A few days ago, I went out to dinner with a couple of my closest friends from grad school. We caught up on each other’s lives and struggles—they both ended up teaching high school, one in a part-time dual credit capacity and the other as a full-time teacher in a very large area high school—and discussed current events and politics, as usual.
Somehow, the topic of teaching “controversial” subjects (in this case, LGBT history) came up. When it comes to the question of what is and is not “acceptable” to teach, I clearly have the easiest time of us three. My classroom is a (benevolent) dictatorship and I have academic freedom and will talk about what I want to talk about, period. The worst I have to worry about is the occasional homophobic course evaluation. My two friends, on the other hand, face varying levels of difficulty when it comes to incorporating things like LGBT rights and feminism into the history survey. One teaches at a Christian school and has to worry about parents and administrators much more than the other one does. This in and of itself is a challenging and interesting topic, but not the subject of this diary!
My full-time teacher friend, while acknowledging that these subjects are more difficult to incorporate than they should be, noted how receptive the students are when they are introduced. The conversation then changed to discussing how attitudes toward gay people, broadly speaking, have undergone a major shift since we were in high school. On this, everybody at the table agreed. I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush here, because there are still so many LGBT kids out there struggling for mere existence, but it is hard to deny that on the macro level, things are better. There is greater cultural and legal acceptance at least of homosexuality, and it does seem that the younger generation has more progressive ideas on this than my peers in high school did. Again, not painting with a broad brush here. You don’t need to tell me that homophobia still exists. In fact, that is the subject of this diary.
Both of the friends I went out to dinner with are straight. Obviously, I am not, and while I agreed in large part with their optimism about the younger generation, a part of me cringed and held something back in this discussion. There is now greater legal protection for LGBT people than there ever has been (that’s not exactly a high bar, though), and yes, the culture has become more visibly accepting. It is sometimes hard for me to reconcile those realities with the oftentimes unspoken anxiety of being a gay person in 2018.
I could give you a multitude of examples, but I’ll just give you one: My boyfriend and I have been together for over six years now. To say that we are comfortable with each other would be an understatement—we do not live together, but we essentially function as a married couple. In private. In public, we are something else, somewhere in between platonic friends and boyfriends, depending on the context. Very recently, he came over to hang out, and when he left, I walked him to his car, as usual. It was broad daylight and there were several people outside. The discomfort of not knowing what to do, how to say goodbye, would have been utterly ridiculous if it wasn’t so “normal” for us. Do we touch? Do we pretend we’re friends and say, “See ya, buddy”? Do we just say “fuck it” and kiss? Do we go inside the car so as not to be seen? What if that person over there, who seems to be looking at us, becomes unhinged? Oh god, I have to live here—do I want to be out to these people? In this case, he made the decision for us and came in for a goodbye kiss. I felt the adrenaline rush through my body, as if we were doing something illegal, or at least taboo, and waiting to get caught. I don’t know if he felt the same way—I didn’t bring it up. It’s “normal.” Nobody attacked us, verbally or physically, and the stares I felt may well have been in my own head (or maybe not). Life went on.
The laws have changed, and will probably further change in the future (friendly reminder that LGBT people can still legally be fired for their identities in many states). The culture has certainly given the appearance of changing, and in some major ways, it has changed for the better. But many cultural norms persist. There are still LGBT people fired for who they are, people beaten and killed, rights visibly denied. But a great deal of the homophobia that persists in 2018 remains unspoken much of the time and, to people who don’t deal with it daily, it is invisible.
But it is there, and deeply embedded—so much so that, for some gay people (myself included), it has become internalized to an extent. A week or so ago, I was out in public when I saw a gay couple holding hands. Two thoughts simultaneously ran through my head. The first was objectifying: Wow, that is an attractive couple. I know nothing about them, but they seem to be meant for each other. Good for them. The second, which occurred at the same time, was more surprising: What the hell are they doing? Don’t they know they’re in public? Couldn’t they get a room? I intervened in this subconscious inner dialogue and asked myself where that came from. I don’t actually believe it—or do I? In this instance, I became part of the crowd I feared when my boyfriend leaned in for the kiss.
All of this has been floating around in my head in recent days. Then, in a moment of synchronicity, I stumbled upon a video that hit me like a ton of bricks. I suppose all of the above could be considered a longwinded introduction to this short film (and poem), titled “A Time for Love.” The film describes what it is like for the poet walking hand-in-hand with his partner in a Glasgow park, being a “walking meal for the mouths of normality.”
I’ve sometimes struggled to put all of what I wrote above into words. Even when it is put into words, it’s hard to fully describe what it is like to have the constant anxiety of deciding how to interact with your partner in public. This poem gets it. It really captures that inner dialogue in a powerful way, going through all of the intricacies of such a “simple” decision to hold or not to hold a hand. As the poet puts it: “I should be holding a hand, and I’m holding shame instead.”
Watch it:
What do you want to kibitz about tonight?