On Heterosexuality

This has ended up being a very long ramble. I take a risk here because I engage in what I like to call "pure speculation" about heterosexuality ... by "pure speculation", I mean speculation unencumbered by fact or reference or proof, and founded upon the ramblings of my own mind. I do not want to offend anyone. But dynamics that we all experience deserve playing out and talking about. I believe in transparency, and I believe in making mistakes, especially of interpretation, in aid of finding your way forward. So here goes.


I spent the afternoon with my excellent friend Roy Ortopan at the American Conservatory Theater's production of Edward Albee's new and not so new At Home at the Zoo. So, spoiler alert, I plan to reveal anything I feel like, so those of you who might want to see this exquisite production should consider bookmarking these scribblings for future reference.

The play is a combination of two acts: the first act is new writing and concerns a discussion about matters of relationship and sex between a long-married couple Peter (Anthony Fusco) and Ann (René Augesen), both long-time regulars at ACT. It has the form of a prequel to the second act which is Albee's iconic first playThe Zoo Story, written in 1958. So a little criticism to start ... the first act exhibited the exquisite writing of a , each line crafted and yet natural. Augesen and Fusco oozed the comfortable relationship whose very smoothness is its own threat. The second act, Pinteresque in writing and in staging, is rougher, even coarser, with a long monologue in which Jerry (Manoel Feliciano) recounts to Peter a murderous story about a dog and works himself from accidental interlocutor to incarnate violence.

The unsettling nature of this production is in its interconnected but stylistically and emotionally distinct one-act plays. The challenge is to find the resistances that flow from the one to the other.

In the first act, set in an exquisite modernistic living room, white and sterile and clean, the exchanges between these comfortably married middle-aged Manhattanites expresses what I would call the inner dynamic of heterosexuality. That is, the dominance of the female irrespective of the power relationship, and therefore the alternating current of resistance and attraction to the female that is the dynamo of male heterosexuality. Let's lead by noting that there's a lot in that that is probably bullshit ... I mean that. But as a lifelong gay guy (notwithstanding an earnest and meaningful heterosexual relationship of 18 months at the end of my teenage years) I observe male heterosexuality as a sort-of alien force in the kitchen of my being. It is there, it is clearly real, and yet it is hard to quantify. It is passing difficult to quantify how the female principle drives straight men even as they alternately dominate it and submit to it.

I never fully accepted the inside game of feminism's more abstruse ideological perambulations. The obvious and ineluctable force of women demanding equality is not feminism ... I call that women's liberation, and I separate it from the ideological prescriptions of the high priestesses of feminism, especially in the 70s and 80s before they slowly faded from relevance in the face of rising female equality. So, a play like this throws light on our present post-feminist era. Women and men may continue to spar as they have done for centuries, but women have a better block from which to jump off than ever before, leastwise in Western society.

Ann presses her complacent husband to be dangerous. It is he who resists, who tells a story of the one time in his youth he was dangerous, and how it was terrifying and almost destroyed his life. This is a flip from stereotypes, because it is the female who is supposed to crave the secure and the predictable. But it is Peter who argues that he thought that they had agreed before marriage that theirs would be a peaceful and predictable journey where excitement was not at issue, but the pleasures of the long and the assured were in the fore.

There is no one heterosexuality, of course, any more than there is only one homosexuality. But one thing that distinguishes heterosexual men from exclusively homosexual men is that one way or another they must encounter the female principle in all its permutations. Gay men ... and this describes me to a T ... love women for the intelligence and wit and, most emphatically, their non-maleness. But the female principle "in all its permutations" we can take or leave. We don't live with it and we don't go home with it. Straight men do. The notion of the traditional chauvinist is that he pedestalizes women in order to wall himself off from those permutations; in other words, chauvinism is a way of isolating and crystalizing femaleness so that it can be used without interfering in the more fundamental and more powerful maleness which the chauvinist prefers.

There is another kind of chauvinist ... I call them "true heterosexuals." These are the men who are focused exclusively on women, and who hardly notice men at all. There are curiously few of these men. I had a lecturer in college who was a great influence on me and with whom I had many excellent conversations. But if there was a single woman present, I ceased to exist for him. I invited him once to my home for a slide show of a recent trip to Indonesia and we were having a rollicking conversation until a then temporary roommate, female and young and pretty, stopped by. He was gone; I never got him back.


But nowadays, notice how most coupled men ... and the more so the more urban or younger or more middle class they are ... foreground the female. Things as simple as walking a half step behind while girlfriend wife gabs on the cell phone (this drives me nuts), or as complex and laudable as the immersion in childcare or domesticity. It is that new convergence that Albee was expressing in his first act. But he is not afraid, as so many commentators are, to express the discomforts of the new prominence of the female in heterosexuality.

Peter found in his female approach to his marriage the comfort of taking the sting out of his masculinity. He complains at length ... and this gets plenty good laughs from the audience ... that his circumcision is retreating. Not that his foreskin is growing back, but that the glans of his penis is ever so infinitesimally disappearing under what foreskin was left by the surgeon's long-ago snip. Meanwhile, Ann complains that from time to time she wants Peter, whom she describes as a great lover and lousy fuck, to be dangerous, in essence to rape her with consent ... though she does not put it exactly that way.

So here we have the male principle slowly shrinking simultaneously happily and nervously, and the female principle casting around looking for the excitement that its very dominance precludes. Nice dialectics ... I love conundra like these. And as with the real world, there is no denouement, there is resolution. Life goes on, uneasily. You wonder if after this conversation they can return to the sweet satisfying lovemaking that Ann both accepted and rejected and that was all that Peter cared to do.

"Cared to do" ... because in the most violent portion of the conversation, Peter relates the one time when he was dangerous, when he had anally penetrated a woman and injured her, caused her to bleed sufficiently to send her to hospital, during a fraternity-sponsored initiation orgy long beforehand. Just that one brush with danger was enough for him, and the idea of role-playing violence with his gentle-voyage wife was thereby abhorrent.

Remember this ... it was blood and penetration forced upon Peter by the other that haunted him.

So the act wraps up with Peter leaving awkwardly to go for a walk with his book, to take a read in Central Park


Remember that the second act was written in 1958, and the language and staging is coarser. I would argue that this is both by reason of Albee's youth and by reason of the writing occurring before the rise of women's liberation. Jerry, a drifter, strikes up a conversation with Peter. From its inception, this conversation bristles with the implied violence of male-to-male heterosexual relations. That Jerry reveals in the course of the conversation that he has sexually hustled men only adds to that unexpressed violence. While in the first act, the audience is satisfied in a conversation that starts and ends essentially nowhere and travels from one indeterminate to another, in the second act, the audience knows that this cannot end well. Blood will be spilled; someone will die.

When straight men are together, they always bristle a little. It can be nice bristling, it can be humorous, vigorous, laidback. It can be any kind of bristling you want, but there is always at least a tiny charge. Perhaps it is almost as if everyone wants to put out a positive electrical charge to make sure that they all equally repel if they get too close. I think this is what explains the tendency to violence under the influence of alcohol, because the tiny positive electrical charge fades and suddenly, unexpectedly and most unwelcome, two men may find themselves too close.

I think that most men actually prefer the company of men ... notwithstanding my notion that the modern defusing of the male/female relationship leads to greater comfort between men and women. Because when men are together, the female principle no longer threatens or demands; it becomes a kind of icon for waving or saluting or acknowledging or, mostly, ignoring. That is why gay men, and I include myself in this, are always vaguely unnerved by being the lone gay guy with a bunch of straight guys. Again, this is meant to express underlying subcurrents, not some supervening agenda. Keep that in mind. Gay guys are unnerved because we do not output that tiny positive electrical charge. To turn the metaphor on its head, we are more AC with each other than DC ... we play by flipping from positive to negative charge, pushing and pulling, alluring and demanding. So the electrical pressure of all those positive charges we experience around a bunch of straight guys is demanding.

It is in this sense that Albee's depiction of the confrontation between Peter and Jerry is so successful. He plays with what I would describe as the AC/DC thing ... alternately repelling each other and attracting each other. But each submission, each attraction makes the subsequent repulsion the stronger. At one point as the denouement approaches, Jerry starts to tickle Peter who laughs and enjoys himself. That rapidly devolves into a fight over territory that leads quickly to Peter picking up the knife that Jerry threw to him, and Jerry impaling himself on the knife as Peter holds it as warning that Jerry must not approach further. The knife which Jerry provided is like the penis which the sorority girl had demanded in Peter's previous encounter with the dangerous. But where his youthful danger was male/female, and ultimately resolved itself, his adult danger was male/male, and death was the result.

Albee's genius here is in the way he flips back and forth. Remember that the earlier part of Peter's life was written recently, where this terminal encounter was written 50 years ago. I wonder how long Albee has been thinking of the prequel.

So I have rambled on as is my wont. These are irresolvable questions, in constant flux. The names of the principles may be eternal, but the practice of them is always changing. Whenever you hear of an eternal principle, keep that in mind. The name may be eternal, but nothing human is eternal. Nothing is solid.

Photos by Arod from a lengthy series I call "Flat Faces" ... pix of men on billboards or posters out and about.

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American Idol et al

Just a few quick notes before all the fun begins tonight. I predict that Kris Allen is gone tomorrow. I see it this way. Adam's fans got the message and will vote until their tiny little fingers start to get numb. Allison is the only woman and that will carry her one more week. Don't get me wrong ... I think either Allison or Kris would make a perfect runner up.

But what goes around comes back to bite you. And that is Danny Gokey. I never thought he measured up ... I thought it was a one-trick pony and a voice that was not very pleasant even if he hit notes and had volume and all that. I admit that last week he nailed it ... his best performance yet. But he is no American Idol.

That said, it turns out he really does have gawd in his corner. One of the best AI blogs, mjsbigblog:American Idol - I Love This Cheesy Show, revealed there is an organized evangelical campaign for him. Check it out.

Like every election, American Idol is about who votes. And like every time a fag is up for election, beware the christians! If Adam doesn't win, well, it will be the work of the devil.



Pastiche: I was sitting alone and reading my Herodotus in the cafeteria of the school of business, an entirely graduate affair, at MRU, the Major Research University where I hull grains in exchange for a sack of the same, sufficient to keep me adorned in dress pants and clean shirts. I decided to grab a coffee and when I returned, a noisome spectacle confronted me. A deliciously bronzed, albeit stereotypically crass and straight, laddie of mid-20s vintage had occupied a seat at my table along with a tall, pale, and evidently supercilious female. He was supercilious too but in a coarse, overbearing sort of way. I nodded my approval at their arrival ... seats are rare, after all. He proceeded to loudly declaim on his many opportunities for work in London, and New York, and Austin. He scorned her for preferring London ... "you think I want to live in London just because I'm Australian." Yawn. She had no spine, and was apparently just happy to be with the big stud. And he was a stud.

We fags see a lot of heterosexuality, and it is always a little mysterious. But the young-stud-looking-afield-with-grateful-female-hanging-on phenomenon is one of the stranger expositions. To be blunt, I'd screw 'im if he nodded at me, but I wouldn't waste 15 minutes trying to lure him into my life. And as for her, what does he think she's gonna do for him? She was retreating before every one of his "excursions", but he was so wrapped up in himself that he did not notice.

This is where the "promiscuous" gay male pattern is so superior. If these were two gay guys, they'd screw around a bit and mutually realize that there is no there here. And then move on to the next trick until something eventually made more sense. But heterosexuality seems to move so slowly that such unlikely pairings as these get stuck rather more often, and to frequently deleterious effect.

I am being obnoxious, of course, and arrogant and all that ... but not one whit more obnoxious or arrogant than my big Aussie hunk. And, yeah, he was a hunk. Yessirreebob.


Photos by Arod from around town. Top photo from a year or more ago on a billboard in the Castro; middle photo recent from the Lower Hater store window on Haight Street; bottom photo recent from a window in the Castro.

Wee Timmie

So Timmie won! Yeah!

I am reminded of ... "Whats the matter, Lassie? Show me what's the matter."

Timmie doesn't need to worry about Lassie ... because he won.

Yeah!

Photo above from the boob tube tonight. Photo below ... don't faint ... from Timmie's days at UW (pronounced you-dub.)



ps., this is my "happy" post, but it doesn't mean that I am not still soul-disturbed at the christers killing my civil rights.

My Trip to Berkeley

I'm on vacation starting Monday ... heading back to Winchester to see the family including my sister who is visiting from Australia. But work demanded one more genuflection ... there is a Drupal conference this weekend in Berkeley called BadCamp, and it was certainly useful for me to go notwithstanding that I am not really a geek, I just play one on TV.

[To set the stage, I am, martini in hand, recovering from my day's exactions by watching Polyester ... this is probably a two-day blog post, but I am going to pretend that it is all taking place this evening, snuggled under the covers and preparing for a Sunday of performance ... update ... oops, never wrote another word after setting the stage which I blame on the martini. I actually managed to sleep through Polyester. I woke up at 5:05 ... how twisted is that I do not seem to be able to sleep past somewhere between 4 and 6 every morning. So I am going to finish this in bed in the dark while the rest of the city snoozes contentedly on Sunday morning.]

So, where were we ...yes, I am not really a geek, I just play one on TV. I go to these things not so much to sharpen my skills as to learn the flow, to understand the medium, to know how to talk to the guys who actually make the things work. Frankly, at my stage in life, I am going to be managing technology not creating it ... in the broadest sense. Sure I can bang out a quick web page and I am pretty slick on page-layout stuff, but only marginally competent on photo or video-editing. But all the content needs to be gathered and massaged, and that is where I come in. (My job is transitioning in this sense, and I plan to spend some time thinking about these terms while I vacation in fabulous Winchester.)

So with these chestnuts of wisdom squirreled in my larder, as it were, I descended into the 24th Street BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) Station. I took BART pretty much daily to Berkeley for years as I pursued my three Cal degrees, but I hardly ever find myself on the system nowadays. It really is sweet ... perfect place for a half hour read. (I am taking a time out from my Central Asian middle period reading to tackle the lively The Trouble with Tom by Paul Collins, and that was my companion today.) BART sounds nice too ... the trains, I mean. And it is sufficiently clean and tidy notwithstanding that it is a heavily used urban transit system. It is not regal, though, like CalTrain which I ride daily now to my job at MRU. IN that sense, BART tells you what is happening, where CalTrain prefers palatial silence ... no announcements, no info. Just a train ... you figure it out.

So a half hour later, there I am at Shattuck and Center in downtown Berkeley ... or Berzerkeley as I generally prefer. The place is awash in studied unconcern and self-conscious coolness. Non-Bay-Areans (if I may) might figure that the two most liberal cities in America scant miles apart would feel the same ... but Berkeley is as un-San Francisco as San Jose or LA to me. It is a world apart ... isolationist, and frankly it feels more American to me than San Francisco. I am not entirely sure how to explain that ... but it is unpolished and raw like America is. It is not a jewel, but more like a big farm where the animals go about their business of eating and belching and littering. Perhaps it feels more American to me because it resembles Ann Arbor, one of the first American towns where I spent a lot of time.

When I return to my alma mater, I am unnerved a wee. Excited, giddy, uneasy. I try to walk the same routes I used to take. Cal looks great these days; the campus glows, and the major construction is confined to a long strip on the far south side. I was trying to admire the new East Asian Library but couldn't come up with words ... later one of my colleagues from MRU told me he thought it looks like a modernist mosque, and he had it right on. A little disappointing. Even so, it has fundamentally changed the weighting of the campus and made what used to be a spot to walk by while getting elsewhere into a hub.

And so, I arrived at the Hearst Memorial Mining Building, one of the finest buildings on campus and one which I only ever entered during my long stay here to look at the lobby. There is a pond outside that used to have fish, but is now, like so many ponds, just a fetid collector of trash ... I suppose the fish are gone as part of the great chloramine scandal ... but I will not go there now.

I like to say to my mother that I am now a wikian drupaller. And now in the lobby of Hearst, I am in the company of all manner of drupallers, wikian or otherwise. One of the guys at the sign-in table liked my Museum of Anthropology t-shirt and we had a long chat about Canada ... alas that turned out to be my only significant exchange with someone I did not know before I arrived. That stems as much from my own tendency to stand to the side and observe as from anything else. Of course at these affairs of enthusiasts, one avoids being exposed as a neophyte. It is the same in all conventions of believers ... I once found myself at a convention of killie fish enthusiasts by way of my then lover who had a brief dalliance thereabouts. The in-talk there, all the little in-jokes and snide asides ... just like every other in-crowd. Of course, being in an in-crowd does not make you cool in the broader sense. In fact, enthusiasts, if I may, are the least cool of all people. Hence, geekdom.

Geekdom. I got a cool, free T-shirt with a bad boy logo ... more like a bad drip logo in the powder blue that drupallers appear to favor. I like the T-shirt because it says "Bad Camp" which sounds naughty, and because it is black. I was surprised it was free ... evidently that exposed my newbie status as they were a little "oh well" about telling me so. Not nasty, just "in". In fact, nothing nasty here anywhere, a very welcoming atmosphere, but no doubt about the in-ness. Found this comment on the feed at the web site: "I was wondering if there was any thinking to having a party or social gathering (at a venue or bar or restaurant) on Saturday night? It's fantastic when a sea of Drupal swarms a place to drink, dance, and hack code." Yes, it is fantastic when a sea of the in expose the out to their in-ness. I wanna be a geek, too.

I attended three sessions ... skipped the middle session in the afternoon to do nostalgic tour of the campus and check in at one of my old coffee-shop haunts. As I said, this sort of thing is not about the latest techniques or advanced programming for me, but to get an understanding of how to manage and be involved with technology like this. So I am looking for flow and paradigm ... and naturally I have plenty of time to observe the interaction of geekdom and maleness ... maleness is my favorite topic any day of the week. So, no offense meant, but I was quite taken with the co-presenter in the first afternoon session I attended.

He seemed sweet and innocent ... rather blond, and evidently a farm boy of some kind as he sported a T-shirt with an inscription "Is this heaven? No it's Iowa" with an arrow pointing to a map of Iowa. Obvious geek. Tight body ... indeed very tight to the point where he didn't seem to be able to unhinge his neck from his shoulders. Lots of uhs and ahs, and constantly leading his sentences with "basically". When he wasn't speaking, he got his hands into the back pockets of his jeans, or stood nervously arms akimbo for a bit before throwing those hands behind him again. His feet dancing. He had to move past his co-presenter to point something on the projection at one point, but he quickly scurried back to his off-position, deferring, each movement behind the other fellow who was vastly more assured but equally informed and informative. The other fellow, tall and truly ill-dressed, looked like a garage band bass player grown past where the style makes sense. That hair ... he must stop every now and then during the day to find a pillow to muss it ... talk about looking like you just got out of bed. Not a studied look, at all. There were no studied looks at Bad Camp.

The Iowa boy works with five monitors. The other fellow made the point, and a light giggle trickled through the audience. Iowa boy was pleased. So was I.

What did I learn ... there are lots of tools and add-ons, and I figured out three things that we can do with our Drupal installation to solve specific problems. Again, I can't do them ... but I know they can be done, and I know how to set up the meetings to argue that they ought to be done.

The other presentation I went to was very advanced. This presenter, probably five years older than Iowa boy, just as cute, but vastly more assured, smoothed his way through what I saw as a complex installation, but never lost his audience for a moment. No highs and lows, no excitement, but ... to channel Cesar Milan ... calm authority. And what did I learn ... all the key terms and the order of creating a module. You see ... and I am constantly saying this at work ... I am looking for the narrative in technology, and I leave the mechanics to the mechanics.

So eventually, the day was over for me. I hung out in the lobby to make sure that my colleagues knew I was still there ... well, and to see if I could catch another glimpse of Iowa boy or smooth presenter ... no such luck. Had a chat with TC who is our server guy at work. Neither he nor I are coming on Sunday ... life, or in his case wife, demands a little attention and an all-weekend Drupal conference is best attended by the young and uncommitted, or by those who still thrill to a sea of night-swarming drupallers making the scene.

A not very efficient, long walk back to BART across the campus, cell chat with my sainted ex whose birthday I managed to forget again. One last thrill ... I managed to sit amongst a group of three louts ... well-behaved louts ... each of whom was sporting a beer. They spoke unaccented English, but slid into patois Spanish from time to time. One guy had his beer up his sleeve ... nice trick. Late 20s, over-fed, dingy-beclothed, bad hair, too loud by only a third, I would say. Suddenly, from nowhere, two BART cops, built like brick shithouses, and cinched into uniforms so sharp you would cut yourself if your ran your hand lovingly along the creases. Talk about calm authority! "I guess I better put this away" lead lout proffered submissively. "I have a better idea," lead cop barked. "Since you held up this train, why don't we get off and discuss this on the platform. For a moment I feared he might think I was part of them, but of course I had an open book as opposed to an open can, and they paid no never-mind to me.

So that was my trip to Berkeley. Long may it reign.


Photos of the Cal campus by Arod, taken with my new Lumix FZ5 with its Leica lens and 10x optical zoom. Sweet. More photos here. Top photo is a frieze on the Life Sciences Building; second photo is the ceiling of the lobby of the Hearst Memorial Mining Building; third photo is from a mosaic on the Old Art Gallery behind Sproul Hall; bottom photo is the Golden Bear on Lower Sproul. The little Drupal logo is, of course, not my photo.

Nirvana and Daddy's

Ended up in a gay bar last night. That doesn't happen very often any more. But there I was on Castro at 10 o'clock, and there was a bar with the pounding music and that big scrum of men, and I just thought I would walk to the back and back again. But a little context.

My good friend Louis and I had dinner at Nirvana, a self-styled Burmese-Californian place on Castro that I quite enjoy. Louis writes a fascinating blog on food and Amsterdam and sundry other topics; I think you will findhis 2007 trip blog (triplogue?), Amsterdam for Free, good reading. So we drank martinis and ate noodles and seafood and engaged in the rollicking discussions which are our friendship. Louis loves food and gives fascinating blow by blow descriptions of selcting, preparing, and serving it, most especially in Amsterdam which he visits annually. I always come away from a conversation with him feeling pangs at not being in Amsterdam right now ... it certainly is one of my favorite cities in the world.

We parted company as Louis mounted up on his Segway ... he is one of the original Segway guys, and to see him peel up the very steep Noe Hill to his home on the summit is thrilling and certainly a little unnerving. And I walked slowly up Castro heding home in the opposite direction from Louis.

Castro at night on a Friday is still pretty much entirely gay, but it is not young gay in the way it used to be. It is not that older guys and middle-aged guys did not hang around in the 70s and 80s, but rather that there were lots of young guys. There was everybody. That was the era of the clone ... boots, tight blue jeans, T-shirt, and lumberjack shirt ... a look I found sexy then and still do. On any evening, but especially the weekends, gay guys of all ages hung out in droves on Castro. But now it appears that young gay guys take little part in what we like to call the gay community. Partially this is real estate ... the gay community consists largely of refugees who collect in cities, and so the young guys are naturally less able on average to afford the real estate. But partially it is choice. I think they grew up taking gay liberation for granted, and they live much more comofrtably interspersed and unaggregated among their straight peers. That's what it seems. I don't actually know.

What I do know is that Castro Street is a decidedly middle aged and older gay street now. And the bar which enticed me, Daddy's Bar at 440 Castro is certainly a case in point. As I noted, I decided just to walk to the back, and back again. "Walk" is an odd word. "Slither" might be more accurate. I am good at bar-slithering, having practiced it more or less nightly for a couple of decades, and so I slowly and with easy strategy, made my way to the back through the press of bodies, up the 4 or 5 stairs, and past the back bar. That was my undoing. The back bar, with a big bald guy working his crowd like a trapeze artist, pouring and pulling and tilling and talking all in a swoop. I had a double Maker's Mark straight up, and I might better have decided that a single was sufficient because they evidently pour their doubles very liberally at Daddy's.

So there I was at the bottom of a mine pit of men with a tumbler of whiskey in my hand ... and this is quite literally the first time I have been in a gay bar in a year at least. So I propped up the wall and took to sipping and studying the passing manhood. It was as if everyone I had been cruising with 15 years ago was still there only 15 years older ... and no one new had come in. I counted four guys possibly under 30. Nevertheless, or possibly consequently, it was a friendly loud boisterous crowd of round and tall and bald and scruffy men, some just fat, some built, not very bloody many of them lean by any definition. I saw precious little of the shark-like cruising in which I partook so valiantly those decades past. This was about grooving to the incessant beat, and shouting the moral equivalents of huzzahs above the loud roil of the crowd. I enjoyed myself, and the drill of the noise was soothing, as I have always found it so in gay bars.

I slowly re-slithered the path I had pioneered earlier, stopping to prop up the odd post or wall. I let my Maker's Mark warm in my hand and in my throat, sip by sip. And when my glass was finally dry, I emerged, quite drunk, equally nostalgic, and feeling warm towards my gay brothers who have survived and still practice the art, warts and all.

Gotta walk the dog, so I'll try to add a few illustrative pix later.

Ideologues and Gay Freedom

To follow up on yesterday's post ... I think I based much of what I argued on three insufficiently answered questions ... leastwise unanswered in the current thread. I think I address subjects like this a lot since they represent core questions in the core ideas that I think about.

1. Why is gay liberation about sex first?

Homo-association is common in all societies. Armies, the workplace, sports, play, the church. Erotic male association occurs in all societies, too, but it often is either unnamed or misnamed. The difference between two guys hanging out and two guys living together as a married couple is that the latter two guys have sex. It is the sex that matters.

The virulent homophobia of the present day is the invention of monotheistic religions. In the case of christianity, the homophobia derived from a struggle in the early church which the sexual liberationist party lost. But the real repression only started in the 11th century, and it relates to the rise in the state side of the church/state dialectic. It is important always to keep that in mind ... both church and state attack homosexuals when it is useful to them ... in this sense, as I have argued before, gays are more like Jews in Western history than we are like women or Blacks. In the case of islam, its founder was a homophobe, and death is the punishment. Like everything in their holy book, there are contradictions and ways of reading different things from different passages ... holy books are like that, as they must be if they are to be holy. State and religious persecution of gays was also sporadic during the muslim centuries, but the key repressive feature was in the "protestant", flat, and family-centric society. It is true that muslim societies have generally tolerated old guys screwing pre-pubescent guys, but it is the tolerance of looking the other way. Their loathing of gay sex among equals parallels the christian world.

Gay people living together in the past might have drawn attention to them, but they were punished for having sex, or for being imagined to have sex. Repression against gay people has always been sporadic and selective. The key to understanding the repression of gay people, though, is to understand the silence. The love that dare no t speak its name. Virtually every lie told about us relies on the fact that we have been silenced for two millennia.

2. What was the impact of 70s feminism's hostility to gay liberation?

I believe that the key impact of feminism's hostility to gay liberation came to fruition only once the AIDS crisis forced feminism to back off ... or more to the point, to join up and garner a cut of the fruits, as it were .. the funding and recognition that started to flow towards AIDS-oriented organizations and the political clubs in the early 80s. (Parenthetically, I note again that I always distinguish between the social movement of women for freedom and equality as against the ideological superstructure built around it. The former I prefer to call women's liberation”; the latter "feminism.")

That impact was to undercut the primacy of the sex question. Feminism sought to domesticate gay liberation, to deprive it of the creativity and radicalism that challenged notions of prudery, dominant mores, monogamy, and centrally regulated morality. The notion that "gay is good" cannot be separated from a notion that sex is good ... that sex is the most profound creative force in human life, and that liberating from domination by religion and the state would lead to free people immune from lies and ideology. Feminism has, with only a very few exceptions, viewed free male sexuality as threat. Andrea Dworkin was vastly more iconic than Gayle Rubin.

Those kooky gay guys with our Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, our predilection for cruising, our hyper-masculine affectations ... the so-called "clones" ... and our fierce determination to defend the right for people to love whomever and however they damned well pleased ... well, it just did not make for tight control. Feminism was and is prescriptive ... it is ideological, starting not from life but from first principles. A band of heroic lovers was not susceptible to the control of a committee of school marms. They didn't like us and we didn't like them. We didn't trust them. But things changed as they are wont to do.

When those feminists who had boycotted the movement in the 70s finally showed up, they brought with them a loathing of what one of them once called, spitting the words in my face at a conference at UCLA in 1981, "your penis politics." That conference was a crazy attempt to build a national gay organization on the left and was like some uranium isotope with a half life of a half a weekend. One of my best friends at the time did manage to find a boyfriend ... in a bathroom ... so it wasn't a total loss. The most hilarious moment was when a women dressed head to tow in expensive Western wear ... you know, the boots, the hat, the shirt, the chaps, the whole nine yards ... rose to vehemently attack drag queens for mocking women.

So with those furious days as precursor, the impact of feminism on the gay movement has been to de-sex it. And that has given pride of place to those who make ludicrous distinctions between gay sex and gay relationships.

3. What is wrong with the notion of the invention of [the discourse of] homosexuality?

Silence.

The notion of the invention of homosexuality relies upon positing the first outspoken gays of the late 19th century as saying something new. No. They were saying aloud what could not be said. No doubt, saying it aloud changed it. But it did not invent it. Saying it aloud made it available for others to modify it, attack us, redefine us, be repelled by us. Finally all their allegations against us made without naming us were open for examination. Of course, it took century for us to rise to our own defense, and in that time they slaughtered us and jailed us and beat us up and drove us from our homes in numbers that the bigots of earlier centuries could only have dreamed about. But that is true of all repression in the 20th century. The means at hand allowed for industrial slaughter. You cannot blame that on us for breaking the silence. You cannot blame that on the Enlightenment. You cannot blame that on people fighting for their rights. You have to blame the slaughter on the slaughterers.

Homosexuality is often blamed on foreigners ... it always something imposed on an innocent population by the evil other. I enjoyed Tim Blanning's recounting in his The Pursuit of Glory of the attitude of the 17th-century Dutch:

In the Dutch Republic, it was asserted that sodomy had been completely unknown until introduced by the Spanish and French envoys attending the negotiations that led to the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. Henceforth it was known as the 'Catholic vice', part of the great conspiracy by the Antichrist whose headquarters at Rome was also 'catamitorum mater'.

Catamitorum mater would be mother of all catamites.

Dr. Massad might take a lesson from all this. He should blame the political stagnation of Arab societies not on European gays but on the rulers of Arab societies, and on the strange lassitude of their subject populations in developing some different approach, notwithstanding the amply models available just for the watching.

The wholesome working class guys whom Massad apparently favors and who are screwing their pre-pubescent cousins and nephews ... they are gay, Massad. So are the allegedly Euro-influenced middle class guys who screw each other. The job of freedom loving people is to defend their right to do what consenting people want to do, and to oppose the bigots and authoritarians who want to kill them irrespective of what a ideologue on foreign shores thinks of their allegiances.

Massad, like the church, like the prophet, like the high-feminist ideologues, supports the silence. Silence kills. Freedom shouts.

I have illustrated this post again with the work of Fred Holle. Check him out. I saw his paintings at an exhibition at American Conservatory Theater, and they impressed me with his mastery of the simultaneity of madness and the quotidian. His web site says that one can use his images for non-commercial purposes ... and gawd noze I ain't making a nickel off my scribblings.

The Tiny Mind of the Ideologue

My somewhat tormented perorations on impostors in my last post came to rest in the notion of the neo-con as impostor. That is a subset of the notion that all ideologues are impostors in that they pretend that thought follows fact when their method is to force fact to follow their idealist impositions. It is true of left and right, and so soon after my little attack of dry heaves at the conceit of Michael Burleigh's Earthly Powers, by chance and the efforts of a friend I have run into a classic case of a left wing ideologue whose mouth has got well ahead of any reasoned thought.

My upstairs neighbor and old friend, Tony, pushed an article through the mail slot that he suggested I read. It is from a gay rag called The Guide which features thoughtful articles among many many salacious and lovely pix of ill-clad men. The piece is called Desiring Arabs and it concerns a new book by a controversial Columbia University academic, one Joseph Massad. The reviewer, Bll Andriette, writes:

Massad's overarching theme is that Europe's encroachment on the Middle East -- Napoleon's aborted invasion of Egypt in 1798 is the opening salvo -- poured acid rain on the Arabs' literary legacy of same-sex eros. Western conquest has had that unsavory effect, Massad contends, whether the interlopers were Victorian-era colonial administrators, European scholars unearthing and systematizing ancient Arabic texts, gay tourists on sexcapades, or Western human-rights groups and the gay campaigners that he contemptuously dubs the "Gay International." Indeed, these latter Massad accuses of being a sometimes witting tool of Western imperialism. Moreover, he says, they do no favors for erotic freedom in the Middle East.

Later he writes:

Massad does not dispute that some Arabs embrace gay identity. But he contends they hail from the increasingly westernized elites. "They remain a minuscule minority among those men who engage in same-sex relations and who do not identify as 'gay' nor express a need for gay politics," Massad argues. The evidence, he suggests, includes Zakharia's care in distinguishing "gay love" from "gay sex," pointing to a world where same-sex activity is a commonplace without name or label.

It is noteworthy that he prefaces the previous comment with this:

"Since the concept of same-sex relations does not exist in the Arab world, being 'gay' is still considered to be sexual behavior," asserts Ramzi Zakharia, GLAS's outreach director. "Just because you sleep with a member of the same sex does not mean you are gay. Once a relationship develops beyond sex (i.e., love), this is when the term 'gay' applies."

GLAS refers to "The Gay and Lesbian Arabic Society (Glas.org), for example, was established in 1988 and claims chapters in New York, Los Angeles, Beirut, and Cairo."

Let's start here ... the notion propounded that "the concept of same-sex relations does not exist in the Arab world" is complete piffle ... idiocy ... one of those commonplaces that develop among people talking in closed rooms that are repeated so often that they start to sound true just so long as you do not compare them to reality. Folks, being gay IS a sexual behavior. When some straight Arab guy, or Afghan where the practice is quite common and roundly tsk-tsked by assorted campaigners of one type or another, screws some straight youth, what they are doing is gay. It is gay by any definition.

Now it may not be a "gay relationship" in the sense of gay marriage or commitment ceremonies or two queers gathering their nickels and quarters and buying a million dollar condo just outside the Castro. But it is gay. Gay equals homosexual, and vice versa. The terms are interchangeable.

The confusion here started, frankly, in the refusal of politically correct feminists to accept the fundamental arguments of gay liberation in the 70s ... and it was much abetted by the partial thinking of poor M. Foucault who had the misfortune of dying before he could complete, and correct, his thought. Let me explain.

The feminists of the 70s loathed and openly opposed gay liberation. They were motivated by two bad theories ... firstly that they had to counter the broadly propounded notion that feminists were frustrated dykes who just needed a good fuck by a proper man and they'd see the light; and, secondly, that all penetrative sex was male supremacist and since gay men are distincly penetrative, if you get my drift, they were the most supremacist of all. Those among my readers chary of hard thought may think I exaggerate, but I assure you that this is not hyperbole ... rather it is stated as fact from repeated direct personal experiences.

Gay liberation was founded on the notion that gay is good, by which we meant that "though some seek to deny it, homosexuality is normal and natural and not a threat to society or the individual." The quote is a paraphrase form memory of the opening sentence in the Gay Alliance Toward Equality (GATE) Vancouver statement of principles. Frobisher will no doubt correct any inessential inaccuracies. I believe that he wrote the line. By "gay is good", we meant gay sex, gay life, gay community, gay individuals, gay lovers, gay people. We did not create some inane separation between the joy of versus sex and gay relationships. Such an distinction is pandering to our enemies, and chiefly our religious enemies.

An aside on poor M. Foucault at whose doorstep we must lay blame for the truncated notion of discourse ... in this case, the ideational underpinning of the silly notion that the homosexual "discourse" was invented in the 19th century. The truth is that the long history of both Islam and Christianity in regard to homosexuality is a history of silencing in literate or reported form of the oral and obvious discourse of homosexuality. I find some support for this in Tim Blanning's excellent The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815, my current reading material, who has an thorough review of gay life ... including sex ... on pages 80-85. Again and again, he notes the silencing. For example, he quotes a 1709 report by the "raffish journalist" Ned Ward "who in his account of the clubs of London and Westminster" uses the phrasing "that they may tempt each other to commit those odious Bestialities, that ought for ever to be without a Name." It is not that there is no discourse for homosexuality, but rather that it is impolitic or blasphemous or what have you to give the discourse a name. Everybody knew what it was.

Notwithstanding our current standing on the left ... to whit that we have after much struggle been accepted as a struggle ... we remain the poor sisters of liberation struggles. What leftoid is willing to credit Mayor Newsom for his courage in standing up for gay liberation ... certainly not current poster-man (smirk) Barrack. (Here's an article article along with an alluring photo of the good mayor in a recent speech in which he avers that politicians are too risk-averse.) But even today, the struggle for gays is against silence and for civil rights.

Against silence.

That is what the would-be liberal Joseph Massad completely does not understand ... I believe he willfully misunderstands it in favor of a pre-figured ideology, to whit the "not quite as popular as it was a decade or two ago" anti-colonialism. His argument has this structure. Arab men used to fuck with gay abandon and repression was rare. Then the Euros arrived with their discourses of sodomy, and the elites adopted these homophobic notions. So all homosexual repression is the result of colonialism. Therefore, to oppose it is to be a colonialist since the removal of colonialism would result in a return to the status quo ante.

Return ... if I might refer to my argument about Lev Nussimbaum and his love of monarchy ... return to that which cannot be re-accessed is the essence of the fantasy of monarchism. If I commit to that which cannot be, then I cannot gird myself against commitment to, or more importantly against, that which actually is. Parenthetically, this is the allure of religion. In the current case, it is that which immunizes a would-be thinker like Massad against taking a stand FOR gay sex ... for the right of free individuals to do what they want in free association with other free individuals. And by consequence, a man who poses as a liberal can find himself defending the brutal repression not only of Arab dictators but also of their fascist Islamist opponents. The fall guys are a bunch of gay boys who just want to fuck. Who the hell cares ... people have sex! Let them be. Leave them alone.

This is precisely the deadly game of ideology. By convoluted paths, it argues that the non-existence of a discourse of homosexuality in the past allowed people to have gay sex, but now the imposition of gay discourse by colonialists means that gay people cannot have sex, therefore gay liberationists should shut up and then everything would return to the situation of silence in which gay guys could fuck. Applied to a context such as cooking or bibliography, such idiocy would get you kicked out of the club. On the left, you get a book published and a professorship. What foolishness ... it would be funny if lives were not at issue ... if victims of this logic were not languishing in Egyptian prisons and at the end of Iranian nooses.

What we really have here is the fact that Massad is a reactionary, a homophobe. Not a liberal. He supports the repression of gays and he opposes free speech. His convoluted thinking ... I am too sane to call it logic ... amounts to supporting the repression of gays by the Egyptian regime and the Iranian murderers.

I will return to the depredations of ideologues against gays tomorrow.

I have read a lot of this to my sainted roommate and bartender, RL, who notes that his arguments reek of perversions and subjections of logic. Perfect.

I am writing this post to the stylings of the inimitable Noel Coward in his 1950 Las Vegas performance at the Desert Inn ... and I am spurred by the equally inimitable RL's production of a Gin Buck, a fine dinner of tortelloni and salad, and soon another cocktail whose identity is yet to be determined ... it is a Hearst with Punta Mes.

Check out this additional good article from the horny Guide.

Photos from the work of Fred Holle.

David, We Hardly Knew Ya

Former gay stripper, David Hernandez, lost out last night, and I am sore sad. It's not so much that he was voted off ... that is not how it works. It's that no one voted for him. Middle aged gay guys who think guy strippers are cool ... we are not a large voting block on American Idol. I confess ... I have never voted, and I am not quite sure how to vote ... but now that I have an iPhone ... yes an iPhone, but I will deal with that later ... perhaps I could learn, and thereby sink one full level lower and closer to the hell that I decry and disdain. (BTW, I did call it (see the bottom of the post), notwithstanding that I thought it was two down, not one.)

But back to poor David. The guy is actually talented, but that kind of talent minus the kooky luck that accompanies all pop idols, might lead to a career as a male lead in drag shows. Maybe he can parlay it into something on Broadway, or in musical theater in Phoenix ... but the total package for big time pop star cannot include stripping, especially male stripping. That is not precisely anti-gay ... rather it is anti-sex, or, as we said in the "movement", it is sex-negative. More on that in my next post.

So, sweet David, I lift my Daiquiri made with kefir limes and light Matusalem rum ("original Cuban formula" made in the DR) to your efforts. You can strip for me any time.

Daydreaming Boy

Just watched the men sing in the only reality show, as they call them, that I routinely watch ... American Idol. Quite an impressive lot. But one of them just plain blows me away, ever since the final 12 men.


Sweet shy Jason Castro, dreadlocked of Dallas, plain rocked my world with his innocent and genuine interpretation of the old Lovin' Spoonful 1966 standard Daydream a couple of weeks back ... I remember the song from my teenage years as What a Day for a Daydreaming Boy ... on the Best 12 Guys American Idol show on Fox. I actually bought the iTunes version and put it on my iPod. American Idol is a guilty pleasure, but only the singing part ... the eliminations and the recursive self-referentiality are so boring. One has to assume that the modern young TV viewer likes vast oceans of empty blather in which content appears only as occasional flotsam. But old farts like me prefer some content.

Anyway, young Castro got the song right not so much insofar as he imitated the original version but insofar as he made it a universal anthem to boyness ... to the carefree concernedness of being and tooling around and caring more deeply than you can fathom or handle. Of wondering and focusing laser-deadly-serious. I have never forgotten my boyhood, never allowed its contours to dissolve in the face of the greater and deeper satisfactions of adulthood. I remember all-day excursions with my dog Laddie, I remember hard biking on the Monkey Trails in Winnipeg, I remember dark anger at the surrounding world that did not get me, I remember first loves unrequited and not knowing what requitedness would mean or involve. I remember having my bicycle stolen at a public pool and raging at the injustice. And, again, I remember the enduring friendship of my dog. I was a lonely boy, a serious boy, a boy who knew, who really knew, that adulthood was what I was destined for, and boyhood was only a torment in the way of and on the way to freedom. Still, I love that boy who is gone, and I never forget his carefree concern.

Thinking about Castro's rendition of Daydream, I found a Paolo Nutini version on Youtube ... I have never heard of Paolo Nutini before, but he would almost certainly set the teenage girl set a flutter. His rendition is fully competent and everything, but seems strangely shy of the romanticism of boyness ... there's is an affected feebleness of the voice that seems staged and artifice. There's a somewhat better duet involving Nutini here. And there's a version by some apparently French group called Sixty-six here but it appears that they think that rhythm has no importance in what amounts to a folk song. A faceless man named James Gillespie has a rather bluesy version here that conveys a more adult sense of the boy in the man ... its emotion focuses more on "my bundle of joy" than on the daydreaming boy ... I can grok that interpretation even if I prefer to be swept back into the ambles and perambulations of boyhood.

The bundle of joy is the girlfriend. I did have a girlfriend rather late in my boyhood years ... I was 18 ... and I genuinely loved her and still have warm feelings for her. But my passionate loves were other boys. That said, passion is what leads out of boyhood, and the intrusion of sex chatter into boyhood ... the notion that boys should be thinking of girls at 10 or 12 or 14 ... is one of the ways in which modern life interferes with the boy. Boys should be left alone to fester and grow. As an adult, I find the notion of the boy appealing, but the reality of boys annoying. In other words, I recollect what it took to be a boy, but I really can't stand actual boys. They storm through the train in the evening commute, either loud and demonstrative or skulking and faux-threatening. If they think you notice them, they shoot daggers with their eyes. And, of course, there is an actual physical threat, rarely realized but always potential.

Still, boyhood has been nay-sayed by a combination of factors. Feminism ... which is the ideological concomittant of women's liberation ... felt it necessary to downgrade maleness. I think that was an error. Feminism ... again, the ideology as counterposed to the social movement ... has had to retreat of late, and that has been a boon to free thinking among radicals. The actual data these days suggests that girls outperform boys in education all the way up to, but not including, graduate school. The problem that feminism had with understanding boyhood was that it projected the dominance of men onto boys, and then failed to see that boys are themselves dominated, and it is that against which they recoil and fulminate. (I think that is true of men too, but that is another argument.) And so now the ideology has nowhere to go when it becomes apparent that boys are not really doing that well, while girls appear to be coming into their own, at least as a social average if not in every case.

... nay-sayed by a combination of factors ... commercialism has created the boy as a critical consumer, and then demanded that he be not-innocent. The boy has also been lumped in with "children" as the innocent object of vile threats. No matter that many children are victimized, that sweeping with a single broom leads to a preternatural protectiveness that undermines the wandering, wondering, glowering, inventive boy of yore. Boys may neither be male nor not-male ... neither strong nor weak, neither free nor protected. Because in each moment, some force rises up to undermine the thrust, and leaves out the boy so that the boy can be made into whatever his interlocutor, his inventor, deisres ... consumer, victim, criminal, annoying passer-by.

How hard it must be to be a boy now. Harder indeed than when I was a boy. And that was tough enough. I fear that modern life has deprived boys of their daydreams.

Here is James Gillespie's version ... the boy man.



And, for reference, here is the Lovin' Spoonful doin it just right.



I'll close this post with a song that was my anti-anthem in the summer of 1966: Summer in the City. Every time that I hear this, I am a lonely boy again, wondering, wandering, angry and ecstatic, just rolling along, hoping it all turns out somehow.

The Warriors

Watching the Suns and the Warriors, my two favorite NBA teams ... favorite because they play to score and move and drive. I loathe the defensive thuggery of all of the East and too much of the West. The NBA needs to have more Suns and Warriors ... and many more Don Nelsons!

Warriors win!!

I think that a lot of the defensive emphasis is a fear of losing rather than a lust for victory, and the NBA feeds the fear by its defensiveness in the face of its fade from primacy in the US sports market. David Stern is an old goat, and he needs to be put out to pasture.

Monta Ellis is a super star ... a real one, somebody who burns the nets and makes magic happen. And he just not "cool" ... not self-absorbed, not into himself ... not too proud to be excited.

Now for the angle behind the angle ... I love Steve Nash ... he just so damned sexy ... and the way he moves the ball and commands the floor ... well, it makes me proud to be a Canuck ... get me a bag ...

... and Kelenna Azubuike is the sexiest black guy in the league, bar none. If the Warriors keep making dumb personnel moves like picking up Chris (time out) Webber, we'll see less of him, and that would be a drag.


Photos from the web.

Brokeback Mountain

It came out today that Heath Ledger died of a foolish overindulgence in downers. This tragic death reminded me of an exchange that my friend J.C. Gaither had with Roger Ebert when the Oscars snubbed the obvious winner of their award two years ago. I asked Jim if I could run his letter here as I have long admired it, and he agreed.

He was responding to an article by Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times defending the selection of Crash over Brokeback Mountain. Ebert responded, and when I get a copy of that response, I will add it below. Here's Jim:

_______________

March 9, 2006

Dear Mr. Ebert:

I am taking the extraordinary step, for me, of writing to you concerning Sunday night's Academy Awards. I saw your appearance on Leno Monday night and read your response (in the Chicago Sun-Times) to the backlash over the "Crash" Best Picture win. I, too, believe that you, and other like-minded critics, are dead wrong in your appraisal of the relative merits and lasting importance of "Brokeback Mountain" and "Crash." I hope that you will indulge me briefly while I put my thoughts about these two movies into my own personal context:

I was born in 1944 and graduated from high school in 1962. My father was a ranch-hand and I grew up on a series of citrus and walnut ranches in Ventura County--before it had become simply a bedroom community for L.A. My life on those ranches was filled with the usual experiences of a rural childhood: caring for a range of livestock and learning to operate farm machinery long before I could legally drive on the road. Unlike Ennis and Jack, I benefitted from an excellent public school education and was able to enter U.C. Berkeley in the autumn of '62. Despite living in San Francisco, continuously since 1969, I did not come out as a gay man (to myself first, then to family and friends) until I was thirty years old.

In the years since my coming out, I have patiently waited for an affirmative representation of a "regular" gay man in a quality film and have not found it--until now. To be sure, there are any number of gay "presences" in film: the limpwristed, lisping stereotypes that straight America is so fond of--or, more accurately, so comfortable with. If the characters aren't of the requisite swishy clown variety, then they are most likely dying of AIDS, or in the case of the equally popular "gay psychopath," seeing to it that other people are dying. Finally, a movie appears that portrays the gay world as I know it through personal experience. My gay world, over the years, has been peopled by military officers and enlisted men, gardeners and Greyhound bus drivers, military and civilian pilots and the full range of professionals from all fields. And, yes, one real, live cattle rancher from Montana! Never, along the way, have I hung out with the makeup artists, hairdressers and choreographers that seem to exclusively populate the psyches of standup comedians--and many movie critics.

The easy acceptance of Philip Seymour Hoffman's excellence as the drug-addled, profoundly flawed Truman Capote stands in stark contrast to the simultaneous slighting of Heath Ledger's superb, understated performance as a gay man "passing" and trapped in a mutually unsatisfying heterosexual marriage. It is evidence of an ugly truth of today's society: American entertainment will tolerate, and even reward, portrayals of gay characters so long as they stay in their traditional roles. Stray from those roles and, to paraphrase Ennis, you're dead!

It is no longer socially acceptable, in "civilized" circles, to blatantly denigrate black people in the television and movie industries. It is highly acceptable to viciously caricature and demean gay people. The hallowed tradition of "coon" humor in popular entertainment has been replaced by "fag" humor--and it is unrelenting in its ubiquity and viciousness. It is in this prevailing atmosphere of socially-sanctioned gay-bashing that Leno, Letterman, et al. reduced the heartrending tragedy of "Brokeback" to the nightly smutty joke and sold the false characterization of the movie as nothing more than "cowpokes in chiffon." The absolute nadir of this pile-on was staged by none other than the (apparently) deeply troubled and self-loathing Nathan Lane with his "Brokeback Mountain--the Musical" skit on Letterman. Well, the campaign of ridicule seems to have paid off--at least as reflected in the voting of a majority--however slim--of the Academy voters.

I have a question or two for you: Were the Best Picture Awards bestowed in Venice, Berlin and at the BAFTA Awards simply "political correctness" in response to some nebulous pressure exerted by the "gay agenda" aspirations of gay Americans? Do you really believe that the "message" of "Crash"--that we are all, no matter our racial or ethnic affiliations, capable of the same blind, prejudicial assumptions about all others who are not "us" and are thus, alike, capable of great, unthinking cruelty and injustice to one another--is fresh, unexplored territory? I submit that anyone who has lived in a multiracial, multiethnic community like San Francisco--or Chicago--knows all of this only too well. The theme, in one form or another, frequently appears in movies and on television. For me, "Crash" is a totally topical and transient commentary on our particular time and place and will have a very brief shelflife. On the other hand, "Brokeback Mountain" is a story not set in our time and one that I believe will prove to be timeless.

The reason that it resonates so strongly with those who have bothered to see it (listen up, Larry David) is that its portrayal of the importance of "following one's heart," even in the face of certain societal disapproval, is one that audiences of all sexual orientations can understand and respond to with profound emotion. The utter, hopeless aridity that life offers Ennis at the end of the movie is a "message" that most people can, and do, respond to at every screening and in every venue. Long after "Crash" has joined the ranks of "Traffic" as a forgotten movie of the week, "plucked from today's headlines," "Brokeback Mountain" will go on, breaking hearts and illuminating the dark, sad places to which frightened self-denial can lead us all.

Best regards,

J.C. Gaither
San Francisco, CA

Ouch

Can't sleep. Woke up bolt awake at 4:30 and eventually gave up trying.

Weird that I wrote the 100-post post and then somehow did not write for 10 days. Don't really know why. Let's call it a hiatus.

I had periodontic surgery on Thursday ... the first stage of three implants to replace molars (3, 13, and 30, just to be transparent) that abandoned me over the years. My friend IM says that we are privileged to live in a period in between the invention of modern dentistry and the complete collapse of the ecosystem. True. That said, I've been vaguely nauseous ever since. I think it might be the potent antibiotic they gave me ... Clindamycin ... gawd nose. I took a Vicodin the first night after the surgery and had violent dreams all night, tossing and turning. I think Vicodin is not for me. My mouth still hurts a little too, notwithstanding all the Ibuprofen. But, still, I am ecstatic to be down this road ... three more months and there will be crowns on the posts, and I will have only the allotted seven holes in my head.

Meanwhile, my alma mater, Cal, blew a shot at being the number one college football team in the last play of the game when the first-time starting quarterback ran instead of passing, and the clock expired. No miracle tying last play field goal. No number one. Why?

Why, indeed. Why do I watch sports when it has this ability to drag you through a ringer as soon as you care. And I don't even care about football. Watched most of an old-fashioned shootout Saturday night between San Jose State and the impossibly hunky Hawaii quarterback Colt Brennan. He was once a bad boy ... got drunk and invaded some girl's dorm room. In some quarters that means he can never be forgiven ... forgiving is so yesterday in American society, both right and left. I didn't care who won, so the game was fun. Watching Cal lose was agonizing. Maybe that's why I can't sleep ... and, if so, that is twisted, man.

"MRU", where I work, managed to pull defeat out of the jaws of victory, although I did not watch the game. This, the week after they knocked off number one themselves. I suppose that tells any alert reader exactly what MRU is.

I'm leaving for Vancouver on Friday for 6 days ... looking forward to my first shot at blogging travel. That should make up for today's little woes, notwithstanding that my great old friend Dodge will be out of town when I am there. O, woe, the travails we have to put up with in this era between dentistry and disaster.

Watching my Giants

When I watch Ryan Klesko at the plate, I am reminded of the notion of the boy in the man. Klesko seems to have an anger problem, and one suspects that you'd have to tiptoe around the guy. I remember when he was not a Giant that Kruk (the inimitable color man and one-time 20-game winner, Mike Krukow) used to comment richly on how annoying anger-holics are in the clubhouse. Now Kruk enthuses about what a good guy he is. That's what boys are like ... endearing and annoying by turns, sometimes at the same time.

Unrestrained anger has a little boy in it. It's a drag that the current child molestation hysteria combined with a rather uncritical proto-feminist de-focussing on the issues of boys is such that the notion of the boy is fraught with danger ... even the mention of it. (Don't get me wrong ... I'm agin child molestation, in favor of girls getting at least as good as boys get. Yadda yadda.) But I was a boy once, and I viscerally remember the confusion and elation, the anger and the flights of joy that I had to constrain lest I seem like a girl. That's what it's like being a boy. Being a man is so much easier and more satisfying. But some guys just never give up the boy ... the boy in the man.

And somehow, gruff and rough-bearded and lumberjack-frame Ryan Klesko reminds me of that spirit. It's not just the quick-to-anger. It's also the suppressed giddy joy when he succeeds. It's the prancy swagger and the glum retreats. It's the seeming confusion and the front of sureness. It's the way he sits down hard on the bench and starts to sigh ... and catches himself ... and flashes a glare. And then gets up for something to drink and prances around some more.

Gary Gaetano Bandiera

Today is Gary's birthday. Gary died of apparently HIV-related liver disease on July 1, 1993. I wrote about that in Three Deaths in Vancouver. The photo above, by our friend Dodge, is of us at our apogee.

I spoke with his mother last night as I try to do every year on his birthday, on the day of his death and at Christmas. She is a fine old lady who lives a fabulous life in the new high rises of Vancouver that arose more or less directly over the discos where Gary and I danced our tails off during the Vancouver days of our love affair. I met him when he moved in to the apartment under me in 1975. It was love at first sight for me, but I think he needed a little convincing. We broke up for a few weeks a year or so later, and then merged again by reason of a more expert campaign of seduction than I believed myself capable at the time. It involved a Shakespearean sonnet and then later a passionate kissing beside the coatcheck in the Playpen Central, a not so elegant Vancouver gay bar.

Gary was Gary in Vancouver, and then he was Gaetano in San Francisco. Those of us who knew him in both places go back and forth between his two names. Gaetano was his grandfather's name and he loved it. In his low bore masculine way, he enforced the name change when he moved here a few months after me in 1981. Its funny how his two names are so iconic and yet each points to this singular man as if they are one and the same name.

Gary was sarcastic, dry, solid, humane, intelligent, sensual. As he grew older, he found solace only in nature, and came, I suspect, to avoid the company of those he did not know, and even those he did. He was never immune to finding quiet joy in solitude and whiskey. When we were lovers, from time to time he would suggest that I spend the day elsewhere, and he would turn up the music, embrace a bottle of Jack Daniels, and spend the day dancing and hanging with himself. I love a man who enjoys the pleasure of his own company.

He used to call me "da Baptist". This was a reference to the Baptist affiliations of three of of my four grandparents. I think lots of folks in our company were puzzled by our union ... I was this wiry pushy "sectarian" (as IM would have it) hyper-political activist with a fast mouth and a sharp tongue, and Gaetano was this natural man, movements like a cat, skin like suede, muscles that grew simply when he thought about them. Maybe a little bit of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis to us. An odd pairing; never seemed odd to us, even after we moved on to other lovers.

Curious conjunction: both my father and Gary's father were born in Timmins, Ontario, a mining town in the Canadian Shield 500 miles north of Toronto. Gary's father, Leo, was born of Italian immigrants, my father born of economic refugees from Nova Scotia.


I moved to San Francisco first, and he followed eight months later. The photo above, by our friend IM, is me at the wheel and GGB riding shotgun in the Ryder rental truck that transported every last dust bunny that we owned from our palace in Vancouver to our new fortress in San Francisco. I think our great days were in Vancouver. San Francisco was where we were destined to go and grow, but it was not the soil that had generated our being together. It was a slow drawing apart, and we even continued living together for a year after we parted as lovers. After a few years of living separately, we ended up as house neighbours, him upstairs and me downstairs in IM's house here in the Castro. I'm still here ... and gawd noze, I wish Gaetano were still here.

So many memories. That he is gone, fourteen years now, is still unfathomable. So unfair. I mourn him every day.

Click on the image below of the altar his friends created for him in San Francisco, for a little photo essay I mounted a decade ago about my sweet Gary.


Some photos by Gary Gaetano Bandiera here.