Terrell Jermaine Starr is a journalist who I've just become aware of. I want to just premise this piece by saying that I would never shame someone's coming-out moment. With that said, what the hell is this tweet? This is a heterosexual man revealing that he identifies as queer, but has never had a whiff of gay sexual energy, or confusion over his own gender expression. He hasn't felt “straight” in years, he says. But what does that mean? That he listens to Barbra Streisand? That he flirts with double denim? That he likes fruit in his cocktail? Starr went on to say:
“For me, embracing being queer was as much an intellectual journey as it was other areas. Just the way I think of structural oppression comes from not feeling heteronormative in my thinking about things.”
This is regressive; it's Dorothy walking backwards up the yellow brick road. It's erasing the delicate, intimate experience of coming into queerness, of discovering your identity, of embracing pride. You don't decide to be queer because you're opposing structural oppression. It's a choice to take on a politic. It's not a choice to be gay. I'd like to ask Starr some questions about his experiences; as a man who is “attracted to a wide range of women, but not men at all.”
Terrell, have you ever woken up in a bemused, panicked sweat in the middle of the night because you had a sex dream about someone in your school who was the same gender as you? Terrell, have you ever wondered why you felt so unspeakably emotional about a friend of the same gender as you, and then suddenly realized “Oh SHIT, I want to kiss my friend. Whyyyyyyyyyyyy”? Terrell, have you ever fantasized that you could be a different gender so you could ask the person of your dreams out, only to realize that they probably wouldn't be into that anyway? Terrell, have you ever felt scared that you might be attacked for holding the hand of a person you love – or even just like – in the street because they're the same gender as you, and wondered if you'd ever be able to live freely like straight people do? Terrell, have you ever had a battle with your own body image because you don't feel that your presentation as a passing heterosexual is going to earn you the kind of pleasure you desire? Terrell, have you had to spend your whole adult life negotiating who you are to people in various settings according to how acceptable your private sexual desires are to those people?
I would simply love to know.
Being gay covers a lot of experiences. A lot. It can mean so many iterations of experiences of sexuality. It has become so diversified and so visible in the US and other parts of the West, and that's great. One experience that being gay definitely doesn't include, however, is being straight. Sorry hets, you're not gay. You'll never be gay. Big bummer apparently these days. No pun intended.
It has been an emotional rollercoaster watching the proliferation of queerness in pop culture in the past five years, or so. In 2018 - or 20-gay-teen, it felt like every new band or pop song was gay before it was listenable. Same with TV series. The detail was that the media was becoming queerer, and whether it was becoming better was secondary to that. There have been gifts and wins in this, but with equal weight there has been a shift towards queerness culturally that not only has lulled many members of the LGBTQ+ community into a sense of false security, but has also overshadowed their experiences in favor of a mainstream approved messaging about what can be popularly queer. Queerness is being fetishized and popularized, and who is benefiting? Is it the queer community or is it the corporations making bank off us, and the politicians currying favor through us?
Ten years ago, we were fighting for marriage rights in America. Now we're so accepted that straight people want to be us. Now we're fighting to be seen. Actually seen. In a sea of homogeneous homosexuality, if such a thing exists. Queer culture has been mainstreamed so much so it sometimes feels like it's slipping through our fingers. So much so that the debate inspired by the Florida Parents Rights In Education bill is fracturing the community between queer people who think it's OK to teach kindergarten kids about sexuality, and queer people who absolutely don't. On Tuesday, Disney employers staged a walkout to protest the company's tepid response to the controversial bill which restricts the discussion of gender and sexuality in schools and has been dubbed the “Don't Say Gay” bill by the progressive Left. (There is nothing about this bill that bans anyone from using the word “gay”, but it does ban elementary school teachers in kindergarten up to third grade from teaching on matters of gender identity and sexuality in class). I don’t know if most of the Disney employees who walked out were LGBTQ+, but I haven’t seen anyone ask that question, and I think that’s an important detail.
Last Shabbat, I was talking with a young Guatemalan couple in the city of Antigua, Guatemala, who I assumed were queer-identifying, or at least very passionate about LGBTQ+ rights. They did not feel remotely safe to align with queer people in their country, where being gay is still illegal, and if you hold your partner's hand in the street, the police will – at the very least – warn you against it. They talked extensively about how they balance their irreplaceable and unwavering pride for their country with a desperation to leave it because of their inability to see a future in a homeland that can't safeguard the equal treatment of people according to their gender and sexuality. It broke my heart that there was no reconciliation for them; no choice other than to leave. What happens to a place in which the youth are the majority of the populace, and the youth only want to drive away, despite having nurtured a deep love for their birthplace? How do you protect pride in yourself if the multitudes within you cannot align themselves in the place you call home?
I thought about that couple as I read Starr's tweets today; the tweets of a cis heterosexual man who has the privilege of coming-out as something he is not, on a social media platform in a pretend world that will shower him in plaudits for an act that for genuinely queer people is the most courageous, self-empowering and terrifying moment of our lives. Starr had nothing to lose by doing this. He rendered the idea of it meaningless. Of course, we'd all love to live in a world where coming-out doesn't need to be the huge deal that it is, but we don't live in that world yet. Not by half. We're not anywhere remotely near to living in that world. A man who does not understand this should not have the capacity to diminish the sacredness of that revelation to those for whom its power is life-changing, life-affirming, life-shattering, life-altering; for whom its power is life itself.
Today during the hearings for our next Supreme Court Justice of the US a not so subtle hint was made by one of the Republicans that the issue of marriage equality should be once again, given back to the states to decide on their own. This is horrifying. America is taking a great leap backwards on every issue from choice, voting rights, and now possibly marriage equality. As a married, white, cis gender Jewish female well beyond child bearing years, who is financially stable (🤞) much of this does not touch me personally, but I am furious! I fought for those rights! We cannot go back! It is not a fad to be gay. It’s not something you adopt like a hairstyle or a new diet. No one I know in the LGBTI community feels safe and wants to be someone’s poster child for a cause of the month. Abortion is healthcare. Voting is a right. WTF is going on in my country!!!!
As a shrink it is my experience that more and more people are claiming queerness as a shield for their actual lack of wokeness. And as you say it has no meaning. It once again puts a muddy foot in sacred waters. I’m beyond sick of arguing with people about how sexuality isn’t a choice, about how children don’t have a sexuality, about how identity is not an outside-in job. You can’t make yourself safe by lying about who you are. His is not an act of bravery. It is an act of cowardice.