Me, Myself, and I: Three's a Crowd

I've been rereading Doris Grumbach's Fifty Days of Solitude (Beacon, 1994), about an extended period she spent alone (more or less) while her partner Sibyl Pike was away on a long book-buying trip.  The two had relocated to Maine years before with their bookstore from Washington DC.  It was the winter of 1993, and Grumbach was 75 years old.  (She's now in her late nineties, still alive and still writing.)  Grumbach hoped to work on a novel she was writing, and limited her interaction with the world to mail, the radio, recorded music and movies, and books, though at times she had to talk to people, as when she went into town to pick up mail.  Since I've been known to fantasize about living alone in the countryside and watching snow pile up outside, I found her situation attractive and read the book soon after it was published.

As I recall, I liked it better the first time I read it.  It's interesting to compare Fifty Days of Solitude to May Sarton's early journals, when she was living alone in Maine, though she was just as connected to other people, neighbors and correspondents, as Grumbach is.  As with Sarton, I'm most pleased by Grumbach's reflections on aging, since I'm ten years younger than she was when she conducted this experiment and wrote about it.  But many of her comments bug me.  She's prone to complain about the horrors of "the world today," for example, though those horrors have always been there, but Americans lacked electronic media to report them to us.  I sometimes believe that if there is such a thing as information overload, it lies more in the pileup of atrocities, disasters, and general human misery that the news media collect and deliver.

The radio news, in a single day while I was alone: Disastrous floods in southern California.  Two trains collide in Gary, Indiana, and six persons are decapitated.  One hundred fifty miles from Ankara, Turkey, an entire village is buried in snow.  The United States and its allies bomb Iraq, killing many civilians.  An Estonian ship breaks up near Finland, spilling two hundred thousand gallons of oil.

... and more.  But such things have always happened.  If an epidemic wiped out a village in northern India in 1770, say, the news wouldn't have traveled far or fast, and North Americans wouldn't have seen video footage on TV.  If a farmer in North Dakota in 1890 went mad from anxiety over a bad harvest and cut his family to pieces with a scythe, the crime would have been reported in local newspapers, but probably wouldn't have made it to Sargentville, Maine.  Even in Grumbach's and my lifetimes, the newspapers have been full of such stories, but people tend to forget them.  When I see summaries of the news from the fifties, the sixties, the seventies, I'm struck by how many terrible things were happening and recorded then; but I'd forgotten about them.  Evidently so did Grumbach.

The same goes for her lament about youth.

For the young: To be left alone with themselves when they are too unsure to respect the self they have been persuaded by the world to dislike, those who feel unworthy in the eyes of their families, what a terrible condition that is.  The dismayingly high number of suicides among young persons attests to the consequences of such destructive isolation, that is, to their insurmountable loneliness.

I'm skeptical about this.  The number of suicides is hard to know for sure, because so often they are ambiguous or covered up.  It's even harder to know why kids (or adults) kill themselves.  Is it because of "insurmountable loneliness"?  I don't know, and I don't think Grumbach knew either; nor do I think that the self becomes more "sure" with age -- it certainly doesn't seem to be so for Grumbach at 75.  There was a flurry of panic in the early 90s about youth suicide in the US, and it was never clear if more teenagers were killing themselves than previously, why they were killing themselves, or whether diminished media attention to the problem meant that the numbers were smaller or that the media had moved onto the next Shiny Thing.  But I grew up in rural Indiana pretty isolated, a gay bookworm, and though I often felt lonely I never contemplated suicide, nor did I feel that bad most of the time.  And right now I'm reading George Eliot's 1860 novel The Mill on the Floss, set in rural and village England a few decades before it was written.  I gather it is largely autobiographical, and its depiction of a young girl's alienation and isolation shows that the problem is not particularly new.  Eliot's depiction of the superficially better-adjusted folk around her doesn't make them enviable either: they are mostly half-educated, indifferently religious, obsessed with propriety, and fall apart when life doesn't go their way.  I would expect the same to be true of many of Doris Grumbach's Maine neighbors.

But also stuff like this:

When I lived in cities, surrounded on every side by people, served by them constantly, I never knew the names of the person who sold newspapers at the corner, delivered them to the door in the early hours of the morning, collected the garbage, waited on me in the grocery store, delivered UPS packages and the mail.  Rarely did I see their faces, or if I did, they were still, somehow, invisible, a part of the anonymous fog of the overpopulation that pushed upon me from every side.

Here, now, I knew the names and life histories of everyone who had ever come to the house, to plow after snowstorms, ... [etc.]

I can relate, but I suspect that in Grumbach's case, as it certainly is in mine, this was her hangup, not an inevitable part of city life.  I'm getting over it as I get older, and I wonder if it wasn't also true for Grumbach, aided by the move to a new environment.  Right now I'm in a very large city, Seoul, and despite my linguistic deficiency, I recognize and am recognized by the people I buy hot chocolate from each morning, the people in the restaurants where I have lunch, the person at the convenience store across the street, some people in the neighborhood, and elsewhere.  Names are good, and I'm learning them, but I don't think they're absolutely necessary; recognition is.  The same is true in the mid-sized city where I live, by the way.  As I get older my shyness is, thankfully, wearing away.

Cities have their disadvantages; so do small towns and rural areas.  But wandering around Seoul impresses me again with the achievement that big cities are.  They don't just happen, they must be organized and kept working by intense human intelligence and physical effort.  I think this achievement is often slighted.

Speaking of George Eliot, Grumbach quotes from Middlemarch: "There is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it."  Grumbach comments:

Determined = formed? or, directed?  But not, I thought, forever.  There may be a time, as now, when the search for the inward being cuts it away from determination by others, frees it for the moment from direction from the outside, gives it stasis, and more than that temporary peace.

I disagree very strongly.  Even shut up alone in her house, and even if she'd stopped listening to the radio or reading her mail, Grumbach would have been connected to and sustained by other people, such as those "who come to the house, to plow after snowstorms, to put up gutters and rototill the garden, to mow down the meadow and to fix the plumbing, the electricity, the telephone, the antenna and the steps."  She knew this.  That she was limiting direct, face-to-face contact with others for fifty days didn't change it.  For that matter, Eliot wrote of "what lies outside" the creature.  That means not just people but the house, the land, the weather, the air and water and living things that inhabit the environment.  I don't believe we are ever freed from direction (which is different from control) from the outside, no matter how fondly we imagine that we've achieved it; or that we ever achieve "stasis" while we live.  Grumbach has a curiously material sense of the self, as if it were a physical organ somewhere inside her, and that's odd, given what she has to say about Christian and Buddhist spirituality as part of her practice in her solitude.

Fifty Days of Solitude isn't a bad book, though; like many books I disagree with, it gives me something to push against, and poses questions I can then answer for myself.  There's no reason why Grumbach and I should have the same answers.

I Need a Dump Truck, Baby, to Unload My Head

Okay, I don't know where to begin so let's just open up my head and see what tumbles out. The matter I'm probably most conscious of not having written about here sooner is the spate of attention given recently to the suicides of several young men -- some in their early teens -- who'd been bullied as fags, whether they were actually gay or not. (That's something that needs to be noticed more, just as girls are bullied as sluts for reasons having nothing to do with their actual behavior.) One, a college student, jumped off a bridge after his roommate secretly recorded him having sex with another guy, and put the video on the internet. These are terrible events, and worthy of everyone's attention. But the attention they've been getting seems to me inadequate, just another media fad which, Columbus-like, "discovers" a continent that was there and full of people all along, and quickly moves to more important matters that concern us all. It's hard to tease out all the strands of this mess, though. For one thing, concern about suicide among youth has erupted into media storms in the US before, in the mid-1980s for example. (That one was an inspiration for the great 1989 movie Heathers.) Where gays were concerned, suicide was a favorite subject for concern-trolling among antigay bigots: Tim Lahaye's notorious 1978 tract The Unhappy Gays stressed our suicidal tendencies as much as the mainstream gay movement does nowadays; gay activist and scholar Eric Rofes attacked the theme in his 1983 book I Thought People Like That Killed Themselves. But there's been a steady drumbeat since then in the American GLBTQ+ π movement, especially its therapeutic wing, about young gay kids and suicide. Intertwined with suicide in the cases before us now, though, is bullying. That's not new either. During the past few years I've begun sampling the academic / therapeutic literature on bullying in general, and while everyone agrees it's a serious problem, no one seems to know what to do about it. (What does seem to work would probably be rejected by enough parents to block it in most schools in the US.) I suspect it has something to do with the concentration of children in large schools, which creates large groups of age mates together and contributes to bullying not only of sissy boys but of girls. I'll come back to that in a moment.) In 1991 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick published a great, furious paper called "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys", which showed how effeminate boys were tormented not only their peers but by adults, and that this assault was justified by the psychiatric profession even after homosexuality itself was officially de-pathologized in 1973. In 1996 Phyllis Burke offered more horrifying evidence in her Gender Shock, which described among other cases a preadolescent boy who was institutionalized and subjected to electroshock in the 1950s for being a sissy. More recently, in Dude, You're a Fag the sociologist C. J. Pascoe wrote about the policing and bullying of boys and girls by elite boys, teachers, and administrators in a California high school, despite the presence in that school of a Gay Straight Alliance and the existence of a California law which forbade discrimination based on sexual orientation. In the current flurry of publicity over these recent suicides, a lot of history has been lost -- some of it disturbingly recent. It's a terrible thing when a fifteen-year-old is so beaten down by the abuse of people around him that he hangs himself, as Billy Lucas did. It's also terrible when a fifteen-year-old kid is shot to death in his eighth-grade classroom by another fifteen-year-old, as Larry King was by Brandon McInerny in 2008. (King's family sued the school for failing to enforce its dress code and make Larry butch up his act, thus blaming the victim rather than the perpetrator; McInerny's defense lawyer concurred.) Or when seventeen-year-old Simmie Williams, wearing a dress, was shot to death at the other end of the country a few weeks later. And it seems that many people have forgotten Matthew Shepard, gay-bashed and left to die exactly 12 years ago, in Wyoming in 1998. Shepard's killing made the cover of Time and was memorialized in TV movies and the documentary play The Laramie Project, as King's made the cover of Newsweek. (A few years later, ABC News helpfully told us that Shepard had told a limousine driver "he was HIV-positive and was considering suicide." Leitmotif!) But that's how it goes in the United States of Amnesia: people are shocked! shocked! to learn that some people won't embrace diversity -- and then it's back to sleep. In a few years there will be another highly publicized suicide or murder, and everyone will run around expressing their horror and shock and making lovely symbolic gestures of support until they get tired of it, and another shiny gewgaw distracts them. Before I wrap this up, though, I want to give credit to the director of our campus Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Student Support Office, who told the student paper the same thing, only (as is his manner) more nicely:

GLBT Student Support Services coordinator Doug Bauder said the deaths are not indications of a disturbing new trend in bullying, but a problem many gay teens have faced for years. “A year ago, someone kept urinating on a student’s door,” Bauder said. “Someone would write ‘faggot’ on the door and then piss on it. Other students that year were repeatedly harassed by phone. The point being, that nasty cases of harassment have happened and continue to happen on this campus.” Bauder said as far as he knows, there has not been an IU student who has committed suicide because of anti-gay bullying in recent years, but incidents such as these have led to IU students transferring to other schools.

More to come.

Dude, I'm a Fag

Recently I was on a panel of gay, lesbian, and bisexual speakers for a class at a local alternative school. One of the other speakers, a gay man in his early 20s, told the class that his mother, a teacher, had asked him to tell them that just saying "that's so gay" was utterly devastating to any gay person, "like the N-word," he claimed, so they should never, never say "that's so gay."

When I hear stuff like this, I wonder how I managed to survive my youth in the 1950s and 1960s, when there was really no support of any kind available for most gay kids. I never was the butt of the kind of harassment, taunting, and assault that many gay kids, then and now, suffer at the hands of their peers, their teachers, and their families. But I heard worse things than "that's so gay" (which no one said in those days anyway, so maybe that's why I wasn't devastated), and when I read that homosexuality was a revolting sickness, or at best a life of isolation without hope, there were no countering opinions available as there are now. (That was partly because there was official censorship of pro-gay expression in those days -- the US Post Office blocked even the most timid materials from the mails for a long time.)

When it came my turn to comment, I said that I answer to words like "faggot," because they refer to me, after all. This surprised the audience, and I think the other speakers too. "Faggot" is a bad word, aren't you supposed to kill yourself if you hear it? But if we let straights decide that for us, we'll have to give up "gay" too, as well as any new word we choose to take its place. Bigots don't look down on us because we're called this or that word; any word we are called, or call ourselves, will be used against us if we let it, as "gay" is my witness. When they talk about "faggots," "queers," et cetera, they are talking about me. Remember that exchange from Catch-22? Yossarian refuses to go on more bombing runs because "They're trying to kill me." "They're trying to kill everybody!" Clevinger protests. "What difference does that make?" says Yossarian. Just so. And in my experience, most people who throw these words around are shocked when someone tells them so: do you realize you're talking about me? There's nothing wrong with being a queer, a fag, a gay -- so why are you talking as though there were?

Incidentally, I disagree that "that's so gay" is comparable to "nigger"; I find the equivalence ridiculous, even outrageous. There are other epithets closer in tone ("faggot", "queer," etc.), but there's a crucial difference beyond that: black kids, for all that they suffer from racism, have families to go home to, and probably peers at school and on the street. Black families generally know that their children are black. Most gay children grow up alone, even in their families, who may not know that they are gay and usually don't want to know. Antigay epithets have a policing function among boys (regardless of color) that is different from racial epithets: "faggot" and its synonyms are thrown at boys who may or may not be gay (though a boy who's suspected or known to be gay will be targeted, with a steep increase in harassment or violence). Growing up in a completely white rural area of northern Indiana, I only once recall having heard a white boy call another white boy a "nigger." ("Nigger-lover" was the pejorative of choice for whites who violated racial solidarity in those days. It's another word I'd answer to, rather than deny, if it came to that.)

I've been bothered by the magnification of "that's so gay" into the ultimate mindkiller because there is a tendency in diversity discourse to romanticize gay youth suicide, and to propagate images of clean-cut, gender-compliant, middle-class, usually white kids killing themselves because someone said something unkind about homosexuals in their hearing. I suppose it happens sometimes, but the research I've seen agrees that gay kids who attempt or commit suicide usually have been overtly and directly harassed and assaulted on an ongoing basis for a long time. They are also more likely to be gender-variant: sissies, drag queens in training, baby-butch girls. Of course, you're not going to see many tearjerking movies of the week about the suicides of such kids; corporate media (and the GLBTQ advocacy groups that advise them) prefer more "positive" images. And if it's destructive to bad-mouth people, if speaking negatively about someone in their presence can drive them to suicide, something needs to be done about gay people who complain about the bad homosexuals who Fit the Stereotype and made it seem that they couldn't be normal Homo-Americans like they wanted to be, scaring them back into their closets for years. It's those Stereotypes who get beaten up regularly and are more likely to kill themselves; it surely doesn't help them to hear themselves denounced as scary, malevolent queer demons who ruin everything for normal homos. It's telling that many respectable gay people think it's proper to demonize them. (And like the straight homophobes, the image people never think about the the impact of what they're doing on real people.)

On the morning of that panel I happened to be in the middle of reading C. J. Pascoe's Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), based on a year of participant observation in a high school in northern California. Among the teenagers Pascoe interviewed for her study was Ricky, "a lithe, white junior with a shy smile and downcast eyes, frequently sported multicolored hair extensions, mascara, and even a skirt. ... While other boys at River High engaged in continual repudiatory rituals around the fag identity, Ricky embodied the fag because of his homosexuality and his less normal gender identification and self-presentation" (65).

Contrary to the protestations of boys earlier in the chapter that they would never call someone who was gay a fag, Ricky experienced this harassment on a regular basis, probably because he couldn’t draw on identifiably masculine markers such as athletic ability or other forms of dominance to bolster some sort of claim on masculinity [67].

The harassment Ricky suffered was physical as well as verbal, and he got it from teachers as well as students, while administrators did nothing. (This despite the California state law which prohibits discrimination against students based on their sexual orientation.) Fag discourse was encouraged and indulged in by teachers, especially males according to Pascoe. Pascoe's teacher Barrie Thorne found this syndrome among researchers too, writing in her classic Gender Play (Rutgers, 1993, 99):

In the United States, ethnographers typically detail the social relations of older boys from the vantage point of a clique of popular athletes. … I detect a kind of yearning in these books; when they went back to scenes from their earlier lives, the authors couldn’t resist hanging out at the top. Cusick writes about his efforts to shake off male “isolates”: “I was there to do a study not to be a friend to those who had no friends.”

When several boys told her that they wouldn't go to a dance if Ricky was there, she asked them,

"Would you really not go to prom because a gay guy would be in the same room with you all?" They looked at me like I had two heads and said again that of course they wouldn't. Ricky's presentation of both sexual preference and gender identity was so profoundly threatening that boys claimed they would be driven to violence [70].

Focusing on random exclamations of "that's so gay" seems to me virtually a deliberate aversion of the eyes from the most serious problems that gay youth face in school. (Pascoe's Ricky, I'm relieved to report, didn't commit suicide, but he did drop out of school [page 71].) For one thing, it's simpler to squelch bad words in the classroom, though even that was too much for the teachers Pascoe observed at River High. Addressing the more systemic problems of teacher and administrator complicity in fag discourse, the acceptance of homophobic harassment as part of school life (where it is interwoven with sexual harassment of girls by boys, as Pascoe also shows), would be a daunting project. That may also be one reason for the romanticization of gay youth suicide: loving your dead gay students is so much easier than doing something about the bullying of living ones.

I'm not saying, by the way, that gay kids need to develop thicker skins. They -- or really, all kids -- need support, need not to be alone against harassment; they need people who will stand with them. It's not that I think being called names doesn't or shouldn't hurt; of course it often does. But we can fight back, and one of the most satisfying things I learned on coming out was what cowards bigots usually are, how they retreat when they're challenged and can't respond simply by ganging up on you. I'm thinking of a guy who was, like me, a regular on a computer BBS for years, a high school history teacher (no wonder our kids aren't learning anything!) my elder by a few years, who would accuse anyone who disagreed with him of being either female, or gay, in the schoolyard terms he'd learned and probably passed on to generations of his students. But in that environment, very few people took his bait. In that teacher's world, if you insinuate that someone's a fag, his only manly recourse is to challenge you to fisticuffs. Most people jeered at him instead; only one threw a tantrum at the insult and offered to take it outside. This refusal to be baited, along with the open contempt his attitude won him, frustrated him no end, but he never learned, just kept calling people girlymen, soft men, and whining about Political Correctness. The Internet can be a good place to begin learning to deal with such people, but of course it can't substitute for real-world interaction. If more males simply refuse to play these games, and stop backing up the would-be Alpha Boys who play them, then "that's so gay" will lose its sting. But I'm not going to hold my breath.