This is a long one, and a little dark. But Elon bought Twitter today and this time, we had advance warning. So I tweeted the biggest thoughts I had going currently in my head, in the hopes of maybe finally getting it right.
And that’s basically what this is, after a rewrite: my third or fourth farewell to Twitter. I didn’t say goodbye, but I did say this. Something I hope the future neo-nazis of Twitter can discover, maybe think a little bit about, before they go back to whatever Fury Road world we’ll be living in.
It’s about growing up, so there are some hard parts. But mostly it’s just everything I’ve learned, about a few choice things. When anyone’s sad or disappointed I always think, “I wish I could let them pet Zooey for a few minutes and they would pull right out of it.”
I forget what book it’s in, maybe Bright Lights, Big City, where the kid is like, “You can pet my dog if you need to.” I was always touched by that image, I guess so much that I forget where it came from.
If I ever see you in real life you can pet Zooey, how about that. If you need to.
(And if you’re a straight cis man, apparently, you can bask in Ambrose’s hatred. But I just keep thinking there’s some Arthurian hex such that the straight guy who Ambrose doesn’t immediately start growling at gets some kind of prize. Like a sword or something.)
I grew up in west Texas, among other places, and let me tell you there’s no “grooming” quite as serious — nor as violent — as the kind intended to keep you in line on your gender and sexuality. Raised in that violence, protecting gender norms becomes a personal war for each of them and exploring them becomes ours.
When the approval of both your peers and authority can come from doing something pretty simple — which is to say, not “acting gay,” starting in childhood — there is no limit to the amount of reshaping you can do on yourself. No distance from the real you that’s too far.
I wanted to dance ballet, it’s one of my first memories. Growing up (growing up thoroughly loved) in the house of my father’s parents, and being trained to walk less like a homosexual, when I was just learning to walk at all.
An unavoidable and plainly obvious aspect of this involuntary service is throwing other kids under the bus for not respecting the line. Whether a kid is gay or straight or cis or trans, we are all playing the same violent, male supremacy game.
There is so much that is beautiful and strong in healthy masculinity that just gets wiped away by the toxic kind. And somebody inside that trap doesn’t know it’s a trap — they just think you missed the memo on how to act. How to pretend.
(How to denigrate the feminine, which is to say, to denigrate women. It’s as simple as throwing in a “bitch” when “woman” would do just fine, or “person” even better. It’s categorically writing women off, but finding a different way to do it every time. King Baby jokes, “What am I doing after work? Going to the titty bar!” and his straight coworkers laugh: He’s doing the act right. Playing fair.)
It’s not as simple as saying, “Well, people are weird about queer kids because we were abused about it growing up” — because that’s the real deal: we were all abused by this, growing up, and reinforced it on each other. To witness it is to be deformed by it.
And we all were, in some way or another. I’ve been called a faggot by straight men and straight women, and I have said that word too. Nobody is exempt.
But if you can step outside of it for just a second… The sun is shining over here. It feels good to be true, it feels so good to be real. To be oneself.
And coming out is hard. But I have some amount of sympathy for people still stuck in the trap for that very reason: To lose hatred you’ve been taught can be as hard as coming out, for the same reasons, but you have even less of a reason to do it. Way less.
My question was never “How can we make straight people allow us to exist?” It was “How does one single straight person get the courage to be nice to me like this,” because there’s so little external reason to do so. “Coming out” partially means coming out of that hate, too.
I came out very late: 14. had a lot of unlearning to do, even with the very good parents that I have. I don’t expect it of anybody else, even though when you dive that deep you bring up gold that has nothing to do with love or romance and everything to do with being who you actually are.
We say hate ages you and I do believe that is true.
Now I see the new thing among the terves & LGB folks is denying that trans and gay kids exist at all. Which seems really messed up — but it’s crucial to understand that this is how the straights really think about it.
Most of all it means denying care to a child that needs it — at the very least — and frequently it means dead kids. Because make no mistake, they would rather see you dead than be who you really are: Because it would feel like death for them.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that elaborate gender-reveals have kept pace with LGBTQ+ advances. I think that’s the most believable thing in the world — a magical spell or religious ritual to ward off the bad spirits.
“My kid is going to be just as unhappy as I am, so help me God.”
Howard Cruse died in 2019. His big work was “Wendel,” a black and white gay cartoon with a highly recognizable and lovely art style. Attractive but not terribly horny, even when he was writing about sex.
What I remember him most for is this interview he did in the 1990s where he said something like: “Being gay in the ’90s is crazy because one day you think gay marriage is a possibility and the next day you’re sure they’re going to put us in concentration camps.”
I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, ever since high school. It’s never seemed so true as it does now.
King Baby and I are not, I think, the marrying sort. But if I was in the hospital I know who I’d want by my side. I know who I want to take care of Zooey if I’m elsewhere. You know what I mean?
We had a talk about the Love Languages. It’s corny but I really thought it would clarify some things, and it did. I’m a Words of Affirmation/Quality Time, he’s an Acts of Service/Receiving Gifts.
What this means that I’m always telling him he’s great and begging him to hang out, and he’s always doing things for me and buying me stuff. Food, especially and particularly. What it means is that we’re always just missing each other — and this, I thought, was profound — by giving each other the kind of love we, ourselves, want.
For all I know, that could be the crux of the book itself: That we do this. But for us it was a revolutionary realization: He just needs to tell me I’m great and hang out with me all the time, that’s how I will feel loved. And I need to be doing little kindnesses and buying him little things, which luckily I was already doing.
He said “Gifts? That doesn’t sound very flattering” — but I get it. A good gift means you thought about it. I give bad gifts, I feel like I’m known for that. Maybe my mistake has always been giving people what I, in fact, need.
Sounds like something I’d do.
My dad’s real sick. I don’t know how much of this old junk is from that, and how much is from reading the tea leaves, or how much is from watching Tell Me Lies on Hulu, for work: a college kid show that is very heterosexual and takes place in 2007 but still reminds me of my college life more than anything I have seen so far. I can’t recommend it exactly but I can say it’s very well-made, beautifully acted and cleverly written. I don’t like it, but technically it’s very good, if that makes sense.
I don’t know how much my dad’s illness is to blame for me getting high and listening to Free To Be You And Me over and over either, but I’m guessing it’s not a minor amount.
I talk to Christian, my best friend growing up, every now and then on text. Yesterday we talked about dads. My dad, his dad, and Christian himself becoming a dad. My dad’s failures in the past, his dad’s failures in the present. He wished us to find peace. I think we have. We’ll see what happens on this front.
I haven’t been writing anything, in particular not on here, to you, because part of me just wants to say “my dad is dying” over and over, and that’ at least worth a trigger warning if not full-on deletion. It’s because you make me my best self, best beloved, so that’s what I want to show you.
Anyway. Not done with the queer stuff.
Sometimes it’s easier to see the game’s rules when you’re sitting on the sidelines, which is what it was to grow up queer in a world of nonstop dating and Spin the Bottle and Jordan Catalano and boys being boys and girls being girls and everything always being about this one thing I was specifically not allowed to do, or be, or have.
So come sit on the sidelines with me because the recent Scottish row over “self ID” is another way to have this fight:
If I say I’m lefthanded, or I say I’m a man: either way you have only my word to go on.
The only violence in the story is your inability to understand it has nothing to do with you.
Which broadens it to the narcissism that is really in play: I cannot accept you as your gender because it would be admitting that we’re internally, fundamentally different. That someone exists outside of my body in a fundamental way, and does not mirror me back to me; that there is a chirality in us, as humans.
“I’m just used to seeing everything in terms of myself — you’re better or worse than baseline, which is me.”
Kind of how the Russians and their American fans are like “How dare you call yourselves Ukrainian, you’re Russian!” That same abject terror of self-determination that throws everything else into question. How dare you call yourself a woman when I — the decider, a privilege — say you’re not.
Kind of like how you believe gay people are just straight people who do this one weird thing. People who “happen” to be queer, like they took this wrong turn somewhere. Who would otherwise be clean.
I never really understood why some folks took that “just happens to be gay” thing so badly, but I do now. It’s not enough to tolerate, it’s not enough to ignore. We have to look these things in the eye, and then get over it, and bless one another.
Rachel Pollack informed a lot of my thinking — she is a brilliant trans writer I was close with in the ’90s — but one thing that sticks with me is when she took over DOOM PATROL, the comic book, at one point “Robotman” Cliff is freaking out from learning that his friend and love interest, Kate Godwin, is trans. And she goes:
“Let’s figure it all out then, once and for all. Who’s a man? Who’s a woman? Are you a man? You’re a robot — you have no penis. So then are you a woman? Or are you a man, regardless?”
That, combined with finding out both Kate & Rachel were trans lesbians, and that being trans and gay was more the rule than the exception — that anecdotally most trans people end up gay, which is to say attracted to their same gender — really changed my perspective.
Because as a callow youth — I can’t even bear to think about the questions I bullheadedly asked — I worried being trans was on the same spectrum as myself. Perhaps it was like being gay, but on a heretofore unimaginably higher level of gayness.
Which is to say, I looked at it through the lens of my own experience. There’s nothing wrong or special about that. Until you act in hate.
All of which is to say that while the end results of it are hate and horror, I can see myself in the shoes of the transphobics, terves and “LGB Alliance” types: honestly confused, and not willing to budge in that understanding.
If I can’t bear for you to self-identify, due to my own epistemological failures, then I have to have “reasons,” and those reasons can’t just be “I am confused and frightened” — there’s got to be imaginary women and children in peril, always. Bathrooms and sports teams.
But here’s what I do know: I’ll still be a man, specifically a gay man, regardless of what happens to my body.
Which is something I think about, now, daily: my body, keeping it safe.
King Baby wants to sit outside the garage on Halloween so that kids don’t have to come up to the door. I want to turn off the lights and leave our candy outside and trust to the better angels of their nature.
When he asks why, I have to be honest with him: I don’t want our first introduction to our sleepy neighborhood to be “that older gay couple that’s really into kids,” even if that’s an accurate description of us. We love kids and we’re gay and old. But to sit out in your garage with candy? Not in a year when the word “groomer” still makes my blood go ice cold.
What happens when one of those parents won’t let their kid come up the driveway? How do I explain that to him? “You still live in the 90s, when everything was about acceptance and tolerance. It’s bad out there now — and getting so much worse.”
He laughed a little bitterly when I said this last night, but it’s true. He thinks everything is Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and I feel like everything is Boys Don’t Cry. I don’t believe either of us is fully correct but I’m not 100% comfortable until he comes home every night.
Why am I so obsessed with the trans kids? he asks.
I don’t know how to say that if there is strength in numbers then there must be a corresponding vulnerability in being scarce. Right now, trans people are the most vulnerable among us. In their tiny, achingly tiny numbers.
It’s odd to hear people talk about the social contagion of it, about the “fact” that trans kids are coming out of the woodwork all over the place — we know this myth, because we’ve all heard it. The numbers don’t bear it out.
“Seems like half the kids in X’s class are some kind of gender,” you’ll say, about your kid or your niece or your college-aged son. What the numbers tell us is that no they aren’t, and that we always were some kind of gender. You’ve got a gender identity just like they do; you have a sexuality. And just like us, you deserve to be affirmed in and for it.
Well, I tell him. You can’t lump us all in together — gays and theys, in a LGBTQIA+ alphabet — without forcing some kind of solidarity. It may feel like half the kids in the class are interested in the finer points of gender theory, and that’s probably accurate, but half the kids in the class aren’t going to die without transition. A tiny small number of them aren’t experimenting, they’re diving. Down deep. And we have to protect them when they get back.
I got in trouble at Facebook for bitching because they wouldn’t comprehend that to deny a trans person their true gender, their true name, is to deny them their whole life.
I know what it’s like to be pathologized but this is worse than that: To be told you don’t exist. “You’re too close to this,” they said. “I’m not telling you what the rules are right now, I’m telling you what they will be in six weeks,” I said.
It took four.
But it’s just this inability to consider that my insides might simply be different from yours —that when someone says “I have acute, life-ending dysphoria & I know what will fix it,” what you might very honestly hear is, “I am having a tomboy phase, just like your cousin did in 1976, or you saw on TV one time.”
What about the underage mutilation? It doesn’t happen. Made up nonsense.
What about the irreversible puberty blockers? Not irreversible.
If these people are lying about their two main things, why listen to them at all about anything else? And are they easier to believe than someone telling you from the bottom of their soul, “I am dying and I know what can fix it.” God, if it were that simple for everybody!
When I personally came/was forced out, my stepmother asked if I couldn’t just be bi. This was 1993, 1992? Not that long ago, anyway.
I think the arithmetic was that being bisexual was only half-broken — I could still take part in public life and ritualized heterosexuality — still be alive in the social sense.
(That’s what they’re taking now, what they want to take from almost everyone reading this: being part of the world, being onstage and taking part in the economy. Whether it’s Roe or Obergefell, the end result is: vanishing us.)
It wasn’t hate then, this stab at being tolerant in her way: it was simply the answer to a vexing question. The wrong answer, but an answer anyway.
And for me it was the perfect point, like so much of her violence, for me to jump off and discover exactly where I needed to go. Oppositional defiance as survival strategy: “Now I know for sure I’m gay.”
My dad was coolest about it, of course: just gave me the “be safe and don’t let anybody hurt you” talk. Biomom lost it at the time, it was really heartbreaking, but now she’s very into her gay son.
So when I think about the “queer kids don’t exist” people I get why they think that. I truly do understand why they think being gay or trans is a pathology and not just a quality of existence, like hair color or handedness.
We make it more than that, in respect for the communities and families of choice that we’re forced to form in the absence of acceptance. We forge it into more than that. But it’s what we’re looking at.
I think we underestimate what a stranglehold gender norms have on the ones who hate queer and trans kids. It’s where Log Cabin Republicans come from, and conservative women.
My friend Susan, whose daughter is trans, said something like:
If they allow themselves to question this one thing that holds them together, this foundational thing that starts at birth and never stops, then everything else falls apart too.
I think if we’re ever going to survive we will have to get a little crazy, as they say. Some things will have to fall apart, just like that. Hate and gender rigidity are what is holding these people together, and whiteness, and without those things they will fall apart.
And there is grace in that moment, because I honestly do believe it will come, and I honestly don’t believe that a single one of us will be healed until it does. Not really, truly healed; not clean again.
“…[T]he dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.”
— Prior Walter, Angels in America