This weekend, for the first time in a few years, I traveled from San Francisco to St. Louis to see my immediate family. My parents, reaching un certain âge, are in the midst of a move from a nostalgic old brick house with narrow walk-ups to a cavernously modern condo with homeowner’s association fees that strike me, the San Franciscan renter, as either exorbitant or aspirational. Mom, deflecting her feelings and anxieties into logistics as usual, has been abuzz about the boxes of old documentation of our childhood development. Are you taking the pictures back with you? Do you want your old report cards? Have you taken a look yet? How much do you think you can get on the plane? Conflict avoidant as always, I took my dutiful look through the boxes of report cards, trophies, Polaroids, and forced childhood handiwork trinkets. All I can think these days—now the Queer Theorist pretender, the tattooed leatherboy, the Castro dweller—when confronted with these excreta of my lower middle-class Midwestern childhood is, “Gosh, what a little faggot.” I texted that to my boyfriend alongside these images. “How did no one ever say anything?” I think now, as I look at the little boy next to grinning proud kindergarten mother figures, the little boy holding his wrist a little limp and angled next to the jungle gym, the little boy with A+’s in all his academic subjects and B-‘s in PE every quarter they tried to make me move my graceless awkward little body into gymnastic shapes, the little boy beaming too brightly next to the butcher less smiley boys I crushed on, the little boy growing dour and pathologically shy of smiling in the too-early adolescence where I couldn’t stop noticing all the other boys around me.
But of course, that wasn’t the only little boy I was. Sorting through the box, I chose the photos I found most striking, most confirming of myself as I see me now. I trashed all the photos of me in straighter nerdy attitudes, in plain colorless Kohl’s garb, in various poses of sports. I curated these slices of my past so that they comprised the piechart of myself as I see me now. This isn’t an experience unique to queers by any means—the experiences of racialized and migrant people come to mind, and I am certain everyone can to some degree claim analogous types of experiences—but it’s one of the more mundane and profound things to come out of Queer Theory. Queers don’t grow up surrounded by narratives of the future selves we’ll become. And there’s a weird temporality to our experience of identity where an identity we achieve only when we’re older becomes an interpretive key that rewrites the narrative of our pasts. The American Dream story—the working hard and wooing a partner and owning property and generating 1.8 children and raising them to share and soothe your unrealized desires and neuroses and collecting enough wealth to retire somewhere where you can keep your and your children’s resentments a healthy distance apart—ain’t a gay one. Queers instead get to a point where we’re able to put a word to all those desires that could be read off our awkward limbs and high voices and little obsessions. That word, “gay,” can seem like it makes sense of all the things that didn’t fit. It becomes an origin story, a key to everything. Suddenly we can make sense of a whole confusing hurtful past and look forward to a future unbounded by those straight development stories. But in projecting ourselves back, in turning something we learn about ourselves in later life into a retrospective origin story, we may also risk reducing all the potentialities of our pasts into a narrative just as romantic as that American Dream. Did I pose hand on hip, wrist akimbo, when I was five because I was always destined to become this cliché of a San Francisco gay quasi-separatist? Does every sign I gave off in the past point inevitably to this present? Would I have been repressing myself, condemned to a life of unexpressed longing, if I’d never found kink and leather in San Francisco, when I look back at what a dense site of erotic longing and fantasy the school’s urinal represented when I hit puberty at 11 and remember the time the boy I loved in high school asked if he could piss on me and I said yes? Or have I done a violence to the past in retrospectively assigning those events instrumental meaning as a part of my growth into my present sexual tastes and communities, rather than remembering them the way they meant to me then (thrilling, scary, supersaturated with shame, a deflection of what I really wanted into the best I could get). Do I kill off other me’s, other selves I could have grown into, other possibilities with nothing to do with my sexual desires or their coherence into an “identity,” in looking at this archive and having the first way I think to make sense of it be, “Gosh, what a little faggot I was”?
The question of origin stories is a knotty one when it comes to thinking about gender and sexual liberation and the pitfalls and possibilities of identity politics. Some have found a sort of beautiful freedom to fail, to not live up to, to choose otherwise in the lack of pre-prescribed narratives of development for gender and sexual misfits. This takes its most extreme form in the queer theorist Lee Edelman, who declares the power of queerness is to dissolve identity and narrative categories altogether, to be perpetual misfits whose oddities resist all possibility of becoming part of society with its families and communities. A whole strain of this kind of thought praises all breakdown of narratives and labels. Labels and narratives are inevitably an expression of social power over the endless possibilities of the individual, this way of thinking would claim. To put a name and a story to it is to assimilate, to give in to the very powers that conspired to oppress us in the first place. We should get comfortable with the discomfort of not fitting in, of not being able to put a word to it, of not being able to imagine a pre-existing future for ourselves. But of course, many actual queers have found an important resource in finally being able to put a name and a story to the thing that’s always troubled their past. Finally, those of us always jutting out awkwardly in those photos of nice family life have a word to put to that awkwardness, and with that word, an immediate history and community of other misfits we can lay claim to. With that, we can make sense of our past hurts and awkwardness and begin moving toward a future life that will redeem them. Coming out, even just to yourself, immediately puts you in touch with the shared experiences of a lot of other lonely boys. But the radical queer theorists of course have a point: this search for origins can become compulsive and reductive. To have a claim to an identity, do I have to scrutinize my past for these signs of gender infelicity and proto-same-sex attraction? Was everything that made me a sad kid my family called “Eeyore” just a prelude to my gayness, a pain that would remain unredeemed without that felicitous move to San Francisco’s well-defined gay subcultures? Aren’t there other origin stories I can put to it, and with them different implied futures and identities and social lives: nerd, neuroatypical, white man, rural kid, class striver?
One concrete way that I think these opposing camps play out is in the present-day exertion of activist energies toward demanding media representation of the stories of politically salient identity groups. The antidote to the straightness of The American Dream is to make movies about The Gay American Dream. I’ve always been of two minds about these demands. On the one hand, I think that, far from the accusations that these were narcissistic demands to see oneself reflected back in art rather than to engage with otherness, or that they diffused the energy fueling the material struggle for better laws and economic conditions toward merely cultural and symbolic struggles, there is a true political demand in these campaigns. I think it’s pretty easy to dispense with Freud and his baggage, but one thing psychoanalysis taught us seems irrefutably valuable to me: fantasy bears far more heavily on our material personal, political, and social lives than we can fathom. Our fantasies about our futures are shaped by the narratives we encounter in media and social life. Those fantasies in turn shape our desires: we must be able to imagine something to want it. Being able to put labels and stories to our desires makes it possible for us to enact them. And it makes it possible for us to form communities around our shared desires who can support one another in their enactment. And those who don’t share our desires need those narratives, too, to make those desires intelligible to them and recognize the political demands of those unlike themselves as political demands. I can’t begin to convey how thoroughly it changed my desires and the decisions I made to realize them when I finally met middle aged gay men who were happy, with lives that did not fall into the marriage-assimilation-and-suburbs or single-loneliness-and-isolation after thirty that were the only stories I grew up with. On the other hand, it’s impossible to ignore how much these demands for representation in media resemble the business practice of “market segmentation.” As anyone who’s worked in business strategy or marketing will tell you, a critical process in optimizing capitalist profiteering is to carve up your market into discrete groups that share essential needs, identify those needs, and find ways to supply them (or at least to represent your company as supplying them). There’s a way in which these demands can de-politicize themselves by simply asking businesses to market better. Please, take my identity and sell it back to me in simplified, alienated, mass-consumable form is a funny form for political demands to take.
The obvious answer, of course, is that labels and origin stories and developmental narratives do both: they constrain, they limit, they are selective, they foreclose possibilities, they exert systemic power on individuals; they also enable us to give meaning to meaningless suffering, to make those experiences shareable with others, who might have the resources to help us imagine and achieve a future we find more livable. The simple answer I think is to say that we should tell stories about ourselves and our identities that do the latter things and not the former things. That’s noble, and certainly we can tell better stories about race and gender and sexuality than the ones that we’ve been given. But I think it’s wishful thinking that we’ll ever erase the constraints and achieve a blissfully labelless future utopia. The more difficult, and I think more accurate, point is that those two sides of labels, identity, and narratives are in fact one whole. To live socially, to be able to share your experiences with others, is to accept constraints on your possible selves. We need labels and stories to make ourselves meaningful to other people, even though they will always leave something out. The utopia of labelless, identity-less queer radicalism that Lee Edelman imagines sounds, to me, like hell. Indeed, Edelman identifies it with the psychoanalytic death drive: the psychic force that Freud thought lived in every person and pushes them toward the destruction of social bonds and themselves. This makes, I guess, for an unassailable radicalism. But it doesn’t make, in my opinion, the lives of actual living gays or trans people or whoever else at all more livable. On the other hand, the radical theorists have a point about narratives and origin stories. You don’t need a PhD in Media Studies to intuit that rom-coms and princess stories and marriage plots have done a number on straight people’s pressure to fit themselves into narrow life paths.
I think we can hold both of these in our heads at once and demand a range of narratives out of our media and artists. I don’t know that there’s much we can do about the constraints narratives impose on us without throwing out their ability to make sense of our desires and form communities around them. All we can do, I think, is demand more of them, in terms of quantity and nuance: more stories of how people of many sorts and inclinations and constraints came to live a good life, more ideas of what a well-lived life can look like, more stories of how people develop themselves and come to identify with their various overlapping communities. And as for what we can do to ourselves, I think we can practice a nimbleness about the attachments we have to our own pasts. “Gosh, what a little faggot I was” is a powerful story because it explains so many signs I see when I sift through my own past. But it’s just one way among many of making sense. Squint a little at those pictures, and I can see a very different story about whiteness, about ruralness, about Americanness. The answer is neither to demand that I refuse all linear stories about my past because they fail to capture its full plenitude, nor to fix my emotional attachments to the first origin story that makes the most sense to me as I am now. Rather, it’s to recognize that origins are always multiple,.that the stories we tell of how we came to be ourselves are as much about our present as our past, that we are indeed constrained by our pasts, but we do have the freedom to re-tell them according to our current needs, that identities and labels constrain and enable at once, and we can refigure them out of the materials of our past when the constraints become too much.