Racheline Maltese

Elisabeth Sladen, 1948 – 2011

Doctor Who has been so successful for so long, in part, because it is so many different things to different people.

At bottom, however, the show is, for me, about loss and love in the face of that loss, and no character has embodied that particular facet of the Whoniverse so much as Sarah Jane Smith, who was once the Doctor’s companion and afterward lived an extraordinary life on Earth despite having once loved and been left behind, exiled from, and yet retaining access to, the wonders of the universe. It always seemed like a pretty big burden and a terribly beautiful sorrow.

I didn’t really discover how great Sarah Jane is until recently, when I had to watch The Sarah Jane Adventures for an academic article I’ve been working on. But I fell in love and felt strongly then, and feel strongly now, that her character taught a generation of adults how to live after lost love and a generation of kids how to grieve the losses that are an inherent part of life.

Sarah Jane Smith was played with grace and joy, power and subtlety, by Elisabeth Sladen on and off for pretty much the entirety of my life. Sladen passed away today after a battle with cancer.

I never had the pleasure of meeting her and have generally forgone mentioning the passing of celebrities in this journal (something which may seem odd considering my interest in the mourning of fictional characters).

But I loved Sladen’s work. I loved the scripts she had the fortune to bring to life; and the lessons of the stories she enacted taught me stuff, recently, and when I needed it. Her work was perhaps not the heart of the Whoniverse, but for me, her work was certainly its driving resilience and grace.

I’ll miss her performances terribly, but like many fans, take great comfort in the fact that so much of her work was about teaching us how to deal with moments just like this.

Fiction, fan culture, and the unnatural acts we engage in to protect the heart

I sort of lost any New York cool cred I had today by getting up at 5am to go hang out in front of The Today Show in the name of Glee fandom. Weirdly, this turned out to be interesting, not just because I’m relatively unabashed about my fannishness and not just because it was fun (even if it was both early and cold), but because the experience was a completely weird lens, not on the act of being a celebrity, but the process of becoming one.

This strange little window into the celebrity moment perhaps hit me especially hard in the wake of seeing Sleep No More with Patty on Saturday night. It, like most environmental theater I’ve encountered (such as WILDWORKS’s The Enchanted Palace), wound up being about celebrity, albeit, in the case of Sleep No More, through the lens of Macbeth.

Hanging around The Today Show also is invariably about celebrity, and today’s experience had a lot of moments both of exposing the backstage moment (e.g., peering into the studio as performers rehearse) and of performing them (e.g., performers coming out in the cold to greet the crowds), which also, weirdly, gave it an environmental theater-type quality beyond the obvious “we are here to see the in-studio performance” aspect of the audience experience.

On The Today Show front all of this was weirdly complicated by the strange beast that Glee is: The Warblers aren’t a real singing group; the guys you see in The Warblers on TV are all singers, but largely aren’t doing their own singing for complicated production reasons; and Darren Criss (who plays Blaine, effectively the front-man for the Warblers) has become enough of a break-out star because of this whole thing that you get these bizarre moments like when The Today Show introduction wound up being “Darren Criss and the Warblers.” Between that and their being in their (fictional prep school) Dalton blazers, the whole thing runs back and forth over the fiction/non-fiction line in a such a bizarrely incoherent way that it’s a little jaw-dropping, especially when you consider that a major Blaine-related plot point is how he gets too much of the spotlight from the rest of the group.

Of course, stuff that tramples all over the non-fiction/fiction divide is the stuff I love as a scholar, and often the stuff that feeds fandom interests (mine and everyone elses). It’s also the stuff that can make fandom weird: like the chick screaming at Criss outside The Today Show this morning that she wished he was straight. He is; the character he plays isn’t, and in that jacket, who knew which one of them she was talking to. Or what object and perspective any of us were singing to/from when we started an impromtu crowd sing of “Teenage Dream” a little while later.

For that matter, what the hell was going on in any of our heads when we all started singing along with the studio performance of “Raise Your Glass?” Because that song, which I’ve already talked about as a victory anthem both personally and in the context of the show, adds another layer of weird when we’re in this murky fact/fiction place and it’s happening on The Today Show and the fans are singing along: Who’s celebrating who? Who are the dirty little freaks or the underdogs here (and remember that line is “all my underdogs” – the possessive matters keenly)? What are the power dynamics? Are we all getting elevated in that moment or does someone need to call bullshit?

In something resembling a contrast to all of this, Sleep No More, being a play, is obviously and explicitly performative. We meet the actors, not as actors, but as characters, and the lines should, on the surface, enforce much clearer boundaries than those at The Today Show and around the The Warblers phenomenon. The surface, however, lies.

All audience members are required to wear identical bird masks going into the show. We become, perhaps, a parliament of rooks, a collective noun I reference here for Neil Gaiman’s take on the behavior of rooks in The Sandman, where rooks fight for their survival on the basis of the quality of stories told before their peers.

While the masks serve to delineate audience from performers, it immediately also establishes audience members as part of the narrative. This becomes more clear as more audience members enter the play space and encounter actors. Most audience members, upon encountering actors, begin to follow them, leading to moments where two actors coming from two different directions meet at the center of a long corridor, an army of bird-audience behind each of them, ready, it seems, for war, or, at least, a competition based on the scale of their fan following, to see which character (or perhaps which actor) will survive the telling of their tale.

This, combined with moments of peering into “private” chambers within the set (much, like being intentionally allowed to peer at rehearsal while waiting outside of The Today Show) and moments where actors pull audience members into private locations to remove their masks and tell them stories (I saw one girl in a phone booth in tears, after a bellhop who had lip-synched a song about the triviality of tragedy cornered her in there) suggests that the fact/fiction line at Sleep No More is equally, if more convolutedly, blurred. This further suggests to me that the very nature of celebrity may be less about a real person who rises out of a crowd in some fashion and more about a real person whose non-fiction identity is partially obscured or even erased by the act of being witnessed by a crowd.

Temporal distortion also struck me as central to these two, admittedly weird-to-juxtapose, events. At Sleep No More I found a murder scene before the actors did: for someone who once played The Lady in Macbeth, it was strange to have that blood on my hands again because I stumbled, both physically and out of time.

Similarly, because there was a rehearsal for camera that was projected on the screens outside of The Today Show we thought we were seeing a live performance when we were seeing a live rehearsal, and then when the live performance happened, thought for a moment that we were seeing tape. This sense of the correct order of events feeling out of order wasn’t just a part of the audience experience, either; before the show, Criss made a crack on Twitter about having performed on “the Tomorrow Show” yesterday.

While largely unabashed about my fannishiness, being a fan is often weird for me. There are all these different types of things I’m not supposed to do because I’m a professional in all these different types of ways. Sometimes I break the rules in ways that are good, and sometimes I break the rules in ways that are bad; mostly I break the rules in ways that matter less than anyone thinks.

Sleep No More and the complete destruction of my New York coolness factor this morning don’t say a lot about whether these types of lines are good or bad, but they do say a lot about how profoundly artificial lines between audience and performance are, as well as the lines between fact and fiction that we are often so insistent about. When we talk about these lines blurring, we often talk about the discomfort inherent in that blurring, and then mistake that discomfort for implying something unnatural about those acts of blurring.

I think the blurring is instinctive. And natural. And sort of fundamental to how we experience performance and audience-to-performance object love. I think it’s also fundamental to the instincts people on the performance side of the fence have towards fans; the gut says — at least in the process of rising to the previously mentioned obscurity or erasure — to let them in, even if wisdom and custom say otherwise.

In turn, I think these fences and lines are established to impose order — not just against all the stuff I’m sure we can all cite in the annals of bad fan and audience behavior, but against the heart, instinctively public and defensively misunderstood.

Ultimately, the link between these two experiences comes back to the wisdom of New York for me. I don’t know or even talk to my neighbors, because I can hear them having sex through the wall. I don’t look at people on the street, because then I’d never get to stop saying hello to strangers all day long. These barriers are artificial, and even toxic, but they allow us privacy in a place, in the place, without.

Fact/fiction and audience/performance barriers serve the same function, and are there to protect not just performers and the fictions they execute on, but to also protect audiences and fans from the permeability of all our extraordinarily vulnerable, easily bruised, relentlessly public and so very human hearts.

Where, oh where, has the trash day gone?

Hey folks. I’ve just finished a week of work best described as brutal. Between that, and having had Patty home for one week (in which at least a day was lost to jet-lag and another 60 hours had me in Boston without her), I’ve been a little distracted. Actually, not distracted. Highly focused and unavailable seems more on point.

So what’s going on both here and in the world?

Well today, we have our first script-development read-through of Dogboy & Justine. This basically means Erica and I and some of our friends are going to sit around and read the first draft, while Erica and I scribble all over it to refine the voices. This, amazingly, is sandwiched between our going to a bridal shower and going to see Sleep No More tonight at 11:00.

Meanwhile, I’m still a bit OMG, Glee! Okay, I’m a lot OMG, Glee! My friend Marci and I are totally going to Glee! Live and there are evil cosplay plans afoot. I spent a really appalling amount of time last night researching the Dalton blazers and may have found the jacket that has to be the blueprint for them from some random fashion company in South Korea. The colors are wrong, but ALL the details seem right. I may order it to take it apart for pattern reference. Look, if I knew why I was like this, I wouldn’t have to write about it here.

As usual, my friends may not understand my obsessions, but they are generous with them. Ellen Kushner sent me a link to an article about the four Glee characters that are Jewish and how they map onto the four different kids referenced in the Passover seder.

It is, in case you missed it, almost Passover, which is the most wonderful time of year, not just for us Jewish and Jewishly-adjacent folks (Patty really likes seder, okay?), but for us celiacs. Exciting products abound! The products you are looking for are non-gebroks.

To close the loops on Ellen and passover, you should also check out the air dates for her radio play with music, The Witches of Lublin, which is super cool and also features my friend, Elizabeth Boskey, who is actually the person responsible for getting me my book contract a few years back.

In other news, Patty and I have almost figured out where to abscond to for our anniversary weekend (something which is complicated by us not being exactly sure when our anniversary is and our B&B of choice being booked for when we can go).

I’ve also gotten edits back on a few things which I need to work on, and had something I did on spec cut free, although I pretty much know what I’m going to do with it next, so that’s all fine.

Less fine is the ongoing domestic disturbance going on in the apartment above us, which has involved shrieking phone arguments we can hear in our apartment and very loud pacing at 2am, but such is life in New York.

pep talk for having a delightfully unlikely life

Most of the stuff that I’m able to do in my professional life I do, because one day I decided that I would. This means that I have a lot of contact both with the “fake it until you make it” strategy of life and often suffer from a mean case of imposter syndrome. This is also complicated by the fact that much of what I do is stuff that involves a lot of pushback in terms of present and vocal audiences — whether specialized (i.e., academic) or generalized (i.e., fandom, or even, people who watch movies).

Sometimes, I deal with this stuff well, and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I do get myself in over my head; other times, I show up somewhere, by some deeply unconventional route, and discover that I’m doing really good work, worthy of the environment in question. Sometimes, something happens that’s just messy and complicated, and all I can do is register the experience, try to find data in it to learn from, and then move on.

So, while there’s lots of stuff I’m still learning about this life of presumptuousness, I have figured out some stuff, and you should benefit from it too. Your benefiting from it, of course, also happens to benefit me. More people pursuing their passions is good. More people doing that unconventionally? Makes my life way easier, because then I don’t look like that asshole who’s always shoving her foot in the door to stop someone from closing it in my face.

So first, accept that you have the right to pursue whatever it is that you want to pursue. Then accept that if a traditional route to that thing isn’t possible or desirable for you, you’re allowed to improvise a plan. Accept that the plan may or may not work, but also accept that you are awesome for having ambition and taking risk, and then go do your stuff.

Along the way, remember that you may have no damn idea what you’re doing. That’s okay. I have no damn idea what I’m doing. It means you have to listen and research and watch people around you and try to figure stuff out sometimes, but that’s not necessarily a failing. You get to be the new perspective, and you have more wiggle room to make mistakes and try new approaches. You can admit that you have no idea what you’re doing without devaluing your work. If you’re really lucky, you get to burst onto the scene.

Now, you also have to accept that you are an expert about something or bring a unique value add to the table of whatever it is you’re trying to pursue. Maybe people want to sign up for that, and maybe they don’t, but it’s real, and you’re allowed to talk yourself up. Enjoy that. You’re fabulous. And fabulous is a fun word to say. So run with it.

Don’t lie. Sometimes, do make judicious choices to omit. Do know that, that can and will bite you in the ass sometimes. Find your comfort zone. Forgive yourself when you fuck up; apologize when appropriate. Do not apologize when it isn’t. And never let anyone convince you that you owe everyone in the world a public accounting of all your flaws.

Also remember that nothing is a straight line. Not only are some days two steps forward and one step back, some days are going to be one step forward and three steps back (i.e., the agent meeting in which I was told I’d “actually be beautiful in France” or the day I made a really crappy etiquette error with an anthology, which, thankfully, involved gracious people, and thus I lived to be published).

Listen to authorities in your chosen realm(s) of pursuit; they can help you. Don’t, however, assume, that all authorities agree with each other or even have your best interests at heart. When you take non-traditional routes to achievements that may impinge on other people’s territory, you’ll get a lot of responses that are complex and don’t necessarily have a lot to do with you.

Stop. Wait. Breathe. Reassess. Is it still fun? Is it still meaningful? Are you still following your dream the way you want to be? Don’t let other people saying yes cause you to forget why you want that yes.

Still good? Okay. Then accept that the fine art of self-promotion is trial and error. Accept that it will make other people angry. Accept that, if you don’t enjoy it, it remains a necessary evil. No matter how awesome you are the world will never find out by your standing pertly to one side and hoping someone will notice. I lived a big chunk of my life that way. Doesn’t work. And while shit happens, you’re probably not going to be discovered in a diner either. That’s okay.

Meanwhile, don’t forget that the most successful people often have the luxury of being generous. So accept generosity when it’s offered to you. Also be sure to be generous with your skills and knowledge when you can, knowing that your generosity, yes, can have a side-bonus of improving your positioning.

And as much as I can tell you to never, ever let someone tell you not to go after what you want? Ignoring other people after a few deep breaths actually isn’t that hard. It’s ignoring ourselves who want to believe them, who have been trained to wait for permission to shine or desire. That’s what’s hard.

Learn to take pleasure in wanting. Get cosy with it and want big. So when stuff happens for you, whether it’s 10% of your daydreams or a 100%, you can love it.

Those are the secrets for me. Do they make the bad days better? No. Do they mean I know what to do to get back on the horse the day after the bad days? You bet. It hasn’t failed me yet.

Go want something ridiculous. Go do something fabulous. You can. In fact, it’s perfectly reasonable.

Also, report back. Consider it self-promotion.

Butchlab Symposium Roundup

Some of you may remember my writing a post about butch identity and beauty a while ago for the Butch Lab Symposium on misconceptions about butch identity.

Well, the rest of the posts are in, and you can check them out from the links below. Meanwhile, more regular content from me soon, I’m just in the throes of Patty’s return and a brutal work schedule at the moment.

Butch Lab Symposium #2: Stereotypes, Cliches, and Misconceptions on Butch Lab:

Want to contribute next time? Keep an eye on the Butch Lab Blog and the Symposium page for the future topic, to be due in June.

Glee: what’s with all the death fics?

One of my preoccupations since discovering the world of Glee fandom, is how many death fics there are. At first they all seemed to kill Kurt (prettiest corpse!), but now I’ve read a mix of pretty much everyone dying. And I can’t stop reading them. Which is a little weird and morbid, but I do a lot of my scholarly work about death, and these fics do feel adjacent to that — if we read a sad fic about loss (and the magnitude of the loss is defined by the intra- and extradiegetic love that precedes it), we get to be all smitten with this fiction without having to be big dorks going on about our obsession in all caps.

More than that, though, I think the death fics are a response to the show being about high school. When folks kill off characters, they are mourning, if not innocence (it is Glee, after all), then at least the luminosity of youth. Although we rarely know it when we’re 16 ourselves, we’re often beautiful at that age in a way we will never be again, even if we go on to be stunning in other ways.

US TV is bad with endings. We put shows on and run them until no one cares anymore. British TV shows, by contrast, often have expiration dates when they start, and certainly no one expects the original cast to stay forever. Spooks (MI-5 in the US), is my eternal example of this. Is any of the original cast still there? It’s all death all the time and makes Torchwood look like happy fun times.

But Glee is a show where the cast is going to have to turn over. Sure, Puck can be a super-senior, but Kurt’s probably going to graduate on time and run for the coast the day after. So we’re losing these folks even now (I’m wondering what the powers that be are going to do around this — How many characters can they justify keeping at a local Lima community college? Who will fail to graduate? Are they thinking college spin-off? Will we see a return of stuff like the Acafellas?).

If we’re grownups about it, we also have to acknowledge that many of the things we love about these characters — which are often their relationships — are also temporary. Maybe Kurt and Blaine will get a happily ever after; I actually know quite a few high school sweetheart couples that have made it a couple of decades and counting. But they’ll probably hurt each other pretty terribly somewhere along the way even if they do make it (and I am so hoping they do). As the audience, it’s what we live for. But it’s also going to suck.

So I think that’s what the death fic is about. I think it’s about beating the show to the punch even more cruelly than the show will eventually and necessarily wound us (plot twists aside, it won’t run forever, even on US TV). It’s like how pessimism makes you ready. We’re ready, dammit. We’re ready.

But I also think, maybe just a little, we’re mourning our own luminosity. And not, so much, the luminosity of the teens we once were, but rather, the luminosity of the teens we weren’t. We’re mourning that our lives weren’t neat. That we weren’t beautiful while being outcasts. That our high school boyfriends or girlfriends were sort of assholes. That we never stood up to that bully. That we never got to be a cheerleader. Or sing the solo.

So the sadness, perhaps, isn’t for what we’ve lost, but for what we never got a chance to lose: our fictional pasts become objects of grief (as a way of delineating unmentioned/unacknowledged love), much in the same way that these fictional characters, with whom we do have these identificatory or receptive/responsive relationships, become objects of intra- and extradiegetic grief in these death fics.

Christian and I were talking briefly about Glee this morning, and he was saying how little work it is to watch the show compared to other programs we both favor. After all, Glee really telegraphs its plot points. But while the work is definitely optional, I do think the show gives us a lot to chew over. Admittedly, that, at times, is about its inconsistencies and flaws (or the really bizarre quirks of fandom. Google canniblaine, I’ll wait), but for me, who is sort of relentlessly Watsonian, it’s like candy. Beautiful, sad candy that leaves a nice corpse, but still, candy.

having a public life when you’re no one in particular

One of the weirder things about my life is that I’m a pretty public person. Some of this is really just because I’m a bit of a low filter individual. As an only child who didn’t really have a lot of friends growing up my life was necessarily private whether I wanted it to be or not, and I didn’t always have the opportunity to learn about when to share and when not to. But I also grew up queer, in the 80s, in New York City, which meant that Silence = Death wasn’t just a feature of the political landscape that surrounded me, but something I took to large, and perhaps in appropriate, heart. Somehow, I decided that survival, my survival, absolutely, positively depended on me telling my story as much as I could.

Sometimes, that’s made things worse. Certainly, it’s been a huge contributor in online bullying I’ve experienced. I can ping people’s who does she think she is? buttons pretty hard, especially when you combine my ambition with a worldview that’s about making sure other people can never use me against me. It’s not, despite what some folks think, always (or even often) an “I’m so awesome” thing. A lot of the time I’m just trying to beat someone else to the punch. If I call myself a horrible person, it doesn’t really mean that much when you call me a horrible person. At least, that’s the theory.

Practically, let’s just face it: I’m really sensitive, and I shatter easily, although I’m also, thankfully, damn resilient and extraordinarily stubborn. But that doesn’t mean that my not quite deserved or useful public life is easy for me to navigate or comfortable for me to have.

The fact is, I’ve been performing myself on the Internet for over twenty years now. And during that time I’ve learned how to show you a projection of my private life that is deeply sincere and entirely a truth. But it’s not everything; it can’t be. Among other things, there’s a gap between the actual logistics and intimacies of my life and the way I show them to you, just like there’s a gap between the New York City apartments on television and how we actually live here.

Having that sort of public face is, in a lot of ways, utterly unremarkable. It’s something we all do in some ways in some parts of our lives. But for me, who’s ambitious, who has never really stopped being that kid who wants to be famous, it’s created this weird situation where I have a lot of the downsides of being a public person (strangers on the Internet deface my picture and say mean things about me) and pretty much none of the benefits of being one, because, dudes, so not famous, which has sort of made me wonder what the hell all of this is for, especially on the days when it’s not fun.

While usually it’s just odd, being a not-really public figure can kind of completely blow sometimes. It sort of requires all of the graciousness and comes with none of the insulation. For someone as hot-tempered and brittle as me, it’s really maybe not the best plan. And I’ve spent a lot of time in the last year wondering what the hell this situation is for and how to step back and undo it all so that people will just leave me alone, even while still having the opportunity to do the stuff I love in the ways that I love to do it. Without giving in. Without becoming silent.

Last night, in one of those 2am light bulbs that only really come when you’re dancing around your living room watching your reflection in your windows and lamenting that you don’t look like more of a rock star, I finally figured out that the purpose of this public life isn’t just about faking it until you make it (although, seriously, that works — it’s astounding) or telling bullies to go fuck themselves or making sure no one can ever blackmail me for being a big ol’ homosexual.

I figured out that my public life certainly doesn’t mean that I don’t get to have a private life, no matter how much it may make people feel free to discuss, not the value of my ideas or work or performances, but my own actual worth as a human being. This public life is here so that I can have a private life. So that when people talk shit about me, they’re talking about the me I perform, and not the me who really needs to go buy groceries and who makes dinosaur noises at her girlfriend. The purpose of the public life isn’t to remove the private life — it’s to give it room to breathe. My private life is big, and it’s able to be big because I’ve put a shield up around it that’s even bigger. What I didn’t get until last night is that the public life isn’t the target; it’s the insulation.

Which means it’s time to stop feeling awkward or ashamed or undeserving of that public life. I have it, for better or worse, thanks to years of steps and missteps, a few successes and probably things like having Rhetoric class in school and growing up with a dad in advertising and thinking that maybe David Bowie’s Berlin albums were enough to save my life when I was a teenager.

When I started to live in the world and perform myself in the world, I had no idea what I was doing. I just knew that I thought I should be famous and had parents who spent too much time asking me why I wasn’t yet. I don’t know that if I had it all to do over again knowing what I know now, that I’d do it in quite the same way or care about the same stuff. Truthfully, I don’t even know if I’d have much control over the process — we’ve already gone over the details of my tendency towards overshare, and I’ve become pretty certain that a public life is, no matter how much you seek it out, a thing that, by its very definition, happens to you often beyond the reach of your fingertips.

Years ago, my friend Anton gave me the subtitle for my old LiveJournal blog. It’s big life; small space and I’ve never really known if he meant my flesh or the reality of New York City apartments. It’s never really mattered, simply because it’s always been true.

Glee: Hats in church and Kurt Hummel’s gender identity

Yesterday, Deconstructing Glee raised the issue of whether or not Kurt Hummel is cisgendered. Having just watched all the episodes in a week (I know, I know, didn’t I write an essay here about how the show is not for me? Well, something happened, that I think has something to do, actually, with the BIg Gay Kiss and the Patty is Far Away intersection and now here we are), I have an opinion. Sort of.

It’s an entirely tricky thing to have an opinion about on a lot of levels. For one thing, you have to define cisgendered, which is all fine and easy if we’re dealing with a quasi-binary model; it’s less fine and easy if you’re genderqueer and don’t necessarily feel okay about including that identity in either the cisgender or transgender category, but know other people who may feel otherwise in a myriad of different ways (hi!).

For another, answering the query means you have to assume not only that production’s choices are deeply intentional and made of coherent messages, but that the character’s choices are also intentional and made of coherent messages. The kid’s 16 and in one hell of a set of difficult circumstances that he deals with through performativity. So really? I think it’s fair to say that no one probably knows what’s going on here, including not just the people writing Kurt, but Kurt himself.

That said, intentionality aside, there are all sorts of cues and clues on this lurking all over the show, and I do think there’s sort of an answer. I think Kurt has maybe had to spend a lot of time wondering if he’s trans, but I also think he’s come to the conclusion that he isn’t.

Somewhere, someone reading this is going, “Wait, if you’re the person in question, how the hell can you wonder about something like that?” Life, my friends, is very complicated, especially when you live in an environment where the theoretical reflectiveness of gender (i.e., my gender presentation serves to seemingly define the gender presentation of those around me) is highly emphasized. Kurt’s environment is totally like that. His queerness is constantly being called out by those around him not as just potentially reflecting on the sexuality of those he interacts with, but on their gender in a way that highlights some pretty intense misogyny (because, dude, it’s a show about really crap high school kids in Lima, Ohio).

That dynamic gives Kurt an option to find allies. No matter how many times he tells us — and he tells us often — that being gay doesn’t make him a woman (“I am a guy, Dad,” he says when Burt talks about how much he loves doing “guy things” with Finn), one of the few relatively positive pre-Dalton choices he has is to ally himself with the girls. Then, instead of being the one gay kid, he’s one of the girls. It’s not an ideal fit, but wow, it’s better than the alternative. And it’s also not a terrible fit, because Kurt is performing a very specific type of queerness (there’s a reason he’s the one in the Leigh Bowery heels in the Lady Gaga episode) that is about playing with feminine archetypes and gestures.

That performance of queerness is complicated in itself. Certainly, many, many older viewers of the show (that would include me; I’ll be 39 this year) recognize the type of queer kid Kurt performs from our own lives in the 1980s (and earlier, or a little later), but also wonder how often teen queerness really looks like that today. Meanwhile, others make noises about stereotypes, while some of us make noises about how grateful we are that Kurt’s a kid that can’t pass as straight. Some queer people just can’t pass. Kurt can’t. Santana can. Brittany can. Blaine can. Karofsky can (oh my god, is everyone on this show queer all of a sudden? Rock on). If you’re going to have a show with multiple queer kids on it, one of them kinda has to be like Kurt.

But the central item, I think, in discussing Kurt’s gender identity, has to, as the original piece I linked to did, talk about wardrobe. That piece, however, didn’t talk about the thing that I think makes solving this little puzzle the most complex (note: it’s a puzzle because it’s a TV show; actual non-fiction humans are not and should not be solved in the same way; therefore, as someone whose work is about lowering the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, I actually should note I feel slightly sketchy about this entire exercise). That’s the “Grilled Cheezus” episode.

You’re groaning. I know. Because it was kind of almost awesome about atheism or diversity of belief and then it was… well, the way it was. Also, it gave us Kurt singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which is one of the best uses of song in the whole series (where, as I’ve noted before, I often think the uses of song don’t serve the genre correctly). But, the point is, in “Grilled Cheezus,” Mercedes ultimately seduces Kurt into joining her at church by telling him he can wear a fabulous hat.

Kurt knows all the rules of fashion. Kurt talks about all the rules of fashion all the time. Kurt notes that one of his only gifts in addition to his voice is his uncanny ability to spot menswear trends. And Kurt loves old-fashioned things and classic films. Which means Kurt knows damn well that a man simply cannot wear a hat indoors, especially in a church, especially in a church where the women still mostly wear hats. And then he does it anyway.

This, far more than Kurt’s insistence on being with the girls in so many of the singing challenges (which really, can speak to self-preservation as much as anything else), is what makes me go, “Hrrrrr, maybe Kurt does see his gender as very complex or queer in a addition to his sexuality,” because it’s a gesture that breaks the type of rules that Kurt doesn’t usually break, in a set of circumstances Kurt doesn’t usually break rules in.

Despite the fact that I don’t identify with Kurt, somewhere, this essay had to get personal in order for me to make the point. When other people tell me I am not a girl, it’s infuriating to me, (see Kurt and “I’m a guy, Dad”), but I often find it just as hurtful, or at least puzzling, when people tell me I am one, and the more fraught and formal a circumstance, the more likely I am to deviate from my gender as assigned and find a profound armor in choices that may seem weird to other people and really, really comfortable to me. I often say that if I were assigned as a guy, I’d probably wear dresses about as often as I do now. Therefore, is it somewhat easy for me to imagine that Kurt lives somewhere in the same country as I do? Sure. And, yeah, it’s all because of that damn hat.

But, at the end of the day, I think we have to come back to the previously mentioned gender reflectiveness of the show’s environment and the opening spoken word bits to Madonna’s “What It Feels Like to Be a Girl.”

Girls can wear jeans
And cut their hair short
Wear shirts and boots
‘Cause it’s OK to be a boy
But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading
‘Cause you think that being a girl is degrading
But secretly you’d love to know what it’s like
Wouldn’t you
What it feels like for a girl

Kurt (in one of the best deliveries the always excellent Colfer gives us) gets the end of that little segment, starting with “But secretly.” Here’s this queer kid, with the high voice, who has to constantly remind everyone around him that he’s a man, and who wants to be romanced like in an old black & white movie delivering a line that, coming from him, is about nearly too much stuff to analyze.

It’s about his own identity. It’s about how he suffers for being gay because of the ways in which that makes people around him perceive him as being female in addition to characteristics he has that just makes it all hard (it’s no accident that a lot of the episode in which he tries to “be a man” for his dad, focuses on him trying to speak in a lower register — and he can’t really, because that’s not his voice).

But there’s also a wistfulness in the delivery. Kurt tells us a lot across the series, and with a bit of pain, that being gay and being gay like this isn’t something he chose, that it was a roll of the dice and one that he thinks sort of sucks. In this line, I think we also hear him wondering if his life would be easier if he were a girl. It’s also so blatantly filled with his longing to be loved (emotionally, sexually) the way he wants to be loved, and it’s presented in a gendered framework, because that’s all he’s got to work with.

So do I think Kurt is trans? Not really. Do I think Kurt is cis? Maybe, maybe not. Do I think Kurt has had to think about it until it’s run him into the ground with exhaustion and that he’s still frustrated by his own answers even if the show never meant for us to wonder about this at all? Yeah, I kinda do.

[Side note for new readers: two weeks ago I started watching Glee. This week, I totally noticed that their football team is called the Titans. My world is a world of deeply absurd circles, but this wacky bit of wackiness has nothing to do with the title of this journal, musings on which can be found in the first post here].

April Fool’s Day is totally trash day

While it’s not quite the middle of the night for me, I have such an odd assortment of notes from the front this week and a very convoluted day tomorrow, that it seemed best to churn this out now.

First of all, Trade School was completely awesome (P.S. – confidential to attendee who donated to The Trevor Project, I passed that along from the cash you gave me tonight, transaction confirmation number: 120951424 — thank you!), even if the thing where I had to write my name in chalk on the blackboard was super weird. I think it was useful to everyone, including me, even if I just ranted and was bitter ex-journalist and told inappropriate stories for a bit. But then I was really not feeling tethered to the world. And it wasn’t a good sort of ethereal. Nothing quite like getting a vicious summer cold and having a celiac moment all at once. That said, I’m glad to get it out of the way before Patty comes home.

Patty comes home on April 8. Do you know what that means? That means one more week. We are so ready. I need to clean house. We also need to logisticize all sorts of things, including her birthday (public gathering will be later than actual birthday, because the 10th is just too soon), my father’s birthday (the following day), and our anniversary. I have a meeting at the UN and a trip to Boston thrown in there too, and we have theater tickets and the previously mentioned wedding shower. Among probably a hundred other things I’m forgetting. And that’s just for April.

Meanwhile, in a bizarre twist of the universe, four different writers I know to varying degrees (including two people I’ve shared a hotel room with (one of whom is a very close friend), someone who has cat sat for me, and a major collaborator of mine) are the four authors in Candlemark & Gleam’s first (re)Visions anthology, which in this case is centered around Alice in Wonderland. This is so ridiculous. One person told me they had a secret project they couldn’t tell me about, another person told me what they were working on (which is such a brilliant idea I’m sort of in agony I didn’t think of it), I sort of knew the third person was working on something, and I had no idea about the fourth person — and I really had no idea it was all for the same book. I know 100% of the book! At random! So you should all buy it. Because they are just brilliant and coincidences like this don’t happen for no reason.

In a totally different type of bizarre, the FBI needs help from amateur Internet code breakers in order to help solve a murder from 1999.

Also, because I care even if you don’t care, the Bronz Zoo cobra has been found alive and apprehended. The FREE THE COBRA chants going around Twitter in response are disturbingly hilarious.

If you’ve known me for any length of time, you know I have a thing for the backstage story. And if I have a thing for anything more than I have a thing for the backstage story (wow, way to go with specific nouns there, Rach), I have a thing for backstage stories about narratives that play with the backstage story trope. Huh? What I mean is, I really dig Moulin Rouge, which is a backstage story, but what I really, really dig is stories about the making of Moulin Rouge. The same goes for anything similar. Hell, most of my best high school stories involve working on a production of Kiss Me Kate — it’s the same sort of doubling of the intradiegetic/extradigetic problem.

That very complicated explanation of something that turns my crank is why I must link you to the guys who play the Warblers on Glee jamming at a party the other night. No Katy Perry song (“Teenage Dream”) should sound so melancholy, lovely and strange. Especially sung in such a messy, unrehearsed, all-over-the-place way, in this grainy, sideways video featuring mostly relatively minor ensemble performers in a backstage-narrative TV show mucking about on their own time with a song the show actually used in a metatextual way to talk about the phenomenon surrounding their part of the narrative. I said metatextual. Now this entire rant is justified. Oh yes, oh yes.

Also speaking of Glee, because it turns out I know the person responsible for the Keep Calm and Warble On shirts (people, I know everyone; it’s a rule of the universe), I am linking to her “how to make your own” tutorial just because it will tickle her. Is there an arts and crafts accident waiting to happen in my house involving red fabric paint and excessively curious cats? I’m not telling. Here, anyway.

Finally, look at that, it’s April Fool’s. I don’t play, and I really don’t play in the middle of Mercury Retrograde. If the universe would like to present me with luscious and unlikely events, I do keep a wish list in my head. But, as a rule, I spend today being very skeptical. It annoys me that I have to do that, that I have to take a day and say, “this is a day on which I refuse to acknowledge magic in the universe because you might be screwing with me.” It’s not cool! But so it goes. Maybe I’ll make the annual “pack of wild chihuahuas” post tomorrow, although that incident was not an April Fool’s event.

Have an excellent Friday, and don’t believe anything I wouldn’t believe.

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.