Category: queer

pre-Rapture trash day

I am officially annoyed by all this Rapture business. I don’t know if it’s the advertising budget (there are ads in the subway!) or the way the Internet can’t stop talking about it, but I find the whole thing creepy. Not because I think the Rapture is going to happen tomorrow, but because of how destructive this mess has the potential to be. My family has its own, less disruptive, religious weirdnesses best not gotten into here, and let me tell you, I feel for these kids. I am also discomforted by the degree that people joking around about this Rapture mess tend to think the end of the world might be fun. I used to think that too, then 9/11 happened. I’d love for this whole non-event to pass without further mention.

In happier news, Part 3 of that series on the male voices on Glee is up. This article series remains completely awesome, and there’s a lot of other great pop-culture content on that blog. You should go frolic with it.

On a less amusing, but fairly interesting, note on the gender and pop-culture front, a major bookstore chain has asked a magazine to put a “decency bag” on issues of its magazine featuring a shirtless male model who happens to look too much like a woman for the chain’s comfort. However, the chain(s) involved now say this rumour was always false, while further reporting seems to indicate that the polybag request was reverse after the original article ran.

This seems as good a time as any to tell you about my shopping adventures in the Macy’s boys department yesterday. I bought some hideous shoes, some great shirts, and a couple of ties. I also used the dressing room there for the first time. I got weird looks, but was able to try on a pair of seersucker trousers that were totally rocking my world. Alas, the fit was terrible, and I mention it only because wow, apparently I’ll do a lot for seersucker.

I also managed to get my hair cut, which was about 80% successful. My bangs are a little too short and “straight across the back of my neck” and my girl sideburns were not executed on correctly, but the first will grow out and I am probably coordinated enough to fix the rest myself. All in all, less stressful than these things usually are.

After going to the Paley Center end of season party for American Idol and Glee Tuesday night (pop-culture fans in NY and LA should totally join the Paley Center, their programming is awesome and wide-ranging), I’m off to Boston on Wednesday morning at fuck o’clock (a time so early that, when you look at your clock, all you can say is fuck) for a conference, and then it’s on to Pittsburgh for a friend’s wedding. I’ll be meeting up with Patty (who is in Ohio visiting with her family) there, and then we’ll be heading back to New York the next day. Originally I was totally going to wear a dress to the wedding, but now I’ve been having quite a bit of male sartorial inspiration of late, so now I’m all torn, and probably will remain so in a way that means having to bring too much luggage with me for these various adventures.

need, want, and adjectives

Like pretty much everyone else who has ever existed, I have a complicated relationship with my parents. And while my circumstances are arguably slightly more complicated than other people’s (we’re all artists, and any cliches you can think of about drama and eccentricity are probably at least vaguely relevant), ultimately, at least these days, it’s pretty unremarkable.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t aspects of that mundanity that I want, and in fact need, to talk about. Not as some wacky Internet catharsis thing, although that’s always a bonus, but because I’m still spending a lot of time parsing how to be my parents’ gay kid, and I suspect there are things about this experience that, while they often make no sense to me, might actually be instructive to someone else.

Now, in a lot of ways, my parents are awesome. They adore Patty; they’ve never said anything that indicates they take this relationship less seriously than they might if it were with a guy; and we’ve always been of pretty similar political minds.

But sometimes they’re just weird, not about my being queer, but about my being part of the queer community. My dad always gets a little bit excited if he misunderstands some story I’m telling about an online disagreement and thinks I’ve angered the gay community instead of someone I’m arguing with about the gay community.

Meanwhile, my mom just sort of freezes if I say I’m a lesbian or talk about the performative hilarity of the hyper-feminine designs I like to wear from Trashy Diva, assuring me, frantically that I look good in dresses. I know I look good in dresses. Sometimes, I even enjoy wearing them, especially the ones that no one, regardless of gender or orientation, could possibly wear without winking. I wink a lot.

All of this feels complicated not because of the moments where they don’t get it, but because of all the moments where they do, like when my mom says that this or that boy on TV reminds her of me or notes that a story line in something or other makes her so glad I’m political and makes her think that she should be too.

But she isn’t, and my parents, while totally rock the boat people in that loud, artist, eccentric way (you should see my mom’s hats, and my dad’s endless self-publishing adventures), are also totally committed to the idea that my being in a same-sex relationship makes me just like anyone else. And, well, it kind of doesn’t. It gives me different adjectives for one, adjectives that I wish they wouldn’t be so uncomfortable about my using.

But these things… it’s not that they aren’t worth getting into fights over, it’s that they’re impossible to even discuss. They are the invisible weights of being gay in a society where that still isn’t entirely (or often remotely) okay, where people have to work to prove that they don’t care, and where everyone makes a ton of missteps because we’re all sick of the topic (in general) and we’re all people who are narratively focused and desperate to be seen (in specific).

My adjectives — gay, queer — are some of the most comforting words in the world to me. Before I had them I just thought I was some other species who didn’t know how to talk to people or wear clothes well or move right, and it was hard, just being other, like a rat in a foreign nest that smelled wrong. These words sustained me when I was less able to be a visible queer person, not because I was closeted, but because it was just hard to keep explaining it when I was involved with someone of the opposite sex. I was still so awkward in those years, smelled wrong and moved funny, and to be at parties and think queer, queer, queer made it all right and reminded me that I was supposed to be different — I wasn’t failing to act right; other people were failing to look close. Being queer made me — makes me — stand taller.

Life is never what we expect, and I’m sure I’ve thrown my parents for a ton of loops over the years and still do with big words and political obsessions and my reflexive need to perform and reference stuff they don’t even know about. I love that they see me as their unique, complicated, weird, driven kid above anything else, but sometimes I really wish they would just see me as one of those people, over there, referred to by the adjectives that make them uncomfortable.

Because my community isn’t just part of who I am, it saved me when all their love couldn’t. And if my parents are going to be proud of me, I’d of really like them to be proud of it, and my place in it, too.

I was going to say need, you know?

But need and want are two really different things, especially, I think, when you’ve got adjectives the way I’ve got adjectives. Certainly, it doesn’t seem so strange to me now when my parents tell me about how as a child I would never ask for anything, but just stare at it with great longing.

Glee: Sex, gender, desire, and what was that about a Sadie Hawkins dance?

I went into this past week’s episode of Glee, “Prom Queen,” fairly sure that I was going to wind up writing a piece about Blaine singing “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You” because it seemed likely to be such a mess of gender and sexuality weirdness.

But then I got to thinking about the completely random way in which Glee often uses songs (“Candles” as a “we just hooked up and really dig each other” tune? Really?) and figured that while the analysis would be interesting (especially in light of the “predatory gay” thing that the show keeps managing to come back to, much to most people’s dismay), it wouldn’t, ultimately, actually be relevant.

Besides, we got that Sadie Hawkins dance Blaine backstory moment dropped on us instead. For context, especially for those outside of the US, a Sadie Hawkins dance is an event where it is customary for women to invite men to the dance as opposed to men inviting women, as is still the norm for stuff like prom.

While a lot of the people I talk to online either didn’t register the weirdness of the Sadie Hawkins dance reference, or if they did, didn’t know what to do with it, I thought it made a few things that haven’t necessarily made sense slide into place in a pretty cool way.

There are, as far as I can tell, two ways to read the Sadie Hawkins dance information. The first is that because this involved non-traditional asking out behavior, that made Blaine feel comfortable with asking another boy to the event. But that interpretation, while the simpler of the two options, actually requires a greater leap of logic to make work as opposed to the more complex, but I suspect more accurate, interpretation: Blaine’s habit is to imagine himself as the one to get asked out, the one to be courted.

If you watch Glee and you like to get thinky about Glee, you’ve probably noticed that most of the discussions about queerness on Glee center on Kurt. Certainly, Kurt’s gender presentation takes up a lot of space both on the show and in fan discussion. And as interesting as that discussion is (it’s certainly one I’ve enjoyed participating in), focusing that discussion only on Kurt has some pretty significant flaws.

Because gender isn’t just this thing you can see; and it’s also a thing that doesn’t just get defined from the outside in. In fact, despite what people tend to think, gender gets defined internally, regardless of how it gets expressed. So we can all discuss how Kurt’s effeminate or has traits associated with femininity (this piece on the significance of his being a countertenor is about my favorite thing on the Internet this week) all day long, but none of that necessarily has any bearing on either his gender identity or how he defines himself within heteronormative constructs (which, let’s face it, totally impact us queer folks whether we want them to or not).

Similarly, just because Blaine doesn’t read as gay in the same way Kurt does and has an affect we can generally consider to be more masculine, doesn’t mean we should be assuming things about his gender identity and how that identity interacts with desire either. Among other things, it’s sloppy.

It’s also obnoxious and not entirely relevant. It’s a bit like when people ask Patty and I who the boy is. Is it me because I own a bunch of men’s suits and will rant, often at great length, about men who don’t understand what the proper length for their trousers should be? Is it Patty because she handles things like tools and bugs? Or wait, maybe it’s because she’s taller? Then again, I’m always taking her cool places… on the other hand….

See, that gets ridiculous fast. Very, very fast.

So here’s my theory, without getting into gender identity, but definitely with getting into the world of the heteronormative assumptions that even us queer people often labor under just out of habit (and, let’s face it, sometimes they’re a little bit fun): Blaine’s always seen himself as the person who wants to get asked out, who wants to be swept off his feet, who wants to be seduced, which is why a Sadie Hawkins dance seemed the time, to him, to be doing the asking.

And it may also be why it took him so long to get a clue and realize he was into Kurt, because the dynamic there, or, at least what he assumed the dynamic to be, probably looked pretty different than a lot of his fantasies. Of course, then he noticed that Kurt was actually sort of courting him just by being patient with his general flailing about (memo to Blaine: less hair gel, more clue).

Except, you know, maybe not. Because Kurt did ask him to prom. And is definitely taller. So you’d think watching these boys get past some of their assumptions about themselves, we might get over some of our own about each other.

That, of course, is harder than it seems. Just writing this post without reinforcing the things I’m trying to detach from is a challenge I’m not sure I’ve succeeded at. And it’s certainly something that came home to me when I received a tweet from @siscolors late last week.

If you tweet me something about sexuality and gender, I’m probably going to follow your link. And the idea, as presented on Twitter, seemed cool — let’s have an identification system that’s less binary and addresses sexual orientation, gender identity and desire all in one package. Room for me! Always exciting, and then I visited the cheesy website (which, you know, I was willing to overlook) and ran smack into their identity quiz.

Skip down to the end (not that there isn’t fail before that, but there are only so many hours in my day), where it asks about “posturing,” by which they mean “the position you primarily take during intimacy.” Your choices? Male, Female, and Other. I suppose I should be grateful there’s an Other category, but I was too busy wearing my horrified face to get there. In fact, I’m still wearing my horrified face with such intensity that I’m having trouble articulating why. But linking gender and whatever it is they’re getting at there — desire for penetration? assertiveness? whether you like to be on top? — serves no one well. At all. And that’s the kindest thing I can say.

Sexuality and gender and desire are complicated. Our expectations around them are relational and pretty deeply ingrained. And that leads us to make all sorts of wacky assumptions: about our selves, our friends, people on the street, and characters on TV. And often those assumptions involve deciding that loudest person in the room is the most “deviant” and anyone we don’t notice in the same way just has to be like everyone else.

Except that’s really not always true. In a lot of ways the normativity we’re all taught to be so fearful of not having doesn’t even exist.

That’s what I got out of the Sadie Hawkins dance moment, and if that’s the message, it certainly circles back nicely to what we’re seeing in the “Raise Your Glass” performance.

would I like romantic comedies more if they weren’t about straight people?

Burning up the corner of the Glee fandom that I play in is this fanvid that edits the Kurt/Blaine storyline together like a movie trailer (note: I have to keep changing this link as it keeps disappearing and reappearing in various places — so hopefully you’ll click on this and it will be useful). It’s very well done (but, understand I’m addicted to movie trailers in general and would watch them all day, so I may care more than the average bear); it’s also, I suspect accidentally, full of commentary.

Since Glee has gone from having one queer kid on it (Kurt) to five (Kurt, Blaine, Karofsky, Santana, Brittany), there’s apparently been (I’m new here, so I’m just reconstructing the Internet drama as I see it) a certain degree of “I love Kurt, but man, why is every plot-line a gay plot-line lately?” To which most of the queer fans are like “huh?”

As queer folks, we don’t get a lot of stories about us, not in mainstream media, and when we do, they are usually along the lines of “issue stories” or “when _______ met _______.” The queer narratives on Glee certainly don’t stray far from this, although it’s less obvious on Glee because their set in high school and most of the narratives for all the characters tend to hit those sorts of notes.

Anyway, this fan-made trailer didn’t actually hit me over the head with how adorable I think Kurt and Blaine are. It hit me over the head with all the stories that don’t exist about people like me and how narrowly formulaic the ones that do exist tend to be. It also made me wonder if my intense disinterest in most romantic comedies (Love Actually being one of a few exceptions for me) is genre-based or about their usually intense heterosexuality? Would I like the genre better if it were about people like me? No idea, really (and I suspect, truthfully, that I just don’t have the receptor sites for the genre), but it’s an interesting question.

Mostly though, I want to show this thing to all the Glee fans who complain that the show is all gay all the time now. This vid is one way a queer-centric story could look. Glee ain’t it. And if that has to be okay for the queer fans (and it always does), then it would be nice if that were okay for the straight fans too.

How can April be almost over? trash day

It’s Friday, but you can barely tell around my house. Patty and I are both deep in about 27 different kind of work in that too much to do and not enough time sort of way. Does this mean I skipped watching the royal wedding as it happened for the greatest hits version at a respectable hour? You bet.

That said, I am aiming to finish all my revisions on the Dogboy & Justine script today and get that over to Erica who will then perform magic I don’t even actually know how to describe (because it’s not just that she writes the songs, it’s that she goes STRUCTURE! and has an ear for playfulness in language that I don’t and makes it all better).

Meanwhile, at the end of next week I’m in Boston for work; Patty’s coming along and we’re going to stay the weekend. Still sorting out hotel nonsense, as Boston’s kind of evil that way. On the other hand, yesterday, I scored a JetBlue fare not for this trip, but a later Boston trip for $9. Yes, you read that right. $9. Which came to a bit more than twice that with taxes. I’m as boggled as you are. Part of me will miss my Amtrak experience for that trip, but I’ve come to discover that while I don’t really like commercial air travel, I do really like my airport time; it makes me feel like the world is happening.

Yesterday, I wound up having to call some company to update my alumni information for some directory they are putting out that costs $100 and that I’m not going to buy. In the course of the discussion, the man on the phone mentioned he has one daughter in J-school in NYC and one in Syracuse and I wound up giving him some advice for them. It was a nice conversation, but a strange one. It reminded me how complex life is: I worried he’d become icy when I mentioned my partner, because he said he was from Texas; but that was fine. Yet, in the end, I was mostly aware of how afraid I am of my own gullibleness as I found myself wondering if the daughters even existed or if he made them up to build rapport so I would buy the damn directory.

From around the Internet, I’m going to refrain from linking you to video of Fox news explaining why Glee is gay propaganda, which means I also have to refrain from ranting about that sort of nonsense. It’s always a catch-22. Do I passive-aggressively say yeah, being gay is AWESOME, people threaten to kill you for who you’re attracted to and deny you your civil rights? Do I reassure people we aren’t recruiting? Or do I actually do the whole being gay is actually awesome, you should try it thing and think about how ludicrous it all sounds? This is me, too tired to be outraged or clever. Hey, has anyone blamed the recent horrific tornado action on homosexuality yet? If not, someone should get on that so we can get it over with.

Meanwhile, to follow up on something I mentioned a while ago, Lara Logan, the CBS reporter who was sexually assaulted in Egypt, is speaking out about her experiences and what female journalists face around the world. She is such a hero for going public with this, and it’s the existence of people like her that make me feel so strongly that we should use the word hero sparingly. It’s for the big stuff like this.

Finally, I’ve not seen the new Doctor Who yet. I’m aiming for the end of the weekend.

a place where I was real

If you know me, you’re probably heard me do the whole hand wave-y, Oh, I’ve always been out thing about my sexuality. But that’s not true; I just didn’t always know what it was that I was hiding; after all, I went to an all-girls school through 9th grade and I was attracted to men. Therefore, it was pretty easy to grow up at least pretending to be sure that I was a girl, and that, like all good girls, liked boys.

I was way more preoccupied by how weird I felt in a generalized way — my face was too long; my uniforms never fit right; and I hated everything from the way my voice sounded and to the shape of my eyes that made me, I thought, look perpetually sad (okay, truth be told, I still think that). I was other, and being queer sort of never really entered into it. In fact, I remember calling myself queer when I was 12, before it was a reclaimed word, before I knew it was a slur against gay people; I thought it just meant peculiar, and I was.

So while I was never really in, I also certainly wasn’t out until college, which sort of happened with a bang I didn’t have all the control over I would have liked (opinion piece in the university paper about how my being bisexual didn’t make my roommate a lesbian? did that seriously happen? can I get a do-over?), but it is what it is and happened over 20 years ago now.

My first experience of being a real-live gay person in a world where everyone knew I was a real-live gay person, was working at Lambda Rising, a gay bookstore in Washington DC. I worked in the stock room, with a dude we all called Millie. We took the phone orders that came in, found the books people wanted, shrink wrapped them and packaged them up in plain brown boxes.

We loved that stupid shrink wrap gun, the way we made the warning beep on the Mac SE that ran the stock room into a clip of Millie squealing about something, and the ice cream shop next door than the manager would sometimes buy us cones at. It was my first normal job in that it was an appropriate fit for my age and skills. It was the type of job people in TV shows had. It was what you do, when you’re in college.

But it was also the type of job that made Millie and I spend a lot of time talking about what it meant to be gay. We sort of had to, after every order, when callers would ask if we had foot-fetish books (I can still hear Millie drawl, are they gay foot fetish books? then yes!) or proclaim they were doing their once-yearly order from a town of 351 in Alaska or check and recheck that the boxes wouldn’t be labeled with anything that might let their neighbors (or their wives or their parents) know that they were gay.

“Sometimes, this job feels like a public service,” Millie would say.

“Don’t you feel guilty sometimes?” I’d ask.

“What do you mean?”

“The way people call like they’re perverts or it’s a dirty secret or they can’t believe I’m actually saying lambda when I answer the phone.”

“We do stock a lot of porn,” Millie would reply.

“Look, I just want you to know, all girls that like girls are not interested in Wonder of the Labia coloring books.”

I was 18 and I worked a gay bookshop in a gay neighborhood across from an independent cinema that often played gay movies. And even if I was never, ever going to get a TV sitcom style romance because I didn’t work as a cashier, I loved it. It was movie magic and hope over and over and over again.

Today, LGBT bookshops are largely disappearing, driven out of the market my a changing culture and by changing technology. Twenty years ago, they didn’t save my life, but they taught me I could have a good, happy, small, non-combative life and be queer, at a point when my life was big and public and very combative in ways that no one really gave me a chance to choose or not. In a life of big blessings, Lambda Rising was for me a small one, but a critical one.

One day, a lot of the things that have defined my queer experience just won’t really exist anymore. I mean, no one really keeps little maps in their dorm rooms anymore of what states they’d broken sodomy laws in, not since Lawrence v. Texas, but that happened in 2003, and we did, back in 1993. And ACT UP seems like more a part of history than the thing, along with Queer Nation, that taught me about what it meant to be gay as a teenager.

One day, this stupid, awful equal marriage rights fight will be over; one day kids won’t risk getting all the clubs in their high schools closed down just because they want to start a Gay-Straight Alliance; one day people won’t even understand why we had to have these conversations. That world is a long way away, but I also know it’s closer than I think most days, because where we are now in this struggle right now? More than I ever could have hoped for when I was 18 and working in a bookstore warehouse and reassuring people about plain brown paper packaging.

But sometimes, I feel like we’re losing things out of order. Or get really scared that my culture that makes me me is disappearing. Assimilation hurts. Sometimes it’s a prize, and, sometimes, it’s a bargaining chip; how much of your history would you be willing to bleed out just to get treated like you’re normal? It’s a shitty question, and one no one should have to answer.

Gay books stores mattered. They were a place where I was real. And I don’t necessarily feel like I’m real enough in this world as it is now for them to be gone already.

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].

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.