by Carl Gopalkrishnan

…

Between 2008-2012, I created paintings with an ‘old school’ queer cultural affinity with vintage Broadway and Hollywood musicals. I used the life of Judy Garland as an internal narrative arc, a reflective tool, as part of my personal response to the 9/11 consciousness we inhabit today.  It became a metaphorical exploration of American politics from the period of the Obama/Clinton primaries, through further conflict in the Middle East amid the background of drones and the war on terror.  I think Judy kept asking the same question too, but kept singing the whole time, so keeping her fucked up life beside me as I painted was oddly grounding.

To me, Garland is more than a gay icon. She represents the best and worst of America – and their inevitable interoperability. The flipside of her talent helped me to understand the American partisan split personality in a more sympathetic way. I also had no difficulty with being sympathetic because I can’t not be sympathetic to one side of Judy without acknowledging the damage on the other side. And this ‘otherness’ in my paintings is how I conceive what is queer in this series of paintings.  This led me to looking at Hollywood movies and musicals as metaphors for the political intransigence of both Bush and Obama’s foreign policies. I call the series The Assassination of Judy Garland, because I feel that we are now separated into those that see Judy in 2 dimensional tragic terms; and those that see how tragedy shaped her genius in glorious 3D.

I also used French medieval epic poetry – chansons de geste – roughly translated as songs of heroic deeds because they were used at that time to support the political narratives of the Crusades in ways that reminded me of how many Hollywood products supports the War on Terror.  So the queer lens I created for these paintings is a prescription lens made for a specific time and place. And this lens acts as a screen to both hide and reveal motivations and desires, as much the screen icons I reference.  So the modern political stage I see is through recent history (Judy Garland’s life) and medieval history (chansons de geste).

As a queer-identifying man of colour with multiple geopolitical and sexual identities, I found myself directly affected by the political climate of the last decade.  It was the first time as a painter that I was looking outside to constructively use what was inside me to create an alternative to the narrative War on Terror, which always insists that I use my cultural heritage to position my loyalties in a dangerous time.  When I looked around to find how I could use my queer identity, I found that it was so busy trying on clothes that it had gone way beyond the body it was made to clothe. It had changed as I had aged.

People seem to forget that queer theory breathes within a time of terror that smashes lenses and burns books. It fancies itself immune. But I could not find a queer framework that helped me to paint what I saw.  I no longer understood what I call the new normative queer, and so I returned to what I knew was ‘naff’ and old school.  I allowed myself to visually languor in the Hollywood of the 1930s and 1950s. I felt quite alienated from the new normative queer climate influenced by a hyper-masculinized LGBTI culture that was becoming increasingly nationalistic in it’s desire to go beyond its backroom history into the light of mainstream acceptance.  Part of that process seems to relegate our screen culture history into the domain of soft power forever, which I really resist.  Screen culture has a power equal to that of the chansons de geste, which could inspire entire populations to lay down their lives through songs orally memorised and sung from village to village in the time of The Crusades. So I painted within that retrospective space, choosing sense over sensibility, perhaps.

I have taken away from these paintings a deeper appreciation for how our queer histories have become silent pictures that sit patiently and move slowly behind the interactive and hyperactive edges of this new normative queer. So while I reference moving pictures, the surreality in my paintings is happening on the silent screen inside us. Applied to the bigger stage, this screen can affect momentous change. We should respect that power.

And Starring Benjamin Netanyahu as Norman Maine  (2010)

This image appropriates A Star Is Born’s relationship between Esther Blodget and Norman Maine (Judy Garland and James Mason) to comment on the nuances in the relationship between America and Israel.

There is nothing like a drone (2011)

I referenced the Pulitzer Prize winning musical South Pacific (which won for its themes of racism) and changed the song There is Nothing Like a Dame to “drone”. It evokes the hyper-masculine fantasies and sexual excitement associated with new technology. Also the romantic, emotional attachment, the anthropomorphic nature that the DOD projects onto this technology.

Chick Flick (2009)

A reflection on Obama’s Cairo speech through the lens of the Bette Davis film Now Voyager, where Davis says to Paul Henried, “Don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.” In my mind the stars and moon of Islamic faith blended with the stars and stripes, but also questioned the role of Hollywood in constructing worldviews on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

  Kandahar Kandy

Kandahar Kandy is about the war in Afghanistan, the cultural conflict here represented by a 1930s “leading man” type with his “leading lady” wearing her burqa. Textually there is a passage from Revelation Chapter 10, and it references religious difference while alluding to the Crusades. I had a thing about cakes (cupcakes here) in several paintings commenting on the way proponents of war project their appetites (for what? – the viewer is asked to reflect).

Tzipi Livni as Sibyle of Cumae with Dancing Follies  (2009)

The Sibyl (as metaphor) has a prophesising role as the priestess presiding over Apollo’s oracle at Cumae, a Greek colony located near Naples, Italy. And Livni is recreated here as a high priestess. It is not eulogising or absolving her in any way, just reflecting on her role on the global stage and Middle East conflict specifically.

Painted at the same time as the Judy/Netanyahu painting in 2009, it’s reflecting on Obama’s Cairo speech.  Netanyahu had just beaten Livni for the PM’s job despite her winning popular votes, and the she declined to share govt.  So it’s a reflection on Livni’s absence, the idea of a leading lady who returns to the chorus line shown through screenprinted Ziegfeld Follies, which I adapted from original photos from the era. I think her absence changed events considerably.

Suppertime (series: 6 x 10x10cm individual canvases)

This painting is inspired by a 1933 performance of the song Suppertime by African American singer/actor Ethel Waters in Irving Berlin’s Broadway show As Thousands Cheer. The musical, really innovative for its time, was a musical about International and national current affairs. The song was about a recent lynching of a black man in the South. In 2008 Barack Obama had a lot of political goodwill as a potential first black president and this painting reflects on the difference between Waters’ performance on Broadway and Obama’s on the political stage.

About the Author:

Carl Gopalkrishnan (aka Gopal) has been a practicing visual artist for over 25 years.  Born in the UK in 1967 and now based in Perth, Western Australia, he explores society’s unconscious personality using metaphors through a queer cultural lens. A self-taught painter with a background in design, he mixes academic study and research with less traditional experiential approaches to making images. He works primarily in acrylic on canvas, photography, drawing and printmaking.

In 2012 he exhibited in a workshop at the University of Surrey in the UK and linked some of these paintings into a discussion on new capabilities and new technologies (drones, military intervention etc), in a way that the organizers thought made sense. This became a cross-over exhibition between the arts/other barrier to challenge the way policy makers and advisers saw reality, by introducing the idea that a surreality of unconscious cultural metaphors and hidden histories were silently participating in foreign policy development.

Photo by Leigh Bowery

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by Alison Bancroft

…

There are a number of popular ideas about fashion: That it demeans and oppresses women, or that it is a capitalist plot to extract money – either that they do not have, or that they do have but do not appreciate – from the gullible and the credulous. Attached to both of these is the idea that fashion is vacuous fluff, something trivial that is only of interest to women and gay men and thus pointless by virtue of those who are interested in it. If it were serious, significant, relevant in any way, shape or form, then straight men would take an interest in it. The fact that, on the whole, they don’t take an interest in it, and the people that do are, on the whole, marginalized and discriminated against, is enough to move fashion to the back of the queue for cultural and political importance.

In this short essay I would like to propose another way of looking at fashion, one that will emphasize the ways in which it reframes notions of gender and sexuality. What makes fashion so remarkable is that it has zero regard for heteronormative ideas about men and women, masculine and feminine. In fact, it offers one of the only cultural spaces there is for variant models of sexed subjectivities. In fashion, the usual categories of man and woman do not apply.

Also, before this essay continues, it should be said that fashion here refers to creativity in dress and bodily ornamentation. It is a branch of the avant-garde that makes people say “but you can’t wear that” as if a garment’s unsuitability for everyday life is a problem when, actually, it is the whole point. Fashion is not about shopping, and if you think it is, you have missed a trick. Fashion is not going to change the world, of course. It is never going be truly revolutionary. It is seditious though, it subverts from within, offering challenges to the presumed naturalness of existing hierarchies within the terms that are available to it.

Sheila Jeffreys is the most vocal exponent of the standard criticism that fashion reflects and serves to maintain female subordination. In her book Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West she argues that the appearance of the drag queen Ru Paul in adverts for MAC cosmetics and on the runway for the designer Thierry Mugler is a testament to how much fashion hates women. By Jeffreys’ logic, using a drag queen as a model tells the world that fashion thinks women are irrelevant.[i]

Unfortunately for Jeffreys, anatomy is not destiny. It is not the case that fashion hates women so much it makes them redundant by using a man in their place. Instead, fashion ignores the very idea of men and women from the outset, and it puts men in the place of women, women in the place of men, and trans becomes the default, the norm, rather than an oddity or an abasement. This disregard for the usual categories of man and woman is evidence firstly that gender binaries are irrelevant in fashion, and more generally that gender identity is not located in the anatomical body anyway. For anyone familiar with the development of Queer Theory in the last twenty years, this second point is no surprise. Queer Theory, though, is a bit niche, and beyond the confines of the humanities and liberal arts departments of Western universities where it is researched and taught, no-one has really heard of it. For people outside of universities, the ideas of Queer Theory are communicated differently – and fashion is one of the ways in which queer ideas become culturally active. Indeed, it could be said that fashion was queer avant la lettre.

Andrej Pejic, on the cover of Schon magazine

There have been a number of recent examples of models that could be called queer. Lea T is a transgender model who is a muse at Givenchy and has appeared in editorials for magazines including Vogue, Hercules Magazine, Interview Magazine, Cover Magazine and Love Magazine, where she was photographed kissing Kate Moss. Andrej Pejic is a model who identifies as a man, but who has appeared in a number of womenswear shows and photoshoots,and his clients include Jean Paul Gaultier and Marc Jacobs.  He has been so successful that in 2011 FHM magazine referred to him as “it” and then voted him as one of the top 100 sexiest women in the world – editorial decisions that testify to the bewilderment of the testosterone-fueled journalists at a UK lads magazine when faced with a man who is not macho. Recently, one of the most successful menswear models has been the former Olympic swimmer, Casey Legler. Signed to Ford Models in New York, she identifies as a woman but rejects the definition of that category as being contingent on the body, and has appeared as a model for Michael Bastian and AllSaints.

Casey Legler. photograph by Michael Donovan (via drinkblackwater)

Jelena Abbou for MAC Cosmetics (via Jezebel)

The advertising campaigns for the MAC cosmetics company are also remarkable in this regard. Where most other cosmetics advertisements feature stereotypically “beautiful” women, MAC’s most recent ad campaign features the female body builder Jelena Abbou, muscular and Amazonian, in a black PVC ball gown.Other campaigns have featured a drag queen (Ru Paul), Lady Gaga, Wonder Woman and Miss Piggy. Where make-up is, in our modern age, quintessentially feminine, MAC deliberately rejects popular or clichéd notions of obedient, heterosexual femininity. Instead they are disarmingly frank, showing, through the use of a-typical models, how their cosmetics are a part of a feminine masquerade that, according to Michèlle Montrelay, “man has always called […] evil.”[ii] MAC models do not pretend to be “natural” and they have no desire to pass as straight, desirable women. They offer another vision of femininity, one that has at its core the idea that the feminine has nothing to do with anatomy. The idea of femininity that we see in MAC models is one that is beyond the body but present in and on the body. It is a model of femininity that is profoundly destabilizing. In psychoanalytic terms, the threat of castration and the subsequent dissolution of the social order is writ large in MAC models.

In all of these examples, the sexed identity of the person is constituted at the level of the psyche, and not the biological body. Sigmund Freud believed that we are all a little bit bisexual, at least in terms of how we choose the object of our desire, and regardless of how much this desire may be repressed in adult life. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan shows us how our sense of ourselves as masculine or feminine is the outcome of unconscious processes that take place in the human mind, and has nothing to do with what and how our bodies are. All these models engender a particular identity in their professional lives, lives that embody and enact the contradictions of human existence. They offer a real, tangible rejection of gender binaries, as well as any fixed corporeal answer to the question of “who…..?”

This is not simply a question of androgyny, either. Androgyny is lazy journalist shorthand for the situation that arises when onlookers cannot tell whether the person they see is a man or a woman. It maintains the gender binary, but implies that sometimes it is a guessing game. These models, with their demolition of gender binary, are not androgynous. They are queer.

It is instructive that the only cultural form to embrace the queer idea of gender plurality is fashion, and it does this because fashion is the only cultural form that defaults to the feminine. All other cultural forms are by default masculine, with feminine as a subsection within that. The book The 100 Greatest Women Artists of the Twentieth Century does not have a companion volume for the greatest men artists, because the assumption is that all artists are men, and women are the minority. Likewise with literature – there is literature and there is women’s writing. And so on. The feminine is as much of a minority interest in culture as it is anywhere else in life. The only exception to this is fashion. This is why fashion is a radical creative space where heterosexual gender binaries are irrelevant and queer is the default setting, and it is also why fashion is routinely denigrated and dismissed.

Fashion doesn’t just break down socially and culturally determined ideas about sex and gender – it provides ample evidence that those ideas were a fiction to start with. In doing so, it undermines the social contract. However, because fashion is feminine, it is marginalized and excluded, and its suggestions can only be proposed in a specially dedicated space. Like Bakhtin’s carnival, fashion is the charmed enclosure where the usual rules can be subverted but only temporarily and never in a way that would encroach in real terms on the rules themselves. Fashion shows us the reality of the impossibility of gender, but the only way it can do this is within a space set aside especially for this purpose. Fashion is seditious and subversive, and inherently queer, but, sadly, it is unlikely to queer the world.

by Bonnie Morris

…

“What’s wrong with you, Mr. Stillwell? Don’t you want to remember? No; you don’t. That’s why you’ve blacked it out. You’ve stubbed your conscious mind, and you’ve put a bandage of forgetfulness on it until it recovers. Have the courage to face that terrible thing that made you forget.”

– Mirage, Universal Pictures, 1965

Screen techniques, the subconscious mind, and the political messages imbedded in Hollywood film are all important tools for me as a professor of history. What the camera’s eye “uncovers” is a means for discussing how we hide historical truths, only to reveal them later in the screenplay of American culture.

At George Washington University, it’s my job to acquaint first-year college students with everything their high schools couldn’t or wouldn’t teach: scholarship on gender and sexuality. The history of slavery and segregation. The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The exclusion of women from schools and jobs and athletic fields. The utter suppression of lesbian and gay lives. Usually, such unflattering pictures of discrimination in not-too-distant America were skipped over in my students’ K-12 curriculum. Too often, the history of the Other is buried–marginalized. So, how do we begin to uncover it and restore it to collective consciousness? On the very first day of class, we start talking about seeing history from the margins; from the authentic perspective of the marginalized.

It’s exciting work. Unfortunately, the rich disciplines of women’s studies/black studies/gay and lesbian studies are still reserved for college courses and advanced degrees, and kept separate from “regular” American history. The subject of American women, who today make up over 51% of the population and almost 60% of college enrollment, is still a “special topic.” That’s as problematic a marker in the academic world as “special interests” are in government. It means my classes only reach self-selecting students; no one has to take women’s history. It also means that even these committed, interested students, who may have attended progressive private high schools, are stunningly unfamiliar with the ugly side of American history. My challenge, each fall, is simply convincing these sheltered and privileged students that racial segregation and No Women Allowed actually happened, and happened right here in the nation’s capital.

“No way—that’s crazy! That couldn’t possibly be true!” is a familiar outburst in my Western Civ class.  Some want to know: am I exaggerating? Inventing? Indoctrinating? No. But encountering the unfamiliar in a humanities class lesson bewilders some students, who, moreover, are anxious to do well and to earn an A.  Teaching “from margin to center”, to use the great book title by critic bell hooks, means teaching students to see what was never made visible in their schooling before now.

What does it mean to focus our “eyes” on the previously unseen and unspoken history too often consigned to the footnotes of a page? When I ask my American students what they know about World War II, for instance, most reach for an emblematic American memory, one that sticks out from a lifetime of rote memorization. Pearl Harbor. Iwo Jima. D-Day. We won. Part of what I’m asking is for them to shift the way history is retold, in the same way they might reassess their own “life moments” as individuals. When we sift through our personal memories, we may find they are stacked top-heavy with proud achievements and celebrations, the first kiss, the winning game, graduation.  These happiest images are the ones kept in the slide-show carousel (or, updating technology a little, the personal power-point overview.) But when are we old enough to find the extra slides, the buried images that tell other stories?  This is where the film screen helps my students with recovering, and thus completing, our marginalized national memories, both good and bad.

I tell my students that what helped me was a movie called Mirage.  Directed by Edward Dmytryk and released by Universal Pictures in 1965, it tells the story of a man [Gregory Peck] suffering from amnesia. As he wanders through New York he becomes aware that men are out to kill him. He’s being followed, shot at, and threatened by a mysterious bad guy called “the Major,” while desperately trying to understand the meaning of it all: the past two years and his own career identity are a blur. A nervous psychologist, a brooding detective, and a cynical ex-girlfriend each give Peck small clues to his circumstances. Then, at last, one shard of memory floats up to the surface: Peck begins to see an image of himself in a Southwestern setting, clearly not Manhattan, meeting with the leader of a prominent peace foundation–a man who recently suffered a fatal fall from a top-story window. What does this memory reveal—or conceal? Did Peck play a role in this other man’s death?

Peck turns to his psychologist for help, and the doctor says “Close your eyes, please. I want you to look at that tree in your mind. Now: look around it. What do you see?” By establishing that the remembered image is like a picture with a border, and that the mind’s eye can rove to that border and look beyond it for more information, the psychologist helps Gregory Peck go to the margins of his memory and discover frightening truths there. That’s when we see Peck’s mental camera pan left, revealing a very modern, high-security nuclear laboratory just beyond the tree in his memory. Now we, the audience, understand that he is a nuclear physicist, somehow involved in the arms race. He’s an anti-war scientist, he’s discovered a secret formula to neutralize atomic fallout, and warmakers will kill him for it. This is a film about the Cold War—and the risk of choosing sides.

Shivers ran up my spine when I first watched this scene on a fuzzy black and white TV set in June of 1982. I watched it in Israel: I was spending my junior year of college at Tel Aviv University, and after an otherwise peaceful year, Israeli forces had entered Lebanon. That very week, my roommate brought home a third-hand television so we might follow the war news, but Israeli national TV tried to divert everyone’s attention with old Cold War movies—much as Americans, during our last two years in the Vietnam conflict, were “distracted” from present realities by watching a TV show called M*A*S*H.

Mirage – and the circumstances under which I first saw it—showed me two invaluable tools for a career in history research. One: never mind the memory you think you know; what else was going on just to the side? Two: who’s invested in having you forget where you are, and what you believe in?

I came back from Israel committed to studying women’s history, only to find that throughout the rest of the 1980s and into the 1990s, I’d be part of the so-called culture wars over the “canon” of whose history mattered. Women’s history, like Jewish history, supposedly only mattered to its own, unless certain key incidents (suffrage, the Holocaust) intersected with mainstream studies. But learning with faculty rabbis and Jewish historians at Tel Aviv University taught me that to understand a page of Talmud, one must also be immersed in the commentaries which form the margins of each page. The commentators, like Maimonides—the Rambam—contributed viewpoints and alternative interpretations that soon became as significant as the centerpiece of each page.

When my doctorate in women’s history relegated me to the margins of academia, I knew from Mirage that what went on at that border often decided the real course of human survival and ethical integrity. What happens at the margins isn’t always marginal; not to the people who live there. For instance, here’s a pleasant image of Washington, D.C. It’s the annual Easter Egg roll for local children, on the White House lawn. Let’s look at that image as it might have been filmed in, say, the 1950s. Move the camera a little to the side—over—a bit more over—say, what’s at the margin? It’s the sad faces of thousands of African-American children, the city’s majority, none of whom were invited; they were banned.

What “minority” historians (and this somehow includes women, who constitute half the world’s population) seek is no less than what the haunted, hunted Gregory Peck character strove to find out: who are we and where did we come from? Why does someone hate us? Will our struggle to survive be believed?

I’ve learned that what’s threatening about women’s history is its placement of women as the focus. We are intent upon understanding the entire picture, the wider screen, not just the conversation of the two men under the tree. Rarely has Hollywood let women behind the camera, in the director’s seat—when that happens we’re usually told to consider the final product a women’s picture, a chick flick. What happens to men is everyone’s history, suitable for a global/general audience; anyone can relate. Mirage, after all, came from a studio called Universal. But I want to teach both men and women to seek out the deleted scenes, for a richer, truer movie script, the past of the excluded and their struggle to be seen.

About the Author:

www.bonniejmorris.com

I am a professor of women’s history at George Washington University and the author of ten books, three of which were Lambda Literary Award finalists; I’m also a scholarly adviser to the National Women’s History Museum being built in D.C., and right now I’m a finalist for Professor of the Year at GWU (actually won it last year, too.) Most of my scholarship addresses women’s history and lesbian culture–and the cultural amnesia of forgetting contributions by marginalized communities. I’ve also written LGBT history features for the American Psychological Association’s high school curriculum on the psychology of sexual orientation. My most recent book was the text Women’s History For Beginners; I just won the  Finishing Line Press literary prize for another manuscript due out in spring; and last weekend I presented my history of D.C.’s lesbian bars at the 20th Annual Lavender Languages and Linguistics conference at American University.

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Marx Ernst, La Vierge corrigeant l’Enfant Jésus devant trois témoins: André Breton, Paul Eluard et le peintre, 1926

by Diego Costa

…

When my sister got pregnant with her first child and was able to see what sex it was going to be assigned (that irreparable death sentence that the ultrasound enacts), she immediately knew what she would name him: Gael. She associated the name with the devil-may-care coolness of harmonica-playing boys who manage to be tough and sweet, masculine and sensitive. Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal served as the perfect manifestation for the kind of boy she hoped her son would be. He was intellectual without being arrogant, manly without being brutish. Unfortunately, as she spread the name choice to everyone around her, strangers were taken aback by Gael. Doesn’t it sound like gal? Or even…gay? From Facebook comments to random women getting their manis and pedis at her local salon, folks went on about how strange, and literally queer, Gael sounded. My sister was thus bullied into re-thinking the naming of her son in order to avoid that this child who hadn’t even been born yet would be bullied because of his unconventional name. Pre-natal bullying, you may call it. He was being bullied as he was being gendered. He was being bullied into gender.

My sister decided to give up on Gael and re-name him something more normativity-friendly. For ethical reasons, I won’t say which name, but the point is that little does it matter. While Gael marks difference and rupture, Brian, Michael, or Ben offers continuity and maintenance. They leave things as they are, granting us the same cozy illusion of inevitability that the direct relationship between genitals and gender that we insist on can offer us. As the-child-formerly-known-as-Gael became, say, Ben, I can’t help but think of it as his first major castration episode. The first of a series of regulatory events that will certainly come in due time to keep him in line, to think twice before daring to venture outside the prescribed path of sameness under the “law.” Before language, before catching sight of the (“lack of”) female genitals, before letting out a cry– he has been silenced. Some fundamental protuberance that may have grown out of his singularity has been smoothed over, patched up like an irksome porthole (don’t holes tend to elicit so much anxiety?) out of which something disturbing is sure to emerge. An openness has been sealed, something has been maimed.

The Mother’s first encounter with the normativity-demanding Other could have become the stage for a symbolic intervention on her part. She could have staked a claim, she could have denied the Other’s entrance, she could have preserved the naming of her child as an intimacy between parent and child, without chiseling the baby into one that fits comfortably (for a price) in the world. Instead, she allowed her position of power, the unparalleled power of naming (and a quite violent one as is), to be contaminated by the anti-queer pre-natal police, transforming her motherhood into a function of the hetero-normative State. Here the Mother becomes not only an agent of bullying under the guise of preventing bullying, but a depersonalized baby-making machine in the service of a utopian hygenized society that is queerness-free. A society that is queer-free before queerness can even begin to manifest itself before our eyes. Like Down syndrome fetuses, which thanks to cutting edge technology, can now be spared from their birth so that we can be spared from their sight.

This has nothing to do with mothers individually or my sister’s excellence or lack thereof as a mother. I admire her as a person in the world and do not doubt her maternal love. This has to do with the Mother as function, the position of the Mother and the labor she is asked to do within the gendering economy. Under the spell of the hetero-normativity promises of an unscathed member of society, the Mother with a capital M is ironically the first to injure her baby by giving it up on a properly labeled platter to those who will actually decide if we will keep him or chuck him. Wasn’t it Eve Sedgwick who claimed that in our society the good homosexual was either the masculine homosexual or the dead one?  In order to assuage anxieties about an imagined future violence enacted by others, the Mother ironically wounds the child preemptively, robbing him of the opportunity to begin life from an authentic position. She teaches him how to lay low and pass before he gets a chance to gage his attraction to whatever it is he is passing for.

French essayist Roland Jacquard once said that bringing a child into the world is already abusing him. American culture does an excellent job bringing the violence of bullying to the headlines in a kind of masturbatory panic. It interpelates its celebrities to plead for tolerance, it creates task forces, it broadcasts TV specials, it puts bullying on display to be spoken about, judged and condemned ad nauseam. It’s like it brings us the sadistic high that the act of bullying begets but in a roundabout way that relieves us from the guilt. Yet, America administers this enjoyment mostly through finding bounded human entities to blame for it — which is the same strategy any kind of panic, fueled by claims of tolerance or hatred, tends to follow (the slut, the Jew, the black man, the homosexual, the illegal immigrant, the sex predator, the barebacker, take your pick). Someone is to blame, which leaves the social and symbolic structures (of which we are authors) conveniently unexamined.

So what is a mother to do? What is a mother to do if she submits to the mentality that one combats violence by changing the behavior of the victim, not the perpetrator and what produces their asymmetric relationship? What is a mother to do if she accepts the outsourcing of the bullying by others into her own hands, with the excuse of eliminating future justifications for bullying? What is a mother to do if the fantasy of some un-bully-able child gets her off? If the existence of her un-bully-able child would, really, be contingent on her child being the bully himself? Is that what she secretly wants? A bully, not a faggot? A bully to beat up all the faggot? A bully if that’s the only safe antidote against faggotry? What is a mother to do if subscribing to a culture of elimination of difference that muffles particularity seems like the safest strategy?

Normativity is labor, labor that is bound to fail, and thus requires constant reiteration. It’s the classic Judith Butler bumper sticker ethos: The lacuna between each reiteration is where the opportunity for something to go (positively) awry lies. If only we could invest in teaching the child to tap into that, into this space of alterity out of which something beautifully unsafe can actually spring… The spaces in between each repetition that aims at some kind of perfectly normative eugenic being oozing sameness and belonging is the potential breeding grounds for something else to occur, for difference to come to being and unsettle the structures that demand mindless (and violent) repetition – which gnaws on queerness until its some grotesque worn out piece of flesh nobody wants to fuck .

But if normativity is labor, so is its resistance. Something presumably so simple and cute as the naming of a child can surely place quite significant and path-defining weight on that child’s shoulders. It can certainly help define what shape, stance, consistency and look those shoulders are going to bear. The naming, just as any other choice a parent may make as it helps mediate the child’s relationship to the world, can be a decisive interceptor or interlocutor of the demands that the hetero-normative script puts forth. Trying to camouflage a child’s queerness (Kathryn Bond Stockton tells us every child is essentially queer) is unlikely to change the dynamics of this war. It instead helps fuel it, reiterating a system in which everyone is pretending to embody some kind of hetero-normative standard that only exists in the realm of ideality – the unbreakable phallus, the woman that lacks, the child who is pure, and not, as Freud famously put it, polymorphously perverse.

If the Mother chooses, in the name of the child’s future wellbeing, the violence of a present castration of her child’s inherent queerness, she is abiding by the same logic that would react to the 2012 bus gang rape of an Indian woman with a “But was she wearing a skirt?”. Which is actually in line with protesters who, thirsty with vengeance, called for the public lynching, hanging or literal castration of the perpetrators. As if killing the latest agents of a whole culture of violence against the feminine (in both female and male bodies) would annihilate the drives that bring that culture into being in the first place.

As of this writing, my nephew “Ben” is six months old. Unlike popular belief, yes he does already have a sexuality. If you’re the kind who needs visible empiric evidence, just know that babies can often have erections in the uterus. As we wipe their butts, massage their limbs with baby oil, hold them or hit them – we are touching/writing/speaking/spanking their bodies into (pleasurable) being. What isn’t yet evident is toward which direction his sexuality leans – which, of course, can always change directions, if he finds the space to. Will he follow his uncle’s footsteps and dream of ballet slippers, stardom and gangbangs at age 7? Will he take up the harmonica and embody the nonchalant cool his mother had originally dreamed for him? Or will he end up taking some unaccounted-for path that will leave us all floored, scrambling for ways to understand it, questioning our love for him, realizing he will never match whatever fantasy we had carved out for him fill in? Or will he do what he is supposed to do, with self-effacing dexterity, comfortably hiding the scars that brought him into being from our sight, and perhaps even his own? Either way, he will bear the heavy burden of that coarse, flakey whiteout separating his mother’s desire from his settled-for name.

by Chase Dimock

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As I write, the French parliament is embroiled in a protracted debate over President François Hollande’s push to legalize gay marriage and adoption in France. The controversy regarding the bill has swept through French society and the regular cast of conservative political and cultural interests such as the Catholic Church and the xenophobic right-wing parties has emerged in demonstrations against it. Yet, one unlikely voice of support for the bill came out last month as Jacques-Alain Miller, representing the psychoanalytic community, authored an op-ed in Le Point titled, “Non, la psychanalyse n’est pas contre le mariage gay”. I say this is “unlikely” not because it would be unexpected for a psychoanalyst to support lgbt rights, but because it is uncommon for psychoanalysis to weigh in on current political issues. In this article, Miller (who is Jacques Lacan’s son-in-law and one of the most widely published analysts still active today) does not come out in explicit support of gay marriage, but instead lambastes the conservatives who have misrepresented and instrumentalized psychoanalytic research and theory in their campaign against gay marriage. As Miller promulgates, “we Psychoanalysts are obligated to declare that nothing in the Freudian experience will validate an anthropology that is authorized by the first chapter of Genesis.” (my translation)

While it is important in the context of the gay marriage debate for scholars to publicly dismantle the pseudo-scientific and unfounded sociological claims made by conservative interests, I find that Miller’s short, five paragraph article also makes a profound, if unintended, argument for how the basic concepts of psychoanalysis are congruent with research in Queer Theory. Miller’s article comes out against the abuses and misinterpretations of psychoanalytic concepts and practices that led the ill-informed to pathologize or inject moral approbation against homosexuality based on poor readings of Freud, Lacan, and other luminaries of psychoanalysis. Miller makes a bold statement against any kind of normative moralizing and instead stresses the fluidity of gender, sex, and desire as a guiding feature of psychoanalytic practice and research. The article serves a double purpose of both defending against socially regressive misuses of psychoanalysis and clarifying the basic concepts and practices for queer scholars and activists who have been mislead by pop-psychology or misinformed critics. Here, I have translated key elements of Miller’s text for an English-speaking audience because I believe his points brilliantly illustrate how psychoanalysis has granted me and other scholars of Queer Theory illuminating language and discourse for the  study of queer identity and desire.

In his third paragraph, Miller explains that the gendered language of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis is metaphorical and not meant to cement specific gender roles based on sex:

If Jacques Lacan gave the Oedipal structure the form of a “paternal metaphor” involving the “Name of the Father”, the “desire of the mother”, and the phallus, this formalization was not meant to be an anthropological invariant. Its advances have led, on the contrary, to pluralize the function of name of the Father, then to relativize it, and finally turn it into a “sinthome” (an ancient form of the word “symptom”).

Regarding the gay marriage debate, Miller corrects those that would simplify the paternal metaphor of the oedpial structure and see it as evidence that a child must specifically have a heteronormative family with a female mother and a male father. Historically, this oversimplification of the oedipal structure has led some to assume that a “normal” family will produce “normal” children and that any disruption in the nuclear family dynamic would cause psychological damage. For example, in the 50s and 60s, some American psychologists performing studies under the name of “psychoanalysis” argued that an overbearing mother and a distant father (or sometimes an overly affectionate father) would lead to homosexuality. Miller dispels this notion, asserting that the terms “father” and “mother” in this usage are metaphorical and not tied to a specific gender or familial structure.

The Name of the Father does not correspond exclusively to the male, biological father of the child, but it can instead apply to any person or entity of any sex that has a position of authority over the subject and functions as the one that acculturates the child into acceptable behavior in society and regulates desire. The phallus has no correspondence to the anatomical penis, but it instead signifies a position of agency in the subject’s life, which is fluid, contextual, and can be held by (or simply be) anyone. For Miller, the job of the analyst is to pluralize and relativize the Name of the Father, meaning that they must help the subject understand who or what has that position of authority and what impact casting that entity as the law giver has on their pursuit of desire.

Further dispelling the idea of innate characteristics or roles for the sexes, Miller writes that relativizing the name of the Father,

is a basic concept. It guides us in our daily practice of psychoanalysis. At the level of the unconscious, unlike the imaginary conveyed by the mythologies and religions, the two sexes are in no way made for each other and are not bound by any originary complementarity; this expresses Lacan’s aphorism: “There is no such thing as a sexual relation.

Lacan’s famous aphorism has caused much confusion over the past several decades among scholars and (justifiably) befuddled readers. At it’s core, Lacan’s quote means that the concept that “male” and “female” are inherently or innately built for one another in a specific kind of relationship is a product of social construction. “Man”, “Woman”, “masculinity”, and “femininity” are products of the imaginary. They are culturally specific and are in a continual state of evolution as concepts. Therefore, the idea of natural complementarity between the sexes as an extension of the necessity of a biological male and female for sexual reproduction is a myth because what constitutes “man” and what constitutes “woman” is a product of culture and not innate essence. If man and woman are not inherently complimentary, then the claim that heterosexuality is optimal because it is “natural” and homosexuality is a mark of degeneracy because it is “unnatural” no longer has any merit. “There is no such thing as a sexual relation” means for Queer Theory that all sexual pairings are inherently “unnatural” regardless of the normality that social institutions grant them. Thus, psychoanalysis argues persuasively against the monolith of heteronormativity and its claim to natural superiority in the same terms as Queer Theory’s critique of all things “normal”.

In his final paragraph, Miller argues for the universal subjectivity of the individual’s desire by presenting the non-judgemental ethics of psychoanalysis:

It is up to each person to find ways of speaking of his desire, which are for each person twisted and marked with contingency and misadventures. Some people are aided by religious belief, for others it will simply happen: an analyst does not decide for them. However, the fact that the ideas and concepts from our practice are being called upon to give a moral backing to a debate that has stirred the nation required us to break the silence, to say stop to this misunderstanding.

It is the ethics of the psychoanalytic method that directs the tone of Miller’s intervention as not an endorsement of gay marriage, but as an interdiction against those who abuse psychoanalysis to campaign against it. It is not the analyst’s job to judge whether the individual’s thoughts and desires are “right” or “wrong” or dispense some Dr. Phil-esque commands on what they should do. Rather, it is the analyst’s job to help the individual navigate their relationships and desires through speech according to however the subject may conceive of them.

The only way to access the psyche of the individual is to proceed without judgment or moralistic interference, otherwise the subject will censor or repress themselves and the cause of their issues would never be accessed. This ethical stance is more complicated in America, because unlike in many other countries, American analysts are bound by law to report certain dangerous or criminal behaviors. In its purest form, the psychoanalytic method would not interject against homosexuality because the practice is not about “treating” it, but it is instead about exploring the subjective function of homosexual desire and attachments on the individual. For Queer Theory, this model of analysis is useful for the cultural study of non-normative desires, identities, and social practices because it refrains from the moralistic judgment that clouds objective study and forced these subjects and cultures to closet themselves in the first place. Psychoanalysis explores the contours of desire no matter how “twisted” one may subjectively find it.

Although Miller did not explicitly intend for his article to be a demonstration on how to use psychoanalysis for Queer Theory, the tone of his writing and his demolition of the normative, conservative values that would lead one to oppose gay marriage performs an inadvertent “queering” of this opposition by using basic psychoanalytic concepts as his tools. It is my hope that now that one of the top psychoanalysts in the world has implicitly recognized the common ground that psychoanalysis and Queer Theory has in studying and critiquing normative and repressive constructions of gender and sexuality, we can reconcile old prejudices stemming from the historical abuse and misuse of psychoanalysis against the lgbt community and further harness it as an empowering method of inquiry and critique.

About the Author

Chase Dimock is a PhD candidate in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois. He specializes in 20^th century American, French, and German literature with an emphasis in Queer Theory, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Marxism. As a Graduate Assistant, he has taught courses on western literature spanning the ancients to the existentialists as well as courses on gender studies, queer literature, and representations of the Holocaust.  His research is devoted to exploring interwar queer sexualities in the works of lost and forgotten American expatriate authors and how the established French canon of gay authors and French gay culture influenced the construction of an American queer subject. Chase Dimock is also a regular contributor to the arts and politics magazine As It Ought To Be and he writes reviews of Queer Studies publications for the Lambda Literary Review

Also by Chase Dimock:

What’s Queer About Psychoanalysis?

Saint Turing: A Few Reflections on Gay Iconography and Martyrdom on the Occasion of Alan Turing’s 100th Birthday

Robert McAlmon’s Psychoanalyzed Girl and the Popularization of Psychoanalysis in America

     by Barbarism

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In the spirit of Nancy Chodorow, BARBARISM presents the symbolic Breast! A physiological screen upon which one may project all one’s psychological terrors, desires and needs. Et, voila, the ultimate in Good Breast/Bad Breast splitting. It’s “…the almost dizzying continual activity involved in the projective and introjective management of inner objects and of hatred, aggression and envy that characterizes shifts in the transference–the doing and undoing, reversing good and bad, love and hate, and self and other, along with the rapid-fire shifting of affect and drive as the infant feels anger at the breast, feels the breast is angry, fears the angry breast, takes it in, fears the angry self, fears that the angry self will destroy the good breast, tries to get the good breast to soothe the angry self, worries that it has destroyed the breast, tries to restore it, and so on.”

-Nancy Chodorow, The Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture

…

About the Author:

BARBARISM  (https://vimeo.com/user4315393) is a multimedia project developed by Rebecca Katherine Hirsch and Sarah Secunda that agitates on messianic behalf of gender-implosion, identity-expansion and balls-out psycho-social analysis! Our videos and screeds aim to put forth a no-holds-barred bundle of art as activism.

  by Chase Dimock

We know Mae West as an actress, a sex symbol, a cultural icon, a comedienne, a master of the one liner and the double entendre. What we don’t think of Mae West as is an author. It has been largely forgotten that Mae West got her start on stage, in a series of salacious plays she wrote for herself in the late 20s. West was by then a veteran of the Vaudeville circuit appearing mostly chorus line gigs and bit parts. But when she grew tired of waiting for the right part and her big break to come around, she decided to write her own roles. With early plays such as “Sex” and “Diamond Lil”, West invented the vamp persona that defined her career over the next five decades. If we think of Mae West as playwright and an author that wrote the character that she ultimately became, then we can view her iconography as its own meticulously plotted text and her careful crafting of figure and image as a finely formulated semiotics of the body. If we think of Mae West as an author, then her pithy one-liners and double entendres transcend the ephemera of comic relief and reveal her as one of the most astute observers of sexual and gender politics of the modernist era. If we think of Mae West as an author, a quote like “I’m no model lady. A model’s just an imitation of the real thing”, becomes an insight into gender performativity. Her quote “Marriage is a fine institution, but I’m not ready for an institution”, becomes a critique of the state’s power to enforce heteronormativity through marriage. And finally her quote “If I asked for a cup of coffee, someone would search for the double meaning” becomes a post-modernist play on the endless veils of irony and metaphor that obscure and inflate every day speech. It is this Mae West as author and sexual philosopher who put her text into her curves, that I want to recover and illuminate.

While West marketed herself as an object of heterosexual desire, she not only understood her appeal to a gay audience, but she also engaged with the newly emerging gay community in her plays. Thus, I want to also think about Mae West as queer theorist—as an interpreter of queer sexuality who saw the newly visible figure of the homosexual in society as a product of power relations—a figure determined by the interplay of institutional powers, medicine and the law, and his own creative power to define himself. For this, I turn to her 1927 play, “The Drag”, a text centered on the question of the male homosexual’s position in society. Unlike her previous play, “Sex”, which launched her into notoriety and stardom on Broadway, “The Drag” was not a vehicle for self-promotion as an actress. Mae West did not write a role for herself. Instead, “The Drag” sought to cash in on what contemporary scholars have called “The Pansy Craze”, a period in the 1920s when female impersonators appeared in mainstream stage shows and the Jazz age youth went slumming at gay bars and drag balls. The “pansy”, often known as the “fairy”, was a figure that created gender confusion; a male that interwove signifiers of masculinity and femininity on his body. He paraded feminine mannerisms, walked in high heels with a swish, and even used feminine pronouns, but he was not a trans-woman. The fairy became the dominant image of what was termed the “invert”, before “gay” hit wide usage two decades later; a biological male with the soul of a woman on the inside.

From her start on stage, Mae West cultivated a strong following amongst fairies and drag impersonators and became what I would call the first true gay icon. Before drag queens impersonated Cher, Diana Ross, and even Joan Crawford, they were impersonating Mae West in

Bert Savoy

the 30s. Over the top, aggressively sexual, and trafficking in wise cracks and double entendres, Mae West was born for drag impersonation, and some scholars believe that she was actually made from drag. Some believe that Mae West borrowed her “vamp” character and persona from the most famous female impersonator of the era, Bert Savoy. Savoy was the first female impersonator to achieve mainstream fame as a comedian with an act that played on the double entendre that every risqué joke he made as a female character echoed queerly as a man speaking the sexuality as a woman. For the masses, he was a man in a dress, but for the queer audience that read between the lines, he was the first gay comedian. West patterned both her outward vamp image and her trademark double entendres on Savoy’s act. Mae West’s status as a sex symbol, was ultimately a form of drag in of itself.

Even before “The Drag” had been staged, the play embroiled Mae West in controversy. West’s previous play “Sex” was currently in a successful, year-long run in New York, but when word of the casting call for “The Drag” came out, a call that attracted hundreds of fairies and queens from Greenwich Village because the play ends with a 20 minute, largely improvised drag show, West’s plays finally elicited the attention of local authorities. Lillian Schlissel documents this in detail in her introduction to a 1997 collection of West’s plays. On February 9, 1927, West’s play was raided by the police and the entire cast of “Sex” was arrested. West was sentenced to 10 days in jail for “corrupting the morals of youth”, and in vintage Mae West fashion, she turned the trial and jail time into a publicity stunt. She arrived at the prison in a limousine in her vamp persona and spent her time there entertaining the warden and his wife. While the trial and conviction shot Mae West into stardom and eventually launched her movie career a few years later when talking pictures were developed, “The Drag” was ultimately never performed on Broadway. The Society for the Prevention of Vice threatened to place all Broadway plays under intense scrutiny if “The Drag” were to be staged. Although the play was wrapped in the spectacular sensationalism of its proposed drag performance, it was at its core an attempt to air discourse about the new urban visibility of homosexuality and to situate it within questions of its medical and legal standing in society. Thus, a play that contained a serious discussion of the legal status of homosexuality in America could not itself find a legal space in which to be performed.

Before I go too far into this question of West’s medical and legal discourse on homosexuality, I should outline the play itself. In “The Drag” Rolly Kingsbury is a closeted homosexual who recently married Clair, the daughter of a prominent doctor. Clair is disillusioned with the marriage because Rolly shows her little affection and spends most of his time working for the family’s profitable iron works company. An unsuspected love triangle forms when Rolly develops an attraction to a civil engineer on his project, Allen Grayson, who in turn, falls for Claire. Rolly’s affection for Allen, in turn, drives his former lover David, an emotionally troubled, obvious invert into a state of rage, and he eventually murders Rolly. Rolly’s death “outs” his hidden sexuality to the family, including his father the judge and his father-in-law the doctor. As a drama on a pure level of narrative, “The Drag” is thoroughly mediocre and uninventive. Yet, what draws me to this play is not the story in of itself, or the proposed drag ball extravaganza that never came to fruition, though it would have been fabulous, but the discourse in which West situates the question of homosexuality. West purposefully casts Rolly’s father as a judge and Rolly’s father in law as a doctor and begins the play with a protracted argument between the two of them on the question of homosexuality in order to stage a serious discussion on legality of homosexuality given its medical and psychological origins. The flimsy melodrama and lavish spectacle of the play conceal a much deeper political question about the homosexual as a medical and juridical subject.

To begin to delve into West’s medical and legal discourse, I start with Michel Foucault’s concept of a “juridico-medical complex”. In an interview, Foucault once stated “Medical power is at the heart of the society of normalization. Its effects can be seen everywhere: in the family, in schools, in factories, in courts of law, on the subject of sexuality, education, work, crime. Medicine has taken on a general social function: it infiltrates law, it plugs into it, it makes it work. A sort of juridico-medical complex is presently being constituted, which is the major form of power.” For Foucault, this juridico-medical complex is a form of bio-power, a power that state and capitalist institutions exercise through the human body to create subjects that are compliant to and efficient in carrying out its interests. As an example of Bio-Power, in The History of Sexuality, Foucault famously claims that the homosexual was invented in 1870. This does not mean that there were not male-male and female-female relationships before this year, but that this was an era in which sexologists and doctors conceptualized same sex desire as the product of a distinct anatomy and biology. The homosexual was conceived of as a distinctly different species that possessed, as Foucault termed it, a “hermaphordism of the soul”. The homosexual was born among studies of other social misfits and undesirables such as the prostitute, the criminal, and the “lower races” in which the medical gaze was deployed through forensics, and pseudo sciences like phrenology to prove that these individuals were truly, biologically inferior beings. We can see that medical science in the 19^th century sought to vindicate social prejudices by finding biological proof of their judgment on the body. Not only did the question of a biological origin for homosexuality have immediate impact on the legal questions of homosexual conduct, but I would argue that its very study and discovery was influenced by the law, both positively and negatively. The French grandfather of forensic science, Ambroise Tardieu produced a guide for authorities to identify homosexuals based on their body characteristics, including, dubiously their “funnel shaped anuses”. The German sexologists, on the other hand, used the medical discourse of homosexuality to campaign for the repeal of Paragraph 175, the law Hitler would later use to deport homosexuals to concentration camps.

Mae West’s drama is aware of this juridico-medical history of the construction of homosexuality as it begins with the Doctor’s sister delivering to him an “Ulrich” book and declaring, “I have never heard of such outlandish diseases in my life”. Ulrich is a reference to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, an early German campaigner for homosexual rights. He referred to the homosexual male as an “Urning”, a reference to Plato’s Symposium and the vaunted male love of the Greeks, and in 1867 became the first homosexual to openly campaign for the repeal of sodomy laws. In an 1870 essay “Araxes: a Call to Free the Nature of the Urning from Penal Law” Ulrichs takes the congenital origin of homosexuality as proof the Urning possesses natural laws as humans and by placing them in accordance with natural law as the foundation of civil society, the Urning is entitled to full protection as citizens as well:

 “The Urning, too, is a person. He, too, therefore, has inalienable rights. His sexual orientation is a right established by nature. Legislators have no right to veto nature; no right to persecute nature in the course of its work; no right to torture living creatures who are subject to those drives nature gave them. The Urning is also a citizen. He, too, has civil rights; and according to these rights, the state has certain duties to fulfill as well.”

What I find interesting about the reference to Ulrichs is that Mae West could have used more famous sexologists like Havelock Ellis, Richard Von Krafft Ebbing, or even the contemporary Freud to establish interest in the biology and psychology of homosexuality. Instead, she picked a more obscure name that was not so much interested in proving the biology of homosexuality as he was in taking it as an a priori fact and using the language to campaign for civil rights.

The Doctor is thus immediately established as sympathetic to the homosexual. Explaining his interest in the text to his sister, the Doctor states “there are many, man ills that science has not yet discovered, Barbara, to say nothing of being able to cure them.” When his sister pushes him on why he has taken interest in such an obscene subject, the Doctor cloaks himself in the rhetoric of the Hippocratic Oath and the objective pursuit of scientific knowledge, “Why every physician owes something to medical science. Old Hippocrates, the Greek founder of medicine himself, did his bit when he formed the school of physicians, and it’s up to the rest of us to do our share.” When his sister questions how such a book could make it through the mail given the censorship of obscene materials, the doctor once again vaguely labels the book “a work of science”, as if the mere mention of scientific inquiry trumps all other pursuits. Often in this era works of fiction, biography, or opinion that directly engaged homosexuality were prefaced with a doctor’s forward assuring that the obscene or offensive subject should be pardoned because the work has value for the medical community in studying a social and psychological problem. Thus, West uses the common tactic of legitimizing the frank discussion and depiction of homosexuality by framing the work in medical discourse.

Mae West in “Sex”

Shortly after this scene, the Doctor is visited by a distraught, effeminate homosexual named David, who is, unbeknownst to him, the secret former lover of his son-in-law Rolly who is plotting Rolly’s eventual murder. David exclaims that he is “one of those damned creatures who are called degenerates and moral lepers for a thing they cannot help—a thing that has made me suffer!” David goes on to describe his previous affair with Rolly, that they were as happy as any married couple, and that he was not distraught about being dumped in order to marry a woman, but because Rolly is pursuing another man, a “normal man”, it has begun to turn him mad with jealousy. Unable to get over his jealousy, David entreats the doctor for a cure for his homosexuality; “I came to you because we all know that you are trying to find a way. Doctor, there is not one of us that would not like to be like other men. Comes a time when our burden is too heavy and—there is only one way.” Yet, it seems as though David, and whoever he got this information from, confuses a cure for homosexuality with therapy for those struggling with their homosexuality. The Doctor reminds him “Don’t talk like that. One man is born white, another black—neither is born a criminal. A difference in a man’s mind, and you are the greatest sufferers.” Along side early medical studies of homosexuality in the 19^th century, criminologists became obsessed with using similar studies and discourse to attempt to prove that criminal compulsion was the product of a biological degeneracy. The Doctor comes close to closing the circle, that if one is born black or white, but is socialized into being “Negro” and “Arian” as social constructs, and if criminals are not born this way, but created by society, then the homosexual is himself a social construction as well. Yet, the doctor stops short of this analogy; the homosexual is presumed to be a real, existing fact of biology that explains his habits and neuroses and that the problem they face is an intolerant law, not a medical practice of science that has pathologized him as a lesser being, an accident of nature, a poor degenerate.

The Doctor’s visit with David is then interrupted by a visit from the Judge, Rolly’s father, who wants him to testify in case to determine the sanity of a defendant. The Doctor is reluctant to take on the task, “How do I know he is? Isn’t sanity or what we call insanity the state of a man’s mind—his viewpoint? When he differs from the course laid down by the rest of us, we call him crazy of a genius. And then, we say, all geniuses are insane. And perhaps he thinks the rest of us are crazy.” The doctor rightfully criticizes the law’s vague, overly broad category of insanity and its claim to criminalize the psyche. This launches the doctor and the judge into an argument over science and the law as epistemological paradigms:

Doctor: “All a judge thinks of is his law. Everything he does is measured by the law, and when he gets through measuring there is nothing left to measure.

Judge: It’s nonsense! What do you know about law?

Doctor: And what do you know about fact? You base everything on theories—hypothesis. When it comes to facts, you’re groping.

Judge: And what is your whole profession but theory?

Doctor: Theory nothing, we work on fact.

Judge: You theorize before you find the fact…

Far from determining whether legal or medical paradigms of thought supply a more truthful or useful paradigm of inquiry, what the argument reveals is that they are ultimately the same. Both adhere to a rigid structure of knowledge production that can only create judgments based on the parameters of its own internal logic. The difference is that law is considered a thoroughly subjective, human institution and science is considered to be an objective observation of the natural world around us. Law is premised on value, science is premised on truth. Although the scientific method proposes objectivity and neutrality in its observation and measurement, it is never fully divorced from the demands of society or the limitations of human perception. In terms of the debate over homosexuality, we can think of this as the false dichotomy we have created in the battle between nature and nurture. Nature is presumed to be the organic state of existence and nurture its social state, but what we often fail to recognize is that nature is in of itself a social construction. What is natural is based on subjective opinions and affects on “the natural”. We only invoke the unnatural to deride practices that we dislike, otherwise the practices of which we are proud are the product of civilization’s defeat of the barbarity of nature. Thus, the question of homosexuality is not a tug of war between legal or medical discourses, but instead it is a product of their collusion, a product of how society uses medical discourse to legitimize their will and how medicine responds to social demands.

The Doctor expands his critique of the law’s inability to properly determine the legal status of the psyche to include sodomy laws, “I’ve got a poor devil in there right now, whom you’d call a criminal—a degenerate—an outcast, and yet in his own mind, he’s committing no wrong—he’s doing nothing save what he should do—his very lack of normality is normality to him. I’d call him a trick of fate—a misfit of nature.” To which the judge responds “Nature has no misfits. Look at the trees—the flowers.” and the Doctor retorts “—but how do we know they aren’t misfits.” The Judge reflects a certain Social Darwinist gaze upon the world, while the Doctor begins to question the categories of normality, but not the power relations of normativity itself. He asserts the subjective concept that one man’s norm is another man’s abnormality, but what he is unwilling to discard is the Aristotelian logic of the binary that nonetheless things can universally be placed into normal and abnormal categories. His conquest is to recover one’s right to normalcy while retaining the rhetoric of the abnormal instead of questioning the very human construct of normalcy, which in his scientific setting as a doctor, already implies a certain judgment on the observed and a preconceived notion of how to observed and categorize it.

Shifting toward a question of the law, the Judge declares that “People like that should be herded together on some desert Isle” and that “A man is what he makes himself—“. The Judge touches on existentialism, albeit in the service of prejudice, but the Doctor argues back,

 “And before that, a man is what he is born to be. Nature seems to have made no        distinction in bestowing this misfortune on the human race. We find this abnormality  among persons of every state of society. It has held sway on the thrones of kings, princes, statesmen, scholars, fools! Wealth, culture, refinement, makes no difference. From nadir to zenith of man’s career on earth, this nameless vice has traversed all the way.”

Still casting the homosexual as the cruel victim of the genetic lottery, the Doctor then attacks the legal response to the “homosexual problem”, “You think that four stone walls and a barred window will cure everything or anything. But still you endeavor by law to force a man born with inverted sexual desires, born to make his way in the world with millions of human beings radically different than he is to become something his soul will not permit him to become” The terms of the debate then shift into a binary between theory and practice, with the Judge complaining that the doctor’s medical theories may be true, but they do nothing to a solve a problem that he is forced by society to confront through the judicial system:

  “After all What have you done? You medical men, you scientists, you social      philosophers? Not one damn solitary thing, so far as I have been able to learn. You sit back just as you are doing now and gabble about faith, hope, and charity—you commiserate with these abnormal creature, out of the charity of your hearts, no doubt, but you don’t lift a finger to relieve the situation. I happen to know that there are approximately five million homosexuals in the United States and of these the greater percentage are born sexual inverts…And yet, you brilliant physicians, you learned doctors who are curing cancer, tuberculosis and other diseases have not bothered to thoroughly investigate what is as vitally menacing to society as any of the more pernicious diseases. Have you five million cancer cases in this country, or in the world for that matter? Yet you sit back in your offices and rant and rail against what the law is doing to handle the  situation, but can you offer a solution?”

Just as the doctor replies “there is a cure for this thing” he is interrupted as his daughter enters the room, and the debate ends for the play as the Doctor attends to her marital woes that begin the drama of the play. The argument between the Doctor and the Judge is obviously skewed to make the audience sympathize with the Doctor’s argument. Just like how the Doctor is blind to how his biases on normality and abnormality actually produce the homosexual as a degenerate subject, the Judge fails to see that his burden of adjudicating millions of homosexuals is a product of the legal system branding the homosexual as a criminal body. There is no criminal outside of a legal system that deems his behavior criminal. Thus, the law does not police already existing criminals, but instead the law creates the criminal and then arrests him. The problem is ultimately then the naturalization of criminality. If homosexuality is a crime and homosexuality is presumed to be in born, then the homosexual is an innate criminal inhabiting an illegal body. This is the essence of Foucault’s juridico-medical complex.

Although “The Drag” never made it to the stage on Broadway due to the preemptive force of the law that caught word of the extravagant drag ball performance that West planned to recreate, had it been performed, the local law enforcement would have found its greatest threat to not be the spectacle of fairies and inverts on parade, but instead its nuanced critique of the legal prohibition of sodomy and the use and abuse of medical discourse to justify a prejudiced status quo.

Post Script: For an excellent analysis of Mae West’s iconography as a movie star, read University of Illinois professor Ramona Curry’s book Too Much of a Good Thing

About the Author:

Chase Dimock is a PhD candidate in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois. He specializes in 20^th century American, French, and German literature with an emphasis in Queer Theory, Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Marxism. As a Graduate Assistant, he has taught courses on western literature spanning the ancients to the existentialists as well as courses on gender studies, erotic literature, and representations of the Holocaust.  His current research is devoted to exploring interwar queer sexualities in the works of lost and forgotten American expatriate authors and how the established French canon of gay authors and French gay culture influenced the construction of an American queer subject. Chase Dimock is also a regular contributor to the arts and politics magazine As It Ought To Be and he writes reviews of queer theory publications for Lambda Literary.

by Diego Costa

.

When I was cruising on Gay.com as a young teen in the late 90s and I “ran into” someone who was in his 30s or 40s (quelle horreur!) I remember thinking, or perhaps praying: Damn me if at their age I am still hanging out at such depressing dens for the embarrassingly lonely. It was a mixture of repulsion, pity, and anxiety.  Only an ugly or inept gay would make it to their 35^th birthday and still be looking. Only a loser fag would by then be willing to stoop down to that level of desperation (please fuck/love/fucking love me now) in order to find a mate. The compulsion to cruise, to reach out for someone out there in the universe to come along and save us from our predicaments, was sure to be a burden of broke young boys who would eventually master the art of being alone and still alive.

This was a time when queer sex was beginning to enter its hyper-commodification phase. Suddenly we didn’t have to settle for whatever guy happened to cross our paths (a curious cousin, a drunk hetero) and, as in a fluke, not find us disgusting. Even if, at, first, we didn’t have the technology to easily exchange digital photographs of photoshopped selves, we could list our frantic likes (straight acting guys only!) and fascist dislikes (No Fems, Fats, Asians, apparently). Like a database of, in theory, easily available men, we were able to sort through, pick and choose, discriminate and reinforce the inherited prejudices of the general culture. And, somehow, demanding through exclusion passed for getting in touch with authentic desire.

By the time kids like myself, whose sexual lives coincided with the development of ubiquitous computing, got to college requesting an impossibly normative masculinity from strangers who were to commit to fucking us before having met us was part and parcel of what it meant to be a queered human being. Now we could make even more demands: photographic evidence of our potential tricks’ muscles, six-packs and convincingly well-acted straightness ad infinitum (More face pics!). The few who could “host” were lucky enough to be able to script their encounters down to their very details. Sometimes the scripting of these narratives were so pleasurable little did it matter if the countless cruising hours led up to an actual encounter or with one nutting all over the keyboard and calling it a night.

We told ourselves we would exit the chat room in 15 minutes, which soon became 2 hours, 4 hours, the entire night. The faceless screen names became too familiar, the logging on to the same old sites automatic, the disturbed sleeping patterns more constant. But what if we leave and the stranger who is supposed to sweep us off our feet and fix us arrives? It became quite hard to tell if what we were really interested was in the potential lovers the digital seemed to promise or in the endless deferral from ultimately frustrating encounters (butch in the picture, a flamer in person) that it certainly provided us.

Eventually, of course, one of these immaterial strangers would show up at the door and something would happen, generally something you hadn’t scripted or accounted for, a mannerism, an unexpected reply, a certain kind of non-desperate availability, or a je ne sais quoi-like shining on the nose, as Freud would have it, and the endless cruising would flirt with an interruption. The stranger would stay a bit longer and not foreclose the possibility for a shameful moment like this, in which horniness just takes the best out of otherwise normal boys (this is my first time on the site), to become something the straight world recognizes as meaningful. The stranger responds to you.

Just as we naively told ourselves that we would hang out just 15 more minutes in the chatroom, or that by 30 we would be married with children and making six digits, our hearts never ever broken, we also didn’t account for the fact that since digital cruising had embedded the very fabric of gayness the repressed was bound to return. So we would lose the few who responded to us for the very apparatus that had produced them to us, making us believe that the interminable searching could actually stop at some point. That we would somehow magically learn, through external means, of course, to sublimate the compulsive will to get fucked right now by whoever dupes us into believing their masculinity isn’t feigned, into the smaller, less disgraceful pleasures in life. Like drinking tea, finally reading Beckett, or experiencing monogamy as something other than laborious violence.

Some became bona fide professional cruisers of the itinerant sort. It became their full-time job. They would work out all day so their market value would rise as they cruise all night. Or they would try to travel as much as possible so they could find an entirely new host of possibilities in brand new cities. For others the compulsive quest became so banal, or out of control, it had to be matched by yet other external, and chemical, promises for emotional assuage. By then we could even exchange videos of ourselves, which we didn’t, for they would reveal too much of our theatrics, promptly outing our masculinities as grotesque mimicry of yet other, just as inauthentic, performances (straight guys have to painstakingly learn their straightness too, and fail at it). By now AIDS becomes a disease of deferral, death hovering over us like a ghostly child instead of immediately taking us like the bubonic plague (or worse, making itself noticeable through a Tom Hanks-in-Philadelphia-like facial rash). Hook-up sites now offer us unsafe sex as a legitimized possibility (anything goes). Even the undeniable interruption that death used to represent through AIDS, and therefore gay sex, becomes fair game in our determination to control everything. To make it all stop by having it never stop.

I write this from a place of amusement and surprise. What has a history of digital cruising taught us? As I withdrew myself from the strange pleasures of cruising for the past several years in order to pursue more normative and just as impossible projects (like monogamy), it was in disbelief that I found, in the aftermath of my relationship’s failure (apparently I cannot compete with Grindr), that while the technology for cruising has changed so much, we are still very much interested in the paralysis it affords us. For a digital landscape so rife with multiple platforms for finding sexual partners it sure is hard to find one! Even in a metropolis like Los Angeles. People engage with each other, they exchange bits of information about themselves, they ask the same questions, they explain how you could possibly help them enact their fantasy, but mostly people defer. Not tonight, I cannot host, you’re too far. Of course, people fuck strangers all the time. Craigslist, for instance, has even facilitated what I would call inter-orientational sex, as socially straight males end up seduced by the possibilities of queer sex without having to claim a new identity category for themselves. Yet, what seems to really get us off is our diligent ability to repeat. As if in the repetition we would not only rid ourselves from our nasty history of failures, rejections and waste (of time, of semen, of health, of life), but also make sure that nothing ever ever ever changes. This inertia-like comfort is echoed in our distressed cries for a masculinity that may simply not exist when we post the ubiquitous “Masc 4 Masc,” as if the masculinity of some fantasized Other would guarantee ours, somehow expunging the only certainty we actually have: We are faggots.

This essay was previously published in print in B Magazine, Summer 2012.

by Albert Herter

…

“In the final analysis I consider the contemporary era to be a kind of interregnum for the poet, who has nothing to do with it: it is too fallen or too full of preparatory effervescence for him to do anything but keep working, with mystery, so that later, or never, and from time to time sending the living his calling card- some stanza or sonnet- so as not to be stoned by them, if they new he suspected that they didn’t exist.”
 – Mallarme

The seminar cost 90 euros, lasted two days from 9:00 am to 11:00pm and consisted of twenty-four papers, one film, and two keynote speakers. I attended the seminar as an analysand, which the woman next to me said was very unusual. I was curious to put faces to the names, flesh behind the words. I wanted to see how analysts handle a microphone, the logistics of ordinary order which can be so difficult for those accustomed to the thin air of high altitudes. I wanted to see the fabric of their vestments. In fact it all went smoothly and cordially.

The Congress had been held a few days before and we talked about how there was no English translation and why not.

The topic of the seminar was “Entering Analysis”. Papers were to be first person accounts of the beginning of analysis.

The room was lit by skylight, a diffuse grey light, like the wandering attention of an analyst, rigorously soft-focused.

My memories of the papers remain amorphous despite my effort to recollect details. The rhythm of the presentations and terms lulled me into a mild stupor.

There were several reoccurring themes. The debate on the validity of “phone analysis”. There were references to how an analysts gesture of the hand, tapping of the fingers, or movement through the room had proved meaningful. It was also pointed out that phone analysis, due to the prevalence of cell phones, no longer dictated any set space.

Eric Laurent’s presentation recalled to mind Lacan’s description of Freud’s handling of concepts as that of a man who holds a hammer which fits comfortably in his hand and says “This is how I hold it for best effect. You may need to hold it some other way.”

Laurent spoke of the nonsensical past which could not have been otherwise, and the future of contingency, when, quoting the Porgie and Bess song, “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” It could be as it ought to be.

There was some talk of humor and one individual remarked “When there is the phallus there can be a lot of fun!” As soon as the phallus is there it’s a comedy.

I wondered if there was a phallus in the American Lacanian movement.

Miller’s talk began at eleven pm. I remembered the only video I could find of him speaking (on YouTube- Rally of the Impossible Professions) where he prefaces his talk by saying he prefers to speak to a tired audience, because their defenses are down and they don’t ask so many questions. He was introduced and someone said it’s not every day you get to speak to Jacques-Alain Miller. I think Miller opened the palms of his hands to this audience of English speakers as if to say “What do you have to offer? What can you contribute?” And he was initially met with silence so he began his account of his free association on the topic of “Entering Analysis” with a recital of the Miranda Rights. He contrasted these lines with what might be a Freudian Warning.

He also spoke of a Freudian bubble one enters, where one is alone together with an analyst. His use of the word “bubble”, it’s silliness, contrasted with the incantation of terms which had preceded it.

I thought afterwards that the Miranda Rights produce silence in a subject, since one is innocent until proven guilty, therefore one’s words will really only be used against oneself. The subject retains a lawyer, a representitive to filter one’s words. Perhaps a pessimistic view. In analysis is one already guilty? Lacan advances a proposition in “experimental form”, at the end of “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis”, which he formulates as a paradox-

“In the last analysis what a subject really feels guilty about when he manifests guilt at bottom always has to do with- whether or not it is admissable for a director of conscience- the extent to which he has given ground relative to his desire.”

And later-

“Doing things in the name of the good and even more in the name of the good of the other, is something that is far from protecting us not only from guilt but also from all kinds of inner catastrophes. To be precise, it doesn’t protect us from neurosis and its consequences.”

So we are certainly all guilty in this sense.

I tried to give Miller one of Roger Penrose’s books in French but he said he already had it.

Leaving the seminar I realized I’d spent all but some centimes on journals and did not have enough money to take the metro so I headed south down the hill from Pigalle towards the Seine. Paris being so geographically small I usually just orient myself by NSEW coordinates. So I walked south, passing the church of the Trinity on my right. I walked vigorously for about twenty minutes and finally ended up with the church of the Trinity on my left.

Two weeks later I sat on my father’s terasse, baking. I looked down at the flesh pink tiles and saw a potato bug on its back, flailing its legs. I used the tip of my index finger to help it right itself, but in the process accidentally broke one of its hind legs. The bug began to walk in a two inch diameter wide circle, dragging a wet limp leg behind him. After he’d made a couple circuits I slipped a wet leaf beneath his course and deposited him (he’s become sexed) gently in the shade of the flower boxes, to trace his circles in the darkness, out of sight.

Some odd notes from the speakers:

St. Paul- The true Christian has to be anything to any man.

Love is suicide.

Passion is death.

Pleasure is always linked to a beyond pleasure, the background fabric of unpleasure.

P.S.

Several of the journals I bought address “the healthcare
debate”. The requirement of quantifiable results, of checked boxes, presents a problem for Lacanians, perhaps even a prohibitive problem. Analysis has been described as a fundamentally antisocial activity. How would any regulatory institution process a truth that can only ever be half said? I had a friend from the seminar over for a drink and posed a question that had been on my mind for awhile. “Do Lacanians have any interest in brains?” He began shaking his head emphatically. He said “Miller’s position, and I believe it’s a mistake, is that even to open the door to that issue would be to risk a defeat. ‘This is our territory, let’s keep it.” I have more faith, in Miller I
mean.

Penrose describes the following in Shadows of the Mind-

According to an idea by Yakir Aharonov and Lev Vaidman (1990) quantum reality is described by two state vectors, one of which propagates forwards in time from the last occurrence of the state-vector reduction (a measurement- magnifying quantum events to the classical level), in the normal way, and the other propagates backwards in time, from the next occurrence of the state vector reduction in the future. This second state vector behaves ‘teleologically’ in the sense that it is governed by what is going to happen to it in the future, rather than what happened to it in the past.

All drawings by Albert Herter, 2011.

(This article was originally published on As It Ought To Be)

About the Author:

Albert Herter is an artist studying Lacanian analysis in New York.

By Don Adams

Author’s Forward

When I look back on it, it seems to me that I have spent a significant part of my conscious adult life in the active and sometimes arduous process of being gay.  The prose poems below have been a part of that process.  From a personal and perhaps generational perspective, these poems, written over a period of years, seem to me as much historical documents as aesthetic objects.  For generations of the future, being gay may well seem, one hopes, a mere fact of life, like being American or Chinese, tall or short.  But for young men and women of my generation, and in many situations of course still today, being gay was and is a predicament.

Psychology can help.  In graduate school I pored through Freud and Jung and their disciples in an effort to explain to myself my inclinations and identity.  Modern psychology admittedly has a long and sad history of being used in the service of bigotry and oppression.  But at its best, psychology is an effort at understanding, and “to understand is to pity and forgive,” as Somerset Maugham, a once celebrated and now critically neglected gay writer, assures us in his nearly forgotten autobiography.

Maugham is a case in point in regards to the at times torturous evolution of gay identity in recent history.  When he was writing his drama and fiction in the first half of the 20th Century, Maugham was compelled by societal prejudice and indeed legal stricture to omit any direct reference to homosexuality.  But when we read him by today’s standards and assumptions regarding sexual identity and awareness, his work all too easily appears the product of a hopeless closet case.  To comprehend that work sympathetically, we have to recreate in some measure the assumptions and prejudices of the society in which it was appreciatively received, and which it in no small measure condemned and critiqued.  For in its broadest existential sense, to understand is not only to pity and forgive, but to accept that one has an ethical duty to challenge and attempt to change.

Maugham’s work takes up the challenge of changing a bigoted world in a courageous but necessarily coded way that requires some teasing out.  The poems below, written in a less dire time for sexual minorities, are correspondingly less circumspect, but they exhibit nevertheless many signs and symptoms of the cultural and psychological closet from which they were attempting to emerge.  When I read them now, some years after composition, and from the relative security of a less bigoted world, it seems to me that they were attempting to compel an ignorant, indifferent, or even hostile reader into sympathetic comprehension.  Perhaps they were addressed in some sort of unconscious way to my parents (who conspicuously appear in them but never to my knowledge read them), kind-hearted individuals who were compelled into psychological cruelty toward their gay son by religious stricture and societal prejudice.  But the crucial audience for the poems as psychological and therapeutic objects was even closer to home.  For it is true, as Maugham said as well, that there is no one in greater need of one’s sympathy, or for whom it is more efficacious, than oneself.

WHEN I WAS A CHILD

I thought like a child, a simple fact.  At the dime store once, my hippie cousin bought us hats.  I chose a floppy denim number with orange and yellow flowers embroidered on the crown.  When I got home with the prized purchase, my mother, glancing up from her recumbent position on the couch, pronounced a casual curse upon it, “Why are you wearing a girl’s hat son?”  Seeing my face tragically altered by the fact, she said to my cousin, “You know what he is going to do now, don’t you?”  And there were tears beneath the brim.

Some years later the young man’s mother, driven to distraction by repeated rebuffs, took the matter in hand one night while riding home with her son in the car, “You think you’re better than us now, don’t you?”  She got, as usual, no significant response.  His thoughts on the matter he was keeping well under the ubiquitous brim of his hat.

AT HEART HE KNEW

that everything was something it was not.  How tedious for one inclined to think it, consigned to this uncommon lot.  For once inferred there’s no denying these obliging antecedents.  Disconsolate chimeras cower before the tower of home and hearth consulting their agendas.  Tomorrow is their favorite part of every passing day.  They are confirmed in one’s concern about them.  O but they are sad!  And so his heart gave way.  He blamed himself instead of them.

WHAT HAVE I DONE TO DESERVE THIS

I know, but I refuse to say.  OK I don’t know, but I have a hunch.  None of your goddamn business.  O kitty kitty poodle-all-day, I love you more than you could possibly fit in your degenerate tuna brain.

Tell me something I don’t know.  Our only bachelor president was taciturn James Buchanan, a one-term democrat, sixty-six when he took the oath of office in 1857. The coming war “annoyed” him, as did “that idiot” Lincoln. He once was heard to say, “What have I done to deserve this?”

It could actually fit in your right hip pocket when not too terribly small, “large” that is.  I know myself to be far too lazy to die.  What have I done to deserve this?  When I was just a little boy, my mother said, “straighten up that face,” and I did.

The word my dear is bliss.  I cannot begin to explain it any more than I can say why you left me, which is ok though, really.  My life, as they say, is a mess.  What have I done to deserve this?  Let me count the ways.

High School hunk Jeff Portell was in my dream last night, all grown up and looking swell.  What have I done to deserve this?  And what business did he have looking so fine while being, as he all but confessed, unloved and unwell?

Adolescence is receding from sight, taking its own sweet time.  What have I done to deserve this?  I am defaulting to an age before the rage set in, when one was at home and couldn’t care less.

This morning at 8:15 central time I turned 32 years old.  What have I done to deserve this?  Never mind.  It wouldn’t help to know.  We hate to practice the thing, but it is perfectly terrifying to even begin to be finished.

ANOTHER DELUGE

at the dick-tip of the Sunshine State.  Elsewhere the world is a universal brown and the drowsy citizens crowd for warmth into the tiny rooms of quite large houses.  Here thousands of tiny sprinklers souse the medians and shoulders of shrub-lined streets, late at night, when the condos sleep.  Some though are forever embarking on arduous night journeys with small hope of a quick return.  Heading home one evening just before dawn, I passed sprinklers going full-tilt in a tropical rainstorm.  I knew how they felt.  Another night I was brazenly groped from behind.  I thought, “This could be it.”  Afterwards I couldn’t shake a sort of putrid taste, not entirely disagreeable.  The invitation had read, “Come over early and I’ll tell you the story of my life, with a demonstration to follow.”  There are times when one seems driven like the rain.  Hopeless cases most of them.  They called it love.

WHEN I WAS A YOUNG TEENAGER

my parents took my brother and me to see the musical Evita.  Although we did not know it yet, both he and I were already well on our way to becoming what we were later to be, he a social worker aiding the oppressed and I an interpreter of tomes and texts.  Over dinner later that same evening, at a fashionable restaurant near the theater, we forecast our futures as we discussed the play’s meaning.  My brother pointed to the hapless victims of a politician’s lies, while I highlighted the romantic fictions that gave meaning to their lives.  Our discussion abruptly ended when our father, who had been gazing about, suddenly announced, “All of the waiters here are gay.”  “But how do you know?” I wondered aloud, affecting a merely casual interest that clearly was faked, prompting my father to turn on me for once his full attention, glimpsing perhaps through the teenage haze an alternative persona averting his gaze.  “Everyone knows,” he at last pronounced and the subject closed like a book, which was then buried beneath an avalanche of adolescent emotion.  When years later it is dug up and reopened, it will help one stumped reader begin to make sense of a particularly elusive and intransigent text.

About the Author:

Don Adams is a Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University and an occasional visiting lecturer at universities in Saigon, Vietnam.  His most recent book is Alternative Paradigms of Literary Realism (Palgrave 2009).  He is currently at work on a project regarding ethics and subjectivity in mystery fiction.  He may be reached at radams@fau.edu