The Decline of the West

So all my liberal friends are slobbering over Michelle Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention.  I didn't watch it (my TV doesn't receive digital signals, and I don't have cable or satellite), so I don't know.  But who cares?  She's not running for office.  I also don't trust their judgment, since most of these people have also rhapsodized over what a great speaker Barack is, and I know that he isn't. Besides, they are all team players.  Michelle gave a better speech than Ann Romney because she's on Our Team.

Aside from that, they've been speculating gleefully that Betty White would perform at the DNC, to show Clint Eastwood how it's done.  So many people have been dwelling on the fantasy that they seemed to have begun to believe it was really going to happen.  White is a charming, funny lady, but I can see no reason why she should give a major speech at a national political convention.  Who'd write it, I wonder?  She wouldn't be allowed on the podium with a speech that hadn't been vetted.  Maybe the same people from Comedy Central who contributed jokes to the President's speech threatening the Jonas Brothers with death by predator drone.

I've noticed that the Obama cultists who spammed their feeds last week with jokes about the Republicans' convention center ("You Didn't Build That" -- it was built largely with public funds) have been silent about the site of the Democratic National Convention: the Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, North Carolina.  As Amy Goodman reported today,

... earlier this summer, Democrats organizing the party’s convention stopped calling the venue Bank of America Stadium, referring to the site instead as Panthers Stadium, even though Bank of America purchased the sponsorship rights in 2004. The move appeared to mark an effort by the Democratic National Committee to distance itself from symbols of the Wall Street bailout like Bank of America after reneging on a pledge to stage the convention without corporate donors.

Not only that, Goodman mentioned

 ... the nation's largest utility, Duke Energy, and its role in bringing the Democratic National Convention to Charlotte, North Carolina, where we’re broadcasting from. The company’s chief executive, James Rogers, held fundraisers, donated his company’s office space, even guaranteed a $10 million loan to the convention committee.

So of course my Democratic friends are kvelling about Michelle and Betty.  But it could be worse.

On the other side, my Right Wing Acquaintance Number One was delighted by a Forbes article which hopefully announced "New York Times Proves Clint Eastwood Correct -- Obama Is Lousy CEO."  "That rings true to me," RWA1 commented.  The Forbes staff writer, shaking his head in disbelief, declared "A Sunday New York Times front page story — New York Times! — might have killed President Obama’s re-election hopes." He sums up:

Imagine, for a minute, that you are on the board of directors of a company. You have a CEO who is not meeting his numbers and who is suffering a declining popularity with his customers. You want to help this CEO recover, but then you learn he doesn’t want your help. He is smarter than you and eager to tell you this. Confidence or misplaced arrogance? You’re not sure at first. If the company was performing well, you’d ignore it. But the company is performing poorly, so you can’t.

With some digging, you learn, to your horror, that the troubled CEO spends a lot of time on — what the hell? — bowling? Golf? Three point shots? While the company is going south?

What do you do? You fire that CEO. Clint Eastwood was right. You let the guy go.

The President of the United States isn't a corporate CEO; a government isn't a company; voters aren't customers.  And I'd like to know who the writer thinks "you" are.  From a corporate point of view, Obama has done very well: the stock market is booming, and corporate profits are at record highs; he's also still quite popular with his "customers" -- certainly more popular than George W. Bush was by the end of his second term.  Obama has also sheltered the corporate sector from accountability for the crimes and mismanagement that nearly destroyed the US economy in 2008.  And while RWA1 may wish that Bush hadn't bailed out the banks (with Obama's and McCain's collusion), or Obama the auto companies, I doubt the corporatists agree with him.  I hold no brief for Obama, as readers of this blog will know, but it's also worth pointing out that a major faction in upper management (the GOP in Congress) did its best to sabotage him from the day he took office.  (I've also been trying to remember when Republicans like RWA1 were bothered by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush's excessive fondness for vacations.)  A CEO like Obama wouldn't be dismissed, but even if he were, he could still count on a generous golden parachute of stock options and severance pay.

So that's the state of political discourse in America these days.  We're doomed.

True Religion

I do hope this is a real billboard, and not Photoshopped.

Radical Enough for You?

After I wrote my post on Vito Russo, it occurred to me it would be a good idea to check exactly what he wrote about the film of My Brilliant Career.  Here it is, from the revised (1987) edition of The Celluloid Closet:

... it is historically true that celebrated figures who were lesbian or gay have invariably been either portrayed as heterosexual on the screen or neutered sufficiently to shift the focus away from the importance of their sexuality to their lives.

This hasn't changed.  Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career (1979) is based on a novel by celebrated Australian writer Miles Franklin.  In the film, Sybylla Melvin (Judy Davis) is pictured as a strong-willed woman who refuses twice to marry a gentle, handsome man (Sam Neill) because she is committed to her work.  Most critics commented on the implausibility of her choice and the lack of sufficient motivation for it.  "Perhaps director Armstrong sees something in Sam Neill's Harry Beecham that would doom this marriage from the start," wrote critic David Chute, "but she hasn't conveyed it."

It was not "something" in Sam Neill's character but in the character of the heroine as well as from the novel on which it was based.  In an exhaustively researched piece by Michael Bronski called "The Story Behind the Movie," which appeared in Gay Community News in 1980, it is revealed that, in fact, the real Miles Franklin spent most of her life in relationships with women.  It is Franklin's own discretion that kept the truth from her adoring public during her lifetime, but it is Armstrong's disinterest in exploring the real woman that perpetuates the deception for filmgoers.  Feminism, yes.  Potential lesbianism, no [274-5].

My obvious next step was to have a look at Michael Bronski's "exhaustively researched piece."  The university library has online access to most of Gay Community News's run, and I found "The Story Behind the Movie" easily.  It doesn't say much more than Russo's summary, because it's not really exhaustively researched at all.  In March 1980, when the article appeared, My Brilliant Career was not available in the US, though St. Martin's Press issued it here later that same year.  Bronski refers to only one book on Franklin's life and work, a Twayne series volume by Marjorie Barnard published in 1967.  Since then a lot more material has appeared, including letters and papers and a huge biography by Jill Roe, Her Brilliant Career (Belknap Press, 2009) that I haven't read, and much of Franklin's other work is in print in the US.

This meant that Bronski didn't read the novel on which the film was based; he presumably relied on a summary in Barnard's book.  That's not exactly "exhaustive," but it's also not his fault.  He also admits that he's reading between the lines of Franklin's life, though she "herself was very private about" her personal affairs: but it is true that Franklin never married and had numerous important friendships with women, and that her later works, as he says (again presumably relying on Barnard), "are filled with strong friendships between women."  In Franklin's 1933 murder mystery, Bring the Monkey, when the female narrator is invited to a weekend at an English country house she brings along her female friend, "who is disguised as a maid and monkey-minder."  (For the narrator also brought along their pet monkey, at her hosts' invitation; I'm not sure what reading between the lines would suggest in this case.)

But Bronski is also mightily offended by Sybylla's refusal to marry Harry Beecham.

Sybylla's steadfast refusal to marry her suitor (whom she professes to love) is the only aspect of My Brilliant Career that challenges plausibility. One can feel the audience getting restless when she refuses him for the second time. Theoretically you can understand why, but the story does not really support the decision. We feel we aren't given all the reasons, that something is being held back. It is not so much that we want her to marry (for romantic reasons), but that there seems little reason for her not to: a comfortable middle-class existence would have enabled her to pursue her writing. Sybylla claims that she is not going to be part of anyone else's life until she has had her own. The movie ends with her back in the outback - sending her newly completed manuscript to a publisher - claiming both her independence and her art.

I don't remember Sybylla professing to love Harry.  I do remember her saying, "Oh Harry, I'm so near loving you -- but I'd destroy you, and I can't do that."  I don't see how anyone could watch My Brilliant Career and not feel the truth of Sybylla's declaration; we've already seen that she will lash out -- literally, with a riding crop -- if she begins to feel trapped, and she knows very well what a trap marriage is for women.  The only implausibility is that a teenaged girl could know herself so well, but this is a movie, after all.  She has also been insistent all along that she and Harry are "mates" -- buddies -- not dates.  Despite his disclaimer, Bronski does seem to want Sybylla to marry, and he is excessively optimistic about the possibility of a "middle-class" married woman's managing to build a career as a writer.  (The Beechams, by the way, are not middle-class: with their huge house, many servants, and land holdings, they have the same pretensions to aristocracy as Sybylla's grandmother.)

The same goes for Russo's quotation from a mainstream movie reviewer.  I'm not surprised that a straight male newspaper writer would be unable to believe that that a woman would be unwilling to marry the "gentle, handsome" Harry, but I am surprised that gay liberationist writers like Bronski and Russo objected.  Unusual in a popular novel and movie, yes, but not implausible, and I have always believed that the film carefully developed Sybylla's character to make it plausible.  The heterosexual and homophobic reviewer Stanley Kauffmann didn't object to the outcome (I believe that his review impelled me to see My Brilliant Career), nor did many others in the audience.  From the first time I saw the film, Sybylla's decision felt right to me.  How odd that two politically and sexually radical writers should be unable to free themselves from their very conventional plot expectations.

(This reminds me of Koreeda Hirokazu's 2006 samurai comedy Hana, which plays similar games with a popular boy-culture plot: The Coward of the County, who refuses to fight until, pushed and bullied beyond endurance, he carries out an exemplary bloodbath against his tormentors.  Slow-motion blood geysers!  Severed limbs!  When the protagonist of Hana is cornered, however, he runs, which outraged many reviewers of the film.  Despite this, he survives, flourishes, and gets the girl.)

Bronski acknowledges that the novel is not strictly autobiographical -- Franklin, he says, never spent an extended period at her wealthy grandmother's estate, as Sybylla does -- but he keeps falling back on the assumption that it is.  (For some reason he insists on referring to her as "Miles," though everyone else is referred to by her surname.)  True, Franklin's family and neighbors complained about what they believed to be their caricatures in the book; I'm not sure how far to believe Franklin's own defense in My Career Goes Bung that several different people saw themselves as the models for the same characters in the book, or that she deliberately set out to confound the conventions of the novel when she wrote it.

But there's another reason to doubt that the novel suppressed Franklin's "potential lesbianism": she was sixteen when she wrote My Brilliant Career.  It doesn't strain credulity that a teenager born in 1879 and raised in the Australian outback with limited access to books might not yet have figured out that she wasn't romantically interested in men.  It's remarkable enough that she had such a radical critique of marriage, which is in the book: one could say she harps on it.  When I saw the movie I wondered if that aspect had been retrojected from its modern perspective, but reading the book soon put that suspicion to rest.  Even if My Brilliant Career was Franklin's wish-fulfilment fantasy, it's notable that marrying a nice, supportive man was not on her wish list.  And the ending of the film is not in the book: Sybylla sends off her bulky manuscript by post after staying up all night to finish writing it, and a title informs us that My Brilliant Career was published in 1901.  That's something that Franklin couldn't have known when she wrote the book, and I still remember the joy I felt when I read those words for the first time.  Someone went against the grain of her family and society, and won.  And I still feel that way every time I watch it.

Not portraying Sybylla Melvin as a baby dyke, even if Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin was one, doesn't seem to me a betrayal of the spirit of the novel, whatever Gillian Armstrong's reasons.  Marrying her off to Harry Beecham would have.  Franklin was a trickster, though, and she had fun with the confusion between herself and her literary stand-in: in My Career Goes Bung, Sybylla has to cope with the attentions of a fortyish, bearded, macho rancher named Henry Beauchamp, who's convinced that he is the real Harry Beecham, and must carry out Harry's thwarted destiny by marrying Sybylla and breaking her to harness.  No wonder Franklin had to light out for the territory of America; all her life she resisted being "sivilized."

(It occurred to me for the first time that the filming and release of My Brilliant Career happened to coincide with Franklin's centenary.  Was that coincidental or deliberate?  I don't know.)

It Was a Hot and Steamy Day

I was about to say that I don't feel like writing today, but that's not quite it.  I don't feel like thinking today, and writing a serious post requires thinking.

Of course I'm far from alone in this, though I may be rare in recognizing and admitting it.  A former IU student and current Facebook friend said yesterday that the US (and our allies, of course, he added) needs to occupy Pakistan to keep more trouble from erupting in that part of the world.  I replied a US invasion of Pakistan would make things worse, not better; indeed, US aggression is a major source of trouble in that part of the world.  I didn't say we should invade, he protested; I still haven't had the energy to reply that you can hardly have an occupation without an invasion first.  It's my liberal friends who keep reminding me of Molly Ivins's slap at some Texas pol, that if his IQ sank any lower we'd have to water him, and that's what makes me feel like shutting down my brain indefinitely.  I can muster more energy and enthusiasm for slapping down my right-wing friends' howlers -- one of them just reposted this cartoon this morning -- than the complacent babbling of the liberal ones.

So, having said that, let me just refer you to Ta-Nehisi Coates's fine article "Fear of a Black President," which includes these heartbreaking passages:

I asked [Shirley] Sherrod if she thought the president had a grasp of the specific history of the region and of the fights waged and the sacrifices made in order to make his political journey possible. “I don’t think he does,” Sherrod said. “When he called me [shortly after the incident], he kept saying he understood our struggle and all we’d fought for. He said, ‘Read my book and you’ll see.’ But I had read his book.”

And:

In her new memoir, The Courage to Hope, she writes about a different kind of tears: when she discussed her firing with her family, her mother, who’d spent her life facing down racism at its most lethal, simply wept. “What will my babies say?,” Sherrod cried to her husband, referring to their four small granddaughters. “How can I explain to my children that I got fired by the first black president?”

What makes it particularly awful is that Obama fired Sherrod based on the lies of the unlamented right-wing provocateur Andrew Breitbart, who was already known to be fraudulent.  Sherrod was fired by the first black president for no damn reason except his political cowardice.

Meanwhile, over at The Sideshow, Avedon quotes Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report, and comments:

Dixon recommends getting out of the two-party, lesser-evil box and preparing for something new. I don't know how to do that, but I do know that blacks and whites alike are "more unemployed than we've been in seventy years, and more imprisoned than we've ever been," and I'm horrified at every "progressive" who somehow thought it was more important to defend Obama's presidency than to defend the Democratic Party and the nation against this rightward push, to the point where even primary challenges to bad Democrats were out of the question. Paul Ryan and other Republican Horrors are people who the Democratic leadership actively protected against real challenges in their districts. The only reason there are any Republicans in Congress from New York is that the Democratic leadership makes sure that happens.

Dixon is right: The Republicans are giving the Obamacrats cover to pass a right-wing agenda. 

The True Pure Centrist commented that the trouble is that people don't know the good things that the Democrats have done: the New Deal, the Civil Rights Bills, Medicare, and so on.  I can't speak for everyone, but I'm fully aware of all Democratic conventions.  It's actually hard to be unaware of those things, because Democratic apologists keep reminding us about them.  So I doubt the general ignorance is as widespread as TPC likes to think.  The trouble is that the great accomplishments he mentions were made a couple of generations ago (Cthulhu, I'm old), and that the last two Democratic administrations have been doing their best to to undo those achievements.

Of course, there are always haters.  This ungrateful Negro, for example, just had to carp and complain and find fault even in the Democrats' glory days:

No president has really done very much for the American Negro, though the past two presidents have received much undeserved credit for helping us. This credit has accrued to Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy only because it was during their administrations that Negroes began doing more for themselves. Kennedy didn't voluntarily submit a civil rights bill, nor did Lyndon Johnson. In fact, both told us at one time that such legislation was impossible. President Johnson did respond realistically to the signs of the times and used his skills as a legislator to get bills through Congress that other men might not have gotten through. I must point out, in all honesty, however, that President Johnson has not been nearly so diligent in implementing the bills he has helped shepherd through Congress.

Of the ten titles of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, probably only the one concerning public accomodations -- the most bitterly contested section -- has been meaningfully enforced and implemented. Most of the other sections have been deliberately ignored.

...

I'm sure that most whites felt that with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, all race problems were automatically solved. Because most white people are so far removed from the life of the average Negro, there has been little to challenge this assumption. Yet Negroes continue to live with racism every day.

--Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope, 1969

It isn't we professional leftists who need to be reminded of what the Democrats did in the past: it is the Democratic mainstream that needs to take stock and stop trying to dismantle everything their predecessors (however half-heartedly) achieved.

A Native New Yorker

Time does fly!  I got busy with some offline things late last week, and then went out of town for the weekend.  Next thing I know it's Tuesday and I haven't written here in almost a week.

I just finished reading the first volume of Out Spoken: A Vito Russo Reader, published this year by White Crane Books.  I had no idea such a project was in the works when I found the book at one of our local independent bookstores, and I was delighted.  One of the editors, Jeffrey Schwarz, worked on the film version of The Celluloid Closet and made a new documentary about Russo, Vito.  The first volume alone is almost 300 pages of Russo's journalism on film and celebrities; I expect to buy the second volume, devoted to other areas of his activism, next week.

As I remember, I first heard of him in the 1970s, when he wrote an angry letter to the Village Voice complaining about their coverage of Pride Week; not only was it angry, it was funny, but without sacrificing its seriousness. The IU campus gay group brought him to Bloomington for a gay conference not too long afterwards, so I was able to praise that letter to him in person.  "A lot of people liked that letter," he said, bemused.  "I should write when I'm angry more often."  At that conference he gave the presentation on Hollywood and homosexuals he'd been working on for a couple of years at the time, which eventually became the book The Celluloid Closet (Harper, 1981; revised edition, 1987).  The presentation, which included slides and (I think) film clips, not only began my education about gays in film but about film itself.  The only thing I specifically remember Russo saying in the lecture was that he thought it possible that in time The Boys in the Band would be seen very differently than we saw it at the time: instead of a parade of negative stereotypes, it would be an interesting portrayal of some gay men's lives in a much harder time.  That pleased me because I'd never seen Boys as an unrelentingly negative play, even when I read it as a closeted teen. 

The Celluloid Closet is still a groundbreaking book, though it wasn't the first book to deal with its subject -- Parker Tyler's Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies (Holt, 1972) appeared nine years earlier.  Russo was doing something different than Tyler, though: he aimed at a full survey of the movies' treatment of homosexuality, viewed from an avowedly gay liberationist perspective.  Even if you disagreed with his judgments, and I often did, Russo did the groundwork for later study and discussion of queer film.  It's out of print now, which is a shame.

So it's great to have this new collection of his journalism.  Russo wrote for several publications, and Out Spoken contains interviews, reviews, and opinion pieces.  Some of this material went into The Celluloid Closet, but much didn't.  I was surprised to find Lily Tomlin almost coming out in print in the 1980s: she was willing for Russo to refer to her partner, Jane Wagner, as her partner, though I don't think "partner" had yet become the standard term for same-sex couples that it is now.

As I said, I have my disagreements with Russo.  I was annoyed when he complained, in the revised edition of The Celluloid Closet, that Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career didn't deal with the lesbianism of the author.  The character Sybylla wasn't Miles Franklin, and I didn't notice any homoeroticism in the novel when I reread it a couple of years ago. I concede that's a sticky question, because adaptations can legitimately make all kinds of changes in source material.  If Armstrong had chosen to make that change, and it had worked within the film, I wouldn't have objected; but she wasn't obliged to.  (A biopic of Franklin would be a different matter.)

Some of the issues Russo grappled with are still with us, of course, like that of straight actors playing gay characters and vice versa.  In one piece Russo wrote:

When Harry Hamlin hesitated to accept the role of a gay writer in Making Love, producer Dan Melnick asked him, “If I came to you with a really great script and asked you to play Hitler, would you consider it?” Hamlin, of course, replied that he would. “So,” said Melnick, “you’re willing to play a mass murderer but not a homosexual. Think about that.” To his credit, Hamlin did think about it and eventually played the role in Making Love [235-6].

But what if the script isn't "great"?  Making Love is one of the worst Hollywood movies I've ever seen.  Maybe the original script was better.  As with the later Philadelphia, nervous Hollywood executives evidently interfered with the wishes and intentions of the gay men involved in the production, but I'm not sure they can be blamed for all the many faults of this turgid flop.  For example, the opening sequence indicates that the male leads lived together, but as I remember the main story they were basically tricks.

One thing that struck me especially odd was the juxtaposition of Russo's attack on the Tom Cruise vehicle Cocktail, "a duplicitous film that spends two hours making promiscuous sex, drinking, smoking, fake values and macho sexism look attractive and then turns around in the last ten minutes to say that fidelity and loyalty are really where it’s at" (222), with a complaint that "In this new world, gay boys are designed to be cute and alluring and slightly 'toyish,' but they don’t fuck around" (229) and a eulogy for Fred "Halsted’s generation, a group of men who lived to push sex to its limit in a way that became an anachronism all too soon" (261). (Halsted was a filmmaker and prophet of leather / S&M. Substance abuse was one of the pillars of his creed.)   These pieces were written at the height of the AIDS crisis, which may have had something to do with Russo's inconsistency.  I'm not casting the first stone here, I've fallen into such contradictions myself; but they're interesting.

Overall, though, Out Spoken is a great, very readable insider's view of the gay movement from the 1970s onward, and well worth your time.  I'm looking forward to getting and reading the second volume.

Oh, How Can You Say Such Awful Things?

I'm reading Gary C. Thomas's essay "'Was George Frederic Handel Gay?': On Closet Questions and Cultural Politics" in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, & Gary C. Thomas; 2nd edition, Routledge, 2006).  Thomas does a beautiful job showing how Handel's virtue has been defended fiercely by his biographers for the past three centuries, without any evidence to support a claim of heterosexuality.  Often they have simply made stuff up: Thomas quotes a late twentieth century biographer who confidently asserts that Handel wasn't homosexual because "in an eighteenth-century context the vagabond life of musicians made marriage a distinct hindrance" (170).  You mean like Haydn?  Or Mozart?  (Even if marriage was a hindrance to musicians, it doesn't seem to have deterred them from marrying.)  Oddly, Thomas counters this claim by pointing out that "gay men from Handel's time through Stonewall (but especially in the eighteenth century) married more often than not, and for a variety of reasons"; a really determined apologist would use that as evidence that Handel wasn't gay, or he would have married.  More germane, and Thomas spends a good deal more space showing this, is that the evidence we have (including from his contemporaries) is that Handel didn't have any erotic liaisons with women at all, unlike many of his artistic bachelor contemporaries.  That's not proof that he was gay either; but it argues against any confident assertion that he was heterosexual.

But I'm digressing; what got me started on this post was Thomas's partly rhetorical question on the same page: "Why in an enlightened age wouldn't the possibility of a gay Handel be greeted if not with enthusiasm, then with a 'modicum of dispassionate objectivity'?"  It's understandable why Handel's contemporaries would have reacted with horror to the suggestion that the great man was a Sodomite; but not in our supposedly "enlightened age," when we know that earthquakes aren't caused by buggery.  One of the virtues of the first edition of Queering the Pitch (1994) was that the more intemperate reactions to it cast doubt on the widespread fantasy that the world of classical music is a tolerant, accepting, even welcoming haven for homos.  If the suggestion that Handel (or Schubert, or whoever) may have liked men is so absurd, why not simply refute it with evidence and reason?  Why do so many highly educated and worldly people react instead with illogic and fantasy?

I can now segue to the main topic of this post, namely Todd Akin, the Republican candidate for the US Senate from Missouri who uttered these now-notorious words in an interview on a St. Louis TV station:

First of all, from what I understand from doctors, (pregnancy from rape) is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.

Akin's claim is ludicrous, of course, but people reacted to it almost as ludicrously.  This Kansas City Star article, for example, quotes an emergency-room doctor as saying, "To try to be able to say that anyone’s going to respond in a consistent pattern that’s going to limit their probability of becoming pregnant is ridiculous."  The doctor seems to be thinking in terms of medical procedures, like a morning-after pill or a medical abortion; what Akin evidently had in mind was an automatic physiological response of a woman's body to forced copulation.  I'm referring to the Star article because it explains where Akin probably got his belief:

But Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association — a nonprofit that describes itself as a pro-family organization — told The Star on Monday that “fair-minded people” know what Akin really meant by his statement. Wildmon speculated that Akin was differentiating between forcible rape and statutory rape, which can be consensual.

“What I read from some medical sources, when a woman is raped, her body shuts down in some respects that may prevent her from getting pregnant,” Wildmon said.

Wildmon referred to an article by physician John Willke, president of the Life Issues Institute — a nonprofit anti-abortion group — and former president of the National Right to Life Committee. In that article, titled “Rape Pregnancies are Rare” and published in April 1999, Willke wrote that one of the most important factors to consider is that a rape victim’s hormone production during such trauma may be “upset,” resulting in a possible pregnancy being compromised.

“There’s no greater emotional trauma that can be experienced by a woman than an assault rape,” the article reads. “This can radically upset her possibility of ovulation, fertilization, implantation and even nurturing of a pregnancy.”

Leading experts on reproductive health, however, dismissed this logic...

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/08/20/3771226/doctors-dispute-akins-claim-but.html#storylink=cpy

(Newsweek's Michele Goldberg, on Democracy Now yesterday, also cited Willke.)  This is what I'd consider the proper response to someone like Akin: Oh, really?  Which doctors?  Can you point me to a source?  What do most doctors say about this?  The struggle for women's reproductive autonomy has been going on for quite some time now, much like the struggle for racial equality or the struggle for the equality of sexual minorities.  Yet every time some bigoted fool says something absurd, the typical liberal response is to freak out (Oh, how can you say such awful things?) and vilify the person rather than his or her words, despite the liberal claim that liberals and especially liberal Democrats are sane rational people while conservative Republicans are irrational wackjobs.  Which isn't to say that Akin shouldn't be vilified, but so should many Democrats.  People who haven't learn to think or debate rationally are not people I trust with a movement for social justice.

The focus has been on Akin's fantasy about the wonderful, no doubt God-given, powers of the female body to protect itself against invasion.  (While he was at it, he should have mentioned the tiny but sharp little teeth that come out of the vagina to chomp up the membrum virile of a dirty rapist, praise Jesus!  That would be a fantasy too, but why stick with half-measures when you're talking about a serious issue?  The more serious, the more important it is to make stuff up.  It's okay, because it's in a good cause.)  I can't help wondering, though: if a woman's body blocks pregnancy after a rape, isn't that like natural abortion?  Should a woman be allowed to punish a zygote, or even a sperm cell, just because she was raped?  That is, I hope you noticed, Akin's rationale for disallowing a medical abortion in cases of rape: punish the rapist, not the "baby" -- once the sperm is in the vagina, it's a potential baby.

It isn't actually irrational to believe that women's bodies could reject unwanted sperm.  Such things happen in nature.  Among zebra finches, females do not conceive after forced copulations, and females of some other species have been observed ejecting sperm after copulation; see Marlene Zuk, Sexual Selections [California. 2002], 84-85.  Women aren't birds, unfortunately, and if Todd Akin wants to build social policy on the assumption that they are, he needs better evidence than one speculative paper by one anti-choice doctor.

Fussing about the definition of rape, as many of Akin's liberal critics have been doing, is really beside the point.  Some have looked past it, pointing out that his fantasy about women's power is an attempt to justify his denial of an exception for abortion in the case of rape, which is the current Republican Party stance on abortion.  The issue is not the definition of rape, but that women's right to make decisions about their own bodies has been whittled away that far.  Roe v. Wade asserted a woman's freedom to decide whether to have an abortion without qualification in the first trimester of pregnancy, whether she has been raped or not.  But focusing on the definition of rape allowed President Obama, for example, to pontificate:

Rape is rape. And the idea that we should be parsing and qualifying and slicing what types of rape we’re talking about doesn’t make sense to the American people and certainly doesn’t make sense to me. So, what I think these comments do underscore is why we shouldn’t have a bunch of politicians, a majority of whom are men, making healthcare decisions on behalf of women.

Obama's own record, however, is dodgier than these tough words would suggest.  As this blogger points out, the Affordable Care Act (conforming with the Hyde Amendment) forbids the use of federal funds for abortion, "except in cases of rape or incest, or when the life of the woman would be endangered," as well as other amendments which "prohibit discrimination" (!) against health care providers whose religious "conscience" forbids them to provide abortion services.  Sounds like male politicians making healthcare decisions on behalf of women to me.

It's worth looking at Akin's "apology," too.  Does he apologize for his determined, longstanding opposition to women's reproductive freedom?  Of course not:

I’ve really made a couple of serious mistakes here that were just wrong, and I need to apologize for those. First, I might say that I’ve always been committed to pro-life, and it was because I didn’t want to harm the most vulnerable. But likewise, I care deeply, you know, for the victims of people who have been raped, and they’re equally vulnerable. And a rape is equally tragic. And I made that statement in error. Let me be clear: rape is never legitimate. It’s an evil act that’s committed by violent predators. I used the wrong words in the wrong way. What I said was ill-conceived, and it was wrong. And for that, I apologize.

It's a typical politician's apology.  Which is why rape survivor and author of the Vagina Monologues Eve Ensler missed the point in her HuffPost response to Akin.  Ensler invited Akin to imagine a violent, stinking stranger breaking into his house in the night and forcing him to submit to his vile appetites -- but stranger rape, preferably by unwashed derelicts of color, is the paradigm of rape that the Religious Right accepts.  (At least in theory: in practice, the victim had better be a white blonde virgin, whose flimsy feminine garments are rent by the brute's grubby paws, and even then they'll never quite believe she didn't ask for it.)  The Republican National Committee didn't cut off their funding of Akin, nor did Romney denounce him and call for him to withdraw from the race, because they've suddenly become pro-choice.  (As usual, the Onion got it right.)

I got into a verbal tussle with the blogger Vast Left on Facebook yesterday, because he blamed Akin's view on the Bible, and invited his commenters to cite cases from the Bible where rape resulted in pregnancy.  His own example was that of Lot and his daughters.  Faithful Bible readers will recall that after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, which also resulted in Lot's wife looking back and being turned into a pillar of salt, Lot's daughters got him drunk on successive nights and copulated with him in turn.  They both became pregnant as a result.  I pointed out that if anyone was raped in this story, it was Lot; Akin's fantasy wouldn't apply to him.  Vast Left didn't seem bothered by the distinction, but of course we're going after Republicans here, and Christians to boot, so all's fair.  More cases were mentioned, such as slaves being used sexually (which, as I've pointed out, doesn't seem to bother gay Christians as long as master and slave are both male), of concubinage and the like.  I pointed out that in the Hebrew Bible, brides were routinely purchased, so it would seem that all Biblical women were raped (except possibly Ruth).  The concept of "consent," so important in liberal discourse on sex, is a legal fiction: in America in the recent past, white women could not consent to copulate with non-white males, wives could not withhold consent to copulate with their husbands ("I do" amounting to consent while the marriage continued), and of course no one of either sex could consent to be penetrated anally.  Legal consent, enshrined in the cliche "consenting adults," is very different from commonsense notions of consent, which have their own problems.

Vast Left offered a nice platitude: Sexual attitudes in the past sucked, and so do some today, but consent is important.  And religion is okay as long as believers extract whatever good they can from it.  Who gets to decide that what is extracted is good? I asked.  Atheists haven't done better than theists where ethics and morality are concerned, as far as I can tell, particularly on questions of sex and gender.

Wherever Akin and Willke got their fantasy about the abortifacient powers of the womb, they didn't get it from the Bible.  Indeed, Willke is a doctor, and they were both appealing to the authority of science, not religion.  Where consent is concerned, atheists -- especially male ones -- have not distinguished themselves.  Remember the proudly atheist and pro-science philosopher Michael Ruse, who confused sex with a woman and defecating on a Persian rug: his rationalist exploration of rape delved into whether he should clear a potential copulation with another male, and the woman's opinion didn't enter into it at all.  (He did lament that human females don't go into heat, because then rape somehow wouldn't be an issue, but again, he was addressing other men's judgment of his behavior, not the woman's wishes.)  "Scientific" discussions of rape have been no better, such as Thornhill and Palmer's recommendation that teenagers be required to take classes on rape prevention before being issued a driver's license: boys would learn the evolutionary issues involved, while girls would be taught not to dress "provocatively" -- any Taliban mullah would surely agree.  Or the whole "evolutionary psychology" approach: rape is awful, terrible, horrible, and maybe someday we'll find a way to alter the genome so men won't do it, without losing their manliness.  Meanwhile, according to the evolutionary psychologists, women will just have to learn not to blame Nature if her sons are sexist; it's nobody's fault.

This is one reason I don't blame religion for bad things in human society (or give religion credit for the good things).  People use religion to ratify what they already want or believe, which is why when many people reject religion, they tend to keep the teachings they like.  Sex and gender are topics that seem especially tenacious.  But again, all this is a distraction from the crucial issue of women's right to make decisions over their own bodies.

That was all I had in mind to say, but just now another friend posted a meme on Facebook to the effect that if men could get pregnant, we wouldn't be having this conversation.  It's a familiar gag; one version went, "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament."  The point is a good one, but I don't think I agree.  Patriarchy regulates men's sexual behavior pretty strictly too: consider the story of Onan (Genesis 38), struck dead by Yahweh for spilling his semen on the ground instead of siring a child on his widowed sister-in-law.  Masturbation, called onanism, was ginned up into a major source of hysteria by the medical profession, more than it ever had been by religion.  Men are supposed to respect each other's property rights over women, though of course they constantly cheat.  And male homosexuality, conflated with the regulation of styles of manhood, is a major arena of anxiety and discipline; men who fail to conform pay a heavy price.  Which brings me full circle to the question at the beginning of this post, and good night.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/08/20/3771226/doctors-dispute-akins-claim-but.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/08/20/3771226/doctors-dispute-akins-claim-but.html#storylink=cpy

An Indelicate Balance

As I close in on the end of J. Neil C. Garcia's Gay Philippine Culture (2nd edition, University of the Philippines Press, 2008), the more I'm convinced that neither 'traditional' nor 'modern/Western' understandings of same-sex eroticism work.  Garcia spends hundreds of pages flailing around, rehearsing the essentialist / constructionist debate on every other page, but neither approach makes much sense of the material -- mostly a few popular films, some fiction, and a widely performed but unpublished play -- he discusses.  He's far from alone in his confusion, of course, and it's not his fault because most discourse of human sexuality is hopelessly incoherent.

I did finally find a passage that helped me understand why this is so.

Furthermore, just because the native Tagalog and Cebuano languages do not have an indigenous term for “homosexual,” it does not mean the homosexual act does not get practiced in these cultures. Certainly, the sexual self-understanding of the people who commit it here can only be different from the sexual self-understanding of the people from other cultures where the distinction between homo- and heterosexualities holds rather firmly (as in the West). For instance, in the case of the bakla, a qualitative difference from Western homosexuality may be the rather strange preponderance of “straight-gay” relationships in the local culture, unheard of and incomprehensible to the dualistic, Western mind [250].

In fact, English does not have an indigenous term for "homosexual" either.  The word "homosexual" (rather, Homosexualität) was invented in the 1860s, welding together a Greek prefix with a Latin suffix, so it can hardly be indigenous anywhere.  Some writers claim that the "concept" of homosexuality was actually invented earlier by another person, though according to the linguistic determinism usually assumed in this kind of social-construction discourse, it's impossible to have a concept without a word, which magically and instantaneously brings the concept into being.

Maybe this is why no one seems to know what a "homosexual" is: the word and the concept are foreign coinages, at home nowhere, not even in the colonialist West.  Karl-Maria Kertbeny, who invented the word, argued that as far as the law is concerned it is irrelevant whether Homosexualität is innate or not.  He also apparently rejected his contemporary Karl Heinz Ulrichs' conception of the 'soul of a woman trapped in the body of a man,' separating homosexuality from gender.  I'm not sure about this last, because the only evidence the blogger I'm citing offers is that "Kertbeny pointedly noted that homosexual men were not necessarily effeminate, citing several heroic historical figures as examples."  In practice that information sits comfortably with belief in inversion, often seeking to show that those big butch warriors nevertheless had a little girl somewhere inside their psyches, perhaps their achievement was overcompensation for their well-hidden essential effeminacy.  The same blogger claims that Kertbeny's supposedly ungendered conception "is probably the most salient for understanding homosexualität’s triumph over urning and invert."  What actually happened, as far as I can see, is that the inversion concept assimilated the word Homosexualität: all modern "scientific" research on homosexuality today assumes the homosexual as the invert.  Foucault's canonical account defined the homosexual as "a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself."  The acceptance and the rejection of inversion as the model of homosexuality coexist incoherently in most "Western" writing on the subject; the writers and thinkers involved seem unaware of what they're doing.  In this respect, Garcia's discussion is thoroughly "Western."

Notice Garcia's conclusion that "in the case of the bakla, a qualitative difference from Western homosexuality may be the rather strange preponderance of 'straight-gay' relationships in the local culture, unheard of and incomprehensible to the dualistic, Western mind."  A perusal of craigslist personal ads for your locale will quickly show you that "'straight-gay' relationships" are not only heard of but fetishized by many American gay men.  If you want to limit the discussion to academic writing, look at Barry Reay's 2010 book on American hustlers and their clients in the first half of the twentieth century, which also conceives the homosexual as the invert, and insists that the men who rent their penises to homosexuals are not queer -- not even when they find they enjoy being "pedicated" by the queers.  After all, the inversion model traditionally assumed that the only acceptable partner for the invert would be "normal" (or "straight"), an assumption epitomized in Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, which ends with the inverted protagonist driving her lover into the arms of a normal man, to give her a chance for a normal life.

Garcia is sure that the bakla -- narrowly conceived as a flamboyantly effeminate, cross-dressing homosexual male -- is not the same as the invert, but it's not clear how: the bakla fits the bill in every particular, right down to the conviction of being cursed to a life of loneliness and paid sex in the twilight world between the sexes.  He's also sure that the bakla is indigenously and uniquely Philippine, though in explicating a Tagalog novella about teenaged hustlers he lists among their "bakla clients" a "middle-aged American" (363).  By Garcia's own criteria, an American cannot be a bakla.  But he doesn't seem able to keep a close enough eye on them to keep such anomalies from jumping the fence.

It works both ways: Garcia wants to use the word "homosexual" to refer to Filipino erotic phenomena and actors, but he never figures out how to do it without violating his own strictures.  For one example out of many I could give, he criticizes the writer Tony Perez for

working from the assumption that only the bakla in a ‘gay/straight’ relationship is homosexual. Since homosexuality does not truly have analogues in our culture -- for there are no local distinctions between the sexual orientations homo/hetero – then the more critical view would be not to dismiss the possibility that in any sexual interaction between two male individuals, both partners may actually be seeing through to its fulfillment their same-sex orientation. [Not in the Philippines! That’s a wicked Western concept, not just “orientation” but “same-sex”, which is what “homo” means.] After all, when we consider sexuality not as a question of identity but of acts, any person who engages in sex with another person of the same genital sex is possibly [!] already a homosexual. [Not in the Philippines! This is after all purely a matter of definition.] This perspective is potentially liberating, for it extends the issue of homosexuality beyond the minoritized identity of the bakla, onto the bigger social realm which will have to include even the macho men themselves [369].

(I've added some comments in square brackets [].)  If "homosexuality" refers to non-gendered relations between person of the same biological sex -- and to repeat, that is not what the word usually means even as it's used in "the West" -- then it has no real analogues anywhere.  In practice, there is a lot of non-gendered homosexuality, probably in all cultures, but it doesn't fit any local conception of sex, so it usually remains invisible and unthinkable.  (That invisibility gives some cover to the participants, of course, who therefore are usually happy to keep it so.)  It's not any conception inherent in the word "homosexuality," nor anticolonalist resistance to Western concepts, that explains the stubborn resistance to degendering it, but assumptions about sex and gender that are powerful in many if not most cultures.

Another sign of Garcia's inability to disentangle his ideas is that "when we consider sexuality not as a question of identity but of acts," the question of whether either participant in "the homosexual act" is "homosexual" doesn't come up.  In that case, neither partner is "homosexual."  At best, it's a separate question.  But Garcia doesn't seem to understand that.

One final issue is the question of "coming out."  Garcia seems unaware of the term's history in "the West," specifically America.  Before the post-Stonewall movement redefined it to mean telling straight people that one is gay, it meant making one's debut in gay society, and as a corollary, having one's first erotic experience with someone of the same sex.  This fits well with the meanings Garcia assigns to it in Philippine gay culture, if he only knew.  But he also distinguishes between "covert" and "overt" gays, especially in his discussion of Orlando Nadres' popular play Hanggang Dito na Lamang at Maraming Salamat (That's All for Now and Many Thanks).  The play is about a middle-aged pawnshop owner, Fidel, who lives a compulsively discreet life punctuated by occasional paid-for sex with younger hustlers.  Though on some level he knows he's a bakla, he believes that he can evade the stigma by acting as much as possible like a "normal" man; his main visible form of resistance is his refusal to marry a woman, a refusal made easier by the fact that his parents are no longer living.  For years he has carried a secret torch for his studly nineteen-year-old ward Efren, whose education he pays for.  Fidel's foil in the play is Julius Caesar Aquino, aka Julie: a flamboyant bakla beautician, who has apparently supplied some of Fidel's sexual partners in the past.  Only to Julie does Fidel admit his secret self, though Fidel still insists fiercely that the two are not alike, because Fidel represses his inner impulses.

So far so good, but what is Fidel repressing?  Not his sexual desires: he satisfies those with the occasional hustler.  What he keeps hidden, it seems, is his bakla nature.  Otherwise he'd be competing in gay beauty contests like Julie. To be a bakla is to scream, to wear one's hair long, to pile on the makeup, to compete in beauty contests.  This is a theme that runs through Philippine Gay Culture, as in Garcia's account of silahis:

… the silahis is a male who looks every bit like a “real man” – he may even be married and with a family – but who, in all this time, would rather swish and wear skirts and scream “like a woman.” A very good example of this conception of the silahis would be the members of the seventies’ novelty pop singing group, Charings. They look like five very “regular” men (mustachioed and all), and yet, the moment the opening strains of their one-and-only hit – the catchy disco hit, “Badaf Forever” – begin, they swish their hips and break into a faggoty song-and-dance routine [134].

"Covert" gays, then, are those men who don't scream and swish and wear skirts, but it takes all their will power to do so, because their inner bakla nature is churning away inside them.   It's hard to see how Garcia can appeal to the existence of "macho gays," because his whole intellectual framework denies the possibility of such creatures.  They may seem macho on the surface, but inside that facade is a bakla just waiting to throw off its chains and take over.

This problem is also built into the supposedly Western inversion model, by the way.  No one has ever been quite able to explain why all externally male inverts aren't letting their inner female souls out to sashay and flounce and shake that thang, or why all externally female inverts aren't lounging around in smoking jackets and wearing butch cuts.  Maybe they do so out of delicacy; maybe they're too cowardly to be themselves.  (False consciousness is such a handy way to explain other people's choices that we happen to dislike.)  There's nothing in the model that gives a reason why they shouldn't, and in gay culture the same assumption is widespread: to be a gay boy is to be a girl.  (Remember what one of the gay sociologist Martin Levine's clone informants told him: "Darling, beneath all this butch drag, we are still girls.")  Lip service is paid to the existence of the fabulous gender-compliant gay person, but most American gay people don't really seem to believe in it except for PR purposes, to assert our fundamental normality.  And who knows what RuPaulishness lurks in the hearts of the bodybuilder at the next workout station?

Myself, I have no idea whether every butch gay man has a bakla trapped inside him.  It's an assumption, based on no evidence whatsoever, perpetuated even by Western "scientific" discourse.  But then I don't believe that bakla or American drag queens really have a woman's soul trapped inside to give them fashion tips.  I don't know how you would even go about investigating, let alone proving it.  Which to my mind is a good reason to think of sexuality not as a question of identity but of acts, but that has its own problems.  We are human beings with bodies and subjective selves, so I don't see why questions of subjectivity (as opposed to chimerae like "orientation" and "identity") shouldn't be on the table.  And some humility about other people's subjectivity is in order, since we have no way of knowing what's really going on in other people's heads; our own heads are confusing enough.

What Garcia and others need to beware is the assumption that all people in a given culture interpret their experiences in the same way, by the same categories.  When he writes, "Certainly, the sexual self-understanding of the people who commit it ["the homosexual act," as if there were only one!] here can only be different from the sexual self-understanding of the people from other cultures where the distinction between homo- and heterosexualities holds rather firmly (as in the West)," he's ignoring the likelihood that that even among bakla there is not just one self-understanding of their sexual experience and of their lives.  It's certain that this is true of American gay culture, despite our own corresponding attempts to fit ourselves into one inadequate category or another.  I wish I knew how to persuade people to do otherwise: most people seem to love Procrustean beds, even for themselves.