Queer Diplomacy

Like sleeper agents hypnotized to awaken to some trigger, our hearts would one day suddenly alert us and desire set us in opposition to our relatives.

It is graduation season, so I thought I would share my speech to the queer graduates from 2023. Below an essay about my historical experience of coming up gay.

Queer Sleeper Agents

It is as if we are born into the enemy camp, pointy headed, taking our first breaths, still attached to our mothers by a cable between them and us. Like sleeper agents awaiting activation, we arrive unconscious of our embodied alliances on the planet.

I remember a song that fascinated me as a child. “You’ve got to be carefully taught,” went the chorus.

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught from year to year,
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear—
You’ve got to be carefully taught!

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a different shade—
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate—
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
You’ve got to be carefully taught!

We arrive innocent, wanting to play with each other, unconscious of differences. Arbitrary differences that define alliances within categories could one day tear us from the friends we sat with as little ones at story hour, from those who led us up the ladders of slides, from those we laughed with over snacks, from those we held hands with in line. Adults we adored, teachers, aunts, athletes, even rock stars! we might come to fear and hate.

My sister and I grilled our mother critically about this song and the plot of the musical, which did not make sense to us. We were going to see a production of South Pacific. So, Mom was preparing us to learn about racism. A woman turns away from true love because he has children of color?! one of us asked as we drove the narrow road in our faded red Volvo along the high bluffs above the Trinity River.

My face felt stiff as I tried to understand. Mostly, I questioned the logic. I had already learned to be horrified by grownups. My healthy skepticism and kid’s self-confidence were modeled and encouraged in my family.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate—

But for us gay ones, allegiance was hidden, even from us. We looked just like our enemies. We were born to them.

So, like sleeper agents hypnotized to awaken to some trigger, our hearts would one day suddenly alert us and desire set us in opposition to our relatives. An athlete’s grace, an activist’s integrity, an actor’s humor, an artist’s eye for beauty, something in them would awaken us.

We would choose this love and ever after struggle with the theme of betrayal.

Passing Queer

You awaken. It’s 5^th grade. She’s in 8^th, a cheerleader, blonde, glaring beneath mascaraed lashes, tough. You name the little stuffed koala bear you won, as grand prize for your Halloween costume at the school carnival, after her. Your dad stretched white sheet across the thin redwood frames of the wings. Your mom sewed these to your Ranger Rick backpack, supplied you with brown tights and leotard. You painted the orange, black, white, and brown monarch design after an image in an insect book from the library.

Every night you embrace Dena in bed. You know not to tell anyone.

Then, there is a camp counselor who is funny and warm. She laughs at your jokes. There’s a basketball coach with rippling forearms from work on fishing boats in Alaska. In 7^th grade, you have a boyfriend. You go together, but hardly even hold hands. Then there’s a girl in high school algebra with a long brown neck and green eyes like yours who is kind, but shy. You hold her gaze a beat too long and she glances away to your shame.

You begin to see evidence of the enemy everywhere. On the radiator under the wall of windows in high school geography, someone has written “Emily is a dyke!” “Eric is a fag.” The first time you talked about it was in French class, a smudged xerox about SIDA, AIDS, discussed in a foreign tongue, the photos of the men too obscured in the reproduction.

For all high school and into college, there’s the star of your basketball team. There’s a guy from church you ask to the prom. When he kisses you, you squirm, laughing. A surfer girl in college, a party girl, boys you let kiss you who you stop. There’s a black out on whisky – you bite him to make him leave. A man takes you to the movies, puts his tongue deliciously in your ear. But on Halloween, dressed as a ladybug, he presses hard against you, says he doesn’t have to take no for an answer, then does.

Another basketball star. You get drunk with her under Orion’s belt, wrestle in the sand on Mission Beach, stay kissing in her car after you drop your other friend off. You have been so alone for so long; you think you are in love. When she goes back to her girlfriend, you obsess, make mix tapes, write a tragic letter, and leave it on her doormat. You are not sure you can live with this pain. You cannot eat.

You spend parts of November in your apartment alone while your roomies visit their families, clipping articles, watching the wall come down in Berlin, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. These offer hope after the false spring, after the tragedy, the tanks that rolled against the Rainbow Warriors of Tiananmen Square.

When you return from Nicaragua the next fall, there is an activist. You see her with her megaphone, singing. She wears a yellow band in her red hair. Her sign says, “the guns of war are not melodic.” You sit down in the street, blocking traffic with her. You ride in her parents’ minivan to Berkeley and sleep on a commune floor with her and the other activists. You march together in San Francisco.

It’s the fall of 1990. When the U.S. invades Iraq, you join her in a sleep in on the library steps. You begin emailing her from the basement computer lab, poetic love notes in gold letters on the dark grey screens. When you hit return, there is no way to go back, to delete. It’s nerve wracking to write. It’s a thrill when she replies. She sleeps between you and a guy she is dating. Early, early one morning, she sneaks her hand into yours. Your heart is pounding. Then she gets up to go to work. That night, she takes you to coffee and then to dinner. The coffee shop is going out of business. You think of Paris in Henry and June as the cabaret grieves, dancing arm in arm before your table while you drink a fishbowl sized cappuccino. At the Thai place, you try vegetarian meat, little wrinkly globules amidst the basil and peppers that hold the sauce. Delicious. You brush your teeth together in the public restroom beneath the library.

This is your real first kiss. You put your hands into her bright hair. How strong and urgent her body is against yours.

The scene is a clothing store. You pretend to inspect the racks. Each meeting of eyes is a fire. Weaving amidst the clothes, your hands grab and clasp secretly. The danger is exquisite.

But then you begin to read, to organize, to find the other sleeper agents. The first time someone asks if you are gay, it is in code: he says, “Are you family?” You say, “Yes!” He and the other ones come to ask for a seat, not even a vote, on the Student Affirmative Action Committee. Representing the Women’s Center, you vote yes. The majority--MEChA, the Black Student Union, the Asian-Pacific Islanders--votes no. That night, you come to her bed and declare, “I am a lesbian.” You whisper it over and over and over.

The following October, on National Coming Out Day, you borrow a shirt. Two women kiss on your chest. Above them the Act-Up slogan reads, “Safe Sex is Hot Sex.” You are short haired, in Doc Martens. No one looks at you twice. The visibility is terrifying. You feel the armor come on like shellac, layer upon layer of pride and defiance. But also, stone.

You are in love. You are an activist. It is time to tell Mom.

It does not go well. Your mom visits you at school. While you go to class, she waits in the Women’s Center where your friend gives her Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Continuum” to read. At pizza that night, your mom is defensive. She says it’s unnatural, that Rome fell, how much she loves men.

Years later, after she has become the leader of PFLAG and attends City Council meetings in a pink dress suit to advocate for gay rights, she tells you, “You remind me of a deer. I am so sorry I hurt you.” You weep together.

Queer Diplomacy

In his beautiful book to his son, Between the World And Me, Ta-Nahesi Coates called us queer people, those “humans who loved as their deepest instincts instructed” and explained how visiting his queer girlfriend in her queer household changed him.

He writes: “’Faggot’ was a word I had employed all my life. And now here they were, The Cabal, The Coven, The Others, The Monsters, The Outsiders, The Faggots, The Dykes, dressed in all their human clothes.” Though invited to belonging to the privileged in this heteronormative white supremacy by identifying queers as “hated strangers,” knowing them meant that Coates could no longer practice such plunder of queer bodies. As he recalled, “my tribe was shattering and reforming around me. I saw these people often because they were family to someone I loved. Their ordinary moments—answering the door, cooking in the kitchen, dancing—assaulted me and expanded my notion of the human spectrum.”

By the nature of our love and desire, we are protagonists in queer diplomacy—because we queers are born into the enemy camp and yet our love and our enemies’ love for us has the potential to open us—across race, ability, class, gender, faith, nation—to identification and empathy.

We drift and are transformed by true love (for lovers and friends of our persuasion). Danger and grief have knit us. Our incredulity at the violence against us unites us. We laugh together--because all we are doing is loving.

We look right into the eyes of the enemy, human to human. Pragmatic. We are sure we will be loved. We believe we will change everyone who loves us because love makes people brave. Love makes us our best selves.

And yes, in this dangerous culture, sometimes they will betray us and themselves for the hope of safety. Or to get ahead. And yes, sometimes we will betray ourselves for the same reasons.

It is true, our love could end civilization as we know it.

Vaclav Havel, the playwright who led Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution, called examples like ours, of living in the truth, the power of the powerless to change the world by setting an example of courageous authenticity.

We are contagious.

Our love, our eyes and smiles, our sure hands, how we are not victims, how we rise, our compassion for ourselves and one another, how we understand that hurt people hurt people, that we simply wish to have little lives and to make art. That we look the same. That we are just like you.

Come over to the winning side. Surrender.

This first girlfriend grew up to be a gay marriage activist. As part of this work, she told her version of our story and it was turned into a very funny skit.

If you would like to read more memoir from me, here are some other posts:

Coming of Age in an Apocalypse

Custody Battle

Wild One

Bicentennial Rage

Gen X Loneliness

2017: The Time of Our Bodies is Over