Briefer Briefs

James Wolcott linked recently to this op-ed for the Wall Street Journal by Ann Patchett. I've only read one of her novels and have felt no need to read more, but I liked the piece. A sample:

The sexual revolution, which rode into town on the backs of those pink plastic cases of birth-control pills, was, after all, not so much a matter of sleeping around as it was of having the ability to decide when you were going to have a child, and then deciding how many children you wanted to have. For me, it meant the freedom to choose not having children at all. It was a quiet use of a revolution, but a completely appropriate one. I never wanted children and therefore doubted I would be a great parent. Perhaps a few more people who don't want children and feel that they wouldn't be great parents could consider following my lead. You can have my birth-control pills when you pry them out of my cold, dead hands.

Patchett (who's Catholic, by the way) argues:

Let us so empower the young women in our communities with the excellent education that is available to them, the love and support of their families, and the abundance of positive role models, that they are strong enough within themselves to wait until they feel fully ready to have sex with a person they trust, a person who values them. And let the young men of our communities benefit from that same education, that same love. To make things easier, let's remove several million degrading images of women that can give a boy the wrong ideas about the value of other people.

I agree, but I wonder if she realizes that removing those "several million degrading images of women" would have to begin with the Christian Bible and a good deal of the early Fathers, along with much of the Western cultural tradition. I limit it to the Western tradition because that's where Patchett and I both live; but it should go without saying that the same applies to non-Western traditions as well.

Comments on the article are predictable. The first I saw was typical: "This article is politically-correct leftist sensibilty at its best. In other words, pitiful drivel." Even better was one which argued that women can't just opt out of the sexual revolution: "Many women find that they can't compete for high-status men unless they make themselves sexually available to them. In this regard, they face enormous pressure to participate in the sexual revolution and to use birth control." That, with its revealing embedded assumptions, got three recommendations and started some debate.

From Wolcott's blog I noticed a sidebar link to an interview with Ricky Martín about coming out, about his sons (who, contrary to the article's header, were born before Martín came out), and about becoming a Spanish citizen. I have never been a fan of his music and am not likely to change my mind about it, but what he has said since his coming-out has given me great respect for him. Unlike most American celebrities who came out after they were famous (to say nothing of certain queer Latino academics with issues), Martín has never felt the need to blame his time on the closet on the gay movement or on the tackiness of other gay people. It's too bad he's so unusual, but I'm glad he exists and has spoken out.

Finally, at a blog from IOZ' blogroll called I Blame the Patriarchy, the blogger reproduces a note she found on her windshield, signed "Holly," complaining about the blogger's parking technique. "I was unable to get in my car from the driver's side," the note reads. "Had to crawl in from the passenger's side." IBTP jeers, "I wonder how she feels about unobstructed access to birth control." Since she doesn't know Holly's politics, this seems a bit desperate; maybe Holly was on her way to a rally in favor of unobstructed access to birth control when she had to crawl into her car from the passenger side. It's nice, though, to be reminded that one can be anti-patriarchal and an asshole.

Livin' the Vida, Loca

Well, how about that -- Ricky Martin has come out. In a blog post on his website, even, posted in Spanish and in English. GLAAD (that's the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) is excited, but decorously. The Wall Street Journal's blogger is reassuring about the economic effects of this decision on his career. And while digging around for more information, I found a post at the Bilerico Project from last December, linking to an op-ed (for ign'ant gabachos that don't understand plain Spanish, it's in English here) that Martin wrote for the Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Dia, calling for acceptance (not just tolerance) and citing by name various victims of hate crimes, including Matthew Shepard. It's quite a good piece; I'm impressed. (Unfortunately the poster, or someone, titled his post "Ricky Martin comes out for acceptance" -- Martin hadn't quite come out yet. But what a clever play on words!)

The headlines everywhere quote Martin as saying, "I am a fortunate homosexual man." That's what he says in the English version of his statement. The Spanish is somewhat different, and makes more sense to me: "Hoy ACEPTO MI HOMOSEXUALIDAD como un regalo que me da la vida" - "Today I ACCEPT MY HOMOSEXUALITY as a gift which life gives me." I like that much better. Martin's coming out is long overdue, as he himself admits; I just hope he doesn't turn out to be a major asshole on gay issues like, say, Rosie O'Donnell.

But reading this news sent me back to a book I read a couple of years ago, after having seen it cited by numerous other writers in queer and postcolonial theory: Tropics of desire: interventions from queer Latino America (NYU Press, 2000), by Jose Quiroga. I had a lot of complaints about Tropics of Desire, similar to those I've had about other queer postcolonial works. It didn't help that the word "intervention" is one of those terms which, in my view, ought to be banned from academic discourse because they pretend that writing a journal article or a monograph is some kind of political, even revolutionary act. But there was so much more wrong with the book than that, epitomized by Quiroga's discussion of Ricky Martin's refusal to come out.

For example, "Still, his [Ricky Martin's] refusal of the coming-out narrative must be engaged on its own terms" (185). Would those be the same terms as other closet cases? And what, I wondered at the time, would happen to this assertion if Martin ever does come out? "Ricky's sexuality may be disturbing for a culture that needs to define it as fast as it can" (ibid.). Erm, are we talking about Puerto Rican culture here? Or does Quiroga think that only the US wants to define people's "sexuality"? I think he does, and that's demonstrably false.

Quiroga went on:

The constant demands for Ricky to "come out," to proclaim his sexuality out in the open, are clearest examples how queer subjectivity can become an oppressive category that is always seeking validation to the extent of oppressing other choices and consigning the subtleties of sexual choice and play to a secondary status [188]...

That Ricky chooses not to become the latest Latino doll for the already constituted moneyed gay and lesbian [!] nomenklatura is something I applaud. There is much to be admired in his merchandising himself for the best and brightest capitalists rather than for the ones who gloss their financial stakes with the received pieties of a noble cause that is not noble, with humanitarian gestures that keep the prison walls intact [189f].

The "best and brightest capitalists"? Oh my. Is Martin really "merchandising himself," or is he being marketed by international capital? Is it really somehow more admirable that Sony/CBS kept him in the closet for the sake of his (or rather, its) "image"? Martin is explicit that such considerations kept him silent longer than he would have chosen to be otherwise:

Many people told me: "Ricky it's not important", "it's not worth it", "all the years you've worked and everything you've built will collapse", "many people in the world are not ready to accept your truth, your reality, your nature". Because all this advice came from people who I love dearly, I decided to move on with my life not sharing with the world my entire truth. Allowing myself to be seduced by fear and insecurity became a self-fulfilling prophecy of sabotage. Today I take full responsibility for my decisions and my actions.

As I read Quiroga I very much doubted that Martin was closeted (and I noticed that Quiroga seemed to assume that he was gay and closeted) because of a sophisticated social constructionist understanding of "sexual choice and play." Martin's coming-out statement confirms my doubts, though perhaps Quiroga would now claim that Martin has sold out to the gay and lesbian nomenklatura -- one only listens to gay Latinos, apparently, when they can be used to further one's reactionary political agenda. As for the "already constituted gay and lesbian nomenklatura," there are not only unmoneyed Anglos but moneyed and unmoneyed Latino queers who might have something to say about that.

Quiroga then denounced "the global reach of a movement that started in New York" (191), and claimed, "The homosexual rights movement critiqued generalized homophobia and claimed Stonewall as its originary moment, but it soon forgot that these events were initiated mostly by people of color -- including Latino transvestites and poor lesbians and gays" (199). So poor people are all "of color"? All people "of color" are poor? First, though, the global gay movement did not start in New York, it started in Germany over a century ago and had some small influence in the US. It was destroyed by the Nazis but re-emerged elsewhere in Europe after the end of World War II. The "homosexual rights movement" started in California at around the same time, and only gradually spread east. The Stonewall Riots and especially the formation of the Gay Liberation Movement were in many ways a rejection of the accomodationist movement exemplified by Mattachine (after the founding leftists like Harry Hay were purged). Quiroga's historical ignorance is quite remarkable.

Bernardo Garcia has remarked that "[a] better way of understanding the identity development process for Latino gay men is to view it as the management of multiple identities" [199]

Duh! as though, say, Anglo gay men don't have to manage multiple identities too: gay and Republican, gay and Roman Catholic, gay and stupid. Quiroga also mentioned "internal colonizations" (212), which reminds me that he completely ignores the fact that "Latino" or "Hispanic" cultures in America are themselves colonial. You'd never guess from this book, or from the way that Spanish-speaking Americans like to call themselves "colonized", that "colonialism" south and north of the Rio Grande involved Spanish speakers displacing and conquering and murdering and enslaving Indians. And Quiroga's construction of "Latino" simply ignores First Nations indigenous people throughout the Americas, even those who also speak Spanish.

But hell, all that's blood under the bridge now. Ricky Martin's intervention retroactively deconstructs Jose Quiroga's apologetics for the closet, and quite neatly too.