In 2013, when I was 24, I headed to San Francisco to begin my Master’s Degree in comics…I entered grad school with a fiction project—no interest in memoir.
Though not quite the opening lines of the book, they are close enough to suffice. Especially since they contain irony that will unfurl outward throughout the text. The part in their middle with the ellipse explains how there actually is a school one can get Master’s Degree in comics, but that is not the important part. The important part is that this is an iconic example of how people go into certain parts of their lives with one intention only to come out on the other side fully committed to the opposite. This is not a rare condition or an exception.
I found the concepts of dating & relationships deeply confusing. What, exactly, did people get out of them?
One of things that contributes profoundly to the state of disjointed perspectives among people usually separated by political ideology is the expectation that everyone deep down inside is really the same. People on the left just naturally expect that empathy is a heightened emotional reaction to everyone at birth. People on the right just naturally expect that grows up with a heterosexual urge to procreate. The author’s story is revelation of many things that are destined to shock those on the right: not all “girls” behave like girls and not everybody grows up getting drunk and hooking up throughout high school. Those on the left had merely to wait two years before the move to ban the book shocked them to the core at how many Americans were born with limited amounts of empathy toward the struggles of anyone not just like them.
“Your happiness is very important to me. But I have a hard time seeing this trend of FTM trans and genderqueer young people as something other than a kind of misogyny. A deeply internalized hatred of women.”
Well, from this quote, it is easy enough to determine that Aunt Shari is pure old school heterosexual woman who would feel right at home in a red baseball cap. This kind of expression of misunderstanding of one part of the whole LGBTQ rainbow is more than enough to key into her missing empathy as well as her very pronounced expectations of widespread conformity. Except there is just one little problem: Aunt Shari had come out into the open as a lesbian before the author was even born. This is an interesting section that is subtly underplayed yet manages to effectively convey a secret about the LGBTQ world that those on both the right and left often don’t know. There are divisions within the rainbow; there are certain perspectives toward elements of those who live their lives beneath its arc through the sky that are far from being universally shared. Once again the book succeeds in reminding everybody that humans do not conform to strict regulatory controls. We may all share the same species, but that species covers so much territory, we may never successful catalogue it.
