“He’d used the word screwball, but I knew what he really meant. He meant I should have named my guitar Doug or Brian, or better yet, taken up the flute. He meant that if we’re defined by our desires, I was in a lifetime of trouble” (Sedaris 29).
At this point in David Sedaris’s book, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Sedaris recalls his experiences taking guitar lessons with a “midget” named Mister Mancini. After seeing people ostracizing and mocking Mister Mancini in a restaurant, Sedaris decides to come clean about his distaste for guitar and secret passion for singing. After singing the Oscar Mayer commercial in a Billie Holiday voice, Mister Mancini calls him a “screwball,” telling him, “I don’t swing that way.”
In this passage, Sedaris repeats the words “he meant” as he reflects on Mister Mancini’s reaction. This repetition connotes the significance of the implications of Mancini’s use of the word screwball to describe Sedaris. “He meant” suggests that when Mister Mancini calls him a “screwball,” he wants to say something else. By stating, “He meant I should have named my guitar Doug or Brian, or better yet, taken up the flute,” Sedaris hints at what exactly Mancini really “meant.” Since Mancini wants Sedaris to “play his guitar like a woman,” naming his guitar stereotypically masculine names, such as Doug or Brian, implies that he is sexually attracted to men. Additionally, mentioning that he should have “taken up flute” references the tendency for people to associate “feminine” things, such as the flute, to gay men. This shows that he is perceived as an effeminate gay boy, leading the reading to think that Mister Mancini means to say faggot or gay instead of screwball.
In “Queer and Now,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick emphasizes that the word queer can often “deepen and shift” with meaning as it intersects with different identities such as language, skin, migration, and state. Although Sedaris may have not been specifically thinking about queerness when he had this experience with Mancini, it can be applied to the situation. When he sees that Mancini is ridiculed because of his identity as a “midget,” Sedaris relates Mancini’s place as an outsider to his own experiences being marginalized due to his perceived sexuality. Although Sedaris may have felt a shared identity of “outsider” or “queer” with Mancini, his homophobic response to Sedaris’s singing shows that notions of queerness is not universal. Sedgwick states that “anyone’s use of ‘queer’ about themselves means differently from their use of it about someone else” (9). This passage therefore sheds light on Kedgwick’s ideas about the importance of first person in queer identities.
Although “queerness” is separate from the heteronormative society in which David Sedaris spent most of his formative years, I would hesitate to say that Mancini is a representation of queer society. If we say that he is, that seems to play too much into the idea of “queer” vs. “everything else” or “hetero” vs. “everything else.” This sets up an unnecessary war and tension between the two things and creates an “Us vs. them” kind of mindset. Mancini is an interesting character, but he doesn’t necessarily need to be a representation of queerness. The humorous telling of Sedaris’ writing style allows him to tell a funny story without making a political point. However, it is certainly true that Mancini is not welcome and is not a part of the “normal” society.
You bring up an interesting point as to unite a movement that inherently pulls itself apart. Can we divide normative and queer? And can we label all that doesn’t fit into normative society as queer, or does that in some way corrupt the meaning of the word? As Kedgwick points out, queer identities only work in the first person. Does that mean that anyone who calls themselves queer can be queer? Or are there other means that must be present as well? Perhaps shame? I’m not sure, but I think it is a very interesting question who gets included and who chooses to be included in ‘queer’.
I really like the connection you made between the Sedaris and the Sedgwick, it really allowed me to see the Sedaris in a different light. In a lot of ways, I do think that queer is used as a word to describe anything that isn’t _____ (heterosexual, cisgender, etc.). To me, queer is the subtext, the read more, the exception to the rule. Sedgwick definitely constructs queerness as in opposition to something else but for me there is a line that can be crossed, somethings just aren’t queer for me because queer is a political term that implies structural inequality. Ergo, in my opinion, pansexuality can be considered queer but no polyamory because I do not think the state actively regulates or oppresses that identity. I also really enjoy your articulation of the queer as a space of bonding for the outsider, as a community. Mister Mancini and David are similar because they are both rejected by society. And the way you tie queerness to one’s own interpretation, as really subjective, is amazing. It also affirms everything I just said because I just articulated how I envision a queer identity, due to my own personal experience.