#its something about the yearning and internalized homophobia and self hatred and just wanting

[mistakenlyfoundnico]

The picture of dorian gray and the sailor song is a devastating combo.

[pridepages]

Gallows Humor: The Comedienne’s Guide to Pride

I just finished The Comedienne’s Guide to Pride by Hayli Thomson. I have thoughts...

Here there be spoilers!

In a time is love isn’t love and pride is sliding closer to protest than parade, I wanted to have a month where I immersed myself in queer joy. So what better time to read Hayli Thomson’s The Comedienne’s Guide to Pride? The novel was pitched as the tale of an aspiring funny girl who finds herself in the wacky situation of being chosen as a finalist for a diversity internship at SNL...but hasn’t come out to anyone yet. The tone felt absurd: funny ha-ha.

That is...not what I got.

Our heroine, Taylor, is an open wound. From tearing up a defaced Ghostbusters reboot poster because of a slur to ripping into herself in self-disgust for masturbating to Fried Green Tomatoes, every page of this novel howls with her pain. 

Which isn’t to say there aren’t jokes. Describing her questioning period, Taylor snarks “my sexuality was still Amelia Earhart-themed--I had no idea where it was going to end up.” The experience of falling in love was watching her crush play a Salem witch and feeling her “phantom touch...reaching all the way to the back row of the theater and strangling the lingering breath of heteronormativity right out of me.” 

Spot the pattern in her jokes? they’re perfect examples of gallows humor: jokes used as a defense mechanism because everything is so horrible that the only way to cope with the pain is to find something absurd to numb the pain. There’s a reason old-fashioned anesthetic was called ‘laughing gas.’

Rather than being notable for its humor, novel’s at its sharpest, its most viscerally impactful, when Taylor speaks directly about her suffering.

When she yearns for romance “self-loathing took me by the throat.” Describing her experience of being closeted, she says she’s “constantly tearing at the seams...If you’re lucky, you get a few miserable, desolate moments to pull yourself back together...You hope that the seam won’t split further. You hope everybody will buy what you’re selling--that you’re totally fine.” But she isn’t simply hiding from homophobia. She’s also busy internalizing it: “soaking in shame and self-hatred for so long that my heart had turned prune-y...Hating myself for who I was and who I loved was the only was I knew how to adapt...Shaming myself was the only way I could grip the seawalls without floating away.”

If the reader is hoping for some relief when Taylor finally, inevitably, comes out...well, prepare for disappointment. This is no Love, Simon fantasy. Her experience is closer to what most of us find in the beginning...especially if we live in a less accepting environment:

“Coming out wasn’t quite sugary sweet. It tasted like lemon icing when you’d been expecting vanilla. It felt like racing toward a crossing and skidding to a stop at the exact moment the walk signal turned red--you had no choice but to pause and watch the traffic move around you. But there was the promise of that green light to come, and that just had to be enough.”

In a way, Thomson’s brutal honesty makes this novel a timely wake-up call to that person who thinks that being gay in 2023 is ‘no big deal.’ The kind of read you hand to the ignorant friend who rolls their eyes at the idea that we ‘need a whole month’ to ‘celebrate what we do in the bedroom.’ 

But me? Even if it’s naive, I think I’d rather step off that gallows and immerse myself in unfettered joy. Even if--for now--it’s just a fantasy.

[exactly24bees]

Ever since I was little my dad had a way of looking for God in everything. One of his most enduring methods is pennies. Every time he sees a penny lying on the ground he picks it up and says something like “Hi Jesus!” I picked it up from him but I didn’t really take it seriously until around this time last year.

So im trans and bi. If you follow me you probably know this because I talk about it a lot. Usually its something I’m pretty ok with, spiritually and otherwise. But sometimes internalized homophobia and transphobia find a way of getting stuck in my mind. This was one of those times. I don’t know how it happened, but somehow I got it stuck in my head that I needed to abandon my transition and my hopes of ever finding love, that it was sinful and I would be disappointing God by doing so. I wanted to die. It hurt a lot, but I didn’t want to disappoint Him. After a few hours of crying and praying I was feeling raw. I decided to give it up to God. I said to Him that I was going to just keep going the way I was going and asked Him to tell me if I was doing the right thing. Then I left my dorm room to get some dinner (I was lucky that my roommate was out of town that weekend or else all my sobbing would have been embarrassing). It was a short walk to the dining hall, so I was back within about ten minutes. I’m the kind of person that walks with their head down for no particular reason, so I was looking at the floor as I approached my door. And you know what was there, laying directly in front of my entryway? A brand new, shiny penny. I almost broke down right there with my keys in my hand. He said its ok. He said I’m ok! I could have jumped for joy. I don’t know, maybe I did. All I know is that He saw me, He saw my pain and my yearning, and He told me how loved I am. I am not a sin, I am not an abomination. I am His child, and He loves me as He made me. So whenever I feel self hatred and doubt creep up in me, I remember this and I hold His penny and remember what He told me.