Q Media: In Bed with the Word

I just finished reading an excellent book called In Bed with the Word, written by one of my favourite former professors. Although not distinctly queer, in its dealing with identity, cultural politics, and "otherness," Daniel Coleman's book reminds me of much of the queer stuff I've read in the past. His slim, inspiring volume also emphasizes for me the importance of storytelling (in various forms) to our own personal struggles with identity. In a world where we inevitably come to understand ourselves through stories in their limitless forms and genres, it's of crucial importance to see ourselves (or an understanding of ourselves) reflected back at us; in other words, we need to hear and read stories about us and the parts of our identities that we deem important. As Coleman writes:

"One of the great pleasures of reading is the experience of having confirmed in a book impulses or instincts that may not yet have become clear enough to be thoughts. There's a real delight that comes when some words on the page give clear, concise shape to a morass of ideas or opinions that you haven't had the opportunity or stimulus to sort through" (105).

The book, for me, was Virginia Woolf's Orlando in my fourth year of university -- I had my mind blown by the crazy idea that our selves were so bound up in performance that we may never have recourse to a true or essential identity or "self." Maybe I had been straight, maybe I was now gay (just as Orlando shifted from male to female) -- did it really matter? Who knew that labels -- male, female, gay, straight -- were just words that had arbitrary definitions and models for behaviour ascribed to them? And although it wasn't a book-oriented discovery, I also learned a lot about my high school aged self by stealthily watching episodes of Queer as Folk in my basement after my parents had gone to sleep. The availability of these queer stories helped me negotiate the twisted path of self-discovery -- or, in Coleman's words, they gave some shape to the "morass" of confusing thoughts about sexuality that I hadn't really sorted through.

So: stories and reading are important. We need to tell our own stories while reading and talking about the stories of others. You should start with Daniel Coleman's book.