Mel Speaks: Invisibility/Hypervisibility

A brave soul telling truth in an often times cruel world.
All love to my courageous companion Melvin Antoine.

Systems and Suicides

An article for the Battle Creek Enquirer

By: Rev. Emily Joye McGaughy

Flipping through these pages, you’ve probably figured out by now that the topic of this month’s Body, Mind and Spirit section of the Enquirer is depression. Suicide is the ultimate (and final) act of depression. Therefore, when exploring this topic it would be avoidant and down-right unethical not to focus attention on the recent suicides of Asher Brown, Seth Walsh, Billy Lucas, Justin Aaberg and Tyler Clementi.

Anyone paying attention to the media in the last month has heard these names. Anyone paying attention has also heard these suicides talked about in terms of gay identity and bullying (which in these cases seems like a dangerously watered-down term; how about “hate-criming”?). Gay kids have been killing themselves for a long time. This is nothing new. I do not know exactly what shifted in our culture to make the national attention of gay suicides possible, but the visibility of these heart-breaking episodes affords us a critical opportunity—as a culture—to rethink and rework ourselves.

Before going any further, I want to answer an important question I assume some readers might be asking: why is an ordained Christian minister using her space in the spirituality section of the B.C. Enquirer to address these issues? Depression is a spiritual issue. Suicide is a spiritual issue. Premature and unnecessary death of children anywhere is a spiritual issue. Further, there is no institution guiltier of propagating homophobic and gender-based violence in this society than Christianity. Columnist Dan Savage recently said of the gay teen suicides: “The Church has blood on its hands.” He’s right. This is one Christian minister’s attempt to acknowledge, repent from and subvert spiritual abuse being carried out in the name of Jesus. There is nothing, not one single thing, about these suicides that isn’t spiritual.

Continued focus on supposed “isolated incidents” of aggressive teen-age behavior in response to homosexuality might be preventing our society from having a harder conversation, a conversation that implicates all of us. I believe social outrage and horror over issues of non-heterosexuality have little to do with who is having sex with who and everything to do with the fear of having gender roles thrown into question. 

Most human beings have, at least once or twice (if not thousands of times) experienced the limits of gender in ways that have profoundly impacted them. Perhaps you were the girl who could throw a football and immediately got labeled a “tom boy.” Perhaps you were the boy who experienced feelings of sadness about cruelty as a kid and got called a “sissy” as a result. Perhaps you are the person whose daily life, whose very body is neglected every single day because it somehow does not conform to this simplistic boy-girl system. Or on the flip side: maybe you are the high feminine woman, recognizable and envied, yet only acknowledged when you’re playing the part of a beauty queen. Maybe you are the football-playing young man, familiar and popular, yet dismissed time and time again because people assume you lack intelligence or compassion. Even those whose gender presentation matches social norms on the surface can experience deeply harmful expectations internally and externally.

Given that many of us have experienced gender-based oppression at some point, it is surprising that we as a society are so slow to question why things are the way they are. And yet, for many of us questioning gender-based reality is like questioning the air we breathe. We human beings are gender-branded from the get go: “it’s a boy” or “it’s a girl” accompany almost every infant into the world. This branding is of course done in conjunction with the observation of an infant’s genitalia. What’s striking is not that we identify babies based on body parts—although why certain body parts have been recognized as the markers of identity still boggles the mind. What’s striking is the meaning we ascribe to body parts, meaning that is arbitrarily assigned and yet upheld as factual and beyond question.

You know about these meanings, right? They are not just about male/female, but about how we dress, what jobs we ‘should’ do and who we are allowed to love. You know, meanings like women are supposed to be feminine and sexually orient towards men while men are supposed to be masculine and sexually orient towards women. That is what Asher Brown, Seth Walsh, Billy Lucas, Justin Aaberg and Tyler Clementi did not do. They did not uphold the traditional notions of what it means to be a man. And when they did not abide by those unwritten, yet daily enforced rules, they paid the ultimate and final price. (One wonders what is so deeply threatening about men loving each other) They did not pay that price because they were different, but because our framework of what’s natural makes this world unsafe for those who do not conform to or confirm the accuracy of that framework. Therefore, their deaths belong to all of us.

A world without them must confront the facts: either what’s “natural” isn’t or we must go on accepting conditions that drive young people to kill themselves. I for one pray to God that we will forsake the latter. 

Rage Today

No one is born inherently inferior to anyone else.

God is doper than that.  

No one chooses what they are born into:

not poverty not privilege.

Social conditions create
vastly different vulnerabilities

for communities and individuals.

Therefore...

Until justice is actualized

and no one comes into this world

more vulnerable than anyone else

for reasons they did not choose,

I don't want to hear anything

about safety, comfort or security

from those who already have it.

The end.