Penis Waving

by Not-Man Morgan Sinclair

January 1999

Dear Queer Revolution,

Just a thought…

Obviously the impeachment process of our President is about his penis and what he does with it. The First Penis, is you will. If his intentions in waging war is to recover his "dignity" because of the impeachment process (though I think that it is only part of the timing - to be fair to him - he has been wanting to bomb Iraq for a while now) it seems to be nothing more than mere Penis Waving/Penis Gesturing.

Although I think he is one of the better Presidents we have had to date (which is not saying much) it is obvious that he cannot escape his own masculine socialization.

This, to me, is all the more reason why Patriarchy MUST be defeated in this country. How it should be done I do not know but perhaps we at Queer Revolution (QR) can brainstorm the topic and work toward this realization.

The idea that we are only offered 2 forms of gender in this country is why our President, when caught in a fix, turns to those actions which were taught to him painstakingly throughout a man's lifetime. That is, men fight - men wage war - men act aggressively - men issue ultimatums in place of compromise, etc, ad nauseum.

Our President embodies for us the cancer in our own society. I am less likely to blame him as an individual though, as I am to blame the society which nutured, formed, and designed him. It is no coincidence, I submit to you, that it is most often the queer among our country's folk who are the most adept at overcoming the hegemonic masculine model. It takes glorious queer bodies and fine-tuned queer minds who have spent a lifetime resisting to do what is very difficult for a person such as Bill Clinton -- white, male, hetero, English-only, Christian, wealthy – to do. So deep within the dominant paradigm, it must be wretchedly difficult for folks such as he to recognize that he won the lottery when he was born.

Alas, we must continually remind him/them and raise our voices!

Though many of us here at QR are not acting, living, and being either men or women, it is still not enough in my opinion. I think it is up to people like ourselves to break the burden of binary thinking, to shatter the icons - to be truly iconoclastic.

My mother reminded me last week that I once told her that I didn't want to grow up to be a man. My father was exasperated and shouted, "What, you wanna be a woman?" To which I apparently responded, "No I don't want to be a man OR a woman."

Harry Hay mentions this in his book "Radically Gay" and operates off of anthropological models based on indigenous cultures that have 3 or 4 genders. He recounts in his book (co-authored with Will Roscoe) that when the Radical Faeries first began (1979), they discussed this at length and learned to be proud of being "not men," for lack of a term. This legacy comes to us in the appelation of the name of their tax-free organization. It is called 'Nomenus' and despite the fact that it may strike you at first pale as a Latin derivative from the classial period, its etymology is actually "No Men Us" borne of a fingernail painting party among a qommunity of queers! >>>>> I think this is something to ruminate over, my friends. As I listen to the news about the War and the ridiculous murmurings of Congressmen, binary thinking is what is most obvious to me. For example, the House Judicial Committee voted against censure as an option and (because of the majority of Republicans) voted for "Impeachment or Nothing" -- since they voted down censure.

I grow weary of either/or thinking. While I pay fabulous homage to freedom fighters of gendered liberations, perhaps the conflict is best resolved by popularizing other options. I visited with Harry Hay on January 2nd and he responded to my concern, he said that we must be ever vigilant of binary oppositional thinking and that we must seek the integration of body and spirit. He also said that we must not think of ourselves as "marginalized," an act done TO us. Rather, we must be the people at the margins who cross WILL-FULLY from one place to another, flexible and fabulous, eliciting self-awareness wherever we go.

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