Heroes

History has weight.

I sometimes see complaints about historical (or contemporary) fiction in LGBTQ groups on Facebook. The sad story, the impossible love, the violent end to romance—these are too prevalent in LGBTQ fiction. Where do we get to be the heroes? Where do we get to see happy endings for us?

It’s a fair question but I’m left with a counter question: How real do you want the fiction to be? Could Oscar Wilde’s story have been much different than it was? How do you write his happy ending unless you’re doing speculative fiction/alternative history?

My novella, Cary and John, is somewhat historical in that the letters between the men are written in the early 1970s, but there is also a contemporary part, the narrative between the daughters of the men. They are not, to put it mildly, queer activists. When I first started shopping the manuscript around, one gay publisher responded in part, and I quote, “. . . too much page time was given to the daughters, whose homophobia overwhelmed the narrative and was not moderated even at the end.”

I could argue about the subtle shift that I think the daughters make by the end of the book, but I admit it is subtle and little bit the point. That moment when the shift begins was what I was most interested in writing about. I gave the titular characters as happy an ending as I could, given their circumstances, but without expanding the scope of the book drastically, any more than a subtle shift was all the daughters earned. Yes, I could have expanded the scope of the book, but that wasn’t the story I had to tell.

Certainly, LGBTQ folk are not alone in this. I hear similar frustration from other communities. Why are so many books about American Black experience centered on slavery? Can Native fiction writers escape the weight of lost land and residential schools? Obviously, there are very good books by Black and Native authors that do not center those experiences, but the weight of being racialized in a way that resulted in those atrocities are still in the background. How can they not be?

And I begin to ask, myself only until now, what if our desire to see ourselves as the hero of stories really just wanted to be part of the empire story? To read a biography of any U.S. president will center on his presidency and whether or not he was a good leader or not. Even if he’s assessed as less than heroic, he became president “because,” not “in spite of.” A biography of Wilde will focus on his literary accomplishments, but it’s a bit “in spite of” him being gay. Would Harvey Milk’s political accomplishments be noticed at all if he’d not been assassinated? Are there happy endings for Rudolf Nureyev, Liberace, Rock Hudson? Are what we want when we pine for happy endings, are we wanting to be more powerful, more traditionally successful, dying of less politicized causes?

This may be why a some BIPOC fiction has turned to futurism. It’s a way of envisioning a future where the previously oppressed can unambiguously end up a hero with a happy ending. It’s envisioning the redemption and reversal of a long history of injustice. There’s something sad as well as victorious in a movie like Black Panther, where we have to invent a place that remained untouched by European colonization. It’s an attempt at “what could be” as well as “what might have been.”

Jesus died a death of political and religious intrigue. His hero story is upside down, a nobody who should have disappeared into the history of other nobodies executed by the state. Whether you’re a Christian who believes in a literal resurrection or a Christian or atheist or other religious who sees the resurrection story as a myth like the story of Zeus becoming the supreme god of the Greek pantheon, the power of the story continues on in the lives of millions of Christians, but it is not a hero story in any classical sense of the word.

I confess I want gay heroes. I want gay heroes who have happy endings. But I’m beginning to check my desire, to see if it’s because I want to take part in the overarching stories of power and imperialism. I take part in those stories daily as a white man, an inheritor of the comfort and position afforded me by European colonialism. If there are heroes for me, perhaps it is in the community that some slaughtered saint left behind.

Exhausted, Anxious, and Checking Twitter

I listen to the Makers & Mystics podcast and a recent interview was with John Eldredge, a writer I used to stock on the shelves at Barnes & Noble, but I’ve never read any of them. On the podcast, he talks about pausing for beauty, pausing from social media and distraction, pausing for our own mental health. He talked about having a hard time reading anything longer than a blog post. He talked about having trouble focusing on his family members

I heard a diagnosis for my own condition. I, too, have had trouble reading books. I’m often at a table with friends and feel the pull of my phone and all the other people inside of it.

He said we can’t take the constant trauma of the world that constant connectivity brings us. I had just told the story, the evening before listening to the podcast, of my summer as a hospital chaplain and how I could not leave the people at the hospital, how they followed me home and weighed on me. I carry the trauma of the national politics in my joints. The world wars, military, economic, and political, have my anxiety up high all the time.

And I want to push back. Yes, even in my lifetime, we didn’t get constant news updates as we do today. We got news on TV twice, maybe 3 times a day, in an hour or shorter bites. We got the newspaper once a day. Outside of that, we lived our lives and maybe what we’d seen or read weighed on us, but so did our immediate company, our immediate work. And before my lifetime, there was a time without TV, a time without radio. News from beyond our communities might have come only once a day or once a week or a couple times a month. The powerful worked their machinations in relative silence, unseen day to day. Was that better or worse?

The deal is, the speed of the world allows the powerful to make their power moves with more speed, too. Two centuries ago, their power grabs also moved at a slower pace. Today, it feels like they have so many more opportunities to create poverty and despair as they create their own wealth. They have many more tools to hide, distract from, cover-up the nefarious intentions.

I could disconnect, live only in my immediate community and be crushed by the bull dozer I never saw coming. Or I can stay connected and see the bull dozer coming and still be crushed, the last hours lived in fear and anxiety as I was powerless to divert its course. Or maybe I could divert its course. Or get out of its way. Those last bits are what keeps me connected and anxious. It’s circular and exhausting. 

“Is it possible to learn how to care and yet not care?” Joni Mitchell asked that question in her Zen-influenced song, “Moon at the Window.” Can I care and not die of anxiety? Maybe that’s my question. Eldredge talked about detachment, a very Zen idea. To care, to pray, to turn over to God, to let go.

I wish I had some quick tips for stepping away from this. "Five Easy Prayers for Immediate Peace." And even as I type this, I'm thinking of people currently way more anxious about the the coronavirus outbreak than I am. Maybe we pick our anxieties.

I want to offer an answer. I want to end on a helpful note but I remind myself, this lenten blogging is more confession than instruction. I leave it here today. I'm an anxious, distractable mess. And I try to pause for beauty, too. It's a lot. I'm exhausted. And you? 

 

Ash Wednesday 2020

Remember you are dust.

It's a practice of humility, this receiving of ashes. Humility, said the Abbas and Ammas of the African desert, is key to following God. I love the Abbas and Ammas but their teaching is hard, even though it is the way to love.

The world is hard, too, and can be a way to love if it breaks the heart in all the right places, but it can also lead us to hate if callouses form in the wrong places.

I fear the latter. I see it happening. I feel it happening.

And so I'm reviving this blog for lent this year, as a tool for confession and an attempt at--at least an exploration of--humility. If one can humbly publish one's thoughts. The Abbas and Ammas would have something to say about that, I'm sure.

I've said that a calling doesn't need to make sense. The point of the calling is to follow. So that's what I'm doing here, following a calling I feel to work out some thoughts and feelings.

Not coincidentally, vocation will likely come up in the next forty days.

I don't expect to write forty posts, by the way. My daily life is very full these days and obligations would not be met if I tried to do that. I'm hoping for at least 3 times a week.

I figure this will be time better spent than craving chocolate until Easter. I hope so.

So . . . into my heart---calloused, broken, tender, and hard. Let's see what I find in there.

Remembering, in the end, it is dust.