The Soul of a Man Trapped in the Body of a Man

I've begun reading Walt Odets's Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men's Lives (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2019).  Here's how the first chapter, "What Is a Homosexual?", begins:

There are two different perspectives on what makes a man a "homosexual."  The first -- the heterosexual perspective -- is that homosexuals are "men who have sex with men."  The gay man's perspective, is that he s "attracted to other men."  The difference between the two descriptions is important: the heterosexual identifies a single, objective behavior, the gay man an entire internal life of feeling.  While the straight man may feel support, indifference, fear, or contempt for the idea of "the homosexual," the gay man has more complex feelings, in part because the term has historically been used to stigmatize ... The majority of gay-identified men do have at least a marginally conscious sense that being gay is about more than sexual attraction or sex; but many gay men have been swayed by the heterosexual definition and have accepted the narrow, behaviorally defined identity.  In today's gay assimilationist politics, gay men often explain themselves to heterosexuals with the idea that they are "attracted to men, but otherwise just like you."

Like most binaries, this one has some value, but it breaks down pretty quickly.  I think that heterosexuals also think of male homosexuals as essentially female by nature and in mentality. This conception certainly typified a great deal of professional and clinical discussion from the late nineteenth-century onward, which focused not only on sexual behavior but on the postulated feminine nature of the invert.  It's a concept shared by many gay men even as they resist it for public-relations purposes.

One reason for the binary Odets advances here is the difference between how I see myself and how others see me.  It's the old subjective/objective divide, which I thought had mostly been abandoned as oversimple and inadequate.  I'm reminded of Graham Shaw's comment on the New Testament stories of Jesus' disciples breaking rules of Sabbath observance, that these stories

also portray a fundamental contradiction in the religious viewpoint they convey.  For paradoxically the refusal to conform to demands for public religious observance is itself intensely visible; so that the criticism of religious visibility acquires many of the characteristics of exhibitionism.  Repeatedly they attract hostile attention to themselves and their master.  Invisible spiritual religion thus proves to have a highly public face.* 

Contrariwise, observant Jews could feel their deep sincerity in keeping the Sabbath, while Jesus and his crew could only see the shallow exterior conformity.  So I don't think that Odets's point has specific relevance to gay people.  The same divide turns up internally to the community, as respectability-minded gay people deplore the shallowness of leathermen gyrating drunkenly on Pride parade floats, though those leathermen are probably perfectly respectable bankers and businessmen who think of their behavior very differently in their minds, perhaps as healthy role models in contrast to all the screaming nellies.  But if you're a gay man who's just been voted salesman of the year by your real estate company, why not celebrate with an amateur drag performance?  It's the gay thing to do!  In our day a gay man can celebrate making lots of money for his bosses by expressing his true, authentic self!  I'm not sure how that fits into Odets's classification.

I'm not happy with the sex / attraction distinction here either.  "Attraction" in this case means erotic attraction, the desire to have sex with someone.  Some gay apologists have tried to de-emphasize sex in favor of some other essential gay quality, but at best it's disingenuous, at worst it's collaborating with bigots -- agreeing that buttsex is nasty, but trying to claim that real, decent homosexuals just stay at home and crochet antimacassars.  Even the people who advance this position don't really believe it; at best they're engaging in doublethink.

Perhaps Odets is trying to see the heterosexual position as an assumption that "men who have sex with men" do so without desire or affect, for some mysterious reason.  But many gay men share that assumption, at least where other gay men are concerned: I'm a free spirit, you're just a slut!  I suppose it's all right to draw the sex / attraction line as long as "attraction" is defined so as to exclude copulation completely; unfortunately, its advocates seem to have trouble avoiding such a definition.

I've noticed myself that "we're just like you except for being attracted to men" backfires by reducing gayness to sex, a stereotype those who use this claim are trying to reject.  But I object to it because it also assumes that all straight people are alike and all gay people are alike.  I strongly reject any attempt to define for me the right way to be gay: there are many right ways to be gay.  I'm also a bit uneasy about Odets's reference to "assimilationist gay politics," since I don't think that "assimilation" is a coherent idea or strategy.  I don't agree with people who advocate some kind of gay assimilationism, because they have an unrealistic idea of what straight people are like, and equally unrealistic ideas of how prejudice works.

Well, I'm only on the first page of Out of the Shadows.  I've liked Odets's previous writings, so I'll read on and see where he takes his argument.
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* Graham Shaw, The Cost of Authority, Fortress Press 1982, p. 246.

You Know You Want It

I've been thinking more about Dan Savage's remarks on sexual attraction, and I realized that I couldn't make any sense out of the final clause of this sentence:

But instead of reconsidering their ideas about attractiveness, a dumb fucking white person—even one from a liberal background—is likelier to say something stupid like “I don’t usually find Asian guys hot, but your Korean friend is attractive,” rather than rethinking their assumptions about their desires. 

As I wrote before, it seems to me that the statement he made up to attack represents someone rethinking their assumptions about their desires.  But then I wondered what "assumptions about their desires" are involved here.  Specifically, I wondered what Dan's assumptions about anyone's desires were, because I don't think he knows anything about the assumptions of the person he's criticizing.

Does he believe that she was already attracted to Asian men but simply, wickedly or fucking dumb whitely, refused to acknowledge it, even to herself?  Because Dan was expressing an assumption, he didn't need to express it clearly, even in his own mind. 

The reason I'm wary of the concept of sexual orientation is that it assumes that human beings contain a mechanism or an organ that responds erotically to a sex, male or female or both.  But as far as I can tell, most people are attracted not to males or females but to some males or some females.  Which ones often changes over time, probably based on experience; not just overt copulatory experience, because for most people the number of people we might want to copulate with is far greater than the number we do copulate with.  But we can still look, fantasize, dream, wish, and we do.  Some people do this more than others, but I doubt that anyone never does it.

People often talk about sexual fluidity, but they don't seem to really mean it.  If your desires aren't genetically, immutably rooted in your being, they don't really count and needn't be respected.  Which I think plays a role in the idea that discovering you're attracted to someone or members of a group you hadn't been attracted to before must be "fetishizing" them - if you weren't aware of it from the age of five, it's not authentic and is probably wicked and exploitative.  So, by Dan's assumptions, what does it mean that I wasn't attracted to fifty-year-old men when I was twenty, but I am now, at sixty-eight?  Was I really, genetically attracted to them already?  Should I have gone to bed with them even though I wasn't attracted to them, because I might be attracted them forty years later? If this case isn't comparable to being attracted to men of a specific "racial" category, how is it different?

There also seems to be a widespread assumption (which may coexist in someone's mind with other, contradictory ones) that our erotic partners are people who rock us to the core.  From what other people have written or said (listening to the stories of other volunteers on the GLB Speakers Bureau has taught me a lot), a significant number of people accepted erotic overtures from people they weren't particularly attracted to, with a "Why not?" attitude, especially but not always when they were younger and less experienced.

One of our volunteers from a rural background recounted how, when he was in high school, he met another gay kid his own age.  They came out to one another and became friends, and discussed whether they should have sex.  Neither had any experience up to this point, and didn't know how long it would be before they had another opportunity.  In the end they decided not to, because they weren't especially attracted to one another.  The instructor of the Psychology class we were addressing became uncomfortable at that point and reassured her students that not all gay men would have sex with just anyone, as if it were unreasonable for two people with few options to get together faute de mieux.  The situation isn't only a gay one; it's the premise of all the man-and-woman-on-a-desert-island cartoons I saw in magazines when I was growing up.  It's also the premise of arranged marriages, where erotic attraction is low on the list of priorities for the matchmakers.  What is important in any erotic situation is that both partners must have the right to say no.

Dan Savage seems to be assuming in this case that they don't have the right to say no, to not be attracted to people for irrational, even petty reasons.  But all erotic desire is irrational: it's not based on a fact-based evaluation of the possibilities.  No one needs a reason to desire another, or to refuse another's overtures.  I'm pretty sure Dan doesn't believe that it's illegitimate for him not to find women "hot."  I know that consent is one of the touchstones of his erotic ethic.  What I don't understand is why he thinks that he's justified in dumping on someone for not being attracted to any other people.  Not being attracted to someone of a given "race" is no worse, and no better, than not being attracted to them on any other basis, and no one should have to justify not being attracted to someone, even someone who wants them very badly.

There's also a difference between not being attracted to a person and choosing not to copulate with them.  One might decline for any number of reasons: being in a monogamous relationship at the moment, not wanting to copulate with anyone at the moment, having religious or other principled reasons for abstention, not being in the mood right now, not wanting to copulate without being in a committed relationship with the other, etc.  Someone I knew years ago, a white Southerner with pretensions to gentility, acknowledged the beauty of a young African-American man we both knew.  But then my acquaintance became uncomfortable: "Oh, Ah couldn't," he said repeatedly, "Ah just couldn't, Ah couldn't."  So, I said, don't.  But he couldn't seem to let it alone.  Maybe he eventually rethought his assumptions about his desires (though his desire in this case was clear enough) and his criteria for an erotic partner; it didn't come up again.  But should he have decided to bed this young man because he had hangups about sex with black men?  What assumptions are we dealing with here?

"Race" is not the only issue.  As I've mentioned, sex/gender is another, and it's not clear why it's privileged -- why Dan Savage shouldn't consider himself a dumb fucking gay man for not wanting to have sex with women.  One reason I object to the bogus claim that we're all basically bisexual is that in practice it's often used to try to nag someone who into having erotic experience they're not interested in having because not being bisexual is so uptight.  Even if I were bisexual -- a "perfect 3 on the Kinsey Scale" as some doofuses have put it -- there would still be plenty of people of both sexes I wouldn't be attracted to.

There has also been some controversy because some lesbians refuse to copulate with transwomen.  Whether that refusal expresses prejudice ought to be irrelevant.  If it is, who would want to get naked with someone prejudiced against them?  I happened on a blog post on this matter a couple of years ago, and some commenters denied that anyone was saying that lesbians must have sex with transwomen - but very quickly some other commenters made it clear that that was exactly what they were saying.  You can argue with the rationalizations that some have given for not copulating with transwomen, they might be prejudiced or bigoted, but none of this overrides the principle of consent: everybody's right to say no and to have that decision respected.

One of the ongoing themes in discourse about human sexuality has been the attempt to justify negating consent: why someone should not be allowed to say no.  Sometimes it's just personal petulance -- I want you, why don't you want me, you have to give me what I want because I want it. But even then, the nagger may try to invoke larger principles.  Almost everybody pays lip service to consent, but in practice, they're not so sure.  I still don't know why Dan Savage thinks that people should be shamed or coerced into acknowledging desires they don't in fact have.  If you're not consciously aware of being attracted to someone, you're not attracted to them.  Maybe that will change, but for now, it's not there.

Am I running on too long about a minor issue?  I don't think so.  Variations on this issue are surprisingly common.  Most attention has been given to defending people's freedom to have the kinds of sex they want; less has been devoted to defending their freedom not to have sex they don't want.  It's interesting how easily asserting the first turns into denying the second.

The Political Correctness of the Center

I hate-listened to The 1A on the road to northern Indiana this morning, which at least kept me alert during the three-hour drive.

Today being Friday, the program covered the week's news in summary, which may account for the rushed, breathless pace at which the commentators had to work.  As usual, today's commentators were from the corporate media and the Beltway.  They weren't stupid, but neither did they have anything to say that you wouldn't be able to hear on CNN or MSNBC.  (On the other hand, I heard that the historian Kevin M. Kruse, who's been correcting right-wing historical discussion to great effect on Twitter, appeared on The 1A earlier this week; I'll have to listen to that segment.)

The dominant topic during the domestic segment was immigration.  I don't intend to dissect the discussion in any detail.  It stayed well within the bounds of the mainstream, framing the issues in terms set by the Republicans: if you want to "decriminalize" crossing the border, for instance, you're in favor of "open borders."  The commentators were, I think, aware that this is a false dichotomy, but they didn't have time to explain why, so they just quoted it.  Noam Chomsky's strictures on concision were confirmed once again: if you aren't given time to explain complex issues, soundbytes and slogans are all the audience will get, and then you can dismiss the masses as brainwashed sheeple incapable of understanding, unworthy of having input.

I noticed that the people being held in our concentration camps were almost always referred to as "migrants."  One of the commentators called them "asylum-seekers" once, but returned to "migrants" after that.  I realize that journalists seeking the phantasm of objectivity have a difficult time with terminology, and I suppose that "migrants" is the best our corporate media can do.  It seems to have become the word of choice all over the media, from what I can tell, so it would be surprising if The 1A strayed from the consensus.

But "migrant" isn't the right word for people who are fleeing from intense economic and political misery.  True, many such people do migrate in search of work and/or safety; the first Mexicans I encountered in Indiana were migrant farm workers who came north in the summers and returned south, even back to Mexico, when the work was done.  (It's worth remembering that most Mexicans who came north returned home periodically until undocumented crossing was criminalized during the George W. Bush administration: that had the effect, not of keeping them out, but of keeping them in.)  There have also been American migrants, most famously the Okies who fled the Dust Bowl in the 1930s (see Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath), and African Americans who fled southern poverty and Jim Crow to the north at around the same time.  Internal migrants, as both those precedents remind us, are not more welcome, or treated better, than refugees from abroad.

"Asylum-seekers" is more specific and accurate for the people who are crowding the US/Mexico border now, but "refugees" is also specific and accurate, and I don't believe it was used once today.  (Nor do I recall encountering it often in most respectable media coverage these days.)  "Refugee" has emotional connotations and might generate sympathy, so of course objective journalists shy away from it, but the disinclination to use it is also a choice -- what could and should be called the Political Correctness of the Center.

Once I noticed this, it was easier to notice that "migrant" was the word of choice by a different batch of commentators in today's international segment for refugees from Africa and the Middle East trying to reach Europe.  I believe "refugee" was used more often for such people before, during the Obama administration; why "migrant" has replaced it, I don't know, but it does seem to have happened.

Among numerous other matters that annoyed me was the discussion of the power-sharing agreement that has just been reached in the Sudan between the military junta currently in charge there and the civilian opposition.  The main question for The 1A's team was whether it would last.  It's a pointless question, because no one can answer it -- certainly none of them really tried.  So why waste time on it?  Because it's the kind of question that such people love to chuckle over.

At that, The 1A wasn't as bad as a BBC segment I heard earlier this morning: the newscaster interviewed one of the civilian negotiators, and tried repeatedly to badger him into saying on the air that he didn't trust the military to hold up their end of the agreement.  The negotiator did his best to evade the question, but even to ask it was irresponsible; I could hear the smirk in the newscaster's voice as he pressed for the answer he wanted, which would have been a handy excuse for the military to accuse the civilians of bad faith, and even put the negotiator in danger.  We're talking here about a country struggling to emerge from decades of one-man rule, in which the military has killed over a hundred civilians recently to, um, "restore order" I think the term is.  Whatever happens, it won't happen to James Copnall.

The Four Freedoms for the Twenty-First Century

I got a mailing from my Congressman today, composed of a column he published in a newspaper somewhere.  The subject line was "America: Worth Fighting For."

It begins with the standard blather about ordinary Americans having cookouts with their families on the Fourth, and how my Congressman hung out with veterans who fought to keep our country free before returning to Washington DC where there are apparently no veterans; and then a Thomas Paine quotation: "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value."  (I wonder if my right-wing Republican Congressman knows what a radical anti-Christian Paine was.)

Our country has always been fought for, and we must ensure it is always worth fighting for. Every generation of Americans has bravely faced threats from abroad and challenges from within. Today, our troops are fighting for peace in the face of terror, and back home we are grappling with how to ensure the next century is an American one. Our men and women in uniform put their lives on the line every day in the name of the very words we celebrate today: “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This boilerplate posing is so familiar that one hardly pays it any attention.  But it's a tissue of pernicious lies.  Notice, for example, "how to ensure the next century is an American one."  Almost certainly that's an anti-immigrant dogwhistle, though it could also be about economic competition with China.  Maybe both.  The real internal "challenge" comes from the racist Right, and the wealthy oligarchs who believe that they should run the country and the world.

It's false that every generation of Americans "has bravely faced threats from abroad."  The United States has been an aggressor at least often as it had to defend itself, and since the end of World War II we have not fought a single war of self-defense.  The same goes for the claim that "our troops are fighting for peace in the face of terror": our endless war is a war for domination of the entire world.

Which doesn't mean that there aren't things about America that are "worth fighting for."  If we were attacked from without, defense would be completely proper.  Defense, even retaliation, was not out of place after the September 11 attacks; the wretched irony is that Bush chose to retaliate against everybody except the attackers.

In that light, we should remember that the American continents were worth fighting for, for the pre-Columbian peoples; Korea was worth fighting for, for Koreans; Vietnam was worth fighting for, for Vietnamese; Cuba was worth fighting for, for Cubans; Palestine is worth fighting for, for Palestinians; Afghanistan is worth fighting for, for Afghans; Iraqis thought that Iraq was worth fighting for; if it comes to that, Iranians and Venezuelans and Koreans once again will hold their countries worth fighting for.  But this can't be admitted by patriots: there is only one country worth fighting for, as far as they can recognize.  They are indignant when the citizens of another country defend it against a US invasion.  If you really want the ratification of Americans' love of country, however, you have to grant the validity of other peoples' love of theirs.

In a broader sense of "fight," many Americans have fought for Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: abolitionists, runaway slaves, opponents of US wars of aggression, the Civil Rights Movement, the defenders of civil liberties, working people, women, gay men and lesbians and transgender people -- everyone that people like my Congressman would rather forget about, and certainly have no interest in celebrating on the Fourth.

What followed made my eyes bug out:

That’s why, in Congress, I work every day to ensure our country’s policies reflect the values that our men and women in uniform are fighting for:

    freedom to spend your hard-earned paycheck for your family, not give it all to the government;
    the opportunity to turn an idea into a Fortune 500 company, not be limited by government overreach;
    the freedom to think differently from your neighbor without persecution or stigma;
    a doctor-patient relationship without the government signing your prescription.

Essentially, it is the ability of every American to pursue their American dream.

Today, on the Fourth of July, I’m reminded that our American values, the freedom and independence we declared 243 years ago, are always worth fighting for.

This, I presume, is the right-wing Hoosier version of FDR's Four Freedoms.  Yeah, that's what Tom Paine cared about: his right to pay no taxes on his Fortune 500 company.  That's what the Second World War was about, the freedom to be a Nazi without persecution or stigma.  And that's what our men and women are fighting for today: the right to go bankrupt from medical bills, assuming you can afford a doctor-patient relationship in the first place.... Since solid majorities of Americans, even Republicans, want a government-run healthcare system and higher taxes on the rich, my Congressman has to be delusional.  But he doesn't stand alone: the Democratic Party leadership shares his delusions, no less than the Republican elites.  Joe Biden would be happy to reach across the aisle to him.  There must be something hallucinogenic in the swampy water of Washington, D.C.

Prejudice

Dan Savage has struck again.  Answering a letter from a liberal white guy about his girlfriend's sketchy comments about the attractiveness of black and Asian men --

The position that I’ve always held is that we’re attracted to individuals, not types, and it’s wrong to have expectations of people based on race—especially when it comes to sexualizing/fetishizing people. I think we should date and have sex with whomever we want and not carry prejudiced expectations into our relationships. 

The woman's remarks, as he reported them, were perhaps sketchy but not outrageous: she "has a thing for black guys" and found a Korean-American friend "handsome despite not typically being attracted to Asian guys."  It seems to me that people tend to fall back on cliches in talking about their attractions and sex lives, because that's what we learn from our culture and few people bother to think it through.  If someone is often attracted to people of color, "I have a thing for them" is likely how they'll express it in casual conversation, partly because that's how other white people will phrase it to them.  "You have a thing for black guys, huh?"  And that question expresses all sort of malignant assumptions about whom a white person should be attracted to.  I've never been asked, "You have a thing for white guys, don't you?" even though most of the men I've dated have been white, just because of the law of averages in the American Midwest.  Dating non-white men inspires comment in a racist society.  If I don't feel it's noteworthy myself, plenty of other people will make it their business to enlighten me.

Since the letter-writer has no information about how she actually treats the black men she dates, it's premature at best to say that she's fetishizing / sexualizing (!) in a way that would bother them in face-to-face, pelvis-to-pelvis interaction.  (I threw in the exclamation point because when you're attracted to an individual, you are "sexualizing" them by definition.  Liberal discourse on sex is impoverished in its own way.)  The liberal guy goes on to blurt out, all unawares, some significant "prejudiced expectations" of his own, for which Dan rightly called him out.

But Dan also wrote:

But instead of reconsidering their ideas about attractiveness, a dumb fucking white person—even one from a liberal background—is likelier to say something stupid like “I don’t usually find Asian guys hot, but your Korean friend is attractive,” rather than rethinking their assumptions about their desires. Declaring one Asian guy an exception allows someone like your girlfriend to have her racist cake (“I don’t find Asian guys hot”) and eat it too (“But this Asian guy is hot”).

I think that saying something stupid like "I don't usually find Asian guys hot, but your Korean friend is attractive," is how a person begins to rethink their assumptions about their desires.  (Except for "hot," a label that has always grated on me.)  It may not come up to Dan's or Liberal Guy's standards of enlightened discourse, but then both of them have their own cliches for discussing attractiveness.  I don't see anything racist even in Dan's (and it's his, not her) supposedly stupid way of putting it.

Dan went on:

I have to say, though, I disagree with you on one thing: People do have types, and there’s nothing wrong with having types.

This starts off well.  I agree that people have types, and there's nothing wrong with having types, though this also means that it will inspire comment when people are attracted by someone who isn't their type.  But I also agree with Liberal Guy that we are attracted to individuals.  After a certain amount of experience with attraction, however, one may notice (or others will notice for one) that some of those individuals have some traits in common, so one may speak of having a type.  That can be a box one uses to limit one's reactions and experience, though people have the right to do so; or it may just be a mildly interesting fact one has deduced from one's experience.  There are those who humblebrag that they are only attracted to a vanishingly small number of people, one more of the many ways people find to rationalize and exalt their own tastes.  I learned early on that I was pleased, even delighted, when I was attracted to someone who wasn't one of my types.  I'm also intrigued when I'm not attracted to someone who 'should' be my type.  But in both cases, it's of intellectual not practical interest.  However you react to such a discovery, there is no obligation to follow through on it, and of course (except that many people forget this) there is no guarantee that the person you're attracted to will be attracted back.  Even if you're attracted to types, you will be interacting with an individual -- an individual with his or her own types and desires, who may not be attracted to you.

Since many are fascinated by the origins of desire, it's fair to ask where these types come from.  No one knows, any more than anyone knows where the type that is standard -- sex/gender -- comes from.  Is a type a master category encoded in me, an unconscious filter that determines who I'll desire?  Is it in my genes?  Was I born with it?  I doubt it very much.  I think it's something learned, based partly but not predictably on early experience, but also shaped by later experience.  When I was eighteen, for example, men of forty seemed old and I was almost never attracted to them.  Now I'm sixty-eight, and men of forty seem young, and I'm often attracted to them.  But I'm not attracted to all forty year old males, nor to all white men, nor to all Asian men, nor to all black men.

Which brings me to Dan's peroration:

It’s a good idea to ask ourselves whether our “types” are actually ours and not just assigned to us by conventional standards of beauty (white, slim, young) or a thoughtless/fetishizing reaction to those standards (a desire to transgress with nonwhite, larger, or older folks).

I agree, it's a good idea to ask these questions, and I have the only correct answer: "Yes," to both.  Our types are both ours and assigned to us by conventional standards.  The categories and language ("hot," for example) we use to think or talk about them come from society, but we aren't absolutely bound by them.  Where did those standards come from, anyway?  We know that they change over time and vary from culture to culture.  And not everyone conforms to the assignment; probably no one conforms in every particular, or all the time.  Nonconformity produces cognitive dissonance, and people will try to explain to themselves as well as to others, why they like someone they're not supposed to like, or don't like someone they should.  Most people will do a crappy job of it.  But it's not important to do it much better.  What is important is treating the people we're attracted to with respect, which seems obvious to me (if you want something from someone, shouldn't you ask nicely?) but clearly isn't obvious to everybody.

I think these problems arise partly because erotic desire produces anxiety: it's not under conscious control, and people hate that.  We try to get control by rationalizing our desires, which won't work because they aren't rational.  So you get Liberal Guy's cliches about fetishizing/sexualizing, which he got from society but adopted, or Dan's about conventional standards and whether they're ours or society's.  Yet Dan thinks more about these questions than most people; it's his job.  The wrench in the works is that heterosexuality is both something assigned (to everybody) by society, and yet it feels like one's own.  That's what social construction means: what we have learned feels as if it's "natural." 

Notice that Dan writes as if he assumes that desire for non-whites, older or heavier folks comes from a "desire to transgress" instead of being one's own authentic wish.  (What are non-whites in America supposed to do?  Society tells them that only whites are desirable, but society also tells them they shouldn't desire whites.)  That's certainly an assumption assigned by society - I can't count the times I've been told that I'm gay out of a desire to rebel against society, not from genuine desire for males.  One reason it's absurd is that so many gay people are utterly conformist.  Another is that rebelling is hard work, and if I had sex with men in order to rebel, it would eventually get tiresome, and I'd get less and less pleasure from it.  I wouldn't be surprised if some people try to deal with disapproval of their desires by rationalizing them as rebellion, but who knows?  Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?  And if we're going to talk about assigned desires and types, heterosexuality would be more suspect than any other fetish.  Homosexuality would be a close second, even though it's officially disapproved, but then it falls under Dan's proscription of rebellion.  It's very telling that someone like Dan, who believes that sexual orientation -- fetishizing one sex or the other -- is inborn, also believes that it's so malleable under social pressure.

Underneath Dan Savage's rebellious, foul-mouthed exterior there beats the heart of the Catholic conservative he was raised to be.  The function of his strictures, regardless of his conscious intention, is to keep people corralled within the boundaries of conventional standards.  You're white and attracted to a non-white person?  First make sure you aren't fetishizing them - and you can never really be sure you aren't, so play safe and fetishize only white people.  Apparently you needn't worry about fetishizing them.  Some years ago, Dan was celebrating his own fetish (which he delicately called a "bias") for slim, hairless, athletic young guys in "tighty-whities" (a variety of fetish underwear), to the point of inviting readers to send in photos.  As he pointed out, "Because it's my column, and when you've got a column you can get away with that sort of shit. (If Miss Manners can do it, why can't I?)"  Or maybe it wasn't a fetish, because it was Dan's.  Fetish for thee, bias for me.

Let the End Times Roll

I just finished watching Good Omens, the Amazon Prime miniseries based on Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's 1990 fantasy novel about the Antichrist.  I was never a fan of the novel, which I began reading with rather high hopes that were soon dashed, and I don't understand why so many people love it.  The miniseries is a competent adaptation, with an excellent cast and decent production values.  It seems to be pretty faithful to the book, though I should probably wait until I've reread it to say that.  And, of course, it sparked a rather limp controversy when a fundamentalist Christian group started an online petition begging Netflix to cancel it, sparking amusement in the secular humanist media.

My lack of enthusiasm for Good Omens comes partly from the thinness of the story.  It's basically a parody of The Omen, a horror-movie franchise about the life and hard times of the Antichrist.  (According to the Wikipedia article, the authors didn't seem to recognize the similarities.)  I saw it with friends when it was released in 1976, and hated it because its scariness relied on shock editing: I'd be frightened for a moment, then disgusted for being manipulated.  When a friend made me watch it again thirty years later, I liked it no better but noticed how little sense the story made on its own terms.  It relied on the New Testament mythology of the end times, and the title character's supposed fulfillment of end-times "prophecy."  But there's no real suspense when the prophecy you're fulfilling ends with your ignominious defeat.  The biblical Antichrist is just a cog, not an agent, set up to be knocked down.

Gaiman and Pratchett took The Omen's premise, the son of Satan born to ordinary human parents, and switched him at birth so that both the angelic and demonic hosts lost track of him for eleven years. Because he never gets the training in Evil he was supposed to get, he grows up to be a normal boy, and the heavenly Plan goes awry.  The main characters in the story are the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley, who've been working on the same cases since the Creation and have become buddies if not exactly friends.  Both are alienated from their Organizations and go native, becoming so fond of human culture and foibles that they decide to try to stop Armageddon from happening, and (spoiler? nah) succeed, so everything turns out all right.  The world is saved.

I had a creepy feeling as I watched the final episode that it left space for a sequel, which seems not impossible since Amazon has already turned Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle into a multi-season series.  Not impossible, but not likely since Pratchett's dead, and Gaiman wouldn't want to mess with a classic - would he?  I don't think the fans would object, though, to seeing more of Aziraphale, Crowley, and Good Omens' other lovable characters; Adam the Antichrist is only eleven years old, and has a lot of growing up to do (Young Antichrist in Love - His First Kiss!); the angelic and demonic hosts have been frustrated in their wish to destroy the world, but not really defeated.  Yes, lots of room for a sequel there.  Luckily for me, I'm not a fan, and will have little interest in watching it if it ever is produced.

I have other quibbles with Good Omens' ... well, call it theology.  An old friend shared this meme on Facebook yesterday, of some screengrabs and dialogue from the program.  Azirophale and Crowley are at the foot of the cross:

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This might not annoy me so much if other people hadn't come up with similar takes. Kurt Vonnegut, if I recall correctly, wrote something similar in Slaughterhouse-Five.  It's ironic, though not at all unusual, when clever people who despise fundamentalists for their ignorance get something so fundamentally wrong.  Of course Pratchett and Gaiman were entitled to make up any Jesus they find appealing, but it's significant that their Jesus is such a cliche.

For what it's worth, according to the gospels Jesus was not crucified for telling people to be kind to each other.  He was crucified because it was God's plan, determined before the creation of the world and leaked to the Hebrew prophets, that he should die for the sins of humanity.  That's the story, and Pratchett in particular was very aware of the importance of stories, though he tended to forget it when he had an ax to grind.  It can be argued that the Romans who executed him didn't know they were puppets on the divine hand, but fairness demands that we attend to what they thought the reasons were.  The gospels give us that, and it's plausible in light of what crucifixion was for: all four canonical gospels agree that Jesus' cross bore the legend "King of the Jews."  According to Matthew, that was exactly what he was, and Pontius Pilate, Caesar's agent in Judea, was supposed to keep little Anticaesars in check.  It's not clear, though, where the charge came from; it's not mentioned in any of the gospel accounts of Jesus' trials.  Certainly "He said we should be kind to each other" didn't figure when Jesus was brought before Pilate.

Remember the story, set just before Jesus' arrest, of Jesus' witticism "Give Caesar what is Caesar's, and God what is God's." Many interpreters have been sure they knew what secret message Jesus meant to send with that ambiguous bon mot.  It's common to argue that he couldn't have said straight out to defy the Roman occupation of Eretz Israel because the Romans would have arrested and executed him as a rebel.  But they did arrest him and execute him as a rebel, and that was, after all, his mission: to be crucified.  The exact charge was almost immaterial.  Perhaps, going by the motif that "his time had not yet come," Jesus didn't want to be executed yet: he had to die, as the gospel of John has it, as the sacrificial Passover lamb, and not a minute sooner.  (Unfortunately, the other gospels have a different chronology.)

Nor did it come up earlier, when Jesus was brought before Jewish officials for interrogation.  According to the gospel of Mark, there were false accusations (which may have been true) that Jesus had threatened to destroy the Jerusalem temple.  Finally the High Priest asked Jesus point blank, "Are you the Messiah, the son of the Blessed?"  Jesus replied, "I am, and you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of Heaven."  The High Priest tore his robes, denouncing Jesus' "blasphemy," and the council agreed that Jesus deserved to die.  Like most of the Passion story, this makes little sense: as far as we know, claiming to be the Messiah was not blasphemy, nor was it an offense in Judaism, let alone a capital one.

There are other possible reasons for Jesus' execution, such as the conflicts between him and other Jewish teachers on aspects of Torah, which would have stirred up a lot of bad feeling but were normal in first-century Judaism, and not capital crimes either. But teaching love and kindness -- which was where Jesus and other Jewish teachers agreed -- never comes up in the gospels as a reason for his death.

Something else that occurred to me as I watched Good Omens was that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were depicted as agents of Satan, sent by him to initiate and lead the forces of Evil against the Hosts of Heaven in their final conflict.  That seemed off, so I looked at the Revelation of John, which is the source for most of this mythology.  Sure enough, the Four Horsemen are agents of Heaven rather than Hell, sent by the Lamb to soften up the earth by slaughtering millions. Only after a third of humanity has been killed will "the beast that comes up out of the abyss ... make war with them" (Revelation 11:9).  Admittedly the chronology here is confused, but it seems that the Antichrist hasn't even been born yet.

Not that Pratchett and Gaiman were obligated to follow John's convoluted narrative.  But it's significant that they decided (if they were even aware they were making a change) to change the  Four Horsemen's team colors.  They also tried to distance the angels (depicted as soulless, vicious bureaucrats) from God, who narrates the TV version as the wise, soothing voice of Frances McDormand.  Maybe, they suggest urgently, all this Armageddon stuff isn't God's ineffable plan after all but just the mischief of Her underlings who have somehow slipped the leash?  Devout Christians, trying to exculpate their omnipotent, omniscient deity of all responsibility for his actions and those of his organization, could go along with that.  And it does leave room for a sequel, the which may Hell forbid. 

Think, for some more examples, of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, in which it turns out that the guy everybody thought was God wasn't God after all but some elderly loser.  The same copout is used in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, featuring a quest for God at the center of the galaxy; once again, the being who claimed to be God is a fraud, not the real God. It's an admission of inability, which is reasonable enough, to imagine how human beings would engage with, let alone defeat, an omniscient, omnipotent being.  But it's still a copout, a step away from "And then he woke up and it had all been a dream."

It's a familiar pattern to me: ostensible unbelievers still insist that as bad as his followers have been, Jesus was a really nice guy who just wanted us all to get along and be nice to each other.  Maybe he was; nobody knows.  But there's no basis, except some sort of strange wishful thinking, for dogmatically declaring so.  More important, it seems to me, is a powerful desire to imagine themselves on the side of the really good guys, and to be able to look down in safety on the eternal torment of the really bad guys. And that's no improvement on the hatefulness of standard Christianity; it just reshuffles the name tags of the players.

This is why Good Omens disappointed me when I read it almost thirty years ago.  I'd really like to see some fiction which radically reimagined Christian mythology without trying to save some remnant of orthodoxy, and challenged unbelievers (including me) as much as it challenged believers.  I'm not calling for a negative, villainous Jesus (though I'm fine with that in principle), but for a neutral one.  I doubt such fiction would go over well with the people who like books like Good Omens, though.  They (fans and, I think, the authors) want to dispose of the God and the Jesus of orthodox Christianity, but they still want to believe that there's a fond sky Daddy who's on their side against the world, and who'll protect them from all harm.  They're entitled to wish for that, but I'm not obligated to give their wish any more respect than I give other forms of religious belief.

What's It All About ...

There was a little flurry of excitement recently in the area of Twitter I frequent, because someone had just learned that Joni Mitchell's song "Coyote" was inspired by the playwright Sam Shepard.  She had an affair, or perhaps a "flirtation," with Shepard in the mid-1970s during the Rolling Thunder Revue.  Someone gushed in a comment how glad they were to finally "know what that song was about."

Is it pedantic to say that Shepard is a who (whom, to go ahead and be pedantic), not a what?  I think the song is about the sparks that fly when two people who are "incapable of a relationship" (which is what she said of James Taylor) strike together.  It's not necessarily a bad thing: as the song indicates, it can be quite exciting.  I could sing this song myself with conviction.  But "Coyote" is certainly as much about Mitchell herself as it is about anyone else.  The critic Robert Christgau wrote of Hejira, the album it appeared on, "The reflections of a rich, faithless, compulsively mobile, and compulsively romantic female are only marginally more valuable than those of her marginally more privileged male counterparts, especially the third or fourth time around. It ain't her, bub, it ain't her you're lookin' for."  True, but Hejira is one of my favorite Mitchell albums, and I find it interesting that I like "Coyote" much more now that I'm old than I did when I first heard it in my twenties.

(To be fair, Christgau also wrote in another Mitchell review that "In a male performer such intense self-concern would be an egotistic cop-out. In a woman it is an act of defiance.")

I also find that I like Mitchell less and less the more I learn about her.  For example, when she told Mojo magazine (via) that "Joan Baez would have broken my leg if she could, or at least that's the way it felt as a person coming out [on to the music scene]."  Maybe she's right, but I think she's projecting.  Which suggests to me that I'd better not read David Yaffe's biography of her, in which she apparently lobs spitballs at just about everybody, mean-spirited and not even in an interesting way.  I don't remember which reviewer pointed out the self-pity that characterized many of her lyrics on her very first album, but he spotted it early.  There are several of her songs that I don't want to perform myself because of that.

Some more Christgau, from his capsule review of Mitchell's 2000 album Both Sides Now: "My favorite Joni story is that they tried to do a TV special on her and none of her old friends would pitch in. Even if it's a dumb rumor or a damned lie, it's a hell of a metaphor for someone who loves herself so much nobody else need bother".  I'm mean enough to find that funny, though I know that in 2019 a TV special and tribute concert was successfully put together for her seventy-fifth birthday.

But I digress.  Back to "Coyote" for a moment.  Suppose, as a thought experiment, that Mitchell and Shepard flirted but never actually made the beast with two backs.  Suppose even that they never actually met, and she knew him only by sight and reputation.  Suppose that she just wrote a fantasy.  ("Now he's got a woman at home / He's got another woman down the hall / He seems to want me anyway" is gratifying to the ego, isn't it?)  How would that change the song?  Not much, in my opinion.  I think a lot of people's prurient fantasies would be dashed, though, and they'd like "Coyote" a lot less.  For me, since I'm neither Mitchell nor Shepard, it's the song that matters, since it's all I really know.

I'd be curious to know how many people decide what a song (or a poem, or any other work of art) is "about."  Who or what inspired it is generally the least of it, and in my opinion the least interesting. Think of some famous Beatles songs: "Martha My Dear" is addressed to Paul McCartney's dog. "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was inspired by a drawing made by John Lennon's young son, of a school friend named Lucy.  (Many people wanted to believe it was about LSD, from the initials, but they could also be Pounds / Shillings / Sixpence.)  The lyrics of "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" were derived from an antique circus poster.

Or another famous song, this one by Bob Dylan.  "Mr. Tambourine Man" was the session musician Bruce Langhorne, who played "a large Turkish frame drum ... [which] had small bells attached around its interior, giving it a jingling sound much like a tambourine."  Is the song about him?  Even if it were, it's hard to say what it has to say about him.  Many people believed the song was about a drug dealer, or a drug experience; a highly knowledgeable high school teacher of mine confidently told me so, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence for this interpretation.  A writer for the New Yorker declared that "the song’s narrator describes losing his spiritual footing, only to implore a mysterious figure to guide him ... It is as tender a tribute to the alleviative power of friendship as I can imagine."  That's pretty good, though I'm not sure I agree with the "losing his spiritual footing" part.  I still like to hear "Mr. Tambourine Man" as a love song, not because I think that Dylan or Langhorne was gay, or that they had a "flirtation," but because the bittersweet yearning of the music and lyrics captures feelings I've had for other men.  It's interesting to know about Langhorne, whose musicianship I enjoy, but really, who inspired the song is gossip; and though, as a very wise man once said, gossip is the food of the gods, it's largely irrelevant to understanding art.

Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" is another good example.  People have been speculating for over forty years about who "you" could be -- Mick Jagger? Warren Beatty? -- and though I've always loved the song for its wit, I've never really cared who inspired it.  At one point it appeared that Simon had carpentered together jottings about several different men.  So, the vain "you" would be a sort of Frankenstein's creature?  Again, the model or models for the lyrics is gossip, and not important.  If you'd known any of these people, could you have come up with these songs? What matters is that Mitchell, Dylan, Lennon, McCartney, and others did.  That to me is the interesting mystery, and as a poet and songwriter myself it's still a mystery where the work comes from.

Gossip isn't the whole story, though.  People love being in on secrets, and they love decoding texts, believing that they are puzzles with a solid foundation of truth or knowledge underneath that they can access if they find the key.  Some texts are puzzles.  Think of the revelation books of the Bible, with their visions that must be decoded.  One thing I find significant is that Daniel and the Revelation both include keys, in the form of angelic guides who explain the symbolism, yet people tend to ignore what these guides explicitly say.  That may be partly because these books' forecasts of the End are false, so some readers decide that they've missed something.  Jesus interpreted the parable of the Sower for his disciples, and the interpretation is something of a letdown at best, which hasn't kept theologians from striving heroically to make it sound more interesting than it really is.  Numerous fans have treated pop songs the same way, obsessively trying to relate the imagery to something else, some Higher Truth that Dylan or Lennon knew but could share only with the elect who divided their Words rightly. The payoff is the conviction that you, the interpreter, are among the elect who have understood.

Some people complain that "crickits" take all the fun out of art by tearing it apart until regular people can't enjoy it anymore.  Biographical criticism -- looking for the meaning of the work in the artist's life -- especially infuriates many, but as these examples show, biographical criticism is lay / popular criticism, as are numerological and allegorical interpretation.  In general I'd say that the best way to avoid this problem is not to read criticism, but I think that regular people love tearing art apart, just in different ways and to different ends.  Think of the "Paul Is Dead" myth, that Paul McCartney died and was replaced with another musician, with many clues scattered through the Beatles oeuvre.  The idea that secret wisdom is woven into texts entrances many people, and trying to decode it, however erratically and irrationally, doesn't seem to spoil the experience for them.  For many it seems to be more important than the work itself.  They're not as different from the academics as they like to think.