... having been breathed out

More and more LGBT people seem to be operating on a similar wavelength [to that of the author, a trans lesbian who prefers to live in a small "red state" city rather than a large coastal one]. I asked Gary J. Gates, the most widely cited demographer of the American LGBT community, what evidence he has seen of queer demographic shifts away from coastal big cities over the last decade.

He pointed me to his recent Williams Institute analysis of U.S. Census and Gallup polling data, which compared the concentration of same-sex couples in American cities in 1990 to the percentage of their LGBT population from 2012 to 2014. (It's an imperfect comparison, but given how hard it is to gather data on a small population like the LGBT community, it's one of the best available.) And the results are striking: Salt Lake City leapt up thirty-two spots in the overall rankings between 1990 and the 2012-2014 time period. Louisville, Kentucky, rose thirty slots over the same period. Norfolk, Virginia, and New Orleans, Louisiana both jumped more than twenty places. Meanwhile San Francisco remained static, Los Angeles fell two slots, and New York had a staggering eleven-place slump.

Gates believes that this discrepancy speaks to the social change happening in many red-state cities. As he wrote in the analysis: "Substantial increases in LGBT visibility in more socially conservative places like Salt Lake City, Louisville, and Norfolk likely mean that these areas are not as different from cities like San Francisco, Austin, and Seattle (all with long histories of fostering social climates where LGBT people felt more comfortable) in their acceptance of the LGBT community today than they were twenty years ago."

Indeed, an "important explanatory factor" for that data, as Gates acknowledged in the analysis, is the increased "willingness" [I, breathedout, would argue "ability"] of LGBT people in conservative areas to come out of the closet. In other words, although the analysis probably indicates some degree of population shift, [there is also an element of simply revealing that... ] LGBT people have been building beautiful lives away from the coasts for years. [...] But because the media overwhelmingly focus on the tragic things that happen to queer people in red states, that kind of community building often goes unnoticed by people on the coasts. As Jack Halberstam wrote in In a Queer Time and Place, "Too often minority history hinges on representative examples provided by the lives of extraordinary individuals"—among them LGBT people who have been murdered in conservative parts of America.

"[In] relation to the complicated matrix of rural queer lives, we tend to rely on the story of a Brandon Teena or a Matthew Shepard rather than finding out about the queer people who live quietly, if not comfortably, in isolated areas or small towns all across North America," Halberstam wrote.

greywash

The discrepancy between "labels as descriptors of observable behavior" and "labels as signifiers of internal lived reality"—and ESPECIALLY the trend toward the latter to the exclusion of the former—really gets me because I feel like a lot of the time it invites exactly this kind of is-he-or-isn't-he debate even when the evidence is not at all unclear. Or worse yet, competitive vying for a person to put their stakes down in one's particular camp via a self-disclosure that that person, as you say, really doesn't owe. And then there's all the intra-queer rhetoric around "It's only your internalized [bi-, lesbo-, x-] phobia that's preventing you from identifying this way," when actually... there are any number of reasons one might choose not to discuss the murkiest facets of one's lived reality at any given time, and shouldn't be pressured to do so.

When a real person does self-disclose a certain way, obviously that should be listened to and not argued with. But in the absence of that, and particularly when discussing fictional characters, if we're going to the extreme of "observable behavior means nothing, and ONLY someone's own words can be taken as evidence of their orientation," then not only do you run up against a whole host of issues with characters who are lacking in self-awareness or actively lying (to themselves or others; for whatever reason), but you create a double-standard about what words... are for... which is in large part to describe the world's reality as we observe it.

And of course there are infinite shades of experience. Of course many gay men have been married to, and fathered children with, women. Of course there are many bisexual people who only ever acted on their opposite-sex attractions (or, especially more recently, who felt pressure from the gay community to only act on their same-sex attractions). Of course there are sex-repulsed asexual people who have a lot of sex because they're using it to fulfill other needs or wants. Of course there's this whole culture of men who self-ID as straight but who frequent truck stops for same-sex hookups. And on and on. And a lot of this is stuff I'm interested in exploring in fiction, because (AS YOU KNOW, DOCTOR) I personally embody a disconnect between my observable behavior (lived long-term first with a man, then a woman) and my internal lived reality (have always been almost, but not quite, totally uninterested in men both sexually and romantically). So, you know, I feel that tension: I don't really feel like "bisexual" is a very accurate descriptor of my inner lived reality, and even though I also feel "lesbian" is inaccurate, I would still be more likely to bridle at a potential biographer using my 12-year relationship with Ex as a way to inaccurately over-represent my investment in men, than I would if they cast that relationship as a nod to compulsive heterosexuality or something. (Again... not super accurate, I don't think, but possibly less inaccurate.) So that liminal space where labels are really messy, is somewhere I feel drawn to & where I feel at home, and I certainly don't want to erase it entirely from the discourse.

But to get to a point where we're divorcing orientation labels from behavior so radically that no amount of observed behavior can be taken as establishing or even strongly indicating someone's orientation, is just bizarre. And goes from "bizarre" to "oppressive" because of course no person, fictional or real, is ever required to self-identify as straight in order to be taken as such.

achray

Yes, a lot of my thoughts about it are coming from a historical perspective as well, and there are so many other issues that I left out of that comment for the sake of relative brevity, such as shifting cultural constructions of queerness over time and space such that the application of modern labels can be reductive and inaccurate; gaps in the archive; families and literary executors who destroyed evidence; the impossibility of fully comprehending the nature of any specific relationship if you're not inside that relationship and sometimes not even then (see, as example A of many of these, the surviving Hawthorne/Melville correspondence).

But it does still seem quite silly to be able to, say, look at a Byron or a Colette, folks who clearly had and enjoyed sexual/romantic liaisons with people of multiple genders, and say: these people were hetero because they never explicitly offered up a label they preferred. I mean. Really.

Of course, the bitter harvest begins long before a child ends up on the streets. When Ben, the youngest son of a Baptist minister from New Hampshire, asked his mother at age nine what the word “gay” meant, he didn’t realize that the answer she gave would describe his own feelings – or that those feelings would, from that moment on, impact his emotional development. “She explained what it was and told me that it was an abomination,” Ben tells me in the sunny group-therapy room at the Ali Forney Center, which he ran away to at age 17. “It was like telling a nine-year-old that they are broken. I remember being on the kitchen floor just crying, praying to God for him to make me normal. That’s how I looked at it: ‘If it’s this bad for me to be this way, why did God make me? I wish I were dead.’” When Ben finally did come out to his parents at age 16, they sent him away to a Christian school across the country and began to explore reparative-therapy options, all of which reinforced the idea that he was terribly flawed, so much so that “the people closest to me thought I needed to be changed, fixed.”

The problem is, running away, as Ben did, may deliver youth from their parents’ judgment, but not from that of God – whom more than half of the youth I spoke with said they still believed in – and once on the street, the psychological trauma that’s inherent in this deeply internalized shame often plays out to their detriment. And yet, as hard as it might be to imagine conservative faiths backing down from their demonization of homosexuality, it can be equally hard to get activists to address the issue. “LGBT­ advocacy groups don’t want to talk about religion,” says Mitchell Gold, founder of Faith in America. “One, they don’t want to come across as anti-religion. And two, they just aren’t familiar with it. But the number-one hurdle to LGBT equality is religious­-based bigotry. The face of the gay-rights movement shouldn’t be what I call '40-year-old well-moisturized couples.’ The face of the gay-rights movement should be a 15-year-old kid that’s been thrown out of his house and taught that he’s a sinner.”