Breaking the Cycle of Rage

Or, examining how internalized hate gets passed on, and how I hope it gets unlearned.

I was going to write a piece on a show I saw this past weekend. Use your noggins to decipher which one, there weren’t that many! I feel more compelled rather than addressing that piece of theatre (there’s a lot of theatre criticism out there) to address my community. Are they my community? What is community?

Is there, in fact, a community that includes L, G, B, T and every other shade of gender and sexuality experience that’s not cis/het? I don’t know anymore.

Is every gay/queer man even welcome in the same community? I would argue not really. And I feel it really deeply.

In media and in every aspect of life, I feel like we are playing hot potato with our trauma and our pain and we pass it to each other down a line, punching up and down and sideways until the buck stops at women and trans people, particularly trans women, particularly trans women of color. Their hypervisibility puts them at risk, while amongst men, it is trans men who find ourselves frequently invisible and the odd ones out.

We are rarely seen or heard outside of trans spaces. Yet we can see and hear and feel in the rest of the world just like anyone else. We need to be in the room to help make changes. Onstage, offstage, everywhere. I want to have these conversations with cis queer men, but unfortunately, the doors slam one by one. And how will we move on from that? I guess I just have to keep trying.

The Velvet Rage by Dr. Alan Downs did a really good job unpacking for me the toxic masculinity and insecurities and internalized homophobia of many of the cis gay men I know. It validated their experiences, rightfully so. But I don’t think it’s enough for us to name that we are misogynistic, transphobic, racist, homophobic. I think we need to do the work internally and externally by listening and learning. I don’t know how else we move on from where we are currently. As the world changes, I hope we can too.