by David Winner

Sao Luis, Brazil,2023 In an interview with Ezra Klein about LGBTQ rights, Sarah McBride, the first openly trans member of congress, talks about a “sense of a cultural victory that lulled us into a false sense of security and in many ways shut down needed conversations.”

I don’t know about that, but before the 2024 election and its tremendous blowback against rights of all but the narrowest sector of humans, tolerance for the LGBTQ community did seem to be at an all-time high.

A cultural time capsule, this writing relays some bizarre conversations about queer issues from long before, the 1990s.

Though I’m a straight cis man, I’ve been fortunate enough to land in queer-friendly worlds, and queerphobia has not been among my pantheon of character flaws. When I encountered milder forms of sexual harassment – persistently tongued in the ear by my friend’s drunken boyfriend on the J train platform just after college, fending off an aggressive Puerto Rican doctor at the gay male end of Jacob Riis beach a few years later – I was neither aroused nor disturbed nor disgusted. Just mildly annoyed.

My odd sartorial choices, my quirky mannerisms of speech often registered as gay when I was younger.

That misidentification started happening all the time after I began teaching at a community college in Journal Square in the 90s, a rough and seedy part of Jersey City. Female students tended to leave me alone, but some of the boys were out for blood, the gay blood that they assumed was mine. A dumb essay that I assigned, simply urging men to be more sensitive with no queer implications, was riotously mocked.

Journal Square One semester when I taught a remedial English night class in a creepy falling-apart building on Bergen Avenue, I was targeted by a Dominican student just released from Rikers.

Inexplicable hilarity occurred in the classroom whenever he showed up. Eventually, I figured out that he had been performatively maneuvering himself in such a way as to always face forward, denying me any opportunity to gaze upon his ass.

Callow and inexperienced, my inability to control the class became evident to the building’s security guard, a man from Spain who wore absurdly short shorts as part of his uniform and informed me, apropos of nothing, that he enjoyed fucking men but that his resolute “topness” connoted total heterosexuality. He offered to help, but I demurred.

*

While I knew that several administrators at the college were gay men, no one appeared to be out, leaving LGBTQ students with no queer allies at school, or, in many cases, at home as they often came from conservative religious families.

Ineptly, I tried to do something to try to help queer students at the college as if I were some straight cis version of a white savior from a bad movie. I could hardly initiate an LGBTQ support group, but I started a “Gay Straight Alliance,” an organization not uncommon at colleges in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The four or five students who appeared at the first meeting were all women of color. (I’m white.) Each women announced herself as bisexual or perhaps bicurious. Tentative, nervous, exposed, no one appreciated the first order of business. A club was not allowed to exist at the college without a president, vice president, recording secretary, and corresponding secretary. But my brave club members plugged up their courage and agree to serve as officers in the Gay Straight Alliance of a virulently homophobic community.

We met for a semester or two, at one point going on a field trip to a gayish bar in the West Village, until I handed over the reins to the coordinator of computer labs at the college, a black woman and an out lesbian.

But before she took over the club, I got myself involved in larger college event, which turned out to be painful and ridiculous.

I was approached by two older faculty members who wanted to sponsor an event somehow addressing “homosexuality.” L, a male former podiatrist who taught biology, and J, a woman who ran the psychology department, wished to create a program that would somehow scientifically investigate same sex attraction. My own interest, less lofty, was simply to promote tolerance in our generally intolerant community.

I wish to absolve myself of responsibility, but, in truth, I don’t remember how responsible I was for the unfortunate idea that got generated for the event. Three people would be invited to speak, representing the three “categories” of “homosexual,” a gay man, a lesbian and a bisexual.

I had no desire to approach anyone in my own life to ask them to participate, but somehow J was able to locate the three speakers on the panel.

I have no memory of the gay man, but the lesbian was a Black woman in her forties who was confident and affirming.

As the plans for the event were coalescing, I was given the number of a “bisexual” and asked to call her, a white woman about my age, thirties, who lived an hour or so away in suburban New Jersey. We spoke for some time about her fears, misgivings. I did not press her to publicly discuss her sexuality with an assemblage of strangers, but, ultimately, she agreed.

*

For better or for worse, the event was fairly well-attended, fifty or sixty people. Most of the audience members came from the larger Jersey City community rather than students at the college.

I don’t remember the order of the speakers, but let’s say that the bisexual woman was last. She spoke of how confusing it was, at first, to feel attraction to both men and women, how she felt judged for it as if she were a coy, insincere person. But then realized that her sexuality was who she was, natural, human, incontrovertible. Twenty-five years ago, being bi was still tremendously stigmatized, and our speaker had shown tremendous bravery.

She had not spoken for long when three women in the audience raised their hands. I had been designated the MC of the panel, so I called on those who wished to speak.

This was still the AIDS era, and the three women had come to the panel to express a very particular point of view. They told stories about married men fucking other men on the side, getting AIDS, and passing it on to their wives.

This was their association with bisexuality, and it pissed them off. The audience, who had been largely quiet before, loudly supported them.

The woman who had spoken so courageously about her sexuality had been ambushed by a righteous anger that had nothing to do with her experience.

She did not respond to the women who spoke. What could she say, after all? Afterwards, I approached her to express admiration, gratitude, apology. I may have hugged her if hugging her had felt appropriate. Wherever she is now, in her early sixties like I am, she may carry some trauma from that event.

This writing is more of a tale than a statement though it does capture some of the evolving conversations surrounding queerness long before the present backlash. My only conclusion is to state the obvious. Life can be painful, confusing, full of contradictions.

I hope that after the queer-phobic haters are gone, and justice and tolerance rise once again for the LGBTQ community, that there will be no assemblies like the one I helped organize, that no poor souls will be chosen to publicly represent their queerness on awkwardly assembled panels.

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