personal – Page 11 – Letters from Titan

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.

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.

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.