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

Eric Fürst

[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.]

I tend to squirm uncomfortably in my seat when someone inquires point blank about my sexuality, and not because I’m bashful. It’s just that I have to make a quick decision, and it usually depends on: how drunk I am, how long I want the conversation to last, and the hotness of the person asking. In some cases I’d rather be seen than heard. So yes I can be a Big Fucking Hypocrite. But beyond it all I’m trying to avoid using a word I find most unsavory—bisexual. Primarily, it wrongly supposes two standards of sexual expression apart from this intermediary. And then there’s that annoying idiom, that bisexuality is merely a way station for gayness. I heard a friend (entirely oblivious to my recent sexplorations) parrot this belief, and made a mental note to postpone any divulgence of the kind. And in my flirtations with the periphery of Duke’s LGBT community, I’ve been surprised to observe the wariness with which the “B” is tolerated; I sometimes feel that it’s given obligatory lip service for the sake of community but not necessarily true solidarity. I guess it’s difficult to embrace a sexual category comprised of participants who embrace categorical uncertainty.

This perception of bisexuals can be expressed in mainstream terms: straight people think they’re hiding something and gay people view them skeptically for not fully fulfilling (or maybe half-rejecting?) their gayness. If a straight man has sex with a man he is commonly considered gay, closeted, or bisexual. If a gay man has sex with a woman, is his sexuality questioned so?

I’m going to take some stabs at deconstructing this rationale. Kinsey may be an easier starting point but I think it’s a misunderstanding of the more complex social construction theories that lost popularity in the last two decades, as the gay rights movement surged and activism was badly needed as the AIDS crisis emerged. The threat that these views posed was misinterpreting sexual orientation as mere “preference.” If this was the case, the conservative opposition could dub homosexuality a choice. Then, what’s wrong with asking someone to choose different, especially if this gay option is so strongly correlated with the frightening emergence of a new disease? This idea of preference can be especially pungent when applied to bisexuality. One might assume that most bisexual men would rather—if their sexuality really was so subjective—spend their lives in a monogamous heterosexual relationship—the kind that allows identity conformity, minimized discrimination, greater sexual health, and of course, the possibility of natural procreation.

With subversion a more enlightening (or at least more daring) end than conformity, I’d probably be interested in a sexual regimen more strictly homosexual than heterosexual. But as it is, I’m happy to traipse through the nebulous grays, confusing some and delighting my own ADD tendencies. Still, it’s easy to envision adopting some monogamous gay lifestyle characteristics. I can think of several male friends with whom I wouldn’t mind signing a lease, and—perhaps unsurprisingly—I don’t exactly subscribe to the notion of heterosexual couples as the gold standard of child rearing. Yet, the thought of homosexual monogamy, from my point of view, is more restrictive than heterosexual monogamy is boring.

Anyway, construction theory doesn’t really discredit the validity of these singularly-oriented referents insofar as individuals derive personal meaning and community from them; it merely challenges the notion that this language actually defines something intrinsic in the way that physical characteristics are thought to be an expression of alleles coded intrinsically in one’s DNA. To me, sexuality hardly makes sense as a phenotype. Sexuality in its essence must account not only for intrinsic desires and orientations but also choices made on the basis of free will, which ultimately has a large stake in the gender of partners whom we seek to bed.

I would further counter that by discrediting this theory, you are not only embracing the mainstream gay rights movement, but also the rote categorization by which people dismiss, abuse, and misunderstand the deeds of others. It may be contrary to the simplicity of mantras like, “We’re here, we’re queer!”, but I think there’s an importance to understanding unconventional sexualities and resisting the compulsion to categorize. Even if one’s experience isn’t specifically covered by the LGBTQAI (etc) umbrella, in the end, it’s going to be phobias regarding otherness that drive policy and retard progress more than any pragmatic concern for the individual, or disease, or equality. For me, it’s an important exercise in unlearning the illusory differences and embracing a more dynamic conception of “self”—an exhilarating and exhausting work-in-progress with no foreseeable end.

So forgive me if, the next time I’m sitting with you in a bar, I try to avoid the word vomit above by just saying “I’m not straight”...it might mean that I think you’re cute.

—Eric Fürst

P.S. Please disagree with me. I’ve assumed an annoyingly didactic tone that I wouldn’t typically use in real life, in an effort to stoke some dissent.

Letter From The Editor: Anonymous Columnists

I think a major strength of our site, and something that differentiates it from its predecessor is complete absence of anonymity of our staff writers. When redesigning the blog in the Fall, we decided that the use of pseudonyms connoted that there was sense of fear among Us, and that couldn't be further from the truth. To reiterate our mission statement, we are not afraid, and we feel safe here. We've gotten so much positive feedback from people that have commended the openness of the writers, and this comment is pretty much Sentence Of The Year for me. The Out Community is blowing up on campus, and I feel as if all of these pictures and full names effectively convey that.

We were not so stupid, though, to think that everyone would be willing to be so visible. Our goal is to effectively and honestly capture what life at Duke and in America is like for LGBTQA students, and this cannot be done without also providing a podium for our closeted peers or those who just could not be as open were they writing under their full name. We set up the anonymous posting system to address this, and it's been hugely successful. 65 entries since November 9 is so many entries!

But! But. I think we may've overlooked a major possibility - that some of our out friends in BDU, more than willing to display their full name and picture, would not be able to out of fear of repercussions at home. A quick Google search of a columnist's name+"Duke" would lead here, and could very well mean a cutting off of tuition funds by parents for some or a revoking of scholarship by ROTC for others. As valued, awesome and all-the-more important as their visibility on the blog would be, it would not be worth being disowned or financially cut off. I know some that would argue otherwise and I understand their point of view, but I'm going to stick by this one.

At the last blog meeting, though, we all agreed that we should find a way to include the voices of those who were still willing to be regular columnists. Our current anonymous posting structure is not conducive to the frequency or length of columns, and I personally don't like the connotation of putting longer entries in a separate post like I did last week. So from now on (starting today) we will have some anonymous columnists.

Here's what I'm worried about. I don't want Readers to assume that anonymous columnists are not sharing their name out of fear of being out on campus. This is no doubt the case for many Duke students, and may even be the case for some anonymous staffers in the future, but I urge y'all to recognize that the choice to not identify one's self is not necessarily a reflection of campus culture (however discouraging campus culture can be). More often, I'm finding, this is a testament to what life's like back home.

Anyhow! While this seems like an obvious solution, it was a decision and precedent we had to discuss quite a bit. Like I said, pseudonyms didn't work too well on the old blog, but I'm confident that we will differ in our huge volume of identified writers that'll be right alongside :)

Okay! Let's do this!