On fear

Warning: this post contains violent and sexist language.

A few weeks ago, I was standing on a sidewalk in Stratford, having just come out of a bookstore. A middle-aged man walked up to me, asked if he could have a minute, and when I said "yes," proceeded to scold me for "not looking where [I] was going" and nearly running into him. I have no idea if I did or not; I'd never seen him before in my life. All I knew was that I was on my own and a strange man had started berating me out of nowhere.

About five minutes later, after I got away, my phone chimed and I pulled it out to see what it was. It was an e-mail from someone I'd defriended on Livejournal and ignored his subsequent "but whyyyyyy?" messages. Apparently he hadn't gotten the message, because he was rhapsodizing about how great it would be if we lived near each other and could hang out. I deleted the e-mail.

Would either of these men have hurt me? I don't know. All I knew was that I was getting unwanted- in the first case, hostile- attention from strange men who were ignoring my boundaries. At what point can I assume that I'll be safe? And if I do and I'm wrong, how many people will blame me if I turn out to be wrong?

A few years ago, I came close to dating a man, but called it off when I discovered a series of disturbing internet posts he'd made before arriving at university. I'm not going to link to them because his real name is attached, but suffice to say they described graphic violence against women. After I turned him down he started to Facebook stalk me- whenever I posted something, there'd be a like or a comment from him within the space of five minutes. He was also wont to send me messages out of nowhere, congratulating me on being "cool" when I saw him in public. I unfriended him. Sure enough, within twelve hours, I had a message from him wanting to know why. I blocked him.

Dangerous? Maybe. Disrespectful of my boundaries? Absolutely. The history of violent rhetoric was there. The low-level creeping was there. If I'd let it pass and put up with the annoyance and discomfort, would he have lost interest and gone away? Or would he have escalated?

When I was in high school, a friend invited me over to his house to watch a movie. He had a TV in his bedroom, so we sat on the bed to watch it. Over the course of the next hour and a half, he repeatedly reached over and grabbed my backside, crotch, and breasts. I slapped his hands away. He did it again. I slapped them again. He kept going. His mother was upstairs, and I threatened to scream and bring her running downstairs- that stopped him for a few minutes. I didn't scream, though. I was too embarrassed. What could I say if she came downstairs? "Your son keeps groping me?" I could barely force the word "vagina" out of my mouth.

We were watching "The Fifth Element" that afternoon. To this day, I can't watch that movie without feeling queasy.

I took drama class in high school, and had a classmate who really didn't like me. His name was Jeff. I was assigned to work on a skit with him and one other boy (the one who groped me, but this was before that.) There was a scene in our skit where I was thrown to the ground and kicked. All staged, of course, but then Jeff started kicking me for real. I told him that if he did it during the actual presentation, I'd break character and yell at him to stop. "Do that," he said, "and I'll fucking kill you, bitch." He got more graphic than that: when I suggested wearing a nightgown as part of my costume, he responded "will anyone be able to see your pussy? If I saw your pussy, I'd kill myself." Then there was the time he asked me if I'd ever masturbated and told me I should "stick a carrot in your pussy."

One day, he passed me in the hall and muttered "see you in drama class, Laura" under his breath. I burst into tears and ran to a payphone, begging my mother to take me home. She pulled me out of that class. After I stopped going, we started getting hangup phone calls, from a number that listed on call display as "012345678." I still can't prove that Jeff was the one calling. All I know is that when I mentioned in front of his friend (the groper) that my mother had called the police about the phone calls, they instantly stopped.

That was high school. In middle school- I was eleven- I went to a friend's birthday party. We were walking home from the park, five girls from the age of eleven to thirteen, when a man pulled up on a bike. "oooh," he said, "five pretty ladies!" We all froze.

"Are you scared?" he asked. "Don't be scared of me." In retrospect, that was his mistake. Before, we'd been paralyzed because we knew there was something wrong with the situation, but we couldn't put a voice to it. As soon as he identified his behaviour as scary, it broke the spell. We all started screaming, and ran the rest of the way home. My friend's parents weren't there- just her sixteen-year-old sister, who laughed when she heard the story. "He was hitting on you!" she said. "Get used to it!"

It's been eleven years.

I'm still not used to it.

The discussion fallacy

Whenever something controversial passes through the media cycle, there are inevitably a variety of responses. Some people are outraged; some people are outraged by the outrage; some people really don't care either way; some people want to examine how the media cycle is manufacturing the outrage in the first place. (Those people are generally sociologists.) And then there's another group: the ones who think that the outrage is fodder for a roundtable debate. I'm sure you've heard it at some point: "I'm glad this happened, actually, because there's a really interesting discussion to be had."

And, well. No there isn't.

Should controversial things be discussed? Yes, absolutely. But the thing about "discussion" is that is generally implies that there are "shades of grey" to be found in the issue being discussed. Depending on what the issue is, maybe there is. But when the issue in question involves violating peoples' human rights- or giving money to people campaigning for the violation of human rights- then no, I don't think there is a discussion to be had. 

Ender's Game comes out this weekend. For those who haven't been following the coverage of Ender and the man who wrote it, the author- Orson Scott Card- has a long history of not just opposing same-sex marriage, but advocating for government overthrow if same-sex marriage was passed at a federal level. He's called gay people victims of child molestation and sexual dysfunction. (He's also a racist.) So in general, he's a pretty foul human being. He's also listed as a producer on the movie. That means that a percentage of the revenue generated by the film will be going into his pocket- and presumably, donated to the National Organization for Marriage, of which he was a member until recently. There isn't any discussion to be had about whether or not supporting the movie supports Card because it's a bald fact. He gets money if the movie does well. Your ticket purchases support him. There aren't any "shades of grey" here.

Now there've been a few other issues raised by people who want to support the film. Some people have said that they want to support the movie because it has prominent female characters. (Note: prominent straight female characters.) Others say, well, what about other authors who hold intolerant views and still have adaptations of their work brought to the big screen? What about SHAKESPEARE? To which I say: Shakespeare has been dead for six hundred years. The man is not recieving any kind of monetary compensation for new productions of The Merchant of Venice. (Although as far as repairing the text goes, it would be pretty hilarious if the big-screen adaptation of Ender's Game featured Ender in a loving, romantic

Apparently the movie also added a romantic subplot.
But they don't support heterosexism or anything!

relationship with another boy. Just to see the look on Card's face.) Absolutely the question of mounting productions of literature that propogate harmful racist/homophobic/sexist isn't clear-cut; but it's not comparable to the Ender issue, because Orson Scott Card is very much alive, well, and spewing vitriol. And if your issue with the boycott is that the representation of female characters is more important than Card's bigotry- well, that's your decision to make. But don't pretend that the harm done by supporting the movie is abstract. You can see the author-cum-producer's views for yourself.

(The studio has also announced their support for LGBT people, and offered to hold a benefit on the night of the movie's release. That's nice of them, but since they're still paying OSC, I'm not really sure how that rectifies the main issue here: that Card is still getting money from the movie, which then may very well be paid towards homophobic organizations like NOM.)

In which I get serious, and more than a little mad

I read a book today. I'm not going to mention the title or author, because honestly, they're both beside the point. I've read this book before. I've read hundreds of this book before. It varies in content and genre and reading level, but one thing remains consistent no matter what the variables: it always, always has a Tragic Gay.

Case in point.

The Tragic Gay (always gay- bisexuals don't exist in the universes this book takes place in, and transpeople aren't even considered) sometimes exists during the timeline of the story, and sometimes is only a footnote in the main characters' backstory. Sometimes they even get to be a main character. Sometimes they're the protagonist, sometimes the antagonist. The one common thread in this parade of gays is that they are Tragic. Often they're victims of bullying, usually they have some unrequited passion for a straight person, and frequently they commit suicide. Very frequently, they end up in the great refrigerator in the sky, and our mains weep and beat the ground with their fists and cry many straight person tears for their poor Tragic Gay friend. Then they go off and save the world with their magic, heterosexual powers and the Tragic Gay smiles beatifically from heaven or wherever they've been shuffled off to. For lo, they have served their purpose;  the author can feel good about themselves for "representation," and the audience can cry for the plight of those poor Tragic Gays and the queer audience . . . um . . . well gosh, you just can't please some people! But some will no doubt eat from the plate they've given, because even if the food is rotten, it's better than starving.

I have read- and seen- this story so many times, and I am beyond goddamn sick of it. Hey powers that be, know why our kids keep killing themselves? Because you're telling them to. Tell someone a story often enough, and they start to believe it. Tell someone that being gay automatically equals a lifetime of noble suffering often enough, and they start to understand that this is what they can expect their life to be. Is it true? Not necessarily. I'm not one for the empty platitudes of the It Gets Better project- well to be honest, I'm not one for Dan Savage in general- but I do think that when you create art, you have a responsibility to consider what cultural and sociological impact art has. We tell stories because they mean something to us- they tell us who we are and where we come from. They tell us not to talk to strangers and to be kind and keep our promises. They tell us what we can expect from the world, and what is happening around us. Do you think it's a coincidence that in the eighties and nineties, we had so many stories about gay men dying of AIDS? Did a bunch of artists wake up one morning, isolated from all current affairs, and say "I'm gonna write an AIDS story?" Of course not. They wrote it because they saw the issues being faced in the world around them and said "I want to explore this story with my art." And now, on the heels of several well-publicized suicides of gay teenagers, we have stories about attempted suicide. And people- children- are surrounded by these stories and decide that this is what they can expect from life. Can we blame them? It's not like we offer them alternatives.

If I never have to watch another outing story or bullying narrative, if I never have to read another book where the main character's sidekick is defined by being gay and persecuted, if I never have to watch another goddamned episode of goddamned Downton Abbey where the lone gay character sits in a corner and cries because his love interest slashed his wrists- if you agree, if you're sick of this shit too, here's what you can do.

Don't write it.

It's as simple as that.

Don't write it. It's more than possible to write stories about gay people- or, shock of shocks- queer people who are NOT gay without drowning them in misery and calling it inspirational. It's been done. It's been done well! (Although how fucking depressing is it that two of those books had to be self-published? Mainstream publishers, you need to STEP UP YOUR SHIT.) I know Annie on My Mind and Keeping You A Secret were important when they were released, and I'm grateful for what they accomplished. But it's not enough anymore. If you agree? Then say so. Comment right here, comment on your blog, comment in your writing that you're not participating in this any longer. It has to stop.

This quote here? It's by E.M. Forster, the author of Maurice. His book wasn't published until the 1970s, because the idea of gay characters having a happily ever after was so anathema in the time it was written, he didn't dare try publish it. It's not the 1970s anymore. I think we can do better.

"A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood. I dedicated it ‘To a Happier Year’ and not altogether vainly. Happiness is its keynote – which by the way . . . has made the book more difficult to publish. If it ended unhappily, with a lad dangling from a noose or with a suicide pact, all would be well . . . but the lovers get away unpunished and consequently recommend crime."