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By Ron Suresha
 It was a thrill and a relief to read a recent story in a Boston-area gay
newspaper about the lack of obituaries printed in the Bay Area Reporter
("San Francisco gay paper has no AIDS obits for first time in 17 years,"
Bay Windows, Aug. 20, 1998).
The news item, for those who missed it, explained that the San Francisco-area weekly gay newspaper had not received a submitted death notice for over one week. This moment in gay history, although anticipated for many years, is significant and deserves further reflection on how our queer media reflect our lives. Although a medical cure for AIDS still eludes us, the fact that so many fewer gay men are dying of HIV-related illnesses appears something of a miracle. I came out in the mid-70's, lived in San Francisco from 1987 to 1994 and, like many others surviving the epidemic, I can hardly believe the contrast from the time when, week after week, I would open the gay weeklies in dread of counting the number of death notices of men I knew. That there are fewer and fewer obituaries is a reflection of many encouraging things in our communities, some scientific, some political, and some cultural. Perhaps now, with the sober understanding that many more AIDS obits will doubtlessly be printed in the future, we can pause to contemplate the deeper meaning of this long-standing media tradition. Generally, regional newspapers run obituaries as a courtesy to their readers, not only to respect the survivors of the dead, but to provide information to the community about funerals (which helps to sell ads to funeral homes) as well as to create "local interest" (which helps to attract more readers). This applies to both straight and queer publications, whether they're sold or distributed for free. How mainstream and queer papers diverge, it seems, is the way that queer papers manage to take virtually no notice of the other landmarks in our personal lives. In most mainstream newspapers we find not only obituaries but also notices about births, christenings, confirmations, graduations, business promotions, weddings, and sometimes even divorces. In contrast, other than a few queer papers that have published a handful of notices of commitment ceremonies, for the most part these events of our lives are absent. Of course, some of these kinds of events don't even roughly apply to self-identified gay men and lesbians (although I can imagine that some young people nowadays are coming out in time for their bar or bat mitzvahs!). We have our own special ways of celebrating the meaningful events of our lives, such as commitment ceremonies, whether or not one thinks of them as imitative or assimilative. But then again, the truth is that queers also graduate, get promoted, give birth, and retire, just like straight folk. So why is it that notices of these life transitions and milestones almost never make it into the gay press unless it is somehow tied into a legal or political action? Why have we managed to emphasize only the deaths? Are queer people inherently morbid? We should examine the reasons for this focus on the deaths in our lives. Certainly, one can hardly imagine how we could have managed through all this catastrophe, from the beginning of the "gay cancer" to this point in time, without taking note of the too many deaths of our lovers, friends, and tricks. We recognize the importance of naming, out loud, those who have gone before us "into that good night," whether courageously or kicking and shrieking. But how could we have gone through almost twenty years of the epidemic, not to mention the years of the gay liberation movement before that, without hardly ever taking note of the other significant events in our lives? I hate to think it's because we dismiss such life transitions-such as the birth of a child to a lesbian in a committed relationship, inseminated by a gay man-as just silly mimicking of the oh-so-pedestrian heterosexual world. Maybe gay folks are actually so secure in their sense of self that it's unnecessary to have to validate their life events in the same way straight folks do. After all, the queer culture we have created reflects our dynamic creative and admittedly offbeat juices-energies that heteros often spend in the service of producing and raising offspring. Regardless of any comparison to straights, however, to the extent we undervalue the deeply significant events in our queer lives, we undermine our sense of community. Sure, most of us don't care to have our personal lives publicized. Nor is it essentially in our best interests for gay citizens to use the gay public sphere to affirm their personal special occasions-it often turns out that the more popular an event becomes, the less special it indeed becomes. But for us to allow the gay media to so thoughtlessly disregard our personal triumphs signals a deeper problem in our communities and in ourselves. At the very least, we ought to insist that queer papers publish notices of our commitment ceremonies, complete with pictures of smiling same-sex couples cutting their cakes. But why stop at only our personal events that have straight correspondents? Shouldn't out gay men, lesbians, bi, and transgendered people broadcast the ceremonies and anniversaries that have unique meaning to us, such as coming out, stages in gender transition, or "the first time I did drag" or "first time I passed as a man"? Walt Whitman's and Gertrude Stein's birthdays? How about events which commemorate our connections structured along the lines of actual queer communities, like master/slave relationships, formation of best-friend alliances, professional networks in gay ghettoes, and tribal confluences? And let's not omit events that affirm our spiritual connection with nature and with all people, such as spiritual initiations, and solstice and equinox celebrations. By neglecting to honor-proudly and publicly-such events in our own lives, we not only tell ourselves that they are not of the same import as heterosexuals' life ceremonies but we also reinforce others' impression that we accept this silence. Although same-sex couples have been trying to get commitment ceremonies notices published in their local mainstream newspapers, it's wrongheaded to push for recognition from straight news venues without even bothering to get similar notices printed in our queer papers. Whether or not such outer recognition is desirable, if we ever want straight people to recognize and honor our capability to establish and maintain committed relationships, we should ensure that we do so ourselves. It should also be mentioned that the (sometimes overwhelming) presence in gay papers of corporate advertising, despite providing much-needed revenue for the publications, gives out a somewhat unpleasant odor of consumerism that dispirits a more soulful sense of community. By prioritizing and re-emphasizing community events in their graphic and editorial makeup, our newspapers can build renewed feelings of community in spite of the ads. What to do with the space created in our papers by the paucity of death notices of our loved ones? Do we want our publications to devote that space for more personal ads-or for more news items of real personal interest? How we shape the media that reflects us is a responsibility that lesbians, gay men, transgendered, bisexuals, and our allies share equally throughout the divergent segments of our community. At this important time in queer history, we need to tell our queer publications that we're ready for them to go beyond obits-by more clearly, accurately, and completely reflecting our wonderfully rich queer lives. Ron Suresha is a writer and editor living in Boston. |
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