I don't see anything queer at all in these pictures after (after?) his transition. He has become exactly the sort of impossibly handsome, athletic man that I have resented and desired since I was about 11 years old. I am aware that I am reacting to pictures, to a presentation, not to an actual man, but I was responding to a presentation, to a performance, in 5th grade too: the straight white teeth, the shirt open 3 buttons, the hiphuggers, the masculine swagger that I couldn't master.
I don't have any pithy conclusion to offer; I just found my reaction to these photos fascinating.
I get bored fast with all the Project Runway/American Idol, etc. talent shows, but for some reason (i.e., because it's drag queens) I'm mesmerized by RuPaul's Drag Race. I actually teared up a little last night at JuJuBe's harrowing last-minute save from elimination when she Lipsynched ... For Her Life. And we laughed and cried to see Jessica Wild sashay away.
If you don't have time to catch the whole thing, this parody from Big Gay Sketch Show pretty much nails it.
M and I were on our way to A's house for his weekly RuPaul's Drag Race gathering last night, guessing that everyone would want to know about our trip to Mexico City last week, and of course anxious to tell everyone how wonderful and magical and absolutely amazing it was, but we both sort of realized that we didn't know how to turn it into a narrative. And, too, I thought, I don't know how to turn the last few months of my life into a narrative. Which is saying something, because I'm pretty good at the narrative thing. Even if I have to bluff.
I fell madly in love with a man, and then I fell madly in love with a city. That's all I've got so far.
So, I'm seriously neglecting my blogging. Not just here, but at The Gay Place and Bilerico where I'm required to write something about something instead of blubbering about my incoherent thoughts. Not only did I take a week off, but now, three days back, I can't focus long enough to write a paragraph that's not a mess. I'll come up with something, I hope soon, but right now my mind is spinning too fast.
Oh! My birthday was Monday, the day I returned from Mexico. I turned 49. Unbelievable. I spent the eve of my birthday vomiting on the bus from Mexico City to Nuevo Laredo at the border. Nice. Maybe it was the lax food safety laws in Mexico (are there any?) or the water, but I'm telling myself I was just overwrought and overwhelmed. I was actually crying the night before we left, I was so sad to be leaving. I haven't fallen so hard for a city since I was 18 on my first visit to New York. Hard core.
(Okay, one coherent thought: the street food in Mexico City is sublime. We ate almost every meal from street vendors. Usually for less than 5 bucks for the both of us, we stuffed ourselves on the most delicious food I've ever had. I guess, in a way, that fact can stand in for the whole experience of the city.)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
[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?
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.
