Your Golden Boy

By Nolan Golden / Summer 2020

Dear Mom,

Surprise! I’m sure you’ll think this is me just being my creative writer self, but I promise, it’s not. Actually, it’s quite the opposite, so, if you’re not already sitting, go ahead and take a seat. And for the next few minutes if you could just put down that long island iced tea, that would be greatly appreciated. I promise this won’t take long.

I write you now at the age of 22 from a bathtub in a house I share with my boyfriend, whose kind of sort of looking like he’s going to be my husband. Set down the iced tea, mother. I chose to write you specifically, at this point and time, because I know we’ve just had the conversation about me going off to live with Kasey and his family. If it’s not already clear, I’m writing you from the future and I’m willing to risk breaking about every time traveling law there is to get this letter to you because you need to hear it – I need you to hear it.

Let me begin by saying, I have a much deeper understanding of why, for all those years, you could never accept me for being an effeminate homosexual. It may sound silly, but the stories you told me growing up helped me garner a stronger sense of who you are. I’ve thought a about those stories a lot, of Adam and Eve; what it means to be a man; and of how good things would happen to good people and bad things to bad people. This Italian guy named Antonio Gramsci called this kind of storytelling social hegemony (1989). And no, I already know what you’re thinking, it has absolutely nothing to do with hedges.

Social hegemony is just a silly word for the way in which particular groups in society utilize excessive story telling in order to maintain dominance over another group in society (Gramsci 1989). These so called “stories”, well, they aren’t even stories at all. The more appropriate thing to call them would be what this French dude from 1796 calls an ideology (Roucek 1944). Think of stories as the mechanism by which ideologies are conveyed. In other words, the “stories” we hear tell us what kind of clothes to wear, who to love, who’s allowed to do certain things, who we consider a man or a woman – hegemonic ideologies are simply sets of rules that dictate essentially everything we know about ourselves and the world around us.

Now, I know you, and I can hear your voice a decade away, already telling me that “God says…” blah, blah, blah. But here is my challenge for you: how do you know what God said is true? And before you can say it, the argument “Because God says so” will not work. That argument is simply a logical fallacy, all you’re doing is begging the question, circling around and around, your only evidence is the argument itself. I want you to sit and just think for a moment about the following question: Is God’s way the only way to obtain a happy life? Because I’m happy, mom, truly happy, and the only Jesus I happen to know is my Taco guy down on West 23rd Street.     

I think the best way to demonstrate this concept of hegemony and the use of ideologies is to look at The Matrix (1999). Imagine I’m Morpheus – but way gayer obviously – standing in front of you and offering you the red pill or the blue. One of the most prolific quotes Morpheus offers during the film is this:

“The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth” (The Matrix 1999).

To put it another way, the Matrix is to the false realm in which we live whereas the codes of the Matrix are to the hegemonic ideologies that govern our sense of reality.

The only critique of the film I can offer is that once you take the blue pill, the world doesn’t lose its color. Beauty is never in fact lost, in my opinion, as that pill enters your system. Beauty, and Truth, only present themselves to you in ways you once never could have imagined. I think about liberating ourselves from harmful hegemonic ideologies like this: why let someone else paint the world for you, when you could pick up the paint brush and use all the colors you ever wanted? What kind of world would you paint, mom?

I also just want to clarify, I know that it’s terrifying to think about the consequences of liberating yourself from the chains of hegemony. Our first thought is that we’re a failure and that’s precisely what these hegemonic ideologies are meant to do when you don’t follow their rules. But are you truly a failure for choosing to be happy on your own terms? How do you, not society, define failure? To me, failure is the abandonment of authenticity and purpose for artificial popularity – something that you taught me.   

I wanted to share all of this because I know that no one ever did with you. I think, if someone had, things would be a lot different with us than they are here in 2019. I know you think people are who they are to the core, but I hope, with this new information, maybe you can see that we don’t have to be the kind of people society wants us to be. I’m scared, mom. I’m frightened that if people don’t have these conversations more, we’ll only continue this insidious life. Maybe my intent for writing to you was purely selfish, you always wanted me to change the world, and I’m trying, but I can’t seem to change the world fast enough in its current state. So, I figured, why not go back and try to offer you insight, maybe together - you, still my mother, me, still your son, and us, still a family - we could have changed the world. I need you to hear this, our future depends on it.

 
Your Golden boy,

Nolan

Works Cited

Gramsci, Antonio. The Formation of the Intellectuals. Oxford University Press, 1989.  

Roucek, Joseph S. “A History of the Concept of Ideology.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 5, no. 4, 1944, pp. 479–488. JSTOR.

Wachowski, Lilly and Lana Wachowski, directors. Matrix. Warner Home Video, 1999.