Identity and Pride
My circuitous path to adulthood began in the Ozarks and wound its way through the middle Atlantic and New York City before arriving in southern California. I was raised by my grandmother, who interceded when it became evident that my birth parents – one of them my grandmother’s own child – weren’t up to the task. After she died, I barely made it through middle school but in high school I attracted the notice of a mother who fostered me based upon my potential and the exceptional insight that comes from an exceptional heart such as her. Thanks to her, I got out of the Ozarks and into college in another mountain range along the Susquehanna River. But like paths that wind through the mountains and along the riverside, it wasn’t always an easy journey.
The good far outweighs the bad and it’s astonishing how different the times, the place, and the people were as recently as a couple of decades ago. But In central Pennsylvania in the mid-eighties, the prevailing culture was of the “plain folk” of Germanic heritage, centered in the Christian church. I was a young gay man and any and every expression of that was startling to these people who very highly valued modesty. It was a situation where, as a boy, I was not supposed to care about or even evidence awareness of things that were inherently important and true for me: I was aesthetically very gifted (boys were supposed to be not just unaware of niceties but dismissive of them), I didn’t care about football (boys were supposed to be competitive, never moreso than with each other), I was clean and orderly (boys were supposed to be messy). It was and for all I know still is a very cloistered world, as if the mountains not only encircled the lands but enclosed a determination, ofttimes stubborn, to cling unto cultural boundaries.
In that culture and not without cause, men were beasts whom women kept in check. At home there was pressure, no less harmful for being indirect, to “man up,” itself a sexist term for a sexist mechanism. As a boy who didn’t evidence any need for civilizing, I provided no path for being influenced. It was not thought a gift that I didn’t particularly need the kind of direction that mechanism addresses to begin with. In fact, the thinking was so antiquated and constrictive that it was believed that I had a character flaw, as the gestalt of emergent male identity is to satisfy the adults’ egos about their definition of the maleness of the man they are making.
It’s so simple that it’s mind-boggling that anyone stumbles over it: there is no single correct way to be female or male or any gender or none or every or fluid. But in an intentionally narrow worldview and the correspondingly narrow real world it creates, gender essentialism is a God-given fact. From that mechanism, just as religious at its core as the occasional well-intentioned individuals who try to rise above it, real harm proceeds. I was hatefully called faggot at least once a day at school, grade school through college graduation, not once with any administrative recourse for it. In college, the Chaplain, whose obligation was to counsel young adults through difficulties, presented me with conversion pamphlets about homosexuality. Tellingly, he was allowed to minister in this way, which is why when the university's Alumni Association solicits me for funds, I expect them to have a good answer, which they have not yet had, of how LGBTQIA* kids on that campus are provided for today. One of their distinguished alumna stepped in to provide an intercession that was life changing, and it is that that counts, and it is that for which I will always be grateful and try to pay forward.
I don’t think it ever occurred to me that identity should be imposed, let alone dictated. It took me a long time to realize, and even longer to empathize with, that for many people that is exactly their truth. Somehow one thing I always did hold sacred was who I knew I was, even during long stretches of the isolation that resulted. It cannot be over-emphasized how inherent and insistent identity is. Identity presses for recognition. When identity or the person identifying is devalued or deprogrammed or deprived, that creates a unique wedge of disassociation, often pain, that constitutes abuse. When anyone tries to dehomosexualize a person, that is abuse. When anyone tries to masculinize a femme male, that is abuse. When anyone teaches a female that her inherent value is to be meek, that is abuse. When anyone presumes to define anyone else’s identity, let alone their personhood, that is the gateway to abuse.
As a young person, I knew nothing of clinical depression nor, I daresay, did anyone around me. I just knew, with what shreds of lucidity I could muster, that I was miserable. The situation was so fucked up that, even had I sought help, the care of a young gay person with depression would have been mishandled at best. The belief was prevalent at the time that young people didn't perceive the situations that cause emotional pain and therefore just couldn’t be anxious or depressed. In fact, it was believed, so entirely in error, that being gay was a cause of unhappiness. They could not have been more utterly and categorically wrong or gotten everything just exactly as backward had they intentionally tried. It is not being gay that causes unhappiness; it is how one is treated because of it, and the repression of it, that causes unhappiness. It is not that adulthood ruins childhood, it is that adulthood, difficult as it can be, frees a person to be who they are meant authentically to be.
What I needed – validation of who I was, not just acceptance but such simple expressions of it as a safe place to meet guys – was nowhere to be found. It’s no wonder I escaped to the city as soon as I was able. The fact is, there are those of us for whom being “plain folk” is discordant to our inherent truth. It not only doesn’t speak to our personhood, it damages it. At long last I found myself away from the timidity, grimness, and most of all narrowness of the plain folk to the joyous, colorful, maddening, cloud of cultural love that is my community. Through it I have circulated through iterations of self from club kid to professional drag performer, from Act Upper to corporate queer, from a career focused A Gay in New York City to a (mostly) laid back gay man in West Hollywood. It’s a long journey from mountains to skyscrapers and from skyscrapers to beaches, and it certainly hasn’t been easy. But it has been worth every step, and I treasure where this journey has led.
Resources
The Trevor Project
The Hetrick-Martin Institute
Pride Month
The good far outweighs the bad and it’s astonishing how different the times, the place, and the people were as recently as a couple of decades ago. But In central Pennsylvania in the mid-eighties, the prevailing culture was of the “plain folk” of Germanic heritage, centered in the Christian church. I was a young gay man and any and every expression of that was startling to these people who very highly valued modesty. It was a situation where, as a boy, I was not supposed to care about or even evidence awareness of things that were inherently important and true for me: I was aesthetically very gifted (boys were supposed to be not just unaware of niceties but dismissive of them), I didn’t care about football (boys were supposed to be competitive, never moreso than with each other), I was clean and orderly (boys were supposed to be messy). It was and for all I know still is a very cloistered world, as if the mountains not only encircled the lands but enclosed a determination, ofttimes stubborn, to cling unto cultural boundaries.
In that culture and not without cause, men were beasts whom women kept in check. At home there was pressure, no less harmful for being indirect, to “man up,” itself a sexist term for a sexist mechanism. As a boy who didn’t evidence any need for civilizing, I provided no path for being influenced. It was not thought a gift that I didn’t particularly need the kind of direction that mechanism addresses to begin with. In fact, the thinking was so antiquated and constrictive that it was believed that I had a character flaw, as the gestalt of emergent male identity is to satisfy the adults’ egos about their definition of the maleness of the man they are making.
It’s so simple that it’s mind-boggling that anyone stumbles over it: there is no single correct way to be female or male or any gender or none or every or fluid. But in an intentionally narrow worldview and the correspondingly narrow real world it creates, gender essentialism is a God-given fact. From that mechanism, just as religious at its core as the occasional well-intentioned individuals who try to rise above it, real harm proceeds. I was hatefully called faggot at least once a day at school, grade school through college graduation, not once with any administrative recourse for it. In college, the Chaplain, whose obligation was to counsel young adults through difficulties, presented me with conversion pamphlets about homosexuality. Tellingly, he was allowed to minister in this way, which is why when the university's Alumni Association solicits me for funds, I expect them to have a good answer, which they have not yet had, of how LGBTQIA* kids on that campus are provided for today. One of their distinguished alumna stepped in to provide an intercession that was life changing, and it is that that counts, and it is that for which I will always be grateful and try to pay forward.
I don’t think it ever occurred to me that identity should be imposed, let alone dictated. It took me a long time to realize, and even longer to empathize with, that for many people that is exactly their truth. Somehow one thing I always did hold sacred was who I knew I was, even during long stretches of the isolation that resulted. It cannot be over-emphasized how inherent and insistent identity is. Identity presses for recognition. When identity or the person identifying is devalued or deprogrammed or deprived, that creates a unique wedge of disassociation, often pain, that constitutes abuse. When anyone tries to dehomosexualize a person, that is abuse. When anyone tries to masculinize a femme male, that is abuse. When anyone teaches a female that her inherent value is to be meek, that is abuse. When anyone presumes to define anyone else’s identity, let alone their personhood, that is the gateway to abuse.
As a young person, I knew nothing of clinical depression nor, I daresay, did anyone around me. I just knew, with what shreds of lucidity I could muster, that I was miserable. The situation was so fucked up that, even had I sought help, the care of a young gay person with depression would have been mishandled at best. The belief was prevalent at the time that young people didn't perceive the situations that cause emotional pain and therefore just couldn’t be anxious or depressed. In fact, it was believed, so entirely in error, that being gay was a cause of unhappiness. They could not have been more utterly and categorically wrong or gotten everything just exactly as backward had they intentionally tried. It is not being gay that causes unhappiness; it is how one is treated because of it, and the repression of it, that causes unhappiness. It is not that adulthood ruins childhood, it is that adulthood, difficult as it can be, frees a person to be who they are meant authentically to be.
What I needed – validation of who I was, not just acceptance but such simple expressions of it as a safe place to meet guys – was nowhere to be found. It’s no wonder I escaped to the city as soon as I was able. The fact is, there are those of us for whom being “plain folk” is discordant to our inherent truth. It not only doesn’t speak to our personhood, it damages it. At long last I found myself away from the timidity, grimness, and most of all narrowness of the plain folk to the joyous, colorful, maddening, cloud of cultural love that is my community. Through it I have circulated through iterations of self from club kid to professional drag performer, from Act Upper to corporate queer, from a career focused A Gay in New York City to a (mostly) laid back gay man in West Hollywood. It’s a long journey from mountains to skyscrapers and from skyscrapers to beaches, and it certainly hasn’t been easy. But it has been worth every step, and I treasure where this journey has led.
Resources
The Trevor Project
The Hetrick-Martin Institute
Pride Month
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