New Book Suggests You Gotta Grow Up Before You Can Love Being You
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Alexander says, “I discovered I had a lot of affection for my younger self, and I started to admire him.”
Recalling the years where he was coming to terms with his sexuality in the deep south, Alexander writes about his struggle to accept himself.
This comes with the realization that he had internalized much of the hate he endured growing up in a conservative, religious family in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Alexander identifies three pivotal years 1989, 1993, and 1996 that cast long shadows on his life.
Those years correspond with major things that happened in his life and also dovetail with major historical moments of global importance: graduating from college, the rise of the AIDS epidemic, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the election of Democratic President Bill Clinton, and the progressive advancement of gay rights.
Dear Queer Self even comes with a mixed tape.
Each of the three sections includes a YouTube playlist surrounding the years Alexander explores.
Chapters in the book are named after pop songs from these years, such as “Giving You the Best that I Got” by Anita Baker (1989), and “Who Will Save Your Soul” by Jewel (1996).
Alexander, who is the Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, has written two previous memoirs, Creep: A Life, a Theory and Bullied: The Story of An Abuse, that now with the completion of Self, form a trilogy.
#GayNrd corresponded with Alexander via email.
Could you have ever anticipated the seeming reversal in politics that has happened recently? What’s your perspective vis-a-vis Dear Queer Self?
Anticipated the specifics? No. Anticipated a general reversal? Absolutely. When my co-authors and I were working on FINDING OUT: AN INTRODUCTION TO LGBTQ STUDIES and surveying the long history of political activism for gender and sexual nonconforming folks, we realized that the ongoing story is one of “push and pull,” two steps forward, one back. We’re definitely taking a step back right now as the forces of conservatism and even fascism try to clamp down on difference. It’s a fear response. Their world is changing. It’s even dying. Their response? Pull everything and everyone backwards. We’ve seen this before, historically, many times, such as in the aftermath of the traumas of WWII and the intense desire for “normalcy” that gave us the 50s and McCarthy. What else did it give us? The Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation. What’s the potential cost of this great big step backward today? The death of our planet. We need to start thinking of queer rights as deeply intertwined with ecological activism.
Ok, my rant for today (tho’ I can rarely confine myself to just one, as my husband reminds me). I wrote DEAR QUEER SELF in part as a warning to younger generations. The relative rights and freedoms and tolerance that queers enjoy today were nonexistent a couple of decades ago. Older queers like me have seen the world transformed. And we could see it transformed again if we’re not careful and diligent to protect—and expand—not just our rights but the beauty of our way of living.
I have talked to a number of folks, professional and otherwise, about the idea that by virtue of our very existence, by being gay, we suffer from a form of PTSD— this hasn’t been peer researched, but the idea of it rings true to me. What’s your take?
I love this question, even as I feel woefully under-prepared to answer it for queers in general. But I would say that yes, for me, I feel like a survivor— the survivor of a culture that was trying to kill me. I think many of us who went through those early days of AIDS and governmental indifference — fuck, not just indifference: we’re talking about calls to send people like us to “camps” or to tattoo our HIV status on our asses — you don’t live through that and come out fully well-adjusted. But you do come out, if you’re lucky, activated — and by that I mean not just aware but willing to struggle not just for your right to exist but for the inherent beauty and glory and fabulousness of your existence.
What aspects of queer life have changed and what are the same for kids coming up now?
So, so much has changed, and so much hasn’t. Historically, we can trace the ongoing evolution of gender diversity across several decades from the interest in androgyny in the 70s to the embrace of ENBY [non-binary] identification today. We can see the investment in sexual experimentation and plural loving from the pre-AIDS heyday to contemporary technologically-enabled hookup culture and polyamory. Changes in how we do these things are obvious, but I prefer to see evolution and development, not radical breaks. For sure, the political climate is different — for some. We have to remember that, for many queer kids living in parts of our country (not to mention different parts of the world), very little has changed. They might as well be living in 1975, or 1955. I hope that DEAR QUEER SELF is a reminder of this.
What, ideally, is the big takeaway you’d like people to get from the book?
I hope readers enjoy the book, and I hope they cannot relate to what I went through — the nearly lethal self-hatred that almost ended my life. A failure to identify would be the biggest sign, for me, of real cultural and political change in our culture. With that said, I hope that what readers can identify with is a sense of one’s sexuality as an ongoing project, something that we don’t discover but that we build with all the messiest and most beautiful parts of ourselves — and often in our interactions with the messiest and most beautiful parts of each other. Sexuality is less about uncovering your identity and more about creating it as a potential to live and connect with others and the world around you.
Word.
Watch the trailer for Dear Queer Self below.
