The dark side of the rainbow

I’ve spent the last couple of days in a funk.

First, Obama’s selection of Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation hit me like a kick to the stomach. Intellectually, I appreciate and applaud the “team of rivals” strategy. I’ve been through the NA 12-step program, practiced Zen with HIV positive men, NSA Buddhism with pushy actors, endured my first lover’s fascination with the Course in Miracles, my second lover’s fling with Est/the Forum, and I often list Alan Watts as one of my heroes. I’ve been accused of smiling and laughing too much. I know better than to be upset.

Emotionally, intuitively, however, I feel like a fox has been let loose in the hen house. Like a deranged chicken, my reaction is not an enlightened one; it’s a passionate one. It’s a reaction rooted deep in the darkness of my brain, the part attuned by years of dealing with bigotry and prejudice as a gay, dark-skinned Latino in USA, Inc. It’s rooted in the blood and flesh I inherited from my lesbian mother who lived with her partner for 30 years but still can’t marry her. It’s my reaction, and it is valid, legitimate, cathartic and a vital part of my conversation and how I experience the world and arrive at insight. Do not dismiss me because I haven’t earned my wings or halo yet. I’m trying; but please, in the meantime, do not ask me to “calm down”, repress my gut-feelings, or take a shortcut. Engaging one’s rivals can and should be visceral, messy, heated. In that fiery discourse, ideas break down and are reconstituted.  As long as there are bigots out there, we will need that fire for protection, warmth and light. Otherwise, I could go up to the next straight stranger I see and kiss them on lips without fear. But, I know better. I know there are people out there who look upon me like a punching bag. My brother, the former gang member, and his friends were people like that.

Which brings me to the second thing that’s upset me. As I was kicking myself for being so radical, so reactionary, so “un-progressive”, cynical, paranoid, so “intolerant”, I came across an article about a lesbian that was repeatedly, brutally gang raped and left robbed and naked outside an apartment building. In San Francisco. Because she had a rainbow sticker on her car.

I’m not a flag-waver, and I know an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. But if this is what we have to look to forward to, is the view really worth seeing? And if it’s not, is it not our duty to say and do something until a better world comes into focus? Are we to achieve this by biting our tongues as our brothers and sisters are beaten senseless for simply being themselves? I could prize civilized discourse above a human life, but that’s not me. Sometimes, I need a heated argument to let my rage burn off. That’s just how Jesus made me. And Jesus don’t make no mess.

So, I will not boycott, censor, avoid or ignore the inauguration or invocation. I’m not even arguing that Warren shouldn’t deliver the invocation. I’m saying that it is in poor taste, a cheap appeal to the hard right. It’s politics, I get that. Rights and privileges are negotiated, bartered and compromised every day. When push came to shove, Clinton backed “Dont’ ask, don’t tell” and the Defense of Marriage Act. When pressed on Prop 8, Obama could have said “Marriage should be between two people who love each other”. But tellingly, he didn’t. Did he not have faith in his base?  I would like to believe that including an avowed exclusionist in a highly didactic moment implies a surplus of faith. But how productive will this super-charged gesture be? Is the hard right going to convert by invocation’s end? Will they be inspired to comfort the queers with bus tire tracks across their faces? Or, will it embolden them to continue committing more brazen hate crimes as statistics indicate?

I do not know. But I will be watching. And listening. And venting. And if that upsets you, let’s talk about it.

Checking Out

I was in our High School library, the one where Van Halen had just shot the video for “Hot For Teacher.” I was always in the library, if not this library, then some other library. I had read that Holly Golightly lost her accent learning French, and as far as I knew, mechanics and leaf-blowers didn’t speak French, so shortly after Truman Capote died, I took up French. One of my counselors noticed and suggested Comparative Literature as a major, since I already spoke Spanish. I agreed to prepare for the AP exams. When the day came to take the test, I walked into an empty room for the French AP, a semi-crowded room for the Spanish AP, and a room overflowing with Academic Decathalon champions in the English AP test room. I was often at school an hour before class, and stayed an hour or two after class, longer if I was having an intense discussion about Apollinaire or watching a Truffaut flick. 

On one of these afternoons, when our library was pretty empty, I grabbed a book from the shelf, and was startled to find my friend B.M. staring back at me from where the book spines had just been touching. He stared at me as if we were in prison and he was planning an escape. Before I said anything, he said, “I know about your secret; I have one too.” I started to ask what he was referring to. My life was rife with secrets, I was unable to pick one to focus on. BM returned the book on his side. I moved around the stack, to ask him what he meant. But he was gone. 

His statement was ominous. I was pretty sure my secret life was wrapped pretty tight. Clearly this was about him. But what could we possibly have in common? We lived and grew up on the same block, went to the same elementary, junior high and high schools. BM was a tall, light-skinned Mexican with green eyes and an Irish last name. He wore glasses, kept to himself, and was devoted to music and played several instruments. He was rarely allowed to play in the street with the rest of us. Sometimes his skin would break out. All adolescent stuff, I thought. 

I was a loner by choice, anticipating life beyond Marshall  High almost as soon as I entered it. I was not planning to bond with anyone on my block, in my class, because I knew someday I’d be living in New York, speaking French, and wouldn’t be seeing any of these people again. I wasn’t worried about my sexuality because after all, we did go to school with a pair of 6-foot Filipino cross-dressers who came to school in full, thematic drag day after day. And everyone on our block knew my family was special – after all, someone had spray-painted House of Dykes on one of our walls. The only thing I worried about was the fact that at age 16, I was dating a 32-year old business man who left his office early to pick me up at school. But even that didn’t seem like a big scandal – at least not for me.

The other thing I could think of was that BM had been talking to someone else, a mutual friend, and a cruising rival. We’d see each other around town, and kept a comfortable distance until one day, just before he graduated we finally connected – in the Aimee Semple McPherson Temple of the Four Square Gospel, of all places. But even this didn’t seem like anything BM should be lurking around about. What was he going to do – tell everyone in school that I popped a teen load in a church; that I had a funny, blond, blue-eyed uncle in button-down shirts? So, what was BM freaking out about? It had to be about him.  As I looked around the library, it hit me – BM was gay too. And unlike me, he didn’t have the luxury of being raised by a swinging family. No, BM was raised by a tall, quiet father and a nervous, submissive mother – a traditional, Mexican country couple raising a large, Catholic family. And here he was, reaching out, as we all do, to a new family.

I stood there, feeling sorry for BM, wondering how in the late 1980’s teens could still be suffering like this – in Los Angeles. I mean, Van Halen was just slithering on our desks. This was where Waldo got off the bus and found his mojo. We were living in Silverlake, where we walked past several leather bars on the way home from AP classes. We could pick up copies of the Advocate, right next to the LA Weekly and LA Reader on the way home. I finished checking out my books and headed home. 

The next day, I didn’t see BM on campus. That night, as I was at home studying, I took a break and did something I’d never done in all our years living in that house. I walked up the block to BM’s house. I rang the buzzer, and waited for an answer that didn’t seem to be forthcoming. As I turned and started walking away, someone, one of his sisters, I think, peeked out from inside one of the windows. “He’s gone,” she said, and disappeared. 

Stacks of Life

Just in time for the latest STH (#66) party, this bit of news from Andy.

Speaking with Fox Spinmeister B.O’Reilly, Ft. Lauderdale Mayor Jim Naugle “claimed a new library opening plans to have a special section for gay pornography right next to the children’s section. He then corrected himself saying it wasn’t all porn, just some of it. O’Reilly didn’t ask for a better explanation of the so called porn.”
Throwing support in their corner was, of course a concerned Christian.

“I thank God for this mayor who is sticking up for children who, after playing a game of soccer, may wander 50 feet into the library to ask the following questions:

Q: “Mommy?” Why is that part of our library closed off?
A: Well, Johnny, Fort Lauderdale Commissioners Cindi Hutchinson, Charlotte E. Rodstrom, and Carlton B. Moore voted to take out the books that everybody can read and replace them with homosexual pornography.
Q: Mommy? What’s homosexual pornography?
A: It’s what you saw in the public restroom earlier.
Q: Mommy? Why are those people so angry at the nice mayor?
A: Because he wants to protect you from all of it. “

Well, I can only speak for myself, but first I will say – how does she know what’s going on in men’s rooms and on boys’ fields? Then, I will say “Thanks” indeed – but not to anyone in Florida. No, my gratitude is reserved for the tiny public library that sat on the other side of the Hollywood Freeway, connected to Echo Park by a short tunnel. It was in this library that I freely explored books like “Numbers”, and “City of Night” by John Rechy, “Forbidden Colors” by Yukio Mishima, and of course, all the Anais Nin and Oscar Wilde a sensitive, alienated, restless, budding young perv egghead could absorb. One of my book reports in Jr. High was on “Story of O”.
Weeknights after school and weekend afternoons, I spent hours in the stacks, on the floor, back to a wall, reading and finally checking out these blueprints for my coming of age. I studied the books as primers for all the spot quizzes that I was sure awaited me as I grew from precocious young slut to jaded middle-aged monk.
Eventually I moved on to the “Different Light” bookstore at the Sunset Junction and their racier content – including STH, Nambla, that odd series of gay “Romance” Novels that were popular in the mid-80’s. For better or worse, many of those narratives informed my instinct, my internal road map. They may have piqued my curiosity for risky business, but they essentially tutored me through an adolescence that otherwise would’ve been doubly, and unnecessarily clumsy – and possibly more dangerous because of the very naivete these concerned citizens seek to protect. When we deny kids a chance to explore their identities and exercise their imaginations in a safe, sanctioned environment, we may as well just ship them off to the next Straight to Hell party.

Wait – come to think of it….

STH
WEDNESDAY, AUG. 29th
we SLURP
@ The COCK (29 Second Ave.)
HO-sted by Linda Simpson
music by Michael Magnan & Telfar
w/Special Guests & Surprizes!
10pm – ?