That Hippie Free School, and the Rigid Position

I strongly advise reading the whole comment thread to the previous post. Lots of wonderful thoughtful stuff.

This made me laugh: Or, you could just become gay. Solves the "ugly sex" problem! Creates others ... from Jarrett.

During the the years at my boarding school -- what I fondly refer to as "my hippie free school" -- one of the many wonderful things that happened to me was encountering openly gay men. That was not so common, in the early 70s, as it is now. I barely knew homosexuals existed: I certainly had no clue that I actually knew any of them.

But my room mate was gay, and our school was one of the few safe places in Spokane, Washington, at the time. Gay boys and men were in the house a lot. So it was my very good fortune to meet the people before I met the stereotypes. There were, of course, people I liked and people I didn't. But I was on my home ground, surrounded by friends, so I felt entirely safe. I could absorb the culture without any fear of getting lost in it; I could flirt without committing myself to any identity.

My orientation was obvious to me. I liked girls. I've always liked girls. The supposed latency period that Freud mentions, when boys purport not to like girls? I skipped that. There has never been a time in my life, since first grade, when I haven't had a serious crush on someone female. I am, as an old friend of mine once put it (in mild exasperation), "heterosexual to a fault."

So the wonderfulness of being around gay men had nothing to do with discovering my orientation. It had to do with being an object of admiration. I was a weird kid, in middle school. A dork. I read books all the time. My hair was too long. I am congenitally incapable of following a party line, any party line: I was out of place even among the weird kids and the outcasts. Being associated with me in any way was a social death sentence.

And then -- there I was at my hippie free school, fourteen years old, plump and inarticulate, with gorgeous flowing blond hair -- and I was the toast of the town. People admired me. They sought me out and chatted me up.

I blossomed. I suddenly found that I could talk. One of the longstanding reasons for my stumbling, almost stammering speech, was that I always dumbed it down. You didn't want to be using fancy words, if you were a teenager in Springfield, Oregon. You didn't want to let a word such as "inadvertent" or "malevolent" fall from your lips. You didn't want to get too clever.

But among these people, clever was a good thing. Words came pouring out of my mouth. I had, it turned out, lots and lots to say. (No doubt much of it was tiresome, but much is forgiven in a glowing teenager.) My hands came to life: I could gesture. I could throw my head back and laugh. I could unlock my wrists and hips and ribs, and let them sway. I could brush my hair out of my face, rapidly or languidly. My words and my body, for the first time, were free. The experience was transformative. I no longer had to hold myself like R. Crumb's Whiteman. I could be someone else.

Gabriel and Christina



Across the way a blue umbrella fishes in and out of the new green leaves.

Three girls run in out of the rain, awkwardly, thighs turned in and heels flying out; but happy for all that, laughing at each other.

I think of Christina, the other Rossetti, turning her thighs in, tending her father, curbing her temper.

She should have been the best of the Victorian poets. Perhaps she was anyway: but broken by the stupidities that also, backwards, broke her brother.

Gabriel buried his poems with his young wife, when he was going to be a great painter. The grief was real enough: but later, when he decided he was going to be a great poet instead, he had her dug up, the sheaf of poems exhumed. The poems were soaked through with something. But he thought he could restore the poems, maybe; and he wandered through chloral nightmares ever after. And not a great poet anyway, after all that. He was a painter if he was anything. He might have been saved by what broke his sister: a sense of proportion, of duty, of unimportance. But he had to be a great something. A great artist, a great poet, a great lover. Hence his titanic love affair with Mrs Morris, which dwindled gradually away to something even he felt to be ridiculous.

We have paid some attention, if not enough, to women being ruined by the expectation of service; but we have not paid nearly enough attention to men being ruined by the expectation of greatness.

I've done my damnedest to raise ordinary children, neither servants nor leaders, who will take their turns serving or leading as occasion demands.

Human beings, like cats, are incorrigibly but flexibly hierarchical. Dogs establish hierarchies once and for all, and are happiest being alphas or betas ever after, whichever it may be. We're not like that. We're never quite happy in our places. Never secure in power, never happy in service. Laying rigid gender roles on top of that makes it worse. We need above all to be able to renegotiate, according to the stresses and demands of our lives, if we are to work, or love, fruitfully and happily.

I have said before that I don't have a liberal bone in my body. I don't believe in equality, not for a moment: I think one of the deepest urges of human beings is to place themselves in hierarchies, to find their place, to have heros and mentors, disciples and adorers. What makes me look and behave rather like a Liberal is my conviction that these places have to be lightly held and easily abandoned. The yen for power and the yen to serve easily become pathological, when they become formalized. To me an equilibrium of equality is not something to be aimed at in human relationships, social, political, or erotic: what's healthy is precisely the seesaw of power, the alternation of roles. There's nothing wrong with being a master or a servant. What's wrong is being stuck as the master or the servant.

Boy

As a small child I was excited to learn that people changed their names when they got married. The most liberating idea in the world. A new name! A new life! Everything new! "I wonder what my name will be?" I said.

Everyone laughed, and someone explained to me. No. I was boy: I would have to be me forever.