What if there was a cure? Here, I don't mean "cure" in the sense of a relief of disease or symptoms, but in the sense of being able to repress gaiety. The Heterosexualizer, let's say.
When I think of such things, I remember a scene in X-Men 3 (those movies are really just euphemisms for being gay, anyway):
ANNA PAQUIN: Is it true? Can they cure us?
PATRICK STEWART: Yes, Rogue. It appears to be true.
HALLE BERRY: No, Professor. They can't cure us. You want to know why? Because there's nothing to cure. Nothing's wrong with you. Or any of us, for that matter.
Admirable sentiments, Halle, but I would disagree re:your hair.
The movie raises some fairly interesting questions as far as the us versus them debate it presents. On the one side, you have Anna Paquin's character, who's actually a physical threat to other people if she just touches them (it flies directly in the face of the "mutant powers are cool!" deal). On the other side, you have Halle Berry - "there's nothing wrong with us, we're normal, just not the majority." Of course, she can also fly around creating ass-kicking hurricanes, so the euphemism isn't quite on the level I really want.
Comics and movies aside now. If there were a quantifiable way to not only suppress homosexuality but encourage heterosexuality, would I partake? No. Because at this point, when I'm 22, it would not only be carving out a part of my personality, it would result in an utter vivisection of self. Yeah, overwrought, but I said it. But, really, I would compare such a change to being amnesiac and retaining only a few key components of yourself. Suppose your brain was simply Wited-Out at random; suppose you remembered your dad but not your mom; suppose you remembered that you liked Corn Chex better than Wheat or rice; but you have no memory of elementary school. To me, that's what repressing my gaiety would represent.
There's a quote from JFK that got splashed on me a few weeks ago but that I've taken to heart:
"We choose to do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." Audio here.
Yeah, he's talking about going to the moon, but I take the quote for my own.
Homosexuality is not personally experienced by the majority. By that, I mean that even if gay marriage is a hot-button issue, even if "Prop 8" is the new Yahoo! top search, it doesn't mean anything in terms of understanding. People may see gay characters on TV, in the movies, in books; people may hear about gay rights and gay bashings on the news; people may have gay uncles and gay friends and gay children; but at the end of the day, the only way to understand is to experience. There is no "being gay" on command, like a show horse. Gaiety extends far beyond the object of love, lust, or desire, and much farther than any stereotype.
I had a friend once, a writer, who brought up the idea of writing what you know. She was a straight female, and she unabashedly said that she would take on writing any character, regardless of religion or gender or skin color or sexuality or whatever. Could she pull it off? Maybe. She asked me to read one of her stories, a story with a straight sex scene. The scene was told from the man's point of view, and it wasn't bad or unrealistic. Maybe she got into the man's skin, or maybe she just knew sex. Could she do the same for a gay person? It's certainly possible that she could write a mind-blowing scene of gay sex, even if the sex itself wasn't good. But I contend that if she did write believable gay characters, it would only be through the degrees of separation of her gay friends, and the filters of her own experience.
I don't want to homogenize every experience; there are as many ways of being gay as there are gay people. But there is an inherent understanding, I think, some kind of almost basic, instinctual thing, that connects gay people on some kind of weird experiential gestalt.
...Then again, maybe I'm full of shit. The next time I meet a guy, I'm going to start up a conversation about experiential gestalts and see if his Jung backflips (education rulez, motherlovers).
Damn. Maybe a more medical look at this next time. Long story short, would you take such a heterosexualizer, and if you would, under what circumstances?
0 comments:
Post a Comment