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Calling Bullshit on 'People With Good Hearts'
THE VEGAN MAKE-UP ARTIST
In the fall of 2017, as the hijabi poet’s abuse started showing up in full color, my gut feeling told me it all was going to end soon. Just like my American visa issued under Obama’s administration was going to expire in January 2018, leaving me no opportunity to travel to the United States in the near future. Networking efforts for my book had been halted for more than a year now, because after my dismal experiences in the beginning of 2016, I started working for the hijabi poet and writing the story she’d made me believe she wanted to read. Now that her true colors – indifference, greed, and hypocrisy – started coming out, I understood it was time to reclaim the agency over my journey. My work was fundamental and huge. It was heavy and full of truth. And truth demanded to be told.
Because right at that point, news as diverse as the #MeToo movement, white supremacists’ march in Charlottesville, humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria, and concentration camps for gay men in Russia – all those events pointed at systemic, intersectional failures of empathy in our culture, which was exactly what my book addressed leveraging the power of creatively storytelling. Yes, poetry alone wasn’t enough. As a culture, we needed less eloquent rhetoric and more meaningful conversations about what we were collectively experiencing and what was taking a heavy toll on our lives – spiritually, emotionally, and economically. My book brought this integrative vision to the table, and by failing to make all possible efforts to put it out there – whether because of fear, insecurity, or shame around my lack of privilege – I was stealing from the world. Silencing that truth and silencing my artistic voice, I contributed to continuing oppression and injustice. I wasn’t having it anymore. Whatever promises and commitments people had made, right now no one but myself was here to help me with the book. Whatever number of followers my page had, I had to reach out to people having necessary connections and tell them about my work and my story.
In the end of the previous episode, I told y’all that two prospective collaborators – one from Miami and the other from New York – ghosted me when I started the conversation about my book. In essence, ghosting is a variant of emotional abuse, but compared to my other experiences, it was quite ‘mild’. By ghosting, people clearly show you their cowardice. They chicken out of practicing what they professed in a straightforward way, leaving you disappointed or humiliated or betrayed or heartbroken, but without leaving you puzzled about what happened and questioning your sanity. And, around the same time, I had another apparently promising professional relationship that didn’t end in ghosting. Now, this one ended in a more serious emotional abuse. And, just like in case with the hijabi poet, I drew specific lessons from that experience that are worthy of being shared with y’all.
Meet a vegan make-up artist from West Hollywood, LA.
His case is remarkable for at least three reasons:
One: He specifically used the word ‘empathy’ a lot both in his Instagram posts and our private chats – and we’ll see what his ‘abundance of empathy’ was worth in reality.
Two: His behavior shows how politeness and kindness are fundamentally different things – while carefully trying to sound polite, people carefully avoid to practice kindness.
Three: Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind. Lack of clarity, including avoidance of giving honest answers when asked straightforward questions, is one of the most reliable signs of emotional abuse.
I had met him on Instagram one year before, in the summer of 2016, following the same networking path I’d originally chosen. He was an openly gay American man, very good-looking in his forties or maybe early fifties, living in a nice house in Los Angeles with his no less handsome boyfriend, working as a makeup artist in the film industry. The moment I followed him, I didn’t know anything about his professional connections, but I could see he was followed by one actor and LGBT activist who would probably be interested to collaborate on a project like mine who I couldn’t contact directly. Mind you, that actor wasn’t an A-list celebrity having international fame and millions of followers. He was known mostly domestically in the U.S., but stood out for his activism. He had a few hundred thousand followers and given his outstanding looks, he received a lot of attention in the gay Instagram. As I’d followed him, on his posts I saw tens and hundreds of hook-up and innuendo comments. So when I tried to DM him about my work and he didn’t reply, I assumed that he received too many hook-up, dick-pic, and other BS messages in his DM requests – so it didn’t seem probable that my professional message could be noticed by him amidst tons of that crap. Since he didn’t follow me, my message couldn’t land straight into his Instragram Inbox. Only people who he followed could text him directly. Only they had access to him.
Well, among my own followers now there were two such people. Just like that actor, there were both gay men – and, just like in the beginning, I assumed they would be willing to support my book as an innovative project addressing homophobia. One of them was that actor’s close friend from Miami – who ghosted me after one year of communication, not even when I asked him to contact this actor for me, but when I just opened my mouth about having written a book and needing help with it. And the other was this make-up artist who lived in West Hollywood – the same place where the actor lived. Maybe they lived a couple blocks away from each other. Anyway, it made sense they followed each other and left comments on each other’s posts.
As always, I didn’t see any people as means to achieve my goals. The fact they had access to someone I needed to talk to mattered, but first and foremost, I had to get to know them as people. I chose to build normal, meaningful relationships with them before deciding if it was right to ask for their help.
When in 2016 this make-up artist followed me back and liked my poetry, I was impressed. Not by the fact that my poetry got liked, but by the fact that a man who was openly gay liked my thoughts, not just my pictures. As an LGBT activist, the last thing I wanna do is sound homophobic or stereotyping, but my previous Instagram experiences with Western gay men showed they were only interested in my body. What I was writing or working on didn’t matter nearly as much as what my body looked like. And since I didn’t have a lot of (honestly zero) smoking-hot, shirtless, well-buffed, all but nude selfies – like these their accounts mostly consisted of – I got treated like shit, and so did my attempts to build a meaningful conversation.
But this make-up artist appeared different right off the bat. He appeared intellectual and even spiritual. Amidst casual pictures of an upper-middle-class American life, there were a lot of talks about the meaning he attached to being vegan and adopting pets – empathy. At that point, I didn’t know enough about empathy to realize that, by its neurobiological definition, it has to do with human-to-human connection. How you treat dogs and what you eat for breakfast says nothing about your capacity for empathy actually. Probably, I bought into his image of “a good heart” as a result of our first chat in DM – where he wondered what I was doing on Instagran and then said he supported my book and its mission. That was such a striking contrast to the bullying, threats, insults, and ridicule I had received from other gay men over the months doing networking – and my reference point was so low that I appreciated any upper-middle-class American who treated me without clear disrespect because of my place of residence and class. My previous experiences had conditioned me to believe that I deserved being treated like shit, unless I found someone was exceptionally kind and understanding.
We chatted back and forth in 2016, before I took on the full-time job of working and writing for the hijabi poet (see previous episode. In summer 2017, after I finished writing, I got back to all of my correspondence threads, including mine with him. As I started researching privilege and intersectional empathy a few months before, in October I shared my early findings in our conversations. He replied in a way that sounded very supportive and understanding – reflecting back my concern around systemic lack of empathy in our culture. Speaking of privilege, he said he’d become acutely aware of it in his twenties, when he traveled to Spain. It sounded like socioeconomically, the American life standard he’d taken for granted was challenged by how he saw many people lived in Spain.
Remarkably, at that point, I didn’t say that when I had traveled to Spain, instead of my privilege I realized my huge socioeconomic disadvantage. Yes, compared to Russia, Spain was a very well-off nation. Compared to America, obviously it wasn’t. That statement on his part made me painfully aware of the privilege abyss separating me and him.
However, he added, he “always had an abundance of empathy”. I put this clause in quotes, because I’m quoting him directly. Yes, he played very well in the face of my insecurity, confirming the solid evidence I’d already found in research – given enough empathy and critical awareness, we can acknowledge our privilege and put it to good use. Then, he went on to illustrate his capacity for empathy talking about he adopted pets. How he found injured dogs and bunnies and other animals and brought them to his house. Ah, yes, and how because of his highly compassionate heart he was a vegan.
The profession of values was made quite clearly in that conversation.
Now, let’s see what happened when the time came to practice them.
A few weeks after ‘the abundance of empathy’ got professed, we talked about the recently released movie Call Me by Your Name and its nomination for the Academy Awards. Set after a novel of the same name, the movie rendered a romantic love story of two men and exquisitely portrayed the context of homophobic oppression. The protagonists were different ages, from different countries, and meeting in a seemingly casual way. They encountered far too many obstacles to building a lasting, meaningful love relationship. Remarkably, it was one of the few stories in the mainstream culture where gay characters were relatable and profound rather than stereotyped and shallow. These were clear parallels between it and my book, in concept and design and values. Call Me by Your Name and its recognition gave me another piece of evidence about the success my book could have. I didn’t voice it, though. Instead, I said that in order for homophobia to be effectively tackled at the cultural level, we need to have more profound stories like that reaching big audiences – not stories where gay people are portrayed as party animals, prostitutes, drug addicts, and other living stereotypes from the story about “deviant gay lifestyle”. He agreed, confirming that the amount of shallowness in the American gay culture was overwhelming. Based on my research findings, I said this shallowness created a big part of LGBT representation in the media and hugely reinforced homophobia around the world. This conversation felt a great premise to start telling him about my book. But I decided to do it later, in a live conversation rather than an iMessage chat. I had been traumatized enough by people ghosting me as soon as I told them I had a book to share with the world.
About a week later, our conversation steered towards health. He saw my Thanksgiving post and learned about the fact I had a probably malignant tumor, with no biopsy available, and with no access to adequate surgical treatment in Russia. He said he would pray for me, or something like that. The important thing is, he became aware of my critical health condition and expressed empathy in words.
Now, what about action?
Another week later, after the Miami guy ghosted me, he remained the only person who could put me in contact with that actor in LA. Vulnerable as I was, given his value statements and expressions of friendship by that moment, there was enough trust between us for my professional request to be grounded and appropriate.
So I texted him if he was available for a FaceTime next day. With 11 hours of time difference between Moscow and Los Angeles, we could still figure it out – I said this was an important thing that I couldn’t talk about in texts.
As always, that’s where the shitshow began.
He said he didn’t do Facetimes with anyone. Guess why? Because in video calls, when he looked at his own picture on the screen, he was uncomfortable seeing the wrinkles on his face. Well, from my reserch I knew body shame (and aging as its trigger) was a powerful force in gay men. It remained powerful even in communication with people like me, who obviously weren’t their prospective partners. So I offered him empathy and instead suggested to have an audio call. Well, if body shame was actually the thing that put him off, audio would work.
But it wasn’t.
“No,” he said. “Text me here whatever you like. It’s okay. I chat with people as I go through my day.”
Here was the first red flag. A self-proclaimed empathy guru, seeing my vulnerability around an important conversation, he set the communication frame in a way that was comfortable for him, not bothering to respect that, given my bid for a real-time conversation, texting wasn’t okay for me.
I assumed good about him and thought it was just a slight misunderstanding.
“Look,” I said, “it’s really important that you’re not distracted and can pay attention to the thing I’m gonna tell you about.”
“No problem,” he replied, “just text me what it is.”
The second red flag: abusers diminish the importance of your emotions, and make it all seem casual. It's remarkable how the person putting great effort in creating the impression of his depth now carefully kept the conversation shallow — because he felt the conversation was getting real.
“At which time should I text you so you could have available attention?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter, just text me anytime,” he said.
Well, of course it didn’t matter. Because whatever I had to say didn’t matter. Because I was a penniless guy from a third-world country, and he was an upper-middle class man working in Hollywood.
I felt things were off, but I thought I shouldn’t give up on him. Who else did I have to help me? Everybody has turned away so far. My American visa was expiring. My tumor needed to get treated. Just like so many times before, seeing early signs of hypocrisy and cowardice, I continued casting pearls before the abuser.
So before going to sleep, I wrote him a long text, telling about my book and its design and its mission and the fact he had one activist following him on Instagram. I said he might know that activist personally, and that I needed to talk to him about my book and couldn’t contact him directly. I said it would be great if he put us in contact over email, or have him look at my Instagram page.
I didn’t sleep well, as if my gut feeling sensed the venom of another good heart’s true colors going to spill before me.
The next morning, I saw his reply:
“Oh Jorge, you’d better contact that activist yourself. I don’t really know how to send emails. I only call and text with people I know.”
My bullshit meter swept off-scale. A forty-some-year-old American man, working in Hollywood, didn’t know how to send emails? I mean, really?
Instead of just blocking him forever, I kept casting pearls. I kept trying to get clarity and truth from another person who was coming out as an abuser.
“Well, you don’t have to send an email,” I said. “You can just text him on Instagram and he’ll immediately see your message because he follows you.”
“I don’t think this will work,” he replied. I’m not good at remembering things. I can promise I’ll do it in January and in fact only do it in June.”
WTF? My bullshit meter nearly broke.
Make note: he didn’t even ask who that activist I need to contact was. It could be the person living next door to him. It could be one of his best friends. But he didn’t make an effort to learn specifically what was needed and then tell me whether or not he would do it. Instead, he denied me help preemptively, at the same time making a big effort to stay perfectly polite.
“Man, do you remember that my American visa is about to expire?” I continued speaking. “That I have to get my tumor treated as soon as possible and that I can only earn that opportunity through my book’s project? If you can’t remember to do things, iPhone has a great Reminders app…”
“Oh, you know,” he replied, “I’ll forget it anyway. I’m so busy all days long – you have no idea. I barely have the time to feed my dogs.”
The ugly truth finally came out. Listen, guys, this upper-middle-class American ass “barely had the time to feed his dogs”. So knowing about my critical health condition – and only knowing that because of the friendship he’d faked in my face – he didn’t think that helping me with my work (which by the way was destined to serve his community) was worth his time any more than feeding his dogs. Like, what was my cancer compared to feeding his dogs? What was my activism compared to his comfort?
There comes this point when you can no longer deny another person’s true colors, because they glare right in front of you. That’s what his ‘abundance of empathy’ was worth – he chickened out of practicing real empathy and acting upon it. Also, politely reminding me of where my place was, in relation to his dogs.
As heartbroken and humiliated as I felt, I was still able to speak truth to bullshit. So I wrote him a long text about kinds of power, and how effective social change can only be achieved through exercising power among and power with – not power over, grounded in privilege. I asked him what kind of power he was choosing.
To which he replied nothing. Because there was nothing to reply. His answer was clear: comfort, privilege, living in a nice house, working in a great job, sleeping with a handsome boyfriend, and continuing to profess ‘abundance of empathy’ on Instagram.
A reality-check here: just like in case with the hijabi poet, I didn’t ask him to move the Everest for me. I didn’t ask him to risk his job, give me money, cross half a country, or approach the President of the United States. The amount of effort required on his part was tiny, although it could make a huge difference for me as a person coming from disadvantage, lacking access and opportunity he had by virtue of his privilege. But that effort just wasn’t within his priorities. Because empathy and social justice weren’t his real values. For him, they were big words, obviously tossed around in the hustle for self-worth and the need to be comfortable with his unearned, random advantages.
My question remained, why every one I had found by that moment was such a hypocrite? Why did this experience repeat with so many people? Putting aside the first bullshit story saying that something was wrong with me, I started to contextualize and understand the hard truth. Hypocrisy and choosing politeness over kindness reflected cultural issues in America: intolerance of vulnerability, belief in the scarcity of power, classism, nativism, and lack of critical awareness. The empathic failure between me and the make-up artist was just one particular situation reflecting those systemic issues.
KEY LEARNINGS
1.
Don’t take people’s words at face value. When your hear statements about empathy, vulnerability, spirituality – and other things related to “good hearts” – remember they may be driven by the hustle to appear good, rather than a practice of authetnticity. In the first place, we’re willing to see in other people what we know about ourselves. So the goodness you see in others reflects your own goodness far more than it reflects theirs.
2.
Trust is built in small moments, and there’s no shame in trusting someone who communicated kindness towards you. Beware, though, that in the guise of kindness, what may be actually sent your way is politeness, not a willingness to connect and support you in a meaningful way. And until a situation requiring the latter arrives, there’s no way to know. As the old saying goes, a friend in need is a friend indeed. When, instead of need, your life’s context is informed by multilateral privilege, there’s hardly a way to understand who your real friends are.
3.
Politeness is worth nothing when there’s no kindness and integrity standing behind it. The more polite a person is, the more disgusting it is to see their hypocrisy revealed.
4.
Empathy is a skillset, not a personality trait. Just like swimming is learned in water, empathy is learned in vulnerability. If your capacity for empathy is limited to being vegan and adopting pets, but you turn away from a fellow human being in trauma because of your need for comfort, yours is a sorry-ass version of empathy.
5.
Bullshit makes you sound pathetic, even when you think you can get away with it. It’s better to say “I’m not willing to do this” than to make up excuses about not being able to send emails or remember things.
With my American visa expired in January 2018, I still didn’t give up. I kept reaching out and looking for new people. The last thing I expected was that a person able to help with my work would find, and reach out, to me. And that’s exactly what happened in February 2018.
It felt like a God-sent blessing. A compensation for all the shitty people I’d met. A long-deserved chance to meet an true ally, a fellow creative, a fellow Christian, and someone with whom I could collaborate on her project, inviting her collaboration on mine.
And, it also ended in an epic experience of abuse – this time facilitated by my religious identity, on top of my remaining critical health situation.
Ready for the next episode? Let’s jump in.