Shame, Privilege and Pain: A Feminist Autobiography

I don’t like to repeat myself.

As a middle schooler in suburban New Jersey, I was on the receiving end of numerous and vicious verbal assaults, often of a homophobic and misogynist nature.

Fag, girl, ballet boy (I was then a student at the School of American Ballet in Manhattan).

“I love annoying Tim, it’s so much fun.”

“Hello Timmy, my gay friend.”

“Diet Coke break!”

…the last a reference to a television commercial in which a group of women ogle a well-built male construction worker. That my classmates were culturally sophisticated enough to read this commercial’s Queer subtext only resulted in more pointed harassment.

I was only able to keep my cool for so long. Then I would erupt in aggressive physical retaliation; books, binders, even desks were hurled across the room. Once, an incident involving “kick me” signs and wadded up balls of paper hurled my direction resulted in my having to be physically restrained by my fellow students in home room. These outbursts only resulted in slew of additional taunts and nicknames – temprotazm. Timinator. Pscyho boy.

These events were cyclical, repetitive. Several years of my life are a blur of principal’s offices, or of dark corners where I retreated tear-streaked waiting for a school officials to locate and reprimand me, the closest thing I had to sympathetic listeners. At least they always asked “why.” I was shamed by my inability to stop these situations from reoccurring, to become less of a target, to better blend in, to reign in my emotions, to better express myself verbally rather than through violent retaliatory outbursts.

Recently, my therapist suggested that the reason I don’t like to have the same conversation more than once, that I resist reiterating things I’ve already said, might somehow be linked to these adolescent cycles of repetitive shame.

I don’t like to repeat myself.

Since becoming a Women’s and Gender Studies student at DePaul University, I feel as though I have been asked to write multiple “feminist autobiographies,” or to otherwise narrate the development of my feminist consciousness. I’ve privately recoiled from what sometimes felt like the self-indulgent character of these assignments, preferring to focus on the theories, arguments and insights provided by outside sources. As a result, I’ve framed my feminism in terms of intellectual and ideological commitments – transnationalism, intersectionality, social constructionism, Queer theory. But intellectual abstraction, while necessary for drawing connections between experiences and analyzing the construction and maintenance of systemic power and oppression, has its limitations. Intellectualism can mask avoidance or denial, both of experiences of privilege and experiences of pain.

After relocating to a friendlier and progressive private high school in lower Manhattan, I came of age and “came out.” Identification as “gay” was linked with identification as an activist. In the years since high school, I’ve begun to frame my experiences primarily in terms of privilege. My high school was ensconced in East-coast liberal elitism. Anywhere west of the Hudson River was a “square state,” the only acceptable travel destinations located across the Atlantic. My sexuality was characterized by my classmates as a “non-issue.”

My prior experiences of isolation and condemnation have receded into the background. My youth feels bifurcated between exaggerated experiences of pain and privilege, the former feeling as though they happened to someone else, someone who is no longer a part of me. My therapist[1] says this disidentification is common amongst survivors of trauma.

But there are other reasons for my emotional distancing. Although my experiences of verbal harassment did not surface in our discussions until very recently, my therapist and I have spent the past four years analyzing my complex relationship with my mother. It is this relationship that I have seen as most formative of my ideologies, behaviors and patterns. For many years, my mother and I lived alone together as a two-person unit, deeply identified with one another. My mother’s anger at having been wronged and mischaracterized both by her family and social institutions encouraged my own condemnation of injustice. At the same time, the lack of ambiguity in her worldview and her expectations of loyalty and personal excellence became something of a prison as I grew older and felt compelled to differentiate myself. Mirroring the separation in my social experiences are two similarly separate phases of this more private relationship. My middle school years were a time of hyper-connection with my mother as I strongly felt she was my only ally and supporter. In contrast, high school was a time of heated interpersonal battles and painful distancing between us.

My mother assisted me in framing my early adolescent experiences in terms of systemic violence. Together, we condemned what we saw as my middle school’s homophobic negligence as it failed to take seriously verbal harassment based upon “perceived sexual orientation.” But when I later acknowledged my actual Queerness, she was less supportive. I felt that my Queerness was only intelligible to her as a category of victimhood. She repeatedly voiced her fears for my safety, suggesting that I keep my sexuality a secret from my classmates. Although she actively condemns the stigma of gay identity, my mother reinforces the shame of gay sex. Her own deeply-entrenched and moralistic notions of appropriate an inappropriate sexual decisions and behaviors, generally couched in psycholigizing and medicalizing terms of “healthy” and “unhealthy” sexuality have felt genuinely marginalizing. She instilled in me a terror of the purportedly abusive older men who prowled the streets of the West Village in search of younger tail. As a result, it took me a number of years to accept my desires, which often trend toward the older end of the age spectrum. These days, I often react to her influence with a vocal anti-assimilationist sex radicalism that includes condemnation of marriage, fetish acceptance[2] and defense of public sex and sometimes belies my own rather conventional/vanilla practices. An additional dimension of shame accompanied my privileged escape from the hostile environments that greet the majority of Queer youth. My mother frequently contributed to this shame as in our arguments she repeatedly threatened to return me to public school or force me to live with my father in Minnesota, where she declared I might not be so lucky nor so privileged.

Over time, I grew critical of her response to my earlier experiences of harassment. While I needed her to help me contextualize my experiences, I also needed her help to take responsibility for my unhealthy relationship to suppressed anger, an ongoing concern that continues to haunt me as two summers ago I was arrested at O’Hare airport for punching a CTA vending machine that refused to take my dollar bills. That this incident occurred returning from a weekend with my mother is likely not a coincidence.

I don’t like to repeat myself.

Shame again visited me last year as Diversity Outreach Coordinator” for Spectrum, DePaul’s GLBTQ and allied student organization. For some time, I have been haunted by the sense that I am unable to “walk my talk,” that my analyses of power, oppression and privilege rarely leave the classroom to manifest as concrete action. I unconsciously felt that validation from other activists would remove my shame and unhealthfully entered into my year on Spectrum’s executive board seeking an external stamp of approval. The results were disastrous. As I moved into my new position, I felt abandoned by the peers that had supported me the previous year. I didn’t feel attacked, just ignored, as their priorities shifted toward other movements and initiatives with which I was uninvolved. My problematic motivations lead me to communicate badly and behave erratically. When the board declared their intention to plan the final of my six “diversity workshops” without my input, I exploded, making condemnatory public comments about the limitations of student organizing. In response, a fellow group member provided me with a no-holds-barred critique that continues to haunt me, as it seemed to confirm my concerns regarding the inefficacy and privileged intellectual and artistic nature of my activist skills and orientation.

As far as you Tim, you're more problematic than you ever want to let on. I think you thought that you could join in the Women and Gender Studies department, hiding your insecurities behind all the pseudo-academic vernacular that you spew out, hoping that no one would ever see you wipe your nose as it was shoved so far up the professors' asses. But honestly, do your own work and check your male and white privilege bit time, it's appalling. You took on the position of Diversity Outreach Specialist, never did anything with it, yet were in the position to watch the inclusiveness of Spectrum and advocate for marginalized students. If that isn't white male privilege I don't know what is baby.

Aspects of this critique are politically valid, while the individual in question often employs a polarizing and dismissive framework that is damaging within our interpersonal relationship. Negotiating this muddled terrain has been difficult and painful. These experiences, which resulted in the evisceration of my relationships with several key members of DePaul’s Queer activist community, reminded me that shame is crippling. There is no room for ego-based insecurity in activism to combat privilege. My own harsh judgments and condemnations of the limitations of my own activism have prevented me from owning my skills and attributes. Furthermore, my self-shaming was directed outward as I criticized the practices of individuals who daily put their individual welfare on the line in the interests of creating a safer and more inclusive campus.

Coming to this point in my narrative, I begin to realize why storytelling feels threatening, particularly when my stories do not represent me the ways I’ve desired to be seen.

I do not like to repeat myself.

Growing up, I was ever aware of myself as a representative of my mother. In a dominant culture that viciously positions single mothers as the source of all evil both social and moral, I felt responsible for validating her parenthood through my successes. Thus I have always felt drawn toward defending her, even as I’ve grown critical of many of her actions.

In the interest of re-situating my feminist consciousness in personal experience, I conclude this essay by returning to her defense with a series of experiences that were instrumental to my feminist development:

--When I was five years old, my mother explained to me why some people choose to hyphenate their names. In response, I changed my name from Timothy Jones Yelvington to Timothy Jones-Yelvington.

--Also when I was five years old, my mother explained in accessible terms what it meant to be White and male, encouraging me to remain aware of my unearned privileges.

--As editor of a national magazine for the generally progressive Women’s Division of the United Methodist Church, my mother introduced me to numerous transnational issues in gender justice.

--My mother instigated my involvement in the “Reconciling Congregation Program” (now Reconciling Ministries Network), an organization working for full inclusion of GLBT person within the United Methodist Church.

For each of these experiences save the second, I might offer a secondary critical note to problematize its limitations. But they are nonetheless crucial to my development. I am learning to own my experiences of privilege and pain.

One of the reasons my Spectrum workshops failed was because I neglected the importance of personal experiences. I thought that perhaps if we spent less time discussing individual negotiations of identity and more time discussing systemic and institutional power structures, members of our group might stop approaching these issues through hyper-individualized frameworks. These goals resulted in workshops that were criticized as dry, academic and inaccessible.

Although I detest repeating particular conversations, ideas, or arguments, my boyfriend complains that I often repeat the same childhood stories over and over again. Yet somehow, despite frequently and self-consciously declaring myself a storyteller, I’ve neglected the power of narrative.

It is frequently necessary to repeat myself.

[1] I am sensitive to the cultural specificity of psychotherapy and its linkages with White middle-class privilege and individualist assumptions.
[2] I remain critical of racist fetishization.