Gay

Gay
Hard to tell when I knew that I was gay. Is it hard to understand when I tell you that I didn't noticed it when I fell in love for the first time? Hearing and using "faggot" as an insult was common in my youth, as common as drinking water or feeling the wind on your skin, and being gay was an abstract flaw - the increased form of being "retarded" - and nothing that anybody could ever relate in a positive way onto themself. Even after I realized that I was in any way more interested into boys, I stayed with the mob, even trying to establish some relations with girls (that of course were futile - I guess my lack of real interest was obvious) - the only place were I appeared as a gay person was on the internet in the first years. I had a split personality. This also affected my doings, and I suppose that I wouldn't have done some dumb things that I have done if things would have been different in this regard - not that this excuses doing them. At the age of seventeen, I had a short internship at an office in a social institution with some distance from my hometown. I can't remember if it was just a a mere error of pronunciation or some purposeful experiment: When doing some smalltalk with the mid aged women who instructed me, and she asked me what I did on the day before, I responded that I spent it with my friend (the difference in german is abmissal: "a friend" is "einem freund", "my friend" is "meinem freund". I refereed to a guy of whom I hoped that he somehow mirrored my feelings for him). She didn't show any reaction to it, and I thought she didn't even notice what I had said. But a few weeks afterwards I was violently attacked on my train back from school that came through this town by a group of goons around my age - and I heard how the one of pointed the attention of the group towards me was saying that word was around that I fucked with man. They beat me, teared apart my headphones, throwing my stuff through the wagon, taking it ultimately with them. I went to the driver, who delayed the opening of the doors at the next station, and even tried to call the police (a thing that wasn't exactly pleasent to me) - but he couldn't do this long enough, telling me that I would have had to come earlier - I'm sure he earnestly wanted to help. I found my bag next to the trains exit, and they hadn't found anything of value in it. This wasn't the only attack I experienced - being a long haired obvious left wing and openly antifascist person in this rural area made me a mark for various idiots, and some of these attacks had (basically by chance) a homophobic connotation - but this was different: This was not because I was left and lefts and nonconformists were "faggots" in general, this was because I was gay. It took years till I came out, and the effects it had to parts of my social live were - even though I had the luck to live in a liberal, supporting family - quite devastating: Not in the sense that people terminated their contact to me, but I soon noticed that many of the friends that until then had close contact or had held me in mutual high esteem now tended to belittle or even avoid me. Some of these guys had been somewhat openly homophobic before, so it was hardly surprising - but even some of those who had vocally rejected any form of discrimination in the past were affected of this. In hindsight, it was a quite educational experience - back then, it was utmost depressing. Time cured most of this. Some things have changed since then, and many got better in the past few years - but when I see how lightly and visible younger LGBT-people go through the public it sometimes makes me jealous (while I'm fully aware that they still experience malignant glances, insults, or even attacks for doing so) - neither me nor hardly anyone in my age is able to do this, as for most of us the discrimination we internalized over the years still weighs to heavy - it is still censoring, limiting us; even though we had it in turn better than those who had only the option to hide completely or live within the ghetto that Rio Reisser wished he could escape from (Kann jedem in die Augen sehn; auf jeden einfach zugehn. His song about it was first recorded by a gay theater group on their album "Entartet"; a word used not only by the national socialists to label art they condemned but also by the west-German government to justify the pursue of male homosexuality that lasted until 1994). Will this come true for a future generation? A backlash is in action. Identity Politics is not only the bogeyman of the far right but also of the capitalist bourgeois since epochal idiot Fukuyama labelled it as guilty for destroying his arrogant fever dream about an capitalist Endsieg by the fall of the iron curtain when he was asked how Donald Trump fitted into this formula - the capitalists hope that they can soothe the losers of their system for a while by throwing us under the bus. Within a system where exploiters and exploited exists, no minority can truly by safe: Eventually the need for a scapegoat will arise. Socialist singer Rio Reisser and his contempary LGBT-activists knew this: Their dream of escaping the ghetto was not about assimilation but about a society without ghettos, and even gay-rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld held contacts to the communist party behind his institutes bourgeois facade. The same is true for any other fight for emancipation - because of this nearly any serious feminist was also a communist, Paul Robeson visited the Sovjet Union, Martin Luther King identified as a socialist, and Malcom X said said that their can't be a capitalism without racist exploitation. Because all of them realized that a fight for equality for a facet of ones identity is always a fight against the whole capitalist system.

Hard to tell when I knew that I was gay. Is it hard to understand when I tell you that I didn't noticed it when I fell in love for the first time? Hearing and using "faggot" as an insult was common in my youth, as common as drinking water or feeling the wind on your skin, and being gay was an abstract flaw - the increased form of being "retarded" - and nothing that anybody could ever relate in a positive way onto themself. Even after I realized that I was in any way more interested into boys, I stayed with the mob, even trying to establish some relations with girls (that of course were futile - I guess my lack of real interest was obvious) - the only place were I appeared as a gay person was on the internet in the first years. I had a split personality. This also affected my doings, and I suppose that I wouldn't have done some dumb things that I have done if things would have been different in this regard - not that this excuses doing them.

At the age of seventeen, I had a short internship at an office in a social institution with some distance from my hometown. I can't remember if it was just a a mere error of pronunciation or some purposeful experiment: When doing some smalltalk with the mid aged women who instructed me, and she asked me what I did on the day before, I responded that I spent it with my friend (the difference in german is abmissal: "a friend" is "einem freund", "my friend" is "meinem freund". I refereed to a guy of whom I hoped that he somehow mirrored my feelings for him). She didn't show any reaction to it, and I thought she didn't even notice what I had said. But a few weeks afterwards I was violently attacked on my train back from school that came through this town by a group of goons around my age - and I heard how the one of pointed the attention of the group towards me was saying that word was around that I fucked with man. They beat me, teared apart my headphones, throwing my stuff through the wagon, taking it ultimately with them. I went to the driver, who delayed the opening of the doors at the next station, and even tried to call the police (a thing that wasn't exactly pleasent to me) - but he couldn't do this long enough, telling me that I would have had to come earlier - I'm sure he earnestly wanted to help. I found my bag next to the trains exit, and they hadn't found anything of value in it. This wasn't the only attack I experienced - being a long haired obvious left wing and openly antifascist person in this rural area made me a mark for various idiots, and some of these attacks had (basically by chance) a homophobic connotation - but this was different: This was not because I was left and lefts and nonconformists were "faggots" in general, this was because I was gay.

It took years till I came out, and the effects it had to parts of my social live were - even though I had the luck to live in a liberal, supporting family - quite devastating: Not in the sense that people terminated their contact to me, but I soon noticed that many of the friends that until then had close contact or had held me in mutual high esteem now tended to belittle or even avoid me. Some of these guys had been somewhat openly homophobic before, so it was hardly surprising - but even some of those who had vocally rejected any form of discrimination in the past were affected of this. In hindsight, it was a quite educational experience - back then, it was utmost depressing.

Time cured most of this. Some things have changed since then, and many got better in the past few years - but when I see how lightly and visible younger LGBT-people go through the public it sometimes makes me jealous (while I'm fully aware that they still experience malignant glances, insults, or even attacks for doing so) - neither me nor hardly anyone in my age is able to do this, as for most of us the discrimination we internalized over the years still weighs to heavy - it is still censoring, limiting us; even though we had it in turn better than those who had only the option to hide completely or live within the ghetto that Rio Reisser wished he could escape from (Kann jedem in die Augen sehn; auf jeden einfach zugehn. His song about it was first recorded by a gay theater group on their album "Entartet"; a word used not only by the national socialists to label art they condemned but also by the west-German government to justify the pursue of male homosexuality that lasted until 1994). Will this come true for a future generation? A backlash is in action. Identity Politics is not only the bogeyman of the far right but also of the capitalist bourgeois since epochal idiot Fukuyama labelled it as guilty for destroying his arrogant fever dream about an capitalist Endsieg by the fall of the iron curtain when he was asked how Donald Trump fitted into this formula - the capitalists hope that they can soothe the losers of their system for a while by throwing us under the bus. Within a system where exploiters and exploited exists, no minority can truly by safe: Eventually the need for a scapegoat will arise. Socialist singer Rio Reisser and his contempary LGBT-activists knew this: Their dream of escaping the ghetto was not about assimilation but about a society without ghettos, and even gay-rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld held contacts to the communist party behind his institutes bourgeois facade. The same is true for any other fight for emancipation - because of this nearly any serious feminist was also a communist, Paul Robeson visited the Sovjet Union, Martin Luther King identified as a socialist, and Malcom X said said that their can't be a capitalism without racist exploitation.

Because all of them realized that a fight for equality for a facet of ones identity is always a fight against the whole capitalist system.