Things I Learned on Saturday Night
Heretic heaven is here on earth
On Saturday night, I rushed between two fantastic events: a book party for Ben Appel’s new memoir Cis White Gay and a Louis CK show at the Beacon Theater. An evening of heretic heaven!
If you’ve not yet read Ben’s book—for which Sarah Mittermaier and I are hosting a paid subscriber book club with Ben on December 12!—then you haven’t yet learned that a chapter on queer theory can be gossipy fun. You’ll learn all you need to know about Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, without the pain of having to read their work!
But you’ll also understand how torturous it could be to grow up as a feminine boy in a society which had no room for such kids—and how torturous it was to encounter the new religion of social justice, that condemned the gay adults such kids grew up to be, for not being “queer enough.”
After the party, I booked up to the Beacon, because Ticketmaster told me that if I wasn’t in my seat by 7:15 the doors would shut without me. (This was a lie.)
Louis went on after two opening acts, and meandered from schoolboy raunchy to philosopher deep. Myself, I love the deep parts and the dark parts, the existential comedy, the contemplating the pain of having to wake up every day—though he had a lot of funny things to say about farts, too. I shall now say “God bless you” after anyone toots.
Somehow, his digressions led him to pronounce that the number one most important skill when he was a kid was to not seem gay.
And that this was now a totally useless skill. (Believe me, it was hilarious when he said it.)
After the show, I went to dinner with a professor who works at a liberal college, a school that I think of as hopelessly woke, for lack of a better description—one where students called out professors for wrongthink and left little room for anything with the vague appearance of normalcy. I think of these environments as the manifestation of the queer theory Ben writes about: an insistence that the minority is the majority, the oddity is normal, that everything must be queered, else it becomes a tool of oppression.
Well, the professor told me it’s all over. You can say whatever you want now, make fun of everyone. You can pretend it’s 1984 in Massachusetts and use the word “retarded” to mean “dumb.” Oh, and you can use “dumb.”
And you can use “gay” to mean “bad.”
Wait…is this progress? Is it regression? Is it correcting the correction to the original wrong? Are we moving forward? Or: are going around in ever-widening circles?
I don’t know.
As much as I love the R-word—a mainstay of GenX childhood—I don’t want to go back to a time when it wasn’t okay to be gay. This was a fear many of us have shared over the past five years as we tried to raise awareness on the left: that the trans “rights” movement, to erase biological sex and transition children, would end up causing many accepting people to reverse course. We’d move forward ten steps and back a thousand, rolling back support of gay rights. (Luckily, the Supreme Court doesn’t seemed poised to nix gay marriage.)
Still, if it’s true that the muzzle is coming off at liberal arts schools, I’ll be so relieved. Maybe by the time my kids head to college, we’ll have achieved some sort of balance.1
Yes, this is delusional.
I love this upbeat post, and perhaps my fave thing (of many) is that you used a footnote to hilarious effect. May there be many more good days in ALL of our futures.❤️🙏❤️
College students using "gay" to mean bad? I see this in my middle schoolers - well, one of them, because the other one may actually BE gay and is fending off this stuff from his brother constantly... It does concern me, and I absolutely think it's a backlash to the alphabet soup nonsense they have been force-fed since elementary school. But by college you'd think they'd have outgrown such behavior.
I do struggle with how to handle this behavior in my son. I'm constantly reprimanding him for this sort of language, or jokes about his brother's femininity. On the other hand, I worry that I'm just making him want to say it more, because he clearly thinks it's so funny, and as we know, suppressing speech doesn't work in the long run. Fortunately, my feminine son doesn't really seem to care when his brother calls him gay, but he does hate it when he calls him a girl. On that note, he got "misgendered" (or shall I say missexed?) twice at school yesterday when he went to a new after-school club, because people can't process the fact that a long-haired, elegantly dressed 7th grader could actually be a boy. I'm not sure if they really thought he was a girl or if they assumed he identified as trans and wanted to "gender" him correctly. Ugh.