Struggles of the past not getting enough credit
The struggles of the past aren’t given the credit they deserve, Matthew Pearson says.
“The closet for me,” admits Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby in her staggering monologue, Nanette, “was no easy thing to come out of.”
Gadsby and I both turned 40 this year, so even though we grew up thousands of kilometres apart — she in northwestern Tasmania, me in southwestern Ontario — I strongly relate to the sentiment.
Coming out has never been a single act or declaration, but rather a lifelong series of vignettes.
It’s also not for everyone, particularly if there’s a concern about personal safety. I’ve grown well past the strident stance of my younger days when I wrongly equated being out with being comfortable in one’s skin. The former is something you do; the latter is something you are.
I befriended a young guy recently who told me he doesn’t relate to the coming-out narrative. He didn’t need to in order to navigate high school and university in the 21st century. At age 14, he told his mother he was gay and she was cool with it.
I’m relieved younger queers like him had an easier time in high school than my generation and those before us did, so long as they don’t lose sight of how hard-won that freedom is.
It’s perhaps a point of friction for those in the community who feel like the struggles of the past — particularly the efforts of those who were on the front lines — aren’t given the credit they deserve.
Yes, in 2018, you may have no use for the gay bookstore, pub or village, but can you imagine what it was like when those were the only places of refuge in an otherwise unfriendly world?
That friction may also mask a bittersweet truth: We are happy it got better for you, we really are, but the burden of shame we carried for years has marked us for life.
I came out because I didn’t have much choice. I wasn’t straight, and no one believed my futile attempts to act like I was. The straight-gay binary was rigid. Bisexuality was basically, and wrongly, viewed as a gateway to gay life or something women toyed with in movies like Chasing Amy.
I don’t remember the exact date, but sometime during the month of July 1998, I told my parents I was gay. It wasn’t exactly breaking news, but rather a confirmation of something both they and I had come to quietly accept. For whatever reason, telling one’s parents in those days made it official in a way telling a dozen friends did not.
I now realize coming out was the easy part. Accepting myself was — and sometimes is — much harder.
As Gadsby says in Nanette: “The closet can only stop you from being seen. It is not shameproof.”
In the early ’90s, around the time Gadsby’s Tasmania was locked in a fierce debate over the legalization of homosexuality, the art gallery in my hometown hosted a show called Visual AIDS and Memory/Elegy. It was an attempt to create a dialogue about HIV and AIDS.
The exhibition included selections from an international collection of HIV/AIDS -themed posters and the work of several visual artists who had been exploring the disease in their work. Thick sheets of paper advising “Viewer Discretion” covered some of the images.
The letters to the editor page of the local newspaper soon boiled over.
One person wrote: “There is overwhelming proof that homosexual activity leads to early death” and that the art show was “nothing but a blatant attempt to make us accept their perverse behaviour.”
This is what I was up against. The message from some of the adults in my community was loud and clear: My desires were disgusting, perverted and wrong, and would inevitably lead me to an early grave. Imagine the weight of that on the shoulders of a 15-yearold.
Eventually, nothing that was ever spit at me — and let’s face it, people never call you a faggot in a friendly tone — was quite as cruel as what I told myself.
This is the insidious, enduring power of shame. The hate directed at you morphs into a poisonous self-hatred.
Years later, under the care of a life-affirming counsellor, I learned to mute what’s known as “negative self-talk.” That’s the clinical name for all the noise incessantly spilling over in my anxious mind like a trash can on René-Lévesque Blvd. the morning after the pride parade.
My mother is often too hard on herself when it comes to my teen
Eventually, nothing that was ever spit at me — and let’s face it, people never call you a faggot in a friendly tone — was quite as cruel as what I told myself.
years. She worries she missed something. What I think she neglects to consider, however, is just how much things have changed since then, and mostly for the better. She mustn’t apply today’s standard of acceptance to events that happened 25 years ago.
The messages the public got about gay people, particularly gay men, throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s — my formative years — were grim. Parents may not have wished for gay children because they wanted to spare their offspring, and themselves, the pain of what might have come.
“I wanted you to change because I knew the world wouldn’t,” Gadsby’s mother later told her.
How refreshing it is then, in 2018, that the world has changed — finally, modestly, imperfectly — because Hannah Gadsby, me and countless other queer people simply refused to.