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Author: Kenneth Sutton

  • Small talk passage from Slow Gods

    I myself have developed several algorithms for doing small talk when it is required, in order to help other people feel secure in my presence and thus improve my overall well-being through social cohesion. But what I struggle with is how this simple thing often escalates into a whole cultural performance. For having expressed “Hello, I see you, and you see me,” a veritable avalanche of small talk must then continue in which the participants go to extraordinary lengths to continue to talk about absolutely nothing of any significance or merit whatsoever, in a process that neither party seems to enjoy past the initial moment of connection. It is as if having established that each sees the other, they then agree by mutual consent to not look too closely, just in case they see something vulnerable, hurting, true.

    Or stranger still: you open with “Hello, isn’t the weather foul?” and before you know it, that little open door results in a flood of “Well actually my mother died yesterday and I’ve got a dreadful lung infection and it’s not getting better and I’ve been struggling to get out of bed in the mornings and my children won’t speak to me but you know, you know, it is what it is, isn’t it?”

    Under no circumstance must you say something meaningful in response to this; merely listen politely and reply, “That must be hard for you,” even if what you are hearing is a kind of death.

    A little connection, but never too much. This is the normality of the interaction, but the rules on how little is too little, how much is too much are never clear or explained. You are meant to “feel it out” and woe betide you if you get that judgement even marginally wrong, for then all connection is lost and you are other, other, other, and must alone continue, shunned for breaking a law that was never codified, violating a trust whose limits were never clear.

    Slow Gods by Claire North

  • Postal service rant

    I wasn’t sure if my old Oyster card would still be good for my trip to London next week, so I bought a new one (a tourist version, which you need to buy in advance and have mailed to you). It has been sitting in US customs in New York since Sunday night without moving, so I’m beginning to wonder if it will arrive before I leave. On the other hand, when I started looking for the £ cash I brought home from my last trip, I also found a second Oyster card here. So aside from potentially having the funds I preloaded on the new card unavailable, I should be able to take advantage of what an Oyster card offers. (And who knows if there’s anything left on the two I have!)

    Other anecdotal evidence of how messed up international post is these days, my winter side gig shipping packages for Adam’s Nest has had an exponential increase in returns and misdeliveries to international customers.

  • Resetting social media

    Trying (again!) to move my online presence to be on a site under my control with Facebook secondary. Part of making this work will mean figuring out how to make posting here as easy as possible and potentially automating reposts to Facebook et al. We’ll see how it goes! (with a bonus recent photo)

    White man with glasses and a bushy gray beard, wearing a red beanie standing in a cemetery with the Provincetown Monument in the background

  • Resistance takes many forms

    Thanks to my friend Patricia Stewart for reposting a Facebook post from Friends House Moscow, which led me to a fantastic visual “Queer Catalog of the Hermitage.”

  • Back to it?

    John Scalzi recently responded to the trashfire state of much social media by recommending we “Weave the Artisan Web,” and I’m feeling inspired to try to back out of social media as the first place to share things and go back to blogging. There’s a lot of blogging rhythm and habits that I’ve fallen out of, and I’m not sure I’m interested in returning to blogging as it once was. But even if the short-attention-span-theater form of FB and IG remain, I do see virtue in putting it out there in my own space first, and the big venues second. We’ll see how that goes.

    Scalzi has some good advice. In addition to actually posting via your own platform, he recommends reading online content in a way that you control. I’ve never stopped using RSS feeds to follow blogs and websites I want to, and it is the aspect of social media that requires more than just setting up a blog. He recommends Feedly. I use Feedbin on the desktop and to manage the feeds I follow, and I used Reeder if I want to read Feedbin on my iPhone.

    I must say, it’s been so long since I was blogging regularly that WordPress looks and feels like an entirely different animal. It will take a while to figure out how I want to use it. I updated to the current default theme, and it’s clearly meant to be a canvas you can use to build out a custom look. It will take a bit of work to learn how to make it look attractive!

  • Social change often comes as a result of suffering

    Soon after I became a Quaker, I read Gene Sharp’s three-volume The Politics of Nonviolent Action (the connection being the traditional Quaker testimony against violence—see footnote). It deeply affected my thinking about social change, most notably that activism needs to have specific goals and that specific actions within it need to be strategic towards a goal as well as consistent with ethical and moral standards of the particular activist movement (i.e., the ends are not more important than the means).

    One of the things that surprised me and that has stuck with me is that Gandhi’s systematic theory of resistance, satyagraha (“truth-force” or “love-force”), included nonviolence not only as a moral choice but as strategy. Ahimsa (“not to injure”) is a Hindu religious virtue. And within the context of Gandhian civil resistance, accepting violence upon oneself without retaliation is intended to awaken compassion in the opponent and bystanders.

    In both Gandhi’s movements in South Africa and India and in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, nonviolent resistance was not passive. Participants actively broke unjust laws and courted punishment. The accusation that pacifists are passive is wrong. Some pacifists (some religious sects notably among them) are in fact passive, but most pacifists are active in a range of efforts from resisting war to creating the conditions of peace. Pacifists regularly connect peace and justice. True peace is not an absence of war or conflict, it is a positive condition that includes justice.

    So that’s very brief notes on a theoretical and historical view of suffering bringing social change.

    But I have a subjective perspective as well, and sadly it does not involve voluntary suffering, but involuntary. From my own viewpoint, I conclude that many of the advances in LGBTQ+ rights, and the speed at which cultural changes are happening, are a direct result of the very public suffering and deaths of young gay men from AIDS. Being homosexual had moved from a shameful secret to an actively claimed personal and political statement (“You must come out,” said Harvey Milk), but the HIV epidemic forced thousands of young men out of the closet in a way that, in my opinion, awakened compassion in many of their friends and families. And the additional suffering of those who were rejected by those friends and families also served to awaken compassion in others. I feel very deeply this connection between that awful time and political and cultural changes. It was a terrible price to pay.

    It’s also terrible that hundreds of thousands of people continue to die of AIDS, many of them heterosexual women in Africa. HIV is now largely preventable as well as treatable and deaths from AIDS are a failure of political and economic decisions, much like deaths from starvation. Not all suffering results in positive social change.

    Footnote

    A number of things associated with Friends took a while to take shape in the early years of the Friends movement, the Peace Testimony included. But by 1660, an influential group of men Friends, responding to political forces, made a statement to King Charles II, often summarized as “We utterly deny all outward wars and strife and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretence whatsoever; and this is our testimony to the whole world. The spirit of Christ, by which we are guided, is not changeable, so as once to command us from a thing as evil and again to move unto it; and we do certainly know, and so testify to the world, that the spirit of Christ, which leads us into all Truth, will never move us to fight and war against any man with outward weapons, neither for the kingdom of Christ, nor for the kingdoms of this world.” As early as 1651, George Fox had said that he “lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars and I knew from whence all wars did rise, from the lust, according to James’s doctrine. . . . I told them I was come into the covenant of peace which was before wars and strifes were.”

  • I have a boyfriend

    I have a boyfriend who has a husband, and everything about that feels great except for the distance away he lives ( ❤️❤️❤️ ).

    For quite a few years now, I’ve had a personal policy of not getting involved with anyone local who already has a boyfriend or husband. It’s not that I disapprove of open relationships or polyamory, it’s that as a single person, the risks of falling in love with someone for whom I’m just a fling or entertainment on the side are too high. Guys who live at a distance seemed not to present that risk.

    But then I met G, here in Provincetown during Bear Week 2017, and his husband D. Both lovely guys. I really enjoyed their company (G’s in particular, wink wink nudge nudge). Then in 2018 we were all eagerly anticipating seeing one another again in Ptown, and my experience that week confirmed that I had deep feelings for G, and they were mutual. D invited me to their home for Christmas last year, and the three of us spent New Years in Paris. I met them in Spain with other friends of theirs for vacation this September, and I’m spending Christmas and New Years with them again next month.

    I miss not being able to see G more often (and D too!), but the relationship makes me happy, and I’m learning things about myself, and I look forward to it continuing. It seems to work well for all three of us.

    And of course, it’s not really anything new. I’ve dated couples before, and also once dated someone with my then-partner. It’s nothing new in a broader gay context, either. Gay men have long practiced non-monogamy in variously healthy and unhealthy ways. And it certainly isn’t confined to gay men; just consider the pre-Raphaelites and the Bloomsbury Set.

  • More gay

    I wonder if I should present as “more gay” at work. I’m not even sure what that would look like, but the question has been provoking me ever since the Unitarian Universalist Association began a concerted effort to change the culture (of the workplace as well as the whole movement). Much of the focus is on race, but not only is whiteness privileged, so is heteronormativity (whether one is straight or not; i.e., gay people also make choices that are heteronormative), cis gender expression, higher education, and upper-middle to upper economic class.

    I have some colleagues who appear to be totally free of “work casual” expectations of how to dress. I’ve been subject to dress codes at previous jobs, and didn’t like it, and while I reject the idea of a dress code, I still tend to reach for unremarkable. As a fat, older gay man, I’ve often fallen into the “wear dark baggy clothes” trap, and I’m trying to get out of that. I used to have quite a collection of earrings, but I no longer change them since I switched to surgical stainless hoops. And I used to wear rings on occasion, but most of them don’t currently fit on my fingers.

    What I have been doing is wearing bracelets and choosing some brighter colors in clothing, as well as paying more attention to fit. The most obvious way in which I don’t conform to the work casual vibe is that my clothing reflects my working-class background. (My father owned his own business and owned property, but he did agricultural work and manual labor his entire life.)

  • Conforming to majority culture

    I struggle with the conflict between conforming to majority culture and being myself. I’m a product of a specific time and place, with my own peculiarities, and those add up to a certain amount of comfort in conformity. In some ways, I’ve blissfully ignored majority culture, and yet inwardly I don’t feel the boldness—or anger—of Zaza.

    I went down a rabbit hole on YouTube yesterday and was reminded of how profoundly moving La Cage Aux Folles is, and how extraordinarily groundbreaking it was when it premiered. I also remember how many members of the cast died of AIDS.

  • The world has changed

    I marvel at how the world has changed in 40 years and sometimes struggle to keep up.

    Remember the context for these prompts is a coming-out day post, hence the 40-year frame. I marvel even more at the way the world has changed in 60 years, though I don’t remember much about the first few. But blogging about the increasing difficulty in keeping abreast of new technology would just make me sound like an old man.

    When I was young, I didn’t grasp how much what we see around us limits our imaginations of what is possible for ourselves, or at least limits what we think is possible, even if we imagine it. This is made clear by how young people are when they realize they are not straight or not one of the genders routinely assigned at birth. I absolutely marvel that people so young have such self-awareness. When I was that age I had no idea. I have to conclude that having examples of alternatives visible in media and in the people around them allows them to reflect on the implications for themselves.

    There’s also the routine social norms that have changed in ways I might have imagined but never thought would happen so soon. While advances for LGBTQ+ people remain tenuous, the speed with which some changes happened amazes me. I attribute some of that speed to the spectre of thousands of young men dying before the very eyes of their families and loved ones. Just as there’s nothing like a war to create anti-war activists, there’s nothing like a plague to reveal how widespread (and close to home) gay lives are.