What we need is a leader

Is it not being educated? Is it self-hatred? Why is this happening?

There was a time that I had referred to myself as a homophobic homosexual. Some people may still claim that I am. I'm not a homophobic homosexual. I don't hate my people. I just wish my people would stop doing stupid shit. Stop doing what is expected of you. Yeah, most people want to see us die. I remember my uncle (who was 18 at the time, I was 9 or 10) saying to me, God made AIDS to kill fags because they're sinners. He wrote an article about it in the school newspaper. This must have been 1986 or 1987. I will never forget him saying that to me. How can I forget? It wasn't just my uncle. We've all heard hateful things being said from ignorant people.

My advice to the gay community: Live. Be here. Speak your mind. We can't be dying off. We need to take over. Be seen as much as possible. Anywhere. Everywhere. The more we're seen, the more normal it becomes.

We need leaders. We need another Harvey Milk. We need someone to take charge of the community. To speak up and bring us together. We're not together. We can care less about each other. This is why we infect each other. Killing each other off. It's what they want. It's what they expect.

Sorry, I got a little angry there at the end. I'm just exhausted.

Maybe I do like football

Cruising for a Bruising

First, we get this piece of shit and now this.
I'm thinking we should go back to the golden age of film and bring back the catty sissy character who is often found backstage hemming some actress' dress (and secretly wanting to be that actresses, so that he can wear the dress). Or maybe we should go back to gays being represented as sick, demented, cross-dressing serial killers.

Faggots are taking whatever they can get these days and calling it progress. I thought Brokeback was a step forward. Here was a film that showed dudes in love. It was okay. Getting there. Better than Broken Hearts Club.

Chuck and Larry pissed me off. And GLAAD supports it. My favorite quote from the interview: Through the disarming use of comedy, there is an exploration of homophobia, which often involves stereotypes and slurs, and it holds a mirror up to that and asks people to consider where it comes from. This is a film that has twenty something tiring jokes about "who's the woman" in the relationship. Or this(???):

Chuck Levine: What do you got?
Larry Valentine: Maxi Pads.
Chuck Levine: What, do we have vaginas now? Put it back!

Is this what GLAAD considers to be an 'exploration of homophobia'? This film isn't clever or smart or subversive or anything. It's fucking idiotic.

Now Cruising is back. In the theater? People are seeing it? I recently watched Cruising with M.T. and we cringed. It's campy, yeah. I laughed at Pacino high on Amyl Nitrate, dancing in his leather pants, pumping the air with his hairy knuckled fist. But I couldn't laugh at the representations of gays. I mean, every gay in that film is into S and M or fisting or into weird shit (one of the murdered gays carries with him a suitcase full of dildos, hand cuffs, and other instruments I couldn't figure out). Yeah, people are into all kinds of shit. I'm cool with that. But not one homosexual is represented in a positive light in this film. The world is dark and dirty and naughty and wrong. I can't believe Friedkin is out there talking about it. It's not a film to talk about.

Oops. And here I done talked about it.

Scare Tactics

I have to say I am very glad to see ads like the one above.

Takes me back. Remember this one:



Scared the shit out of me. Never wanted to have sex after seeing that one. And when it did finally come down to finally doing it, well, I had to put on a condom, cuz I was afraid of the consequences.

A few months back I bought an Advocate. Not one ad for condoms. Yet, I found two in a Maxim. Hm.

40,000 people are infected a year. That's a lot of people.

I wonder if young gays who see the ads put out by the drug companies promoting HIV/AIDS medications are getting the wrong idea. They may see these ads and think, oh it's manageable now. All I have to do is take a pill. Good for the drug companies, right. Put up some ads showing hot, young gay men sailing or mountain climbing. I mean, sure HIV/AIDS infected men are living longer and healthier lives, but what else is an ad like this showing the young people--and what's with all the side effects/warnings in very tiny print on the bottom of the ad (sometimes even continuing onto the next page) all about.

I don't know. I just want people to stop dying from this disease. It's preventable. I know it comes down to people not being educated or people being misinformed or people just not giving a shit. I want people to give a shit. Especially gay men. Look at our past. So many died. So many died because at that time nobody knew what the fuck it was. And even when we found out, nobody would do anything. President Reagan didn't even say the word AIDS publicly until 1987 and by that time 41,000 people were dead and 90 something thousand were infected.

I think I'm alive and well because of those ads in the 90's. It seems so stupid now thinking about Salt-N-Pepa rapping about wearing rubbers. But it worked. It may have been preachy. It may have been shameless at times. But it worked.

What will put the fear into youth today?

40,000 infected every year.

Makes me sad.

Anyone, anyone?

Summer Reading: Siestas, Fiestas and Drag Queen Hookers?

How's about we all read this for fun after Kiki finishes up with all the bildungsroman he has to read for his class.

It sounds similar to the book I'd really like to write about Dublin, except it has more of a racial/tranny twist. I'm very skeptical of men who write women main characters, but I'm curious enough.

Hedwig Is Alive and Well and Living in the Ukraine

Why do Europeans get to have all the fun? While our AmIdols bend over backwards to deny that they, um, bend over, the annual Eurovision Song Contest provides an endless parade of boyish girls, girly boys and trannies of all stripes, some of whom, like our friend Verka (above), end up placing as high as SECOND. (Meanwhile, grand prize winner Marija Serifovic is a chantenuse who looks like she regularly hangs with the ladies who lunch on The L Word.)

Across the Atlantic, these same folks would be relegated to the mean-spirited freakshow that is the early rounds of AmIdol. Is it any wonder the Scissor Sisters sell millions of records overseas but can't garner more than a "cult" audience here? Call it homophobia if you like, but it seems to be more of an aversion to all things remotely fabulous -- just look at how toast-bland some of our most-popular divas have gotten.

For more info on the insane drag-off that is Eurovision, look no further than GoFugYourself...

http://gofugyourself.typepad.com/go_fug_yourself/2007/05/its_that_time_o.html

Don't Call Me Twink, Faggot

I hate labels. I'm not going as far as Michael Stipe by saying labels are for canned goods or whatever the fuck that has-been said in the 90's while he danced around the issue of his sexuality. Here's the exact quote. I can't believe he avoided it for so long. He has a responsibility as a gay artist to let people know. To say, yeah, I'm gay, so what. Instead, I had to hear his wah wah-ing about the environment and Tibet. And remember when he won all those MTV music awards for 'Losing My Religion' and he had a different shirt on for each award. Like one shirt read "Pro-Choice" and another one read "Rock the Vote". Not one of those 12 shirts said "ActUp" or "Queer" or "Bald Ugly Faggot". Nothing. Labels are for food.

I'm a gay man. It's who I am. I'll say it. But will I say I'm a twink or a straight-acting gay? No.


I remember being in some bar and this dude who looked a lot like Gary Coleman came up to me and called me a twink. (He actually said something more offensive like "hey twinkie, I want to suck the creamy filling outta you"). I didn't know exactly what a twink was but I had an idea (well, visuals from gay porn sites). Either way, I didn't want to be called a twink. I didn't want to get lumped into that category of gay. I've done my research and twink I am not. If we follow the rules of the definition, twinks are under the age of 21. They are slender (ok), slightly muscular/athletic (hm), and have little to no body hair (well, that's not me unless you count the pathetic patch I have on my chest as little to no hair).


Then there's the whole straight acting controversy. Lance Bass said this is People Magazine last year:

"I want people to take away from this that being gay is a norm," Bass said. "That the stereotypes are out the window ... I've met so many people like me that it's really encouraged me. I call them the SAGs — the straight-acting gays. We're just normal, typical guys. I love to watch football and drink beer."

Yep, the stereotypes are out the window. Straight men watch football and drink beer. It's true. They do.



Maybe watching football and drinking beer is code. Watching football really means sucking cock and drinking beer means fucking ass. How subversive.

Lance Bass is trying to win over a straight crowd with his coming out by telling them: "Hey, I'm just like you." But he's not. He's not straight. He may drink beer and watch football, but he also eats ass and I'm not sure I know any straight dudes willing to do that. Shit, it's tough to get a straight man to eat pussy. Am I right, ladies? Let's not give straight dudes another hole to avoid with their tongues. Am I right, ladies?

Gay men need role models. We're raised in a heterosexual world where we need people to say I'm gay and it's normal. Lance should have said: "I'm just your normal, typical gay. I love to watch football and drink beer." And those that are hip to the code will know exactly what he means.

Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan

Julie Andrews, Babs Streisand, Linda Hunt, Hilary Swank have all been nominated for (or have won) Academy Awards for playing men or women pretending to be men. Cate Blanchett, I'm sure, will be another one.

We all perform gender. Some of us 'do gender' better than others.

Just another gay Sunday morning

This morning, while avoiding delving into the tedious task of writing a looooong overdue seminar paper, I got introduced to two important figures in gender bending through the wonders of television.

First, a profile on tennis champion and specialized surgeon Renee Richards on Sunday Morning.

Second, a documentary about Charles Busch, drag performer and playwright extraordinaire.

I'm ashamed to admit neither of them had been on my radar screen until this morning.

I also watched John Waters on Henry Rollins's IFC (or is it Sundance?) show last night. Love them both.

Cable is ruining my life.

But back to the gender benders. BFF asked me why I have such a fascination with transgenderism and transexualism. I think she might suspect I'm a closet case. But I actually do think of myself as a drag queen. I find men who perform as women with reverence to be playfully liberationist for all of us who identify, or perhaps struggle to identify with our feminine natures. Male dipshits on sitcoms who dress as women to make fun of women have the opposite effect. What drag does better than anything else, is show that gender is indeed a performance. Language doesn't help us with this. In French there is only one word for woman, female, feminine--at least in English we have the three words. There is a difference between sex, gender and sexuality. There can, and often is, overlap. All of us deserve to think through the complexities of who we are in these terms, especially within a culture that denigrates the feminine.

And as much as I love drag queens, I'm concerned that the gender bender figures who are gaining positive attention and getting accepted by a mainstream audience are/were born into male bodies. Where are the women transitioning into male forms? Where are the beloved butch dykes? They're out there, but they're not getting press. Why are drag kings harder for us to swallow, so to speak, than drag queens, especially if my cultural-hatred-of-the-feminine argument stands? Is it fundamentally biological (and believe me, I hate to bring the argument into this territory, but bear with me) . . . is it the 'how-dare-you-subvert-your-procreative-nature'? Or is it the harder to pull off performance of it all? It's perhaps easier to worship a glamorous figure who is indeed performing on a literal stage, a la Charles Busch or Ru Paul, and harder to be drawn to someone we expect to perform a glamorous role in life who is choosing to fade into the background. Or, do we believe in a kind of essentialism for men that we don't for women? That somehow, you cannot perform masculinity the way you can femininity, so butch dykes are ultimately frauds? Aha, perhaps I'm winding my way back to the hatred of the feminine here. . . .

Help me out, ya'll. What says you?

One of Kiki's characters comes out:

Dina McGreevey talks to Oprah. Airs Tuesday. Can't wait to hear what you've got to say about this one. . . .

By the way, I hate Gawker.

Hooray for tranny journalists!

From Mike to Christine.

So this LA Times sports reporter has begun her public transition in a very public way. God, I love California.

I hate, however, that journalism doesn't quite provide the forum necessary to really address these issues with as much complexity as they deserve. Or perhaps I'm just not giving readers enough credit.

I appreciate that Mike hints at the relationship between identity and writing--that since he's begun his transition he's brought more energy to his writing and suffered less from writer's block. But I want more depth in that area. I want a discussion about how even when he's writing about sports, he's creating himself on the page, and for all these years he's created a made up character. Now, or soon, when his byline changes to Christine Daniels, she'll be creating a more truthful character and reinforcing a self she doesn't have to do battle for the sake of cultural normality.

What do you think?

*thanks to Sid for the link! and I strongly encourage you to visit her most recent, brilliant rant on Russell Simmons.

A new blog begins

I woke up this morning, read the front page of the Times and slipped into a panic attack. I don't tend to be prone to such a thing, but today's news was more than I could passively take.

Kiki and I got together over brunch this morning, as we're wont to do, and we quickly got to the depths of things: fear and self-identity. Our conversation ran the gamut from growing up in the age of AIDS and Lyme Disease, being creative writing professors in the age of Seung-Hui Cho and Virginia Tech, why passing as straight is hated in the gay community, how we hate being defined by others, how we hate that our institutions fail us, how we hate that we're feeling powerless in a world full of hate that we, at moments, see with great clarity. We're writers, and I daresay truth tellers, each in our own way, but we question the depth and reach of our impact (I should quit with the "we" here and just start speaking for myself).

Growing up in the '80s and '90s, I expected to contract AIDS and/or Lyme disease and die from it. I did not expect to get cancer and survive it. Right now I'm expecting one of my students to attack me physically, because he sees me as a vulnerable woman and I confronted him publicly about his agression. Am I concerned about the right things? Maybe I should fear diabetes. Maybe I should fear the karma splash from my government's illegal foreign policy. Perhaps I should fear the local community theater board of directors that wants my head on a platter. Maybe I should worry about head injuries incurred in my shower or fatal car accidents on a spring day. But what horror (or perhaps delight) might actually befall me I do not know. Whatever it may be, I feel duty bound to a moral imperative to resist the radical wrongs I witness in whatever ways I can. I do not want to live or die complicit in things I despise.

I am now a part of the media, that nebulous machine that helped create the pervasive fears that are so often red herrings. Who's asking the right questions? I think Kiki and I are, but we tend to do it over brunch. I think it's high time we open up the discussion to the rest of y'all inquisitive, thoughful beasts out there.

Be forewarned: I take many a cue from Michel Foucault and my life's greatest teachers and mentors have been queer and feminist theorists. This blog has been inspired by Kiki's and my work in linguistics and narratology--we're questioning and writing for our lives. To paraphrase Kierkegaard, the ethical person is editor of his life: to write one’s life is to assume responsibility for that life. But to know and write one's life, one must come to grips with her self, and honorably face the truth of that self despite the forces at work to berate and denigrate that self for not conforming to cultural norms.

So, it's an experiment. We tried to recreate our brunch conversation that birthed this crazy thing but then I inadvertently erased the damn thing before we made it into a podcast. Oh well. Now it's a blog.