Cockroaches, Sex Education and the Queer Apocalypse

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We must pause and once more consider Boys Beware!, the infamous public information film about the dangers of homosexuality. One of the lies that it relies on is the idea that queer people are recruited into the lifestyle through molestation and deceit, a purposeful effort from evil gay adults. 

However, many allies also behave as though queerness is deviant and harmful to children, just like our supposed enemies do. The socially acceptable version of queer “recruitment” panic is the belief that nice queer kids discover their full sexual orientation at puberty, in an ahistorical way that requires zero education about our bodies and does not freak straight people out. No kink at pride, no kissing in public.

Squeamish adults pretend that there is no such thing as a queer child, at least before it is exposed to the Gay Representation that awakens it like a sleeper cell. That doesn’t stop us from existing, but it does mean that we learn to hate ourselves before we get to know ourselves. You cannot avoid absorbing the background radiation of queerphobia that exists in a society run by people who were literally taught that queer people hide in bathrooms to rape them as a part of their high school curriculum. 

The “born this way” stance is supposed to be nicer because our condition is genetic, instead of acquired via a chance encounter in a public bathroom. However, it is rarely kinder in practice. Queer kids are still queer whether they know it or not. And all queer kids learn that they are being raised in a society that hates their guts. 

People like to say that times have changed, but how much, and for how long? If we’re truly beyond it, why can’t I piss in peace in Utah? Why would anybody call the police to report classroom books about people like me in Massachusetts? Why is Florida accusing people like me of defrauding the state by existing?

It's terrifying to live through, but does social stigma signal an apocalypse? In “AIDS and Its Metaphors,” Susan Sontag explored the apocalyptic rhetoric around the impact of AIDS on society and the way certain groups were singled out as “worthy” of its plague-like judgment.

(When I was a kid, AIDS being perceived as the “gay disease” led to an institutional policy of medical genocide for the queer community. This resulted in a decade of mass death. My mother was a medical social worker in the 90s, and I volunteered alongside her. It isn’t my right to share tragedies that aren’t mine, but I still have them with me. I still cry sometimes, thinking about what I saw. Some people forget that there was a time when AIDS demanded a lonely and brutal death. But I can’t forget it, and I cannot stop thinking about it as another apocalypse brews.)

Sontag argued that while life persisted as usual for society's dominant classes during the height of the AIDS crisis, it changed in a fundamental and terrifying way for the people who were stigmatized by it. The knowledge gained by surviving was akin to the root word of apokalypsis, a synonym for revelation. It is an understanding that ends your world as you know it, and heralds the birth of something dark and new you have to learn to survive. As Sontag put it: “Apocalypse is now a long-running serial: not 'Apocalypse Now', but 'Apocalypse from Now On.'”

Given this lens, it's hard not to see our current political and social landscape as a rhetorical post-nuclear apocalypse for us nasty queer mutants. And yet, we persist, and yet, we remain. The cockroaches of our own apocalypse.

And make no mistake: we are cockroaches by design. We are meant to live squirming in fear, without our elders, and with the shared traumatic memories of persecution, violence and death. Worse yet, this treatment is purposeful. It occurs because people do not want us to exist. And it occurs because we live in a society that condones it, even encourages it, and then punishes us for acknowledging it. 

Of course, Sontag meant for her apocalypse lens to be metaphorical. I freely admit I am mangling this concept to serve my own purposes. Luckily for me, there is zero chance that Susan Sontag's ghost will ever read a goopy monster fuck-blog, so let’s proceed. 

If you are a queer person, Sontag’s apocalypse metaphor feels all-too-real. Put yourself in the shoes of a queer high schooler in 1965. At a special sex-segregated assembly, your school shows you a movie that is full of information that is supposed to keep you safe. Surrounded by your unbothered peers, you learn the following:

• People like you have a contagious disease that compels them to rape and occasionally murder young boys like yourself. Queerness makes you sick and dangerous to others.
• If a homosexual does not rape or kill you, there is a chance they will extend kindness towards you in exchange for sex. This may be the only kindness you can rely on. 
• If you choose to inhabit the world as you are, you're choosing the form of a monster. You will be hunted by police and shunned by society. You are not supposed to exist.

None of this is factual, but that doesn't matter if the world you live in believes it anyway. Your life as you know it has ended, replaced by the dark thing you'll learn to survive. Boys beware: apocalypse from now on.