Category: tv

Elisabeth Sladen, 1948 – 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where, oh where, has the trash day gone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glee: what’s with all the death fics?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Glee and the victory moment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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