I’M DAVID SCHMADER, and I am a pothead.
By this I mean when it’s time to enjoy an adult intoxicant, I’ll forgo beer, wine, and spirits in favor of marijuana, which, for me, offers a world of nuance, delight and inspiration beyond the more crude effects of booze.
But I’m not here to proselytize, and for a long time, I kept quiet about my enjoyment of weed. It was illegal for most of the time I was enjoying it, and why make myself vulnerable as an out-and-proud lawbreaker if I didn’t have to? I also dreaded being saddled with the stoner stereotype, of having my every move interpreted through the lens of “pothead”—a word that suggests Mr. Magoo-levels of forgetfulness and a passivity bordering on the comatose. So what if I used weed not to escape, but to engage with art, ideas, food, and hilariously terrible movies? I was but one man, and couldn’t reconfigure society’s image of marijuana users by myself. I stayed in the closet.
And I’m familiar with the closet. I grew up gay in the pre-Ellen bad old days, when the only “out” gays were those who couldn’t or didn’t want to hide it—drag queens, butch lesbians, gay-bar raid victims whose faces wound up in newspapers. These trailblazers might’ve been the whole of gay representation if Harvey Milk hadn’t begged everyone to come out, especially all the non-remarkable queers who’d previously flown under the radar. Only then could an honest portrait of this subculture emerge.
It’s the same with marijuana, but instead of butches and queens, weed’s visibility parade is led by Cheech and Chong, Snoop Dogg, and unlucky subjects of weed busts. And I love drag queens and Snoop Dogg—but leaving such exceptional outliers to do the heavy lifting of representation not only skews perception, it allows damaging lies to flourish.