Queer Pain
Mar. 30th, 2021 09:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bladesparkThere's a Discourse in the writing community about stories of marginalized pain. (Chuck Tingle is actually running it today. His takes are always excellent, so I'm not complaining.)
A point often made is that this is what the mainstream expects, for queer people and POC and other minority groups to write about their suffering and their struggles, for the consumption of the majority, whether simply because it's expected, or in some attempt to educate and create empathy amongst straight white people.
The push-back says that we should write stories of joy instead, that we should tell our happy stories, and imagine worlds without that suffering.
Thing is, for me personally, sometimes those stories hurt so much more than the stories about pain.
I can read about people living in this world, that I live in, and feel I'm not alone. I feel I have friends out there, comrades, people who understand what I feel, what I've been through. (Discovering trans and enby ex-Mormons is always a huge delight, tbh. They get it.)
When I read about people living in a world where queerness just *is* and nobody judges them and people understand and they find love and happiness, it can be an absolute gut-punch, because I will never live in that world. Parents gently guiding young voyages of gender discovery? Nice, my dad thinks I'm following Satan just for believing gay people might not be sinners. Wonderful partners who say things like "I don't care if you're male or female, I love you either way." The only person in the whole goddamn world who's ever truly understood me is also FUCKING STRAIGHT, and he will love me either way, but so what? Even if there weren't a thousand other barriers to transition in my way, I'd destroy the best thing in my life, pursuing it.
The closest I come to something golden and perfect and happy still hurts so bad sometimes, and then I'm supposed to enjoy reading about people who have that golden, perfect, happy thing without any pain, and have loving families who support them and get to live in a world where everyone around them uses their pronouns and gets that the binary isn't a thing and doesn't care who kisses who, and this is supposed to make me feel better?
God, it just makes me want to break down crying for hours, or scream, or... I don't even know.
What's good about staring through the department store window at some other kid getting the perfect Christmas toy, when you know that you will never, ever have it?
A point often made is that this is what the mainstream expects, for queer people and POC and other minority groups to write about their suffering and their struggles, for the consumption of the majority, whether simply because it's expected, or in some attempt to educate and create empathy amongst straight white people.
The push-back says that we should write stories of joy instead, that we should tell our happy stories, and imagine worlds without that suffering.
Thing is, for me personally, sometimes those stories hurt so much more than the stories about pain.
I can read about people living in this world, that I live in, and feel I'm not alone. I feel I have friends out there, comrades, people who understand what I feel, what I've been through. (Discovering trans and enby ex-Mormons is always a huge delight, tbh. They get it.)
When I read about people living in a world where queerness just *is* and nobody judges them and people understand and they find love and happiness, it can be an absolute gut-punch, because I will never live in that world. Parents gently guiding young voyages of gender discovery? Nice, my dad thinks I'm following Satan just for believing gay people might not be sinners. Wonderful partners who say things like "I don't care if you're male or female, I love you either way." The only person in the whole goddamn world who's ever truly understood me is also FUCKING STRAIGHT, and he will love me either way, but so what? Even if there weren't a thousand other barriers to transition in my way, I'd destroy the best thing in my life, pursuing it.
The closest I come to something golden and perfect and happy still hurts so bad sometimes, and then I'm supposed to enjoy reading about people who have that golden, perfect, happy thing without any pain, and have loving families who support them and get to live in a world where everyone around them uses their pronouns and gets that the binary isn't a thing and doesn't care who kisses who, and this is supposed to make me feel better?
God, it just makes me want to break down crying for hours, or scream, or... I don't even know.
What's good about staring through the department store window at some other kid getting the perfect Christmas toy, when you know that you will never, ever have it?
no subject
Date: 2021-03-30 08:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-30 11:49 pm (UTC)It's so much more complicated than that? But that's definitely part of what's going on.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-31 12:16 am (UTC)I get twitchy when people start applying "should" to stories -- they should be this, they should be that. There are too many kinds of things a story can be, too many kinds of things that someone might want or need of a story, to be able to apply a simplistic 'should' like that. There is no monolithic queer audience, and what some might find empowering/comforting/validating/whatever, others definitely will not.
no subject
Date: 2021-04-01 04:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-31 06:37 am (UTC)I also think that some of those stories - especially real world ones - can seem like a department window but are often just...something you haven't found yet. Especially older queer stories with people in their 50s and 60s. It's aspirational, a promise that maybe we can find lives past that pain.