Category Archives: Notable Quotes

Federal Court Rules “Proposition 8” Gay Marriage Ban Unconstitutional!


Hooray!

U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker of San Francisco has issued a landmark ruling in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, overturning California’s Proposition 8 gay marriage ban as a violation of the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the U.S. Constitution.

The Courage Campaign’s Prop 8 Trial Tracker has posted a thorough analysis of the 138-page decision (read the full text here).
Go send them a donation; they’ve worked hard to inform the public about
this historic legal battle, despite the other side’s efforts to keep
the proceedings secret.

Judge Walker ruled that there is no rational basis for the government to impose gender-based restrictions on the fundamental human right of marriage (boldface emphasis mine):

The evidence shows that the movement of marriage away
from a gendered institution and toward an institution free from
state-mandated gender roles reflects an evolution in the understanding
of gender rather than a change in marriage. The evidence did not show
any historical purpose for excluding same-sex couples from marriage, as
states have never required spouses to have an ability or willingness to
procreate in order to marry….Rather, the exclusion exists as an
artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles
in society and in marriage. That time has passed.

The right to marry has been historically and remains the right to
choose a spouse and, with mutual consent, join together and form a
household….Race and gender restrictions shaped marriage
during eras of race and gender inequality, but such restrictions were
never part of the historical core of the institution of marriage….Today, gender is not relevant to the state in determining spouses’
obligations to each other and to their dependents. Relative gender
composition aside, same-sex couples are situated identically to
opposite-sex couples in terms of their ability to perform the rights and
obligations of marriage under California law….Gender no longer
forms an essential part of marriage; marriage under law is a union of
equals.

[…]

Plaintiffs do not seek recognition of a new right. To characterize
plaintiffs’ objective as “the right to same-sex marriage” would suggest
that plaintiffs seek something different from what opposite-sex couples
across the state enjoy —— namely, marriage. Rather, plaintiffs ask
California to recognize their relationships for what they are:
marriages.

(And that, folks, is why gay marriage is a feminist issue.)

The court concluded that the ban was purely motivated by anti-gay animosity: “Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California
Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to
same-sex couples.”

Though the decision was immediately appealed and is likely to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, a trial judge’s factual findings are entitled to great deference on appeal. Thus, it’s significant that Judge Walker devoted 100+ pages to a thorough examination and rejection of the other side’s factual claims that gay marriage harmed children, straight marriages, and society as a whole.

Watch this space for video of tomorrow’s celebratory rally and kiss-in on the steps of Northampton City Hall. I’d better go iron my rainbow-striped pants.

Online Literary Roundup: Wag’s Review, Gemini Magazine, DIAGRAM


From time to time I like to highlight memorable work from some of my favorite online literary journals. In addition to the ones featured below, I regularly read Anderbo, Narrative Magazine, DMQ Review, and The Pedestal Magazine. Scoff all you will at the iPad/iPhone cult, but I’m in love with mine because they allow me to catch up on these journals without wasting work time at my desktop.

Wag’s Revue issue #6 , “Truthiness”, features fictional, nonfictional, and metafictional musings on the blurry line between fact and…everything else. One person’s assault on authorial credibility is another person’s mixed-genre innovation. Sometimes they’re the same person. With Stephen Colbert, you’re never quite sure. The man who coined “truthiness” speaks with editor Will Guzzardi about how things become true because we believe them. “My performance of myself, I think, testifies to the omnipresence of art, inasmuch as the artistic gesture ultimately comes down to an intrusion into semblance—exposing, in its brute state, the gap of the real.” Yes, that’s Colbert–or is it Guzzardi inventing what Colbert might say, if he deigned to be interviewed? Does it matter?

Other intriguing readings in this issue include an essay on the nonexistent Hiroshima poet Araki Yasusada, and Tony Tulathimutte’s story “The Man Who Wasn’t Male“, whose protagonist’s solution to the burden of performing masculinity has its own bloody, twisted logic. (Is “nonexistent” really the right word for a poet whose biography is fictitious, but whose work genuinely exists, though written by another? Read the essay and decide.)

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Hallie Rundle’s “Asphalt Sky “, the winner of Gemini Magazine ‘s latest fiction contest, is an affecting story narrated by a girl who works for an escort service, as she seeks genuine understanding of the people she meets in a profession that depends on disconnection and illusion. The runner-up stories are also good reads.

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In DIAGRAM issue 10.3 , Emma Ramey interviews Miss Peach, the trippy but fierce protagonist of Catie Rosemurgy’s new poetry collection The Stranger Manual. I enjoyed Rosemurgy’s earlier collection My Favorite Apocalypse and will have to pick up this volume very soon. Other useful or ornamental features in this issue include diagrams of “Antecedents of The Wasteland” and “How to Hit Back at Dive Bombers”, and Amy Marcott’s “Flying the Coop“, a story about Alzheimer’s caregivers that’s written as a discussion thread on a fictitious online message board.

Wisdom (?) from Miss Peach:

“There have only ever been two kinds of poetry: narrative and lyric. And some other kind that is sort of lyric but in a new way that sounds like a breakdown but doesn’t lead to the hospital because that’s a narrative. I say, don’t worry: narrative and lyric hate each other, but like the rest of us they share a house and make babies. They buy one another the perfect gifts.”

“To find something beautiful one must have no idea what it is.”

“Call me optimistic, but I believe that inside every girl is someone who is not a girl but who looks like one and laughs.”

Big Gay News: Massachusetts Judge Deems DOMA Unconstitutional


Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley wasn’t able to hold onto the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat for the Democrats, but she got my vote for supporting this lawsuit against the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, the 1996 federal law prohibiting the U.S. government from recognizing same-sex marriages in any context. The AG’s office argued that the U.S. Constitution leaves the definition of marriage up to the states. Since gay marriage is legal here, the federal government shouldn’t force Massachusetts to discriminate in distributing federal benefits.

Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) brought a companion case on behalf of several gay couples who argued that DOMA violated their equal protection rights with regard to federal income tax, Social Security, and federal employee benefits for Massachusetts residents. GLAD was also behind the lawsuit that led to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s landmark gay marriage ruling in 2003.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Joseph L. Tauro ruled in both cases that Section 3 of DOMA was unconstitutional. Read the decision and GLAD’s press release here . Read more analysis in The Advocate magazine here . Visit the Courage Campaign website to send President Obama a message urging him not to appeal the ruling.

From The Advocate article:

…“Today the court simply affirmed that our country won’t tolerate second-class marriages,” said GLAD Civil Rights Project director Mary Bonauto, who argued the case. “I’m pleased that Judge Tauro recognized that married same-sex couples and surviving spouses have been seriously harmed by DOMA and that the plaintiffs deserve the same opportunities to care and provide for each other and for their children that other families enjoy. This ruling will make a real difference for countless families in Massachusetts.”

In his 39-page opinion in Gill, Tauro dismissed lawmakers’ intentions in passing DOMA to “encourag[e] responsible procreation and child-bearing,” among other identified societal aims.

“Even if Congress believed at the time of DOMA’s passage that children had the best chance at success if raised jointly by their biological mothers and fathers, a desire to encourage heterosexual couples to procreate and rear their own children more responsibly would not provide a rational basis for denying federal recognition to same-sex marriages,” Tauro wrote. “Such denial does nothing to promote stability in heterosexual parenting.

Preserving marriage as a one-man, one-woman institution for the interests of “responsible procreation” was a central argument for attorneys defending Prop. 8 in federal court — one that faced similar scrutiny during closing arguments last month from U.S. district judge Vaughn R. Walker, who has yet to reach a decision in the case.

In oral arguments in May, Bonauto argued in Gill that the government has no reason to withhold the more than 1,000 federal benefits of marriage from same-sex couples, noting that a 1996 House Judiciary Committee report “explicitly stated the purpose of DOMA was to express moral disapproval of homosexuality.”

In Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Health and Human Services, Maura T. Healey, chief of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Civil Rights Division, told Tauro during oral arguments that Section 3 violates the state’s right under the federal constitution to sovereign authority to define and regulate the marital status of its residents. Healey called DOMA an “animus-based national marriage law” that intrudes on core state authority and “forces the state to discriminate against its own citizens.”

Christopher Hall, representing the Department of Health and Human Services, argued that Congress should be able to control the meaning of terms, such as “marriage,” used in its own statutes, and should be able to control how federal money is allocated for federal benefits provided to people based on their marital status.

In considering whether the federal government had any legitimate need for DOMA, both Bonauto and Healey had urged Tauro to apply strict scrutiny review, which requires the government to show a compelling reason for a law that affects a fundamental right or a vulnerable group. In both lawsuits, however, Tauro said that DOMA failed to meet even the most simple judicial review, rational basis.
…


Also of interest in The Advocate’s June-July issue, a profile of Mary Glasspool, the new suffragan bishop of Maryland and the first openly lesbian bishop in the U.S. Episcopal Church. My favorite quote:

…Why is the issue of sexual identity so difficult for so many churches—Episcopal or otherwise? “I think the basic issue is gender,” Glasspool says. “And one can see this being played out in the Roman Catholic Church. The issue is the status and role of women, and the balance of the feminine and masculine in the way in which we experience and encounter God. Where we allow women to be in positions of leadership and power and authority, we have a more balanced view of the community that is the world.”
…

Peace be with you, Bishop Glasspool!

Tell Hard Truths, But Go Easy on Yourself: Advice from Glimmer Train Writers


There’s always something inspiring and insightful in the email bulletins from the literary journal Glimmer Train. Each issue features interviews with fiction writers who’ve been published in the magazine. These two articles particularly resonated with me.

I think I’m a reasonably upbeat and entertaining person to be around, but darkness predominates in my writing. My novel protagonist is a gay fashion photographer with a laid-back Southern approach to life–what could be fluffier?–but after four years of working with me, he’s often found lying on the beach in a drunken stupor, crying for his dead boyfriend and worrying about his soul. “Be more funny, Julian!” I berate him, like Homer Simpson talking back to “Prairie Home Companion”.

After all, my so-called logic goes, if my book doesn’t make people happy, I won’t be able to sell my ideology to the masses, and the whole idea that I’m doing Something Important for the World is called into question. Then I start to feel guilty that I’m not using my law degree to bring about social change instead of writing gay erotica. (Or sitting at my computer blogging about my literary self-loathing instead of writing the damn book!) I once wrote in my diary, “I don’t want to sing the blues that no one wants to hear.”

Jenny Zhang, winner of Glimmer Train’s April 2010 Family Matters Competition, understands this fear. When she was a young girl in China, her parents left for America to get an education, and she sent them cassette tapes recounting her adventures in kindergarten. Only problem was, her upbeat tales weren’t actually true. She missed her parents and felt like a misfit in school, but created an alternate storyline for the adults to hear. To protect them? She isn’t so sure. What she does know, as a grown-up storyteller, is this:

…I have come to realize that as fiction writers, the easiest thing we can do is to invent, to lie, to make things up, to imagine, to create fictions. I know this is true because there is nothing more natural and intuitive than the impulse to dream. The difficulty lies in telling the truth. We will always have opportunities to tell stories that are meant to comfort, to delight on dark days when light is needed, but where else and when else, if not in our fiction, are we going to tell the stories that comfort no one, the stories that we often don’t tell out of love or pity or compassion or simply because it is unpleasant? If not in our fiction, then where else can we tell stories that say: I’m lonely. Or: I fear I may matter so little to this world that I can cease to exist and no one and nothing would mourn my disappearance. I know it isn’t much to say: Tell the truth! But it’s the only thing I have, and it’s the only thing I can offer you.

Zhang’s essay reminds me that my approach to writing can become too instrumental. I fall into thinking of my book as a way to change what other people do and feel, when perhaps it would be better understood as a way to name and reflect the experiences that they already have. In other words, my job is to give my readers a way to make sense of who they are, not force a new identity or agenda on them. My excessive need for control springs from the fear that I may not be heard by the people I most want to reach, because they are unwilling to recognize themselves in Julian and his friends, no matter how charming he is or how clever I am.

In the same bulletin, Nic Brown advises writers to “Make It Easy”: use whatever simple tricks you can find to turn your book-length project into a manageable task that you can get your mind around. In his case, it was structuring his story collection like a 12-song musical album with A and B sides. “Make it easy, however you can. It’s not going to cheapen the work. It will improve the writing. It will keep you from hating the process.”

This essay recalled themes from my earlier post on resisting compulsive revision. Writers need to overcome insecurity that we’re not doing real work, because to the untrained eye, we seem to be lying on the couch daydreaming. But being kind to one’s self is the necessary support for telling those hard truths.

Oscar Wilde: Surface as Depth


No Pride Month series would be complete without a nod to Oscar Wilde, the queen mother of the queer aesthetic. This profile by Joshua Glenn from Hermenaut , a journal of philosophy and popular culture, summarizes Wilde’s defense of artifice as a vehicle for a subversive and redemptive critique of society. Like Emily Dickinson, Wilde believed the best way to tell the truth was to tell it slant…or, if you prefer, inverted . Some excerpts from Glenn’s article:

…Contemporary theorists of “subversive laughter” argue that laughter provoked by slips, stumbles, and somersaults of the body or tongue offers the hope of political liberation by suggesting that the world is not unchangeable, that inflexible rules can suddenly be transformed into something flexible: think Charlie Chaplin or Lenny Bruce. Irony, on the other hand (they claim), is a form of humor which is not revolutionary but subversive, since it only pokes towards reform among an elite audience instead of seeking to overthrow the reigning order outright: think of Socrates’ affected ignorance or Kierkegaard’s roundabout writing. Wilde’s humorous plays, which take sly jabs at bourgeois customs and morals, are certainly ironic, but not in the detached and shallow way that every “sophisticated” playwright after him—from Noel Coward to Neil Simon—has used irony. Because it is always laden with the foreboding sense that the society he was baiting would eventually punish him for it, and because it is also always informed by a deep moral seriousness (although his morality conflicts with that of bourgeois society’s), Wilde’s flippant yet emotionally and politically engaged form of irony is camp.

When asked to describe the “philosophy” behind The Importance of Being Earnest (whose subtitle is “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People”), Wilde replied, “We should treat all trivial things very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.” This is perhaps the closest anyone has ever come to defining the camp attitude, which asks, “What is the importance of being earnest, anyway?” “Who are the people the world takes seriously?” asks Lord Darlington in Lady Windermere’s Fan, “All the dull people one can think of, from the Bishops down to the bores… I think life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.” Wilde, who published his own intellectual notions (which he took seriously) in collections of witty aphorisms with titles like “Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated” and “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young,” also refuses to accord intellectual seriousness the respect it demands: “Nothing is serious except passion,” says Lord Illingworth in A Woman of No Importance, “The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all.” The earnest mind cannot comprehend the paradoxical truths which Wilde would reveal, and, like Nietzsche’s Overman, Wilde’s aesthetes operate at a moral level which is so absurdly removed from the ordinary it seems like a put-on.

Wilde and the enlightened aesthetes of his writing are not flippant, nor are they earnest; nor are they not-flippant, nor not-earnest. Like the dancing Shiva image in Hinduism, which is indifferent yet amused, detached yet dancing the world into being, Wilde’s camp irony is more revolutionary than the laughter espoused by radical humor theorists, precisely because it is beyond good and evil, beyond funny and un-funny. Wilde’s camp philosophy, which mixes serious espousal and mockery, is absurd, and only by being so can it be truly redemptive.

HOW SHALL WE BE?

“The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has yet found out.” —from Wilde’s “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young.”

“My ambitions do not stop with composing poems. I want to make of my life itself a work of art,” announced Wilde. Putting on new identities like he put on new outfits, Wilde wasn’t simply heeding Pater’s admonition that “Failure is to form habits”; he was putting into practice his existential belief that the self is in fact no deeper than a painter’s canvas. Having studied under the American drama coach Steele Mackaye, who taught that self-conscious gestures and poses could transform one’s very interiority, Wilde sought to transform his own self into a work of art which—like all art considered beautiful by Wilde’s theory of aestheticism—called into question conformist bourgeois values. So although the dandy pose Wilde adopted seems merely frivolous and queer, in the utilitarian bourgeois culture of Victorian England it represented something much more subversive.

Today, Wilde’s brand of dandyism signifies a frivolous, non-threatening display of homosexuality. But the “sodomite,” according to the Victorian mind, merely engaged in a peculiar sort of sexual behavior: The word “homosexual” didn’t even exist at the time. Same-sex desire, that is to say, was considered to be nothing but a degenerate pose, not a mode of being—hence Queensberry’s curious accusation of Wilde. So, although his trial may have forever associated effeminate dandyism with same-sex desire, for Wilde the dandy represented the struggle artistically to develop one’s unique individuality in a materialistic society which requires of its male citizens the utilitarian virtues of rationality, moderation, self-sacrifice, self-discipline, industry, and thrift.

How so? When the English bourgeoisie came into being, it rejected the pleasure-seeking values of the hated aristocracy in favor of new virtues related to hard work and simple pleasures. According to one recent study, the no-nonsense bourgeoisie even created a new body language, one which was open and direct as opposed to the stylized poses of the aristocrats. So the original dandies of the 17th and 18th centuries, who admired the vanishing aristocrat’s disdain for the socially acceptable pursuit of wealth (in favor of the pursuit of self-development), were in turn rejecting bourgeois values with their frivolous poses. This explains why Wilde set his plays and stories among the aristocracy: not because he worshipped power and money, but because he admired the dandy’s anti-utilitarian world-view. Wilde wasn’t against the “common man,” but he despised anything “common” or “vulgar” (by which he meant “received” or “taken for granted”). In Wilde’s first play Vera, the hero states, “In a good democracy, every man should be an aristocrat.” Wilde wanted an aristocracy of everyone.
…

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…Art, for Wilde, is the source of truth—precisely because it never tells the truth. In a famous passage in “The Decay of Lying,” Vivian tells Cyril that “Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us… Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style, while Life—poor, probable, uninteresting human life…will [always] follow meekly after…” However, although the artist performs a service by showing reality as it is not, his or her perspective is still made too narrow by the focus of their particular medium. The critic, however, who is free to explore all schools of art, and is therefore free of prejudice, is another matter.

Wilde argues that in “criticism of the highest kind” (or “right interpretive criticism”), rather than seeking to discover the “true” intention of the artist, the critic actually lends a text or canvas its myriad meanings. (Any work of art which has but one message to reveal, and is therefore incapable of inspiring reverie and imagination, is not beautiful by Wilde’s definition.) “It is Criticism that, recognizing no position as final, and refusing to bind itself by the shallow shibboleths of any sect or school, creates that serene philosophic temper which loves truth for its own sake, and loves it not the less because it knows it,” says Gilbert. “Truth,” he concludes, “is merely one’s last mood.” More importantly, according to Lord Illingworth, “Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore.”

But Wilde is not simply a relativist. For as one character says in Dorian Gray, “The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope. When the Verities become acrobats we can judge them.” And in “The Truth of Masks,” Wilde writes that “A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.” (“The wise contradict themselves,” agrees “Phrases and Philosophies.”) That which is ultimately true can only be that which beautifully contradicts itself, thereby provoking us to wonder. This is why Wilde so often praises the liar, whose aim “is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure.” By not seeking to force his opinions on others, the liar may actually help to usher in a new, utopian world in which, as Vivian puts it, “Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will be found mourning over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper of wonder, will return to the land.” The willful creation of self-contradictory, multiplicitous, “insincere”—and therefore wonder-inspiring—meaning, is camp truth.
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Read the whole article here .

TC Tolbert Interviews Performance Poet Sonya Renee Taylor


The blog Persephone Speaks is a project of Kore Press, an excellent feminist literary press based in Arizona. Persephone Speaks features interviews with authors and performers about the creative process, gender issues, social justice and antiwar activism, and much more.

Their latest newsletter introduced me to the work of performance poet Sonya Renee Taylor. Her first full-length collection of poetry, A Little Truth on Your Shirt , has just been released by GirlChild Press. See this video of her powerful and heartbreaking poem “Still Life” from the National Poetry Slam:

TC Tolbert, a genderqueer feminist poet and educator, recently interviewed Renee for Persephone Speaks. The two artists talk about sexual identity, the difference between poetry written for the stage and for the page, and the challenges of telling difficult personal truths in a way that is also healing and respectful toward the people in your life. Here’s an excerpt:

TC: How do we, as artists, – or, do we – consider the reader or audience? At what point do their needs influence what we create?

SR: It’s difficult. Nothing starts, for me, with the reader. It starts with me and my place in the experience, in the observation, in the thought process. That’s where it starts, for me. My decision to share that is about where I believe the reader exists in the work. There are things that I have written that I feel very clear that the reader does not exist at all in that work. And I feel very clear about that. Usually the poem will tell me if it is for more than just me. And if the poem tells me that, then I share it.

TC: A personal question I found myself wondering – has her mom read this? Has her dad read this? How do the folks who are very much present in this work, how do they respond? How do you navigate that?

SR: They know that they are in the book. There are a lot of pieces that they have heard already. I read “Penance” to my mother long before I considered publishing. We were having a conversation about how I could establish boundaries around her drinking and what I could do that does not re-traumatize me and I didn’t know what to say so I said let me read you this poem. Just yesterday I read the piece, “Dreams for My Father,” on the radio in Portland, Oregon and my father called me b/c he had heard me read it and he said, “When I hear the poem it reminds me that I need to call and tell you I love you unconditionally. So I’m calling to tell you I love you unconditionally.” And this is its own art in that experience b/c that is not where we started when I wrote that piece. The piece, “Fragility of Eggs,” I read to my mother when I first wrote it and she cried and asked me to never do it publicly. I obviously didn’t honor that. And here is my perspective. Whenever the experience impacts me, it becomes my experience. And as an artist, I want to honor the space where that came from. And I’m not going to not tell my truth b/c that makes you uncomfortable. Because it is mine. But what I feel committed to doing is writing from a space that honors, that doesn’t exploit, that shows the humanity in the experience. I can do that. I feel committed to doing that. But I don’t feel committed to keeping other’s secrets, for their sake. Not when it makes them my secrets too.

TC: That is interesting as it relates to other kinds of writing, like memoir, and the expectation that everything that is written is factual. I wonder what is the line in your work between what is factual and what is true?

SR: There is a difference. Truth is often conceptual. Knowing isn’t about detail. It is about core and spirit and synthesis. That is not about detail. That is not about making a left turn instead of a right turn at two in the afternoon. In my work, knowing and truth are about destination. And facts are about roads. How did you get there? Sometimes I absolutely believe in factuality. I am interested often in how do you make fact poetic. Fact is newspaper and newspaper isn’t often poetic and I’m interested in that line between fact and poetry and where do you create that. But I think poetry is about creation and creativity and nuance and language and I feel free to utilize that when I need to. And I feel like the truth in my work is always present. The other thing is that truth, in my work, is never about exploitation. I have read work that is more about exploiting the subject, reader, or audience to get the reaction you want but I never want to exist in that space. My story is about truth and people’s ability to find their own truth in my truth.

Here is a concrete example. In the Bonus section “Liking Me” it is about me and an interaction with a guy who does not want to use a condom. Did that scenario happen in that exact way? No. Have lots of scenarios similar to that happened? Yes. Have those always ended with me being super strong and saying “Get the fuck out of here – I’d rather masturbate.” No. Sometimes I’ve bent. But the truth of my spirit is that I know that I am more important than someone who is getting me to compromise my safety. That is my knowing. And that work is a vehicle to get me to live in my knowing and to get other people to live in their knowing.
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Read the whole interview here .

Straight Women, Gay Romance: Bridging the Gender Gap?


There isn’t a name for us (yet) but we’re out there.

I discovered my inner gay man four years ago when I began writing literary fiction. It wasn’t a “choice” to write about certain “subject matter”: he was just there. And I liked him, sometimes more than the woman named “Jendi Reiter”, that persona assigned to me by biology, life circumstances, and the strange sense of humor of the Lord.

However…not only am I not “Julian”, I am not even a real gay man writing about “Julian”. I don’t want him to sound like a chick with a dick. (No offense to my intersex friends.) And I worry that when he tells me what’s in his heart–when he admits to caring about something other than casual sex and sarcastic put-downs–our readers will say to both of us, “You throw like a girl.”

Until recently, I didn’t know there were others of my obscure species, apart from the slash fanfiction subculture (you know, Kirk ‘n Spock in luv). But apparently, according to this Dick Smart column on the Lambda Literary book blog, we straight female writers of gay male romance/erotica even have our own publishing niche, “M/M”, with specialty presses and everything.

On one level, this is encouraging. I’m relieved that I haven’t been afflicted with a unique (and unmarketable) kink.

At the same time, I feel a little sad that traditional male-female divisions persist even in queer culture. Some editors quoted in Smart’s article suggest that the difference between gay male fiction and female-written M/M is that the latter is more romantic and sentimental. Men who want lasting love, who talk openly about their emotions with and for other men–are these still mainly a female fantasy, scorned by other men regardless of sexual orientation?

It wouldn’t surprise me if, in a sexist and homophobic society, gay men police each other for not acting macho enough. I would be more depressed if I had to accept that the difference is innate–that even among gay men, there will always be someone of lower status, namely me, who gets the low-prestige job of doing the emotional work for both genders and is excluded from the boys’ treehouse by virtue of that “weakness”.

There are many reasons why I write M/M. I’ve posted about the more high-minded motives on this blog: I’m proud of my queer family, I believe in radical equality, blah blah. Yeah, and I also think naked men are hot, and the more the merrier.

But, to get back to the high-minded stuff for a second, I have an agenda for everything I write. Spiritual, political, ethical–it’s all of those. I believe (or at least hope) that people are more alike than they are different. We all need an intimate connection to God and to one another. We all need dignity and a safe place to be honest about who we are. I believe that gender roles that restrict our emotional range (men get lust and anger, women get empathy) are oppressive illusions. I want to dispel these illusions by writing in the voices of characters outside my demographic, and reaching readers outside that demographic, too.

Lesbians Raise Good Kids (If I May Say So…)


CNN.com reported Monday on a study that concluded that children raised by lesbians were better-behaved than their peers. Naturally, I find this flattering, though some might say the results have worn off with age.

A nearly 25-year study concluded that children raised in lesbian households were psychologically well-adjusted and had fewer behavioral problems than their peers.

The study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, followed 78 lesbian couples who conceived through sperm donations and assessed their children’s well-being through a series of questionnaires and interviews.

Funding for the research came from several lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender advocacy groups, such as the Gill Foundation and the Lesbian Health Fund from the Gay Lesbian Medical Association.

Dr. Nanette Gartrell, the author of the study, wrote that the “funding sources played no role in the design or conduct of the study.”

“My personal investment is in doing reputable research,” said Gartrell. “This is a straightforward statistical analysis. It will stand and it has withstood very rigorous peer review by the people who make the decision whether or not to publish it.”

Gay parenting remains a controversial issue, with debates about topics including the children’s psychological adjustment, their parents’ sexual orientation and adoption restrictions.

Wendy Wright, president of the Concerned Women for America, a group that supports biblical values, questioned the legitimacy of the findings from a study funded by gay advocacy groups.

“That proves the prejudice and bias of the study,” she said. “This study was clearly designed to come out with one outcome — to attempt to sway people that children are not detrimentally affected in a homosexual household.”Gartrell started the study in 1986. She recruited subjects through announcements in bookstores, lesbian events and newspapers throughout metro Boston, Massachusetts; San Francisco, California, and Washington.

The mothers were interviewed during pregnancy or the insemination process, and additionally when the children were 2, 5, 10 and 17 years old. Those children are now 18 to 23 years old.

They were interviewed four times as they matured and also completed an online questionnaire at age 17, focusing on their psychological adjustment, peer and family relationships and academic progress.

To assess their well-being, Gartrell used the Child Behavior Checklist, a commonly used standard to measure children’s behavioral and social problems, such as anxiety, depression, aggressive behavior and social competence.

The answers were coded into a computer and then analyzed. This data was compared with data from children of nonlesbian families.

The results surprised Gartrell.

“I would have anticipated the kids would be doing as well as the normative sample,” she said. “I didn’t expect better.”

Children from lesbian families rated higher in social, academic and total competence. They also showed lower rates in social, rule-breaking, aggressive problem behavior.

The involvement of mothers may be a contributing factor, in addition to the fact that the pregnancies were planned, Gartrell said.
…


Read the rest of the article here .

I have just one objection to CNN’s reporting. Can we please not call the anti-homosexual position “Biblical values” without a qualifying phrase, as if there’s only one legitimate or mainstream interpretation of the Bible on this issue? That’s how Concerned Women for America uses the phrase, but it’s hardly uncontested.

Compare how major news outlets cover another equally controversial topic. Reporters understand that the phrase “partial-birth abortion” is a value-laden description of a medical procedure, crafted by its opponents to stir certain emotions. Instead of endorsing this description uncritically, the paper will say something like “the procedure that doctors call intact dilation and extraction, and opponents call partial-birth abortion.” The disagreement in nomenclature reflects a disagreement in values, and so an objective journalist will refuse to take sides by omission.

In the story above, a more accurate and neutral description could be “Concerned Women for America, a group that interprets the Bible to condemn homosexuality” or “…that opposes same-sex relationships, based on its interpretation of the Bible”.

Against Compulsive Revision


Before I entered that zone of Sisyphean torment reserved for writers of novels-in-progress, I used to say I was a poet because I have a short attention span. I can see my way around all sides of a poem at once: it’s like carving a statue, rather than building a house. It takes me about an hour to write, and once it’s done, it’s pretty clear to me whether it sucks or not. If it does, I generally abandon it. When the tone is off, it’s off. None of that “parts of the omelet are excellent” wishful thinking.

If the poem smells OK, I don’t do much to it after that. I’ll tinker with a line or two that might have concerned me the first time around, but I don’t approach my drafts with the presumption that more input will always make them better. By contrast, it’s common for creative writing workshops to silence the author while the other students critique her piece, an approach that troubles me because of the potential for peer pressure to stunt the development of her own internal smell-o-meter.

Even outside a group setting, the self who writes the first draft is not the same person who revises it. You are, in a sense, your own peer pressure. You’ve got to be careful that the anticipation of judging-self’s criticism doesn’t stifle creative-self, because creative-self is the expert and needs to be trusted as such.

A Facebook link posted by the poet Rus Bowden led me to this satisfying screed by Art Durkee , a writer, musician, and visual artist, who goes off on his fellow poet Mary Karr’s advice to students that “every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it”. Durkee thinks, as do I, that bragging about how many reps you did at the revision gym says more about your ego than the quality of the poem. Some choice quotes:

…Rewrite after rewrite after rewrite after rewrite is a completely alien way of working, for me. I literally cannot imagine doing sixty drafts of a poem. I cannot imagine doing endless rewrites without the process itself literally killing every good thing in the poem, including the impulse that originally caused me to want to write it. The spontaneity and freshness and surprise and life will all be killed, each phrase will become so overly-familiar that all the life will be sucked out of it merely by repetition. You can’t bring a poem back to life, after killing it with rewrites: there are no zombie-poems (although one can make a case for there being some living-dead poets, in certain instances). I’d rather shoot the poem and put it out of its misery than subject it to such pointless and endlessly painful surgery.

If I can’t get it in four or five drafts, sixty drafts won’t make any difference: one reaches a point of diminishing returns. Far better to start over, because—in my case at least—endless rewrites will not magically repair what a few drafts cannot. It’s magical thinking—or worse. The definition of insanity is to keep repeating the same behavior again and again, each time hoping for a different outcome than that which the previous hundred repetitions provided. In the case of obsessive rewriting, I’d want to see some evidence that the last twenty drafts made any noticeable improvements to the poem. I remain skeptical until presented with such….

…Poets constantly suffer from an insecurity, inherited perhaps from Romantic stereotypes about tubercular Writers wasting away in starving garrets, that other members of the literary clan won’t respect them if they don’t appear to be working hard enough at their “craft and sullen art.” Certainly every poet wants to appear to the non-poet as hard-working, as if they must work hard, to achieve what they’ve achieved. Poetry is, after all, specialized language, intensified and heightened speech, with more meaning packed into a few words, compared to every other literary artform. Yet poetry is a verbal artform, with no physical component to it, so one might well understand how a poet might feel like a slacker when standing next to a construction worker: although both are building things, only one makes tangible things that one might actually trip over. I myself would argue that poetry at its best is a tangible thing one can trip over, and have one’s life changed thereby—but it’s easy to see how some poets might be insecure about their art’s lack of apparently physical results, especially in a consumer economy wherein the dominant measure of intrinsic value is monetary and physical utility….

…I can conceive of no worse hell than being forced to follow a creative process so alien to one’s own, natural process.

The point here is that there are many different ways of working, even within similar creative processes. We may have fundamentally different working methods. I’m fine with that. I’m not okay when the disbelieving try to impose their values, or their working methods, on others.

Read the whole post here .

Tranifesto Asks: Is It a Choice? So What?


Trans man Matt Kailey recently posted this timely and well-reasoned piece on his Tranifesto blog: “It’s Time to Lose ‘I Didn’t Choose’ (to be Transgender)”. Kailey writes that he gets tired of hearing GLBT folks defend themselves against social prejudice by saying “I didn’t choose to be this way”, as if their orientation or gender expression were some kind of disability. If being straight or gender-conforming feels preferable, that’s because of stigma and discrimination, not because there’s anything wrong with being different.

…Being trans, in and of itself, is not a curse. Neither is being gay or lesbian. It’s the society and the culture that decides whether such things are negative, positive, or neutral. If, as in some cultures, we were revered as powerful, knowledgeable, spiritual, and blessed human beings, would we wish that we weren’t trans? If our family was proud, if we were deemed as special — or even if we were just treated matter-of-factly — would we wish that we weren’t trans?

The “I didn’t choose to be this way” argument paints us as victims. It paints us as tragic figures with an external locus of control — life has done something to us. We have no control over it or over ourselves. We have no “choice.”

I understand the purpose of the argument, because, truly, none of us did choose to be transgender (or gay, lesbian, or bisexual). No one chooses to be straight or non-trans, either. But you don’t hear straight, non-trans people arguing that they didn’t choose to be that way. They don’t need this argument, because they have the power. We don’t. That power makes their particular existence the “right” way to be. We feel as though we have to make the “no choice” argument in order for those in power to accept us, to grant us our rights, and to quit killing us.

But I think there are better arguments — arguments about equality and dignity and human rights — that give us a stronger position and make us stronger as people. To say, “It wasn’t my choice” is to say, “I wouldn’t be this way if I could help it” — which is to say, “This is a bad way to be.”

But is it such a terrible way to be, or is it only terrible because of the way we are looked at and treated by society? Why is straight better? Why is non-trans better? We have been brainwashed into believing that this is so, and we have been brainwashed into believing that we are “less than,” so we have to come up with an argument that excuses our deficiency — and that argument is: “I didn’t choose.”

We come to the table as victims, we sit at the table as victims, and then we wonder why we have no power. It doesn’t matter whether I chose to be this way or not — what matters is that, by virtue of being a human being, I deserve the same rights as everyone else.
…


Read the follow-up post here. Excerpt:

…please remember that I am not saying that sexual orientation or gender identity is a choice. It’s not. What I am saying is that, in my opinion, the “I didn’t choose” argument causes us to relinquish our power. The “no choice” argument says that we are deficient — but it’s not our fault. It says that there are other ways to be that are better — but we can’t be them, because we are “like this.” It hands the power over to those with more “desirable” characteristics — characteristics that we are supposed to want … if we had the choice. And it diminishes the concept that all human beings are worthy, simply by virtue of being human. Some are not more equal than others.

If we say it enough, we might convince ourselves (and others) that nobody would choose to be us — not even us. And honestly, if given the choice, I would choose to be me.


I say “Amen!” to Tranifesto, because I believe that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and all other forms of prejudice arise from our unthinking acceptance of arbitrary value judgments about the differences between us. Transgender rights may seem like an obscure and low-priority fight to some people. But actually we have a lot to learn from people who occupy a liminal space. They are living proof of the unreality of the boundaries that oppress us.