Said David Sedaris, quoted in "David Sedaris Knows What You’ll Laugh at When No One Is Judging" (NYT).
That interview is so full of quotable stuff, it's hard for me to stop, but I'll stop there.
October 25, 2021
"When gay men and lesbians come up, I say, 'Where do you stand on the word "queer"?' The young people are like, 'I love it.' It’s their word. I hate it."
"I read an interview with this woman, and she identifies as queer because she’s tall. People who identify as queer because they feel 'other'? Everybody does at some point in their life. It’s just the rebranding. No one asked me about it. There was not a vote. So now I identify as a straight man. Whatever you identify as, people have to respect that, right? I identify as a straight man because the word 'straight' doesn’t change. I just want some stability.... I’d rather say I’m homosexual than queer. It’s completely strictly generational. That’s what people my age were called, you know? But that’s not the part of it that bothers me. It’s just the rebranding. That’s why now I’m a straight man. And you know what?... I’m going to be a really good spokesperson for straight men too. We’ve been maligned for too long, and we’ve had it. We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore."
Said David Sedaris, quoted in "David Sedaris Knows What You’ll Laugh at When No One Is Judging" (NYT).
Said David Sedaris, quoted in "David Sedaris Knows What You’ll Laugh at When No One Is Judging" (NYT).
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22 comments:
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
I'm a proud Band Queer. Scum of the Earth.
If you know what I mean, then you'll know where to find me.
It's completely strictly an awkward sentence. Double the adverbs, double the fun.
First world problems.
More First World Problems.
People are still calling themselves 'queer'?
That's so gay...
To me, "queer" always meant flamboyantly gay. Usually, but not necessarily a man. (Why is a gay man gay, but a gay woman is a lesbian?) If queer now just means "doesn't fit in" and has been watered down so much that it can refer to a tall person, then I'm against the change. It was a perfectly good word with a perfectly good meaning, and now it barely means anything at all. That's progress?
Was first introduced to David Sedaris on NPR. The Santaland Diaries.
Later, my wife and I took in a live show at the Fargo Theater on his "Me Talk Pretty One Day" tour.
I never much cared for "queer," partly because in my formative years it was so unambiguously pejorative, and partly because although I was always very much "other," I never saw myself as abnormal.
That said, the word is useful and more rhetorically pleasing than so many of the phrases that attempted to unseat it. Anyone remember "genderfuck"? At least I can listen to queers talk about themselves without having involuntary spasms of patronizing laughter.
He does skip blithely past the point (deliberately, and for comedic effect of course)--the instability is the entire purpose. Young people always try to define themselves away from the social archetypes of their elders. And the fact that the oldsters find this silly and exhausting keeps them from spoiling the whole thing by joining in and rendering the whole affectation uncool.
What rubs me the wrong way is less that it's tiresome and more that it's just so boring. Every other generation thinks it's the first to discover sexual ambiguity. They think it's so novel, so transgressive. Never mind the glam rockers of the 70s/80s or the libertine flappers and vaudevillians of the 20s/30s. People can (and have!) written volumes on the flaunting of foppish fads among the European idle rich over the centuries. But no, their discovery is unique, and it MUST BE ACKNOWLEDGED.
Anyone want to tell them that David Bowie and Iggy Pop wore it better?
Here’s an idea… maybe don’t “identify” yourself at all. Why do people think they have to adopt an identity ? Especially one that is solely based on who they have sex with?
That’s not my identity. If it was, I’d have to identify as my wife.
Seriously though, aren’t we so much more that who we sleep with? Who we’re attracted to? I thought we were deep, complicated people, individuals all, made up of our experiences, and our philosophies and theologies, our consistency or hypocrisy, the content of our character to steal a phrase.
South Park covered this issue years ago with kids using "fags" as an insult having nothing to do with sexual orientation. That was before PC Principal, of course.
It seems to me implicit in the phrase "I identify" that what follows is a fiction. I don't "identify" as anything. I "am" a heterosexual man.
” We’ve been maligned for too long, and we’ve had it.
True that!
We’re mad as hell,
Damn right!
and we’re not going to take it anymore."
No we won’t.
[Obama and Biden and a whole lot of other left wing autocrats might think that they were going to usher in a revolution. They might be right, but not the way they thought.]
More evidence of the woke tripping over their underwear as they dress for the culture wars.
"Sometimes I wonder what you boys would do if you weren't gay. You'd have no identity. It was easy when you couldn't talk about it. Now it's all you talk about. You talk about it so much that you forget about all the other things that you are." -Jack (perf. John Mahoney) The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy.
It seems I can recall sometime in the early 2000s when a lot of people were talking about how funny David Sedaris was. I think the first book of his I ever read was Me Talk Pretty One Day. It did nothing for me. My reaction wasn't even critical. I didn't think it was bad or was surprised that people liked it. Then I remember several different times when I would mention that I wasn't a fan of his work, someone would say, "you don't like David Sedaris?" It started really annoying me. I was nonplussed by why people would find that surprising, and I assured myself that the next time someone said it, I would interrogate. I never heard it again.
Amy Sedaris, on the other hand, I adore.
I've had several family members try to explain their sexual identity ('come out' to me). When I said it didn't matter to me who they slept with, that it was their private business and that I loved them regardless, they were adamant that their sexual identify had NOTHING TO DO WITH who they were sleeping with. (Both were in heterosexual relationships btw, but identified as 'queer.') Those are minefield conversations and I stick to the unconditional love response. Seems the only safe way to reply, and even that didn't feel very safe.
I think that there are a lot of people who love being offended, and work hard to get someone to offend them.
J.Farmer, I'm the exact same with the Sidarii! I own a couple of his books and I tried, but dont have any interest linger. I always am delighted by her.
Throughout most of history, individual humans have felt a sexual attraction to the same sex without the need to make it into some stupid, all-defining identity. That to me is the worst aspect of LGBTWTF culture - ie. That it IS a culture, rather than just something people do occasionally, which is what it actually is.
"Queer" meant a little strange or different or odd (or at least that's the connotation that Victorian writers gave it). I don't think it could originally be applied to anyone truly flamboyant. At least that was before generations of schoolyard bullies picked it up as a taunt. Enough of the old sense of the word persists that I really don't think of applying it to truly flamboyant homosexuals. Enough of the pejorative uses persist, if only in memory, that I can understand why older gay men don't like it.
But now do "flamboyant" and "flaming," two words with much the same original meaning, but which may have different connotations, "flamboyant" being more positive than "flaming."
"We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore"
...they said mistakenly.
@Blair:
Throughout most of history, individual humans have felt a sexual attraction to the same sex without the need to make it into some stupid, all-defining identity. That to me is the worst aspect of LGBTWTF culture - ie. That it IS a culture, rather than just something people do occasionally, which is what it actually is.
I agree that sexual orientation should not be "all-defining" but disagree completely that it is "just something people do occasionally." Intimate relationships are about more than just sex. They involve building a life together. People socialize as couples. And if you grow up in a society where the sight of two men kissing is considered controversial, then that culture is already categorizing you purely on the basis of social behavior.
I may start identifying as queer. My wife thinks I am a weirdo sometimes. Sometimes I feel "other." No feelings towards men, but that does not seem required. I can thereby go from a straight white male (reviled) to a member of the lgbtq community (beloved) with little or no effort. What is the downside?
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