Charlie Hebdo: There's a price for everything
Eerily, the Charlie Hebdo killings happened on the same day that a friend and I had a discussion about the contents of my Facebook account. For those of you who, in the slim chance, are not aware of this feature, Facebook provides a cover photo option on the profile page, where users put up things that are personal or meaningful to them.
My cover photos are generally images of male love, with two men embracing, kissing, or just lying together in bed. I pick up these pictures from a film that I have watched, or a website that I am reading, because they feel personal and meaningful. When I watched Lilting, for example, I was so consumed with the tenderness between Richard and Kai (Ben Whishaw and Andrew Leung), that writing about it did not seem enough. I wanted to consecrate it in some grander way, and for weeks, my Facebook cover was a picture of the protagonists kissing.
For obvious reasons, some of my friends do not agree with my cover photos’ subject matter. Not for any homophobic reasons but for propriety’s sake. They think these pictures take away from the seriousness they associate with me, first as a person, but more pertinently, as a writer. They worry that I am tarnishing my “image” with the pictures. “I totally get that you are gay, but when was the last time you saw someone put up pictures of straight people making out on their profile?” a friend asked me the other day, as we watched news of the Charlie Hebdo massacre flash on TV (I will explain the connection in a bit).
My friend has a point — she does. I understand that the images are mildly provocative even if there is no pornography involved. The current picture, for example, has two shirtless men locking lips as they lie sprawled in opposite directions. I concede it can be disconcerting to log into Facebook, say, early morning and be overwhelmed by the sight of too much entangled male skin, if one is not into that sort of thing. Is that a good reason for me to stop posting the pictures?
Why provoke, right? When some of my relatives started complaining to my family about the photos, I was forced to consider if I should perhaps find a middle ground between expressing myself in whatever way I deemed fit and hewing to more conventional definitions of good taste (my immediate family, to their credit, never bothered me). They were only photos after all, I told myself, and were, at any rate, not a match on some of the stuff I was putting out there – emotive write-ups in which I freely explored elements of gay identity that I found cute, difficult, or both. Why bother with a bunch of photos?
But I kept coming across moments when a photo of two men would hold a resonance that a 1,000-word article bawling with rhetoric could only hope to achieve. One such moment happened as I watched the Italian gay web series G&T on YouTube recently. Tommaso and Guilio are childhood buddies who go through confusion, heartbreak and loss before discovering that they are, after all, meant for one another. The two make for such a beautiful couple, and not just because of their tortuous story. They are also really good-looking and come together on screen in a delicate simulation of how I imagine a perfect relationship to be. (I would like to say more, such as how desire between men plays itself out, how it is feeds off not merely the physical, but much more; but that’s a topic for another piece.) There was no way I was going to rest until I had, in some way, let the world know about Tommaso and Guilio. So I picked up a picture of them nestling their necks and pasted it as my Facebook cover picture.
Every gay man discovers his own way of locating himself in respect to his sexuality after coming out (if he finds the time and space to come out, that is). Sometimes this may involve overstepping conventional boundaries. It is only natural. Gay men and women go through their early lives, through school and college, in the hope of a real existence. If they are not being summarily bullied, they are at least keeping their most intimate desires to themselves for fear of ridicule and ostracism. When they gather the courage to finally come out, they cannot but begin to see the world through their sexuality. They come to wear it on their sleeve and rejoice in it as if it were a secret personal gift, until they find themselves and settle into calmer waters.
My way of this celebration, among others, has been the Facebook pictures. It’s not even a political statement anymore — “Look here, I am gay.” It was, at one time, but my ship sailed a while ago and now I only post pictures of something that really moves me.
Yet, there is still my friend’s carping to deal with. Truth be told, if she were not so adamant about it, I may have eventually given up on the goddamn thing out of sheer monotony. But now that I am assailed with questions of respectability, I make it a point to double down on my efforts and refuse to retire into the bunker. I don’t think posting gay pictures puts me in a bucket that strips me of my standing as a writer. If anything, my choice to post whatever, melds with my choices as a writer to produce an all-encompassing gay identity. Remember, provocation is (or was) only partly my aim. Expression is another, and I don’t see how I can resolve the conflict between that and someone’s discomfort without compromising on either my idea of propriety or theirs. To me, propriety is borne of love, or respect, or one of those gentle, worth-aspiring for emotions. Propriety is personal and malleable. And if it means I am going to get on some people’s wrong sides, that is a choice I am happy to make.
As for the Charlie Hebdo link, I know the contexts are very different and there is no comparison between the complexity of terror and my own niche dilemma. But here it is. In the aftermath of the Paris massacre, Shekhar Gupta wrote on this website that he agreed with the cartoonists’ right to offend, even if he himself would not publish the cartoons in question. That is a laudable aim but one that I find untenable. I don’t think I can sit on the fence and merely dip into the intellectual without getting my hands dirty, as it were. If I am called upon to take sides, I prefer to have my skin in the game. I am willing to earn the opprobrium that comes with putting (perhaps inappropriate) pictures of men making out online, if that is the price I am expected to pay for expressing myself.