The year I moved to Los Angeles, I went to the lesbian bar du jour and met Lisa, the woman who would become my girlfriend. The bar was called something like “Muse” or “Fishbowl” or “Minx,” and it was full of hot women, half of them execudykes with shiny hair and the other half scruffy Joan Jett lookalikes. I was having a fine old time making eye contact with Ellen DeGeneres and her coterie of sultry young butches, when this pretty woman with a Swedish accent walked toward me and held out a glass of wine. “You’re really beautiful,” she said. Note to shy lesbians: directness works. We chatted. We laughed. We left the bar and made out in the bushes near my car. When I got home that night I had twigs in my hair.
On my first official date with Lisa, we drove up on Mulholland to watch the Leonid meteor shower. We parked along the side of the road and hiked up a hill to watch the sky, then we went back to my car and starting making out again. We were deep into it, oblivious to anything else, when we gradually became aware of a blinding light shining into the car. At first I thought it was a spaceship landing. It was that bright. “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” bright. We blinked and squinted and saw two guys in uniform coming toward us. They had parked their giant off-road vehicle directly in front of us and had left on the headlights – the brights, not the regulars.
I could hear them expostulating at each other as they approached. One fragment rang out loud and clear: “...the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. Isn’t that the most disgusting thing you’ve ever seen?” They were talking about us. Us, kissing. I thought straight men liked seeing pretty girls kissing. Clearly they weren’t used to seeing full-on genuine lesbian mackage.
Anyway. They shined a flashlight at us, knocked on my window and told us in no uncertain terms to get out of the car. Lisa reached for the door handle, but I told her not to open it. She gazed at me with wide-eyed alarm. I locked the doors and rolled down my window an inch. “What’s the problem?” I wanted to know. “What have we done wrong?”
Evidently we were parked in a no-parking zone. That’s no reason for us to have to get out of the car, I argued. Plus some part of my brain registered that they weren’t real cops, just park rangers. Beige uniforms. They started verbally abusing us again, walking around the car, commenting on my New Mexico license plates. “Are you from the rez?” they kept demanding, their voices getting shriller. “Did you just come from the REZ?” They saw my dog’s striped Indian blanket on the back seat and repeated the knee-slapper about the rez, cackling at each other’s wit. Then they ordered us out of the car again.
We were alone in the middle of nowhere, and except for their headlights, it was pitch dark. I was unnerved, but pissed. “The way you’re treating us is completely unprofessional and inappropriate,” I enunciated loudly. I picked up my cell phone. “I’m calling my dad. He’s a cop,” I said, “and I’m going to report you for harassing us.” My dad was, in fact, a police detective, but in New Mexico, not in Los Angeles. There was nothing he could have done to help us in that moment.
But invoking his name did the trick. Just like that, the inquisition was over. The puffed-up rangers shrank down to size, slunk away, slithered into their ATV and disappeared.
Lisa sat staring at me. “You’re my hero,” she said, or something to that effect. We laughed about it, a little shakily, and went back down to West Hollywood where all the other queers were. But it threw a shadow over the first sunny days of our relationship. “That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.” The words echoed for years.
This is how it feels to live in the pseudo-religious quasi-theocratic Puritanical brothel of American culture. This is why we need gay pride parades. So many heteros mouth the tired old canard “I support the gays, as long as they don’t flaunt their lifestyle in my face,” as if we all don’t spend our lives muffled in the bland suffocating embrace of heteronormativity.
When I first was coming out, I was afraid. Although I knew no lesbians in particular and very little about lesbianism in general (this was pre-Ellen and way pre-Ellen and Portia), I was afraid that my feelings made me monstrous, unlovable, a social outcast who would never have a family of my own or be able to keep a job. Nebulous fears of workbooted hairy women in tool belts, of growing old alone and abandoned, made me stifle and hide my feelings from the age of 13.
The lumbering beast of monolithic tribal culture wants us to be afraid. It posts warnings like so many flashing red hazard lights or the glaring headlights of park ranger trucks, like the signs on antique maps warning “Here be monsters.” To be fair, the tribe originally policed its boundaries for reasons of safety: against outsiders, marauders, saber-toothed tigers. But those monsters don’t exist anymore, so the culture has cast its own children as alien. Some cultures have embraced their outsiders and boundary-crossers: the native Americans with their berdache and two-spirited ones, for instance, but American culture doesn’t love its freaks.
At my high school of 2,000 kids, there was one out gay boy. He was flamboyant and dramatic. He tried to bring another boy to prom, but the school said no. Those were the days when schools could say no and not be slapped with lawsuits. It was the talk of the lunchroom, and we cool art kids agreed that he was brave. I didn’t dare reveal to even my closest friends, though, that I was prone to intense feelings about girls as well as boys. I was lucky to go to a college inhabited by lots of gay men, and more importantly, beautiful, entrancing lesbians. The scales fell away from my eyes. Once I broke down one boundary, it opened my eyes to the falsity of them all. And they fell like dominoes: female inferiority, male standards of female beauty, and so on and so forth, ad nauseam.
And that’s what the keepers of the tribe do not want, what they fear the most: that its wayward children will discover that it’s all a sham, put in place by people (read: straight white men) who like their power imbalance just as it is. The man behind the curtain is just an acne-pocked little dude with a combover.
For years Lisa and I asked each other “Are you from the REZ?” and burst into giggles. But I’m just glad we never had to find out what would have happened if we’d gotten out of the car.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Good news from New Hampshire!
Welcome, #6! You woulda been #7, if a bare majority of Californians hadn't passed Prop. H8. But still, #6 is pretty good. New Jersey and New York look pretty certain to follow. One small step for a governor, one giant leap for same-sex couples and their allies.
Sometimes the back-and-forth skirmishes in the battle between good and evil are downright dizzying. This has been one of those weeks.
Sometimes the back-and-forth skirmishes in the battle between good and evil are downright dizzying. This has been one of those weeks.
Could gun control have saved Dr. Tiller?
There are so many urgent political, social and environmental crises demanding my time, mental energy and dollars that gun control, while really important, doesn't usually make it to the very top of my list. But I wanted to append to my post about the murder of Dr. George Tiller the observation that stricter gun control is an intrinsic part of quashing anti-abortion, anti-women terrorism. For such a small proportion of our population, the NRA still has an absolute stranglehold on politicians, including Democrats. Way too few of our cowardly elected officials are willing to risk their jobs by taking a strong stand against semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles, whose raison d'etre, after all, is not target practice with squirrels but mowing people down in large numbers and penetrating cops' body armor.
Not that we needed any further evidence that Dr. Tiller's murderer is unhinged (affiliation with fringe anti-government groups, supergluing the clinic's locks, assassinating the good doctor in his church), but a family member of the shooter said that the guy has had mental problems for years. Putting aside for a moment whether Roeder's relative is just trying to make a case for insanity, temporary or otherwise, in an attempt to lessen Roeder's sentence, I have to ask, how and why was this nut job allowed to get his hands on a gun?
It's a great country, with bigotry and ammo for all.
Not that we needed any further evidence that Dr. Tiller's murderer is unhinged (affiliation with fringe anti-government groups, supergluing the clinic's locks, assassinating the good doctor in his church), but a family member of the shooter said that the guy has had mental problems for years. Putting aside for a moment whether Roeder's relative is just trying to make a case for insanity, temporary or otherwise, in an attempt to lessen Roeder's sentence, I have to ask, how and why was this nut job allowed to get his hands on a gun?
It's a great country, with bigotry and ammo for all.
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Thank you, Dr. Tiller.
I grieve and rage at the assassination of this hero for women’s health, autonomy and lives. George Tiller cared about women and girls, and did what he could to help them in desperate circumstances. Despite years, decades, of intimidation and violence, he wouldn’t abandon the patients who needed him. He was incredibly brave.
I read a short story a few years ago that chilled and sickened me (I wish I could remember its title and author – I’ll go look on my bookshelves). A woman living in a totalitarian regime where abortion was illegal had attempted to obtain one anyway, was caught, and was punished with something like thirty years of forced, back-to-back pregnancies. A bleak, dystopic vision, yes. But there are parts of the world – Latin America, parts of the Middle East – where this story, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, are terrifyingly close to reality. Where pregnant women are jailed for trying to get an abortion, forced to carry fetuses to term, even when it threatens their own lives.
Pregnancy and childbirth are risky propositions, not the walk in the park that some adoption advocates would have you think. Every baby should be a wanted baby. And even sometimes the wanted babies have fatal abnormalities that are not diagnosed until the second or third trimester. Or a woman is diagnosed with cancer and must have an abortion in order to undergo chemotherapy. These are the cases that Dr. Tiller, almost singlehandedly, tackled. Only one or two other doctors in the country are willing, for reasons of fear and intimidation, to perform late-term abortions. Of course Dr. Tiller also was a regular Ob/Gyn who delivered hundreds, if not thousands of babies in his career.
“Pro-life” is a sickeningly propagandist term that the anti-choicers have successfully co-opted. Insinuating, of course, that the opposing contingent is “anti-life.” When it’s the pro-choice people who are actually “pro-life”: pro-women, pro-family, pro-wanted children. Recently it was trumpeted in the media that something like 51% of people now consider themselves “pro-life.” (Who knows if all of them even know what the term means?) But if you asked many of those people what legal penalty a woman should face if abortion were recriminalized and she broke the law to get one, they would look at you blankly. They don’t really want to see their friends and sisters go to jail. But it is sheer blind laziness not to think about what the legal consequences would be.
This anti-choice intellectual laziness, and the rabid frothing-at-the-mouth that too frequently accompanies it, obscures for anti-choicers the fact that they are free to hold whatever beliefs they want, but they don’t have the right to decide what happens inside someone else’s body. That’s fascism, and worse (see The Handmaid’s Tale, above). They conveniently don’t think about the slippery slope – about which of their own rights other people might decide to legislate away (as catchy slogans go, I like “Protect traditional marriage: Ban divorce.”). We live in a democracy, and a woman’s body cannot be subject to anyone else’s opinion, majority or otherwise. Women will not be content to remain second-class citizens; we can and must be trusted to make the best decisions for our own lives about when and whether to bear children.
The second reality that the rabid anti-choicers can’t or won’t comprehend is that women and girls will have abortions whether they’re safe and legal or not. Better, for the sake of women and the people who love them, that they be safe and legal.
No woman should ever be forced to carry a pregnancy she does not want or cannot sustain. The consequences to women of compulsory gestation and childbirth can be devastating. Bringing a human being into the world is a tremendous responsibility. When you are not equipped or willing, it can be a nightmare. We see the consequences of unwanted children in the foster care system, where abuse and neglect are endemic, on our streets and in our prisons. Do the anti-choicers care about those lost kids, take them into their homes, provide for them financially and spiritually? Yeah, right.
Ultimately the anti-abortion crusade is not about saving babies, but about controlling women – our sexuality and autonomy. The solid citizens who harass women at clinics and from Republican wingnut bully pulpits are usually the same ones who rail against contraception and sex education. Women shouldn’t be sexual, the twisted logic goes, but if they are, they’re sluts and they should be punished with pregnancy. It is no accident that the cultures in which women and their reproductive lives are controlled most repressively are also the cultures in which girls are not allowed to go to school, and women are not allowed to work outside the home. The anti-abortion forces know that overturning Roe v. Wade would be difficult, if not impossible. But if they can’t make abortion illegal, they can make it almost impossible to obtain. 87% of American counties do not have an abortion provider.
Somewhere around 35-40% of American women have had abortions. They, and their husbands and boyfriends and family members, need to stand up and say no to the campaign of domestic anti-choice terrorism that has made George Tiller its latest victim. (And Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, for years an on-air fomenter of hysterical violence toward Dr. Tiller "the Baby Killer," has blood on his hands.)
To honor Dr. Tiller’s memory, you can donate to Medical Students for Choice, Planned Parenthood, NARAL. You can volunteer at your local women’s health center. You can stand up and be counted as a voice for sanity, for the equal citizenship of women, for the kind of care that Dr. George Tiller stood for. We will really miss him.
I read a short story a few years ago that chilled and sickened me (I wish I could remember its title and author – I’ll go look on my bookshelves). A woman living in a totalitarian regime where abortion was illegal had attempted to obtain one anyway, was caught, and was punished with something like thirty years of forced, back-to-back pregnancies. A bleak, dystopic vision, yes. But there are parts of the world – Latin America, parts of the Middle East – where this story, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, are terrifyingly close to reality. Where pregnant women are jailed for trying to get an abortion, forced to carry fetuses to term, even when it threatens their own lives.
Pregnancy and childbirth are risky propositions, not the walk in the park that some adoption advocates would have you think. Every baby should be a wanted baby. And even sometimes the wanted babies have fatal abnormalities that are not diagnosed until the second or third trimester. Or a woman is diagnosed with cancer and must have an abortion in order to undergo chemotherapy. These are the cases that Dr. Tiller, almost singlehandedly, tackled. Only one or two other doctors in the country are willing, for reasons of fear and intimidation, to perform late-term abortions. Of course Dr. Tiller also was a regular Ob/Gyn who delivered hundreds, if not thousands of babies in his career.
“Pro-life” is a sickeningly propagandist term that the anti-choicers have successfully co-opted. Insinuating, of course, that the opposing contingent is “anti-life.” When it’s the pro-choice people who are actually “pro-life”: pro-women, pro-family, pro-wanted children. Recently it was trumpeted in the media that something like 51% of people now consider themselves “pro-life.” (Who knows if all of them even know what the term means?) But if you asked many of those people what legal penalty a woman should face if abortion were recriminalized and she broke the law to get one, they would look at you blankly. They don’t really want to see their friends and sisters go to jail. But it is sheer blind laziness not to think about what the legal consequences would be.
This anti-choice intellectual laziness, and the rabid frothing-at-the-mouth that too frequently accompanies it, obscures for anti-choicers the fact that they are free to hold whatever beliefs they want, but they don’t have the right to decide what happens inside someone else’s body. That’s fascism, and worse (see The Handmaid’s Tale, above). They conveniently don’t think about the slippery slope – about which of their own rights other people might decide to legislate away (as catchy slogans go, I like “Protect traditional marriage: Ban divorce.”). We live in a democracy, and a woman’s body cannot be subject to anyone else’s opinion, majority or otherwise. Women will not be content to remain second-class citizens; we can and must be trusted to make the best decisions for our own lives about when and whether to bear children.
The second reality that the rabid anti-choicers can’t or won’t comprehend is that women and girls will have abortions whether they’re safe and legal or not. Better, for the sake of women and the people who love them, that they be safe and legal.
No woman should ever be forced to carry a pregnancy she does not want or cannot sustain. The consequences to women of compulsory gestation and childbirth can be devastating. Bringing a human being into the world is a tremendous responsibility. When you are not equipped or willing, it can be a nightmare. We see the consequences of unwanted children in the foster care system, where abuse and neglect are endemic, on our streets and in our prisons. Do the anti-choicers care about those lost kids, take them into their homes, provide for them financially and spiritually? Yeah, right.
Ultimately the anti-abortion crusade is not about saving babies, but about controlling women – our sexuality and autonomy. The solid citizens who harass women at clinics and from Republican wingnut bully pulpits are usually the same ones who rail against contraception and sex education. Women shouldn’t be sexual, the twisted logic goes, but if they are, they’re sluts and they should be punished with pregnancy. It is no accident that the cultures in which women and their reproductive lives are controlled most repressively are also the cultures in which girls are not allowed to go to school, and women are not allowed to work outside the home. The anti-abortion forces know that overturning Roe v. Wade would be difficult, if not impossible. But if they can’t make abortion illegal, they can make it almost impossible to obtain. 87% of American counties do not have an abortion provider.
Somewhere around 35-40% of American women have had abortions. They, and their husbands and boyfriends and family members, need to stand up and say no to the campaign of domestic anti-choice terrorism that has made George Tiller its latest victim. (And Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, for years an on-air fomenter of hysterical violence toward Dr. Tiller "the Baby Killer," has blood on his hands.)
To honor Dr. Tiller’s memory, you can donate to Medical Students for Choice, Planned Parenthood, NARAL. You can volunteer at your local women’s health center. You can stand up and be counted as a voice for sanity, for the equal citizenship of women, for the kind of care that Dr. George Tiller stood for. We will really miss him.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
You have to read this book!
It's been awhile since Pontifica has officially recommended a book, but the hour has arrived. I've just finished Fingersmith, a smashing, jaw-dropping 548-page Victorian Gothic mystery. I snatched it up yesterday and just put it down with the utmost reluctance, having re-read the last few pages in a desperate attempt to will another couple of chapters onto the end. Charming Girlfriend read it before me (it was from her hand that I snatched it), during which time there was much gasping and exclaiming. Naturally I would peer over her shoulder to see what all the fuss was about, only to have her slam the book shut so that I couldn't inadvertently pick up any clues. "You can't read ahead," she hissed when she finally handed the book over. "Promise me you won't read ahead." (She knows I am a reader-aheader.) I kept my promise, though sometimes I had to cover the part of the page I hadn't yet read so my untrustworthy eyes couldn't jump forward.
I envy those fortunate book-lovers who haven't read this gem yet. Sarah Waters. Have you heard of her? She also wrote Tipping the Velvet and Affinity (both adapted into miniseries for the BBC), but Fingersmith surpasses them and just about everything else I've ever read. Ever! Go get this book. Then clear your schedule.
I envy those fortunate book-lovers who haven't read this gem yet. Sarah Waters. Have you heard of her? She also wrote Tipping the Velvet and Affinity (both adapted into miniseries for the BBC), but Fingersmith surpasses them and just about everything else I've ever read. Ever! Go get this book. Then clear your schedule.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Whatever, California.
I'm not a legal scholar, so I can't dissect the California Supreme Court's decision to uphold Prop. 8 to figure out if it contains the seeds of Prop. 8's undoing. Some of my friends and Facebook acquaintances are sure that the Supremes found for the haters with a very narrow interpretation of the law, leaving room for future challenges, because they (the aforementioned Supremes) are actually supportive of equal protection under the Constitution for same-sex couples in reality. After all, thousands of queers are still legally married. The whole thing just makes me tired and confused. Why do we have a legal system that allows murderers to walk free when everyone knows they're guilty, and that reinforces bigotry and fear even though that's not what the justices believe in personally?
Whatever.
I do believe we'll reverse Prop. 8 in the near future (the margin was so narrow, after all – just a few percentage points – and has been steadily narrowing in recent years). I'm just really sick of being a second-class citizen. Lots of my friends are marching in protest tonight, but I'm going to bed.
Whatever.
I do believe we'll reverse Prop. 8 in the near future (the margin was so narrow, after all – just a few percentage points – and has been steadily narrowing in recent years). I'm just really sick of being a second-class citizen. Lots of my friends are marching in protest tonight, but I'm going to bed.
Thursday, May 07, 2009
It’s bigger than marriage.
Gay marriage is a worthy goal, and I have rejoiced to see Vermont, Iowa and Maine join Connecticut and Massachusetts on the righteous side of the civil-rights aisle. But wedlock for same-sex couples, while essential to giving lesbians and gay men the 1,000+ federal benefits that hetero marrieds (often obliviously) enjoy, is not the whole picture. Lack of marriage rights is a symptom of a cultural malady, not the disease itself.
The disease is second-class citizenship for queers. As long as we can’t get legally married, it’s easier to justify denying us jobs, housing, shared custody of children, hospital visitation rights. It’s easier to make the leap from “weird and different,” to “ungodly and abhorrent,” to “must wipe off the face of the planet” when society at large supports the premise that queers are subhuman. It gives gay-bashers and homophobes a free pass to bask in bigotry and violence. “Hey, President Obama doesn’t think they should be able to get married, so why should I?”
Culturally sanctioned hatred of gayness (which for males translates as femininity, weakness) enables the sick, poisonous so-called “boy culture” at the root of the recent suicides of two eleven-year-old kids, Carl Walker-Hoover and Jaheem Herrera, boys who were taunted as “gay,” “faggot,” “queer” by their schoolmates. Who knows if those boys were, or would turn out to be, actually gay? When even the perception, the possibility of gayness is frightening and ghastly enough to cause kids to hang themselves, we know gay people are not equal citizens. And President Obama, you’re not helping.
Imagine that instead of “gay,” the insult tossed around in playgrounds and locker rooms were “nigger” or “kike.” But those days are over, right? Teachers, not to mention the rest of our society, wouldn’t stand for it. Black and Jewish people and their allies have fought to make this a country where those ugly slurs are unacceptable. Why is it still okay to denigrate a sexual minority? Well, let’s see. Anxiety about sexuality runs very deep in our neo-Puritanical, machismo culture. Female sexuality is policed in outrageous ways (see: the right wing’s nonsensical, punishing attitudes toward contraception and abortion), but the keepers of male sexuality exercise equally insidious means of control. God help the boy who doesn’t hew to the he-man mold. Recently I overheard a woman telling her little boy in a store that he couldn’t have the purple sparkly bucket, because “that color is for girls.” This massive culture-wide anxiety has mothers policing their little boys about what color buckets they are allowed to like, for god’s sake.
What a society says from the top down is very powerful. Some folks might not agree with it, but they know that they can’t lawfully discriminate on the basis of race anymore. When our leaders at every level of government (I’m talking to you, President Obama) make it clear that lesbians, gay men and every other shade of queer are protected by robust anti-discrimination laws and are included under the big colorful diversity umbrella as the recipients of every right that everybody else enjoys (consciously or not), the bigots will be forced to tone down their rhetoric. And if some are too set in their ways to change, their kids will.
Why are so many people afraid of same-sex marriage? Why do they insist that it threatens their own marriages? Because when lesbians and gay men are free to marry, straights won’t belong to a privileged class anymore. They won’t be able to teach their children that they’re better than those other people. Their kids will be less likely to believe what they're taught in Sunday school when they can see for themselves that their friend's two dads or two moms are perfectly nice (if a little strict). It’s nice to belong to a privileged class, isn’t it? A lot like living in a gated community, where you can keep out the Mexicans except for when they come, bowing and scraping, to clean up your house and garden for a pittance. The homeowners association will have to get together to figure out what else they can lord over the peons. Once the pesky PC patrol has taken away race, religion, gender and sexual orientation as blunt objects with which to knock lesser mortals on the head, by gum, what’s left? Never mind, Mr. and Mrs. Thurston Howell III, there’s always class.
So, same-sex marriage isn’t the be-all and end-all, but when it is made legal at the federal level for same-sex couples, we will be that much closer to a time when anti-gay epithets will draw the universal gasp that “kike” and “nigger” do today. A time when 11-year-old boys like Carl and Jaheem might not resort to killing themselves. An era when parents won’t have to disown their gay kids, while buying their hetero kids condos. And we’ll throw in the confetti for free.
The disease is second-class citizenship for queers. As long as we can’t get legally married, it’s easier to justify denying us jobs, housing, shared custody of children, hospital visitation rights. It’s easier to make the leap from “weird and different,” to “ungodly and abhorrent,” to “must wipe off the face of the planet” when society at large supports the premise that queers are subhuman. It gives gay-bashers and homophobes a free pass to bask in bigotry and violence. “Hey, President Obama doesn’t think they should be able to get married, so why should I?”
Culturally sanctioned hatred of gayness (which for males translates as femininity, weakness) enables the sick, poisonous so-called “boy culture” at the root of the recent suicides of two eleven-year-old kids, Carl Walker-Hoover and Jaheem Herrera, boys who were taunted as “gay,” “faggot,” “queer” by their schoolmates. Who knows if those boys were, or would turn out to be, actually gay? When even the perception, the possibility of gayness is frightening and ghastly enough to cause kids to hang themselves, we know gay people are not equal citizens. And President Obama, you’re not helping.
Imagine that instead of “gay,” the insult tossed around in playgrounds and locker rooms were “nigger” or “kike.” But those days are over, right? Teachers, not to mention the rest of our society, wouldn’t stand for it. Black and Jewish people and their allies have fought to make this a country where those ugly slurs are unacceptable. Why is it still okay to denigrate a sexual minority? Well, let’s see. Anxiety about sexuality runs very deep in our neo-Puritanical, machismo culture. Female sexuality is policed in outrageous ways (see: the right wing’s nonsensical, punishing attitudes toward contraception and abortion), but the keepers of male sexuality exercise equally insidious means of control. God help the boy who doesn’t hew to the he-man mold. Recently I overheard a woman telling her little boy in a store that he couldn’t have the purple sparkly bucket, because “that color is for girls.” This massive culture-wide anxiety has mothers policing their little boys about what color buckets they are allowed to like, for god’s sake.
What a society says from the top down is very powerful. Some folks might not agree with it, but they know that they can’t lawfully discriminate on the basis of race anymore. When our leaders at every level of government (I’m talking to you, President Obama) make it clear that lesbians, gay men and every other shade of queer are protected by robust anti-discrimination laws and are included under the big colorful diversity umbrella as the recipients of every right that everybody else enjoys (consciously or not), the bigots will be forced to tone down their rhetoric. And if some are too set in their ways to change, their kids will.
Why are so many people afraid of same-sex marriage? Why do they insist that it threatens their own marriages? Because when lesbians and gay men are free to marry, straights won’t belong to a privileged class anymore. They won’t be able to teach their children that they’re better than those other people. Their kids will be less likely to believe what they're taught in Sunday school when they can see for themselves that their friend's two dads or two moms are perfectly nice (if a little strict). It’s nice to belong to a privileged class, isn’t it? A lot like living in a gated community, where you can keep out the Mexicans except for when they come, bowing and scraping, to clean up your house and garden for a pittance. The homeowners association will have to get together to figure out what else they can lord over the peons. Once the pesky PC patrol has taken away race, religion, gender and sexual orientation as blunt objects with which to knock lesser mortals on the head, by gum, what’s left? Never mind, Mr. and Mrs. Thurston Howell III, there’s always class.
So, same-sex marriage isn’t the be-all and end-all, but when it is made legal at the federal level for same-sex couples, we will be that much closer to a time when anti-gay epithets will draw the universal gasp that “kike” and “nigger” do today. A time when 11-year-old boys like Carl and Jaheem might not resort to killing themselves. An era when parents won’t have to disown their gay kids, while buying their hetero kids condos. And we’ll throw in the confetti for free.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Arlen Specter switches teams!
Because he just couldn’t stomach anymore the lying corrupt craven murderous right-wing mess the Republican party has become? Or a craven, desperate ploy for reelection, facing an unwinnable Republican primary? Who cares?
Hello, Democratic Senate filibuster-proof majority (once Al Franken gets the okay from the Minnesota recount, as he is likely to do). Smug? Hell yeah, we’re smug.
Hello, Democratic Senate filibuster-proof majority (once Al Franken gets the okay from the Minnesota recount, as he is likely to do). Smug? Hell yeah, we’re smug.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Another boy wearing makeup.
I take Adam Lambert’s popularity as a sign, despite apocalyptic indications to the contrary – a shrinking economy, melting polar ice caps, Sharia law, Republicans who say that waterboarding doesn’t hurt, Republicans giving Obama’s first 100 days a failing grade, as if somehow Shrub’s nearly 3,000 disastrous days NEVER HAPPENED – a sign that all is not lost. Sure, the fact that Adam is talented is a contributing factor – if Mr. Eyeliner were a no-good wannabe, he’d have been, if not booed off the American Idol stage, at least damned with the faint praise of lackluster votes. His boy-next-door wholesome cuteness and emo haircut, and those flattering blue lights, make fourteen-year-old hearts flutter all across the nation. Then he opens his mouth and pours out that melting voice and heck, a certain Charming Girlfriend is brought to tears every time. And she is no fourteen-year-old. Adam wears makeup unapologetically and I guess there are pictures of him on the Internet in drag and with his tongue down some guy’s throat. And in drag. That’s why I love America a little more right now – because no one seems to care that Adam is gay. There are comments online like “Too bad he’s not into girls cuz he’s so cute!” and “He is my favorite!!!!!!!! He's not just good, he is so aammaazziinngg!!!!!!!!!!!!!” That’s thirteen exclamation points. Hey, Charming Girlfriend, is that you? The girls are still holding up the hand-painted “Adam Lambert is my Idol” signs and shrieking those so-high-only-dogs-can-hear-them shrieks.
I also got my love on for Allison Iraheta and her candy-apple-red hair – I mean, that spunky lil sixteen-year-old can SANG! But then Adam comes on all pompadoured and powdered within an inch of his life and, Clay Aiken notwithstanding, I would love to see an openly gay or bi American Idol, one who doesn’t take eleventeen years to come out. Just think of how many fourteen-year-old girls are gonna vote for same-sex marriage in four years when they get legal, because of mascara-wearing, high-hair-having, voice-like-you-died-and-went-to-heaven Adam Lambert.
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Friday, February 06, 2009
Two boys wearing makeup.
Have you seen the hysterical web series on thewb.com called A Boy Wearing Makeup?
If you’re not a fifteen-year-old girl or an industry queer like me, I will tell you that it stars a charming flamer named Mathieu who gives tips on, yes, how to wear makeup. Who doesn’t want advice on applying blush to best advantage or disguising dark undereye circles from a young guy wearing foundation? Well, I don’t, but that’s beside the point. My point is simply that thewb.com is savvy enough to realize that all fifteen-year-old girls are budding fag hags and, unless they’re being raised on a polygamist compound, those girls know that gender-bending of the sort embodied by Mathieu of the plucked eyebrows is hip and hot, very post-binary oppositions 21st-century yes-we-can, and kinda ’80s retro too.
I am afraid you will not be surprised to find that unhip-itude extends beyond polygamist compounds to the doldrums of mainstream America. We have only to look as far as Matt Allsup, a 13-year-old boy in that middlest of middles – Hamilton, Ohio – who has been harassed and intimidated by administrators at his middle school for wearing makeup – the kind of makeup that 13-year-old girls get away with wearing every day (unless their parents are as strict as mine, since it’s kind of Gothy and I wouldn’t have been allowed to wear black nail polish). And that’s the supercool thing about Matt’s mom – she is totally supportive of her son’s iconoclasm. She claims quite rightly that Matt is experiencing gender discrimination, that in being forbidden to wear makeup to school he is the victim of a sexual double standard. Isn't it ironic that the "Character Badge" that all Hamilton Middle School students must wear says "Do you value the uniqueness of others?"
Ironic, too, that the same culture that brings forth, on one hand, a boy whose makeup-wearing skills score him a web series deal from an entertainment mega-corporation (a fabulous platform from which to give us all lessons in a good smoky eye) also spawns a bunch of gender-conforming goose-steppers who do everything in their power to squash the boy who is brave enough to strike a pose for the freedom to rock his own smoky-eyed, black-lipsticked Robert Smith look amidst the cornfields of Ohio.
Hamilton Middle School administrators’ makeup-phobia is the Twinkie defense all over again – homophobia, pure and simple. A collective panic at the idea that a boy might be gay. But at the root of homophobia lurks the real villain: misogyny. The oh-my-god-this-boy-is-acting-like-a-girl panic, the reason why gay men and trans women are hated and bashed and murdered: they are voluntarily giving up their male supremacy and power, voluntarily assuming a subservient position, voluntarily becoming Like Women. And lots of good ol’ boys with a fragile hold on their own masculinity just can’t handle the gender anxiety.
We’ve forgotten (if we ever grasped it) Freud’s assertion that all neurosis is based on our ultimately futile attempts to be “real men” and “real women,” when no such essentialist identities exist. It’s all a spectrum…some women are more “masculine” than some men…lots of men are nurturing…blah blah blah. No. Instead, whole regiments of society get in line to police men (and 13-year-old boys) who won’t act like Men. It’s not a new concept; we all know why tomboys and women who renounce their femininity to become trans men have a slightly easier time of it (relatively speaking – I’m not forgetting Brandon Teena) – because they are gravitating toward the gender role with more power, and everyone can understand that, even if only on an unconscious level.
(I’m not even going to get into American macho culture’s ridiculous love affair with fake lesbianism. If I have to see one more video of college girls kissing each other while their boyfriends roar with drunken approval, I will have to head over to AfterEllen.com to cleanse my palate.)
“I’m not like most other people,” says young Matt Allsup. You go, boy!
If you’re not a fifteen-year-old girl or an industry queer like me, I will tell you that it stars a charming flamer named Mathieu who gives tips on, yes, how to wear makeup. Who doesn’t want advice on applying blush to best advantage or disguising dark undereye circles from a young guy wearing foundation? Well, I don’t, but that’s beside the point. My point is simply that thewb.com is savvy enough to realize that all fifteen-year-old girls are budding fag hags and, unless they’re being raised on a polygamist compound, those girls know that gender-bending of the sort embodied by Mathieu of the plucked eyebrows is hip and hot, very post-binary oppositions 21st-century yes-we-can, and kinda ’80s retro too.
I am afraid you will not be surprised to find that unhip-itude extends beyond polygamist compounds to the doldrums of mainstream America. We have only to look as far as Matt Allsup, a 13-year-old boy in that middlest of middles – Hamilton, Ohio – who has been harassed and intimidated by administrators at his middle school for wearing makeup – the kind of makeup that 13-year-old girls get away with wearing every day (unless their parents are as strict as mine, since it’s kind of Gothy and I wouldn’t have been allowed to wear black nail polish). And that’s the supercool thing about Matt’s mom – she is totally supportive of her son’s iconoclasm. She claims quite rightly that Matt is experiencing gender discrimination, that in being forbidden to wear makeup to school he is the victim of a sexual double standard. Isn't it ironic that the "Character Badge" that all Hamilton Middle School students must wear says "Do you value the uniqueness of others?"
Ironic, too, that the same culture that brings forth, on one hand, a boy whose makeup-wearing skills score him a web series deal from an entertainment mega-corporation (a fabulous platform from which to give us all lessons in a good smoky eye) also spawns a bunch of gender-conforming goose-steppers who do everything in their power to squash the boy who is brave enough to strike a pose for the freedom to rock his own smoky-eyed, black-lipsticked Robert Smith look amidst the cornfields of Ohio.
Hamilton Middle School administrators’ makeup-phobia is the Twinkie defense all over again – homophobia, pure and simple. A collective panic at the idea that a boy might be gay. But at the root of homophobia lurks the real villain: misogyny. The oh-my-god-this-boy-is-acting-like-a-girl panic, the reason why gay men and trans women are hated and bashed and murdered: they are voluntarily giving up their male supremacy and power, voluntarily assuming a subservient position, voluntarily becoming Like Women. And lots of good ol’ boys with a fragile hold on their own masculinity just can’t handle the gender anxiety.
We’ve forgotten (if we ever grasped it) Freud’s assertion that all neurosis is based on our ultimately futile attempts to be “real men” and “real women,” when no such essentialist identities exist. It’s all a spectrum…some women are more “masculine” than some men…lots of men are nurturing…blah blah blah. No. Instead, whole regiments of society get in line to police men (and 13-year-old boys) who won’t act like Men. It’s not a new concept; we all know why tomboys and women who renounce their femininity to become trans men have a slightly easier time of it (relatively speaking – I’m not forgetting Brandon Teena) – because they are gravitating toward the gender role with more power, and everyone can understand that, even if only on an unconscious level.
(I’m not even going to get into American macho culture’s ridiculous love affair with fake lesbianism. If I have to see one more video of college girls kissing each other while their boyfriends roar with drunken approval, I will have to head over to AfterEllen.com to cleanse my palate.)
“I’m not like most other people,” says young Matt Allsup. You go, boy!
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
California morning.
Early this morning I took my Lawless Hound on a walk past my Dream Home (the one in Los Feliz, not the one in the English countryside). It was another cloudless brilliant morning, a brisk, vivid 55 degrees. I pulled an orange off a branch that hung over a fence, and its scent on my fingers and when I punctured the rind with my fingernail was the sharp, sunny tang that is the very essence of optimism, the Platonic ideal of citrus. Nothing like those neutered plastic perfectly uniform orbs in the chilly produce section. This orange blushed tangerine on one side and faded to lemon on the other and just smelling its wild tartness made me salivate. I thought of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her sister Mary in their house on Plum Creek, when neighborly Mr. Edwards risked his life crossing a raging winter river to bring them Christmas trinkets and one orange each. Maybe this is what those prelapsarian oranges smelled like.
Before I got in my car to go to work, I looked up to the end of my street and saw, above the waving palms, the Griffith Observatory blindingly white in the intensely blue sky, beneath an insouciant little horsetail cloud.
I confess that I think of it as my own personal Observatory. I felt a protective panic on its behalf during the Griffith Park fire two springs ago – we stood in the street and watched the raging wall of flame leap high behind its domes.
The next morning I nearly cried with relief to see that it was still there. It’s my beacon – when I’ve been away from home, and I see it with its Art Deco pilasters there on its hillside getting closer, it gives me a thrill of happiness. I bet there are a lot of us who feel that way, people who can look up from their driveways and see it squatting placid and glorious just above us on the hill.
I was jealous to see news and pictures of the snowstorm that blanketed London earlier this week – I miss the muffled hush of snow, how it shuts adult life down, business and transportation, and gives people license to play. I miss the cold that makes being indoors and drinking tea by a fire so delicious. But on a morning like this, southern California has its charms.
Photo credits: Shutterberry; AP/Matt Sayles.
Before I got in my car to go to work, I looked up to the end of my street and saw, above the waving palms, the Griffith Observatory blindingly white in the intensely blue sky, beneath an insouciant little horsetail cloud.
I confess that I think of it as my own personal Observatory. I felt a protective panic on its behalf during the Griffith Park fire two springs ago – we stood in the street and watched the raging wall of flame leap high behind its domes.
The next morning I nearly cried with relief to see that it was still there. It’s my beacon – when I’ve been away from home, and I see it with its Art Deco pilasters there on its hillside getting closer, it gives me a thrill of happiness. I bet there are a lot of us who feel that way, people who can look up from their driveways and see it squatting placid and glorious just above us on the hill.
I was jealous to see news and pictures of the snowstorm that blanketed London earlier this week – I miss the muffled hush of snow, how it shuts adult life down, business and transportation, and gives people license to play. I miss the cold that makes being indoors and drinking tea by a fire so delicious. But on a morning like this, southern California has its charms.
Photo credits: Shutterberry; AP/Matt Sayles.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Some notes on how to make a short film, Part 1.
If you’re renting costumes from the wardrobe department of a major studio, take pictures of the costumes with your cameraphone so that, if they decide they’re too busy to accommodate your request, you can go to Jet Rag and find something pretty close. (If, however, you want them to rent you that indescribably divine handmade violet silk satin embroidered Marie Antoinette gown worth about $50,000, save your breath and go buy a cheap costume for fifty bucks.)
Work with the best, most experienced and professional people you can find. This is especially good if they’re your friends and they’re willing to work for free. Professionals are prepared to work hard. This applies to production assistants, too. Believe me, you don’t want your PAs flaking after the first day.
Find someone who’s willing to “rent” you their production insurance. You will save hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.
If one of your actors gets a paying gig and drops out the day before your shoot starts, you can actually find good actors on craigslist.
Get all your location releases signed before you shoot in those locations. I don’t care if it’s your best friend’s house. Make her sign.
Make sure you have hot coffee available the moment your crew arrives each morning.
Double-check that your DP transferred every single file from the P2 cards before said P2 cards get sent to the Middle East.
Work with the best, most experienced and professional people you can find. This is especially good if they’re your friends and they’re willing to work for free. Professionals are prepared to work hard. This applies to production assistants, too. Believe me, you don’t want your PAs flaking after the first day.
Find someone who’s willing to “rent” you their production insurance. You will save hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.
If one of your actors gets a paying gig and drops out the day before your shoot starts, you can actually find good actors on craigslist.
Get all your location releases signed before you shoot in those locations. I don’t care if it’s your best friend’s house. Make her sign.
Make sure you have hot coffee available the moment your crew arrives each morning.
Double-check that your DP transferred every single file from the P2 cards before said P2 cards get sent to the Middle East.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
Alan Weisman, meet the Duggars.
I recently read Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us. It’s a fascinating exploration of what would happen to our planet if humans suddenly disappeared. Like, completely. Of course, almost immediately, every single nuclear reactor around the globe, without people to maintain it, would melt down, causing if not nuclear winter then at least a real bummer of a nuclear autumn. What’s really heartening is that our denuded forests and the irradiated wildlife around Chernobyl would eventually come back (albeit with a few extra legs), and, sooner or later, our poisoned oceans would heal themselves. Sort of. It’s pretty cool to read Weisman’s description of how nature would swiftly reclaim a typical house.
He talks about the efforts of some scientists to create a durable record of ourselves and our doings (an actual record, made of gold-plated copper and designed to last a billion years) containing sounds (human greetings in 54 languages, plus whales and birds) and images (buildings, babies, bagels). They sent it into space along with glyphs explaining how to play it back, should it ever found by some life form with eyes and opposable thumbs. What struck me with almost unbearable poignancy was the realization that someday, maybe far off, maybe a thousand generations from now but still, some actual day, everything will be gone. Not just Britney Spears CDs and plastic tampon applicators, but all of humanity’s most sublime achievements: Bach’s sonatas and partitas, Shakespeare’s plays, Caravaggios and Rothkos and Calders, jazz and fishnet stockings and love letters, everything ever created by a human brain that makes life exquisitely beautiful and meaningful.
It makes me lonely to think about a time when every human accomplishment, conversation and passionate striving, every simple pleasure and phenomenal triumph will be but an echo traveling through the void of space.
Which brings me to those Duggars of Arkansas. You know, the Duggars. The family with 18 kids? There’s a whole show devoted to them. TLC parades this family around as if they’re a spectacle to be celebrated, instead of stigmatized. Clearly the Duggars feel no shame, but rather a surfeit of pride in their dubious accomplishment. Are we supposed to see them as role models? I will grant you that caring for your children is far preferable to abusing and neglecting them; I have no doubt that the Duggars love their children. That’s not the issue. For Mrs. and Mr. Duggar to propagate themselves so extravagantly, heedless of the population explosion and diminishing world resources, is irresponsible and selfish. Moreover, it smacks of hubris. What makes Jim Bob and Michelle think their genes are so special?
If a healthy proportion of their kids goes on to beget kids of their own, in just one or two generations the Duggars will have an overwhelmingly disproportionate impact on the gene pool. Then again, maybe some of the Duggar kids, conscripted into raising their younger siblings, will be so fed up with changing diapers that they will swear off reproduction altogether. And let’s face it: statistically speaking, at least two of them are gay.
Have Michelle and Jim Bob stopped to consider the environmental impact of just one or two generations of grandchildren and great-grandchildren? In her book Small Wonder, Barbara Kingsolver tells us that Americans, who make up 5% of the world’s population, use 25% of its fuel. And there go hundreds of Duggars buying cars, all while blithely outstripping the 2.6 replacement average with which most people content themselves (which itself, according to Alan Weisman, is 1.6 too many).
Weisman argues convincingly that starting NOW, every woman needs to limit herself to one offspring. One. Otherwise, in 100 years, we will have destroyed life as we know it on our small planet.
Newsflash, Jim Bob and Michelle: many people actually agonize over whether it is responsible to bring even one child onto this groaningly overpopulated planet. In your home-schooling classes, surely you've learned more than just how God wants you to “be fruitful and multiply.” If you haven’t noticed, being fruitful and multiplying has really screwed up our poor beleaguered planet. How would you like it if everybody else had 18 kids? That’d clog up the carpool lane pretty damn quick.
The Duggars say that each child is a gift from God. Guess what? There are other kinds of gifts. Condoms are a gift from God too. And how about the gift of regular undivided attention from one’s parents?
Anyway, the Duggar kids are more than just gifts from God – they're cash cows. This family needs to take some of that green and start buying some serious carbon credits.
He talks about the efforts of some scientists to create a durable record of ourselves and our doings (an actual record, made of gold-plated copper and designed to last a billion years) containing sounds (human greetings in 54 languages, plus whales and birds) and images (buildings, babies, bagels). They sent it into space along with glyphs explaining how to play it back, should it ever found by some life form with eyes and opposable thumbs. What struck me with almost unbearable poignancy was the realization that someday, maybe far off, maybe a thousand generations from now but still, some actual day, everything will be gone. Not just Britney Spears CDs and plastic tampon applicators, but all of humanity’s most sublime achievements: Bach’s sonatas and partitas, Shakespeare’s plays, Caravaggios and Rothkos and Calders, jazz and fishnet stockings and love letters, everything ever created by a human brain that makes life exquisitely beautiful and meaningful.
It makes me lonely to think about a time when every human accomplishment, conversation and passionate striving, every simple pleasure and phenomenal triumph will be but an echo traveling through the void of space.
Which brings me to those Duggars of Arkansas. You know, the Duggars. The family with 18 kids? There’s a whole show devoted to them. TLC parades this family around as if they’re a spectacle to be celebrated, instead of stigmatized. Clearly the Duggars feel no shame, but rather a surfeit of pride in their dubious accomplishment. Are we supposed to see them as role models? I will grant you that caring for your children is far preferable to abusing and neglecting them; I have no doubt that the Duggars love their children. That’s not the issue. For Mrs. and Mr. Duggar to propagate themselves so extravagantly, heedless of the population explosion and diminishing world resources, is irresponsible and selfish. Moreover, it smacks of hubris. What makes Jim Bob and Michelle think their genes are so special?
If a healthy proportion of their kids goes on to beget kids of their own, in just one or two generations the Duggars will have an overwhelmingly disproportionate impact on the gene pool. Then again, maybe some of the Duggar kids, conscripted into raising their younger siblings, will be so fed up with changing diapers that they will swear off reproduction altogether. And let’s face it: statistically speaking, at least two of them are gay.
Have Michelle and Jim Bob stopped to consider the environmental impact of just one or two generations of grandchildren and great-grandchildren? In her book Small Wonder, Barbara Kingsolver tells us that Americans, who make up 5% of the world’s population, use 25% of its fuel. And there go hundreds of Duggars buying cars, all while blithely outstripping the 2.6 replacement average with which most people content themselves (which itself, according to Alan Weisman, is 1.6 too many).
Weisman argues convincingly that starting NOW, every woman needs to limit herself to one offspring. One. Otherwise, in 100 years, we will have destroyed life as we know it on our small planet.
Newsflash, Jim Bob and Michelle: many people actually agonize over whether it is responsible to bring even one child onto this groaningly overpopulated planet. In your home-schooling classes, surely you've learned more than just how God wants you to “be fruitful and multiply.” If you haven’t noticed, being fruitful and multiplying has really screwed up our poor beleaguered planet. How would you like it if everybody else had 18 kids? That’d clog up the carpool lane pretty damn quick.
The Duggars say that each child is a gift from God. Guess what? There are other kinds of gifts. Condoms are a gift from God too. And how about the gift of regular undivided attention from one’s parents?
Anyway, the Duggar kids are more than just gifts from God – they're cash cows. This family needs to take some of that green and start buying some serious carbon credits.
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