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eredienAn lj friend of mine recently asked queer folks what they thought of forcibly outing queer politicans who were publicly anti-gay. Were they victims of societal homophobia? Was it their just desserts? Or something else?
I was going to answer there but it turned into a post of its own. This is long, and it's as much a personal meditation on religion as a public question of politics, so I put it behind a cut-tag.
I think to answer the question which we are trying to answer here, which is "can outing someone else as queer have a social benefit greater than its social cost to that person, which would justify the outing?" we should first look at what outing does.
I think that the best description I've ever seen of what the process of outing others--and not just outing as queer, all outing--does to the person being outed is this: "By outing someone, you are deciding, on that person's behalf, to incur whatever consequences outing that person might have." - Hilzoy, on Obsidian Wings [ital. original].
It's been my personal experience that outing myself has consequences, even when I am able to choose the time and place and the people I speak to and the words I say. That's even more true if you don't get to choose the time, place, people, or words. For example, even though I now encourage my mother to talk about me and my fiancee to extended family and friends--effectively outing me as queer every time she brings up my relationship in any context--I'm still nervous about it. I wonder what words she uses. I wonder how she presents me, my life, and my love to others.
I've learned to live with that fact, the fact that I no longer have control over every circumstance in which my sexuality might be discussed, for two reasons:
- I'm confident enough in my own sexuality that I don't have to have control over how it's discussed.
- I'm confident that those around me discussing it on my behalf are trying to do so in a respectful manner (and even if they don't, I've done what I think is right, and am content).
I feel like closeted queer politicians passing laws against queer people, especially, lack that confidence, and may also lack people who they believe would discuss their sexuality respectfully.
That's probably a large part of the reason why anyone, politician or not, is closeted in the first place, and in this case I definitely think that any closeted person is a victim of homophobia.
However, I think the situation to homophobia is to get that confidence, get those supportive people, not to institutionalize more homophobia into law. And that's where I think closeted queer politicians do the most damage--to themselves, to out queer people, and to the straight world.
I said above that outing oneself as queer has consequences. Some of those consequences, especially when you're unsure of yourself or others around you are unsure, are bad. However, if you have the opportunity to become more sure of yourself and the opportunity to get support from those around you, outing can be life-changing. I know it's improved my relationship with everyone I know, and with myself, to wake up and have the first thing I feel be "I'm happy" instead of "I'm hiding a secret that's making me miserable because I think I can't share it, but I have to pretend I'm happy." It's made me more truthful, less resentful, less scared, more likely to be aware of other social justice issues, better about knowing my own feelings and thinking it's ok to have them. Also, starting to heal my relationship with myself has healed relationships with family and friends, and has started to heal my relationship with God.
If you out a confident person in a supportive environment, the consequences of coming out can be amazingly positive. Even if you out a confident person in a less supportive environment, the consequences of coming out can become supportive with time, or that person can find the will to move on to a more supportive environment.
If you come out in an unconfident person in a non-supportive environment, though, the consequences can be very, very bad indeed. I don't think I have to say more than that.
I think that we should recognize that closeted queer politicians who are passing laws designed to create a non-supportive environment where people aren't confident coming out, and where straight people aren't confident about talking about queer people. It's important to recognize and call out the very real harm that they're doing.
When such people are outed--as they will be--it's easy to stop there. It's easy to say, "this unsupportive environment is the very same one that the closeted queer politician themselves helped to create with the bigoted laws they supported, so they can go stew in it and see how it feels."
However, I think that stopping there is the wrong tack--after all, they likely wouldn't have felt the need to create and support those laws if they weren't already feeling unconfident and had a non-supportive environment; they already know all about how it feels to stew in it. I think it's important to out such people so that they can stop doing harm to others, but I think it's most important to out bigoted queer politicians so that they can stop doing harm to themselves.
If you saw a person standing by a wall with a bleeding head, surrounded by non-bleeding friends cheering them on to keep bashing their head into the wall because somebody needs to do it and it feels good, you wouldn't assume that the person bashing their head into the wall really wanted to be in that much pain, even--especially--if they looked at you with a big smile and said, "this is great!" You'd assume that the cheering people were wrong, and that the person bashing their head into the wall had problems with self-preservation and not being able to understand that their friends weren't always right. You'd want to stop the person from hurting themselves.
But you wouldn't just walk up to the person and say, "this person hates bashing their head into the wall!" The wall-hitter and their friends might have convinced themselves that it felt great, and paint you as a liar. If the wall-hitter finally broke down and started saying, "you know, it's true; this feels horrible," their friends will turn on them--and you--because they've convinced themselves that someone needs to do it and it feels great, despite the fact that none of them have really tried it.
And after that, what is the mental state of the wall-hitter? They will will hate you for telling the truth. They will hate themselves for listening to it and for speaking up about it. They'll hate their friends for hurting them, and then they'll hate their friends for leaving them. They'll hate the wall. They'll hate the truth. They'll hate the fact that they were so gullible. All that hate might convince them that even though they were being hurt before, they prefer the pain they know rather than dealing with the truth you haven't equipped them to deal with and for which they can't equip themselves--maybe they are still convinced they need to hit the wall even though it hurts, and start again knowing the truth and hating it even more. They might go join someone else's cheering section.
What else could you do?
- You could replace the wall-hitter's cheering friends with friends who said, "it's ok to stop doing that."
- You could whisper daily in the ear of the wall-hitter, quietly saying, "it hurts, doesn't it? Why not stop and see what happens?" so their friends wouldn't hear you, until they decided to stop hitting the wall and walk away. They'd see that they wouldn't actually need to do it and wouldn't hate you for it, because they would feel as if they came to the correct conclusion themselves and have self-confidence in their decisions.
- You could tear down the wall.
I think we should out queer politicians who make laws against queers or are otherwise anti-gay.
I don't think we should do it because there are no consequences of outing that person, or because the consequences of outing that person are not dire, or because "they're a public figure, they should be able to take it," or even because that person deserves to be outed because of their hypocrisy and the damage they've caused to other queers.
I think we should out queer anti-gay politicians because if we can do it right, it will confirm what we say--that being out can be the best thing that ever happened to a queer; that there's a life here to live, free of shame and free of self-hate.
However, in the case of forcibly outing anti-gay queer politicans, I don't think we queers are doing it right.
The discussion of this issue in the queer community, I've noticed, often stops at the issue of "they deserve to be outed and damaged by it because they're a hypocrite; look at the damage they've done; look at the consequences of the laws they've passed on other queers!"
We pride ourselves, we queers, on being open and supportive to anyone who comes out, from 16-year-olds outed without their consent and kicked out of the house, to 60-year-olds finding octogenarian partners in the retirement home.
We talk about how supportive our friends and family have become, even if they started out by telling us we were evil, or if our friends and family are still on the evil kick, how we can create new families that love us. We talk about how God helped us through it and how we've found supportive communities of faith. We talk about how coming out was the best thing we ever did, we talk about being outed and how that was hard but ok too; we tell people that saying that we were gay was the best thing that ever happened to us.
When queers forcibly out an anti-gay queer politican and leave them to the damaging consequences, we are fostering a disconnect between the original problem, "can outing someone else as queer have a social benefit greater than its social cost to that person, which would justify the outing?" and queer communities' general answer, "yes, the greater social benefit of outing someone else as queer can be greater than its social cost to that person, but outing someone else as queer can also have an eventual social benefit to that person greater than its initial social cost to that person, which would surely justify the outing. With our very lives, we model how that individual social cost can become a greater individual and communal social benefit."
For anti-gay queer politicans forcibly outed, the queer communities' behavior doesn't show that the greater eventual social benefits of outing someone as queer may outweigh the initial social cost, and we aren't showing how that individual social cost can become a greater individual and communal social benefit, either.
Instead, we think it's ok to out a bigoted queer politician and then leave them to their "friends," because they and their friends hurt us. We can see the politician bleeding. They turn to us and say "this feels great." It breaks our heart by reminding us of who we used to be before we were out and happy, as it should, and at the same time the hypocrisy disgusts us, as it should. We rejoice when they admit that it hurts, but we're not rejoicing because they've understood the truth or rejected their own hypocrisy; we're rejoicing because they've finally started crying from the pain and finally noticed the blood running down their own face.
Then we walk away, leaving them to the friends that we know aren't friends, to the pain we know that you can trick yourself into thinking is necessary, to the voices of doubt, to the hate of themselves and of us, to the consequences we tell ourselves we'd never let anyone else face alone. And we congratulate ourselves on our good deed among our supportive friends because now that one person will stop hurting me and mine.
That one person is me and mine, an out queer, hurting, with no support, thinking, "being out is the worst thing that's ever happened to me." If the queer community really has an obligation, as it keeps saying it does, to support all of its out members, we especially need to support the people we don't like, the ones who were forcibly outed as hypocrites, the ones who made laws to hurt themselves and us, the ones who were bashing their head against the wall of legislation and public opinion polls and love codified into pain.
If they can't see how the initial social cost to them now will be outweighed by the eventual benefits for themselves and others--and they can't, because they're overwhelmed by the initial cost of the bigoted system that they themselves paid into--queer communities need to be around in order to model alternative behavior and model how the initial social costs will be outweighed eventually.
Coming to understand for themselves that there are alternatives--and coming to understand for themselves that those alternatives work, and how those alternatives work--is how queer people, even closeted bigoted politician queer people, change "being outed is the worst thing that ever happened to me" into "being outed was the best thing that ever happened to me." That's how people recognize their own problems, their own hypocrisy, and come to apologize to themselves and others for their very real errors, and be forgiven and forgive themselves, and start working for change.
Right now they can't see the alternative to pain, can't see how their attitudes will change, because the people who model that change are abandoning them. We are being "friends," but we need to be their friends.
If queers can start doing that--and I think we can--we gain voices to whisper louder in the ears of the bleeding; gain hands to dismantling the wall of homophobia and silence faster and faster; gain people who, when a bleeding person turns to them and asks, "how do you know it's ok to stop banging my head against this wall?" can point to the scars on their own head.
I was going to answer there but it turned into a post of its own. This is long, and it's as much a personal meditation on religion as a public question of politics, so I put it behind a cut-tag.
I think to answer the question which we are trying to answer here, which is "can outing someone else as queer have a social benefit greater than its social cost to that person, which would justify the outing?" we should first look at what outing does.
I think that the best description I've ever seen of what the process of outing others--and not just outing as queer, all outing--does to the person being outed is this: "By outing someone, you are deciding, on that person's behalf, to incur whatever consequences outing that person might have." - Hilzoy, on Obsidian Wings [ital. original].
It's been my personal experience that outing myself has consequences, even when I am able to choose the time and place and the people I speak to and the words I say. That's even more true if you don't get to choose the time, place, people, or words. For example, even though I now encourage my mother to talk about me and my fiancee to extended family and friends--effectively outing me as queer every time she brings up my relationship in any context--I'm still nervous about it. I wonder what words she uses. I wonder how she presents me, my life, and my love to others.
I've learned to live with that fact, the fact that I no longer have control over every circumstance in which my sexuality might be discussed, for two reasons:
- I'm confident enough in my own sexuality that I don't have to have control over how it's discussed.
- I'm confident that those around me discussing it on my behalf are trying to do so in a respectful manner (and even if they don't, I've done what I think is right, and am content).
I feel like closeted queer politicians passing laws against queer people, especially, lack that confidence, and may also lack people who they believe would discuss their sexuality respectfully.
That's probably a large part of the reason why anyone, politician or not, is closeted in the first place, and in this case I definitely think that any closeted person is a victim of homophobia.
However, I think the situation to homophobia is to get that confidence, get those supportive people, not to institutionalize more homophobia into law. And that's where I think closeted queer politicians do the most damage--to themselves, to out queer people, and to the straight world.
I said above that outing oneself as queer has consequences. Some of those consequences, especially when you're unsure of yourself or others around you are unsure, are bad. However, if you have the opportunity to become more sure of yourself and the opportunity to get support from those around you, outing can be life-changing. I know it's improved my relationship with everyone I know, and with myself, to wake up and have the first thing I feel be "I'm happy" instead of "I'm hiding a secret that's making me miserable because I think I can't share it, but I have to pretend I'm happy." It's made me more truthful, less resentful, less scared, more likely to be aware of other social justice issues, better about knowing my own feelings and thinking it's ok to have them. Also, starting to heal my relationship with myself has healed relationships with family and friends, and has started to heal my relationship with God.
If you out a confident person in a supportive environment, the consequences of coming out can be amazingly positive. Even if you out a confident person in a less supportive environment, the consequences of coming out can become supportive with time, or that person can find the will to move on to a more supportive environment.
If you come out in an unconfident person in a non-supportive environment, though, the consequences can be very, very bad indeed. I don't think I have to say more than that.
I think that we should recognize that closeted queer politicians who are passing laws designed to create a non-supportive environment where people aren't confident coming out, and where straight people aren't confident about talking about queer people. It's important to recognize and call out the very real harm that they're doing.
When such people are outed--as they will be--it's easy to stop there. It's easy to say, "this unsupportive environment is the very same one that the closeted queer politician themselves helped to create with the bigoted laws they supported, so they can go stew in it and see how it feels."
However, I think that stopping there is the wrong tack--after all, they likely wouldn't have felt the need to create and support those laws if they weren't already feeling unconfident and had a non-supportive environment; they already know all about how it feels to stew in it. I think it's important to out such people so that they can stop doing harm to others, but I think it's most important to out bigoted queer politicians so that they can stop doing harm to themselves.
If you saw a person standing by a wall with a bleeding head, surrounded by non-bleeding friends cheering them on to keep bashing their head into the wall because somebody needs to do it and it feels good, you wouldn't assume that the person bashing their head into the wall really wanted to be in that much pain, even--especially--if they looked at you with a big smile and said, "this is great!" You'd assume that the cheering people were wrong, and that the person bashing their head into the wall had problems with self-preservation and not being able to understand that their friends weren't always right. You'd want to stop the person from hurting themselves.
But you wouldn't just walk up to the person and say, "this person hates bashing their head into the wall!" The wall-hitter and their friends might have convinced themselves that it felt great, and paint you as a liar. If the wall-hitter finally broke down and started saying, "you know, it's true; this feels horrible," their friends will turn on them--and you--because they've convinced themselves that someone needs to do it and it feels great, despite the fact that none of them have really tried it.
And after that, what is the mental state of the wall-hitter? They will will hate you for telling the truth. They will hate themselves for listening to it and for speaking up about it. They'll hate their friends for hurting them, and then they'll hate their friends for leaving them. They'll hate the wall. They'll hate the truth. They'll hate the fact that they were so gullible. All that hate might convince them that even though they were being hurt before, they prefer the pain they know rather than dealing with the truth you haven't equipped them to deal with and for which they can't equip themselves--maybe they are still convinced they need to hit the wall even though it hurts, and start again knowing the truth and hating it even more. They might go join someone else's cheering section.
What else could you do?
- You could replace the wall-hitter's cheering friends with friends who said, "it's ok to stop doing that."
- You could whisper daily in the ear of the wall-hitter, quietly saying, "it hurts, doesn't it? Why not stop and see what happens?" so their friends wouldn't hear you, until they decided to stop hitting the wall and walk away. They'd see that they wouldn't actually need to do it and wouldn't hate you for it, because they would feel as if they came to the correct conclusion themselves and have self-confidence in their decisions.
- You could tear down the wall.
I think we should out queer politicians who make laws against queers or are otherwise anti-gay.
I don't think we should do it because there are no consequences of outing that person, or because the consequences of outing that person are not dire, or because "they're a public figure, they should be able to take it," or even because that person deserves to be outed because of their hypocrisy and the damage they've caused to other queers.
I think we should out queer anti-gay politicians because if we can do it right, it will confirm what we say--that being out can be the best thing that ever happened to a queer; that there's a life here to live, free of shame and free of self-hate.
However, in the case of forcibly outing anti-gay queer politicans, I don't think we queers are doing it right.
The discussion of this issue in the queer community, I've noticed, often stops at the issue of "they deserve to be outed and damaged by it because they're a hypocrite; look at the damage they've done; look at the consequences of the laws they've passed on other queers!"
We pride ourselves, we queers, on being open and supportive to anyone who comes out, from 16-year-olds outed without their consent and kicked out of the house, to 60-year-olds finding octogenarian partners in the retirement home.
We talk about how supportive our friends and family have become, even if they started out by telling us we were evil, or if our friends and family are still on the evil kick, how we can create new families that love us. We talk about how God helped us through it and how we've found supportive communities of faith. We talk about how coming out was the best thing we ever did, we talk about being outed and how that was hard but ok too; we tell people that saying that we were gay was the best thing that ever happened to us.
When queers forcibly out an anti-gay queer politican and leave them to the damaging consequences, we are fostering a disconnect between the original problem, "can outing someone else as queer have a social benefit greater than its social cost to that person, which would justify the outing?" and queer communities' general answer, "yes, the greater social benefit of outing someone else as queer can be greater than its social cost to that person, but outing someone else as queer can also have an eventual social benefit to that person greater than its initial social cost to that person, which would surely justify the outing. With our very lives, we model how that individual social cost can become a greater individual and communal social benefit."
For anti-gay queer politicans forcibly outed, the queer communities' behavior doesn't show that the greater eventual social benefits of outing someone as queer may outweigh the initial social cost, and we aren't showing how that individual social cost can become a greater individual and communal social benefit, either.
Instead, we think it's ok to out a bigoted queer politician and then leave them to their "friends," because they and their friends hurt us. We can see the politician bleeding. They turn to us and say "this feels great." It breaks our heart by reminding us of who we used to be before we were out and happy, as it should, and at the same time the hypocrisy disgusts us, as it should. We rejoice when they admit that it hurts, but we're not rejoicing because they've understood the truth or rejected their own hypocrisy; we're rejoicing because they've finally started crying from the pain and finally noticed the blood running down their own face.
Then we walk away, leaving them to the friends that we know aren't friends, to the pain we know that you can trick yourself into thinking is necessary, to the voices of doubt, to the hate of themselves and of us, to the consequences we tell ourselves we'd never let anyone else face alone. And we congratulate ourselves on our good deed among our supportive friends because now that one person will stop hurting me and mine.
That one person is me and mine, an out queer, hurting, with no support, thinking, "being out is the worst thing that's ever happened to me." If the queer community really has an obligation, as it keeps saying it does, to support all of its out members, we especially need to support the people we don't like, the ones who were forcibly outed as hypocrites, the ones who made laws to hurt themselves and us, the ones who were bashing their head against the wall of legislation and public opinion polls and love codified into pain.
If they can't see how the initial social cost to them now will be outweighed by the eventual benefits for themselves and others--and they can't, because they're overwhelmed by the initial cost of the bigoted system that they themselves paid into--queer communities need to be around in order to model alternative behavior and model how the initial social costs will be outweighed eventually.
Coming to understand for themselves that there are alternatives--and coming to understand for themselves that those alternatives work, and how those alternatives work--is how queer people, even closeted bigoted politician queer people, change "being outed is the worst thing that ever happened to me" into "being outed was the best thing that ever happened to me." That's how people recognize their own problems, their own hypocrisy, and come to apologize to themselves and others for their very real errors, and be forgiven and forgive themselves, and start working for change.
Right now they can't see the alternative to pain, can't see how their attitudes will change, because the people who model that change are abandoning them. We are being "friends," but we need to be their friends.
If queers can start doing that--and I think we can--we gain voices to whisper louder in the ears of the bleeding; gain hands to dismantling the wall of homophobia and silence faster and faster; gain people who, when a bleeding person turns to them and asks, "how do you know it's ok to stop banging my head against this wall?" can point to the scars on their own head.
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