Heteronormativity

Gay people can be heteronormative. Heteronormativity is the logic that stems from a reprosexual way of looking at the world. A reprosexual way of looking at the world is one in which the ideas of male, female, partnership, love, family, sex, marriage, mother, father are given meaning only in relation to heterosexual reproduction [hence: love is for marriage, which is for family, which is for having children, which are either male or female, who will have children themselves]. Gay people can internalize this logic as well, trumpeting their ability to reproduce [both children and norms].

Fortunately, reproduction is not the only thing that gives the world meaning (especially today, as overpopulation depletes the world’s resources) [and even if it were, humans are capable of reproducing outside of heteronormative conditions—i.e. marriage and families]. I’m curious what our idea of love would look like if it weren’t all tied up in reprosexuality. One thing is certain—we wouldn’t need to have holidays to test our allegiance (skills at) to normativity.

The Places that Scare Us

Once upon a time, for about a week (that is, a very long time), we empathized with all our red and beating hearts as Tyra Banks mourned the thirty minutes that she walked around as an obese individual (and the four hours it took to get in and out of the latex suit).

In the red corner, a so-called "mobocracy" with Palin, et al., at the helm rants against big government, Obama, national debt, and other "taxation-without-representation" issues. In related news, tickets to their convention, plus keynote speech, are over $500 a pop.

And in the former capital of the Reds, a lone white American middle-class straight male kvetches that he might experience some slight discomfiture, as if he were suddenly a member of some subaltern community, as if, in one crystallizing moment, he understood what it meant to be on the business end of repression.

It was for this I wanted to prepare in my previous post. The rhetoric needs to change from one of instant gratification and momentary, shock-therapy-driven revelations. Instead of making wild promises or throwing tantrums that one political group has been capsized by another, instead of "suddenly understanding" the sum totality of a human's problems (the so-called "another's doorstep" syndrome from To Kill a Mockingbird), instead of infusing our world with a wasted rhetoric of revolution...

An Intimate Gathering - My 1500 Closest Friends

Consider this article.

In short, it explains the statistical phenomenon that for any human (x) with set number of friends (y), at least one friend (z) will have a set number of friends (y') that is significantly higher than x's y. Why? Because x is part of z's social circle, and it's much easier to be 1:100 than it is to be 1:5.

But the tone of this article is not "so stop comparing and appreciate the people you DO have, those people who will tolerate your drunken revelations or ponder your queer thoughts." No!

This is also why people think of certain beaches or museums or airports as usually ­busier than they actually are: by ­definition, most people aren't there when they're less crowded.

The article takes what could be an opportunity to expose the irrational, consumerist underbelly of demand-based economy, and chooses instead to make it into a reductive account of the observation bias.

Modern vanities.

As print newspapers struggle and web-based newspapers grow in supremacy, I vacillate between my excitement and my fear.

Because web-based news is in real-time, there's no longer a canon of headlines and "major issues" - no history of Great White Men and their Great Wars that will dominate, forever and ever, amen, the homepages of newspapers. What runs as the major headline of the New York Times homepage will not be the major headline for even a day, even twelve hours, even, perhaps long enough for me to read the headline before it changes.

Because web-based news is in real-time, any ridiculous issue on which a journalist's written for the sole purpose of keeping the job will get more-or-less identical treatment to the outbreak of a Great White Man's war, and both will seem to have equal importance, and we will choke on the bile of our own hysteria.

Queer Community

We usually think of identity as referring to some group that one either “is” or “is not” a part of. With gay identities, the boundaries of such a group are harder to identify. The irony of coming “out” is that it really means going “in.” When you come out, you become part of a group that you were previously not a part of. There is a moment where you belong to the group without knowing anyone in it. Additional complications: what of all those cases where someone is put “in” the group against their will?

Would a QUEER identity (which tries to catch all) have to include all those who are mistaken for gays; all those who will be gay but aren’t yet; all those who have been and no longer are; etc, etc.? I think so, yes.

And it is for that reason that a Queer community is a contradictory, impossible thing.

Am I arguing "guns don't kill people?"

Give a public speaker a bad microphone. She might have the vocal power to fill the hall on her own; if she had seen just one more "Stomp the Yard" movie as a teenager, she might have become the 32-year-old star playing a teenie-bopper in a Disney made-for-TV movie; she had chops.

As soon as that mic is in her hands, she can't let go. Even as it loses battery power and ultimately dies, she clutches the useless metal and plastic. She raps it over and over and over. She presses it to her mouth and prays it will eventually fix itself.

There are all those stories of people "feeling depressed after watching Avatar," or of going insane while Blackberry™ had a temporary outage and they couldn't compulsively check their emails and facebook pages.

In short, I planned this to be a drunken revelation that amounted to technophobia. But then. Oh, then -- then I was in the metro, and I saw a teenage boy playing on his cell phone, and the only seat open was right next to him. And from that seat I could see that the kid wasn't playing on his cell phone - he was drafting poetry.

Technology is technology is technology. "Good" and "bad" are terms we can only add after the warranty's worn off.

Poem #1

Revelations: Grime
A poem in alternating stanzas
by Storm and Drunk

The wine flowed like urine
The urine like blood
I wandered to Turin
I witnessed the flood

Send Delilah out of Samson’s tent
And Mary, from Jesus, to a nunnery
Since Eve we’ve not a thing to say
To women, evil Jezebels eternal.

Slimy, crabby, lace-y, lube-y
Crawling like spiders towards the light
These girls dress in silk that’s ruby
And wait like mantises all night

And they wonder why whores – killed Jack the Ripper
It was because he couldn’t get to Victoria
Through the jewels, and the couriers, and the drugs and the fat
Nothing would ever kill her, were it not for that satanic gnat.

And from the rift, a monster beckons
As if half-sleeping, looking foolish.
My guard-dog barks, I think he reckons
Tonight’s events must needs be ghoulish.

They walked through the forests, deep and dark
In the forests they walked.
Those pagans, those carnivores, to whom Conrad gave his heart
Who killed Piggy, and Simon. They start –

Anon! A monkey shrieks and I head now towards death
I wish I’d known her smells and sights before…
And so I take a hit of crystal meth
So as to bring me closer to her door

OH, IN THE DEPTHS OF MY DEAR GHETTO
NEVER GET IN A CAR THAT SMELLS LIKE CAT PEE!