I've been reading a lot about outing lately. Today I read a long peice on how Condoleeza Rice might be gay. And on how Larry Craig is a hypocrite. On how this republican, or that republican, people who've put their best effort into control and brutality writ large, a vision of human nature somewhere between lord of the flies and the inquisition...is queer. Goddamn pervy funky weird no good queer. Icky. Like me.
I've got to say this gives me pause. I mean, somewhere along the way all my hopes for a world where I could be safe went south. Like a drowning person I've bargained for a few more minutes afloat with the foam cushion before it finally fills up, a couple more waves. If my country keeps open borders, it doesn't matter if they pass laws that take away my identity as a transsexual woman. If my country will avoid killing another quarter million, half million people...well, I guess it's all right, ok, something to be lived with, if I can't fly anymore, travel to the places I love, 'cause my credit's not so hot, and I'm one of the bad people now. Thoreau had Walden; I'll find a good measure for my life. If, if...
...the thing is, ain't nobody listening, except myself. This is all going to go as it goes. There are rational things I can do; money I can donate, calls I can make, time I can put in for campaigns. But my bargains are with the wind. No special deals coming down.
So then I think...well, damnit, nobody should get trashed for being queer. Republican, National Socialist, whatever...there have always been gay folks in authoritarian movements, just like there are straight folks, and their ruin merely serves as a final act of homophobia, a rotten little coda of self destruction which impels the larger society to further contempt, puts us queer folk further at the margins looking in. I start to pipe up, in comment threads on various diaries. Hey! Don't you be trashin' Condi for that! It's not our business. And even if it were...even if it were...this doesn't help.
But goddess help me...I'm still mad. After roughly a year or so on Daily Kos, I've learned how little a rant buys :} It's sophistication, ease, kind words which bring people around to a point of view, open up their thoughts, push aside old prejudices and beliefs. Conversations, not lightening coming down. And this is just...a conversation with myself, and like usual...I'm pretty upset. But sometimes, you've just got to write it down, someplace it will be read, by somebody.
All those people who live one life, and speak another...I finally figured out, I think, why I can't just say "everyone is where they are in the world" and let it go. I think I had to watch part of Angels in America again, tonight, to get it. One of the great dramatic works of my generation, I think. Roy Cohn, witch hunter, the man who made sure the Rosenburgs died hard, he's dead, and one of the protagonsists must say Kaddish for him, he puts a napkin on his head. He can't remember the words, until the ghost of Ethel Rosenburg starts speaking behind him. It sounds corny but it works. The words pour through him, a terrible mouring for a life -- a human life, gone -- grace and power and respect. And Ethel finishes it, the young man echos, with unmitigated, contemptous fury -- "you son of a bitch".
These men and women who are running the show -- they are human. Their frailties are real, they are just trying -- against whatever issues of self awareness and personal truth they hold -- to live their lives. It's not the hypocrisy that bothers me. Everybody's got something, right, and we're all doing our best. It's that they knew, at least some of them, that the people who they've demonized, and denied AIDS funding for, and made jokes about bashing, they knew that we were human. At the moment they kissed another man or woman, at the moment they tapped their foot, at some moment when we all are responsible for knowing ourselves, or are lost, they knew that gay folks are human. Just like them. All issues of impression management, of "the right thing", of public protocol and private ambition aside...that's what I can't forgive. They knew, and didn't have enough love for themselves, or for me, or for mine.
There's another great scene in Angels in America -- go see it if you haven't, if you're young and it's just a little before your time -- where Cohn is speaking with his nurse, late at night in the deserted hospital. It's lyrical as hell, but I get the rage.
What's it like? After?"
"After...?"
"This misery ends?"
"Hell or heaven?"
"...heh..."
"Like San Francisco."
"A city! Good! I was worried... it'd be a garden. I hate that shit."
"Mmmm. Big city. Overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going up catty corner to that. Windows missing in every edifice like broken teeth, gritty wind, and a gray high sky full of ravens."
"Isaiah."
"Prophet birds, Roy. Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and obsidian, and diamond-colored cowspit streamers in the wind. And voting booths. And everyone in Balenciaga gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers. Race, taste and history finally overcome. And you ain't there."
"And Heaven?"
"That was Heaven, Roy."
Tony Kushner, Angels in America