How it felt in the wake of June 12

by Boomer Moore
Special to The Gayly

When I was in the fifth grade, the boys in my class would play a game called “Smear the Queer” at recess. It was essentially rugby played with a standard red rubber gym ball; whoever had it was the Queer, and the objective was to tackle him with as much ferocity as children can manage.

No teacher ever voiced any objection to this game. No Christian adult at this church school who was charged with our education and spiritual growth had a single rebuke. In their minds, Smearing the Queer was, if anything, admirable, if not outright laudable.

The homosexuals, I was taught, were unhappy. They were unhappy because their lives were in contrast to the will of God. The pleas for tolerance of and protection for these Others were the devil’s insidious calls to arms, a way for Satan to work his way toward the heart of American culture and lead that great nation that we were all taught to adore into darkness.

The gays were not people, not really; their existence was an affront to God and should we ever suffer them to live peacefully we would be complicit in the acts that would inevitably lead to God's protection being lifted from the nation.

That is the Culture War, and all little children must remember to say their prayers or be swept up in the wrong side when the War came.

American history is the history of blaming the Other for society's problems, a narrative of men in power pointing at the minority and saying “Look upon Them, countrymen. It is They who are the reason that you are poor. It is They who are the reason your family is hungry. It is They who are killing each other and causing violence, They who are undermining the destiny that the creator made manifest for you.”

The Other has had many names and many different skin tones. The Other has been Catholic; the Other has been indigenous; the Other has been the immigrant come to take your job, be he Irish or Chinese or Mexican; the Other has been women who do not know their place; the Other has been Mormon; the Other has been Muslim; the Other has been the gays and their AIDS; the Other has been trans. The Other has been me.

Among all the lies with which my head was filled by the men in pulpits, there was a shining truth. The Culture War is real; they were merely wrong about who was oppressor and who was oppressed. The Culture War is here to stay: to keep women silent, to keep people of color under the heel of society and pretend that their oppression is the end result of undirected social evolution and not centuries of unethical laws with no intent other than to oppress, to starve and imprison the poor, to Smear the Queer.

It is a war against me, and against people I care about, and there can be no mistake: we are losing. And we will continue to lose as long as we fail to recognize that all of these problems are real and not symbolic, socially inscribed and not deterministically inevitable, systemic but not immutable.

I am sure that many will disagree. If I fail to make my words private, I will myself be bombarded by comments from angry people with agendas, gun lovers who skipped straight to the end so that they could give me a piece of their mind. They cannot recognize that the day where we mourn the lost is not the time to quote Ben Franklin out of context or barge into conversations about grief to verbally martyr themselves and their freedoms.

All I can ask of such people is that they attempt to entertain, if only for ten seconds, the possibility that they might be in the wrong. Question why this issue is such a point of contention for you when your fellow Americans are dying every day, and question why the concept of freedom that you have constructed (or which has been constructed for you) has no room for even the smallest compromise.

Question whether you would still feel the same if it were your neighbor, sister, lover, parent, child, or friend who was lost on June 12, and if not, ask yourself why.

I know it's hard to wonder if you might be wrong, because inspecting a long-held assumption could mean questioning every action and decision that has been made as a result of that belief. Our culture doesn't value that kind of introspection, and it values a willingness to change one’s mind even less, but I promise you that freeing yourself from toxic thinking is more rewarding than clinging to falsehood simply because it is all you have ever known.

We will all grow stronger and better when we look at our neighbors and see brothers, not Others.

Dream of a better world than the hell we occupy now, a world where no “Queer” is ever “Smeared.”

Boomer Moore is a writer from Southeast Louisiana currently residing in Austin, Texas.

The Gayly - 7/3/2016 @ 8:27 a.m. CDT