This post was submitted by Andrew Fogle

Readers who remember last Wednesday’s TNG content despite the weekend torrent of alcohol and amyl nitrates will recall that new contributor Chris Stedman, in addition to dibs-ing a delicious bit of wordplay I’d intended to use in a future column title, totally brought it on and called me out in the course of his nuanced commentary on the ethics of blogging. I thought about offering to settle things with a private ink-spilling contest, but after getting a handle on the size of his staff profile I knew it would be more fun to grapple with his considerable rhetorical endowment before the lustful eyes of the few dozen voyeurs who read this column (note that this innuendo is actually topical.)

As I read it, Chris’ concern is that insensitively direct stories about the  “private lives of queer folks” risk a profound moral shortcoming: by sharing too much, too quickly with those who might not be comfortable discussing, for instance, analingus techniques with a complete stranger, we queers might alienate people who could otherwise, with patience and prudence, open up (conversationally) to talk about new and interesting perspectives on things like faith, politics, and life. He defends what he calls an “ethic of empathic discretion,” an approach which resists beating others over the head with stories about, say, beating off over the heads of others, and makes space for different voices to break into and expand our own horizon of understanding (the criticism of “Ivory Tower” intellectualism was obviously lost on me, but not the fact that “Ivory Tower” would make for a terrific drag name.)

This all seems about right. We gays do seem to trend toward a kind of exhibitionism which, though rooted in the best intentions and most sound political reasoning, tends to shut other people up and keep them from feeling comfortable telling their own stories. It’s the difference between, say, an evangelical Christian who talks about her faith only in the mutually-affirming context of a close friendship  and the guy with the “John 3:16” placard at a major league baseball game: one is an invitation to open and sincere dialogue of the sort that can change lives, while the other is a conversation-stopping bumper sticker that makes you want to shout “Do whatever you want with your god, just keep it behind closed church doors on Sunday mornings!”

For all of that, I’m convinced that there is an appropriate place for heedless, aggressively pornographic, employment-jeopardizing narrative ejaculation. Say, the kind of place where a community of differently-minded queer people come together in solidarity to exchange interesting ideas about sex, sexuality, culture, and identity on a flashy and well-managed internet forum to figure out, at the end of the day, what the fuck to do with their freedom. In a place like this, I think that another, even more basic ethical demand comes into play.

Blogging of the kind that we get up to on TNG shouldn’t be confused with autobiography. In blogging, we don’t tell stories about ourselves, as if some stable, self-contained subjectivity with interesting things to say about Japanese sexual subcultures or with hilarious poop jokes to tell is reporting, neutrally and transparently, on thoughts and experiences it pulls out of its stream of consciousness. In blogging, we tell stories that become ourselves, configuring emotions and ideas, memories and hopes, pasts and futures in a way that orients us in the world and, finally, keeps us sane.

The blogger’s “I” is the pronominal equivalent of a hungry power-bottom – demanding, well-worn, and infinitely accommodating, it challenges reader and writer alike to enter into it and get a feel for new and stimulating kinds of boundaries. However briefly, it gives us the room to be someone we’re not, exploring from the first-person perspective the kinds of emotional or cultural or sexual biographies we would otherwise have no excuse to live through (end raunchy extended metaphor here, if you haven’t already.)

So when I, for one, write about houseboy summers or sexual awakenings or hint at occasional dabblings in bestiality, I never intend (only) to shock or titillate. This is because, before the process of self-creation that narrativity involves, there is no a priori “I” to do any intending. We don’t, in blogging, tell stories to trick other people into thinking we are interesting, worthwhile, unique individuals: first and foremost, we tell stories to trick ourselves into thinking we are these things, so that we can get on with the business of living. This kind of endless self-invention is, I think, the most basic and important kind of moral work, prior to any consideration of the feelings or sensitivities of others, because it is what gives us the sense of self that makes responsibility possible in the first place. We gays, not having grown up on the handy kinds of Sunday-school bible stories that give so many of our peers firm, community-bound identities, have to work especially hard at it, stealing and improvising scraps of narrative whenever and however we can. Storytelling, however shockingly or inappropriately personal it might seem, is no luxury and no kind of selfish exhibitionism – it is our ethical substance, the thing that has to come before any mention of an “ethic of empathic discretion,” and the thing that makes us human and more than hairless, shrieking apes (or at any rate more than shrieking apes.)

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have ethical substance all over my hands and keyboard, and need to find some tissue before it dries.

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