Poster of a Girl

I meet up with a writer friend named Candice. Candice’s butch girlfriend had their baby for them about 18 years ago.

He’s now this tall, adorable boy with a head full of wild, golden curls going to college at some cool school somewhere, and he’s gay! Another older lez I know tells me her son is gay, too. I’m sure gays who are trying had to make everyone think they are totally normal and just like straight people won’t like this claim, but I bet that more kids of gay people are gay!

Maybe in part because of some cool gay or bi gene, but also because I think a lot more people would be a lot more gay if they understood it was an option. And being raised in a home where it’s super awesome and no big whoop to be gay will probably make a lot of people feel relaxed about their gayer impulses.

Ever since puberty, ever since I was 11 or 12, I’ve had cyclical depression. That’s something that has been a defining feature of my life as an adult. It’s manageable. But it’s real. And it doesn’t take away from my joy or my work or my energy, but coping with depression is something that is part of the everyday way that I live and have lived for as long as I can remember. … Depression for me, you can’t distract your way out of it. … When you are depressed, it’s like the rest of the world is the mother ship, and you’re out there on a little pod and your line gets cut and you don’t connect with anything. You sort of disappear. And so it’s not something you can talk-therapy out of. It’s really a chemical thing. You get adrenaline from work, but adrenaline is not a cure.

I’m for abortion. If you can’t love your kid, don’t have it because it will grow up and kill us.

Some of the infants, children, and adults in whom shame remains the most available mediator of identity are the ones called (a related word) shy. (“Remember the fifties?” Lily Tomlin used to ask. “No one was gay in the fifties; they were just shy.”) Queer, I’d suggest, might usefully be thought of as referring in the first place to this group or an overlapping group of infants and children, those whose sense of identity is for some reason tuned most durably to the note of shame.
…[I]t has been too easy for the psychologists and the few psychoanalysts working on shame to write it back into the moralisms of the repressive hypothesis: “healthy” or “unhealthy,” shame can be seen as good because it preserves privacy and decency, bad because it colludes with self-repression or social repression. Clearly, neither of these valuations is what I’m getting at. I want to say that at least for certain (“queer”) people, shame is simply the first, and remains a permanent, structuring fact of identity: one that…has its own, powerfully productive and powerfully social metamorphic possibilities.

Women are still in emotional bondage as long as we need to worry that we might have to make a choice between being heard and being loved.