Dear Queers,
Last quarter, I wrote a piece that pissed some of you off. I was safely abroad at the time, but from afar I ate up the feeling that peers I’d never met might be thinking nasty thoughts of me, or better yet discussing something I wrote with their own queer polis or responding to me in kind. Since returning to campus, I’ve been introduced to friends of friends and immediately asked, “You wrote that column, didn’t you?” to which my answer was always, “Yes, do you want to talk about it?” I stand by part of what I diagnosed, but in light of the fact that there’s no learning without admitting when you’ve changed your mind, I want to reopen my investigation.
I have no doubt that a large but scattered segment of Stanford’s queers feels isolated from or unfulfilled by the so-called community here. In fact, the conversations I’ve had in the first weeks of this quarter have made me more confident in that statement than ever. My impetus for critiquing gay life at Stanford was precisely to bring to light the unappeasable loneliness many of us share, yet few can name. I was, and still am, searching for the words myself. Here’s where I’ve come to think I had things wrong: I misunderstood the source of the loneliness and didn’t grant that it could exist even where I failed to see it.
The gay community at Stanford is multipolar, but that’s hardly better than the binary vision I once presented. The middle is vaster and more intractable than I suspected. Just because I size you up in line at Coho and mentally deem you painfully progressive or a normal dude who’s also gay (but it’s not a big deal) or whatever doesn’t mean you’ve successfully assuaged the loneliness, as I haven’t either. Even if you did find your community, your experience of being gay at Stanford may not be glowing without exception. Perhaps you just keep your head down about your problems rather than write griping articles about them. (But let’s also admit, I’m far from the first gay man to savor his bitchy snap judgments). We all have blind spots and empathy is a big one of mine, but I’d be spilling my seed if my empathy wasn’t aimed at greater understanding.
I now believe the little islands that constitute queer Stanford partly represent different ways of relating to one’s sexuality. This is a deep-set concern for all of us, tracing its murky origins to our oldest teenage wounds, often still tough to look at. It takes months or years for those of us who are queer to realize it and even longer to accept it. Sexuality is a puzzle piece to be fit in not once and for all but continuously, frustratingly, for the length of our lives. Selfhood is a moving target for everyone, but we queers have our own special set of obstacles in this endless footrace to figure ourselves out.
Allow me to posit that the underlying loneliness I’ve been discussing, as undefined as I’ve so far left it, is in part the product of our times. We have more freedom than ever before to define ourselves as we choose, thanks largely to the generation of queers who directly preceded us. The hearts and minds of mainstream America were won by Ellen Degeneres, Heather’s two mommies, clean-cut white gays in TV shows like “Glee” and gay penguins, of all things. I’m not saying this was the ideal plan of attack, only pointing out that the path to the Obama Era we inherited was paved with acceptability. The argument that’s earned us representation and legal recognition of our rights is: We’re not so different from you.
Where once definitions were imposed on us, often cruelly, the question now left to our generation is how much our sexuality should define us. At least at Stanford, we’re at our leisure to identify or present ourselves pretty much however we want without facing social censure from our immediate community. So, what does it mean for me to be gay when being gay doesn’t need to mean much of anything? We now have the freedom to be queer and nonchalant about it, or alternately, to fixate on that fact, organize our self-conceptions, social spaces and political beliefs around the biological irregularities that we are. How best to conceive of oneself is obvious to no one; Scylla and Charybdis are within us and must be met at the level of the individual.
Poles form because like-minded people tend to group together. If you and I answer the question, What does my sexuality mean to me? in the same or similar terms, odds are we’ll likely locate common ground in our approaches to other aspects of life and identity. If mutual understanding is then the basis of a close community, no big tent is possible when queerness has broadened to such plurality. The cost of increased freedom is that we have less in common than ever. In this, we really are like everyone else.
Whatever answer we cleave to, the question remains an open one. As any queer knows, the world asks you to come out again and again. Sometimes we find it easier not to, while some of us don’t have that luxury. At the heart of our particular loneliness is the knowledge that we’ll spend our lives struggling – some days more than others – to navigate our queer selves and must ultimately do so alone. (Though of course we’ll find compatriots along the way and maybe even an Oliver to our morose little Elio.)
In the last few months, I’ve learned from you. I aimed to start a conversation and it’s one I hope to continue. Being queer at Stanford can kind of suck. I believe it’s important to put into words why if we seek to reconcile that part of ourselves with the rest of our sunny little Stanford lives and come into our own as the next generation of queers in America.
Love always,
Iain Espey
Contact Iain Espey at iespey ‘at’ stanford.edu.