“I’m a closeted teen,” writes Billy-Ray Belcourt in “Gay: 8 Scenes,” one of the beautiful lyric essays in A History of My Brief Body. Reading Billy-Ray sent me back to Samuel Delany’s “Coming/Out,” one of my favorite essays. It opens,
In the twenty-seven years since the 1969 Stonewall riots, "coming out" has acquired extraordinary significance in the gay community—so much significance that many of us might even say coming out "defines" the difference between being gay and an older, pre-gay notion of being homosexual. Through much of that quarter-century-plus, when, if you hadn't "come out of the closet," many gay men and lesbians felt you had somehow betrayed them, that you couldn't really "define yourself as gay," that you had not "accepted your gay identity," I found myself faced with a paradox: Much of my critical enterprise over that same period had been devoted to showing that such "defining" or "identifying" events (when, as a reader, you first became aware of science fiction; when, as a child, you realized you were black, gay, or an artist) simply did not "define" anything. (67)
In conversation with a friend, Delany clarifies,” I didn't say that what happens in a single moment can't change your life," I told her. "I said that it doesn't define your life” (68). Narrative always intervenes. Which is to say: we are asked to narrate the genre of our lives or, more commonly, we are asked which genres our lives fit into.
I shall return to those teenage years, though, now, they are too cut through with the after to be a pristine object, too woven through with experience and desire from many afters to be anything other than a fantastic reconstruction.
Three interlinked stories have dominated the genre of gay.
In the first, to be gay is to move from the closet to out of the closet. Out of the closet does not mean to freedom. It might mean something like identity. A discovery. “I know who I am now.” “I am living my truth.” More rarely, though more accurately, it means “I have found my people.” Where that “my” cuts across time and space, creating intimacies with textual and virtual characters often many years before one encounters another human who also claims the label gay. We live at a time when these lives half-lived in fantasy might be mocked, when we are told to “face the real world,” even as many of us know how often fantasy and imagination have kept us tethered to presently hostile worlds because of the promise of otherwise worlds. From the closet to out of the closet. One might move into rooms in a house or be kicked out onto the street or shuttle through the capriciousness of something like Narnia, subject to the whims of cruel queens and salvific lions. One may be lucky enough to make lives and friendships. Or simply survive. And that is also something like luck.
In the second, gay is linked to suffering and death. I’m part of those who moved into gay erotics in the shadow of AIDS, spared the many deaths of some I would have called friends and lovers and neighbors and “person at the club,” but not spared the narrative that AIDS was destiny; if AIDS no longer meant death, it still meant a kind of marking. A marking that made—that makes—gay life disposable. We are now almost three decades into the success of antiretrovirals, those miracles that turned death sentences into not that, and just slightly a decade since PRep was approved. Yet, the defining event of that era, what sticks, was Matthew Shepard’s murder. It’s not as though I imagined I was fully safe. Yet, there were moments when friends and I would leave the club and head to Squirrel Hill to a diner where one of us worked and take over the space with all our gay outrageousness. There were brief pockets when we felt invincible, protected by youth and our numbers. We could be outrageous. Brief moments, yes. Punctured easily by the ordinariness of the classrooms to which we returned, where we fought hostile teachers and even more hostile students, trying to make space where we could breathe. Or, we simply tuned out. Jobs where we were described as quiet or antisocial because we would not participate in the rituals of heteronormative bonding, which often included being the token gay person. AIDS was one name for the random ways moments could turn against us. Prophylactics. We knew how to don social prophylactics.
In the third, gay names a trajectory from single to couple to marriage. It names the conditions under which we are acceptable to a range of institutions. How we can get health insurance. How we can travel with partners. How we can retain jobs. How we can visit loved ones in hospital. How we can attend funerals. How we can immigrate to be with people we love. Because, no matter how often “love is love” is shouted, we live with and through institutions. I understand why gay marriage. I do not like the disciplinary trajectory of gay marriage, the too-common understanding that it is what we all want or, worse, need so we can be domesticated and tamed, no longer a threat to vulnerable women and their husbands.
These are the genres of our lives.
Yet.
As I read Billy-Ray, I was struck by the thought that I was never closeted. The frame of the closet did not exist in the world I inhabited as a teenager, not in the rugby-playing boarding school or the church-dominated neighborhood. It was simply not a question that arose. And this does not name repression or normativity, though I once thought it did.
Now, I’d say something like: I had one erotic relation with my body and myself before I discovered another erotic relation with my body in relation to other men’s bodies. This was not a coming into myself or a discovery about something deep inside. It was a movement of erotic possibilities. And I have long maintained that if queer gave me anything, it was the sense that erotic possibilities could change, that what I desired and enjoyed at 20 need not be what I desire and enjoy at 40 or 50 or 75 or 90. That erotic invention and play exist along one’s life trajectory. It is one reason I find the “what do you like” conversation so truncating: what I might enjoy in one setting might not be what I enjoy in another. How I use one bathhouse might not be how I use another. What I enjoy with one person might not be what I enjoy with another.
And so I’ve been thinking about how I might narrate the teenager I was with a certain erotic relation to my body, a certain awareness of my hungers, an uncertain relation to what those hungers meant or how they intended, and also a full, rich life. There was no sadness about my erotic needs. No sense that anything was hidden and might emerge. I would have been more comfortable naming my hungers than naming if they were directed toward any person or object outside my fantasy life. It was a fantasy life driven by text, by the many romance novels I read, where the possibility of pleasure as waterfalls and rainstorms and erupting volcanoes and earthquakes fed a sense of something that might be interesting, but was also ridiculous. I thank romance novels for teaching me to giggle at erotic scenarios. It’s good to leaven one’s hungers with laughter.
Perhaps I mean to say: like many other things in my life, my relationship to the coming out genres has been aslant. I recognize what those genres want and require and I find what is useful from them. And I hope to remain in the possibilities of invention.
Thank you for this, K’eguro. As someone who’s always been open about my sexuality, even as a youth (I officially came out at 14 but knew long before that), and who loved and lost friends (and a beloved teacher) to HIV/AIDS in the nineties, I deeply resonate with this. Thank you again.