These aren’t traditional stories where one of us speaks and the others listen. No, these are interactive, collaborative stories. Together, we build the narrative, roll some dice, and see where our imaginations take us for hours on end.

With the majority of people now working from home for the foreseeable future, there is suddenly so much more free time. We aren’t spending the majority of our day commuting to and from an office.  Not being around our friends can feel isolating, lonely, potentially even creatively stifling. We humans are natural storytellers, working together to paint grand adventures with our words. That’s what we are constantly striving to accomplish. Whether it’s written or spoken, we string together words, phrases, sentences, details, applying our verbal brush to the awaiting blank canvas of our imaginations.

In the past decade, such storytelling has experienced an unprecedented boom in popularity. Roleplaying games exist in the hundreds, ranging from mainstream games like Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder to indie games like Monster of the Week and Monsterhearts, each bringing unique twists to fantasy, science fiction, horror, and more. And while Dungeons and Dragons maybe be one of the most well-known systems, having been around since Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson sat down and devised what would become the 1^st Edition in 1974, it isn’t the only choice. Say you want to tell a story that isn’t centered around high fantasy adventures of magic, wizards, elves, and gods – you want something more flexible, more modern. The Powered By The Apocalypse system, designed by Meguey and Vincent Baker, has welcomed dozens of unique settings while still using the same rules system. While the “Dungeon World” setting is still based in fantasy, “Monster of the Week” takes a more Scooby-Doo twist to investigating modern monsters and mysteries. Then, of course, there’s more cosmic horror adventures like Call of Cthulhu and The Dresden files, where players can experience the incomprehensible terror of H.P. Lovecraft and Jim Butcher. Whatever mood you want to set, whatever tale you want to tell, there are dozens upon dozens of options to help you and your friends create an immersive experience.

The best part of trying out a roleplaying game comes from gathering the resources to play. You don’t need to invest in pricey rulebooks or accumulate a hoard of dice – although that’s arguably the best part of getting hooked. Many systems offer free, downloadable PDFs and basic rules available on their websites. There are online resources like Roll20 that function as online databases of ready-to-play games complete with customizable systems and settings, including assets to build visuals and background music to accentuate your tales. And when it comes to actually coming together, nothing is more important than being able to see and hear your fellow storytellers. Google Hangouts, Discord, Skype, and Zoom are just a few programs that can allow you to be with your friends almost as if you were there in person.

I like to think that everyone has a story to tell, whether they know it or not. As is the nature of roleplaying games, the person in charge of running the game doesn’t have to know the whole story from the beginning. If anything, all they need is a good idea and a basic outline – and the players take it from there. Everyone involved helps to craft the story, learning how to cooperate, troubleshoot, and improvise in real-time situations to determine what happens next. And most importantly, the stories you and your friends tell are entirely unique. Even if you follow a published module or stick to pre-written story beats, there’s always bound to be an errant dice roll or sudden character choice that throws the whole plot out the window in the best, and most chaotic, way possible.

It is, in my opinion, one of the best ways to bring together a group of friends who want to have some fun and be together as much as they can in the face of isolation and social distancing. Together, we can burn off some of that pent-up energy from not being able to leave the house. We can laugh, cry, fail, and succeed together, forging and strengthening our bonds before, during, and after our games. As distant and digital as it may be, when we’re in the moment we forget that we’re not actually sitting around a table side-by-side. Distance doesn’t have to be a factor in when and how you see your friends and spend some time together. So, go ahead and tell that story you’ve always wanted to. And get your friends in on it too, while you’re at it.

Aysel Atamdede is a MA/MFA student at Chapman University and Assistant Editor at Anastamos. She graduated from Santa Clara University with a BA in English and minored in Studio Art, specializing in fiction and animation.

You can follow her on Twitter @AyzPlz

This language of invasion is often employed to rally support, the “us versus them” mentality it conjures encouraging active participation from the listener. If you don’t want to be overrun, you need to act. However, such language does not come without its share of dangers. While there is no plant or animal actively waging a war against human existence, once hit with the label “invasive species,” they might as well sound a battle cry. Regardless of how concerned you may have been with an ecosystem before, when you hear an enemy has appeared on the front, you know you need to defeat it to protect those land and those with the right to live on it.

But how do you decide who has such a right? The “not native” portion of the definition implies time is the determiner; however, one look at America’s history of colonialization and you should know that isn’t always the key factor. Take the wild mustang. A symbol of Americana, the horse has lived on the soil here longer than any white American, and yet, today it has to fight to live, its label as “invasive species” making it the target to some horrific eradication campaigns. Why? “If the horses get to be too numerous,” says rancher Jackie Ingram in an interview with the New York Times, “it affects the sage grouse, the elk, the antelope and us. All of us depend on the grass.” Ingram claims the wild horses leave so little grass to eat on the Bureau of Land Management land that it has caused other wildlife to disappear and forced her family to cut back on their cattle herd.

There is not enough grass to go around.

That fear is not only central to Ingram’s sentiment, but to the American identity. With every update on rates of unemployment or homelessness, you are reminded to keep working, that it will be your labor alone that protects you from economic despair. It seems hard to believe that this world of fear and suffering is one humans created for themselves, certainly no other species made a priority in its construction. Are you, as Ingram suggests, simply the victim of a lack of supply? Not according to Deanne Stillman, author of Mustang: The Saga of the Horse in the American West. “We have plenty of wide open space in this country; certainly there is room for wild horses and grazing at the same time. It’s already happened WITH heavier regulations,” say Stillman, “There really isn’t a clash, other than the one that is commercially driven.”

Commercially-driven—that’s the key. While there may be more than enough land for mustangs and cattle to co-exist, there is not enough land for mustangs and the massive amounts of cattle necessary to feed our industrial agriculture system—a system that has led to the Dead Zone in the ocean and even driven some populations of grizzly bears and wolves (key predators to horse) extinct. Given such extensive destruction, it seems obvious you should target the industry and promote small farms and ranches. But that locally-sourced beef is pricy, and with the current economic instability, can you really risk the added expense? Will it make any difference if you do?

It can be demoralizing to realize how little effect you have, which is why the competition embedded within capitalism can appear so seductive. If you can’t touch those on top, you need someone or something to control and prove you still have power. And whom better than those villainous “invasive species”? While you may not rally behind the “eradication of the mustang,” you can certainly get behind “curbing the spread of an invasive species.”

Unfortunately, such language is not applied to plants and animals alone. In a poem titled “Super-Insensitive Species,” Korean-American poet Ed Bok Lee parallels the portrayal of immigration in the U.S. against that of the Asian carp consuming native ecosystems. Before I moved out to California, I remember seeing evidence of this “Asian-American-as-Invader” narrative in online comments that described cities like Irvine as “nice until Asians overtook the place.” And it is this narrative Donald Trump capitalized on when he referred to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus.” While he may not have used the words “invasive species,” he encouraged the same sort of “us versus them mentality” to redirect attentions onto a non-white population and away from his crumbling economy, the ecosystem where he so readily thrived.

In a capitalist society, you are taught to compete, and if you want to win, you need to choose an opponent you can defeat, i.e., someone society has disadvantaged more than you. Should this raise ethical concerns, dominant classes can placate them, writing populations off as “invasive” so you know you are fighting the good fight. More and more, you separate yourself from everyone around you, until you believe you only have you to rely on. Place us in a pandemic, however, and we can see the harms embedded within such a mindset. As people wear face masks and practice social distancing, we can finally see how interdependent we are, a perspective we must not only use to combat COVID-19, but to create a world where more than a few can survive.

—

Works published in Los Angeles Review of Books and Entropy and upcoming in Terrain.org and Crab Orchard Review, Sam Risak is a Florida transplant pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English Literature at Chapman University.

“But there is enough food,” I said, “This is scarcity from greed.”

“Not greed, fear,” he said.

I’m not sure they’re so different.

I saw the man rolling away with eggs in different versions everywhere: the toilet paper snatchers, the people clearing out Costco’s pads and tampons. Greed in the sense of gluttony obviously exists—imagine being the richest man on earth and not providing your warehouse employees health benefits or PTO—but it also trickles down into an anxiety felt by people who would otherwise be prosocial. It’s hard to let go of whatever we’re clenching if we believe no one will catch us.

If you have a serious illness, you can spend even generous savings in a week. If you lose your job, you can be evicted or default on your mortgage within a month. I feel this clenching in myself when I see the news, and I don’t immediately write a check to the food bank. Even if you’re fortunate, you’re always looking over your shoulder, seeing how far you can fall. In these circumstances, charity starts to look suspect. It doesn’t make sense to hope for generosity when we haven’t made a pact to catch each other as a nation.

When my grocery store put limits on how much we could buy, I exhaled. I know in a few weeks the milk will be back. I’m relieved and also so ashamed that an inky voice in my gut has been cuffed. The grocery store’s guard rails have spared me the moral exercise of not taking an extra bag of rice, even though I know there are people who will take ten. The social safety net not only catches people in hard times, it puts a ceiling on how much can be hoarded. This anxiety of this pandemic has convinced me that I’m ready to let go. Please raise my taxes. I’m ready to give more if I know we’ll take care of each other.

As I’ve been processing what the future can look like, I had a dream that I was cave diving on SCUBA. We were passing through a rocky tube too narrow to turn around in. I could touch the fins of the person ahead of me, and behind me, there were people who could touch mine. Sediment clouded the beams of our flashlights. Inching through on our hands and knees, it occurred to me how we were limited to the air in our tanks, how there was no turning around if the person in front of me panicked. I could panic and drown thrashing for an exit, and the people behind me would be trapped, too.

So I didn’t. One hand in front of the other, I crawled out for myself and everyone behind me. The cave widened and we swam to the open water. At the surface, we spat out our mouthpieces. We could speak again, and then our masks came down. We helped each other carry our air-tanks off the beach.

When I woke up, the crisis was still unfolding, but a tightness inside me felt loosened. We have the capacity to escape this crisis. I hope we choose to help each other out of the water.

Author and Visual Artist Biography

Paige Welsh is Anastamos’s creative director. She is pursuing an MFA in fiction. Her thesis at UC Santa Cruz won the Chancellor’s Award. You can follow her on Instagram and on Twitter @MarkthatPaige.

*                    *                    *                    *                    *

 
“Oh, you’ve been to Taiwan? I am so jealous. I love Thai food.”
 

*                    *                    *                    *                    *

 
You see a performance along the beachside. There’s this teenager doing acrobatic tricks before a crowd. When he is done, he brings a hat before people, asking for money. Your partner gives you money and asks you to give it to him. You turn to your partner and ask why he won’t go give it to the boy himself. He shrugs and nods you to go with his five-dollar bill. Confused, you go and drop the money in the hat.
 
“Thank you,” the performing teenager smiles at you. You gesture a nod for him.
 
“Japanese?”                                                                                                        You stop. Blink. Shake your head.
 
“Korean?”                                                                                                           You smile and shake your head.
 
“Vietnamese?”                                                                                                   “No,” you say to be polite.
 
“Filipino?”                                                                                                           “Nope.”
 
He is absolutely lost. “What are you, then?”                                                 American?
 

*                    *                    *                    *                    *

 
You are with family for the holidays. The table is set and the food is warm. Chatter from all around the house fill the air. A sudden burst of laughter reaches your ears. It is in a language familiar for you to hear.
 
They ask you about school. They ask about your grades. Your internships. Your health. Your sleeping schedule. How much you eat a day. What connections you’ve made. Did you not know that your cousin is doing just fine in that other Ivy League in the east? They ask why you have gained weight. Do you always look this messy? Maybe consider using some skin products. You need to get more sleep. You need to graduate, soon. Are you dating anyone?
 
Oh. You are. Well.
 
Did you meet at school? At your internship? At work? Who are they? What race are they? Who is their family? What do they do in their free time? What sport do they play? What about instruments? What languages do they speak? What kind of—
 
Your partner only knows English? They know nothing of their own culture?
 
Now that you mention it, you could also do with some improvement. You need to know your language. What’s English going to do for you? Everybody speaks English. You’re no different. Do you want to work at some small company with no international communications? How far do you want to go in life? You should think about that.
 
Eventually.
 
Eventually, the conversation changes pace. There is reminiscing of your parent’s hometown. To the home of your grandparents. It captivates you. There are stories of war and survival. Of running along the banks of rivers in bare feet to catch little shrimps. Stories of walking down the street after school to the local candy shop where your mother would pick up her favorite dessert, once a week, with her allowance. You mention you’ve been to that city once, to add to the conversation as your family bite at pieces of pears and apples and dragonfruit after dinner.
 
To your mistake.
 
So what if you’ve been there? What you see is the city that’s been rebuilt and modernized in the last twenty years. You know nothing about when the city was just a town, nothing about when the country was of a different name, nothing about anything that had been, before globalization. You’ve lived in the United States all your life, you’ve been so modernized. You know nothing about what it means to grow up there, in that part of that country, and breathe in that air. Your mind has been so simplified. It knows nothing of war and the struggle for survival. You don’t even know your own language. The traditions of our life and your family will die with you.
 
Your mother calms down your father’s mother.
 
But she is right, your uncle says. He leans back with a hand on his chin and looks at the table as if in heavy philosophical contemplation. Kids these days, the ones from Asia. None of them care about their heritage.
 
The table nods all around you. You make quick eye contact to the siblings and the cousins who share in your struggle, but silently wish you had kept your mouth shut. You turn to the younger ones who do not understand and have yet to learn what lies ahead in their future, in this home.
 
They grow up so ignorant, your uncle continues, shaking his head. You’d be lucky to find any Asian kid born here that’s truly bilingual. That knows what the hell they’re supposed to prepare for the Lunar New Year. I mean, just the other day…
 
You bow your head to excuse yourself and bring your plate to the kitchen sink. You place it in softly and turn on the water to pretend you are rinsing your plate. You are rinsing your thoughts. You tell yourself you belong in your family.
 
You must belong with your family, because even when they see how Americanized you’ve become, it is still not Americanized enough for you to belong in the United States, in a land where the narrative is so black and so white, so black against white, so determined to throw everyone in every shade in between back to their motherlands, back to a land that does not wish to call itself your mother, back to the Eastern lands of this Westernized world, full of mysterious superstitions and strange mouths eating strange food and speaking strange languages, conversing with different looking people and filling their days with unordinary things, as if bound by a different part of space, a different place in time.
 
You turn off the water and rejoin the table.

Author Bio

Most of the ads in the Daily Record, the newspaper in Northern Jersey where I grew up, said “SWM looks for SWF” or “SWF looks for SWM.”  Some ads were more inclusive, and racial identity wasn’t an issue.  Other ads were M4M or F4F.  Now and then an ad with the word “passing” would show up in the middle of these lists.  These days, this language would seem either archaic or offensive.  The ad would say something like “Transsexual Woman, Passing, Looking for Single Male” or “SWM looking for beautiful, passing, transsexual woman.”  What passing meant is that somehow a person could “fake” being cisgender.

There are many reasons why passing is problematic.  The word suggests that part of our being, our identity, who we are can be erased.  Of course, it’s normal to want to fit in.  But, fitting in isn’t always a good thing.  We lose something when we are passing.  We conform because we are afraid.  Passing is the negation of identity, the negation of self, the negation of history, the negation of critical thought.  By sticking out, by being unique, we take a stand against oppression and find the freedom that comes from living out our identity.

My mother’s, parents emigrated to this country from Italy during the early 20th century.  Like many other children of Italian immigrants, her mother didn’t teach her Italian.  My mother was told by her mother that she wanted her to be “an American.”  My grandmother was afraid that if her daughter was bilingual, that somehow my mother would be bullied.  Americanness equaled the English language.  My grandmother’s, native Sicilian dialect seasoned with Arabic, Greek, French, Spanish, and Catalan words was not handed down to the next generation, perhaps, to evolve on new soil, growing on United States soil.  In effect, her family wanted my mother to pass as “American.”  I understand why my grandmother felt this was necessary, however, the loss of language is really a tragedy.  With the loss of language came the loss of a culture.  Something that made us who we are, that was a birthright of our ancestors who were born in a place that they loved, has been severed from our mouths.

The problem with the United States is that we are fed the idea that identity is a bad thing, that culture, color, and language have to be set aside so as to become whatever an “American” is supposed to be, when the word “American” literally encompasses everyone from Greenland to Tierra Del Fuego.  It’s time that we recognize that our “Americanness” is artificial.  Even the histories in our textbooks are a mixture of truth and fiction.  We are taught to buy into mythologies in order to be American.  We venerate our Presidents when many of these men were far from perfect.  We often ignore the fact that slavery and genocide built this country.

“Passing” never leads to peace.  During the 80s and 90s the slogan “Silence equals death,” was used by AIDS activists. Our political leaders had to confront the fact that our LGBTQ population the fact that their ignorance and prejudice were literally killing people, especially those from marginalized populations.  When people, especially gay men, put their lives on the line those who were in authority had to take notice.

When people are “Passing,” the status quo never realizes that they exist.  Instead, people become invisible.  “Passing” is a form of slavery that binds our minds and souls with invisible chains.  It submits to oppression because it has given up trying, given up marching in the streets for change.  Instead, it merely walks mindlessly accepting that the world will destroy itself.  The way to free one’s self is not with conformity, but the truth.  Our truth, that truth that makes us who we are, will set us free.

It’s hard to define “Americanness.”  If we are honest with ourselves there isn’t one American identity.  There are over 500 Native nations within our boundaries.  There are regional identities in this country too.  Often people from Boston, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Nashville, and Miami differ drastically from one another culturally, not only because of where they live, but the immigrant communities that have flavored their regional identities.  There are many speakers of indigenous languages in this country like Navajo / Dine, Inupiaq and Native Hawaiian.  Also, descendants of settlers and immigrants have brought Spanish, French, Mandarin, Tagalog, and various Italian dialects to these shores.  At times the lines between identities blend, creating new colors.  That ability to create something new is uniquely American.

It’s time that we live out the motto “E Pluribus Unum,” “Out of Many, One.”  America is a multiplicity of Americas bound together by history and histories, bound by a common fate.  We are at war with ourselves because many of us are afraid of the diversity that is the cornerstone of American culture.  If we defend that multiplicity, we defend ourselves and preserve our heritage for many years to come.  We are a quilt of various pieces.  The way these pieces are mended together means preserving both our diversity, and the thread that binds us together.  This is accomplished not by passing, but by being our, unique selves.

Daniel Miess is a graduate student at Chapman University, pursuing a Master of Arts in English and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from New England College in May 2016. His work has been published in the Adelaide Literary Magazine, the Henniker Review, the Harbinger Asylum, and Mud Chronicles: A New England Anthology. He recently moved to Orange, California. He grew up in New Jersey, and has lived in Long Beach, California; Jay and Auburn in Maine; as well as Lebanon and Concord in New Hampshire. He lives with his husband of six years, Kelly.

Featured Image: “Individuality” provided by Loozrboy is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Desperate Living, the most political film that John Waters has made so far, exists in two different worlds. One of them is the essentially all-American suburbs, where Peggy Gravel, a neurotic housewife played by Waters regular Mink Stole, lives in what’s supposed to be domestic bliss. Of course, this being a John Waters film, it isn’t long until the mask is ripped from the face and the film descends into a sort of anarchic, coked-out Douglas Sirk style madness, climaxing in Peggy and her maid, Grizzelda Brown, killing her husband. On the run from the law and assaulted by a perverted police officer, the two women seek refuge in the garbage-built town of Mortville.

Mortville is populated by outcasts and down-and-outs, queers and criminals, people who, for one transgression or another, aren’t fit for polite society. But there’s something rotten in the state of Mortville; the fascist queen Carlotta, carried around and sexually serviced by a harem of men who are straight out of Kenneth Anger.

Revolution and revolt sweep over Mortville, and the film ends with a glorious declaration of victory: for once, the people who are normally losers have managed to achieve a hard fought victory. They don’t need to change who they are; they don’t need to live in fear. In a typically perverse John Waters kind of way, a town made of garbage becomes a sanctuary for those who would normally be considered unworthy of respect or humanity. The climax of the film is a rallying cry to stay as you are, and not to bow down to fascist heteros who try and keep you in line.

On the other side of the coin, I’ve seen respectability politics be used as a justification to complain about gay characters in sitcoms, New York Times cultural critics, and the Gus Van Sant film Milk.

There are plenty of reasons to complain about Milk, but respectability politics is low on my list.

Here, respectability politics are a forced mediation of two different poles with queer people on one end and straight people on the other. In order for the two to meet in the middle (what gets called “equality,” sometimes accurately and sometimes in a way that feels misguided), the former needs to make themselves recognizable to the latter. In other words, the queer community must act and talk in a way that is not “too gay.”

In Angels in America, sitting on a park bench after a funeral, Louis Ironson is told by his boyfriend that he gets “butch” around his family. He’s impersonated, somewhere between lovingly and mockingly, as saying “hi, you don’t remember me, I’m Lou, Rachel’s boy.” The reason for being Lou instead of Louis is that “if you say ‘Louis’ you get the sibilant ‘s’.” The kind of s that can be turned into the high camp lisp of a raging queen. This, in a nutshell, is respectability politics: changing a little about yourself that can be outwardly read as gay so you can avoid the scrutiny of straight people.

The problem here is, obviously, straight people. I don’t know if practices like respectability politics have any kind of malice behind them, or if legions of straight people really are incapable of understanding that people who are different from them might also act or sound different than them, but the extent to which queer people engage in self-censorship for the benefit of The Straights can’t help but give off that impression. The quietly pervasive nature of this kind of censorship gives an almost punk energy to the idea of an unapologetic, disrespectful queerness; a sense of rebellion, of self-expression and self-acceptance that respectability, deliberately or otherwise, tries to sideline.

This version of respectability politics can probably be called Respectability Politics 101, an entry level seminar on how minorities are forced to minimize their differences in order to make their way through the majority.

This gets taken to comically ridiculous extremes by the comical, ridiculous, and extreme Brass Eye. Morris’ dark comedy about late-night news was at once a parody and prophecy of what news programming was becoming at the dawn of the 21^st century, and plays its stupidity dead straight, so lacking in self-awareness that warped fiction turns into a kind of fact, into what we would now call fake news. Anchor Chris Morris talks to an audience member about AIDS, and is told that the audience member caught it from his boyfriend. Morris’ response is to call this “bad AIDS,” something caught through the fault of an individual via “drug abuse, or homosexual act,” to riotous applause from the rest of the audience. Morris wears a green ribbon, with a similar design to those worn for breast cancer awareness, and says to the camera “I support those with good AIDS, because they caught the virus through no fault of their own.” This is another binary taken to extremes, where the disreputable side of the binary – homosexual acts – has disrespectful consequences – bad AIDS instead of good AIDS.

***

But what if that binary was disrupted?

If entry-level respectability politics is between queer people and straight people, then there’s a different version of it that seems to affect people with any kind of sexuality that challenges binaries. Enter Respectability Politics 201, informed by code-switching, gatekeeping, and the instability of binaries.

***

Someone once said to me that bisexual people are “only gay until a woman shows up” because they couldn’t get laid at a festival. Bisexuality is only acceptable if it errs on the side of gay instead of straight. It’s why Call Me By Your Name is a piece of “gay” art, and all of Elio’s experiences and attractions to women are either ignored or sidestepped. Overhearing a conversation about Call Me By Your Name between a group of writers who all happily call themselves queer, I heard the group consider the possibility of a sequel where Elio will date women. Of course, nobody at the table is very happy with the idea, calling it pointless and boring. To me, there’s nothing boring about the idea of seeing the entirety of Elio’s identity and sexuality explored. Call me By Your Name had a nuanced approach to Elio’s attraction to Oliver, underpinning it through art and sculpture as much as through bodies and emotions. There’s no reason to think that a sequel would somehow be less capable of exploring the many-splendored ways that desire can manifest itself, how it splits and comes together when directed toward someone of the same or a different gender. I’ll be first in line to buy the book, a ticket to the inevitable film adaptation, and the BluRay.

***

While bisexuality that foregrounds opposite sex relationships has become a kind of anathema to certain people in queer communities, the other side of the coin is just as damaging; the idea that bisexuality is only understandable if it isn’t too gay. If it is, if someone goes from a relationship with someone of a different gender to one with someone of the same gender, their sexuality stops being palatable to straight people, and you’re back to square one, forcing yourself to adhere to narrow definitions of respectability in order to be accepted.

It comes back to the classic assumption that any kind of expression of sexuality becomes an attempt to seduce whoever you’re having a conversation with. Let’s say you’re exchanging a few texts with an old friend when you’re out drinking at a just-above-average gay bar in an Oxford college, and you drink something called Queer Punch, a mix of sickly spirits and fruit juice. It goes down nicely and gets the job of getting drunk done quickly. You can’t remember what your friend says, because they sent their message on Snapchat and it disappeared in between looking at it and going to get another drink. You shoot off a meaningless, barely-even-flirtatious “I bet you say that to all the boys.” He tells you to slow down, or take it easy, or something like that.

You don’t say this, but you know that if he was talking to one of his straight friends, he wouldn’t have said that. If he was talking to a girl, even though he’s been in a relationship with someone for at least two years and they’re looking at moving in together, he still wouldn’t have said that.

***

There’s a reason why bisexuality is called “unprecedented” in the Desiree Akhavan TV series, The Bisexual, and it’s the same reason that the show’s title leaves an almost thrilling taste in the mouth: bisexuality is unprecedented, it never gets to exist on its own terms. Instead, it is filtered through either gay or straight social circles; there’s a certain degree of code switching involved.

If I mention a girl in the smoking area of a gay club, will I get sideways glances and have my presence there questioned?

Will straight people start laughing under their breath if I get too animated or theatrical describing how good Patti LuPone’s version of ‘Ladies Who Lunch’ is?

Does a mention of an ex of one gender make a partner of another ask “but I thought…?” without ever being able to finish the question?

***

The Human Rights Campaign released a batch of statistics for what they called Bisexual Health Awareness Month in March of 2017. Whenever numbers like these come out, they tell the same story: higher rates of anxiety and depression than those reported for gays and lesbians, higher rates of suicidal thoughts. All of the bad numbers are bigger. The only ones that are smaller have to do with coming out. According to the HRC, bisexual people make up 50% of the LGBT population, but less than a third of them are out to those of their closest friends and family.

***

The refrain of “are you sure you’re not just gay?” is a frequent echo in queer spaces. Amongst a straight audience, many bi people’s sexuality is often labeled as a “phase.”

Bisexuality is always stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Not that kind of a hard place.

Respectability politics for bi people isn’t just about a sense of self-mediation; instead, a part of you is literally pushed aside.

Existing outside of the binary means that there’s no binary to look to when it comes to respectability politics. There’s no good bi or bad bi. Instead, there’s no bi–you’re either gay or straight depending on who you’re with.

***

Overheard at the box office of the Gielgud Theatre: “I can still only see you with a woman. Is that bad?”

The response in my head at the time: Yes.

This guy (who, from what I overheard, was gay) clearly had a slightly frayed relationship with the concept of gayness. Talking about going to the theatre with a friend of his, he said “he’s the only gay guy I know who cares if I do things that make me happy.” I didn’t know the context, or anything else, but it struck me as interesting. It made his comment about only being able to see his – female – friend with a woman sound a little strange. If so many gay people that you know apparently don’t care about your happiness, why would you force your friend into a gay or lesbian box? Does her attraction to men somehow alienate you? Can you only understand her identity if you make it as similar to yours as possible?

***

The interesting thing about Respectability Politics 101 and 201 is that they both operate under the same conditions: we cannot understand people unless they make their identities similar enough to ours that we become able to ignore the gulf of Otherness between two people. While queer people engage in self-censorship, straight people engage in self-deception, pretending that these differences are so small that they don’t exist, that these respectable queers might as well be straight, especially when they don’t ram their sexuality down your throat.

The road to equality is long, unsteady, and not all of it has been travelled yet. And it isn’t only about being able to get married.

Just as Respectability Politics 101 has caused a certain, narrow brand of queerness to be fully accepted by straight people, Respectability Politics 201 makes it clear that to step outside of binaries is still a rebellious and potentially dangerous act. Equality with an asterisk is not equality at all, but pound-shop assimilation. More should be done to embrace the messy, unapologetic, and disrespected elements of queer culture so both straight people and other queer people are forced to wake up and accept people as they are. The overthrow of fascism at the end of Desperate Living is becoming more and more necessary, both metaphorically and otherwise. Desperate Living challenges the idea that society’s losers always have to lose, and that all queer stories need to end in tragedy. Outcasts storm the castle and kill their tyrannical queen; the revolution that started in Mortville can’t stop now.

Sam is a writer of poetry, prose, and drama. His poetry has appeared in the inaugural issue of Please See Me, the Hawaii Review, and other places. His debut play, Savage, was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August of 2015. Since then he has had three plays performed at the Burton Taylor Studio in Oxford, most recently Like a Virgin (May 2018).

Featured Image: “Mask with two heads” provided by Kevin Hutchinson is licensed under CC BY 2.0