Beware the Single Story

There is a TED talk that I have shown to my students every year since I have taught. It is given by novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and it is titled, "The Danger of a Single Story."

The "single story," as Adichie puts it, is the ideas and perceptions we have, whether from books, our family, or media, about a person, a place, or a group of people. For example, we Americans tend to have a single story about Africans: they are all starving and have myriad diseases and flies in their eyes and noses. When Adichie came to America (from Nigeria) her American roommate was shocked that she spoke English so well and that she knew how to use a stove. We might have a single story about Mexican immigrants as lazy freeloaders. We might have a single story about atheists as lost souls with no sense of morals. We might have a single story about people from Alabama and people from Afghanistan. People who aren't Mormon have a single story about Mormons. And the single story doesn't have to be only about bad things. We have a single story about the kind of life that celebrities live.

Straight people, by and large, have a single story about gay people. And it's usually not a good one.

Adichie says, "The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story" (emphasis added). Are some Islamic people religious extremists who would willingly kill anyone who goes against their religion? Yes. Are they all like that? Of course not. Are they even mostly like that? Certainly not. But the media, for the most part, has only given us a single story of Islam. Are all gay people self-absorbed sex fiends who go to fancy cocktail parties and dance clubs, take ecstasy, and love to redecorate their posh apartments? Clearly not, but we've been fed a single story for so long that that story has become the Gay Standard.

That standard can be seen even in innocuous, well-meaning places: the father who says, "my gay son is so sweet and kind and helpful and loving," the missionary who says, "I want to keep teaching this homosexual even though he still practices homosexuality," and the church that says, "We need to love and welcome all in spite of their sins." These words paint "the homosexual" as The Other and forces him into that single story where gay people are supposed to be innately selfish, sex-based, and sinful. The fact that so many well-meaning people need to point out that their gay child is also good and kind, the fact that missionaries are praised for teaching gay people "even though" they "practice" being homosexual, and the fact that churches see innate human sexuality as sinful means that the single story is being propagated. All of these phrases have one philosophy in common: tolerance.

As you may know from previous posts on the subject (like this one), I loathe the word tolerance since it implicitly suggests a hierarchy where the tolerator is higher up on the socio-religious ladder than the tolerated. This philosophy will continue until we dare to step outside the single LGBT story.

Yes, I was a ballet dancer. Yes, I play the piano. Yes, I love classical music. Yes, I hate football. Yes, I like to wear nice-looking clothes. Those are all gay stereotypes, and they are certainly not the only ones that apply to me. I am a good person; at least, I try to be the best person I can be. I don't help people in some attempt to show that "even gay people can do nice things!" I do it because I am a good person. I do not ever want someone to say, "My gay son is so loving and charitable." I love to camp. I don't like camping in order to deliberately subvert the gay norm. I do not ever want someone to say, "My gay friend likes to rough it and go a week without showering."

I do not "practice being homosexual." And I don't abstain from having sex because I want someone to praise me as some anomaly, that rare gay guy who isn't all about the sex. I do it because I went through a period where the single story that was forced upon me my whole life made me internalize and believe that I was a bad person, that I was not capable of truly loving, that I would never find true happiness. I am currently celibate because I know that I want the next person I am with to be someone special, someone I am in love with. Because I have come to know, through a very painful process, that I am not that single story, that stereotype that society and my religion taught me I was.

I wonder now what my life might have been like if I hadn't been taught a single story about myself, if I had grown up in a world that loved and embraced me for all of me. I wonder what my life would be like if I didn't have to be "accepted" or "tolerated."

As we become more enlightened, as we come to embrace the diversity of our world, let us also let go of our single stories, not just for LGBT people, but for all people. Let us recognize that we all have our own personal story, that there are plenty of things that unite us and bind us together, plenty that we have in common, but also so many wonderful, amazing, and beautiful things that make us individuals.