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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope so.

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

Star Trek TNG: Remember that LGBT issues episode that’s actually about straight people?

Since one of the themes of this blog lately has inadvertently become “Well back in my day all we had was Willow and Tara and all that ‘magic is an allegory for orgasm’ nonsense,” I feel compelled to mention that I’ve somehow stumbled on to a marathon of Star Trek: The Next Generation (inexplicably on BBC America) and am currently watching “The Outcast.”

For anyone who may not remember this episode or never watched the show: The Enterprise encounters a species without gender; Kirk stand-in Commander Riker works closely with one of these individuals, who then reveals that she considers herself female and has to keep this a secret on her world lest she be subjected to ridicule, violence and reparative therapy. Riker and this person hook up, and then get busted. Sure enough, she’s subjected to said reparative therapy (which on her awful world actually works), but not before a few impassioned speeches that will sound almost too familiar to any queer person out there.

This episode is central in an annoyance that many people feel about Star Trek. The original series was so cutting edge regarding race, and yet the newer series (TNG, DS:9, Voyayer, and Enterprise) have never exactly included a gay character (despite one or two similarly murky moments as “The Outcast” and quotes from more than one actor on the shows regarding their own interpretations of characters they played to include queerness).

“The Outcast” was their attempt to address LGBT issues in a way that was arguably comfortable to mainstream audiences: It’s upside-down world, no actual gay people here! You can have compassion without being squicked!

I’ve often ridiculed the episode myself. As a gay person, it is annoying in that instead of representing gay people, it is an “issue moment” that made it all about straight people; after all, the structure of the episode allowed the people our society would view as queer to remain the bad guys. Really, in its own way, it’s clever, if a little nauseating.

But watching it tonight for the first time in years, I find myself struck by it as genderqueer person. From that standpoint, it feels far less like a sloppy (and cowardly and annoying) attempt to tell a gay story without a gay character and more like an almost deft look at the reality of those of us who experience gender as non-binary and/or divorced on some level from traditional external perceptions of our physical form.

Emphasis on almost, since I don’t actually remember feeling this way about the episode at the time, and I was definitely identifying as gender-variant by the time this aired.

Most amusing (to me anyway, long story, don’t ask), perhaps, in the end, is that Jonathan Frakes, the actor who plays Riker, apparently has been quoted as saying that the female character in the gender-neutral species should have seemed more male in order to make the message clearer. On one hand, I’m impressed, on the other, that sentiment just seems to muddy already murky waters further.

Then again, I’m the girl who often dresses/feels/identifies as a boy and who gets told that people don’t question my maleness, just my masculinity; since I tend to shop for dresses with masculine avatars in mind and go for pure camp in my feminine selections, I suppose this actually makes sense. Anyway, as such, I may be the worst person to evaluate this hot mess of an ancient Star Trek episode ever.

But if you haven’t seen it, and you’re interested in queerness on TV, this thing is almost required viewing.

Glee: Santana, Dave Karofsky and the naming and shaming of desire

While I continue to attempt to draft a post about what’s wrong withfor Blaine Anderson, this mini-hiatus really belongs to Santana.

To get the basics out of the way: Santana is cruel, and it’s no surprise someone snapped and outed her (Finn) admittedly poorly kept secret (her love for Brittany). But if Santana doesn’t deserve our sympathy (and I think whether she does depends on who you are and how you watch TV), she certainly deserves our notice.

Santana is, in part, the conclusion to the Dave Karofsky story we never got to see. She, like Dave, is a bully. That bullying, while not addressed to her object of desire, is often related to sexuality and gender and is designed to keep her safe, or at least throw up a good distraction. She beards for Dave at the end of Season 2, not just because they are both closeted gay kids, but because they are both closeted gay kids with the same defense mechanism.

While Dave’s been working his issues out largely in private – a conversation with Kurt here or there, a transfer to a new school, hiding out under a cap at the local gay bar – it’s been so private that it hasn’t even happened on our TV screens.

But Santana’s working her issues out in public. And even if that weren’t already clear by the way she baits Finn and moons over Brittany, she certainly doesn’t have a choice now; she’s about to be outed to the entire congressional district.

It’s a critical narrative choice about a character who looks nothing like many people’s stereotypes about gay women, because Santana is the exception to no rule when it comes to the intersection of her gender and her sexuality. Women often simply don’t get to resolve these matters in private the way Dave does.

Sure, Dave got lucky in the generosity that Kurt afforded him, but who women sleep with, how often, and whether they like it too much or not enough is pretty much always a matter for public discourse and opinion. Especially in places like William McKinley High School.

Had Dave’s journey from bully to self-accepting gay man been documented more on our television screens and transpired in the halls of William McKinley, gender-based insults, placing him as a woman, would have been central to the narrative. But that’s not the story Glee is telling about Dave.

It is, however, one that Glee is telling about Kurt.

So let’s predict what happens next, or at least discuss what we’re clearly supposed to expect to happen next: With Santana’s sexuality dragged into the congressional race by a third candidate, she has to attend to her now very public personal life. So does Sue Sylvester, who spoilers tell us will be on a quest to prove her heterosexuality, possibly at the expense of butch-appearing straight gal Sharon Bieste.

But if we’re talking about how homosexuality is used in American politics, especially in places like Lima (my partner, a third or fourth generation Buckeye, may throttle me if I cast aspersions on the entire state of Ohio), there’s no way that Kurt’s not going to get similarly dragged into the race, and it will be Burt’s job to, in an echo of Kurt’s speech for class president, try to rise above the mudslinging.

That it is women — or male characters “tainted” with femininity — that have to defend their identities in public, while people like Dave can grab a fresh start somewhere else is one of those moments of real-world nastiness that can make Glee seem like such an unkind show. For a fantasy, it sure is mean.

But predictions aside, we’re still early in season 3, and I’m still unsure where they are going with a lot of things including Blaine’s constantly shifting self; Kurt’s sudden return to more feminine attire around the events of 3.05; and Rachel and Finn’s struggles with gender role expectations around their relationship to each other and Lima.

But I am convinced that if we’re looking for clues to those sorts of questions, the answer unavoidably rests with Santana. Despite (or perhaps because) Glee‘s main narrative drivers outside of Rachel are male, the show is often overtly about people’s reactions to unusually-located femininity.

So if we want to know what happens next, who better to look at than Santana? She’s an archetype of femininity (a cheerleader) who’s broken the rules (not by being mean, but by being gay) and is about to undergo one particularly unpleasant ritual girls and women face — a big public discussion of the appropriateness of her desire.

It’s something we’ve gotten with Rachel (with Kurt and his gender non-conformance playing mirror) around ambition. Now we’re going to get it with Santana (with Kurt and his gender non-conformance playing mirror again, but he’s a magician, of course, and exists in that other world made up of shadows and the looking glass) around the public naming (and shaming) of desire.

In light of all of that, I bet Dave Karofsky’s glad he managed to get the hell out of dodge right about now. But part of me wishes he would come back in this particular arc and speak up with his masculine affect and relative safety for Santana, Kurt and the relentlessly flawed strength these two — the girl he pretended to want and the boy he actually did — have been forced to have by the way the world so often feels about girls.

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

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

You know, except that it is.

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

I guess you know that.

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

So….

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

But there are other reasons too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what happens next?

Glee: It’s different for queers

Last night, in what was essentially a successful attempt to make it very clear that gay stories are just like straight stories, Glee became the very passing narrative it’s been attempting to elucidate since the start of season 3 around Kurt and Blaine’s disparate gender and sexuality presentations. And, just as that narrative has not mentioned that for someone like Blaine passing can hurt as much as not passing does for Kurt, “The First Time” was, for this queer viewer, uncomfortably silent on all the ways that gay stories aren’t like straight ones.

This isn’t a political judgement. It’s not really any sort of judgement at all. I thought, frankly, that the episode was gorgeous (always, always let editors direct, because nearly every shot and transition will be visually astounding), and despite the tone of a lot of the advance marketing (“a very special episode” indeed), not actually an after school special.

I also thought it got a lot of things right about virginity: how you can’t ever really know what ready means and how terrifying it all is, sometimes, even moreso, when it is right, because you just want to do right by the other person. I also thought it gave us some great character moments and a bucket of interesting when it comes to your favorite preoccupation and mine — Dalton as faerieland (that’ll be a separate post).

But what the episode didn’t give us was the idea that virginity is, actually, not a cut and dried issue, especially for queer teens who, until last night on Glee don’t, for better or for worse, particularly have pop-culture narratives that tell them what their virginity is. And, despite the lovely, “The First Time” didn’t really do anything to solve that problem.

This is where I could tell you about the Great Condom Wrapper Debate on Tumblr (Is it, or is it not empty? Are there one or are there two?). Or the fact that not even the actors can apparently place the scenes cut in with the performance of “One Hand, One Heart” in time (before, after or during sex? Chris Colfer gave a big “I don’t know!” in at least one interview).

I could also mention that it strains my credulity that two boys who had, for a year, refused to touch each other below the waist, decided that their first time was going to be all about penetration, managed said act, and then got dressed for the post-coital snuggles (although the Internet is working hard to make that make sense, and will probably succeed by the end of the day. The Glee writers should thank us all).

But the fact remains that no matter how inappropriate and unfair I think it is, even for straight people, penis-in-vagina or as close as you can get to same, remains the standard for virginity loss in American culture and pop media. This is generally without discussion or challenge unless we’re talking about good girls staying “virgins” by having anal sex on some mediocre b-level cable network movie of the week. And, in making absolutely sure the Kurt/Blaine and Rachel/Finn narratives ran in tight parallel, this is where “The First Time” went, even without explicitly saying so (or, you know, actually making a lot of sense).

This erasure of a part of queer experience (“What is my rite of passage?”) in an effort to show that the two couples are equally as beautiful, in love, and facing the same challenges, is a case of a queer narrative passing as if the world is not different for us, just as Blaine experiences passing because of the style of his performance of masculinity; no matter what people take him to be, the world is still different for him than for a straight boy.

Here, the Glee narrative is able to pass because it’s 8pm on Fox, where we don’t look too closely at certain things on US TV, and where the powers that be worked hard to make sure they would submit nothing in the final cut of the episode that would force later cuts that might un-equalize the focus on the two couples.

But the fact is Rachel wearing a slip to bed to lose her penetrative virginity is just plain logistically different than boys in their trousers. And Rachel deciding that penis-in-vagina sex is what her virginity is about is also logistically different than Kurt and Blaine deciding that their virginities are also about penetration; Rachel probably came to her conclusion in under an hour, possibly in under five minutes. Did Kurt and Blaine?

This what-is-virginity? gap is also mirrored by the fact that we know Brittany and Santana have sex, but yet, this just gets blurred away in the show’s long-term narrative, not, I don’t think because they are still a b-plot or because their virginities are long gone, but because Glee doesn’t know how to say, “these two girls are fucking” without the penetrative assumption, and you really can’t talk about the nitty-gritty of lesbian sex (which is perhaps, sadly, the biggest mystery of all to the American mind) on Fox at 8pm. You can’t particularly de-essentialize the penis. People just don’t get it.

Back when we first found out “The First Time” was coming, I made a lot of dismayed noises about the prurient “Who tops?” conversation around Kurt and Blaine. In fact, I was probably kind of an asshole about it. And, while I remain chagrined by the casual and snarky nature of a lot of that conversation by people outside of the queer experience, I have to sort of eat my words here and apologize.

Because a huge piece of the analysis I want to do about this episode involves Kurt and Blaine’s gender positioning — Kurt, for the first time in this season, is back in his “fashion has no gender” and “I’ve never met a sweater dress I didn’t like” attire; while Blaine gets serenaded by Sebastian as the naive “Uptown Girl.”

This, combined with the Rachel/Finn parallels, and the degree to which teen gay sex became about Glee trying to make a queer experience pass for a straight one, makes who topped (again, if penetration happened, see: the Tumblr condom debate) a somewhat salient question if we’re trying to figure out what Glee’s agenda is around masculinity, femininity and queerness. But because we’re in this cultural moment of normalizing gay, often aggressively, I’m left with what feels like a lot of peculiar and specific road signs pointing, well, nowhere.

This is, perhaps, as it should be. Maybe, we all just need to make up our own minds, and tell the stories we need to have told. But I find myself a little frustrated for gay teens and for passing gay teens, that this narrative was so aggressively about normalization and spoke so little to queer experience, even if it was kind of a great thing to show our straight parents.

On the other hand, when Patty went to bed last night, she said the episode had made me mushy. “But I’m always like this,” I said, brushing my nose against hers. And it’s true, we always are. So I suppose this is one of those things I’m just going have to let go, because this is what fiction always is for each of us, stories that are, and aren’t, our own.

That said, don’t worry, that gender/sexuality positioning post is totally coming, even if it’s going to drive off into a vortex of passing vagueness thanks to the construction of this episode. Like whatever is next for Kurt and Blaine and Finn and Rachel, I think it’s safe to assume: Detours Ahead.

V for Vendetta: I have a pencil

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

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

Her wrists. Her wrists were beautiful.

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

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

… But within that inch we are free.

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

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

In 1988 there was the war…

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

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

Oh Ruth.

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

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

… Except one.

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

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

– Valerie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glee: The Rules for Boys

While I not-so-secretly suspect that large portions of last night’s viewing audience were only there to see the trailers for 3.05 (called “The First Time,” for anyone who might not know the basis for my suspicions) and to see if Fox would let a bunch of supposed teenagers sing about being drunk and having a menage a trois in the 8pm time slot, one of Glee‘s best recurring themes was also on display, and that was the rules for boys.

It’s most overt when Finn explains to Rory that “dudes don’t ask dudes to be their friends.” But that remark isn’t just about explaining America’s social habits to the over-eager, adorably scamming foreign-exchange student. Nope, it’s about defining the masculinity that all our male characters have to navigate. Without it as background noise — even if it’s arguably background noise we all know — the passing plotlines around Kurt, Blaine, Dave Karofsky, and the soon-to-be-introduced Sebastian don’t mean anything, not to gay audiences, but to the straight ones who don’t necessarily have a reflex to think about the world as they create it for us.

Finn’s speech to Rory, in fact, goes a long way to explain the friction between him and Blaine in the choir room, because that is not just about Finn’s insecurity and his desire to remain the glee club’s vocal leader and captain-type dude. It’s about Finn’s homophobia, which, no, is not gone, despite the fact that he loves Kurt and does truly see him as his brother.

Because Finn and Kurt’s drama didn’t entirely neutralize because Finn got over his generalized homophobia, it neutralized because Kurt became his brother and the incest taboo made Finn forget about his still existent homophobia as it applied to Kurt. He no longer felt fear of Kurt’s sexuality, because Kurt as sibling became more important to him — and more gross in a sexual context — than Kurt’s being gay.

Blaine, to a given extent, was probably shielded from Finn’s homophobia by that. We see them being friendly around the prom episode, and we have to assume that dealt with each other a lot over the summer. However, Blaine’s transfer removes the incest taboo shield when it comes to Finn’s ability to deal with homosexuality amongst his male peers. Blaine goes from just being his brother’s boyfriend to the dude Finn goes to school with, basically moving him out of the protection accorded to him by his pseudo-family status. And so, aside from the leadership/solo issue and Finn’s insecurity, what does Blaine do that upsets Finn so much? He spends all his time effectively asking everyone, INCLUDING OTHER DUDES, to be his friend.

That breaks the masculine (read: heterosexual) code Finn describes to Rory, and also amplifies the level of competitive threat Finn feels from Blaine, because part of the non-verbalized homophobia in play here, and in the passing plotline around West Side Story, is that gay dudes aren’t leaders, despite the way Blaine was first introduced to us at Dalton (but remember, Dalton was faerie land — not real, and only being reintroduced to provide us with more faeries gay boys).

So here’s a place where Blaine’s ability to pass makes him more threatening to someone like Finn, rather than less, not just as competition, but in the context of Glee’s constant reminder of the fear of “the predatory gay.”

I expect this link between dude friendship rules, predation, and homosexuality are going to get an even bigger focus when Sebastian joins the narrative next episode. How will Blaine, who is so needy, respond to a gay man who works the passing and masculinity thing differently than he does, breaking the guy friendship rules that Blaine is often oblivious to himself?

How will Kurt (who is very aware of those rules, schooled in them as he was by Finn regarding not just himself, but Sam) respond to witnessing that? And, most importantly, how will their straight male friends interpret it?

Will it be about breaking the dude code? Will there be concern for friends who might be facing relationship drama? Or will they back away from what they will perceive as threatening predatory gay culture stereotypes they are not sufficiently insulated from by Kurt’s kinship with Finn because there are just too many other players involved?

Monday seems like a good place to start

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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