The Privilege out on the Edge

The irony of my "minority status" lies somewhere between the remorse I can't muster and the regret I cannot maintain.  The toxins in the elixir of the victim are such that one either chooses to die from them or denies them their power.  There is no lingering illness, no long spring of lazy afternoons wrapped in blankets on the balcony, no slow convalescence:  One is either "health" or decimation.  One (in Nietzsche's verbiage in a random translation of many translations) overcomes.  One transmutes the implicit ugliness in certain terms into something universal or, by alternative, into something innocuous, ridiculously small.  

"I am what I am" is a statement that in its otherworldly clarity befits only a comic book character or the divine.  Without the muddy waters of adjectives or nouns (the generic assumptions about the generic gay, the generic homosexual, the generic queer), being generates a comprehensive comprehension that--broadly, easily--encompasses a kind of wholeness that is evolutionary and adaptive. This infers, at its center, a self that stands (and changes) outside the bounds of gravity.  Imagine the majesty of that  amorphous mass of possibility.

And it is not just that the constructions that limit and exaggerate the generic self proffer some specific set of insights; rather, the pull and power--as contextualized by the culture and by the frayed edges that tear beyond the pale--lies deeper than mere insight, rooted in identity.  This reveals the profound attachment that necessarily arises between victim and the isolated source of victimization (however one might be moved to define and describe and diagram that).  It is a kind of Stockholm Syndrome of arts and letters, in which words are the potentates obstructing a whole army of ideas.  They are dictators whose dictation makes the trains "run on time".

The suffering and one's attachment to it can be, in the end, treason against one's own best angel.  Or given thoughtful declamation, these same stifling (even crippling forces) can be the beginning of transformation, transmutation, transfiguration.  The kernel of wisdom and the ember of personal power that one's body plays host to are the promise that orbits just outside of the dull reach of shame.  I know the solution is often presented simply: Pride.  But these antonyms contest my soul.  A Faustian bargain.  I would rather be a FAGGOT (even in a screaming font) than live in the constant sway of the rhetorical persuasions of community "standards".  The lesson one learns out on the edge is that one's ability to not only endure but to transubstantiate oppression and marginalization leverages access to one's own life force. 

Let me define the names.