The Great Work Begins

Usually, when I read something 'shocking' from a century or more ago, it's hard to see how it could have shocked anyone -- think of Beethoven's 'dissonant' late quartets, or try to imagine how a man could have been excited by the sight of a woman's ankle when skirts trailed the ground. Occasionally something still works. Mrs Warren's Profession, for instance, still strains against male limits on women, and Bernard Shaw's work in general goes places where drama hesitates a century later. (I think this may be one reason some people try to dismiss his work. Yes, he was a very conscious dramatist, jerry-rigging his structures and effects as methodically as a carpenter, but even his lighter work often has a visceral undertow.)

Then there's a play like Henrik Ibsen's Little Eyolf, from 1894. (Beware: Here There Be Spoylers, though it's hard to believe that anyone could care about one of Ibsen's more obscure works after 114 years.) Eva LeGallienne, whose translation I read, commented in her introduction that the play was avant-garde in its day. I can see that, for reasons I'll try to explain, but I can also see how it plays Chicken with themes that avant-garde theatre would later glory in, and I wonder what Ibsen would have done with more freedom to pursue those themes.

Little Eyolf is the name of a crippled little boy, the son of a Man of Letters and his sensual, neglected wife. Eyolf was injured as an infant, and now limps around the scenery on a crutch like Tiny Tim (or perhaps Little Lord Fauntleroy, as he later makes an entrance in what seems to be a major Foofy Outfit). His father has just returned from a rest cure in the mountains, in hopes of recovering the strength to write his masterpiece On Responsibility. Also present is his father's younger half-sister Asta. The tense family reunion is disrupted by a visit by the old Rat Woman, a Pied Piper figure who enchants rats and other crawly things into the sea, where they drown. Allmers, the father, wants to bond with his son after neglecting him for his Great Work, to the fury of his wife Rita, who doesn't want to share Allmers even with their child.

Unsurprisingly, Eyolf in his Foofy Suit follows the Rat Woman into the icy fjord and drowns; only his crutch is recovered. As Allmers sits mourning with Asta, they reminisce how, as poor orphans, they had pretended that Asta was a boy named Eyolf, to the point that Asta wore her brother's hand-me-down clothes. We learn that Allmers had shared this memory with only one outsider: his wife Rita. Asta reveals that they are not really even half-siblings, for Allmers's father, who had married Asta's mother, was not in fact her father. It seems that Allmers and Asta may run off together, since their love will no longer be incestuous, but Ibsen stops just short of this scandalous suggestion. I was half-hoping that Asta would turn out to be really a boy after all, and that they would still run away together, but of course that doesn't happen either. Then there is a great confrontation between Allmers and his wife, who plan to separate rather than live together with the ghost of their drowned son. Thus we learn another guilty secret:

ALLMERS (With sudden anger): You’re the one who’s guilty, Rita!
RITA (Rising): I!
ALLMERS: Yes, you! It was your fault that he became – what he was! It was your fault that he couldn’t save himself when he fell into the water!
RITA (As though warding off a blow): Alfred – I won’t have you lay the blame on me!
ALLMERS (More and more beside himself): But I do! You were to blame! It was due to your neglect; you left him lying on the table – unguarded, unprotected – a helpless infant!
RITA: He seemed perfectly safe; he was lying on the pillow fast asleep. And you’d promised to look after him.
ALLMERS: Yes, I had. (Lowers his voice.) But you came and lured me away from him; enticed me into going with you.
RITA (Looks at him defiantly): And you forgot the child, and everything else – why not admit it?
ALLMERS: (With suppressed rage): It’s true. (In a lower tone) I forgot him – in your arms!
RITA (Outraged): This is intolerable of you, Alfred!
ALLMERS (In a low voice, shaking his clenched fists in her face): So, you see, it was you who sent little Eyolf to his death.
RITA (Wildly) It was as much your fault as mine – if what you say is true!
ALLMERS: Yes – you have every right to accuse me. We were both guilty – both of us – Eyolf’s death was a kind of retribution, after all.
RITA: Retribution?
ALLMERS (With more self-control): It was a judgment on us both. We have been justly punished. I suppose that’s why we shrank from him while he was still alive; we were tormented by a secret shame – a cowardly sense of remorse. We couldn’t bear to see him dragging himself about on that – that thing –
RITA (In a whisper): The crutch.
ALLMERS: Yes. And what we call our grief, is nothing but the pangs of conscience, Rita. Nothing else.
RITA (Gazes at him helplessly) : We shall be driven to despair – driven into madness. There’s no possible way that we can ever make amends.

Yes -- Little Eyolf was crippled because his mother seduced his father, and they were married at the time! This is beyond kink; it seems more Theatre of the Ridiculous.

It didn't help that as I was reading the passage quoted above, I was also peeking from one corner of my eye at this satirical video from the Onion, which made the whole thing seem like a parody of 19th century Sturm und Drang -- despite Shaw's adulation of Ibsen, it felt like the sort of drama he mocked in his plays. In fact, it felt Wildean: one would need a heart of stone to read about Eyolf dragging himself around on that -- that thing -- without laughing. With incest, gender-bending, primal-scene trauma, and infanticide (Eyolf's death is the fulfilment of Rita's wish not to share Allmers with him, though she does nothing overt to bring it about) peeking out through the cracks, Little Eyolf almost bursts the limits of melodrama into camp, at least from the perspective of a century later.

Queen of the Darned

Another book review for Gay Community News, published January 15-21, 1989. Boy, was I ever wrong! I still enjoy and even respect Rice's work up to Queen of the Damned, but in retrospect I know I rated it too highly. After Queen of the Damned she went on a long slide down the slippery slope to self-parody: the Mayfair Witches books, the later Chronicles of the Vampires (reaching their nadir with Lestat's Excellent Adventure aka The Tale of the Body Thief, and Lestat's Bogus Journey aka Memnoch the Devil), and then the books which brought the two series together. Now, having returned to Roman Catholicism, she's writing the Chronicles of another undead figure, whose followers will drink his blood and eat his body. (I confess I haven't read either Christ the Lord book; but then I couldn't bring myself to read any of her books after Merrick.)

I don't know what happened. At the time Queen appeared she gave an interview in which she said that it was the first book she'd brought to publication without an editor's interference -- and it shows. The books which followed presumably suffered from the same freedom. Upheavals in her private life, even the religious conversion, can't really explain it: Dostoevsky, for example, was a religious nut with vile politics, who suffered from epilepsy and compulsive gambling, but he wrote brilliant fiction and continued growing as a writer up right up to his death. Rice herself apparently didn't renounce the writing of vampire fiction until years after her conversion anyway.

Nor can I explain it simply as changes in myself: I was not an adolescent but in my thirties when I began reading Rice. It doesn't matter. I post this review, gushing and a bit embarrassing as I now find it, in tribute to, and in memory of, the Anne Rice who was.

The Queen of the Damned
by Anne Rice
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988
448 pp.
$18.95 clothbound

If you'd already read Anne Rice's previous vampire novels, Interview with the Vampire (1976) and The Vampire Lestat (1985), then you very likely were waiting for The Queen of the Damned; you probably, in fact, already have finished reading the copy you bought as soon as it appeared in the stores. But suppose you haven't. Suppose that genre fiction in general bores you, or that horror fiction isn't a genre you like. (This last option is mine, by the way: Rice's vampire novels are almost the only horror fiction I've read. I've never read anything by Stephen King, for instance.) Why should you read Interview, Lestat, The Queen of the Damned?

It's an odd paradox that fantasy fiction, including its ancient grandparent Mythology, always ends up being about reality: imaginary worlds, no matter how outré, are our world. Not all fantasies are interesting or revealing, of course. Hardcore genre fiction is as rigidly conventional as hardcore porn, intended to push certain buttons in its readers without stirring them uncomfortably; fast-food fiction, if you will -- predictable, interchangeable, disposable. And it's nothing new. From today's heroic-fantasy tetralogies through 19th-century dime novels to medieval lives of the saints, formula fiction has suckled many a reader. But fantasies can be ironic or critical comments on the world. Consider Orwell's 1984, which was not only about the future but the present of post-WWII Britain, with its bombed-out ruins, rationing, and Cold War politics.

Similarly, a humanoid monster is not just an imaginary bogeyman but a distorted portrayal of humanity. As Walter Kendrick pointed out in a 1986 Village Voice essay-review which introduced me to The Vampire Lestat, vampires since Bram Stoker's Dracula have represented human sexuality and sensuality. If those embodiments have been monstrous, that tells us something about our attitudes towards such things. But, Kendrick noted, Stoker's Victorian vampires reflected Victorian fears, desires, and beliefs; Rice has not only updated her vampires but given them a six-thousand year-history -- a mirror-history of the world which offers not escape from the human dilemma but confrontation with it:

“There is so much talk in this century of the nobility of the savage,” [Marius] explained, "of the corrupting force of civilization, of the way we must find our way back to the innocence that has been lost. Well, it's all nonsense really. Truly primitive people can be monstrous in their assumptions and expectations. They cannot conceive of innocence. Neither can children. But civilization has at last created men who behave innocently. For the first time they look about themselves and say, ‘What the hell is all this!’... To be godless is probably the first step to innocence,” he said, “to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost.”

“So by innocence [said Lestat] you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions.”

“An absence of need for illusions,” he said. “A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes.”

Anne Rice has created a body of work which marks her as one of the most imaginative, intelligent, and skillful writers currently working. While she has produced in several areas, all her work seems to share a fascination with the implications of the forbidden. Her two historical novels are good examples. The first, The Feast of All Saints, dealt with the gens de couleur, people of mixed race who lived in and around New Orleans before the Civil War. (New Orleans is plainly a place of power for Rice. Most of her novels are set there, in whole or in part.) The gens de couleur occupied an uneasy place in antebellum society, for obvious reasons; apparently numerous wealthy white men kept colored mistresses by whom they had children. Even nowadays interracial relationships and people of mixed race are problematic; but to this melange Rice added male homosexuality and a romance between a teenaged boy and a woman old enough to be his mother. In Cry to Heaven she went further: the hero is an 18th-century Italian castrato, a star in the opera of the day, with lovers of both sexes. Rice also pursued themes of forbidden sexuality in novels she wrote under pseudonyms but has since acknowledged. As Anne Rampling, she wrote Exit to Eden, about an s/m club/resort on a Caribbean island, and Belinda, about the love between a middle-aged author of children's books and a sixteen-year-old girl. As A. N. Roquelaure she wrote a trilogy of s/m literary pornography based on the tale of Sleeping Beauty. As in Exit to Eden, the sexuality is polymorphous-perverse, everyone has everyone else; but the fairy-tale ambience frees her to create the most picturesque and symbolically potent excesses. And alongside the baroque imagination there clearly stands guard a first-rate intelligence, aware of the politico-sexual issues involved and taking them into account. This is of no small importance, for reading is in certain ways like sex. You have to be able to trust a person whom you're allowing to lead you into soft and vulnerable parts of yourself: to turn you on sexually, to scare you, to make you complicit in acts of terrible violence, to test your limits. Even when you've provisionally and temporarily surrendered your will to another's, you are still responsible. Anne Rice is one of the few writers I trust to play literary top to my literary bottom, even on topics such as s/m which disturb me personally a great deal.

One thing which, in my limited experience with the genre, sets Anne Rice's vampires apart is that she tells their stories from their viewpoint, sympathetically, forcing the reader to identify with the vampires rather than with their victims. (The only exception I know of is Suzy McKee Charnas's The Vampire Tapestry.) These vampires are of course alienated, in a way which some people imagine was invented by 20th century philosophers though in fact it's as old as humanity: they are unnatural creatures in the natural world, puzzled about their origin and purpose. Lestat, who figures importantly in all three books, is my favorite. A man of talent and intelligence raised in the boondocks of 18th-century France, longing to study in Paris; a man who loves other men; a man who after his transformation by the Dark Gift is different from most other people in ways so subtle that he can move among the majority almost invisibly, subsisting parasitically on them, savoring his sameness and his difference as he prowls the night – clearly Lestat is among other things a metaphor for modern urban gay men. But he is not content merely to exist. Lestat will not be satisfied till he has pursued the history and origins of his kind into a haze of legend. After a half-century's sleep buried in the soil of New Orleans, Lestat rose in The Vampire Lestat to discover the 1980s (in a tour de force which you ought to read if you read nothing else by Rice), and went public by becoming a rock star. I envy his power, his knowledge, his immortality, and I would gladly accept the Dark Gift myself (just in case Lestat happens to be reading this).

The Vampire Lestat ended on a cliffhanger, and if you haven't read it already, do so before beginning The Queen of the Damned. Determined to punish Lestat for endangering them by his revelations, hundreds of other vampires had converged on his first concert, only to be mysteriously snuffed out. (Literally, in bursts of flame.) Lestat, his mother Gabrielle, and his friend Louis (the subject of Interview) had escaped into the night not knowing why or for how long they had been spared. The Queen of the Damned picks up the story from there. We learn what had been suggested at the end of Lestat, that Akasha, the ancient Egyptian queen who had been the first vampire, had awakened from her long sleep to rescue Lestat from his would-be assailants; also, as the jacket blurb asserts, that Akasha has plans that threaten the future of at least half of the human race. Along the way we meet several other vampires, some ancient and some young, like a teenaged punk/biker from Detroit called Baby Jenks. There are scenes of real horror, such as a human-sacrifice rite in the Himalayas led by a vampire playing the role of Kali, and a Mary Daly-esque fantasy of women slaughtering all the men in a Third-World city, commanded by Akasha playing The Great Mother. There is the Story of the Twins, two mysterious red-haired women who hold the secret of the origin of the vampires, a story which builds on and demolishes much current neo-matriarchalist mythology. There's not much to tell about the plot; the wicked end well, and the even-more-wicked end badly. What carries the book is Rice's amazing imagination, her ability to bring to life worlds long-dead or never-born, and the meaning she finds in her story. Paradoxically again, this story of the supernatural decrees the irrelevance of the supernatural; it's a tale of monstrous immorality which climaxes in a debate to the death about true morality; out of the fulfillment of superstition and the birth of religion, Rice spins the death of all gods and an end to superstition; and though she writes mostly of the distant past, she refuses adamantly to romanticize it:

“Behold, earthshaking inventions which are useless or obsolete within the same century -- the steamboat, the railroads; yet do you know what these meant after six thousand years of galley slaves and men on horseback? And now the dance hall girl buys a chemical to kill the seed of her lovers, and lives to be seventy-five in a room full of gadgets which cool the air and veritably eat the dust. And yet for all the costume movies and the paperback history thrown at you in every drugstore, the public has no accurate memory of anything; every social problem is observed in relation to 'norms' which in fact never existed, people fancy themselves deprived of luxuries and peace and quiet which in fact were never common to any people anywhere at all.”

“But the Venice of your time, tell me...”

“What? That it was dirty? That it was beautiful? That people went about in rags with rotting teeth and stinking breath and laughed at public executions? You want to know the key difference? There is a horrifying loneliness at work in this time. No, listen to me. We lived six and seven to a room in those days, when I was still among the living. The city streets were seas of humanity; and now in these high buildings dim-witted souls hover in luxurious privacy, gazing through the television window at a faraway world of kissing and touching...” [The Queen of the Damned, 83].

The Queen of the Damned is, I confess, about twice as long as it needs to be, and might better have been incorporated into The Vampire Lestat, whose story it essentially completes. (Personally, though, I couldn't put it down and would have been happy if it had been even longer.) The Story of the Twins is partially repeated several times, like the story of Snowden in Catch-22, which some readers may find tedious rather than ominous. The long discussions about morality and meaning, which I found enthralling, may strike others as merely windy. This is a risk taken by any ambitious author. Rice promises more Vampire Chronicles, and already in Lestat has given us a major novel which transcends its genre to become literature. The Queen of the Damned is not quite up to that, but it's still remarkable, and supports my belief that Anne Rice may prove to be one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century.

The Love Boat

It has been entertaining, I admit, the spectacle of right-wing bigots tumbling out of the closet like the finale of the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera.

Every time I started to write this post, another case would appear. But not all the hypocrites are on the religious right pretending to be straight; some are openly gay. This has a lot to do with bigotry in the larger society, of course, but so do they all. The late Randy Shilts, for example, hid the fact that he was HIV-positive for a long time after And the Band Played On, his book on the AIDS epidemic, was published. As Michael Bronski wrote,

while no one is mandated to announce their health status it would have been interesting to see how the straight media would have responded to Shilts the “objective” reporter as an out, openly HIV positive gay man. For among all of the things that AIDS has contributed to our thinking and culture it has made the link between the more palatable idea off a “gay identity” and the less palatable reality of “gay sexual behavior” inevitable; simply put: you have to get fucked to get AIDS. And would Shilts's public position as a Person With AIDS have made the mainstream press see And The Band Played On as a document of special pleading--a label that is quickly attached to most all "non-objective" minority writing from Kate Millett to Larry Kramer to Lani Guinier.

The fault here lies not so much with Randy Shilts, but with the context and parameters set up from the mainstream press and media about what is acceptable. Randy Shilts understood that he lived in a world that would not take him seriously as a journalist if he was too partial to the gay press or showed too many signs of “non-objective” writing.

For, despite Shilts’s public criticism of gay male bathhouses (he eventually advocated closing them),

During the 1970s Shilts – like most all gay men in San Francisco – was an avid bathhouse attendee, both in the more mainstream baths as well as the more s/m oriented South of Market establishments. This is not news, it is common knowledge and up until the publication of And the Band Played On. Shilts was always forthcoming about the details and the vagaries of his sexual history. The story of how he was accidentally locked outside of South of Market's Handball Express (an establishment that specialized in fist-fucking), naked and handcuffed, was told by everyone – including Shilts himself. What would have happened in the critical reception of And the Band Played On if Shilts had been more forthcoming about his own involvement with the institutions about which he spoke. Would straight critics and media folk have treated him with the same respect he received by not disclosing his relationship to his material? I suspect not.

Stephen O. Murray reports that the offensive to close San Francisco bathhouses in 1984

was undertaken by Larry Littlejohn, a gay deputy sheriff later shown to be engaged in competition with bathhouses – he was dismissed from his job in 1987 after being charged with pandering for young male prostitutes. Littlejohn did not attempt to organize a gay community response, such as demonstrating in front of the establishments or talking to patrons inside or outside them. After meeting with Shilts and Leonard Matlovich, Littlejohn’s first resort was to seek government intervention [American Gay, Chicago 1996, 112f].

That was a long time ago, I admit. But since then we’ve had cases like that of Michelangelo Signorile, who blamed the gay community for his inability to use a condom with a hot man in the privacy of his hotel room, and we’ve had scourges of gay male ‘irresponsibility’ like Larry Kramer who seroconverted after they’d been demanding that everyone else stop having sex altogether. (Kramer was also a bathhouse customer, which wasn’t a secret – he portrayed his alter ego in The Normal Heart prowling the tubs and rejecting men who weren’t young and twinky enough.)

One of the Promiscuous Reader’s Laws is that if gay people want to have a “respectable” public life, we have to have a “scandalous” private life, and vice versa. I codified this in the late 1970s. It explains why so many respectable heterosexually married men get caught with male hustlers or prowling tearooms… Oh, dear; that bit of slang may be out of date by now. It’s camp argot for public restrooms where men go for sex with other men. One of the traditional features of gay male life has been the ironic juxtaposition of our grubby reality with our affectation of elegant terminology – compare “coming out,” taken from high society debutante parties, let alone “queen” itself. In the old days, say before the late 1970s, gay bars tended to be murky, grotty sub rosa places; nowadays it’s possible to have commercial gay establishments that are clean, well-lit, and appealing.

The flip side of this Law is that, in order to have a “respectable” private life (partnered, ostensibly monogamous), a gay person must have a “scandalous” public life (admittedly, openly, unabashedly, militantly flaunting gay -- one of Those!) But things are changing here too, as Homo-Americans fight to become respectable on both fronts at once. As far back as 1963, Erving Goffman wrote in Stigma (page 7, note 10):

Interestingly, a convention seems to have emerged in popular life-story writing where a questionable person proves his claim to normalcy by citing his acquisition of a spouse and children, and, oddly, by attesting to his spending Christmas and Thanksgiving with them.

Goffman was writing about various sorts of stigma, including physical handicap, but when I first read Stigma a couple of years ago, I was struck by the parallel to my Homo-American contemporaries. In the 1980s, some theatre people made a splash coming out at the Tony Awards by thanking their lovers in their acceptance speeches. When celebrities come out nowadays, they nearly always seem to have their Partner, and often a child, standing nearby for the announcement, making with The Gaze like Nancy Reagan beaming at Ron.

I’m wary of the grand claims and promises being made for marriage by gay people now. One assumption is that legal same-sex marriage will “civilize” gay men by turning us monogamous, though marriage has never had that effect on straight men. So what will it do for lesbians, since they’re presumed civilized already? (And if they aren’t, the male proponents of marriage don’t want to hear it.) Most of this talk ignores the differential roles men and women play in heterosexual marriage, where the husband’s happiness is bought at the price of the wife’s. More recent research finds that married women are happier than they used to be, because they’re more likely to work outside the home – i.e., to be more independent of their husbands. But they still have to work the Second Shift of housework on top of their paid jobs. I’m curious to see how this symbiosis (if not parasitism) will work itself out in same-sex marriages, especially between men.

E. J. Graff, author of What Is Marriage For?, sent me a nice e-mail arguing that I’d misinterpreted her remark (which I construed as a complaint) that “anyone can see on TV some scantily leather-clad man gyrating drunkenly on an urban Pride float.” I can see where she’s coming from, though after checking it in context again I don’t agree. Graff was writing about the Protestant rebellion against Roman Catholic clerical celibacy, and quoted the reformer Martin Luther’s claims about thousands of dead baby cadavers (aborted or killed after birth) found in convents. Here's the context. Graff commented:

Of course these are nonsense charges, equivalent to the medieval cry that Jews killed Christian babies for their Passover feast – or, to use similarly ludicrous charges from contemporary anti-gay pamphlets, that most gay men eat feces and prey on young boys, or that lesbians die by age forty-five. Luther could get away with such exaggerations because everyone knew some local sexual irregularity (or, to be contemporary again, because anyone can see on TV some scantily leather-clad man gyrating drunkenly on an urban Pride float) – and so listeners could imagine that, far away, things could be so much, much worse.

(Bold type is mine.) Leaving other issues aside, it seems to me that Graff agrees that scantily-clad leathermen are not a Good Thing – unlike, say, scantily-clad female cheerleaders shaking their buns and bazooms before drunken (but presumed-heterosexual) football crowds. She also has a slight fixation on drunken queers, apparently assuming that married people never get drunk (or for that matter, gyrate drunkenly on urban [as opposed to rural?] Pride floats). I was sure there was another passage in What Is Marriage For? complaining about Pride parades, and I finally found it: this cute bit from page 144, boldface mine:

And yet the very existence of same-sex marriage would send a message to young people – a good one. It would offer visible evidence that there’s nothing wrong with being gay, that “sodomy” is a sin only in the eyes of the beholder. Some commentators would much rather see outré urban queers throwing drunken kisses off bar floats than have two nice married girls move in next door, with or without papoose, demonstrating to every neighborhood kid that a good marriage is defined from the inside out.

Remember the quotation from Goffman, above. Graff takes for granted that you have be outré, drunk and urban to throw kisses from a parade float (she’s evidently never seen a small-town Fourth of July parade), that a “papoose” defines a good marriage, that everyone will see “two nice married girls” as positive (which is why conservative Christians support same-sex marriage, right?), that those “two nice married girls” couldn’t possibly drive into the city from the suburbs on Pride Day to ride bare-breasted on their motorcycle, with “papoose” in tow. I’m not sure which “commentators” Graff has in mind here, but her polemic is built on the assumption that you have to choose between drunken Pride parades and sober couplehood, between city and suburbs, between niceness and naughtiness. She may not actually believe that, but it’s what she wrote. Aside from being false, it’s the same Manichean divide that drives a lot of anti-gay propaganda: either be decent Christian father-ruled married heterosexuals, or degraded feces-eating homosexuals blowing kisses from Pride floats. (Those interested might check out page 188 of What Is Marriage For?, where Graff grinds the same ax to misinterpret Michael Warner and Edmund White.) In the real world it’s not either/or: you’re going to see both the party animals in the Pride Parades, and the suburban same-sex couples, and sometimes they'll be the same people. Legal same-sex marriage won’t silence bigots, who will simply not see what they don’t want to see.

For a variety of reasons, I have increasing doubts about legal same-sex (and mixed-sex) marriage. Graff, like so many advocates, thinks that marriage is basically a good thing, born of people’s “more common human desire to pair off, for two people to dedicate themselves to one another, to build a shared life and a home – and have it recognized by those around them, whether parents or governments” (page 190). If there are any problems with those desires, they can be reformed by, um, getting married; if your marriage doesn’t work out, it’s your fault, not anything wrong with marriage itself. Graff turns up her nose at what she terms the arrogance of Utopians, but it’s hard to get more Utopian than this. It is fine with me if people pair off to, in Graff’s terms, dedicate themselves to sharing sex only with each other; we all have our kinks, and I’m very tolerant of diversity. But outside Utopia and romance tales, that desire doesn’t always (or even often) last for very long. I’m not sure that the State should be invited to enforce it, nor that the other legal privileges that go with civil marriage – which I agree are important – such as inheritance, health care, and the like, should be reserved for couples. Everyone should have health insurance and Social Security, whether they’re married or not, and children should have enough to eat, health care, and good educations, regardless of the marital (or class) status of their parents. (Hm. What if a nice single lesbian moves in next door to you with a “papoose” in her arms? Would Graff and her wife rally the neighborhood association to run the cheap slut out of town?)

If, or rather when same-sex civil marriage is implemented, it will be only a matter of time before we start seeing news stories about the Baptist minister, father of two, with a loving husband of twenty years at home, caught making sexual advances to an undercover police officer in a park tearoom. (Better yet, imagine him caught picking up a female streetwalker, and defending himself with the claim that he thought she was really a male transvestite.) Or about the nice Episcopalian couple in the suburbs – he’s a lawyer, he’s an accountant – whose child keeps coming to school with mysterious bruises, or worse. Or the nice Jewish lesbian couple – just celebrated their tenth anniversary -- one of whom turns up at the Emergency Room with a broken arm from “falling down the stairs” of their ranch home. How about the not-so-nice trailer-trash butch-femme couple who scream drunkenly at each other every night on the other side of your thin apartment wall – but they’re married, bless ‘em! (Graff’s vision of wedded bliss is not only clean-and-sober, it has a decided middle-class bias.) Being single won’t solve all your problems – I know! – but marriage isn’t Utopia either.

'Nuff Said

I'm not endorsing Hillary Clinton, by the way, just endorsing Fey's neat slapdown of middle-of-the-road sexism. Katha Pollitt, take note.

If You Will Be My Friend, Then I Might Give It To You: Chronicles Of The Backlash, Episode The Fourth

I found this entertaining clip at Who Is IOZ?, who got it from Crooks & Liars, who got it from Pam’s House Blend, who got it from something called the Victory Fund – their Web address is in the clip, if you care. (That trail of transmission reminds me of Tom Lehrer’s song “I Got It From Agnes.”) Apparently the speaker, Oklahoma State Representative Sally Kern, thought she was speaking to “only” fifty people, as if she were a primitive Christian preaching in the catacombs, but she was being recorded.

Now, on the one hand, I certainly agree that this woman should be squashed, politically speaking, like a bug. Since her remarks were publicized, she has confirmed that they represent her beliefs, and she stands by them. (Which, I must say, is refreshing, considering the way most politicians, and most Americans for that matter, backtrack immediately when they get caught saying something outrageous: My remarks have been misinterpreted and taken out of context by malicious people trying to make trouble! I certainly never meant to offend anyone by what I said, and I never said it, but it’s true anyhow, okay?) The same article informs us that “Karen Parsons is a local activist. She said the majority of Oklahoman's [sic] don't care about sexual orientation.” Well, here’s a great opportunity to prove that; but since Kern has apparently been saying similar things publicly for a long time, and is still in the State House, she may be more typical than Karen Parsons likes to believe. (We have a similar clown in the Indiana Legislature, Woody “He Listens. He Cares. He Takes Action” Burton.)

But on the other hand, there are responses like this one by one Jim Burroway: “Have you ever wonder [sic] what anti-gay extremists say to each other behind closed doors?” Well, no, not really, thanks very much. I already had a pretty good idea of what they say to each other behind closed doors, and the recording of Kern confirms it. What I wonder, often, is which planet people like Jim Burroway live on, so that beliefs like Kern’s are some kind of news to them.

Of course, they aren’t really news to him, or to anyone else. He’s just being officially shocked! shocked! to learn that people can believe and say such things. And I can’t help thinking that such fake indignation is not a good idea, just because fake anything is not a good idea. You can’t really attack others for dishonesty when you adopt a public stance of dishonesty yourself – oh hell, I know you can, it’s the American Way, but that’s the problem, isn’t it? These folks with their prim little signs in the video, and Jim Burroway, and all the other Captain Renaults who are pretending to be surprised that we live among bigots, are really just the mirror image of Sally Kern, who is shocked! shocked! to find that, in 2008, there are queers who have been elected to city councils and other government offices in the United States. (Darlin’, we don’t need to “infiltrate” – we run openly as homosexuals, and can still be elected, even in the Heartland, which is why Karen Parsons may be right.) They got their high dudgeon from Sally, and she got it from… And you ought to hear the things that those nice, respectable Homo-Americans say when they think no one’s listening.

In 1994 the lesbian writer E. J. Graff wrote tolerantly about leathermen in Pride parades for The Progressive: “But the sexual display seen at Lesbian and Gay Pride can be found in any American community, albeit less conveniently collected in one parade.” But by time her book What Is Marriage For? was published by Beacon in 1999, her view had hardened, and she complained more than once that “anyone can see on TV some scantily leather-clad man gyrating drunkenly” (page 65 that time) on a parade float, giving decent gay people a bad image.

In 2002 gay evangelicals Jeff Miner and John Tyler Connoley produced their own book, The Children Are Free: Reexamining the Biblical Evidence on Same-Sex Relationships under the imprint of the Jesus Metropolitan Community Church in Indianapolis. These boys, being hard-core Christians, stressed to their readers how different they and their congregation were from “idolaters, people who hated God, and pursued their own desire for new and greater sexual thrills” (p. 16). Here they were reacting to a Biblical passage in a typically fundamentalist way: Paul’s condemnation must refer to some actual wicked people instead of caricaturing outsiders, but modern gay Christians are nothing like that. Again,

We’re not talking about the common stereotype of a radical fairy, riding half-naked on the back of a float in some Gay Pride parade, looking for his next sexual conquest. We’re talking about ordinary human beings wanting into loving relationships with the blessing of God – for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, ‘til death do them part [68].

This is real Christian love; by their own account, it should have been the despised and rejected half-naked radical fairy that Jesus came to save, not the respectable Pharisees who wrote this book. To see the humanity of the unrespectable is apparently beyond Miner and Connoley.

I think it goes some way to illustrate why so many gay people react as they do to people like Sally Kern: she’s talking about someone else, not them! But they are exactly the people she and her ilk are talking about. The decent gay people apparently have no idea how to deal with such bigots. It’s important to remember that the gay movement which made it possible for them to come out in the first place was the work of eccentrics, loners, weirdos, half-naked radical fairies, and diesel dykes, oh my! Later the “decent” folk tried to wrest away control of the wheel, on the assumption that they knew better how to drive the movement; they’ve shown abundantly that they don’t -- unless running around in panicky circles is the way to run a movement.

Para Mis Amigos Mexicanos - Dos Monedas En Inglés

One of my Mexican friends asked me to find this song, a favorite of his by the accordionist Ramon Ayala, just before he went back home. We'd been drinking together, and listening to it quickly brought him to tears. My Spanish is adequate but slow, but I gathered from what he said that it reminded him of some experiences from his own childhood (I hope not nearly as bad). We played the video over and over, and as he sobbed beside me, I began making out what the lyrics meant. It took me a while to grasp just how morbid the song is, given the sprightly waltz tune and the chittering accordion. (And, in the live version we were watching, the audience singing lustily along with Ramon Ayala.) It goes beyond American country music, to Victorian tales of starving children. Later I found that other Mexican friends knew and adored "Dos Monedas" too.

I'd been thinking about translating the song into English, to help me learn to sing the Spanish. (If I ever get my guitar fixed, I'll learn it.) But then I found the video embedded above, which wasn't there (gracias a Dios) when my friend and I were looking for the song online last year. Whoever put it together found the most powerful photographs to illustrate the lyrics, which I finally grasped. Yes, it's sentimental, and its religiosity makes me gag (couldn't God have punished the father without killing the boy? and why punish him, when omnipotence could just as easily heal him?) but it's also real, and I wept as I was translating it -- not for the people in the song so much as for the real children who suffer in every country, including my own, while their gods ignore their misery.

(By the way, I'm creeped out by the callousness of middle-class atheists who fume about people who go to faith-healers. The reason why poor people pray to their gods for miracles is that they can't afford doctors. An older woman I used to work with showed me how her arm was crooked: she'd broken it as a girl, during the Great Depression, and her parents were too poor to do anything but set it themselves and hope for the best. They probably prayed too, but it wasn't religiosity that kept the doctor away. But I digress -- or do I?)

The Spanish lyrics are easy enough to find online, though I found while working on this that they're not always reliable: I worked with two rather different versions, and then found that both of them sometimes disagreed with what Ayala was singing. I've tried to keep the translation as literal as I could -- it's not a singing version -- and to convey some of the Dickensian floridity of the original.

Dos Monedas / Two Pennies

I’ve got the worst luck in the world
And the fault belongs to this vice
The wife that I had left me
Now I also lose my son
He never knew I was a father
Because I was always drunk
He begged for pennies in the street
So I could keep on drinking

One night it was raining, near winter
The poor boy showed up where I was
And he told me Forgive me daddy
Today nobody gave me nothing
I’m hungry and I’m really cold too
Please today don’t say nothing to me

But I was so blind with rage
I beat him almost to death
And I told him, you go back to the street
I won’t put up with this any longer
Now you have no home nor father
If you don’t bring me nothing for drinking

So the boy left shivering with cold
And crying after what I said to him
While I, stupefied, in the house
God knows how much I cursed him

The alcohol and sleep overtook me
I got up just before dawn
When I opened the door of the house
I didn’t believe what I saw

There was the son I’d thrown out
Dead from the hunger and cold
In his hand I found two pennies
He’d brought me to buy more wine
And I too drunk to hear him knocking

So he died from my inattention
From drunkenness I lost my son
And my wife I adored so much
So now I plead with all fathers
Never do such harm to your child
Maybe God sent me this punishment
To drive me from the path of vice

In Like A Lion

I'm working on some more longish postings, which are still unfinished. But today it began snowing fairly heavily, enough to close the schools early and cancel evening flights at Indianapolis airport. Since I had no pressing responsibilities, I enjoyed looking at it and walking through it. So I took my camera out tonight to record the way things look.