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O R EG O N 'S LGBTO N EW SM A G A ZIN E
OCTOBER 21. 2011
Bones Loathe Marrow
Rainy Saturday night, and the tiny gallery is
packed. I sit in the back row o f chairs, eating
cheese and crackers, waiting for Naming
Names to start their show. A red-haired wom
an in a tight black dress beside me whispers
conspiratorially. “The Calvinists are coming to
town,” she hisses. “They moved into that castle
building in the Southeast.” She pauses to gulp
her wine. “W e’re planning a protest, though,”
she continues. “A demonstration against the
anti-gay church—a kiss-in to show them
whose town this is!”
“Wow,” I say quietly,“I just... I hate that.”
“I know!” she exclaims. “W hat makes them
think that they can come here and spread their
anti-gay religion?”
“No,” I reply, “the protest. I don’t support
that.”
The woman and I look at each other for a
moment, great distance between us. Then, Em
ily brings her violin to her chin and the room
goes dark. A projector whirs, shoots forth light
onto the screen above the stage— the image of
a woman dancing, billowing curtains, the sea.
Racquel glides to the front of the gallery in a
white jumpsuit, sits at the piano. “All I need are
my bones, and my bones, and no skin to cover
them,” she croons. I close my eyes.
Anything that I hate strongly enough, I find
myself bound to. In my experience it is constant
remember to breathe
BY NICK
and dependable, like death and taxes and red
wine in plastic cups at gallery parties. If I hate
someone it is inevitable that I will see them ev
erywhere— their name a blue link in the com
ments of a Facebook post, their eyes across a
crowded bar, their profile in the window of a bus
chugging past me on Hawthorne Boulevard. If I
disparage a group (and God knows I’ve talked
my share of shit) it is worth betting that, within
a decade, I’ll briefly flirt with membership in it.
After many years of wondering why the hell
this happened, I came to a hypothesis as to the
cause: self-hatred. Somewhere in my past I de
veloped an inner voice that sounds like me and,
at my worst moments, reminds me that I am
not good enough, that I am ugly and sinful and
weird and crazy and in all ways bad. Coinci
dentally, the people and groups I have hated
have tended to be those who, each in their own
unique way, asserted that I am not redeemed,
that I’m weird and crazy and sinful and isolat
ed—exactly the messages that appear in my
negative self-talk. In a very real way, I hate
things when they sound too much like me.
“Bones loathe marrow,” Racquel sings plain
tively over the piano and violin. “Do bones
M ATTOS
at catching myself in my hatred, still developing
the ability to parse out the difference between
what actually happened and the meaning 1 as
signed to it. However, here in this gallery, I can
see the difference between a church that takes a
strict view on scripture coming to my town and
the anxieties it provokes: Will it change the city?
Could it impinge upon my rights? What if I'm actu
ally going to hell? Am I really this had? I can also
see the difference between my fellow gays loudlv
crying out against the church and my anxieties:
Is thisjust liberal parochialism? Do gay people really
need to fight this battle right now? Is anyone will
ing to coexist? Am Ijust too weird for gay culture? I
can even see the difference between disagreeing
with the red-haired woman beside me, and h a t- "
ing her for thinking differently.
“And can’t we decide when we’re caught in
the middle of, wrought, bought into the bitter
of,” Racquel belts beneath the projector screen.
I turn to the woman beside me. “I fully re
spect your right to voice what you think is
right,” I whisper to her, “even if it’s different
than what I think. There’s enough space in this
world for both of us.” She grins back in agree
ment as Racquel hits the last note. In unison,
the audience applauds, smiling. T#'
loathe marrow?”
Perhaps this is why the queers of Portland
find themselves so stricken by the threat of a so-
called “anti-gay church” establishing itself in our
city. A politically conservative friend of mine
also asserts that this is why the Right s doctrine
that one should pull themselves up by their
bootstraps so thoroughly riles up my fellow lib
erals. In such religious and political rhetoric, we
hear the message that temporal and spiritual
salvation are in fact accessible things, that they
have been within our reach the whole time if
only we exerted ourselves in pursuit of them.
That we, too, could be prosperous in the present
and secure in the future, if only we are willing to
play by the rules they set forth. Mixed with the
self-loathing part of ourselves, this message
twists into a screed that it is not the system that
fails, it’s us—we ourselves that don’t stack up to
the promises. If only we weren’t so bad at play
ing the game, so apt to fail, so bad, we could be
redeemed with them, too.
“Go ahead and count our bones, baby, add
them up— I’ll become whole for you. W hat will
you do for me?”
N ick M a t to s welcomes your thoughts at nick-
Despite my hypothesis, I am not yet very good mattos@justout. com
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