Two Liberation Conversations

The topic was social justice. And whether the prophecy of real-estate developers Long Island City would ever manifest: if the neighborhood would indeed, come up.

We shrugged and decided in the end they would keep building half-million dollar condos there and everywhere whether the neighborhood in question had any redeeming qualities.

Half-million dollar condos are their own justification.

Is this what is meant by 'If you build it they will come?'

The topic was social justice.And whose backs you had to massage if you were a massage therapist who wanted a half-million dollar condo in Long Island City.

He told me a story of a classroom of budding massage therapists: many of them queer or black or brown or poor—all of them the members of the new underclass: overeducated and under-employed—and how each of them, for better or worse fancied themselves the masseur or masseuse of some old white lady from Park Avenue, a raisiny body smelling of Chanel No. 5 and talcum powder.

She walks the dog each morning and makes polite conversation with the doorman, who is a nice doorman in spite of his saucy Latino patois. Her conversations with the doorman who brings her mangoes sometimes means that she 'doesn't have a problem with them' and thinks 'they're great' and wouldn't mind giving them amnesty if 'they'' all became nice doormen like 'oh-what-was-his-name?'

She and her husband--an investment banker named Bud would argue about it: amnesty, what the doorman's name was, whether the doorman was an illegal.

She never takes off her pearls for a massage. Being naked under the towel, simple black Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress draped someplace behind her, being here with someone nondescriptly clothed who was--well--middle class—she requires a badge of her identity. Her pearls always stays on.

This was who the budding massage therapists—all of them members of the new underclass—thought they had to work for in order to be successful.

Not successful. Put it baldly: rich.

To them wealth was a rose bush. Pretty to look at, painful to touch. They all thought about justice. They all had worked, were working or would work in non-profits with noble missions.
They all were...put it baldly: broke.

It is hard to be a thinking feeling person and not have a thorny relationship with wealth.
Often if you have wealth and you are a thinking feeling person you spend time feeling ashamed, denying you have it or pretending it doesn't matter.

Often if you don't have wealth and you are a thinking feeling person, you've probably never had it and spent your life beneath a penumbra of privation.

You develop a cynical attitude toward money because this is the intelligent attitude to have:but you still want it.

But you still don't want it because of the injustice, filth and waste often associated with it.

Sitting in a nondescript Long Island City bar drinking Miller High Life and musing about justice reminded me of undergrad and of a more imaginative self.The strategy at 18 or 21 was: subvert the dominant paradigm at all cost.That the dominant paradigm could be subverted was not an open question.

The epiphany at 27 or 30 was: get with the program; you are not a child; this is the way of the world; welcome to the jungle.

I expected to die this death.I just didn't expect to die it so soon.

I was reminded of another justice conversation I had had recently. With another liberal queer. In another nondescript bar.

I need to get new friends or drink faster.

The conversation spiraled like the curve of a nautilus shell, folding into a tighter and tighter coil.

I would always be among the most wretched of the earth as a gay black man and above me the yoke of oppression lightened in stair step fashion until one reached the plateau of the omniscient white straight male.

I remember stifling a yawn and thinking that this paradigm didn't reflect very inspired or imaginative thinking: that societies would forever be at tug of war with the whites/straights/moneyed/males having the upper-hand and at the opposite end of the rope everybody else heaving with all their might but nevertheless two tugs away from the mosh-pit of misery?

It was disheartening to hear this class of budding massage therapists—many of them queer or black or brown or poor—had hardly paused to consider a paradigm of wealth other than Park Avenue.

Somehow in this cosmic tug of war, we 'everybody elses' remain suspended in the moment just before that last great pull from the rearguard: muscles taut, teeth clenched, our heels carving canals in the soft lip of the pit.

But it never seems like we all put our backs into it. Not really.

We can only conceive of liberation in terms of oppression.If we are imprisoned in a dungeon with four walls and a door, what of creating another door? A 5th or 6th dimension which renders doors--and walls for that matter—useless? Growing new sets of arms, legs and heads, becoming revolutionary arachnids and Gorgons who laugh at chains and stockades?

We expect to subvert the institutions that oppress us by subscribing to a definition of power which only serves these institutions. We expect to respect (and thereby re-inscribe) the paradigms we fight against yet overcome them?

It does not serve a revolutionary to do or exchange power in a currency or on a marketplace not of his choosing; this is senseless.

Too often liberation has meant becoming conscious only to our oppressions and stopping short of our possibilities.What is worse is when oppressions are made to compete with one another for priority (?), as though one justified redress more than the other.

By the dawn of the 21st century one would hope we have deconstructed our oppressions to their lowest common denominator: we have all been hurt, hurt deeply.

Now may we begin?

Solutions? Anyone?

The principal thing to remember is: that we are the answer to our oppressions not merely an instance of them. I am the answer to racism and homophobia, much as I am marked by them. We are each the counter-voice, the counter-narrative, the counter-argument to those who would claim we do not exist, that we are no different, that our pain is imagined.

What each of us is not, however, is reducible to our individual or collective oppressions: to believe this is to validate the machinery that created niggers, faggots, cunts and others.

To create new languages, new tools, new weapons, new paradigms, new powers is to deconstruct the dungeon from within—to claw at rock and mortar for a purchase till our bloodied fingers pluck the first stone from the wall. From the space that opens, a sooty light pours into the dark.