Not knowing how to say it

As a child, I always had close friends. One close friend usually. My first was a girl, and we used to play strawberry shortcake together. I even went one Halloween as Huckleberry Pie. It was at her house where I saw JAWS for the first time. Apparently afterward I had to be accompanied to the toilet.

School was a different story. For some reason my friends were always a grade behind me. Perhaps I liked to be the older/wiser friend, and maybe it was just because they didn’t get to see what a dork I was in class. If anything, it was probably because they were the ones who lived closest to me, and well, didn’t pressure me into things like sports, etc.

Recess was always terrifying for me. Not so much because of the physical activity although that was part of it. I didn’t want to play sports with all of the other boys. The girls didn’t seem interested in having me play jump rope with them, and I was friendless. I used to wander the playground and go towards the fence and walk by it. I used to fantasize about leaving the school grounds.

I knew I wasn’t the best at things on the playground. I was terribly afraid of most things. I remember that once I learned to go across the monkey bars I was ecstatic. I ran to the woman who oversaw the students during recess and wanted to show her what I had mastered. She dutifully came, and seemed to look less than interested, and said, oh, that’s great. For some reason, I felt that it was boring, and I was being silly for wasting her time. In short, I felt ashamed.

I saw some kids on the tire swing, and one day I eventually got the courage to go over to it. I really enjoyed it because it didn’t seem to involve anything terribly strenuous. Actually, I had already thought of myself as overweight although looking back I’m not quite sure why, as I certainly wasn’t big by any stretch of the imagination. I found a rare moment of courage and somehow ended up in the tire swing with another student.

Whirling around I would lean back and the tire swing would slow down, but if you leaned in, the tire swing would spin faster. As I leaned in, so did my classmate, and I felt the excitement of being close to someone, of being accepted.

After a while, the same classmate ran over to the teeter-totter, and I followed, holding on to the brief connection I had felt. Up and down, down and up, balancing each other, while pushing off of the ground to propel up into the air. After a while, the classmate seemed to just sit at the bottom and leave me suspended. I didn’t want to fall off, and didn’t want to upset, so I just sat there. Eventually, I came down again. This happened more and more frequently, and I began to be upset. But if I got off, would I ever be able to get back on? I was certain my inadequacies would follow me off the teeter-totter, so it was probably best to just stay. After all, for the most part it was more than walking around alone, I suppose.

A p(t)o(a)st to a friend

After leaving BYU, I had decided that I was going to be more true to myself. Over the summer I became acquianted with someone, and we became friends. Joel was always pleasant and self-effacing, and I liked that about him. He was also very good looking. I was still in the closet, and near the end of the summer, I had almost come out to him. I remember wanting to tell him as he put on his black pants, black shirt, black shoes, and brown belt, but I thought it was just silly and inconsequential. Eventually, he told me about a friend that he had in Denver who shared my same name, and was also mormon. He told me this person was also gay. I really was quite curious.

Eventually I met Jethro Scott (obviously that is a pseudonym as is Kalvin, but just for clarification). Jethro and I got along well, and I began to learn the ways of going out, and he taught me a great deal about fashion. A couple of months after we met, we were out at the triangle (a gay leather bar in Denver) where I picked up a trick that now rests on the right side of my blogroll at the top. I told this trick that I wanted him to come to brunch and to meet my friend. Oddly enough, JR already knew him. Apparently, however, JR knew Jethro in a time when he was still wearing makeup and large glasses. I never got to know that Jethro.

We stayed close, and said horribly inappropriate things all the time. When Jethro was breaking up with Jizz Moper (as JR and I called him because he worked at a bathhouse), Jethro would always say things that he should say/do to his boyfriend: “Next time he puts his finger in your butt, make sure it’s full of poo, but not just any poo, really nasty poo.”

Jethro got a new boyfriend who was ever so young, and their relationship seemed tumultuous to us. After they had a fistfight at our house, we didn’t really talk anymore. I felt really bad about it, and I wanted to talk to him. For several years, I would think about him, and saw him a couple of times walking the streets of Denver.

We then moved to San Francisco, and I thought I would probably not ever see him again. But then one day, JR and I saw him walking down Market street towards the castro. We didn’t say anything to each other. I decided to do some internet sluething, and I eventually found out that he had moved to San Francisco.

We met up at 440 Castro (Daddy’s) and we picked up contact, which I am really glad about. Why does it seem that important things seem to happen to me while drunk at a leather bar?

In any case, few other people love to mangle English words with French pronunciations, talk about Proust, and generally laugh at life.

Tomorrow, he’s moving a couple blocks from me, and we will both be near the very center of gayness. It’s so strange to me, as a couple of years ago, I never thought I would live in SF let alone where I do live in SF and I never thought I would see Jethro again. Strange how life turns out, isn’t it?

Check him out.

"When the world stops for snow; when you laugh, I’m inside your mouth."

So…I’ve been busy. It’s been another big push for a paper that I feel is in many ways over my head, but at least the rough draft is settled and I don’t have to worry about a final for over a month. Some times I write these things, and I think, no one really cares about that and I’m becoming rather loathe about being self-reflexive about blogging lately, but perhaps that’s because I’ve been avoiding thinking about myself as well.

Now I’m going to do something that I don’t think I’ve ever done before: go through a comment point by point and discuss. Perhaps it’s been laziness on my part that I haven’t done this more often, but this raised many issues that actually help me get out some thoughts.

This comment was on the last post regarding marriage equality.

“Perhaps the LGBT community can lay claim to a new word that best describes “marriage” without being as cumbersome as “civil union” or “domestic partnership, LLC” … without stepping on the toes of the religious crowd.”

Honestly, this sounds like a great idea. However, I don’t think that any form of separate name is going to be equivalent (a lesson learned in Brown v. Board). What is interesting is the way that we focus on this as a business partnership to avoid steeping on the toes of the religious crowd. Marriage has primarily been an economic institution, not an institution of love. I can’t think of a single story in the bible where someone was admonished solely for marrying someone they didn’t love. Also, I don’t think most societies until recently would have done so either. The use of business terms helps the squeamish avoid thinking about what marriage inherently means in many ways at the core: sex.

“I’ve always felt that marriage was kind of a traditional thing that was best intended between men and women. Plus, it has many of the trappings of religion, which is exactly what many gays I know… want to avoid. In a way… the (Christian Right in particular) feel that marriage is sacrosanct - and that is rightly so, if it is indeed ordained by God.”

In my book the tradition argument should carry little to no weight. According to tradition women should be property and not allowed to vote. Slavery should be upheld. People of different races should not be allowed to marry.

Saying that marriage has the trappings of religion is an interesting argument. Immediately following solely with a definition by the Christian Right reveals a fixation (or blindness) to other traditions or cultures. Indeed, even polygyny (the practice of one man having many wives, not polygamy where either spouse has more than one partner of the other sex because there is no case in the bible of a woman having more than one husband, and that is precisely what was deemed so distasteful when people queried Jesus in the bible about marriage in the resurrection) was in the bible, other societies have practiced polyandry (a woman having more than one husband) and other societies have had different ways of creating/reflecting intimacy within themselves.

“Despite the apolgists who twist scriptures and make cases for couples like David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi (who were in-law relations, hence adding a spectre of “all-in-the-family” ickiness if they were lesbians) or Paul and Timothy, or even Jesus and Disciple John (!) … at no time do we see a Biblical ordination of a same-sex marriage.”

I always find the twisting of scripture argument to be rather silly. Partially because I only think of the bible as a work of loose historical fiction, but also because of the large lapse of time and general uncertainty surrounding the bible and the contradictions that occur so frequently within the bible itself. Most histories have censored same-sex love. This does not mean it did not occur. It may have had no name. Indeed, there was no word for heterosexuals until after the word homosexual had been coined. As for the “all-in-the-family” ickiness, why is everyone so willing to gloss over the fairy tale of Adam and Eve being the sole humans in the beginning? As for Jesus and John, heck, I think you can make a good case for that one.

While it is true that there is no biblical ordination of same-sex marriage, you could also say there is no biblical ordination for the abolition of slavery; the rights of women; the wrongness of genocide (which god commanded the Israelites commit when they occupied Canaan). A great deal of society functioned with the propagation of heirs and farming within the biblical culture. The one passage in Leviticus deals with a tribe that is struggling for its very survival. Homosexual relationships would impede the maximum number of offspring in the same way bestiality would.

Furthermore, you can make a very good case that the bible is opposed to interracial marriage. Many stories in the bible surround people not marrying outside of the covenant (the tribe or faith) and how this led to god’s displeasure, sinfulness, and destruction.

“Very close relations between men, but hardly any snogging, much less a marriage.”

Well, I guess that means there were hardly any women around back then either because they are rarely ever mentioned. Perhaps this is another instance of the nexus between homophobia and sexism.

“And, the nouns to describe the traditional partners ion a marriage - “husband” and “wife” always have struck an odd sound whenever I have heard a man refer to another man as his “husband” or “wife” (which treads into the whole marginilization and definition of roles game: top, bottom, femme or butch, or off the wall? )”

Part of this comes because of the underlying sexism that is tied to homophobia. We worry about roles because we worry about men being like women (which because of sexism would marginalize their existence). Beyond this, isn’t it strange to hear Latin people call the pope papa? So much of language is only odd to us because we are unfamiliar with it. It is because of the heterosexual paradigm that overlays our societal consciousness that this somehow becomes disturbing, otherwise, if we weren’t sexist or didn’t view everything through a heterosexual lens, what would be odd about it?

“Not much better are the other nouns we use for same sex nuptial relations:
“Domestic Partner” sounded too much like an AMWAY scam in the making.
“Spouse” seems suitable, since it is gender neutral. But as the natural plural of spouse is “spice”… one gets to thinking about food, which is not good for those trying to keep thier (once upon a time) svelte figures. I recommend therefore, that the LGBT community appropriate to itself a suitable verb and companion nouns to define monogamous (we hope!) LGBT relations that has all of the niceties and benefits of marriage, without the religious aftertaste, or obtuse linguistic acrobatics.”

What I think is funny about this is that LGBT’s are asked to appropriate a new word, whereas we automatically ascribe this word to other cultures whose practices and languages obviously differ. Why are tribal unions called marriages? Why do we even refer to the marriage of companies? We actually use marriage in a fluid way, but the heterosexism we’ve been fed keeps us from using this word in other ways that would rob the white male protestant heterosexual of some exclusivity and power.

“Of course, the whole marriage thing might be mooted anyway if the Democrats bring back the marriage tax… “

As for the whole marriage tax debate, this is one of the smaller issues at stake in my opinion. Creating the same legal incidents of marriage can be extremely costly without some form of laws. Additionally, married individuals have HUGE benefits when it comes to estate and gift and generation transfer taxation exemptions and options that are simply not available to unmarried (or same-sex married couples) in any case. Beyond that, courts have often invalidated legal contracts that approximated marriages making transfers ineffectual. Thus, passing on property is very difficult between a gay couple. It may even be impossible now under many of the new state constitutional amendments that prohibit things that approximate marriage (which should be unconstitutional because one of the fundamental rights as a citizen is the right to contract which we don’t give to minors and we didn’t give to slaves or women in the past).

Beyond this, I’d like to agree with C.L. Hanson that there are also international implications as to what a civil union would produce.

If marriage truly is a religious institution why do we honor marriage performed by a Justice of the Peace? Why do we honor marriages performed by non-xtian religions?

End of my discussion in this post.

On another note I was really surprised to see that best gay blogs posted my “Bodies that Sell” post. I would have thought that it would be tremendously antithetical to what their site primarily is: pictures of those bodies. But I’m happy that maybe it made someone out there think about it, and I know I don’t have all the answers, but I think it’s a good topic for discussion.

Thanks everyone for your input and insightful comments. I really do appreciate them!

Put your money where your mouth is…so to speak

Many politicians have said that marriage equality is an issue that should be decided from state to state. In some ways this is happening, but in others it’s not.

The Defense of Marriage Act defines the federal definition of marriage as between one man and one woman. Thus, even if your state allows marriage equality, the federal governement does not. What does that mean? No federal tax exemptions or other numerous federal rights are available to couples who are married who don’t fit the federal governement’s discriminatory definition.

I think all of these democrats who have said that states should decide for themselves should live true to that, and the defense of marriage act needs to be challenged. The federal government should recognize marriages that states perform. I understand that Bush would most likely veto any legislation like this that passes, but I don’t think that even many gay people are aware that some if not most of the benefits of marriage are still denied regardless of whether their state will grant them a license.

On another tangent, for everyone who thinks “oh, civil unions are just like marriage” I would like to point something out. When NJ handed down its decision, everyone was like oh, it will be just like Massachusets, or Vermont or Connecticut. No one, however, thought about California. Honestly, the differences between domestic partnerships and marriage in this state are so small that I don’t consider them of major significance. There isn’t really anything left in CA to get except the word for the most part. But no one thinks about it like that. It’s another example of how discrimination in words truly does affect our perception of these unions.

Bodies that Sell

I’ve taken to saying this about the “acceptable” gay body. You know, the body you see in any ad that is targeted at gay men or on the cover of almost all gay publications. From an early age, we learn shame about our bodies: not to touch them (for most); that certain parts of our bodies are disgusting; and most powerful of all (in my opinion) whose body may be seen and whose may not. Within our ads and culture, when do we see bodies revealed? Only when they fit some sort of level of acceptability. How often do you see a large public figure like Oprah pictured naked on the front of magazines? Although perhaps that’s a bad example because it can perhaps suggest an intersection of favorable bodies and favorable skin color.

As an example, I always think about nude beaches. Every time I hear someone talk about a nude beach, I can count on hearing the same line (in fact, it’s so repetitious I wonder why people even bother to say it), “The people who were naked on the beach were so not the people who should have been” or alternatively, “not the one’s you would want to see.” Why is it that some people should be naked on a beach and others should not? Clearly this is because some bodies are socially acceptable while others are not. Do we expect to see our centerfolds and cover pictures sprawled out on the beach impeccably lit and photographed by Bruce Weber or Herb Ritts (neither of whom has/had one of these bodies from photographs I’ve seen)? Are we shocked or even surprised when we see these bodies, these things that are hidden from us? Shouldn’t we be more interested in seeing those things which are hidden from view when we go to a place that ostensibly celebrates freedom and openness?

The body we expect to see is a body that is used to sell things: bodies that sell. Personally, in our capitalist mindset, I think that we have been conditioned to want what we don’t have, and to expend resources to get it. Honestly, this body that sells is not easy to achieve. That’s why you can sell so much with it. Ab rollers, diet books, pills, clothing, cars, investment banking…because maybe if I have this, I will come closer to having what they have which I don’t.

I wonder how often people look at their own bodies except for the sake of comparison to this body that sells. When we look in the mirror do we consider our bodies as they are or compared against this body that is used precisely because it is so rare? On the last post, a commenter suggested that he was less aware of his body the closer it approximated this body that sells. I’m not surprised by this. One’s own body is no longer problematic and needing to be fixed. I plan to talk more about this soon (under the concept of covering being more severe among those who are obese and people of color within the gay community).

Furthermore, how are we supposed to eroticize something we are never shown? Most gay men have some experience with porn when initially coming out. Many even posit it’s how gay men get their sex education. Why would we think a body that doesn’t match this standard is okay to express itself erotically? Why will this change over time? The cycle that started with the images that we’ve seen from an early age conditions us to expect and want only to see things that we view as acceptable: bodies together that sell.

This fuels the exoticism around people of color, the fetish surrounding bears and daddys and all other body types. We place our hopes in the simultaneous possession of a body that sells having a personality as well. In the expectation that all these others already have personalities (we see so many people that don’t have these bodies that we know they are real) we don’t come in expecting someone that is something other than human, but at the same time we don’t search as much for the human because it’s not as important as having that body.

It’s been so long…

That I simply don’t know what to write. I would kind of hope that after such a long break I would have something that at least I would think was a good post, but no; the longer it is between posts, often the more I feel like I have nothing to say. Strange how that is.

In some ways I have lots of things to say, but I think I just need to get back into therapy. As much as I enjoy blogging, it’s not exactly a confidential environment, and I’m starting to envy those who have such luxuries.

Oh, and I’m also feeling fat. JR finally won me over with his insistence about my getting a hair cut. And now I feel even fatter. This didn’t use to bother me, but somehow JR’s constant denigration of those who are not “bodies that sell” (as I like to say) is getting to me. Not to mention that’s all I can see out there. Hell, if I even go on flickr the only pictures people put up of bears are “muscle bears” which in my opinion are not bears. It makes me think of a great movie; you all probably know it, “Bring it on!”, when the compton squad comes up to Dunst and says “Every time we get some, here y’all come trying to steal it, putting some blonde hair on it and calling it something different.” Anymore, they are just circuit boys with hair. Sigh. Perhaps we as gays just love to assimilate. Those who don’t fit in break off into different groups (leather, bears, drag queens) but then the major group just comes in and turns it into something it never was forcing out the original members. I know this is an exaggeration, but I’m sick of the monoculturalism that seems to be so pervasive in the gay community. If haven’t voted yet, I will hunt you down and let Ted Haggart have his way with you if you don’t do it in the end. GO NOW!