Old activists coming out?

I don't know where else to post this. I've learned a lot here, reading the stories of people coming out. But I feel inceasingly like I don't belong.

Of course, coming out is personal, involves our sense of identity, all our primary relationships. And here is where we rightfully seek support... and find heart warming responses.

Being way way older than most, even on this forum, I've done a lot of that work before coming out. I've been an activist for 50 years. I've been "Queer" long before I was ...
"gay" . I hate that word, 'gay.' It was used to replace homosexual, because it weighed more positively on the normativity scale. Which is why I hate it. I don't want to be NORMAL. I belive we have a role to play in making this a better world--as QUEERS, and I embrace that, the word, the politicalization of our outsider status. I DO NOT WANT to blend in.

I have all the sympathy in the world for those so overwhelmed by their personal conflicts, that assimilation looks like a good thing. To be 'accepted' and all that. But in what kind of a world? Accepted by the very system that has made us so fearful of our very lives that doing what might have been easy and natural was turned into a crisis that tore us apart within, and in our relationships? To be accepted into THAT world! NO WAY! ... not for me.

Everyone here should be supported where they are in this process. But surely there are others who--where they are-- is not into become assimilationists? Who are looking for ways to be proud, and more than proud, of our QUEER? I mean--who get that this is more than about sex--though that is it's center, but connects to all the major problems in our world?

How does it feel to be coming out--when you have already and long ago accepted yourself as an outsider, and that as a good thing? How do you integrate that into your new indentity as a genderfucking radical Queer revolutionary?

.. or am I alone in this

 

For 16 years I lived shomer shabbas, kashrut.. .the works.

I appreciate the analogy.

The difference for me, is what it is we're supposed to assimilate too. A murderous, planet destorying, exploitive elite--who would use us as willing slaves and tools for their criminal pleasures. We are on the edge of extinguising the possibility of life on this planet --except perhaps, for the few who are building themselves armed gated "communities"... ARKS, so they can (in their delusions) float above the destruction while the rest of us drown.
I think we have a unique perspective--on the weird way gender has been distorted and used to plank up the patriarchal corporate tyranny, what Harry Hay and the Radical Faeries thought of as a third way, a new subject-subject consciousness. That we have a role... maybe an obligation, to engage this Empire of Money and Death, and resist with our very lives becoming part of it.

 

Thanks... I get how difficult it must be for people who haven't already distanced themselves from Nomativity. What made it take so long for me to come out was way different, so once it was there, I slipped almost seemlessly into this new skin.

Now I'm concerned that those coming out are being seriously misled into thinking it's possible for us to be 'normal on the street, 'gay' in the arms of our lovers.'

It's not. That's a multilayered delussion.

You can't escape by becoming a part of the oppressor class.

And nothing illustrates that more than queers in the military.

---------- Post added 14th Sep 2013 at 07:05 PM ----------

... so, do we have a responsibility, rather than leaving, to remind people that there's a 3rd way? That the illusion of acceptance is not the hope over the rainbow?

That it's possible to come out fighting, not apologizing and hoping to become invisible?

 

How could I not empathize with the difficulty of negotiating this transition, and thinking it's easier not to have to fight on two fronts at once. but mabe that makes it more difficult, not easier--on the one hand, coming to terms with being truthful about who and what you are, and at the same time, using a soothing lie to make it easier to engage in the world. There's a terrible contradiction here... what it is I/we want? to know the truth? but only part of it?

Maybe knowing that there are those who have no need to apologize or hide, who see their outsider status as a gift and power for truth--might make it easier, not harder! The greater the felt need to 'belong,' the more difficult the transition will be. Give up that wish, and most of the friction disappears.

 

My problem with assimilation... is what we'd be assimilating to--an Empire of Money and Death, Oppression and endless tyrany.

... but enough. sleep calls.

G'night! And thanks for the conversation.

 

What does it mean to live a 'normal life' in a country and world that is insane? What does it mean to be accepted in a culture of murder, exploitation and oppresion? What does it mean to be accepted by a country that blows children to bloody pieces on the other side of the world, and puts more of its own citizens in prison than any country on earth--while closing and privitizing public schools? What does it mean to live a normal life in a country with the geatest disparity of income and wealth since before the great depression? What does it mean to live a normal life when we are on the brink of irreversable global warming that will be the death of hundreds of millions of people? What does it mean when black mothers live in fear that their sons will be blown away on the street or swept up into the new slavery of our prison industrial complex?
Living a normal life, means you are part of the machine that is doing all that. How can anyone who has experienced oppression belive it's ok to join the oppreser class--and for what? The right to be part of the Patriarchal system of privilege by getting a marriage liscence? By joining the military to help blow children up on the other side of the world.
I just don't get it. We are PARTS of all this. Pretending we can 'just be individuals' is delussional. A kind of insanity--erasing the rest of reality for the belief that nothing exists or matters but the tiny bubble we live in.
I just don't get it.
Doesn't being Queer give us an advantage--not one 'given' to us by them, but the advantage of seeing more clearly by being on the outside? By understanding that making us look 'normal' doesn't really make us safer? The Jews in the Weimer Republic were the most assimilated in Europe. Lot of good that did them. There will always be outsiders, 'weird' people... making the world safe for weird people, not curing or disappearing them, is how we make the world safe for everyone.

---------- Post added 15th Sep 2013 at 11:37 AM ----------

... and it's the Normative world that erases difference, steam rolling everyone into a homogeneous mass of consumer clones. Staying on the outside, is where we can fully explore and celebrate our differences without constraint, without having to conform to the restrictive norms of the oppressors.

 

And yet, being normal and accepted, we are accepted by that killing machine, and become a part of it.

It would be wonderful to be able to love, in comfort and safety as though nothing else existed... but it does exist. Getting a pass in this sick world doesn't end oppression. It makes it easier for some of us, for those who go along with it--until they change their minds--like the Germans did about their assimilated Jews. And should I mention, there was no place more tolerent of Queers than Berlin before Hitler. They were sent to the death camps with the Jews.

And we're part of it, that larger world. There is no way we can buy a safe bubble for ourselves without changing the whole system.

There's a problem here. We face up to it, think how we can work to better the world, or live in a state of delusion.

 

Queers too, were safer and more accepted in Berlin than any place in Europe or America… with maybe France as an exception. But that didn’t save them from being sent to the death camps, because it ignores the question of WHO or WHAT was accepting them.
Blending into a diseased, violent, patriarchal power dominated culture does not make us safe. We pose a threat to that power on the most fundamental level…the level of sex. We are subversives, even when we pretend to be like everyone else, because that power structure is based on white men who fuck only women having power, is accepted as the very order of nature.

We are safest, not when we hide our own power as outsiders, surrendering to our oppressors and making ourselves totally vulnerable to them, but by building power through what we are—AS outsiders, as only outsiders can change or bend self-repairing power structures.

That doesn’t mean we can’t at the same time fight for civil equality under the law—but only that we not fool ourselves into believing that will make us safe. It won’t

As MLK said, every injustice, is an injustice everywhere. Our fate is bond up with all those this Empire of Money and Death are exploiting and killing. We stand with them against the Empire, and we may be able to change the world. If we join with the oppressor, they will turn on us and attempt to destroy us.