The Supremes: Take that, compulsory heterosexuality!
It’s all but unavoidable. Most of us live or have lived in the vice grip of ideas, principles, and institutions imposed on us by others. Things that we never actively chose to make our own and that may well be doing us physical, emotional, and spiritual harm. The institution of compulsory heterosexuality is a big one.
It’s all about control, of course. But thanks to the June 26 Supreme Court decision legalizing “gay marriage” nationwide, it’s going to be a little harder to control people’s minds, hearts, and bodies in this particularly deep, painful way. A little harder to train children to believe—to know—that to grow up that way is to be deviant.
Many will still try to exercise that control. But it will be harder, now that equal marriage is the law of the land. Not to mention now that the White House has been lit up—for real—with a big freakin’ gay rainbow!
(Have they dimmed those lights yet? A lot of people have been waiting a long time for this. Wouldn’t it be proportional to let the White House shine gay for, say, a couple of years? My straight two cents.)
Stop Living the Lies
Freeing yourself from other people’s ideas and beliefs and reclaiming your power to define yourself and your life as you please is a big part of what The Brown Method, outlined in Addiction Is the Symptom, is about. It helps you see that so much of what we take to be compulsory is, in reality, not. It can be hard to see the truth—never mind feel it, live it—when the lies are so omnipresent, so woven into our beings, and reinforced on a daily basis by other people, by our culture, by our laws.
The big crappy lie of compulsory heterosexuality certainly fits the bill as omnipresent and diligently reinforced—sometimes enforced, sometimes violently. Is it any wonder that rates of chemical addiction are higher among LBGT people? It’s estimated that 20 percent to 30 percent of gay and transgender people abuse substances, compared to an estimated 9 percent of the general population. The pain of massive social prejudice and “minority stress,” as it’s called, will do that.
But it’s basically the same for anyone whose true self is obscured or constrained by lies, by any colonization of the mind. Which would be most of us. Most of us absorb a variety of lies that tell us we are defective in some way. “You don’t deserve . . .” “You are ugly because . . .” “You are a failure unless . . . ” I’ll let you fill in the blanks. It’s all too easy, isn’t it.
These kinds of things may seem like paper cuts, relatively speaking, but their cumulative effects can also crush the soul—and set us up for addictive behavior. Indeed, that 9 percent substance abuse rate for the general population isn’t exactly pretty.
Ultimately, we must free ourselves from all such garbage. No one can do it for us. Fortunately, each of us has the power to do it.
Prejudice Spares No One
Let’s not forget that compulsory heterosexuality is toxic for straight people too. To the extent that we believe it, a shadow of judgment darkens our hearts, which in turn darkens the world and stokes our capacity for self-judgment.
I grew up homophobic. Full of hate, no, but brimming with ignorance, yes. Then, in college, I joined the staff of a women’s newspaper run almost exclusively by lesbians. I’d already been disabused of a great deal of ignorance due to the diverse university environment, or I wouldn’t have surrounded myself with lesbians, obviously. But then came the coup de grace. One day, sitting in the newspaper office at the campus center with another woman working a knot out of my upper back, I realized that the students walking by probably assumed I was gay. And, in a moment I will never forget, I realized that I didn’t care.
I wish I could adequately describe to homophobic people what freedom from prejudice means for them. The mental-emotional energy it frees up for being your own self and living your own life. A weight that I hadn’t even known was there lifted, just like that. Ah! Ahh. Remember the Grinch? The one who stole Christmas? “His heart was two sizes too small,” but then came a moment of revelation, and “his small heart grew three sizes that day!” It feels like that.
Equal marriage is a big blow to a crumbling, soul-killing, control-freak institution that diminishes everyone. Not the final blow, alas, but a good solid one. And far from the first: it follows countless smaller blows doled out by all the LGBT people who ever found the courage and even gave their blood to live their truth—and in so doing have made more room for everyone else to live theirs.
Our collective heart just grew three sizes. Do you feel that? Take a minute. Take it in. Okay. Let’s go for four.
Photo: Thanks, Ted Eytan (via Flickr)
