pre-Rapture trash day

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

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

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

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

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

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

need, want, and adjectives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was going to say need, you know?

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

fashion forward trash day

My life, it is editing. Editing, though, is good. It makes things better. It also means that things are closer to being out of my hands and into yours.

In less workaholic news, Patty has been inadvertently teaching me about nail polish. Now here’s the thing, I’m really good at giving other people manicures (I don’t even know), but this is not a realm of fashion in which I actually personally engage. But, now that she’s finally been victorious in a hunt for a particular shade of yellow nail polish that’s McQueen-inspired, I can tell you that I now know that nail polish comes in collections. I thought this data was freakish, but when I tweeted about it last night, it quickly became apparent that I am entirely the last to know.

On a slightly more critical fashion front, it’s reunion night at my private school. What am I going to wear? All I can promise you is dorky pictures of our grand spiral staircase later. Certain fannish friends know why.

Meanwhile, for someone who travels so much, it’s a little scary how itchy I am to travel. Of course, by this time last year, I’d already been to London once. My next plane trip? Boston. And then Pittsburgh. I’m feeling an urge for a little more grandness, but so it goes. I hate commercial air travel, but I love airport time, because it’s the great equalizer. Also, even with my lap top and wifi, whatever you want from me, I cannot provide because airport. I love that.

This weekend one of my oldest friends and her new husband comes to town. Which means, among other things, dinner at my beloved Emporio (gluten-free pasta options that tastes like my grandmother’s cooking).

Patty’s mom also arrives tomorrow, and then she’s headed back to Ohio for a visit. We’ll be reuniting in Pittsburgh for a friend’s wedding and then the trip back to New York.

Finally, this picture? is terrifying. Birds are so creepy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

i learned to speak in dance

Dance was pretty much not just the first thing I was really good at, but really the first thing I was good at, at all. But while my peers went to ballet school and dreamed of pointe shoes and being in The Nutcracker, I wound up at The Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance as soon as I was old enough for them to let me in.

I don’t recall whose idea this was — mine or my parents’ — but looking back on it, it seems about, among other things, how much I wasn’t made for the world of ballet. I was not P&G, I did not have long hair, I was terribly fragile but not at all delicate.

Martha Graham’s dance probably taught me more about being a woman than anything else I have ever done. It taught me more than Hewitt, where I mostly felt inadequate at performing my gender; and more than my parents, who were shocked and confused when I took it upon myself to shave my legs because that’s what all the other girls were doing.

But the things Graham dance taught me were weird. Weird for an eleven-year-old anyway. Because they were about sex and death and ritual and a life spent on the ground. Sometimes, when I think about how I’m too serious, or don’t get teasing, or do all this scholarship about sex and gender and mourning and death, or felt so proud of the way I endured the relationship disasters of my 20s, I think, this is all Graham’s fault for teaching me that a girl’s fate is grief and vengefulness.

I don’t mind, really, but it’s a funny legacy to carry around in my body. It’s something I’ve lived with longer than almost anything else about me, after all.

Graham is the subject of today’s Google Doodle. She would have been 117 today. She died when I was 18, at college and unable to pursue dance because of health problems and needing to have the financial support of my family to attend school. I remember coming home to go to the celebration of her life and her work at City Center. I remember thinking I should have been up there. I remember thinking I would never be able to iron my hair straight enough to be a “little Martha,” and so maybe nothing was so different from ballet in the end after all.

But I speak the way I speak as much because of her as because of all the speech therapy I had growing up. And it’s such a funny, funny thing to see the way I move, and the way I hurt, dancing, spritely, in my web browser.

Other lives. We are always in some way leaving them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

in a lot of ways, I would have preferred the aliens

Last night, Erica and I were sitting in my apartment’s office working on the show when it became clear from the living room that something important was happening. So we rejoined the rest of our households and flipped from HBO (because we were going to watch Game of Thrones again) to CNN and waited to find out what very important thing was happening, all of us with a certain degree of trepidation.

“Well, it can’t be something anyone else knows, or the news would have it,” we reasoned, which quickly ruled out any sort of explosion or nuclear war. We figured the Libya and Syria situations had been too ongoing to merit this type of news moment and we were sort of at a loss. Like most of the Internet, we reached the first contact or Bin Laden’s dead conclusion pretty fast.

And then we all know what happened.

Today, I both feel like I’m supposed to write about it, and that I don’t need to write about it. Isn’t everyone writing about it? But I also live in New York City, lived here in 2001, and when I didn’t live here, lived in DC just blocks from where all that partying was going on in front of the White House last night. So whether I like it or not, and whether you like it or not, I have stuff to say I should probably say.

When 9/11 happened, I termed the time after, when parts of my city were closed and you could still smell the burning, During. Eventually, During would be over, and it would be After. But in the time since then, I’ve discovered something horrible: After never came. During‘s just gone on and on with all sorts of fear and bigotry and security theater and wars that were supposed to be about one thing and turned out to be about something else.

I’ve spent ten years saying I want my country back. Everything wasn’t perfect before 9/11, of course. And terrorism isn’t just about bin Laden; most terrorism as it transpires in the US, is, of course, actually domestic in origin and related in no way to the fears that particular Tuesday in September instilled in us (except when it’s an ugly and violent response to said fears).

I’ve also spent ten years wanting my city back. New York isn’t just where I live or where I’m from. It’s where I was born. It’s my home. It’s in every iteration of my biography; it may as well be part of my name. It’s changed a lot, in the decades I’ve spent here. And lots of those changes have had nothing to do with 9/11, but some of them have. We went, I felt, that day from being the world’s myth — a slightly wicked city every one dreams of calling home — to being America’s TV-movie of the week setting — theme park and object lesson, safe in a box, and not even real, not even in legend. It’s something that sucks, and that I’ve hated.

Last night lots of people cheered and lots of people felt relief. And I just felt… not that much. It was anti-climatic. I’m glad we finally found the guy and did something that at least resembled what needed doing. I’m certainly glad we have one less bogeyman out there to justify all the ways in which things over the last ten years have gone wrong. And I wish that this means that soon it will finally be After, and we’ll bring our troops home, and I’ll be able to do silly stuff listen to Ani diFranco’s “Arrivals Gate” without having to explain to people younger than me what the world was once like (if you’re impatient, skip ahead to the 30 second mark).

But I’m not counting on it. I don’t think many people are. And that’s really been the price of all of this, hasn’t it? On top of all the lives — and if you only watch US media the numbers are way higher than you realize — there’s this whole no going back thing. Time never works that way, I guess, but last night I realized I’ve spent ten years waiting for After, when all I ever really wanted was Before.

If last night was the end of a war, I have no discomfort with all that celebration we saw on TV. But I don’t think it was. And if the news of bin Laden’s death is a cause for celebration, it is one because it means that fewer people will die because of him and his legacy. That’s not just about the US, that’s about the world.

Look, I know in New York City we often pretend we don’t live anywhere but here. We don’t live in America; we don’t live in the world; we live in that conglomeration of quasi-legendary cities, a country made up of places like London and Rio and Rome.

So when I say that much of what I saw on TV last night made me uncomfortable, it’s just that; I’m not policing your feelings; I’m telling you mine. I live in a place where yeah, some really terrible things happened, a place that doesn’t even always seem real, by choice, even to those of us who live here. And it’s complicated and it’s hard and someone, no matter how criminal, being dead isn’t something I know how to be happy about, not because of some moral high ground (believe me, I don’t have a lot of that), but because it’s still During, and I just want to be done.

How can April be almost over? trash day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a place where I was real

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zoom, zoom, zoom trash day

Patty and I are getting read to head upstate for a couple of days to do absolutely nothing for our anniversary, other than occasionally wander across the street from our B&B for French food. Explaining this Do Nothing plan to my mother was slightly awkward. I could just see the look on her face as whatever I said translated to we are going to have sex all weekend, which, you know, isn’t untrue. Parents are definitely past that stage where they think my being queer is awesome because it doesn’t involve sex they define as sex. Anyway!

The less sordid truth is that I’d also like to get to Boscobel this weekend. Despite all the time I’ve spent in the Hudson Valley, I’ve never managed to make this happen, so if we’re feeling it on Sunday before we head back to the city for Easter dinner or if there’s decent weather on Saturday, I think that is the plan.

It should be noted, meanwhile, that planning a birthday party in NYC is challenging. This is currently Patty’s task of woe for her recently transpired birthday. Everything is difficult because of weather, people’s over-committed schedules, and just the general aggravation that so many aspects of New York living can be. Have I mentioned that we deeply, truly, sincerely love it here, though?

Meanwhile, I’ll be back in Boston twice in May. I may, may even be able to see people one of these times around. I also desperately need to call some hotels about a wedding we’re going to in Pittsburgh. Oh, this life of extreme glamour. Clearly, I need some, since I’m starting to get really excited about the West Coast trip for Labor Day already, but I suspect part of that is my periodic desire to have a better relationship with California than I do. That said, I love San Francisco, and its Chinatown and Seal Rock are two really fertile creative places for me. It’s been years, Patty’s never been, and it’s going to be a great good thing.

All of this aside, I have to confess I’ve been in a sort of funk lately. I do this sometimes. I say it’s pothos, and it’s a little bit that, but really it’s just me being a moody bastard. I struggle, even at 38, with accepting that I need to be the best me I can be, even if some things about me don’t seem as complimentary to my goals as things about other people. The storm in my head broke the other day though, so I’m hoping I can pull it together on getting a ton of stuff done soon. Actually — dance break, I’m going to go send some emails!

Okay, AWESOME. How was that for you? That was great for me.

Finally, I want to link here something I mentioned in passing on my LJ the other day: The Sad, Beautiful Fact that We’re All Going to Miss Almost Everything. I like this piece both because it’s about the beauty of sadness, but also because it speaks to a tendency that I not only have to fight in myself (often, admittedly, unsuccessfully), but that I run headlong into in other people constantly: the need to devalue, sometimes aggressively, things that don’t speak to us or that we don’t have time for; this is not, for the record, a complaint about actual critical discussion, because, man, I love me some stuff that is deeply flawed. Rather, this is an objection to “I don’t enjoy this and therefore no one else should either,” which, I’ll grant you, is sometimes what we hear even when it is not meant. Anyway, check the piece out; it’s cleverer than me on this front.

Now I have to throw some stuff in a satchel and get the hell out of here.