Queering the Neighborhood
It being the last day of Pride and all...
I spent a good chunk of this last week thinking about kink and Mr. Rogers.
Before you start thinking I have some sort of fetish for Presbyterian ministers in cardigans and house slippers, let me be clear. I was not having kinky thoughts about Mr. Rogers (though if that’s your thing, god bless). What I was thinking about was the radical love and inclusion of Mr. Rogers and the watered-down, tepid inclusiveness of an increasingly mainstream and corporate-friendly Pride.
Fred Rogers was a man of strong Christian faith. But unlike the many public figures who profess strong Christian faith these days, Rogers actually followed the teachings of Jesus. He approached love as a verb, rather than a noun, and modeled radically inclusive belonging. He once said, “Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.”
Though he argued that our similarities, the things that connect us, are always greater than our differences, he didn’t look to ignore or devalue people’s divergences from the norm. In his decades of work with children, in fact, he continually focused on the intrinsic uniqueness of every person and modeled loving people for what made them special.
He was also a consistent, if sometimes imperfect, ally of the queer people in his life. He famously invited Neighborhood regular Officer Clemmons, played by François S. Clemmons, a black, gay man, to come cool his feet with Rogers in a kiddie pool during the height of racial tensions in 1969. The implicit association with the Christian story of Jesus washing his disciple Peter’s feet was clear, and subversive as hell.
Rogers also, it is true, encouraged Clemmons not to come out publicly as gay so that he wouldn’t threaten the fate of the already-popular kids’ tv show. He even encouraged Clemmons to commit to a marriage of convenience with a woman to protect his career—which Clemmons did. This was not Rogers’ finest moment in the history of allyship. But it’s also worth noting that when that marriage ended, Rogers apologized to Clemmons. He encouraged him to find a male partner and subsequently welcomed Clemmons’ gay friends to the tv set in Pittsburgh.
I don’t call it integrity practice for nothing. We don’t always get things right. But we keep working at it. We practice and get better. Just like Mr. Rogers.
Despite acknowledging that he had been attracted at different times to both men and women, Fred Rogers never claimed the label of bisexual. He never went to a Pride parade, or publicly discussed queer rights at all. But in his efforts to love and welcome everyone in their uniqueness, he offered us a framework to reconsider how we approach Pride.
If we want to create a world in which queer people are safe to live and love whoever and however they choose, we have to fight for safety for the young, queer, sex worker hooked on meth and the homeless, trans woman of color as readily as we do the middle-class gay dads that look nice in tv commercials or the glamorous, hot, Hollywood lesbians. We have to act, as Fred Rogers did, as if everyone is a part of our human family, and that the unique gifts they bring to our family are worthy of our love.
Pride is not a petting zoo. It’s not a family-friendly chance to ogle at the sparkly, happy queers. Do children deserve to see queerness in a positive light? Yes, they do. Fred Rogers advocated that we “do what we do and love it in front of the children” in order to introduce them to possibilities, but he also understood that there are ways to address complex topics with children. They do not involve the entirety of the queer community being forced to censure its kink, radicalism, creativity, or anger so no straight parent will ever have to worry that we are coming for their kids.
Rest assured, a radically inclusive, loving Pride that makes space for all that being queer means will draw the kids who need us to us when they’re ready. Straight kids have the rest of the whole world to celebrate in. They’ll be just fine.
Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public. — Cornel West
In light of what Pride has become— corporate, rainbow-draped virtue-signaling and Right wing-fueled backlash— gay author Richard Morgan speaks my mind when he argues that being queer will never be “normal”, nor should it have to be reframed that way to make it palatable to a mainstream, straight public or its corporate sponsors. “The broader, blander mainstream desires authenticity in foreign cuisine or subtitled foreign streaming shows, but it demands sad homogenization of the forever foreign nature of queerness”, Morgan writes. “Consigning someone to a caged and cataloged existence isn’t an act of tolerance; it’s an act of taxidermy. I can’t abide a merely unapologetic queer life; it cries out to be unfamiliar, uncomfortable, unpredictable, even unknowable. True queerness is a leap of faith — a pilgrimage to our fullest, truest selves…”
I no longer crave the comforts of normalcy because so much joy and insight have come on the other side of fear and being an outlier, even an outcast. I have divorced my comforts from those of people around me. I know now that our culture’s fringe is also its framework. That is the power of queerness. Normalization is, frankly, anti-queer. No amount of respectability politics can change that. Being normal is a lie people tell themselves to cover up the reality that they are merely common.— Richard Morgan
If you don’t read in Morgan’s words someone insisting on the right to practice their integrity then you have missed the radical message of this newsletter. Practicing integrity is no more a family-friendly parade of sparkly, moral do-gooding than Pride should be. It is getting down into the uncomfortable, messy muck of ourselves and figuring out how to be all of who we are in community. It is living our beliefs and desires, joy and anger and grief with awareness and intention, not in pursuit of palatability but wholeness—for ourselves and for everyone.
One of Mr. Rogers’ favorite stories was about the genius cellist Yo-Yo Ma teaching a group of young string players. Ma said to one student, “Nobody else can choose to make the sound you make, that particular sound in that particular way.” For Rogers, this was a testament to the blessing that is our intrinsic uniqueness, and his goal was to embrace the singularity of everyone with love.
That’s the kid-appropriate version of what Pride should be, what practicing integrity should be. Here’s the adult version:
There is only one you in all the history of the world. If you are transgressive or kinky, flamboyant or wild, wanting or messy or struggling or angry or seeking or sad, be that. Be all of it, all of who you are. There is not simply room for you here; we will not simply tolerate you. Our family is incomplete and lacks integrity without you. We need you. We love you.
It's You I Like
Written by Fred Rogers | © 1971, Fred M. Rogers
It's you I like,
It's not the things you wear,
It's not the way you do your hair
But it's you I like
The way you are right now,
The way down deep inside you
Not the things that hide you,
Not your toys
They're just beside you.
But it's you I like
Every part of you.
Your skin, your eyes, your feelings
Whether old or new.
I hope that you'll remember
Even when you're feeling blue
That it's you I like,
It's you yourself
It's you.
It's you I like.
Happy Pride, y’all. Be back next time. Bye-bye!
Many thanks to Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, who published an amazing newsletter on the radical theology of Mr. Rogers this week. You should read it.
Oh , this! This, this, this!
Reading this in my car after kid drop off —and all the tears. That man has been such a light in my life, ever since I was that exhausted mom in the little apartment in France and I would put on his songs and recording he of his shows to calm us all down. Thank you for highlighting him and sharing Rabbi Danya’s piece, too. 💜