| Monday, December 05, 2005 |
| integration, application, moving forward |
Those of you who are keeping score will remember that there was one openly gay boy in my four years of high school. His name was John. And I watched him suffer alone. I dwell on it more often than I'd like. It's easy to say that I just wasn't ready to be openly gay in high school, but I can't hide the truth that if I had been, I could have at least shared his burden. But what I said to Jason, a close friend, earlier tonight about dwelling not helping anyone, and applying lessons learned from past experiences to present identity, is also true.
There's often a question about whether or not "outing" of public figures is ethical, about whether we're willing to sacrifice the private lives of politicians and celebrities in the name of visibility and advocacy. I tend to say no, though I'm certainly tempted to make exceptions in cases where said person's false straightness is doing harm, such as the vice president's daughter.
Now, I feel that Matthew Shepard is a horse that has been beaten to death, forcibly revived, and beaten again far too many times. But his mother has something useful to say. In her lectures she pleads with gay people to be authentic about who they are, that we cannot have a voice with which to obtain power and a place in the world without authenticity. The complication is that in this world, straight is a default. If I tell a story about some boy or girl without any mention of sexuality, it's assumed that he or she is straight. Innocent until proven queer, and all that. So unless with every breath we are declaring our queerness, how can we truly be authentic?
It's very hard to carve out that middle ground, where we are both authentic and yet have enough spare breath to live our lives. I haven't found it. But in the interest of exploring for such a place, here's a fourth attempt at An Essay About A Boy, which is less about a boy and more about me, in an effort to stop hiding. |
posted by La Malinche @ 4:18 AM   |
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| 1 Comments: |
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Pete, once again, you are a great writer.
I really enjoyed reading your piece and it made me think a lot. I really admire you for openly sharing your thoughts in the internet.
Oh and I wanted to tell you a little story. In a german-Spanish translation class that I am taking we had to translate a text into spanish. It was about a person that felt misunderstood by his/her partner and it was written from the perspective of that person. At some point it said that the person kissed his/her boyfriend (and from the German word you couldn't see whether the narrator was a he or a she) Anyway and then we had to translate the sentence. "And he left me alone"
Well most of us translated it as "Me dejó sola", but two persons intentionally translated it as "me dejó solo" implying that it was a gay and not a straight couple. Of course they got mistakes for it, because the teacher thought that it was just a pure mistake. After the exams had been corrected, we were discussing the issue in class.
And after a little discussion the teacher announced that she would accept both "solo and sola". The only thing that made me angry personally was, that during the exam I had thought of using the male form intentionally to show that it could be both.
Well I didn't, because I was afraid of a mistake.
I still feel kind of bad about it because I feel its perfectly normal ...
Well I promised myself one thing the next time there's something like this in a translation I'll translate it the "gay way" (sorry for that stupid expression from a straight German ;-))
oh and by the way I failed the exam anyway.
I hope you'll be having a relaxing holiday season.
Best Wishes from Germany
Johannes
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Pete, once again, you are a great writer.
I really enjoyed reading your piece and it made me think a lot. I really admire you for openly sharing your thoughts in the internet.
Oh and I wanted to tell you a little story. In a german-Spanish translation class that I am taking we had to translate a text into spanish. It was about a person that felt misunderstood by his/her partner and it was written from the perspective of that person. At some point it said that the person kissed his/her boyfriend (and from the German word you couldn't see whether the narrator was a he or a she) Anyway and then we had to translate the sentence. "And he left me alone"
Well most of us translated it as "Me dejó sola", but two persons intentionally translated it as "me dejó solo" implying that it was a gay and not a straight couple. Of course they got mistakes for it, because the teacher thought that it was just a pure mistake. After the exams had been corrected, we were discussing the issue in class.
And after a little discussion the teacher announced that she would accept both "solo and sola". The only thing that made me angry personally was, that during the exam I had thought of using the male form intentionally to show that it could be both.
Well I didn't, because I was afraid of a mistake.
I still feel kind of bad about it because I feel its perfectly normal ...
Well I promised myself one thing the next time there's something like this in a translation I'll translate it the "gay way" (sorry for that stupid expression from a straight German ;-))
oh and by the way I failed the exam anyway.
I hope you'll be having a relaxing holiday season.
Best Wishes from Germany
Johannes