I’m filing this from New York, at the start of my first visit here in five years. “You’ve been away too long,” said the US Immigration woman in Shannon, cheerily. Perhaps, I thought. But as soon as I hit 42nd Street, I knew she was right. The life, the energy, the hustle, the enthusiasm. I feel alive here.

I’m staying with a dear Irish friend in Brooklyn, whom I’ve known for over 20 years. He’s threatening/promising to take me to Fire Island, the resort immortalized most notably by Dancer From The Dance author Andrew Holleran. It was the world capital of gay hedonism in the ’70s. Maybe it’s my Atlantis. Maybe it’s just a tacky touristy island. Maybe it will rain.
I’m also planning to take a trip up to the Gay Marriage State, Massachusetts. See if I ca I can get me a husband in Boston. Before the Christians get their federal constitutional amendment passed to outlaw it. There’s so much hate here.
It was an ache to see the Manhattan skyline emerging out of the haze on the freeway from JFK. The beauty of it. That towering absence. On 9/11, I managed to get through to my friend in Greenwich Village after the first plane hit. He had heard it scream overhead. We both watched TV and talked our way through it together. We must have gasped “Oh my God” dozens of times. I kept on asking him was he sure that he didn’t want to hang up, did he have other people to call? He kept on reassuring me: no, stay talking. The two of us, single gay men, living on our own in different cities, going slightly mad with isolation. When the second tower was hit, and the full horror hit home – this wasn’t an accident – someone wanted it to happen – I let him go, to flee Manhattan. He told me afterwards that having me at the end of the line made it real for him. I felt powerfully afraid for him. It was that experience that helped me do the maths – one unit of terror felt like that. Magnify that a thousand fold and that’s terror-ism.
According to most Americans, that’s when this war started, Pearl Harbour revisited. They could not comprehend why America was hated so much; 9/11 was a shocking wake-up call. They had hitherto failed to register the impact they had on the world with their economic and foreign policies. The truth is they don’t particularly care – it’s a classic case of pathological Narcissism. The only thing that registers is their pain, their success, their “freedom”. There is such a lack of maturity in their body politic, no awareness of the need to relate healthily with the rest of the world, no notion that other nations and cultures are not inferior but different. The blindness to their own faults is shocking.
There is no negotiation with the US – you’re either with them or against them. The axis is virtue or evil, no half-way house. If you’re “Anti-American”, you’re not worth listening to. You are the enemy. And if you’re the enemy, you get punished where it hurts – investment, jobs, wealth. If Ireland had taken a principled stand against the war in Iraq, we would have kissed goodnight to the Celtic tiger. What government wants to risk that? Only the French, who prize intellect, and their pacifist allies Germany. They’ve got the gall to take sanctions on the chin.
There has to be an answer to US hegemony, a way to make them understand the damage they are doing to themselves and the world. With narcissistically wounded people, the therapeutic task is to painstakingly help them to acknowledge other people’s reality, and to accept their humanity, their ordinariness – for narcissistic people tend to flip wildly between grandiosity and secret, but powerful, feelings of worthlessness. The best thing for Americans would be to hear some home truths about themselves from friends that they trust. Like Britain, for example.
(My hatred for Tony Blair just gets more concentrated with time.)
Maybe the answer lies in thinking like they do. American culture is all about tribes, gangs. Perhaps, as a defence against the horror of being displaced and/or enslaved and/or forced to emigrate due to war or famine, people in the US tend to split apart, coagulating in competing, disparate, collective identities. African Americans and Hispanics and Jews and Muslims and Fundamentalist Christians and Liberals and Gays and Bikers and Amish and Mormons and neo-cons and WASPs and Democrats and Republicans and Feminists and Transgendered and Catholics and Episcopalians and of course the original Americans, in their scattered remnant Nations: Sioux, Cherokee, Apache, Navajo, Arapaho. An Irish American, the sort that wears green on Paddy’s Day, would not understand the complexity of modern Irish life, its multiplicity and ambiguity. But their “Irishness” is fiercely defended. But their “Irishness” definitely does not include gays or lesbians.
As a member of the Gay Tribe, the Queer Nation, I go to New York and the Village to bolster up a part of my identity, to blow away any lingering cobwebs of shame – to stand proud and not be cowed. I go to get in touch with the fire of defiance that sparked the riots in 1969 against police harassment. Modern (ie Western) notions of sexual orientation and identity began, there and then, to be put into practice. Mechanisms of social control and conformity were abandoned, and, in their place, in typical American fashion, were new notions of experimentation with what was possible, a pursuit of individuality without an internal, self-regulatory, sense of limit, but pushing it until the constraints, the repercussions, were reached externally. It was a good party, while it lasted. The hangover is still with us today.
American culture is about pushing boundaries, ignoring them, banishing shame and responsibility, projecting them outside, where they take the form of hostility and outrage. Americans can’t bear to be ashamed or constrained, but they are blind to how they shame and oppress others, most notably in how they have supported Israel’s war against the Palestinians. America has torn up the Geneva Convention, yet claim their war on Iraq is for human rights.
The only thing we non-Americans can do is work towards creating a tribe or gang that, eventually, the US would want to belong to, that it could trust. The United Nations deserves our support, now more than ever. When dealing with a child behaving like a bully, acting out his hurt, the task is to welcome him, build trust, heal wounds, and help the child not lose face when he agrees to stop fighting and to respect others. That takes an enormous amount of determination, dedication, planning and intelligence. In other words, it requires us to behave like grown ups. Outrage is not enough.