Soliloquy on Becoming like Every Other Adult

"Aren't you so excited to leave? I can imagine it must be so incredible!"

Those are the words that come almost verbatim out of the mouths of almost anyone I describe leaving for Portugal to, at least anyone who isn't in my immediate circle of close friends. When I go on to express that I have mixed feelings about it, and that I'm still trying to just get through the bureaucratic process of graduating before it will sink in, I'm met with ambivalence or surprise that I'm not positively shitting myself more excited about it. The truth, as I have learned it, is that not to have mixed feelings about something is not to have analyzed it and thought out the full context of whatever that something is. The other truth, as I have learned it, is that red tape and bureaucracy are things that will never end in adult life, not after college is "over", and especially not when you're moving to another country that has enough of its own problems to be welcoming in more potential economic liabilities.

I wrote about this before, but the point of this post is that I can be forgiven for a downtime in my pursuits of interests while I'm in the middle of a sobering reality check that involves all aspects of life, from finances to relationships. At the same time that I've reconciled my relationship to my own country with my desire to get out in the world, I've become aware that, despite my youthful years, time is not as abundant as it seems to be; instead of thinking about figuring out what I'm doing with myself, it must simply be done. The amount of things that need to go right and align themselves for what I intend to do in Portugal is staggering, and yet, it's not a degree of magnitude worse than what I had previously gone through to spend a significantly shorter period of time there. Anything I have to do after I've actually arrived in the country seems the easy part.

The world of undergraduate studies is a cozy bubble, which I find coddles the friendships and contacts you build and makes it easy to live in a world of the temporary—a space in time where you know things will, for the most part, not last, but where the day of reckoning is far enough away that you don't have to worry about it. Now I'm worrying about it. Moving away from the comfort of going to and from class, working short hours, and seeing people with flexible time schedules exacts a huge strain on even the closest of relationships, and part of leaving is also facing the idea that some of that strain already existed, it just wasn't brought up, because college life reduces its importance. There is tension constricting the amount of socialization I can bring myself to do and which others can bear to put up with, knowing as we all do that at some point I'll be on another continent and unable to communicate and build connections with the same ease, grace, and thoughtfulness as naturally occurs in person. I'm forced to consider my place in an intimate relationship. This process of bursting the bubble of college life to move onto other pursuits is a solemn note in accepting that when you're putting yourself out there, you really are on your own doing so.

When I stop and think about it, things are going the way they should be. But tell that to the gray hair that popped up in my eyebrow.

Gay

It's over, I voted, now let's move on from all of the amateur punditry that's been going on since the campaigns started and the media picked up on it. But bravo to Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington, which all voted to affirm that people like me deserve logical and not religious sensibility in the legislation affecting us.

So, it happened. I watched a whole season of RuPaul's Drag Race in one day (among other shows), vegging out to drag divas, heathers, and their t. It made for entertaining television, but I felt the same sensation of being a little dumber afterward that accompanies watching the Real Housewives or the Kardashians. It was a day of cotton candy and cheesecake for the brain in the form of wigs and duct tape.

Identity, culture, belonging. These concepts are thrown around so often in the collegial environment, discussed over coffee or tea in the late afternoon with friends who have the same malleable beliefs and understanding of lower-division coursework that you do, conversations accompanied by the vague feeling of advancing yourself into a progressive new social era. Without this kind of thought, though, we might never come to build on our understandings of the world or question the things around us. These three concepts are things I find myself frequently questioned about by other gays most often, whether being derided for not engaging enough or out of innocent enough curiosity.

I think what interests me the most are the accusations I get of somehow not being gay enough or of engaging with our culture. But you're always denying your culture, you're just not outspoken or political enough, you're such a bad gay. I hear it so often, and I don't know what that means. I challenge anyone to present to me a solid showing of what we could call a singular gay culture. That doesn't exist, nor should it, because the whole point of queer culture is the idea that we're all crazy little critters trying to make the most sense of the world the way we're in it with all of our differences—cultural and otherwise—and they're all perfectly okay as long as you're not harming anyone else along the way. It doesn't require loving Cher or being an activist or being androgynous or anything else that is thrown at me as an example of what I should be doing to be a "better gay", for as wonderful as all of those things are for the people who do. The idea is humanist at its core, which is why you hear similar concepts repeated ad nauseam in feminism and why most people with higher education in the social sciences have embraced this concept to the point of expanding upon it without second thought.

Here's the thing. With all respect to our—and I say our, because whether you're fully a part of gay culture or something of a "gay secular" like myself, it affects us all—very important political history over the last fifty years (and we can all be so thankful that it's happened so quickly), something which I hold of utmost importance to be aware of and build upon, I've always felt like a foreigner in gay-specific cultural events. When I go to pride festivals, I feel the same indifference as I would to any other festival, with the addition of guilt because I feel like I'm supposed to feel more passionate about something that just feels like a parade, a city event, another notch in the calendar of summer activities in the public sphere. It's just there—in my lifetime it always has been—and I have no true emotional or personal connection to it. Every time I've gone to Pridefest or attempted to involve myself in other gay community groups, I feel myself a cultural outsider in these groups of people who work so hard to be all-inclusive. This sense of gay community, this idea of cohesiveness that we espouse, rings false to me for the simple fact that there are people like me who don't fit the bill of engagement most prominently offered. When I feel like I'm forcing the issue, it's negative, and it doesn't give me any motivation to engage further. When I don't engage in these specific ways is when other gays start telling me that I'm a bad gay and that I'm rejecting my culture.

The same goes for the heart-wrenching stories of coming out and hardship that many support groups and other gay functions are built around. I have deep compassion for the hardships of coming out and self-acceptance that so many have experienced, but I never had that experience. I don't connect with it in a personal way, I can only have the compassion of knowing that suffering for trivial matters is never acceptable and that it takes courage and strength to work past it into a better place. I grew up in an environment where even those who held nominally negative views toward homosexuals never had a problem with it in me. The way I grew up, it was never an issue any further than people just wanted me to confirm it to them and then we would all collectively move on to more pressing concerns like breathing, what's on the television, what have you. I've never personally felt the effects of discrimination or violence, I've never been told to leave somewhere because I'm gay or threatened for it or anything else in that vein. "Gay, so what?", not "gay, what's wrong with you?" My mother publicly claims up and down that she never had any suspicions about it but she and I both know that's not really true, that she had given me plenty of space to tell her or not until I did at the early age at which it happened. I always knew, and I never struggled with it or the idea of being different from the other boys as far back as kindergarten. Even then, my socialization never put me in a position of clashing with the swinging scale of heteronormativity; if I wanted to play with the girls, no big deal, and if I wanted to play with the boys, that was fine too. I've been a socially abnormal creature for my whole life and being gay was always quite literally the least of it. Nothing changed through grade school, high school, or college either, where the other students were indifferent and the other gays had similarly comfortable lives of acceptance as mine.

I'm a so-called millenial and grew up in front of various kinds of electronic screens, and accordingly I had to learn about gay culture from the internet and whatever shows happened to be on basic cable. It was like most of my knowledge pursuits, Googling and Wikipedia-searching for factoids and an understanding of how these things worked. It was one of countless things over time that I've completely immersed myself in learning about, things which I couldn't enumerate if I tried because it's just what I do with my time. I'm obsessive with things in that way. I could always intellectually relate myself to these gay things I read about, but in practice being campy and embracing lots of the things we typically assign to gay culture was foreign to me. I don't believe anyone who's spent more than twenty minutes with me has ever doubted my sexual orientation, superficial identifiers in the form of campiness or lexical quirks or anything else are unnecessary. I've taken a liking over time to more and more things that we think of as gay, in part due to their expanding presence in general American pop culture and in part because I can appreciate that sometimes we do stand out in our own peculiar way. It's just never been the whole picture—a small and significant part of it, but by no means the whole thing. I am not and have never been the kind of gay whose life revolves around it, due to the circumstances I've had throughout my life and the work of others past who have enabled those circumstances, which is no less reasonable or okay than those who do. Call it secularism if you want. I'm not rejecting or denying gay culture, I just accept that my relationship with it is an in but not of situation, and I think that's what many have a hard time understanding.

So I watch the wink wink, nudge nudge of Drag Race feeling both like I have some kind of cultural agency in viewing it and like it's the ultimate realization of a particular format of reality show that lends itself to over the top everything and thus that I am completely in keeping with pop culture "normal". I can not credibly say I have more than a passing interest in drag, as entertaining as it is, nor can I credibly say that it's something that's completely in the mainstream despite great recognition of RuPaul and his show, so the answer lies somewhere in the middle. The point is, it doesn't make me a "better" gay for watching it, it just means I'm comfortably following a similar pattern of interaction with the overly broad umbrella of queer culture that I always have. I don't need to have interest in or be entertained by drag queens just because I'm gay, but it's all the more salient that I do and am. I think my story is more normal than it might at first strike you.

Post-Grad Redaction

I know I said I was going to write about racism, but you're going to have to wait another post for that. It is worth mentioning that the current semester still needs to be finished, but with such rousing things going on as studying ocean waves and plotting cross-tabs, sue forgive me for not caring just slightly more. What's on my mind is what comes next, and with not so much time remaining, that's probably where it should be.

Portugal is looming again and the uncertainty with which it is happening is the only control variable in this experiment of an adventure I seem to be embarking upon, complicating everything for myself a little bit at a time. The general idea seems simple enough still, despite its obvious seams: go study Portuguese through May or June, get work preferably teaching English to pay the bills, do an MA in European studies for two years, figure out the rest of life somewhere in the meantime. The problem is that life is both expensive and not so simple, and there are plenty of things about Portugal that compound that expense. In purely financial terms, two years of living in Portugal as a student would not cost very much relative to other Western nations, but the raw cost is still a lot of money to account for when employability is not guaranteed. The social cost is less obvious, but has implications for, well, employability as well as my overall state of content with the direction things are taking.

To elaborate on social capital, the idea is fairly simple: it is much easier to advance personally and professionally when you are surrounded by others in the position in which you would like to place yourself. Doing that is made much simpler when communication is not a barrier; the subtleties of communicating with a fellow native of your cultural and linguistic background put that person in your favor significantly more so than even the most adapted and linguistically proficient non-natives. It's a device that you can see at work among study abroad students clinging to their countrymen and the way that we react rather negatively to people not speaking the predominant language of whatever area we come from. I can't claim that in pure academic or professional terms either of my circles in the United States or Portugal is better for the sake of personal advancement, but I have a much more natural time connecting to native English speakers, which is not to deride those who are not. My Portuguese friends will recognize this in themselves—I had many conversations about how they feel less expressive and less like their genuine selves when speaking English than when speaking Portuguese, although their levels of English fluency are excellent and self-sustaining, posing only sporadic problems to communication. Unsurprisingly, in my short time being back in the United States, I have come to realize and appreciate these things and take advantage of it by talking too much.

The MA from Católica remains a highly strategic option for me, it being immediately in my field of interest, a program they would happily accept me into, and costing much less than programs anywhere in the US. I still have some reprehension about it from my time spent taking classes there, though, mostly due to the nature of taking (some, not all) classes in Portuguese and not feeling as though I get as much out of them intellectually as a result. I have a much better time motivating myself and fostering creativity for academic pursuits in English. The upshot is that my work would not have to be done in Portuguese, giving me enough room still to make of the degree what I want. I'm dithering on it, but it remains the best option I have immediately available for graduate school.

I have also given up on any notions of remaining in Portugal on a permanent basis for various reasons to do with both the country and an elaboration of what I've already written about communication. For all of the positive aspects of the country, it is very easy to get a sense of being an outsider in a way that will not change regardless of time spent. Language aside, much of the ties that bind in the country revolve around family situation and history. Portuguese politics and economics are shaped by the country's history of poverty and wealth disparity and their social effects, whether they have caused emigration, corruption, or despair...so much as you would hear it from them, at least. It remains a wonderful place to stay, but my time in the United States has informed my own greater cognizance of the benefits to an 'insider' status, whether that be as simple as language or as complicated as being from somewhere and intrinsically familiar with it. Although I am confident my Portuguese will over time increase in fluency, French will likely always be the secondary language I am most comfortable in. It doesn't take much symbolism to demonstrate why that would pose problems for settlement chez lusitana. The main point is that I've gauged my need for adventure more accurately now and have been allowing that to inform my continually developing thoughts on where I'd like to see myself end up. I'll probably expand on this more clearly in a future post. Just don't count on it being in Boulder.