Martha Shelley – Gay is Good

I write about Martha Shelley’s perspective this week because of how severely I was caught off guard by her extremism, along with my new found infatuation with this concept of radicalism versus assimilation. As I openly speak in class as a proponent of the integration perspective, I tried to put myself into the shoes of Shelley while she was writing this and to gain insight of essentially why she feels the way she does. At both my first and second reads of this, I still find a lot of her voice in her literature to just be a little too eccentric, but I also read with the realization that self discovery is not half as easy for most as it was for me. An excerpt that stood out in particular was on page 32, which reads, “Understand that- that the worst part of being a homosexual is having to keep it a secret. Not the occasional murders by police or teenage queer-beaters, not the loss of jobs or the expulsion from schools or dishonorable discharges- but the daily knowledge that what you are is so awful that it cannot be revealed. The violence against us is sporadic. Most of us are not affected. But the internal violence of being made to carry- or choosing to carry- the load of your straight society’s unconscious guilt- this is what tears us apart, what makes us want to stand up in the offices, in the factories and schools and shout out our true identities.” This truly hit home with me, realizing that my experiences with self-identity and my personal “coming out process” has been so easy and so well-received in comparison to how many others have it. There are virtually no facets of my life in which I feel that hiding my identity is necessary anymore, and forget those feelings of angst when I was unable to be self-liberated in both my life and my culture. Although it is a shorter read and still a very radical approach that I don’t feel is the true answer to acceptance, it really shaped my perspective on radical literature. Shelley even notes that “we” don’t even want to be tolerated or to be accepted- we simply want to be understood; this piece indeed helped me understand the radical approach much better. How have your all's perspectives changed throughout the semester in terms of the concept of pride, assimilation, tolerance/acceptance, radicalism, integration, etc?