A Letter by Any Other
Name
©2020 Ross Williams
My daughter is a lesbian.
…this week. Sometimes she’s bisexual. It all depends.
Normally I wouldn’t write about
my family in any great detail. I respect
their privacy way too much. But she has
indicated that this aspect of her privacy isn’t private at all, and … well, alright.
Like many gay and bisexual
people, my daughter has a self-pity streak on her a half-mile wide. She views herself as different, therefore she believes everyone else does as well. Because everyone else − in her head − sees
her as different, where different
equals bad, she therefore concludes that no one accepts her for what she is,
that everyone is bigoted and biased against her.
Not to put too fine a point on
it, but that is simple garden-variety paranoia.
Very few people care about these things; I myself could not care less if
I tried. I have way too many parts of my
own life to worry about that who my daughter is attracted to, and why, doesn’t
even show up on the radar. Honestly, the
only worry I have about her is that she could stand to lose ten or fifteen
pounds.
Yet to hear her talk − and I’ve
heard her talk and talk and talk about this − you’d think that I’ve called out
priests and shamans and witch doctors to cure her, and held séances to fend off
the evil spirits who’ve inhabited her.
Same thing with my gay younger brother.
He was convinced that everyone in the family was so against him that for
years he drank heavily for comfort and numbness, and pulled all kinds of
death-defying stunts. He was honestly
surprised that no one denounced him when he told the rest of us. I, myself, always trying to find humor in
everything, told him to find a nice lesbian and settle down. My brother, who seems to be one of the few homosexuals
in existence with a measurable sense of humor, actually laughed about it.
I can’t stress this enough: No one cares!
Everyone knew my cousin
Michelle was a lesbian. Not a single one
in the family cared, not even those in the Mormon section. Yet she was so convinced that everyone did care, and would condemn her for it,
she also devoted her life to crazy, self-destructive behavior. She died of a heroin overdose a little before
the turn of the millennium. And it’s too
bad. I really liked her. She was fun, and some of the best stories
from family get-togethers involved her.
But … no one cared! Michelle, if
you have internet … no one cared.
Say this to my daughter,
though, and the self-pity kicks in. It
means we don’t care about her, an
accusation I’ve fielded for longer than I’ve known she was gay. Or bisexual.
Or whatever it is she is this week.
In order to care about her we
also have to care about who she’s
attracted to. …as if it’s any of our
business. …which she insists it is,
while also acting as if she resents the nosiness that comes from anyone making
it their business.
My daughter is not alone in
this attitude. The reason most often
given by The Alphabet People for
throwing their sexuality-as-identity in the face of the world at large is
because − they claim − us straights [and that term is typically used
derogatorily] have been throwing our sexuality-as-identity in theirs since
forever. Ask any of them how they come
to this conclusion, they’ll commonly report the preponderance of heterosexuality
in movies, television, books, art…
Frankly, there is almost no
sexuality-as-identity in these media unless it’s pornography, and there is way more than enough alternative porn
available that no one should feel left out.
But “heteronormative” is the pseudo-intellectual reduction spit with
righteous invective. Most people are
heterosexual therefore, in this culture ruled by decolonized exception
processing, it is wrong. More than
wrong, often; evil.
Outside of porn,
heterosexuality isn’t portrayed as identity, it’s portrayed as merely existing,
primarily gleaned by inference. We see a
man and woman getting married; we do not insist on a blow-by-blow [as it were] description
of the honeymoon. We see a couple with
children; we do not witness the process of making them.
Very few people care to know
more about others’ sexual habits, preferences and peccadilloes than can be
derived from inference. We are fine
with knowing Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi are married; we can guess, but
we don’t need − or care − to know what goes along with it. Keep it to yourselves. But that appears to be what far too many Alphabet
People can’t do. They insist on all-too-graphic
descriptions of what they are, what they like to do, and to whom. Then they insist we acknowledge, learn, and
repeat these terms when talking to them.
There was a time not too long
ago when there were no Alphabet People.
There were merely lesbians and gays.
Then the bisexuals, who outnumber both by 4 or 5 to 1 [and were considered
“cheaters” and “fence-sitters” by both], demanded to be recognized. And The Alphabet People were born. Together they were known as
[L]esbians,
[G]ays, and
[B]isexuals.
LGB.
A few years later, those who liked
to play dress-up demanded a letter. They
called themselves “transsexuals” [“transvestites” was passé], and believe
themselves to have been born in the wrong body.
It became LGBT. “Ligbit”, “lugbait”,
“logbat”.
Then “queer” was added for who
knows what reason, since ‘queer’ is a collective term for each of the foregoing,
primarily as a slur. And it became
LGBTQ. “Ligbitic”. It also became redundant.
Very shortly thereafter, anyone
who sometimes felt like maybe he was a lesbian born in a straight male package
demanded a letter. A letter he got. Then another guy who occasionally lingered
too long a look at the junk in the locker room demanded his own letter. He got one.
After a few months of minor neurotics leveraging their personal neuroses
into Letters of Admission to the Sexuality
Hall of Narcissism, the list of letters was unwieldy and contained
duplicates. It was shortened to LGBTQ+.
The list of recognized neuroses was effectively ended. But the minor neurotics were having none of
it. Instead of letters, they invented a
whole dictionary of new terminology to identify and label every group of
one-to-twelve people who shared the same fetish. Are you a chick who believes you think and
feel like a guy, but likes dressing like a chick, and you’re into guys? You get your own invented label! Are you a dude who dresses like one, are into
chicks, but you read Jane Austen and love chick-flicks? You also get your own label!!
Each label? A brand new “gender”
straight off the assembly line.
All this to describe what men and women like to do privately and which is none of anyone else’s business. Yet somehow it is made everyone else’s
business.
If you resist all this being
made your business, you get called vile names.
My daughter knows a whole passel of them. If you don’t know the invented term for a gay
dude who likes playing dress-up, then you’re a bigot. …and just a hint, “Gay dude who plays dress
up” won’t cut it, even though that’s exactly what the invented term means.
There’s a new term for “Straight
guy who will bump uglies with anyone who calls himself a girl, even if they’re
not”, and it’s not “bi-guy” despite that being reality. There’s a new term for “Straight guy who will
bump uglies only with those who call
themselves girls and who are not.” No, it’s not “gay dude”, even though it is. You’d better know both terms. And there’s a thousand more where these came
from.
It’s your responsibility as a
fellow human being to trail around after those you’ve [boo hoo] discriminated
against by virtue of sharing a trait with Robert Young in Father Knows Best which was only discernible by inference, and
adopt their sensibilities as your own.
You owe it to them. Your own
priorities, if you’re allowed to have them at all any more, may come only after
mastering[?] …mistressing[?] …non-gender-specific perfecting of a lexicon that
means nothing to you and which you will never use because it involves becoming privy
to information that you don’t want − or need − to understand any more of than
what can be gleaned from inference.
And isn’t inference enough?
No. It’s not.
The Alphabet People will see to that.
