Secessionists movements are making headlines around the world (“Spain Dismisses Catalonia Government as Region Declares Independence,"NYT, 10/27/17). Citizenship is not enough for subcultures with languages and cultures that run the risk of being drowned within the larger and more impersonal nation states in which they're legislatively contained (with these themselves continually homogenized by the procrustean nature of technology and modernity). The Catalan legislature has voted for secession and the Kurds and the Scots are waiting in the eaves. Back in the 70’s French speaking Quebec separatists attempted to break away from Canada. The motto of the town of Key West also known as The Conch Republic is “we seceded where others failed.” The countervailing tendency of small states seeking to reconstitute themselves, or irredentism, is evidenced by the imperial aspirations of the Putin regime. Significantly developments in the socio-political sphere are mirrored on a psycho-social level in the politicization of sexuality. Children with precocious sexual ambivalences have found themselves having to make sometimes premature choices about their innate gender preference and if you experience sexual desire for someone of the same sex, you're encouraged to come out and become part of a culture that supports one lifestyle or another. The legacy of repressive societies is generally a wholesale push in an equal and opposite direction ("For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction," said Newton and Yeats famously wrote, "the centre cannot hold"). Just as some Catalans feel they can’t enjoy their ethnic identity while being Spaniards, some heterosexuals can’t tolerate the notion that they can love both those of the opposite and same sex. Bisexuality—being AC/DC— is being increasingly challenged in a climate where desire is looked at as a cause and those who may be wavering are pressured to choose one side or the other.
{This was originally posted to The Screaming Pope, Francis Levy’s blog of rants and reactions to contemporary politics, art and culture}