Bad Feminist: Essays (20 page)

During Sandusky’s trial, we saw just how broken he really is and how he has, in turn, broken far too many others. The details that came out of that Pennsylvania courtroom are as repulsive as they are heartbreaking. There might be some small measure of justice for the victims—it’s too soon to tell. We can hope. The damage, though, has been done and it cannot be undone. The trial ended. Penn State will rebuild itself. A new football season will always start in Happy Valley and in Lincoln and in college towns all across the country, casting a wholesome veneer over ugly truths. Young men will break their bodies against one another while we cheer them on. Off the field, who knows what those young men will do. We will forget about Jerry Sandusky and his victims, even if we don’t mean to. This is how it goes. There’s always some new fracture in humanity to focus on.

On Saturday, June 9, 2013, a father in central Texas found a man sexually abusing his daughter. The father beat that man to death, broke him so badly there was no coming back from it. There won’t be a trial. Justice, in this case, was swift and applied brutally. Many are calling this father a hero. Many of us would do the same thing, would get caught in a moment of blind fury in the face of such a violation. That father was remorseful. He wasn’t trying to kill a man. He was trying to save his daughter and he did, or at least, he saved what he could. He was not charged. Mostly, this story shows us how broken men are everywhere—on ranches in central Texas, in elite football programs, both on the field and on the sidelines. And alongside these broken men are the women who all too often become broken too. It’s a spectacle in every way.

We are still in that time in our history when public figures come out of invisible closets largely built by a public insatiable in its desire to know all the intimate details of the private lives of very public people.

We want to know everything. In this information age, we are inundated with information, so now we feel entitled. We also like taxonomy, classification, definition. Are you a man or a woman? Are you a Democrat or a Republican? Are you married or single? Are you gay or straight? We don’t know what to do when we don’t know the answers to these questions or, worse, when the answers to these questions do not fall neatly into a category.

When public figures don’t provide outward evidence of their sexuality, our desire to classify intensifies. Any number of celebrities are dogged by “gay rumors” because we cannot quite place them into a given category. We act like placing these people in categories will have some impact on our lives, or that creating these categories is our responsibility, when, most of the time, such taxonomy won’t change anything at all. For example, there is nothing in my life that is impacted by knowing Ricky Martin is gay. The only thing satisfied by that information is my curiosity.

Sometimes, this zeal to classify has resulted in public figures being outed against their will. In particular, politicians who have gone on record for legislation that suppresses civil rights have found themselves in the glare of the spotlight. Congressman Edward Schrock was outed in 2004 because he voted for the Marriage Protection Act. There have been many others. When people have been forcibly outed, those doing the outing have said they were acting for the greater good or working to reveal hypocrisy, as if the right to privacy and the right to determine if and when to come out is only afforded to those who are infallible.

This is, in part, a matter of privacy. What information do we have the right to keep to ourselves? What boundaries are we allowed to maintain in our personal lives? What do we have a right to know about the lives of others? When do we have a right to breach the boundaries others have set for themselves?

People with high public profiles are allowed very few boundaries. In exchange for the erosion of privacy, they receive fame and/or fortune and/or power. Is this a fair price? Are famous people aware of how they are sacrificing privacy when they ascend to a position of cultural prominence?

There are many ways we have surrendered privacy in the information age. We willingly disclose what we’ve eaten for breakfast, where we spent last night and with whom, and all manner of trivial information. We submit personal information when registering for social media accounts and when making purchases online. We often surrender this information without question or reflection. These disclosures come so freely because we’ve long been conditioned to share too much with too many.

In his book
Privacy
, Garret Keizer explores privacy through a series of essays that consider privacy legally, from the feminist perspective, through the lens of class, and more. He demonstrates a real concern for how little privacy we have, how cavalier we can be with our privacy, and how unthinkingly we might infringe on the privacy of others. He says,

We speak of privacy as a right but we might also think of it as a test, as a canary in the mine of our civilization. It lives or dies to the extent that we remain willing to believe that the human person, body and soul—our blood relative in his or her flesh, and beyond reduction in his or her grandeur and nobility—is sacred, endowed with inalienable rights, and a microcosm of us all.

We tend to forget that culturally prominent figures are as sacred to those they love as the people closest to us. We tend to forget that they are flesh and blood. We assume that as they rise to prominence, they shed their inalienable rights. We do this without question.

One of the most striking arguments Keizer makes is that privacy and class are intrinsically bound together. He asserts that people with privilege have more access to privacy than people who don’t. Keizer notes, “Social class is defined in large part by the degree of freedom one has to move from private space to public space, and by the amount of time one spends in relative privacy.”

This relationship between privacy and privilege extends to race, gender, and sexuality. When a woman is pregnant, for example, there’s increasingly less privacy because, as she reaches full term, her condition becomes more and more visible. Keizer remarks, with regard to pregnant women, that

her condition is an unequivocally public statement of a very private experience, begun in circumstances of intimacy and continued within the sanctum of her own body—yet there is no hiding it for her, nor any denying the feeling we have that somehow she belongs to us, that she embodies our collective future and represents our individual pasts.

Any time your body represents some kind of difference, your privacy is compromised to some degree. A surfeit of privacy is just one more benefit the privileged class enjoys and often takes for granted.

Heterosexuals take the privacy of their sexuality for granted. They can date, marry, and love whom they choose without needing to disclose much of anything. If they do choose to disclose, there are rarely negative consequences.

In recent years, celebrities have started coming out with little fanfare by way, perhaps, of an interview where a man might casually mention his male partner or refer to himself as a gay man, or a woman might thank her partner in an award acceptance speech. The public reacts when celebrities come out quietly, but the spectacle is somewhat muted. When celebrities come out in this manner, they are generally saying, “This is simply one more thing you now know about me.”

In July 2012, popular journalist Anderson Cooper came out of one of those invisible closets built by someone else’s hands in an e-mail to the
Daily Beast
’s Andrew Sullivan, who published the message on his blog.

Cooper wrote:

The fact is, I’m gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn’t be any more happy, comfortable with myself, and proud.

I have always been very open and honest about this part of my life with my friends, my family, and my colleagues. In a perfect world, I don’t think it’s anyone else’s business, but I do think there is value in standing up and being counted.

There was a range of responses to Cooper’s coming out. Many people shrugged and said Cooper’s sexuality was presumed, an open secret. Others insisted it was important and even necessary for Cooper to come out and to, as he puts it, stand up and be counted.

This is often what is said when public figures do or do not come out in this day and age: there is a greater obligation that must be met beyond what that person might ordinarily choose to meet. We make these demands, though, without considering how much less privacy that person might have as a public figure who is also part of an underrepresented group. I am not suggesting that we cry for the celebrity who enjoys a lush lifestyle; I am saying we should give thought to the celebrity who would prefer to keep his marriage to a man private for whatever reason, but isn’t allowed that right, a right that is, for heterosexuals, inalienable.

In
Privacy
, Keizer notes, “The public obligations of prominently powerful people can also constrain their private lives.” We see these constraints time and again when celebrities and other prominent figures sidestep questions about their personal lives they are unwilling to answer. They may be hesitant for any number of reasons—protecting their privacy, protecting their careers and social standing, protecting loved ones. The public rarely seems to care about those reasons. They—we—need to know.

At the same time, we live in a complex cultural climate, one where seventeen states allow same-sex marriage but twenty-nine states have constitutions forbidding marriage equality. Things are improving, but we are inching too slowly to equal rights for all. The world we live in is not as progressive as we need it to be. When a celebrity comes out, it is still news. The coming out is still culturally significant. When a man like Anderson Cooper comes out, it’s a step forward in achieving civil rights for everyone. At the very least, it is one more person saying, “I am here. I matter. I demand to be recognized.” Cooper is, by many standards, the “right kind of gay”—white, handsome, successful, masculine. Many celebrities who have successfully come out in recent years fit that profile—Neil Patrick Harris, Matt Bomer, Zachary Quinto, and so on. These men are held up as examples—not too flamboyant, not
too
gay.

Still, prominent gay people need to stand up and be counted because the word “gay” is still used as a slur. Nine out of ten LGBT teenagers report being bullied at school. LGBT youth are two to three times more likely to commit suicide. The bullying and harassment of LGBT youth are so pervasive that, in 2010, Dan Savage and his partner, Terry Miller, created a YouTube video to show LGBT youth how life can, indeed, get better beyond the torments of adolescence. That video spawned countless other videos and a foundation dedicated to continuing this project of showing LGBT youth there is a light at the end of an often very dark tunnel.

Celebrities like Cooper also need to stand up and be counted because there is only a handful of states where gay marriage is legal. It was only in 2013 that the Supreme Court invalidated the Defense of Marriage Act, passed in 1996. The Defense of Marriage Act denied gay couples 1,138 federally preserved rights afforded to heterosexual couples. More than twenty states have constitutional provisions explicitly defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman. There are states where LGBT people cannot adopt children. Depending on where they live, members of the LGBT community may lose their jobs because of their sexual orientation. They may face ostracism from family, friends, and community. Things get better, perhaps, but slowly and certainly not universally.

LGBT people are the victims of hate crimes. There is the young lesbian couple in Texas, Mary Kristene Chapa and Mollie Olgin, who were both shot in the head by an unknown assailant and left to die. A gay couple in northeast DC was attacked two blocks from their apartment by three assailants who were shouting homophobic slurs. One, Michael Hall, was hospitalized; he had no health insurance and had a fractured jaw. In Edmond, Oklahoma, a gay man’s car was vandalized with a homophobic slur and set on fire. In Indianapolis, Indiana, there was a drive-by shooting of a gay bar. Hate is everywhere.

It gets better, sort of. It gets better unless you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes the wrong place is your home, the one place where you should be able to feel safe no matter what the world is like.

Sally Ride, the first woman astronaut, who died in July 2012 at the age of sixty-one, was survived by her female partner of twenty-seven years. At the time of her death, Ride’s widow was not able to receive the federal benefits normally given to a surviving spouse. Sally Ride was able to fly into space and reach the stars, but here on earth, her long-term relationship went largely unrecognized. The 2012 Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney tweeted, “Sally Ride ranks among the greatest pioneers. I count myself among the millions of Americans she inspired with her travel to space.” Music group the Mountain Goats replied, “Kind of despicable and grotesque that her partner of twenty-seven years will be denied her federal benefits, don’t you think?” Despicable and grotesque, indeed, but in her death, Sally Ride stood up and was counted. She became even more of a hero than she already was.

It’s a problem, though, that there’s a right kind of gay, that there are LGBT people who are warmly encouraged to step out of the closet while others who don’t fit certain parameters go largely ignored. It’s easy enough for a man like Anderson Cooper, living in fairly liberal New York City, to come out. He will likely continue to be very successful. He has a supportive family and a welcoming community to embrace him. Coming out stories for everyday people are often far different, complicated and difficult. We forget what it’s like to come out in the so-called flyover states. It’s not easy.

In July 2012, musician Frank Ocean, a celebrity with a lower profile than Cooper but with, perhaps, more to lose, came out via Tumblr as having once loved a man by sharing some of the liner notes for his critically acclaimed album
Channel Orange
. Once again, cultural observers noted that Ocean’s coming out was significant.