The Absurd Hellishness of My First Semi-Disgrace, Pt. I

[In addition to all of our awesome visible and identifying columnists, we also have some awesome anonymous columnists that for one reason or another must use a pseudonym (and pseudopic?). Details on anonymous columnists here.]

She will probably read this somehow, eventually, and it hardly matters—she knows, and has for some forty-eight hours.

I slept in my car last night. I had been offered plenty of beds, but fell asleep drunkenly slouched all the way down in the front seat of my car, and never bothered to respond to my benefactor’s text message inviting me in.

The library computer has a sixty minute time limit for personal use, and I don’t even have a membership card. My tremulous fingers retard the fever pitch of my thoughts and it’s hard to sit upright on this wooden stool on account of my hummingbird heart.

She has known for some forty-eight hours, but the corporeality of my semi-disgrace only emerged yesterday with the text message that broke her stony silence after locking herself in her room and slinking around in the background while I entertained friends in my home for

brunch:

“You may as well have reaped out my heart & then spit on me.”

There’s an odd inversion process when a child moves out of the home, whence the child’s parents graduate from abstractions and turn into real human beings, for all their successes and failures and malaise and turpentine gradations of consciousness and abject depravity.

Preceding this transformation a parent is merely a vessel of self-service, an artificial processing mechanism whom you love unequivocally and who serves you French toast before high school,

even waking up hours before their own work day to do so.

I had hoped for a reciprocal process, but the text message tells me better: I am still mere progeny, reflecting upon my mother the triumphs and inadequacies of her own imparted will on my being. Though it was she who insidiously found her way into my gmail account and read long, stream-of-consciousness messages forming the rough draft of my imminent Bildungsroman, and multitudinous uncensored anecdotes of my sexual experiences over the course of the last year, I am the aggressor here, thrusting her headfirst into her own naiveté and veritable nightmare, manifested in the candid prose of her devilish creation of four-limbed fleshfulness.

“Only God can forgive you for what are doing (sic).”

This couldn’t have happened two years ago, I wouldn’t have written about it. “I hope you are able to be proud of me again, though I can’t stake my happiness in that possibility,” was my SMS response. I can’t, and I can no longer deign to placate her in a guise of superreligious contrition. God cannot forgive me, nor do I desire forgiveness.

My instinct is rationality without succumbing to condescension; I dismissed the thought and replaced the word ‘rational’ with ‘calm’ in my text message, “I love you and can talk to you calmly when you’re ready.”

Rationality is secularism-cum-treachery in her universe and, despite having studied contemporary Hebrew Bible literary critique and history in my past semester at Duke, I should spare my insistent earnestness about the nature of the Bible—how its divine infallibility is a farce, how it’s teachings of worth—if any—are excluded from its grossly antiquated moralizing; how its social artifice is cruel and unbecoming of modern humanity in ways no lesser than it’s haughtily dismissed distant cousin Islam; how it has no conception of sexuality and speaks in only discrete terms of sex.

No of these ruminations will pass from my lips into her ear, even were I to scream them vociferously and hand her a bold-faced transcription replete with dictionary definitions of terms.

Having finished brunch in the highest of spirits, I sprighted up the staircase into my bedroom to retrieve my laptop and show my friends pictures from a recent vocation. The laptop was gone, in its place a Bible in a black slipcase with the acronym “WWJD” emblazoned in rubber pressed letters.

The last time this happened, condoms had been discovered from their hiding place in my bookcase. They had been used for women, then. I was sixteen.

“I can’t even bring myself to tell your father, who is so proud of you. “

The third and final line of her text message, and sum total of communication with me in the past forty-eight hours, is the only line without a grammatical error, and for my ESL-mother, this means she has pondered it most heavily.

And yet, it is nearly immaterial for me. I had divorced myself from my father’s approval in middle school, when I decided that I would retreat to a false projected identity in his presence—a typical response I feel, for those of us deeply wounded by our father’s inabilities to emote.

The timing is unfortunate, if inevitable—I had first desired economic solvency, a pragmatic consideration that could not be exaggerated; though my present hellishness is unexpected it is concretely unsurprising—twelve years ago my eldest sister revealed her nascent lesbianism. I want gather my courage, and resist effrontery, and be graceful. I want to articulate that, unlike my sister, I will not internalize feelings of self-loathing and “conviction” and become purged in a penitent religious catharsis that has maimed my sister’s soul and leaves her at impossible odds with her own identity.

I sat in a brew house last night celebrating a friend’s birthday, in the presence of at least four men whom I love dearly. No amount of rhetorical self-esteem-instilling-therapy can replace their investment and confidence and love for me, and the solidarity of their faithfulness —in no uncertain terms—presents to me a reality far more palpable and esteemed than even the foulest lapses of the (supposedly unconditional) parent-child contract my parents can possibly impart.

I can’t end this post with any modicum of resolution, because I have still yet to converse with or look upon my mother or father in the flesh, and am currently cherishing my self-imposed defection from home and hearth and the reverie of being “on the road.”

—tbc ,

Eric Fürst

Elena Kagan, Lesbians, and Women's Sports Stereotypes

Back in May President Obama nominated current Solicitor General Elena Kagan to be the next United States Supreme Court Justice. Kagan, if confirmed by the Senate, will replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens.

Following her nomination, the news reported several key findings about her background. In addition to mostly being unsure of her stance on many issues, since she has never presided as a judge over a case, the media reported that Kagan has never married, has no children, played softball and has short hair. Well, the later of those one has to discern for themselves, which isn’t hard to do given her photo accompanies many of the articles (as it should/would for any other candidate). Nonetheless, the information is out there: She is "unmarried." She is not a mom. She has short hair. She played softball.

I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean. I mean, I know what I’m supposed to conclude. The media wants me to think that she is gay (an obvious deduction…not). Call me stupid, but I don’t really understand why those facts lead to that conclusion. These details don’t reveal to me any information about to whom she is sexually attracted.

I can’t isolate her history with softball from the other information of being unmarried or having short hair to make any assertion about the role her athlete status has on this suspicion. If she hadn’t been involved with sports, but was unmarried, without kids and had short hair, the same rumors would likely be circulating. And, if she were Jennie Finch (two-time Softball Olympic medalist), who with long blonde hair, a husband and an infant epitomizes the feminine construct, playing softball would probably not be seen as a marker for her sexual orientation. But in Kagan’s case, when all of these forces combine, a lot of people will have a hard time divorcing them from her perceived sexual orientation.

The softball storyline came out just the day after Kagan was nominated when a photo splashed across the front pageof Tuesday May 11th’s Wall Street Journal. It almost seems to me that this softball thing is supposed to be the icing on the cake, convincing people she’s gay. Like, “If yesterday you thought she was a lesbian…congratulations, you’re right! She is! Because look, she played softball!”

I don’t have to tell the readers of this blog that whether one is an athlete or not doesn’t mean anything about one’s sexuality and the assertion that it does is absolutely ludicrous. What it does tell us, though, is that she’s a competitor (even if only in a friendly way), she understands the value of teamwork and…get this: SHE LIKES SPORTS. (Is this really such a revolutionary conclusion?) Let’s not forget that Obama is a big basketball fan (he even attended the Duke-Georgetown men’s basketball game in January), but that only makes him “cool.” [sigh; double standards.]

I don’t know what to make of the fact that Kagan played other sports, yet softball was the one the media really latched onto. While completing graduate school at Oxford, Kagan was a coxswain (the small person who functions like the coach in rowing). She also played in pickup basketball games while clerking for the Supreme Court. What does it mean, though, that both of these other experiences were largely ignored in favor of softball? Does coxing pose less of a threat to patriarchy and therefore isn’t deemed to be as unfeminine because it’s not a physically exerting task? After all, the coxswain role is more analytical than anything else. But what about basketball? The stereotypes and stigmas surrounding women in basketball can be pretty harsh. Is something about softball “more gay?” [Aside: I don’t really believe in the construction of some things being ‘gay things.’ I use this language merely because I’m trying to understand how everyone else perceives different activities.]

In any case, this scenario is merely another example of the frequently tense relationship between the gay community and women’s sport. There is this stereotype which exists and like most stereotypes, there is some truth to it. By that I mean, some gay women have and continue to play sports. The problem is that this stereotype is seen as “damaging.” And I can't really argue with that on a practical level. In a homophobic culture (which ours tends to be), things associated with the LGBT community are negatively affected (even if they shouldn't be). This stigma is especially problematic when, like women's sports, the institution requires money to function and therefore relies on a capitalistic business model. It's equally problematic when the individuals affiliated with this institution feel the need to "protect" their image. What ends up happening as a result of this, though, is that the “higher ups” in women’s sport and many participating athletes seem to deny that gay women participate in athletics--which is just bad all around.

Because the truth is: some gay women play sports. Just like some straight women play sports. Some bi women play sports. Some transwomen play sports. Some tall women play sports. And some short women. And some brunettes. And blondes. And Protestants. And Catholics. And Jews. And Muslims. And...well, you get the picture.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that...I can't wait for the day when mainstream media and the rest of society finally come to understand that you can’t extrapolate anything about someone’s sexual orientation based on athletic preferences.

[For the record, Elena Kagan identifies as straight.]