Hermetically Sealed

When the amendment  allowing Gay Marriage in California first passed, I waited for the collective sigh of relief that was sure to come from the LGBTQ community. It mostly did come, but not without a few hiccups.

It took exactly five minutes for posts to start appearing on my Facebook wall saying things like, “Pardon me while I don’t dance in the streets that we can finally marry in California. It’s racist to demand marriage rights for Gays as long as People of Color are still being discriminated against!”, and “Gay marriage doesn’t matter while girls are still being circumsized against their will in parts of Africa!”

Or my personal favorite, “I will not be getting Gay-Married because Gay people need to focus on things that REALLY matter instead of seeking heteronormative institutions!”

I was saddened but not surprised to see that people in the Queer community didn’t wholly embrace the small victory that California had handed down. After all, we Queers don’t all think alike yanno. My sadness mainly centered around the negative statements being hurled at friends of mine who were Queer and had decided to get married by Queer friends of mine who had not decided to get married for some of the reasons listed above.

Such judgment. Such aggressive posturing.

Fast forward to this morning. I woke up with an extra pep in my step because I knew that President Obama was going to sign into law the bill allowing my Gay and Lesbian Brothers and Sisters to openly serve in the Military. Without hiding who they were, without shame.

The end to a 17-year-long journey toward equality in the Military.

I was and am so very proud of President Obama for having the gumption to take a stand for equal rights and for pushing through all of the adversity to get this bill passed. What an amazing achievement for our President and our country.

Fast forward just a few hours more. I log into my Facebook account and see various friends sharing the news story about President Obama signing this bill into law. There are lots of “likes” and comments and thankful rejoicing.

This time, however, it took exactly one hour for someone from my own Queer community to start sqwuaking about how GLBTQ soldiers being allowed to openly serve wasnt necessarily something to celebrate, because “Queer soldiers are still agents of genocide.”

And here we go again with the olympics of how GLBTQ people can’t be happy when we gain just a sliver of equality or a crumb of equal rights because “someone else either has it worse than we do” or because we really are just “buying into the system by demanding equal rights in the first place”.

I am so SICK of Gay people subjugating themselves and their own rights at the feet of the oppression olympics beast. It seems that within our own community, it has become passe to celebrate any achievement of equality, lest we step on the oppression of another, even if the person’s oppression on which we step overlaps heavily and cosmically with our own as Gay people.

Because last I checked, Queer people are People of Color, differently-abled, differently classed, educationally disadvataged, addicted, discriminated against, beaten, raped, robbed, marginalized, and subjected to all of the -isms that most of the world encounters. Because Gay and Lesbian people are not all White, upper middle class, able, and aware. Because those Queer folks of color want to get Gay Married and serve openly as well. Because those Queers who are poor put just as much stock into getting married and serving openly as they do trying to get ahead.

Because being able to marry your partner and serve openly doesn’t make us racist or insensitive to the oppression of others. It makes us a group of people who are finally seeing a pinprick of light in a very dark chasm of oppression after a very, very long time.

My point is this: In the Queer world, we often brainwash each other into giving up our joy over things like this. We often waggle virtual fingers at each other about how “we’re not doing it right” by writing manifestos about how Gay folks who want to get Gay married are hurting their fellow Queers and buying into racism. We refuse to dance when our Lesbian cousin who has been serving in the Navy under super-oppressive conditions can finally exhale all of that silence and just be.

We don’t raise our hands together in victory.

Instead, we apologize to the world and to each other for demanding better than we have been given and we sabotage each other’s happiness and, by default, ruin our cohesiveness as a Queer community by gobbling  up those heaping spoonfuls of shame with both hands.

Because it IS shame, ladies and gentlemen, when we take a step forward in our collective journey toward freedom and can’t appreciate where we are because we are either too busy pontificating about how we don’t deserve to take that step, or we’re looking across the way, trying to figure out how to make someone else’s path easier.

And if that isn’t buying into what the Patriarchy expects of us? I don’t know what is.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that Queer folks do have a huge responsibility to look at other forms of oppression and try to combat them since all oppression is pretty well linked.  I sometimes feel, though, that Queer folks have deemed themselves to be the “United States” of the world and come to everyone’s rescue, no matter the cost to our own community.

I’m still doing some thinking around this and why it pisses me off so deeply. Trying to check my White Privilege while doing this thinking is hard but necessary.

In the meantime, I rejoice over the repeal of DADT and I don’t give a damn which of my Queer friends thinks I’m a bad, bad Queer for doing it.

Awake
Before Dawn
Hot tea, Internet, NPR
Me and my world,
a secret date
ending when the rest of them
wake up.

I was flipping channels the other night and happened to land on TLC – The Learning Channel. There was a show on called “The Little Couple” which featured the daily lives of two Little People. Not “little people” as in cute little people, but rather Little People. Capital “L”, Capital “P”. Some folks call them “dwarves”. Some folks use a term that starts with an “M” that is kinda like the “N” word of the Little People world.

Little People. On TV. Eating dinner. Dating. Driving cars.

I asked myself why anyone would want to watch a show about two people who really weren’t all that interesting aside from their height. The female half of the couple was some kind of Doctor, not particularly funny or beautiful. The male half of the couple was a, pardon my bluntness here,…he was an asshole.  And irritating. And I did not like him one bit.

So I flipped channels and glazed over immediately to a “The Nanny” rerun. In between Fran Dresher’s nasally whines and snorty laughs, my mind kept returning to the Little couple and why TLC thought it was a good idea to give them a show. Do people really think Little People are all that interesting?

I flipped back to TLC and turned on the guide for that channel.

Imagine my surprise (dismay) when I discovered that TLC has TWO shows about Little People.

TWO SHOWS. On LITTLE PEOPLE.

I scrolled to the right and discovered no less than THREE shows on multiple births (Kate Plus 8, 19 Kids and Counting, and Quints by Surprise).

I scrolled further and discovered:

A show on Hoarders

A show on people who didn’t know they were pregnant and often got caught in ridiculous situations because of it (I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant)

A show on Polygamy (Sister Wives).

TWO shows about people who work in tattoo shops (Miami Ink and LA Ink)

A show on those crazy (and creepy) child beauty pageants and the compulsory “Smothering Stage Mom”.

And don’t even get me started on the crapfest that is “Sarah Palin’s Alaska”. And in all honesty, they should have called this show, “I am going to run for President and thought it would be a good idea to make people forget how very ignorant about any and all political issues I am by showing them that I can shoot a gun, say “You Betcha” 5 times an hour, and lament the woes of how the entire country is out ta’ get me!” Oh, and I tan, a LOT.  My ENTIRE FAMILY tans! As a matter of fact, we live in the coldest, most desolate part of the United States but my body is as golden brown as a Thanksgiving turkey (that I shot from my helicopter)!

In short, TLC is your sideshow stop on the cable channel guide. All they are missing is a show about bearded ladies and maybe a show dedicated to people born with flippers for arms. Seriously. What the crap?

I understand why it works. I think that people often want to feel more normal by “othering” other people. Because those Little People? Not all that interesting.

The fact that TLC built not one, but TWO, shows around Little People and their mostly boring lives says a lot about their faith in America still being willing to pay a quarter to see the World’s Fattest Lady or the Sword-swallowing Albino.

It says that we still dehumanize each other based on differences. It says that TLC is willing to buy into that. It says that, on some level, the people IN these shows are willing to sell out to the side show.

Admittedly, I’m a “Hoarders” fan, and I fully admit to sitting in stunned horror when they start clearing out 6-foot mounds of garbage and discover the inevitable “smashed cat” or opossum skeleton. On the surface, I’m terrified of that ever being my home so I am often tempted to go on cleaning sprees after watching that show. Deeper still is the way the show reminds me that folks normalize their hoards. They see it every day and it no longer looks like a mound of garbage but rather, a “thing” that just needs to be “organized”.

In a weird way, I’m sitting here wondering if TLC is not doing much the same way with folks who are exceptional. I would venture to guess that a great many people would goggle inappropriately if they encountered a couple comprised of Little People. A man and his 6 wives walking down the aisles at Wal-Mart. A woman with 8 children in tow.

Or maybe not.

It’s a TLC world we live in. Until we flip the channel.

People like having blogs. Vanity blogs. I like having this one even if nobody reads it. It’s like fishing, throwing your pole out and thinking that something might bite and that even if it doesn’t, you got to sit in the sun and make mental lists or think about your first kiss anyway.

I’m very jealous right now of a girl I used to know because she has a vanity blog and posts pictures of incredible artwork that she is creating. After I am done rolling around in her beautiful pictures, I often wonder where she finds the time. Where in the world she finds what must be several hours a week to take photos, to make words, to paint. She is in a relationship and has a kid for fucks sake! And still, I see these incredible images and I go even further and wonder how she has the brain capacity to store these bits of wonderment until she sits down at the canvas. How, with a kid and a house full of pets, she can steal enough uninterrupted time to mix ochre and ultramarine before it forms a paste and sets, unusable.

I envy her in beautiful ways. It is tempting to take stock of my own life and hold it up against hers – a swatch of hair, comparing the length, the color, the smell. Perhaps I would find split ends or gray roots, perhaps a tangle. Somewhere deep in the comparison I would remember that I work 80 hours a week and run a full-time website, that my projects often consist of wrangling extended family, keeping a house, and managing mountains of paperwork. That even sleeping uninterrupted is a luxury.

And again I wonder, would she envy me? Me, a driven white-collar woman with an office and a briefcase. Would she yearn for a career, financial freedom, and progressive education? Would she want to put her hair into a stiff french knot and click down the hallway in a giant corporate complex balanced on dagger-like heels while skinny women lashed out with hateful stares because a fat woman dares to be beautiful. I dont know. And is that even my life? Because some days my feet stink inside of cheap shoes and my whispy hair escapes neat knots and looks more haggard than sleek. Some days I drone away at a keyboard while staring out the window at my secret whisper tree waiting for the clock to land on the magic ’5′.

Some days, though, I am a magic speeding bullet darting across the landscape of Unix code and php scripts and racing around curves made of ASCII letters and binary bends. Some days I cross the finish line and the fanfare is overwhelming.

We aren’t that different, she and I. She lives through pigment and I, through electronic symbol. We weave and bend and there is magic at the end.