Why I Listen on the Night Before

Tomorrow, I turn 28, and this project officially begins. I'm spending the evening straightening the house, experimenting with bourbon and chocolate milk, and contemplating why I'm setting out to do this in the first place. More specifically, why women in film? Why not something else?

The answer is selfish, but I think it's honest, too.

I'm gay. I won't take this time to explore whether or not I was 'born this way," but I was certainly born different and with a sense that I'd inherited a different script from everyone else around me. I observed stories and "stories" of how to be a middle-class white boy in Missouri, and they mostly suggested there was a particular way I was to exist in the world, but none of those ways of existing worked for me. (I imagine they work for very few people). So I sought out different stories about different ways of being, and I learned about possibility, and about others, and about myself. And I discovered pathways to take in this world that read very true to me, and I discovered pathways that seemed six dimensions away from me, but I still recognized them as human and as valid. It was a real blessing, not seeing myself in the most accessible story, and having to reach out to find others.

Which is all a flowery way of saying I've sought out female (and other) subjectivities since I was a child because the prescribed worldview of most male protagonists was not my story and could not capture the world as I experienced it. I learned how to identify with and appreciate a small handful of the 8 billion ways you see the world, which is sadly a lot more ways than most people bother to try. I grew comfortable in accepting that some people experienced existence in a way so contradictory to my own vantage point, but that there's was just as much the reality of life as mine was. I felt safe, cuddled, hand-held, when someone countries or chromosomes away from me seemed to share a thought or feeling, and I was invigorated and challenged when a would-be neighbor seemed to occupy a different universe.

That is, I strapped myself into the empathy machine, and a lot of the operators were women, and a lot of the women helped me feel less alone, helped me feel better understood and helped me better understand.

And I think, ultimately, women in film because gender fails us all. It's an arbitrary and harmful way of dividing the world, and I refuse to limit myself to male cultural products when genes and experience both indicate I'm just as likely to identify with and learn from a woman's keyhole to the world as a man's. In fact, more so-- as a population who has long been forcibly removed from their voices and their subjectivities, women have seen and felt and known a world so much different from the one laid out in more dominant, prevailing narratives. It's a chance to be liberated from the narrow story we're given of how the world is. It's a chance to see the world differently, perhaps more truthfully, at least more completely. And if we keep expanding access to who gets to tell stories, and if we keep demanding stories from diverse points of view, maybe one day we'll see the world so completely that we'll know what it is to be ourselves and to be alive.

That's the itch; that's the dream. Gertrude Stein had it. I've got it. Here's hoping you do, too.