Humiliation is a very American kink. We desire in bed what we cannot get on the national stage. I have always been ashamed of my desire to be humiliated, but lately, that has changed. It is my duty to be humiliated. Humiliate me for peace. Humiliate and humility share the root word humble, which in turn is derived from the Latin humus, meaning earth, low, soil. I never considered before that my desire to be humiliated might be related to a desire to be brought close to the earth. A desire which is constantly thwarted by my country. I know, of course, that those who are not American can also desire humiliation. And I know that none of this is news that a big macho man, say, secretly wants to be brought low. But I am not a big macho man. I am a short, balding, slightly effeminate of center white trans man who has no choice but to bring his citizenship into bed with him. Humiliate me for peace. Debase me to remove the foreign bases.
In a time of war, it feels like everything I do is wrong and none of it can fail.
Humility actually feels kind of hard to write about for an audience of queer writers. It’s not something we’re taught to value. We’re either meant to be proud and visible and loud and unapologetic; or we’re supposed to hide out of sight and steep in shame (presupposing the interlocutor on this side of the divide thinks we deserve to exist at all.) But none of this really represents humility, which I think is a kind of self-assured modesty: i.e. you are comfortable with who you are and what you do with your life, and so you don’t feel the need to make it sound bigger or shinier than it is.
My allegiance to and love of the small things is part of my practice of humility. I want to feel close to the small and inconspicuous. Being loud and moving quickly makes this difficult.
And then there’s the question of the link between the earth and humility in the first place. Does this exist because of the Great Chain of Being? Because earth is not heaven is not the sphere of politics? The land, the dirt, the humus are all easy to walk over and forget they are there, but only if you live without any connection to them in the first place. Perhaps humility is more about remembering this connection in each moment.
Choosing to write about one’s connection to the earth as a queer writer, however, is a different matter entirely. Part of me feels like the structure of STREAM is a result of being unwilling to stay for too long inside of this discomfort of writing about myself and my relation to the land. Because if I stay too long I am forced to admit that this connection is much shallower than I wish or even than I imagine it to be. Part of this is a result of being bicoastal, the fact that flying is such a big part of my life now. Then again, there is a sort of connection I feel to the land when I am looking at it from above and not on a screen.