QOTD (2009-09-14)

From Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind:

The Memorial was published on February 17, 1932. There were a few really favorable notices. The best of them was in the Granta. I remember how one reviewer remarked that he had at first thought the novel contained a disproportionately large number of homosexual characters but had decided, on further reflection, that there were a lot more homosexuals about, nowadays.

Funny, that.

Incidentally, naïve question: who are Christopher’s “kind”? Gay men? Expats? Literary types? None of the above? By “his kind,” does he mean “people like him,” or “people whom he fancies”?

The third-person POV in this book is awfully interesting. I’m trying to figure out what I make of it.

Update

You may know that I write for Campus Progress, but you probably don’t know that we’re trying to get into a blogging swing of things over there. As such, I’ll be cross-posting some of this stuff over there, and adding some content that I don’t post here as well. So check it out—and be sure to see what my colleagues have to say as well, because they’re all smart and interesting people. The CP blog is here, and also linked from our main site at CampusProgress.org.

Calling Ourselves Things; or, In Which I Turn a Statistic Into Wishy-Washy Po-Mo Identity Politics

In the theme I appear to have been developing recently of “Let’s take something I read on the intertubes and use it as an excuse to have an entirely different conversation,” Bilerico pointed out a statistic that, sadly, does not surprise me at all: “While women make up 14 percent of Army personnel, 46% of those discharged under DADT in 2007 were women.”

The saga of Caster Semenya tells us that women who do not behave in “womanly” ways—e.g. by displaying leadership, athletic prowess, skill in combat, fearlessness, or being good at things—wind up having their femininity and their sexuality questioned. In a world that frequently equates gender identity and expression with sex and/or sexual orientation, that questioning could take the form of suspicion about sexual orientation (and subsequently being fired for it), or suspicion about sex and gender (and subsequently having your name, reputation, and career dragged through the mud for it).

I don’t know whether our society will ever come to adopt a model of gender that doesn’t depend on two essentialist categories that have associated with them not only additional expectations with regard to sexual orientation and behavior, but also the notion that one essentialist category represents a higher moral good than the other. It seems impossible that Western society (and many of the societies by which it’s been more recently influenced), which has operated on this model for so long, should change now. But until and unless it does, our headlines will be wracked with these kinds of accusations. Caster Semenya is not really a woman! That Army officer is not really a woman!—but for entirely different reasons that have more to do with how our culture views sexual orientation than with how it views sex. The problem, though, is that over the past few decades it’s proven remarkably difficult to unravel the public’s perceptions of gender and sexuality and all these other forms of identification from one very muddled-up ball of yarn.

For the sake of being able to say “I told you so,” I predicted that Semenya’s battery of tests would result in an intersex diagnosis from the start. But whatever that may mean for Semenya and her sense of identity, identifying as a “girl” or a “woman” is her sole right, something completely apart from whichever internal organs she may or may not have. So is it anyone’s right to identify themselves with whatever sexual orientation labels they wish—only you know who you are. No one else should be able to make that decision for you.

That decision becomes a non-decision when it means being faced with exile from a community of international athletics predicated on a rigid gender binary. And as readers of this blog should well know, it becomes a non-decision when, particularly if you serve in the U.S. armed forces, your career and family life may depend on what you say or what you allow other people to say about you.

Can we force our culture to grant us the right to call ourselves what we please—or, more radical yet, to call ourselves nothing at all?

(cross-posted)

QOTD (2009-09-12)

I have nothing to add to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ excellent point:

One of the great tragedies of the past half century or so, is how patriotism has been coopted by people who claim the Confederate flag, while black leaders, from King to Obama, are dismissed as communists/socialists and now Hitlerite. These are people whose heroes routinely flouted the federal government and assaulted black troops carrying the Union flag.

(cross-posted)

Sunshine, and Metaphors Involving It

My friend Jim wrote recently about his experience going to see the Tony-winning Broadway revival of Hair (which I saw last April). Jim has a very interesting critique of how the revival stages the final song of the show, “The Flesh Failures/Let the Sunshine In,” which you should definitely read, and so I’ve had the song floating around in the back of my mind for the past few days.

I realized a while ago that it was pretty impossible to categorically rule on what my “favorite” things are (my Facebook profile notwithstanding), but if there were ever a contest for Emily’s Favorite Song, “The Flesh Failures/Let the Sunshine In” would be a strong contender. I think it’s because it represents to me what is so intoxicating about the hippies and their version of counterculture: they’re one of the very few countercultural movements I can think of which, in addition to acting against the dominant society, offers up its own alternative portrait of what dominant society could be (it may not have been a truly viable alternative, but it was an alternative all the same). “Let the Sunshine In” is a prayer born out of anguish and betrayal, out of the built-up anger of a generation sent to die in a needless war and denied any institutional voice. The hippies and other disaffected late-’60s youth made their own avenues for communication, their own ways to speak out. And while I’ve written many, many words about the degree to which Hair actually reflects the counterculture it commercialized, that final plea the cast makes to the audience is an echo of an alienated counterculture’s voice, getting through.

But the late-’60s youth counterculture is such a tragic entity because its various visions were never realized. Every time I listen to “Let the Sunshine In” I think—in a totally secular sense, mind you—about how prayers go unanswered, and after a while we just stop asking. I think about how the world I’m living in is full of insanity, equal to that which produced the war and the generation gap which drive Hair and the culture it reflects. I admire the resolve of fictional characters from a halcyon time when someone thought it was still worth asking, and I wonder why, today just as 40 years ago, we need actors in a Broadway musical to say, “Let the Sunshine In”—is it just such a ridiculous premise to broach in any more “serious” setting? (1975’s Government in the Sunshine Act notwithstanding. Joke. See what I mean?)

Because I’m from San Diego, getting anywhere in my adolescence necessitated driving. My mom and I have spent a lot of time in the car, and we’ve spent a lot of it listening and singing to music, and talking politics. I have vivid memories of the times my mom and I have listened to the Hair soundtrack (original Broadway cast) and sung along, and the times my mom has used the songs to launch into one of her nostalgia trips, longing for a better, more optimistic time that even she knows may not have really existed. I have equally vivid memories of our discussions of all-too-current events: in the aftermath of 9/11, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, during presidential and midterm campaign seasons alike for the past ten years. I cannot tell you how often my mom has drummed the steering wheel in anger and I’ve stared flatly out the window as one or the other of us intoned, “The world is going to hell in a handbasket.” And then maybe one of us would put Hair in the CD player, and skip to track 32, and sing, “Let the sunshine in!”—willing for it to be true.

But Generation Y’s answer to some hippies who may never really have existed except in the minds of a couple out-of-work actors who decided to write a book and lyrics based on their times as they saw them is that the clouds don’t part. The sunshine doesn’t shine in. All the prayers in the world won’t cause our country to live up to its ideals of justice and fairness and freedom; all the cries and pleas and all the singing won’t (to quote Ginsberg) “end the human war.”

It doesn’t seem inappropriate to appropriate Christian terminology to express how I feel about the never-realized ideal of the country I call home. I’m returning to the US in two days, and I guess you could say I’m having a crisis of faith. You can shout “Let the sunshine in!” from the rooftops, but who will hear you? Love, peace, and justice don’t make a good headline.

At the time of the inauguration in January, when Pete Seeger sang all the verses to “This Land is Your Land” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, I believed that I could see the sun shining at last. But while I do still cry when I watch that video, and I do still cry when I hear the last song in Hair, it’s more because of my present feeling: no matter whom we put in office, the winds of change are never really more than a rhetorical device. They aren’t strong enough to blow the clouds away and let the sunshine in.

QOTD (2009-09-09)

In a poem called “Ego Confession,” Ginsberg describes himself as someone:

who saw Blake and abandoned God.

His references to his Blake visions can get a bit tedious at times, and I like this take. It’s a refreshing change. Of course, given who Blake was it’s also an awfully interesting statement to make, and it also indicates how Ginsberg saw himself as heir to a Whitmanic tradition that holds (as Ginsberg says in his “Footnote to Howl”) that “Everybody’s holy.”

It’s also just a really, really good line, and there’s intrinsic merit in that.

Sometimes I think it’s embarrassing that seemingly the only subject on which I can speak with any knowledge is Ginsberg, but mostly I don’t mind. At least I know that, unlike most of the time I try to talk about lit, I’m not bullshitting.

Coded Language

As I read more and more about what it meant to be a gay man in any decade of the 20th century, I become immersed in a language. Sometimes that means just picking up enough in context, or inferring enough from the slang of our own era, to know what someone means when he talks to another man in a bar, using words the undercover cops wouldn’t know. Sometimes I see someone give me a funny look in conversation, and I realize I’ve used a turn of phrase natural in the 1950s but completely anachronistic—and perhaps offensive—in our time. And sometimes—as happened just yesterday—it’s not so much basic comprehension that I gain, but a sense of what greater significance simple words had to someone living in a different time and place and social context.

I’ve read, or listened to a recording of, Ginsberg’s “Howl” more times than I can count. My iTunes says I’ve listened to my favorite recording of Ginsberg reading “Howl” (yes, I have more than one) 19 times, but I’m sure that’s not accurate. It doesn’t count the number of times I’ve listened to just Part I, my favorite part, and stopped before I reached the end of the track. It doesn’t count the times I listened to one of the other versions instead, for a change (though I find the other versions jarring, because I’m so used to Ginsberg’s cadences in the first version). And it doesn’t count the times that I’ve opened one edition or another and stared at the pages, passing my eyes over words obscene and sublime, or perhaps sublimely obscene; the times I’ve typed those words out on an electric typewriter, or quoted them in conversation, or added them as epigrams at the start or finish of my essays as they happen to take on temporarily a significance that informs what I’m trying to get across.

Last night I was listening to Part I of “Howl” again, trying to fall asleep, as I do at least a few nights a week. I tune out a bit, usually, when I do this—sometimes I murmur along with my favorite parts, but usually I just let Ginsberg’s voice lull me. I tuned back in for this part:

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning and the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccupped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blonde & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,

This passage is preceded by a section about young political radicals, and alludes to their naïveté without condemning it; it is followed by a hymn to the heterosexual essence of Neal Cassady, Ginsberg’s great unrequited love. And in looking for details about the political movements or characters that made up the Beat Generation, I’ve never really paid much attention to that above passage. Despite its prurient nature, it never struck me as particularly interesting.

But all it takes is some conversance in stereotypes of gay culture (not to put a negative connotation on “stereotype”; it’s just what they are), and you realize how exciting it is that Ginsberg is including all these things. He puts a humorous, light-hearted, camp spin on being arrested in a police raid. He applies the same sense of joie de vivre to bikers and sailors, and to sex in parks and bathhouses—marred only by that sob in the “Turkish Bath.” And then, of course, the poem turns to the essentially pathetic (in the sense of pathos, though maybe I’m not using that word correctly) underbelly of this whole situation; it invokes loss and traitorousness and all that other stuff Ginsberg must be feeling as he goes on to sing to “N. C., secret hero of these poems.” This was 1956. Ginsberg hadn’t yet morphed into the Great Icon of Homosexuality he would become. His journals from both the period in which he was writing and the period he was writing about reek of that tortured self-psychoanalysis that characterizes how a lot of gay men in the ’40s and ’50s tried to make sense of their lives. But still. Still there is this sense of what fun, what larks, what silliness can be had if you giggle your way through the maneuverings of your tortured soul. And still he was not afraid—even in 1956—to share that bubbling of joy.

On the live recording I have, there’s a ripple of laughter in the background when Ginsberg, then in his mid-60s, solemnly intones lines like “scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,” and in the past when I heard that laughter I thought they were giggling because he said “semen.” I thought they were behaving the way most people do when a prurient subject is raised. But knowing what I know now, being conversant in some tropes, I’m not so sure of that. This time the laughter sounded entirely different: it sounded relieved, this outburst of held-in breath that is thrilled this sagacious, bearded man proposes to “scream with joy” when engaging in a bout of anal sex; that in 1975 (whence the recording dates), it is finally possible to publicly agree on delight in bikers and sailors. It’s almost as if they’re screaming with joy with him.

I read books where anonymous interviewees talk about holding papers over their faces in police raids of New York bars. I read accounts of gay life at mid-century written in the 1990s, where the participants are still afraid to reveal themselves. I watch old movies filled with references so coded they got through the Hollywood censors; I read the letters and diaries of famous figures, some of whom were closeted until they died and those letters and diaries were revealed. And I follow the news religiously and sometimes despair that America will ever change, that gay public figures will ever have any civil rights, much less be able to admit that they have sex lives like straight public figures do.

But 52 years ago, when he published “Howl,” Allen Ginsberg launched himself onto the national scene with an obscenity trial about what continued for the rest of his life, and long after, to be his most famous work. He stood in a witness box and defended his right to “scream with joy.” He read “Howl” again and again, and in my recording he reads for a group of students, decades before homosexuality was decriminalized in this country. And yet he asserted his right to “scream with joy” and the students laughed—not at him, as I’d once thought, but perhaps with him.

That, to this cynical blogger and proto-historian, is incredible. It’s been nearly three years now, my relationship with Ginsberg and with “Howl,” and I’m so glad that after all that time the tools that I gather, and the codes that I learn, continue to dig up more things inside the head and the life of that wonderful man.

Labo(u)r Day

I unfortunately haven’t been able to tear myself away from installing kitchen cabinets long enough to write a proper Labor Day essay, but it would be remiss of me not to observe the holiday of a movement (and its music!) so emotionally significant to me and my childhood and my intellectual development. So by way of soundtrack, let’s have my favorite song in the IWW’s “Little Red Songbook”:

Once you’ve taught yourself the chorus (it’s dead easy), I’ll leave you in the safe and brilliant hands of Chris Hayes, whose essay “In Search of Solidarity” is a must-read.

Labor Day often seems like just another federal holiday, as silly as Columbus Day or Flag Day. But if there is any holiday whose original purpose is worth contemplating on that day, it’s this one. Remember the thousands of men and women who have stood on picket lines, who have walked out of factories, who have sometimes died in the name of higher wages and better working conditions and fair treatment. To quote Woody Guthrie:

Oh you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union
I’m sticking to the union, I’m sticking to the union
Oh you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union
I’m sticking to the union till the day I die.

QOTD (2009-09-04)

I bet former UChicago dean of admissions Ted O’Neill thinks the culture of college rankings is stupid:

[Colleges] are all different: We all have our own strengths and our own cultures. Test scores tell us next to nothing about who a student is, how he/she thinks, what they care about…. We want to know how a student will behave around a seminar table at the University of Chicago.

I don’t know whether there’s any truth to the rumor that O’Neill resigned in protest at UChicago moving to the Common Application, but I do know that, when I applied in O’Neill’s last admissions season, the UChic application was my favorite one to complete. I also felt the most certain that the folks there weren’t judging me on the basis of my SAT scores or some artificial resume or my family history—they were assessing whether I would actually flourish at their school.

I’ve since had conversations with a number of people at Princeton that have convinced me that Princeton admissions cares about more than just test scores, too. But it certainly wasn’t something I believed at the time, and I wish other admissions deans who do follow the whole student approach could be as blatant as Ted O’Neill in breaking away from the rankings culture.

QOTD (2009-09-04)

And it’s a depressing one, folks. Steve Benen on right-wing lunacy:

Birthers, Deathers, Tenthers. Beck, Palin, Limbaugh. Bachmann, Inhofe, DeMint, King, and Broun. A scorched-earth campaign intended to tear the country apart, questioning the legitimacy of the president, the government, and the rule of law. It’s all very scary.

Josh Marshall recently noted, “It’s always important for us to remember what the last eight years have again taught us, which is that America has a very strong civic fabric, one that can withstand, absorb and conquer all manner of ugly behavior. It can take in stride a lot of angry rhetoric, townhall fisticuffs and more. But as this escalates we should continually be stepping back and thinking retrospectively from the vantage point of the future about where this all seems to be heading.”

[Time‘s Joe] Klein’s not the only one with a sinking feeling

The crazies have a political party, a cable news network, and a loud, activist base. They’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take their medications anymore.

As the weeks of August have gone by, I’ve gotten progressively more concerned as well. Our country has obviously survived many a period of hysteria before, but I keep thinking back to the anti-communist lunacy of the Cold War, and everything that happened in that period. Obviously, that particular hysteria dissipated when the USSR dissolved, but it seems as if that void has been filled by other ways to prey on the public’s fears—certainly, the role of “communist” as chief political slur didn’t end in 1989. In my role as a research assistant, I’ve been reading Congressional debates about deregulation from the mid-1970s, and the discourse wasn’t precisely sane, then. Has American political discourse ever been sane? What on earth is sane, anyway? And when do you just throw up your hands and move to Canada?