Queer and in a Pub

CAMBRIDGE, England—This pub is called Revolution and although it’s a Thursday night and there’s a five pound cover, the July 4th crowd is teeming with both Americans and Brits. I’m sitting on the roof deck and talking to two youngish guys from the town of Cambridge, UK. It’s a genuine cross-cultural experience: we discuss everything from the American club scene to British words for inebriation (“Wankered”? “Trolleyed”? Really?). Finally, one of the two asks me an important question: “Well, you’re an American. What do you think about gay marriage?”

Before I have time to respond, he quickly answers his own question, declaring, “I think people should have rights and all, just don’t stick something up my fucking ass!”

The guy and his friend both laugh. I smile along uneasily. The conversation quickly moves on to something else.

I feel somewhat like I have missed an important political moment. Wasn’t there somewhere in that interaction where I was supposed to say, “Well, In My Own Experience as a queer woman, I might marry a woman and I of course want that to be okay but there’s a lot more to rights than just marriage and also gay men are not all rapists—”?

But I didn’t say any of those things. I didn’t say anything at all.

Later that night, I reassure myself with excuses. There was no room for such an interjection in the tempo of our pub conversation. Plus, I had already told the two men about my boyfriend so that might be complicated to explain. Plus, I didn’t really technically disagree with anything they said—I don’t think people should be sticking things up each other’s asses non-consensually, either! Plus, when in Rome…

None of my justifications could help me shake the feeling that I had somehow failed in my American queer ambassadorial mission.

Of course, I didn’t have to travel to England to find people not familiar with liberal discourse on gay rights. And I’m not sure if there is, or should be, such thing as an American queer ambassadorial mission. (If there is, it’s exemplified by the Obama administration’s decision that US foreign aid be tied to countries’ gay rights records. And I don’t want anything to do with that—either the US aid or the strangely prescriptive liberal universalism.)

So on one level, I don’t think I should feel guilty for not pushing back when I could have. On the other hand, perhaps my status as a foreign student with a really cool American accent lends me enough authority that I could have made a difference in the minds of my two new British friends.

I’m still not sure whether I did the right thing or the wrong thing or if there even is a right answer on how to confront heterosexism when you find it on the roof deck of a British bar. Either way, it’s strange (but perhaps not unsurprising) that it took spending my fourth of July in England to make me think hard about what it means to be a queer American.