Pride & shame

I’ve become a bit fixated on this idea of disgust and abjection. So, disgust can be understood as having the function of defining one’s limits; i.e., to say ‘that’s disgusting’ is to say ‘I wish to distance myself from identification with that thing’. That’s one understanding of disgust, anyway. Well, I know disgust. It’s one of the most fundamental ways in which I relate to my own sexuality. The origin of my sexuality – and I mean this in terms of experience of arousal, universal rather than specific to being gay – is disgust. I looked at men, I was aroused, and I was disgusted. I don’t know if it was quite as linear as that, the causality implies some kind of straightforward way in which I comprehended it at the time, but I think more accurately I was unable to differentiate the two sensations. Arousal was disgust; they were coterminous. And I don’t think I can overstate the significance of that. So long as I can remember I’ve been disgusted by myself. And obviously I’ve since ‘got over’ that (if such a thing can ever simply be ‘gotten over’) – I know that what turns me on is beautiful and not disgusting. Beauty’s where you find it. But I think these associations remain. I’ve normalised disgust. I think a lot of the rhetoric of pride in the gay community can have a somewhat blanching effect; we shout that we are proud of who we are but fail to attend to the shame that is a fundamental aspect of being queer. I can wear a rainbow and hold a man’s hand in public, but that doesn’t resolve that much of my identity was built around. Obviously I don’t want to paint the queer community as defined by shame and suffering, but I think this overemphasis on pride fails to attend to the shame that I think most of us have been defined by. I’m taking a class on disability/illness studies and one thread is that people generally struggle to deal with pain and so it remains largely ignored and unrepresented, and I think the same applies here: the glittery, happy version of the queer experience sits more comfortably, and so that’s the only narrative that is allowed to exist. And then I think people start to feel ashamed of their shame. At a pride parade it’s pretty shit to feel like you’re not fully comfortable with your sexuality. And, honestly, I think the truth is that I’m not fully comfortable with my sexuality. I’m proud of being a gay man, but I also harbour a lot of murky, shameful feelings around a sexuality that never felt fully comfortable. I would like to think that a lot of gay men / queer people in general feel similarly, but I don’t know because there’s not much space for that. I think queer people feel pressured to have a happy ending when they tell their stories; because queer stories have historically ended with tragedy we are held to higher standards than our non-queer counterparts. And I think this compulsory optimism makes us ill-equipped to deal with shame, a shame that can’t be uttered for fear of it manifesting itself, as though to discuss it is to perpetuate it. I’m not a psychologist, but I’m pretty sure ignoring shame doesn’t make it go away. I consider myself quite secure in my sexuality, but I have no fucking clue how to make this shame go away. I don’t know if such a formative experience can go away. It’s all a bit of a blur now – over the past few weeks I’ve been kind of working through my memory to tease out what I can only assume I’ve blocked out – but all of my formative sexual memories are drenched in this absolute disgust. Every time I had a wank I felt like I was letting myself down. To go back to where I started, I think it had this weird impossible distancing effect; my disgust was an attempt to dissociate myself from same-sex attraction, an attraction that I felt incredibly strongly. What kind effect must that have on a person? You just have to get on with it, get through,and I did. But I’ve ignored it for a long time, and now I’ve rediscovered it from the dregs of my subconscious it kind of makes sense; it certainly informs much of my action. ‘Is there no escaping the junk shop of the self?’ I don’t think there really is. I can’t pretend that I learnt about my sexuality in the same way as everyone else. For a long time I think I wanted to prove that I was just like everyone, with the minor qualification of being gay. But I’ve learnt that being gay can never be a minor qualification, no matter how much I wanted it to be. How I move through the world is massively informed by the fact that I’m gay. That means something different for every gay person, but for me I think it means that from a young age I had to navigate a lot of shame: shame for being attracted to men, shame for being friends with girls, shame for not doing all the things boys are meant to do. And I navigated shame poorly for a long time. I remember being twelve at school when a girl in class asked me if my mum knew that I was gay, and I burst out crying. Not because she’d found out my secret – I wasn’t anything at that point, I don’t think I’d felt any sexual attraction. I was viscerally ashamed of being associated with homosexuality before I even knew that I was gay. Shame preceded the sexuality. I remember telling a childhood friend when I was maybe eight or nine that my best friend was called Hannah and she was incredulous that me, a boy, might be friends with a girl. Lesson: being friends with girls is shameful. The more I look back, the more I realise that shame was never exclusive to me sexuality; it was more widely attached to anything that marked me as different. I was a little gay boy – everything marked me as different. I do wonder why I turned my difference into shame. I guess I wanted to fit in, and shame was a pretty effective means of quelling my difference, at least in the short term. To this day I’m fighting a constant battle with shame, one that I rarely win. But I don’t think pride and shame are mutually exclusive. I think I can say with confidence that I’m absolutely proud of everything about myself and that I’m ashamed of everything about myself. Maybe alongside pride we should have a shame parade – and that need not be as depressing as it sounds. It can be liberating to state your own shame, rather than having shame pushed onto you by others – this is the shame that pride is a protest against. Maybe there are some perfect gays out there who have never been ashamed of themselves, but then again maybe pride isn’t really for them; at the end of the day pride is meant to be the antidote to shame. Maybe this pride we can all take a moment to utter shame to someone – not public, maybe to a loved one or a friend or even a stranger, who cares. As long as we can be proud while attending to shame I think it can be productive.