Class trespassers . . .

Richard Rodriguez writes in Hunger of Memory about the pain of feeling that he was leaving his working-class Latino family behind as he pursued his own education and work as a writer and teacher. I too have felt split, cut off from my own past in similar ways. Eribon writes, “To invent myself, I had first of all to disassociate myself from all of that” (61)—which makes perfect sense to me. I remember undertaking that process of disassociation early on, even if I couldn’t have identified it at the time. During many a family reunion, I’d rather sit in the car, away from the festivities, reading or writing, once even pretentiously working on composing a symphony. I could feel myself, even at twelve, thirteen, fourteen years of age, already different—not only “queer” but also intuiting that to be who I needed to be, I would have to leave—as I ultimately did. If anything, I think my general queerness—my deeply felt sense that I wouldn’t, even couldn’t belong—propelled me out. Eribon puts it this way: “I described myself as a miracle case. It could well be that what made that miracle possible for me was my homosexuality” (199). That sounds completely right to me.

But it’s a painful rightness, and one that Eribon describes with both candor and care. The force of Eribon's analysis lies in the recognition that queerness and class are nearly unthinkable together. That is, it's hard to imagine a queer working class, even though it truly exists. Leslie Feinberg shows it to us all the time in her political writing and fiction, such as Stone Butch Blues. So does Amber Hollibaugh in My Dangerous Desires. And Dorothy Allison in Skin. But instead, in much pop culture, we are given images of queer interior decorators who fabulously outfit the houses of the well-to-do or help hapless straights find their own fabulousness. More realistically, the typical narrative is that provincial queers leave the rural behind and head for the flashy big city to pursue their lives in greater comfort and security, a move that can coincide with a step up in class status. Like Eribon, my uncle Glen had to leave rural Louisiana to create a queer life for himself in the city. And while I might have grown up in that same big city, his example haunted me—the need to leave behind a particular trajectory, a fixed genealogy, in pursuit of a different life. The force of his life, even cut short, remained latent in my own life as a possibility I could take, if I was only willing to do the difficult work of leaving. Such narratives of leave-taking form a stereotypical but nonetheless powerful trope in the cultural imaginary about young queer people.