people are homophobic too, all this threat to the established order that
benefits so few, but so many are so heavily invested in, the only way it
works is if that's the best you can hope for, and these alternatives feel
like cheating
via https://ift.tt/QYDOcx4
gatheringbones https://gatheringbones.tumblr.com/post/664440051074220032:
[“If we want to know why many queer people prefer their own company to the
company of straights, certainly one answer to this question is about
protection and mutual care—we hold each other up in a world that pushes us
down. But there is also another, far less discussed facet to this story
about queer people keeping their distance from straight people—an element
that has less to do with queer vulnerability or oppression in the face of
straight privilege and more to do with queer power, freedom, abundance or
relief in the face of heterosexual misery and myopia. It is a story about
queer people sometimes finding straight culture and relationships too sad
or enraging to witness, too boring or traumatic to endure. It is about
queers often wishing to look away from the train wreck, by which I mean the
seemingly inextricable place of sexual coercion and gender injustice within
straight culture, or what the feminist writer JoAnn Wypijewski described in
2013—as she reflected on the ubiquity of sexual assault among teenagers—as
heterosexuality’s relentlessly “primitive” attachment to lies,
manipulation, and violence as the formative route to sex. It is about queer
recoil, or something like the nausea that the French scholar Paul Preciado
has felt in response to both the aesthetics and the misery (the miserable
aesthetics?) of heterosexuality, described in an essay titled “Letter from
a Transman to the Old Sexual Regime”: “I am as far removed from your
aesthetics of heterosexuality as a Buddhist monk levitating in Lhassa is
from a Carrefour supermarket… . It doesn’t excite me to ‘harass’ anyone. It
doesn’t interest me to get out of my sexual misery by touching a woman’s
ass on public transport… . The grotesque and murderous aesthetics of
necro-political heterosexuality turns my stomach.” Sometimes straight
culture is quite literally repulsive; we feel it in the gut.
We have insufficient language to describe queer people’s experience of
finding straight culture repellent and pitiable, given that heterosexuality
has been presented to us as love’s gold standard. But even without a
suitable name for this contradiction—the fact that the world’s most
glorified relationship is often a miserable one—many queers have still
spoken this truth. In 1984, a few years before his death, James Baldwin
explained to an interviewer from the Village Voice that queers could see
the precarity of heterosexuality, even as straights kept it hidden from
themselves: “The so-called straight person is no safer than I am really… .
The terrors homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if
society itself did not go through so many terrors it doesn’t want to
admit.” As Baldwin saw it, it is not simply that straight people are
suffering and in denial about it but that heterosexual misery expresses
itself through the projection of terror onto the homosexual.”]
Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality
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