"I'm Not Myself Tonight" (shitshow s4 ep22)

This late Sunday night, I am dismounting the coat tails of a very profound weekend with regards to my homosexist advocacy. Specifically, my friends and I devoted this night to entering one of the most straight-dominated establishments of our college town in support of one of our heterosexual friends. In an effort to assist him on his quest for a good night, we entered the fold of a bar that I usually describe as: "it's basically where straight people go to exchange STDs."

Then plan? We all went deep undercover as straight people to act as a system of support for him while blending into the setting. The girls femmed it up to the point of atonishment, donning mildly catty, impressionable and subtly stereotypical long-island, hetera personas. My other male friend, who was already a natural hetero, simply fell into some of the more brutish aspects of the stereotypical male hetero consciousness. I astounded my friends almost to the point that they were genuinely disturbed by my complete transformation into a total bro-ski. I hardly recognized myself. I was the (socially) straightest I have ever been. It was awesome to be able to shed the coding of my sexuality and wondrous how easy it was. I could spend an entire blog series discussing the ways in which my race factored into my new alter-ego, but for tonight it would only be a tangent.

The outcome of the night is also inconsequential to this entry, but I will assert some of the basic phenomenology. It was an admitted relief to not be automatically marked or other-ized based on the perceived sexuality that I bare, or even by the way I present myself as a militant, political queered symbol (I have my reasons for doing that... yet another blog).

Now, why should straight people not be offended by us seemingly mocking them? Well let's talk about hegemony for one thing. I'll make the analogy to race (which I'm not particularly wont to do, but I find it appropriate this time). A Black American male, who already lives in a white-bred, white-owned, white-washed world, purposefully assuming a "White-acting" persona would never meet any criticism from the Major Social (my term for the mainstream) as he is (one could say "Finally") moulding himself to the normative standards of behavior that is set by the (Capitalist) culture that longs to fully subsume his body and mind. He's "finally" woken up and realized that holding onto his alterity in behavior only (one could say) 'exacerbated the problem of his Blackness. Likewise, in "straightening up," I'm only acting in accordance to the prescriptives that are already in place pressuring me to be like "everyone else" or behave "the way I should." If I did that everyday, I would make the friends that I should make, make my parents proud and I could enjoy an ease that, in my insecure stages prior to my metamorphosis into TAHS, I always craved. I don't want to exacerbate the problem of my non-heteronormativity by behaving like a homo, now do I?

The next point of contest to any possible offense is that, straight folk, I LIVE IN YOUR WORLD! I live in YOUR world, watch your television, am told that you are my role models, am expected to want to be like you and thus can only live comfortably (and I can trouble that) in the margins. And yet you make fun of us, you find us monstrous, wayward, unnatural and so far removed from yourselves that you would quicker puff out your chest and chat up how heavily and militantly preoccupied you are with only heterosexual encounters to the point of gross exaggeration and self-denial (yes guys, I see through some of you).

And lastly, I was embodying a "straight guy." Not "a guy who happens to be straight." There's a conceptual difference there that is key. I was aiming to mock the stereotype and found it hilarious how easily even a caricature of a member of the Major Social can blend in and fit in the world. Going for that Platonic essence of male heterosexual sociality is what made this experiment valuable in the first place. I recognize intimately that heterosexuals are more than just heterosexuals and are complex agents of multiple nuanced identities. The critique that my "performance" was based on however was of those men who are unnecessarily overcoded by their heterosexuality.

I'm not done analyzing last night by a long shot. Especially given the encounter I had towards the tail end with the girl who cried the word "faggot" three too many times in front of the wrong Angry Homosexist. I will leave you with a link to a piece of satirical comedy wherein the character is threatened by the phenomenon pursuant to what my firends and I accomplished last night: the ability to shed the overcoding of our respective alternate sexualities.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFjWRGaV-Fs

--TAHS