Category Archives: GLBT

November Links Roundup: Counting Down the Days

Well, it’s November. Yay. Tonight we turn the clocks back an hour, and Tuesday we find out whether America will turn the clock back to 1850.

In case you’re Jerry the Vampire and only just woke up from a 50-year nap, don’t burst a blood vessel trying to read all 900 pages of Project 2025 before Election Day. Instead, consult the Stop Project 2025 Comic, an online anthology of graphic narratives that summarize the Trump team’s plans to destroy fair elections, internet freedom, reproductive and gender rights, the environment, and pretty much every other good thing in America.

Read Susan Perabo’s devastating flash fiction “The Life of the Mother” at Fractured Lit, inspired by the many real-life news stories about women dying from pregnancy complications after Dobbs. For some resistance vibes, read G.H. Plaag’s poem “Televised” in the journal ANMLY:

…we are posting this
to TikTok so the Chinese government knows
that we are hot and young and slutty
in our artificial cages, in our handcuffs,
in our straps. we need the spies
to learn about femdom and
the Wednesday Dance. we know,
we know—this could threaten everything
that makes this country great, our security
could be at risk, but we don’t care. we don’t believe
in borders or in anything. you have taken that
from us, belief. and you only have
yourselves to blame.
…

Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn’s feature essay “Ghosts of the Groves”, from the Summer 2024 “Florida” issue of Jewish Currents, takes a deep dive into the political history of orange cultivation, connecting the crop’s rise and climate-change-induced decline in the Sunshine State to Israel’s appropriation of Palestinian orange groves. With agriculture worldwide under threat from global warming and new insect-borne diseases, Florida looks to Israeli technology as a savior. Meanwhile, Palestinians saw their former cash crop being recast as a symbol of Israeli “improvement” of their land.

This budding partnership is a natural extension of the parallel histories of Israeli and Florida citrus. In both places, generations of settler colonists have valued oranges not only as a source of wealth, but also as a treasured part of their mythology. Early Zionist settlers in Palestine saw their agricultural output in morally and socially redemptive terms; their famous promise to “make the desert bloom” positioned cultivation as a route toward seizing the land, and oranges, in particular, became a narrative device to scaffold claims of rightful occupancy. In Florida, where oranges were likely introduced by Spanish colonizers in the 16th century, they came to represent the idea that the terrain was a potential paradise that only Europeans could bring to fruition.

As far-right political projects have consolidated power in both Israel and Florida—with Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration openly working to push leftists, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and other minority groups out of Florida’s social body, and Israel currently perpetrating a genocide in Gaza, seeking to complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that it embarked on more than a century ago—shared politics have become the basis for an agricultural alliance.

And what are our preeminent universities doing in this time of crisis? Telling teachers and students to STFU about anything controversial. “Faculty Members Suspended From Harvard’s Main Library After ‘Study-In’ Protest,” The Crimson reported on Oct. 25.

The faculty study-in protested the library’s decision to similarly suspend student protesters who conducted a pro-Palestine study-in last month. The University’s decision to suspend students from the library had already come under fire from free speech groups, including the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard.

During the faculty study-in, professors silently read materials on free speech and dissent while placing signs related to free speech and University policy on the tables in front of them. As they did so, Securitas guards noted down their names and ID numbers…

…Though the University has previously disciplined faculty members for academic misconduct or violating policies on sexual harassment, the decision to suspend professors from a library for protesting appears to be unprecedented. The Crimson could not identify any past cases where Harvard barred a group of faculty members from entering a specific campus space as a result of their activism.

Along the same lines, “Yale College admin direct Women’s Center to institute policy of ‘broad neutrality’,” The Yale Daily News reported Oct. 15. Staffers are understandably concerned that this vague, sweeping directive would interfere with their choice of invited speakers and their advocacy for women’s issues like reproductive rights.

The News spoke to three Women’s Center board members about the “broad neutrality” directive. The students were granted anonymity for fear of losing their jobs as board members are employed by Yale College.

The three board members all emphasized that a policy of “broad neutrality” would be a drastic change from the Women’s Center’s feminist mission since its founding.

“The Yale Women’s Center was founded in 1970 when a group of the first women undergraduates staged a sit-in, occupying a space of their own. At the time, their feminist demands were divisive. What is divisive changes over time, and through the decades, the Women’s Center has continued to be a feminist space on campus, working towards collective liberation,” one board member wrote to the News. “Neutrality would contradict our purpose and compromise our daily functions.”

What could possibly have prompted this policy? Three guesses:

Last year, an annual event planned by the Women’s Center titled “Pink-washing and feminism(s) in Gaza” was indefinitely postponed by the board amid threats of disciplinary action from administrators, following their failure to respond to a Jewish student leader seeking to “meet with a representative from the Women’s Center to talk about how Jewish women can feel included and represented in our Yale community,” per the student’s email.

Doubling down, Yale’s Committee on Institutional Voice has extended the gag order to deans, top administrators, and faculty who head up departments or programs. “Yale leaders advised to refrain from statements on issues of public significance,” the Yale Daily News reported Oct. 30. While there’s something to be said for caution and humility in speaking for an ideologically diverse intellectual community, this move feels to me like preemptive compliance with authoritarianism. Yale leaders may fear retaliation from a Trump administration, similar to Jeff Bezos blocking the Washington Post from endorsing Harris. It’s still cowardly. If America’s most powerful individuals and institutions knuckle under to the Mob, who’s going to help the rest of us stand firm?

How about Trans Godzilla? Jude Doyle at Xtra Magazine playfully explores the monster’s many gender possibilities. A gem in this article is the link to Cressa Maeve Ainé’s “Coming Out,” a stop-motion short in which a Godzilla couple affirm their child’s transition.

For more trans joy, read the story “Circles, Triangles, Squares” by Charlie Sorrenson at Electric Lit. My favorite part is towards the end, where the narrator realizes that mutual oversharing isn’t the same as a trusting friendship.

Britney Spears GIF - Britney Spears ...

October Links Roundup: Hermit Crabs and Other Art Forms

Pagan god or Eastern States Exposition parade float? You decide!

Welcome to spooky season, readers. This month there will be two links posts, this catch-all literary and cultural one, and a forthcoming one to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the war in Gaza.

To start the Halloween pumpkin rolling, let’s appreciate Taisiya Kogan’s flash fiction “Mrs. Morrison Proofreads Her Obituary” in Electric Literature. This is known as a “hermit crab” piece because, like the crustacean who lives in other species’ discarded shells, the author borrows a non-literary writing template to contain emotions and occurrences that don’t normally belong in that template. The disjunction between form and content, used brilliantly here, is a way to restore honesty to language instead of allowing received forms to numb our perceptions.

Also from Electric Lit, this horror-satire by Mary Heitkamp takes the metaphor “House Hunting” completely literally. While competing offers aren’t usually settled with crossbows in real life, the gore in this story forces us to feel the life-and-death desperation of our scarcity-based economy, which  makes us crazy no matter how many resources we have at the moment.

My 12-year-old son wants to be John Wick for Halloween, but you know what’s really scary? School bureaucracy! FYI, I love his new school and I have nothing but awe for the number of state-required IEP forms they must complete every year. But McSweeney’s understands the dread we parents feel when we receive an email like “A Note from Your Child’s School About Its Apps and Websites”:

Sports Apps
Register for athletics on SportsStarter but pay for the activity on PayBall. Message team parents/guardians on CrowdChat and coaches on CoachBabble. Find your team’s regular season schedule on YouthSked and its playoff schedule on TourneyTime. Buy tickets to athletic events on GameTix, but only after you’ve topped off your recently hacked School Wallet.

I recognized my own complicated gender feelings in essayist Oliver Radclyffe’s “The Sum of My Parts” at The Gay & Lesbian Review. A midlife transitioner, like me, he talks about the difficulty of forming a “cohesive narrative” that would include his female-presenting history, his gender role models, and the body he chose for himself now.

I always knew that “acting like a girl” felt wrong, but in order to compensate for the parts of my body which were still female, I was now trying too hard to “act like a boy.” It seemed that performative masculinity felt just as inauthentic as performative femininity. I wanted to stop performing, and just be.

It was only after a year of obsessing about whether or not I should start testosterone that I began to wonder if the problem was my sex, not my gender. Perhaps it wasn’t my femininity that caused of my dysphoria, but the fact that my body still retained traces of the female sex. Irrespective of how nonbinary my gender felt, my body wanted to be fully male.

At CRAFT Literary, Jennifer Springsteen’s speculative story “Corpse Washer” is a surprisingly tender and uplifting post-apocalyptic narrative about people caring for each other, medically and spiritually, in a time of plague. Race and class inequalities are not elided here, but neither are they insurmountable.

That’s it for now. Enjoy the season!

Date night at the Big E.

ICYMI: Watch Video of Jendi Reiter and Ella Dawson Reading at the BGSQD

Autumn-time, and the living is spooky… Happy October! I’ve just returned from New York City, where I had the privilege of reading with Ella Dawson at the Bureau of General Services – Queer Division. In the Q&A session, we discussed how humor and romance leaven the portrayal of healing from abuse in our new novels. Mine, of course, is Origin Story (Saddle Road Press), perfect for fans of butt sex, radical Judaism, superhero comics, and hating adoption social workers. Ella’s debut novel is But How Are You, Really (Dutton, 2024). A bisexual love story with a theme of healing from intimate partner abuse, Dawson’s witty novel is set at a 5th-year college reunion where journalist Charlotte Thorne must contend with her bullying boss, the friend group who wonders why she ghosted on them, and the lovable almost-boyfriend who got away.

Watch our video (1 hr 7 min) on the BGSQD’s YouTube channel, admire our fit, and buy our books from their store. The BGSQD is located in the LGBT Center at 208 W. 13th St. off 7th Ave. in Manhattan. (Contact them for ordering if you are not able to visit the store in person.)

 

September Links Roundup: Boobs Week and Dad Caps

Autumn is on the way! Soon it will be time to switch from my closet of 50 short-sleeved button-down shirts to my closet of 50 long-sleeved ones. This makes me not-so-nostalgic for a problem I had from the ages of 12 through 50: Boob Gap! I’m talking about that awkward pulling between the second and third buttons that anyone not built like a supermodel or a washboard has likely experienced. As part of “Boobs Week” at Slate Magazine, Shannon Palus wrote this feature on Aug. 15 about clothing companies that are trying to, well, fill that gap.

Left adrift by most (though not all) major clothing retailers, some women, like Allen, are taking matters into their own hands. A decade ago, as an adult, Allen started her own brand, Exclusively Kristen. Using herself as a fit model, she created a pattern for a button-up shirt that would neither pop open at the top nor leave extra fabric hanging around her midsection: a shirt that would just fit. The design achieves this with princess seams, which trace the body in a curve from the armpit, over the breast, and down to the hemline. This, Allen said, accentuates the figure, “without being inappropriate for work.”

…Even if you are a pro at shopping, finding clothes for an ample rack can be impossible. Alice Kim, another fashion entrepreneur, spent years employed as a buyer for major brands like Victoria’s Secret and Prada, working her way up to be a vice president of merchandising at Diane von Furstenberg. “And I still can’t find clothes that fit my body off the rack that I don’t have to tailor,” she said, recalling her frustration. In 2020 she founded PerfectDD, pronounced “perfected.” (Kim said that she is a 28I—but that she often refers to her own cup size as “DD” because “that’s what people understand.”) PerfectDD’s offerings, which include button-downs, scoop-neck tees, a lace corset top, and a jumpsuit, are designed for the titular DDs to M cups. The first time she tried on a sample of PerfectDD clothing, she “literally cried,” Kim said. Not having to size up into something baggy just so the clothes fit her breasts was a huge relief. “I was like, I look my size. This is the actual size of my body.”

If you’re not following Menswear Guy (@dieworkwear) on Twitter, you are missing some of the shadiest shade on the Internet, not to mention an entire education about men’s fashion history and the elements of a good fit. At Politico on Aug. 8, he explained why “Tim Walz’s Camo Cap Is More Important Than You Think”. Unlike a lot of politicians who dress down in an inept attempt to appear like Regular Joes, Walz comes by his “remarkably unremarkable look” naturally.

Walz’s avuncular outfits are visually successful because they are culturally coherent — teaming workwear with workwear, rather than mixing suit jackets with jeans, as DeSantis was wont to do. They also rely on classics from American heritage labels, such as LL Bean’s barn coat, Carhartt’s utility pants, Filson’s Mackinaw and Red Wing’s work boots. But most of all, they possess a quality that style writers have spent generations trying to dissect: authenticity. Walz grew up in small town Nebraska, where his high school graduating class included about 25 students. He earned his bachelor’s degree from a small public state college before going on to serve in the Army National Guard and then working at Mankato West High School, where he taught geography and coached football. His hunting get-ups don’t look contrived because he’s an actual hunter.

This critical dash of authenticity is why Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, who served in the military, looks natural in his bomber jackets; why former President George W. Bush could convincingly pull off cowboy boots; and why New England-raised John Kerry and Mitt Romney look at home in preppy barn coats.

It’s also why former President Donald Trump stands as a unique figure in today’s dressed-down environment. Except for when he’s on the golf course, Trump is rarely, if ever, seen in anything but a navy worsted suit, white spread collar shirt and crimson, satin tie. The uniform burnishes Trump’s reputation as a successful businessman.

Walz is doing the same, but for the opposite effect.

I got a kick out of this flash fiction by Karen Heuler in Electric Literature, “So Much to Know”. The narrator’s deadpan observational humor creates a perception of her as a dotty older lady, which works to her advantage when confronting a mugger.

I’ve learned that new experiences keep the aging brain on task. I don’t worry about myself as long as I stay interested in life. Actually, I think I worry less than most people do, and that’s reassuring.

I was robbed one night, at knifepoint, and the knife interested me. I asked about it.

“Forget the knife. Don’t ask about the knife. Or I’ll use it,” my assailant said. He was getting nervous.

“But isn’t it a kitchen knife? Can you really just grab a kitchen knife and run out the door like that? Won’t it cut you just as likely as it cuts me, for instance? You should have a holder.” That was obvious, and the obvious deserves recognition.

“Give me your money,” he said.

“Of course,” I said. “I certainly will. I have a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket, but I’m afraid that’s it. I was just going to the drugstore to get some soda. Funny isn’t it, that we go to drugstores now instead of delis? I grew up when there were delis.”

Daniel Lavery mashes together two of my special interests in this 2020 article from his Substack archives, “Which Misconception About Testosterone Therapy Does Each Character from the Popular TV Show ‘The Sopranos’ Subscribe To?”

PAULIE: T, all due respect — all due respect — the Bada Bing is a women’s space, and I think you at least gotta take that into consideration before you make a decision.

TONY: You saying I can’t come into the Bing? I created the Bing.

SILVIO: No one’s saying anything, Ton. You go wherever you feel led to go.

PAULIE: You just gotta be mindful, T.

At LitHub, Gabrielle Bellot’s essay “The Joys and Fears of Trans Motherhood” reflects with humor and poignancy on her own mother as a model for the devotion she will show to her future child, and their subsequent estrangement when she transitioned. Some of the obstacles faced by Bellot and her partner are familiar to couples coping with the uncertainty and cost of IVF, and some are unique to queer folks surrounded by right-wing propaganda that we’re a threat to “The Family”.

When we first became serious about trying, my wife and I decided to go through sperm banks. I hadn’t imagined just how much like online dating sperm bank sites could be. I also never imagined I would say the word sperm more than a certain chapter of Moby Dick.

I didn’t realize how unprepared I was until our first try, when we received the sample in a heavy luggage-like shipping container that had the distinct appearance of biohazardous cargo. When we opened it, we found another container inside, this one arctic from dry ice; frigid air unfurled when we unlocked it. We then had to thaw the sperm and, nurse-like, prep a long syringe to transfer the sample into, which ended up being the trickiest part.

Everything, we quickly learnt, had to be clinically precise: when you order the sample relative to when you assume you’ll be ovulating, when you open the inner container, how long you let the sample thaw, how you transfer the semen to the insertion tube, how you lie on your back and for how long after the insertion, how you repackage the imposing shipping container to be returned.

We tried a few times, and although we thought we got everything right—minus the unfortunate time that I dropped most of the sperm on the kitchen floor—it felt like stumbling in the dark, hoping for the best. We switched to IUI, which involved a doctor performing the whole, slightly more in-depth ritual, but even then, we had to deal with mishaps and ignorance, including a doctor seemingly shunning the advice not to thaw the sperm in water, while another seemed cavalier about missing an ovulation window or differed sharply about how to position your body after insemination.

The whole process soon started to feel horribly biased against queer couples, in part because the language in almost every fertility guide we read was explicitly tailored to straight couples who could keep trying even without the donor material. For us, though, each expensive effort was the only shot we had, so it mattered to get it, well, right. And while the odds for IUI are never sky-high, it’s hard not to blame yourself (and differing doctors) each time it fails. The pregnancy test has become a sort of scrying pool, a future-reflecting thing you approach as much with dread as hope.

Speaking of parent-child relations, novelist Jessica Pegis (The God Painter) sent me this provocative essay from the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America/Metropolis of San Francisco website, after she read the queer midrash on the Binding of Isaac in my novel Origin Story. Rev. Fr. Seraphim Ivey, the writer of “Blessed Abraham: The Troubling Narrative of Abraham, Isaac, the Sacrifice, and the Missing Bits Between”, observes that there are problems with reading this Genesis 22 story as a prefiguration of the Crucifixion:

First, Abraham is known for seeking counsel and talking about his plans with those closest to him – Sarah, Lot, the Lord, etc. For him to not enter into discussion about anything God has asked him to do, even in passing with his wife or the Lord Himself in depth, is challenging to say the least. This is especially so in light of how much Abraham loves them both. Didn’t Abraham dialogue with the Lord over Sodom and Gomorrah and about Lot’s fate? Why would he not have done so over Isaac’s even more so? What about Sarah? Isn’t Isaac Sarah’s son as well? Where is the love being expressed between the two of them?

Second, if Isaac is the prefigurement of Christ, then shouldn’t there have been dialogue between the father and the son about the impending sacrifice? If the sacrifice is to be the proper and right kind of sacrifice, then it must be voluntarily given. This is not an animal being offered up, but a human being. So it can’t just be Abraham offering to sacrifice his son. Isaac too must be given the opportunity to voluntarily lay his life down. For this to happen there must be some informed dialogue. This is seemingly absent from the text. Even the ending is challenging. Rather than the son returning home with the father, the father comes home alone.

I was impressed to see this priest bringing up the issue of consent, which is so often sidelined in Bible stories as compared to its centrality in modern psychology and ethics. Fr. Ivey hints that perhaps not everything in the Bible should be read straightforwardly as a go-and-do-likewise: “We might also look to extra-biblical texts, including Jewish sources, for commentary on these texts, trusting God will help us discern which are from Him and which are not.”

Sources, perhaps, like the book reviewed in this 2012 article from The Times of Israel, “When Abraham Murdered Isaac”. Biblical scholar Tzemah Yoreh believes that the happy ending of the ram in the thicket was tacked on later, to an original narrative where Abraham did in fact sacrifice his son.

One eye-opening hint at what he believes is the original story lies in Genesis 22:22. Previously, in verse 8, Abraham and Isaac had walked up the mountain together. But in verse 22, only Abraham returns.

…That strange contradiction, Yoreh says, may be why a few ancient midrashim, or rabbinic homilies, also assumed Isaac had been killed.

In one homily quoted by Rashi, the revered 11th-century French rabbi and commentator, “Isaac’s ashes are said to be suitable for repentance, just like the ashes of an [animal] sacrifice.”

Yoreh also relies on the widely accepted hypothesis that the Torah consists of several narratives from different time periods braided together, identifiable by the different names they use for God, e.g. YHWH or Elohim.

The Biblical text calls the God who instructs Abraham to sacrifice his son “Elohim.” Only when the “angel of God” leaps to Isaac’s rescue does God’s name suddenly change to the four-letter YHWH, a name Jews traditionally do not speak out loud.

Elohim commands the sacrifice; YHWH stops it. But it is once again Elohim who approves of Abraham for having “not withheld your son from me.”

…Indeed, Isaac is never again mentioned in an Elohim storyline. In fact, if you only read the parts of Isaac’s life that use the name Elohim, you don’t have to be a Bible scholar to see the story as one in which Isaac is killed in the sacrifice and disappears completely from the Biblical story.

You won’t find that on a flannelboard in Sunday School, kids. (At least I hope not!)

 

Cummington Fair Blue Ribbon!

They’re strawberries. Get your mind out of the gutter.

Best in show! My poem “Vita Sackville-West Wins the Golden Wedding Award at the Cummington Fair” won first prize in the 2024 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award for LGBTQ Poetry. You can read this poem and my finalist poem “Why the Sunrise Is Trans” in their online journal ArLiJo, Issue #201.

The Cummington Fair is a real event held the weekend before Labor Day in the Western Massachusetts town of Cummington, also home to the Cummington Creamery, I kid you not. It’s a great old-fashioned country fair with an amateur art exhibit, antique cars, midway rides, a petting zoo, and great Polish food. One year they had an acrobat who took breathtaking dives from a tall metal pole, telling the story of his sobriety journey between feats. Lest I be accused of smuttifying this family event, the Japanese dumpling vendors at the Nom Nom Hut this year had to wear shirts saying “Put our balls in your mouth”.

I wrote this poem after the 2023 fair, where they did hold a Golden Wedding Award contest for couples (presumably straight) married 50+ years. The country singer covering “Gentle on My Mind” was also real, though I can’t recall her band’s name. Around this time, my mom’s lesbian movie club was on a Bloomsbury Group kick. We saw the 2018 film “Vita and Virginia” followed by the 1990 miniseries “Portrait of a Marriage”, which was based on Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson’s book of the same name. For those who don’t know, chaotic bisexual novelist Vita was married to British diplomat and moderately discreet homosexual Harold Nicolson. Apparently they were deeply devoted to each other and found a way to express their sexual complexity while maintaining a strong partnership. I was yearning to make some space for this kind of marriage to be recognized as praiseworthy, or at least possible.

Vita Sackville-West Wins the Golden Wedding Award at the Cummington Fair

An optimistic alto covers Gentle on My Mind

in the bandshell by the chicken barn.
Her calves chunk-chunk in floral-stitched boots.
Is the idea of a woman less demanding than her pussy?
Twinned oxen yoked to concrete

blocks pull through dust
to cheers. Desire anything

because it’s in front of you,
soap, mortgages, and dyed quartz flowers
sold from white wooden stalls

at the bottom of the hill. Ideas don’t tire,
rub themselves to rash, or bleed like roast beef dinner
that’s promised as a prize over the loudspeaker

to the best couple fifty-plus years wed.
Man and woman is understood
by the burlap-faced leaders of the two-step, gently
resting their chins on their wives’ tucked curls.

Slow, slow. The alto swings
long molasses hair back from her cheeky face
singing that not-like-other-girls song.

The oxen win a ribbon. The boy who hits
the bell with the hammer wins a ticket to do it again.
His mother sticks her face into a cream puff
the way Vita would have

tongued Virginia Woolf’s cunt. To be pleasant
memory, to be covered in art,
don’t cry at leavings. Blame

is a trash barrel of single-use knives.
Ideas are insatiable. Vita and Harold died

one anniversary short of golden,
she with her tea cakes, he with his Persian boys.

And Virginia, when she weighed down her pockets
with tickets for the final carousel,

what vows held her up so long?

August Links Roundup: Plastic World

Hello August! Like a closeted Republican politician, I have acquired a comprehensive knowledge of airport men’s rooms this summer, having traveled to the Bay Area for a family vacation. The San Francisco airport was actually a highlight of the trip. I was impressed not only with the food selections but the thorough commitment to recycling, composting, and phasing out single-use plastics. Water is sold in aluminum cans, and when you have to spill out your liquids to go through security, there’s a bottle refill station right at the other end so you don’t have to buy another one.

This NPR feature by Michael Copley, “Creating a throw-away culture: How companies ingrained plastics in modern life”, delves into the failed promise of consumer recycling and how plastics manufacturers always knew it wouldn’t solve the pollution problem. Even now, manufacturers are fighting regulations that would require sustainable packaging.

Synthetic plastic was patented in the early 1900s. It was known as Bakelite, and it sparked a boom in durable and affordable consumer goods. Soon, companies started selling different kinds of plastic. At first, most of it was marketed as sturdy and reusable. One television ad from 1955 — about a made-up homemaker named Jane in a made-up place called Plasticstown, USA — touts how plastic containers are ideal for families because they won’t break if kids accidentally drop them.

But soon, the messaging started to change. In 1956, the industry learned about a new way to boost sales — and profits. At the plastics industry’s annual conference in New York, Lloyd Stouffer, the editor of an influential trade magazine, urged executives to stop emphasizing plastics’ durability. Stouffer told the companies to focus instead on making a lot of inexpensive, expendable material. Their future, he said, was in the trash can.

Companies got the message. They realized they could sell more plastic if people threw more of it away…

…“It was a really difficult sell to the American public in the post-war period, to inculcate people into a throwaway living,” she says. “That is not what people were used to.”

A solution companies came up with was emphasizing that plastic was a low-cost, abundant material.

A 1960 marketing study for Scott Cup said the containers were “almost indestructible,” but that the manufacturer could still convince people to discard them after a few uses. To counter any “pangs of conscience” consumers might feel about throwing them away, the researchers suggested a “direct attack”: Tell people the cups are cheap, they said, and that “there are more where these came from.”

Barbie begs to differ: “Life in plastic, it’s fantastic”. Now she’s available in more inclusive styles. CBS News reports that “Mattel introduces its first blind Barbie, new Barbie with Down syndrome”.

The company worked closely with the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) to ensure the blind Barbie doll accurately depicted individuals with blindness or low vision, while making sure that the doll was still accessible…

To that end, the doll’s fashions are tactile with a satiny pink blouse and a textured ruffle skirt with a brightly colored hook and loop fasteners for closure on the back of the doll’s top. The new doll even has accessible packaging with “Barbie” in Braille.

Accessories include a white-and-red cane with an identifiable marshmallow tip and includes stylish and functional sunglasses. The doll also reflects the sometimes-distinct eye gaze of a blind individual: facing slightly up and out.

In partnership with the National Down Syndrome Society, Mattel created a white Barbie with common physical characteristics of this genetic condition: “a rounder [face] shape, smaller ears, and a flat nasal bridge with her body also featuring a shorter frame with a longer torso and a single line on her palm”. This year they’ve added a Black version with “braided hair texture, one of the key features requested by the Black Down syndrome community.” She’s really charming!

Do you speak whale? Project CETI, a novel interdisciplinary collaboration among engineers, linguists, biologists, and machine learning experts, is discovering complex language patterns in the click vocalizations of sperm whales. Harvard Magazine reports:

In the past, sperm whale codas have been analyzed principally in terms of the number of clicks and the intervals between them. A representative discovery, for example, deemed in shorthand by the researchers as the discovery of a “whale phonetic alphabet,” as reported last September by a team at MIT, detailed detection of “fine-grained modulation of inter-click intervals relative to preceding codas,” as well as the addition of an extra click to existing codas, that changed depending on the context in which the whales were vocalizing. The researchers also documented independent changes in rhythm and tempo. When combined, these elements suggested complexity of the click communication that is an order of magnitude greater than previously suspected.

The paper generated tremendous excitement among the scientists because simultaneous work by Shafi Goldwasser had suggested that the more complex a system of animal communication, the more likely that a machine learning algorithm might succeed in translating the clicks into something humans could understand.

Then, in December, Project CETI’s linguist, Gašper Beguš, Ph.D. ’18, took the understanding of click complexity further, revealing the presence of acoustic properties in codas that are analogous to the vowels and diphthongs in human speech. Beguš, whose studies under professor of linguistics Kevin Ryan focused on animal communication, argued that the number of clicks and their timing correspond to human vowel duration and pitch, and that properties such as click timbre and harmonics correspond to the resonant frequencies formed by the human vocal tract in speech and song. These previously unobserved qualities and characteristics of click sounds, in the context of associated patterns of whale behaviors, Beguš wrote, appear not to be artifacts, but rather are under the whales’ control.

Read the whole piece to find out about the creative technologies they’re developing to monitor the communications and try to translate them.

In January, the humor magazine Cracked interviewed magician Penn Jillette about comedy, politics, and leaving Libertarianism behind. The Right’s turn toward conspiracy thinking, suggests Jillette, is a product of our craving for quick fixes and constant entertainment:

So much of trying to live our lives to do it right is tedious. And truth is very tedious…

Einstein comes up with this idea E = mc² — a profound, powerful, mind-blowing idea — and he has to work forever to make people understand that and to share that reality. Woodward and Bernstein are pretty sure the president of the United States committed crimes, and they work their asses off to try to prove that. But if you’re deep in the MAGA movement, you can just type that Biden went to China and set up a secret nuclear arsenal, and you get this incredible amount of praise with seven-minutes work.

…I don’t think we’ve ever experienced a time in human history where there wasn’t a shared reality, even if that reality was false. I’d rather everyone believed in Christianity than what it’s turned into.

We should always be striving to agree on what reality is. A bunch of people have decided that it’s easier and more fun to not worry about that part of it.

…What we do in live magic, it’s constantly dealing with that subject. Recreational epistemology is what stage magic is — we play around with that. And if you want to get heavy about it, you can say that every magic show is an exploration of how we determine what’s true.

When you do a live magic show, (lying) does not enter into it. A live magic show in Vegas cannot include deepfakes. It cannot include false news. Everybody in our theater must agree on the reality — it’s the reality they’ve been agreeing on since they were in the crib. Gravity, time, objects, persistence — it’s all we deal with.

In the March/April 2024 issue of Mother Jones, Madison Pauly reports how “independent” sexual abuse investigation firms prioritize damage control for the organizations that hire them, instead of justice for survivors. It’s painful but essential reading. The feature focuses on Tania Culver Humphrey, the daughter of a prominent missionary who co-founded Mercy Corps, a Christian humanitarian aid organization. She claimed that Mercy Corps knew and did nothing as he molested and violently abused her for many years. Then, when she sued them as an adult, bringing up additional evidence that he was part of a child-trafficking ring with others in the Mercy Corps network, the group commissioned a so-called independent probe as part of their settlement with her.

Mercy Corps hired Freeh Group International Solutions, a risk management firm run by former FBI Director Louis Freeh, to conduct a probe. Over the summer of 2020, the firm’s investigators grilled Humphrey, sometimes in full-day interviews, for about 100 hours, leaving her distraught and suicidal. Yet when the report was released the following year, it concentrated on the mishandling of her claims in the 1990s—something the ­organization had already acknowledged and apologized for. If the hired sleuths had uncovered any new information about the circumstances under which the abuse took place, Humphrey says she was never informed of it.

In September 2022, Humphrey, then a 51-year-old art teacher and mother of two, sued Mercy Corps. The lawsuit calls the probe a “whitewash” and alleges the ­organization used the process to gather information about potential threats to itself—of which she was one. Mercy Corps had “manipulated and deceived [her] to gain exclusive access to her explosive information,” and had used “systematic intimidation and bullying” and “the guise of an independent investigation” to control reputational damage, her lawsuit says.

Humphrey’s experience of betrayal is not an anomaly, according to the article:

Freeh helped define this line of work in 2011, when a task force of Pennsylvania State University trustees had hired him as a “special investigative counsel” amid the explosive revelations that former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky had sexually abused young children for more than a decade. Many of the victims were participants in a charity for troubled youth that Sandusky had personally founded. Sandusky was charged with dozens of felonies, and two administrators were indicted for failing to report him.

Freeh’s mandate was to determine who at Penn State had been aware of Sandusky’s abuse, and when. The probe took eight months, included 430 interviews, and cost more than $8 million. When it was done, the task force waived attorney-­client privilege, allowing Freeh’s team to publish its “essential findings.” Their report concluded that legendary head football coach Joe Paterno, university President Graham Spanier, and the two indicted administrators had concealed Sandusky’s child abuse, acting with “total disregard” for the victims amid a “culture of reverence for the football program.”

The report was widely seen as vindicating the board’s decision to fire Paterno. But it also generated endless debate about whether Freeh’s investigation was truly independent. In 2013, Spanier sued the Freeh Group and its founder for defamation, arguing the report had served the trustees’ interest by making him a scapegoat. Freeh had “developed a lucrative business model—predicated on Freeh’s name recognition and FBI credentials—that depends on conducting so-called ‘independent investigations’ and producing ‘investigative reports’ custom tailored with preconceived storylines to meet his clients’ objectives,” Spanier’s lawsuit claimed. The suit was ultimately dismissed, but the controversy continued…

Even as the field grows, there are few rules governing how independent investigators carry out their work…And there are virtually no resources available to help survivors understand what they’re signing up for when they agree to participate in a probe, making it hard for them to spot potential pitfalls—especially if they don’t have an attorney.

…Timothy Lytton, a Georgia State University law professor who has authored books on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and the dynamics of self-policing industries, is mindful of the ways that companies can exert influence on a seemingly independent investigation, for reasons other than getting to the facts. Not only do institutions set the scope of the probes, they control what evidence they disclose to investigators. Lacking any subpoena power, he adds, investigators are “dependent on the information that they’re provided, which they don’t have any particular legal or economic muscle to ferret out.”

As Freud’s incest survivor patients could tell you, the person who pays the bills determines the narrative. I’m not sure what the answer is, but industry self-policing never works.

June Links Roundup: Speaking for the Trees

Happy Pride Month! Or, if you prefer one of the other so-called deadly sins, how about Rainbow Sloth Month?

“Diversity leads to resilience, and it is the reason we, and every other living thing on the planet exist,” says Ames Reeder at the Sloth Conservation Foundation.

At the ecology-minded literary journal Terrain, Ana Maria Spagna’s essay “Yes, and… Talking Wings, Queer Ecologies, and the Rights of Rivers” profiles a pair of queer environmental activists who are attempting to give legal rights to some rivers in upstate New York. They belong to a growing global movement to assign “standing”–the right to sue for injuries, or to be recognized more generally as a rights-holding entity under the law–to nonhuman natural phenomena. The movement traces its rationale back to Christopher Stone’s 1972 Southern California Law Review article “Should Trees Have Standing”, which is quite readable for the non-specialist and veers into poetic and spiritual territory by its conclusion.

Essentially, the argument is that our legal system should value trees, rivers, and ecosystems for their own sake, not merely for their economic or recreational use to humans. Their well-being would then have to be balanced against proposed developments that cause pollution or habitat destruction, just the same as any other stakeholder’s property rights or their right to be free from injury. Spagna quotes one of the activists in Talking Wings:

How can we give rights to a nonhuman entity? We do it all the time, they said, with a hint of incredulity. We give rights to states and municipalities, to estates, to infants (who know less than, say, a chimpanzee), and most damningly, if you consider real damage to humans and nonhumans alike, to corporations.

Stone eloquently questions the whole impulse behind our cramped and anthropocentric notions of property rights toward the end of his law review article:

A radical new conception of man’s relationship to the rest of nature would not only be a step towards solving the material planetary problems; there are strong reasons for such a changed consciousness from the point of making us far better humans. If we only stop for a moment and look at the underlying human qualities that our present attitudes toward property and nature draw upon and reinforce, we have to be struck by how stultifying of our own personal growth and satisfaction they can become when they take rein of us. Hegel, in “justifying” private property, unwittingly reflects the tone and quality of some of the needs that are played upon:

‘A person has as his substantive end the right of putting his will into any and every thing and thereby making it his, because it has no such end in itself and derives its destiny and soul from his will. This is the absolute right of appropriation which man has over all “things.”‘

What is it within us that gives us this need not just to satisfy basic biological wants, but to extend our wills over things, to object-ify them, to make them ours, to manipulate them, to keep them at a psychic distance? Can it all be explained on “rational” bases? Should we not be suspect of such needs within us, cautious as to why we wish to gratify them?

…To be able to get away from the view that Nature is a collection of useful senseless objects is…deeply involved in the development of our abilities to love–or, if that is putting it too strongly, to be able to reach a heightened awareness of our own, and others’ capacities in their mutual interplay. To do so, we have to give up some psychic investment in our sense of separateness and specialness in the universe. And this, in turn, is hard giving indeed, because it involves us in a flight backwards, into earlier stages of civilization and childhood in which we had to trust (and perhaps fear) our environment, for we had not then the power to master it. Yet, in doing so, we–as persons–gradually free ourselves of needs for supportive illusions. Is not this one of the triumphs for “us” of our giving legal rights to (or acknowledging the legal rights of) the Blacks and women?

This invitation to shift our consciousness is also expressed in Claire Kohda’s beautiful, disorienting story “An End” in Electric Literature, which is told from the viewpoint of a river observing species extinction and human interventions therein. A sense of foreboding, as in a horror story, is created by the gaps in the river’s knowledge and the alien-ness of its ethical code.

The poet Richard Siken has become a beloved Twitter oracle of late, creating a collective call-and-response poem with his aphoristic answers to people’s advice questions. You can ask him if you should call that guy back, what is the meaning of life, or how to spend less money on groceries. I think the secret of his success is his combination of compassionate acceptance and bluntness. There’s always hope in his answers but it’s not cheap. And he treats every type of question or questioner with equal importance.

@FernandaHofm: @richardsiken how do I make it stop hurting for good?

@richardsiken: You don’t make feelings do anything. You feel them as long as you need to. They go away when you’re done.

****

@h3ll0t17ty2: richard siken how do I stop being so afraid all the time?

@richardsiken: Some things are scary. Some things only seem scary. Practice distinguishing between them.

In the Spring 2024 issue of BOMB Magazine, Z.L. Nickels interviewed Siken about his forthcoming poetry collection, I Do Know Some Things, a book that came out of his recovery from a severe stroke four years ago. As he does on Twitter, he comes across as a person who is willing to feel deeply and investigate his experiences even when they are devastating. Maybe that’s why he’s become a beacon for others trying to cope with sudden unwanted changes, i.e., life.

On readers’ insistence on conflating the author and the speaker of poems:

People would still ask, “Is this true?” I think they were asking, “Can this happen to me?” and the answer to that is “Yes.”

On his new book’s primary concerns:

In the first poem I wrote, which is the first poem of the book, I considered my death. Other themes arose naturally: What do I know? When is now? Am I a liar, and is that why no one believes me? What belongs to me? How do I make this leg move? What if I can’t make that leg move? And what parts of me died? Truly, a version of me did die, and I had no baseline for the old me or the new me who was writing these poems.

In this exchange, his humility is expressed with such dry wit that it comes all the way round to supreme confidence, like something a British aristocrat would say:

Nickels: This is a selfish thing to say, but I am so grateful you’re doing this. As someone who has closely followed your work, this book really matters. My first thought when I heard about the stroke was, My god, I hope he’s okay. My second was, Oh no. Because there aren’t many writers who are capable of achieving what you have in this book, much less your previous collections. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have your work, and thankfully I don’t have to. But you haven’t published a whole lot of poetry.

Siken: About sixty pages every ten years. I don’t want to waste anyone’s time.

But I think he really means it, because this book was written for himself, out of gratitude and a need to piece his mind back together. I admire that attitude so much.

My neurologist said the fact that I am a painter and a poet is why I recovered. Because of the building of pathways—I already had such weird pathways built on lateral thinking, that continuing to paint and write poetry would help with the neuroplasticity. I made an amazing recovery. I’m lucid, and I can walk, and when I’m rested you can’t really tell I have a limp. I can use my right arm pretty well. So I can make a pretty good recommendation for the power of language and the need for poetry and painting. And maybe I do need to write, but I don’t need to publish and I don’t need to share—and that’s a different thing.

…I needed to write the book so I could figure out who I was. But the idea of having a publication date? That’s weird.

Read some poems from his books Crush (Yale Series of Younger Poets, 2004), War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon Press, 2015), and I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, forthcoming 2025) on his website.

May Links Roundup: Have a Good Time with Bad Art

Happy May, readers! I have been traveling a lot, writing a little, and gluing things together. Remember how, during the pandemic, those of us stuck at home went through a Little House on the Prairie phase of cooking and handicrafts to stay grounded in our bodies in our suddenly virtual social world? My Instant Pot is gathering dust, but my collage habit remains. The pleasure and challenge of amateur art-making is defending a space where self-evaluation doesn’t enter into the process. Though trying to refine my craft in terms of composition and editing, I’m working hard to keep ambition and comparison out of it. Save that for my literary career!

Caroline Osella, an anthropologist turned freelance writer and novelist, shares similar sentiments in her tongue-in-cheek Substack post “Make Shitty Crafts”. In elementary school, everyone’s encouraged to try painting, singing, and writing poems. But soon this democracy of creativity gives way to the academic Sorting Hat of “talent” and competitive testing that narrows students’ access to the creative professions. Social media threatens to recreate this joy-killing dynamic once we start comparing our quilts and apple pies to perfect photos online. Osella describes how her experiments with fabric dyeing and crochet made her happy no matter how irregularly they turned out.

There was a good slice of humour involved for us all in our house, especially at the beginning, as a kind of transitional mood over the period when everyone’s hopes for gorgeous outcomes to my studio time transmuted into pure and indifferent absorption in activity for me and into a sorrowful letting-go for everyone else. But, unlike those ironic millennials, deliberately setting out to do horrible stuff was never the initial goal. Product – satisfactory or disappointing as it might be – quickly faded out of any reckoning altogether, as I found myself completely taken up in process and flow and gradually developing a kindness towards myself, towards my lack of skill and towards everything that resulted. There’s no archness or camp irony at work here.

On his literary Substack, The Common Reader, Henry Oliver (Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Reinventing Your Life) takes up the question “Is Mary Oliver a good poet?” (And does it matter?) Like Stephen King or Rupi Kaur, Mary Oliver–presumably no relation to Henry?–is a frequent focus of the eternal rivalry between popular, accessible writers and obscure niche weirdos like yours truly. Henry quite convincingly argues why Mary’s work should not be reduced to the quotable platitudes that make the rounds online. She dares to be sincere and straightforward, to such an extent that her work has a transcendent quality, becoming a clear window through which we view the nonhuman world. Citing her “wild and precious life” poem, Henry notes:

If you only quote the last two lines, as happens so often, then you are taking this poem out of context. We do this to Kipling too, another victim of the “middlebrow” label. But he’s still a great poet. If is still a great poem. Just because lots of people turn a poem, or a quote, into the poetic equivalent of muzak doesn’t mean the poem is in fact muzak. Read this poem again. Mary Oliver is asking that final question in a very different manner to the way it is usually asked out of context.

I suppose it’s a special and rare irony to have your work be so popular that it’s underestimated. This past week, visiting the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, I was in the actual presence of paintings that have become so widely reproduced that it’s hard to see them with fresh eyes: Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”, for instance, or Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon”. It takes real self-discipline to sit down in front of these paintings, empty the mind of what you think you know about them, and let them speak to you. I couldn’t do that very well with the Van Gogh because it’s quite small and was surrounded by fans taking iPhone pictures of it, but its juxtaposition with Georges Méliès’ goofy 1902 silent film “A Trip to the Moon” brought out the painting’s previously unnoticed resonances with early science fiction.

The Summer 2023 issue of online lit mag Tyger Quarterly includes poet S. Yarberry’s imagined “interview” with William Blake. Both the questions and the answers are playful and visionary in a manner befitting the author of “Tyger! Tyger!”

Would wings be an improvement for the human body?

Flying is very fun although it’s not bad to save some fun things for the afterlife.

…

What two historical characters would you like to bring together?

God is a funny historical character and not one I’ve always liked. If everyone who believes in God (“God,“ of course, can and should be interpreted broadly, creatively) could meet God (which to me means to meet themselves more truly, more ardently), they might have a new outlook on the way things could be. That might be nice.

Billy Lezra’s visceral personal essay at Electric Lit, “I Don’t Know How to Live If My Anorexia Dies”, resists a predictable recovery arc in favor of examining how our strengths may be intertwined with a mental illness or addiction that people tell us to overcome. A self without this fundamental trait can feel too hard to imagine. I resonated with this passage in particular:

In her essay “Writing Shame,” Elspeth Probyn draws a connection between the act of writing and the experience of shame. She suggests that writing and shame go hand in hand because there is “a shame in being highly interested in something and unable to convey it to others.” As writers, we are required to wrestle with the question:what if no one cares about what we care to uncover? Or worse, what if people reduce and reject what we disclose?

Yes–my self-hating voice doesn’t say I’m a bad writer, it says “Nobody cares about what you care about.” It’s not imposter syndrome but weirdo syndrome.

Lezra’s author bio took me to Rough Cut Press, the queer lit mag where they are editor-in-chief, and this interview with inspirational nonbinary author and social media influencer Jeffrey Marsh. Marsh’s Buddhist-inspired advice helped me get through some difficult family conversations this week.

In an interview with PBS, you invited the interviewer to describe you in a word, and he said “light.” And then you said: “Well, you just described yourself.” I was curious about how you came to this understanding–that you are a mirror.

I realized quite a long time ago that my mission in life is to draw out what needs to be healed in people. Sometimes that is a great thing if they are in a place where that is what they want. But sometimes it gets ugly: I draw out their bigotry or whatever they need to get over in order to have peace in their lives. And they rebel, which is understandable. But my mission doesn’t change. What I’m here to do doesn’t change. And what I hope to be is a bookmark for unconditional love and acceptance until people realize that unconditional love is actually within them and has been the whole time. I’m always pointing people toward the realization that whatever they see in me is because they have it already.

…

I would like to ask you about anger. You write: “At its best, anger is a call to fairness and a hand stretched out in your direction, an invitation to honor how much you care.” How do you distinguish between generative anger and destructive anger?

Yes–what we might call righteous anger versus run-of-the-mill hate. To me, I think they’re one and the same. I’m going to give you a very non-binary answer: constructive and destructive anger both spring out of a sense of injustice. I would imagine that someone hateful hates me because there is some sense that my freedom is not available to them, which is an injustice: that I’m getting attention, that I deeply love myself, and that they’re not allowed to. And that sense of injustice creates a lot of anger, just from what I’ve observed. But anger can be a source for good because there’s a lot of injustice that ought to be overturned in this world. Anger is a friend. Anger is trying to tell you something. Jesus got very angry in the Bible, famously. And that story, as far as I understand it, is about injustice. So anger is human. Anger is a kindness. For so many of us who have been traumatized, the worst thing we can think of is inflicting trauma on other people. We tend to associate anger with one or both of our parents being very traumatic, violent,  hateful, mean, being the chaos. And if you break anger away from those associations, it really is a story of injustice and sensations in your body. So anger can really be an invitation.

A word I’ve seen surface in your work is “nonviolence.” What does this idea mean to you? 

I’m committed to nonviolence both internally and externally. And as we were discussing before, you almost can’t have one without the other. You can’t do activism to end the violence in the world without ending the internal violence as well.

What does it look like to be nonviolent with yourself?

Unconditional love. These phrases get thrown around and I’m guessing some people reading may be rolling their eyes. But what I mean is: even if something happens that doesn’t go well, even if you have feelings, you have trauma, you have things that are coming up…can you love yourself in every single situation? To me, judging yourself, hating yourself, those voices inside your head saying, “Why’d you do that?”, “They’re going to laugh at you,” “You’re so stupid”– that’s internal violence. And if you’re going to commit yourself to nonviolence and commit yourself to be nonviolent in every possible situation, that is a wide-open invitation for life to bring in things that may challenge you because you’ve committed to facing challenges.

Marsh’s latest book is called Take Your Own Advice. It’s about learning to honor your own needs as an empath or trauma survivor. Added to my long wishlist!

Also from Electric Lit, I recommend Laura M. Martin’s salty essay, “Fake Authenticity Is Toxic, and So Are Iowa-Style Writing Workshops”. In it she slams the encounter-group model of writing workshops where the author stays silent while their classmates gang up on them with feedback. She compares it to a meet-up series she tried, Connection Games, whose social norms ended up pressuring participants to share vulnerable feelings more quickly than wanted to. “Unnerving people by oversharing and demanding reciprocal vulnerability” is at best untrained group therapy, at worst a technique for pick-up artists to neg women.

The game assumes honesty from others; it requires trusting what they say over your own impressions…

In both writing workshops and Authentic Relating, participants are expected to share deeply personal information with people they don’t know and may not even like or be comfortable with. Both spaces require vulnerability without providing the room to acknowledge discomfort or push back against assumptions…

“Authenticity” has become code for ignoring the impact of our behavior on the people around us, being unattuned to their responses. Others will be freer, the guidelines state, if they don’t have to worry about your “unspoken needs.”  But a lack of concern about the feelings of other people isn’t authenticity, it’s immaturity…

…

I hated writing workshops, but I also believed they were necessary. How could a method used by dozens of universities for over seventy years be wrong? Once, I voiced concern to other members of my cohort. They said they found the criticism valuable, but after graduation, most of them stopped writing entirely.

If we make people feel unsafe, we aren’t seeing their true selves; we are seeing their responses to threat. Forcing personal disclosures and giving unsolicited “feedback” puts us in a state where self-reflection is impossible. Who can work on self-improvement when they’re under attack? Safety is a necessary prerequisite for connection and growth. It must come first.

April Links Roundup: Contested Histories

Happy cruelest poetry month, April, etc.

Speculative fiction pioneer Samuel R. Delany, who is still going to gay sex parties at age 80, wants you to stop treating the terms “literary fiction” and “high art” as synonymous. One is a genre description, the other is a value judgment. He explains in this 2019 interview with John Plotz at Public Books:

SD: …There’s a reason why the term “science fiction” jelled around 1922.

JP: So that makes Frankenstein not science fiction?

SD: No.

JP: Making The Time Machine not science fiction.

SD: With all due respect, I think that’s a crock of shit. They’re gothic novels. And the gothic novel is a perfectly good and reasonable genre. There’s no point in snatching it out of one genre. The gothic novel has enough problems maintaining its own dignity.

JP: You use the word paraliterary a lot.

SD: The paraliterary genres in the mid-20th century were specifically those that if you asked someone on the street, they would say: That’s not literature. That’s science fiction, westerns, mysteries, comic books, pornography, for example. Now, I think any of those can rise to very high art. The fact that it is a separate genre means that it has its own way of becoming. That there are people who can do something with it, and then there are people who don’t do very much with it.

JP: But the point of the classification would be that, even if someone becomes great in that field, it’s not like they earned the title of literary.

SD: Yes, although there are some writers who have—Theodore Sturgeon, for example, who I think is just one of the great writers of the mid-20th century and whose collected stories create one of the best portraits we have of the world from that time through to the end of the century. And some of it was science fiction, some of it was very borderline science fiction, but it’s a great art. I would much prefer to see him in a Library of America edition than Ursula Le Guin: whom I liked personally very much, but don’t think was anywhere near as interesting a writer.

I agree, it’s weird that no one talks about Sturgeon these days, because he was such a big deal when I was devouring every book in my high school library’s sci-fi section in the 1980s. I recommend his novel More Than Human, about a found-family of people with various paranormal abilities and cognitive impairments who together make up a superhuman gestalt consciousness.

A historian friend sent me this provocative long read from the London Review of Books, “The Shoah after Gaza” by Pankaj Mishra. According to Mishra’s account of post-WWII Jewish identity formation, the first generation after the Holocaust did not want to make this great trauma and humiliation central to their self-understanding as Jews. It was only in the 1970s that Zionists within and outside Israel started to emphasize the Holocaust as a moral trump card to silence criticism of how the Palestinians were treated.

[Israeli Prime Minister Menachem] Begin, who had organised the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in which 91 people were killed, was the first of the frank exponents of Jewish supremacism who continue to rule Israel. He was also the first routinely to invoke Hitler and the Holocaust and the Bible while assaulting Arabs and building settlements in the Occupied Territories. In its early years the state of Israel had an ambivalent relationship with the Shoah and its victims. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, initially saw Shoah survivors as ‘human debris’, claiming that they had survived only because they had been ‘bad, harsh, egotistic’. It was Ben-Gurion’s rival Begin, a demagogue from Poland, who turned the murder of six million Jews into an intense national preoccupation, and a new basis for Israel’s identity. The Israeli establishment began to produce and disseminate a very particular version of the Shoah that could be used to legitimise a militant and expansionist Zionism.

…Primo Levi, who had known the horrors of Auschwitz…and also felt an emotional affinity to the new Jewish state, quickly organised an open letter of protest and gave an interview in which he said that ‘Israel is rapidly falling into total isolation... We must choke off the impulses towards emotional solidarity with Israel to reason coldly on the mistakes of Israel’s current ruling class. Get rid of that ruling class.’ In several works of fiction and non-fiction, Levi had meditated not only on his time in the death camp and its anguished and insoluble legacy, but also on the ever present threats to human decency and dignity. He was especially incensed by Begin’s exploitation of the Shoah. Two years later, he argued that ‘the centre of gravity of the Jewish world must turn back, must move out of Israel and back into the diaspora.’

Current rhetoric about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Mishra writes, prevents us from calling the genocide in Gaza by its true name. This is not to deny the unspeakable suffering of the Jews under Nazism, but to question the political uses to which it’s been put. In fact, this very point was made by Jewish critics of ethnic cleansing in Palestine in the 1960s-80s.

In 2024, many more people can see that, when compared with the Jewish victims of Nazism, the countless millions consumed by slavery, the numerous late Victorian holocausts in Asia and Africa, and the nuclear assaults on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are barely remembered. Billions of non-Westerners have been furiously politicised in recent years by the West’s calamitous war on terror, ‘vaccine apartheid’ during the pandemic, and the barefaced hypocrisy over the plight of Ukrainians and Palestinians; they can hardly fail to notice a belligerent version of ‘Holocaust denial’ among the elites of former imperialist countries, who refuse to address their countries’ past of genocidal brutality and plunder and try hard to delegitimise any discussion of this as unhinged ‘wokeness’. Popular West-is-best accounts of totalitarianism continue to ignore the acute descriptions of Nazism (by Jawaharlal Nehru and Aimé Césaire, among other imperial subjects) as the radical ‘twin’ of Western imperialism; they shy away from exploring the obvious connection between the imperial slaughter of natives in the colonies and the genocidal terrors perpetrated against Jews inside Europe.

One of the great dangers today is the hardening of the colour line into a new Maginot Line. For most people outside the West, whose primordial experience of European civilisation was to be brutally colonised by its representatives, the Shoah did not appear as an unprecedented atrocity. Recovering from the ravages of imperialism in their own countries, most non-Western people were in no position to appreciate the magnitude of the horror the radical twin of that imperialism inflicted on Jews in Europe. So when Israel’s leaders compare Hamas to Nazis, and Israeli diplomats wear yellow stars at the UN, their audience is almost exclusively Western. Most of the world doesn’t carry the burden of Christian European guilt over the Shoah, and does not regard the creation of Israel as a moral necessity to absolve the sins of 20th-century Europeans. For more than seven decades now, the argument among the ‘darker peoples’ has remained the same: why should Palestinians be dispossessed and punished for crimes in which only Europeans were complicit? And they can only recoil with disgust from the implicit claim that Israel has the right to slaughter 13,000 children not only as a matter of self-defence but because it is a state born out of the Shoah.

Jewish Currents had an interesting article last month about Israel’s dependence on underpaid Palestinian labor. Jonathan Shamir’s “Between Exclusion and Exploitation” details how the state is balancing competing pressures from security hardliners and Israeli businesses. Give them just enough work permits to keep the economic frustration from boiling over into violence, but not so many that they become an organized labor force who want equal rights. Meanwhile the BBC reports that enterprising Israelis are already planning beachfront resorts in Gaza once it’s cleared of its pesky inhabitants.

For some in the Israeli cabinet, the Palestinian territory – now drenched in blood – is ripe for resettlement. That includes Israel’s hard-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir – a settler himself.

In late January, he made his way through a packed conference hall, slowed by embraces and handshakes. He was among friends – about 1,000 ultranationalists pushing for a return to Gaza at the event entitled Settlement Brings Security.

Mr Ben Gvir, who favours “encouraging emigration”, was among a dozen cabinet ministers in attendance.

“It’s time to go back home,” he said from the stage, to loud applause. “It’s time to return to the land of Israel. If we don’t want another 7 October, we need to return home and control the land.”

At the Yale Review, Paisley Currah surveyed two new books about the anti-trans backlash from notable queer theory writers: Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender? and Jules Gill-Peterson’s A Short History of Trans Misogyny. Butler focuses on the intellectual incoherence of arguments for an immutable binary, while Gill-Peterson takes a materialist approach, looking at how gender and racial classifications are invented to subordinate certain populations.
Gill-Peterson finds the psychological approach, which Butler exemplifies, useful but partial. It might explain violence against individual trans women, but it cannot account for why trans misogyny initially arose as a violent instrument of governing. Trans panic began with an assault in colonial and settler states on what was perceived as sexualized femininity in male-bodied people. The psychological phenomenon that motivates individual violence did not precede state violence but followed it…
As scholars have demonstrated from a variety of angles, it has been politically and economically expedient throughout history to deem certain populations improperly gendered and sexually corrupt. These designations provided chattel slavery and vulner­able mobile labor for capital and granted states the opportunity to consolidate their sovereignty by unleashing immense violence on these groups. Sylvia Federici’s work, for example, recounts the social, political, and economic losses women experienced with the emergence of early capitalism, which relegated women to unpaid domestic labor. In a similar fashion, Gill-Peterson outlines how the dispossession wrought by slavery and colonialism shunted trans-feminized people of color into cities, where they monetized trans femininity through the service economy and sex work.
Something that stood out to me from this article was the link between transphobia and hatred of personal freedom. This is our supposedly liberal Pope Francis: “Releasing identity from the grip of the body leads to a ‘radically autonomous’ conception of the individual as one ‘who can choose a gender not correspond­ing to his or her biological sex,’ as the Vatican explained in its 2019 document ‘Male and Female He Created Them.'” Stop and think about that. Why is autonomy such a dirty word? Is God a narcissistic parent? The issue isn’t even what we do with our freedom, but the affrontery of having freedom at all.
Besides which, choosing to actualize our queerness is not this caricatured break from all communal accountability or formative interpersonal influences. That’s not humanly possible. What we’re doing is leaving communities that don’t let us grow, and joining different ones. That’s what the church can’t tolerate.

March Links Roundup: Baby Got Humpback

In the spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of…blowholes. “Humpback sex photographed for first time–and both whales were male,” The Guardian newspaper reported in February.

Despite decades of research on humpback whales, sightings of the male’s penis have been rare. Copulation by the species had not been documented by people – until now, when two photographers captured images of a sexual encounter between two whales off the coast of Hawaii.

The sighting, confirmed by scientists in a newly published study, occurred in January 2022 in waters west of the island of Maui, where two whales approached and circled a boat before engaging in sexual activity about three to five meters below the vessel.

Both of the whales were male, which makes the photos, taken by Lyle Krannichfeld and Brandi Romano, the first evidence of homosexual behavior in humpback whales as well as the first sighting of sex in the species.

In other queer animal news, a green honeycreeper was sighted in Colombia with a rare mutation called bilateral gynandromorphism. In plain English, that means that one half of the bird’s plumage is electric blue like a male, the other half emerald green like a female. The New York Times appreciates how fashion-forward our community is: “This Bird Is Half Male, Half Female, and Completely Stunning”. See pictures at the link.

It is not entirely clear how the condition comes about, but one leading theory is that it results from an error during the production of egg cells in female birds. Female birds have two different sex chromosomes, designated W and Z, while males have two Z chromosomes. An error during egg cell production could result in two fused or incompletely separated cells, one with a W chromosome and one with a Z chromosome.

If those fused cells are fertilized by two different sperm, each of which carries a Z chromosome, the result might be a bird with the WZ chromosomes of a female in some cells and the ZZ chromosomes of a male in others. “And so you get a bird that’s half and half,” Dr. Spencer said.

These stories remind me of a recent episode of the podcast Straight White American Jesus, where hosts Bradley Onishi and Dan Miller offered a decisive takedown of conservative Catholic “natural law” theory–the theology that (allegedly) deduces the purpose of human sexuality from observations of biology. Surprise surprise, that purpose is heterosexual procreation, only. But why is it, the podcasters asked, that such Christians’ ideas of biology are stuck in the era of Aristotle, or at the latest, Thomas Aquinas? No amount of evidence of homosexuality in the animal kingdom, let alone modern human psychology, can make a dent in their cis-hetero-patriarchal idea of “Nature”.

Let’s just keep on with the gay links a little longer. I resonated with Jarek Steele’s personal essay “The Club” at Electric Literature, subtitled “In a bathhouse meant for cis gay men, trans is transgressive”. Steele and his trans male friend decide to integrate their local bathhouse in St. Louis, a space that traditionally “wasn’t meant for my eyes, the eyes of a man who was assigned female at birth.” For the author, it wasn’t about looking for a hookup, so much as feeling present in his body, being accepted as a gay man in a place that’s been central to their culture. “What I wanted was uncomplicated. I didn’t need acrobatic sex or a million orgasms. I just wanted to be in the room.” He describes a flirtation there that didn’t end in sex but was healing nonetheless.

Before I stopped using women’s restrooms, I was used to people talking and holding the door for each other. It took practice to master the art of men’s rooms. Walk in. Stall. Hurry. Sink. Hurry. Walk out. No looking or talking, especially at Lowe’s or even the YMCA. Maybe I was just like that because I was afraid to stop moving. Maybe they were too busy trying not to be seen to notice me anyway.

But here was a place built for anonymous sex, where looking and touching was the point. It was a temporary ceasefire with rules for those desperate to be touched without consequence, and even though Steven and I hadn’t come here to hook up, I felt a crushing tenderness toward these awkward, average, strikingly beautiful middle-aged men who came to an anonymous place to stop diverting attention, to stop feeling poisonous. Just like me.

…As I followed Steven silently back through the shadowy maze toward the locker room, a stranger emerged from around a corner. We passed each other there in the dark hallway in that bathhouse in a manufacturing district in St. Louis, late morning on a Tuesday in February. This anonymous man’s friend, if he was a friend, had turned away. I slowed to let him pass. He reached up and stroked the hair on my chest, a passing glance before we walked away from each other. I wanted to take his hand. I wanted to touch his face. I wanted to be gentle. I wanted not to be gentle. Every second of my life lived in that tender stroke of my chest in the dim light of the most nakedly male place in the world, where I had trespassed and had been wanted.

Meanwhile, Anastassia Gliadkovskaya, at the website Fierce Healthcare, reports on a potentially deadly form of exclusion: “Denied care: Trans men struggle for inclusive gynecologic healthcare”. She interviewed a patient who was turned away from several OB/GYN offices in New York City because he identified as male, which meant that his ovarian cancer was not diagnosed until he had gender-affirming surgery. Although such discrimination is technically prohibited, many medical programs still give insufficient training in gender-inclusive care, causing doctors to feel ill-equipped for such cases.

Noah Communoah’s blog Communotes, which I discovered via Daniel Lavery’s Substack, posted an article about his deconversion from Christianity that struck a chord with me. “On the Christian Question” talks about Noah’s journey into, and out of, an attraction to a hardcore faith that promised justice for his trauma.

My best friend at Simon’s Rock was Wren (pseudonymized as usual), a transmasc MCR fan and fellow fledgling anarchist. We were both survivors, and vocally so: we were not doing well. Wren was Catholic, raised in a secular family but committed to a feminist veneration of Mary— and to the transcendence of soul over body. (I’ve since learned that the latter is a gnostic heresy). At the time, neither of our bodies were a particularly hospitable place to be. We were both coping with dysphoria and rape trauma, and had turned towards Tumblr communities that were proudly sex-negative. So I experimented with the religion of Simone Weil and Catherine of Siena, of which Wren had long been a disciple. And I tried out Christianity too…

…I had serious misgivings about the basic Lutheran doctrine of solo fide, justification by faith alone. I thought that non-Christians should get to go to heaven, of course. But more than that, I thought that evil Christians should be damned to hell.

My dad is a miserable, controlling man, prone to outbursts of rage and deeply averse to any kind of therapy. He has two coping skills— exercise and prayer—and relates to both of them in excess. One of my last memories of him, right after he beat up my sister, involves him praying for forgiveness and then going for a run. He didn’t bother apologizing to us.

I found it hard to believe in a god that could forgive him.  I fantasized about hellfire for him and the other men who’d hurt me, recited Psalms for the destruction of my enemies. At the same time, on this mortal coil, I had recently embraced abolitionist politics. It made intuitive sense to me; the court system facilitated my dad’s abuse, and the cops abused my girlfriend for trying to escape her own violent home. But just because I knew policing hurt survivors doesn’t mean I was ready to give up on punishment. Hell was an eternal prison sentence, but one administered by a perfectly fair and wise judge. I secretly believed in a kind of purgatory, where thoroughly rehabilitated offenders could someday access heaven. But I knew my dad never would…

…My theology changed when my politics did, which changed with my relationship to trauma. I saw the survivor advocates I trusted, who encouraged me to see my abusers as monstrous, get outed as interpersonally violent themselves. I saw autistic and mad trans women accused of spurious abuses, then “held accountable” by removing every resource they had to survive. I read Against Innocence by Jackie Wang; I did EMDR. I just didn’t want to torture my abusers anymore.

So Christianity became something new. By this point, I had lived on my own for about four years, then returned to my mom’s house for disability care. I joined a local ELCA congregation that advertised as progressive and affirming. I made friends with the pastor, an incredibly sweet woman who I still think of fondly. And I started reading about queer theology: Jesus as dissolving the human/deity binary, the God character as a BDSM top, Paul as a sex-repulsed asexual. I loved the possibilities of textual interpretation, but I was still terrified of getting it wrong. After all, the Bible had to mean something specific, right? Otherwise what’s the point?

I quit Christianity without much fanfare. I just started HRT, moved to New York, and for the first time really felt comfortable in my skin. It just didn’t make much sense to go to church anymore. There was nothing I needed there.

I look forward to a future post where Noah explains his conversion to Judaism!

I admit it, I’m one of those bad people who can never remember the difference between Naomi Wolf (second-wave feminist author of The Beauty Myth turned alt-right conspiracy theorist) and Naomi Klein, the Canadian filmmaker and progressive political analyst who had to write a whole-ass book about repeatedly being mistaken for Naomi Wolf! In response to Israel’s bombing of Gaza, Klein has generously shared two chapters from Doppelganger on her website about “trauma-forged identity politics”. These chapters discuss “how the Nazis were influenced by European colonial and racial segregation in the Americas—and how a failure to reckon with those connections shaped and misshaped Israeli history, and contributed to exiling Palestinians into an unbearable purgatory.” It seems to be human nature to mirror our enemies instead of reflecting on ourselves.