choosing queerness
This Week in Reading
The Fixed Stars by Molly Wizenberg
I’ve been aware of this story since Molly Wizenberg first came out on her blog, Orangette, in 2016. I was captivated by her story: a woman who had been straight her entire life, with a happy, decade long marriage, two restaurants she co-owned with her husband, and a 4-year-old daughter, who woke up one day, and was suddenly a lesbian. It was a queer narrative that felt refreshingly different from the ones I had been fed by gay movies and books. Like her food writing, her coming out was matter-of-fact and unfussy. Her story was not one of closeted repression and teenage experimentation. She had loved—truly loved—Brandon as a straight woman, and then, at the age of 36, her sexuality changed and she had to end her marriage. I was taken by the easy fluidity of her story, the breezy lack of angst to it. She and Brandon still loved each other, would continue to raise their daughter together, continue to work together.
I’ve been anticipating this book for over a year, but when I read it I found it to be full of the anguish her blog post lacked. I will admit— I was disappointed that the memoir was so difficult and sad and complicated. Which is to say I was disappointed that life continues to be as messy and heartbreaking as it always has been. In the years since her initial blog post, Wizenberg had time to settle into her new life and reflect back on her previous one. Her marriage had been infected by problems separate from her sexuality; post-divorce she realized she did not, in fact, want to stay involved in Brandon’s businesses. The Fixed Stars lacks the fresh simplicity of her coming out post, but is instead, more honest.
It is less a book about sexuality and more a memoir about divorce, and the struggle to change the story you have told about yourself your entire life. In an interview with the Rumpus Wizenberg says: “All along—through developing this crush, deciding what to do about it, opening my marriage, leaving my marriage, ending my first relationship with a woman, falling in love with a different person—I was grappling with how to integrate this shift into the person that I had written myself into being. Writing is, for me, primarily a tool for thinking.”
We (the gay community) tell straight people that we are “born this way” so that they leave us alone. Don’t try to convert us— we have always been gay. But behind closed doors, our conversations look very different. While some queer people do feel like their queerness is something that has been inside them from the very beginning, this is not a narrative that is true for all, or even most, gay people. Some people, like Wizenberg, feel their sexuality shift and flip at various points in their lives; many of us, myself included, view our sexuality as a choice that solidified the murky fog of homoerotic curiosity into something more concrete. I’ll let you in on the secret—you can choose to be gay.
The subtext of the born this way narrative is darker than the surface level rebuttal it offers— of course gay people are born this way, who would ever choose this, this tragic curse of homosexuality? Who would choose a life so sad and hard and bad? The mainstream fixation on the born this way framework also actively alienates many people who come into their queerness later in life, as if their newfound curiosity is invalid if they are not able to pinpoint an earlier gay impulse deep in their past. Upon her sexual awakening, Wizenberg feels compelled to interrogate her past romances: her current marriage with Brandon, her college boyfriends. She latches onto a tiny instance from her past— a lesbian cheese monger she had worked with at Whole Foods, who she had gone on a non-date with one summer break. Unconsummated by a goodnight kiss, the non-date was easy to move past, seemingly erased by the slew of male crushes and boyfriends that followed it. Now in middle age, Wizenberg examines it more closely: was that the moment? Had she always been gay, her lesbian desires suppressed for decades? Was her past loves and current marriage a lie? Tools to repress her own homosexuality? This impulse to rewrite her past was a way to write herself into the born-this-way narrative that felt synonymous with gayness— but to fit herself into that story arc was to write herself further from the reality of her experience. She writes: “what do we make of our unreliable narrator? She would have swapped anything, even her sanity to make sense.”
Personally, I believe that each of our capacities for desire is broader than we can imagine. Sexual orientation is simply how each of us chooses to engage with that capacity. When faced with this wide spectrum of pleasure, some people feel compelled to engage with every permutation of desire, engage (physically or intellectually) with their capacity to feel attraction for every gender, their ability to love multiple partners simultaneously. Others may prefer to set boundaries on their desire— lay out frameworks for their attraction to live within. Some people may decide that sexual intimacy is not important or urgent or even appealing to them in their relationships. When I say that I am a lesbian what I am conveying is that I am only interested in dating women, not that I am exclusively attracted to them. I’m extremely disinterested in men— that has nothing to do with biological attraction. In my eyes, biological wiring has little impact on identity. Yes, we are all calibrated differently, lean more or less heavily towards various forms of desire, but it is up to us what we do with that. For some people, engaging with queerness feels impossible, while for others, not allowing themselves to experience queerness is the true impossibility. I won’t say that being gay is an act of bravery—it is not brave to give in to the part of yourself that you hear most loudly in your own brain, but in a world where heterosexuality is still the accepted norm, opting into queerness does require some measure of courage.
My views about sexuality have grown softer over the years. I am less judgmental than I once was, less fixated on policing other people’s identities. Dating a straight woman will do that to you. I gravitated to this book for reasons extremely obvious to anyone familiar with my relationship. There is so much of that story that is not mine to tell, but this is what I can say: Sophie spent six months telling me she was too straight to try dating me, and another six months insisting she was still straight while dating me. This was stressful at the time, but simultaneously, irrelevant. Who cared what labels she did or did not affix to herself when she stared at me with those huge mushy eyes, held my hand so gently I worried I might pass out. Whether or not she felt “gay” was honestly immaterial to our relationship. What was relevant was whether or not she liked me enough to remain with me, and the answer to that was always yes. The words she chooses to know herself by, and be known by the world by, are both powerful and important, but are separate from the way we know each other.
I had been gay for seven years before Sophie and my first date. Dating me was the catalyst for her queerness and her practicum in it. I have been intimately a part of Sophie’s life as a queer woman. And yet— I have no role in how she defines her sexuality. Her queerness is bigger than me and bigger than our relationship. I do not get to determine her identity for her, or worse, teach her what it means to be queer—god knows we tried that.
Love, like sexuality, is a choice. We take the broad spectrum of attachment: domesticity, friendship, cohabitation, sex, companionship, partnership, and choose to affix it to the concept of romantic love. And we choose that, choose to stay in love, day after day after day.
"Jock Tarot", 2020
Studio-ing
After more than a year and a half, my jock tarot deck is finally done, printed, and here. I methodically photoshopped sports imagery into all 78 cards of the Rider-Waite deck: kings cradling bowling pins, The World clutching a set of pom-poms. I see both sports and tarot as modern day forms of divination. They are both way of manifesting luck and good fortune in a world that is organized only by chaos. Faced with the uncertainty of the future, humans have created systems to determine success-- whether that be new age mysticism that allows us to interpret the past and foretell what is to come, or systemized sports games that determine clear winners and losers in a universe that is inherently unwinnable. Systems create the illusion of control, as if with the right training and conditioning, the correct analysis of the cards we draw—victory can be assured to us.
With this deck, the power of tarot is infused with the richly charged imagery of jocks-- one of the most powerful forces we have. Jocks are modern day gladiators. They are masters of the physical world, inhabiting their bodies at a higher skill level than the majority of people. They are motivated by the twin values of teamwork and winning, a noble pairing that is now embedded into this deck.
I am an expert on neither tarot or sports. I have created an alphabet for a language that hasn't yet been invented. Though I made the deck, the piece is only activated when used and interpreted by someone else. I have numerous ideas of how this project can manifest as a performance or installation piece, but alas, they will have to wait until after the pandemic.
I sold out of this deck in a matter of hours but I am getting more printed—if you want to get on the wait list for them respond to this email and I’ll reach out when they become available— they are $88 with free domestic shipping.
Further Reading:
If you are looking to read more Molly Wizenberg, her first memoir, A Homemade Life, is a light and unfussy food memoir. I also highly recommend this interview she did with the Rumpus. In terms of the Gay Canon: Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin is a cornerstone text.