I Have a Conspiracy Theory For That

What roused me from my luxurious sloth to start writing today is the apprehension that I may be blocked from seeing the tweet that set me off.  But my readers may be able to see it even if I can't.

Buttigieg: "If they made a pill I could take to not be gay, I'd take it"

*Sees Chasten in the front row*

"But thank God I didn't because then I wouldn't have met Chasten"

-Chasten looks less than enthused-

I'm adding this to my research 👨🏻‍🔬#GayTrutherism #PetesNotGay pic.twitter.com/yrVDzpSA8Y

— Carlo (@yesthatCarlo) February 25, 2020

I'm not a Buttigieg supporter or fan, and was criticizing him before a lot of people smarter than I am caught on to him.  My opinion of him has sunk ever lower as time has passed.  But I was skeptical of this tweet right away, and when I watched the video I saw that Carlo had transcribed Buttigieg's words inaccurately.  What he said was not "I'd take it" but "I woulda jumped on it."  That indicates that Buttigieg was not describing his feelings now, but how he felt before he came out.  There are other little problems I have with Carlo's version, but I do agree that Chasten looks less than enthused.  (But at least now I know how to pronounce his name.)  There are some truly weird aspects to Carlo's work that I'll return to presently, but let me concentrate for now on Buttigieg's statement.

There are many gay people who would have agreed with Buttigieg before they came out, and some still wish they could change (or be changed, magically) even now that they say they're Out and Proud. Allow me to quote a story I've told before:

I once asked another speaker on a GLB panel what he would do if it were proven, scientifically and unquestionably, that he had chosen to be gay. He thought for a moment, then said that in that case, some psychiatrist would make a lot of money helping him undo that choice. I was stunned, not least because earlier he had been talking about how he'd helped younger gay kids come out and feel good about being gay; yet he himself clearly felt quite bad about it. He was also wrong in assuming that all choices can be reversed. This doesn't mean he is a bad person; it does show how deeply miserable and wrong many of us have been made to feel about ourselves, our desires, and our loves. 

Ever since the early 1970s, when I first moved among gay people, I've encountered some of us who claimed that there was no need for activism, no need for debate, no need for Pride, because all gay people had their act together by then and bigotry was no longer a problem.  It was a dramatically clueless position at that time, but every so often someone still says it.  Sometimes the point is that pushing back against bigotry is unnecessary; sometimes it's that only the weak still feel bad about themselves, and we enlightened queers should just let these losers stew in their own juices.  I've been critical of gay people who claimed retrospectively that it was impossible to do other than hate yourself in 1972, 1982, 1992, 2002, or 2012 -- not because they hated themselves, but because they were distorting the very history they had lived through.  They're projecting their own unhappiness and isolation onto everyone else. 

But I don't blame people for wanting to change.  I did myself when I was in high school in the late 60s, and wanted to go to the main campus of Indiana University because I'd heard that the psychology clinic there did change therapy.  I failed to make the move, however, and went to a nearby regional campus instead, where I found more reading material and learned that change therapy doesn't work.  I also began encountering the ideas of the Gay Liberation movement - the Stonewall Riots took place just as I was graduating from high school -- and learned that change wasn't necessary or desirable even if it were possible.  I also learned that, contrary to the heterosexual  propaganda I'd imbibed, it was possible to be homosexual and have a fulfilling life.  By the time I made my way to IU's main campus in the fall of 1971, I'd forgotten about the psych clinic and was ready to join the gay student group there instead.

Most gay people I met, including many I met at GLF meetings, didn't feel the same way.  Any time their love life went awry, they blamed it on their homosexuality and spoke wistfully of going straight. As a young newly-militant homo, I probably saw this more negatively than I do now.  But I still saw it as the result of growing up and living in a homophobic society.

Nor do I imagine that homophobia and antigay bigotry are things of the past.  I'm not surprised in the least when they rear their heads, or when young gay people are affected and influenced by them.  I am a bit surprised when I find that they were able to block out the rapidly increasing counterimages, positive ideas, and resources available and feel sorry for themselves.  But who would I be to condemn others for feeling sorry for themselves?  My interest is to encourage them to feel better, and to help them if I can.

I don't know how Pete Buttigieg came to terms with his homosexuality, and have little interest in finding out; it's not really important.  For my purposes today, what matters is that he clearly has done so, and this Carlo person is lying, either deliberately or through agenda-driven laziness, about it.  There are many other, I think, more important reasons to despise and oppose him, so why make one up?  Many people seem to prefer made-up reasons to real ones, which I don't understand and hope to return to in another post sometime.

But it goes farther than that.  See Carlo's hashtags, #GayTrutherism and #PetesNotGay? I realized that I've seen seen the results of his "research" before, and one of his favorable commenters confirmed it.  Unfortunately, she has set her tweets to be invisible to non-followers without actually blocking me, so I can't link to her, but what she wrote was that Buttigieg doesn't set off her fine-tuned gaydar, and she was grateful to Carlo for confirming that he just isn't gay.  Gaydar is bullshit, and neither this person nor anyone else is authorized to decide who is or isn't gay.

Someone else commented: "I’ve heard 'gay for pay', but never 'gay for power'. You’ve stumbled across something here."  I've run into uncountable bigots who argued that people were claiming to be gay just to seem cool, to seem hip, to get attention, to be trendy.  (He replied: "Muncan Ditchel."  Oh my god what brilliant wit!  I am totally DESTROYED!!!! SCHOOLED!!!  YAS SLAY QUEAN!!!!)

Another commented: "He came out when Indiana was getting blasted globally for their anti-LGBT discrimination bill. Not saying that he only came out after it polled well, but it sure is interesting!"  We've made a lot of gains since 1969, but opportunistically hitching one's star to LGBT identity doesn't look like easy money to me.  Also, I came out largely after and because of the post-Stonewall explosion of the gay movement; such events do have a tendency to give closeted people the boost of encouragement they need.  It doesn't count against them.  Buttigieg's willingness to run as an openly gay candidate is probably the only thing I respect about him.  These people are the queer equivalents of aging right-wing wunderkind Ben Shapiro, who just declared that Bernie Sanders isn't a real Jew.

What Carlo has stumbled on is something much less positive than he thinks.  Trutherism isn't a flag I'd care to march under: to adopt it voluntarily is basically to declare yourself a crank.  I don't think Carlo's going to do Buttigieg any harm -- he's doing it to himself abundantly, without Carlo's help --but I hate being reminded yet again what bloated and inflamed, lying assholes many gay people are.  I already know that about Buttigieg, and now I get to/have to put Carlo on the list.  Forbear, girlene!

Uh, What?

I was in the library this morning, trying vainly to get anything constructive done, when a middle-aged couple came into the Fireplace Room with their son, who was in a powered wheelchair, and began talking to an older woman they evidently knew.  First they talked about the boy, and then switched to politics.  The younger woman said that she objected to people who say that Trump isn't their president, she didn't like Obama but she never trash-talked him like some people did, and Trump is the president so he should be respected, he's the president.  I share her distaste for the Not My President Resistance, but that never stopped me from criticizing Obama or his predecessors, and it doesn't stop me from criticizing Trump.  Her husband remarked quietly that Obama was a "puppet of Congress" (what?). 

Next she said how glad she was that Trump had killed "that terrorist" (presumably Soleimani) - when Obama killed "that terrorist" (presumably Bin Laden) everybody thought it was great, and it's not fair.  We Do Not Negotiate With Terrorists, we kill them.  Perhaps she's just too young to remember Ronald Reagan negotiating with Iran to free American hostages, or again to get money for Nicaraguan terrorists.  It was a long time ago.  Frankly it's a stretch to claim that Trump's critics thought it was bad to kill Soleimani.  The objections from corporate media and the Beltway were not to killing Soleimani per se, everyone agreed that he was a Bad Man and a Terrorist who deserved to die in fire and fury, but because Trump didn't say "Mother May I" to Congress first.  There was also concern -- well, panic -- that the assassination might lead to war with Iran, which was not a consideration in the execution of Bin Laden as I recall.

But then I saw the video clip I embedded above, which reminded me that the Trump administration has been openly negotiating with the Taliban, the Evil Terrorists Responsible for 9/11, which drove America to invade Afghanistan to defend America against terrorism.  We did remove the Taliban for awhile, but they are back, and now we have to negotiate with them.  This will have no more impact on true Trumpians than Reagan's negotiations with Iran hurt him with true Reaganites, of course.  I wished I could have asked this woman about these little matters, but I stayed in my corner and held my peace.  Sometimes I romanticize my new/old town, and an episode like this is a bracing reminder. These people were perfectly nice, they didn't froth at the mouth, they were equable and mild, but they were still scary.

I Don't Know How You Were Introverted

I like and agree with this meme, which a Facebook friend passed along the other day.  I've been critical before of the discourse around introversion and extraversion, which goes back to Carl Jung and that's not a recommendation.  It turns out that there's a lot of variation if not disagreement about the concepts among professionals, and the popular discourse is predictably even worse.  My only reservation about radicarian's suggestion is that it seems to assume that the maximum and minimum amounts of social interaction are fixed in each individual, as if we were measuring cups with limited capacity, which seems unlikely.  I think it's important to notice that "introverts" may crave quite a lot of social interaction until we reach our limit and need some solitude to recover, and I'd bet that even the most "extraverted" also have their limits and need to rest.

Some people commented that the concepts are meant to be a continuum, not a dichotomy, and while that may be true, I don't believe most people see it that way, or frame it that way when they talk about it.  Many people don't like the idea of a continuum and refuse to understand it -- compare the Kinsey continuum, a popular focus of misunderstanding -- and even those who like it and appeal to it tend to get it wrong.  Jung himself admitted that gendering his concepts of "anima" and "animus" was misleading, since those constructs are present in every person, but he evidently couldn't resist gendering them, and characterized traits as masculine or feminine anyway.  (Another reminder that "essentialism" doesn't have to refer to supposedly physical or biological traits: essences can be psychological or spiritual.)

Another person climbed onto her hobbyhorse and commented:

I think the difference is still worth talking about as long as we live in a capitalist culture that celebrates and rewards only particular orientations. Who gets to have their introverted/extroverted needs met is also deeply bound up with class, race, gender, disability. Like all identities, these labels are political, and can help us describe and change the societies we live.

I don't see any reason to bring capitalism into it (let alone "orientations").  Pre-capitalist societies also categorized people, rationing rewards and punishments according to their ability or willingness to conform.  I don't agree that introversion and extraversion are identities, but when a trait or label becomes an "identity" it becomes problematic for other reasons.  Labels and identities are political, all right, but they didn't start to be with the rise of capitalism -- another label that is political, and difficult if not impossible to define.

Someone else chimed in:

Margaret had a great response to this! I would just like to add, being an introvert is a positive identity for me. I have shared characteristics with other people who consider themselves to be introverted. And, frankly, I'm not concerned if other people think that identity is a negative or a positive.

Maybe I should have replied that I'm not concerned if this other person thinks that identity is a negative or a positive.  I'm not going to tell them that they shouldn't regard introversion as a positive identity, but they can't legislate for other people.  The bit about "shared characteristics with other people who consider themselves to be introverted" shows the problem with adopting identities.  What are those shared characteristics?  Are they inherent to introversion, or are they accidental, like, say, diva worship or cross-dressing among gay men, which encourages people to regard them as essential parts of the identity and promotes the imposition and policing of irrelevant boundaries?  I vote for the latter, and I consider it negative because not only does it promote groupthink (also known as "tribalism") but promotes ignoring that people outside the granfaloon share those supposedly gay, male, or introverted characteristics.  Such mischaracterization is not just false but harmful and counterproductive.

Someone else remarked,

I think the terms are efficient ways to identify those thresholds without having to say that entire sentence to describe yourself.

A chacun son gout, but efficiency in such matters tends to be oversimple.  To get any precision, you need ever more complicated classifications to describe yourself.  People will hear your term as they understand it, which may be very different from how you understand it.  If you realize the confusion, it will probably take more than just one sentence to clear it up.

But you don't have to repeat that entire sentence.  You don't even need a label to do it.  You can just say something like, "Sorry, I'm burnt out on people right now and need some time to myself."  Yes, that's a longish sentence too, but it has the virtue of being accurate without relying on confusing and inadequate labels.

Sauce for the Goose, Sauce for the Gander

The composer, diarist, and critic Ned Rorem was born in Richmond, Indiana, a few months before my father was born in 1923.  At 96 and counting, Rorem has outlived my father by fourteen years.  He was still composing as late as 2010.  I've never been able to get much from Rorem's music, though I keep trying; but his books have given me a lot of pleasure, from the notorious Paris and New York diaries, down to Facing the Night: A Diary (1999-2005) and Musical Writings (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006).

Raised a Quaker, Rorem later became an atheist, but he is still a pacifist, and I was intrigued by these remarks in Facing the Night, dated 13 June 2000 (17):

With those feminists of yore [?] who claimed that men have it better than women, one must agree, but for this crucial disclaimer: Women are not subject to the draft.  The draft eats up young males, whether they will or not, forcing them to learn how to kill their brothers in ignorance of whatever they're fighting for.  Indeed, if their male superiors - inevitably above draft age - find women so dispensable, why not form our armies from exclusively female combatants?

No, "intrigued" is the wrong word; more like "mildly offended."  Rorem is annoyingly glib and simplistic here.  Biologically speaking, men are much more dispensable than women, since human females usually bear only one child at a time, and are tied up by gestation for nine months and by early child care for several years.  Men, by contrast, can inseminate many women in a short time.  A cultural materialist like the anthropologist Marvin Harris could argue that this fact explains the male near-monopoly on military activity.

But that's the least of it.  As I just indicated, men have fiercely maintained war as a male preserve.  A popular rationale is that women are what men are defending by killing each other, either directly by keeping their opponents physically away from them or, more piously by casting women as a holy good, like the Nation itself.  (I don't know if all countries are regarded as feminine, but the US definitely is.)  It's not very convincing.  First, women (and children) have never been exempt from the horrors of war: massacred, enslaved, or raped, they have been regarded as prizes.  (The word "rape" originally meant the carrying away of women, not their forcible use by their captors, though the distinction was notional: soldiers abducted enemy women in order to fuck them.)  This reality is all over the Hebrew Bible (and indeed world literature in general), which regulates the sexual use of female captives from areas where Israel had not been ordered simply to kill every living thing.  There's also the phenomenon of military prostitution: the US military requires the nations in which Our Boys are Protecting Democracy to provide them with comfort women, among other vital services.

Second, like male-homosocial spaces in general, the military has traditionally been regarded as a refuge from women who might nag men to wipe their butts, pick up their underwear, take out the garbage, or refrain from blowing their noses on the floor.  Ironically, perhaps, joining the army is just going from the frying pan to the fire in this respect, from the demands of nagging moms to abusive drill sergeants and endless chickenshit barracks policing.  I suppose that the deadly masochism of the male is a factor here; women express their version of this syndrome through heterosexual marriage.  So I don't take the claim of "defending our women" very seriously: military men and organizations view women as more dispensable even than men.

One reason I like the term and concept of "patriarchy" is that, as someone has defined it, it arranges people of both sexes by their relationship to older men.  Do the Fathers care about the young men they send to war?  Not very much, and they manfully subdue their care in the service of Higher Values like power and profit.  Do they care about the young women they claim to be defending and protecting against the buck Negro, the Mexican, the Hun, the Gook, the Hajji?  Oh, my dear, possibly even less than that.  Male supremacy might be the last survival of feudalism and its forerunners.  But Enlightenment values have not managed to improve things much in this area.

I also noticed that at the time Rorem wrote those words, the United States hadn't had a draft for decades.  (Though, true, young men were and are required to register in case the draft is reinstated.) And of course, increasing numbers of women have been going into combat to defend Our Oil Companies (which really are sacred), where they too can be maimed and killed, or maim and kill others.  Equality, yay!  Maybe I shouldn't expect even a gay man of Rorem's vintage to have a very nuanced grasp of sexual politics, but his view of war and the military also leaves a lot to be desired.

Men have been whining that they have it rough too at least since the advent of Second Wave feminism ("feminists of yore"?).   They tend to ignore the fact that feminists have been vocal about the harm done to men by patriarchy all along, and have tried to engage them in the effort to eradicate sexism.  I suppose the problem is that feminism is run by, y'know, girls, and they want their own show; even collaboration as equals seems unacceptable.  A men's movement against sexism is fine with me, but what we've had always ends up blaming women for men's disadvantages, perhaps because blaming other men is so much scarier.  Dorothy Dinnerstein wrote a lot about this problem in The Mermaid and the Minotaur (Harper, 1976).  I've quoted her before, but today I'll add this observation; rereading it reminds me just why I found Rorem's remarks so faulty.

I have seen on the faces of some men who are on the whole quite likable a certain smile that I confess I find deeply unattractive: a helpless smile of self-congratulation when some female disadvantage is referred to. And I have heard in their voices a tone that (in the context of what women put up with) is equally unattractive: a tone of self-righteous, self-pitying aggrievement when some male disadvantage becomes obvious. This sense of being put upon that many men feel in the fact of evidence that the adult balance of power is not at every point by a safe margin in their favor seems based on the implicit axiom that to make life minimally bearable, to keep their very chins above water, to offset some outrageous burden that they carry, they must at least feel that they are clearly luckier and mightier than women are [215ff].

"Self-righteous, self-pitying aggrievement" says it very exactly.  If I were like many people, I'd call Dinnerstein prophetic; but she was describing a problem of her own time, and much older.  I'm not putting Rorem down, however; I enjoyed Facing the Night very much overall, and it gave me more than just this bit to write about here.

The Pursuit of Happiness

This morning I was browsing through a listing of discounted e-books I don't need, when I noticed this review excerpt, quoted to tout B. F.'s Daughter by J. P. Marquand:

“No one can write more engagingly of their search for happiness. Or of their sulks when they discover—too late, alas—that happiness must be earned.” —The New York Times Book Review

Wait a minute, I thought, since when does happiness have to be earned?  For that matter, how do you earn it?

There's no agreement about what happiness is, but I think most people recognize that it's elusive.  You can be unhappy despite having all the conventional advantages -- wealth, comfort, a loving family, etc.  You can be happy despite the lack of such advantages.  People work hard, dutifully, all their lives hoping to achieve or earn happiness, either in livelihood or in personal relationships, and then find themselves wondering why it didn't work.

In English, at least, "happy" and "happiness" originally meant "good fortune" or luck.  But it also meant "a pleasant and contented mental state."  The first sense, which I often encountered in English literature from the nineteenth and early twentieth century, hadn't completely died out by the time B. F.'s Daughter was first published in 1946, but I suspect most Americans have forgotten it by now.  I suspect that the second sense, though, derives from the first: if you are content and feel pleasant, it's not something you've achieved, it's something that happened (same root) to you, by luck or good fortune. So the idea that happiness "must be earned" is, it seems to me, obviously ridiculous. Perhaps (same root) you can improve your chances by judicious action, but happiness is ultimately beyond your control: in the hands of the goddess Fortune, who like all gods will knock you over just to hear the splat.  (Read the book of Job sometime, if you haven't already: the malignant whimsicality of gods is not specifically a 'pagan' idea.  Nor is it limited to Job: doesn't Yahweh say somewhere else, "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy"?  [Yep: Exodus 33:19, quoted by Paul in Romans 9:15.])  I'm almost tempted to find the original review to learn who wrote such a silly thing.  Maybe I will.

What makes that second sentence not merely silly but pernicious is the implication that if you aren't happy, it's your fault.  You didn't work hard enough. You were lazy.  You thought the world owes you a living.  Or Catch-22: You must have done something wrong, or you wouldn't be sad.  Or a theological version: You thought you could compel God to give you happiness through your own efforts, so you deserve to be miserable; the beatings will continue until your morale improves.  Stop whining or God will give you something to cry about!

I'm not blaming Marquand for the foolishness of his reviewer, mind you.  But I do wonder why this vendor, seventy-odd years after the book was published, chose to highlight this quotation to recommend it.