Fringe Festival

I have come home to Cincinnati for a few days to attend performances at our local Fringe Festival with Mack. Mack got us "Full Frontal Passes," which allows us to see anything we want--nearly 150 shows, installations, films, etc. I get antsy after 2-3 shows in a row. Fringe, though interesting, is still a pretty "passive" experience. You sit and watch, bitch or clap. Passive. But we did have an interesting experience early Friday evening. En route to one of the shows, a couple of late middle-aged white guys passed us, muttering the word "homosexual" under their collective breaths. About a block later, a group of teen black girls skipped past us shouting "GAY GAY GAY!" Neither Mack nor I had encountered such behavior in a while, though we have experienced it before (but mostly in the conservative hellhole known as Colorado Springs--for me, at least. Used to live there--long story.) Anyway, I inevitably started thinking about the digital dimensions of our lives, and how easy it is to *block* homophobic interlopers. Harder to do IRL. It also occured to me that this is an experience that STRAIGHTS just don't have. If they do, I'd like to know about it. But I doubt it. I believe this is one of the dimensions of radical difference, incomensurate difference between queers and straights, though some overlap is certainly imaginable. I agree with Dider Eribon in *Insult & the Making of the Gay Self*--the direct experience of homophobia is a key marker in the construction of a self-conscious gay identity. Does the digital allow us, as queers, to escape such constructions? Might it allow us to turn the tables, as it were, in the creation of queer spaces that would be pleasantly heterophobic? Might it invite straights to experience the kinds of (potentially) empathy-inducing discriminations that often (still) characterize so many queer lives? I know I can't share with straights the fear-induced adrenaline flush experienced when walking down the street and being called out as queer... I wonder if Jason Bruffy, the delicious Producing Director of the Cincy Fringe Festival, experienced some homophobia (either his own or that of others) when posing for this wonderful photo to promote Fringe? Note how, in the poster, everyone turns away from the naked man. The naked STRAIGHT man. Not everyone turns away from the queer. Sometimes they turn TO the queer...