Sexuality and Gender in Cereus Blooms at Night

A few weeks ago, my mother and I had a conversation about the relationship between gender and sexuality. Specifically, she told me that the acronym LGBT confused her, and she didn’t understand why the T was included alongside the LGB. Why do we think of gender and sexuality as belonging under one umbrella? Why are straight trans people considered part of the same group as gay cis people? What connects them? This isn’t a question I’ve thought much about before, and I wasn’t sure how to answer her. I tend to consider gender and sexuality as inherently linked, in the way that a person’s sexuality relates to the gender(s) they’re attracted to, or how a person’s gender influences the way they define their sexuality. However, I think there is a deeper connection here than a simple reciprocal relationship, and I think Cereus Blooms at Night provides a good lens through which to explore this question. I want to use this text and the character of Tyler to explore how gender and sexuality are related, specifically in terms of Tyler’s own sexuality and gender identity. 

There are two main elements to Tyler’s queerness: his* attraction to men, and his femininity. Tyler seems to have become comfortable with his sexuality before the text begins, and though he never explicitly labels himself as “gay” or “queer” or even “attracted to men,” neither does he hide his sexuality or speak around the moments when it comes to the surface of the text. While his attraction to men is made very explicit early on in the text (at the moment when the officers bring Mala to the Alms House [9-10], and when the doctor arrives to examine her [22]), his femininity starts out as more implicit, shown through his preference for a traditionally feminine career and his lack of traditional masculine abilities (his account of the physical labor he was assigned at the Alms House especially affirms this [10]). It wasn’t until Mala steals the nurse’s dress for him (75-78) that I began to consider his identity as other than an effeminate gay man. As the text progresses, Tyler’s femininity and non-normative gender identity become more and more explicit, until the very end of the book when he puts on makeup and the nurse’s dress to meet Otoh and Ambrose, appearing the most feminine that he has throughout the entire text (247). 

Tyler’s experience with gender and the social repercussions of not conforming to heteronormativity reflect our own society and recent attitudes around queer identities, specifically in the way people tend to be more comfortable with queer sexualities than with queer gender identities. I think the reason Tyler is more explicit about his sexuality than his gender identity is because gender can be a difficult concept to tear away from heteronormative ideals, more so than sexuality. Identifying as a man who is attracted to other men begins to align Tyler with (straight) women and starts chipping away at the boundaries of heteronormativity. Once he is comfortable with his attraction to men, he can begin exploring what his femininity might mean – and that is the journey his narration shows the readers. 

 

* The first question I had when considering Tyler’s identity is what pronouns to use. Because the text primarily identifies him as male, I could use masculine pronouns for him; however, I could just as easily read the ending of the text as a declaration of identity, and argue that Tyler’s feminine presentation is a sign to use she/her pronouns. Or, I could read the ambiguity of Tyler’s gender as a reason to use they/them pronouns. For the sake of clarity, and because Tyler presents as a man for the majority of the text, I decided to use he/him pronouns to refer to him. However, it appears that the text would just as easily support a different set of pronouns. 

What is Queer?

“If we think about queerness as an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices, we detach queerness from sexual identity and come closer to understanding Foucault’s comment in “Friendship as a Way of Life” that “homosexuality threatens people as a ‘way of life’ rather than as a way of having sex” (310)” (Halberstam, 1).

My first thought is Sedgwick’s Tendencies, specifically Sedgwick’s definition of queer, as well as the exercise we did on the first day of class of what queer means. Sedgwick describes queer as “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses, and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality, aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (Sedgwick, 8). While Sedgwick is referring to queer as elements of sexuality or family that differs from the “list” society has made as acceptable; Halberstam define queerness as abnormalities or as something differs from the norm, but not just family and sexual identity but everything, like time and space. Their core definition is similar, not sticking to the norm or the status quo in whatever way (this also reminds me of the song “Stick to the Status Quo” from the first High School Musical). What is truly interesting is that on the first day of class before we read anything, we talked about what does queer mean. We used many words and phrases to describe this word, including one particular phrase, something different than “cis”. In Sedgwick’s Tendencies, she has two lists that describe elements that makeup, in the first list, what a family is, and sexual identity in the second list. The elements listed are what we would consider being “cis”, just a bit fancier.

My second thought is about the quote from Friendship as a Way of Life that Halbustam uses, “homosexuality threatens people as a ‘way of life’ rather than as a way of having sex”. This is interesting because a lot of people use words like “lifestyle” and “choice” when talking about homosexuality. In their minds, people are making the conscious decision to stray from the list of what is acceptable. That these people are more afraid of their lives being upturned than of how a couple or group likes to have sex. If people start turning away from what is “right” and “acceptable” then what does that mean for the people that have structured their lives around it. We see this is Lisa Dordal’s Mosaic of the Dark in the poem Intersection, “Have you ever thought you might be… – / …It wasn’t an option, you said. / Your head never turning, both of us looking straight…” (Dordal, 11). Dordal’s mother tells us in this snippet that being anything other than a heterosexual woman, that being attracted to anyone other than a man was not possible. What is more terrifying, two people of the same sex having sex? Or the timeline people are brainwashed into believing is the only is not the only way?