Not surviving, but asserting

I would like to start this editorial response by being clear that, on the whole, I sympathize with Francisco Tirado’s “I’m a survivor, alright?” column published Tuesday.

When I was a freshman in high school, this pasty redhead painted his fingernails black and wore black band shirts and tight, black pants. I was not popular, even though I so desperately wanted to be.

And one day in gym class, I was reminded just how different I was when I got pantsed in front of my entire class — cropped gym shorts, tighty-whities and all.

The only response my P.E. teacher could muster as I pulled up my pride was to say to the kid, “What, are you a homosexual or something?  You wanna see his penis?” I stood in awe, saying nothing.

This man in a place of authority, my teacher, had missed the point. Or worse maybe — he had gotten the point all too well.

Teenage suicides occur at a significantly higher rate among LGBT youth than heterosexuals. Bullying is undoubtedly common.

But the dominant solution — Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign, which has come to define our generation — only creates a culture of passive victimhood.

We are told to stand there and stare as they figure out that we’re as normal as they are.

Just as we believe the myth that society has come around to integrating African-Americans and women, so too do they exhort us to believe it will with homosexuals. Pull your pants up, the videos tell me, and wait for the right, tolerant response to come around. 

This is the very rhetoric Tuesday’s column supports. Much of the queer community can certainly sympathize with the narrative, as I myself do, in which an unpopular kid becomes the victim of ridicule.

But that is not the only narrative. We are constantly told, even by infantile adults such as Doug Wilson, that we are “afraid of success,” poorly coded language that means we are afraid to take part in a society that mandates coupling based on heterosexual standards. 

But those failures to succeed cannot define us in simple terms. Queer youth are not only bullied in their high school but are also denied in a myriad of ways the fundamental right to live.

We have, in fact, always lived outside the institution of marriage, and consequently, our primary problems as a community are not marriage or fitting in or even being cool.

Queer youth are constantly faced with familial abuse, homelessness (one in four will become homeless the day they come out), and, as Tuesday’s column rightly pointed out, legal sanctioning of public verbal assault.

To promote the idea of being a survivor, while personally true and resonant for some, cannot capture the total rejection youth experience.

I take issue with this word “survivor” in that it paints a gay man as a victim. We have to shed our idea of being victims and instead become agents and advocates. 

Waiting for the right, tolerant response will only disappoint us. We should therefore not let Mr. Wilson’s words “speak for themselves.”

We should be using Mr. Wilson’s visit to IU as an opportunity to open dialogue.  Approaching sexuality in the same way we have been since “It Gets Better” cannot produce constructive conversation about bigotry.

We must not assert our success in life but assert our failure to Doug Wilson’s expectations, cast off the badge of survivor victimhood and refuse to conform to a standard of heterosexual progress.

We must show how we never have, and never want to, fit in, because fitting in means that we continue to tacitly allow ignorance about queer exclusion and abuse.

If we focus on fitting in, we forget those who cannot fit in. How does the black lesbian fit in? The boy who sees himself a girl? The man who will never marry?

They cannot be subsumed under survivorhood if we only understand success in the terms of heterosexual standards.

Let’s go out to Doug Wilson’s talk on Friday. Let’s sit with grinding teeth through all his ignorant chirpings.

And let’s remind him that we are not willing to conform to his standard of success. We would rather be the outcasts than create more of them.

Let’s pull down our own pants, so to speak, and refuse to lift them back up.  

­— jbhayden@indiana.edu