Not Writing, Shopping.

I've been such a lazy blogger this last week. I didn't post anything at all, not since Monday, on The Gay Place (nor did anyone else!). I was recently invited to become a contributor on one of my favorite blogs, The Bilerico Project, an LGBT blog with a national audience, the excitement of which, you'd think, would have spurred some rumination on something or other, but it did not.

I'm preoccupied. I doubt this will be as momentous to anyone else as it is to me, but I am putting on a suit and tie and going to a fancy party tonight. I can't even remember the last time I wore a suit. Maybe my sister's first wedding, about 20 years ago? The best part of it is that I got the whole outfit at Savers for less than $15.

I'll post pictures later.

Harrumph.

I seriously wish the restaurant industry would get together and reform the ridiculous system of tipping. Maybe then they won't be able to justify the fact that waiters in many restaurants make at least five times as much as the cooks. I haven't kept up with this recently, but I remember a few years ago reading that some fancy, high-profile restaurants (including Chez Panisse in Berkeley and Per Se in New York) had abolished tipping.

Restaurant owners: Pay your staff a fair and decent wage. Charge your customers what the food and service really cost. Not just because it would be simpler and more equitable, but because then we won't have to read any more stupid editorials by cheap, petty assholes who had an unpleasant experience in a restaurant the night before and feel the need to share their bad mood with the world.

Stop the Presses! Some Bimbo Has An Opinion About Gay Marriage!

Does anyone else find it bizarre how much we care lately about the political opinions of beauty pageant contestants? I don't for the life of me understand why it's interesting that Miss Beverly Hills (Miss Beverly Hills?!) supports the execution of homosexuals.

I mean, c'mon, this peabrain's comment barely merits an eyeroll, but instead we get the story covered by every major news outlet and plastered all over the blogosphere. Here's an interminable segment by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, complete with counterpoint by America's favorite gay dad, Dan Savage.

Maybe if we all just decided to ignore these nitwits, we wouldn't find them later in life poised to be a heartbeat away from becoming the president of the United States. Seriously, people. Turn around and walk away. Don't encourage them.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Happy Birthday, Johnny.

When I was a little kid, my mother played two records more than any others. One was the Jordanaires' This Land, an album of American folk songs sung in beautiful, smooth 4-part harmony. Their version of "All My Trails" still lives deep in my soul and floats on the surface of my dreams.

The other was Johnny Cash's Greatest Hits Vol. 1. Those songs indicated to me at a very young age that adults must have a world of exotic and dangerous concerns: erotic obsession, social injustice, marginal people, the tenuousness of sexual fidelity. Those songs may have been my first encounter with the idea that people often say things they don't exactly mean, to be funny or to make a point.

Anyway, I revere Johnny Cash, so does J, and this was always one of our favorite songs to sing.

The Ohio Theater Is Closing.

I know things change and die, blah blah blah, but this is a tough one. The Ohio Theater was my artistic home for many years. It's where I met and became friends with Tim and Kristin and so many others who are still my dear friends. It's where I began to learn how to write songs for theatre. It's where Lizzie Borden was born. It's where I met Jay. I guess I thought if it could survive the 80s and the even more brutal 90s -- in Soho, for god's sake, I mean, in 1989 we were bitching about how Soho had become an upscale mall -- I guess I thought it would be around forever. So sad.

The Great Texas Snow Freakout of 2010.

For a while this morning there were big globs of snow, or more like airborne slush, falling from the sky, and the Texans were beside themselves because apparently that sort of thing never happens here. Then later on for a bit, there was some real snow falling, but it was too warm and the ground was too wet for it to really accumulate. I drove to the film festival office where I've been volunteering in the afternoons, and the roads were nearly empty. Everyone stayed home because the roads are ... wet? Then the precipitation stopped, now it's close to 40 degrees, but still the Austin schools district told parents they could come get their kids from school, every one is leaving work early, and everything this evening has been canceled. As far as I can tell, the "snow" is over, but everyone is so traumatized, they need an evening off.

New Gay Theater.

I stumbled on this article minutes after writing a blog post on the Gay Place about the new gay conservatism. I'm sorry I didn't see it sooner or I would have linked to it as an example of this conservative trend.

It's a shame that the economics of New York theater ensure that what happens there is mostly a conversation between artists and rich people, but I guess the point is that you can see these new plays as symptomatic of the kinds of concerns gay people have now, at least gay playwrights.

Keeping in mind that the New York Times is good at making things sound dull whether they are or not, the new plays mentioned in the article don't sound interesting to me, except The Pride (because of the history angle and because an old friend -- who is crazy talented -- designed the sets). But I would love to see the revival of Boys in the Band. I saw the movie when I was in my twenties -- at that time, it was understood, in the fringey artist/activist circles I traveled in, to be an embarrassing relic and our quintessential self-loathing story. But I remember being moved by it. I'm very curious to see how a contemporary group of artists interpret it, and how a contemporary audience receives it. In fact, I think I'll rent the movie and watch it again, to see how it holds up.

Seriously?

Dick Cheney is bragging about his war crimes, Uganda is close to passing legislation calling for the execution of homosexuals, and this is what people are up in arms about today? Is it possible that she was snubbed by Vanity Fair not because she's fat and black but because Precious is a stupid movie, her performance is unremarkable, and the only reason she got nominated for an Oscar is because the voters feel guilty about abused pregnant fat black girls with AIDS? Give me a fucking break. This is not injustice. Worry about something important.

Dark Shadows.

Did everybody but me know that Tim Burton and Johnny Depp are making a movie of Dark Shadows? Oh my god.



I loved this show when I was little. It came on some time in the interval between school and dinner. I remember only getting to see it sporadically. Maybe I wasn't allowed to watch it at home. It was so disturbing in the very best possible way. Monsters in a soap opera! The kind of disturbing that a 9-year-old boy craves. Not to mention how sexy Quentin was, writhing and groaning as he turned into the wolfman.

And, as an added bonus, I just discovered that Dark Shadows was created by Dan Curtis, who directed Trilogy of Terror and Burnt Offerings.

My Oscars.

If anybody cares, here's who I would give Oscars to this year:

Best Picture: Bright Star by Jane Campion
Best Actor: Christopher Plummer for The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus
Best Actress: Maya Rudolph for Away We Go
Most Infuriatingly Mispraised Movie Ever: Precious Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire

One Never Knows When the Homosexual Is About; He May Appear Normal.

[Cross-posted on The Gay Place, Austin Chronicle's LGBT blog.]

It's kinda funny, except for the fact that it's not.



What's unsettling to me is how much this video gets right, if I can extrapolate from my experiences as a teenager in small-town Indiana in the 70s. (This video was made in the 50s, but small-town Indiana in the 70s is roughly equivalent to the 50s.) There actually were homosexuals driving around looking for action. But they weren't looking for unsuspecting straight boys, they were looking for others like themselves. I would have been ecstatic if one of them had pulled up and offered me a ride, listened to me, touched my shoulder, showed me porn. Ecstatic. As a teenager, I used to spend hours walking around town, hoping. I never did get picked up by the man in a car -- but I did, at 16, have my first sexual experience with a man much like the one in the video.

My puberty -- this fundamental human experience of becoming a sexual person -- was saturated, marinated, stewed in ideas of crime, pathology, risk, and shame. I don't say this in an effort to get sympathy. (Yes, I'm a victim of a horrendous injustice. Don't try to tell me I'm not. But, at the same time, there's no need to dwell on it.) I go back to this story because I want to bring some kind of understanding or perspective to this conversation we're having about whether or not homosexuals are just like heterosexuals except for their erotic orientation. Does my status as a survivor of trauma set me apart in a meaningful way?

And, here's the big question: even though the culture, at least in the West, is obviously much much better for queer kids growing up now, they are still, and I imagine always will be, disproportionately raised by heterosexuals. Is this experience of being aliens in their own families built into human biology? Is it just a failure of my imagination, the fact that I think we will always be different?

(This post was inspired by a wonderful essay by Dave White on Advocate.com and the accompanying CBS News video from 1967.)

Tim Miller Preaches To The Choir.

cross-posted at The Gay Place, Austin Chronicle's LGBT blog.

I went to see Tim Miller's show The Lay of the Land at the Vortex Theater here in Austin last Sunday night. I left the theater feeling disappointed, angry, a little disgusted even. On and off all day Monday and Tuesday, I tried to come up with something to write about the show, but couldn't figure out a way to approach my critique without sounding whiny and negative and making it all about me and my utopian dreams dying.

I have to start by saying that part of the difficulty of knowing how to write about Tim's show is that it's sort of a rule with me to be careful about slagging another artist. It's a hard life, and I feel like we should support each other. But part of supporting each other is being willing to call each other on our bullshit, right?

So I mulled over my thoughts all day yesterday, and I'm still not sure if I have something to say that really holds together, but I'm gonna share some thoughts.

It is not accidental that I see the thread of this show reaching back to Tim's work in the late 80s. He makes frequent reference to his status as one of the NEA 4. He mentioned that his first Austin appearance was at the Vortex Theater, some 25 years ago. And he has been wearing essentially the same costume the whole time (tank top, shorts, black Doc Martens, i.e., ACT UP drag, 1988). I suspect he does it deliberately in order to suggest some continuity in his work and in its relationship to the gay rights movement, to suggest that our struggle follows a continuous thread; but maybe that's just what he's comfortable wearing on stage. What it does for me, and maybe for anyone who's been here for the long haul, is to emphasize what has changed, what has aged: Tim's hair has gone gray, he's grown thick around the middle, his skin has lost elasticity. I've experienced all those changes in my body too, which I think is why I had such a personal, emotional response to the show. Since I felt such solidarity with Tim and the activism his work was a part of 20 years ago, my response to the show on Sunday made me question what my politics meant back then and what they mean now. Tim's politics have grown soft along with his muscle tone, and that feels like a betrayal.

Maybe I'm projecting something onto Tim's work that was never there. It's been a long time, I should go back and read the earlier stuff. My memory tells me he was, we were, calling for something more radical than what Tim is asking for now: that is, so-called marriage equality, in other words, asking to be let in the gate. I thought we were demanding that the wall be broken down, that possibilities be expanded. I know that's what I was fighting for. But maybe Tim was always just begging for his entitlement and it just seemed more radical back then. Was the whole gay rights movement only about demanding what we felt entitled to? That's what sickens me.

For work that purports to be about politics, Tim's political commentary is not at all sharp; it is even incoherent at times. He makes offhand reference to the immorality of Bush's war in Iraq, but a few minutes later he complains that American soldiers, whom he paints in heroic terms, are kicked out of the military because they are homosexual. No indication at all of any contradiction or irony in the juxtaposition of these facts.

I think the most off-putting aspect of the show is the same thing that I find off-putting about most LGBT activism of the last few years, and about liberal politics in general lately, the assumption that "of course we all agree. Of course we all believe that gay marriage is a civil right and that it should be the main focus of our movement." It's a smug sort of California arrogance, an expectation of consensus, an attitude among privileged people who somehow can't imagine that many people's lives are not exactly like theirs. The message of The Lay of the Land is so mainstream, so conservative, so normative, it might as well be a commercial for the Human Rights Campaign.

He begins the show by reminding us that on election day in 2008, a majority of Californians voted "to take away our civil rights." It ends with a sort of paean to American democracy and a plea that the U.S. government grant Tim and his husband full citizenship. He frets that he might have to move to Australia because the U.S. won't let his immigrant husband stay here because they're not really married. Poor thing.

Is this what the anger and creativity of my generation is reduced to? Are we really that tired and slack that all we want is to file joint tax returns and be left alone with our American dream, just like the straight people? If this is where my generation has ended up, with this hobbled, compromised vision of what our lives can be, I reject it.


Tommy Glass.

How strange to know that J.D. Salinger is dead now. I guess everyone is gonna say it this week, but me too. Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey changed my life. Not so much because I recognized myself in them but because they blew wide open my notion of what art could be. I had never imagined that art could be so sad and puzzling. I loved the Glass family because they were so fucked up.

For a few weeks or months around 1990, I dated a guy whose name was Tommy Glass. I never knew much about him, never met his friends or family, and I imagined that he was one of Salinger's Glasses, maybe a child of one of the Glass siblings.

I met Tommy in the Ramble in Central Park. He was movie star handsome, tall and dark-haired with a bitter sense of humor. We didn't have sex in the park but passed each other as we were both leaving and he flashed me a smile. He invited me home. He lived in his grandmother's apartment on the Upper West Side. I'm not sure where the grandmother was, but the apartment was still filled with her things, dark antique furniture and damask curtains, doilies.

We never went out anywhere when we got together. I met him at his apartment, we had sex, and then we ate ice cream in bed. Edie's, back when it was a local brand. He was aggressive in bed, talked about opera a lot, didn't have a job as far as I could tell.

He didn't call for a few weeks once, and then he did, and he told me that he had joined SCA (Sexual Compulsives Anonymous). His sponsor told him that because he had met me in a public cruising spot, he should stop seeing me. But he said we could get together again if we met somewhere besides his apartment, like say a restaurant, so that our meeting was not just for sex. We could then go to his apartment and make out, but we had to stop short of actual sex. It was sort of a reenactment of the beginning of our relationship, this time more chaste.

So we met at the coffee shop on his corner, had a quick coffee or bowl of soup or something, then went up to his apartment. The only rule (according to him) was that we couldn't take off our underwear. Which really just made it hotter. Seriously, try it some time. And then ice cream.

Every time I left his apartment, he would walk me downstairs. (He had impeccable manners.) But if I started to step out on to the stoop, he would pull me back into the vestibule to kiss me goodbye. I didn't for a long time understand why he was doing this, but then I realized that he was afraid for us to be seen kissing. I found it irritating. I was very Queer Nation back then. I started to take longer and longer to return his calls, and eventually he stopped calling.

Months later, one morning when I was running to the corner for cigarettes and milk, stinky and bleary-eyed, I ran smack into him on the sidewalk. His black hair was combed straight back, his teeth were bright white, his blue eyes sparkled, he was every bit as sexy as ever. He was with a friend, they'd come downtown for brunch. He was exuberant, thrilled to see me, and told me that he had just been accepted to Tulane law school and was moving to New Orleans in a few weeks.

I wished him good luck. He grabbed me and kissed me long and hard on the mouth, right there on First Avenue on a Saturday morning, and then he walked away with his friend and I stood there with my pint of milk and pack of Marlboro Lights.

I google Tommy Glass every once in a while, but as you can imagine it's a pretty common name.

Supreme Court Freak Out.

People are freaking out about the Supreme Court decision. Rightly, I think. I was trying to make the case last night during a dinner-table conversation that the decision may in some way be a positive thing, because it throws the issue in front of our faces, makes us all think hard about whether or not we have the political system we want.

Granted it's a nightmare to contemplate the real-world effect of unregulated contributions, the power it gives huge corporations over our political process, but I have to say I have some sympathy with the libertarian stance, the attitude that it's always bad to restrict political speech.

And, let's be real. The McCain-Feinhold reforms have been in place for a while now, and have they really made a dent in corporate influence over elections? In a practical sense, I don't think they amount to much more than false reassurance. Corporations will find ways around regulations, we know that.

Like most, I've been reading a lot of articles about this stuff for the last few days, and, though I've learned a lot, I have to admit I'm in over my head. But the more I read, the less convinced I am that the right way to deal with this problem is by limiting corporate contributions to campaigns. I like the idea of requiring disclosure. ("I'm so-and-so, the CEO of such-and-such, and I approve this message.") And I've always liked the idea of public financing of elections as a way to sidestep the issue and make elections more fair.

Here's one of the more interesting articles I've read in the last few days.