A response to the prompt “Tell us about a time when you were in the minority,” this brief essay argues that although being in a minority usually means being in a minority everywhere, if identity is understood as a generative phenomenon, this need not always be so.
One of the inconvenient things about being a member of a minority—and there are at least a few to choose from—is that it’s not the sort of thing one can slip into and out of. Even though being gay is supposed to come with the ability to hide being gay, I for one have never been able to purge a slight sashay from my walk, or correct the Bette-Davisian way of holding a cigarette that feels so natural, or extend my hand to meet someone at a 90-degree angle, for a shake, rather than a 35- or 45-degree angle, as if expecting it to be kissed. And I’ve never met a gay man who holds himself the way straight men do—which turns out to be an infallible indicator of sexuality, but that’s totally irrelevant here; the point is simply that being in a minority group means always being in a minority group. Closeted or out, flaming or doused, it’s just a fact of self. So with respect to U.S. society, which is largely not gay, I will never not be in a minority, and an oppressed one at that.
Which is nit-picking, but with noble intentions. I want to suggest that there’s another way to look at the question that not only answers it, but also makes it possible to find its obverse: the rarer and more interesting times when I have not been in the minority. Not the times when I’ve felt as though my minority status had lifted; not the times when I’ve been exclusively, comfortably around other members of my minority; but the times when I have been, for brief periods, not a minority in any meaningful sense of the word.
We have to start with a definition of “minority.” To talk about a minority is to talk about a group that is, linguistically, un. Unlarge, unpowerful, unrepresented, unreal. And shockwaves from this linguistic fact propagate through all understandings of oppression: Simone de Beauvoir argues that women are essentially constructed as whatever is un-male; Frantz Fanon argues that Black identity is a phantasmagoric reproduction of white subjectivity; the current gay-rights régime defines its domination as not having what is normative—minority identity is always imagined as a straightforward negation of the majority. As not-that.
In fact, the politicophilosophic programs still very much en vogue today so embrace the idea that all identity is negation as to say that without domination, identity would collapse. Liberation—which, on top of everything else, is impossible for these people—would be self-abnegation, an abandonment of the thing we love most, viz. ourselves and our masochism. Liberation would be unbearably unsexy. Freedom would be boring, because the eternal boot on the face is so hot. Which to be honest, I’m really in no position to call into question, the sexiness of sadism and masochism and boots to the face. Abreaction may well have serious psychic importance, and playing the role of the masochist may indeed be quite exciting. For all I know, the vague and oracular Judith Butler may feel most herself when secured to her bedpost by fuzzy pink handcuffs. That’s fine.
One of the basic differences between Butler and me, though, seems to be that I have no interest in making my desire tell the story of anyone else’s desire. And, actually, that the least sexy world I can imagine isn’t a liberated one, but one full of facsimiles of my personal self, defining their politics and their personae along the lines of my really boring fantasies and cutting out fantastical variety. (Any gay man should worry about a lack of variety, given that someone has to be Zeus and someone has to be Ganymede and I can’t grow a beard.) Politics, which is something we can only talk about as being outside of our selves, is not personal sublimation, something working from the psyche up; if anything, it’s something working from the social down.
Regarding psyches and politics, a nota bene: It’s impossible to speak for any subject-position but mine, so I’ll continue the argument with respect only to a white male with an upper-middle-class background and not a little education who is homosexual, and stick to an example that are more or less concomitant with that. If the account can’t be generalized, it’ll have to be abandoned; but for now, I’ll write what I know.
The above, what I want to call the negation account, claims that a minority identity is constructed in reality too only as un, as a reaction. And that’s true, but within limits. It accounts for a specific and important part of the way the oppressed know oppression: namely, the historical moment when a line is drawn between one type of person and another, the ur-trauma that leaves the oppressed historically, mnemonically, and psychically not able to exist as persons within the established historic–mnemonic–psychic order. It’s a break that’s more significant than bar raids or arrests or bans on same-sex dancing because rather than targeting a handful of people it targets a category of person. A personhood, not any number of persons, is meant to be destroyed by this divide, to be placed so far outside the reality in which most people understand themselves and make themselves understood as to become nothing—without context, without personal, social, or political identity, without a way to understand an unusual sexual itch as anything other than solipsistic. Pathological.
It’s the response that’s significant, and it’s the response that’s remarkable. Because the response is to build. We can look at Esther Newton’s ethnography of Cherry Grove, a hamlet on Fire Island that evolved into one of its largest gay resort towns, to see how the process works.
Nineteenth-century Long Islanders were afraid to build in Cherry Grove and on Fire Island. According to Newton, it “was considered dangerous to even visit, allegedly because of murdering Indians, pirates, and ghosts.” (And history eventually proved them right, these Long Islanders, at least on the vaguely-frightening-Native-American count, circa the ’70s, when Fire Island resorts were overrun with them, and with construction workers, and with bikers, and with GIs, and with cowboys.) The straight couple that bought the Grove land wound up building a hotel and then breaking what was left into single-cottage lots, which they sold cheap.
The area gradually began to attract New York City gays. Even Oscar Wilde almost certainly stayed in the hotel. It doesn’t take much analysis to see why. The hotel was unbeautiful and the only place to stay or go in town; the beach was attractive but not more so than any other beach; the landscape was lovely but similar in every respect to the Pines one hamlet over. But the Pines was developed faster, and the Pines became straight—identical in most sociopolitical respects to New York, heavy under the weight of condos and missionary heterosexuality. Gays and lesbians settled—and the word, with its associated images of covered wagons and uncharted territory and Laura Ingalls Wilder and hunting for meat, is not chosen accidentally—the empty place. The blank slate. A territory barely touched by straight hands; and one that where it had been the space could be reclaimed for a dollar.
Which story is the generative way of looking at identity put into practice. The early trauma excludes gays and lesbians from the society, leaving them atomized, pathologized, and alone, deprived of what may be the most basic human right: the right to build oneself as human. The response of gays and lesbians, the real response, not the reaction or the negation, is to build something else. Not just cottages or boardwalks, but new societies in which new personhoods, and thus new persons, can be made. And will not be unmade.
It’s not just Cherry Grove where this happens, this construction of a new society and a new people. It also happens at piano bars like Marie’s Crisis; for better or for worse, it happens at Pride parades; it happens in visceral, perfectly tribal movement on dance floors. We’re not in the minority, because our people have built and we are building another world. To shout off-key into a showtunes chorus—not into five hundred people singing, but into the chorus, into the unity—at Marie’s, or to dance as we move to the same marrow-resonant bass as everyone else, is to find the restrictive four walls of I breaking down, is to really worship an identity not only one’s own, is to truly exist beyond and outside of every conventional way of being. Is to move into and create a new reality, in which we are possible. And in which we are actively making ourselves possible.
Here, no, look. See hundreds of mouths opening, hundreds of throats vibrating, hundreds of diaphragms in hundreds of chests pushing till they very nearly collapse, to get one single phrase out: I had a dream! A deep inhalation. Very nearly enough to create a vacuum. Heavy bar air that must have a proof sucked in fast and hard. Just enough for: A dream about you, baby!
Ecstasy. The ecstatic feeling of becoming a part of something that was only a dream sixty-four beats ago.
There, in those places, like Cherry Grove and Marie’s, I’m not in the minority at all. Not because they’re overrun with gay people, but simply because they are quite literally, in a way that has strong philosophical backing, not of the straight world. I am not a minority at Marie’s, and it has nothing to do with numbers. I am not a minority at Marie’s because historically, culturally, and mnemonically, it was built for me, built as a world in which I will never be less-than.
What’s particularly interesting is that this way of analyzing how oppressed communities develop is a repudiation of postmodern politics on its own terms. The claim that Judith Butler makes (and she’s taking Foucault to his logical conclusion, here) is that we can never rebel, we can only parody. We can turn something like gender into a superficial ironic performance. So her (their) political goal is to find those tiny loci in a vast network of power where we can play with what power does.
And the reality is that places like that, small places where resistance is possible, do exist. But they don’t exist ironically. A claim like that makes no historical sense, that the gay and lesbian people who ran to Cherry Grove were building a vast parody of straight society, a Magic Kingdom Main Street U.S.A. with gay bars. And they don’t exist in loneliness. Any theorist who can talk unironically about things like pain and despair and love and hope, about the words that have been declared vulgar because they’re common, can see that even the worst, seediest gay bar exists supported by a fundamental, mnemonic worship and love. The kind of love in which irony withers.
They, these loved and built places, do something. Something that’s not a joke. The politics of irony are a politics of despair—finally a politics of non-politics: not a way of making the social but a way of transforming a person from a social being into an isolated thing. And the irony, the post-everything that is-nothing, shatters connection. Shatters feeling. Shatters us. If it’s a game, then it’s Bergman’s chess.
So, no; we build our places and we build our selves. At a certain historical point, the oppressors have the same weight and impact as mosquitoes: they can find something to bleed, but to the body, they’ll never be more than an itch.