For those of you who watched the Oscars on Sunday night, you may recall one of the more memorable speeches of the evening came from Graham Moore, the winning writer of The Imitation Game, a film about famed gay scientist Alan Turing. In his speech, Moore linked himself to Mr. Turing and espoused a celebration of weirdness, and talked about his own struggles with depression and suicide. It was a moment in the ceremony that was much ballyhooed, and even the most cynical viewers of The Imitation Game could be faulted for feeling a little proud of watching a gay man talk about dealing with depression and the ways that he rose above it, in a way that society never let Alan Turing do decades earlier.
Except for one thing: Graham Moore is not gay. Asked by the press on Monday, Mr. Moore confirmed that he doesn't identify as a gay person, which puts a different light on the context of his speech. This might not seem fair, of course (it should mean the same thing regardless of his sexuality, at least to people who like to have things be more concrete when there are clearly shades of grey involved), but life isn't in a vacuum and Graham Moore's speech and its sentiment transform with this assertion.
The reality is that seen in the light of a straight man trying to equate his struggles as an outsider because of his feeling of not fitting in to that of a man persecuted because of his sexuality, this entire speech and its content becomes pretty damn insulting to gay people. Listen, everyone hated high school and everyone got bullied, and depression can strike anyone, even people seemingly as privileged as Moore was growing up (he went to a liberal Chicago high school and had wealthy parents). But there's a difference between getting bullied because you love movies or you don't behave in a normative way and something like racism or homophobia being the result of your bullying. For starters, that bullying doesn't disappear once you graduate and the world gets to embrace who you are. It carries with you, frequently in institutional ways like banning your rights as a citizen or having to worry about things that heterosexual people don't worry about. I frequently hear straight actors talk about how their character is "gay, but that's not all they are." This is idiotic, for starters (of course there are things about them that have nothing to do with sexuality), but it misses the point that being gay informs so much of what you are, principally because you had to struggle and form your worldview in a way shaded by homophobia.
For me, for example, I was bullied throughout much of middle and high school and occasionally even into adulthood. I have had my life threatened, I have been ostracized, I have been beaten up all for things that had nothing to do with a choice to "be weird," but something that was biological. Am I proud that I took a stand and ended up being someone who accepts this aspect of myself? Absolutely, but that doesn't mean that there haven't been times of my life where I didn't wish that I had been born differently, and my sexual orientation inhibits me in ways every single day that it's hard to explain to someone who doesn't live in that specter. I don't hold hands with a boyfriend in a parking garage because I'm afraid of being beaten up. I am constantly on alert of who is around me to ensure that I'm not amidst people that will discriminate against me based on my sexuality. I will frequently brush off questions or comments like "do you think some girls just fake it for attention?" or "I'm fine with him being gay as long as he doesn't come on to me" or being boxed in by certain perceptions from seemingly tolerant individuals who want me to succumb to specific stereotypes about gay men. I do these things because picking a fight over homophobia every time you experience it is exhausting, pointless, and it happens so often you'd never get anything else done. The reality is that being gay is about more than just sex-it's about the experiences that led to who you are, and the cautions, tendencies, and realities of your situation as a minority in society. People throw around a term like "Oppression Olympics" with regular abandon when these sorts of conversations come up because they are incredibly uncomfortable for all involved, but the reality is when there are institutional discriminations against certain groups of people, this term becomes less a pissing contest between who is more mistreated and more a way to try and equate all problems as being solved the same way. Which they cannot be.
This is why I am so upset about Graham Moore's speech, which is surely full of very good intentions. I have little doubt that Mr. Moore meant nothing but solidarity with the gay movement, but the reality is that "being weird" and "being gay" are not the same thing, and if we actually want to overcome bullying, it's not just a giant one-size-fits-all band-aid. Mr. Moore, the son of a First Lady's Chief of Staff and a socially-connected child-of-the-80's didn't mistakenly choose to talk about his own weirdness in this speech and compare it to Alan Turing's; he's not naive enough for us to have assumed that he meant his own sexuality when he talked about Alan Turing's struggles (this is my way of saying that he knew the collective internet would assume he was gay based on his words and, quite frankly, his demeanor, and that he probably should have chosen a different venue to equate weirdness and homosexuality where he had longer than 45 seconds to give a more eloquent analogy).
The reality is that you can choose not to play Dungeons and Dragons and the reality is that you can choose not to be a girl who plays football, but you can't choose to stop being a racial or sexual orientation minority. It is not right or fair that anyone is picked on, but one of them largely ends when you leave your high school, and the other you deal with every day as an adult. Mr. Moore's issues with depression are tragic and something that should be addressed by society, but they are not the same thing as what Alan Turing had to go through. In many ways his view of them being similar informs a lot about his writing of Turing in The Imitation Game, where he frequently equates all of the "being different" aspects of Turing's personality into one bucket, when one aspect of him eventually made him a national hero and the other made him a criminal. The fact that these were put into the same breath in the film is why I frequently find myself at odds with straight viewers of the movie (many of whom are straight friends and allies whom I respect and admire, though I disagree with them in this instance) when I say the character wasn't actually gay in the film, even though he says that he was. The script says that he's gay, but the character himself gives no indication of romantic leanings for any other man as an adult nor does he seem to carry the life experiences of someone who has struggled with his sexuality, and his gayness becomes simply something "different" about him. Much like Mr. Moore's speech, the weirdness serves as a proxy for being gay, when they are two entirely different and unrelated personality aspects.
In conclusion, I do feel like Graham Moore's speech, like all expressions for more tolerance, has good intentions, but it's the wrong thing to say that homophobia is the same as being bullied, because it's not. Tolerance and equality are wonderful goals, but we unfortunately don't get there with a happy smile and a one-size-fits-all solution. The reality is that you may have to think outside your own personal purview and find a way that isn't instantly relatable to try and get a handle of the issue at hand. And that starts with admitting that your weirdness and my "weirdness" are not the same thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment