QUEER QUISLINGS

SUMMARY: the flap over how a Longmont, Colorado charter school refused to allow gay valedictorian Evan Young to disclose his sexual orientation in a graduation speech has lit up the Internet and social media, calling forth a firestorm of comments. The school has sought to spin the whole thing as something akin to the act of a radical faerie hijacking the graduation celebration to push some kind of dangerous homosexual agenda. That straight people would buy into such a narrative is not surprising, but what’s even worse is when queerfolk do so as well. Yet, as much as Norwegian homegrown Nazi Vidkun Quisling made his name synonymous with the word “traitor,” the queer quislings who took up the cudgels against Evan have made their own point of view synonymous with self-loathing, Stockholm Syndrome nastiness.   It's more than a little disheartening how many of the same queerfolk who lionized Caitlyn Jenner for courageously telling her truth lined up to excoriate Evan Young for telling his.

In recent days, there has been some controversy concerning Evan Young, the gay valedictorian of the graduating class of Twin Peaks Academy, a Longmont, Colorado charter school.

Apparently, school administrators objected to Evan’s plan to disclose in his graduation speech that he is gay. School administrators, also apparently realizing at the 13th hour how poor were the optics of their action, circled the metaphorical wagons, and appreciating that “the best defense is a strong offense,” engaged in the classic American rape culture enterprise of victim blaming, asserting that Evan had tried to hijack the event to push some kind of radical homosexual agenda, and that he had “bad character.”

Needless to say, the Internet and social media both lit up when news broke of what had transpired. Indeed, on social media, the comment threads soon became long and contentious. Most of the comments on the threads concerning the story were very supportive of Evan, and took the charter school to serious task over what appeared to be a gratuitous and homophobic decision by the school principal.

Nonetheless, the school’s effort to spin the narrative in its own favor was not completely without success. A fair number of commenters weighed in repeating variations on a common trope, that Evan had been selfish, narcissistic, or just plain wicked in “hijacking” the event to push some kind of “radical homosexual agenda.”

Repeated over and over again, such sentiments soon became an example of what American psychologist Robert Lifton referred to in his monograph on brainwashing in Red China, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, as a “thought-terminating cliché,” where a commonly accepted phrase or trope winds up being rhetorically invoked as a substitute for real argument. In short, the thought-terminating cliché is a kind of metonym, a shorthand for a concept or line of argument. In this case, the repeated invocation of the trope “not the right time and not the right place,” essentially became a cover for another, more dangerous trope: “shut up, faggot.”

Now in terms of straight people commenting on these various threads, invocation of such a trope comes as no surprise at all. A lot of the angriest rhetoric against the queer nation still comes from fearful straight people. But what has been worse is to see on these comment threads people who identify as queer eagerly embracing the charter school’s narrative. Those people, those queer critics, put me in mind of Norwegian homegrown Nazi Vidkun Quisling, whose surname has become synonymous with the word traitor. (“A gift,” the London Times chuckled editorially in 1940, “from the gods.”) Embracing the charter school’s narrative, if you happen to be queer, is problematic for a number of reasons beyond just the fact that to be a queer quisling is simply inadmissible on its terms.

First, queer quislings embracing the charter school’s narrative display and demonstrate lamentable ignorance not only of queer history, but also of the larger history of the American body politic. When Rosa Parks, that “uppity Negress,” had the effrontery to ride in the front of a Montgomery, Alabama bus, many in the African-American community criticized her for upsetting the apple cart at the wrong time and in the wrong place. Such people also were critical of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for his role in the Montgomery bus boycott that followed.

By the same token, a lot of older, more established homosexuals got themselves into hand-wringing, pearl-clutching paroxysms of prim, proper upset over the fact that it was largely drag queens and gay street kids (“not our kind, dear”) who had dared to defy the NYPD at Stonewall. That queerfolk would attack Evan for the same reason that so-called responsible Negroes in Montgomery or that the tame, respectable queer quisling homosexuals of Manhattan would have launched their barbs at Rosa Parks or at the drag queens and gay street kids of Stonewall displays an almost horrifying, terrifying ignorance of our queer history.

Second, excoriating Evan for having the courage to speak his truth reflects a kind of indifference to privilege that necessarily gives the queer nation a bad name. We have come an astonishingly long way since Stonewall. It may be that this very month, SCOTUS will rule that the United States Constitution guarantees that the right to marry extends to same gender couples. Who would have thought such a thing possible in 1969 when the street kids and the drag queens misbehaved at Stonewall? But for the tame, domesticated homosexuals, the queer quislings who think Evan Young was “too over-the-top,” a little knowledge of history and privilege ought to have militated against their saying such foolish things. 

For our struggle is by no means over, and as more than one fellow trench fighter and queer activist has reminded me, we are always, always, always in the fight of our political lives. Yet the queer quislings, the tame ones, the Uncle Toms, the strident queer critics of Evan Young’s heroic graduation speech, seem far too ready to take our progress for granted, never being willing to acknowledge that progress does not depend upon tame, quiet acquiescence in existing dispensations.

 Progress depends on truth tellers and hell raisers and bomb throwers, and if the queer quislings, the Stockholm Syndrome sisters, the fearful-of-straight-displeasure homosexuals who vented their vials of vitriol on Evan Young have forgotten that essential reality, then they have only themselves to blame when straight America turns upon them and re-consigns them to second-class citizenship, to the back of the American bus, or to the fearful confines of the closet.

Third, Evan Young’s homosexual and bisexual critics seem to have lost touch with what we still regard as the cardinal American virtue of truth telling.  They’ve forgotten the importance of truth tellers and whistle blowers; they’ve also forgotten how much we owe to those hell raisers and bomb throwers. In a military context, for example (and here I invoke the experience of the Marine Corps, which places an extremely high premium on a culture of truth telling), the importance of truth telling can often be summed up in five simple words: when leaders lie, Marines die.

Of course, it’s not just Marines who die when leaders lie. And a lie can be a lie of silence as much is it can be a lie of affirmative misrepresentation. During the horrifying, scarifying, terrifying early years of the AIDS crisis, activist groups such as ACT-UP hit on a very simple graphic message, Silence = Death, to convey the reality that refusing to talk about AIDS helped to facilitate the transmission of the disease. Having lived through that Ragnarok time, I internalized that message right down to the marrow of my bones. In a sword age, an ax age, a wind age, a wolf age, truth telling, while sometimes “icky” to the excessively polite and the priggishly purblind, may be the only thing that ensures survival.

But it is not just the survival of the body with which we must be concerned; we must also be mindful of the survival of the soul. For the soul is constrained to lie, the soul will die. Where the soul is constrained to silence, it will languish, and where it languishes, it cannot live. For Evan Young to speak his truth was not selfish, it was not an act of hijacking, it was not an imposition upon those who had expected him to speak the truth.  It was an unapologetic affirmation of life and truth. For in truth is life, and as Scripture reminds us, “the truth will set you free.” John 8:32.

Indeed, on the subject of truth telling, I find it a little disturbing how many people who have condemned Evan for courageously daring to tell his truth have rallied to and lionized Caitlyn Jenner for having the courage to tell her truth. I don’t think you get to lionize Caitlyn and line up to abuse Evan without having to face justified criticism for being a two-faced hypocrite. Caitlyn and Evan have both told their truths, and, as St. John once wrote, it has set both of them free.

 And because it is so important to tell our truths and set our souls free, queerfolk dare not succumb to the temptation of seeing silence as a luxury in which we may profitably indulge, for what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Mark 8:36. Our queer souls are not for sale; they are not to be silenced to assuage the discomfort of the oppressor, even if the oppressor is a Stockholm Syndrome homosexual.

Fourth, one of the things that truly disturbed me, given how our movement for queer civil rights has so often been riven by gender cleavages, was the stridency of some of the lesbian condemnation of Evan Young’s truth telling. Indeed, the stridency of some of the comments from a relatively small, but vocal, minority of the lesbian commentators on social media was such as to cause me to wonder whether some of this small, vocal, minority of queer women had taken leave of their senses.

Now I don’t want anyone to jump to an automatically gendered conclusion that I am necessarily trying to “mansplain,” using male privilege to engage in an equally gendered enterprise of telling the women to be quiet. But to a certain extent, I do find much of the gendered criticism of Evan to be in a sense almost an expression of resentment that Evan, as a gay man, remains “privileged” as a male to say and do things which many lesbians still hesitate to contemplate even today. “How dare that privileged man do things which we unprivileged women can’t?”

In such a thought process is a kind of self-disempowering, self-deceiving self-identification as victim. Somehow, it appears that in the view of some of that small, vocal, minority of angry lesbians who took out after Evan Young with metaphorical pitchforks and torches, Evan is “guilty” of contributing to the male victimization of women.  What makes Evan “guilty” of this gendercrime?  Let us shame the devil and tell the truth: Evan’s gendercrime was to occupy a truth-telling, prophetic, shamanic space that as a male he is comfortable occupying.  And to that small minority of angry lesbians with their pitchforks and torches, that makes Evan “guilty” of “asserting male privilege.”

For the truth telling space, the prophetic space, and the shamanic space have often been traditionally regarded as gendered, male-privileged places where women have not been encouraged to go, much less occupy. Indeed, through much of our history the role of the truth teller, the prophet, or the shaman has often been viewed in a gendered way as fundamentally masculine.

Because Evan went there and occupied without apology those gendered places, it does appear that some of the angrier lesbians on these comment threads have got a beef with him that can only be expressed by these women identifying themselves very publicly with the oppressor, with the one who confronts, with the one who silences. We may therefore conclude, at least tentatively, that any male in Evan Young’s position would have become an equally objectionable target in the gender wars. Apparently, the sin of “male privilege” outweighs the social virtues of courage and truth-telling, and justifies censorious queerfolk ranging themselves alongside the oppressor.

Yet, when all has been said and done, and when the sound and the fury are over, we may still take encouragement from the fact that rather more people seem to be standing with Evan Young to uplift him than seem to be standing against him to constrain him to silence. We may take encouragement from the support that has come Evan’s way for his truth-telling, his prophecy, his shamanry. It is not given that often to straight people to be truth tellers, prophets, shamans even; that space is often a place for Others, for those of us whose world is simply different.

Yet, we who are queer or gender nonconforming must, at some point in our lives, be all three, truth tellers, prophets, and shamans. To come out, whether as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or —-- as Caitlyn Jenner did so amazingly courageously the other day --— as transgendered, involves an act of existential truth telling that no one who has not done so him- or herself can ever truly comprehend.

To come out, to say those simple words “I’m gay,” or “I’m a lesbian,” or “call me Caitlyn,” is also to engage in real, authentic prophecy: because queerfolk and trans people are not alone in that endowed state of being; the role of prophet falls to us precisely because we are not alone, but rather parts of a unique and special community; we thus owe a duty of candor and of disclosure and of encouragement to the still-closeted and the un-transitioned. It is our duty to pay it forward by making it possible for our closeted or untransitioned brothers and sisters openly and forthrightly to live their truths, too. I daresay my own personal experience of coming out was probably made significantly easier by having close family members who had come out before me, and by having parents who had a large circle of queer friends.

Moreover, while my own knowledge of the transgendered community is imperfect, for I see as through a glass darkly, 1 Cor. 13:12, I think I can safely guess that, notwithstanding all the talk of privilege and politics that has accompanied her transition, Caitlyn Jenner will still be a beacon of hope to individuals wrestling with the existential question of their own gender identity.

So, even if gay valedictorian Evan Young has only a Warholian 15 minutes of fame, or even if at some future point he proves to have feet of clay, this week, he has been our teacher, reminding us that our queer struggle is yet incomplete, and that we still have “substantial additional work,” Bush v. Gore (2000) 531 U.S. 98 at 110, to do within our own community to ensure that we are neither so ignorant nor so complacent nor so gendered that we cannot rally around the next queer kid who is silenced or censored for daring to speak an existential truth that must now dare to speak its name, without quibbling from queer quislings.

Let us tell our truths boldly, for they will set us free.

-xxx-