The Gayest Essay Ever − 16 January, 2008

“Fruitbats are gay.”
I cling quite firmly to this belief. Whether or not it means I find them stupid, homosexual or happy is left to the reader/listener.
The origin of this statement lies in an autobiographic story, told to me by a friend who is recently out to himself and only a few close friends. A paraphrased version of the story (names changed) follows:

"Once upon a time there was a fruitbat named Devin. He spent more than half his life obsessing over a girl fruitbat who he loved. Then it turned out that he was gay and the girl fruitbat who he was in love with had her own fucking fruitbat and that Devin's gayboy emo fruitbat soulmate was a dick.
"The end."

Devin’s story, to anyone who knows him as well as I do, is a self-mocking rant. His “gayboy emo fruitbat soulmate” refers to an acquaintance of his (who I will call “Phil”) who has known longer than anyone how much Devin cares about him and has used Devin’s under-the-surface desire for him to keep him on a leash. Devin, in his seemingly derogatory reference to Phil, exposed his deep and somewhat inexplicable love for him.

Pondering how touching I found this story inspired me to question a strange censorship that I put on myself. I spent a couple of years in high school trying to convince myself that I was gay (I’m pretty sure I’m not.) I was in the GSA in high school (Gay-Straight Alliance), I’ve had gay friends pop in and out of my life and my current roommate Rafael is a lesbian. But having grown up in Madison, WI (which I have unofficially dubbed the Politically Correct Capital of the World) I still found myself cringing each time I’d hear Rafael blithely claim that the driver who just cut her off was gay.
I’ve heard the same explanation from teachers (even textbooks) over and over: a member of a group being mocked is “allowed” to use the derogatory epithet in order to “take the power of the word back.”

I’m sorry. What?
So I, in my heterosexuality, am not given permission to laugh when I hear “my pussy went back in the closet again” to indicate that the cat is hiding?

Rafael and I were at Walgreens the other day laughing at the greeting cards (or rather, I was mocking them and she was trying to choose the least lame ones.) A black woman laughingly approached us and guffawed, “you will not believe what my daughter just said to me; my four-year-old just called me ‘nigger.’” The three of us laughed together for a moment and the woman turned back to the fine opportunity for parental speehifying.

Did this woman, who only knew us by overhearing a frustration for bottled sentiments, mind that two white girls laughed at the word “nigger?” Does my multi-lingual Okinawan-American Anthropology teacher expect the class to gasp and stare nervously when he jokes “yes, Engreesh vedy difficurt ranguage,”? A few my shift nervously in their seats, but the good humor of Luke’s Anthro classes successfully drowns out the horror of a healthy joke at the expense of a stereotype (not the stereotyped).

In the GSA, the moderators explained that “gay” is not a synonym for “stupid.” But, again, I find language lacking. When fiddling with a toaster oven that overtoasts on the first run, but undertoasts on the second and crying out “this toaster is so gay!” am I literally calling the toaster oven stupid?
To call a toaster oven stupid is to anthropomorphize. If I so chose, I could be offended by this common occurrence as well. I’ve known many a human (and animal) less capable of solving algebraic equations for X or forming coherent dissections of Shakespeare than I. But the majority of people who fall into this category reveal in themselves through actions and words an underlying kindness and affection for those around them. It pains me to have seen several less “bright” friends use the “fact” that they are “stupid” to assume that they have less worth than the rest of the world.
Yet I find myself using “stupid” as an insult for inanimate objects on a regular basis.

Am I really insulting female dogs when I call my dead car battery a bitch?
Am I really insulting my own vagina when I call the cord that won’t plug into the wall a cunt?
Am I really insulting women whose lives have treated them so poorly that, in order to get by somehow, stand in short skits on street corners, looking for a way to be paid for their emotional pain when I call the leaky faucet a whore?
I am quite confident that I am not.

Forgive me for the paradox, but I have found that language is just one form of language.

I do not use certain words in all lifetime situations. If a cop pulls me over and points out that my taillight is out, I don’t say, “oh fuck; I just replaced it but it’s being a bitch.” I say, “Is it really? I just replaced it but it seems to have a grudge against me.”
But if my friend Steve tells me of his neighbor who bangs on his door at two in the morning to tell him that his light for the plants is keeping her awake, and asks me why someone would be so obnoxiously hurtful, I may find myself answering “because she’s a whore.”
A fine translation of that statement in that scenario is as follows:
“Because she’s probably had a long day at work and the dog won’t stop peeing on the carpet. She probably feels like everyone directly in her life is treating her like shit, disrespecting every need she has. Because she probably feels the need to stifle these feelings around those who have much more consequence in her life, she displaced the emotion onto you and the light for your plants with the genuine feeling that you deliberately set it up to piss her off when she was feeling down, even though I’m sure that on some level she’s aware that that’s an irrational response.
“Of course, now that’s she’s done so, she’s fed into your sense of always wanting people to be okay and inspired you to feel her pain over something unrelated to you. You know this is unfair and you feel angry that she would do such a thing so unnecessarily so by all means, go ahead and feel your anger at her, feel justified in it while you vent it and then calmly come back to yourself and realize that you’re okay.”
Steve, because he knows me well, understands the meta-message in “because she’s a whore.”

Perhaps readers who do not know me cannot fathom calling an un-plugging cord “cunt” with anything other than hatred for myself as a woman as a motive. For the sake of background knowledge to put my essay into better context, I will summarize my current perspective on life in a paragraph:
I refuse to be too humble in order to respect an identification of my own talents and often find that people think I’m insulting them when I identify their hidden talents and verbally ponder why they hide them. I have a knack for redefining everything negative in my life to give me hope that things will be better and enhance an underlying faith that life doesn’t suck.

How can life suck? Life is not a corporeal being and sucking is an action that requires material presence. This is not to say that I don’t have a fundamental appreciation for the origin of the insulting verb “to suck” and it’s myriad of uses. I was, in fact, using it in its metaphoric form in the paragraph concerning myself.
In elementary school teachers and parents awkwardly explained to me how the phrase “that sucks” is both ludicrous in its literal form and vulgar in its origins (what with undertones of assuming fellatio to be some kind of ultimate evil). Out of respect for all these factors that created the language around me, I have frequently cut myself off from embracing the mutability of English.
But to see language as something to be tamed is to treat the symptom and not the underlying cause. (Our culture, as a whole, tends to have this problem manifested throughout.) The underlying cause of language being used as a symbol of hatred is hatred. Language is nothing but symbolism used to explain and categorize what we feel we cannot (emotions, spirituality and all things as yet undefined by science, which is yet another symbol in its own way).

What is left to do but reclaim our symbols? Why fight the redefinition of words like “nigger,” “fag” and “pimp?” The words only have power because we give it to them—if a word already has power, why not transmute it into a tool for venting feelings, whether those be hate, anger, affection, sadness or apathy?

In the interest of leading by example, I take my initial statement (that fruitbats are gay) and I redefine it here and now:

Through the ranting on this computer screen I have defined to myself a deep compassion for those in this world around me in my desire to respect others’ hang-ups with my vocabulary and the cultural context of language usage. In order to respect myself (as part of the world) I choose to try to understand it so that I do not feel helpless in my frequent urges to use “foul language.” Instead I am determined to explain myself to those willing to hear the deeper meaning behind the system of symbols I’ve laid before them.

Let “fruitbats are gay” stand as a symbolic phrase for an understanding of the context behind language and a decision not to be offended by the variety of ways we all try to relate to each other. Let it lead us to the understanding that, in trying to relate to each other, we are all expressing love through an infinite number of unique filters.

Fruitbats are gay, my family and friends. Fruitbats are so incredibly fucking gay.