Coming Out of the LiveJournal Closet

This week I've been challenged to blog about something that makes me uncomfortable. Of course, when danger is your middle name, you scoff in the face of discomfort. It's taken me some time to decide what I might write about that causes me discomfort (short of commitment, human interaction, accountability, and the future, of course). What if I abandoned my faux-cool faux-intellectual detachment and blogged about something personal?

In the winter months of my junior year of high school, I did two things: first, I started a livejournal account, which I more or less actively maintained for the next three years of my life. I've spent some time recently thinking about the new interactions which social media enable, and come to realize a few things about my livejournalistic engagements.

First, though this didn't mean very much to me until recently, my livejournal is the longest writing project in which I've ever been involved. My most recent entry was this past January, bringing my total posts to 348, the majority of which were posted between 2005 and 2008. My eight livejournal friends (my closest real-world friends) and my numerous comments on their respective livejournals also suggests that this has also been the longest-running reading project in which I have ever engaged. Whether I want to admit it or not, my time on livejournal has played a significant role in shaping the way I engage and respond to texts, which is extremely interesting to a blogger for whom English grad school might be on the horizon (This would also be your cue to make a cheap, but well deserved, shot at my grammar and my ability to edit).

The founding of my livejournal, my first adventure in blogging, also coincided almost exactly with my decision to start the coming out process (temporally, I think I started coming out a week or two before I began my livejournal). Obviously, this is not to say that I came out because I started writing about myself online, or that I started blogging because I couldn't handle the (at times very stressful) public/private negotiations of secrecy that mark one's coming out. However, I'm coming to understand that the two were, for me, closely connected. At the very least, my insistence on making all of my entries "friends only" paralleled the kind of "friends only" attitude I took with my sexuality (I came out to my friends a significant amount of time before confronting the issue with either of my parents). Livejournal then, to some extent, helped me negotiate my coming out.

I remember the public nature of such a blog being absolutely terrifying to me; even then I spent a lot of time thinking about how public such a project could potentially be. I spent large quantities of time, at least in the beginning, thinking about what I could write or not in a particular entry and what information about me would be available to the world. I wonder though, if being forced to think about coming out in those terms, as a negotiation of publicity and privacy, actually helped me come out more easily. Rather than compounding my already-sizable anxiety about everyone discovering my secret, I think my livejournal helped concretize the process, enabling me to think about coming out in different terms, even if I wasn't quite aware of it. I wonder, was the way I thought about the telling/keeping of secrets and sharing of information in the "real world," most of all coming out, structured by my engagements with livejournal, at least on some level?

What's more, becoming comfortable with the process of writing about and around my coming out made me infinitely more comfortable with the process off-line. I can, in fact, think of at least two situations (each occurring a significant amount of time after my initial coming out)  in which I ended up coming out to people precisely because they had joined our expanding livejournal community, and it was going to start being weird if I denied them access to mine. My social media interactions both made coming out easier and gave me a little push to do it (something I think people need on occasion, especially me). This also suggests that I was starting to see a weird conflation between my digital interactions and my real ones. What does it mean for my coming out narrative to shift to "Oh, if you're gonna read my livejournal, I should tell you, I'm gay?" And this is not to mention the somewhat obvious and oft discussed point that once I understood it to be a safe space, my livejournal community provided me a place of digital acceptance and relatively judgment free social negotiations (complicated and made even cooler/more useful by the fact that all of my livejournal correspondences were my real-life best friends). 

One of my biggest fears in writing this blog is to become "the boy who cried queer," using the word so many times that it ends up not meaning very much, but I wonder if we can think about this experience in two ways. First, how might we understand the new forms of community and organizing which social media enable to be queer? In the case of my livejournal, my community was a new iteration of my already existing social network, whose workings (though they weren't always positive) feels decidedly queer. Secondly, do we see social media, the blogosphere in particular, to have unique effects on and present unique opportunities to its queer citizens? The wide distribution of the internet is changing coming out narratives and providing new ways for queers to organize, both socially and politically. Maybe social media isn't a queer technology, but we're certainly doing our best to make it one.

Have a good week, folks.

PS: I feel weird that there aren't many links in this post. For the sake of easing my mind, watch this (by now sort of dated) video, in which a bully victim fights back very harshly against his bully. And then this responding penny arcade comic, and let me know what your thoughts are. This alone might be enough to start a discussion. Remember my rule about blogging not being a spectator's sport? I was serious.

The Days When Birds Come Back

I'm back, folks, after a long bout of the flu that has left me looking rather like Kate Moss. This week has been sort of nuts, as the week before spring break often is, and I hope you have all been riding out the chaos well enough. Despite all the craziness and anxiety about impending graduation and my less than lucrative career goals, there are some mornings, when I have time to get up and do some writing and purchase a new book, with springtime-appropriate weather streaming in through the windows. These are mornings of optimism for me, that leave me feeling as though maybe we can all plug onward. To paraphrase E.D, these are the [mornings] when skies resume/The old-old sophistries of June-/A blue and gold mistake.

I want to take a blog moment to examine both the project I have set forth in this blog and my own commitment to that project. As you may be realizing, two things are occuring with regards to my writing habits: 1) I am not updating as frequently as I'd like and 2) I have made some blog promises on which I have not followed through, mainly in the form of promised follow-ups. I imagine these writerly habits are quite frustrating for you, as readers. All I can really say on this front is that I will try to play a better host to the handful of you who visit this cozy pocket of the internet.

Onward and upward, though. All the hubub which has been taking place at and around this queer turtle's university (Anna Deavere Smith, Selly Thiam, the recent marriage debacle, the many documentaries I spent my sick days watching) have left me wondering about the political and cultural weight of testimony. On the one hand, I think lots of scholarship out there (with some notable exceptions) teaches us that personal testimony is to be avoided. It is purely affective and therefore has very little critical appeal. And yet, with the recent MD marriage disappointment, we cannot discount the political importance of testimony, even if it seems a strange data source, in a number of ways. How do we read a partially affective data source? Do we attempt to draw any sort of objective conclusion from such a subjective construction? Finally, why do we find personal testimony so compelling?


Of particular interest to me is the ex-gay presence at the hearing (Its use of the word "homosexual" should gesture toward my feelings about that particular post, however I find its videos and commentary to be useful). In the spirit of the archive, I'll try to offer this evidence sans commentary, and let you readers draw your own conclusions. However, I can't pass up the opportunity to ask about the myth of the "Homosexual Lifestyle." This seems to sort of undercut the diversity of the gay community. Implicit in such phrasing is the idea that, though there are many different kinds of straight people, the gay doctor. lawyer, and blogger are all the same, which is a pretty silly idea. Returning to the evidence at hand though, why do people find ex-gay testimony so effective? Is it the narrative of redemption that attracts them?

To round out some of the last posting I play to make about marriage for a good, long while, Gender and Sexuality in Law has some great postings on marriage stuff. Check it out and tell me how hard you laughed at this video. Because srsly folks. It's good.

Things to think about:  Why didn't the marriage bill go to vote? What do we make of politicians who are willing to make such a political maneuver? What does this mean for future ventures in the realm of marriage equality and gay rights, more broadly? And, as always, where do we go from here?

Finally, we all need to get our kumbaya-yas out in one form or another:

I'm surprised it's taken Buffy this long to surface 'round these parts.


 (Dickinson image thieved via)

An Archive of Girl-Power

Hey folks, sorry its taken me so long to get this sophomore posting up. I hope in the future to post more regularly, but we’ve had some thrilling goings on ‘round these parts. Also, I'm not totally convinced that this post necessarily properly belongs to this tiny portion of the internet, because, though decidedly queer, it tends to be a little more academic in focus than I had planned. As a result, this posting has been cross-posted at my good friend/parent/exact-same-person blog, Heterocide (You thought it was dead, didn't you?). At the risk of alienating some of my readers, then, I want to take a moment to think publicly (and briefly) about Ann Cvetkovich's lecture "Queer Ephemerality and the Counterarchives," before moving on to some hopefully more interesting material. (Really though, if you want to skip ahead, I won't be offended. And even if I am, I'll probably just leave a passive-aggressive whiteboard/post-it note about it.)

Ann Cvetkovich has come to town, and left the College Park area feeling a touch of archive fever. I will first say that her lecture was fantastic. Most thrilling of all, especially for a young English major with a penchant for getting up his own ass about theory, Ann's work doesn't originate in the academic sphere, something which usefully underscores the usually vexed link between scholarship and activism.

During the lecture, Ann said something to the effect that objects/archives "take the form of labors performed on them." Apart from feeling weirdly Marxist, this suggests an implicit phenomenological undercurrent to Ann's work, or at least makes me think of Sara Ahmed, who says, similarly, that bodies tend to take the shape of their orientations to objects and spaces. I find this interplay of objects, spaces, and bodies to be quite fascinating, and perhaps we can understand (or at least theorize) bodies to be archival materials in their own right. I wonder, then, how bodies might differently enable knowledge production and might shape the conceptual contours of the archive in decidedly queer ways. As a final speculative question, what do bodies archive?

Can we then understand bodies to be affective objects in the same way that other archival objects are (Ann Cvetkovich is quite interested in recovering the affective register of archived objects)? On the one hand, I guess this seems fairly self-evident, even if deceptively complicated. People create emotional attachments to bodies (their own and others), which in turn becomes a kind of affective labor that shapes both the subject and object of said emotional attachment. (After all, aren't we the primary objects of our own emotions?) This line of reasoning seems to suggest a complicated matrix of bodies, emotions, and selves, where, at the very least, we become archives (both psychic and physical) of our own emotions. Conclusion: Bodies are weird, but neat.

At any rate, when Sara Ahmed and Ann Cvetkovich release their co-authored article/book, I expect to get an acknowledgment. And maybe some royalties. 

Alright, alright, here endeth the academic bumbling. Please accept this very funny comic as a palate cleanser. 

For those of you who caught the grammy's (I did not), I hope you saw this fantastic tribute to Aretha Franklin. Queer or not, there's too much girl power on that stage to ignore. I can even forgive Christina Aguilera for being generally tasteless, even if she is fantastic. I was pleasantly surprised by Florence, whom I absolutely adore but is generally pretty rough live. Finally, this tribute gets a little awkward at moments because Yolanda Adams might actually be a better singer than Aretha herself. I won't tell. Enjoy, folks.

                                                                                                                                   Will Danger

(Image thieved from The Guardian)

An Introduction, Some (Light) Gaga Bashing, and the Homosexual Steamroller

Welcome, folks, to this obscure and totally un-recommendable slice of the internet. I find it equal parts appropriate and terrifying that my inaugural post comes on Valentine's Day, but that ratio seems appropriate for such a blog.

An introduction is in order: This is New Queer on the Block, and I want to be transparent about the fact that I am unsure what this project might turn out to be, though I am hopeful. My title is meant to suggest two things (three, if it registers to you my lack of creativity on a deadline). First, I intend this blog to contain my own musings and perceived queernesses, indulging my love of both trashy pop-culture and books (speaking of books, this is too good not to share).  Secondly, my title should warn you of my relative newness/inexperience, so while I think you'll find I am quite opinionated, it seems important to frame these opinions with the fact that I am a college student who, let's face it, may not be particularly in touch with the real world.

As I'm sure you've gathered, Will Danger is a thinly veiled pseudonym, behind which stands an exceedingly cynical college student who lies about his middle name, mouths off about things he doesn't really understand, and watches way too much Law and Order (SVU, of course). Welcome, and God bless those of you who are still reading.

Shall we dive right in? Anyone connected to a facebook/twitter feed has undoubtedly been made aware that Lady Gaga is at it again. I'll refrain from embedding the video here because, frankly, I don't want to watch it again. Whether I like the video or not is irrelevant though. My question here is, what do we make of Lady Gaga's attachment to the gay community, especially gay men? She seems to have located the gays as a cash cow, which she is now proceeding to milk dry. To be totally honest, I find Lady Gaga's convenient sexual tourism to be border-line offensive. Regardless of her own sexuality (I'm told she may be bisexual, though I am unable to find a reputable link to confirm this), this just seems like a dangerous bit of exploitation on her part. Plus, who on earth would wear something like this and deny that it's an effort? She just woke up one morning wearing a Kermit T. Frogg dress. Weird.

Secondly, the message of her new single, "Born this Way" might be both dangerous and uninformed. Do we really need someone fueling the flames of the etiology debate? If I decide to put on my blonde wig and 10 inch stilettos and spend my weekends riding the DC metro in Baby Spice drag, it hardly matters if I'm hard-wired to do so. Maybe bone up on some Foucault or D'Emilio, and then decide if you still think "born that way" or "choose to be that way" are your only options. What if you weren't born that way, Lady Gaga? What if you work hard to construct an outfit entirely of meat and figure out exactly where to wear it to set the most people a-talkin? Is it still ok?

In an effort to create the illusion of fairness, I will say that I think it's obvious that the gay community can count Gaga as a friend, and, if the number of gay folks who put on their boogie shoes to her beats on a weekly basis is any indication, she has certainly done quite a bit of good. I just wonder how much cultural or political capital we're supposed to invest in someone who is really just Madonna, part-two.

I'll close on another introductory note. This comic pretty perfectly embodies the (intended) spirit of this blog. The perfect mix of absurdity and militancy!

Be good(ish) folks,

Will Danger