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: These things happen here
Do you understand where you are?
A blogpost about a family reunion in a small Southern town in 1993. You really need to read it, and the comment thread. It's about the Jena 6, who are being targetted in 2007 for being "uppity blacks" by outraged whites: but also about a Klan attack on a bunch of uppity black kids in 1993.
It reminds me of an offhand comment by a straight friend who went to see Brokeback Mountain and was shocked to realize that it was happening in her time - 1963 to 1983. I interpreted her reaction as shock: she expressed it as disbelief. Although she makes much of having "lots of gay friends", she's not much for LGBT activism: her reaction to Brokeback Mountain was the disbelief that this could happen now. I would imagine she's rationalised away as happening elsewhere - in the strange, primitive parts of the US, she thinks, gay men marry women and carry on covert relationships and find out that their partner died by a letter returned with "deceased" on the envelope... it doesn't happen in the here-and-now.
My first attempt at being out at work was 1995. The reaction from my senior manager scared me back into the closet again for another three years: when I came out again, a colleague used his knowledge of my sexual orientation to attack me in a work dispute. I never spoke about this to any of my straight friends: including, of course, the woman who didn't believe Brokeback Mountain could happen in the here-and-now. Trying to talk about it would have required too much explanation: whereas I don't know a single queer person who wouldn't have understood why the senior manager's reaction was scary, or how a straight male colleague can react to knowledge that someone who supervises his work is a lesbian.
Tags: angry queer, being queer, brokeback mountain, evil american politics
Do you understand where you are?
A blogpost about a family reunion in a small Southern town in 1993. You really need to read it, and the comment thread. It's about the Jena 6, who are being targetted in 2007 for being "uppity blacks" by outraged whites: but also about a Klan attack on a bunch of uppity black kids in 1993.
It reminds me of an offhand comment by a straight friend who went to see Brokeback Mountain and was shocked to realize that it was happening in her time - 1963 to 1983. I interpreted her reaction as shock: she expressed it as disbelief. Although she makes much of having "lots of gay friends", she's not much for LGBT activism: her reaction to Brokeback Mountain was the disbelief that this could happen now. I would imagine she's rationalised away as happening elsewhere - in the strange, primitive parts of the US, she thinks, gay men marry women and carry on covert relationships and find out that their partner died by a letter returned with "deceased" on the envelope... it doesn't happen in the here-and-now.
My first attempt at being out at work was 1995. The reaction from my senior manager scared me back into the closet again for another three years: when I came out again, a colleague used his knowledge of my sexual orientation to attack me in a work dispute. I never spoke about this to any of my straight friends: including, of course, the woman who didn't believe Brokeback Mountain could happen in the here-and-now. Trying to talk about it would have required too much explanation: whereas I don't know a single queer person who wouldn't have understood why the senior manager's reaction was scary, or how a straight male colleague can react to knowledge that someone who supervises his work is a lesbian.
Tags: angry queer, being queer, brokeback mountain, evil american politics