Fluent in Fag

With Friends Like These

2007-09-07T19:08:00.001-07:00

In the wake of the Larry Craig story, here's what GLAAD has to say:

GLAAD urges media developing such stories – whether separately or as part of their coverage of Sen. Craig – to place them in context by consulting credible experts who can discuss whether such behavior is reflective of any healthy orientation, gay or straight. Gershen Kaufman, a professor emeritus of psychology at Michigan State University, yesterday told ABC News, "[C]ruising is practiced mainly by deeply closeted men...There is a lot of self-hatred and shame, and they can't allow themselves to come to terms with their sexuality."

Additionally noteworthy is the fact that such behavior is being condemned by gay and straight people alike. Intimations that gay Americans broadly object to the enforcement of laws against this kind of activity simply are not supported by the facts and should be avoided.

Finally, GLAAD stresses the importance for reporters to note that these kinds of furtive activities stand in stark contrast to the loving commitments that gay couples everywhere are making to care for each other and for their families.

"GLAAD Provides Recommendations For Media Covering Revelations About Senator Larry Craig", August 30, 2007

Let me be tactfully understated: there are some problems.

What exactly is GLAAD's point of view? Despite the (understandably) mealy-mouthed nature of their recommendations, I think we can glean the following:

1) Cruising reflects an unhealthy "orientation".
2) Gay Americans are probably okay with the enforcement of "decency" laws. Possibly even when it involves the state merrily dancing right up to the line of entrapment.
3) Cruising is the "polar opposite" of committed gay relationships.

It's hard to decide which of these statements is the most appalling and why.

Is it the joylessness and sex-negativity of (1) and (3)?

Or perhaps it's the nonchalant acceptance of marginal sexualities as criminal/pathological in (1) and (2).

Or maybe it's the willingness to engage in divisiveness in the service of political acceptability evidenced by (2) and (3).

What GLAAD's message here boils down to, not to put too fine a point on it, is: "Please don't confuse the good, upright, reasonably chaste gay citizen couples with those sick, lawless men who have sex in bathrooms. Unlike them, we deserve the rights and privileges you're still denying us."

NOTE:
This is an edited excerpt from a longer (and more rambling) post about the media response to Larry Craig that I made on entrepreneurialcity.

It wasn't a choice

2007-07-30T13:07:00.001-07:00

*Image removed*

All I want is a room somewhere, far away from the cold night air, with one enormous chair . . . lots of chocolate for me to eat . . . oh wouldn't it be lovely?

Rest and easily digested nourishment - Eliza Doolittle guiltlessly celebrates caloric accumulation. Puritanism is only necessary in a state where nourishment and rest are easy to come by. In a situation where one is starving and constantly on the run from predators (and other people), it hardly makes sense to extol the virtues of industry and abstinence. No "ought" without "can", but correspondingly, no oughtn't either.

Now what I eat is constrained partly by time, partly by money, and of course a lingering sense of guilt. Gone, however, is the literal parental control, punishing me for having chocolate, denying me the extra plate of noodles. In theory, life for me could be one long, sweet meal, punctuated by sleep, television, books and radio.

But enough about food. Let's talk about sex.

Sex continues to be an area where I dare not dream. And perhaps it is an area of life where a certain obliviousness serves us well. Dig around too much in your sexual tastes and activities, and you might uncover truths about your past and present that you'd rather not face. Colonialism, childhood fears, family violence, insecurity, economic status (or lack thereof), all affect our sexual desires, just as they do our more prosaic appetite.

The drive towards structure as we follow our appetites is ever present: eating is neatly quarantined into meals and snacks (although the new healthy way to eat is to constantly "graze," though that too implies a kind of structure: a levelling out, rather than a gathering together); sex is confined to a few or one partner, or, if not, then wrapped in a sanitizing "safe, sane and consensual"* language. But rarely do our (perhaps I am projecting. Let me just say "my") appetites run solely to monogamy, or safe, sane consensuality, or punctuated regularity. They hit us (me) as an insistent rumbling, a hunger that is larger than myself.

To have a desire - is this an act? I suppose it is merely a property in that we "have" a desire. To want, then, is the act. One may protest, and many do, that it is an act that one has no obvious hand in, at least, not without intense investigation. However, as the Oedipus myth teaches us, guilt may attach to acts which we didn't know we were committing, so why not to acts that we didn't know how to not commit?

If I trip while holding a child, and she falls and breaks her neck, does not her family feel resentment, no matter how careful I was?

By protesting our innocence, either through an appeal to genetics or even to the inscrutability of desire, queers allow our acts to be defined as criminal. Nobody is called upon to justify their taste for chocolate (although given the nature of the two cultures, Colonial European and Aztec, that are responsible for it, perhaps they could).

*Note: Just a little internet reading on this phrase reveals that slave david stein (who coined it in 1983) was/is aware of the potential for its misappropriation as yet another way for one group to define what is "good" sex and what is "bad" sex (or even "not" sex).

photo: Loving it... by barbus22

So you want to marry a lesbian

2007-07-23T17:58:00.000-07:00

You may have heard about the eharmony lesbian lawsuit by now. If you haven't you can read all about it on EDGE Boston. From what I understand, a lesbian sued eHarmony because they provide services for straight women only (and straight men, of course), and claims this is a violation of Californian law. Of course, the more-centrist-than-thou John Corvino of IGF wasted no time deciding that this was a "frivolous" lawsuit:

It’s not that I approve of their policy (I don’t). It’s not even that I think that their policy, while wrongheaded, is in fact legal (I’ll leave that question to those who know California anti-discrimination law).

It’s that the last thing the gay-rights movement needs is a frivolous lawsuit.

Oh really? And here I thought that the last thing the gay-rights movement needed was, oh, hmm... apologists for anti-gay discrimination?

Anyway, I'd looked up the story because my friend J. and I had discussed it while/instead of studying for the bar. For the record, J. thought that regardless of the legal merits of the case, eHarmony should not have to accomodate lesbian users, because same-sex dating is qualitatively different from hetero dating, and would necessitate a whole different Special Process. On the other hand, he acknowledged that inter-racial dating was also qualitatively different from same-race dating, but that he would probably find it problematic if a site were for "whites only" dating and prohibited non-whites from using its services. Still, he thought that in the realm of dating, not catering to those seeking same-sex relationships was ethically justifiable.

According to tech.blorge, one of eharmony's explanations for the lesbian/gay/bi exclusion is that it seeks to connect users for the purposes of marriage, and since marriages between two people of the same gender still are not recognized by the states in the U.S. (has anyone thought of bringing suit in Massachusetts, btw?)

I'm guessing that the suit is brought under California's Unruh Civil Rights Act, which includes the following language (it's California Civil Code section 51. This is section (b)):

All persons within the jurisdiction of this state are free and equal, and no matter what their sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical condition, marital status, or sexual orientation are entitled to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, or services in all business establishments of every kind whatsoever.

(emphasis mine, obviously)

My favorite quote from one eHarmony user (taken from the EDGE Boston article):

As a single woman seeking a single man, I do not want to stumble upon a lesbian on my dating site, purposely or by accident," wrote an eHarmony user. "As it is, it is a long shot at finding compatibility on line, so I really appreciate eHarmony for connecting me with the right matches. I am not anti-lesbian, but for the love of God, I do not want to tell lesbians to fuck off for cordially or accidentally contacting me.

If the thinly veiled homophobia of that last quote isn't clear enough, the EDGE article points out the real chewy, caramelly, how-many-licks-does-it-take-to-get-to-the center of this dispute:

Given that eHarmony’s founder is a Christian evangelical with longstanding ties to James Dobson and the anti-gay group Focus on the Family, the real objection is probably that eHarmony does not want to facilitate what it regards as immoral and unbiblical relationships.

Yes. Once again a religion whose central figure was an anti-government, anti-wealthy, anti-hierarchical, homosocial, ass-kicking bachelor rebel has been turned into an "Ick, not the gays!" club.

The thing that intrigued me most about the EDGE article, however, was the author bio at the bottom:

Caught between the moon and New York City which he calls home since 2000, Ambrose Aban wrote for Malaysia, Singapore and Bangkok Tatler, reviewed restaurants and wrote special ad supplement, "Christopher Street", for HX Magazine New York, contributed to leading English dailies in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore. Ambrose loves giving up the secrets of everything from where to find the most delicious Orange Glazed Peking Duck to how to prepare extravagant chic soirees in the city.

Another SEASian queer expat online, perhaps?

Pomo Homo Hypo

2007-07-20T02:38:00.001-07:00

Breaking news from the I-should-be-sleeping-instead-of-reading-these-blogs front:

Check out comment #35 on F44's post about inter-racial (i.e.: white-asian heterosexual) partnerings. I quote:

Finally, let me clarify the “gay” analogy. I said:
“Finally, choosing a mate/spouse is a fundamental human rights issue. Let’s say that gay people are not born gay, but choose homosexuality. That still doesn’t mean we should tell them to stop. Doing that would be oppressive, wouldn’t it?”

And you said:
“Your example would be relevant if I was not born gay, and I advocate for how awesome straightness is, and then I chose homosexuality in my private life. What does that do to my message?”

If someone was not born gay, and was an advocate of how awesome straightness is, and then ends up choosing homosexuality, then yes, that would be hypocritical. That’s because homosexual identity is an identity of action as well as sexual preference (assuming being gay is a choice). In other words, the gender of one’s partner is the defining action of a gay activist, and therefore, it should be a factor when gays choose an activist.

Now you know FiF ain't a hater, and I mean to cast no aspersions on Mr. lycheng's worth as a person, but OMG can you spot the We Are Living In Two Different Worlds nature of this comment?

Please analyze the So-Not-Down-With-The-Queers
(Yet-More-Than-Happy-To-Use-Us-To-Make-A-Point) characteristics of the following words/phrases in the above comment.

1) "gays" (the noun)
2) "the gender of one's partner is the defining action of a gay activist"
3) "when gays choose an activist"
4) "homosexual identity is an identity of action as well as sexual preference"
5) "homosexual identity"

Inter-racial dating, a websurfing chronicle and some thoughts

2007-07-19T23:48:00.000-07:00

So last week, toughstuff from belowthebelt emailed me and asked me to look at the blog. I, flattered, did so and paid particular interest to some of the recent posts about asian men and white men dating (by the way, has anyone else noticed that often "inter-racial" dating discussions default to POC-white? I've dated interracially several times, and not always with whitey).

Anyway, one of the posts (the first link) led me to Andy Quan's page for his campaign against racism in online personal ads. Quan calls for an end to online ads which contain charming racially-exclusive lines such as "no GAMs" or "no fats, fems, or asians."

From that page I clicked through to his archive of and response to Dan Savage's callous and (un)shockingly privileged advice to an Asian man experiencing sexual racism (the one I read back in the day in SF Weekly right before I stopped reading both Savage Love and the SF Weekly).

From that page, I went to modelminority's repost of a student note in the Harvard Law Review about the use of race in personal ads, which I found quite well-reasoned. I have to admit that, as an example of law review writing, the student note is almost parodically methodical. Still, it gets the job done. Those Harvard boys are nothing if not thorough. Take, for example, the introductory paragraph of part II:

The use of racial signifiers in personal advertisements may have a stigmatizing impact on the excluded group. Moreover, such signifiers may perpetuate the notion that racial group members should "be with their own kind," which in turn may lead to increased social segregation and economic stratification. It is possible, however, that racial signifiers in personal ads serve valuable purposes that outweigh any harms they pose. This Part explores these purposes, and weighs the social costs and benefits of this conduct. There are several possible motives that lead advertisers to specify the desired race of respondents . . . [author then goes on to give each possible motive a heading and analysis]

I wish Supreme Court justices would write as clearly.

Meanwhile, some hetero Asian bloggers I follow (well okay, I just follow Jenn at reappropriate, but she linked to the other blog!) are having their own discussion about Asian-white dating. Oh, and also marriage. Of course.

Jenn's first post that I read on the subject links to C.E. Le's statistical analysis of inter-racial marriage, which seems to show that Asian women marry white men more often than Asian men marry white women. To be precise, my understanding of the numbers on Le's page is that his analysis shows that asian-women-who-marry-white-men are a greater segment of married-asian-women than asian-men-who-marry-white-women are of married-asian-men. Which makes me want to know what percentage of asian men are married, and what percentage of asian women are married. After all, the other stereotype/perception of Asian men is that we are losers who can't get dates. It wouldn't surprise me if this social stigma was reflected in lower marriage rates for Asian men.

Of course, I have issues with both Jenn and FF44's posts (would I be FiF if I didn't?), though I tend to side more with Jenn's "don't blame the person of color for stereotypes imposed on their dating choices" approach than with FF44's "be a role model, date Asians" exhortation (which is a little creepy, and reminds me of the oft-unspoken "only gender-normative, clean-cut, monogamously coupled gay men and lesbians need apply to be LGBT community spokespersons" attitude that I've always deplored).

I do think that Jenn is a little too quick to dismiss as "stereotyping, pure and simple" Asian (presumably hetero or bi) men's complaints about certain Asian women's explanations of their choices to date white men. I've personally heard Asian (and white) women, in explaining their preference for white men, denigrate Asian men's masculinity and sexual attractiveness, or make the same old tired excuses that feminists rightly called men on when they were used to devalue women ("oh, Asian guys just never ask me out!" sounds a lot like "oh, women just don't participate enough at meetings!").

I do think that Asian women should not be singled out as the cause of the sexual disenfranchisement of Asian men (and thus saddled with the burden of undoing it), but neither should they (or any of us) ignore the many ways they have been affected and are sometimes complicit in that disenfranchisement.

Image from daviddarling

Guy love

2007-07-17T00:26:00.000-07:00

I find it very easy to talk to some straight guys about my sex/romantic life and they, in turn, find it easy to talk to me about theirs. Is it because both of us are "safe" for each other? After all, we don't share a grapevine or a dating pool.

Love will keep us together

2007-05-11T12:54:00.001-07:00

But the Uniting American Families Act won't hurt.

It's a bill that was re-introduced on Tuesday. It has been introduced several times (previously also under the name Permanent Partners Immigration Act). Each time, the list of Congressional supporters grows. Seems like only a matter of time.

UAFA would extend to same-sex couples the same immigration rights currently afforded only to opposite-sex couples.

Historically. the U.S. government has committed to the position that family unity is a worthwhile policy objective for immigration law and that forced separation of family members may be a hardship. Congress has eliminated numerical restrictions upon immediate family members of U.S. citizens to immigrate to the United States. The disparity between same-sex and opposite-sex couples then is an undue hardship imposed not only on foreign national partners, but on American citizens and permanent residents.

UAFA holds Congress and the U.S. government to its commitment that immigration law should keep families together.

Although a growing number of countries are recognizing the importance of allowing same-sex partners equal immigration benefits, many couples are unable to live together because neither of them lives in a country that provides such recognition. The U.S. needs to get off that latter list, and on to the former.

What's up with gay folk and The Namesake?

2007-03-27T02:25:00.000-07:00

So I went to see the Namesake recently (it was excellent, btw), and noticed that about half the people in the theatre were gay. Or at least, gay-lookin. What's up with that? Why do we love this movie?

Is it the whole guilt about parents thing or what?

Enlighten me, internets!

The Shirtless Guys Post

2007-03-11T22:46:00.000-07:00

Photo of Three Shirtless Guys from A. Currell

Is taking your shirt off always liberating?

I used to envy the athletic straight boys for what I saw as their exclusive ability to be thoughtlessly shirtless. Taking sides for football, jogging around a reservoir on a muggy day, or even just lazing around outside, all seemed to be as comfortable for them sans shirts.

Having been told (I use the passive voice, because to name names would be oh so incriminating. Also exhausting) that my fat body was shameful, I hid it away under large T-shirts. I did not reach the point of wearing a T-shirt while swimming (which I have seen), except once at the beach when I was feeling particularly ashamed for some reason. Swimming aside, however, I was uncomfortable with my shirt off, and wondered often what it would be like not to be so uncomfortable.

I've lost some of that childhood fat, and also learned that it might be okay not being ashamed of my body, whatever its size. However, my shirtlessness concerns remain.

Shirtless - Winter in LA by Pay No Mind

Today was a hot day, and we went to the park for a picnic. There were many shirtless men there, of course. I've noticed that SF's shirtlessness threshold is quite low. Temperatures reaching anything above 50 degrees in San Francisco, or more than 1 hour of continuous sunshine, prompts spontaneous shirtlessness (we're so British this way). Nevertheless, today was hot enough that even I considered shedding my top, but I decided against it, still too embarrassed, after all these years.

It got me thinking, however, about the etiquette of shirtlessness I saw at Dolores Park today. Almost uniformly, the men I saw shirtless were either slim, muscular or at least on the somewhat worked out side. Now, while I am not so body-dysmorphic as to exclude myself completely from this category, I also believe that I am not so firmly centered in this category as to uncontroversially pass for "conventionally pleasant to look at with shirt off." I saw only two men shirtless whom you might call fat (and not fat like bears with lots of muscle and soft beliies, but I mean fat with no hint of muscle tone).

There were also plenty of guys like me, in the not-uncontroversially-hot category, who kept our shirts on.

Shirtless from Socksasgloves

Waikiki Beach from Nite773

Which makes me wonder if, for the toned and thin, taking their shirts off is as liberating as for the non-toned-and-thin.

To compare: one often imagines that a high paying job is more liberating than a low paying one. Yet, above a certain salary, people (at least lawyers) report decreasing job satisfaction as their pay goes up. The stress of living up to such a high level of expectation likely plays into this lack of satisfaction.

After all, part of the allure of shirtlessness for me is as an indicator of lack of self-consciousness. If you have to look good to go shirtless, then you're conscious of being looked at, and you care about what those lookers think.

Frank from Frankfarm

On the other hand, perhaps being shirtless facilitates a lack of self-consciousness. To return to the idea of swimming - once you get used to it, the water isn't so cold. Similarly, once you get used to having your shirt off, you don't feel... well, shirtless.

Am I absurd for thinking so much about being without a shirt? We all start life shirtless, after all.

Shirtless Little Guys from Manda

The F-word

2007-02-04T01:07:00.000-08:00

Dan Savage was on Talk of the Nation recently to talk about the word "faggot" in connection with the Isaiah Washington incident (more details follow). The show's producers? host? funders? decided that they weren't going to have epithets said aloud during the show (also discussed was "nigger"), so instead of "faggot," people had to say "the F word" and then clarify that they meant the one referring to gay men, and not the more versatile (pun intended) and ubiquitous "fuck." This actually caused some confusion early in the show, when John McWhorter began an exposition on the history of "fuck," when the host wanted a bit of background on "faggot."

Before this episode of Talk of the Nation, I must say that I have never heard "the F word" used to refer to "faggot." I just don't think "faggot" is that kind of word.

Dan Savage himself noted that it was odd to be talking about how it was ok to use the word "faggot" while having to avoid using the word, even as a referent. If only people could hear quote marks on the radio. Savage's point, from what I gathered, was that it was all about context. Hostile use is scary. Affectionate use is not.

I pretty much agree with Savage's position, which seems more accurate than fellow guest McWhorter's rather Pollyanna-ish view that those words can't hurt us if we don't let them (I mean, come on).

I'm a fan of the word "faggot" when used in a friendly manner, in case you hadn't guessed.

What's interesting to me, and what I hadn't realized just listening to coverage about this incident on the radio, is that Washington (hot ambitious black doctor) apparently used "faggot" in a confrontation not with his gay colleage T.R. Knight (boyish cute intern), but with married and ostensibly straight Patrick Dempsey (McDreamy). According to People:

After Washington and Dempsey, 40, clashed on Oct. 9, reports surfaced that Washington had used a homophobic slur during the fracas.

Specifically, Washington had used the word "faggot" in the following manner (according to Billy Masters over on PrideSource):

Isaiah Washington allegedly told Patrick Dempsey, "I'm not your little faggot like T.R. [Knight]" - a statement that was overheard by T.R. and other cast members.

This statement falls somewhere in between "that's so gay" (thoughtless, undirected, non-threatening, middle-school-flavored) and "fuck you, faggot" (directed, immediately threatening, good for all ages).

Like "that's so gay," Washington's statement was a callous devaluing of gay men, equating gayness (faggotry, rather) with negative qualities (in this case submissiveness, I assume). Also, with that statement, Washington distanced himself, quite enthusiastically, from any connection with gayness/faggotry.

Yet, Washington's statement shared a lot with the "fuck you faggot" group of slurs. Washington used "faggot" to refer to a person whom he actually knew to be gay (I think), and he thus at least had notice that the word could be hurtful in a direct way.

To understand what I mean by "hurtful in a direct way," put yourself in the position of a gay person hearing each type of slur. For some of us, this is less a leap of the imagination than an exercise in remembering. Oh fuck it. Put yourself in my position. Are you ready? I'm a size 10 shoe, by the way, if that helps.

When I hear "that's so gay!" I go through a multiple step process on the way to being hurt (supposing, for argument's sake that I am hurt, rather than just annoyed and/or secretly amused by this ubiquitous youthful affect that I did not grow up with). First I get the wealth of information conveyed more or less from the statement itself, its "objective" meaning, in context, of course. This would include the idea that "gay is bad." Second, I would need to then apply that to myself, to add information that the speaker may or may not have, but that is certainly not required for his statement to make sense. I need to recognize myself as a subject included in the referred-to group. I am gay. Finally, I have to deduce that therefore the speaker is saying that I am bad.

On the other hand, when I hear "fuck you, faggot," (or something like it), it's immediately obvious that what the speaker is saying is that I am a faggot, and that is bad. Not that some abstract group of faggots is bad, but that I am the faggot included in the group of faggots that is bad. Pretty direct, huh. Also frightening. Almost never amusing (perhaps from a random tiny child wearing some kind of floppy hat and with no weapons or pets, but not from a large co-worker in his forties).

Humble questions for your consideration:

1) Is there a point in reclaiming or rehabilitating words like "gay," "faggot," and "queer" when people can still use them in hurtful ways?

2) What's the function of the in-group/out-group distinction in acceptable use? This is an important rule for "nigger" and somewhat less intensely important for "faggot" (though in general everything about "faggot" is less intense than "nigger." There's a reason this blog isn't called "Nattering in Nigger." Actually, there are so many reasons. Anyway.) Should there be this in/out distinction?

3) Should we have an alternative "affectionate" pronunciation for "faggot" (as in "niggER" with a rolled "R" vs. "niggA/UH" without the R) and what should it be?

4) "Dyke" rules and dykes rule. Comments? Questions?

He blogs, he cross-posts, he scores!

2007-01-22T03:57:00.000-08:00

So in my previous post on entrepreneurial city I talked about softness and blurring boundaries, but I just realized, after a particularly bad fallout with a friend (although in his new world view, we were never friends to begin with - somewhat reminiscent of judges who, in engaging in a novel reading of a law, say that it was always this way), that I am mister compartmentalizing.

By that I mean that I have certain roles that I want people to play and that I play in return, and in those roles I feel quite safe. For example, I think that when I have straight male friends, I feel freer to admit to myself my emotional attachment to them, because I’ve ruled out the possibility of sexual contact, and thus the possibility of sexual rejection (a big source of anxiety for me, apparently). Conversely, with some friends that I have sex with, I don’t feel free to admit to emotional attachment, or the mixture of shame, pride, joy, despair and desire that such arrangements often entail for me. This means that I have a script for those arrangements too. That script is "It’s Just Sex, And That’s Okay." As if anything could ever justify sticking a "just" in front of a complex social interaction like sex. It would be like saying "It’s Just Rocket Science" or "It’s Just Hegel." One could imagine a rocket scientist or Hegel scholar maybe saying such things, but to say "it’s just sex" brings a whole new level of arrogance to the table.

Compartmentalizing is a reaction to totalizing worldviews (like "all sex is bad except within a monogamous heterosexual non-transgendered marriage," or even "sex without love is bad" - which just sort of shifts the question to "what is love?"), but I think it’s time my pendulum started to swing back. No penis jokes please.

Where no fag has gone before

2007-01-20T23:45:00.000-08:00

I've been watching an awful amount of Star Trek: Enterprise. I must admit, it's mainly the Scott Bakula factor. Also the frequent gratuitous male shirtlessness. The show's writing is somewhat hokey and fanboyish.

As an adjunct to my watching, I've been reading episode summaries (those who know me know that I don't always pay full attention to television shows when I watch them) and reading up on Star Trek in general.

In my reading I came across this page about Star Trek's ongoing heterosexism. It's chock-full of information, as well as text. A lot of it.

Remember me, once in a while, please promise me you'll try

2007-01-11T17:31:00.000-08:00

I never thought my blog was evergreen
or as unchanging as the sea.
But if you can still remember,
stop and think of me.

I haven't posted in, like, forever. My strategy of fragmenting my life into four to five different blogs seems to be a spectacular failure. I thought that having different "themed" blogs would result in me posting more frequently. This has turned out to be true overall. However, it means I spend much less time updating each blog. My personal blog on LJ has suffered the most, being reduced to quick laundry lists of things I've done recently. I've utterly neglected reading and posting on the various LJ communities. It's the blogging equivalent of having waay too much stuff.

At the same time, I find myself wanting more attention (i.e. comments) on my food and faggotry blogs (the food blog is communal, so the sting of rejection seems to be less. At least we've got each other.)

I've also started writing over on entrepreneurial city with my good friend Rich, who's finishing up a PhD down in Stanford. It's a musing on life in Silicon Valley. Most of my posts, of course, have to do with my memories of the Valley, rather than current happenings.

So Happy New Year all. My resolution is low, but I'm hoping to get some focus soon.

Haha I made a pun.

Soy Homo

2006-12-13T12:32:00.000-08:00

Thanks to my frieng Neil for pointing me to this article on the People for the American Way website, which links in turn to this bit of alarmist homophobia on WorldNetDaily, in which self-confessed "health-food guy" and "fanatic" Jim Rutz warns of the danger that soy will turn Good American Boys into girly men. To wit:

Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That's why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today's rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products. (Most babies are bottle-fed during some part of their infancy, and one-fourth of them are getting soy milk!) Homosexuals often argue that their homosexuality is inborn because "I can't remember a time when I wasn't homosexual." No, homosexuality is always deviant. But now many of them can truthfully say that they can't remember a time when excess estrogen wasn't influencing them.

Apparently, before Jim Rutz discovered the dangers of soy, he thought homos were all just Big Gay Liars and falsely reporting on our own memories. Also, Rutz leaves us wondering: if soy only takes the "medical blame" then who or what gets the "socio-spiritual blame" for "today's rise in homosexuality"? It's a toss up between atheism, television, and the Liberal Media Elite, of course!

By the way, the title of Rutz's piece is "Soy is making kids 'gay'". Why the scare quotes, you ask? Well, because to Rutz, homosexuality is not an identity, it's a sin! So says the "church," and Rutz has to stay a good "Christian."

Notice that for Rutz, the most awful effects of estrogen on men are "a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality." Further on in the article, almost as an aside, he notes that it may also cause infertility and leukemia, but clearly neither of those things is as terrible as being gay.

I don't mean to downplay the negative effects of eating food that messes with the hormonal balance of one's body, but Rutz's misogynist and homophobic take on the effects of estrogen deserves some snark.

Homophobia aside, does estrogen correlate with or cause male same-sex desire?

There was a study that showed a correlation between sexuality of a child and hormone levels in the womb, except that gayness was not linked to higher levels of the dreaded Femme-erol (I mean, estrogen), but to higher levels of Manly Manly Testosterone. Which might explain why gay men have bigger dicks.

That's Not Nice

2006-12-04T15:26:00.000-08:00

The English Are So Nice

The English are so nice
so awfully nice
they're the nicest people in the world.

And what's more, they're nice about being nice
about your being nice as well!
If you're not nice, they soon make you feel it.

Americans and French and Germans and so on
they're all very well
but they're not really nice, you know.
They're not nice in our sense of the word, are they now?

That's why one doesn't have to take them seriously,
We must be nice to them, of course,
of course, naturally.
But it doesn't really matter what you say to them,
they don't really understand -
you can say anything to them:
be nice, you know, just nice -
but you must never take them seriously, they wouldn't understand,
just be nice, you know! Oh, fairly nice,
not too nice of course, they take advantage -
but nice enough, just nice enough
to let them feel they're not quite as nice as they might be.

- D.H. Lawrence

On Saturday, while discussing the West Wing, a friend and I got onto the topic of proper respect for the office of the POTUS. I felt that the expectation that one would stand when the president entered the room was inappropriate, and smacked of monarchist sentiment. He thought that it was just "polite" since the president was the person who represented the interests of the American people.

I noted that shareholders don't stand when CEO's enter the room. If the president really was regarded (as I thought he should be) as the servant of the people, then no American should feel obligated to stand when he entered the room. In addition, I thought that any symbolic trappings of monarchy decreased the likelihood that the POTUS would be held properly accountable for his actions, and would become conflated with The People (as opposed to a servant of the people). My friend countered that the CEO just safeguards the shareholders' financial interests, while the President safeguards the lives and security of the American people, and thus deserves commensurate respect. He also said that the respect was for the office, and not the person occupying that office. I should note that my friend is not a supporter of the current POTUS, his foreign policy, or his domestic policy. He is, in fact, a San Francisco liberal. We agreed to disagree on the issue of respect for the office, though.

It turns out that our little argument was rather apropos, since on Wednesday, in response to a question from the current POTUS, Jim Webb had declined to discuss how his son (who was a Marine) was doing. He had also refused to pose for a photo with him. On Thursday, George Will wrote a circuitously snarky piece about how this demonstrated Webb's lack of "civility," since the President had asked "a civil and caring question, as one parent to another." Nora Ephram then responded with the observation that Bush's question wasn't caring so much as callous, being a product as it was of a political culture that seems to think you can send kids off to die in the morning and guiltlessly go on to hobnob at a fancy dinner in the evening. E&P quotes Peggy Noonan at the WSJ who noted that after Webb had told Bush that he wanted his son back from Iraq, Bush had said "That's not what I asked you. How's your son?" This, she thought, was rather insensitive, and reflected a public culture of increasingly common petty aggression.

Which reminds me of another incident of public rudeness a while back. In April of 2005, Eric Berndt stood up at a Q&A with Antonin Scalia in NYU and asked "Do you sodomize your wife?" This drew predictable calls for explanation from his fellow students. He responded with admirable clarity and conviction:

It should be clear that I intended to be offensive, obnoxious, and inflammatory. There is a time to discuss and there are times when acts and opposition are necessary. Debate is useless when one participant denies the full dignity of the other.

. . .

Although my question was legally relevant, as I explain below, an independent motivation for my speech-act was to simply subject a homophobic government official to the same indignity to which he would subject millions of gay Americans. It was partially a naked act of resistance and a refusal to be silenced. I wanted to make him and everyone in the room aware of the dehumanizing effect of trivializing such an important relationship. Justice Scalia has no pity for the millions of gay Americans on whom sodomy laws and official homophobia have such an effect, so it is difficult to sympathize with his brief moment of "humiliation," as some have called it. The fact that I am a law student and Scalia is a Supreme Court Justice does not require me to circumscribe my justified opposition and outrage within the bounds of jurisprudential discourse.

Brian Leiter has a good post about the incident and the administration's response over at Leiter Reports. Apparently the Dean of NYU's law school had written a public letter condemning Berndt for not being "mature" and had asserted that "a show of incivility to any individual invited to be a guest of the Law School, let alone to a Supreme Court Justice, has no place in our intellectual community."

Leiter notes that the Berndt's actions were certainly rude (by his own admission), but that such an act of political speech was in fact quite "mature." He also questions why a Supreme Court Justice deserves any more respect than any other visitor to a law school.

"Aren't you a nice fellow?"

Three Problems With Politeness

In my opinion politeness is a virtue, up to the point where it becomes a form of concealment akin to lying, a way of reinforcing social hierarchy, or a weapon wielded against others. It is a virtue when it signals respect for another person as a person. Between equals, friends, casual acquaintances, politeness is wonderful - it creates the kind of atmosphere where interpersonal morality can flourish, and where alienation, competition and hostility can be eased.

Politeness can be used to conceal one's true intentions and strong feelings, which reduces the likelihood of moral action. It treats another person as a means to an end, in Kantian terms, since you seek approval or respect by concealing your contempt or disgust at the other person.

Politeness used in the above manner often reinforces social hierarchy as well. It is more important for one with less social power to be polite, since the consequences of not doing so mean loss of favor with those with more power. There's a simple narrative that goes something like "The boss has a bad day and tells off the employee, who goes home and shouts at his wife, who then spanks the child, who kicks the dog." In the President Bush story above, for example, George Will conveniently ignores Bush's own rudeness to Webb in so casually brushing off his desire for his son's return.

Which brings me to my third caution about politeness - it can be used as a weapon. Like any system set up that exults too much in its own legitimacy, etiquette can become a way for its skillful manipulators to get what they want at the expense of others. Courtly intrigues are an example of a hyper-regulated etiquette being used by the strong (the sly) against the weak (that is, the less skilled). There is a double harm being done here - first is the harm of the strong bullying the weak, and second is the concealment of this harm under a legitimizing cloak of politeness. Scalia, by refusing to answer Berndt's question, was the one harming the discussion by avoiding defending his rather homophobic views. Yet it was Berndt who suffered immediate administrative censure.

As Christmas draws near, I feel I should end by quoting an amusing, if hypothetical, admonition to one of the rudest of prophets that I saw once in a comic strip. An angry member of the religious orthodoxy shouts at Jesus for his insolence, "What were you, born in a barn?"

Seriousness and Play, Sex and Death

2006-11-12T19:27:00.000-08:00

[A] love that springs merely from sexual impulse cannot be love at all, but only appetite. Human love is good-will, affection, promoting the happiness of others and finding joy in their happiness. But it is clear that, when a person loves another purely from sexual desire, none of these factors enter into the love. Far from there being any concern for the happiness of the loved one, the love, in order to satisfy his desire and still his appetite, may even plunge the loved one into the depths of misery. Sexual love makes of the loved person an Object of appetite; as soon as that appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry. Sexual love can, of course, be combined with human love and so carry with it the characteristics of the latter, but taken by itseld and for itself, it is nothing for than appetite. Taken by itself it is a degradation of human nature; for as soon as a person becomes an object of appetite for another, all motives of moral relationship cease to function, because as an Object of appetite for another a person becomes a thing and can be treated and used as such by every one.

- Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield

Just as there have been philosophers who are playful with the topic of death, there have been philosophers who were deadly serious about the topic of sex. Kant is chief among them. But this entry isn't about that, at least not precisely. Instead, I'd like to call into question the strict separation of seriousness and playfulness, of sex and death, love and alienation.

Play and Seriousness

I have a friend with whom I have sex. Or perhaps more accurately, I have a person with whom I have sex that I consider a friend. His mother recently passed away, and I have been thinking about the appropriate response (from both of us) to this event. I want to send a card (and I will), but other than that I'm also not sure how much care I should extend, how much I want to extend, how much he wants me to extend, and how much he expects me to extend. We had actually been having less sex and meeting less frequently because of the stress of his mother's ailing health. He would talk about it to some degree, but I think he is in general quite private about such things (though I could be wrong - he might just be private about those things with me). I do know that I do care, and I'm sad for him. I'm just not sure how much I should/can do. So far my plan is to send a card and just be available if he needs anything.

Sex and Death

In a time of death, in anticipation of death, one might want to have less sex or more. It's almost inconceivable that one would want to have the same amount of sex. Because of its oppositional quality (Eros vs. Thanatos - fight!), sex can either be an antidote to death's chilling promise or an inappropriate response to its somber demands. But of course, sex and death are inextricably linked in a chicken-egg, cause-effect way.

Evolutionarily speaking, in a way, as a species we have sex because we die (how could a queer person really get away with saying this, you ask? I'm not totally sure). To continue going, our genes had to get really good at making copies of themselves even though those frail vessels would one day decay. Reproduction turns out to be the solution to death's inevitable entropic mandate.

Practically, of course, most of us die because someone had sex. Life is a disease that only death can cure, and sex is the chief mode of transmission.

Love and Alienation

Half an American lifetime ago I attended a lecture by a visiting professor from France who argued that the traditional picture of romantic love entails alienation. Perhaps he was just playing around. Who knows? This was back when the French were charmingly rogueish, and not the cowardly America-haters that they apparently are today. So, to bring my interpretation up to date, for "playing around" read "refusing to commit to a real position, that flip-flopping cad."

To brutally summarize, the argument went something like this:

1) Love requires recognition of the will of another
2) Love requires making one's happiness dependent on fulfillment of that other's ends
3) In so doing, one subsume's one's own will into that of the other, and thus becomes profoundly alienated and unfree.

So there you have my hasty un-binarification of those things. I have more thoughts, but they aren't really coherent right now. I'm just going to skip to the questions.

1) Can anyone think of a good poem or poems about this stuff? So far I've got Thomas' The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives The Flower.

2) Thoughts on the contrast between "play" and a "serious" relationship. Can play be serious? Can relationships be playful? And if you get it, won't you tell me how?

3) What should I do for/about/with my friend?

4) Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying. Other times you have to cry to keep from laughing. I read an interesting quote in an otherwise objectionable law review article today about how sometimes we are faced with a choice between tragic struggle and a pleasant trip to hell, and for the sake of our humanity, we have to pick tragedy (or something like that). How is this a question?

Radical, Conservative, Married, Polyamorous

2006-11-05T23:59:00.000-08:00

Let's call the whole thing off.

While searching for more Zak Szymanski articles, I found this National Review piece (or rather, two pieces) by Stanley Kurtz about the "confessions" of a "radical" agenda by many in the same-sex marriage movement after the publication of the Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement. The only movement figures who stuck to their conservative gay guns, apparently, were Jonathan Rauch and perhaps Rob and Clay Calhoun (the Calhouns I had never heard of before reading this article, to be honest).

Couched in the tones of a clever analytical piece, the article is in fact a sensationalistic bit of red meat for the National Review's social "conservatives" and perhaps some of their "moderates" (and which conservative in These United States doesn't at least sometimes enjoy being thought of as a moderate?). In it, Kurtz "reveals" that the LGBT movement is at its core socially "radical," and that even the strongest proponents of the "conservative" goal of same-sex marriage turn out, after some prodding, to be of a kind with the polyamorous freaks that the Right has always assumed them to be (notably absent from Kurtz's list of closet sexual radicals is orgy-lovin' Justice Antonin Scalia).

If the language Kurtz (ab)uses sounds familiar, it's because the divisions come in part from Andrew Sullivan's seminal homocon tract, "The Politics of Homosexuality" in The New Republic in May 1993. Though the words have been switched around a bit, the categories remain the roughly the same. In part this is because Kurtz can't hold a candle to Sullivan's originality of thought (honestly, his talents are completely wasted in Time magazine's online blog). It's also because the political climate at the New Republic is very different from that of the National Review, where "conservative" means "you, dear reader." Finally, it's also a testament to the superficial inclusivity of neoconservatism that one can even talk about "gay conservatives" and not be referring to some closeted religious nutjob.

Instead of quoting Sullivan's piece, why don't I quote an enjoyable summing up of the relevant categories by Tony Kushner:

Andrew divides said politics into four, you should pardon the expression, camps - conservative, radical, moderate, and liberal - each of which lacks a workable "solution to the problem of gay-straight relations." Conservatives (by which he means reactionaries, I think, but he is very polite) and radicals both profess different brands of an absolutist politics of "impossibilism," which alienates them from "the mainstream." Moderates (by which he means conservatives) practice an ostrich-politics of delicate denial, increasingly superseded by the growing visibility of gay men and lesbians. And liberals (moderates) err mainly in trying to legislate, through antidiscrimination bills, against reactive, private sector bigotry.

By the way, also absent from Kurtz's article is any mention of Andrew Sullivan - a pretty glaring omission, akin to visiting Paris and somehow managing not to see the Eiffel Tower. Of course, this is completely in keeping with the "conservative" tradition of completely failing to credit one's intellectual and political ancestors. For a group of people whose faction has "conserve" as a root word, they have remarkably porous memories.

Bitchy aside over.

So in Kurtz's article you have the "radicals" (who have kept the same name since 1993) and then you have - or rather, you don't have - the gay "conservatives" (who Sullivan called "liberals"). What "radicals" want, in Kurtz's remarkably narrow reading of Beyond Same-Sex Marriage, is eventual state recognition of polyamorous relationships. "Conservatives," on the other hand, want same-sex marriage that looks exactly like old-school hetero-marriage, but with two suits or two bridal gowns.

How exactly did Kurtz come to such an "understanding" of what the LGBT movement really wants? His final paragraph offers some valuable clues about how Kurtz thinks of LGBT organizers:

For now, “conservative” proponents of same-sex marriage are out in front, supported by a vast array of considerably less conservative activists and lobby groups. Meanwhile, the radicals are marginalized and/or intentionally keeping a low profile. In a post-gay-marriage world, this situation will flip. The radicals will step out in front, supported by largely the same coalition of activists and lobby groups who currently support same-sex marriage. At that point, the conservatives, no longer needed to run interference for the larger movement, will be quietly put out to pasture. By then we shall be well beyond same-sex marriage. Listen carefully to the words of same-sex marriage supporters, and they confess as much themselves.

It's as though he thinks the whole movement is merely a kind of exciting strategy game for everyone in it, instead of a struggle for our lives and dignity. By using this "strategic" lens, of course, Kurtz manages to completely avoid any engagement with the underlying issues raised by the Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement (Should marriage continue to be the "gold standard" of relationships? Should alternative forms of family be recognized? How should the state regulate human relationships generally?). Instead of treating various people's statements as part of a complex community conversation, he regards them as merely obfuscatory remarks meant to diffuse intra-community tension (admittedly, they also have that function). He then writes what is essentially a piece of schoolboyish self-congratulation at having "found out" the gay radicals by "listening carefully" to what they said.

But of course, I'm only scathing about Kurtz because he almost hits too close (see, if Sullivan had written this piece, it would have hit too close - Kurtz is dogmatically, intentionally oppositional to the LGBT movement, Sullivan thinks of himself as within it).

Earlier this year I had a conversation (just after Beyond Same-Sex Marriage) with my friend Rich about how marginalized I felt whenever same-sex marriage was the topic in political circles. He suggested a course of political judo. Perhaps, he said (I'm paraphrasing), same-sex marriage is the move in the wrong direction that can eventually lead to a move in the right direction. I was initially heartened by this thought, though eventually I was too uncomfortable with the idea of toying with what I saw could become a kind of political disingenuousness.

Some questions, then:

1) Could same-sex marriage "undermine" marriage? What would this mean?

2) If everyone decided to stop getting married (a la Brangelina), would we still need same-sex marriage? Would we still want it? Are hypotheticals like this completely counterproductive?

3) Why did Kurtz focus on the polyamory part of Beyond Same-Sex Marriage when this was merely one aspect of a call for recognition of a wide variety of already existing family structures? (okay okay, this is kind of a leading question)

Lies, Damned Lies, and Religion

2006-11-05T21:46:00.000-08:00

Just when I thought my week was going badly.

Ted Haggard, the leader of a large evangelical church, the New Life Church, finally admits, after an initial denial, that he's had some kind of "lifelong" sexual problem. It all started with an out of work personal trainer saying that Haggard had paid him to have sex with him for three years. Haggard initially denied this, but then later admitted, vaguely, to being a "deceiver and a liar" and also admitted to having purchased, but not used, methamphetamines from the trainer.

He was fired from his position as leader of the church, but apparently this was done in a "loving" way. His congregants, at least, seem to still have some fondness for him:

"I probably cried all morning," [one congregant] said. "He knows he's hurt us and it hurts when your brother has done something, but like Pastor Ross said, he's in a good place -- he's better off this week than he was last week -- and he will receive the healing he needs and he did a good thing for our church so that we can heal."

A pretty gentle fall, all things considered. Donald Rumsfeld, take note.

My queer cents on this whole thing:

1) This was really skillful use of the media by Mike Jones, the trainer who outed Haggard. As Larry Gross noted back in 1993, in his book Contested Closets:

[t]he involuntary exposure of closeted homosexuals was long a favored tactic of social control threatened and employed by our enemies. The adoption of outing as a political tactic has challenged their ability to determine the meaning of gay identity and the consequences of its visibility.

Jones was not a trained spokesperson, but he recognized that he had the opportunity to expose hypocrisy where he found it (Haggard had come out in support of an anti-same-sex marriage measure in Colorado). Sex worker ethics aside, what he did was pretty savvy, and his statements to the media make him sound like your Gay-Man-On-The-Street. It's refreshing to see a religious figure backpedalling wildly while an out gay man is portrayed as the indignant voice of reason.

2) I feel rather sorry for Haggard, of course. The man is doing crystal meth, for goodness' sakes. This is not the kind of drug you do when you're loving life. You might say he had it coming (and he did), but I still can't help but feel sympathy for the man. Unfortunately, it looks like he's going to continue making himself miserable for some time to come, saying that his (homo, presumably) sexuality is something "so repulsive and dark that I've been warring against it all of my adult life." The tragically divided self is alive and well in evangelical America.

3) Who has Haggard wronged? In his own eyes, he has sinned against God. In the eyes of the non-evangelical public, he has harmed us with his hypocrisy (however indirectly), by shaking our faith in religious figures to practice what they preach. In the eyes of those jaded queers who still watch these events with interest, there is little surprise or injury in the hypocrisy (which we have come to expect). His real sin is homophobia. Public humiliation repays this debt that he owed us even before we discovered he himself had some desires for same-sex intimacy. Why do I speak of debts? Here's a passage from On The Genealogy of Morals (essay II section 4) that has informed my thoughts on this:

Throughout the greater part of human history, punishment was not imposed because one held the wrongdoer responsible for his deed, thus not on the presupposition that only the guilty one should be punished: rather, as parents still punish their children, from anger at some harm or injury, vented on the one who caused it - but this anger is held in check and modified by the idea that every injury has its equivalent and can actually be paid back, even if only through the pain of the culprit. And whence did this primeval, deeply rooted, perhaps by now ineradicable idea draw its power - this idea of an equivalence between injury and pain? I have already divulged it: in the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor, which is as old as the idea of "legal subjects" and in turn points back to the fundamental forms of buying, selling, barter, trade and traffic.

So you see, it all comes back to Contracts. One has to wonder what payback is going to be for Mike Jones (not to us, of course, he hasn't wronged us)

I'm reminded of this apropriately Christian joke about a lawyer, a surgeon and an engineer arguing about whose profession is the oldest. The surgeon says that his profession is the oldest because God created Eve from Adam's rib. The engineer says that in fact his profession is the oldest because even before that, God had to build the world out of the chaos. The lawyer smiles and asks, rhetorically, "Ah, but who do you think created the chaos?"

By the way, in case you hadn't already heard, Dougie Howser is also gay. As is this other baby-faced TV-doc.

So, like, how do you guys, you know, do it?

2006-10-27T23:48:00.000-07:00

There is a fetishization of difference that society engages in when it comes to queers. Stereotyping is just the tip of the iceberg. Underneath the faux-ironic, soul-numbing, pop-reactionary images of gay men being good at fashion and lesbians being good at sports lies the belief that Those People Are Just Different.

That iceberg ripped a new one in the now-ailing ship of Californian constitutional law just this month (hmm - has this metaphor gone too far?). October 5th saw the denial at the appellate court level of the right of same-sex couples to marry (or, to reframe, the right of all Californians to marry any person they choose, regardless of gender).

The court did not even see fit to subject the discriminatory state of affairs to any heightened scrutiny (which would require taking the government to task on its reasons for the law). The court would have had to do this if it had found marriage in this case to be a fundamental right. However, it did not.

Part of the reason the California Appellate Court gave for not considering marriage a fundamental right for same-sex couples is that marriage has always been between opposite sex couples:

Considering the importance of judicial restraint in this area, we must agree with appellants that, carefully described, the right at issue in these cases is the right to same-sex marriage, not simply marriage.

First of all, this is not true (there have been marriages between same-sex couples before). Second of all, it borders on saying that since a right has been denied to certain people for so long, those people never had that right (a sort of relinquishment of rights by adverse possession). Finally, it essentializes the difference between heterosexuals and homosexuals to the point that the same rights are somehow of a completely different nature when a homosexual asserts them (and are thus not fundamental). Under this analysis, "same-sex marriage" is sui generis, and so not "fundamental" in the right way.

The problem is that this sort of reasoning was already disavowed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas? There are no such things as "homosexual rights" (assuming one buys into rights discourse, of course).

The Lawrence Court dismissed the ridiculously narrow definition of the right in Bowers v. Hardwick (which held that Georgia's sodomy statute was constitutional):

[R]espondent would have us announce, as the Court of Appeals did, a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy. This we are quite unwilling to do.

Contrast Justice Stevens' characterization of the issue in Bowers in his dissent (which the Court eventually adopted as part of its reasoning in Lawrence):

[M]ay a State totally prohibit [sodomy] by means of a neutral law applying without exception to all persons subject to its jurisdiction? If not, may the State save the statute by announcing that it will only enforce the law against homosexuals?

To rephrase, Stevens recognized that a court must ask:

1) Is there a fundamental right generally (in that case, to consensual sodomy, in this case to marry)

2) Is there some reason inherent to the nature of the right that negates its fundamental nature when exercised in a particular way by a particular group? (this is not the same as whether the state has a compelling interest in restricting the right, despite its fundamental nature - that question comes later)

This "same-sex rights" shit is getting same-sex old.

This reminds me of a great quote in Kate Bornstein's My Gender Workbook from a transwoman whose femininity was challenged because she was smoking a "man's pipe". Her response:

I am a woman. This is my pipe. It is a woman's pipe.

Just one question today:

1) Are there contexts where when a queer person does something it's a queer thing and when a straight person does the same thing it's a straight thing?

Liberation vs. Liberalization

2006-10-23T01:31:00.000-07:00

Having heard (and uttered the obligatory cry of dismay at so hearing) that Hersheys recently acquired Dagoba, I've been thinking about the relationship between pleasure and commercialism. It's not such a great leap from thinking about chocolate to thinking about sex (it's also not a great leap from thinking about sex to thinking about chocolate, by the way).

I recently read Mark Greif's article, "Afternoon of the Sex Children" that was originally published in n+1, issue 4 and excerpted in November's Harpers Magazine (which is not yet up on their website). From the excerpt, I gather that Greif is explaining the simultaneous social phenomena of sexualization of youthfulness and the stigma of adults actually having sex with youths. While doing so he makes an interesting distinction between liberation and liberalization:

Liberation implies becoming free to do what you ahve already been doing or have meant to do. But what passes as liberation has often become mere liberalization. Liberalization makes for a free traffic in goods formerly regulated, creating markets in what you already possess for free. It has a way of making your possessions no longer native to you at the very moment that they're freed for your enjoyment. Ultimately, you no longer know how to possess them, correctly, unless you are following new rules.

* * *

[Sexual] liberation went astray because another force turned out to have a use for the idea that sex is the bearer of the richest experiences - commerce. Sex was initially difficult to liberate against the rival norms that had structured it for centuries: priority of the family, religious prohibitions, restrictions of biology. But once liberation reached a point of adequate success, commerce discovered it had a new means of entry into private life and threw its weight behind the new values. What in fact was occuring was liberalization by commercial forces as they entered to expand and coordinate the new field of exchange. Opposition to this is supposed to be not only old-fashioned but also joyless and puritanical - in fact, ugly.

When I stroll down the Castro (which is increasingly rarely, by the way), I notice the commerce, first of all. It's almost become cliche to compare the street to a mall. Large retailers are moving in and replacing independent stores. There is a notable paucity of accessible public space. People are on the move, not spending time on the streets so much as moving to the next bubble of privacy, and many of them are clearly tourists. Any lingering notions that community should be free are safely confined to outbursts of sentimentality about the Castro theatre, as if saving one building can erase the fait accompli of commercialisation. I'm guilty of this behavior myself. So what is to be done?

This coming week I shall be working with some young queers who, I hear, share my concern about the lack of public queer space. I've got my hopes up, but the insistent voice in me mutters danger and hums despair. My unclouded optimism has been killed, and I blame San Francisco - the promised land that failed to deliver. That's the problem with the transcendental visions of the diaspora queer - they're almost always disappointed.

Discussion Questions

1) What are the differences between liberation and liberalization? Has sexual liberation failed, or has it merely stalled?

2) It's pretty clear to me that sex sells, and that this is not the ideal state of affairs, because it requires the creation of a false scarcity of sexual pleasure. But what about selling sex? How does prostitution fit into all this?

Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been A Homosexual

2006-10-17T19:31:00.000-07:00

In doing my research for my Legal History paper, I found this great exchange in a case involving a German national petitioning to naturalize. The cite is Nemetz v. INS, 647 F.2d 432, 433-434 (4th Cir. 1981).

In 1976, Nemetz petitioned for naturalization. Although it is unclear from the record exactly how or when the Immigration and Naturalization Service (hereafter, the "Service") first became aware of Nemetz's homosexuality, at the Service hearings on his petition, he was questioned extensively about his homosexual activity:

Q. Mr. Nemetz, are you now or have you ever been a homosexual?
A. I'm now.
Q. You are now?
A. Yes.
Q. But you have and you so testified at this time dated women in Germany before you came to the United States?
A. Yes.
Q. Do you have sexual relations with your roommate ?
A. Well, we have a relationship. I like him.
Q. Have you ever had sexual relationships with him?
A. What do you mean sexual relationships?
Q. Intimate relationships. Getting into the sexual aspects.
Q. Either yes or no.
A. Yes.
Q. Mr. Nemetz, have you ever committed a homosexual act in public?
A. No.
Q. Have you ever recruited for any type of sexual activities in public?
A. No.
Q. Or everything you state that you have done as far as your private life is concerned, sexual life has been private. Is that correct, sir?
A. Yes.
Q. And to this date you still are (a) practicing homosexual. Is that correct, sir?
A. Yes.
Q. Ok. Have you ever been arrested or been questioned by the police for any of these activities?
A. No.
Q. Any complaints made against you concerning these activities?
A. No.
Q. So what you're saying is that your relationship in the United States has been with one individual. Is that correct?
A. Yes.
Q. And no others?
A. That's right. Yeah.
Q. And in your lifetime that is the only individual you've had a relationship of this type with?
A. Yes.
Q. Ok, Mr. Nemetz. In the last six years have you had sexual relations with (your roommate)?
A. Yes.
Q. Alright(sic). These sexual relations, were they oral type sexual relations?
A. No. Not particularly.
Q. Have there been any in the last six years?
A. I guess.
Q. Yes or no?
Mr. Murray: Can I ask a question?
Q. Yes.
Mr. Murray: Why is that particular question asked? I mean he has admitted to sexual relations.
Q. Well, ah, sex relations can be interpreted different ways and I don't want to get into, ah a linguistic battle of what sexual relations are at this point. There is (sic) either been penetration at one point [**4] or another, for sexual relations or sex relations at some point can be petting or kissing or things like that and inorder (sic) to further determine and interprete (sic) what exactly is meant by sexual relations, I'd like it specifically on the record.
Mr. Murray: But what I'd like to know is why this particular question when he has admitted to sex relations. What would be what's (sic) relevance to the proceeding?
Q. The relevance to the proceeding is a practicing homosexual whether it is would have a bearing on naturalization or not would be dependent on ah the type of activities that have ah gone that have gone before the activities that have gone with Mr. Nemetz and his roommate would have a bearing on depending on what the state law is concerning these activities.

My favorite part (besides the first question, of course), is the clearly uncomfortable line of questioning that begins with "These sexual relations, were they oral type sexual relations?"

They really know how to get into a man's head, those INS interrogators.

Personally, I've often wanted to go on a date type situation to a nice dinner type meal occasion, maybe some wine type beverage, then a film type situation, before being invited in for a coffee type situation, which of course I know typically leads to oral type sexual relations, and possible other types of sexual relations as well.

Come out and stay out

2006-10-16T02:17:00.000-07:00

I've been working for the past few weeks (okay, two) on research for a paper I'm writing on the exclusion of LGB people (or, as Congress says, "homosexuals") from the U.S. through immigration laws. These exclusions were in place until 1990, when Congress changed the immigration law (removing the "psychopathic personality" section) and even arguably until 2003, when Lawrence v. Texas confirmed that sodomy laws were unconstitutional.

It's been pretty interesting. I've been reading (sometimes re-reading) books and articles on gay history. John D'Emilio has prose as crisp and tart as a cider apple.

Fluent in Fag Loves Footnotes

2006-10-08T19:35:00.000-07:00

I came across this gem while reading William Eskridge Jr.'s Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet: Establishing Conditions for Lesbian and Gay Intimacy, Nomos, and Citizenship, 1961-1981, 25 Hofstra L. Rev. 817. It's a footnote from a section discussion the regulation of gay pornography. For those with access to the article, it's footnote 323.

I am using the term pornography to mean erotic pictures or pictures-and-words, but not words alone. Also note that I advert only to gay (male) pornography. There was little photographic pornography aimed at lesbians; most images of two women making love were in products marketed for heterosexuals, as woman-woman lovemaking is highly erotic to many straight men.

Apparently the heterosexual men, they like the woman-woman lovemaking.

I guess there's just something about the requirements of propriety in law review articles that precludes him saying something like:

By gay porn, I mean pictures of men. There was no such thing as lesbian porn. Pictures of women getting it on were for straight men, who found such images majorly hot.

Gripe 1: Eskridge says that the woman-woman porn was for "heterosexuals", when what he really means is "heterosexual men". Are women not heterosexuals? Somehow I don't think Eskridge was giving an unspoken nod to the "compulsory heterosexuality" theory. My guess: he's just not that into including women in this analysis. I am guilty of the same sort of thing, on occasion, but that doesn't mean I can't gripe about it when others do it.

Gripe 2: Eskridge's reference to "images of two women making love" really stretches euphemistic license. People in porn are sometimes faking it, sometimes having sex, but "making love"? On the other hand, maybe his editors made him do it. Or perhaps he was just poking a little fun at the prudishness of law review culture.

Discussion questions:
1) What's the world of porn like today? To what degree do audiences expect to see themselves in porn? Is porn still "targetted"? Is that "targetting" still effective? Can straight men consume and enjoy porn meant for lesbians, can straight women enjoy porn meant for gay men? Are bisexuals the perfect audience? Can/do trans audiences enjoy porn featuring trans performers? Can gay men and lesbians enjoy straight porn? Do androids enjoy porn with electric sheep?

2) Do those "straight guys" who jack off in "audition videos" for male cameramen/directors really think that this is going to launch their straight porn career? Given that these "audition" tapes are really going to be aimed at the gay male market and there is likely no straight porn film in the making, have these men been defrauded? Do they have a contractual remedy?

Won't Somebody Think Of The Children!?!

2006-10-06T02:24:00.000-07:00

I have only questions for this post.

1) To what degree is the current attention being given to the Mark Foley affair a function of popular homophobia and lack of any reasonable discussion of teenage sexuality and autonomy?

2) What does it say about the Republican party that it will adopt rampantly anti-gay policy positions while retaining open and not-so-openly gay people in the party? What does it say about those gay people?

Fag School #1

2006-09-30T19:32:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-28T01:37:00.000-07:00

[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

2006-09-21T01:36:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-07T01:11:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-03T18:04:00.000-07:00

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?

2006-09-02T02:06:00.000-07:00

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.

"I think I swallowed a girl"

2006-08-28T00:13:00.000-07:00

I read this article in today's SF Chronicle (I don't normally get it, but I got a copy from some friends).

The article is about how many parents and schools are becoming more aware of gender variance in children, and are being supportive instead of trying to force them to conform to "appropriate" gender behavior. Generally the article is positive about this trend, although it has that slightly forced "neutral" (i.e.: emotionally dead) voice that really annoys me.

While I am excited at any positive mainstream mass media coverage of gender variance, I did notice that the article still reveals some slightly misguided attitudes about gender variant kids.

First off, a quibble about the title and tagline for the article, "When is it OK for boys to be girls, and girls to be boys? Many kids want to look and act like the other sex. For some, it's a phase; for others, it's not. Parents and schools are adjusting." Reinforcement of the gender binary much?

There's also this (I love the quote at the end, so I quoted the whole paragraph):

For some children, it's a passing phase. Some grow up to be heterosexual, some gay. Some children insist they are the opposite sex although they might have a hard time explaining it. One nurse therapist said a boy once told her, "I think I swallowed a girl."

There's an implied conflation of gender variance with non-straight sexual orientation. Now, I'm personally of the opinion that homosexuality and bisexuality are themselves aspects of gender, and that the tone of some gay/lesbian denials of the linking of sexuality and gender-variance are somewhat transphobic (and often, in the case of gay men, femme-phobic as well). However, I don't think that's the analysis here.

Yeah, I'm a picky bitch. But you knew that already.

Other than these quibbles, the article is really good. The web version also has some good resources following the article.

I particularly liked a bit in the middle about the dangers of trying to enforce gender roles. However, the message is diluted somewhat by the "mainstream medical health professionals are not unified" bit. Sans explanation. Are we to believe that Warren Throckmorton*, quoted later, who supports ex-gay therapy, is a "mainstream medical health professional"? It's unclear:

Their common message is not to try to change who these kids are, though mainstream mental health professionals are not unified. Some believe such feelings can and should be extinguished through therapy; others believe that can destroy children's self-esteem.

"If you are forced to be something you don't want to be as a kid, you are miserable," said Carla Odiaga of Boston, the consultant hired at Park Day.

Odiaga speaks from a decade of experience counseling lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender teens who she says are scarred by early memories -- a daughter forced to dress like a girl or a son whose dad hit him when he refused to play sports.

In the worst cases, children pushed by parents and picked on by peers grow depressed, suicidal or physically ill, said Caitlin Ryan, a clinical social worker at San Francisco State University who is conducting a long-term survey of gay youths and their families. She said many adolescents she talked to were picked on from kindergarten age -- long before they knew their sexual identity -- for looking or acting "too feminine" or "too butch."

*Throckmorton's bio on his website mentions that he is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Grove City College, but neglects to mention that this is a private Christian college. It is also the Grove City College that was so opposed to gender equality that it litigated a Title IX case all the way to the Supreme Court. For a rather more full-disclosure version of the bio for Warren Throckmorton, one really needs to go over to Ex-gay Watch.

I have one more snarky response I need to get off my chest, in response to this quote from Andrea Lafferty, the ED of the Traditional Values Coalition:

"If you talk to your typical person across America, they would be appalled," she said. "God made us male and female, and God makes no mistakes. To teach a child at an early age self-hatred, and that's what this gender variance is, is very sad."

God makes no mistakes, eh? So all those homosexuals and other sexual "deviants" that the TVC wants to discriminate against are... what, exactly? God's Special Political Puzzle? God's Fundraiser for the Religious Right? What's the plan, Andrea?

More generally, it annoys and dismays me that right wing crazies are appropriating the language of progressive communities. "God makes no mistakes" and "self-hatred" are our buzzwords, damn it.

On the topic of gender inappropriate behavior, do people remember Ferdinand the Bull? I read this as a child and loved it, although it doesn't move me as much as Are You My Mother? (abandonment fear trumps sissy-identification any day). One of my friends, who is middle aged, also remembers reading it when he was a child. It's a really old book!

Back in SF

2006-08-10T00:29:00.000-07:00

Was it worth the 17 hours sitting in a dehydrated plane cabin, the 1 back-pain-inducing hour at Immigration, and the full body cavity search by a handsome customs officer, all just to get back to San Francisco?

You bet your BARTing-to-Berkeley, glorious-sunshine-moderated-by-sea-breeze-enjoying, cheap-taco-eating, raw-food-cafe-going, peach-sniffing, fuckbuddy-phoning, bicycle-riding, blue-bottle-coffee-drinking, strawberry-picking, evening-fog-breathing, rainbow-grocery-shopping, roseanne-thoning, tank-top-and-skirt-wearing ASS it was.

Okay I made up the full body cavity search thing.

What's the relation of this to queerness? Umm... Not that much. I'm just really happy to be back, and wanted the few of you who read this blog who don't read my other blogs to know. Woot! Also, SF has so many of teh Gay. Plus I might go to Folsom St. Fair and blog that, so... I have to be here to do that, and that's why it has something to do with being queer.

*shakes fist at everpresent blog mission*

Image in this post from cbcastro, it's under the ever-awesome Creative Commons license.

Righteous Sex

2006-08-07T00:03:00.000-07:00

I just read JoAnn Wypijewski's article "The Way of All Flesh" in the current issue of Mother Jones. In it she describes the website The Marriage Bed. The site is a kind of "Leviticus meets Girls Gone Wild", dispensing sex advice (both from "experts" and through community fora to Christians who want to make sure they're doing the Right Thing.

Here's a great bit that Wypijewski quotes in her article:

[Women are] urged in an essay by the Reverend Paul titled "How to Strip for Your Husband" to "finish your performance by letting him watch you enjoy a self induced orgasm. To drive him over the top, put a chair in front of him, sit down, put your feet on his knees, spread wide and masturbate. Bonus point for self penetration."

It's like Savage Love for the evangelical set.

Of course, the website condemns extramarital sex (including sex with someone of the same gender), but it does allow for certain types of masturbation.

The list of "What's OK? What's Not?" reads a little bit like a Sexual Harrassment training explaining what constitutes appropriate and consensual sexual behavior, except the person consenting here is God, and the law is the Bible (mainly the old testament, I believe). Here's what they have to say about masturbating in front of your spouse (as you may have guessed from the quote above, the gist is that it's okay):

...[One] issue is a couple watching each other masturbate. Most men, and many women, find this very arousing, and it can also be informative. As a frequent alternative to more interactive sex it could be a problem, but we know of no Biblical or medical reasons why it would be wrong or unwise to do this from time to time.

Notice the cautious tone of the approval, though - it's a classic lawyerspeak approach: "With some limited exceptions, we know of no specific reason why not to perform this activity".

Another interesting bit for me was the discussion of permissible sexual fantasies and roleplay:

Since God cares about our thoughts, not just our actions, there must be a line in this that we should not cross, but where is that line? A safe way to approach this is to say it's wrong to fantasize or act out anything it would be wrong to actually do. This means you must always play yourselves, not a real movie star or someone you know. It also means you must be married in the fantasy.

There is an interesting parallel to this position in the anti-BDSM strain of feminist thought, which argues that (enactments of) fantasies of domination or non-consensual sex are wrong. In part the argument turns on the effect of such fantasies on your own thoughts, and not the problem of actual consent of a partner (that is, even if consenting to the enactment of such fantasies was unproblematic, the fantasies themselves were still problematic). There is no posited third entity (God) watching, but you are expected to be your own censor.

Much of the feminist analysis of BDSM focuses on heterosexual or lesbian BDSM. As far as I know there has been little significant feminist/queer criticism of BDSM in the gay male community (which is not to say that there is not a fair share of sex-negativity among gay men - it's just not as heavily theorized with regards to BDSM).

Which got me thinking - what are the sexual norms of the gay male community? Are there such norms? I know that there are micronorms for certain gay male spaces like saunas, bars, street parties.

Gay men don't seem to spend a lot of time searching for these norms (at least, not aloud) - we're more concerned about getting what we want. A message board about "what kind of gay sex is okay"* seems like it would be a non-starter. Even Savage Love columns seem mainly to consist of letters from troubled straights; or bisexuals in heterosexual relationships, though its audience includes a large number of gay men.

*I mean "okay" in a broadly ethical sense, not the instrumental sense of preventing STD transmission.

Personally, except for certain rare circumstances (criminal law classes on rape, reading feminist essays on BDSM) I don't spend a lot of time worrying about what kind of sex is moral. I'm more likely to be thinking about what kind of sex would feel good, when I'm going to get to have that sex, who is likely to join me, and how to go about finding such people. So in a way morality and sex seem to be totally different realms of thought and emotion for me. I never feel self-righteous during sex.

Unless the other guy comes first.

Wear your hate on your sleeve

2006-08-06T08:21:00.000-07:00

How would you feel if someone at your high school wore a T-shirt on National Day of Silence that read "I WILL NOT ACCEPT WHAT GOD HAS CONDEMNED," on the front and "HOMOSEXUALITY IS SHAMEFUL ‘Romans 1:27’" on the back?

Tyler Harper did just that, and his school asked him to leave (they didn't suspend him). Actually the school asked him to leave the next day, when he wore a shirt with the same message on the back, but a "BE ASHAMED, OUR SCHOOL EMBRACED
WHAT GOD HAS CONDEMNED" on the front. Very topical.

Harper sought a preliminary injunction against the school. The district court denied it. Three judges on the Ninth Circuit affirmed (opinion behind the link). Harper asked for a rehearing en banc, but was denied

Dale Carpenter writes about the original Ninth Circuit opinion over on The Volokh Conspiracy. He thinks that the Ninth Circuit applied the case law incorrectly (in other words, based on existing First Amendment law, they should have held that Harper had a right to wear that T-shirt, or at least had a good case for it). However, Carpenter thinks that the case law should change. This would require the Supreme Court to modify or overturn a previous First Amendment case - Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District.

Tinker set a judicial standard for deciding when a school could and could not regulate students' speech. Basically, if student speech would infringe the rights of others or interfere/disrupt school activities, the school can suppress it. Carpenter thinks that the problem isn't the specific content of these standards, but the level of intrusion they allow judges into schools' actions. He wants there to be more discretion given to public schools to decide what is and is not permissible speech on their campus.

Carpenter argues the eminent reasonableness of preventing a student from wearing a T-shirt saying that homosexuality is "shameful", in a school where there had been a history of harassment of LGBT students:

Of course, a single T-shirt bearing the words “Homosexuality is shameful” isn’t that sort of direct face-to-face harassment and doesn’t, by itself, create a pervasively hostile environment. No single derogatory statement, taken by itself, creates a pervasively hostile environment. The problem is that it's expressed in a context that is already a living hell for gay kids in many public schools, as it probably was in this one, making it difficult for them to concentrate on getting an education.

I am disinclined to agree with Carpenter. I find it hard to imagine an alternative, workable standard that doesn't end up giving way too much leeway to ideologues or complacent bureaucrats in schools to prevent student dissent.

Carpenter does make a qualification that he would protect students' right to express any viewpoint in an appropriate setting:

I would not want to allow schools to banish all ways of expressing certain viewpoints, including the viewpoints that homosexuality is wrong, that blacks are inferior, or that women should remain at home. It should be permissible even to say that homosexuality is "shameful" in the context of, say, a classroom discussion of sexual morality. There should be times and places for expressing political views in schools; but that time is not all day and that place is not in the middle of a classroom on another topic. Schools should be given considerable latitude – certainly more than Tinker seems to give them – to ensure that students focus on the curriculum.

This all sounds reasonable until you consider the fact that schools most effectively suppress student dissent precisely by never providing the appropriate forum to discuss their viewpoints, or by structuring the forum so as to minimise the effectiveness of a dissenting voice. A school that does not want to hear about student dissatisfaction with immigration policy, for example, might ask its teachers to reschedule a history unit on immigration to a time when the issue is not up for debate in Congress. A school that does not want students to discuss queer sexual politics might remove all discussion of sexual morality from its curriculum. In my own experience, there was rarely an "appropriate" classroom time to bring up queerness or political dissatisfaction - many curricula at the pre-college level seem designed precisely to PREVENT substantive disagreement from entering the classroom.

This is not to say that I think that Tyler Harper's T-shirt was just great and a fabulous contribution to any kind of discussion. In fact, it was a rather uninformative, dogmatic and hateful piece of couture ideologique. While it didn't quite rise to the level of invective or fighting words, I certainly don't think it would have been ok for the school to leave Harper alone and take no action in response. In deciding to do something, the school's administrators had the right idea, though perhaps a bad implementation.

However, as cliche as this sounds, the school was free to respond to Harper's speech with more speech. Teachers could speak to their classes about the negative effects of homophobia, and even bring up the fact that not all Christian denominations or congregations believe that homosexual sex acts are sinful. Students who organized the Day of Silence could be invited to speak to classes about the day. Outside speakers could be brought in. All of this could be done without treading on the dangerous ground of state infringement of speech.

In suggesting that Tinker be overturned, Carpenter flirts with a disastrous curbing of First Amendment rights. In these paranoid times, it is bizarre for any person who cares about civil liberties to call for overturning or limiting Tinker, a case that protected the right of students to wear armbands in protest of the Vietnam War.

Student dissent is what we need now more than ever. If it means that once in a while schools and students have to shout down a self-righteous homophobe, well, that's the joyous clamor of a free conversation.

Priorities

2006-08-02T18:21:00.000-07:00

Let's see. If I were god, which of the following would I most want my followers, with their limited resources, to be most concerned about?
a) ending hunger
b) eradicating poverty
c) promoting peace
d) hating fags
e) the evils of cotton-poly blend

Black Episcopalians have decided that it's not (d). According to the article, black Episcopalian leaders are calling for the church to stop focusing on gay clergy while ignoring issues of poverty and oppression.

[Rev. Sandeye] Wilson linked the debate over gay ordination to the decades-old ordination of women -- a pill she said conservative leaders never fully swallowed. With women now incorporated into many churches, she said gays have become a new scapegoat.

She joined other leaders who said the church enlisted the support of right-leaning African bishops while overlooking issues facing their continent, including the HIV crisis.

On Tuesday, she asked black Episcopalians to remember the civil rights era as she held up a copy of the Windsor Report, a 2004 document that urged U.S. Episcopal leaders to apologize for dividing the faith.

"As I looked at the Windsor Report, there were echoes of all the oppression that I've experienced throughout my life as a black woman," she said. "We who have been oppressed and rejected ... do not need to be a part of rejecting and oppressing others."

I usually couldn't care less what churches are doing to "improve" their stance towards LGBT people (though I am more than ready with my Bag-o-Snark when they do stupid homophobic things). However, I was drawn to this article because of Wilson's expression of black people's solidarity with LGBT people. I think it's a ridiculous thing that, with everything else going on in their countries, African bishops seem to have made a huge issue out of Gays in the Church (ooh, wouldn't that be a great sequel to Snakes on a Plane?).

Love sucks. Hate sucks more.

2006-08-02T04:57:00.000-07:00

My mother used to scold me for using the word "hate". When I'd say something like "I hate this park, there are bugs!" or "I hate this itchy shirt!"; or "This movie is so boring. I hate it!" I would get a swift reprimand, and an instruction to say "dislike" instead. I guess she was trying to teach me that hate is a potent emotion, not something to be thrown around lightly. Hate has consequences. The thing is, you can't beat up a buggy park*, you can't kill an itchy shirt, and you can't intimidate a boring movie with a knife (well, you could try, but... well... okay, you know what? Do what you want). Ooh! You know what you can intimidate, beat up and kill? Fags, dykes and trannies! And many people do. And sometimes it seems nobody cares.

*when I was about 10, I went through a phase where I would buy food at recess that came on styrofoam plates, and then gleefully break the plates into pieces as I threw them away, thinking that would release more CFCs, leading to global warming, and killing all those bugs that I hated so much.

From feministe, I clicked to this post, Epidemic of Hatred by Shakespeare's Sister about the media silence on homophobic/transphobic* violence.

*Note: Shakespeare's Sister doesn't specifically mention or reference any instances of violence against people who identify as trans-, but as Kate Bornstein said (I'm paraphrasing, obviously): we aren't bashed for "being gay", we're bashed for transgressing the rules of gender.

ShakeSis points out that the media and Congresspersons create political storms in a teacup over flag-burning and keeping the pledge of allegiance in schools, yet say nary a word about the numerous anti-queer incidents happening all the time:

How little it takes to whip up the media into an exploitative frenzy, all in the name of “protecting” us. How little it takes to move our Congress to pay attention to an issue and pass legislation to “protect” us. (Which is, of course, ever an excuse to limit our rights, but they nonetheless claim it’s about “protection.”) One or two incidents, or, sometimes, just an imaginary scenario of what might happen. That’s all it takes.

But in the course of two months, there have been at least six vicious attacks on the LGBT community, and the media is silent. And Congress, well, they were pushing for an amendment to deny equal rights to same-sex couples. Their focus was “protecting the sanctity of marriage.” They’re more concerned with protecting an institution, an abstract concept, than protecting people.

In 2004, according to the FBI, 1,482 people were victims of crimes motivated by hatred based on "sexual orientation". Of these, about 600 were targeted by violent crimes. The other incidents were mainly property damage and intimidation. That's just under 2 violent incidents per day! And that's just the reported ones. I hardly need to note the reasons why such crimes might go underreported (either not reported at all, or not reported as motivated by hate).

Even if someone reports a crime and mentions the motivation, there's no guarantee that the agency receiving the report documents it or passes that information on. Check out this table. Out of Alabama's 51 participating agencies, only 3 submitted reports of any hate crimes at all. Now, do you think that no hate crimes happened in the other 48 agencies' jurisdiction?

Now, you may be opposed to or ambivalent about hate crimes laws* (I'm ambivalent), but hate-motivated crime is still something that needs more media and community attention. Our communities need to address and change the culture of fear and misunderstanding underlying these crimes, as well as the too-prevalent underenforcement of existing laws, or victim-blaming in cases involving anti-queer violence.

*Actually, I make a distinction between laws requiring documentation of hate crime, laws requiring special attention to hate incidents (or preventing police or prosecutorial neglect of hate incidents), and laws requiring increased punishment of hate crime - I am unequivocally in favor of the first two, and ambivalent about the last one.

This need not involve criminal law at all. CUAV in San Francisco, for example, has a great volunteer speakers bureau program that puts on events in schools and other settings to educate people about LGBT issues by giving them a safe, non-confrontational setting to interact with openly queer speakers. My undergraduate college had a similar program, and speaking with a class of high school kids about LGBT issues was such a rewarding experience - I learned as much from it as they did, if not more.

So, as ShakeSis says:

write your Congress members and your local media and tell them to pay attention to this Epidemic of Hatred against the LGBT community. Donate to LGBT advocacy groups. Straight people, register your support with Atticus Circle and PFLAG. And keep talking about this. Blog this issue. Tell anyone who will listen and get them involved.

I would add: find out about your local LGBT/Queer community organizations and ask them what they are doing to address anti-queer hate and build understanding, and what you can do to contribute (it could be time, it could be money, it could be some other resource).

Cellphone girl to the rescue!

2006-08-01T10:54:00.000-07:00

http://www.whowantstobeasuperhero.tv/

Is this for real? Has anyone seen it? How is it?

The SCI FI Channel, Nash Entertainment (Meet My Folks, For Love or Money, Who Wants to Marry My Dad?), and legendary comic-book creator Stan Lee (Spider-man, Hulk, The Fantastic Four, X-Men) are the producers of this six-episode, one-hour weekly competition reality series that will challenge a lucky few to create their very own superhero and reward the winner with the best reality competition prize yet: immortality!

Each contestant begins with an original idea for a superhero, a self-made costume, and their best superhero mojo. From thousands of hopefuls, Stan Lee chooses the lucky finalists who move together into a secret lair. There they will begin their transformations — and their competition for the opportunity to become real-life superheroes. Over the course of the series, they will test their mettle, try to overcome their limitations, and do what it takes to prove that they truly are super.

Love, Valor, Commitment

2006-08-01T01:47:00.000-07:00

My mother emailed me this article from Yawning Bread (it's pretty old, but still worth reading, seeing as it's not about current events so much as a musing on gay relationships).

Here's an excerpt:

Let’s face it. Gay men’s relationships are completely different [from straight marriages]. Don’t kid ourselves. They’re not built on love and commitment. They’re love or nothing. What commitment there is comes out of love. You can’t pull commitment out of yourself (let alone out of your partner) in the absence of love. There’re no children, there is no legal basis to shared property, and no fear of alimony. Love or nothing.
...
It’s no wonder then that gay male relationships tend to fall apart within a few months or years, not because their love is more hollow, but because quite often for men, whether gay or straight, that's about how long love lasts. Nevertheless, despite this knowledge, the pain is terrible still. And then the misery is compounded by comparing ourselves with straight marriages that seem to last forever. Anything more than 10 years is forever. In fact, we’re not comparing like with like, but we don’t even realise it. It’s not that the majority of straight men remain in passionate love for ten years. They just get used to the wife, and enjoy the compensations of children, comfort, security and social esteem. If we want to compare, then compare how long we remain in love with how long straight men remain in love. Don’t compare ourselves to a piece of paper called a Marriage Certificate.

The analysis is simplistic (YB is a master of the art of the simplistic but appealing argument - I don't mean that in a snarky way. It really is an art), but it brings up a point that I think is well taken. Marriage is about more than love. In fact, often it is about something quite different from love, namely "commitment".

The problem is, when you look at how "commitment" is enforced in a marriage, it starts to look awfully coercive. Now, I'm not against a little coercion now and then, but... well, we'll leave that for another post. Anyway, the essay's worth reading, is my point.

Oh, it also made me wonder if relationships last longer in cities where apartments are expensive. Stay together for the rent control. There's a great personal story about that over at Mortification & Leisure, btw.

CAVEAT: feminists among us (I include myself) will notice some pretty back-asswards attitudes, especially in the first part of the essay, about relations between men and women, and the totally male-focused analysis of heterosexual marriages is offputting to say the least. I promise it gets better in the second half. I just thought I'd warn y'all.

I gay love you. Will you gay marry me?

2006-07-31T21:04:00.000-07:00

Saw a link on towleroad to this article in the Australian Daily Telegraph.

The headline is "David Wants Gay Wedding". David is one of the contestants on Big Brother, a popular reality TV show here (there's a U.S. version too, I think, but it's not as popular) where contestants live in a house and have to do weird tasks, and each week Australian viewers get to vote one or more of them out of the house.

A few things about the article got my attention.

First, of course, it's another article about marriage, so yeah.

Second, check out this paragraph:

Next to the gay love he received from [his partner] Sherif, the former model said he was also overwhelmed by his father's uncharacteristic displays of affection.

The "gay love"? What is with certain editors/journalists just tacking "gay" on as an adjective to all manner of inappropriate things? It isn't really a huge deal, it just gets on my gay nerves. I guess if I were feeling especially intellectural today, I could hypothesize that this penchant for gay-as-adjective reflects an essentialist idea of sexuality, that gay men are inherently different, and extend the taint of our difference to everything we do and touch.

But I'm not feeling that intellectural, so let's move on to the "whoa" bit of the article:

While David's mother and three sisters were aware of his homosexuality, his conservative father - also a Queensland farmer - discovered his son's secret by watching the reality series.

So how did you come out to your father?
On national TV! While I was locked in a house where he couldn't contact me for several months!

It's wrong, but kinda hot. Oh wait no, it's just wrong. David is pretty hot, though. But I'm just saying that because he's a gay farmer.

Also, I have to admit I got a little misty at the mention of "uncharacteristic displays of affection", especially in light of this:

"In one evening being with him as a gay man I got more love than 26 years of being a straight son,'' David said.

Who doesn't love a good story about emotionally distant men eventually cracking and revealing their feelings? Hell, that description just about covers the major theme of several genres of film.

More stuff on marriage

2006-07-30T09:01:00.000-07:00

As noted in the quote from the NYT in my previous post, several leading political thinkers, activists, writers and organizers have gotten together to sign a statement, Beyond Same-Sex Marriage, that calls for a push for legal protections for a broader range of human relationships, and an extension of protections for/reduction of restrictions on individual freedoms. This has prompted this post by Joe over at Joe.My.God. As Joe says, the manifesto could have come from the "Department of About Fucking Time". There's some interesting discussion in comments about when marriage became this defining issue, and who is responsible (Ok, yes, I left a comment there too - so go read it and stop rolling your eyes already).

Brian at Faggoty-Ass Faggot (so that's who took that domain name!) also crticizes the drive for same-sex marriage, though not prompted by the Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement.

Of course, marriage has had its queer doubters from the beginning, but the old critiques were more on ideological grounds (since it wasn't being pushed for at the time). The new manifesto explicitly declares itself "strategic", perhaps to distance itself from the old debate (ah, our love of the new). However, it may be less strategic and more ethical and visionary than the title lets on:

...many of us long for communities in which there is systemic affirmation, valuing, and nurturing of difference, and in which conformity to a narrow and restricting vision is never demanded as the price of admission to caring civil society. Our vision is the creation of communities in which we are encouraged to explore the widest range of non-exploitive, non-abusive possibilities in love, gender, desire and sex – and in the creation of new forms of constructed families without fear that this searching will potentially forfeit for us our right to be honored and valued within our communities and in the wider world. Many of us, too, across all identities, yearn for an end to repressive attempts to control our personal lives. For LGBT and queer communities, this longing has special significance.

We who have signed this statement believe it is essential to work for the creation of public arenas and spaces in which we are free to embrace all of who we are, repudiate the right-wing demonizing of LGBT sexuality and assaults upon queer culture, openly engage issues of desire and longing, and affirm, in the context of caring community, the complexities and richness of gender and sexual diversity. However we choose to live, there must be a legitimate place for us.

I'm quite glad that this manifesto got written and signed by who signed it. At the very least, it'll be harder to (further) marginalize voices in the queer movement criticizing the drive for same-sex marriage.

If anyone finds other blogs discussing the manifesto, do let me know. I'm interested. As of today, no comment yet from Andrew Sullivan, Queerty, Towleroad or Keith Boykin.

8/1/2006 EDIT: Queerty now has a post on this topic, linking to the NYT Style article, but not to the statement or the gay.com article (both of which I found more informative).

As far as editorials go, Chris Crain of the Washington Blade wrote an editorial critical of the statement. I'm not aware of any others.

Gay.com has an article about the statement and responses to it by a few LGBT orgs. Basically the orgs (Lambda Legal and HRC) are saying "we've never made marriage The Big Gay Issue, so we don't know what all the fuss is about". While I'm willing to believe this about Lambda (or at least, that it has this self-perception), I'm a little more skeptical about the HRC's diversity-washing of its past behavior. Luckily the article does quote Joseph DeFilippis, a co-author of the statement, who politely calls bullshit by its proper name (I'm quoting the article quoting DeFilippis):

I'm glad to hear national organizations saying they agree with us, but speaking for myself, I think some have driven the marriage issue and spent resources that dwarfs what's spent on other important issues such as domestic partnership and universal health care, and it would be disingenuous to say otherwise.

New York Times reports on the problem with marriage

2006-07-29T22:48:00.000-07:00

Urseberry pointed me to this piece in the July 30th New York Times Style section by Anemona Hartocollis (who, by the way has written several other pieces for the Times on LGBT issues).

An excerpt:

To these activists, the fight for gay marriage is the mirror image of the right-wing conservative Christian lobby for family values and feeds into the same drive for a homogeneous, orthodox American culture. The Stonewall confrontation and early gay rights movement, after all, was about the right to live an unconventional life, and to Mr. Dobbs and others like him, marriage is the epitome of convention.

While I am always wary of any coverage in non-queer media about conflicts within the LGBT community or any marginalized group (too often it becomes a way for the privileged and those uninvested in struggles of that group to delight in the infighting), the Times article seems... not horrible. There's even mention of this rather interesting development, a sign that a broader non-binary idea of family and love is making its way into "respectable" politics (although the word "strategic" is a little troubling to me):

...some 250 academics, celebrities, writers and others, including Gloria Steinem, Barbara Ehrenreich, Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun magazine, Armistead Maupin, Terrence McNally, Holly Near and Cornel West, signed a manifesto called “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage, A New Strategic Vision for All Our Families and Relationships.” It calls for the legal rights and privileges of marriage to be extended to arrangements like extended families living under one roof, and close friends in long-term caregiving relationships.

It's not all ponies and sunshine, however. I do think that the article should have gone further to establish that there is still plenty of common ground uniting the advocates and opponents of same-sex marriage within the LGBT community. Also, the ending is a bit of a random non sequitur, signalling to me that the journalist didn't quite get the nuances of the issue, but wanted to end the piece with a bit of local flavor - after all, this is the Style section:

Then there are those gay men who find themselves embracing marriage in spite of their iconoclastic temperament. Florent Morellet, the French-born owner of Restaurant Florent in the once-raunchy meatpacking district of Manhattan, had a commitment ceremony in 1988 with his partner, Daniel Platten. Mr. Platten died in 1994 and Mr. Morellet says he is at a stage in his life when he is looking for a monogamous relationship.

Yet, influenced by French attitudes toward erotic life, he does not subscribe to the American ideal of marriage as a narrowing of sexual opportunity. “In France, which is nominally a Catholic country, adultery is actually an equal opportunity,” he says. “Women have almost as much adultery relationships as men.”

Quoi?

No Comment

2006-07-29T08:00:00.000-07:00

My awesome cousin Justin pointed me to The End Of The World* tonight, with the exhortation "YOU HAVE TO BLOG THIS". And he was right.

*not to be confused with http://www.endofworld.net (sans "the"), which hosts that flash movie many of us geeks are fond of quoting. You know. "I am le tired!"

The End of The World hosts a single long scrolling webpage, white text on a black background, with some graphics/icons, and plenty of information about the author's views on the end of the world.

The site's author informs us of why he thinks there will be Apocalypse Soon:

Here are six major reasons why I think
the End of the world may be near:
1. Nuclear Weapons -- There Are Many
2. Israel is a Nation -- Israel Back As A Nation Is Biblically Significant!!! From a Bible Prophecy Standpoint!!! And From All Standpoints For That Matter!!! A "Super Sign" Quoting someone from TV.
3. Abortion* -- In The USA alone, over a period of 33 years, There have been 45 million or more Abortions performed. We could stop right there, and have one of the strongest cases of judgment against this country, for just that reason.
4. Homosexuality* -- God says it sin. Many people are becoming reprobate, in not knowing the difference between what is right and what is wrong. - God has said a man with a man, and a woman with a woman, is not right.
5. Hurricanes -- I live in Florida, went through Charlie, Jeanne and Frances, or I should say Charlie went through here.
6. Earthquakes -- Earthquakes are everywhere and seemingly big earthquakes.

There are some additional reasons:

* Famines -- Commentary by Mike Mickey at www.rapturealert.com
* 4 billion people on Earth live on 2 dollars a day or less -- Habitat for Humanity magazine (2000-2002ish)
* It's been 2,000 years since Jesus was here
* The Avian Flu
* Extreme weather, Solar Flares
* Godlessness of Hollywood
* Divorce in this country -- epidemic
* Pornography -- epidemic
* The Godlessness of the Music
* God given the exit sign in Public Schools
* Evolution -- In Genesis in the Bible it says God Created The World!

Gay Hate Speech

2006-07-26T16:44:00.001-07:00

Ervan commented in my Vocabulary post about this, but I thought I'd reply in a separate post because it's really a different topic, and interesting enough (to me anyway) to deserve its own post.

He said:

Speaking of language: have you heard the latest "backlash" against LGBT folks?
Apparently, some are accusing them of "hate-speech" for using terms like "breeder" in reference to those damn hetero peeps.

I had not heard it, but I did my homework and found some interesting stuff on the net about "gay hate speech."

Provincetown

Richard Newell at Outright Libertarians discusses community reactions against "hate speech" in Provincetown. And also links to this article from the Boston Globe.

Trees and things has a story with some background on the history of hate crimes/hate speech in Provincetown, as well as the knowthyneighbor group.

A quick note: one of the instances of hate speech given in the Boston Globe article involved a Jamaican woman reporting that many (presumably non-Jamaican) gay residents harrassed her because they assumed that all Jamaicans were homophobic:

Winsome Karr, 45, originally from Jamaica, has worked in town since 2002. Lately, she said, the off-color comments stem from gay visitors who mistakenly believe that all Jamaicans share the views of an island religious sect that disagrees with homosexuality.

If this is true, I think it actually is unacceptable behavior. Being hostile towards immigrants of a certain group because of an overgeneralisation about their culture sounds like xenophobia to me. Just because you're gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans doesn't give you a free pass to be racist and xenophobic. Hell it doesn't even give you a free pass to be homophobic.

On the other hand, calling someone a bigot (another incident reported in the Globe article) because you see them signing a petition against same-sex marriage is much more of a gray area. I don't think it's hate speech, personally, but just calling somebody out on their bigoted action. There's no overgeneralization here - you just saw someone perform an act of bigotry. I only say it's a gray area because there might be a minor problem of misinterpretation of her actions. Maybe they signed the petition not understanding what it was calling for, or in a mistaken nod to "radical" queer notions (note, although I am opposed to many of the methods being used to campaign for same-sex marriage, and am ambivalent about the goal as well, I think that it is absolutely wrong to sign anti-same-sex-marriage petitions or support religious opponents of same-sex marriage, because in context they are inevitably also anti-gay)

GALHA Magazine in the UK

This article in the Guardian says that the Gay and Lesbian Humanists Association published in its magazine an article "that described immigrants as criminals of the worst kind and Islam as a barmy doctrine" (internal quotations reformatted). It also said that Islam was growing in the UK through "unrestrained and irresponsible breeding".

Other gay rights groups (not sure which ones) condemned the article.

GALHA actually seems to be a generally level-headed not-in-favor-of-bigotry organization, and anyway the ExCom did take action against the magazine's editor:

Galha's executive committee said the magazine's editor and deputy editor had been forced to resign over the comments, published in the autumn issue, and the magazine had been relaunched under a new editorial team. "We've done everything we can to rectify the situation," said the secretary of Galha, George Broadhead.

Most of GALHA's website content and events seem to be directed not at Muslim homophobia, but at Christian and Catholic homophobia, which makes sense, since there are far more Christians in Britain than Muslims.

I haven't found the full text of the GALHA piece, so I can't make a fully informed comment on it (although it does sounds pretty misconceived). Just a note: other than the "unrestrained breeding" comment, nothing else in the Guardian article indicates that this magazine piece was specifically anti-heterosexual, rather, it was anti-Islam. As I said above, nothing about being gay makes you immune to charges of racism and xenophobia.

"Burning Black Triangle" campaigns against "straight haters"

Ex-Gay Watch has a 2004 piece about PFOX's webmaster "Burning Black Triangle"'s personal website. Part of the mission statement of that site:

Many Homosexuals would like nothing better then to become an elite class among the Heterosexual population. We will not be pushed around by these heterophobes!

Look, this "elite class" of homosexuals isn't going to manifest, unless they somehow manage to get organized enough to start manipulating politics and blindsiding the media, numbing the nation with fear while accumulating more wealth and power for their rich friends. In other words, if they became the Republican party.

The Ex-Gay Watch piece is pretty long and has a lot of quotes from the BBT website. I couldn't read them all, as I would have to bang my head against the desk too hard, and it might startle the other office folk. Here's just one more, in reference to the Broward County v. Boy Scouts case (in which the judge ordered a school to allow the Boy Scouts to access its facilities, despite its disagreement with the Boy Scout's anti-gay policies):

The Boy Scouts of America... are caught up in the resurging wave of a Socialist movement in America. The Nazi's in Germany had a similar paramilitary group. The pedrastic leanings of the Nazi's tried to subvert Germany's youth this way too. Keep our Children safe from Homosexuality... Support your local scouts! OPPOSE QUEER AMERICA!

Homosexuals are closet Nazis? The sheer historical amnesia of this little tirade is astounding.

As a bitchy aside, Scouting worldwide was founded by Robert Baden-Powell, whose sexuality is the subject of some speculation. What is NOT the subject of speculation is that he commanded a regiment for the British in their colonial war against the Boer (who wanted self-governance).

Vocabulary Word of the Week

2006-07-26T08:17:00.000-07:00

So you know how when you're a straight guy and you're engaged in oral sex with another straight guy?

Turns out there's a word for that now.

EDIT: By the way, I've heard "bro" pronounced "bruh" (like the first syllable of "brother", of which "bro" is an abbreviation) and "br-oh" (to rhyme with glow). I think this new use pretty much settles it for me which pronunciation should be preferred.

Virtually Over It

2006-07-23T00:47:00.000-07:00

Reading this review of Andrew Sullivan's Virtually Normal over at OGMN, I was reminded of the first time I read that book. I read it in 1996, as a 15 year old closeted gay boy in Singapore. Its neatly argued call for gay marriage seemed revolutionary to me. Gay Marriage! Like all revolutionary ideas, of course, I saw it as completely unattainable, yet completely reasonable (yes, my political miseducation was well underway).

wtf, mate?*

*Sorry. I couldn't find a good creative commons licensed photo of Andrew Sullivan or his book, but in my search I did find a picture of a redheaded cutie reading Virtually Normal. ~~It's still not creative commons, so I won't steal it, but you can see the photo here~~. Instead, I found a cute chipmunk really giving it to that rock. Courtesy of ReneS. EDIT: So it turns out that photo of the redhead is under a creative commons license. But the chipmunk is too cute to delete. Here is the redhead too, though. Courtesy of alaspoorwho.

Alaspoorwho says: Protect yourself from the sun with the power of virtual normalcy!

So, First, some words on the emotive power of marriage to the 15 year old Minger:

!!Embarrassing Revelation Alert!! At 15, I was very into marriage ceremony fantasies. I wanted it all - first, an elaborate Singapore/Malaysia-Chinese-style wedding: the tea ceremony, the ten course dinner followed by long exhortations to "Yaaaaaaaaaam Seng!", the bowing to parents, and then driving through the streets in a gaudily decorated white or silver Mercedes Benz.

One exactly like this! Yes, that is a Singaporean license plate, as well.
Photo taken by St@ce. Another one under the creative commons license. I heart creative commons.

I also wanted the whole white-dress and tuxedo Western church wedding - somewhat odd in retrospect, because in addition to being a flaming queenlet, I was also a raging atheist - with the hushed awe as I walked down the aisle (I wanted to be in the dress), the solemnity and explicitness of the vows, and the awesome drama queen moment where the priest asks if anyone has any reasons that these two should not be wed, and everybody looks down while priest and couple glare accusingly at the crowd. It all sent shivers down my spine. I wanted a honeymoon too.

Not my ideal wedding. Although being presided over by a pumpkin would be great. Photo by Eric van der Neut. Again, creative commons license.

But that's not all. I didn't stop at the marriage ceremony fantasies. My schoolgirlishness was quite advanced. I'd also constructed an exquisitely detailed picture of domestic bliss. Everything in the house that could be covered with white or natural undyed linen would be (having actually done my own laundry now, I shudder at this particular aspect of the fantasy), the sun would always be rising or setting, and we would always be spending long mornings in bed or long evenings on the balcony with breakfast/cold drinks. ... Actually that's all the details I'm willing to divulge right now. Take a 2 minute sigh-of-relief break and keep reading.

WHEW!

So, back to Sullivan's book

Photo of gay shame anti-wedding cake is from dannyman.

Oh how I have changed. I suspect that if I were to read the book today I would be:
1) annoyed/amused by Sullivan's naivete;
2) still delighted by his crisp "Yes chaps, I was educated in England" prose;
3) furious at his caricatures of what he now calls the "Gay Far Left" (I think at the time he had another term for this, I forget what; and
4) bitchily remembering the bareback sex scandal in 2001. (others also still remember) BTW: Bronski's piece behind the first link is quite good. You should go read it AFTER you finish reading my post.

In any case, I certainly wouldn't be the overawed little boy from (what was in in gay terms) a cultural isolation cell.

So what is Sullivan's appeal? And who is he appealing to besides 15 year old gay boys? (Ok that sounded wrong)

I think Sullivan's work finds an eager audience in the embarrassed conservative base* that doesn't really like/care about gay people all that much, despite their protestations of "fiscal conservative, social liberal". This group, however, is a little alarmed at the sheer vitriol/hatred being spouted by the Religious Right that passes for idealism in the Republican party (and disguises the fact that it is a vehicle for the rich to use state power against the poor).

*I'm sure some gay and lesbian people and some liberals who genuinely care about gay and lesbian rights read and agree with Sullivan too. Now, how should I overgeneralize about and belittle them? Deluded? Self-hating? Insert Third Bit Of Invective Here? This is left as an exercise for the reader.

After all, one may not want that homosexual hanging around one's children (which is why one sent them to private school, where it's alright to discriminate more or less openly against gays, and probably always will be), but one does want him around to do one's hair. Surely it's only cricket to let him have a crumb or two of civil rights. Oh yes, marriage, that's a perfectly respectable one. After all, one doesn't have sex in a marriage, does one, unless one intends to have children. And homosexuals don't do that. Do they? Now Canada's gone and sanctioned gay marriage. One can't have all the homosexuals fleeing across the border - whoever would decorate one's house? The U.S. simply must keep up with its neighbors. Just so long as they don't try anything funny, like advocating for economic, social and political justice, those homosexuals are okay.

Photo of "Separate the Church and Hate" sign from sushiesque. ----->

In fact, I think Sullivan is at his best when he is taking on the Religious Right on their own terms. He (euphemistically? kindly? strategically?) refers to them as "social conservatives". There's no denying the man is a master of rhetorical moves.

But seriously. I understand the appeal. No, really. I feel your pain. I was once like you, entertaining fantasies of assimilation and obsessed with sexual privacy and the sanctity of the marital home. And it's not just me and you. Even Supreme Court justices have these fantasies. Yes, underneath those solemn black robes beat nine romantic hearts secretly dying to pass a covert love note across the bench ("Clarence, what do you think about this Lawrence guy from Texas? Totally gross or what? - Tony. P.S.: Do you like Ruth? Yes/No"). In fact, we have that Court's (well, a previous Court's) fantasies of the marital home to thank for legal contraception in the U.S. Thank you, marital home!

Let me just ramble on about marriage a bit more

I get the impression that, in a libertarian-flavored way, Sullivan generally opposes cultural change coming from government legislation. But then why campaign for government to sanction certain relationships and not others? Why not remove the hand of government altogether from marriage, and let whoever wants to call themselves "married" do so with no formal change in their relationship to the government? The answer must be that somehow, there is an overriding interest: certain relationships need government protection.*

*I think that Sullivan also argues (sort of) is that marriage encourages social stability. Now, I say "sort of" because, if I recall correctly, he really makes this point not as something he personally endorses, but in the context of pointing out the inconsistency in social conservatives' idealization of (straight) marriage even as they oppose gay marriage.

The fact is that "marriage equality" is not merely the removal of a bias, it is the extension of a regulatory scheme. Not just any scheme, but one that is rank with normative implications for sexual behavior.

Marriage is a set of conditional benefits. Those benefits are given not based on need (unlike redistributive schemes). A person would be entitled (let's say) to their spouse's healthcare if that spouse were an employee of the government, whether they* really needed it or not, which leaves us with the inescapable implication - that these benefits are given to those who deserve it.

*Yes, I use the singular "they" where I feel like it. I will also, but more rarely, use "ze" and "hir".

The normative nature of marriage is inescapable. "You get these rights because you deserve them" it says to married couples. By implication, unmarried people do not deserve these rights. So what happens? Gay people start reinterpreting our community narratives to fit into marriage's narrow picture of "deserving" couples. Just take a look at Freedom to Marry's current publicity materials. Most of these couples have been together for a long time, and many have kids and apparently steady jobs. Through implication by omission (anyone who has been "semi-in-the-closet" you know what I mean), they are monogamous. Certainly none of the publicity materials say "on weekends, Kris and Eddie like to go to sex parties, where they enjoy having group sex with friends and strangers" or "Lisa and Tyra are active community organizers and advocate the decriminalization of prostitution and marijuana".

I'm not saying that Freedom to Marry's campaign is ineffective. I'm certainly not devaluing the couples' lives together, or impugning their love for each other. I'm also not saying that going to sex clubs is preferable to not going to sex clubs, or that monogamy is never the right decision. (Actually, you know what, fuck that, you all are intelligent enough to figure out what I am not saying)

So what ARE you saying?

Thanks to irina slutsky and emarquetti for these two images, that I modified to make the above graphic. (creative commons licenses r00l!).

What I'm saying is that the couples picked to represent the LGBT community are de-fanged, sanitized, and otherwise made "safe" (however they are in real life, this is how they are portrayed). They've got one issue, and they're sticking to it. We're going from predatory sex fiends in the shadows to Model Minority 2.0. It seems that in order to get marriage, many in the community are trading in one set of cultural stereotypes for another, and abandoning those with whom we used to have solidarity in the process.

This is a pet topic of mine, and I could harp on it all day. It's not just Sullivan's focus on marriage as a gay rights panacea that bothers me, however. And anyway, it's not just Sullivan, but apparently the whole mainstream liberal camp that is adopting the attitude of marriage-as-crowning-achievement to a materialistic, individualistic version of the gay and lesbian movement (Sing it! We've got Castro, we've got WeHo, we've got marriage, who could ask for anything more?).

Oh dear oh dear, this has turned into a post on marriage. I wanted to talk more about Sullivan's core beliefs and how mine have changed from a set something like his (libertarian-esque) to something subtly different. But I've been working on this damn post for 3 days now, and it's time to let it go.

Thoughts for future posts or further reading:

So we'll become the new model minority - is that so bad? Asian American community organizers and theorists have done plenty of thinking and writing on why the model minority myth is harmful to Asian Americans and other oppressed racial groups.

Should government play a role (and what role should it play) in cultural/social change? I mentioned that Sullivan, like many libertarians, is averse to government meddling in "private" social relationships. My own view is that it is far more complex than this (obviously, Sullivan's view is more complex as well). I don't think there is a sharp public/private divide, nor do I think that government should be singled out and fetishized as the Big Disrupter of social relationships (there are other forces that interfere with personal autonomy as much as or more than government).

Heterophilosexuality

2006-07-22T17:18:00.000-07:00

I am quite a fan of homespun sociology/psychology (as well as criticism of homespun sociology/psychology). So as my inaugural post, here's a little theory you may enjoy. It's a regularity that I noticed in an very informal survey of my friends and acquaintances. See if you can spot it applying in your own life!

Definitions: three types of people

First, I will define 3 types of people. Gynophiles, androphiles, and bi-philes (sorry about the ugliness of that last word). Notice that I color coded them because, well it's damned fun.

Gynophiles are people, male or female, whose circle of friends mainly consists of women.

Androphiles, conversely, are people whose circle of friends mainly consists of men.

Bi-philes, as you might expect, have more or less equal numbers of men and women in their circle of friends.

Note that these definitions depend, unlike some definitions of hetero- and homo- sexuality, not on the genders of the friends a person would prefer to have, but rather on the friends that a person does have.

"When we grow up we're going to be androphiles!"
(photo used under Creative Commons license from Tiggywinkle)

Get to the theory!

My theory is this - a great majority of same-sex binary relationships (with two partners of the same gender) consist of one androphile and one gynophile. I'll call such couples heterophilosexual.

This is different from butch and femme, and also different from masculinity and femininity. I know femme androphiles in relationships with femme gynophiles, masculine gynophiles with feminine androphiles and so on. The one thing (so far as I know) that has remained constant - one partner has mainly male friends, the other mainly female friends.

Just to clarify, individuals are not heterophilosexual, couples are. I don't think of heterophilosexuality as a preference or even a status that can be accorded to individuals (what would that even mean as an individual status?). It refers only to couples that have one androphilic and one gynophilic partner.

Problems/Gaps in knowledge:

Does this work for different-sex couples? Well, I don't have as much opportunity/inclination to inspect their relationships. It seems to me that often, regardless of their previous status, these couples often start to hang out exclusively or predominantly with other different-sex couples, hence making both partners default to bi-philes. In contrast, partners in same-sex couples tend to maintain more separate circles of friends (either ones they had before entering the relationship, or ones they cultivate on their own while in the relationship). It's a question of community norms.

What about bi-philes in same-sex couples? Well, like most nascent theories of this kind, mine does not fully escape the trap of dualism, so... you're out of luck, queer bi-philes. I'd welcome more anecdotal accounts of bi-philes in relationships, though. I'm more than happy to mess with mister in-between. I just need more data.

What's the point of all this anyway? Mostly an idle exercise for intellectual interest. I suppose if it is true that most same-sex couples are heterophilosexual, it raises some interesting questions about the mechanisms by which androphiles and gynophiles seek each other out or end up getting along. Because I've framed the categories as behavioral rather than identity or desire-based, I think the theory lends itself to behavioral explanations of how gyno and androphiles meet.