Now We Are Become the Suits

I just finished, for about the third time, The Future of Queer: A Manifesto by Fenton Johnson in the January 2018 edition of Harper's Magazine.

It implicates me, as a queer white woman aspiring to relative comfort. A selfish part of me bubbled up, indignant as I read the manifesto: "It took me long enough to find my love, don't I deserve to enjoy it?"

To hear Johnson tell it, I don't.

On the one hand are the far left queers, including all out trans people, who are activists and teachers who fight daily, not for the right to marry or anything so conventional, but for the right to completely deconstruct the way society thinks about family and community. And build something more beautiful in its place.

It was the kind of fantasy I certainly had as a bisexual in my twenties -- a commune-style space where relationships are communal rather than transactional and there are plenty of old folks around to care for the children that come up.

On the other hand we have, though a I am loathe to admit it, me and most of my friends. Increasingly, I know almost no single people. The lesbians and queers among us are building our comfortable lives in the image of our straight-couple friends, buying houses and marrying and having babies.

"Now to be LGB (T remains beyond the pale)," Johnson writes, "is no longer to be forced to look outside the norms, since our largely white, entirely prosperous leadership has so enthusiastically embraced the norms. Now we can forget AIDS. Now we can get married. Now we are become the suits."

It stings, but he's right. There are no lesbian or queer couples I know of who will decline the right to marry. In most cases, we point to children as the reason. If Sonia is the birth mother, I have more rights if we are married before she gets pregnant. The reason that most of us marry is to keep our children inside our chosen clan -- so they don't end up with their evangelical grandparents or a cousin in a distant city, far from the community that raised them.

For Johnson, the idea that we marry to manage these kinds of relationships under the keen eye of the state is part of the problem. It's a cop-out, and it's opposed to the early queer communities that may very well have been stronger because they had to navigate the messiness of these relationships on their own. Or maybe they just grew closer together because their children were more often taken away.

Johnson, a professor, activist and survivor of the AIDS era now teaching somewhat reluctantly at the Koch-funded University of Arizona, tells the story like this. "The assimilationists have won, with state-sanctioned marriage as the very mortar cementing the bricks of the wall of convention that separates us from ourselves, from one another, from all that is unfamiliar, strange, challenging and thus from learning and growth."

He goes on, "state-sanctioned marriage is precisely analogous to gentrification -- the creative outliers do the heavy lifting, and when a certain level of safety has been achieved, the assimilationists move in, raise prices, and force out the agents of change."

And on (he's a beautiful writer), "Because our salvation, our literal salvation in the here and now, in this nation, on this planet requires our abandoning those ancient clan divisions in favor of the understanding that we are all one. As the Buddha abandoned his family to undertake the search that led to enlightenment, so Jesus, that communitarian photo-feminist celibate bachelor Jew, rejected the ancient clan divisions in favor of a new order."

Johnson might be a gay man, but he knew how to strike an arrow right to my heart with a sexy and original description of Jesus.

I want a new order, too! I want to wander the countryside in sandals with twelve women! I want to occasionally settle, all together in a house, and plant a garden! I'm grateful to be reminded of all this, but of all of the battles that I choose in this life, I'm not sure this societal restructure will be one of them. I'm 36, I've found someone to love and I'd like to have a baby soon.

"And so what defines queer, finally," Johnson writes, "is not what one does in bed but one's stance toward the ancient régime, the status quo, the way things have always been done, the dominant mode, capitalism."

While I'm sure I'd disappoint Johnson with my comparative lack of revolutionary spirit, I will continue to define my life in small ways against capitalism: taking care of my mind and body, shopping at the co-op and abstaining from the pervasive impulse to buy and consume. Such simple steps can be incredibly difficult for those of us who were raised in a strongly mainstream and consumer culture.

Difficult on any given day, and still not enough. But I am grateful for the worthy struggle, and for Johnson's resounding wakeup call.

The Path of Joy Is Connection

We can walk to a gorgeous, redesigned public library from our new house, so Sonia and I recently rediscovered the magic of borrowing books. You can take 10 home, try them all on for size, and read one or none at all! 

We've been interested in mindfulness, so The Book of JOY  became my bedtime reading. It's written by Douglas Abrams and details a week when His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, two dear friends and spiritual leaders of Buddhism and Christianity respectively, spent a week together talking about the meaning of life. 

All three are listed as authors because the spiritual leaders' dialogs are recorded and sometimes quoted for several pages at a time. 

It has gems like this: "Modern society has prioritized independence to such an extent that we are left on our own to try to manage our lives that are increasingly out of control" (p. 95).

My independence is often at issue in our relationship. Sonia doesn't understand why I won't call my dad to help us hang a new light fixture or tear out the old bushes by the front sidewalk. 

I try to explain. I never saw my parents asking their parents for anything. They did everything on their own. Parents give you eighteen good years and then they should be able to reap the benefits of their hard work. It's your turn to shine.

Korean culture is more familial, so that even though it's just the four of them plus the sister-in-law in the U.S. (and, more and more, me!), the bonds seem stronger. Dinner every two weeks is non-negotiable. Parents weigh in on how much you're eating, how healthy you look, how eager they are for grandchildren. 

My parents have never in 36 years asked about grandchildren, and so I have no idea how they picture their role in that time of life. Sonia's parents bring it up every second visit and it's clear that mom wants to be involved, daily if we'll allow it. 

"Once again, the path of joy was connection and the path of sorrow was separation. When we see others as separate, they become a threat. When we see others as a part of us, as connected, as interdependent, then there is no challenge we cannot face -- together" (p. 100). 

I haven't yet put the "Script for Clearing the Air" into practice. When I wrote it, I saw my parents as a threat rather than as a part of me. It's a common feeling for those of us lucky enough to have living parents with whom our connection is still recalibrating. 

Today, after reaching out to talk to my mother this weekend about her own mother's decline (they may have to move her into 24/7 care within the week), it feels more like we're on the same team. I can almost picture my parents attending our wedding one day. 

Today the connection, which is not static but ever-changing, feels like enough. 

Choking on Credal Arguments

Joanna Macy - A Wild Love for the World, an On Being interview with Krista Tippett, stopped me in my tracks yesterday. I stood in the kitchen, frying my mother's zucchini from a too-abundant crop, when I heard Joanna Macy describe becoming devotedly Christian at 16 and how, four years later, everything changed.

"When I went into studies of Biblical history and theology, I began to choke," she said. "I found there was something that I balked at terrifically, which were credal arguments about items of belief, but also any hint of exclusivity, that there were people who were 'beyond the pale.'"

After 13 years of Catholic school (K-12), I left the church by my second year of college. Since that time, I've struggled in my arguments against the Church because I didn't know everything. In Macy's words, I recognized that fallacy. I need not know everything about a religion in order to decide that it doesn't serve my journey.

Senior year of high school, my best male friend, in the moment when I thought he was going to confess his love to me (how many of us have been in that boat), instead came out to me, and made me promise not to tell a soul. We went to the same Catholic school.

Three years later, I learned that a girl I'd known and loved since Kindergarten had had an abortion that same year of high school. Catholic credal arguments against homosexuality and abortion would never trump the innocent struggles of young people I loved, whose high school traumas were linked inextricably to the church calling them sinners in their moments of greatest strife.

According to Catholics, my friends were "beyond the pale." If an institution as powerful as the Catholic church could not offer comfort and support to its own children, honestly trying to navigate the world into which they were born, I didn't want any parts of it.

I've softened in my distaste for the church, the more I've become exposed to its evil stepchild, Evangelism. Where Catholics twist themselves in knots to provide sound reasoning on their credal arguments, Evangelists cater to the same lowest denominator as Fox News. It's all pomp, circumstance and emotionality; they don't even try to develop sound arguments.

My sexuality is intertwined with my spirituality. Both come from love, and from my sense of purpose. About twelve minutes into the interview, Macy talks about falling in love with the Tibetan people because their joie de vivre shone through their hardship so clearly. They are what drew her to Buddhism.

The ever-wise Tippett pointed out how Macy was drawn to the lived experience of the faith before learning more about its tenets.

I want to live my sexuality and life with Sonia in a way that reveals my own joie de vivre, clearly and emphatically, to anyone who is paying attention. It will require more grit and unabashed optimism than I generally wear publicly, but that struggle feels purposeful.

The next step is a picture postcard to the extended family. We'll get a shot on vacation and send it to the extended families and friends, a sort of "We've moved in!" announcement despite the homophobia expressed by several of them.

With the postcard, we'll know officially who's on our team, and the rest of them be damned. At least some part of finding joy in life must be curating the people you choose to have in it.

Vacation begins Saturday!