The Life and Death of Latisha King by Gayle Salamon

Author:Gayle Salamon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004160 Literary Criticism / Lgbt
Publisher: New York University Press

All suicides kill other people. However isolated the moment, suicide is also always an act of cruelty. . . . Suicide is rarely the singular, definitive act it appears to be. The ego, Freud tells us, turns onto itself the hatred it feels towards the object. But the object is never spared. No one commits suicide, psychoanalyst Karl Menninger wrote, unless they experience at once ‘the wish to die, the wish to kill, the wish to be killed’. You can die, but you can’t commit suicide, on your own.35

Despite the isolation, both perceived and real, of those queer youth who violently end their own lives, their deaths extend outward: “You can die, but you can’t commit suicide on your own.” The responses to these deaths, the addresses to anonymous others and the insistence that it gets better is not merely a well-meaning platitude spouted by anxious adults who have safely steered their lives into a harbor of privilege, but an invitation into a different future that is unknown. A shared horizon, in this instance, cannot indicate spatial or temporal proximity or even community. That is, in the invocation of “it gets better,” I wonder if there is not something in the vagueness of that “it”—the passive voice, nonagentic, nonindexical—that might be thought of as precisely the location of that hope? If I am a trans or queer youth who feels at the end of my rope, with no resources and nowhere to turn, the very thing that might sustain me in that moment is that there is an it that can get better exactly when I have reached the limit of my own capacity to make anything at all improve, even without specifying its contours of features. In that way the abstractness of the world invoked, its distance from what I can know or imagine in this moment and also from my own will, allows my own horizon to widen and to offer a way to an outside, to the as-yet unknown, to a differently valenced life.

But sometimes, it does not get better. Sometimes pointing toward some sunnier future horizon is not enough. Sometimes it gets worse. Sometimes it ends. The last time I taught Queer Theory, I began the first day of the semester as I always do, with a collective consideration of “Queer and Now.” We sat with Sedgwick’s haunted contemplation of the suicides of queer adolescents. We were a small seminar that year, just a handful of students. Most of them queer. Half students of color. One of them did not survive to the end of the term. Suicide.

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One of the most remarkable things about Latisha King’s short life was her resilience, the way that she persevered in her self-expression in the face of normative regulation and prohibition. She emerged, and persisted, in defiance of all the different forms of violence directed at her, with the aim of extinguishing her very being. She was not crushed into submission by the insistence, by family and teachers and peers,

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