tired just standing here

[rm]

I had an unpleasant LJ communication yesterday that largely revolved around both myself and the other party not taking the time to make ourselves more than even passingly clear. And it's stuck with me since, not because of whatever unfairness I contributed to the drama, but because it really got under my skin that the conversation was even happening. Not the fucked up part, just I'm sick of hearing about it.

And what, pray tell, is it I'm sick of hearing about? Gay issues. And let's be clear, it's not that I want them to go away, and it's not that I don't appreciate that the current state of GLBT acceptance is better than I thought I'd see in my lifetime when I was 18. Rather, I am exhausted. Not by being an activist, and not by being politically aware. These are necessary things.

What I'm exhausted by is living in a world with so much noise about whether I'm human or not, diseased or not, evil or not, acceptable or not, hot or not, relevant or not, fit to be a parent or not, capable of having a family or not, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum. And that noise is there every time I turn on the television, every time I visit the websites I work as a paid writer for, every time I want to check news on the web.

I am not, for the record, an insecure person about my nature. I never worried what it meant that I liked girls as well as boys. I've always had a certain naivete about it, even though I've had bottles thrown at me for who I've held hands with, sat in the emergency room with friends who were bashed in DC, had peers threaten to rape me to show me what I needed. I've never thought I was ill or broken or shameful for who and what fascinated me. My neuroses, like anyone's, are certainly legion, but they lie elsewhere.

I don't know if all queer people feel this way; I'm not trying to speak for them. I'm also not trying to say the bullshit I deal with is worse or more interesting than the bullshit people deal with for being anything other than white and able-bodied in this country either -- those situations have their own narratives. All I know is mine.

And mine is that you're goddamn right I'm defensive. Because I'm tired. And like walking home at 3 a.m. when my day has been too goddamn long and all I want is to go to sleep, the exhaustion this constant debate about my existence, as if it is hypothetical or a piece of furniture, provokes in me requires a certain vigilance. Without it, I run the risk of shrugging my shoulders and not bothering to say anything when my goodness, decency, patriotism, talent, relevance, desireability, compassion, humanity, sense of humour, intelligence, morality, ethics, and whatever else you want to list here is challenged because my heart isn't the exact same shape as someone else's.

News flash: they're like finger prints.

I am exhausted. I can't remember the last time I turned on a TV and didn't hear a debate or news story that came down to the simple matter of my, and a whole hell of a lot of other people's, worth on this sphere.

I have lots of queer friends who can laugh this stuff off. Oh, isn't it silly and sad that people think this way. More power to them; it's not one I possess.

I know a lot of you don't have to imagine where I'm coming from, whether because you're queer or because of other bullshit you have to deal with. But I sure the hell would appreciate it if people who didn't know what this was like took a second to try to imagine it. It's a really unbelieveably annoying way to have to live. I'm so grateful that my safety is so much less compromised for being queer today than it was ten years ago, but seriously, that there is even a debate about any of this shit is so insulting to me and so reinforces the degree to which equality just ain't there right now. If I have to hang around waiting to be told I'm equal, listening to people argue about whether I'm equal, it doesn't mean shit regardless of what I know to be true about myself. Because the world isn't listening to me, or even believing in me as a real, live, actual human being with anything to say about it.

So I can do the work all damn day long, but sometimes it's worth noting that I'm tired. Just standing here.

Comments

[adriang.livejournal.com]

Well said.

Adrian

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I understand completely. Also, if you are interested, my good friend Daire wrote
an absolutely fascinating post quite a while ago about very similar feelings, and it struck me as something you might find helpful to read. Blessings to you.

[telesilla.livejournal.com]

I was reading this and nodding my way through the whole thing because it's exactly how I feel all too often.

[darkrosetiger.livejournal.com]

I've been following the train wreck of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion for the past month. Just today, I was so frustrated by the comments on one blog that I wanted to throw something. You've just articulated perfectly why I felt that way.

[saltbox.livejournal.com]

Me too. About the tiredness part. Though honestly the tiredness I feel this week is more about racial issues. And now not only tired of the continued existence of racial issues, but I'm also tired of being a mediator[*], and--what's more--I'm tired of being in an appropriate position to be a mediator. And I'm tired of being worried that I'll suck at mediating this conflict. Yet I'm also tired that I will somehow be "too good" at mediating, and thus have to mediate other conflicts.

[*] Which is why despite whatever mediating opportunities I see regarding comments on my own journal, I am restraining myself from having much to do with it, because I've got too much going on in my immediate vicinity already.

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

This is why I put down the damned bisexual activist flag. It's hard enough just standing here; the flag got heavy.

And it's not just queer issues either, although that one's pretty high up on the list. Being female, being disabled, being not Christian, being poor, being not entirely white, being a freak - I'm tired of having to justify my and others' basic human rights, up to and including being allowed to *stay alive* in this world, to a bunch of idiots who ought to know better.

I am grateful that I live in a world which, for the most parts, consists of idiots who ought to know better instead of idiots who have no reason whatsoever to doubt that I should be pounded into the mud and left to die. Yes, that's very nice, and big thanks to all those who helped make it possible.

Really, we should be done with this shit by now though. It's the goddamned twenty-first century; grow up.

[rm.livejournal.com]

You were one of the people that came to mind when I was writing this. How the fuck do you not kill people? The being chronically ill in a way I need people to take seriously, but because they can't see it (what am I supposed to do, eat toast so they can see me shit blood and be stuck in bed for a week?) don't, really made me go, woah, because the impact on my life is quite enough thank you.

Oh yeah, and the cane fighting stuff? Would _totally_ work from a chair.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Really, we should be done with this shit by now though. It's the goddamned twenty-first century; grow up.

Gods yes. For me, the fact that what other consenting adults do with each other causes no end of shouting, hand-wringing, and panic for no shortage of media figures and ordinary people has gone beyond horrifying and is now simply both baffling and utterly and completely pathetic.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I say it all the time, but we were better off without mass media.

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

Thanks. You have no idea how good that is to hear, actually.

Awesome. I'll keep an eye out for cane-fighting stuff locally.

As another gimp chick said recently, "I'm not able to of course, but I'm counter-jumping in my mind."

Mostly I think I'm too tired to kill people, and sometimes I'm just too damn gobsmacked to react before they get out of reach or my cane. But tired helps.

[raaven.livejournal.com]

Tired. Yes.

*sigh*

?

[keith418.livejournal.com]

I read this and thought to myself, "If she wasn't in New York..." I know many people say the city is very gay friendly, or rather just sensible and normal about the issue (which is what we should all expect as "normal" anyway), and it is and always has been. The gay counterculture was well established in the city even in the 1800s. Stonewall itself, say no more. But the whole East Coast in general? It's all too repressed and guilty. It just is. The ethnic tribalism that lingers on is a part of this. The Italians are guilty, the Jews are guilty, the Irish are guilty, and the WASPS are quilty. Deep down people are deeper and more intense, but they are also guiltier and more repressed.

I grew up there, and I know it's changed from the '70s and '80s, but the Bay Area is really different and this kind of crap just isn't the same dealio out here. Even though I get frustrated by a lot of the things by, and the people living in, the Bay Area, this kind of problem is something I feel we don't have the same problems with. I know you don't want to leave, but you may have to chalk it up to something you'll deal with if you stay.

I say it all the time, but we were better off without mass media.

Isn't Harry Potter and all the movies you go to part of the mass mass media? If anything, I see you as someone very deeply invested in the mass media. You aren't telling us about the out-of-print books you had to get on abebooks, or the small press books you're into, and you usually don't need to hunt down films from speciality DVD companies.

Please, rm, take some time off yourself from swallowing up the mass media. I think you'd find a lot in more obscure, foreign films (like, for example, Cache - which was a big deal in Europe; I'd LOVE to see you writing about that film and its politics and history, rather than the mass media films you keep telling us you're seeing all the time), or older, more challenging films and stuff that's more off the beaten track.

I know this sounds like criticism, but you're one of the smartest, most articulate people on my friends list, and I am puzzled why you seem so invested in what I see as the mass media. And I can't understand why you haven't rejected it in favor of weirder, less well known, and - forgive me - what I think of as more intelligent, challenging fare.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Yeah. The things that bother me the most are the everyday things- which are often little, and petty, and easy, but they're just always always there, and you have to think about them and respond to them constantly. And I hate that; it's a strain, and terrible and just. Yeah. Tiring. It's unfair that I- that anyone- should have to deal with it, and sometimes it makes me so angry.

[ladyofthelog.livejournal.com]

Weirdly, on a college campus, I feel very little of this on a day to day basis. I go out of my way to make sure people know that I'm bi, I'm a freak, I'm a woman, and I'm not ashamed of any of it.

On the other, Oh Yeah re: Episcopal/Anglican trainwreck. There have been tears shed in my house many a time over communal frustration with teh idiocy.

[dien.livejournal.com]

This is so wonderfully said. Every now and then I have an argument with my mother in which I try and explain why people of other orientations might want the right to marry/other right currently being denied them. And invariably she does not get it-- invariably she responds with "Well, they already have this right or that right"-- and I just want to scream, because she doesn't understand that even the way she's putting it already signifies the very indecency of it all.

If I might have your permission to, I'd like to print out the text of your statement and show it to her. Not that I magically think any lives will be changed, but just maybe for once she'll understand what it's like for one of "them" who has to live this way.

[droolfangrrl.livejournal.com]

Um... If it helps, I don't really much care who you sleep with as long as they're concenting, of age, and nobody gets really hurt.

(erm and not my husband ;) )

[miep.livejournal.com]

yeah, well, try being in a leadership role in an Episcopal church and being queer. and I'm just in one little bitty iconoclastic church that the bishop is personally shepherding along....

[miep.livejournal.com]

yes.

and it needs to be said sometimes.

I would love to live in a small town, but I like being out and feeling safe more than I want to live in a small town, and that makes me incredibly sad.

[ladyofthelog.livejournal.com]

I am actually in a leadership role in a mini-Episcochurch (Wash U's Episcopal Campus Ministry - I live upstairs and am some combo of ninja, RA, and sexton) myself, but we're all pretty queer and freak friendly here, and our diocese is generally pretty welcoming.

[miep.livejournal.com]

heh. I like the idea of a ninja sexton RA...

I got a nice email from our bishop, which was encouraging (it wasn't to me, personally), and my freaky little church is doing its best...

[threewalls]

Yes. I have days like this, too.

[magnetgirl.livejournal.com]

Hey, if you're feeling saddened by the Episcopal Church, check out this link:

http://emrc.dioceseny.org/home.shtml

Look at all their programs. My mother is part of the social concerns committee, here's another link: http://www.dioceseny.org/index.cfm

look at programs and ministries. These are really great people, I've met them. I'm very much an agnostic, but it's great to see religion with a brain (now if only it would spread!). They made enamel pins with the shield symbol on it, with a rainbow over the top and the words: STOP HATE printed on the bottom. I wear it on my bag proudly :)

[magnetgirl.livejournal.com]

I love your icon.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Go right ahead. I hope it helps.

[denn566.livejournal.com]

With all the other problems in the world, You'd think that any form of bigotry should be obsolete.

[hangedwoman.livejournal.com]

I'm one of those people who can relate for other reasons. Can I offer you a comfy virtual seat?

[ladyofthelog.livejournal.com]

Hee hee, thanks.

We pray every week for a peaceful resolution of this dramarama in the church, but it's so hard to argue with people who don't grasp the basic principles (love your neighbor... even if he is omgz teh gayz!).

[rm.livejournal.com]

this comment made me giggle, as I'm not envisioning the non-peaceful resolution which involves torches and ptichforks.

[cookie-cm.livejournal.com]

Just my own experience and perspective: In my life the only negative backlash I have ever experienced has always been from the gay/lesbian communities – I am bi. Coming out in Cleveland in the mid-80’s was part exciting, part surprising. Exciting in that the light bulb went off, surprising that I was accepted by all persons with the strong exception of lesbians. I have always been very feminine, and loved the idea of amping it up and going out to gay clubs, after all wasn’t it a place to step in, be free and accepted? Apparently not. I was shunned and talked about and constantly accused of as a straight playing with toys. I found that lesbians who wore even a shade of lipstick were damned. Females I dated dressed very feminine as well, and, oh my! Get us together in a club and we were treated like circus freaks. Again, always by lesbians. This behavior did extend beyond the clubs. Any place where I became recognized by the lesbian community, I was basically ignored and treated like a perv. (Though oddly enough when their tribe was not looking, they would slip me their phone numbers.)

Somewhat, but not completely opposite to your experience, I have never experienced any typical negative words or experience from others (aside from lesbians). Why? I believe, pathetically, that it had/has to do with (my) looks. People either, I suspect, never took me seriously, or (especially from men) I was this instant fantasy. It never registered that my attraction was deeper than their typical fantasy, that it holds weight and I scrutinize, love and hurt, no matter the sex of my partner. So, this was just as shitty of an insult. I have always been open when asked, and if ‘spotted’, never flinched. I have never flaunted, have never worn an actual badge. I can’t say that I can completely related to your anger and feelings, but the shit can come from anywhere.

[laurel]

You know, I hadn't ever thought of it from quite this angle, but when I do I think I get it and how very tiring it must be.

I get sometimes get tired and cranky from being in the minority in my own community and with some of my own friends, but that's a choice I made to hang out with these people and to call it my community. It's a milder sort of thing, of course.

For others, they don't make a choice, that's just what they get 'cuz of who they are and yeah, it really sucks.

[newsbean.livejournal.com]

As bi woman with both a boyfriend and a girlfriend (they know about and care for each other) - the heart is like a fingerprint. I live in a city with the highest population (per capita) of queers in the nation, and I still wouldn't dare walk hand-in-hand with both of them. Why? Because some Queerness is more acceptable than others. Here, Lesbianism and Gayness are fine - but transvestites, bis, androgynous folks, and people like me, not so OK.

It's a start - but how long does it take?!