Queer and Loathing

"This is as close to the truth as I can get," David Feinberg once said about his seminal collection of essays, Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone.

It was a truth I needed to hear.

Published in 1995, just as I was graduating college, David's biting and personal stories opened up a whole new world for me, giving me permission to explore my own relationship to religion, HIV, family, death and homosexuality.

I grew up in a military family in Tidewater, Virginia in the 1980s, a region filled with complex racial tensions, tourists, Pat Robertson, roller rinks, convenience stores, beaches, and active duty military personnel. Looking back, it would seem like there would have been ample opportunity to question my environment or rebel against the ways I was being brought up. At the time, however, and as a child, the only disorder I could seem to fathom was choosing public speaking and drama over football and baseball, and later going with Black friends to their Baptist church instead of the less diverse Methodist one my parents attended. This lead to me later being invited to join a gospel choir called Ebony Expressions, but that's a story for another time.

I always had a girlfriend and was known to be a safe date for dances, which meant I attended multiple proms and homecoming dances, and got to rent tuxes in all kinds of colors. Once I could drive, my dad would let me take my dates in his 1986 Dodge Daytona Turbo Z with a 5-speed manual, a miserable car by many measures perhaps in retrospect, but about as cool a car as I could have wanted at the time. Maybe it was my popularity with girls or the dearth of LGBTQ role models, or maybe just my own lack of self awareness, but the thought that I might be gay quite literally never occurred to me. In hindsight, I can say I had a huge crush on Mr Thompson, my history teacher and the high school soccer coach, but all I knew at the time was that I admired the way he was kind and patient with us (in fairness, I may also have noticed his killer mustache and the way his chinos showed off his glutes and strong legs, but I had no idea what to do with those feelings).

Perhaps all of those field trips to Revolutionary War sites in the region set the bar too high for me to feel like I was capable of major internal or external disruption, but it wasn't until I left home that I began to question what I had been taught or what I believed to be true, and it took a good couple of years away from home to start to figure out just what I thought about the world. It also took that time away from home to consider that I might be gay.

Unfortunately, without mentors or role models, much of the exploration of my sexuality was directionless. With the AIDS crisis decimating gay male communities and much of America (and certainly most of Virginia) declaring that this was disease gay men asked for and deserved, it was hard to identify with or seek out mentors or connections. At a loss for support, it was hard to imagine a future as a gay men when so few of us were surviving. My exploration started with awkwardly purchasing straight porn magazines from one of those many convenience stores late at night after work, and trying to determine just what I was most drawn to. Eventually I switched to purchasing Playgirl, exlaining to the late night casher that "I needed a gag gift for a woman at work," somehow imagining my story believable. After a couple of years of this, my girlfriend at the time introduced me to the first man I would kiss, and it all began to both unravel and become clear with the feeling of his rough stubble rubbing against my upper lip.

Still in Virginia but now going to school in Colonial Williamsburg, the queer influences were scant, but I did begin to build connections with the few other LGBTQ students. We would drive to Richmond and Washington DC to find community, and as I started to learn more, I discovered just how naive I was. I met an older gay man at work who told me a bit about LGBTQ history, and a lot about AIDS. I started searching out books on queer history at book stores in DC and Richmond, and started having sex with men. One of my coworkers collapsed and died during his shift, but no one talked about what happened. I learned later that he was living with AIDS, and only from that older gay man who had become a mentor. It was all overwhelming, and I still didn't know if being gay was what I wanted or, if so, where it was going to take me.

After graduation, I got the chance to move to Germany thanks to a fellowship I won. Out of Virginia and living in Berlin, I was surrounded by a world that felt limitless and nothing like the places I had grown up. I began to volunteer with two AIDS organizations and met Thomas, the first boyfriend I had who was open about living with AIDS. At a bookstore, I picked up David Feinberg's book Queer and Loathing, and as I read his words, everything was once again both unraveling and becoming clear.

Precisely because the essays were neither melancholy nor reverent, reading them gave voice to so much of the anger and fear I was experiencing, trying to manage my own sense of self and my own mortality after growing up in a military family in Southeast Virginia in the shadow of AIDS. His words were wise and unsettled and his feelings were displayed in such a raw and viceral way that seemed to give me permission to experience and trust all of the things I had been feeling. The mentorship and guidance I had longed for were jumping out at me from the pages, and his personal accounts of key moments in the history of the AIDS crisis gave me knowledge and strength I desperately needed. I was learning who I was, and also discovering who I could be.

Sadly, David died just as this book was published, but reading it awakened so much in me, and I am so grateful for it. That year in Berlin completely changed my direction in life- not just in being able to have more ease with the complexities of my identity, but also because the book allowed me to have space and direction for all of my anger and helped me make more room for both kindness and justice as I tried to reassemble my life and become my own person. His writing is chaotic, but it is imbued with such humanity and outlines deep friendships and connections and loss. Thirty years later, I'm still taken by the direction his words gave me at just the right time in my life, and I know the person I am today would never have happened had I not stumbled upon his electric and raw writings so many years ago.