The Pleasures of Adolescence
(or The Madness of My Adolescence)
(20 1/4" by 20 1/4")
by Ed Check
In my high school, queer and fag were a few of many epithets used by students, not only to shame and embarrass other males, but as a way for boys to project and practice their masculinity. Often such denigrations were accompanied by violent behavior that was targeted at some innocent male student. This behavior was both a testimony and celebration of the tenets of cultural masculinity and a reminder to all of us boys of the consequences (usually psychological or physical violence) of unmanly or unmasculine ways. As boys, we learned that a man's masculinity was just about the most important character trait to protect.
Now, as a forty-something academic, artist and activist reflecting upon the pleasures and madness of my culture and life, I chose to look at my youth. For many reasons, I never liked high school much, never quite felt I fit in. And so began my madness of exhuming old thoughts, feelings and experiences of well over twenty years ago.
"The Pleasures of Adolescence" addresses how shame and low self-esteem worked to undermine any notion of self-worth in high school. The poster reminds me of images and news clippings my mother would post on our basement walls. The poster is a reappropriated photo from a 1960s health text. The digitized photo is a looming facade of a high school with hundreds of students waiting outside to enter. Text at the top of the image reads: "The things you learn and the experiences you have in school help to form your personality." Along the bottom and right edges of the image, I added names I had been called at some point at school (homo, queer, faggot, etc.). Those words, so powerfully shaming years ago, are paradoxically a part of my healing and reclamation of my sense of personhood, self-dignity and pride in my sexual identity.
A few years ago, as I prepared to move to Texas from the Midwest
to teach at Texas Tech, I finally jettisoned my high school annuals.
As I perused through them, for one last time, I still felt the
need to get rid of such a painful part of my past. A year later,
a friend told me that he salvaged two of those annuals from the
dumpsters. I was actually delighted that my past had come back,
not to haunt me, but to be used in my art and my writing to help
tell my stories. The madness oand pleasures of my youth now fuel
my imagination and creative output as I engage in the madness
and pleasures of adulthood. I hope my art will dispel some of
the cultural madness surrounding sexual identity and the myths
and distortions about sexual difference.