(Trigger warning: homophobic language. Please note that this column has been pre-emptively tone policed down to allow for hetero/cis/allosexual comfort.)
To whomever vandalized East House with a homophobic death threat on Thursday:
Thank you for your interest in our community! Let me be the first to say that it’s always refreshing to hear frank and honest discussion of hard topics like these on campus. Queer experience has taken something of a back seat in the national dialogue since gay marriage was legalized this summer, so your interest in bringing us back into the conversation is truly flattering! However, we did detect a faint hint of hostility in your message “DEATH TO ALL F--- @ JACK,” so we decided to use this space to address any of your possible concerns with our community.
We’ll begin with the good news: all gays will indeed die! Unfortunately, science is not yet sufficiently advanced to unlock the secrets of immortality, meaning that at present both all queer and all straight people are on course to at some point perish. Mission accomplished!
We sense that your demand for our genocide may be motivated by a subtle dislike for our community. While we get that—you can’t be friends with everybody, after all!—we would still love to get your feedback on what exactly grinds your gears about us.
Perhaps on this occasion your objection was that young Jack was just being “too gay” for your tastes. This, we freely admit, is a complaint we hear often about our community! Unfortunately we’ve had chronic problems taking steps to deal with this pressing issue because we haven’t yet managed to work out what “too gay” means. We’ve had our best queer minds working on it: does it mean being so attracted to the opposite sex that the gay builds up within your body, periodically bursting out of you from toxic queer pustules? Maybe instead it means that you’re so gay that you have excess gay, and the gayness physically exudes from you, creating whole surplus body parts made only from gay. One theory we’ve been working on is that when a person is “too gay” it means that person is dangerously enthusiastic about being queer, leading them into activities like roaming the Serengeti looking to wrestle any aggressively heteronormative animals or BASE jumping from a cliff with only a copy of Foucault’s “History of Sexuality” for a parachute.
Of course, you could just dislike queer people because they’re queer. Alas, there’s not much we can do about that! But if that is the case we would just like to ask that, if possible, you try to avoid murdering us. I don’t want to be an inconvenience or seem to be stepping on your freedom of opinion—and I apologize if I’m coming across as overly emotional!—but it would very much be a lovely surprise to have you not kill us for being queer. Sorry if that’s an imposition!
We’d next like to address the many allies who have stood with us through this somewhat trying time. We know that we have probably seemed unusually angry of late, and that our indiscriminate rage has made some of you feel unjustly attacked. We understand that! But allow us to analogize for a moment.
Imagine that you are strolling down a bucolic country path. All of a sudden you come across me, who has been moderately stabbed. “Monday Monday!” you exclaim, “What can I do to help?” To this I respond by screaming “CALL A DAMN AMBULANCE YOU IDIOT!”—except with more swearing, which I’m not allowed to print in The Chronicle. Now, I hope that you’d agree with me that it would be a tad perverse for you to respond to this outburst by saying, “Well come on, Monday Monday. You could stand to be a little more polite to someone that’s helping you.”
I understand fully if this analogy seems hyperbolic to you! Receiving a death threat probably doesn’t engender the exact same sensations as actually getting stabbed. But to make the metaphor work, it’s important to point out that queer experience of violence at Duke isn’t limited to the threat against Jack’s life. As it happens, intimidation and physical threatening of queer people here actually happens pretty often. The number of people I know who’ve had a homophobic run-in at Duke (especially at Shooters, naturally) would make your head if not spin then at least revolve gently in attenuated surprise.
So in a context where violence really can happen at any time, I hope it doesn’t seem odd that we’d react to a real life death threat with a little nervousness. If anything, as I’ve tried to demonstrate through the unflappably positive tone of this column, it should seem far more bizarre to respond to a death threat by remaining perfectly neutral and academic. And indeed, this neutrality is a farce: I am very angry. Somewhere on campus our friend with the unusually square-shaped handwriting continues to walk among us unnoticed; combine this danger with Duke’s typically short institutional memory (*ahem*), and it should seem obvious that we’re a little irate. And before you say that we need to grow a thicker skin, do bear in mind that this is not the first time most of us have encountered homophobia. We’re not upset at getting our first taste of the real world; we’re upset that the worst of the real world has followed us into a space we like to think of as safe.
But yes, I suppose I should go back to being satirical. If you have any queeries for us, feel free to get in touch. Maybe skip the vandalism this time, and do something more creative. Here’s an idea: how about you pay a biker to have his back tattooed with your thoughts and stand shirtless in the middle of Chapel Quad, every thirty seconds shouting, “I AM THE MESSAGE FLESH. DEVOUR THE INFORMATION FROM MY BONES USING YOUR EYE SPHERES.” That’d be fun.
All the best,
Gays.
DUKE, WHAT’S GOOD?
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