Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (10 page)

In those same spaces, I saw those same boys having to deal with the uneasy fact that in these precious transformation zones, it wasn’t just people who looked like them realising their own power as citizens. Women, people of colour and queer people were there too, and they shared that hunger for social justice.

The important thing about that sort of trauma is not just that it is survivable. We did survive, after all, most of us, though I can’t honestly say that it always got better. The important thing about that sort of trauma is that it is the material out of which change is made.

The young America that created the Occupy movement is the same young America that has for years been in the grip of an epidemic of suicide and self-injury. Rates of suicide among fifteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds in the USA have tripled over the past thirty years. After a brief respite, those rates have been rising since the recession hit in 2008, as youth unemployment has soared to 2.7 million. When Émile Durkheim wrote
Suicide
in 1897, he observed that the older a person was, the more likely he or she was to take his or her own life.
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Durkheim believed that there was a straightforward reason for this: the young usually have more life ahead of them to lose, and more reason to hope for a drastic change in their circumstances.
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 In the past sixty years, however, the correlation between age and suicide has become more complex.

What does it take to make a young person despair?

On 9 September 2010, Billy Lucas went out to his grandmother’s barn in Greenberg, Indiana, and hung himself. He was fifteen years old, and one of the few non-white kids in the small-town high school where he had suffered homophobic bullying for over a year before he took his own life. There was nothing out of the ordinary about Billy’s tragedy: last year in America thousands of teenagers killed themselves, and just like last year and the year before that, young gay, bisexual and transsexual people were particularly at risk, with suicide rates over quadruple those of heterosexual youth. That autumn, at least ten young Americans who were gay or lesbian or who, like Billy, had been bullied mercilessly for not conforming to expected stereotypes of sexuality and gender performance, took their own lives. What was unusual was what happened next.

The popular advice columnist Dan Savage made a video with his husband, telling gay teenagers to hang in there, promising them, in words that would become a worldwide anti-suicide slogan, that ‘It Gets Better’.
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‘I wish I could have talked to that kid for five minutes and been able to tell him that,’ Savage told NPR, after the clip went viral around the world, prompting thousands of others to tell their own stories of hope. ‘But I would never get permission to talk to these kids or an invitation to talk to high school or middle schools. And it occurred to me that I was waiting for permission that I didn’t need any more . . . We could talk about having survived bullying and our lives now and offer these kids hope.’
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Celebrities and politicians from across the English-speaking world jumped on the ‘It Gets Better’ bandwagon: what began as a well-positioned campaign quickly became a way to prove your credentials as a progressive public figure. President Obama’s contribution was one of the finest made, and it worked precisely because the Obama brand has long been about ‘offering hope’ without going into too much detail about what the road from here to hope might look like. 

From the start, the kind of hope on offer with ‘It Gets Better’ was specific and familiar: leave Indiana. Leave. Leave Alabama. Leave Antrim and Teesside. Leave all of those small close-minded towns behind and go to college, move to the big city and join the creative upper-middle classes any way you can, if you can. ‘It Gets Better’ is neoliberal mythmaking writ large, not just a plea for emotional resilience but a manifesto for economic compliance, the promise that if you only work hard and tough it all out, you’ll have a better life than your parents had. It’s a promise that a majority of Americans no longer believe will be true for the next generation. It’s a promise that erases class, race and gender difference, and as austerity clamps down those differences are becoming impossible to ignore.

Savage’s message may have been a desperate fairy tale, but fairy tales have their uses, especially when you’re scrambling to think of something to say to stop an anonymous child somewhere in the world damaging themselves beyond help. When you’re talking to a person having suicidal thoughts, you will say anything – literally anything – that sounds like a plausible reason not to give up on life, you will promise them unicorns and magical lands at the end of the rainbow and secure jobs after college and other such happy fantasies. Crisis talk, however, is no long-term solution to inequality, and crisis talk is all the Obama generation has had to cling to for five years and more.

As rousing slogans go, ‘It Gets Better’ is hardly fist-pumping. The painful fact remains that for LGBT youth it gets a whole lot better a whole lot faster if you’re white, middle-class and moneyed, like every other empty neoliberal promise ever tossed at millions of lonely, hurting kids. For many young people – for young people like Billy Lucas – life is actually a whole lot more complicated.

Sometimes ‘It Gets Better’ isn’t enough. Sometimes you need to make it better right now.

At the end of the Occupy movement in New York, I stood on a side street in the early evening in Lower Manhattan, watching the bus-kids unroll their sleeping bags and cardboard pallets. They were the last vestiges of the Zucotti Park camp, the lost kids from all over America who came to New York the prevous winter and had nowhere else to go. They hadn’t gone home, because they couldn’t. On the pavement across from Wall Street, they slept outdoors while the weather held, chalking slogans about corporate greed on the concrete, refusing to leave, and when they got too noisy, too rowdy, the police swept in and dragged them away in ones and twos. A lot of them were runaways. Many of them were queer or transsexual: nineteen-year-old Rina, Envy and Franklin, young lovers who met in the Washington camp nine months ago; Little Sean from Philadelphia, curled in a crusty sleeping bag, his cornrows poking out, who burnt a dollar he really needed just to show me how much he hated money, and then told me how his parents kicked him out. Across the street, armed police took shifts to watch them sleep, occasionally charging in with cuffs and pointed guns to arrest them if they got too rowdy. These kids waited for it to get better. It didn’t. 

Sometimes young people get sick of waiting for things to get better, and that’s when they start to fight back. Over two years of following the new student protests and Occupy protests in Britain, Europe and the United States, what struck me most profoundly is how these movements are driven by those same lost, vulnerable young people for whom the promise of a better future rotted with the recession. In the temporary refugee camps that sprung up in New York and London and Washington and Chicago, I met countless homeless runaways in their teens and early twenties. Interviewing them for article after article on the economic focus of the protests, I began to see patterns many mainstream journalists seemed to me to be ignoring on purpose, because they didn’t fit any neat story about dirty hippies or passionate anti-capitalist revolutionaries. The scars on arms and shoulders, the marks of knives and cigarettes on tender skin, some of them self-inflicted, some, I was told, anything but. The dirt under their fingernails. The excitement in their eyes at finding something to belong to, at finding love and acceptance after years of frustration and rejection.

So much of the Occupy movement, with its parades, its crazy costumes and its proud declarations of solidarity, was like a great big coming-out party. Across the world, storytelling was an enormous part of the uprisings of 2011. Against the single story of an individual striving towards, inevitably, prosperity that has dominated the past thirty years of political inheritance in the West, people offered their own stories, hard, raw stories of debt and disease and disappointment. 

Talking about trauma is a queer activity in every sense, particularly for men, when it is forbidden unless you’re in a war movie. It allows us to reimagine the present. In the middle of a noisy demonstration on 17 November 2011, two days after the eviction of the first Occupy Camp at Zucotti Park, I saw something very special happen at the corner of Nassau and Pine in the Financial District. About two hundred people had gathered at the junction, pushed backwards by the police, and suddenly they began to step forward one by one and give impromptu speeches about how the American Dream had failed them. One was a schoolteacher who barely made her rent; another was a disabled parent struggling with no health insurance; a blue-collar worker whose home had been foreclosed; a young student facing lifelong education debts. 

I arrived just after it began, and I have no idea if it was pre-planned, but everywhere people were nudging each other forwards, stepping into the circle that had formed to share their own small, hurting piece of the global economic crisis. To say that the stories were tragic would imply that they were somehow extraordinary, but this was ordinary suffering and everyday rage, the sort of feelings that Americans in particular are meant to feel ashamed about owning in public. As these people shared their stories – quickly, because the NYPD were approaching with plasticuffs and billy-clubs – there was a sense of elation, a relief in finally being able to be open about the truth of their lives. Social change happens when the old stories we tell ourselves to survive are no longer sufficient, and we create new ones.

The anger of men-children shut out of the future they were promised can be productive. Those lost kids peopled Occupy Wall Street, fronted the student uprisings of the century’s tweenage years with precocious sloganeering and red-hot rage. 

I watched transfixed as the mournful young men I’d spent so long trying to drag out of the house and down to the dole office to fill in applications for jobs that weren’t there were transfigured into adults. They stood taller. I watched them stand on steps of occupied squares and make speeches, and then I saw them stand aside so that women and people of colour could speak too, and that sacrifice of space and privilege was suddenly in the squares. In those few days between the opening up of the protest camps and the influx of police beating and arresting and loading tents and books into dumpster trucks to be pulped, there was space for everyone.

At least, that’s how it seemed. But then the music stopped. The police came in with guns and gas to clear the camps, but even before they had done so, rancour and suspicion had settled in. You see, even in these temporary autonomous zones, in these brief magical spaces opening up across the world to let in freeloaders and free-thinkers and revolutionaries and lost kids to hold the space for as long as they could stand, even there, there was rape.

For three years after the groundswell of grassroots rage that swept the globe in 2011, the fledgling counterculture fractured and fractured again over its own inability to deal with male privilege and sexual violence. Groups split. Angry lines were drawn in ground that had only recently been reclaimed by the young and hungry. It was heart-breaking to watch.

In 2010, the world’s most powerful activist, Julian Assange, was arrested on rape charges he refused even to answer, and marginalised men-children across the world held his face on posters, telling the carrion-feeding cameras come to feast on the still twitching carcass of the renascent left that state surveillance was immoral, that whistle-blowers should be protected – and that women lie.

At Occupy, women were raped in their tents and sexually assaulted at sit-ins. In Baltimore, in Dallas, in Cleveland, in Glasgow.
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At Occupy London a prominent activist who was tried and acquitted for the rape of two female comrades kept a list of sexual conquests on the wall of his tent. The list began, according to his defence, ‘as a joke with other men’ at the camp.
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At the same time, the online dissident group Anonymous published a Survival Guide for Citizens in a Revolution,
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intended, quite seriously, ‘for citizens who feel they are about to be caught up in a violent uprising’. A whole page of the guide was dedicated to a ten-point plan for avoiding rape, including the following advice: ‘try to appear undesirable and unattractive’, ‘never go out alone’ and ‘do not wear skirts’. The people who wrote this guide meant well, as do most men who instruct women to live in fear for their own good. The authors of the guide take pains to reassure us that these hypothetical circumstances are not normal: ‘what might be okay in a stable society’ – wearing clothes that show your thighs, for instance – ‘will get you in deep trouble in times when there is no backed law enforcement’.

What is a stable society? I’ve never heard of one, never lived in one, not here, not anywhere. If women’s bodies are fair game outside ‘stable society’ then hell, we’re always fair game. Show me a society that’s stable that isn’t a miserable police state; show me law enforcement that gives less than two shits about protecting women from rape and assault if they’re not wealthy and white.

Socialism without feminism is no socialism worth having, and men and boys are beginning to learn, slowly and painfully, that they cannot liberate themselves alone. Too many social movements have treated women, queer people and people of colour as collateral damage, telling us to swallow our suffering until the revolution is over – but somehow, that time never comes. This time is different. We are refusing to wait any longer, and we are taking the boys along, too.

CLOCKING IN, CHECKING OUT

The precious core of modern male privilege is time. It’s the time to decide where your life is going before certain people start telling you it’s effectively over. It’s the time to make money, build a career, travel the world or just learn to play the trumpet really damn well before you even have to think about finding a partner and starting a family. It’s the time to be young, to fuck up, to fail and start again. It’s the time to get distinguished, rather than grow old. It’s time.