The Ordinary Extraordinary blog
The Ordinary Extraordinary blog
The Future of Queer ... and polyamory
We thought we’d share a few thoughts from Fenton Johnson’s manifesto “The Future of Queer,” published in the January 2018 issue of Harper’s Magazine. In his essay, he bares himself to the slings and arrows of coolly modern irony and tells of his hopes for where the defense of queer principles might lead. He wants more than the legalization of same-sex marriage—he wants to get back to the deeper struggle for an opening of hearts and minds, an opening of the myriad ways in which we humans, especially those on the fringe, can build community and relationships. He wants the wider spectrum, and the poly community certainly shares many of the same ideals.
As we said, Johnson bares himself in ways that border on the embarrassing—in the naive teenager thinks she might see a way toward world peace way—but he acknowledges the rainbow-unicorn flavor of his words in two ways. One way is spelled out in the final paragraph: “I feel your skepticism through the page, dear, thoughtful reader, and I stand my ground. Is it not clear that conventional science, conventional economics, conventional politics, and conventional religion are not going to rescue us from ourselves? Can we afford to continue to cultivate and inhabit this age of irony, with our minds separated from our incarnate bodies and the world in which we live? In place of our age of irony, I imagine an age of reverence, chosen in full embrace of the knowledge of science, even as it grounds itself in the calm conviction that we live and die in mystery, that all human endeavor must begin and end in respect, for ourselves, for one another, for our fellow creatures, for our wounded, beloved Earth. Let us all become queers.” But the other way he acknowledges it is far more compelling. He reminds us of Walt Whitman’s unrestrained exhortations of human (particularly American) spirit and camaraderie, and quotes the great poet:
As I lay with my head in your lap, Camerado,
The confession I made I resume—what I said to you
in the open air I resume:
I know I am restless, and make others so;
I know my words are weapons, full of danger,
full of death;
(Indeed I am myself the real soldier;
It is not he, there, with his bayonet, and not the
red-striped artilleryman;)
For I confront peace, security, and all the settled
laws, to unsettle them;
I am more resolute because all have denied me,
than I could ever have been had all accepted me;
I heed not, and have never heeded, either experience,
cautions, majorities, nor ridicule;
And the threat of what is call’d hell is little or nothing
to me;
And the lure of what is call’d heaven is little or nothing
to me;
... Dear camerado! I confess I have urged you
onward with me, and still urge you, without the least idea
what is our destination,
Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell’d
and defeated.
Johnson shares this after relating an anecdote: “…I asked my students, several of whom were married, which they thought more important: marriage or friendship. Thirteen of fourteen favored friendship, a response I found so incredible that I asked them to keep their hands up while I counted a second time. In their raised hands I find hope—I hear the voice of Walt Whitman’s camerados…”
We confess, the essay is not flawless. But it is heartfelt and mindful, and it raises several cogent questions about what we as a society are truly striving toward—and are the battles won quite the victories for freedom we think they are? As Johnson points out, “…we have forgotten or marginalized the in-your-face, in-the-streets activists of the LGBT left. So long as we, the outliers, insisted that we had something to offer, that our world, where we formed enduring relationships outside the tax code and the sanction of church and state, where we created and took care of families of lovers and friends and strangers alike—so long as we insisted that this world was richer, more sustainable, more loving in so many ways than the insular world of Fortress Marriage, we got nowhere. Only when we exchanged our lofty ideals for conventionality was our struggle embraced.”
A longer extract:
State sanction of same-sex relationships conveys certain privileges—I hesitate to call them rights—to a subset of the LGBT community even as it mimics mainstream discrimination by reinforcing a hierarchy of affection. Once, loving same-sex relationships served as an obvious critique of any necessary connection between love and marriage. Now the American Family Association and Lambda Legal are in agreement: serious relationships lead to marriage. Everything else is just playing around.
The legalization of same-sex vows is another step in the monetization of all human encounter. Under capitalism, love, like everything else that was once sacred, has become inextricably entangled with Social Security perks and property transfers and thirty-thousand-dollar weddings accompanied by prenuptial agreements written in anticipation of divorce. When its advocates spoke of marriage as a civil right, they were speaking not of love, which remains mercifully and always indifferent to the law, but of property—its smooth acquisition and tax-free disposition, the many advantages it affords, one might say, to the married.
One last snippet: “That there are exceptions to this rule—marriages I know, admire, and respect, in which spouses work to bridge the wall, engage with the community, invite solitaries into their lives—does not belie the predominance and glorification of Fortress Marriage as the norm…” It’s true. The invitation for homosexuals to enter the institution of marriage is not the end-all, be-all many would wish it to be. There is more fertile ground to be won. And when the poly people come to claim legal protections, they should hope that’s not all they win. They should not simply be mollified by a nod from the gatekeepers. Rather, they should press for their ideals to be well considered and even blended into the mix—for the sake of building a finer, wider society.
Friday, February 2, 2018