A friend has written a brilliant, insightful, and very emotionally charged essay on the subject of queer identity, finding ones tribe, and being ostracized by ones role models due to the fracture and balkanization of identities of sex and gender in queer culture. To be a Painted Bird is a tragedy on the scale of a private Holocaust, and some of this seems to me to be a result of increasing specialization and siloing of LGBT subcultures, and also a shocking failure of solidarity. If those who are marginalized by normative society do not stand united, surely they will become vulnerable to silencing and erasure.
I am not a member of this community, and can not speak from within this space, nor have I much studied what seem to be a highly diverse, nuanced, intentionally baffling and obscure as in-group coding, misdirection, and confusion, and complex set of authorized identities within the community of outlaws of sex and gender, so am utterly clueless about how such representations and choices are negotiated. I suspect this is true for many potential allies who would stand with any human who stands alone, but may not know how to do so, or recognize when someone is in pain.
Sadly, it may be also be true for those whose awareness of desire, sexual orientation, and identities of sex and gender are emerging or in transformative processes of change, and who may feel confusion, ambiguity, and dislocation not as freedom and joy but as crisis and trauma, especially those who become aware of differences and chasms of meaning between themselves and others, and must cope with authorized identities of sex and gender as systems of oppression which manifest as isolation and disconnectedness at best and as shaming, dehumanization, and persecution at worst as consequences of negotiating identities in a social context of judgement, ridicule, and massively unequal power.
The universal human struggle for autonomy here collides disastrously with authorized identities and a Theocratic-Patriarchal Gideonite value system which reinforces heteronormative narratives as submission to authority, in parallel with the need for belonging and membership in the quest to find a tribe within a society riven with hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, wherein our negotiations between self and others are mediated by elite hegemonic forces of dominion, whose lies and illusions, like a wilderness of funhouse mirrors, can falsify and steal our souls.
The awakening to total freedom as a self created being can be both wonderful and terrible. How do we safeguard that freedom? What does our duty of care for each other require of us as mentors and stewards for each other’s limitless possibilities of becoming human?
We also have a need for another kind of work, one whose intention is to provide guidance in finding ones tribe among the full spectrum of multilayered and wonderfully diverse smorgasboard of choices available in our society now, chess pieces in a great game of human being, meaning, and value, and reveals and opens the limitless possibilities of becoming human and discovering communities of wellbeing and mutual aid which can foster such a journey of introspection for the young and curious, without authorizing a prescriptive set of identities.
Identity is not a static frame into which one must fit oneself regardless of our pluralities; we are all pluralities, we are all in processes of change and growth, and our nature, to paraphrase Freud’s delightfully wicked phrase “polymorphously perverse”, obeys but one law; anything goes.
Are we not both Harley Quinn and the Joker, bound together in one flesh?
Does the range of choices act as an intrinsic limit on autonomy? If so the task of becoming human involves chaos, disruption, reimagination, and transformation, as I believe; the violation of normalities and transgression of boundaries of the Forbidden to free us of the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and of authorized identities, to create limitless possibilities of becoming human as seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes. As Guillermo del Toro wrote in Carnival Row; Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.
Audubon publishes a wonderful field guide to birds, which usefully describes their glorious and beautiful differences and uniqueness without suggesting it is better to be a falcon than a dove; each have a niche in the system of life, as do we all. We need a version for humans; Queer Tribes, and How to Find Yours.
This raises the question of how we discover who we want to become. If I were designing an instrument for this purpose in terms of sexual orientation, I would base the process not on prescriptive authorization of identities like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter, which involves both submission to authority and overdetermination as a limiting factor, and also tends to lock one in to rigid and unchanging categories of being, but on descriptive taxonomy and a tool with which I am very familiar, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which could easily be modified for the discovery of identities of sex and gender.
Our masquerade of identities of sex and gender as culture, ethnicity, and performance can be played as a game or as live action theatre; here I offer you a ritual act of Chaos and Transformation which is useful in disrupting order and randomizing the masks we wear. Begin each new day with a set of possible selves to perform; write down three masculine and three feminine characters you know well enough to perform, roll a six sided dice to find today’s persona, and live as that character until tomorrow, when you can become someone entirely different. And regardless of who you are today, you will have five more selves in reserve.
Such constructions of identity as performance flow from the nature of self as a development of the persona or Greek theatrical mask characters speak through; a prochronism or history expressed in our form of how we solved problems in adaptation, like the shell of a fantastic sea creature.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle to create ourselves.
And what of the underlying forces of love and desire from which such structures and figures are made?
Milan Kundera, paraphrasing Plato in Phaidos, wrote; “Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost”. To this I would add a conditional which directs us to the function of love in the construction of identity; love also reveals us to ourselves, for we choose those we love as figures of who we wish to become.
We choose those we love and share our lives with in part because they represent potential selves and qualities we aspire to realize within ourselves, as informing and motivating sources and shaping forces. This is what it means to become human, and why interdependence is at the heart of becoming human. Our values are revealed in our circle of partners and friends.
Love is dangerous because it is free, uncontrollable, wild. Love redeems, transforms, and reimagines; love totalizes and transcends. Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioners, because that is exactly what it is.
As I once said to Jean Genet, it is a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason, and has no pleasures worth dying for.
Love and desire are linked as forces beyond reason and our own control; this is why they bear redemptive and transformational power, and confer autonomy in our self-construal and becoming human. Choice and volition have nothing to do with it; there is only the ground of struggle and seizures of power between those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh versus the falsification of authorized identities.
We are made of stories, both the ones we tell about ourselves and the ones others tell about us, and the first question to ask of a story is, whose story is this?
When you begin to question the boundary and interface between normality as authorized identity and transgression as seizure of power, between subjugation and liberty, the grotesque and the beautiful, idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of madness and vision, and to challenge the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, you enter my world, the place of unknowns and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value.
Welcome to freedom and its wonders and terrors; to reimagination, transformation, and discovery.
May the new truths you forge bring you joy, and don’t forget to run amok and be ungovernable.
Joker X Harley: Bad Things
Here are my three essays interrogating identities of sex and gender:
March 8 2024 International Women’s Day: Interrogating the Idea of Woman and Identities of Sex and Gender As Performance Art and Revolutionary Struggle, Identities of Sex and Gender Part 1 of 3
March 9 2024 A Sorting Hat of One’s Own: A General Theory of Identities of Sex and Gender as Processes and Functions of Personality, Identities of Sex and Gender Part 2
March 10 2024 Of Love and Desire as Forces of Autonomy and Liberation: Identities of Sex and Gender Part 3
https://www.16personalities.com/free-personality-test
https://www.humandignitytrust.org./lgbt-the-law/map-of-criminalisation/
Torch of Liberty 
Leave a comment