Month: March 2011

queerness, performativity and bridal showers

Patty and I were recently invited to a bridal shower for one of her friends. I’ve never been to a bridal shower before, and while this seems like a lovely affair (tasteful invitation, a request only for recipes as gifts), I’ve heard things about them.

The things I’ve heard were swiftly confirmed by the wisdom of my online social network. Yes, there are generally games. Yes, they involve things like making bouquets out of present bows or styling wedding dresses out of toilet paper or gag gifts and slightly off-color jokes about the wedding night (but the really tacky stuff gets saved, apparently, for the bachelorette party).

I’ve been a little rattled by that confirmation ever since. Not because I’m dreading the event; I’m not. But because how much of the tone of the discussion has been Well, of course, it’s like this. Like it’s just what’s done. Like I should have known. As much as I can be that way about my own subjects of concern (and hey, good reminder of why that is maybe not cool and I should chill) — seriously, does no one know the rules about wearing white anymore? — it seriously discomforted me.

I’m queer, and sometimes it is like living in another country. And I’ve always been queer. Even in my relationships with men (which have not been insignificant in import or share of my personal history), I was always extraordinarily explicit about the fact that I was queer. Sure, I often had some sort of straight privilege in those interactions (a tremendous amount in certain cases — I have a particular ex with whom we performed public, expected gender exceptionally well. In retrospect I know it sort of freaked him out, but I had mostly thought it was fun and hilarious, a game like any other, wow do I fail at communication. Anyway….), but I still wasn’t living in a kingdom that understood things like these rituals.

It took me a long time to realize this was true. I was engaged once, after all, and like many women, viewed that engagement as evidence of my success (to get back to a previous theme around here, I was chosen) and adulthood. I certainly bought wedding magazines then, thought about dresses, the whole nine yards, because that’s what you do when you’re engaged. But it was, for me, a ritual firmly about adulthood. There was no moment of wanting every little girl’s dream wedding because I had never actually had that dream.

Weird thing to realize, that. That one of the most common things held up as an obvious subject for collective, gendered fantasy, just completely never pinged on my radar as a kid. Not once. Not ever. That makes a lot of my 20s more inexplicable to me, but what can you do? My point is, while wedding fantasies I may have harbored at various points in my life were certainly jejune, they didn’t come out of childhood. And, as such, the games of some of those rituals (e.g., the bridal shower), which speak to me of the reenactment of childhood fantasies, completely boggle me.

I don’t know what they are for. Or why they are done. I don’t understand their appeal. And I find descriptions of them nothing but infantilizing. More than that, I’m positively disturbed by the tone of discourse as I perceive it — that of course these things are normal and pleasurable and why is this even a question. It’s not a moment of feminism or politics. It’s really a much more basic sense of huh?

Because I really and truly don’t get it, since in terms of societal positioning, I come from somewhere else. I’m not trying to be stubborn or obtuse. I lack the receptor sites for the activity, and I have not been trained to it. I find myself wishing people would be more sensitive to this fact — that I am not like them in either my desires or my experiences and, certainly, should not be expected to be — but am also fairly certain that that’s nearly impossible. It’s like the impulse to speak louder to someone who doesn’t know your language. It’s obnoxious and it doesn’t work, but most of us do it anyway. I know I do.

None of this means I’m going to be sitting at the shower with my arms crossed huffing at the what the shit is this? feeling I may have if we really do have to break up into teams and design wedding dresses for each other out of toilet paper. No. As a constant, unavoidable visitor to the world not mine (remember, straight people, visiting the world of queer people remains an option for you; but being immersed in your culture isn’t actually an option for me, but a sea about which I have no choice), I am always planning my strategy for passing as if I at least half belong or am safe to have in the room. And so I am strategizing both my wit for the occasion and the drape of this design already.

All of which leads us back a bit to what I wrote about performativity and my childhood the other day. You want stereotypes about queer people in the arts? Is it because the arts are more accepting? (puh-leaze and no.) Or is it because we became skilled at them growing up, rehearsing and performing, in order to survive? If there’s any truth to that, it’s certainly absurd that I’ve pointed it out to both you and me through wedding dresses made out of toilet tissue. What is an act of reliving childhood dreams of an adult future for one person, is, for me, a performance, not just of exclusion from heteronormative adulthood, but of my ferociously clever childhood of survival.

Film-in-Progress: Salina Conlan’s “Resistance”

One of the cool things about playing in fannish spaces is that you meet a lot of cool, stunningly creative people. While lots of people question the value of transformative work (which I don’t, and neither does Celia Tan, who is also someone I know through fandom), many people who play in transformative spaces, also play in original ones.

Among them is Salina Conlan, who I first met at the Gallifrey One convention as part of a somewhat legendary team of Torchwood cosplayers. She’s one of those people I see once a year and get to have a cool mutual respect thing with because we love some fiction in a somewhat similar way.

Salina is currently working on her senior thesis film Resistance, which is about a reporter, who happens to be gay, going to Iraq to cover a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” related story and then has to reassess his priorities (she’ll give you a better summary below).

As a queer person and someone with a journalism background who now does work about the media, this was pretty exciting to me, and not just because Salina’s good at stuff. So, I thought I’d let her talk a bit about the project here to help her get the word out about the film and her fund raising efforts:

Can you give us a brief synopsis of the film?

Reporter Joe Hodges goes to Iraq to interview soldiers about the DADT repeal and a soldier from their unit who was dismissed because of that. In the process he learns that things are not just black and white and the repeal doesn’t wash away the ingrained biases that people have.

Why did you choose to tell this story? With the DADT repeal process well underway, what makes this still relevant?

Originally, the script was built around the idea of a reporter who works to expose the truth and a closeted soldier, who works desperately to hide his personal truth. I think that theme is still prominent in this version of the story. I started on draft 1 in March or April of 2010 and the whole repeal came about when I was just locking down the structure of the film and the heart of the story. I wrote a few drafts while the politics bounced back and forth, then finally figured out how I wanted to tell this story regardless of how the politics ended up. DADT may be officially repealed, but the process of enforcing that repeal seems to be in limbo. More importantly, changing a policy won’t change people’s opinions. I made that notion a big theme in “Resistance.” This film goes beyond the bias of the policy and gets into the individual opinions that people have on gays, the military, service, and obligation.

What makes you the right person to be telling this story?

I love to tell stories about people. I like to get into the grit of what inspires us, what makes us tick and what are we afraid of. You can get on a soapbox and offer an audience all the facts and your opinion on the matter. There are times when that is the best way to tell a story, but I didn’t feel that way about this project. While I certainly have an opinion, I wanted this story to be about human issues. It’s a story about people that is framed by politics. I think that makes it something enjoyable to watch.

Tell us a little bit about your cast.

I’m thrilled with the actors who have come on to this project. Rory Coyle plays Joe and he brings that character to life effortlessly. Joe goes through a heck of a journey and there is some intense acting required to pull that off. Rory is so good, he makes it look easy. Ric Maddox, plays Lieutenant Daniel Burke and not only is he a very talented actor, but he served in the U.S. Army and has been really helpful with keeping the military aspects of the film as true to reality as we can get. I could take up pages and pages raving about this cast. I’m thrilled with every single person that we’ve gotten. They are all amazing actors and perform these roles perfectly.

Is this story personal for any of them, or are they just excited to tell a story that hasn’t been told very often?

From the start, many of the actors said that they were excited to work with this script. A couple of the actors shared some moments from their lives that made aspects of the story resonate with them. That was interesting to hear because it’s not necessarily the plot that they connect to, but the journey that the characters take or the way that they interact with each other. It seems to me that they like playing in that world and examining tensions between all these different characters. I give them a lot of freedom, as well as ownership of their characters. I still make sure it’s all true to the story, but these guys are so talented that I want to work with their ideas and bring out moments that are real.

I think most people know that film making is really hard, but not necessarily what goes into it. What do you want people to know about this process that they might not be aware of?

The first thing that comes to mind is that everything costs money. More than I even realized at first. Food, costumes, props, gas reimbursement, locations, permits, lodging, etc. all cost money. To make a film of this size and scope and do it justice takes a substantial chunk of cash. Yes, that’s a bit of a plug for support, but it’s something I didn’t fully realize until I was in the thick of it. I thought I could cut corners to get by – and I have – but it’s still a constant struggle to stay on budget without sacrificing quality.

The other thing is that we are filming 26 pages in 6 days. I’ve heard that in Hollywood the standard of shooting is about a page a day. Since we’re pushing for so much more, the amount of pre-planning and scheduling is insane. I’m very lucky to have a talented and patient assistant director on this project that makes our schedules and keeps us all on task. We have two days in Mojave coming up where we shoot our exteriors and we have to do those days like clockwork because we can’t afford another day on location. If we don’t shoot it then it’s cut from the script.

You’re using crowd-funding for this process. How is that going? I have my own experience with crowd-funding, and it was both really great and really stressful.

It’s going well because a few people have been so very generous. I’m trying to get the word out and compel people to help fund this because the film I’m making is one that Hollywood wouldn’t dare make right now. When studios are concerned about selling tickets and DVDs, they are less concerned about art and social commentary; especially when that commentary combines the US military and a gay storyline. I don’t blame them for that- a business is a business. Still, I’ve got this story being made. Talented people are working to bring it to life and it’s going to be good and unique. I’d hate to have so much going for this project and get held back because my bank account bottoms out.

If people can’t donate to your project, what else can they do to help?

Please spread the word. There are billions and billions of people in this world. If 3,000 of those people see this project and can contribute $1 that’s out budget. It doesn’t take much, if a lot of people are invested. I’m trying to get the word out and that’s gone pretty well, but I’m also in production so I can’t spend all day dropping notes on twitter and facebook. You guys can do that.

Also if anyone knows of resources I can utilize for getting the word out about this project, whether it’s a branch of HRC or a charity that assists soldiers who have been dismissed under the DADT policy, that information would be a huge help. If you work for a LGBT center or have a good relationship with your local LGBT community tell people about this film. Start a buzz.

What’s the rest of the time line on your shoot and post-production?

April 8 we’re back into production. We shoot for two days at a small studio in Mojave and then our last day is back near home (Long Beach). Once we get through that weekend we’re wrapped on filming. The editor has already been working on the footage from the first weekend so we’re somewhat ahead of the game. It’ll take about a month to get picture lock- that’s the first edit with no special effects, sound editing, credits, or music. The rest of the process will take another two months. Part of the reason it will take that long is because we’re all students and have to focus on passing other classes and graduating on top of finishing this film. My hope is to have it all done in June and start submitting to festivals right away.

And, while I’m sure thinking ahead is slightly overwhelming right now, what’s next when this is done?

The next steps are publicity and submissions. Once it’s done, we have to find an audience. I can submit to festivals, but then people need to come and see it. At this stage, the main way to draw a crowd is to spread the word. There are so many people trying to be seen every single day that one voice crying out is easily overlooked. However, if a lot of people are vouching for a project, it’s a lot more likely to get viewers.

When that is done, I think I’ll take a long nap and maybe a bath. It’ll be nice to have some free time again.

performing nostalgia for how the light was

Long time no write. Well, not really. A few days, but things have been extraordinarily busy here, and that’s likely to continue for a bit (as ever, I know). I do have an interview with a friend who’s making a film about DADT coming up (I’ll post tonight or tomorrow depending on how much my day gets away from me), but for now, I want to talk about not about people I know, but people I used to know.

For me, it’s reunion season. For folks that went to large or, well, normal, high schools, reunions are milestone affairs set at five or ten year intervals. Certainly, having spent a couple of years at a large public school in New York, I do have that experience as well (my 20th was, in fact, last year), but the one that always looms for me is the Hewitt reunion, even if last year was the first time I actually went.

I didn’t graduate from Hewitt. Very few people in my year did. Of the near thirty girls I started with, there were only eight by the time of graduation. Most of us fled to other private schools, boarding schools, or, in a couple of cases, public school. But I spent ten years of my life there, and it has affected every single moment of my existence in a way Stuyvesant has simply been irrelevant to. Because Hewitt didn’t just teach me how to write and how to speak, which it did on both counts, rigorously. It taught me how to perform.

And I don’t just mean performance under pressure as came by way of writing two-hour essay examinations in every subject from sixth grade on. And I don’t just mean performance in terms of our required music, dance, and acting classes (geared less, I always thought, towards making us artists than making us cultured about actual artists; we were educated to be patrons, nothing else). I mean that Hewitt taught me (and it would be nice to say inadvertently, but I don’t really think so) a lot about performing class and money that served me, if not well there, than at least as a sort of necessary evil, even if it has often left me in a pretty awkward place in the rest of my life since then.

I do feel grateful for all the access I have had to secret worlds and my ability to move in world in ways I might not have otherwise learned, but it’s hard for me not to look back on those years I attended Stuyvesant after I transferred (and the faint echoes I still carry of the whole mess) and be in awe of just how much I did not know what the hell I was doing. That’s what happens, I guess, when you grow up in a world that doesn’t quite exist, that’s dying and doesn’t know it.

Last year, I went to the Hewitt reunion and it was… weird. It was good to see people and the school, an old private home, looked so much smaller and so much more modern than I recalled. It looked like a school, and I don’t remember it being that way when I was a child (to be fair to everyone, there has been some extensive remodeling). The school choir sang our spirit song (did we even have one of those when I was there?) and I felt teary and wished I could have loved the placed and been as gorgeous and coltish as the set of my childhood deserved. I’d worn a dress and felt just as much like I was pretending (and in drag) at the reunion as I had when I had worn the uniform skirts of my childhood. I walked down the central grand staircase as I had never had the honor to do as a student, never being a senior there or faculty.

But this year, despite all of that and the more fundamental No Useful Purpose of actually going, I think I’m going to go. Because there are still people I’m hoping to run into from that life, and no, actually, I can’t just look them up on Facebook.

In part, it’s that some of them aren’t on Facebook or really online at all. Some that I’ve found have been happy to click OK, but not to actually connect with words and recollections. And mostly, I’m afraid of being too motivated, or showing, after all these years, that I care too much, that I remember too well (as was noted to me at last year’s all classes gathering), that I am flawed (or rather, a desperate loser) for so cherishing the few true kindnesses and movie magic moments I remember — it was the book fair to buy our required summer reading list books and light was spilling in from the massive floor to ceiling windows in the library, and there were piles and piles of books that had that smell like ink and popcorn and no matter how many books you had to buy about girls surviving the wilderness to get into eighth or ninth grade, you still made sure to pick up a book or two that might make you cool, whether it was a teen relationships advice book you need parental permission to buy or The Vampire Lestat.

I bought both, the first because everyone did, even though I knew no boys and my parents must have been rolling their eyes at me in all my appalling wishful thinking, (“You don’t want to be sexy, do you?” they’d asked me once), and the second because my best friend, knowing I was terrified of vampires, dared me too. She changed my life that day, possibly by what was a bit of petty cruelty, actually. Say what you will, but when I read that book, it was the first time I’d ever heard anyone say that being emotionally demonstrative wasn’t wrong.

Memory is a funny thing. It plays tricks on us and makes more sense out of events than ever existed in them in the first place. We lie to it and it deceives us. It convinces us we were better than we were and more courageous than we are. It’s something of a bully and a wound. It is the private manifestation of the public performativity I learned as a survival mechanism in school. I remember, at Stuyvesant, that my friends and I took the public bus to the prom, because it stopped across the street from my house and went right to the Plaza.

I had the luxury of leading that little act of rebellion because of the school I had come from. I didn’t have to prove I could afford a limo, because it was presumed I could, even though I couldn’t, and I remember feeling so pleased that people were impressed with us for taking the M30. I remember too, lying on the roof of my parents building, 38 stories up, afterward, and not telling my year younger than me prom date that I was in love with him or kissing him or anything. I felt like a coward then, but looking back, maybe I was brave to be silent, or at least, not to perform that too. I did find my prom date on Facebook. He has three kids now; the thought of it is like the ocean around my ankles between us.

When I was nineteen, I was part of a truly ridiculous social circle in New York City, even as I lived in Washington DC. We were all people who had met on the brave new world of the Internet, before anyone talked about social media and PPP was a shocking and novel technology. It was 1991 and we were all living in a lot of strange castles in our heads. We were going to found an off-shore stock market in the British Virgin Islands. I would have five sons. There would be a hacker revolution. We would change the world. Believe me, no one is clearer than me, no one how jejune it all sounds now, even if I can find a clear and vivid thread from there to here in things like Anonymous and the global financial crisis.

In that moment in my life, I was involved with a man twice my age, and we knew, in passing (also from this Wild West of an Internet), a boy a couple of years younger than me, seventeen and delicate and luminously beautiful. And one night, I took him back to a friend’s apartment (he lived at home, I was visiting from DC), and we made out all night, because the older man I was involved with said I should. I should be ashamed of this. Embarrassed. Tell you how appalled I am at the way I let people treat me then. I could, and none of those things would be untrue. There’s a reason this is not a story I tell early, often, or at all.

But what I remember about it is that this beautiful too young creature, whose real name I’m not sure I ever knew and certainly can’t quite remember now, kept telling me thank you and kept looking at me in awe and kept acting like it was important to him that I be the happiest person in that room; I don’t think he’d ever touched someone before. Not like that. At any rate, I certainly didn’t have such grace about such things at 19, and I can’t even imagine having it at 17. We stayed up all night; I remember talking at dawn; and we never really spoke again for no other reason than the world was busy and complicated. It wasn’t, in the end, particularly important.

Like the girls of my private school years, like my once best friend who saved my life with vampires and doesn’t even know it, like the people I can’t really bring myself to look up on Facebook, I wonder from time to time how he is and if he would have any recollection of me as anyone other than that mad girl who remembers too much and merely did as she was told with a kindness she could not offer herself.

So when people ask me why I go to reunions for any reason other than to mess with people, why my high school and college years can seem so complicated, or why I don’t just look up the people who matter on Facebook, all of this is why.

I remember too much, stories are too fragile, and I am often expected to hold a certain cynicism for my teenage years that I was not able to muster at the time and still can’t seem to muster now. But somehow, in spite of all of that, of all my mistakes and trying too hard and petty cruelty and really misplaced generosity and completely poisonous nostalgia, I just want to know that someone remembers, as I do, the way the light was on some of those days.

And I can’t do that on the Internet, because it doesn’t feel safe or possible. I can only tell you about it. Which, thanks to a school I once went to that taught me I had to perform myself in order to survive, is often quite good enough.

I might just be singing a lot of show tunes right now trash day

So the big news of today is that Patty is coming home. I’m doing research and tomorrow we’ll be grabbing her a plane ticket for April 7 or 8. For those of you not in the know, we’ve essentially been apart since September, although we got to spend a weekend in Zurich and ten days together in Cardiff in November and had about another ten days together over New Year’s (although some of that was lost to food poisoning). We’re used to this thing we do, and we’re very good at it. But this one was a long, hard slog. So while her coming home is always exciting, this one feels particularly momentous.

Meanwhile, I continue to roll around in the Glee fandom (someone drew art for one of my stories yesterday!), which we have already established will be her time to be all “Yeah, reading a book now,” when she comes home. Despite the fact that we met through fandom (thank you, Ellen Kushner), we don’t actually share fandoms with much frequency. Although sometimes she call me Jack when I’m being particularly egregious, so it’s another wacky thing we navigate with good humor.

Speaking of pop-culture (this is the flimsiest segue ever), I’ve been meaning to make note of Rebecca Black, a teen who put out a really terrible video thanks to her parents paying to make it happen. The back story is as fascinating as the reaction to the video (which truly must be experienced to be believed). It raises a lot of questions about how we define a person as a public or private person in the digital age, bullying, slut-shaming, and whether there really is any such thing as bad publicity. I’d urge you to read this one.

Also deeply compelling is this piece about a mom having to unpack slut-shaming on the playground. Her son is eleven, and expressed to her disapproval that one girl he knew was kissing a lot of boys. And the reason he felt it was a problem seemed to be because of her gender.

Meanwhile, while out of the realm of stuff I often write about, it seems necessary that I note the existence of Mark Kirby, A. J. Sapolnick and their son Digby, a family that doesn’t seem to firmly fit into the category of fact, fiction, or art, because they’re pretty much all three all the time.

Next, a story that’s so irritating, I could write a full post on it, but I can’t bring myself to: an author pulls a story of hers from a YA anthology because the editor says that the publisher won’t like that the main couple in it are two boys and one has to be turned into a girl. Of course, later it turns out the publisher doesn’t care and the editor is defending herself with “Well, I assumed other people are homophobic, but I’m not; I once touched a gay person.” Not even kidding. I so do not have the bandwidth for this crap. But I will note, I am sick of my sexuality being described as alternative. At least we didn’t hit “lifestyle” on the bingo card.

Finally, on one more personal note, there are only 7 seats left in my Public Relations for Creatives 101 class on March 31, so if you’re planning to register, you should do so soon.

A few quick goodies

I’m in Boston right now, and about to do some meetings, but in the meantime, I can still keep you at least marginally entertained.

First, you can catch me over on the 2MTL (that’s Two-minute Time Lord to you) podcast talking about how and why people mourn fictional characters. Chip gives great interview and makes me sound smart. Also, the the music under his opener is really worth a giggle in all the best ways, but we do try to jump into the topic as seriously and respectfully as we can. It was super fun to do, and um, you can hear my shockingly girlish giggle at one point.

Next, for those of you who still actually read my LiveJournal, I’ve committed some Glee fanfic (and thanks, by the way, for putting up with my “Oh, hey, shiny,” about all that). I might just have some meta for you here later about Blaine’s hair styling choices and race/ethnic identity and private school. Not even kidding. And I’ll certainly totally at least have some less serious business meta back on LJ about why I wrote the story I did and what is and isn’t realistic about it (and why I made those choices), and why, aside from parts of Glee being problematic, writing about some of the non-problematic parts of Glee (like the well-rendered queer relationships) actually runs the risk of creating whole new problems because of certain aspects of fandom culture and its tropes.

Glee: Teen narratives and measuring up

One of the truly great things about working at home is being able to sing along really loudly with the stereo. Yes, this post is secretly about Glee. Actually, not so secretly, because aside from being in the obsession stage, I’m in the anger stage.

This is why I don’t watch shows about high school. This is why I resisted Buffy for so long. This is why I can’t watch stuff like 90210. Because this stuff makes me angry. It’s really true, you know, no one ever gets over high school. Which is why these shows work. But….

It’s hard for me to watch shows about people that would be mean to me. I almost couldn’t watch Buffy‘s first season because Cordelia made me so uncomfortable I kept wanting to get up and pace, or, better, leave the room. And I know Buffy and her friends are supposed to be misfits and all, but still, they’re good looking and have each other. There’s a reason, after all, that I tell people that maybe Andrew is my favorite character in Buffy, and it’s because he’s not even cool enough to be their friend. He’s a loser. And he does some terrible stuff. And he’s so awkward and pathetic that our nerdtastic heroes even tell him so all the time. But it works out okay for him in the end. So he feels a lot, well, safer to me than the rest of the crew. He and I could have been part of the same pathetic friends network for sure. Buffy and me? Probably not so much.

Now that I’m writing this out, I promise you, I know how ridiculous it sounds. But it’s really true for me. It may also be why I don’t really read YA. Because it either reminds me of horrible books I had to read for summer reading examinations in private school, which usually involved coming of age stories about girls confronting the 19th-century American wilderness, or of all the ways I failed at being a delightfully quirky, gorgeous, magical teen.

So, despite (or because of), staying up to 7am (I’m so serious and so full of shame) to watch all of the second season of Glee the other night, I kind of want to punch a wall. In part because all the New Directions kids are more or less horrible to each other, and when they are not being horrible to each other they back each other up like nobody’s business. Also there’s making out. And music! Mostly, I didn’t have any of that in school. Blaine’s GAP disaster is about as magical as high school ever got for me, and that was on a good day. And I never looked that good in my uniform. I suppose that’s true for most of us.

But of course, what’s really getting me, having seen the bigger Kurt arc now is, how does this show exist? Or, I suppose more accurately, gay kids today are so damn lucky, which, okay, isn’t true. It’s still really, really hard to be a gay teenager, and for a lot of people it’s fundamentally terrifying and dangerous. And I was lucky; in that I was safe and sneaky and didn’t have any reason to think I was a bad person for being queer. On the other hand, I do remember spending a lot of time looking at the one out girl at my school and how people called her ugly and wondering if this meant I would be ugly too and quietly seething about how gay boys were socially luminous and gay girls, well, weren’t.

That sort of nonsense hasn’t really changed of course, and I always have to think of it when I think about my gender stuff, which I always fear is a mere longing for privilege. But the fact is I grew up as the kid who never got to buy the personalized pencils at the stationary shop (because I had a weird name) and never saw people on TV who looked like me (because I had a weird face). I never got to watch stories about teenagers whose lives bore any resemblance to mine because I had such a weird education — I used to study the The Brady Bunch in hopes of understanding life in America, where boys fixed radios and longed for cars and there was football and homecoming. And I sure as hell never saw a first kiss on TV that bore any connection to the idea that someone like me could be chosen for something other than some boy deigning to cure me of my ugliness and awkwardness.

And in a lot of ways, Glee is, of course, more of the same. Pretty fake-nerds with the sort of American lives people in New York City don’t get to have and where the boys are always cooler than the girls. But the way Kurt is sort of strange looking and takes everything so seriously and how all these queered characters are front and center in different ways and this show is a hit? Really? Really really really? It’s sort of awesome.

Except for the part where I still feel jealous and cheated, even if a huge part of my fannish journey over the years has been about going from identifying with characters who are self-injurious and wear their wounds on the outside (e.g., Severus Snape) to identifying with characters whose circumstances are pretty screwed up, but are going to do their damnedest to do everything (e.g., Jack Harkness). I felt so guilty, the first time I identified with a fictional character that was better looking than me. It’s quite a bit funny weird.

And I’m definitely having that identification guilt thing about Blaine on Glee, because seriously? If a photo exists of me in school uniform, you’re never, ever seeing it; we’d all be disappointed. And I’m probably a bit of an ass for thinking he’s awesome largely because he goes to private school and is good at stuff and parts of fandom sort of hate him for that (because, er, parts of fandom sort of can’t stand me either for some of the same reasons). But hey, if shows about high school aren’t for addressing the too long lingering wounds of that period in our lives as reenacted in our adult existences, then I don’t really know what they are for.

When I think about this ridiculous simmering anger I feel about not having characters like Santana and Kurt and Blaine on my screen when I was sixteen, I wind up reminding myself that I never could have stood to watch this show at that point in my life. Sure, maybe I wouldn’t have felt so alone. But I still wouldn’t have had cars or football or friends or kisses or known how to identify with all that luminousness.

I can’t tell you how much I hope that’s just my own brokenness. Because all my well-compartmentalized neuroses aside, it makes me sad to think that there are some stories that are just too lovely to help, because you just don’t think you can measure up.

But for me, that’s what fandom’s about in the end. Measuring up. Giving yourself permission to measure up, to say that your real life and real flesh and real everything is as good as fiction. Maybe that’s not important to everyone; maybe that’s weird. But I’m an only child, and stories were my world. They were who I had to keep up with, and I’m still learning how. In spite of how hard I find it sometimes, it sure is a lot of fun.

the ice cream trucks are back trash day

Happy Friday, all. It’s been a long week, hasn’t it? I don’t know about you, but yesterday was one of those days that really felt like a full moon and wasn’t, but stuff was just weird! On the other hand, I can report that since my Glee post I’ve had a nice chat with an editor, scheduled a podcast interview re: the mourning work, and have just remembered that I totally need to email someone else about an interview.

Today, having already produced a report on coverage of wealth disparity in the US media, I need to bang out a couple of emails, an abstract regarding Torchwood, and a couple of scenes for Dogboy & Justine. I also need to go pick up a package from UPS, which is slightly hilarious.

Like many New Yorkers, I live in a building without any sort of doorman or concierge and you can’t just leave packages on the porch here (can you do that anywhere? I don’t actually know how things work with houses). So I have to go to the UPS center in the Bronx to pick up a couple of shirts I ordered on sale from Trashy Diva, purveyor of all things Jack Harkness would wear if he was doing drag. Yes, my brain is very possibly not like your brain.

The last time I had to go up to this UPS center was when I ordered the Snape coat from Kambriel. I needed it for an event the day it arrived, but when I got to the UPS center the truck it was on (it wasn’t supposed to be on the truck!) hadn’t come back yet, and the center was totally closing. So, I… um… lied and said it was something I needed for my wedding that weekend. And then hung out drinking bad hot cocoa from a machine with the UPS guys until the truck came back and I got my Snape coat. Awkward. And now you know. So that should be fun, right?

Next week, I’ll be up in Boston on Tuesday and Wednesday, hence the move of my Public Relations for Creatives 101 class at Trade School to March 31 at 8pm.

And circling back to that Glee post from last night for just a moment, the clip of the Warblers doing “Raise Your Glass” is now off-line, which leads two things: 1. Anyone have a new link? and 2. Fair use and Internet discourse – it’s really annoying to write half a dozen fairly serious paragraphs about a two-and-a-half minute clip I can’t share with you. Same as it ever was I suppose. But super frustrating.

Meanwhile, for those of you who enjoy the Patty report, we still don’t know when she’ll be home, but we’ll know soon, once she gets to Puna early next week. It’ll certainly still in that first half of April as far as we can tell. Logistics are complicated, especially in her field and current location and it is what it is. I did get to speak to the woman who’s flat she’s being staying at today though, and that was incredibly charming. I thanked her for taking such good care of Patty; she thanked me for letting Patty be there so long visiting her. On Sunday it is Holi there, and people throw colored water and powder on each other to celebrate the season change. Patty is excited about it, and I think I will maybe go to this event for it in New York, so it can be like we are doing something together.

Glee and the victory moment

Before we get started, this post contains spoilers about a very recently aired episode of a major TV show. This blog, as a rule, contains lots of spoilers. I’ll use cut tags in the community that is LiveJournal, but it doesn’t suit my purposes or technology here. So Snape killed Dumbledore; Tara got shot; and Ianto Jones was killed by a vomiting, drug-addicted, three-headed turkey alien. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I’m going to talk about Glee.

I’m not a Glee fan. I’m not really anti-Glee either, it’s just that I’ve watched parts of a few episodes here and there and it hasn’t grabbed me. It should grab me for all sorts of reasons, but I find myself profoundly resistant to how much they don’t utilize the movie tv musical form to its full advantage.

By making sure the presence of the songs is relatively naturalistic — which isn’t to say they aren’t bizarre and unlikely, but do people announce they are going to sing and have relatively legitimate plot reasons for singing — the show is never quite a heightened reality as far as I can tell. Songs do not substitute for months of relationship development; they illustrate, rather than embody, change. So to me, the bits I’ve watched always seem to hover endlessly on the cusp of the moments I’m actually looking for. It’s a bit like when you can’t sneeze, and we all know what that’s like.

But I did just watch “Original Song,” because I was so profoundly taken with a particular moment in it I caught on YouTube. The surprise may be that, that moment wasn’t the Blaine and Kurt kiss (which was admittedly pretty remarkable and nuanced). The moment was the Warblers’ performance of “Raise Your Glass.”

I love Pink’s “Raise Your Glass.” For me it’s brilliant and real and relevant, and the video (which contains a lot of confrontational stuff and so engenders lots of interpretations and reactions, not all of them positive) makes me cry pretty much every time I see it. But it’s about, at its heart, being different, and never ever being able to hide it.

So when the Warblers get up at that competition in their grey trousers and smart blazers with the red piping and Blaine — perfect, pretty Blaine — bursts into that song, it’s astounding to me, especially after that duet with Kurt, especially when he’s walking backwards across the stage and, grinning, beckons the rest of the Warblers towards him. There are so many implications there at once — is it a gesture of asking people to follow him towards something awesome? or of calling someone into a fight? or of seduction? It’s hugely powerful to me in its ambiguity.

It’s also hugely powerful to me because it’s a reminder that looking for signifiers in people — are they my tribe? are they safe? will they understand? — is a useful mechanism, but it’s not remotely the whole truth. It’s not always accurate. And for people who aren’t necessarily assumed to be what they are, to see all those uniformed boys saying we’re all freaks, obvious categories or signifiers aside, is huge. It implies a world of which I don’t have to be afraid.

One of the videos going around the Internet today is of a group of Glee fans of indeterminate age reacting to the Blaine and Kurt kiss. It’s a dark, grainy video and hard to see, but it seems like a mix of genders and, I’ll go out on a limb and assume, orientations. It’s pretty fantastic to watch them cheer so madly, because I never got that.

There were no gay kisses on network TV when I was a teenager. Or when I was in college. It was a long time after when there finally were. And that was after a great deal of ridiculous debate and really pathetic news articles about the whole thing first. I know that Tara and Willow were huge for a lot of people, but watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer as late as I did, it was actually just sort of weird and sad for me the way they couldn’t have them kiss for ages and how that was somehow supposed to be enough.

I consume a lot of media. And these days it has a lot of queer content in it. Some of it speaks to me, some of it doesn’t. But the stuff that speaks to me, no matter how much I talk about it because that’s what I do, speaks to me in a pretty personal way. I’ll watch an episode of something and walk around with a little secret smile about it for days (I just rewatched the first two seasons of Torchwood and had forgotten some of the interpersonal loveliness in it). I don’t, as a rule, want to stand up and cheer no matter how much I’m enjoying myself. For me, it mostly feels too late to have the moment those fans in the Glee-viewing video are having.

But when Blaine starts knocking “Raise Your Glass” out of the park, I had that moment. And the reason was because he was absolutely up there performing for both the intradiegetic and extradiegetic audiences as a gay teen who is happy and smitten and confident and sexy and none of that is why he’s up there singing about being a freak. He’s singing about being a freak, because everyone is a freak, and because life is awesome.

Glee, I’ve heard, gets a lot of stuff wrong, especially when it comes to people with disabilities (remember, other than this one episode, I’ve seen about 20% of a handful of different episodes, so I am, in fact, relaying other people’s insights to you that I am absolutely not qualified to comment on). But the show really does seem to get something remarkably right with its gay teens. Just the fact that the show has multiple queer characters whose queernesses read so differently is fantastic; we are not a monolith.

But what I really love? Is that Blaine is a leader. And readily followed. And deeply insecure. And struggling with the consequences of talent and attention. And maybe it’s the blazer and my sense that I can understand the world of his part of the show more than I can understand the world of the other parts of the show (entertaining side note: Dalton is also the name of a notorious New York City private school at which I attended summer camp as a kid). But he knows he’s lucky. And he just grabs for things. It’s all there in “Raise Your Glass,” which is his victory moment after doing something he adores (singing) with someone he adores (Kurt, who is complex and remarkable in his own right). It’s glorious.

Most of us don’t get victory moments like Blaine’s on that stage. Not in front of a cheering crowd, not spurring every one of your friends on to more joy and awesomeness. But somehow we get let into that moment in “Original Song,” and it’s startling. It’s why musicals matter. Hell, it’s why music matters.

I don’t often wish I were younger than I am. But wow, jump to my feet cheering during all that in my parents’ living room? Someone was somewhere. A lot of someones. What a thing!

But here’s another thing I want, that I believe we can, and must, have. I want queer female characters on TV that are also get to your feet and cheer moments like Blaine’s “Raise Your Glass.” For me, Blaine is kinda sorta enough, but then I look at Blaine and think I need to try my hair like that; he’s seriously a look that could work for me. But he’s absolutely not enough for a lot queer female teens out there; and he’s not enough for all the people who have a lot more lessons to learn about queer folks than “Oh hey, they’re actual individual humans.”

I know better than to hold my breath. But I also know, that like this instant on Glee, that moment just might sneak up on me, on all of us, at any time. I hope there’s some crowd of kids in a living room somewhere cheering when it happens.

And I also hope, to quote the song, they are never anything but loud. I am struck, always, that the most central message and lesson of my own queer experience has always been, simply, speak.

I don’t imagine any of this is going to make me start watching Glee, unless I succumb for scholarly reasons. The show still gives me that feeling like when you need to sneeze but can’t. To me, the “Raise Your Glass” moment is just proof that, that feeling is real and makes sense. Because when Glee delivers? Apparently it really delivers.

(ETA, 5/12/2011: And that was then and this is now. I’m completely hooked on this ridiculous show.)

stories, loss, and the power of what needs be done

When I talk about the Whoniverse, one of the things I tend to talk about it how it frames heroes and heroism. It’s all about the ordinary (all those shop girls and queer boys), who have a tremendous amount to sacrifice (e.g., their lives), and the extraordinary (like Jack and the Doctor) who have been deprived of the more obvious means of sacrifice. It’s one of the things I really love about the Whoniverse, even though it’s hard. I love it because because it takes a common trope and bends it; I love it because it speaks, effectively I think, to our societal tendency to overuse the word hero; and I love it because I’m wired for tragedy.

At least in narratives. Fictional narratives.

It’s kind of different when big, real, terrifying, impossible to miss tragedies are actually happening in a manner relentless, ongoing and actually beyond the previous scope of our imaginings.

So, if you’re still in a place where you’re actively able to engage the news, it seems like one of the only things I can do, beyond getting out my wallet, is to encourage you to read stuff about ordinary people, doing heroic things.

Miki Endo was a 25-year-old who worked in the Crisis Management Department in Minami Sanriko. Her voice led people to safety in the face of the tsunami wave. She died doing her job.

While we don’t know the exact numbers of workers remaining at the Fukushima Daiishi Nuclear Plant (numbers have fluctuated between 50 and 180), they are undoubtedly putting their lives at risk, if not this minute, then this month or this week or this year; radiation is funny like that.

Last night, I caught one of those non-scientific polls on the CNN website. It asked whether you’d be willing to risk your life the way those workers are. It made me so angry. Not, actually, because it had simplified the matter to a short, trite, and unscientific query, but because it is absurd to think you know what you would do in a moment like that.

No matter how much you’ve thought about it, no matter the degree to which your job or other circumstances of your life may require you to think about it, no matter how wired for tragedy you are in your fictional habits or whatever else, there are some questions we never know how we’ll answer until they come to us. I’ve faced some of the smaller quandaries on that continuum, and they were nothing like I could have expected.

I haven’t, in regard to all this tragedy and horror in Japan, been particularly calm. I am, as previously noted here and elsewhere, one of those people who had a childhood shaped by our collective nuclear imagination. We didn’t get a color TV until the late 80s; my father resisted the law (and fought with our building management) that forced us to have a smoke detector in our apartment — in both cases, he was concerned about the radiation.

Until today, I’ve always viewed that as part of the many frustrating, sometimes alarming, eccentricities that surrounded my childhood. But today I remembered that my father, born before WWII, knew the world before we split the atom.

The habits of fear from my nuclear childhood are not due to my father’s eccentricities or paranoias that often made the world of my childhood seem both cruel and arbitrary. They are due to the fact that he was a twelve-year-old boy and in love with television and radio and the idea of soldiers when the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And he, of course, just lived in New Jersey, in a perfectly safe life, in a blue-collar seaside town where his father was a shoemaker. If you read the comments here, or on my LJ blog, you’ve seen comments from people whose parents didn’t grow up in New Jersey, but instead lost friends due to the radiation that resulted from the those bombings my father listened to on the radio. It makes all the terror of my American 1980s seem absurd and crass, even as it makes it make sense.

All of this is why I’m so invested in fiction, because of the way it intertwines with non-fiction, because of the way non-fiction gradually morphs over time, becoming our myths, our lies, our stories, our fictions that ultimately, in times like these, force us back to the non-fiction truths from whence they came.

These stories, these truths, tell us heroes are real. And ordinary. And pay terrible prices, not because of what suits the story, or because the audience might be wired for tragedy, but because of what needs done.

The Red Cross | Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières | ShelterBox