In college I took a class called New Queer Cinema, taught by the filmmaker Maureen Bradley. We watched Todd Haynes films and a musical about AIDS and other gay dramas where someone dies or goes to jail or in some such way meets a tragic fate. We learned about the obscurity of queer cinema, and the prominence of tragic ends in whatever exists of a queer filmography. The course focused on films from the early nineties. We discussed the onset of AIDS and its effect of increasing visibility in queer cinema.
If you Google “new queer cinema,” you’ll find this on Wikipedia:
New Queer Cinema is a term first coined by the academic B. Ruby Rich in Sight & Sound magazine in 1992 to define and describe a movement in queer-themed independent filmmaking in the early 1990s. The term developed from use of the word queer in academic writing in the 1980s and 1990s as an inclusive way of describing gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender identity and experience, and also defining a form of sexuality that was fluid and subversive of traditional understandings of sexuality. Since 1992, the phenomenon has also been described by various other academics and has been used to describe several other films released since the 1990s. Films of the New Queer Cinema movement typically share certain themes, such as the rejection of heteronormativity and the lives of LGBT protagonists living on the fringe of society.
In the textbook (New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader), there’s an essay by Monica B. Pearl called “AIDS and New Queer Cinema.” It’s about the historical moment when enough queer artists were making work – and enough of this work was reaching an audience – for the phenomenon to be considered a movement, and for the term new queer cinema to be coined. This moment coincides with the AIDS crisis, which really brought homosexuality to the forefront. All it takes is people dying.
I remember a classroom discussion when the pride parade came up – a rare moment of levity in the midst of otherwise grim and brutal subject matter. A student raised his hand and asked, “why do gays get a whole day dedicated to them every year?” (I’m reminded of this on national coming out day because now we have not one, but two days dedicated to our sexual identities, and surely this is excessive, as anything queer is typically considered to be.) The professor’s response to this question cut to the heart of why the question is so deeply hostile, and why this student asking the question reveals a staggering lack of awareness of himself as well as entire demographics of people. Bradley responded effortlessly, the way we often wish we had responded to such a phobic situation, in retrospect. (Perhaps she had come across this question before.) “Every other day of the year is straight day,” she said. The fact of needing to set a day (or two!) aside for the recognition of an entire population of people sort of answers the question, too, doesn’t it?
Today, in the spirit national coming out day, I would like to propose that every day is also coming out day! For example, in order for new queer cinema simply to exist, filmmakers had to come out. In the germinal queer film Go Fish, there’s this beautifully overwrought scene where Guinevere Turner’s character observes that no matter how queer she is or how many women she’s been with or how much she dresses like “hip hop Barbie,” she will nonetheless be expected to come out to colleagues and new acquaintances and distant relatives and complete strangers for the rest of eternity.
In college, I wrote an essay mourning the final season of The L Word because it was the first and only show of its kind – a series written by, for, and about lesbians. You know, the FUBU ideology. The creative writing professor opened the workshop discussion of my piece by zeroing in on my use of the word heteronormative, which he matter-of-factly stated was not a word. “You invented it,” he said with alarming confidence. “And it’s heterophobic.”
It took setting up a meeting with the head of the creative writing department, for me to begin to unravel this problematic treatment of my piece. When I met with the department head, I brought along a copy of an essay by a professor who taught in the gender studies department of the very university I was attending. The essay discussed the concept, and the coining, of heteronormativity. The department head graciously pulled me out of this workshop and transferred me into her own. I was lucky for her support and her readiness to act on my behalf. I have always felt a deep gratitude. She also instructed my professor to read the academic article about heteronormativity, which perhaps he did, perhaps not.
Writing the essay about The L Word required me to be gay, and to know it, and to feel comfortable in asserting this identity. It required me knowing enough about homophobia to feel alarmed by my professor’s treatment of this identity, not only my own but its depiction in the public sphere. It required a sense of validity that’s hard to come by for any young woman, let alone a queer one in the infant stages of finding her voice, who is being erroneously called out in a classroom where she is the only self-identified queer, and accused of making up a word, and of being “heterophobic,” which to my knowledge has no history whatsoever, insofar as being a word. It also required me rising to the undue occasion of treating a simple class assignment like a political (and personal!) crusade in order for my work to one day receive the same, fair treatment as any other essay in an undergraduate workshop would, all while avoiding being accused of fabricating words. The professor also used the word agenda a lot during my critique. To his mind, my writing an essay about The L Word could only be done if I had an agenda against heterosexuality.
In summary, for the privilege of the opportunity to write about something relevant to me, I was required to come out, and to fight some vague fight that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with a professor’s own internalization of the gay plight. I had to fight for all lesbians, I felt. The class discussion that ensued after that hearty introduction, was one where students and professor joined together to name other gay television series. The list was exhaustive but the class as a whole seemed satisfied, either with it or with themslves for coming up with the list. The one show I remembering, because it came up repeatedly, was Will & Grace. I’ve never watched the show, but to my knowledge it features no lesbian characters.
If I hadn’t been comfortable enough to write about The L Word – comfortable enough to out myself as a lesbian because to write about anything queer necessarily implies an agenda, and an oppositional one at that – I likely wouldn’t have written this piece to begin with, on account of wanting to avoid having to come out.
Before going off to college, I bartended at a fancy restaurant in the theatre district. The chef and the restaurant manager met my girlfriend one night when she came to pick me up after a shift that ended at 4am. The following night, the chef and the manager called me into the kitchen. The manager asked, who is the man in the relationship? When I deflected the question, the chef asked me to describe how lesbians have sex – trying, I suppose, to bring the conversation back to who the man was. When their questions got nowhere, they took turns offering themselves up as thirds in a potential future threesome, and asking if they could watch my girlfriend and I having sex. I was twenty. The chef and manager were in their fifties and seventies, respectively. I didn’t want the job, but I needed to save money for college. I never asked the chef or the manager what their wives liked in bed, or offered to watch them have sex.
In order to get through a day at work or at school, as a young queer, I felt I had no choice but to make public, as well as inadvertently politicize, my sexual identity. The alternative would have been to hide it. It takes a special kind of awareness to live in the world as a queer person. It takes great strength to have one’s sexual identity invested with so much meaning by strangers. It takes surviving a special kind of hell, to have to come out and then watch your colleague or your new friend or a complete stranger process your sexual identity, and whatever notions they’ve internalized about it, and to know this will happen over and over again for the rest of your life.
I had a doctor’s appointment on campus once. I went for a physical. The doctor asked if I took birth control. I told him no. He perked up.
“Well you won’t be needing a papsmear, if you’re not sexually active,” he said as if delivering wonderful news.
“I have sex with women,” I said bleakly.
“Oh,” he said, then laughed nervously. “That’s okay, that’s just fine, that’s alright,” he said. He started to fidget. “It’s alright. There’s nothing wrong with that!”
“I know,” I said.
He proceeded to inform me with astounding confidence that lesbians didn’t need pap screenings nearly as frequently as heterosexual women, because of penetration. I don’t know what, exactly, about penetration. Because of penetration. Anywa, his medical opinion was rooted entirely in assumptions and misinterpretations about my sexuality. If I had wanted the papsmear, I would not only have had to come out, and then watch him manage his own awkwardness, but I would also have had to trust my own suspicions that the information he was giving me (amidst his display of discomfort and his reassurance that there was nothing wrong with my gayness) was inaccurate. It would have taken more conviction, and quicker reflexes, for me to ask if fisting counted as penetration.
Instead I booked a physical with a female doctor. She asked if I was sexually active. I told her yes, and I told her with women, and she gave me a papsmear. I had read about the higher rate of undiagnosed cervical cancer among lesbians. Lesbians must be predisposed. Is this a new, woman-centric version of the AIDS crisis? Will we be famous? Lesbians must be predisposed to cervical cancer. Surely it has nothing to do with the violently negligent misinformation that continues to kill – kill! – innumerable lesbians and queers.
All it takes for queers to access basic experiences like an unbiased workshop, or a papsmear, too often necessitates a series of invasive, unwanted interactions having to do with strangers’ feelings about someone else’s sexual identity. And it’s important to come out, yes – is absolutely is. It’s important because in a world where queers live on the fringe and continue to struggle with violence and invisibility, a person needs to embrace their sexual identity in order to access basic experiences like an unbiased workshop, or a papsmear. But do you know how hard it is for any person to grapple their own sexuality? And then, if it’s non-normative, to wear it as a badge in order to move through the world in a way that befits their marginal experience in the wake of all this heternormativity?
On national coming out day, I would like to take this opportunity and honor the tireless strength and conviction required to move through this life despite endlessly coming up against the redundant yet always freshly-piercing hatred, hostility, misinformation, ignorance, prejudice, and violence that make possible the relentless, dreadful experience of having to watch a stranger reckon with your own sexual identity over and over.
Coming out often strikes me as a service queers provide to the – forgive me – heteronormative world. In this spirit, I must say that the uncomfortable moment where I watch a stranger reckon with my sexuality is a moment I’m not compelled to celebrate. Most often, bringing up my sexual identity seems entirely off-base, really, and I recognize this as a privileged sentiment; one made possible by the countless queers who came (and perhaps came out) before me. Whether by political endeavor or the mere fact of being alive, these are the people who have made the world a less hostile place for me. I feel lukewarm vis-à-vis national coming out day, but if I must celebrate, then I would like to thank all the dead queers who came out before me, and those of us alive right now, who are still doing it. Here’s to a future where queers might increasingly live their lives with the grace and privacy afforded other humans already. Here’s to not having to come out for the rest of eternity.
Next week in Queer Studies: if lesbians love women so much, why do they dress like men?