There it is, the shrug, that gesture that turns some burning word into ambivalence; the shoulders unload their pride. It admits uncertainty. It abandons dialogue. And if I listen carefully to the tape I made at the beginning of the quarter, that shrug is like an echo in the box, a toxic surrender that has settled too readily into my voice, too easily defeating me before I even attempt to address oppression. When discussing race, I simplify by hiding behind the concept as social construction. When considering gender, I question the efficacy of challenging stereotyped roles in a culture saturated with the heterosexual dichotomy. I proclaim the limits of empathy, bemoan the grand assumptions of both bigots and social activists, and--in telling contradiction--argue that progress toward equality is both inevitable and impossible. Between the lines, I quietly abdicate my power to alter the landscape of a world that is less than my ideal. I pull my aspirations into myself. And while there is certainly an admirable sentiment in my response to one of the questions ("I prefer not to discuss issues of difference with others and instead try to be a model of a kind of sensitive humanity that treats everyone with equal respect."(Self Interview, 10/14/08)), behind the words there seems to be a shrug.
The process of this course has been, if anything, reflective. From the creation of the culture chest and the self-interview to this paper, I have been forced to analyze both my history and my assumptions as regards the panoply of categories that define me as me and formulate the substance of difference. Essential to this process has been revisiting the man I was twenty years ago when--newly out and living in Montana--I emerged from the Reagan years an activist.
In those days, I was an ardent youth. Shedding the dead skin of lies, I wanted desperately to effect change in the lives of other closeted gay men and women living in the relative isolation of the Northern Rockies. I was a member of a speakers panel that confronted misconceptions about homosexuality for groups ranging from college students to public health workers. I participated in
efforts to lobby for repeal of the state's sodomy law. With my ex, I founded the Missoula Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and built the event through successive years of growth in both attendance and box office. Looking back on these buoyant interventions, even I was inspired.
This class has been a seance for the man that I once was. Here on the far side of Will and Grace and Brokeback Mountain, in the brave bright light of Ellen Degeneres and Rachel Maddow, here in the era of the emergent legalization of gay marriage, the claustrophobia of 1988 is almost unimaginable. But it was in that era that I stood up. There in the time of weighted nightmares--the barrage of threats and epithets, the gay bashings, the circling predator of AIDS and the governments indifference to its glowing eyes--there in the time of muffled screams, I was the man that I would like to be again.
And I have been wondering these past few weeks what in me was different then. Certainly there is an element of youthful energy to be considered. Maybe as I have described above there was an urgency that has been eclipsed by both symbolic and fundamental shifts in American culture. There is as well the argument that years of basking in the agency of being white and male in a corporate incarnation desensitized me to the plight of vulnerable communities including one to which I myself belonged. The reality is simpler and more dangerous. What happened to me was the shrug.
The readings and conversations in which we have been involved these past many weeks have attuned me to the noise of homophobia that still persists. In a post-modern, post-politically correct period, the assumptions that pass themselves as irony are more angled on their assault of one's identity. However, their minimizing quality is clear. They simplify gay men and lesbians and promote the otherness of their placement in the broader society. I recognize their insidiousness if not their malice; six months ago, blinded by "progress," I would have dismissed these stings--if I
noticed them at all--with that proverbial avalanche of shoulders, and the twisted half-smile that punctuates it.
The dilemma boils down to this: how does one address that residue of bias without being humorless, without being self-concious, offering insight as opposed to admonition? When a coworker (or two, or three, or four) replicates the cavalier curiosity of the popular culture with gay sex, where does one draw the line? One response might be read as shame, another might appear a tacit agreement to the whole amalgamation of presumptions that lie coiled beneath. The burden of otherness is the eternal, internal debate over meaning and intention. Politicized in one's own skin, one becomes invariably oversensitive. The friction of the world can either be turned out or turned in. There is no such thing as "the shrug."
In her article The Common Elements of Oppression, Suzanne Pharr speaks with authority about the universal experience of exclusion across all marginalized groups. "There is no hierarchy of oppressions," she demands. (Pharr 1988. 26) And her insight into the institutionalization of various isms demonstrates her case effectively. One can easily draw historical parallels between the violence of racism, gay-bashing and domestic violence. Its reality and its threat have repeatedly discouraged a genuine challenge to the dominant norm by oppressed groups. By way of excising their own culpability in this violence, the dominant culture has blamed the victim: "He should have known better than to go into that neighborhood." "He was flaunting his sexuality." "She just wouldn't listen and do what she was told." (Pharr. 28-30).
But from her Pharr vantage--twenty years prior, concomitant to my era of activism--what insight does the author offer to the current, more subtle manipulations of "otherness"? As the
groundwork of multiculturalism and diversity laid in the 1970s and 1980s has transformed society, there has been the beginning of something dumb-founding to the militancy of old social critiques: for all of the very real symptoms that the cancer of the isms still infects the body, the prognosis is improving and all indications would lead us to believe this will be a lasting remission.
The Secretary of State-designate is a woman. She is proceeded in this position by a black woman who was proceeded by a black man who was proceeded by a woman. If anyone would dare call the ascension of these four individuals tokenism, the historic election of Barack Obama by the largest majority of any first-term candidate for president since FDR should silence them. Even the surreal popularity of Sarah Palin among the most conservative segment of the electorate is indicative of the cultural sea-change that the last twenty years has begot.
Just as the concentration on issues of diversity and social justice resonated in my daily life, the historic events of a particularly eventful political season added tambour to the class' themes. A counterpoint to the jubilant election of a mixed-race son of a single mother was the passage of Proposition 8 in California. While one could not help but re-imagine America after Obama's victory, the constitutional amendment to deprive gay and lesbian couples of marriage rights in California reminded us all of the largesse of deep-seated prejudice. Even in a moment of transformative inclusion, there will always be somebody left on the outside looking in.
It has been said that politics is always personal. For my partner and I, the vote in California occurred two weeks prior to our own planned registration as domestic partners in accordance with Oregon's legal compromise. We had each invited one friend to travel to Portland for the event. Our best friends from here in town also joined us. We made this event small, quiet; we wanted to depoliticize it, allow it to be about our decision rather than the sanction of the state. The date had been determined in mid-summer, but on that rainy afternoon the clouds were a hangover from
election day.
My mother had reacted to my obligatory phone call about the event with a stymied pause. One of Jon's friends from college, a devout and conservative Catholic who had heard about our decision through Jon's best man, had taken the occasion to send an email expressing her discomfort with all of it and to announce that she and her family would not be attending a planned reunion at the Oregon Coast next summer that Jon and I are hosting. Regardless of our intention to have the moment be about us, it was still about everyone else. What could one do but shrug, smile, and enjoy the wedding dinner at Beast?
Of course, the underbelly of such a reception of momentous news by those one loves is not a shrug but a prolonged and stifled scream. One wants to appeal to this feeling being with a cogent argument such as those put forth by Warren Blumenfeld in his essay, How Homophobia Hurts Everyone. The problem is that homophobe's choke on the very idea that they have an issue. In the words of Jon's friend, "My faith is very important to me." In the words of Blumenfeld, "Negative attitudes internalized by members of these groups often damage the spirit and stifle emotional growth." (Adams etal. 2000. 268) In the words of my Mother, "Oh, how is the weather out there?"
I can get agitated reading Michael Kimmel's essay equating the construct of masculinity with homophobia, understanding instinctually that he is right in much of his assessment. And--letting my 87 year old Mother off the hook for the moment--I admit that it is the ghastly mirror of my own internalized homophobia that he reflects back at me. Kimmel blurs the lines for me of my own sense of self. Ironically, by casting doubt on an innate masculinity, he uses the same mechanism by which a homophobe would erode the definitions of an innate sexual orientation. (Adams etal. 213) Where does 'I' begin and where does the construction of the 'I' end? Kimmel: "Masculinity
becomes a defense against the perceived threat of humiliation in the eyes of other men, enacted through a 'sequence of postures'--things we might say, or do, or even think, that, if we thought carefully about them, would make us ashamed of ourselves." (Savran 1992. 16) Something along the lines of a shrug, perhaps?
Fortunately, the code of masculinity offers an alternative gesture to that non-commital dismissive drop of shoulders. Confronted by exclusion of another based on race or gender, ability, ethnicity or class, and yes even sexuality, the "masculine" response can be to defend, to speak directly and authentically to the unjust word or unfair treatment. Calling-out and naming is an alternative to silence. It is an alternative that in its positive associations with maleness affords me something of my muddled self and saves the mask that is my face.
