healing as a form of activism

For a long time I’ve felt guilty because I’ve thought that I stopped participating in activism. When I was in college, I would go to meetings (for a while, a meeting almost every day of the week) and protests, walking in the streets and shouting chants. This felt powerful, like I was part of a mass movement for radical change. After I graduated, things changed. I stopped doing activism in that way. As with everything, there were several factors involved: disillusionment from being unable to prevent the invasion of Iraq, the dissolving of several activist groups I belonged to, having to focus on finding a job and navigating the “real world,” and a change in my physical health which makes it hard for me to walk or stand for lengthy periods of time. But the most important factor is this: I realized that I had been sexually abused by my father, and began to devote an enormous amount of time, energy, and head space to coping, healing, and transforming. Now, it has become clear to me that this work is activism itself, that I have not dropped out of struggles for change but shifted my focus to a different form of activism.

I have been thinking a lot lately about masculinity and “manhood,” which is, of course, deeply tangled up with my history with my father. I finally finished reading The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks, which I started to read months and months ago. Reading this today reaffirmed that the personal healing work that I have been doing is activism, and that it has the potential to benefit many more people than just myself, to be a ripple of change in the world. Here is some of what bell hooks writes:

[M]en must set the example by daring to heal, by daring to do the work of relational recovery. Irrespective of their sexual preferences, men in the process of self-recovery usually begin by returning to boyhood and evaluating what they learned about masculinity and how they learned it… Understanding the roots of male dis-ease helps many men begin to work repairing the damage. Progressive individual gay men in our nation, particularly those who have resisted patriarchal thinking (who are often labeled “feminine” for being emotionally aware), have been at the forefront of relational recovery. Straight men and patriarchal gay men can learn from them.

(Of course, gay men and straight men are not the only types of men that exist.) Lately, I have been longing for male role models, for images of men crying and being vulnerable and emotionally whole. Reading the above quote made me realize that I am one of the queer men that bell hooks mentions and that I can serve as a role model for other men. Once again, “we are the people we’ve been waiting for.” There is a loneliness in this, and an anger that I have to do it myself, but also a sense of liberation, and a promise of connection to community; if I become a mentor and am able to connect to and help men in the future then what I am longing for will be brought into existence.

There is also the promise, as bell hooks writes, of creating nurturing childhoods for future generations of boys:

If boys are raised to be empathic and strong; autonomous and connected; responsible to self, family, and friends, and to society; able to make community rooted in a recognition of interbeing, then the solid foundation is present and they will be able to love.

Currently, too many boys (and girls and children whose genders are complicated, queer, and/or currently nameless) are not raised in these ways. This is because, as bell hooks writes,

In dominator cultures most families are not safe places. Dysfunction, intimate terrorism, and violence make them breeding grounds for war. Since we have yet to end patriarchal culture, our struggles to end domination must begin where we live, in the communities we call home. It is there that we experience our power to create revolutions, to make life-transforming change. We already know that men do not have to remain wedded to patriarchy. Individual men have again and again staked a different claim, claiming their rights to life and love. They are beacons of hope embodying the truth that men can love.

These past few years, it is here that I have been making my revolution: in the painful reality of my dysfunctional family; in that dangerous and fruitful wilderness beyond the safe garden of denial; in the tangled, unspoken history of male suffering caused by patriarchy; in my heart, which is simultaneously broken and whole, full of poison and medicine, which I am learning to fill with more and more love.