I AM OUTRAGED THAT QUEERS ARE SURVIVING[1]

          I am out at a gay bar, and it's a convivial atmosphere.  Guys are friendly and flirtatious.  But as I look them over at some length, I don't ultimately feel too compelled by any of them, so I go to sit on the outside patio on a bench, by myself. 

          There are still guys out here, though at a comfortable distance.  The music isn't really moving me hard or fast enough (I'm a rock and roll gay boy who actually really likes hard rock and sometimes needs it), so I put on my headphones.

          It's then that I notice a guy who is so beautiful to me that he makes me upset, makes me panic a little about what to do about it - in a way that people you find really beautiful and attractive can do.

          I'm upset because I don't know how to react to him, and I'm flummoxed by his offensive beauty - offensive because I was doing just fine with my distance and my music and my watching, and yet now I feel consternation over what to do about this beautiful guy I've seen.  What would I or could I even do with him?  Lie down next to him and just behold him?  He had the kind of beauty that makes the desire for sex move into a subordinate position to the desire just to be in his aura - to merely be near or with him.

          I go through the vacillations of trying not to look/looking, trying to forget about him/thinking only of him, deciding to try/deciding not to try.  During one of my failed attempts to not look, he catches my eye, and smiles in a way that shows marked notice and interest.  I'm shocked and horrified and panicked.

          Now the stakes are higher, and I'm more upset and flummoxed than ever.  What the hell and fuck to do now?  I'm nervous.

          He is dark.  He has black eyes and black hair.  Thick and long eyelashes.  An exquisite face with a small but elegant nose and incredible cheek bones. His eyes are both extremely dark and extremely alive and bright, but without any luridness at all, and his bearing shows what seems to be a confidence and poise in the bearing of great beauty. His hair is thick and wavy. He's dressed a bit dorkily, and I'm not sure how much awareness he has of this. He's wearing long shorts and cream colored socks that are of medium height.  He's muscular and a bit hairy in certain places, but with no signs whatsoever of the common gym or sculpted looks or of the "bear" look.  He has a naturally tight body in the manner of a foreigner and of a young man, and not the overfed look of an American in his second youth, like most of the guys here. I finally decide that his socks must not be contrived, because he otherwise shows no signs whatsoever of contrivance.

          I look.

 He looks, and smiles easily.

   I look away.

     I look back.

      He looks. 

  His friend sits down near me and then he himself moves closer.

             He speaks to me. 

          [Happiness, Excitement, Possibility, and Panic all enter from stage left and fulminate]

My expectation is something like that his life and thoughts will consist of things befitting great beauty as a variety of greatness, the kind of thoughts and living one reads about in ancient literature - the kind of thoughts that one should be able to impute to someone who possesses great beauty.

So I am surprised when, after his lengthy asking about me, I get to ask him about himself and hear his response.  I ask him what motivates him, what excites him, what gets his motor going these days. 

He tells that he is merely surviving. 

He has a mundane job, lives in the Valley, and is merely surviving. He actually uses the word 'surviving'.   

I have told him that I am out that night because I did not want to go back to where I am staying - where I am merely staying.  And that I came out because, being in survival mode, I had not wanted to go sleep with the handful of people with whom I could trade sex for comfort and camaraderie, for a place to sleep, for weed.      

He told me that he understood completely and that he had recently passed out of such a phase, and was holding on to his slightly improved state of survival.  He seemed terrified of going back to that state that I was in, and yet, for him, where he was now was clearly still only just surviving.

 It became evident in talking to him that I was hearing what I had heard many times from honest L.G.B.T. persons  - that they had ceased to dare to dream after being forced into survival mode for a rather long time.  This ceasing to do anything but place cautious stock in survival was then too familiar, and also personal. When people ask me how I am doing I often answer that I am surviving, since I am not one who favors either dishonesty or small talk, and who thus prefers honest answers, even if they interrupt the requisite politenesses that people want to get through quickly in any conversation.

But in this boy, with his great beauty, beauty that one might write about, beauty that made me think that he could be a king or a god, there was, so incongruously, a depressed demeanor that the people often call 'realistic', one that is a particular cohort of L.G.B.T. persons now, despite heteros' labeling of us as 'fabulous'. 

We are somewhere between fifty and sixty per cent of the homeless in the United States, and we have lost so much of our independence and freedom.  

Being an older queen, I can actually remember the 80's.  "In the late 80's, all the young gay guys that I knew had their own apartments, a car, and enough money and freedom to go out to dinner once or twice a week and to go on at least short vacations pretty frequently", I am saying to my friend one day. He concurs, saying that he remembers this too.  Today though, I know almost no gay guys in their twenties who have such means or freedom or independence.

This is to leave aside the social and political facts of our lives.  And, no one wants to mention the needs of gay men. How we have lost our sexual freedom and independence, and thus free determination of even our sexual, romantic relationships and friendships.  How our needs are not the same as those of straights, and how our economic and social abuse and degradation are related. 

So many of us are in survival mode, deprived of independence and of the freedom to develop our own lives and communities,  and I am enraged by this.  Outraged.  The words of Dorothy Allison run through me, and I repeat them often and everywhere.  She wrote better of this problem than I, and wrote in an earlier time, wrote to us as queer persons "I need you to do more than survive."[2]   

I am outraged at the lost potential of queer persons.  I define oppression in somewhat the way that Terry Eagleton defined it[3], as the forced loss of development of possibility and potential. 

The beauty of this boy bespoke a potential that his resignation seemed to confirm had been there but had been relegated to the shadows by his forced entry into survival mode. 

Beauty's potential, intelligence's potential, the creation of culture and new social forms, voluptuous living:  all of these, are not really possible under the heterosexual political regime, which speaks out a discourse of "gay-friendliness"[4] and of "progress"[5] for queers, when all the while our potential and our possibility ends up in the gray, depressed, tiring and deflating world of economic survival.  Survival is worse for us because we're not the prosaic ones. We're not the ones who make life dull and stupid.  We are not trying to define or prove ourselves at others' expense.   We are not sexually assaulting everyone publicly with our fascist "family values" fetishism, or with our desperate, hysterical, sexually aggressive and assaultive sanctification of children. We are not somehow at the same time delusional and insipid.   

We are not the common fodder and exudate of the heterosexual political regime. 

We are not made for survival.

We are capable of living so many possibilities that are buried under the mode of life that surviving under this regime is. 

It felt to me like this boy's beauty deserved better.  It feels to me like so much queer extraordinariness deserves better.

Forgive me as a corny old queen with a memory of a time when queer life was not about survival, and for being one who waxes nostalgic about this. 

But, if I am allowed to speak as such, I would like to claim that we should no longer talk so much about being "out" but rather we should speak about survival, but that if  we speak of being "out" we speak only of it with its proper suffix appended, and thus speak only of outrage.

Action Jackson

( My heartfelt thanks to T.S. Bandito for inviting me to be a guest blogger)

         

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[1] This blog post is by guest blogger Action Jackson.

[2] Dotz Allison, 'Survival is the Least of My Desires'

[3] Eagleton, Terry.  Ideology (Don't make me go find the page number and the other bibliographic stuff  yet; or do make me go find it, so this can get published).

[4] Gay Friendliness:  1.  A mode of the invasion of gay spaces by heterosexuals  2. The euphemism which is intended to disguise this invasion.    (These definitions from the Gay Dictionary).

[5] Progress here means the supposedly improved ability to live without being attacked so long as we live and act like conservative or commonplace heterosexuals.