Another day, another guest post, as the poets say. Or maybe they don’t, but they should do from now on. Which is to say we have already hosted a number of very talented people on the blog, and you can read all the previous guest posts here.
Today though we have for you an essay by Candas Jane Dorsey, whose newest book – What’s the Matter with Mary Jane? – comes out tomorrow (October 19th). And you will actually learn a thing or two not only about Dorsey, but about the book itself as well by reading it, so enjoy!
Okay, so here’s the thing. I have written a couple of books now, working on the third, about a nameless smart-ass detective. She’s a well-adjusted social justice warrior who is queer (you will notice two reclaimed slurs in that sentence!) But like me and many people I know, being queer isn’t the only interesting thing that ever happened to her.
Some of the best and sweetest queer activists I know personify this process. Even if you haven’t lived all of it yourself, you know how it goes. A regular middle-class kid getting all set for a nice simple life: you decide that all you want is to pick a Mostly Harmless profession, go through school, get hitched, and end up behind a picket fence in the suburbs with two kids, two cats, two cars, and a gas barbeque. Then suddenly you realise you’re queer, in a queer-unfriendly world, and your plan for the future goes off the rails. Or you go ahead and do that heteronormative thing, and then suddenly realise in your forties that you will be leaving your het spouse for a same sex spouse, or that you are actually trans, and suddenly, your peaceful normativity is interrupted.
Worst of all, you discover that people will discriminate against you for your new choice, which means that this thing, this coming-out-as-queer thing, is going to be a Big Deal! Up until now, the biggest adult-life choice you were going to have to face was whether to paint the Great Room greige or taupe. Now, suddenly, you are catapulted into a life of Unfair Treatment—in relationships, at work, in housing, at your place of worship—and you are outraged. In a moment, another committee queen joins the activist ranks. Because it is so damned unfair that you— privileged, entitled, self-absorbed YOU! — could be treated this way.
This has been the origin story of many great queer activists.
But it is not mine.
Being queer is not the most interesting thing that ever happened to me. It is interesting, but it doesn’t win a trophy. I never went through the affront of turning from an insider into an outsider in my gender and sexuality choice. On the one hand, I was always an outsider: too bookish in school (“teacher’s pet”); marks and reading levels too high (“egghead”—today it would be “geek” or “nerd”); sick a lot (“weakling”); bad at sports (“klutz”); artsy (“damned yahoo”)…when I began to realise I wasn’t going to be normative in one more way—in 1970 when I was a young hippie—it was just another Thing. In fact, it hardly was a Thing at all, because in 1970 if one was a young hippie a threesome or foursome was almost de rigeur. On the other hand, I was privileged by the ability to actually be a hippie, my family was fine, I was never suicidal, my relationships were so good as to be almost boring. I was lucky, and, as in the Paul Simon song, born at the right time (and place)—and therefore deeply privileged in so many ways that being in another small percentage was not a big deal.
Except for the bigots.
It still really sucked that there were people ready to discriminate, against me or anyone, for being queer. It sucked that there was a world of violence, bullying, intimidation, imprisonment, and continual harassment waiting for those who would not accept a gender or sexual binary. The bigotry was (and is) illogical, stupid, and mean—all qualities I disliked in myself or others. It was bone-headed to be a bigot. But people insisted on inhabiting that ecological niche.
So I became an activist too. I decided to use that privilege and luck to give me strength, while I learned some empathy and grew up into someone who used my voice to help amplify both my own and others’ case for equity.
That was some time ago. Not to put too fine a point on it, that was 50 years ago. In that time I’ve seen the pendulum swing far to the side of equity and justice, and then far back to the side of bigotry and violence against women, queer people, racialized people…possibly several times, and at different rates. Because progress is uneven and imperfect. There’s a William Gibson quote something like this: “The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed.”
Same with equity. Same with inclusion. Same with acceptance.
Not evenly distributed. Better than it was 50 years ago, in some places, and for some values of better, but not any more equally distributed.
Lesbian activist and writer Jane Rule once said, “Politics is housework”, and I’ve been sweeping out the trash for a long time—but it’s never going to stay clean.
Now, that’s my civilian life. What about as a writer?
For most of my career, the books I wrote were categorised as speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, like that). But the secret is that all fiction is speculative. It never happened. Sorry to disillusion you, but. Anyway, so when I started writing mysteries, I was already clear, after a lot of years of writing, that I could make up the world I wanted. So without even thinking about it, I wrote a protagonist who doesn’t worry about being queer. She is who she is. She’s got a lot else going for her. She lives by a set of values that is often-uncomfortably ethical, and sets her own norms and standards.
The thing is, we have to live as if our own skins are normative. We are our own norms. Humans like to belong, and even within the queer community we all know that there are people trying to lay down rules for “the right way to be queer”. It’s not because they’re bad people. They just want to understand the world, completely and fully. They want “words to live by”. They want the world to make sense. And for many of them, the first time it didn’t was when they realised they were some value of queer. So they spend their time trying to quantify and normalise this new state of being, and they think that by setting new rules, they can feel at home outside the picket fence.
I have some very very bad news for us all. This will never work. We will never make the Universe make sense. All we can do is make sense of what’s within our own skins, and try to live in right relation with our community, whatever shape it is.
Unfortunately, we need activism because others (from individuals right up to regimes and religions) are not living in right relation with us.
But the state we are aiming for is not a new conformity, it is instead a wide acceptance of a diversity of realities. We need a radical change, moving from expecting normativity to embracing diversity.
In an effort to avoid speaking entirely in homilies, an occupational hazard for activists, I write fiction. (Actually, I wrote fiction first, but that’s a different Ted talk.) In The Adventures of Isabel and the upcoming What’s the Matter with Mary Jane?, and whatever books follow them in the series, one of the most radical choices I can make is to portray a protagonist so comfortable with her identity that she can get on with the rest of her complicated, crime-solving life.
This isn’t science fiction. My nameless lead actor lives in a present-day, real world of injustices. She has been fired for being queer. She worries about her ultra-right building owner booting her out for her activism. She has friends who embody an entire spectrum-and-a-half of the queer world, and she sees with clarity what they are all up against. She has intelligence, awareness, indignation, righteous rage, and a passion for change. She has lots of “housework”, and she tries to keep up with it.
But what she doesn’t have is angst.
Do we really have to say it again? “We’re here; we’re queer: get used to it!”— really? It’s true, coming out is a process, not a product—a daily, sometimes hourly, choice to be visible. We’re stuck with it. Or are we? Can we eventually be so unmistakeably “out” that we are simply present, in the moment—Zen and the Art of being Queer? I think we can try.
When Lee Child “designed” his series hero Reacher as an intelligent, strong 6’5” bruiser who would never lose a fight, he did so impatient with the trope of the tormented, “broken” sleuth. (He didn’t expect a fan-base of middle-aged women—people who also lose a lot of fights!—reading for revenge. But it happened.)
Likewise, though my “design” of Nameless was more instinctive, I know her well, and I know that she will never apologise or explain or doubt who she is. She has been through all that, long ago, and has no need to relive it. I’m hoping that the occasional person takes courage from someone who’s far more interested in the Oxford comma and in “doing no harm” than in being angsty about who she is.
It’s kind of refreshing.
About Candas Jane Dorsey
Candas Jane Dorsey is an internationally-known writer, editor, former publisher, community-builder, and activist living in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. She is the award-winning author of, among others, Black Wine, A Paradigm of Earth, Machine Sex and other stories, Vanilla and other stories, Ice and other stories, The Adventures of Isabel, What’s the Matter with Mary Jane? and the upcoming He Wasn’t There Again Today (the Epitome Apartments Mystery Series), and YA novel The Story of My Life, Ongoing, by CS Cobb.
