I think that human beings need stories as much as we need food. I know this is true for me. I know this because at times I have been famished for stories. When I was in high school, and still in the early stages of coming to terms with my queerness, I felt horrible whenever I watched a movie or read a book in which they were no queer characters or even any mention of queerness at all. I felt like my existence was questioned… threatened… erased. I had a deep need for affirmation that there were other queer people, that queerness was real, and, within those fictional worlds, queerness was not allowed into the circle.
The depth of my hunger was partially because such stories had been denied to me. My parents, as fundamentalist Christians, were both homophobic and ignorant of queer culture(s). There were no out or visible queer people in my mostly fundamentalist social world as I was growing up. But this invisibility was mirrored (if perhaps to a lesser extent) in the suburban communities I grew up in, and even in American culture as a whole. On this broad stage, the stories and histories of queer people (and queer peoples) have been erased and “disappeared” by heteronormative culture.
The only stories I knew about queer people as a child were those that claimed that we were wrong and misguided and could be cured. There was also a never-fully-spoken, shameful association made between gay men and the sexual abuse of boys. This is ironic, because the person most responsible for the overall filtering of the stories I had access to was my father, the (apparently) heterosexual man who molested me.1
These are some of the forms which that filtering took: My father once forced me to return a Dungeons and Dragons book which I had bought. My sister and I were not allowed to watch The Simpsons, or R rated movies. He also, in the most absurd example of this dynamic, (temporarily) forbid my sister and I from watching The Smurfs because he had read in a fundamentalist Christian newsletter that Gargamel used Satanic magic in the show.
(This episode from my childhood reminds me of the many examples of fundamentalist Christians attempting to ban the Harry Potter books from libraries. To me, this suggests the political importance of struggles over access to stories, especially for children. See also the recent controversy about the federal government purging religious books which did not appear on their approved lists.)
Despite these efforts at control, books were often like secret messages from other worlds, smuggled in beneath the watchful gaze of my parents, who were mostly unable to recognize their significance. This was especially true once I was able to drive and thus had unfiltered access to the public library. I began to devour queer literature, especially short stories and novels with queer male characters. Still, my hunger was unsatisfied. Partially, this was because I needed more in person interaction with queer people. But I was also searching for a spiritual story about queer people, for a mythology to replace the Christian teaching that a core part of my being was sinful and twisted. Although I had already rejected fundamentalist Christianity as a worldview, this was not enough for me. As Carol P. Christ says, in Why Women Need the Goddess, “[s]ymbol systems cannot simply be rejected; they must be replaced.”
1In his abuse, he verbally affirmed the supposed connection between queerness and sexual abuse, calling me a “faggot,” and telling me, in the all too common practice of blaming the victim, that I wanted the abuse to be happening, that it was happening because I wanted it. In the story he told himself (and me), my “queer” desire was the cause of the abuse. In reality, of course, it was his own unresolved feelings about trauma and his own history of sexual abuse that caused him to make the choice to abuse me.↵
