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| Control Queens |
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I have this
theory. It has to do with why straight people are so upset that we exist.
Straight people who are threatened by our existence are control queens.
People with control issues have two things that govern their lives: fear and
fear. One thing they fear is being alone. Not many people like being alone,
but these folks have gone a bit far. They are so afraid of being alone that
they can't stand anything that points out an essential fact of human
existence, and that is that each of us IS basically alone. Absolutely unique
and therefore, absolutely alone. Differences define the Other, and the more
Others there are out there, the more alone a person feels.
If a CQ has her clones around her, if everybody looks and acts just like
her, then it *appears* that she is not as isolated as she suspects in her
liver that she is. No one who looks or acts differently is allowed around
her. No doubt she threw a huge brunch when she heard the news about those
sheep in Scotland, and started saving her money for the clinics which are
sure to spring up in LA so that she can give up on all her rebellious
friends and have some doctor make a few more just like herself.
The ultimate CQ can't even stand it when you eat something she doesn't like.
You know the one. She curls up her nose and moans, "Eewwwwww!" over what
you're about to have for lunch. Is it going in her face? Why should it
matter to her how you season your food or that you like your fried eggs
runny?
Somehow, she has developed a direct neural link between her tastebuds and
yours. She has the synapses of death, apparently.
Food may not trigger most people's control issues, but sex certainly will.
If you cast longing glances at someone your CQ doesn't find attractive, you
will certainly hear about it. (I'm talking about casual friend control
queens here, or even your mother. Not your ex, who naturally will always
insist on passing approval on who you'll date next.) Your difference in
taste is a personal affront to her because it makes her feel alone, which
makes her feel vulnerable, which makes her think about her mortality, which
threatens her very core.
You wouldn't think a little extra salt on the mashed potatoes could grab
somebody by the short hairs like this, but I assure you these people exist.
The fact that you just know Demi Moore could roll your socks down when she'd
rather swap Birkenstocks with kd will stick her to the crown molding. Now
you *know* she's not aware of all these internal causes and effects. All she
knows is that you simply cannot be human if you can eat that stuff for lunch
or go out with that girl. Now if our friends get this worked up over who we
find attractive, think a minute about people who have no concern for our
welfare.
CQ's fear not only being alone; they also fear, quite naturally, loss of
control, however little of it they have in their lives, constructed as it is
out of fantasy and wishful thinking and not a small amount of dogged
vigilance over their neighbors' lives.
Take for example the CQ who truly needs some clinical help: the one in the
pulpit (usually white and usually male, and hypothetically straight) who
gets a knotty torque in his knickers over gay sex. I'm including politicians
in this category, because the podium is made of the same wood as the pulpit.
When our preacher starts in on the evils of gay sex, what our preacher is
really saying is that, because he doesn't find men attractive, he doesn't
want to have sex with a man. Or rather that he doesn't want a man to have
sex with him. Well, not *sex* exactly. What he doesn't want is to be raped,
which is what I suspect he defines sex with a man to be. (Think about the
deeper implications of this. If, in his mind, sex with a man is rape, then
wonder how his wife feels?) But the point is, he doesn't want to be out of
control, and rape would obviously have him a bit out of control. Now WE know
that's not what is going on in most gay bedrooms, but somehow in our
preacher's dark, buried psyche, that's what he's thinking, or else it
wouldn't get him all tied in knots and flinging spittle. Preventing lesbians
from being with one another is a separate construct and a subset of a
straight CQ's issues, but has more to do with the assumption that all women
be required to be available to whatever straight man might want one or two.
As gay and lesbian people (or bi or transgendered) what we've always asked
the rest of the world to allow us is the right to love whom we chose, and
part of that choice involves the right to define those consenting adults we
find attractive. It's a matter of taste. A personal matter. Personal taste
is not the same thing as choice, however. Not the kind of "choice* the right
wingers are always insisting that we *do* have. I think what one finds
attractive is as hard wired as eye color. But this matter of personal taste
is a matter which apparently drives control queens to join the clergy and
run for Congress.
So if you can buy a share of stock in this theory, you'll realize that we
can only feel pity for all those rabid, terrified souls out there who are
desperate for us to come to our senses and get out of this phase we're in,
those who insist we wake up and admit that we're really straight after all,
just so they won't have to be so lonely. It's not our "evil ways" they want
us to give up. After all...they do most of the same things we do and love it
all. They just can't stand the thought of feeling more alone than they
already do.
So have pity on them. They're just being big babies afraid of the dark.
Carole
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