Gay Fiction

I've always been reticent when it comes to LGB fiction, as if there's something about it that drives me away. I've read my fair share and almost always come away from it with a question: Where are the voices that speak for me?



If you look at most pop-fiction for gay male youth, it's either the tortured angst of coming out or some slightly less tortured, teen romance. Looking at a lot of the literature for the older set, we come across pages written by the justifiably angry gays who spent the 70s and 80s fighting for visibility and the right to march in something as outrageous as a Pride Parade, now a little bit older, a little bit settled in.



A long standing in joke amongst my friends says I never came out as gay so much as I came out as Danny. That kind of intense romance was okay when my body was swimming in enough of its hormones that I even had crushes on a few girls. Having grown up in a culture where Pride Parades have reached enough mainstream appeal that they can be sponsored by Budweiser, I think I'm what's called the epitome of Millenial apathy, at least when it comes to a homogenized subculture that while I respect it's history, is the stuff of history books (or as is more likely the case, Wikipedia searches).



I'm among the first in a generation of fairies standing on the shoulders of giants, bears, self-styled trannies and assorted other woodland creatures to see at least hints of equality in America. Yes, the racial, class and gender divides meanwhile are even farther from equality, but from certain perspectives we're closer than we've ever been.



We're here, we're queer and we're not something you've seen before. We're the generation saturated in postmodernism from birth onward. I was part of a panel discussion my junior year of college on what it means to be queer in community and one of the panelists could barely answer our questions because of the contextual differences created by the age gap. The very fact that we could ask about a “queer community” at all was astounding.



It's not apathy that we face; it's a paradigm shift. There is an intimate connection between generation theory, activism and sexuality that I don't think current discourse has completely taken into account yet.



So again I ask, where are the voices that speak for me and those like me?



They don't exist. Or rather, they're out on the streets protesting the color/gender/class-blind ideology and practices of reactionary mainstream movements. They're in classrooms laughing at all the silly little boys and girls who still have this image of feminism as bra-burning and man-bashing, writing papers and quoting names like Judith Butler and Michel Foucault. They're homeless on the streets. They're on social networking sites like tumblr, aggregating information and resources and the occasional funny image so that others can stumble upon their tumblogs and make better sense of the world.



And really, when it comes down to it, do I want any other voices other than my own representing me? No, but I would like just once to find a story about a queer that I can relate to without being sickened by the cliches and stereotypes and heteronormative tropes and the bad writing. It's a wonder people even know what queer is since the literature is hidden away in academia rather than mingling with the masses and making itself known.

Queer Tarot: A Final Project

Tarot, like Mark Doty’s Ouija board, in Western culture is seen as a part of the occult. It is relegated to the fringes of society, the dark corners of psychic shops, late night television and gypsy houses, seen from a distance but rarely ever sold. But at the same time, it has been around for centuries, used historically as a divination tool and card game, and in more recent years has gained a wider acceptance into mainstream culture. Walk into any Borders, and you can find and purchase a deck of tarot for under $30. The same can be said of queer and gay culture and identity.

The deck I’ve created is meant to reflect some of those parallels, drawing on the traditional meanings of the cards and prominent images from within queer culture to make new meanings based in part within GLBT theory.

Tradition states that the Fool, sometimes numbered 0, sometimes numbered infinity, is the card of infinite possibilities. It is a card of the future, of new beginnings. Here we have a card that depicts not a lone traveler standing on the edge of a precipice, but an activist, faceless and alone. The Fool here wears traditionally masculine clothing and appears to have short cropped hair, but because of the facelessness, defies the gender binary. Possibilities are indeed open as the activist hopes for the future and endeavors to bring it forward. Equality, safety, family, all the hallmarks of the gay civil rights movements can be represented by the simple rainbow sign, but the card is still the Fool. A movement is not one person. Change will not happen because one person, alone, stands on a street corner and yells to passerby. But one person can start a movement; just like how Galloway in Mean Little Deaf Queer defied her own limitations and went on to create from within herself a life worth telling about.

The Empress in this deck is a Queen, specifically an image of RuPaul from a promotional photo for RuPaul’s Drag Race, and what better way to queer-up what is seen as the mother card of Tarot than to express it as the extreme feminine that is simultaneously everything masculine? In this card we can see the dualities of identity. As a drag queen, RuPaul represents everything about the Empress, that spark of creation and performance in art and life, gender as a performance as Butler worded it. As the antipode of traditional femininity though, she evokes a certain level of acceptance and almost tongue-in-cheek playfulness to the idea of gender. The role of queen, empress, and mother is not limited to the female, but is instead an inherent trait available to all peoples, showing that the idea of essentialism, that there is only one kind of Empress, does not hold true in the face of drag. It is proof that there can be aspects of the mother in all of us.

A wedding topper marks the Lovers in this queer tarot deck. In many traditions of tarot, this card is known simply as Love because love is seen as a force of decision and control. You surrender to a higher power when you submit to love and are forced to make decisions that you might not make otherwise. Celie, of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, submitted to love and she found her strength through it. It is this idea of love that so strongly resonates within the queer community because it has been a rallying point around which to draw those battle lines that the activists (the Fools) can work to create the kinds of change the Empress represents. And in recent history, the biggest rallying point of the queer community has been this idea of gay marriage. On another level too, marriage marks a decision as you choose to make those vows and give up or adjust your lifestyle. And for that matter, the decision to allow/not allow gay marriage or the decision to get one are both cultural creations. We are not born married, but through the constructions of our society we are indoctrinated to believe that it is something we want. The cultural imperative to marry is so embedded that social and political structures have grown up around it. Taken in that sense, this card can serve as a warning against the very image it so innocently projects. Marriage is not natural any more than these wedding toppers are actual people or actual food.

Rather than the Hanged Man, the next card we find is a Well-hung Man dangling in similar position to the traditional card his black leather chaps, thong and chest-belt showing him to be something a little more than your average queer but as someone from the further marginalized spectrum of sadomasochistic inclinations. He is a visual example of Rubin’s sexual hierarchy. For his preference for bondage, he has been strung up and left to dangle, which for all its irony perfectly shows the meaning of the original Hanged Man, the idea that in suspension of thought, in meditation and reflection we find new perspectives that can lead to insight. Within other aspects of what it means to be queer, beyond the gender binary, beyond the heteronormative constructions that have homogenized and isolated the queer community to being ruled by a class of white, middle-class gay men, we find sub-queers that can live perfectly happy, productive lives and are indeed no threat to society but a part of it.

For the final card, we have Death, the unnamed skeletal creature that walks with its sickle, portending doom. But just as Mark Doty did in his discussion of AIDS in My Alexandria, Death is not a thing to be afraid of. It gets a bad rap from pop culture and society, but it is a tool of transformation and change part of the cycle of renewal. An end is but a new beginning, for spring cannot bloom if not first for the fallow wastes of winter. There is beauty in the act of passing. And so in this queered tarot we find a frail, skeletal looking woman admiring a bright, vibrant flower, freshly bloomed. The Fool then is an agent of Death, working to end the cultural stigmas around the queer identity and bring about a new world as the minority works to be recognized and integrated into the acceptance taken for granted by the majority.