When I was in ninth grade, I stole a book from the bookshelf in the room of the LGBT support group I attended. It was a short story collection published in 1994. Its title is Am I Blue?: Coming Out From the Silence. This copy was obviously once in a library; its cover is protected below a laminate and it is stamped for a high school in Illinois. I wondered how it got from there to the little office space my group would meet in every week. I took it home and only began reading it on the school bus the next morning.

The opening story, the eponymous “Am I Blue?,” was written by Bruce Coville (you know, the My Teacher is an Alien guy). In the story, Vince, a teenage boy routinely subject to bullying and gaybashing, meets Melvin, who describes himself as Vince’s “fairy godfather.” (“Like in Cinderella?” is Vince’s skeptic reply, but Melvin later states he is more similar to a “guardian angel” but preferred this nickname). They go to a coffee shop, where Melvin explains that he was himself a victim of gaybashing and has returned to earth to help Vince out.

At the cafe, Vince asks Melvin, “Does that mean I’m gay?” Melvin responds softly, “You may be, you may be not.” A bit later, Melvin describes developing a “gaydar” as a gay survival tactic (noting that flirting with the wrong guy too easily leads to “get[ting] his face pounded in”), and Vince asks whether gaydar is “something you can learn.” They discuss reclaiming slurs, stealthing (Melvin calls it “protective coloration”), and more.

These conversations circle in towards the conceit of the story, in which Melvin reveals that he wants to grant Vince what he calls the third of the “three great gay fantasies.” The fantasy, he explains, is for “every gay person in the country to turn blue for a day.” In a test run, Melvin gives the sight to Vince, who sees “about a third” of people in his cafe turn various shades of blue (he himself is a light shade, still figuring himself out). The vision even works on pictures—“‘Alexander the Great was a fairy!”—and through television. That night, Vince sees that the congressman on TV pontificating about “the gay threat to American youth” is blue, too. 

That is when Vince decides to ask Melvin to grant his wish: to fulfill “gay fantasy number three” and make the blue visible to everyone for twenty-four hours. 

The story basically ends here. We only find out that Melvin did indeed grant the wish; we aren’t privy to how the world reacts. Vince speaks directly to the reader: “If I caused you any trouble on Blueday, I’m sorry. But not much. Because things are never going to be the same now that it happened. Never.”

“Am I Blue?” is of a particular era of LGBT politics. In the mid-nineties, gay kids were regularly violently bullied in schools (one may assume Melvin is based on Matthew Shepard if Shepard hadn’t died four years after this collection came out, in 1998). The story literalizes, through a folktale-adjacent magical realist vehicle, Harvey Milk’s political call for every gay person to “come out; “once they realize that we are indeed everywhere,” Milk famously said, “every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and for all. And once you do, you will feel so much better.” Coville’s ending doesn’t assure readers that Milk’s fantasy, itself mythologized as a “great gay fantasy,” ends homophobia, but it certainly entertains the fantasy.

A contemporary queer reader can easily poke holes in this story. It is white gay male-focused. It does not account for those who do not have the luxury to be stealth (although Melvin’s ghost is described as self confident in his openly feminine mannerisms). But perhaps more than anything, the narrative of visibility has come to feel less like a wish fulfilled and more like a monkey’s paw: acknowledgement of the fairly common nature of LGBT experience has not stopped the marginalization of and violence towards queer people at large, albeit through the vector of a marginalized subcommunity (sex workers, drag performers, trans children). And further, the visual metaphor of turning blue has a tenuous relationship to real visual markers of marginalization and dehumanization, most notably race. Although the blue is described as somewhat based in behavior and subject to change over time, the fantasy that a visual marker of difference is a salve for existing and continually reproducing oppressive regimes marks the fantasy as racially ignorant and pernicious (in fact, it inverts and yet reflects liberal “colorblind” narratives where race is hidden and empathy is built in those terms). This short story is by no means a relevant political framework for LGBT life in the contemporary, even as it serves as a great piece of archival memory of gay politics in the 1990s.

The above analyses, however, are not why I told you about Coville’s story. Rather, I want to reconsider “Am I Blue?” through questions of essence, and by extension of being. 

First, let me update you all on my orals reading journey. Since my last blog post, I have covered Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Marius, Bynum’s Christian Materiality, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, and Abu Bakr Ibn Tufayl. I am about a week behind in my reading, but it honestly could be much worse. 

Even though Aristotle would be chronologically grouped with the Ancients I discussed in my previous post, he actually functions much better thematically in my Medieval cohort. The reason for this is that I see Aristotle (and Plato, as well, although I tabled him from this particular list) as a turning point in materialist philosophy compared to the Presocratics and the Stoics. Specifically, the Socratics provide a framework of understanding material reality through not only matter and its motion, but through form. Therein, Aristotle in de Anima particularizes types, classes, of material beings with different “souls.” This is not the same as saying simply there are different things in the world because there are different combinations of the elements, themselves made up of primary matter—Thales, Xenophanes, Epicurus and the like all admit that there are lots of things in the world!—but rather that there is some matter more refined, spiritually pure, and closer to a prime Being than others. This is most evident in Aristotle’s famous division of the soul into the vegetal, the sensitive, and the rational, but is equally expressed in de Caelo’s cosmology of the celestial spheres. Both the cosmic and the animate work to mark humans as “rational animals” imbued with the lower limit of celestial substance and natural hierarchs of living beings.

Of course, it’s much more complicated than that; I’ve found myself stuck on Aristotle as a key actor. This sounds incredibly pompous, I know, I know—who am I to arbitrate that the guy everyone’s been talking about for 2000 years is indeed actually good and worth engaging?—but as an undergrad I was fast to write off Aristotle as a problematic counter to Plato and leave it at that. Through this list’s readings, I’ve come to see the necessary shift in materialist frameworks that Aristotle provides that allows for Medieval mystics to engage in naturalistic observation alongside theological frameworks. Further, though I am by no means versed in studies of the “anthropocene” (my parents are geologists, and so I might be just a bit too sensitive to sloppy applications of this term), I do see how Aristotle’s mode of centering the human changes the game for Western philosophy. I will note that, in continuity with my last post, I want to once again challenge the binary division between the mythic and the philosophic: perhaps Aristotle’s mode of centering the human through a rational soul—and centering the earth in the cosmos, mind you, even as it remains the least perfect form of matter—is not diametrically opposed to the Orphic myths (that he cites!) that center the human through anthropomorphizing natural forces and narrativizing creation ex nihilo. In fact, maybe these modes are in continuity with one another even as they represent discursively debating frameworks. 

And perhaps this interplay between the mythic and the rational (categorical? quantitative? empirical? not sure what to call it…I hesitate to pull material out of the mythic!), as an interplay of the anthropomorphic metaphor and the more abstract hierarchization of nature with humans on top, continues to develop in and through Medieval materialist theory. Indeed, Aquinas, Marius, Gabirol, and Tufayl all propose some slight variation on the relationship between a similar vocabulary: matter, form, elements, substance, essence, being, reason, and humanity’s place therein. Their approaches are informed by, among many factors, their religious frameworks: Aquinas and Marius are Christians working in Italy, while Gabirol is Jewish and Tufayl is Muslim both working under Islamic caliphates in Andalusia. That said, they all approach the same key questions of materialism equally differently—and therein, equally similarly. 

Marius is the most naturalistic, arguing in On the Elements that “In the beginning God created a certain body:” a primary matter that “is one common substance” undergirding the four elements (Dale 76; 74). Body exists in three dimensions (which, for Marius, are curiously up/down, left/right, and before/after), occupies place, has qualities, and is made from/returns to the common substance. This common substance is like wax formed into different figures, and which therein have different qualities attributed to them, but can be balled back into simple wax. All matter is endowed with “potential mobility,” but relative mobility leads to different qualities. It is out of combinations of the four elements, variously hot/cold and heavy/”rising upward,” that all other compounds occur.

Solomon ibn Gabirol presents a significantly more complicated cosmic model in Fons Vitae. (It is also really cool, and worth obsessing over.) For him, the Supreme Being endows all with a Will that emanates from it like the rays of a sun or an ever-flowing fountain (although it is not temporal like moving water, he clarifies). Universal form and universal matter fill the universe of forms (yes, including souls: Gabirol sees souls as material, of a spiritual substance.) Substance is the combination of matter and form, while the Will or “hyle” is what agentially gives and sustains all forms (through providing motion), and matter is what accepts the form and becomes therein substance (and does not exist without form). The soul “emerges from the essentiality of reason” like energy from a power source, flowing from it into all facets of a substance (3, 54). This cosmic pattern is replicated and particularized in the human form, where humanity is the upper bound of sensual knowledge and lower bound of the will. (Confused yet? Probably. But you want to read it, don’t you?)

Ibn Tufayl… I will come back to him next post when I return to the anthropomorphic metaphor.

And so we are left with Thomas Aquinas, the most difficult of the medieval philosophers I read over the last couple weeks. I asked various medievalists I know to help explain Aquinas to me; they were all very helpful. I also found Bynum’s broader diagnosis of Christian materialist debates in Christian Materiality helpful to grasp the context of his metaphysical claims. She writes:

“Issues of how matter behaved, both ordinarily and miraculously, when in contact with an indefinitely powerful and ultimately unknowable God were key to devotion and theology” (17)

and, a bit later:

“I argue that paradox lies at the heart of medieval Christianity” (34)

Bynum explains that among the several paradoxes of medieval Christianity, one is how base matter, the “locus of change” as well as “generation and corruption,” could first have held the form of Christ on Earth and second be used to represent and know God through images, natural phenomena, relics, and miracles (25; 30). And though Bynum is not specifically discussing Aquinas’ metaphysics, I do see this paradox informing his complicated characterization of “being” and “essence” in de Ente et Essentia. 

Aquinas cannot root the unity of all things in matter as the Presocratics try with various elements (wind, water, aether) or Epicurus does with the atom. Therein, he grounds the final indivisible layer of which all things are made and which permeates them—while not resorting to divide God animistically between things-in-the-world—as “essence,” with “being” as the means of positing a thing exists in the way it does. Meanwhile, God is the only existent that has no essence, or rather equates essence with existence. Form, matter, soul, body: these are phenomena too close to the sensual—either themselves sensable or existing within sensual forms—and therefore are not themselves “the essence of a thing” (Aquinas II). He acknowledges the paradox directly in his characterization of the first cause in God:

“…there is something that is the cause of existing in all things in that this thing is existing only. Otherwise, we would have to go to infinity in causes, for everything that is not existence alone has a cause of its existence, as said above. It is clear, therefore, that the intelligences are form and existence and have existence from the first being, which is existence alone, and the first cause, which is God.” (Aquinas IV)

And, lastly, the human soul “holds the lowest place among intellectual substances,” but through that intellect imbued in a sensual body, it is “so close to material things that a material thing is brought to participate in its existence” (IV). So, the human is centered as that which alone among the material world can ever “come to participate” in the immaterial world of potent substances closer to God.

But still…what is essence? It’s such a hard concept for me to wrap my mind around. I’m hoping to continue to explore that question. But for now, let me finally wrap this long, long post with why I told you about “Am I Blue?,” that YA story I read on the school bus in ninth grade.

Essence is a common term in gender and sexuality studies. “Essentialism” is, basically, a term for a belief system in which things are said to be a certain way because they hold an essence of that thing within them. You are gay because you were “born that way:” this statement is  essentialist (although there’s a lot more going on there, too). Some people are “born in the wrong body” and fulfill their innate purpose when they transition: this statement is also essentialist. Essentialism is, here, tied with teleology and with ontology: it is a transhistorical, unchangeable, nonagential, and inherent. Often, performativity or social construct theory are poised as alternatives to essentialist thinking; that gender, for example, is a historically and culturally contingent matrix that produces us as gendered and gendering beings, not a magical internal reality reflected in our forms. One can be trans without adhering to a narrative that their body is “wrong” compared to another. These differing formulations—and the dichotomization of them—are ongoing conceptual frontiers of our current gendered political reality from which many branches of anti-trans moral panic and middling centrist liberalism stem their attacks.

So, I’m thinking about materialism’s relationship to essence in the history of Western philosophy in relation to modern conceptions of essentialism in relation to the body/material in trans and queer history. I’m not sure if they are the same thing, even if they share similarities. I don’t have my answers. But I have a better sense of my question.

“Am I Blue?” plays with the possibility that sexuality does have an essence. Vince repeatedly expresses insecurity and fear at the possibility of being gay, and already lives the reality of homophobic violence no matter his inner essence. His fantasy, and the “gay fantasy” at large, may say that its intention is to create empathy by displaying the common nature of LGBT experience. But I would venture that the real fantasy it fulfills is resolving the question of essence; it would confirm that gayness is a quality, an internal form, an identity—rather than something that must be explained through a less mythical framework (a relation? a social-political position with relation to structures of partriarchy, capitalism, and the colonial gender binary [that is, with that relation as the cause, not the effect]? an ongoing act? an existential freedom and expression of agency? I genuinely don’t know!). 

Within the moral panic pushing the narrative that trans kids cannot know themselves, cannot claim to be trans, do not deserve the power of such language and relation, we have an implicit joining of trans life with an essence of transness. In contrast to my critique of the fantasy above, I am pulled in by it and can imagine it doing good political work. Lots of us are blue! Some kids are trans! You can’t always clock a trans person! Trans people don’t look one way or transition one way! Hey, maybe you wish you were a boy, too! So, is my essence as a trans person the same thing as essentialism? Am I blue?