Life Unarmored

There are vast swaths of my life that I do not talk about. 


It's always been like this for me, and I'm sure I'm not alone on this behavior, but to myself, from the inside peeking out, it seems bizarre.  These days, people share everything.  Your parties end up on Facebook and Twitter before you even leave them and God help you if you call out sick tomorrow, because HR has already seen that photo of you doing that thing at that place with that guy.  It's as if the whole world adopted a practice I used to engage in when I was younger - just live your life on broadcast, and be a wide open book to the world.  


But really, do we do that?  We still don't share our deepest darkest fears and secrets on social networks.  I tried an experiment with this on Facebook.  I still have the group set up for the folks I had chosen.  I still do not talk to them about everything, and I reckon the reverse is true.  I know of no one that shares their every last fear and secret, their desires and their drives, nobody that doesn't have at least one piece of armor wrapped around them, at least one thing you may never, ever know.  


I don't think this is entirely abnormal or unhealthy.  Everyone has thoughts they keep to themselves, things they don't really discuss with others.  We obey the taboos of our common culture and omit things.  Or we embrace the rebellion of a counter culture and discuss them in graphic detail - and steer clear of the more urbane parlance.  But what becomes of us when circumstance and one or the other set of mores wraps us up in armor?  


It's not just societally imposed, either.  There is safety in the armoring of the soul.  Hidden safely behind That Which Isn't Discussed, we can obscure everything over in taciturn silence, our reticence requiring inquiring minds to mind their business.  We are not questioned about these things if they are That Which Isn't Discussed.  The armor goes on, the self is protected, these weaknesses are never exposed, and we are suddenly made Achilles, all dipped in the stuff.  


But Achilles was held by the ankles when dipped, leaving them the one lone place that can still be touched.  Imagine had he not been killed.  Perhaps, gone long enough in his impenetrable shield of all shields, he would have yearned to be held again?  Maybe time after time of being touched with only a toe he would have yearned for the embrace of an arm or hand?  What's the the likelihood that Achilles would have wanted to drop off all his armor, and stand naked in the rain?  It's not as though he had never had the experience.  This is not do the blind know they're missing color - it's Beethoven blindly thumping time, doubtless craving the lost connection to music.


I believe Achilles would miss the rain.  I believe once he started to peel his armor off, there would be no stopping, not until every last article was gone.  That could've been well and good for Achilles, had he lived.  There could never be a life unarmored for Achilles.  But can there be for us?  Does the armor ever come off, or does it just get stickered over in likes and lolcats?  

Nothing Moves 36 Points

Nothing, as in nothing, in American politics moves by 36 points in two months.  We are a single-digit-spread nation. 31% of us are Democrats, 29% are Republicans.  Obama beat McCain in 2008 by 53% to 46% nationally. We talk a lot about how polarized American politics are, but really, we are frozen in this nasty evil bifurcated state of affairs.  The two sides may be getting ever louder about how correct they are, but the two don't actually gain a whit of advantage over one another, and no part of the electorate actually moves. 

And then one part of the electorate packs up its bags and trucks off in one direction at a faster speed than anything we've seen anything in the history of, well, ever. The segment in question is the African-American population, and the issue they're suddenly all changing their minds on is gay rights.  

Historically, and to me personally this is deeply upsetting, the black community and the gay community have not gotten along terribly well. This has been the last aisle we could not reach across, the last of our fellow minorities we could not wrap our arms around and embrace, the last that would not embrace us. Anti-gay sentiment has always run deep in the African-American community, in no small part thanks to that community's deep-seated religiousness. We can't truly hold this against them. As a community, when they had nothing else, they had their faith. Indeed had the Great Awakening never happened, the spread and crystallization of abolitionism may never have happened, either. It only makes sense that a community so steeped and so both owed by and indebted to its faith would find queers queerly upsetting.

Then there's the modern stereotypes of masculinity in the gay community, which run directly contrary to the perception of what it is to be gay. Never mind for a minute the wrongness of the gay stereotype, nor the pressure on gay men to not live up to it. Just look as far as black male celebrities. There is a loudly heterosexual machismo that radiates from that segment of society, that gives rise to concepts like 'pause', that flaunts its love of women and things traditionally masculine. What if that doesn't apply to the subject in question? What if you're black and don't like women? Worse, what if you're not the dominant or masculine partner? This has been for too long and for too many been a double prison, an exile from exile. Bad enough to be a member of a group visually identified as other, but then to open one's mouth within one's own group and immediately be castigated again?  

Nothing we in the gay community have ever said nor done has ever made a dent here. We have never been able to win over the black community to our side. Gay liberation's blatant homage to the African-American civil rights movement has never, at any point in time, won us any quarter with them. It has always seemed that on this we shall routinely lose, and that nothing could ever, ever change this. Until now. 

Since President Barack Obama opened his mouth on the subject, Jay Z, Chris Rock, Colin Powell and the NAACP have all come out in favor of gay marriage. And in Maryland, where gay marriage is headed to the polls, the state has gone from favoring gay marriage on an 8% span to favoring on a 20% span - and that's been driven by a swing among black voters of 17% opposed to 19% in favor, a thirty-six point swing in two months.  And the only thing that's changed, the one and only thing that's changed, is the president, the man who captivated the African American community by demonstrating that truly in American you really can crash through the glass ceilings as a black man, spoke openly about his journey from opposed to in favor. Now, on top of it, we hear stories like the President of the NAACP talking about how back when interracial marriage was illegal, and he had to speak out that no one, no one should live that nightmare ever again of not being able to marry who they loved. 

I'll be the first to admit I didn't see this coming.  I saw a big fat nothing coming out of the President's interview on the matter.  But now that it's over, now that the cat is out of the bag, could the President have bridged the gap between the LGBTQ and African-American communities? Of all the talk of politicians promising to unite us, did one of them actually do it? The mind boggles. 

Fred Karger as a Noun

Merriam-Webster defies the term "uncle tom" as follows 

1. a black who is overeager to win the approval of whites (as by obsequious behavior or uncritical acceptance of white values and goals) 

2. a member of low-status group who is overly subservient to or cooperative with authority <the worst floor managers and supervisors by far are women ... Some of them are regular Uncle Toms - Jane Fonda>

The roots of the term are debatably Stowe's, or maybe from minstrel shows, but it matters not - this is the definition that lives in the public consciousness.  I'd like to submit a similar term for the queer community. I vote we strip away Fred Karger as a person, and make im into a noun.

Fred Karger can't be a person.  He simply cannot be a real live flesh-and-blood human being.  Characters like Karger have to be made up. You see, Karger has his bona fides as a gay activist.  Karger founded Californians Against Hate - which has been absolutely positively instrumental in unveiling the Mormon church's involvement in California's Proposition 8, and the National Organization for Marriage's blatant attempt to create and exploit racial divisions in Maine (which is hilarity unto itself, for entirely different reasons). He speaks openly these days of the need of the Republican Party to be "cleansed" of bigotry - and he's right.

He also worked for the President who let tens of thousands of Americans die of AIDS before acknowledging that any such problem existed. 

This is not a matter of the Republican Party's stance on gay rights and Karger's tacit stated support of the party regardless. This is a matter of a party of laissez faire allowing the thought to run to its illogical, immoral conclusion - we help no one, no one, not even to avoid the grave itself. Let the gays die. Let the women die in childbirth. The sick? The elderly? The disabled? Be sick, be old, be cripple, but be it on your own, we shall not help you.  

Karger is old enough to know this, and stayed on that side of the aisle the whole entire time. He was living in California during the AIDS epidemic - and working for the side that wouldn't acknowledge it. What drives a man to work for a leader who lets that man's people die a slow, horrible death? Surely, any such man would be wracked with guilt the rest of his days the moment the error of his ways were made clear. Surely he would at some point see the light, and come crawling home to his people, ready to take on the labors of Hercules to make things right. Maybe this is the reason for Karger's about-face in 2004. Perhaps a rock thrown by God hit him in the head. Perhaps he realized he could no longer carry on aiding and abetting the castigation of his very self, and felt the need to atone for it.  

But this is not a real Saul on the road to Damascus moment for Karger. The scales off the Apostle's eyes, he switched sides and went into the world a new man. But Karger? No, good Fred only gets the mud in his eyes. He chooses to envision a "Clint Eastwood" Republican. But Eastwood isn't really a Republican - he's a libertarian. He said so himself in a 2011 GQ interview. Eastwood, claiming to believe in a politics of leaving everyone alone, surely couldn't - and likely doesn't - support the ultrasound-requiring, gay-marriage-banning, immigrant-hating far right that has so plainly hijacked the Republican Party and taken it for a ride to Fascistville. That seems the sort of place Clint Eastwood would ride into and shoot up. 

But I've gone of track - my argument is that Fred Karger is a noun, and not a person, because his story cannot be real. His reference to a kindred spirit holds no water. The sort of about-face we could potentially view as mayhap private epiphany simply did not happen. And those roots... those awful roots... surely, no subjugated person could ever ever contribute to their own subjugation! That behavior cannot be human. It is the sort of thing you can train an animal to do - to see itself as the natural inferior, to believe that he who holds the food dish holds it by divine right. To hold otherwise, we can speak of no such thing as a human right. If a human can view itself as rightly subjugated, can aid and abet in its subjugation without being viewed as somehow sick or corrupted, then how do we differentiate between the human rightly demanding equality, and the human mistaken regarding his right to that? We can't. We can't have human rights if this is human behavior, because we have to allow for an all-powerful master choosing who is his equal and who is not, since the other party may or may not be correct on the matter. This behavior must be illness or damage of some kind, they cannot be the undertaking of a rational human actor. Therefore, Fred Karger cannot be a real person. He can only be a noun, and I submit the following definition for him: 

1. a gay man who is overeager to further the causes of those who hate gays (as by directly aiding and abetting those who turn a blind eye to the death of scores of homosexuals)

2.  a member of an oppressed group who is overly subservient to the group inflicting that oppression <After driving gays from the party and refusing to seat them at the caucus, you'd have to be a real Fred Karger to be a Republican.>