Category: personal

Personal note: Swordspoint audiobook

Even when I’m aggravated by it (and let’s face it, we’re all aggravated by stuff we love sometimes), I adore fandom and, particularly, fanfiction. I will always be inclined to defend it and be honest about my participation in it for all sorts of different reasons including that it’s just fun and that it’s arguably an act of perpetual longing, which just totally fits how my brain works. But, most importantly, it’s also how I met my partner.

Specifically, Patty and I met writing fanfiction about Ellen Kushner‘s Swordspoint, which is sort of hilarious as far as romantic impetus goes. Because even with a glorious couple at its center, Swordspoint is not a romance, and wow, neither of those guys are anyone you want to date, even if they’re pretty awesome as far as narrative kinks go and are people that Patty and I can be said to be bear some slightly hilarious and superficial resemblance too: she is a scholar, who is taller than me, and is, on occasion, quite difficult; and I do, in fact, keep swords by our bed.

Anyway, Swordspoint is now available as an audio-book from SueMedia Productions for Neil Gaiman Presents/ACX. I’m telling you all because I love this story like burning, and it helped me find Patty, and there are some rockin’ voice actors on this, and oh hey, I also have a teeny, tiny, awesome credit on it.

It’s cool stuff that I think many readers here would enjoy — swords, queer people, intrigue, and witty insults, just to name a few. If you do check it out and want to find the fandom, it seems to live on Livejournal.

Team Starkid (and friends!): Internet memes go to Vegas

One day, Las Vegas musical reviews will all be things we can blame on the Internet. When that happens (i.e., when we’re all old), Team Starkid will probably be the daily 4pm show at some casino just off the strip. And, in that distant future, whatever it is that they are (and “a musical-theater comedy troupe perhaps best known for a spoof musical of Harry Potter and a show about dicks” is still probably the simplest of the vaguely accurate answers available), might actually make some easy-to-explain sense.

Until then, however, it’s probably just best to say that Team Starkid means a hell of a lot to a lot of people, most of whom seem to be between the ages of 14 and 20. And while the group has talent, drive, and some composers who absolutely know how to write a song you can’t resist (even when you very much want to), they really are the last thing on earth you ever expect to see at Irving Plaza or the Gramercy Theater.

They’re not a rock band; they need an editor; not all their performers are at all suited to a venue of that type or scale; and they tend to under-utilize their talented women despite having a legion of female fans and a lot of songs that are designed to, and I think actually do, make young girls feel good about themselves.

But really, Team Starkid’s fans (who are known as Starkids themselves, if you weren’t confused enough already) don’t care about any of that. And neither do their detractors. The whole thing seems to be one of those things that you either have receptor sites for or you don’t, and so the quality details largely just don’t matter.

I pretty much don’t have those receptor sites, and yet, catchy, catchy, catchy, and I may have “Boy Toy” stuck in my head for the rest of my natural existence (which is unfortunate as there are some visuals from the show burned into my brain to go along with that I didn’t need at all; thank you, Joey Richter).

But that lack of receptor sites didn’t stop me from spending all weekend in a cloud of Team Starkid festivities. After not being able to get tickets for a single show (and I wanted in for the Charlene Kaye, who was probably best served of all the performers by the big venue, and Darren Criss factors), I wound up with tickets to all three shows in the NYC-area and an assortment of friends to hang out with — some were in from out of town for the event, while others were dutiful journalists on the job. As a bunch of people largely in our 30s, I think a lot of us guiltily felt a bit too knowing at times to really want to relinquish ourselves to the experience.

And yet….

The thing about Team Starkid that is super weird for me, is that for the true fans, it’s this incredibly meaningful and joyous thing and the live shows over the last month have just been an amplification of that. But for me the whole thing was actually a little bit melancholy.

That may be, to a certain extent, my natural temperament, but listening to Starkid Meredith Stepien explain, before launching into “Coolest Girl in the World” that one day everyone in the audience would find their “weirdos and magical Darren Crisses too” just kind of made me sad. At fifteen, I wouldn’t have believed her, and I wondered if any of the girls in the audience she was talking to did either.

But I suspect they did. Starkids (the fans) are happy, or at least seem to try hard to be happy. I was sort of a ball of despair at their age, and so, observing their experiences at these shows (for fuck’s sake there was a bubble machine and a streamer cannon) is super weird for me, but I’m certainly glad for them.

Ultimately, the show was a lot of fun, even if it dragged hard in the middle for someone who wasn’t fully committed. Certainly, it was interesting as an event. At three hours in length for the Saturday shows, and four on Sunday — thanks to the presence of The Gregory Brothers, the folks that bring you Auto Tune the News, and a mini-set by Criss — nothing about the experience was about tight narrative. Rather, it was a collection of Internet memes, random hopefulness, in-jokes, and short attention span theater in which everything has meaning, nothing is deadly serious, and everything feels…. mostly really good.

For me, who first started using the Internet back in 1990, Team Starkid is probably most interesting as another step in legitimizing the Internet as a place where things happen and where real connections are forged. It’s an idea that seems obvious to most long-time Internet users and those who have grown up with the technology. But it’s one people outside the digital generation are often suspicious of, questioning whether the friends, creations, and ideas formed and explored here matter.

If Team Starkid can sell out a 21-show tour in minutes (seriously, getting tickets for this was hard) and The Gregory Brothers can have me singing the turtle fence song in my kitchen days later, and one day there won’t be anything weird about either of those things? Well, that’s a paradigm shift worth noting.

Ultimately, though, the shows turned me introspective towards the moments in which I was young enough for all my friendships to be easy and desperately intense. I had no idea what college would be and was just sure that a chosen family was waiting for me, easy and instant. It made me wish a little bit that I could go back to that moment and have the experiences of my teens and twenties with a more open heart — and with a bit more wisdom and luck — than I actually did.

This, of course, was aided and abetted by Criss’s more wrenching moments on stage (“Home” on Saturday and the whole of his mini-set on Sunday), which reminded me of just how good he is at selling exactly what I’m buying. As a performer he breaks my heart even when my brain is screaming at me about what a damn savvy marketer he is. It’s a little funny, and probably why I’m never more interested by what he’s got on offer than when he’s performing songs either explicitly about fame and fannishness (“Sami” and “Sophomore”) or arguably repurposed to be about same (“Teenage Dream”, “Home”, “When You Wish Upon a Star”).

For most of the audience, there’s a damn good chance that Team Starkid and their very many friends was their first concert experience. I hope they look back at it fondly when they’re checking out that review in Vegas in thirty years. Certainly, I suspect it’ll all make more sense in the narrative of their lives than my own first concert experiences, which included The Eurythmics (so cool, but I was nine and my parents were just dragging me along so they could go), Starship (I know, I know), and A-ha for my 13th birthday.

Even when they were happening, I knew those shows had no particular place in the story of me; I suspect for Starkids the experience of seeing this tour has been entirely different and will, actually, probably matter a great deal to their personal stories, at least for a little while.

I hope so.

It seems like a pretty neat damn thing to actually have receptor sites for.

Police brutality and that thing I haven’t been writing about

I like to pretend that I don’t really write about politics here. After all, when I talk about marriage equality or anti-gay violence, I can link that to Glee or Torchwood or at least to my own life. It’s politics, but the sort of politics I give myself a pretty free pass on, because it’s not really politics, I like to say. When it’s my life up for debate, that’s not fucking politics.

You know, except that it is.

Anyway, I’m a political person and an opinionated one.

I guess you know that.

And I do write about media, and these days everything is media. But I guess you know that too.

So….

One of the things I haven’t been writing about here, or, well, anywhere, is Occupy Wall Street. There are a lot of reasons for that, including that the movement really ramped up when I was out of the country, and I just sort of missed the initial sweep of impetus.

But there are other reasons too.

One is my frustration with the American left’s seeming inability to organize in an effective, message-focused way, even if identifying OWS as a movement of the American left isn’t exactly accurate.

Another is my sense that many parts of the 99% aren’t welcome in the OWS movement; that includes both the homeless and the people who are doing pretty well for themselves but certainly aren’t that 1% or benefiting from the taxation and regulatory absurdities than the 1% benefit from.

Various accusations around particular OWS groups regarding racism and sexism also haven’t helped earn my comfort.

But none of that is really here nor there. I agree with many of the complaints that have spawned OWS even if I don’t always agree with my perception of its methods, (un)focus, suspected goals, or apparent consensus model (for the record, I sort of loathe consensus models). And I think it has initiated a desperately important conversation in American life and politics, and I hope the protestors are able to hold on, even if I’m not necessarily sure of what I mean by that. Which gets us to why I am writing about this, finally, now.

I did my university senior investigative reporting project on police brutality in Washington DC, centered around, but not limited exclusively to, the events of the Adams Morgan riots. One of the most most notable incidents I remember from that project was the story of man beaten by police when he would not answer their questions. The man was deaf, and the police were accused of additionally ignoring his family providing this information during the confrontation in question.

So police brutality is one of those things I know a lot about. I know that when we hear about police brutality, as lay people, it’s hard to understand how scary a cop’s job is, or what their training is like, or how a situation that doesn’t seem threatening to us can seem threatening to them. But I also know how much utterly grotesque brutality happens, how little it gets reported both within the system and within the media, and how little it gets resolved by institutions like DC’s Citizen’s Complaint Review Board.

Today, things are a lot different than in 1991, when the Adams Morgan riots happened, or in 1994, when I wrote my report (the brutality cases from the riots were still languishing in the CCRB process at the time). When increased hard evidence of brutality was starting to emerge through cheaper, smaller video technology then, the sense was that incidences of clear-cut police brutality would drop. Twenty years later the tech is ubiquitous, but egregious incidents of brutality, because they happen at the extremes, still happen. These days, they just get documented.

And there are things happening in response to Occupy Wall Street that are not okay.

The UC Davis incident is just one example of the severity of the problem It is one particular detail of this story, not caught on camera that anyone is currently aware of, that caused me to write this. It pushes a personal horror button for me so hard, I have found myself wanting to turn away from the news, and in my experience, that’s usually when it’s the most important to talk about the news.

There have also been cases of critical injuries at OWS protests (including a war vet who suffered skull damage), protestors being denied medical attention (such as the dude with the lacerated spleen), and significant video footage in NYC of a police officer dragging a woman out of an authorized protest zone and assaulting her. There have also been significant reports of reporters being arrested while doing their jobs.

So something’s happening here. Seriously, even Forbes is blogging about it.

With the UC Davis incident, there is the sense that a moment has arrived that changes everything, even if we’re not sure what’s changing or how. But it is a moment where I think it is important for us to look, and to speak. Because for the first time in a long time there’s a movement in America where patience has been lost, and where people are willing to make explicit, personal, physical sacrifice for change. That’s notable; it’s not something I’ve seen in my adult life-time in this form and was only hazily aware of as a young child in the 1970s.

But more than all that, this is a moment where at least some police action has stepped outside of the bounds of appropriate behavior. It’s become violent, punitive, and medicalized.

And even while sitting in a comfortable hotel room on a business trip, it’s hands down the most frightening trend in response to American protest I’ve seen in my own life and experience, and let me tell you, I didn’t just do that one piece for my degree — I covered, and participated in, a lot of protests as a student journalist when I lived in DC. I saw people two feet away from me get bloodied by police batons, and I don’t even want to talk about the humiliation and nastiness that went on in response to Act-Up protests in those days in DC. I know how things can get ugly, and I know how these things can be more complex than they seem, but this, this is something else.

If there’s something you’re unhappy about in America, if there’s a cause you’ve ever protested for, or would ever consider protesting about — whether it’s gay rights or pro-choice issues or the death penalty; the wars or the union stripping bills or internet censorship; homelessness or the environment or nuclear power — whatever it is, on some level, what’s happening out there in response to OWS, is about you and your rights.

And no matter how uncomfortable it is — and this one is uncomfortable for me — I think we have to stop and look and ask ourselves what happens next.

So what happens next?

V for Vendetta: I have a pencil

I don’t know who you are. Please believe. There is no way I can convince you that this is not one of their tricks, but I don’t care. I am me, and I don’t know who you are but I love you. I have a pencil. A little one they did not find. I am a woman. I hid it inside me. Perhaps I won’t be able to write again, so this is a long letter about my life. It is the only autobiography I will ever write and oh god I’m writing it on toilet paper.

I was born in Nottingham in 1957, and it rained a lot. I passed my eleven plus and went to girl’s grammar. I wanted to be an actress. I met my first girlfriend at school. Her name was Sara. She was fourteen and I was fifteen but we were both in Miss Watson’s class.

Her wrists. Her wrists were beautiful.

I sat in biology class, staring at the pickled rabbit foetus in its jar, listening while Mr. Hird said it was an adolescent phase that people outgrew… Sara did. I didn’t.

In 1976 I stopped pretending and took a girl called Christine home to meet my parents. A week later I moved to London, enrolling at drama college. My mother said I broke her heart, but it was my integrity that was important. Is that so selfish? It sells for so little, but it’s all we have left in this place. It is the very last inch of us…

… But within that inch we are free.

London: I was happy in London. In 1981 I played Dandini in Cinderella. My first rep work. The world was strange and rustling and busy, with invisible crowds behind the hot lights and all the breathless glamour. It was exciting and it was lonely. At nights I’d go to Gateways or one of the other clubs, but I was stand-offish and didn’t mix easily. I saw a lot of the scene, but I never felt comfortable there. So many of them just wanted to be gay. It was their life, their ambition, all they talked about… And I wanted more than that.

Work improved. I got small film roles, then bigger ones. In 1986 I starred in ‘The Salt Flats.’ It pulled in the awards but not the crowds. I met Ruth working on that. We loved each other. We lived together, and on Valentine’s Day she sent me roses, and oh god, we had so much. Those were the best three years of my life.

In 1988 there was the war…

… And after that there were no more roses. Not for anybody.

In 1992, after the take-over, they started rounding up the gays. They took Ruth while she was out looking for food. Why are they so frightened of us? They burned her with cigarette ends and made her give them my name. She signed a statement saying I seduced her. I didn’t blame her. God I loved her. I didn’t blame her… But she did. She killed herself in her cell. She couldn’t live with betraying me, with giving up that last inch.

Oh Ruth.

They came for me. They told me that all my films would be burned. They shaved off my hair. They held my head down a toilet bowl and told jokes about lesbians. They brought me here and gave me drugs. I can’t feel my tongue anymore. I can’t speak. The other gay woman here, Rita, died two weeks ago. I imagine I’ll die quite soon.

It is strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses and I apologized to nobody. I shall die here. Every inch of me shall perish…

… Except one.

An inch. It’s small and it’s fragile and it’s the only thing in the world that’s worth having. We must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.

I don’t know who you are, or whether you’re a man or a woman. I may never see you. I may never hug you or cry with you or get drunk with you. But I love you. I hope you escape this place. I hope that the world turns and that things get better, and that one day people have roses again. I wish I could kiss you.

– Valerie

I posted the film version in my Tumblr earlier, but this is the one from the original graphic novel, that a boyfriend (who was gay; I was something of an exception; hell, we even met at the campus LGBT group) made me read when I was eighteen and in the incredibly homophobic environment of our university.

I was already out, so it was not a catalyst for my coming out. But reading it meant I never, ever wanted to be in again, no matter what was happening, and could never stand myself on those occasions that it felt safer or easier to allow for misunderstanding to closet me.

I post it, and write about it pretty much every November 5th, because of the context in which it was written. And I post it here, in the graphic novel form, to tell you how terrifying it felt to read it in 1991 when it felt like a pretty terrible and frightening time to be gay; the 80s had been terrible, and it didn’t feel like they had ended. The tone of protests around AIDS — and I actively participated in those — was angry and frightened, directed at a government that we were sure wanted us dead and perhaps viewed the disease as a convenience.

I remember sitting in a restaurant now long gone in Washington DC that I much loved and jokingly called my lesbian blues bar and cafe, even though it wasn’t technically any of those things, with a group of my friends, and one of them, a woman, stealing a piece of cheese off my plate, popping it in her mouth, and asking, “yeah, but how are they going to get rid of us?”

I was 18, highly imaginative, political through what seemed like an utter lack of choice, and frightened. And “Valerie’s Letter,” in all the weird and possibly unhealthy ways I connect with fiction, was a constant reminder to me to be brave and kind and speak.

I fail at each of those things, especially kindness, at least as much as anyone else, but I’ve got to try with whatever I have left on any given day, because that one inch, if you aren’t paying attention can be stolen so quick and so fast.

I still sob reading this. I suppose I always will. I imagine a world where people won’t, because it won’t make any sense. It’s closer all the time.

Glee: Remember how I said I wasn’t going to write about 3.05 before it airs? Yeah, well, I also once told my mother I would never have sex before marriage.

So, I’ve spent a little bit of time here, and a lot of time over on Tumblr saying I’m not going to talk about 3.05 until it airs. I’m not going to speculate about the structure of the ep, the deflections I think are present in the trailer, the various concerns about the introduction of Sebastian, or even the significance of the episode even existing.

And then today was a sea of spoilers as various journos tweeted as they watched screeners and everyone flipped out. Me included.

And that’s when I realized that to write about 3.05 well, or to talk about the other topics I talk about here, I actually need to get some of my 3.05 anxiety off my chest. But that anxiety isn’t about the episode, that anxiety is about me.

If you’ve been reading for a while, you know that I was originally deeply resistant to Glee in part because I find high school shows hard. I wasn’t a beautiful loser in high school, I was just a loser, and while I’m over the spectacular disaster of my 20s, there’s a lot of shit that happened — or didn’t happen — when I was sixteen that I’m not, and I just want to get some of this out there.

Because it’s mostly personal, not analytical, and may be more than you want to know about me (although it is resoundingly non-graphic), I’m forcing you to click to get the rest of the entry. But it’s not just about my life, it’s about how this episode of Glee is a case of anxiety being the mode through which all us fans are inserting ourselves into the 3.05 narrative, and why anxiety is probably, actually, the most logical emotion for that activity, no matter how unpleasant it may seem.

Continue reading “Glee: Remember how I said I wasn’t going to write about 3.05 before it airs? Yeah, well, I also once told my mother I would never have sex before marriage.”

Monday seems like a good place to start

Hi. I’ve been quiet lately. I wish I could tell you that was due to unbelievably exciting developments in my life, but, while there have been a few moments of success, promise and absurdity, mostly that’s not true; I just take a long time to recover from trips abroad and sometimes do battle with anxiety.

The fact is that I get behind on things, and my head gets turned around in this season, not just by jet lag, but by how incredibly dark it gets incredibly early in latitudes north of New York City. When I’m grateful for all the light in the sky when the sun is setting here before six, you know Europe’s done a number on me.

But, in logistical news you probably don’t care about, I’m headed up to Boston at the end of this week for less than 48 hours and then Patty’s parents will be here for the weekend. In logistical news you’re slightly more likely to care about, I have a contract for something that you’ll eventually be able to read to drop in the mail today, and also have to send a bio in for a thing or two I’ll be speaking at also at some time in the for now unspecified future.

Meanwhile, my guitar playing is still terrible, but full of hope and amusement, and there are a few things of interest off on the horizon so distant it seems indecent to mention them in the dark season. Of course, knowing my life, they’ll actually be here in half a second and splat all over the windshield of my schedule like a bug. I’ll let you know.

But in terms of giving you something to read other than my own attempts to get my head together (new Fluevogs are here, and really, you do not want to hear me wax poetic about the fact that I now own three, yes, three pairs of plaid shoes), I feel nearly morally obligated to post a link to Gregory Maguire’s “Friends of Dorothy: How Gay Was My Oz?” after all my previous rambling about Kurt Hummel and flying monkeys.

Glee, of course, returns from hiatus tomorrow, and if I’ve been silent about a ton of thoughts and theories I have (because Kurt’s clothes are telling us more things this season, and I’m emotional about 3.05 spoilers, and I sort of want to rant at everyone about how narrative requires conflict — three points that both are and are not related), it’s because talking about all that, in lieu of canon actually being revealed through the show (as opposed to leaks, speculations, and that most dubious of news sources, Tumblr), felt a little bit like having a debate with the vague suggestion of a summer breeze.

Even with hefty spoilers, we don’t know what a thing is until we see it, and in the case of the 3.05 frenzy in particular, I’m pretty strident on the fact that we know a lot less than we think we do. So words on all that are coming, but not until I have something concrete to address them to. I’ll warn you in advance that some of those words, even more than usual, are likely to be pretty personal.

But now it’s off to the really important stuff — putting in the laundry and taking Patty to a haunted house.

The incredibly weird world of Kitty Perry and her dancing gingerbread men

It’s nearly impossible to write a review of a Katy Perry show and not somehow call it, or her, a teenage dream. But even if the struggle to avoid that is awkward (as it surely is here), it has to be noted, because it speaks to the marketing genius that is the Katy Perry phenomenon: you can’t talk about what she’s selling without helping her sell what she’s talking about.

For me, who knew about four of her songs definitively going into this (“Teenage Dream,” “Firework” and “Last Friday Night,” which were each brought into my life by Glee; and “I Kissed a Girl” who was brought in my life by virtue of being queer and appalled), I really had no idea what to expect. But I had 20 hours in London, and the trip really needed to be about something other than curry and grocery shopping.

So, at the last minute (like, sitting in the Zurich airport last minute), I bought a ticket to the Katy Perry show. Assuming my plane landed on time, I could get to my hotel, shower, change, go to Picadilly to pick the ticket up, and head out to the 02. Half of my Twitter friends said it would be no problem, and half of them cackled at the thought of me trying to dodge crowds in central London on a Saturday in those weird hours no one knows whether to call afternoon or evening.

It was, shall we say, an ordeal. And if I never have to set foot in the Trocadero again, it will be too soon. The Seatwave people were very nice though, and dear lord, for the cheapest seat I could get at the last minute, it was perfect: dead center, lower tier (the 107 block for those who know the 02), just slightly higher than the stage. I saw David Bowie on the Glass Spider tour at Madison Square Garden with seats like that with my mom when I was in high school, and sure, everything was really far away, but for scale and the sense of how bizarre it must be to perform for an arena, it couldn’t be beat. This was exactly the same.

So, here’s my teenage dream: as a teenager, I was really obsessed with London. Anglophilia, boring, I know. But most of the music I listened to was British, and I bought expensive magazines about British music and dreamed of the all-night night life there without parents to sneak away from. When I got older, it wasn’t that important anymore, but it still twinged in my heart a little when friends would come back from trips and talk about all sorts of not entirely appropriate things they did stay awake at dance parties lasting not until 4am or 6am, but 9am or noon.

Even in a mess of trips to London in the last year or so (five now) and with the Anglophilia still going embarrassingly strong (even if it’s more Doctor Who than the club scene now), I’ve still never been dancing there. To be frank, I’m probably just a little (okay, a lot) intimidated.

But one of Perry’s opening acts on this tour is a DJ, and watching the huge floor crowd move together, arms in the air, I knew that whether it was travel exhaustion, missing Patty, or just memories of the girl I wanted to be when I was fourteen (I wrote to a boy from the pen pal section of one of those music magazines, because we liked all the same bands; he was 18 and in the military, and when the letter came from whatever British base he was stationed at, I got in a world of trouble because he didn’t care about music, my parents said, and I wasn’t allowed to have British music magazines after that), this show was somehow going to hit all my emotional buttons.

After an introductory video narrative that was seven parts fairy tale, two parts Alice in Wonderland and 1 part Sweeney Todd that later wound loosely through the entire show, Perry opened with “Teenage Dream.” To say I wasn’t ready for the glitter-drenched dancers who weren’t doing much more than the Warblers’ step-touching (don’t worry, they redeemed themselves later) and parading around a Candyland set as Katy fell down the rabbit hole crawled through her flat’s cat-door in search of her missing Kitty (we’ll get back to Kitty, so hold that thought), would be vastly understating the case. I laughed my head off. It was delightful. And weird.

And I kept laughing, even if it was sometimes deeply awkward. “Peacock” was already a dirty song, but Perry in a remote controlled tail that could pop up and down and her and a bunch of dancers really, really, bobbing their heads over their microphones in a move that did, remarkably, read quite clearly as fellatio all the way to the back of the arena, made it a really dirty song, and I was sitting next to a nine-year-old and her really bored dad. The kid kept sneaking glances at me, wondering, I guess, either why I was there alone, or if I knew what the song was about. Oh yes, honey, I so do.

But really, when “Peacock” isn’t the most absurd moment of the night, you’re onto something. At various points the stage show also involved assaultive mimes; a slot machine named Slot (“Slot not Slut!”); girls spinning on circus contraptions in a manner that was oddly evocative of a Victoria’s Secret ad; giant slabs of cartoon meat; and the return of Kitty (after Kitty was found, then blended with Katy into Kitty Perry, then unblended with Katy and rescued) as a dancer in a full fur suit.

With all that weirdness (and with Perry floating over the crowd on a tiny, tiny cloud named Cloudy at one point), it would be easy to actually avoid talking about the particular sexuality Perry was selling, but when “I Kissed a Girl” was a sultry and angry followup to her inviting a shirtless boy on stage, critiquing his figure, distracting him so she could plant a kiss on his cheek without him going for her lips and then shoving him off-stage, I got interested fast.

Because sure, sex is just as much a product as Katy Perry herselves (that’s Perry the character in the performance narrative as well as Perry the public persona of the performer in question). But the degree to which the sexuality wasn’t unintelligent, excessively coy (oh, it was coy, all right, but with a delighted eye-roll from her) or about her being at anyone’s mercy was startling.

I won’t say it was empowering, because when it comes to the lives of women and talking about how we feel about sex, the phrase is so overplayed I’m no longer sure what it means. But I will say I found it hot, because it seemed like it was happening entirely for her own amusement and that our amusement was merely a secondary good. I think it was how I was supposed to feel about Madonna in the 80s but didn’t; and despite all the glitter and fluffy short skirts, on Saturday night all I could think was (is this blasphemy?) Annie Lennox.

Audience participation wasn’t limited to the boys, either. At another point in the show, a hoard of people were dragged up on stage. They ranged in age from young, young girls (like aged six), to a mixed-gender group of folks in their teens and 20s. It was hard to feel like my heart wasn’t bursting for them, because it doesn’t mean anything, but they’ll ride that high, and that story, for a long time. What a way to get chosen.

When they were chased off the stage at the end of the song, Perry held one girl behind and asked if she had a camera. The girl, it turned out, didn’t speak English, but with pantomime they figured it out, and Perry snapped a picture of them together (so it really happened!). Then, as it was time for her to go, her purse up-ended! So there Perry was, down on the floor with this girl in front of 15,000 people, laughing and helping her pick up her money.

It turns out, of course, that I knew more Perry songs than I realized, including “Hot and Cold,” which I’ve always really liked, and “California Gurls,” which closed the show as Perry sprayed the crowd with an incredibly phallic looking candy-cane striped water-gun as a kick-line of gingerbread men danced behind her (she’d found her true love, Baker’s Boy, you see) and beach balls bounced around the audience.

But the show’s emotional highlight, perhaps predictably, was “Firework,” which, truthfully, is one of those songs I don’t want to love, but apparently excites my brain’s pattern recognition systems in a way that means I can’t resist it. Of course, I had a nine-year-old on one side of me and some teen girls in hijab on the other and a group of gay men in their 40s in front of me and we were all singing along, as loud as we could, staring straight ahead, lost in what seemed very private, if perhaps, non-specific moments. Yes, there were tears, and no, they did not belong to the nine-year-old.

So was I a Katy Perry fan walking into this? No, I was bored and felt like doing something ridiculous. And I’m not sure I walked out one either; I don’t enjoy her ballads, and I thought the narrative that strung the show together (and allowed for her constant awesome costume changes) was too incoherent.

Certainly, “I Kissed a Girl” still annoys me, even if the tonality of it at Saturday’s performance nearly changed my feelings about it and involved some lesbian tango action. In fact, as a side note, I can’t stop being interested in what happens to Perry’s songs when they are performed as if they are something other than vapid pop; Darren Criss’s weird, melancholy live version of “Teenage Dream” certainly hasn’t stopped fascinating me, and I think there’s a certain richness that could probably be added to a lot of Perry’s songs (and, okay, really any random pop if we’re being fair) with some deftly applied emotion and tempo changes.

But, one thing I am sure of, is that I am now a huge fan of the Katy Perry experience, from the large number of fans cosplaying as her in both the “to find your true love wear the blue wig” and the “Last Friday Night” 80s teen with head-gear versions, to the intensely diverse audience that I can’t blame just on London.

All of it put me in mind, more than once, of Absolute Beginners, which is a very weird 80s movie musical about racial strife and the construction of the teenager as a marketing demographic in late 50s London. It features David Bowie as an evil ad executive tap-dancing on a giant typewriter. It’s both amazing and awful, but more than that, is just weird (and, like Perry’s show, it’s the weird that makes it work).

Anyway, Katy Perry — I’d go again in a second. And if her music even faintly amuses you, you might want to too.

Trash day is almost home and deeply parenthetical

Happy Friday. Tomorrow, I go back to London and then on Sunday I’ll be home. I can’t wait; I don’t do so well here, largely because of the abrupt shift to a lot less daylight, and I’m antsy for my own bed and the people I’m closest to.

That said, the trip has been far from all bad. I discovered Ritz-like gluten-free crackers from Schar, saw a new city, and really have made some progress with the guitar, although I haven’t had as much time for it as I’d like. The flat I’m staying in has appallingly thin walls, and you can barely run water after 10pm without eliciting complaints from neighbors, so often, I just sat around practicing chord changes without really playing; it’s a metaphor for something.

What I also haven’t done is as much writing as I’d like — here, professionally, or in a fannish capacity — although I’ve sorted a lot of things out in my head. And we will not even discuss my lack of getting to the opera or any real time spent in Zurich (Zurich, at least, I’ll do tomorrow morning when I go to buy chocolate filled with pear liquor for folks back home) or my various failed quests to get tickets for Bruno Mars here (that was hilarious and involved one of the weirdest Twitter interactions I’ve had in a long time) or my absurd attempts get back to London in time to see Katy Perry for no other good reason than I can (except, you know, that I determined that I can’t).

So, I asked on Twitter, but I’ll ask here. If you were a random girl-like object going dancing on her own (and I love to go dancing on my own, for the record) on a Saturday night in London, where would you go? I think I spent so much of my teen years fantasizing about the London club scene, I’m now completely intimidated by actually getting to do it. Also, what should I wear? And what time do people go out there? Super late right? I know nothing!

National Coming Out Day

October 11 is National Coming Out Day in the US (it’s the 12th in the UK), and since I’ve been out (and really, really out online) for a long time, today, what I’m thinking about is those times when I’ve not been.

Like two nights ago when I played the pronoun game at an awards banquet thingy when someone took “partner” to mean “husband” and it just seemed too awkward to correct them. It’s hard, I’ve always found, in small talk with strangers, even if you’re comfortable being out, to have to say, “Oh, by the way, you’re wrong.”

I’m lucky enough to run into situations like this rarely, but they always linger with me, long and strange.

And the world is changing so fast; I don’t always even know how to keep up.

When I met my guitar teacher, for example, she asked if I’m married, and I said, “Oh, no, I’m gay,” which actually didn’t make sense as an answer in New York State anymore (unless we’re actively talking about non-assimilation, which is a great convo, but was not the one at hand). Anyway, she’s surely forgotten about it, but I think about it from time to time; how it marks my age; and how my age has marked me.

So, on the odd chance you were one of the few people who didn’t know: I’m queer. Queer is my preferred word because it lets me get the genderqueer stuff and the attraction stuff and the fact that I feel like bisexual is too binary a word for me (but I’m really interested in gender, it’s not an afterthought, so apparently pansexual is wrong too? I don’t know, I’m not great at keeping up with the ever expanding QUILTBAG terminology) and the probability that I really can’t pass all into one neat little syllable.

I’ll also take gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, whatever, because they’re all varying degrees of accurate and I know queer isn’t a comfortable word for everyone. Mostly, it’s like my pronouns — if you’re not using it as an insult, with that nasty little hitch in your voice — we’re good. As ever, in case anyone still needs to know this, don’t use queer for people who don’t self-identify as queer, and please, it’s an adjective, not a noun.

Meanwhile, coming out is a privilege and should be a choice (political figures who actively support anti-gay agendas and who later turn out to be queer, being a common, but not universal, exception to this belief).

Additionally, coming out is complicated. For a lot of us, it involves not a sentence, but paragraphs, about sexual preference, romantic attraction, personal history and gender presentation and identity; and if we pass for whatever reason(s) (which is this whole mess of a thing filled with advantages and disadvantages and all sorts of complicated stuff), it can feel even harder to speak up.

Coming out can also often involve not just speaking personal truth, but often, countering assumptions or offering reassurances (No, mom, you didn’t make me gay). This can be everything from tiring to amusing to heart-breaking to just plain weird.

Of course, coming out also carries real, serious risks — homophobic violence still exists around the world (including even in my precious New York City) and in most US states you can still be fired from your job for no other reason than being or being perceived as being LGBT.

However, in spite of that (and perhaps because of it) if coming out, if being out, is a thing you feel you can do, it’s probably a good thing, not just for yourself, but other people in your community. Secrets are, I think, a dangerous currency, easily stolen.

National Coming Out Day has a lot of purposes. It says we are not silent. It says we are not invisible. But it also says you are not alone.

And that’s true regardless of whether you’re out or not.

This blog welcomes anonymous and pseudonymous comments that are non-abusive in nature. That’s true every day, but that’s especially true today. If you want to make this random little corner of the Internet a place you can be out in today, you are welcome to do so, but if you just want to keep reading along, that’s cool too. Either way, we’re honored to have you.

Trash day is incredibly surreal

Greetings from Switzerland. I’m in my fourth city in six days, not counting taking off from New York. I’m exhausted, and I have the flu. But, at the moment, I also have a swank hotel room with a bathroom larger than my first apartment. Actually, the hotel room may be larger than our current apartment, and we have a floor-through. More ridiculously, turn-down service also included them setting out some fancy embroidered cloth for my bare feet to rest upon and slippers by the bed. It is all highly absurd. Anyway, this is a work thing, so not on my tab, because, really, I shudder to think.

It’s late here; six hours ahead of home, and 7 and 9 hours ahead of a lot of my friends. I’m tooling around on the Internet, having just failed to get tickets for the Starkid tour (although that mission continues, har har).

Mostly, though, I feel as disconnected from the world as I often do while traveling. My body clock is off; keeping up with the news is a bigger challenge; and my on-line habits are seriously disrupted. Patty and I talk when we can, but it’s all hard. I will say, however, that missing each other for two weeks is far sexier than when we have to miss each other for three or four months.

Meanwhile, there are just four days left to pre-order your copy of (re)Visions: Alice via Kickstarter. Four amazing stories (okay, I haven’t read them yet, but I know all the authors, and some details about some of the pieces) in one really cool anthology premise. I would strongly recommend checking it out.

And while I still need to deliver on some promised thinky thoughts about various TV programs, this small accounting of life lately has pretty much taken it out of me (flu + jet-lag = le suck), so it will have to wait. But hey, I totally called it on The Playboy Club, huh? Gone gone gone. Sort of sad, as I did really care about that Mattachine Society plot.