Thawing Out My Frozen Heart
Letter to the editor
Okay, this might sound strange. I am probably not the type of person who usually contacts you, but I noticed this article by Zachary Zane pop up on my Facebook newsfeed and, although I would usually scroll by, something made me read it.
I am right-wing. I do have some sympathy for social justice causes, but too many aggressive arguments on Twitter made with sneering condescension, the elitist language mentioned in the article, and what appears to be outright hatred of anyone remotely conservative, have pushed me further into the right-wing camp than I feel entirely comfortable. I am not making excuses, I am just laying out my position and partly how I got there.
Politics in my country is sort of veering into the fraught identity politics I see in America, and I have been somewhat of a reactionary against it. So that was my position until this morning, when your article pushed me from a spark of revelation into a full-blown realisation that I have been too closed-minded, have stayed silent for my own comfort, and have suppressed the open-mindedness and creativity I fully embraced when I was younger.
Recently, I saw a film with the actor Ezra Miller. The skill and character he has intrigued me, so I read up on him and how he identifies as queer. It made me think back to my teens, when I loved people with that confidence and belief in themselves, and how I would actively seek out queer venues in my city because I knew the crowd would be warmer, more creative and embracing of creativity, and more honest than the degrading, uniform meat markets I subjected myself to because of peer pressure.
I started to review my own politics and how I had come to be in the midst of a crowd that, although I agree with on ideas such as meritocracy and some economics, often anger and exasperate me with hard-line, sweeping stances against queer people, not even on more controversial issues, but based on what seems to be a rage directed against their mere existence. That is not who I want to be. I don’t believe it is who I am, but I am even more ashamed and disappointed in myself for staying silent, for allowing peers to say these things unchallenged, for scrolling by as I always did until Zachary Zane’s article caught my eye.
It was this line that struck me: “I learned how to speak about identity politics using academic language, so when the topic comes up, I can now say things like: ‘non-binary depictions of gender help to eradicate toxic hypermasculinity and dismantle hegemonic heteronormativity,’ when all I really mean is: ‘this picture of a man wearing a dress shows that it is okay for men to embrace their more feminine side. I hope to see more pictures like it because I think it can help men.’” I realised a lot of my reactions against more liberal-minded people were not actually against the core message, they were because I hadn’t bothered to decipher the academic terms. I just saw the sheer number of tweets using elitist, exclusive language and reacted with a snarl, a product of my own fear that phrases like “dismantling hegemonic heteronormativity” were calls for a nuclear war against my identity, culture, even demographic group. I am actually embarrassed now that my reaction was so stubbornly, gleefully arrogant and ignorant. When Zachary Zane broke down the example to show it simply meant freedom to be yourself and not have these crushing pressures put on us, and for a bit more diversity that would actually allow that amazing young actor to star in more wonderful films, it dawned on me that I actually believe that too. What a better world it will be, when we can live and let live, and nobody has to feel ashamed, excluded or stigmatised for being more than the sum of their parts.
So the whole point of my long message is that I just wanted to thank you for helping bring me to my damn senses, and to say that maybe sometimes you feel like the world is a cold, hard place and you are fighting against a hard enemy who will hate and lash out, based on nothing but their own insecurities and ignorance, and you would be right, but also that you are not alone. You have turned around even a bitch like myself, so I am damn sure there are others here in my wing of politics, thinking that maybe things are not alright and it is time for some self-reflection and action.
I swear to you I will no longer scroll on by, I will act on the lessons I have been taught recently. Please, please thank Zachary Zane for me. I hope he feels some love from karma today for thawing out my frozen heart.
Kindest Regards,
Published January 1, 2020
Updated June 19, 2023
Published in Issue IV: Activism