Great if You're Straight this is part of an essay I'm working on. I figured I'd post it here before I do an archive
Part of the reason urban gay men live the infamously lavish “lifestyle” they do is that it is an immediate escape from a difficult internal conflict. It’s also the light at the end of the tunnel.
Whether you consider homosexuality an identity or an activity, it is an act of rebellion and it directly challenges the sanctity of gender roles. To be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans-gender means at some point in your life you considered and rejected your assigned sexual role. That’s much easier said than done.
The bravery it takes to “come out,” especially at a young age, has been downplayed after the “socially aware” early nineties. But no matter how many other homosexuals are “out;” you are an individual, not a community. You have friends and family. Some may think of you differently. Some may be disappointed.
The conflicts don’t end once you are “out.” Gay communities have their own rigid mores and constraints.“Feminine” gay men are considered less attractive than “masculine”-acting ones. Considering feminine aspects and homosexuality tend to run concurrent, this standard produces another common internal conflict. One might compromise his character to gain acceptance and attract partners. No wonder so many gay men enjoy theater.
Let us not forget that sensitivity, empathy, and desire to be loved are all “feminine” qualities too.
Sunday, April 6, 2003 04:08 p.m.
Sayonara Bonsai Kitten Yep. The FBI is cracking down on everyone's favorite online kitten-mutilation guide.
Saturday, April 5, 2003 05:06 p.m.
Eat to the Beat
There are few conversation pieces as masterbatory and unneccissary as food and ailments. Got a toothache? Sorry to hear, just don't tell me about it for the next twenty minutes. Similarly, I can't stand hearing about individual dietary restrictions. Food science is sorority science. Who cares whether A has x number of proteins and y number of carbohydrates? Does it ever fucking matter unless you are trying to lose weight? (And that the cost of maintaining a diet rarely excess the benefits of weight loss is commentary for another post.)
Look, healthy food is common sense. If it's green and comes from the ground it's probably good for you! But common sense isn't good enough for the bumbling general public that wants so badly to come accross like chemistry experts when it comes to the kelvins and the calories of what we injest.
I eat nothing but peanut butter sandwiches all day and never get sick. Maybe I could write a best-selling diet book! Or maybe at every party the host should round up all the Atkins dieters and hypocondriacs so they can annoy each other all night long
Saturday, April 5, 2003 04:10 p.m.
Doom and Gloom Do I believe a world reccession is on the horizon? Yeah, actually I do. But SARS won't be the culprit
Friday, April 4, 2003 01:59 p.m.
Making a Statement
Like most writers, I'm paranoid about interpretation. It's a topic Foucault covers in the essay "What is an Author?" (courtesy of Zoe.) It's also the underlying theme of Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation," and probably a whole host of other works I've yet to uncover.
Consider writing is like calculus. Your objective is the limit. While words are a tool to bring you closer and closer, you can never quite make it. The better your talent, the closer the reader is to interpreting your work the way you want it to be. When you worry about misinterpretation, you're really worrying about your capability.
What I like about blogging is its semi-private nature. This isn't a collection of essays, but an assortment of scribbles. And so I can brush off occassional improper commentary or flakiness as laziness. People tell me they like my caustic screeds the best, but that makes me no less comfortable when I post something critical. Like I said about Mary McCarthy, one needs to draw the line between constructive and cutting.
The reason that polymath Aldous Huxley remains a favorite of mine is he is like a funhouse mirror on my inside. He's an apologetic cynic. We have that in common. Intellegent introvets often find it exhausting to always be kind and well-mannered. But if you are a good person, you keep it up no matter what. That's why Huxley and I let out steam at the keyboard. If I wasnt caustic every once in a while, I wouldn't be human. But I never mean any harm
For the Filofax
There is a lot happening in April. Politics and Prose has Bernard Lewis, Niall Ferguson, Joseph Stiglitz, and Paul Berman (from the NYT magazine piece on Qutb) in coming weeks. Too bad for you, if you missed out on tickets to the Flaming Lips at the 9:30 (hey, 4-20.) I'll be there with bells on. Then, The Sea and Cake is playing the following week.
By the way, the curious quotation I have at the end of the page comes from a short story by Robert Musil called "The Blackbird." I insist you read it. Here's a copy online. To print it out circumventing the frames, go to View, then Source, then cut and paste the text to a Word document.
Thursday, April 3, 2003 08:57 a.m.
Fight Terr'ism: Stop Protestors! An Oregon bill will automatic sentence direct-action protestors, 25 years to life for the crime of terrorism.
Wednesday, April 2, 2003 01:31 p.m.
Cloning Our Way Out of a "Disadvantaged" Society
The Family Research Council says, "Human cloning is likely to become a powerful industry built on disadvantaged women." Why? Because, "as long as profit depends on women participants, we can be sure that the most vulnerable women will be aggressively pursued regardless of the risk to their health and happiness." One would expect the most "aggressively pursued" will be the people with the best genetic make-up (good-looking, healthy, intellegent.) People with good genes tend not to be "disadvantaged." (thx)
Wednesday, April 2, 2003 01:08 p.m.
Today in Washington
I watched several people carrying banners that read "Circumcision is Torture," walk down Constitution Ave and cheered them on. It's absolutely a horrendous, damaging, and unnecessary procedure that is perpetuated in American just because people are unable to make reference to male reproductive organs without nervousness or juvenille humor. I don't know about any of you male prototypes, but if it were my foreskin that had been removed in infantcy -- hindering my sexual performance in adulthood, in addition to perhaps, innumerable latent psychological effects -- I would be very upset.
Also, this is the first time, after five years living in and around DC, I saw the cherry blossoms. Eh, they're alright...
Wednesday, April 2, 2003 11:22 a.m.
If You Can't Say Something Nice...
The sidewalk sale at Second Story Books included a stack of Mary McCarthy books each for $3. She's a marvelous writer; first making a name for herself as a literary critic, then as a novelist, finally in politics covering the McCarthyism and Vietnam from Hanoi. Though overshadowed by contemporaries -- her friends -- including best-friend Hannah Arednt and ex-husband Edmund Wilson, her oevre is vast and impressive. She also lead an exciting life, from what I got out of the biography Writing Dangerously, I just finished.
After an unhappy orphan's childhood, she moved to New York and made a name for herself in the literati. Perhaps my favorite anecdote was that-- though she was tall and slender with a beautiful expressive face, and sharply-dressed and well-mannered -- she was clumsy. She made jerky, eccentric hand-movements and lacked any grace in motion. It's kind of symbolic of her social graces. While a clever conversationalist, and very well-liked, she was a vicious gossip. Her attacks on first Simone De Beauvoir, then Lillian Hellman were not professionally critical, but mean-spirited, ad hominem, and contradicting to her otherwise kind, light-hearted spirit. It's a lesson in keeping your cool when others annoy you. Undoubtably anyone to read comments she made about Hellman or De Beauvoir will assume she's just a superficial, second-rate bitch. Critics need to draw the line somewhere between constructive and deconstructive. There's more room to be witty with the latter, but if you can excel with the former, that's a talent.
Tuesday, April 1, 2003 10:11 p.m.
Save Us
The American Atheists listserv criticizes Billy Graham's North Carolina-based Samaritan's Purse for using Iraq "humanitarian" missions to convert Middle Easterners to Christianity.
Ibrahim Hooper of the Washington, D.C.-based Council on
American-Islamic Relations, though, raised questions about Christian
missionaries exploiting human tragedy and using a superficial
"humanitarian" relief effort to push their religion.
"They go after them when they're most vulnerable and hope they can get
them to leave their faith," Hooper opined. "It's a very despicable
practice."
Hooper also warned that permitting a flood of eager Christian relief
works and preachers into a devastated Iraq with plans to convert the
population to Jesus worship could result in "a public relations
disaster" for the Bush administration. "They are coming into a
situation where vulnerable people don't have food, shelter or
clothing," he added.
Graham's 1995
autobiography, "Rebel With A Cause," is about his success flooding the Persian Gulf with Bibles before the first Gulf War.
Another note, An Evangelical group called In Touch Ministries distributed to thousands of marines, pamphlets called "A Christian's Duty." These mini prayer books include "a tear-out section to be mailed to the White House pledging the soldier who sends it in has been praying for Bush." Yeah, he needs it (courtesy, Kerim Friedman.)
Tuesday, April 1, 2003 05:21 p.m.
The Politics is Personal
Harsh words from the UN's IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency.) Senior officials are calling him a "fake," and "as fake" as the forged Iraq-Niger documents. An IAEA working draft leaked to reporter Dennis Hans says:
“Bush exhibited a pattern of lying — as well as condoning lying and cheating by staffers — whenever he deemed it politically necessary. He lied in 1998 to Dallas Morning News reporter Wayne Slater to hide a drunk-driving conviction. In 2000, he condoned vicious smears of John McCain and McCain’s wife, and he repeatedly, knowingly misrepresented his own and Al Gore’s economic plans to enhance his electoral prospects. As president, he has lied or misled on a host of issues, economic, domestic and foreign.”
Very professional. But let's see if it goes public, before passing judgement.
Tuesday, April 1, 2003 04:54 p.m.
Or Maybe They're Just Josh Harnett Fans
The Telegraph reports Iraqis watch Black Hawk Down for strategy inspiration, via orders from Saddam.
Tuesday, April 1, 2003 11:26 a.m.
Free Leonard Peltier, Meat is Murder, Save Our Schools ... Oh, And Stop the War! Mother Jones reminds protestors their work is counterproductive if the public finds them unintelligent and annoying. Plus, a lot of protesters are irreverently retro.
"Off the sidewalks and into the street!" one young blonde woman in an embroidered blouse exhorted onlookers. "Guatemala, Che Guevara," she shouted, employing her best sandalista accent. ("Oh, for God's sake," someone next to me muttered.) Others, perhaps having just rented "Hair," brought flowers for the cops.
But far worse than the '60s role-players, were those determined few who relentlessly taunted the police. Cries of "steak fajita"--referring to our local police scandal--prompted cops to laugh. But taunts of "Kent State" or "pig" or "fascist" were not only unfounded and recklessly provocative, but undermined the notion that protesters can support the troops--who like the cops, are just doing their jobs--while opposing the war. San Francisco's police force, perhaps the nation's most ethnically diverse and most experienced with demonstrations, started the day in good humor. But imagine you're the 30-something Hispanic female officer I watched while some white kid called her a "Nazi" over and over. At first, she just rolled her eyes, a little bemused. But that kind of abuse gets old real fast.
Maybe then, my protest-in-suits idea might work. It would at least, throw everyone off guard.
Automatic Speech Translators and Remote-Control Minitanks
The new Business 2.0 has something on DARPA's new toys. Impressive
Sunday, March 30, 2003 10:31 p.m.
Dependent Variables
I've been reviewing a few assignments I did in my undergraduate career with a delicate sense of pride. I really do love economics, and I'm afraid that feeling does come across as much as it should. My best assignment was the one I did incorrectly. We were instructed to use the Corruption Index and come to some conclusions on international corruption. I used other data, and set up an excel file that listed the country, its per capita health expenditure, and the infant mortality rate. I explained that countries with high government health expenditure and high infant mortality rates indicate corruption. I really should writing a working paper or something, just talking about it gets me excited.
For another fun assignment, I predicted the Virginia state elections, running a regression on the number of Democrats and Republicans in the House of Delegates. Dixiecrats are a dying breed, so each election about three Democrats are replaced with Republican officers. That was a great class. The class average forecast of the Virginia state economy was two points from what state economists were expecting.
Sunday, March 30, 2003 08:46 p.m.
Married to It
Progressive thinkers can be too quick to abandon tradition for the sake of maintaining their progressiveness (or should that be just progress?) Take the case of the marriage institution: now, few of us consider "marriage" as a function of procreation at all, let alone as it's only function. Also, well past the epoch of divorce, it's not a situation for life anymore either. Instead, marriage is the act of bestowing a title upon someone you would like to publically recognize as your partner. Of course marriage should be privatized and it should be welcome to homosexuals and polyamorous relations; that's stuff that can be discussed later. I'm talking about the naysayers that scoff it as just a "piece of paper." No, it's a title. Retrofit it to your own romantic interests as you see fit -- or not, if that's what you wish.
By that definition, I hope to be married several times in my life. It's "weddings," I despise. I don't go to weddings, and it goes with out saying that I will never have a wedding. I can't think of a more detestable pagent, that is as much of a waste of money and time.
Random note: The fascinating economist Harriet Martineau, used the once rigid definition of "marriage" to explain one oft-ignored unethical aspect of slavery, and add fuel to the fire of the abolishionist movement. She said slave-masters had harems of women, producing children outside the marriage institution. It degraded therefore degrade the slave-master's wife and made her irrelevant. Martineau appears to have been quite a progressive person herself. It's nice to see someone subvert mores in such a manner. A female economist in the nineteenth century is daring enough, but that she'd publish such an honest account of slavery's sexual nature, is why she's a hero of mine (despite some statism when it comes to labor unions.)
Pray Across America
I thought that prayer was one of the perks of religion -- a few minutes to zone out, calm down, and feel appreciated by the big guy. Turns out the nation's zealots have been slacking on this indulgance, so the US house has stepped in at a most solemn occassion to remind all of us to fold our hands for the troops. The House passed, 346-49, a resolution calling for a National Day of Prayer.
By the way, can anyone give me a background sketch of Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, apparently anti-war and a presidential hopeful? He has a good quote that this measure, "may be seen by some as an attempt to inject religion into this war at a time when some of America's enemies abroad are asserting that this indeed is a war about religion."
Saturday, March 29, 2003 05:16 p.m.
Quote of the Day
You will admit that human freedom consists essentially of where and when we do what we do, for what we do is almost always the same: thus the sinister implications of one uniform blueprint for all. Once I climbed up on top of a cabinet just to make use of the vertical dimension, and I can assure you that the unpleasant conversation in which I was involved looked altogether different from that vantage point. - Robert Musil