I still somehow manage to walk toward the back of the restaurant, where the men's bathroom is.  I see him  entering  the bathroom while nodding from a distance for me to follow.  As I am walking back toward the back of the restaurant and the bathroom he has entered, many thoughts are running through my mind, thoughts like,  "Is this happening?"  "Do I want this?"  "How could he want me?"  "Why here?"  "Why can't we be alone to talk or slowly lead up to something silently and sensually, somewhere where the heterosexual police forces in the form of nosy and envious women or of angry old men or of church-trained  dolts wouldn't  ruin, as they always do, something beautiful?"; "Why can't we live in the ancient world, before heterosexuality and pedophilia were invented?"  "I don't like bathrooms - they're not sexy or comfortable"  "What does he want?" " Is he working for the enemy forces?" "Does he want to embarrass me or beat me or make love with me?"; "Should I be prudent even if he isn't?"; "God damn it, this poor child is trapped in the prison of family", and  "Don't lose this chance!" 

     I am scared to death as I enter the bathroom, but more because of his attractiveness and from thinking that I might have misjudged his intentions than from being attacked by the family values forces.  When I enter the bathroom he is right there in the middle of the room and looks at me with a little smile which is not at all salacious or devious. Despite the fact that there are other men in the bathroom his boldness knows no limit, and he motions for me to enter the largest of the bathroom stalls with him.  We are in the stall together before the last of the other men is out of the bathroom, and I am very aware of this.  I am standing a couple of feet away from him there in the largest stall of a busy McDonald's restaurant bathroom.  He pulls down his shorts, displaying his penis in an almost impatient manner, as if to tell me that I should know what to do and that no time would be too soon to do it. 

     These children who molest adults!  These child molesters.  These children take us by surprise with their confidence and boldness and, in the original sense of the word 'molest', take us out of our preoccupations by the outrageous honesty of their actions.  My sense of being molested, of being disturbed in these situations, really comes from this, from the sudden sense of a truth being boldly and beautifully spoken, a truth that it is ridiculous to deny.  I feel cheated and ashamed.  I suddenly feel again that I have been cheated out of reality by the lies of the heterosexist regime. I feel ashamed of myself for having allowed myself to, even as an out gay man, walk some of the walk and talk some of the talk of that lie life that consists, among other things, in the invalidation of the sexual desire of children, especially when they are LGBT children, and in the invalidation and incrimination of sex which crosses the line that delimits the false concept of adulthood.

     Soliloquy:  Oh, why did you have to molest me, blond, brown-eyed boy?  Why?  I was, if not happy, at least content and comfortable walking their walk and talking their talk.  You again exposed the lie, and did it boldly and beautifully.  You made them look like pitiful cowards and desperate frauds.  And now, I am disturbed in my comfort zone . Why did you have to molest me?  You.....child molester. 

Excerpted from the play "Let's Drive A Stake Into the Heart of Heterosexist Psychology" written by Hung N. Yung.

Dedicated to the memory of Shawn Devlin.

1969

1969

            As a political scientist, one would be irresponsible if one were not to include within the study of the political, the study of the social and of the economic.  Such a statement is clearly correct, and yet fraught with problems, since it is, for one, too agreeable to liberals, who will tend to think that this means that politics proper, as it has been understood by the discipline of political science, is and should be the primary focus of political studies, but that, of course, one must also consider the social and the economic as important foci as well.  Communist political science, with its prioritization of the economic, calls the primacy of the political into question, even as it remains more deserving of the name 'science' than does the study of the political in a liberal framework, such as what passes as 'political science' in most American and Commonwealth political science departments.  We can see the primacy of the economic as in comportment with historical consciousness, and thus as progress in the way the the process of consciousness is progress. The social, however, in some respects, has now emerged, via the same mechanisms of historical consciousness, as the more important focus of political science.

            1969 represents and stands as the height of the relevance of the social to the political, in the same manner that Year II (1793-1794) of the French Revolution stands as the height of consciousness of the political.  The portent of 1969 as a nexus, culmination, and example, is the scientization of the social, but, as it were, under the aegis of the political.  1969 represents then, the possibility of the social as the primary focus of the study of the political, of political science. The social as the primary focus of political science is very different from doing what is understood more broadly as 'social science'.  That said, I am not writing here about taxonomic debates within a deconstructionist mode, which latter, albeit perhaps historically necessary, falsely aggrandizes the role of language in (free and conscious) thought, and which has helped lay ruin to the liberatory potential of semiotics. 

            We have reached the point in history where the social scientist who does not present and consider herself or himself revolutionary must always seem like somewhat  of a coward and like one confused; a point where a social science that does not have a political program, a historical consciousness, and which does not operate from the premise that radical (real) democracy is a precondition, is doomed to imposture in relation to its attempt to stand as objective.  As the French Revolution instantiated the revolutionary as 'politician', 1969 as the pinnacle of many Western social movements, established the social revolutionary as politician, as the focus of political science at the personal level.  Stonewall, as a social rebellion of the most oppressed, established the social as the political in respect of the fact that that gay men, bisexual men and women, lesbian women, and trans persons who rebelled against the guard dogs of the establishment (its proxy and interface with the people), can now be called politicians, since their role in political history is more important than that of more than half of the persons who commonly carry the name 'politician' in liberal systems.

             The social remains the realm in which the most oppressed - L.G.B.T.Q. persons, women, Native Americans, African-Americans, and others, have been forced to express the political.  The delegitimization of this realm appears as liberal inclusion of the social under the political. The proper prioritization of the social is paradoxically brought about by political liberalism as it exists as an apparatus of capital, and simultaneously made impossible by this apparatus.  Thus, when we consider the High Revolution (1793-1794)  as the pinnacle of the political-as-the-political, that is, of class consciousness of the political as its redefinition of such in mostly bourgeois but also protoproletarian terms, we can see the High Social Revolution which can be said to have culminated in 1969 in the West, and the actions of L.G.B.T.Q. persons on June 28, 1969, as more clearly political actions, and can say of these L.G.B.T.Q. persons, that they were politicians. The primacy of the social in the examination of politics, on the general level, both delegitimizes mere examination as the practice of the political scientist, and clears the space for the understanding, formerly barred from the political, that heteronormativity is now the primary problem posed to political science. 

             Dorothy Allison wrote, "I believe in the truth in the manner of someone of who has been denied any use of it."  We who have been denied 'political' as a description of what we do, especially when it refuses the mendacity of what constitutes and what does not constitute politics (e.g. queer cruising, women's daily life at home) do not subscribe to the liberal legitimization of the false political (the realm of abusive, public heterosexual masturbation known as 'society'), but rather to our historical consciousness of what the social has been in relation to the political causes us to rename the political, that is, to align it with the reality of what it is.  A social movement in this view, is mass political consciousness which delineates (and tries to execute) a plan of action against the traditional political.  1969, as the height of many social movements, represents the hope and promise and active living out, of the redefinition of the political.