Small Things by Sky Gilbert

Author:Sky Gilbert
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771832946
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Published: 2018-10-04T16:00:00+00:00

the oppression olympics.

I recently had the misfortune (perhaps I exaggerate; you decide) to attend a queer/performance conference. It was, in countless ways, a nightmare. Sure, it had its beautiful moments. Some of us were staying at the Sandman Suites in Vancouver; if there ever were to still be such a thing as a gay hotel, this was it. There was a pool, and in the evenings myself and several dyke and fag friends would gather, gossip and talk sexual politics. It was like being at queer theory summer camp. And one drunken summer evening, someone whom I like very much kissed me, more than once. That was nice. I met a couple of drag queens, both playwrights, boys who run a theatre company dressed as girls and (call me naive; you will certainly call me old-fashioned) I loved their courage and of course the fact that either for real or for personal advantage, they seemed to idolize me. (I prefer of course to think it was for real.)

I say all this in the interests of full disclosure.

But for the rest of the time, having my face was pressed into the ground under the grimy heels of those who hate and misunderstand me was, to say the least, unpleasant.

I think what happened to me and what I’m sure is going to happen to a lot of others in the next few years will destroy the queer movement—or whatever they want to call it these days—perhaps we should say LGBTQ+++ (?) people. It killed the movement back in the good ol’ Queer Nation days (the 90s), and the same thing is likely to happen now. I think this might be what kills every radical political movement these days—and what I mean to single out here is the tendency these movements have to eat their own.

I am telling the story for a wider purpose than just to vent (but to be honest, I am venting). But the wider purpose is to answer another question. I put it to you that it is a particularly feminine one. I am listening to a comedy album by Michael Ian Black in which he sings a very funny and tasteless song: “I love sad puppies, I cry at funerals, and feel sorry for retards.” (I am paraphrasing, but you get the idea, and he uses the word ‘retards’, not me.) He says he does all this because he is “a total fag.” (The song is called “Emotion.”)

Well I am also a total fag. So I must ask: Why do people feel it necessary to torture other people in the name of compassion? Isn’t it enough just to torture; do they really need to do it while at the same time sanctifying themselves? Is it because they are actually not sociopaths, and thus feel guilty? Or is it just a very human, automatic and all too common brand of hypocrisy? I think in this context (and it’s relevant to my story) of the genocide of the Canadian Aboriginal

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