I recently read The Stonewall Reader1, an anthology of primary sources from the decades before, during, and after the Stonewall Riots in 1969, drawn mostly from the New York Public Library Archives and published by Penguin Books in 2019 (fifty years later). Several reflections emerged from my reading, especially about how these primary sources might relates to my own little corner of the LGBTQ+ world: the Side B community (that is, Christian sexual and gender minorities who submit to what is often called a “traditional sexual ethic,” and who therefore pursue either opposite-sex marriage or lifelong celibacy).
…
Samuel R. Delany, from The Motion of Light in Water
Samuel R. Delany is (still alive!) a writer and critic perhaps best known for his contributions to science fiction and fantasy; he also documented his struggle to navigate life as a Black gay man in 1950s and 60s New York City in his memoir, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village.2 The excerpt from the memoir in The Stonewall Reader includes his description of a group of patients in a mental hospital where he had checked himself in after a mental breakdown. Delaney dwells at length on his anxiety about coming out to this group, especially to the patient he calls Hank, a straight white man around Delany’s age.
Delany finally works up the courage to share with the group, expressing his sexuality in terms of an unfortunate “problem” he could overcome:
…Monday morning, when the eighteen of us were seated around on our aluminum folding chairs, I launched in: as I recall, it was the most abject of confessions. I explained the whole thing, looking fixedly at the white-and-black vinyl floor tile. I had this problem—I was homosexual, but I was really “working on it.” I was sure that, with help, I could “get better.”3
This works out about as well as you might expect: that is, very awkwardly. One older male patient—who by all accounts seems gay himself—suggests attraction to men is a phase that Delany will eventually move past, and that he will live out the rest of his life in proper heterosexual domestic bliss. This Delany rejects, and the group returns to an “unanswerable silence.”
Nothing much changes in the group over the next few days, except for the fact that Hank stops telling “faggot jokes.” Delany begins to wonder what the point of his coming out had been, exactly: “what has I managed to tell them about homosexuality, my homosexuality?” He comes to this conclusion:
When you talk about something openly for the first time—and that, certainly, was the first time I’d talked to a public group about being gay—for better or worse, you use the public language you’ve been given. It’s only later, alone in the night, that maybe, if you’re a writer, you ask yourself how closely that language reflects your experience. And that night I realized that language had done nothing but betray me.
For all their “faggot” jokes, the Hanks of this world just weren’t interested in my abjection and my apologies, one way or the other. They’d been a waste of time. They only wounded my soul—and misinformed anyone who actually bothered to listen.4
Delany, like plenty of other LGBTQ+ people, had been offered a script for describing his sexuality: it was the language of sin (“confession”) and of pathology (“problem,” “working on it,” “getting better”). But this language, although it perhaps allowed him to speak about the unspeakable to his fellow patients, seriously limited his ability to speak truthfully about what it meant for him to be gay—its pleasures as well as pains, joys as well burdens. This ended up being a kind of destructive lie, or at least only a half-truth.
The first word I used to describe this part of my life was “homosexuality” in the key of sin and pathology. When I first came out to my youth pastor on a mission trip at the end of high school I told him, with tears streaming down my face, that I was “struggling with homosexuality,” I thought it was the most neutral language available. The word “gay” seemed too permanent, like I had resigned myself to being this way forever, and I was not ready to give up on radical orientation change yet. All the other words I knew were slurs that had been hurled at me in the locker room, and even though I feared deep down that they did describe me, I rejected them as well. I suppose I thought that by using words like “struggling with homosexuality”—through “abjection and apologies”—I would be able to somehow salvage my dignity.
This language of “homosexuality” and “struggle” allowed me to open up to my youth pastor and share with him something I had shared with no one else. If “gay” had been the threshold through which I had to pass, I might not have come out during my teenage years, if at all. But the language also limited me. Saying that I was “struggling with homosexuality” prevented me from seeing my attraction to, and love of, men as anything other than a wrestling match with the ugliest and most broken parts of me. It made it almost impossible to see how my unique desire for love and intimacy with men was a gift, not just a burden. It also—and this took me almost two decades to see clearly—overstated just how important sexual desire and attraction were to my experience. The language, in other words, was a kind of betrayal.
I rush provide two clarifications. Firstly, there are certainly aspects of my sexuality that—like the sexuality of any person—could be described with the language of sin, or even pathology. I have not achieved pristine sexual purity; I confess my own sins regularly and ask God for the grace to grow in chastity; if I look really closely I can discern behind some of my attraction a sense of inadequacy for which I am trying to compensate with male attention. These are not gay problems, just pervasive and pernicious human problems.
And secondly, no language is perfect. Each person has different experiences and needs to take into account. For me, language like “homosexuality” and “same-sex attraction” feels too much like an unfortunate diagnosis, even if it has helped me in certain periods of my life (if you want to read about my personal experience and philosophy of sexual identity language, check out the allegory I wrote here). But for others, these words feel neutral or even helpful, allowing them to speak sincerely about their experience. And conversely, language like “gay” or “Queer” has the ring of truth for me, but does not feel quite right to others—and might even betray them.
Delany encourages us to “ask [ourselves] how closely that language reflects [our] experience,” to not unthinkingly adopt the “public language” we are given, because it might not be true enough or authentic enough to us. Language, in other words, is like a window. It can open up new vistas of possibility, new ways of understanding ourselves and the world—but it can also frame and focus our attention, excluding some things from view. Who does this language actually serve? Where does this language direct us? What does this language clarify, and what does it obscure or blur?
Perhaps it is part of the duty of writers to ask these questions.
Jason Baumann, ed., The Stonewall Reader: Edited by the New York Public Library (New York: Penguin Classics, 2019).
Samuel R. Delany, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004)
Delany, The Stonewall Reader, p. 57
Delany, The Stonewall Reader, p. 59-60