Kyle Labe's Blog

Fireworks on the front lawn, singeing the asphalt. I call them fireworks, when actually they are more a cheap excuse for roman candles. There is a get-together, my parents host a picnic: uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents, their dogs. My pug’s birthday is today, on Independence Day; most likely he is three, or four, and his wrinkled-up face is graying. During the evening when the sun sets and the sky grows dark, we gather on the driveway, where neighbors join and stake their lawn chairs in a circle. Around this time someone rises, wearing a tee shirt of a bald eagle, and they say, “God bless America.” Behind him the American flag oscillates above our garage.

The fourth of July. Every year I swear it becomes more irrelevant. As a child I admired the fireworks, the aura of a summer picnic, the radio stations blasting “Party in the U.S.A.” But as a child I also had no political identity, and whether it’s convenient or not to remember, Independence Day is a politicized holiday. With every firework there’s a military parade, with every barbecue there’s the knowledge that our president is caging immigrants, stripping abortion rights.

Perhaps a love for one’s country is not a love for one’s government. Fine. Yet even the history of Independence Day was built on the backs of slave-owners; when First Lady Abigail Adams urged her husband to “remember the ladies” when declaring independence, John coincidentally forgot to. How to admire my country when it’s jailed, let die, discriminated against, and prohibited my peoples?

Personally I find this dumb patriotism to be ignorance born from ignorance. Why be blindingly proud of a nation when history warns against that, when it advocates that we examine our past and progress from there? How can we be expected to grow beyond war, to put an end to oppression, when we hero-worship the likes of Christopher Columbus, of Thomas Jefferson, of, albeit British, Winston Churchill? Why celebrate awful things, simply because its result was good?

If I must put a term to it, I am a globalist; I despise the concept of nationhood. To be proud of one’s country means to dislike another’s. When we say we are proud of America, that’s only because we’re relieved we’re not of the Middle East, of Latin America. Because we hate them; or, actually, we hate what we’ve done to them. We war-ravaged the Middle East, we militarized Latin America, we colonized Africa, we set off atomic bombs in Asia.

“I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism,” Ursula K. Le Guin writes in The Left Hand of Darkness. “I mean fear. The fear of the other.” If the philosophy of patriotism truly had a foundation in love, there’d be no such thing as nationhood, borders, states. When we say we love our country, what we mean is we love its mountain ranges, we love its beaches and lakes and national parks. We appreciate our freedom of speech, our freedom of the press, not because we grasp these freedoms, but because we take them for granted; not because we have the knowledge that other places lack this, but because we fear that they do. We fear immigration because with it harbors international expectations, with it reminds us there’s an entire planet outside our borders. Nationalism is militant, patriotism is of self-interest and egoism.

Love and fear are not the same thing; they cannot exist where the other does. And what patriotism does is engender an us versus them narrative, one that equates love with fear, and from that war arises, nuclear weapons. Humanity will be better off once we join together as a planet, and not as minutely drawn nations making up a whole. Regardless how romantic the ideal is, we need to stop emphasizing division and highlight our humanity.

How can love so easily become bigotry? Possibly because it never was love in the first place.

The summer of high school graduation was my first Pride. Local, by the waterfront in Harrisburg. There was a storm so that afterward a rainbow arched over the Susquehanna River; even Mother Nature was on the right side of history that day. I was in the closet but I wasn’t—a strange time in a queer’s life, and if you lived in my town, the one thing they pleasure in more than gossip is presumption. I knew what my classmates perceived of me, what my family did, what the general consensus was before I realized I liked men, this being solidified in the eighth grade when I won the yearbook superlative as “Most Dramatic”—my peers’ polite way of calling me a fag.

But back to Pride. There, I encountered many staples of the culture I never had before: from drag performances, to flags of all colors and designs, to show tunes and protest chants and selfishly queer art. Even my share of opposition picketers, hoisting their homophobic signs and slurring at us as we entered. Quickly I realized it wasn’t my scene, it never had been; I have an admiration for the culture itself, and an appreciation for the history it represents, but it’s just not in my character. Yet that doesn’t mean whenever Pride comes around I neglect to recognize its indispensability in the present day.

This Pride marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, where queer people finally had enough and fought back. Not as if we hadn’t been fighting back for centuries prior, but this week in 1969 is a historical landmark. Until that point, New York police would storm into gay bars and arrest its guests. Oftentimes they’d use physical force; other times they would blackmail the wealthier customers, handcuff the poorer ones, strike innocents in the heads with batons. Standard procedure dictated they check patrons’ identification, lead them to a restroom, and “check” their genitalia to ensure it corresponded to their dress. If not, they’d arrest whomever.

If this sounds brutal, that’s because it was.

The Stonewall Riots were not some civilized call to action for same-sex marriage, or equal rights in the workplace; it was a reaction to institutionalized violence. Violence that has plagued the community for centuries, between our peoples being hanged, beaten, sexually assaulted, driven to suicide, and left to die. Stonewall doesn’t only equate Pride; it means fight back, smash oppression, eliminate homophobia in all its institutional and cultural manifestations.

We have now a presidential administration that puts itself in direct opposition to the LGBTQ+ community. We have reports that roll in, detailing the casualties of transgender citizens annually. We have hate groups that thrive, we have churches that unify against gay rights, we have the everyday microaggressions. We have a president who laughs at jokes about his chosen vice president wanting to hang gay people. We have only a limited number of states that prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ+ people—in adoption, in jobs, in housing—and even fewer states that ban conversion therapy. We have an entire generation of gay men wiped out by the AIDS epidemic. We have our own internalization of hatred in our community, with rampant racism, classism, and misogyny. Around the world homosexuality is outlawed, met with imprisonment, forced labor, quasi-concentration camps, and execution.

Maybe if you’re heterosexual you view Pride as unnecessary in modern society, in a culture that’s supposedly, but not actually, post-feminist. Personally, I just can’t buy that view. Pride is supposed to be the one safe space where you can forget about the existence of the closet, where we’re shoved into for the first half of our life to suffocate, to fester, to die inside. The closet is a restricting force: You don’t know who you are, you barely live, you’re like a non-sentient being and, because of that, it seems a quarter of your life never happened. Our lives only begin once we’re out, so how are we to make up all that wasted time? All those wasted years, being too terrified of human connection, of love, of our own selves? Pride is the closest we have to mending that hole.

I, like almost every LGBTQ+ person, am still so traumatized by the closet, in a way I don’t believe I can ever overcome. Author Paul Monette, who won the National Book Award for his memoir Becoming a Man, put it best: “Sometimes my head filled with a scream that went on for hours but was silenced by the walls of the closet.” Imagine that. Every day as claustrophobia.

Because of that, I don’t think Pride will ever be unwarranted until the closet is no more. Until there is no such thing as coming out. Until we quit worrying about biological sex and gender expression. Until we understand that gayness isn’t just about whom you love, or whom you marry, but a lived experience as a marginalized identity. That, in the end, is why I believe Pride will always be necessary.

A family friend of ours, my grandmother once told me, used to shuttle women to the clinic. This knowledge followed the release of my book, a collection of short stories of which all proceeds—hundreds of dollars—I donated to Planned Parenthood. I never found abortion to be a question of morals, but rather an issue of human rights. And any attempt to erase or remove this right is a direct attack not only on women but everyone. Reproductive rights, and the right to choose what one does with one’s body, is a staple of any society that even seeks to hail itself as egalitarian. In a world where about 60 countries have serious bans on abortion, and others like the U.S. place it under some inspective spotlight, laws proposed by Alabama, Georgia, and Missouri do well to exhibit the collective treatment of women.

Logistically, there are a slew of justifications for the legal right itself. Obviously there’s the standard set by our Supreme Court and the overwhelming majority of Americans who claim to be pro-choice. There is the science of what classifies an embryo versus a fetus, and what can feel what during a pregnancy. Also there is even the ethical argument, that if women are truly equal to men, and men cannot suffer unwanted pregnancies, then a woman has the right to terminate hers. Abortion is a valid and positive reproductive choice, and keeping it legal promises that it will keep it safe. Prohibiting abortion will not stop it, as history shows. I understand just how nuanced politics can be, and how many layers build certain debates, but this is an issue that has a clear right and wrong side.

I don’t like to even provide “pro-lifers” a space to propose their viewpoints; everything these zealots spew is just more and more anti-woman rhetoric. They don’t care about life; they never have and they never will. They’re self-righteous sadists who wish for women to suffer. If you observe the boards creating these laws, particularly in the South, you will moreover notice a common theme: the severe male majority. The idea of being “pro-life” is a product of the patriarchy and laws that restrict or regulate abortion are the result of a constant policing of women’s bodies.

There has always been some male obsession, or fear, of the pregnant female body. Fixations on purity and virginity, on birth control, on lactation, on sex education, on producing an heir. It is one of the few spaces where male power fails to seep through, for men are forced to rely and be dependent on women. Long before paternity tests men had to take women at their word for whose baby was whose, and—as Freud would admire me for pointing out—men are dependent on their mother’s milk. The only means that men can produce a male heir is for women to birth them. So of course they seek to regulate it: They wish to control the one aspect of society they have no control over.

But, and this is one topic many love to gloss over, it isn’t only men who patrol women’s bodies; sometimes, and unfortunately, it is women too who are guilty. Look at Alabama Governor Kay Ivey as an example. She is the one who furthered the misogynist law in the legal process after twenty-five old, white men passed it along to her. It is a sad reality that many women are against women, and it is something often ignored. Yes, men are to blame for the power structures and systems in place, but we must not avoid women who are agents of the patriarchy. We must not perpetuate the false belief that it is only men who dictate women’s oppression. Conservative women like Ivey are just as culpable and act in their own self-interest rather than for women at large. When we say we must elect more women, of course, but we must elect progressive women. As much as the Republican party is against women so are Republican women—who are mostly, need I add, white. These women would prefer to uphold the patriarchy and white supremacy, and it is not enough to hope their legacies are destroyed because of it.

Which leads me to my next point. We do nothing when we tease Alabama and Georgia as being products of an age-old South, full of ignorant, illiterate hicks. No, we are seeing some of the most restrictive laws against abortion in America’s history, and it does nothing to dumb it down to bigoted rednecks. This is a calculated attack against women that has been years in the making, these leaders waiting for the perfect moment for American culture to fluctuate enough to pass their anti-human legislature. We must answer and react as so.

Because abortion rights are much more than a subject of surgical procedures. When we think of reproductive rights we must also think in terms of what activist Loretta Ross coined in 1994 as “reproductive justice.” Removing safe and legal healthcare is as much classist and racist as it is misogynist. As I pointed out, Republican women like Ivey are conservative white women who care nothing for the poor women and the women of color whom this disproportionately affects. When they claim they’re pro-life, what are we to make of their avoidance of infant mortality among black women, of the women who can’t afford to travel across states for a procedure and instead submit themselves to back-alley treatments? What are we to make of the LGBTQ person, of the transgender man who becomes unwillingly pregnant? Of course this is an issue that has a clear source in the systemic policing of women’s bodies, but we need to also view it as the intersectional dilemma it is.

And there are those who argue for abortion only in the context of rape or incest, which these new laws fail to care about. But I see this as being as detrimental to the cause as anything else. Why should abortion only be available as a product of women’s suffering? Why should women have to be punished in order to be granted bodily autonomy? When people argue that these aborted fetuses could grow up to be prodigies or geniuses, why do we forget they would also grow up to be constant reminders of the mother’s trauma? Pregnancy shouldn’t turn women into second-class citizens.

I don’t even desire to address the abstinence idiots who spit, “If you don’t want to get pregnant, then don’t have sex!” These people don’t even deserve any of my time, but I will say this: Women should not be penalized for pleasure. Women have the right to do with their bodies as their wish, and that means consenting to or withdrawing from copulation. Even those who argue on a grounds of religion don’t care about what’s right and what’s wrong—they only care about themselves, as usual. There is no religious justification to being “pro-life”—there is only hate and fear.

I am pro-choice and I am more than proud to be. I am pro-choice because I am a feminist, and I am for the freedom and liberation of people everywhere. The truth is, “pro-life” kills and maims women, and these new perils to reproductive freedom are omens for what is to come. So what is there to do now? It is not enough to kick these Republicans out of the legislative process and elect progressive women in their places. We must petition, we must protest. Donate to organizations—nonprofit, local, grassroots, nationwide, any and all—that are pro-choice and pro-woman. I already have and I plan to continue to. Volunteer as a client escort like my grandmother’s friend, or if you can’t, help and support the women around you. Organize, like the Jane Collective so many decades ago. Most important, speak out. Anyone who doesn’t should be ashamed. One should be criticized for silence, but never condemned for speaking too much.

In high school I used to believe I was the loneliest teenager to ever cross this planet, but the truth is that my generation is the loneliest yet. Honestly, and as this Guardian piece puts it, there’s an epidemic of teenage loneliness not only in America, but around the globe. And it’s so fascinating to me. Sometimes I watch movies and observe how the young adults portrayed are meeting up at diners or drive-in movies, always doing something, always together and comradely. It was something in which I thought every teenager but me participated—but I was wrong, so wrong. In college, speaking to others, I realized we all had that same characteristic: We’d spend our weekends of high school in our bedrooms alone, prowling Twitter and Facebook and waiting desperately for a text or a call that’d never come. That Guardian article surveys that over 60 percent of teenagers feel lonely, and I and nearly everyone my age I’ve encountered are a part of that statistic.

Of course baby boomers and traditionalists love to claim that it’s all social media and the internet that have driven us to depression, anxiety, and overall social ineptitude. We don’t go outside enough, they say. We don’t interact with others, we don’t detach from our phones. I wonder if they ever grow tired of their droning, adultist whining, or if we must do that for them. Because I also wonder why it’s the young people who are blamed for adapting to a culture fostered by those older than us? We can only do what’s best with what’s given to us, and the generations prior to us didn’t give us much.

Recently I read a New York Times opinion piece titled “Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good” and I can’t stop mulling over it. In it, writer Nellie Bowles theorizes that it’s the wealthy elites who have done it to us: They’ve created a culture where it is impossible for the poor to live without technology, and a luxury for the rich to live without it. “Life for anyone but the very rich — the physical experience of learning, living and dying,”  she writes, “is increasingly mediated by screens.” How obvious this is and how little did I pay attention to it. First, “smart” technology—iPhones, iPads, Androids, and so on—was introduced almost as a symbol of status; the rich could go about tapping all day on their screens while the poor were left with flip phones and internet cafés.

But then smart technology became so commonplace where it became impossible to function in society without it. Laptops are now used in schools, workplaces regularly use apps to communicate, and messages and mail have become virtually digitized. If the poor dare to even fantasize of climbing the economic ladder, then they must need an iPhone. And while the poor struggle to afford the latest version, the rich purchase their kids the finest toys and send them off to the most prestigious charter schools and daycares. I can’t help but conceive of it all as some conspiracy, another way for the rich to shun the poor and cast them off from the world.

The whole concept of human contact in the modern age has become corporatized. It’s a scene your grandmother loves to share on her Facebook timeline: an image of a family dinner—except the parents are on their phones and the children are glued to video game consoles. But you can’t help but fathom that this is what happens when we’re driven to it. The notion of a 9–5 workday has now transformed into 24-hour shifts with email and Slack and employees’ contacts a fingertip away. Kids are products of the system they’re involuntarily a part of. People work two, sometimes three or four jobs, and now that divorce isn’t as stigmatized and women have the possibility to leave their neglectful husbands, separation is widespread. Families are not nuclear; in fact, they’re displaced. What used to be a model formed around religious ideals of community and mutual appreciation is now no different than the businesses and corporations—which are, unquestionably, manifestations of the male hegemony—that already dictate our lives.

Think about it: The workplace and the home have become increasingly integrated. Women now have to bear the domestic labors of the household and family with the demands of the boss and employer. Families are isolated in single-parent households, and how can one be expected to play the role of both parent and worker interchangeably and constantly? We can’t afford daycares, or nannies, or babysitters, but we also can’t afford to miss that night shift of our second job. Our children expect “quality time,” but there is no time left in the day. So our only quality time is on our phones. We declare that the youth have been tainted by technology. No. Corporations and big business have done that for us, inserting themselves into our culture and ruining the core values we cherish most.

A while ago—a few years, actually—I shared a list of my top eleven favorite books of all time. Recently I reviewed it, having forgotten it even existed, and I realized how wrongly this reflected my current tastes in literature and the absolute behemoth works of art that  have affected me in some way since. So, with this, I hope to mend that and hope that you, as well, will find a recommendation or two to add to your personal list.

The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K Le Guin

[image error] “A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.”

Ah, what a delightful surprise this was when reading it for the first time. I, who absolutely have no taste for sci-fi, decided to give its feminist hero a read following her passing. A book concerning an alien planet where its inhabitants have no assigned sex and alternate between genders upon their will, Left Hand chronicles an Earthling who attempts to cultivate a cultural understanding between the two foreign nations and, in the end, discovers the one thing that rings true for all living beings: an instinct for love, for belongingness. The queer themes are just an added pro.

Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

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“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

A controversial choice, sure—but I was very much impacted upon reading Lolita, the classic “banned book” everyone loves to misinterpret. Obviously this is no love story; it is the narrative of a pedophile who, over the course of the victim’s preteen years, chronically preys on and abducts her, tearing her from her family and friends and uprooting her life for his sadistic instincts. It’s an incredibly dark and bleak novel, known for embodying what we know now as the “unreliable narrator.” But it’s Nabokov’s radically empathetic and uncanny ability to understand the actions and behaviors of humans, and especially Americans, in the face of severe threat and adversity that makes this story so lasting.

Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell

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“Perhaps—I want the old days back again and they’ll never come back, and I’m haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears.”

The other week I came across a tweet that made the point of how we laud absolutely massive works of literature by men where their authors almost “show off” in a way—think Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Knausgaard’s My Struggle. And, while there’s nothing wrong with them, where are these same humongous, genius pieces by women? So I’ve embarked on a search to read these, and Gone with the Wind—about the trials and anguishes of debutante Scarlett O’Hara as she fights to survive pre–, mid–, and post–Civil War—was my first venture. At the outset it’s invaluable to know this book is racist; one cannot read it without the intense scrutiny of a critical eye. That being said, when it’s not simply consumed as Southern apologia, it may very well be one of the most human pieces of literature I have ever read. Even more so, it’s one of the very few books that has caused me to cry.

The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing

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“For the truth is, women have this deep instinctive need to build a man up as a man. Molly for instance. I suppose this is because real men become fewer and fewer, and we are frightened, trying to create men.”

Another in my vain search for behemoth books by female geniuses. And this one is by far much more difficult; its structure consists of a novel within four notebooks, within a novel, within another novel, encompassing the mental crackdown of one woman in the mid-nineteenth century. In the end, it’s made me a better feminist and a better Communist. It’s a book that will transport you to every end of the spectrum of human emotion, and it’s one I still ruminate over each day. Many attribute Lessing’s Nobel Prize win to this novel, and I can easily see why.

One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez

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“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”

Someone recommended this one to me after claiming it had changed their life. And I can confidently confirm that it did, in fact, change mine too. Chronicling the Buendía over seven generations, One Hundred is a meditation on solitude, a yearning for belongingness, a political tour-de-force, a magical realist exposé, and more all in one 400-page novel. García Márquez was actually an author banned from the U.S. for his anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist beliefs, so you know this’ll be a good read. There’s a blurb on the back of my copy that proclaims that this, along with the Book of Genesis, should be required reading for every human being, and I wholeheartedly agree.

Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys

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“There is always another side, always.”

Jean Rhys’ magnum opus is unlike anything I’ve ever read. On one hand, it’s a retelling of Jane Eyre through the perspective of the “madwoman in the attic”; on the other, it’s a postcolonial, feminist exploration of the social forces that bind a person. Many attribute to this novel the rise of postcolonial theory, for what Rhys sets out to do, through multiple narrators, is to examine the exoticism and the isolation of the Other. For its protagonist, Antoinette, embodies the Other: She is always in between, never belonging, and it drives her mad. I’ve read a lot of Modernism, yet this one always strikes me as the most poignant.

The Awakening – Kate Chopin

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“She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.”

Typically I forget how much I completely adore Chopin until I read her all over again. She didn’t produce much other than short stories, yet when I reread my own pieces I can’t help but witness her in every one of my sentences. Her ability to capture the human spirit—how it suppresses desire, identity, and how this contextualizes with a culture—astounds me, and her capacity for such raw honesty in nineteenth century, Southern America is not only something to appreciate, but to celebrate. The Awakening follows one summer in Edna Pontellier’s life as she, through a series of extramarital affairs and a taking up of art, discovers her own female identity within a patriarchal culture. It’s naturalist and it’s feminist, and schools never seem to do it proper justice when it’s taught.

The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

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“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”

How can I be a college student of my generation and not list The Bell Jar as one of my favorite books? Plath is not only a genius, but one of the greatest poets of all time, and even if The Bell Jar is the one novel to define her legacy, it’s quite the novel to do so. Yes, it examines how a male-dominated society perceives mentally ill women, but it is also a meditation on life. The novel follows Esther Greenwood through a summer internship in New York, and her consequent breakdown in her hometown outside Boston. She is always balancing her self-assuredness with deep vulnerability, always terrified of her own insecurities and deeply cognizant of societal iniquities, longing to be bigger than she is capable of yet hyperaware of her smallness on such an enormous planet.

The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner

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“It’s not when you realize that nothing can help you—religion, pride, anything—it’s when you realize that you don’t need any aid.”

If you want to talk about bleak novels, this is the definition of one. Faulkner’s Modernist masterpiece documents the fall to ruin of a once Southern aristocratic family, torn apart by their failure to adapt to a constantly changing society. Faulkner is known for his characters—how realistic they are, how they leap off a page—but this novel in particular truly captures that niche of his. From Caddy to Jason to Quentin to Dilsey to Miss Quentin, I can’t seem to shake these characters’ memories from my mind. I’ve always been fascinated with the South, and not only how it grapples with its history, but how its past always finds its way into the present. If you’ve been searching for the Great American Novel, this is it.

The Complete Works – William Shakespeare

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“This above all: to thine own self be true.”

If you know me, you also know I can’t have a list of favorite reads and not include Shakespeare. I find with Shakespeare that I learn more about humanity and life than I do in philosophy texts, in self-help guides, in psychology writings. I want to say to people faced with this volume: Here is the wealth of human knowledge. From his tragedies to his comedies to his histories to his poems, Shakespeare is and will always be unmatched for his radical empathy; his works each have lives of their own—they are living, breathing entities, featuring characters from every walk of life. Shakespeare has about covered it all and more, and there is always, always something there to learn—for everyone. If you’re wary of tackling this entire volume, at least read some of my favorites: Antony and Cleopatra, The Taming of the Shrew, Troilus and Cressida, The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Titus Andronicus, King Lear, or The Tempest.

The Neapolitan Novels – Elena Ferrante

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“Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.”

I can’t believe I would lay down my life for an anonymous, eponymous author. For no one knows who Ferrante really is, but most of us know what she has given us. With her Neapolitan Novels, she follows the lifelong friendship of two women from impoverished, postwar Naples, Italy when one of them, in her old age, disappears (or, possibly, runs away), and the other sets to writing their entire lives in novel-form. Sure, this is a series of four volumes, but Ferrante considers it as one large story, and so do I. Never before have I read something so violently personal, so viscerally political, so eloquently written, so psychologically adept, so geographically contained yet so thematically universal. It’s so hard to encapsulate the power of these novels within the space of a short blurb, so I can offer is this: read it.

Two instances, both in high school, with comparable interpretations: One, a boy accosted me in the locker room for “watching” as he changed; second, a girl darted up to me in the hallway, inquired of my sexuality, and insisted on having me as her “gay best friend.” Often I don’t remember occurrences like these; they’re so frequent that I wonder if I should label it as an expectation rather than a micro-aggression. In fifth grade classmates would tease me for surrounding myself with girls; in middle school, when other boys’ voices deepened, I was mocked for a higher pitch; in high school, I was either something to be feared or tokenized; in college, I’m often the odd gay out.

People humor me. In a liberal arts school like Emerson College, where I attend, a straight person will encounter one or two queer people and claim the institution is infected with sexuality—I can’t count the amount of people who have told me I’m the first gay person they’ve known, as if we’re some endangered mammal you observe at a zoo. Yet even here, in this allegedly queer haven, I’m subject to the overwhelming sensation I’ve felt since coming to terms with my sexuality: the cognizance that—everywhere I look, everywhere I go—I’m surrounded by heterosexuality, by some “norm” I can, and will, never fit in to.

On the other hand, I don’t fit in well with my fellow queer community. I never have, and I’m not quite sure why. Maybe it’s the fact that I grew up in a conservative space, thus stinted to queer culture, and because of that I can’t let loose like others, or mold myself to their mannerisms. Personally I’m not a fan of drag, I don’t watch Queer Eye, I’ve never been to a gay bar or club, I’m not familiar with the slang—you know, those stereotypes that are wrong to perpetuate, yet ring nonetheless true. Because of this, I’m always surprised when my straight friends refer to me as “so gay,” or of the like. To straight people, it’s as if to simply be gay is the same as being too gay for comfort.

Here’s the rundown for straight-gay relations: Straight men over-sexualize gay men—they fear from gay men the same treatment with which they treat women. Oppositely, many straight women, in their neoliberal eagerness to integrate themselves into the queer community, not only emblematize gay men but de-sex us. We are either perverts or eunuchs. Male anxiety over homosexuality often manifests as retaliatory violence, while female anxiousness more or less isolates. The truth is, I act “gayer”—whatever that is—with women, because I feel more comfortable and safe around them, while with men I assume different, more masculinely perceived expressions and idiosyncrasies: I’m still not sure which is the more genuine version of me. And within the LGBTQ+ community, there are standards: One must look this way, one must weigh this much, one much neither be too feminine nor too masculine. What to do, where to go, when you’re a gay man who isn’t in love? So we are barred from equal human relations.

As a gay man mostly friends with straight people—moreover, straight men—I’ve hardly, if ever, felt equal among a group of peers. Everything will go well until it doesn’t; for example, if I say the wrong thing, men will hop on the opportunity to mock me, to patronize me. Men form bonds with one another for a means of solidarity to use against women, minorities. If I ever begin to feel equal, this will inevitably find its way to poison my selfhood—I will feel like one of the boys until these same boys gang up on me, and then I understand: Oh, yes, I am gay, and they are not.

Gay men will often resort to the company of women for equal relations. Notions of gender, here, become fuzzy, and as much as I yearn for female friends, I am also a man and contribute to the patriarchy. I feel as if many gay men fail to grasp this. Solidarity between women is the one space where the patriarchy fails to fully invade—if male friendship reinforces the patriarchy, sisterhood dismantles it. Why should I enter, and bring with me my maleness, into the sacred atmosphere of womanhood? If I were to forget my gayness among women, they will not neglect my maleness; if anything, my gayness would denote me to the role of courtier, cupbearer, a shoulder to cry on. Because I am not straight, I must not be a real man—I must be some castrated boy, some contamination of true manhood.

So where do I go for a feeling of equality? I don’t know. Sometimes it feels as lonely—sometimes more—as when no one knew about my sexuality. Possibly, even out of the closet, I feel as suffocated and restricted as I did in it.

One of my fondest memories of childhood is visiting the public library on summer afternoons. The air was always, surprisingly for central Pennsylvania, oppressively hot, and when prepubescent me sought never again to venture outdoors, my mother would drive our family to the township’s library. Inside the air conditioning was magical—my mother separated from my brother and I to scour the mysteries, the true crimes, while I’d go to the children’s corner with coloring pages and picture books. I’d find a seat by the windows overlooking the back roads, or I’d log on to a computer to play a CD, and it was all I could do but to believe I was in some sort of earthly nirvana.

Except, I didn’t realize it then. You never truly realize a good memory when it happens; or, you do, and it spoils the rest of the day—either it disappoints, or you attempt to make something out of nothing.

Libraries are one of the few traditional institutions where I believe humanity did something right by conceiving it. It is a glorious space; it is some sort of socialist utopia where, stepping inside, everyone and everything is on an equal plane—education becomes free and abundant, the world’s greatest literatures are at arms’ length. They are cornerstones of any healthy society, an idea built of community and accessibility for all.

People—usually privileged elites—will always go on and on about how libraries are antiquated: We don’t need them anymore, they claim, why should our taxes fund such fossils of American culture? Have you ever noticed it is the most wealthy, the most privileged ones, the ones who can afford to pay taxes—the only ones who can spare to boost a common good—who whine about public programming? If you seek a paradox of American culture, that’s one: Those ones who can’t fathom the benefits of libraries are the same ones who don’t need libraries.

Libraries are not just study spaces and bookshelves; they are resources for the poor, for the less-privileged. They offer job assistance, refuge for the poor and homeless, research materials, internet access, education; they help break the cycle of poverty. They are lifelines to history and to knowledge—they bring communities together. If I could make it happen, I’d construct a library in every neighborhood and town.

I feel myself indebted to libraries. Every weekend I spend my afternoons in one. I check out books, I study its texts. I’ve written short stories, poems, novels all cooped up behind a library’s desk. I love to approach librarians with questions, and I love to lose myself in the Dewey Decimal System. And now, at 21, I understand what my mother so adored about our trips to the library: It wasn’t just something to pass the time; no, in a library, my mother could escape both herself and the confinements of our hometown, and in it allow me, her child, the possibility to do the same.

Two weeks ago, the United Methodist Church voted to tighten its bans on same-sex marriage and queer clergy at a St. Louis conference. How unsurprising. There is to be no officiation of any married couple that doesn’t fit a heterosexual structure, or such a minister faces suspension and permanent discharge. How age-old, how antiquated. The United Methodist Church continues, into the twenty-first century, to believe homosexuality as immoral and sinful. How predictable. How absolutely foolish for a religion already struggling to gain traction among young people.

I grew up gay in a Methodist family structure, so nothing about this is surprising. I attended church—more as a child, scarcely, if at all, as an adolescent. Even before I realized my queerness, I knew that something about Christianity was very, very wrong. I couldn’t pinpoint it; I hadn’t the philosophical or academic training yet. But I knew that with organized religion there was, is, and will be a foundation incredibly against everything I believe in and everything I hope for the world.

I cannot stand those who—though in a good mindset—try to point out some misinterpretation of the Bible. Those who, when confronted with some Bible-thumping zealot, like to comment things such as: If you can’t agree with homosexuality, then you mustn’t eat seafood, or wear mismatching fabrics, or get tattoos; if you can’t agree with homosexuality, then you mustn’t fornicate, or masturbate; if you abide by this one passage in the Bible, then you must submit to them all. Even those who go to the ends of the Earth in order to defend, somehow, that the Bible never actually does condone homosexuality—they get on my nerves, too. Personally, I don’t have the theological background to speak on any of this or that, but I also don’t care to.

This is what I know instead.

Religion, particularly organized religion as an institution, has been used to discriminate, abuse, and oppress people since its conception. That is all I need to know to understand that I don’t wish it in my life. I don’t care to know what service it’s supposed to fulfill when, put into practice, it’s been manipulated for personal gain on a global spectrum and at overwhelming rates. It’s started wars, it’s been used to justify terrorism, it’s played its role in enslavement, in capitalism, in misogyny. In nearly all evils of the world is a root in religion. Because of this, I have no need for it.

I do understand where the intrinsic yearning for religion stems. It makes sense that people want a reason, that they long for sense and order. I understand those who, late into their life, devote themselves to religion in their final years. With it comes something solid onto which one can grasp. It subverts the philosophical questions of nihilism, cynicism, and absurdism. It rids one’s self of that negativity and replaces it with another. I understand that. Because even those who claim they’re prepared for death aren’t. Face it. Deep in our bones is an extreme fear of what is to follow and, with religion, there is a beautiful promise of heaven and nirvana. That promise is nice, that promise isn’t scary—in fact, it’s welcoming. People wish for a means to an end. Because, at the end of the day, who wants to admit to themselves that, actually, there very much may not be anything? That there may a nothingness more intense, more endless than nothing? I don’t.

However, if I were to worship something, anything, it definitely isn’t going to be some man in the sky. I don’t need some scripture to validate me—I can do that myself. That is why I choose to live my life secularly. I have fought with how I seek to integrate spirituality and faith into my daily life only to find that, without it, nothing is missing. It’s not that I believe fiercely against any existence of divinity; no, I’m not that close-minded. What I do believe in is absolute secularization of the state, of education; religion has no means dipping its grimy fingers into the public sphere. Obviously I believe in the freedom of expression, of the private practice of whatever beliefs one chooses. Nonetheless, in my own life, I don’t think to myself before every action and behavior: How does God, my faith interact with this? Actually, I’ve found my life is better without that question.

I have always identified deeply with Virgil’s Dido, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, Homer’s Penelope. These characters never fail to enthrall and compel me. Their “infinite variety” seems a roundabout way to describe their complexity, their strength, their diligence. These are women who occupy patriarchal roles, ingraining within themselves a system of masculine power that would otherwise marginalize them entirely. They must be man and woman, masculine and feminine, at once: The ill-fated Dido must divide her heart between her city and the hero Aeneas; Cleopatra, the woman-goddess hybrid, must manage a private romance in the public sphere while protecting her nation from the same empire as her lover; Penelope must assume the throne of her husband for decades, all while outsmarting and manipulating a slew of violent suitors.

What intricate characters—what beautiful, tragic stories. I always gravitate to these women, these same ones who are constantly overlooked by history, for their capacity to convey both power and compassion, loyalty and heart, in the face of severe threat and danger. Their identities are erased: They must be what others expect of them—no, not even that, they must be more than their male counterparts, they must be without flaws, without feminine traits, without masculine stoicism. They must, to summarize the words of Queen Elizabeth I, have the body of a woman and the heart of a man. They must be an infinite amount of mutually exclusive characteristics all at once—and for what? Oftentimes, Dido is viewed as weak, Cleopatra as lascivious and sneaky, Penelope as archetypal and dependent.

Seldom, in the modern world, do women ever find themselves in positions of power. And for the few who do, I contain immense sympathy for them. This is not due to some kind of pity or internal belief that women leaders need my sympathy. They do not, they are perfectly capable, and even the worst of them have my respect.

Just the other week, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany spoke about her gender. This was a rare remark from a leader who’s always shied away from feminism, from the female identity and experience. In a way, she’s seemed to erase her femaleness, eradicated it from her persona in order to assimilate into the power structure and gain respect and admiration. But that’s an impossible feat, and—although I, personally, am not the biggest fan of her politics—I was intrigued that now, as she gradually exits politics, she’d finally crack about her gender. She spoke on the pay gap, discrepancies between the genders in leadership, and her own experience having to “radiate authority”  and finding her “way” to contribute to women.

Merkel is different than, say, those like Hillary Rodham Clinton and other powerful women who have made feminism their ultimate goal. Truthfully, I wish for a world overflowing with women leaders; I believe it’ll improve the world tenfold. My dream is for the current systems of power and privilege to be uprooted, to be replaced with more feminist models of egalitarianism and humanism. But these are just dreams. In reality, women leaders—like Merkel, like Clinton—are often referred to as a plethora of slurs, as a bitch, a snake, a phony, a devil. People say they want a woman in power, just not “that woman.” They said that about Clinton, they say it now about Warren and Harris and Pelosi, and they’ll continue to say it about every woman with even the most minuscule speck of power because they don’t want women to have any power. We wish to elevate the voices of women until they become a priority—then they must be silenced.

In these cases, I can’t help but contemplate history’s pattern of suppressing powerful women: When Dido and Cleopatra inevitably fell to power-hungry men, their authors killed them off. Even today, that’s what we expect of women leaders. Even today, the “greatest” of women are not enough.

I may be able to write—or, I like to believe I can—but, for the life of me, I cannot speak. Incessantly, my mind races at rapid rates, throwing thoughts against every corner of my skull with each moment. Yet, I fail to articulate these same ideas, these same ruminations, the minute I’m called on to vocalize them. My mind turns blank, my brain grows heavy. Physically, I feel myself clam up, my palms sweat, my intellect on which I pride myself shrinks to nothing but an illusion of what I wish it to be.

I notice this most when in class. I absolutely despise being called on to participate; I dread it when I notice my professors’ eyes scan a room, or I bury my head so far into my chest to render myself invisible. Oftentimes, this isn’t out of some ignorance or lack of knowledge on a subject. I could offer my viewpoints and perspective—sometimes, I desire to—but something always stops me.

Is it shame, a fear of public humiliation, an anxiety that, if I were to speak and say something incorrect or laughable, I’d prove myself a fraud? I’m not sure. If I had the answer to this, I could analyze this internal struggle at its roots and eradicate every worry, every concern. With others, it’s as if they’re natural-born speakers—even if inaccurate, these people amaze me with their openness, their willingness to have their mind be exposed in such a public sphere.

When I detect that a professor is leaning toward open discussion, I whip out a pen and paper and sketch my response or organize a structural setup for an answer in my head. Then, I recite. The same goes with public speaking: Something in which I used to be so competent now proves a dread. When, two Decembers ago, I had a reading for my book, every word uttered from myself, despite being written on the page, seemed entirely wrong. I hated the way my voice sounded, I hated my own prose, I dwelled on every stammer and each stutter.

What’s peculiar is I don’t attribute this to some unease toward others’ judgments. When I feel embarrassment, I never mediate on how I must be perceived by those around me; no, it’s more internal, more psychological. I feel myself—normally driven by boundless ambition—become an unfamiliar being, something I’m most terrified of glancing in a mirror and discovering in its reflection: an unremarkable shell of a person who believes themselves capable of bursting potential when, in reality, there’s nothing there.

That is why I will stick to writing. Here, I can hide behind anonymity; I mustn’t show my face and be exposed as the human being I am. Because, when it boils down, I am nothing but skin and bone; but at least with words I can elevate that, even if momentarily. In writing, I can excel at the same reasons at which I fail in interpersonal relations: I can calculate, outline, plan ahead. For all the walls I tear down in order to lay myself bare in my prose, in the act alone of writing, there will always be that one fortress still standing.