The Queer Normative Future Is Already Here

Just Unevenly Distributed

Toddler with teddy bear in bondage gear, Balenciaga ad.

What follows is the second part of a multi-part series of memoirs about the sexual constitution as premises and motives drawn from Queer Theory are both normalized and acquire disciplinary power throughout American bourgeois culture. I expect to integrate these essays into a larger work that includes memoir, theory, and cultural history. Paid subscribers will get a first look at certain parts of this line of thinking while those more directly addresses to current affairs will circulate freely.

Laila Mickelwait @LailaMickelwait

This is true and disturbing… if you scroll down on the homepage they also placed a court document in an ad referencing Ashcroft vs Free Speech Coalition—the court case that made virtual/fake child sexual abuse images and videos legal in the US. https://t.co/ECMW2j7ji3

Slarty Bartfast @DatCatDer

Balenciaga using photos of little girls playing with teddy bears dressed in bondage gear on their website. Lovely. https://t.co/mYnt0CJuif

A few years ago, when my daughter was five, I took her to an event at a newly opened commercial playspace where I live in Montreal. The event had been advertised as a "Rainbow Party," which in retrospect ought to have given me more pause. (I wondered about it just long enough to dismiss the possibility that it was going to be what it turned out to be.)  It began with an extremely flamboyant young man, perhaps a bit more than five feet tall, reading to a group of children around my daughter's age, from a children's book about an LBGTQ pride parade, replete with pictures of leathermen and other marchers dressed in cartoony renditions of the kink gear that is now omni-present at these events. 

The children did not seem very attentive to the story. Doubtless few — preferably none — had any of the context required to pick up on its sexualized trappings, which were depicted in the background rather than featuring in the story’s plot. But it was an exhibition of something I would not have thought possible prior to seeing it myself: an open invitation, within a para-pedagogical setting, for the youngest children to revel in the atmosphere of queer bacchanalia sustained at Pride parades, which toggle between a candy-colored neon aesthetic disturbingly convergent with the things that attract and delight young children — rainbows, faeries, sparkles, unicorns, glitter butterflies — and sporadic eruptions of the rawest carnality.

I looked around at the faces of the other parents, none marked by any outward sign as the sort of people who would consider it a great moral imperative to expose their young children to the panoply of forms of sexual and gender expression beyond the heteronormative. They all looked like very ordinary, straight, middle-class parents. We were in a large city where a certain default liberalism no doubt obtained. But my understanding of what that category encompassed had not kept up with the changing times. A major software update was being pushed out. Would we accept?

I have always found Pride parades to be nuisances when I have found myself stuck in them — maudlin try-hard exhibitions by those intent on treating their base appetites as accomplishments — rather than frightening threats to the civilized order. It would not, of course, pass muster among cynical urbanites to feel threatened by such displays. The correct position was to see the marchers as needy dorks, recent transplants from the provinces feeling their oats in cringe-inducing spasms rather than Satanic influences trying to corrupt the youth. Underneath the carnival of transgression, there was always a room temperature banality to these daytime open-air proceedings, which invariably included many young children among the onlookers.

The child at the queer bacchanal.

It called to mind my own childish KISS fandom. Between the ages of 4-8, I, like many young children, was drawn to the cartoony fetish gear worn onstage by an androgynous rock band whose lyrics celebrated the perennial rock and roll themes of drug and alcohol abuse and statutory rape. I remained entirely innocent of any of its sexual meanings. (I heard, for instances, “Meet, meet you in the ladies room” as an earnest plea to “quit peeking in the ladies room.”) But KISS fandom, of course, was not something being urged on me by my teachers, nor something brought into a space full of kindergarteners as a part of a didactic conditioning process in tolerance and love.

I owned this album as a 5 year old and stared at this back cover for a long time while remaining totally innocent of its sexual content.

None of the other parents seemed in any way startled by the reading. I suppose I also didn’t appear to be startled, taking my cues from the behavior of those around me, who were perhaps in turn taking their cue from my own poker-faced equanimity. Did they know something I didn't? Did they think I knew something they didn't? I could not tell whether any of them were considering the possibility of objecting to this performance. None of us did.

We had, after all, attended something advertised as a “Rainbow Party.” When I had earlier batted away the premonition that the Rainbow Party might turn out to be what it in fact was, I did so by reassuring myself that the rainbow remained primarily a part of the iconography of early childhood rather than a symbol wholly appropriated by the LGBTQIA+ movement. To have that confidence so swiftly disabused opened a new vista in my moral imagination.

I did not say anything — an objection would have called attention to disturbing details that would have otherwise gone unnoticed by the children, thereby bringing to fruition the very agenda the objection was designed to thwart. Or so I rationalized it to myself. That was the vise in which they had caught us.

I did not say anything because one isolated encounter with this material wouldn’t mean anything to the kids. Only as an opening foray within the sustained conditioning process could it have any real influence — and I could easily opt out of further exposure. But I did not know if I could opt out from what the rest of the culture had in store for her.

For above all, what came across that day was the serene self-assurance of those staging this reading — and the docility of the parents in the face of it. It was not a confidence that the owners of a newly launched commercial playspace in western Montreal could generate on their own. It was a confidence that could only be derived from a broader cultural consensus which they were enacting. The practice and the prevailing ethos that sustained it could only have reached this obscure outpost of the North American imperium by having first commandeered the cultural apparatus virtually everywhere else.

Shortly afterward I began to notice a new crop of books aimed at very young children prominently featured at the Cote St. Luc library, situated in a mostly Orthodox Jewish neighborhood —

All books explicitly aimed at children 3-7 or 5-8.

I did not yet understand what would become clear later about the concept of “gender identity” — that it was the leading edge of a movement that sought to grant men who “identified as women” access to the competitions and intimate spaces of women, and to subject children to uncontrolled and non-evidence based medical experimentation with drugs that will chemically castrate them.

I also remained silent because of the simple herd instinct that acquiesces reflexively to whatever situation presents itself as normal by those in a position to define it. The people in charge of the space that we had entered voluntarily had made a choice that they were free to make about what would happen in it. They presented it in such a way that no one would be able to break the enforced consensus thereby imposed without risking being seen as a bigot or merely a person behind the times. I realized what this disciplinary power enjoined at the very instant I felt myself subject to it for the very first time. This was the source of the docility. We all understood implicitly in that moment that where once we had lived in a culture that would have penalized those who had exposed children to material normalizing a queer bacchanal, we were transitioning to a culture that would penalize anyone who would resist exposure of children to material normalizing a queer bacchanal.

I should quote here from the opening paragraph of a previous memoir piece that is a prequel to this one, in no small part to immunize myself against the charge of bigotry, but above all to protect myself against the softer charge of being merely behind the times. It is this desire to not be left behind by changing times even more than the overt disciplinary operations of cancel culture, reserved for those insensible to the cues and prompts of the approved culture, that allows cultural change to move unimpeded. The power of this charge has not deterred the composition of this post, but it has moved me to establish my bonafides, without which I might instantly be consigned to that frightening irrelevance which keeps so many in line:

“My daughter has had only a glancing experience of what has come to be known as the heteronormative nuclear family. She has one cousin, begotten of a surrogate contracted to my elder brother and his male partner. Her closest friend is the daughter of a single mother, conceived with sperm from a donor. She says that her father is the North Star. Her next closest friend was for years the daughter of a single mother (recently remarried) who chose to keep the accidental product of a one-night stand and move back in with her mother in Montreal to raise her. As long as she has known about parenthood, my daughter has known that some children have two fathers and others have two mothers, and that some have only a mother and not a father, and others only a father and not a mother. Her own experience of the heteronormative nuclear family was brief. By the time she was six her parents were living separately.”

My daughter, in other words, had no need of any education in acceptance of alternate sexualities, which were a part of the given for her. Both of her uncles on her mother’s and father’s side of the family are married to men. Never having known any other way, she requires no lessons in acceptance of the quotidian facts of her life by anyone. That this should not be enough, that she needed further inculcation into the lubricious details of minoritarian sexual practice or into the pseudo-political claims of oppression that accompanied it was the risible thought. But of course it would not be enough — not for those suddenly in charge of early childhood education throughout the Western world.

It bears noticing here that I speak as the product of my own prior conditioning — in retrospect, a relentless conditioning intended to undo heteropatriarchal norms beamed into my household every night — which I swallowed uncritically in the way that young children swallow uncritically whatever cultural product is aimed at them. I don’t remember anything about these shows which I watched regularly as a child. But they surely helped establishe my own baseline assumptions even if at no point did they cause me to doubt the priority of the nuclear family as the primary institution of socialization. The ludicrous scenarios by which the shows nominally evaded the portrayal of homosexual domesticity still then forbidden on the screen, while encouraging young to regard alternate domestic arrangements as in no way inferior to the ones that only a few decades prior had been seen as universal, seem quaint to us today. They laid the groundwork for the developments that would make them seem quaint in retrospect.

We all absorbed countless hours of televisual entertainment meant to disrupt the heteronormative familial expectations of children.

And so today we arrive at the next stage in this process to which I myself was subjected and upon which my own moral baseline was constructed. It is one that I bridle against.

The process now asks me to acquiesce to the teaching to very young children that they can be male, female, both or neither, on the basis of an internal subjective feeling; that young girls who want to stand up to pee are providing a message about their trangender identity, and that dosing children with drugs that chemically castrate them to prevent their physical and mental maturation can help prevent them from going through “the wrong puberty.” Today, teachers in 18 states obey the affirmative protocol of “social transition” whereby they assign cross-gendered names and pronouns to schoolchildren without parental notice or consent — hiding the practice from parents.

I’ve been talking to parents whose children are living in this new world of gender affirmation, this queer normative future, for a comprehensive feature story — the sort of story that the major publications should be working on themselves. One such parent has been keeping of a list of the friends and colleague of hers who have trans-identified children since her own daughter briefly identified as male in her freshman year of high school. The tally today is at 22. What I saw at that rainbow party was indeed the first premonition of a future that early childhood educators fully intend to to create through the medium of other people’s children. The parents I’ve been talking to testify to the amazing rapidity with which the inherited patterns of 20,000 years of human existence have been overwritten by a handful of pieces of copypasta. We will be looking closely at this change in the coming weeks.

— Second part of a series