Queering the Straights

When I initially came to Brooklyn, I had a lot of expectation for the neighborhood to which I was moving. "East Williamsburg," or rather Bushwick, held some promise to continue a lot of my college lifestyle, sense of community and though I was not an artist some immersion in a creatively subversive world. Somehow, this never really panned out. There's something about New York that really silos you; you come driven with some purpose, yet find all too often that in turn you're surrounded by a less diverse group of people, other that those that fir your "niche." Where did the artists, the musicians, the philosophers, the geeks go in my life? If they were in Bushwick, I wasn't finding them, but then again I wasn't exactly looking.

Year One, as I call it, had one focus: gay party. The scene burned me out and I learned quickly how a lot of billyburg queers are more scene acquaintances than friends. Afterwards I lived with my parents for a few months to break away from the cycle and the BS and I came back to the city to find a higher caliber of queer. It worked and I have a far more solid sense of who I am and who and what matters now.

Yet, there's something about the NYC party that is relentless, and it seems that although I am "over it" I can't help but find myself at one pretty often. I've been anxious about it before, anxious to leave, anxious to call into old habits, expectations, both on myself and the party. But somehow this past Saturday I was able to let a lot of it go when I did so again.

Granted, there were particulars of the evening that made it an unusual night from the start. My close friend Christina that I've known since elementary school was in town and I had agreed to go to a Bushwick "art party" with the likelihood of doing some "Molly" (pure MDMA, main drug in ecstacy). I haven't done anything outside of pt and booze in years so I knew to be ready for a "strangeness" from the chemical. I made a conscientious decision beforehand to be observant and relaxed with no expectations on the night, and this choice proved to be fruitful. For a good amount of the party Christina and I sat to the side on comfortable couches taking in the party and its participants. Running into another old college friend of ours, Drake, and his friends, we all sat together, self-chosen wallflowers. Drake griped a little about the party, how these series of parties used to be more interesting and subversive and how they had come diluted with hordes of douchie, yuppy, coke-heads. I told him to pause and consider why exactly he came to the party, what his expectations were, what exactly the art was he was looking for. He gave descriptions of old art installations these parties used to have, and I asserted to him that whatever the parties were before, for now the parties' art installations WERE the hordes of people. You came to see the masses, the ebb and flow of expectation, disappointment, the chase to find the party within the party. To this he laughed audibly and agreed, making me smile a bit to know that he got it.

The night progressed and Christina, still high, was grateful that I could be cognizant of things around us, as there was an off-moment where a seemingly predatory cis-male was bothering her as she was absorbed in her couch-sitting. A little after that incident, we met up with Tom and his crew. Tom was who we initially came to party with and he was making it a habit of going out every weekend and rolling, so I was wary of him from the start, though knew I trusted myself enough to handle him since I've known him for years. During the height of the night Tom, his crew and Christina were all crashing off the Molly (since I had taken such a small amount and was never really high, there was no "crash" for me). Tom, chasing after the high, bought more and tried to push it onto Christina. He was also simultaneously trying to get Christina to hookup with his friend Bill, who was out of his mind high.

Now, Christina was clearly incredibly uncomfortable, to which I reminded her that she was in control and her choice was her own. It took a lot of self-control on my part to not go off on Tom, but I knew confrontation with him, particularly in his state, would not be welcome or effective. And besides, I knew at the core of the situation, what was crucial in that moment was Christina standing up to Tom. Too often have I seen the pattern where he has manipulated her to a point of clear discomfort. I'm happy I could be there, squeezing her elbow as a reminder that it was not on her to absorb his will, even as he tried to push the pill for a third god-damned time into her hand. She was firm and TOm and his drug crew went back to the dance floor as we went back to a comfortable spot to watch the waves of people move from room to room, chasing the night for something fun, hot or eccentric.

We had a good talk the whole night, and particularly after that incident about the drug pushing and the lack of boundary recognition from Tom. We chatted about his pattern, needing to always be in control. I brought up to her the notion of radical consent, where the only "yes" is an emphatic one, rather than the mere absence of "no." It was striking to see that even though this is conventionally a concept about consensual sex, she had never heard of it.

The night ended late and well. We left "early" relative to the rest of the party and Christina, at this point sober, drove home. I was home, metallic taste in my mouth, eerily awake at dawn, and buzzing with retrospective concern for if I hadn't been there to support Christina. Those two people, Drake and Christina, have been really important to me for a long time now and I love them both. But I wonder sometimes if my life now is far too queer-separatist to foster deeper friendship with them both, or more pointedly, to foster deeper community. I question how welcome they would be, especially Drake who is a straight cis-male and may not always grasp the sensitivities surrounding queer spaces. There's a lot of angry (rightfully so) queers who I could see jumping down his throat for a simple word mis-use, when in truth I know he's one of the most damned open-minded people I have ever found in my entire life.

In truth, I really consider the two of them Queer, in the Capital Q, sexually, gender-bending, politically-speaking transgressive sense, independent of their heterosexual alignment and their lack of conscious identity with it. The tools we've built as queers to continue to explore and pursue our freedom and transcendence of social expectations, our body-radical ethics, and our sex-positive feminist socio-politics expand beyond our now insulated social circles; these truths are ever the more self-evident in how we live, and ever the more inaccessible to the larger populous. I don't make any claim today to open up our spaces, nor do I diminish the need for safety and community and places to harbor our radical selves in order to perpetuate in a micro-cosm this learning and growth. But I do worry that separatist mentality perpetuates. I know it's summer, which means it's Mich-fest-bashing season. The trans and male-hatred there is a vitriolic emblem of old world feminism, but I think this is the short-term issue, whereas the longer-term concern is the insular notion of the queer sub-culture. Where's the work to really thread into other ("straight") communities the self-empowering notion that we all hold transgressive bodies? Where's the fostering of a queer sex paradigm within a heterosexual partner configuration? Where's the affirmation for the like-minded who may just not have the language semantics and lexicon to grasp what words and triggers and which words are empowering? Do you really plan to eliminate someone from the movement because they may not realize they're flagging fisting switch with that bandana? Have you decided that someone is beyond the capacity to understand or contribute because uninformed they called themselves a bio-male, unaware of the bad blood the term conjures? Have we really still just reached a point to disparage so strongly to a presumably (presumption on OUR part) conventional sexual relationship since it does not fit within the 6,000 permutations of queer-identified, gender-bending, gender-fucking, sex-transgressing, gay-oriented, queer-fuckery and faggotry we get to see within our big queer walls?

I have to caveat this with the acknowledgment that I by no means organize nor do any particular community efforts, either to alleviate this or for queers in general. It's admittedly not necessarily my niche within any group of people, though I wonder if given the right concern...

Nonetheless, I haven't stumbled over much hetero-inclusion, and when I say this I mean beyond the realm of fag-hags and lesbros and your brother that came out to the dance party. I mean conscientious and concerted, organized efforts to queer the straights through education and community inclusion. And when I say queer I do mean Queer, because I'm not including signing on your mom and dad to support gay marriage or assimilationist shit. I'm not talking about homos signing up for the mainstream paradigm, and I'm not talking about making grandma reach a point of "tolerance" for faggots. I'm talking about transformation that extends into heterosexual spaces, those most conducive to it, those who may already actually BE queer in ways you may not initially perceive.

I'm sure its inevitable that someone will try to debunk my observed "rule" with an exception, but just because there's some evidence of someone out there making the attempt to do this work doesn't mean the strong line of separatism and resentment towards straight persons (particularly straight cis-men) isn't worth consideration and a closer look. And I think part of my frustration is not really having my own habits or drive to directly address this. I'm not that sort of social creature to run events and flyer and organize, as I really do take pleasure in being the wallflower finding joy in watching the ebb and flow of bodies and souls. But I do enjoy discourse, and questioning and having those with the energy and drive to build community give me some insight into whether they think about this or agree in any capacity.


- D