#1. Food.

Christmas for me is about food, not just about indulging, but about special food that only appears once a year. My best Christmas memories are associated with food.

That huge white cake our friend Nick in Syracuse made when we celebrated Little Christmas with him and Michael many years back. And Michael's Italian wedding soup with the little meatballs.

Those dry and not very tasty but fascinating and huge ginger cookies with Victorian-looking paper decals of old St. Nick stuck to them, which my grandmother brought with her from her boyfriend's German bakery in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

When I was growing up, I think we usually had turkey and dressing, sweet potatoes, similar to Thanksgiving dinner. In later years, my mother started broiling a loin of beef and serving it with Yorkshire pudding and mashed potatoes. Of course, there was always pumpkin pie and maybe some sort of a cheesecake or other fancy dessert. In the last few years, since my brother and I have started coming for New Year's instead of Christmas, she's done the beef for New Year's dinner, which is very nice. For New Year's Eve last year I made a posole stew with pork and red chili, and I'm going to do that again this year. I like cooking with my mom.

My mother makes about 15 or 20 different kinds of cookies every year. She gives them as gifts and keeps an assortment of them out on a big plate for everyone to nibble on through the day. She started, before I was born, with a few recipes from an old Betty Crocker cookbook: green Christmas tree butter cookies made with a cookie press, little powdered sugar-covered Russian tea cakes, thumbprint cookies rolled in walnuts and filled with chocolate. She still makes those, but over the years she has added and subtracted many others: dark chocolate-dipped macaroons, shortbread, biscotti.

Today J and I are having a small group of friends for dinner, and I'm making carrots roasted with maple, garlic, and thyme, twice-baked potatoes with cheddar and roasted poblano and red bell peppers, sage dressing, and a combination of kale and mustard and turnips green (from the farm) with chipotle. And I'm going to make biscuits.

J made a dark chocolate Southern Comfort pecan pie last night, and someone is bringing an apple pie. I also made little appetizers by stuffing Medjool dates with Parmesan cheese and wrapping them in phyllo pastry, and I'm going to bake them.

I haven't had a chance to make a big holiday meal in years, so I'm very happy and grateful this Christmas Day!

#2. Christmastime in the Trailerpark.

Y'all's finest moment. In a way, though we had many many highs in our 10 years, we were best before we had given it much thought. This recording is from our 1994 CD; we wrote the song for our first Christmas show at Dixon Place in 1992.

"Christmastime in the Trailerpark" was the climactic song of our annual pageant, The Y'all Xmas Xtravaganza, in which we told, year after year, the story of the fateful night the CowGirl Chorus bus crashed in the Forest of Singin' Pine Trees and everyone learned a lesson about the magic of love and absurdity.

Lyrics by J, music by me, backing vocals by the CowGirl Chorus and the Singin' Pine Trees, Cousin Rob on the mandolin, produced by Anthony Erice, and recorded in a cavernous church somewhere in Queens. Christmas alchemy by Y'all.

#3. The Lights.

I love Christmas lights. I didn't start noticing that I loved them until I lived in New York and I would go all soft at the first sighting of a string of colored lights bordering an apartment window.

One of my family's traditions was a Christmas Eve drive around the neighborhood -- after dinner at the local Chinese restaurant, a later tradition, after my grandmother got too old to come to Indiana for Christmas and insist that my mother make oyster stew for my dad on Christmas Eve even though nobody else would eat it -- to gawk at the gaudy light displays. I love the ones that are bright as noon, stuff on the lawn and on the roof, and all twinkling and blinking and chasing.

The season is about the lights, isn't it? Isn't it about light in a long, dark night, about faith that it is as dark as it will get, and now it's going to get lighter?

#4. The Saddest Christmas Song in the World.



Judy Garland met Vincent Minnelli -- her first homosexual husband -- when he directed Meet Me in St. Louis, the movie this song is from. (So you could say that we have this film to thank for Liza Minnelli.)

Apparently the original lyrics were even darker and changes were made to brighten it up a little for the film. But the most egregious change -- "Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow" became "Hang a shining star upon the highest bough" -- was made later, for a Frank Sinatra Christmas album, and now you hardly ever hear the earlier version sung.

The wikipedia entry for the film is worth a read. The very dry plot summary cracked me up. Here's a sample (Tootie is the little girl, played by Margaret O'Brien): "The emotional climax of the movie occurs when Tootie cannot cope with the disruption of her social world, and experiences a violent breakdown in a yard full of snowmen."

#5. It's the Most Wonderful Humbug of the Year.

If you love a good tirade about American Christianity, you can't beat December and you can't beat Christopher Hitchens. He reminds me that I hate what Christmas has become not only because it's evil, but because it's stupid.

I don't agree with a lot of what he writes about other stuff, and, even when he's writing about religion, he tends to overlook the fact that there are some Christians for whom Christ is something other than a passive-aggressive imaginary friend. But, even though I appreciate that there are many people who practice a contemplative Christianity that is worlds different from the born-again shopping mall religion constantly bleating in our faces -- in fact, probably pretty close to my own beliefs and practice -- even those more thoughtful Christians have some explaining to do about that Bible.

Oh, he loves Hanukkah too.

Happy Solstice!

#7. I Wish I Had a River I Could Skate Away On.



(You don't need to watch the video -- nothing happens, this is just the only version of the song I could find to post.)

The last time I saw Richard was Oxford, Ohio in '81.

Until I was 19, I used to say that I didn't like Joni Mitchell because all her songs sounded the same. My sophomore year of college, when I was home for Christmas break, I met a boy. There was a small college in my hometown, and, through high school friends who were going to school there instead of leaving like I did, I met a group of music and theater students who lived off campus, and I would spend most of my evenings with them whenever I was home for breaks. This boy's name was Richard. He was a voice major, smart and funny and effeminate. He wore a bright yellow crewneck pullover sweater.

The two of us ended up alone together after a couple of parties in his room, drunk and stoned, and he played Blue for me. It may have been the first time I'd ever heard it. It was the first time I'd ever heard it. I had never heard anything so beautiful as those songs. I still haven't. Richard and I sat on chairs facing each other and caressed each other's stocking feet (winters are cold in Indiana) and I fell in love -- with Joni Mitchell.

A week or so later, Richard drove to Oxford, Ohio, where I was back at school, about a three hour drive. It was different. Most of that year, my best friend and I (we were also roommates) struggled painfully with whether or not our relationship was sexual, so Richard suddenly in the middle of that was emotionally too complicated, and I couldn't handle it. I snuck off to bed that night, and, when Richard joined me, I pretended to be asleep. He got out of bed and kept my friends up for hours with stories of men who'd mistreated him. He was gone when I got up in the morning.

That was the first time I was passively cruel to a man who didn't deserve it. Not the last, though.

#8. Collin Street Bakery in Corsicana, Texas.

I'm convinced that people who say they hate fruitcake have never actually eaten fruitcake. It's like people saying they don't like Italian food because Spaghetti-O's are gross. If you've never had a fruitcake from Collin Street Bakery, you've never had fruitcake.

I think it was my grandma that used to order fruitcakes from Collin Street Bakery and send them to us at Christmastime or bring them with her in her suitcase, but I could be mixing up my Christmas memories. It's been known to happen. I do remember the tin they came in with the cowboy superimposed on the Currier & Ives-ish scene on the lid, because my mom kept them and used them for other things, cookies, etc. They still come in those tins.

I didn't get to Texas until I was almost 40 and J and I were touring down here so much and visiting his family. We stopped at the Dr. Pepper plant in Waco and the Collin Street Bakery in Corsicana, just off I-45 about an hour south of Dallas. We sampled everything and bought an apricot pecan cake. I highly recommend it. If you like sweet things -- if you don't, well, then, you're a lost cause, and besides I don't believe you -- you will like this fruitcake. It's tender and very flavorful and something like 25% pecans.

#9. Auntie Mame.

From the late eighties to the mid-nineties, I worked the graveyard shift proofreading and word processing in corporate law firms in New York. At one of the firms, I worked with a man named Silvio. He was a native New Yorker, second generation Italian-American, and a bit of a bitchy queen in the old style -- half Sylvester Stallone, half Estelle Getty in Golden Girls. He was sarcastic, very very funny, a great cook, and good to the marrow.

When I met him, his partner (he would have called him his "lover") of many years had just died of AIDS, and we worked together for only a year or so, so I never knew him except as someone who was tender with grief. Most of the time it didn't show, but every once in a while, I'd look over and he'd be staring at the air in front of his face, his eyes wet, utterly lost. Even after you've been working the graveyard shift for years, and your dinner is breakfast, the long night still has the quality of a vigil. In those cramped and smoky -- this was before New York outlawed smoking and before I quit -- proofreading rooms, we might reveal things, laugh harder than our daytime laugh, feel close for a few hours like drunk people and slightly embarrassed when the sun came up.

I had just discovered Auntie Mame -- who turned us on to it? J might remember -- but Silvio knew it by heart. We would recite whole scenes together; well, he would recite them, and I would try to keep up, laughing till my throat hurt. His favorite was the scene when Mame meets Patrick's debutante girlfriend, Glory, who tells the story about the ill-fated ping pong game. It's hilarious. He also loved to do the southern matriarch ("My bougainvilleas!"), who appears in this clip. Silvio did all the voices to a tee, especially, of course, the great Rosalind Russell.


#10. The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl

In the spirit of my resolution to complain less, and since there are 10 more days till Christmas (rather than shopping days, I like to think of them as "hiding days"), and since I'm done with school for a few weeks and have more time to blog, and above all because scoffing gets old fast, I thought I would do a countdown of the good things about Christmas. Maybe I should have saved this one for last, because it might be the very best thing ever about Christmas, but I can't wait, and besides, this is not meant to be a hierarchical list, but just some things to get us through December. I listened this morning and had a good cry:




The Fairy Tale of New York
by Jem Finer and Shane MacGowan

It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won't see another one
And then he sang a song
The rare old mountain tune
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you

Got on a lucky one
Came in eighteen to one
I've got a feeling
This year's for me and you
So happy Christmas
I love you baby
I can see a better time
When all our dreams come true

They've got cars big as bars
They've got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you
It's no place for the old
When you first took my hand
On a cold Christmas Eve
You promised me
Broadway was waiting for me

You were handsome
You were pretty
Queen of New York City
When the band finished playing
They howled out for more
Sinatra was swinging,
All the drunks they were singing
We kissed on a corner
Then danced through the night

(chorus)
The boys of the NYPD choir
Were singing "Galway Bay"
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day

You're a bum
You're a punk
You're an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it's our last

(chorus)

I could have been someone
Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can't make it all alone
I've built my dreams around you

(chorus)

What I Happen to Think.

I for one am glad the primaries are getting earlier and earlier. I'd much rather hear about the election than about shopping. The driver on the shuttle bus yesterday was playing bad Christmas music really loud. I had to sit there and pretend I was Jane Goodall to keep from strangling someone. (I'm trying to coin a word. I like "Chri$tmas," but you can't say it. "Shoppingmas" is clumsy. "Mallmas" sounds like a disease. Any ideas?)

For some reason I've followed an unstated rule to avoid electoral politics here. The reason, in general, is that -- though I love to talk about the candidates and the election with thoughtful, curious people, there are more than enough forums for uninformed people to blow hot air out of their asses at each other without opening up my blog for that. But this morning, I was leaving a comment on a blog I read regularly, and it got to be so long that I decided to move it here. Despite my frustration with the shallowness of media coverage, I do believe that our system depends on a big chaotic exchange of ideas, especially around election time. I think people should tell each other who they're voting for and why. In that spirit, here are a few thoughts on the Democratic primary. It starts with a rant about Nancy Pelosi, because the blog post I was responding to was about her and our ineffectual Democratic Congress:

I never liked Pelosi. The first time I was aware of her was when she became Minority Leader around the time we were going into Afganistan. I was in Indiana at my folks house for the holidays, and she was on the news constantly repeating, "I stand shoulder to shoulder with President Bush, blah, blah..." She just kept saying that, "shoulder to shoulder." She's like a windup doll, with her little scripted phrases.

I used to like Edwards. I liked him last time. I like his focus on poverty. If it were between him and Clinton, I'd vote for him in a second. I just can't get past his Senate vote to invade Iraq. How do you explain that? It was cynical, and his justification for it is disingenuous. How can he say, "If I knew then what I know now..."? I knew then that Bush was lying. How could he not have known?

I'm voting for Obama. Nervously, I remember how good it felt to vote for Clinton in 92 after being so beat up in the 80s by Reagan and Bush the first, feeling so hopeful, and what a crushing disappointment he turned out to be in short order. But I'm better informed this time. In '92, I didn't pay much attention to globalization, big business, or how money worked in elections, so it was easy for me to miss everything that was wrong with Clinton. He was a friend of the gay people, so I voted for him. My support of Obama is more informed.

I don't care if he's got all his t's crossed and i's dotted with the gay people. I used to be a single-issue voter, thinking that homosexual rights could function as a litmus test for the bigger picture. But when the gay rights movement took such a hard turn right in the late 80s, 90s -- with marriage and the military becoming the agenda -- I woke up. At this point, habeas corpus, the balance of powers, the Constitution, are more important than whether or not gay people can get married or kill people in the Middle East or whatever it is they think they should be allowed to do just like straight people. If we can preserve our Constitution, we'll get to civil rights for sexual minorities eventually. I think this election has to be about civil liberties more than civil rights.

Poor Me.

Last week my right pectoral muscle was a little sore, but I didn't think anything of it because since I've been working out every day I get sore now and then. But on Wednesday, I was bench-pressing my little 20 pounds (I spend half my time at the gym removing other people's weights) and after I finished my first set and reached up to start my second set, I felt a sharp pain just to the side of my sternum. I sat there for a few minutes, thinking it would subside, but it got worse and worse, and finally I gave up and went home.

It still hurts. It's a bit better, but it still hurts. I haven't been back to the gym since. Yesterday, I decided that I would go and spend some time on the elliptical machine, just to keep in the habit of going there every day, but my chest hurt and I was feeling crappy, so I blew it off. (I took Nyquil three nights in a row because my coughing was keeping me awake; Nyquil always makes me feel sleepy all the next day.) But I think the main reason I was feeling pissy is that I was just mad about my gym routine being interrupted. Since I started in mid-September, I have worked out religiously 5 days a week. I only missed two days that whole time. I had just begun to really notice a change in the shape of my body, and I was enjoying it.

Since I'm such a novice at this working out thing, I thought I'd look for some advice on what to do about my injury. I found a couple of web sites, one of them called Real Jock (a "gay fitness community"), or something like that. I couldn't find any information about healing from injuries, but they have hookup ads. (You can't be a gay anything without hookup ads, and besides, we're all working out so that we can have more sex anyway, right? so why not put it all on the same web site. Now I'm even more annoyed.)

The Reason for the Season.

Today was the last day of classes. My only Friday class is (was) Biology at 9, so I came home afterwards, had an early lunch, and went back to the library to get a head start on preparing for my English final. Usually when I study at the library, I sit in a big common area on the first floor where there are lots of comfy leather couches and chairs, but today that area was crowded so I ventured up into the stacks and found a study carrel. When I emerged at 5:30, it was dusk already, and, as I walked out onto the big open plaza in front of the library, despite the fact that it's 75 degrees out, the particular light at that time of day blindsided me with Christmas melancholy.

Whereas for the first 40-some years of my life, Christmas was an anchor, a moment of absolute predictability and the purest rest I got all year, in the last several years it has become an emotional tangle that may never work itself out. Christmastime feels like a big hole in the middle of the calendar. It's not what it used to be, it's not what I wish it were, it's sort of nothing but memory and sadness.

The first concrete thought I had when I walked out of the library -- after that wave of indistinct nostalgia -- was of my second winter in New York. My first winter there, I was in school (1981), but I dropped out after a year and got a job at Pearl Paint on Canal Street, unloading trucks and stocking shelves. Because I spent most of the work day going back and forth from the overheated store to the frigid street, and because I smoked like a chimney and didn't sleep enough, I caught a bad cold which turned into bronchitis which, because I didn't have health insurance, turned into pneumonia. Late one night when I was coughing so hard I could hardly breath, my roommate and a guy I was dating at the time took me to the emergency room at Beth Israel a few blocks up 1st Avenue. If I remember right, that was the first (and only, until recently) year that I didn't spend Christmas with my family in Indiana. I couldn't afford the trip.

(I'm sure the reason that experience came to mind is that I have a mild cough today, due to allergies, and a few days ago I strained a chest muscle at the gym and it still hurts. The combination of the two unrelated symptoms echoes -- faintly -- the feeling of pneumonia.)

I should say that I don't think I ever celebrated Christmas, really. We called it that, and we celebrated on the 25th, but my family was not religious. My mother attends a Unitarian Universalist church now, and she and my dad were Catholic when they were younger, but ours was a secular household. Christmas was about the tree, snow, lights, candles, food. We didn't use the word, but it was a pagan holiday at our house. We celebrated the Solstice.

When J and I had a more traditional relationship (at least in the eyes of my family), we went together to Indiana every year. And my brother's longtime companion would be there, and my sister's husband. My mother baked insane quantities of cookies (she still does). We spent long evenings talking and eating. We went out for Chinese food on Christmas Eve and came home and exchanged gifts. Many years, it was the one time that we were all together.

Three things converged to change everything: 1) The last year and a half before J and I separated, we had a third partner, R. My mom had a hard time with it. J and R and I were together for about 17 months, which spanned one Christmas. My mother told me that I couldn't bring both J and R home that year. I'll save the whole story for another day and just say that it was a very painful time in my relationship with my mother. (We avoided the issue by booking a high paying gig in Aspen on Christmas. They put us up in a ritzy hotel, and I spent a very surreal Christmas Eve, sitting in an outdoor jacuzzi surrounded by snow.)

I don't want to create the impression that my mother is an intolerant monster. There's too much evidence to the contrary. She was the one I learned tolerance from. Some of my earliest memories are of her organizing neighborhood association meetings in the early 70s to fight racist realtors in Indianapolis when black families started moving into our neighborhood and everybody started moving out. Maybe because I grew up in such a liberal family -- when I was 20 and still hadn't come out, my impatient mother left a book called something like "How to Talk to Your Gay Son" in a magazine rack in the family room where I would see it -- maybe because my mother always spoke out against intolerance and bigotry and small mindedness, is why it was such a blow when she refused to accept my unconventional relationship.

The result was that for the first time in my life, my chosen family was not automatically incorporated into my biological family. My whole notion of family, something that had never given me a moment of tension, was blown apart. Further complicating things in the succeeding years, J and I separated for a few years but now we live together again. Though our relationship was in many ways not much like a traditional marriage, in some ways it was. But now, who knows what it is? J ignores Christmas altogether -- his super-religious family ruined it for him, which I think is why he enjoyed my family Christmas so much back then.

(The first year after we separated, J and I took a road trip to Florida for Christmas. On the way, we stopped at a hostel in southern Georgia where all the sleeping cabins are treehouses in a swamp, and then we drove down and spent Christmas Day in Key West.)

The other two trends that have changed things are 2) my sister has three young boys, so their Christmas is now all about Santa Claus, etc. She and her family live close to my mom and dad, but a lot of their celebration centers around the kids, naturally, so logistically it's not effortless like it was when we all just converged at my mom and dad's house. And 3) I get more and more uncomfortable with exchanging gifts. My family is not too crazy with it, but as I've simplified my life (and gotten poorer) over the years, Christmas throws the contrast into relief and I'm never quite sure how to deal with it. I always end up feeling judgmental and ungrateful, so I just avoid it.

Lately, I've been thinking about my ex-boyfriend B, who I was with in my twenties. He's a Christmas fanatic -- and an atheist as far as I know -- but we always had a huge tree and lots of lights in our Brooklyn apartment. Christmas music playing all the time, the good stuff, like Waverly Consort or Emmylou Harris's Christmas album. I loved it. Maybe I should go spend Christmas with him. I wonder how his partner would feel about that? Or maybe I should track down that sweet guy who took me to the hospital and sat with me and rubbed my back while I coughed in the waiting room for 8 hours until a doctor saw me. We only dated for a few weeks. All I remember is that his name was Paul. I wonder what he's doing for Christmas.

World AIDS Day.

One of my classes -- for those who haven't been keeping up -- is Biology of AIDS. It has been fascinating and difficult, and I'm so glad I took it. We started in September with chemistry, the nature of chemical bonds, moving on to genetics into cell biology, the immune system, microorganisms and viruses, epidemiology, and on into public health and drug therapy and research, and prevention efforts.

On Friday, we had a guest lecturer from the University health service (whatever it's called) who spent last summer in Tanzania, volunteering with a group doing HIV prevention and treatment education in a small village. She gave a presentation about the experience. She showed lots of slides of the Tanzanians she lived and worked with, along the lines of National Geographic photos, beautiful traditional African dress, ebony skin, big smiles, and lots of dust. At the end, she showed a few short video clips of the villagers singing and dancing.

She said that they sang and danced on and off all day long, at the drop of a hat. Any time there was a lull in activity, they spontaneously began singing. The video clips unexpectedly moved me. It's easy, and I guess dangerous in a way, to romanticize that sort of thing, to trivialize, to condescend -- "Look at the charming natives" -- but the images filled me with the same longing I feel sometimes for a kind of generalized Appalachian past when people got out banjos or a jaw harp and sang songs on the front porch at night. Maybe it's eighty percent nostalgia, but I think there's some amount of blood memory in that longing, a yearning that gets more intense as our modern world spins us farther and farther from each other, community, family, god.

(And of course I feel profoundly conflicted about any longing I might feel for a "natural" community, because those traditional structures have not, at least not those in my particular European lineage, been kind to sexual deviants, which is probably why as a teenager I began to run screaming from anything that looked like traditional community or family.)

After her presentation, she handed out little embroidered red ribbon stickers and "safe sex kits" -- small ziplock bags with condoms and lube and information about STDs. Maybe I was emotionally primed by the video of the African villagers, but those safe sex kits really got me. They reminded me of the mid-80s, when it was so exhilarating to finally know what was causing AIDS and how it could be prevented, and we all had a feeling of solidarity and purpose, because, now that they knew what caused it, it was only a matter of time before there would be a vaccine or a cure, and until then we would keep having great sex because we had this new exotic sexy device called a condom -- "safe sex is hot sex!" Condoms were everywhere it seemed, handfuls of them, big bowls full, like candy everywhere you looked. And the burst of activism was powerful and exciting -- all those demonstrations and marches and the boys in their cutoff jeans and ACT UP t-shirts, shouting.

I remember when we all rode in buses to somewhere in Maryland or Virginia, to demonstrate outside the FDA headquarters building in 1988. (I only know the year because I looked it up. My recollection is a little foggy.) One of our slogans at that time was something to the effect that more Americans had died of AIDS than died in Vietnam, which was some 40,000, I think, and at the time we were terribly indignant and saddened by such an impossibly high number. Blows my mind.

Twenty-five years later -- and I've just taken this course and learned that the nature of this virus is such that it's difficult to imagine there ever being anything as neat and clean as a vaccine or cure -- they're still handing out "safe sex kits," trying to get college students to use condoms, and I'm 46 and still trying to keep it together, still trying not to get infected.

Last Night, I Couldn't ...

I took me two hours to get to sleep last night, and then I couldn't stay asleep. I woke up 4 times to pee. Completely unpredictable. I should have been sleepy when I went to bed at 11:30 -- I get up at 5:30 a.m. on Mondays -- but I wasn't. I had slept extra-soundly the previous three nights, so maybe I was just all rested up. I woke up (again) at 5, but, instead of getting up and doing something, I lay in bed till 6 and tortured myself trying to figure out my cash flow for the next two months.

I slept some, I know, because I dreamed that I was in the back seat of a car with my English professor trying to come up with an instance of female bisexuality in Southern literature.

Enchanted.

J and I are Amy Adams's biggest fans, so we couldn't wait to see Enchanted. I think the word I see most often used to describe her is "incandescent," and she is. The rest of the cast is great too, but I could barely keep track of what was going on in the scenes she's not in, because my mind was going c'mon c'mon c'mon c'mon c'mon until she reappeared.

Most of the reviews I've read this morning, the positive ones anyway, say that Amy Adams makes the movie. She certainly lights it up, but it's a pretty interesting film for other reasons, too. The big musical numbers are hilarious and thrilling. Each new layer of Busby Berkeley nonsense they added on to the Central Park number made me laugh hard and I still teared up at the end. Is it ironic? Or is it us? Is the production number in Central Park any more ironic than Clang, Clang, Clang Went the Trolley?

There are obvious clues that you're not supposed to take it too seriously, like when the princess summons the rats and cockroaches to help her, Cinderella style, clean the lawyer's apartment. But the song they sing is the real deal. You know because Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz wrote it. It is, simultaneously, the thing and a parody of the thing. I'm sure there's a fancy-schmancy word for that. Postmodernism?

But in the end the movie, like a cat that falls out the window and does a couple of flips but lands on its feet, turns out to be selling the regressive Disney happily-ever-after fantasy after all. Which -- because I was thinking how'd you do that? instead of oh, please! -- ends up being satisfying instead of infuriating.

Why is it that, even when you know it's a load of crap, it's so much fun to believe it for a couple hours? It may only be because I want so badly for Amy Adams to be happy.

Boundaries II.

I titled that last post "Boundaries" because I was going to write about my sister but then I got waylaid with Todd Haynes and never got there. The subjects of Z, Todd Haynes, and my sister were related in several ways.

Z is my guinea pig for a new way of relating to loved ones that I suspect is better than any other way. I've not kept anything from him. And even the stuff that I would have been tempted to keep from him, like my feelings about him, he has read here, so even that barrier is broken. So, though our friendship has been in some ways superficial because we don't spend a lot of time together, it is complete, clean. We can be present, in the present, with each other, because there's no debris from the past clogging things up. I don't edit myself with Z and he still likes me, and that is a powerful lesson. I try to take that lesson into the other relationships in my life, and for the most part it improves them.

It's complicated in older relationships, though, because I have a history of having edited what I've shared with them. There is that debris. So, when I tell a friend something about me he didn't know, I am not only telling him that particular thing (which I probably kept from him because I thought he might not like me if he knew), I am also telling him that I've kept a secret from him. This has been a pattern -- presenting an incomplete picture of myself because I fear being rejected, then getting angry because "you don't know me!" -- and I aim to stop it. This blog helps. The artist in me naturally wants to approach it as a literary project, and that helps me to not limit what I write.

I found out last week that my sister has been reading my blog. I had a feeling. When I started this, I didn't tell anyone for a while. I wanted it to be anonymous at first, so I could get used to the freedom. Since my family knows more about me than anyone because our relationships cover more years, I suppose there's also more they don't know. And even though, in recent years, I've tried to be more open with them, share more of my life with them, I see them once maybe twice a year. I want them to know all about me, but how to do you do that when the conversation is so limited?

I imagine most people don't talk openly with their parents about their sex lives. (I have a good friend in Syracuse who is very close to his fairly conservative Italian Catholic mother and will talk about any sexual subject in front of her, sometime just to make her blush, but I envy their openness, and I especially envy their sense of humor about the discomfort). Part of this reticence is appropriate I guess. There are, I suppose, valid reasons for setting different boundaries in different relationships, different rules regarding what of ourselves we share with which people. Some things are legitimately private, I guess, maybe especially between adults and children. I guess. Mostly I think the whole boundaries thing is just an excuse for keeping secrets.

My difficulty, so much of my life, being honest about sex was some combination of an intense discomfort associated with nakedness because my parents are Midwestern and modest and sexually conservative (my parents never talked to me about sex, no birds and bees, nothing, and I feel for them, I understand how it happens, but still -- what kind of message does that send to a kid?) and a deep shame that my emerging sexual feelings were about boys. (As far as training in how to disguise and dissemble sexual feelings, my teenage years were like boot camp.) To my never-ending annoyance, that particular shame can still be very fresh all these decades later, like, for instance, when I strike up a friendship with a guy in one of my classes and I dread the moment in casual conversation when I'm going to be faced with revealing or avoiding revealing that I am a homosexual. It's as simple as being asked, "Do you have a girlfriend?" and having to decide, "Do I really want to deal with this person's discomfort right now?" I get so fucking weary of that. (This a great example of how this pattern starts, with that first little lie which later is the secret -- why didn't you tell me that before?)

So, though it made me a little woozy for a while to know that my sister was reading this stuff, I was glad. It's like mining, you can only get so deep with a pickaxe and shovel (Christmas visits, the occasional email or phone call) -- sometimes you have to blast a big hole to get somewhere.

Boundaries.

Last week, or maybe the week before, I had dinner with Z and his new boyfriend, R. We hadn't seen each other in a while. I missed him. He suggested dinner, the three of us, which I jumped at because I didn't (or thought I didn't) make a good impression when I met R a while back, and I was glad for another chance. So we had dinner, very nice. R is a sweet man, and it made me happy (in a sort of maternal way) to see them hold hands as they walked into the restaurant, to see their affection for each other, to see how much R cares about Z. Happy, as in sad. Because it used to be me holding Z's hand and it used to be me who Z looked at with affection (it's not maternal any more, is it?). Am I entitled to feel wistful about a man I more or less pushed away because I didn't want the attachment? (My opinion about that kind of love is like my opinion about God: It would be nice, but c'mon, really, you can't be serious.)

Over dinner, we talked about aGLIFF -- the gay film festival here, last month. Life in a Box was in it, in 2005. I think they've had a lot of administrative problems, I'm not sure what-all, but the staff has turned over a couple times in the last few years. In my opinion, the programming is uneven and frustrating, but these queer festivals have an impossible mandate -- they have to please such wildly different tastes. They have to program a certain number of silly shirtless boy films (Eating Out, etc.) to please the suburban gay men who actually buy tickets and make donations to the festival while maintaining some artistic credibility for snobs like me who complain about the lowbrow programming.

(I kicked myself plenty of times for not choosing a shirtless boy still from Life in a Box to promote it at the queer festivals. There are plenty of shirtless shots in Life in a Box. It hardly matters what the film is about, if the still in the program shows a shirtless boy, the lines are long. But then you have the problem of an audience expecting something your film is not going to provide. Maybe I'm second-guessing. Maybe all they're expecting is a flash of skin, and they don't care what the rest of the film is about. And maybe it's good that the shirtless promo shots bring the suburban gay male crowd to the theater to see some more serious work. And how condescending was that last sentence?)

Anyway, Z and R said that they'd seen only one film in this year's festival, and they hated it, they thought it was the worst thing they'd ever seen. I asked what it was. It was Poison.

"Poison? Todd Haynes? Prison sex? Spitting?"

"That's the one."

"That's one of my all-time favorite films."

Now, I've already disproved the movie test. And I would not think poorly of someone who doesn't like Poison. Even though I'm a huge admirer of Todd Haynes, I don't always love his films, and Poison is a difficult film. His films are often too cerebral for me, and it's hard to get past the thick layer of style to whatever emotional content is underneath. But still I think he's a real artist. (Though I'm sure it's come out in dribs and drabs here, someday I will put together some working version of my argument that real artists deserve regard whether we like their work or not.) I gave Z and R a little background on Todd Haynes and Poison. I wasn't trying to try to change their minds, but I felt compelled to offer some context for their reaction. I don't think they were looking for context, they just hated the film. Which is fine.

What was jarring though, is that Z said and R agreed that he doesn't like sad films. They don't interest him, he doesn't want to watch them. I live for sad films. And sad books, and sad songs, and sad plays. Sad pictures. Sad people. Sad weather, sad dogs, sad days. I had not really thought of it in such simple terms before that conversation. I feel cheated if there's no sadness in a movie. Happy is fine too, but only because it makes sad sadder.

Regardless of what we know about the movie test, and even though we had a really nice dinner and the conversation about the film was not awkward or uncomfortable, it emphasized to me how separate I am from the two of them, how separate I am now from Z.