A Letter by Any Other Name

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.