it may seem odd to those with with good historical recall: there I was in the depths of the Deep South and up to my ears in angry but earnest warnings that the most innocent thought experiment involving sex of any kind was designed by the devil himself to ensnare me in something so terrible that nowhere in scripture has there ever been found a metaphor powerful enough to contain it which may be why the threat refuses to dissipate in spite of all the energy that has been expended to counter it. and yet the twin specters of homosexuality and transsexuality appearing and disappearing and appearing again as the offers life was most certainly making to me in terms I could almost understand never added their weight to the running list of reasons to kill myself. it is true that learning to recognize the words themselves as actually signifying anything was a life-threatening process yes. or rather my life was a precarious question between the time I began needing that significance and the time I finished uncovering any of use to me—with the help only of several of the infinite numbers of those invisible communities that used to arise from any given collection of useful printed and/or recorded materials and seem now to have found their natural environmental niches gathered around weblogs and forums where invisibility is not as marked although still possible depending on one’s determination not to appear.
but once I had gone round with the terms long enough that they began to emerge as bounded human specifics that happened also to apply to me, their blunt obviousness was no longer enough to upset me.
one of the millions of mental health workers under whose care I had fallen told me that I could not possibly be lesbian because to that point I had shown no signs of homosexual panic. what they did not know—because at the time I was incapable of finding or making sense of my own life and even less so of communicating what I did know—is that I had been thinking about it silently for so long that any and all panic had remained unexpressed to the world at large, muted into incomprehension at the erratic urges my mind and body began to exhibit as puberty and the return of the repressed overtook me in my efforts to flee life for a place in heaven. and so by the time I was asked where my panic was whatever it may have been was all long past if it was panic at all which it was not so much even when it was as it was confusion as to why I did not entertain thoughts of kissing boys but spent most of my fantasy life hugging my girlfriends and not knowing just why that seemed at once so promising and so pointless.
or the panic was not at all concerned with whether or not I was queer. more pressing were those questions being posed directly to my plausibility, not only as a legible person, but as an ordinary terrestrial animal of any kind.
raising children without informing them of perfectly reasonable possibilities is a dangerous practice. if you grow up without a full complement of concepts to cover yourself when it becomes clear that the passions celebrated in others are not at all the passions that you yourself have come to experience, the resulting vacuum of meaning can be deadly. and I mean that quite seriously. I was not bullied because I was queer. I was never told that being queer would damn me to hell in so many words. as a young teenager I did not fully understand what “queer” even meant. I knew only that to be homosexual was to be so abject as to be quite plainly unthinkable. if the word randomly tumbled out of a television speaker no matter where I was or whom I was with silence would descend immediately and absolutely until all present had wandered elsewhere in thought. this could take some time, but nobody would dare talk about it or even acknowledge that they considered it any sort of possibility at all.
thus my knowledge was not even negative. it was absent.
and so my desires as they arose did not appear perverse to me. they appeared unintelligible. in other words they were not able to appear at all except as empty spaces reverberating with what felt to me to be all the passion in the world that I knew. such unrecognizable passion was in this instance pure agony: appetite without end or aim and thus unrelenting and irresolvable, a shapeless wish that could not articulate what it wanted and could not figure its own depth. even at its most desperate points it did not alarm me exactly—it overcame me slowly enough that it was an already familiar stranger once fully arrived. but the effort to decipher its messages nearly annihilated me or perhaps I should say that I felt compelled to respond to the only directive it gave that seemed at all clear: I had some time although I could not tell how much before the hidden question all million or so of them would consume me to the point that anything like reality would have been lost to the past tense as would probably my own having lived. and I had approximately that long however long it was to discover just what I was up to or just what had been left up to me.
it took a few years. there was bloodshed where one might normally expect love notes and wet dreams and names written over and over on the covers of spiral notebooks. but that was. well it was a little more complicated than I am letting on but one can only cover so much ground with each sweep so I will tell you just not immediately and you will be able to put it together although not every piece will be an exact fit which is why it might take the rest of your life and mine to be able to declare the picture solved. which is fine by me I have all the time in the world that is I have no idea how much time I have except all of it to the very end. and your time. how do you figure your time?
for an almost nonexistent portion of my own time I thought that the best strategy for calming myself was spending the night in the sense that children invite their friends to spend the night although we were arguably not children by then although we were not adults yet or certainly I was not even if I was not a child. I have never been able to identify with either development stage to tell the truth although there are not a great deal of others available to describe the largest moments in arguably human life. but child, adult, or other: I had no idea how to approach an opportunity to spend the night in such a way that it might help at all and this did not change until long after spending the night had already become something else entirely from what it was in, say, fifth grade. or fourth. or third. I hear kids grow up quickly these days but in those days we did not so much or that is I did not by any means.
and so spending the night mostly left me stranded inside of my own opaque desire. we would fall asleep next to each other without touching and without the faintest sign ever suggesting that she was even thinking about touching. this drove me to distraction so great that I could not think of anything else for several days after. why I wondered that I would feel the most isolated and inconsolable when I was at the side of the person I most wanted next to me. the answer was as plain as the force that kept me still: I knew that the fracture in the universe there between us could not be patched. but anytime I tried to find in it any explanation for its being there at all whatever sign I had hoped to make out became completely obscured. was it self-inflicted or did someone else put it there? was it permanent?
given the very short range of visibility the future was then offering me permanence did not have to be especially tenacious to still look permanent. the prospect of reaching twenty-one was for me so far from assured that it had not yet appeared as a possible event even at the furthest end of the most distant time imaginable. I could think ahead clearly for about a week. Two weeks pushed the limits of graspability, and anything three or more weeks away remained mostly unreal and not yet worth the worry. I do not know if this is typical of mid-teenagehood but I suspect it is quite unusual in those of us entering our second half-century.
several years ago I was told by another mental health professional that I live as though I have no future. although I am beginning to understand that what happens ten years from now will be informed by what happens now and if I survive till then I will have to live through both I still would not go so far as to call this the prospect of a future so much as the overwhelming influence of inertia on bodies in orbit. with some sort of luck I will persist which is already to say far more than what is apparent to me today. with some other sort of other or more luck tomorrow I will remember writing this as though I were the one writing it but if not then who is writing and who will go on tomorrow without me?
tomorrow maybe I will read this over and see if I can recall who wrote it.
but so the fracture occulting the desire fueling the appetite animating the distraction: as a provisional thesis I submitted that there was something terribly wrong with me. at least I was far enough along not to include immorality as a possible diagnosis. despite the preachers’ insistence that confusion and unhappiness were always caused by sin, not making sense was not immoral or not in the universe I was starting to renovate so that I might have a chance at survival in it. not making sense mimed insanity. and it did that so well that my neurological tissues began to arrange themselves with insanity as their principle of order. such appears to be the inevitable effect of having been deprived of ordinary language that could have taken into some account or other a sizable proportion of my experience. without, say, sending it to hell.
I did suspect even then that no single prescription would render my personal mythology less dangerous to me. if it had been as simple as needing to know that I was for the foreseeable future going to be a dyke then once I had figured that out life would have proceeded without further digressions. which it has not of course but if it had what would I write about.
these sorts of moments are not unique and their poignancy will surely come in for abuse once we have all forgotten what it was like before. think of how dated the well of loneliness. or is it that we all have our victorian pasts to grapple with so sooner or later we tire of them and tell them they were cowardly for living life the way it had to be lived. the Deep South of the US in the 1970s was not and will not be the only time and place where those unable to fit themselves under the heading of “traditional” will be robbed of their ability to understand themselves at those moments when they most need to be able to understand themselves. but it can happen that a sizable group of people can be convinced that everything is different now and so we are done with all that.
thus this may not seem to matter at all now but it mattered then that on my first visit to the big gay bar in Atlanta I waved my money around at the people hanging out outside because I was so nervous I could not efficiently locate the bouncer who was actually collecting the cover at the door. I am jumping ahead a few years here so this was not panic either but a squirrelly elation at making so public a move which became publicker still when I ran into a high school acquaintance who danced with me, talked me into buying her a drink, and then kissed me on the cheek before saying good night at last call.
and that was it. my first coming out was almost unbearably chaste.
did I fall in love right away? I most certainly did. did I see her ever again? no. not once.
I do not remember my second visit to this bar but I am fairly sure there was one and I know I did not find the person I was hoping to find. I do not remember any visits subsequent to the second and am not sure whether there were any to this particular establishment. and so what I have is this momentous first night, when very little happened except that I paid cover and then stepped over the threshold separating the solid churchgoing populace from their black sheep children many of whom knew only that this door likely opened onto that last-chance, nearly hidden exit from the overwhelmingly inadequate array of culturally-approved life lessons that never applied to us but somehow worked fine for nearly everyone else we knew. once inside I bought a beer, picked up what looked to be my new identity, put it on and then left to go on about my business as an aspiring punk rock artist in the punk rock art scene such as it was.
This bit here will go barefoot
practically speaking there was no punk rock art scene except the one I projected onto people I could never work up the nerve to say hello to and I had no business going on there beyond my fervent wish to have some business going on there. as has happened so many many times I waited in vain for someone to invite me in and show me what to do. because for some reason this was what I had come to believe must happen before I could be granted entrance into any given association of practitioners which they all could be said to be even if they do not call themselves associations or practitioners.
I suppose you could say I adopted the Do-It-Yourself approach that was supposed to save us from the base yet exclusionary mechanisms of profit-driven music and art. but I lived it a bit too strictly in that I never shared what I was doing with anyone else who was doing anything like what I was doing except for one person who felt much the same way I did or seemed to. we were a closed universe. mostly we worked to save each other from ourselves—which, to make an impossibly long story ridiculously short, we must have succeeded in doing insofar as both of us walk the earth even now.
it was years later that I became aware that upon finding a community for which one feels some affinity one must invite oneself in. sometimes over and over and in fact that realization still has not fully dawned upon me in all the areas where I would like to cut something like a figure or at least leave light impressions of rogue experience in case either might ameliorate something for someone somewhere eventually. I cannot shake the feeling that I have relevant things to say although it is not clear when and where they might be or become relevant or to whom but when I have so strong an urge to speak not even I myself can keep myself quiet. but still it is not clear to me if or when it is appropriate to ask for a microphone or a lectern or xerox machine and a truck.
if you are reading this for instance I must have invited myself in to wherever it can be said we are here so here we are. I am not sure how I got here and I cannot promise you anything in particular and I am not one for grand narratives or overarching conclusions and I suspect that after I write this all out in whatever way this turns out to be it will become necessary to start over and do it some other way but for now I hope this is helping somehow either you or me or someone else or even animal life as the fluke embodiments that we are, embraced and pummeled by our own unlikeliness until we begin to bite at the air thinking somehow to catch onto a sure and certain thing.
not that there is anything that can be made sure or certain in the process of telling or unveiling or patching together out of whole cloth but for now we can continue on me writing and you reading and we can see what else happens. because what happens now almost certainly bears complex relations to what happened then but what I mean really is that what happens now takes what happened then as its occasion rather than its direct cause. this makes it trickier to predict just what today will show up or how. I am fairly convinced that I will continue to fit for this occasion however many sequences and relations and associations might illuminate some portions of it for a moment and I am fairly convinced I am going to do this for as long as I can but not because there is any higher morality in it rather that in the telling there is at once violence and its amelioration but only if you don’t stop or rather if you don’t settle down to any particular story but keep it moving along.
your own story cannot kill you as long as you keep changing it but that does not mean one can dispense with honesty. we can honestly say most anything.
or you can hold a bullhorn for first this bit of dust and then that one and register everything they say in an all possible languages forward and backward and sideways and cattycorner and spiraling in and spiraling out or heading straight for the tradewinds and open ocean or sitting in one place for the rest of your life or oscillating imperceptibly between stillness and mayhem.
given enough time. which nobody has given me and I cannot even pretend otherwise at this point. and so although I do not choose where or what next at random neither can I predict it very far in advance. I welcome this arrangement even when I could not have arranged it myself.
the Blue Socks Chapter continues
in two weeks if the gods of dopamine settle down a bit
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
