Category Archives: Queer

Stand By Me

Posted on 21 February 2009 | 2 comments

Sometimes things look more hopeful than other times. Sometimes you get good news and it gives you hope.

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I want to start a piece of writing with: The first time he said he was a Trans-Man, I thought he said Trans-Am and the words took me back to the early 90s when every guy I knew had a run-down Trans-Am, Camaro, or Nova they were “fixing up.”

They were constantly talking about faulty trannies, souped up hot rod engines, sleepers, and paint jobs. There is something to being a Trans-Man and a Trans-Am having a faulty tranny. There is a bit of word slippage in the idea that somehow reminds of the dire need of men to guard and bolster their own masculinity. Is this accomplished by fixing their trannies? Is this accomplished by having a big engine that one does not suspect like in a sleeper? I need to tease this out more, but I know a stolen dildo and a leather harness figure in somewhere.

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Right now, I am watching a movie that I should have seen years ago. When it came out, my mother wouldn’t let me watch Stand By Me because it was too violent and they swore too much. I think the story outweighs the unnecessary crudeness. In fact, the crudeness is a good part of the story of growing up. Isn’t it?

I wonder, am I better now for having seen it? I think so, but I will have to reflect more once I am finished wiping my warm, wet cheeks.

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Today will be filled with writing. I have to write a letter of recommendation for a friend, my CV (resume), my educational philosophy, and a formal observation of one of my professors. I also have to read Jubilee, American Anatomies, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, and two articles for one of my classes. It never ends.

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I want to write some short-short memoir pieces to cobble together into one for publications. I need to revise the pieces I already have written and I need to send them out for publishing.

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One day I will get everything done.

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Posted in Just for Fun, Queer, School, Writing

Sometimes Things Are What They Seem

Posted on 15 February 2009 | 2 comments

Right now I am sitting on the couch in my living room watching Natural Born Killers with Becky’s nephew Jacob. He is staying with us for a couple of days. When I asked him why he was on break in the middle of February, he responded by explaining that the rich kids at his school needed to go skiing. While some of his classmates are at Breckenridge, he is here. In Muncie. Brave young man that he is.

I had forgotten how strange, how deranged, how fucked up this movie is.

It is very fucked up.

The most fucked up.

Only Tarantino and Stone together could make this fucked up shit happen this well.

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I spent the weekend in Chicago. I miss it already. I spent the hours of sitting at CElla’s booth counting the numbers of writer stereotypes I saw. Apparently, there is a school somewhere that teaches a class in how to dress as a writer. Hopefully they teach their students how to write as well.

Perhaps, though, they concentrate more on teaching their students how to look like Rembrandt:slf_prtrt_gorget_beretWe counted the berets (particularly those paired with a scarf), the long flowing skirts, the Nathans (men with beards, plaid shirts, and corduroys), men with leather vests, and women with tall leather boots. I hope they can write as well as they dress. There is something to be said for originality, in both realms.

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I went to some excellent panels while I was there. The best ones involved writers that I already knew I loved: Lucille Clifton, Kim Addonizio, and Dorothy Allison. From each woman I took new strength, insight, and inspiration.

Clifton reminded me of the universality of suffering and how common the female experience is. She reminded me that good writing reaches the heart whether or not we have shared experience. I have never had an abortion but that didn’t keep me from weeping at Clifton’s reading of Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Mother” and her reading of her own “Lost Baby Poem.” I was moved deeper than I have been in a long time. I didn’t have to have my own abortion to understand the implications of their words. My guts moved at them.

Kim Addonizio reminded me not to take myself too seriously. There she was on the stage at one of the largest sessions at the conference laughing at herself as the woman who was signing her poems made the motions for vibrator and dildo. The same sign for both but the former with a little jiggle of the wrist. Addonizio has the kindest eyes. And the most sincere laugh. What do you say to a woman whose poetry changed your life and made you want to write something other than the shit you wrote before? I stood before her smiling and saying, “Thank you.” It was all I could say.

I hope I never get the opportunity to speak with Alice Walker or Toni Morrison. I would probably throw up like on South Park when Stan talks to Wendy.

Finally, Dorothy Allison taught me that she isn’t my Yankee-ass’s granny, which I take to mean that she isn’t my mammy. I don’t want her for my granny or my mammy; I just want to read her writing and have it change me for the better. I want to know how someone can love and hate a place at the same time, how someone can hold onto their past while simultaneously purging it, and how my writing can reflect all those things I loved about growing up somewhere like Hartford City, but how it can also betray the fact that I need so desperately to never return to it. How does she do that? I think humor and honesty. Without saying it, she said it.

Sometimes things are what they seem; sometimes they aren’t.

The worst panel was about being a gay writer in the Midwest. This panel quickly digressed into an advertisement for Chicago, and how they (Chicago Queers) feel so oppressed because they don’t get the publicity of San Francisco or New York. They don’t even get as much press as LA: “We have big events and they don’t get into the Advocate or Out.” gay-boys“Sniffle, sniffle, and dry your eyes,” I wanted to tell them,”come to Muncie to see the real Midwest. Then you can go home and choose one of your many gay bars at which to drown your sorrows, while the queers here in Muncie all join up at the one, the only, Mark III Tap Room. Seriously. Get rural in the Midwest and then figure out why half the room got up and left your session.”

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I had two new beers while I was in Chicago: Belhaven Wee Heavy and The Reverend Avery Ale.

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Mickey and Mallory just shot the Indian on a bad trip. Things will begin to go very badly for them. It will involve lots of biting snakes and my favorite song on the soundtrack. And, Jacob will still be moving his hand keeping time to the music. Or, he will  go upstairs and go to bed. And so will I.

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Posted in Beer, Feminism, Literature, Queer, Reading, School, Writing

Diving. Scheduling. And Ginsberg.

Posted on 22 January 2009 | 1 comment

Tonight I am going to watch high school diving. My brother coaches. I love diving and I hate it. The beauty of it intrigues me. The danger of it undoes me. And, I despise those few second between the leap and the landing: reverses are the worst.

Even Greg Louganis, the world’s best diver at the time, cracked his head doing a reverse. Of course, he went on to win both the spring board and the platform competition that year. The dive that actually won the platform competition for him was a reverse dive. Irony.

I think I have an aversion to reverse dives because I saw someone land on the board trying to complete one. She didn’t get hurt, but I was afraid in that split-second that she would break her neck. Possibly I was afraid she would fall from the board into the pool and drown, surrounded by life guards too stunned to move.

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Last semester, I didn’t have room to breathe. This semester, I can’t seem to get on a schedule. I read next week’s assignment this week, and didn’t remember to do this week’s assignment. Having too much time is sometimes worse than not having enough.

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Finally, I will leave you with this, some of my favorite Ginsberg from Howl:

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and some eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake, …

1 Comment

Posted in Just for Fun, Queer, Relationships, Swimming

This is why …

Posted on 18 January 2009 | 2 comments

I love my pastor. He started the sermon today with this video:

2 Comments

Posted in Grace, Politics, Queer, Relationships, Religion

Snow and Brokenness

Posted on 14 January 2009 | 2 comments

Once a year, I like snow. Today is that day. I won’t still like it tomorrow. I wouldn’t have liked it yesterday. Today is the only day I will like it. And it is beautiful!

Falling in small concise flakes with an occasional conglomeration of them posing as a larger flake or two, the snow has made the usual greyness of Muncie a pristine white. I won’t say the snow has blanketed the city—that would be cliche.

Is it cliche to say that the snow only covers the sins of the world, but the snow doesn’t make them disappear? Is it cliche to say that the snow is a bandage with a wound festering under it? Is it cliche to wish that melting snow would leave behind healing and love?

Today’s snow may be beautiful, but its’ beauty doesn’t change the fact that the world is broken. People hurt and people suffer. We no longer live in Eden. We have yet to see paradise.

I just had a conversation with a woman who is becoming a friend. I wanted to remove her sorrow like the non-beating heart it is. I wanted to make it better, then, but I can’t. I wanted to tell her it will all be okay. I can’t promise that. Things don’t always work out. If they did, we’d have nothing to celebrate.

Today, I celebrate the snow. I celebrate Walt Whitman and his ability to understand. I refrain from singing the body electric, but “I Sit and Look Out” is one of my favorite poems of his:

I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all the oppression and shame,

I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done,

I see in low life the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate.

I see the wife misused by her husband, I see the treacherous seducer of young women,

I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love attempted to be hid, I see these sights on on the earth,

I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny, I see martyrs and prisoners,

I observe a famine at sea, I observe sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d to preserve the lives of the rest,

I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;

All these—all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look out upon,

See, hear, and am silent.

Walt wasn’t silent, though. He wrote it all down. Sometimes the written word resounds more fully than the spoken.

Whitman amazes me because he wrote such sad, and anguished poems as “I Sit and Look Out,” but he also wrote about beauty and life. Take for example this short poem: “I see the sleeping babe nestling the breast of its mother,/ The sleeping mother and babe—hushed, I study them long and long.” How beautiful!

Maybe a better metaphor for the snow is this: The earth is cradled in the bosom of snow. I feel cradled today. I want to study the snow long and long.

2 Comments

Posted in Grace, Literature, Queer, Relationships, Religion, Winter Weather