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by Marco Wilkinson

Cheerleaders with beards strolled arm in arm down the street. "Women" with three-foot-high green bee-hives giggled at silver-lame suited space boys. Six-foot-five divas draped in sequins and heels and attitudes that extended  around them like magical auras sauntered along, too beautiful, too glamorous, to  even notice the ordinary people around them. But if a camera, glinting in the  sunlight, caught their eyes, they turned fiercely, like dragons with glittering scales, not to attack, but to pose. Some over nine feet tall in full regalia,  they were totems of defiance against any attempt at definition. This was  Wigstock, a festival of drag and a window into the recent disappearance of  "Truth" from the West's intellectual landscape.

I walked into this wonderland unassumingly and was sucked into its surreal reality. It turned out to be the perfect introduction to my studies at NYU because it showed me just how slippery, and ultimately untenable "Truth" can be.  I came to this city and this school for many reasons, but one of them was  because I am gay, and I wanted to live in an environment that was not only  tolerant but actively accepting of that part of myself. I had gone to a Catholic high school, where, surprisingly enough, I received the most support as I began to work out for myself a definition for my sexuality. In high school I embraced what I suppose is our society's mainstream pro-gay stance: "Sexual orientation and gender are natural, maybe even biological, and not a matter of choice, thus homosexuality should not be condemned." In the spirit of this position even my  religion teachers took on the issue of homosexuality in classes on morality, teaching tolerance and acceptance. And yet, after my experiences in New York,  starting with Wigstock, I can see how simplistic and even demeaning the argument really is. Coming in the form of a justification, it amounts to little more than an excuse for my existence. "Marco is gay, but it can't be helped."

"Well, honey, are you gonna take my picture or are you gonna let all this  beauty go to waste?"

I just stood there for several seconds in awe. What was I to make of a seven foot tall Diana Ross with an impossibly deep voice and a dress of purple sequins that trailed forever behind her on the soft summer  breeze? This, contrary to everything I ever believed in support of my sexuality, was certainly not natural. The lush purple eye shadow and the glittering  lipstick still moist on her smile were certainly chosen, not forced by  mysterious natural forces onto this person's face. And though it was all  unnatural, it was still beautiful. This utterly unreal vision before me evoked a sense of liberty that made the "natural, biological" argument that had once wrapped around me like a warm coat, protecting me from the cold barbs of my high school peers, seem more like a straitjacket--restraining, uncomfortable, and  untrue.

This new sense of discomfort over my own sense of self-definition stayed with me, through experience and study, until this semester when I was introduced  to Stanley Fish, whose ideas clarified for me issues that were quickly  dismantling that old "natural" argument before my eyes. In his essay, "How To Recognize A Poem When You See One," Fish, a prominent literary theorist, discusses the ability of words to take on multiple meanings and examines the source of those meanings. He proposes that meaning rests not in the object of  interpretation but in the method by which the object is interpreted.

He recounts how he taught two classes in very different subjects,  linguistics and religious poetry, and how the same words, a list of names on the chalkboard, could have very different meanings. In his linguistics class the list of names was for a reading assignment. In his religious poetry class he found that his students easily understood the list of names as a poem, finding  lucid and appropriate meanings within the context of religious poetry. Fish  presents us with a problem here of one object containing multiple meanings whose answer, while addressed to the literary community, begs for application in wider and wider circles of understanding life, including understanding of one's own sexuality.

How can the same word or words explode with an infinity of meanings  without creating meaninglessness? How can something as complex as gender and desire be crystallized into stasis and objectivity? The answer is in the act of  recognition, simple enough at first glance but a complex process under Fish's  keen eye. Fish writes that while we may believe we recognize poetry by its  distinguishing features, with his students "it was the act of recognition that came first . . . and the distinguishing features that followed" (143). Meaning rises up after the interpreter is able to name what she or he sees. This naming allows for a construction of parts to fit the interpreter's idea of a  pre-supposed whole. "Definitions," Fish writes, "instruct them [the interpreters] in ways of looking that will produce what they expect to see"  (144). Thus, a series of words, as in Fish's example, can be both an assignment  and a poem, depending upon the name or blueprint according to which the parts  are arranged and viewed.

In my own life, as I look back, I can see clearly now that moment when,  standing in the middle of my kitchen at the age of fifteen, I thought to myself, "I am gay." The sentence raced faster and faster through my head, organizing all of the emotions, thoughts, and experiences that I had until that moment been  unable to name. I can see now how from that moment on I began rearranging the  parts of my life to fit this definition. My mistake was in thinking that I had  discovered a "fact," when now I realize that no such thing can objectively exist.

Fish goes on in his essay to explain that we do not notice this process  of definition and construction because the definitions, the blueprints by which  we organize and understand our lives, have been inculcated in us by society so deeply that they appear to be natural facts. At once creating a mask of reality which veils our constructs, it also holds all of our individual constructs of  "reality" together so that life doesn't disintegrate into meaninglessness. In a world where each person constructs her or his own reality there is surprisingly  less variety than one would think, Fish points out, because we all get our  supply of definitions and categories by which to interpret the world from the  same reservoir of information. As parts of the same society we see the world in  remarkably similar ways.

When the thought, "I am gay," occurred to me I was working with a  definition that, for better or worse, I received, like everybody else, from the society in which I was raised. Thus, just as I was reconstructing my life in the  image of a definition I shared with everyone around me, they were all interpreting this newly reconstructed self using the same definition I was  using. I was making myself "gay" and they were seeing someone who was "gay." The fact that both the viewer and the viewed share the same definition from society works to create the veneer of naturalness. But there are problems with the  "naturalness" that is created, because it reduces the complexity of the process  by which we understand reality to mere objectivity. Although it seems so, nothing has inherent meaning. It is precisely the inherency implicit in a  "natural" approach to reality that makes it so unnatural.

This unnaturalness sometimes allows for cracks to form in the mask of a  "natural" reality, creating a sense of unease which offers a chance at insight.  In my own experience I could never construct a perfect mask of real "gayness" to fit over my face. I always felt a subtle sense of alienation from myself because I could never quite get the parts of my life to fit the mold of "gayness" which  I knew, even though I was supposed to be "naturally" gay.

While there may be an uneasiness in trying to wear masks that will never precisely fit, the prospect of living in a world that doesn't truly exist outside of one's own head can be unnerving. Fish forces us to realize there are  no anchors of Truth to hold on to. Many right now are struggling to reassert a  new sense of objectivity and "naturalness" onto a world grown too complex, too  full of possibility. Sadly, one of those people is Lynne Cheney, former chairwoman of the NEH, who has claimed that, in the words of Matthew Arnold,  study of the humanities should be "a disinterested endeavor to learn and  propagate the best that is known and thought in the world" (Times 3-10-95). She does not pursue the questions, "'Best' according to whom?" or "'Known and thought' by whom?" If she did, perhaps she would be a little less  sure of herself when she writes that the NEA and the NEH "will be spending taxpayers' money on academics and artists whose purpose is to mock the idea of  'the best that is known and thought in the world,'" a statement that is not only filled with judgment but also misrepresents the motives of the people she discusses. In this case, where Cheney is actually supporting the dismantling of the organization she once headed, the "naturalness" of truth is not only unnatural but dangerous.

"Honey, a goddess is a rare thing. Are you just gonna stand there or are you gonna take my picture?" The drag queen's immaculately tweezed eyebrows arched up and her sparkling lips puckered inquisitively. I smiled and snapped a quick shot before she moved on to other admirers.

Looking back on Wigstock I can see that it was but the first foray into a  world of illusion and artifice that has grown larger and larger as my studies show me just how complex a problem "reality" can be. The drag queens are  transformed. No longer otherworldy divas, their wigs have become helmets, their dresses armor. In my mind now, they stand as warriors who fight not on the side  of "Truth," but, in fact, to expose the lie that "Truth" is. I thank them and Stanley Fish for helping me loose myself from the straitjacket of "naturalness." I am unnatural. I am queer.

Works Cited

Cheney, Lynne. "Mocking America at U.S. Expense." New York Times ,10 March 1995: Op-Ed.

Fish, Stanley. "How To Recognize A Poem When You See One." Ways of Reading. 3rd edition. Ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky, Boston: Bedford, 1993. 140-52.

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