LINE FEEL: "I'll Have A Beer With Any Of My Opponents"

LINE FEEL is a series of minimalist sketches aiming to document, illustrate, and promote discussion on the artist's relationship to societal pressures. Visit the tag at the bottom of the post for more content and follow the Patreon for free (yes, actually for free) for updates in your inbox.

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Hello, Patrons and Public.

I'm going to be talking about one particular artist in my life. A few of our mutuals know who he is, but I won't be naming names. If I did mention his name, I don't think he'd particularly mind, but I have a complicated relationship with him that I felt worthy of posting about here. Let's call him D.

At least one page of LINE FEEL was a result of notes on a D talk. You'll hear his name (his letter?) come up throughout this series for this reason.

When I think of D, I think of a swirl of emotions. I think of how his work helped me get through an emotionally vulnerable time, 8 years ago. Before that, I had actually liked his work since, oh, 16 years ago? I think of how he'd do anything to help someone by his own metric of goodness. I think of how he's a hard worker and (I have no reason to believe otherwise) a solid dad and husband.

As wonderful as those qualities are, D is also a queerphobe, the kind too distanced from the situation to understand that "queerphobia" doesn't mean he's literally afraid of a queer person. I think of the destruction he propagates without realizing it, with his oversimplified dadisms and his oldschool-boys-club ribbing. I choose to believe if he really knew what he was doing that he would change how he behaves.  And as much as I want to root for him, I can't even engage with his new work because it bums me out too much. The goodness of your being a dad changes if you teach your child become queerphobic by example, and especially so if your child ends up being queer, themself.

All that to say, I love D and think of him regularly. I do follow him on Twitter, and I did appear briefly on one of his talks, but I have to mute his accounts because as edifying as he is in certain contexts, he's absolutely toxic in others. I watched him retweet propaganda from a white supremacist account and then delete it as soon as one of his friends let him know what he had just done. This is a common and often unintentional trend among Republican Americans in 2019, so that kind of thing is not surprising to me. He is both a good and a very bad spiritual influence on me, and I can't compartmentalize which of those parts I'll get from him on which day. Because I can't handle bad influences, I now distance myself to be safe.

In one of his discussions, he suggested that he would have a beer with any of his opponents. I view this as a well-meaning and impressive gesture that is also emotionally stymied. If he were to have a beer with me, he'd need to acknowledge that the tone of his talking to me will always include his denying the civil rights of me and my partner. It's unlikely that D has been in the position where his rights were not granted by default but by government intervention, so of course he views my campaigning for civil rights as denying him his rights.

D thinks that having that beer with me is where the conversation should start. D probably can't understand why that would be a turnoff to someone in my position. I can't teach him otherwise until he respects my opinion, and he doesn't. There's only one friend I know of that can do that for him, and that will come down to some very sensitive timing.

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In the LINE FEEL drawings, I take one of those tricolor pencils and draw lines to represent the unseen part of the discussion.  We could just be at a bar having a beer, but I have to carry the burden of everyone who has meant just as well as he has, whose niceties and votes can still make the world more dangerous for The Other. At this figurative bar, D can't see it, but I'm also seeing Sasha's cousin, who would take a bullet for him but still voted for an administration that is actively trying to scale back civil rights. Next to D is also a childhood friend of mine who treated the struggles I shared as if it was simply a difference in theology. The mother who disowned me (or more accurately, I disowned her), who believes everything The Bible says, despite not reading it nor knowing its origins, is on the other side of D.

D thinks by referring to us all (himself included) as "crippled Children of God" that we are on equal terms in D's eyes. He can't yet see how that isn't true. D is not in a power minority, and he does not have to face praxis for his religious hypotheticals. I am D's strawman. He is not mine. I've been in his culture for most of my life, but he has not walked where I've walked. The worst of humanity is rooting for him while he thinks he's nothing like those people. He's trying to love me and other queer folks the best way he knows (again, I choose to believe) while fighting for the power to discriminate against me. By doing so, he is also siding with the people who more intentionally wish me to be destroyed.

My friend, who survived a Christian concentration camp before we met at my Christian university, was sent there by a mom who loved him very much, and who really wanted what was best for him. She loved the sinner and hated the sin. Does that make that mom a monster, for trying to correct her teenage son's wild behavior? That's complicated. Does it put her on the wrong side of history? Absofuckinglutely.

D and his guests, as wonderful as they may be, must usually be disconnected from people like me, my partner, and my other queer friends. I assume they must not have any queer friends who serve as good influences in their lives, since that was really the start of me listening to The Other. So I wanted to be that for D and his community. I reached out twice for a 1-on-1, to share our figurative beer. He hasn't responded. Whatever the reason may be for that decision, it's not good-enough for me to keep trying. I still have no reason to believe that isn't a waste of my time.

I mentioned that I appeared on one of his talks. He said he'd love it if our groups could cross-pollinate. I said I may hang out in his group later, but I couldn't tell him this part: I don't want his group in my spaces if they think that transness is a kind of mental illness that we celebrate, or that gay marriage should be illegal in the same way as unlicensed medical professionals. If I welcome those kinds of people into my group, my group changes. My group is sometimes the only place in a person's day where their pronouns are respected, where they can safely be honest about who they are. My group is not the space for them to defend themselves, when just showing up takes bravery. I don't want people who think they're doing others a favor by tolerating that kind of vulnerability from my regulars. My life is so much richer for being informed trans personalities. How dare anyone view them as an inconvenience.

Normally, I'd sign off on these kinds of posts with actionable advice to implement, or maybe something affirming. I can't do that here. That feels wrong. So here's what I'll write instead:

D is fucking up in a major way, and I can't do that emotional homework for him. He needs to go through that journey with someone who he already respects, and I have to admit that it's not me.

Dear Reader, you don't need to run away from every fight, but you have no business talking to people who don't respect you, unless it's an opportunity for you to safely practice how you operate in those contexts. Don't take on people-shaped assignments that don't have solutions. As a human being, you are infinitely more useful if you spend most of your time in healthy spaces, where doing what you need to do is easy.

Please don't set yourself on fire in hopes of keeping others warm.

Love,

-J