Day(s) of Silence

Today is the day of silence, and for the first time in eight years, I'm not shutting my big mouth for a day. This is something that I have always felt a little bit ambivalent about. While the website does say that "silence is loud", I sometimes wonder about its ultimate effectiveness. The ways that I have justified it is by saying that, in general, on the campuses where I have done this I have been a very active queer voice, rarely silent on matters queer or, let's be honest, all matters. When I sat silently in black, handing out cards explaining my silence to professors and classmates I'm sure it made some impact.

But it didn't reveal all of the ways that I felt silenced.

I think it was good for the community, but not good for me. Which is fine, community action will never be good for all its members, and I acknowledge that. Maybe people in the closet felt heartened by my solidarity with their silence on that day, and it is a nice balance point to Coming Out day in October, framing the academic calendar year with queer activism. In short I think it is a good thing, and I applaud those people who are participating. I also think that the more complete the silence the better, for instance, TP's email immediately bounces back today with a message to members of the RedStateU community. I also think that there are ways to counter the silence. For example, at EliteLiberalArtsCollege at the end of the day we would scream at 6:00 to end the silence, and then there would be a "talkback" event about how the silence had been experienced by the community. This made the rest of the day much more bearable.

But it didn't reveal all of the ways that I felt silenced.

In my Spanish class my sophmore year I had to write a two page essay on my typical day. Keep in mind that at that point my spanish was pretty poor. Anyway, at several points in that essay I mentioned 'mi novia' , my girlfriend. When I got the essay back, in addition to all the other grammatical corrections, there was a red mark making all of the 'a's into 'o's, giving me a boyfriend. I had been erased, corrected. It was the beginning of the semester, and I didn't know the professor and I can be incredibly shy, so I just let it slide. The day of silence did nothing to counter this kind of pervasive heteronormativity. I know the spanish essay doesn't sound like a big deal, and in some ways it wasn't, in others way it exemplifies what everyday was like there (and maybe everywhere).

At ELAC I was consistently alienated from the student queer community. Part of this was all about the word 'queer'. I was consistently identified by others in the community as a lesbian. Which is a word I haven't used for myself since I was 15, and I was constantly explaining queer, over and over. I wanted to agitate and use the Queer Student Union to do that, they just wanted to have a rockin' party twice a year (not that I'm down on rockin' parties). I was sex-positive and was willing to confront people on their shit about that. I didn't assume that just because people were queer, I would want to spend an hour a week talking to them about some banal topic that the board came up with. Again random examples, that aren't really doing a good job of explaining the silence and alienation that I felt.

In some ways I felt less silenced in the general populatin where I could talk for myself instead of a queer community that I found isolated, monolithic, and well... not very queer.

I think that there are layers of silence; every community truncates what its members can say and do. So, the day of silence is great, it pulls a community together and makes them realize some important things about homophobia, particularly in educational settings. But, like all community action, it is not an end point, or sufficient agitation against all the hegemonies that constrict queer voices, in all communities.

Or at least it does not satisfy me.