You may recall that sometime last month (which feels like it was about a million years ago) I published a piece on this Substack that was subtitled “The Pride Letters: Volume I” thus implying there would be a Volume 2, at least. The idea was that I would use June, now commonly held to be “Pride Month”, and abuse this platform, now generally considered to be my little corner of the internet to publicly ruminate in, to talk about various personal axes to grind in the queer community and how June seems to really highlight those for me every year. But then June sort of kind of got away from me as everything seemed to be happening all at once (my favorite person in the world moved away, the Food Bank went through lay-offs, the Opera season came to an end, my therapist and I parted ways, the worst Presidential Debates in maybe the history of the US Presidency cast a palpable pall over every decent human being I know) and, well, here we are. Plus, there is so much I want to write about Pride and the general experience of being queer, and the more specific experience of being a homosexual man, that sometimes it doesn’t seem like there is much point in writing any of it. Like, whatever I endeavored to make clear to the rest of the world, would inevitably fall short in its reductiveness or collapse under its own ambition, and so I found myself starting and stopping and starting again. Till I finally gave up, and decided to write about smaller, and more personal things and people in my specific queer/homosexual man experience. Which is what this entry will more or less be. I chose July 4th to publish it because over the years I have found it often ends up being a bit of “check in” on how the year/life is going time for me, and also because Independence Day was the favorite holiday of one of my favorite queer people of all time: Daphne Dorman.
Though she left us (and by that I mean she died) far too soon in 2019, Daphne made upon everyone who crossed her path, an unforgettable impression. She was a deliciously uncomfortable human who thrived on your mutual discomfort and how she was contributing to it- usually through flirting, but also through just being wildly intelligent and really off-beat and not ever apologizing for it. She was also one of the most consistently kind people I have ever met. She had no boundaries, and rarely respected yours, but in a way that could make you examine whether your boundaries were sourced in love or fear, and she was inspiring in her unconventionality and vulnerability. I think for many of us who knew her, we often felt like we were just getting to know her, no matter how long we had, in fact, known her (a sentiment frequently expressed at her memorial service) and when she was suddenly gone it was, as is often the case in such things, both incredibly shocking and yet somehow something many of us felt like we should have seen coming. And maybe even done something about. Certainly she had never been shy or embarrassed about her own potential for self-destruction (her openness is something I envy, and have tried to emulate since) but to me she also epitomizes one of the most troubling aspects of the queer community: the phenomena and, frankly, tragedy, of being socially obligated to live your most honest self publicly, in a culture that absolutely detests honesty, but loves the illusion of authenticity more than it loves anything but money. To be queer in America is to be compelled to be yourself (often as a political statement) while never actually being allowed to be yourself if that self doesn’t manifest in the proscribed ways, which it almost never does for most of us. But boy you wouldn’t know that from the press release, would you? But that tension is so fundamental to most queer existences, especially at Pride, that it’s a wonder the parades don’t start with a sign that says, “We’re All Still In The Closet Where It Counts” except that then queer people wouldn’t be buying or selling something and if you’re not buying or selling something you will get asked to leave the store. Which probably is what we should do but… you know, we kind of just got here? So I get why many of us will do whatever it takes to succeed by the standards of the people who not even half-a-century ago thought AIDS was a divine punishment we deserved.
Which is all something I often think about when I think about Daphne, because the most troubling thing about her was how much she wanted to be a star when she already was one, effortlessly, if perhaps in ways the world wasn’t ready for yet. And neither, ultimately, was she.
“The best thing that ever happened to me, is my life finally fell apart,” is a sentiment you hear a lot in group therapy, particularly for drugs, alcohol, or any other coping mechanism that eventually makes your life so untenable that you can no longer live that way and are finally motivated to seek help to change. The problem is, nothing is as hard to give up as that which almost works, and so for many people it takes the bottom falling out for them to finally be forced to abstain from what, let’s be honest, was a kind of medicine, be that prescription heroin or making a spectacle of yourself. This is why so many “dry drunks”, as a friend of mine refers to folks who are sober but haven’t yet figured out how to manage their challenges or find better coping mechanisms, often feel like assholes. It’s because they usually kind of are. But you probably would be too if you were being asked to walk on broken legs without crutches, and that’s why many people ultimately won’t willingly choose to do so, unless they absolutely have to because there are no other options left. Unfortunately for many people, hitting that rock bottom doesn’t bring them a moment of clarity- it kills them- we just tend to think of them as addicts and not failures of a flawed recovery system and lack of social safety nets for addicts- which is what most of them actually are. And without trying to trivialize or judge anyone else’s journey, there’s a reason why many folks who achieve success through a twelve-step program sound and act like they are in a cult. Most of us would, if we were lucky enough to have the kind of moment that kills someone else, spares us to try just one more time. There is rarely someone as faithful as an eleventh hour convert.
Though the direct association between twelve-step and Christianity has been dissolving in more recent times as more agnostic and atheist people have found their way into a program but not to identifying Christ as their higher power, 12 Step itself has come under much closer scrutiny and its previous reputation is now somewhat (unfairly) tarnished, but so it goes when any institution that either works too much like a religion, or with a religion, has the curtain pulled back to show it’s not going to work for everybody. Most religions, when you come right down to it, are lenses through which the believer can look for signs that the Universe is not only knowable, but worth knowing, especially if with that knowledge, we might be able to, you know… make our lives better. Religion tends to work best when you make the choice not to look too closely, let alone at the failures or short comings, but rather give yourself over to the guidance of the larger community religious faith (which can be practiced in non-religious settings, but with the same fervor) makes you part of. Because I have chosen a cognitive behavior therapy and harm reduction approach to my sex addiction and comorbidities, I have frequently gotten side eye and tongue clucks from individual 12 Steppers who see my choice to take a different route as both foolish and probably threatening- to them. Especially if it works. As someone very much in the middle of his journey, there are days and weeks and months when I can say with confidence it does, though it has also meant I’ve had to be both very intentional and very willing to have it not work from time to time. Which it also does. And while I’ve certainly never had anyone celebrate a relapse when I’ve had one, I’ve definitely had to navigate some “I told you sos” at precisely the times when I needed that not at all, least of all from people who you’d think would be masters of empathy. But it can be hard for a community centered in surviving crisis, to make space for a member whose path not only goes against the standard, but calls it into question.
Sometimes, when I think about this- especially at Pride- Daphne feels the closest to me. In so many ways, she was polarizing, and I suspect often felt quite polarized by herself. Highly self-aware, I have no doubt that Daphne frequently stepped outside of her own life and found herself both shocked and amused by it. Most of us involved in the arts not only tend to have that trait pretty well-honed, but find it frequently useful- even enjoyable- to indulge in, because most of us also really love learning, we hunger to keep discovering more about everything, and you rarely fail to learn something from each time you blow up your life. Or it blows up on you. The problems arise when you either find yourself doing it again and again without learning something- or can’t protect yourself from the things you’re learning. To See- whether it is yourself, other people, or the world- is the whole point of being alive for people like us. But you’re not always going to like what you see. Or feel seen back. For some people the best thing that ever happened is their world fell apart. But that’s only true because they survived the fall.
An idea I always think of when I think about Daphne, and the spirit of which at least partially explains why she chose July 4th as her favorite holiday, is that all stories are trans stories, whether the storyteller (or the audience for that matter) thinks of them as trans stories or not. When discussing her trans identity, Daphne never shied away from the parts that made her potentially look bad, and she never cut corners when she talked about what a process it was. A long road of self-discovery, with much error and accident and investigation that some of her peers saw as contradictory, even undermining to the narrative that queer identities are always held with conviction by members of the queer community, that they are rarely discovered so much as hidden, usually out of fear, and never evolved into, or out of. But Daphne was too smart, too self-aware really, to feel comfortable going about her transition any way but the way Daphne would do it, and recognizing that if that were possible, then a lot of other truths were too. Yes, we are born this way (“But so is everyone, whatever way that way is,” she once said to me) but certainly one doesn’t have to stay that way, or any way, and more to the point nobody is born with an idea of themselves, we spend our whole lives building and rebuilding who we are, and what that might entail, how far that could go is only as limited as we want it to be, or feel pressured to keep it so. For reasons that some might argue are necessary to the social and political climate we find ourselves in, there is often an inclination to paint a collective identity with a broad brush that turns guidelines into rules and anecdotes into expectations. Trends and not deviations become the defining points of journeys that, because they are similar in destination, are first assumed and then required to be the same. Often ironically by the people you’d most think would know better. Usually because, having “arrived”, those people have the most stake in needing to believe they have gotten there. And that where they are is not only the best place to be for them, but everyone. Which is very American, isn’t it?
I think Daphne loved July 4th at least in part because it is a holiday of seeming contradictions, but in reality, deep paradoxes that reveal the most mesmerizing and frustrating things about being a human being, not the least of which is our tendency to perpetuate our exceptionalism under the guise of celebrating our uniqueness. A trait I think our country probably demonstrates far too often and far too well. “The story of the United States of America is the most trans story ever told,” Daphne told me. “Which you’d think would make us the best place on the planet to be trans, but that blind spot is usually part of the trans story too. Because we all have one, until we don’t. And then you really have just one less.” I remember she made it sound so obvious, and so noble, and so exhausting all at once. This determination to determine who one is, and how best to be that person, no matter what anyone else may think, without also painting one’s self into a corner from which one might find themselves wanting to escape. Which is probably all corners, eventually.
The most alluring thing with which you can bait a trap is the illusion of freedom, and I’m pretty sure that is because we all have some idea what freedom feels like, but no real sense of what it actually looks like, how it works in our individual lives, and what we’re to do with it once we have it. All we tend to know is that we “want to be free.” But freedom doesn’t come free, it comes with many responsibilities and very few promises (which is not the same as saying it by definition doesn’t allow for safety nets, this is NOT some kind of bootstraps argument) and it affords a lot of chances to really fuck your life up, learn the hard way, or not learn anything at all. To be always on our way, to be always transitioning, really, is not for the faint of heart and all the freedom in the world still doesn’t make the world any easier to be free in but it’s that or die silently and that’s what Pride and July 4th are supposed to be about. Recognzing that, sitting with it, maybe even wondering if its worth it, especially when it’s really not going well, or according to plan. But here we are.
Until we’re not.
Ah. The unintentional poignancy of days so reliant on floats.
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