Posters Have Important Point

To the editors:

I find it ironic that a piece ("Sensationalism Does Not Instill Pride," Oct. 13) that accuses the BGLTSA of co-opting the silence of closeted people, moderately gay people and the poor Nike logo quotes a suicide note to suggest that queer visibility kills queers. Indeed, it isn't the threat of murder, disownment and discrimination in every walk of life that keeps people in the closet, the authors claim, but sexually explicit posters and publicly queer peers, making gays their own worst gaybashers.

Having bartered my way into Harvard with an essay bemoaning the difficulty of being a "normal" gay person (or, better yet, "just a person") in face of drag queens and leather daddies, I can understand the repudiation of naughty queers who apparently embody the very homophobic stereotypes that wound us so badly. Why can't they just be normal, decent and respectable like me?

Certainly I can recognize, as a much-maligned BGLTSA co-chair, the importance of establishing queer folk as "normal," but it's doubly important to interrogate those boundaries of normality. To those who found some of our posters offensive (and it's remarkable that it's the same 20 posters that are mentioned in this debate without regard for the 90 or so that featured traditional Coming Out Day slogans, shocking statistics and Liza Minelli), ask yourself why you found them offensive.

It's great to want to develop profound affective bonds, monogamous relationships, and everything else that Cliff Davidson and Alex Boni-Saenz claim we are trivializing. It's also great to just want to "Enjoy cock," "Have a golden shower today," "Cuff a friend" or yes (horror of horrors) even "Taste Menses." Why are these sexual behaviors sensationalistic, trivializing and fundamentally indecent? As a co-chair committed to recuperating pathologized sexualities and gender identities, I am not willing to re-closet those of us who fall outside monogamy. Public visibility is a small, initial step toward avowing these privately popular but publicly denied behaviors. One person's "sensationalism" is often another's way of desiring and living. It's not worth coming out into a world where all we've done is switch the genitals and left whom and how we can love unchanged.

Contrary to Davidson and Boni-Saenz, we have not forgotten the "pain and uncertainty" of being the closet; that pain produces posters like "fuck you, I'm positive not poisonous" and "St. Sebastian: the first fag in the military." That pain motivates our anger in an unjust world. I hate that our posters embarrass some closeted people but a) don't assume other closet queens don't love them (I still have my poster of RuPaul giving the camera the finger from my middle school locker), b) don't assume closeted people don't engage in naughty sex acts themselves, and c) being closeted or speaking in the name of the closeted doesn't necessarily authorize the abjection of people who have different sex lives than yours. Putting forth a "respectable face," while more palatable to the noblesse oblige of the Harvard community, leaves those still deemed indecent in the cold.

Underneath the poster blitz, if anyone bothered to read our literature, this BGLTSA works on wonderfully substantive programming that includes volunteer work at local high schools and gay rights organizations, fighting harassment in first-year dorms, the renewal of a long-dead support group on coming out, the promotion of queer studies, phat dances, art shows and speaking events. We are more than silly sensationalists, silly, masturbatory fags and dykes out to put our egos and personal pathologies on display. Idealistic, perhaps, in our desire to screw the world, but alive, angry and proud.