Shame – humanconditioned

Just To Clarify, It Is Your Fault

January 29, 2021RobertLeave a comment

Spoilers for It’s A Sin

There is a beautiful moment at the end of It’s A Sin, Russell T. Davies’ new series exploring the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, when Jill Baxter confronts Valerie Tozer, mother of her best friend Ritchie, who died the day before from AIDS. As well as not telling Jill when it happened, Valerie also made it impossible for her to see Ritchie and say goodbye. In response, Jill tells Valerie that it’s all her fault – the lack of support Ritchie had around his sexuality throughout his life, the shame he lived with about his sexuality, how that shame kept him sleeping with other men and passing on the virus. “Actually it is your fault, Mrs Tozer. All of this is your fault.”

I agree.

I shall not specify who the you of this blog post is because I hope you know if you’re the sort of person who does not champion and support the LGBTQ+ community and makes our lives harder be it through ignorance, indifference, antipathy, prejudice, bigotry and/or violence. Whether you are the sort of person who espouses transphobic views or shames men who have anal sex. Whether you think non-binary people are simply confused about their gender or that bisexual people don’t exist. Whether you think queer people deserve to burn in hell or are welcome in your congregation so long as they tone it down. For these things and more you form part of a long legacy of queerphobia that has killed thousands and thousands and thousands of LGBTQ+ people.

The suicide statistics. The self-loathing. The homelessness. The depression. Loneliness. Anxiety. Fear. Shame. Trauma. Isolation. Self-harm. It is your fault. You make us hate ourselves or you simply ignore us so we think we are invisible and worthless. You tokenise and stereotype us. You feign largesse by letting a few of the ‘not so bad’ ones have a seat at your table. You take pride that there aren’t any gays in your family. You silence transgender voices with your transphobia. You still say bad stuff’s gay. You steal our stories and tell them badly. You turn the homophobia of the 1980s into the transphobia of today. You say we are a threat to children. You make the quest for Queertopia next to impossible by decimating, over and over again, the efforts we LGBTQ+ people make to build community. Some of you don’t. Some of you are beautiful & brilliant and I couldn’t live without you but this post isn’t for you.

I don’t want to exchange the shame you give for more shame. I don’t want you to feel worthless and miserable but I want you to stop killing us, literally and metaphorically. I need you to take responsibility for your actions and inactions and I need you to learn. It’s too late – for so many – but there is still time. It’s too late – fascism is alive and well – but there is still time. Take the blame, then turn it into something better. Make this blog post redundant. You can start by watching It’s A Sin.

Does Watching Gilmore Girls Make U Homo?

December 4, 2018RobertLeave a comment

This website is a WordPress one and as the administrator I get to check out the back end. There, I can look at how many people have (or haven’t) read my latest post, I can edit my draft posts and I can even discover what search terms people have used to find this site. I’m not quite sure how this works but I guess it has something to do with Google. Search terms that have been used include: “anal sex is disgusting”, “anal sex is for the selfish and self absorbed”, “princess fierce faggot”, “hufflepuff rebranding”, “tomato images”, “liam fox utter twat”, “you tube smack me on the bottom with a woman’s weekly” and the title of this post: does watching Gilmore Girls Make U Homo?

It’s an interesting question, not least because of the proposed correlation between sexuality and Gilmore Girls but the idea that watching something can make someone homosexual. For example, at what point would a heterosexual person (and I’m assuming a male or maybe a concerned partner, parent, Priest etc) become homosexual? Would watching one episode be enough or would it have to be a whole season or every single episode ever, including those awful new ones? And how would the process work? Would said heterosexual man suddenly find himself exclusively attracted to men or would it take a bit longer as he gradually starts to find his male mates hotter than his female ones? As you can see, there’s a lot going on in one simple question.

Clearly homophobia is something going on here as the implication is that being homo is bad (unless this straight person yearns to be gay and is trying to figure out a way of changing). There’s shame and repression going on here as men’s sexuality tends to be marked as rigid – straight or gay, with bisexual men either being confused or greedy – and a deviation from that rigidity, rather than being something exciting, is seen as shameful and negative, and regularly violently repressed. There’s misogyny going on here as the assumption is that for a man to watch a show with two female protagonists is so emasculating that it alters his sexuality, which is nearly as bad as being a woman. There’s the assumption that it’s easy to label sexuality, as if one can point at an occurrence, e.g. two men holding hands, and say “gay”. Or two lads drinking beer together and chatting about birds, “straight”. Or a guy watching Gilmore Girls, “homo”. Yet I think these acts of labelling tell us more about the finger pointer and the culture they live in than anyone’s sexuality and I think it’s worth exploring that culture and its labelling further. Now, here’s the closest I could find to a coming out story on Gilmore Girls.

The Poem In My Pants

December 18, 2017RobertLeave a comment

Last Thursday evening I was downstairs at Ku Bar in Soho for the last Let’s Talk Gay Sex & Drugs open mic night hosted by Pat Cash. I’ve been a few times and it’s ace (so is Pat). There’s usually a theme and everyone gets five minutes to do whatever they like – read a poem, sing a song, speak from the heart, plug a show, all sorts. I’ve tended to read short stories, something poignant about my experience of queerness and the queer community in 2017. I’ve usually edited and practised the story a lot in advance and love it when I get applauded at the end. The thing is though, I’ve kinda been hiding behind my stories, only revealing myself through the odd metaphor and simile. So last week I thought I would expose myself, which is why I stripped to my pants and read a poem.

I did this for many reasons. Firstly, for those of you who don’t know Ku Bar, whilst it’s a fab gay bar, it’s also the case that each topless barman is basically a model and all the TV screens project images of hunky men with 8-packs. If you have any hang ups about your body it’s not the easiest of places to be. So bearing my hairy shoulders and my lack of a 6-pack, felt like a political act in itself. For too long I’ve cared about what others think of my body and I’ve projected my insecurities at people I think are hotter than me. I assume the world has only judgemental eyes and is critiquing every hair and mark on my body. But when I was up there reading my poem I stopped caring and just enjoyed my five minutes. If there were people in the audience thinking that I have an awful body or that I’m ugly, then that’s their problem because I imagine they still believe in a conception of beauty that prioritises toned, white, male bodies over all other forms of body. And to that iteration of beauty, I call bullshit.

I am done with the beauty pyramid that ranks us in leagues and fills us all with shame and self-loathing – whether that shame takes us to the gym everyday to work on our abs or that shame means we don’t go clubbing anymore because of the way people have treated for how we look. Instead, I think beauty is for everyone. We are all beautiful and we must give ourselves permission to be. Simultaneously, we must also give others permission to be beautiful no matter how ‘far’ they are from the norm of beauty we’ve been brought up on. Love goes both ways, as does shame, and I’d far rather be able to look myself in the mirror and like the person staring back at me while also letting myself have off days, be unattractive and just to be human. And yes, challenging and changing beauty norms is not easy and there is so much work to do but maybe it starts with shamelessly (and safely) showing ourselves to the world. In essence, I got on that podium for me – to turn all these ideas about beauty into an act, the act of stripping to my pants and reading a poem. Now I’ve done it, I don’t fear it so much, and maybe I’ll do it again.