October 2009 Archives

It's been three weeks since I stopped buying cigarettes. It was a bit of a collective decision between me and three friends who decided that, at the very least, it was costing us a fortune and we would rather spend our money on champagne and foie gras than on the tobacco product. But more than just financial rationality, I think we all were grappling with a variety of concerns regarding our health / well-being. But I need to explain a few things first before I get there.

I started smoking when I was thirteen or so. Me and my cute neighbor snuck out to the woods behind his house to share a smoke. Ever since then, I've smoked to varying degrees -- sometimes going as long as six months without smoking, sometimes smoking more regularly. I never considered myself a "heavy" smoker, because it was primarily a social phenomenon in my life that was relegated to the weekends for most of these years.

From the beginning, smoking was closely tied in my life to a kind of rebellion against authority. The act of sneaking out, after all, was indeed the very method by which me and my similarly angsty neighbor enjoyed our first cigarette. Over time, as I became more of an "out" smoker, it became a way of signifying my disagreement with larger social norms about what constituted a morally acceptable lifestyle. Let me dissect this a bit more.

I believe that for me, smoking and coming out as gay were related processes for me that deserve a bit of attention here. By the time people started condemning me as "disgusting" for smoking, I had become quite accustomed to people accusing me as "disgusting" for having sex with men. Living in the South, it took much longer for Public Health's moralizing messages about tobacco use to disseminate in tobacco country than perhaps in other places in the US. But eventually it became agreed upon in white, middle class communities (e.g. where I'm from) that smoking was unseemly and morally suspicious. Smoking was something poor people or "deadbeat dads" did. It was a sign of moral failure.

So when people started telling me I should quit smoking, it was rarely framed in terms of caring for my well-being. Not in the slightest. Rather, people took care to tell me how "disgusting" and "repulsive" my habit was, and that I should immediately stop engaging in this kind of repellent behavior. It is very clear to me now that being gay made me extremely suspicious and hostile to these messages. I knew from experience that "health" had been used to attack my sexuality and frame it as morally suspicious ("AIDS = God's Curse for Homosexual Promiscuity"), and so I was primed to be suspicious of anyone calling into question my character as person because of my taste for cigarettes. I distinctly remember someone in college remarking in surprise at my lighting up, noting that she didn't think I was "the kind of person who smoked." In that moment, I embraced her shock and dismay -- it was something of a badge of rebellion. Just in the same way that I might embrace someone being shocked when I describe a particularly slutty weekend.

I don't mean to say that being gay and smoking are actually in practice equivalent -- rather, I mean to say that people's telling me how disgusting I was for smoking actually prompted me to smoke more often, and for much longer, because of my already-antagonistic relationship to patronizing moral discourses on homosexuality. Criticizing me for smoking had the exact opposite effect of what was intended. After all, the way people reproached me for smoking was most commonly in terms of self-righteous snide comments that seemed aimed at serving the anonymous critic's sense of moral superiority -- rather than any actual concern for my own health.

I do not believe that I am a "better" person for not smoking. I do not believe that people who smoke are somehow more "damaged" than those who do not. These kinds of fucked up, pathologizing tendencies are exactly what prompts many of us who do smoke to come to identify as a smoker and thus make it much more difficult to consider stopping smoking. For me, quitting became synonymous with selling out to a "healthy" discourse that is riddled with problematic tendencies to associate "health" with "goodness" and "risk" with "badness." It took me years to feel comfortable deciding to quit for my own reasons, rather than feeling as though I had to proscribe to a presumed narrative of personal "betterment" that pervades popular discourses about "healthy behavior."

So please, for Gay's sake, don't congratulate me for stopping smoking. I don't feel better about myself for quitting. I'm almost a bit ashamed of it. It's just a decision I made, that took years of consideration and was informed by a complicated set of reasons. Congratulating me will actually make me feel like I made the wrong decision. And if you have a habit of self-righteously telling people that smoking is disgusting, cut it out. It's hypocritical. It's patronizing. And you're liable to make people who smoke only more committed to continuing to do so.