Can You Help Me Find Tina?  

What is crystal methamphetamine (aka Tina) to the queer community?  

It is part of our reality.

This is an invitation to you, my brothers and sisters and those identified in trans- or non-gendered terms, to be real - to tell the truth about your lives to one another, relentlessly, and also to relentlessly refuse the trap and dead end of their lies - the trap of their mendacious discourse about our lives - the discourse that always tells the same story - the story that heterosexual life is to be emulated, that we should want marriage and families and ridiculous and creepy styles of self-presentation and all of their sad baggage. 

I need for you to tell the truth, and this telling the truth is essential to revolution.  The name of this essay is not in vain nor is it merely stylistic.  Finding Tina is finding the truth.  Your gay brothers are dying slowly, are checked out from reality because of their pain, or respoinding to it with desperate attempts to go somewhere else, because heterosexist life does not offer enough or the right things and offers a surfeit of the wrong ones. They are dying from H.I.V. infection because their methamphetamine use prevents them from taking care of themselves; they are wandering the streets and wandering through the interstices and alleys of our society, brain-damaged,  with speech impediments and cognitive impairment and diminution of attention due to the effects of methamphetamine.  They are the living dead whose mark is the capital T.

They are not to be cast aside.

They are us.

The addicts, the many methamphetamine addicts that comprise a significant part of us, they are an essential part of the truth of our lives and of our reality.  And yet, the regime and its queer adherents and rah rahs bury this and other essential and important elements of our reality by disfiguring them with delusions.  The ongoing crystal methamphetamine "Tina" epidemic among us, I will venture to say, is our real life. Tina is the truth.  Marriage is a lie.

 Our real lives and desires do not have much of anything to do with theirs, and this is the hard truth, the revolutionary truth.  I want to ask you to stop supporting those who demean us by their very existence and who want us to validate their mechanisms of abuse and control, mechanisms like marriage and the end of public sex and public sexual spaces.  Your queer comrades need you. The revolution needs you.   I need you to tell the truth of our existence.  I need your help.  Let me state again, and risk misinterpretation, that the truth of our lives is in many ways addiction to methamphetamine more than it is heteronormative desires like marriage or family, yet every day our reality, our discourse, our lives are being thoroughly buried by the regime, and this is why we must work to unbury our lives, to know them, to build from our reality from the truth.   

This seeking and finding and uncovering of the reality of queer lives is itself a type of revolutionary work, and it takes unity and concert.

Let’s work together.         

So, I ask again.  

Can you help me find Tina? 

 

 

 

From the Concepts Series

On the Colonization of Concepts:

Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, attempts to replace all democracy, including its superior forms, with liberal democracy, and she does this by building up a poor argument that has become a typical one, that the Nazi regime and the 'Stalin regime' can be grouped together as 'totalitarian', as despotic and dictatorial.

This argument is, among other things, subjectible to skepticism from those who feel the oppressions and falsities of liberal democracy.

Notwithstanding its pomposity and success, Arendt's theory of 'totalitarianism' with regard to the Soviet Union is really a reaction to Stalin's rightly saying 'no' to Zionism. One thing we can say is that, ironically, the reactions to Stalin's saying 'no' to Zionism have now themselves become the forces undermining liberal democracy from the anti-democratic direction. But that is another story.

And, Arendt's conflation of regime types and her anti-Stalinism are beside the point of the real narrative of a detrimental totality anyway.

I say 'detrimental' totality because totality itself is not necessarily detrimental but can actually be necessary and valuable to liberation and justice.

If we stick for a moment to the idea of a detrimental totality however, that is, to the idea of a detrimental totalitarianism, we should implicate much more correctly than the 'mass man' of totalitarian theory the heterosexual political regime and its adherents, and thereby perhaps rescue the term from its origins in Carl Schmitt, himself an anti-liberal loved by liberals, and thusly help bring the term 'totalitarianism' into a more correct and less mendacious narrative.

Why should right-wing heterosexuals like Arendt and Schmitt have anything to do with the idea of totalitarianism when they have so little to do with reality?

These fatuous oafs of heteronormativity who portray themselves as clever neologists sail along in boats that are false concepts riding over seas of false discourses.

However much this is the case, and all LGBT/Queer recognize the falsity of dominant discourses, the term 'totalitarianism' is valid in the heterosexual discourse at least in its abstraction and neutralization, in its general idea of something all-encompassing.

We can rescue, co-opt, and colonize the term and idea however, by first merely bringing it from irreality and misdescription into reality, into the reality of the totalizing nature of heteronormative desire.

Heterosexist desire is founded on the obviously false importance, false centrality, false necessity, and absurd valuation of heterosexual desire. This desire however, is as totalizing as it is false: it demands and commands that all of reality, and certainly all of desire, be forced into its falsity. All queers know this absurdity, the absurdity of living under something both falsely valued and total.

Even, however, if heteronormative desire is total, its forms and styles are not constant. Heterosexuals can jump on the bandwagons of 'free love' or 'marriage and family' as forms of heterosexuality without changing at all the totalizing nature of the regime of falsity that heterosexuality is.

Although Stalin did not "fabricate a structureless mass" as Arendt falsely claims (he merely stood up to Zionism, and this was outrageous to Zionists), the heterosexual regime, an actual structureless mass, keeps its power over, above, and beyond all of its specific iterations ("gay friendliness", "the extended family", "swinging", "a man and a woman"), and thus more properly fits the ideas of totality and totalitarianism. Its structurelessness lies in its total nature.

Heterosexual desire is total.

Under its totalitarian regime, queerness can only serve as its amusement, appendage, annoyance, or sometimes, when heterosexuals get either bored or charitable, as its neutralized challenge.

Totalitarianism is, as a concept, falsely conceived and falsely taught in universities far and wide in its Arendtian description. Its reality is buried in the actual and current totality itself, the totality that is the heterosexual political regime (of force, abuse, rule over, fraud, and other traditional political forms).

This is not an apology for Stalin, despite its having recently come to light that Stalin was involved in homosexual love triangles and in cross-dressing. It is rather more that we make outrageous demands of the heteroesexual regime.  These demands are not actually outrageous, but only seem so, because they, like everything else, are comprehended within a false reality of understanding.  

With that all in mind,  I demand that 'totalitarianism' be used henceforth in its proper form, as a description of the political regime that enforces heterosexual desire.

 

Thanks to Shifty, Lefty, and Scheistée De Leon for their comments and input on this blog entry.