Fag School #1

I picked up a copy (the first copy!) of Fag School, a zine out of Oakland, at Modern Times today. I'd actually noticed it at Comic Relief in Berkeley about 2 months ago, but didn't get a copy because I wasn't feeling spendy. I then hankered after it for 2 months, looking for it in each bookstore I visited, until I found it again at Modern Times.

The zine has a deliberately (gratuitously?) low-fi aesthetic. Photocopied and stapled, with typewritten passages cut out and stuck over photographs. My friend Molly and I went through a low-fi period as well in undergrad, when we were creating posters out of photocopied newspaper overlaid with sharpie writing, so I was totally into it.

Anyway, one of the awesome features of Fag School (besides the great porn! :)) is the "Cruising Reviews" section, which is an inspired bit of sexy sleaziness. I give you a sample here:

Two hours into my friends wedding party, I found myself in the bathroom with a older Cuban guy, SCORE! "I only like you cause your young and you got big lips." This was the HOTTEST thing an old dude i was blowing had said to me, so i got REALLY hot and started going double-time on his dang (he-he). He told me I had a "big lead for a little gun", jizzed all over my glasses and hair and then left my drunk ass to wander the party putting on my "oh, that wasnt ME getting slammed in the bathroom" face (everyone saw right through me). And then i walked home in the rain. It was by far the hottest sex ever and I would recommend it to a friend.

Let's do a close reading of why this is so awesome, kay?

Two hours into my friends wedding party, I found myself in the bathroom with a older Cuban guy, SCORE!
He's having casual sex at a wedding party. That is delicious. A big fuck you to this straight marriage game without having to say so explicitly. Also, a reminder that queers get horny at weddings too. The fact that it's an older Cuban guy brings up issues of immigration, ethnicity and race.

"I only like you cause your young and you got big lips." This was the HOTTEST thing an old dude i was blowing had said to me, so i got REALLY hot and started going double-time on his dang (he-he).
The (he-he) is genius. Cute and nasty. Also, you HAVE to love the modifying phrase "an old dude i was blowing" because so many hot things have been said to the writer that he needs to add on all these qualifiers to make sure he gets the story right for the zine. One can almost imagine an annoyed former hookup saying, "I thought that what I said to you on the BART was hotter", to which the appropriate response would be "yeah, but that was the hottest thing a young dude i was giving a hand-job has said to me. This time was different. Old dude, blowjob." And plus, "big lips" is another thing that brings up race. I believe the writer is black. It's hot because the hookup did NOT say "I like you cause you're black." That would NOT be cool.

He told me I had a "big lead for a little gun", jizzed all over my glasses and hair and then left my drunk ass to wander the party putting on my "oh, that wasnt ME getting slammed in the bathroom" face (everyone saw right through me).
A complex sentence worthy of a French novelist who shall remain unnamed. In this one line we find out that:
a) The sex was loud
b) Something about the writer's "big lead"? I don't know much about guns. Anyone want to tell me what this is about?
c) The writer was drunk
d) The writer wears glasses
e) The writer apparently gets slammed in the bathroom often enough to have a face for denying it
f) The writer's friends can see through that face, because he's used it so often

And then i walked home in the rain.
Okay, I admit I don't know why this line is there and what it contributes to the piece.

It was by far the hottest sex ever and I would recommend it to a friend.
This is just the whipped cream on the sexy cake. It made me laugh out loud. Also, it's saying something rather deep about the unreproduceable nature of experience (and thus implicitly pointing out the limits of the institution of reviews generally) and/or the non-scarcity of sexual experience (I had great sex, you too can have the exact same kind of great sex). Also, it assumes an acceptable public discussion of explicit sexual pleasure and lets us know that the writer really is not ashamed of having sex in bathrooms at wedding parties.

I can't wait for Fag School #2.

No fats, fems, or asians

[M]any people are not aware of [the] complex roots of desire ... . The phrase, "sorry, just a preference," for instance, dominates the world of online personals when it comes to racial and body type exclusions, an unexamined statement that potentially damages and further allows groups in power to define the sexuality of minorities.

- Zak Szymanski, "Some Fetishes Play With Double-Edged Swords", Bay Area Reporter Vol. 36 No. 38 (21st September 2006)

In this week's BAR, Zak Szymanski starts off by problematizing something that a lot of White gay men take for granted - racial preferences in their choice of sexual partners. The article then expands somewhat to a discussion of responsibility and sex-positivity generally, then returns to the question of racial preferences.

First, a minor gripe: the title is somewhat mismatched to the content of the article I don't think the article made clear why preferences and/or fetishes are a "double-edged sword", which I understand means something that may hurt as much as harm the person exercising/expressing the attitude, behavior or argument. In this case, racial preferences don't directly harm the (presumptively white) person who has them, but rather the racial minorities who are dehumanized or essentialized by them. I suppose indirectly it harms white men insofar as they consider themselves part of a queer community that includes men of color. As one member of a sex & politics discussion group quoted in the article noted, "racism [is] our problem as a community to solve". Or as John Donne might have said if he were an internet chatroom queen, "Ask not for whom the racist email notification chimes. It chimes for thee." So maybe the title sort of matches the article. But seriously. FOOTNOTE NEEDED!

Szymanski's piece is typical of the thoughtful writing found in the BAR, one of the finest LGBT local free papers in the U.S., especially when it comes to columnists and opinion pieces (this is hardly a scientific opinion, it's based on my limited experience with a few other LGBT locals). It also shows that BAR has enough trust in the community that it can challenge its readers to re-examine their beliefs about sex and race.*

* I still remember being at a screening in 1999 or 2000 at the Castro theatre of Rice and Potatoes, a documentary about Asian/White gay male relationships. The crowd jeered and booed at an Asian gay man who spoke about his negative experiences dating white men using an analysis that implicated white gay men in structures of racial dominance. To me, what he was saying rang true and seemed pretty reasonable. To be fair, perhaps the Castro audience was expecting some kind of soft-core film featuring Asian-White male pairings. In contrast, when I screened the film for Q&A (the Queer Asian group at my undergraduate institution), there was respectful silence throughout, and the discussion afterwards acknowledged the problematic nature of white male desire for the racial other. At the time I chalked it up to an academic/non-academic setting divide. Looking back, I think it may also have been a question of who controlled the setting. At the Castro theater, white men clearly had the upper hand. This was their neighborhood, their theater, their gay utopia, and who were these Asian theoryheads to come rain on their pride parade? At the campus screening, the hosts were an Asian student group, and we screened the film at the East Asian studies house (actually there were two separate screenings - the other was in the Asian American studies theme dorm, I believe, or possibly the LGBT center). An Asian man led the discussion. White men were clearly guests, and did not control the space or agenda.

Szymanski's article also notes that while a pattern of sexual rejection based on race can be hurtful and destructive, racial fetishes can also be problematic. The article quotes Midori of fetishdiva.com, who notes that "[s]ome subconsciously channel [the nervous energy that comes from social change] into sexual curiosity, reducing the object of anxiety into a simultaneously fearsome and yet controllable fetish icon." She "draws the line at desires that dehumanize people and treat stereotypes as truth rather than something to play with and challenge."

Yet, while all this theory may be appealing and easy to engage with in a newspaper article (or some fag's blog), when a person is out (or the net) and looking for sex, negotiations of boundaries are often not as nuanced or even verbalized. Rod Wood, a "noted local leatherman," expresses this reality when he says he "hate[s] to use" the term "exchange of power", because it "feels too much like processing." As he says:

In my experience, a man can walk into a room and spot the one that he's probably compatible with, and have a pretty good idea of what that person wants to do with them.

Though I must give props to Wood for using my preferred gender-neutral pronoun (the singular "them"), I take issue with his picture of appropriate gay male relationships to desire. Wood does seem to make clear that he's speaking only of his own experience, but by expressing a resistance to "processing", he may encourage others to compartmentalize their sexuality.

What I mean by this is that sexuality becomes this cordoned off area of life where ethics and morality no longer apply, and one is not a whole person. I am aware of such compartmentalizing tendencies myself, and notice it in other gay men as well. It's the seemingly-benign secret twin of the over-regulated sexuality (where an overreaching prudishness intrudes into sexual pleasure in the name of "morality"). In both cases, sex is seen as a special case, where ordinary moral notions of caring for other people and your community are negated. The prude sees morality in sex as impossible (or only possible within incredibly narrow bounds), while the compartmentalized-libertine sees morality in sex as irrelevant.

But again, the reality of the sexual drive intrudes. When I'm horny, I don't have time to wonder how my actions implicate structures of oppression and domination. How then, to incorporate morality and sex, if the act of seeking out sex seems to preclude any kind of thoughtful engagement?

My humble suggestion is that here, as in many areas of life, ethical behavior must become a habit, cultivated when one is reflective (reading newspapers and blogs), then implemented when one is faced with the situation that presents a moral problem. White men need to spend time when they are not looking for sex thinking about the implications of the racial preferences they express when they are seeking out sex, and sometimes making difficult decisions about how they are going to bring commitments to anti-racism and building a better queer community to this area of their lives.

Since they were such a big hit last time, I'm going to end with questions:
1) A lot of the article's discussion involves online cruising, where racial preferences can be made brutally plain pretty much from the outset. Do people think this is more or less hurtful than the more subtly revealed racism of the club/bar/park?
2) To what degree can people of color be said to be complicit in the curtailment of their sexual roles? Is a person of color who has sex with a white person who fetishizes them in an unhealthy and racist way responsible for that person's racism? For that particular racist act? Should the person of color affirmatively ensure the white person is not invested in racist fetishes?

You don't seem gay

Instead of writing up Lavender Law, here's a choice synopsis of a certain TV show.

In the premiere episode, viewers will meet James (the "leading man") a handsome, 32-year old administrator in the human resources department of a law firm. James and the fifteen potential mates will live in luxurious but separate accommodations. The suitors vie for his affections by participating in group activities and attending one-on-one dates, while James–with advise [sic] from his best friend Andra–eliminate men at the end of each episode. In the final episode, one lucky mate will be chosen for the opportunity to enjoy an exciting and adventure-packed New Zealand vacation with James, courtesy of Alyson Adventures.

THE TWIST! What the leading man and Andra don't know is that some of the "mates" are actually STRAIGHT men posing as gay men–an interesting twist allowing for numerous avenues of heated on-air discussions and debates that challenge socially preconceived notions of what is considered gay and straight behavior.

CAN YOU GUESS who is straight and who is gay?

Quote taken from the Boy Meets Boy website.

Yeah, that's right. I'm writing a post about a TV show that's long over. This blog will never get pegged as topical. Fuck entertainment news. If you want musing about Lance Bass (though even that's old by entertainment news standards, right?), go read some other fag's blog.

Boy Meets Boy's premise relies on a misogynist and homophobic valuation of masculinity masquerading as a message of "we're all the same". It's also pretty cruel, but that's standard fare for reality shows.

Well, so are misogyny and homophobia.

Anyway, a friend and I were talking about our personal reactions to assessments of "straightness" and "gayness".*

*One initial criticism I have is that the binary nature of the assessment perpetuates the invisibility of bisexuals. But this little note is all I'm going to say about that, because I have something else I want to discuss. Any bisexuals feel free to chip in with your thoughts on this topic.

My friend, J, and I noticed that our personal reactions differed depending on the gender and straight/queerness of the assessor. I was far more likely to get annoyed at any straight person's pronouncement of their opinion of how "gay" or "straight" I seemed to them. This annoyance for me was the same whether the person thought I seemed gay or straight. "I couldn't even tell!" riles me as much as "Oh it's so obvious!".

J's reaction also depended on the straight/queerness, but he was more forgiving of straight women than straight men. He also claimed to be fine with being assessed as gay because, he said, he found it insulting to be thought of as straight.*

*I must admit I harbor some skepticism about this professed preference of his for being read as gay, given the privilege that attends being assessed as straight. As far as I can tell, J "passes" far more often than I do. Given that I pass on a somewhat regular basis, this means that J passes quite a lot, suggesting at least some attachment to the privilege of straightness.

J's theory about our shared lower tolerance of straight people's assessments of the gayness of our behavior was that they're not "family".

My theory is that I find these assessments annoying generally, and am just extra upset when straight people do it because it is a kind of flaunting of privilege. Which may just be a fancy schmancy way of saying they're not family.

Both J and I are gay asian men. We both also have legal education (me ongoing, him completed). This informs our attitudes I'm sure.

I've been reading a lot of readers and casebooks recently, so I'm going to leave you with two questions based on the reading:

1) Do you have different reactions to being told you act "gay" or "straight" based on the gender and/or queerness of the speaker? If so why do you think this might be the case?

2) Do you have different reactions to being told you act "gay" as opposed to being told you act "straight"?

Outlaws in suits

Fluentinfag is going to Lavender Law in D.C. Very Important Queers discussing Very Important Things.

Stay tuned for the report next week!

Words from on high

I'm halfway through Kenji Yoshino's Covering at the moment. It's a well written book, a quilted blend of personal and political narratives, history and theory. A poet in his undergraduate years, Yoshino knows economy. He makes a sentence do the work that other law professors might spend a whole chapter on.

Yoshino describes how, under the stress of keeping his sexuality hidden while pursuing an academic career, he had a kind of minor emotional breakdown in front of his father. Then:

[t]hree weeks later, I came home for Christmas. My mother met me at Logan Airport, a hummingbird of love and anxiety. I was still at the slow-moving end of the animal spectrum. She didn't make me talk. "Don't think so hard," she said in Japanese. "Life is not that simple." I loved her for this.

I think of the contrast between this and the scene in Angels in America where Joe comes out to his mother over the phone, and she in turn reveals that "of course" his father never loved him. Callous in only the way hurt loved ones can be, she then hangs up.

I had a long phone conversation yesterday with my father, during which we talked about his reaction all those years ago when I came out to him over dinner. Although the impetus for this talk was less than ideal, and placed him in a somewhat defensive mood, I welcomed the opportunity to discuss this episode of my life, with the benefit of hindsight.

Each of us was ensconced in the safety of our rooms, telephones and memory providing the emotional equivalent of protective padding. My body, however, refused to acknowledge the temporal and geographical distance. My voice grew hoarse and my head began to ache, old neural and endocrinological pathways firing up again from that intensely emotional time, only six and a half years ago.

Apparently the body renews itself every seven years. It's worth revisiting memories before then.

What are our kids going to resent us for?

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
- Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse

I was alerted to the upcoming publication of Alison Bechdel's new book, Fun Home, at the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum's No Straight Lines exhibit, featuring queer cartoon artists. The book deals with Bechdel's relationship with her father, who turns out to be gay and closeted (though not especially well, if one buys into the theory that fastidiousness and a love for antiques is a telltale sign of gay-ness). I just finished reading it a few weeks ago, and was hoping to review it. Instead I'll just get down some thoughts about parenting.

But first some thoughts about Alison Bechdel, who is awesome.

If you didn't know about Alison Bechdel before, now is the time. Bechdel is the artist responsible for Dykes to Watch Out For's always funny, always politically astute, always spot-on observations of our queer lives.

There's a great photo of Bechdel in her garden from her blog. Wearing Crocs no less!

Okay. On to the subject of parenting.

It seems to me that there is a lot of focus on what makes kids gay (genes! wombs! quantum swerving!), how to tell if kids are going to grow up gay, and how fucked up gay kids are. Not that such information is bad or unimportant (actually I do think that the "what causes it" information is pretty irrelevant, but whatever), but I do wish people would focus on how to make queer kids' lives better, specifically, how to be a good parent to LGBT kids.

The article I discussed in my previous post about how parents and schools are accomodating gender-variant kids is a good one. I'd like to see publication/discussion of studies comparing, for example, mental health statistics for LGBT teens in families that vote progressively, or teens raised in homophobic religions as opposed to those not. Sure it's important to have nation-wide information about gay teens and suicide, but I'd also like to see some reports and articles making it absolutely clear that it's not being queer that makes us crazy. To coin a phrase, IT'S THE HOMOPHOBIA, STUPID.

On a more positive note, I have to give a big shout out to my Mama, who has been giving interviews to journalists and writers in Singapore about her experience as a proud mother of two queer sons. The press attention is because she was recently featured in a new book that came out about LGBT people in Singapore (full disclosure: I used to go to school with the author, and also we were in the Drama Club together. That's right. Drama Club.). She's also started a support/discussion group called Safe and Accepting Families for Everyone (SAFE), and they're having their first meeting very soon (or perhaps have already had it).

All this while being a full time professor at the National University. I don't know where she finds the energy.

My father also has been quite supportive, if not quite as community-organisey. He told me that he put in place a policy at his firm of non-harrassment and non-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (I think it was in response to some offhand homophobic or heterosexist comment by one of his colleagues). He also once told me that if I were transgender, he would support me (I hadn't made any noises about being trans, but perhaps it's my femmeyness?).

So I count myself pretty lucky now, as far as nuclear family goes. My parents have really shown themselves to be very supportive, loving and open to understanding*. On the sexual orientation issue, anyway. Body image is another matter (for another blog, perhaps).

*There have been some recent reported insensitive remarks about lack of grandchildren on my father's part, but there's reason to believe they were uttered in anger and inconsiderately. Not to excuse them, but improvement is a process.

It wasn't always such smooth sailing though.

When I was younger, my father had made some pretty careless homophobic statements around us, and there was a general sense that it was something he disapproved of. My mother didn't really address the topic at all. My school, of course, was also completely silent on the issue, except for a segment in health education where we learned that along with drug users, homosexuals were a high-risk group for STDs, especially HIV/AIDS (why this was the case didn't really get explained - the implication was that it was because they were unethical in some way). This was accompanied by pictures of cold sores and other visible symptoms of STDs like syphilis and gonorrhoea (though interestingly, I don't think we ever saw photographs of people with AIDS, or even body parts of people with AIDS).

Much more prevalent than outright homophobia, of course, was heterosexism. Talk of what kind of wife I should have, when and whether to have children, and how many, whether it would be appropriate to marry someone of a different race. This is how hegemony operates. It doesn't even see itself as operating without your consent. Hell, YOU don't even see it as operating without your consent. Consent is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We are heterosexual.

I came of age in the very homosocial environment of a single-sex school. Most kids in my social circle weren't publicly dating or having sex with anyone, same sex or not. The peer pressure wasn't as great as it seems to be in the U.S. to prove one's heterosexuality. It was assumed, and that was that. Of course some of us fooled around with each other, but the tabloid agony aunts assured me it was a phase and - being 13 going on 14 - willingly I believed.

It was when I was 14 going on 15 and the feelings still didn't stop that I realized I was in trouble. Hey, a year is a long time in a young person's life.

Also I started reading books on LGBT politics and history at the local Borders, and got a name for what I was. And you know how us philosophy types* are - give us a category, any category, and we'll cling on to it for dear life. Suddenly those cravings to be physically pressed up against track athletes and TV personalities stopped being dirty, weird thoughts, and became something far grander - an IDENTITY.

*I realized I wanted to be a philosopher when I was about 9, rolling marbles back and forth in the grooved metal rail of our sliding glass doors, recalling "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" and thinking, troubled, to myself - Yes, what if life really is but a dream? Note: If I become a major figure of anything (other than derision) I want this episode to go in my biography as the epiphanic moment.

Not only did I get an identity from those books, I also got a whole new field of knowledge, legitimized by the publishing industry, that I was sure my parents didn't have. I also got some first hand cultural knowledge by meeting other gay teenagers and youth at gatherings organized over the infant internet. I got "adopted" by older brothers and sisters. I discussed such gay literary luminaries as Robert Rodi (my tastes then were embarrassingly low-brow, melodramatic and right wing - Sullivan, Bawer, Rodi, Monette, although I did read and enjoy Edmund White as well). I didn't get laid though - still too nervous about that.

Suddenly my parents were fallible. Suddenly I saw they had these ideas that weren't just annoying-because-I-agreed (like the idea that I should be getting good grades), but actually WRONG. Mistaken. Illogical. Immoral. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It was a terrible, wonderful realization. Here were these two intellectual demigods - PhDs, professor and attorney, graduates of prestigious American and English universities - and they didn't seem to know the first thing about LGBT history or culture, or even the fact that men cruised each other in certain malls, and that their children were creating a new language of sexuality (largely influenced by U.S. and English discourses, but with some syncretic elements, of course).

I recently realized, my parents would have been in the U.S. (Massachusetts) for college in 1969 - the year of the Stonewall riots in New York. Weird. I wonder if they heard about it, or if anyone then in their lives understood the emotional significance the riots would take on for LGBT people (in the U.S. especially, but also anywhere that U.S. culture makes its presence felt, which is, well - everywhere)

I can't help wondering what events the next generation won't be able to believe that most of their parents missed out on or didn't realize the significance of. Perhaps the Seattle demonstrations (in 1999, the year that I first came to the U.S. for college), or the leftist leaders getting elected in South America and Europe again, in part as a reaction against the horror/disaster of neoliberalism.