Queer Identity: Coming Out into Indictment, Pushing out Radical Selfhood, by Regi Worles

There is a question of who, or perhaps more fitting what, is a criminal in our country and in our world. As a society, we have done the great evil of seeing difference and naming it malicious. In doing this, we have created a history of trauma and pain for many individuals within our communities and cultures. While the experience may bubble to the surface in a multitude of ways, the results are always the same­—our human superpower to make difference into an identity marked by feelings of danger instead of curiosity seems to be the only way for us to understand ourselves.

The focus here is on the queer body and soul. That is, how is it that we come into an understanding ourselves as queer, gay, bisexual, genderqueer, pansexual, transgender, or any other “non-normative” sexual identity, without answering the call of criminalization. The bath of freedom that so many of us queer folks experience as we come out, is still affected by years and years of systemic and cultural muddying. This mucks the waters of queerness by mixing in moral degradation, societal danger, and other processes by which we criminalize into what is supposed to be waters of creative forms of understanding self. Our history facilitates an automatic indictment from our systems and structures once you come out, but through a poetic and creative understanding of self, it seems possible that we might be able to fight against it.

We begin at our country’s first indictment of queer bodies, an incident wherein people who were what we might call today queer, were “discovered” and then as Mogul et al. put in their book, “Queer (In)Justice,” thrown to the dogs to be dismembered. As the United States as we know it was being colonized and ravaged by Europeans, there was a decision to bring here the morality of Europe, which included their conceptions of what appropriate and acceptable expressions of sexuality and faith looked like (1). What is even more disgusting, is that these arguments were not just made on behalf of morality, but they were fuel to an omnipresent fire of colonialization: people could be killed, populations taken out, cultures burned down, and assimilation could be enforced because of these behaviors (3).

How then could early settlers not justify their treatment of indigenous peoples by guilding their actions under their quest for morality? It was an easy cop out, but also created a culture of policing sexuality and gender that we use unceasingly against queer people to this day. Things like sodomy laws became modes of discrimination and effective methods for eliminating dangerous threats to the ways of life that the Spaniards preferred. One of the quoted authors from “Queer (In)Justice” argues that the colonizers had to, “first naturalize hierarchy through instituting patriarchy,” this act was not just establishing male domination, but it was also carefully done by imposing European conceptions of gender and more importantly gender performance on the people’s present. (3). Even as time progressed, as laws were codified, sodomy laws became the very backbone of policing the progress and perpetuation of the particular mode of domination. While it may not have been commonplace for straight men to participate in sodomy, it most certainly was not a rarity either. The laws still though, were used to, “reinforce hierarchies based on race, gender, and class,” ensuring that people who might find themselves outside of the straight white male category had as little institutional safety as possible (9). Thus, allowing sodomy to be an identity that became closely linked, if by nothing that association and who was seen as perpetrator, to criminal.

Over time, it was this very continued fusion of identity with death or imprisonment or horrifying punishment, that led to the creation of the queer archetype, the roles etched in stone that for many of us are inescapable (23). In fact, it is the archetype that functions as one of the elements that make coming out so difficult. In choosing, or sometimes even being forced, to come out, one answers the already ringing call of these archetypes. And while many people may not even identity with even the “non-dangerous” archetypes, a sort of blanket claim on their being has been asserted by society. It is the interaction between identity and archetype and archetype and punishment that makes coming out challenging. Because what are you coming out for? What are you coming out into? When coming out, things like criminalization and the reification of your innocence fleeing your person make what it is already a burdensome personal experience, a challenging social one as well.  While things like the sexualization of race and class and gender are types of suppression and violence that are not new to our country, the ways in which modern society has taken the vision or purpose of our wicked ancestral lawmakers still have affected us in powerful ways, sometimes still ending in death.

Audre Lorde’s theories of destructuring patriarchy and purposefully leaving something new behind plays a role in this as well. I would be remiss if I offered this critical blow to our experiences of coming out, without posing a solution, but in this case, the solution itself is not mine. It is Lorde’s. As a black, lesbian woman, Lorde dealt with what happens to your visibility and social mobility as you are recognized more and more like something that ought to be marginalized.

As we try to solve queer issues in our society, we must remember that we ought not solve them without queer modes of action. In the “Master’s Tools” essay, Lorde warns that our often uncreative tactics, “mean that the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable,” (111). Our tactics must change, coming out has to be a queered concept, not just by act but by nature. When we do not allow for queer to mean something aside for the prescribed modes of being that the heterosexual patriarchy has put on us, we become subject to the very minimalization and dehumanization that we have a problem with. Let us instead, act in the most poetic formation of identity possible, radically loving ourselves and attempting to understand ourselves not in juxtaposition to the roles set for us by patriarchy but creating something new altogether.