Invert(e)

Two Sides of Pride

I am a misanthrope.

This comes as no big surprise to anyone who knows me well. People, in general, simply piss me off. And large crowds of them piss me off exponentially. So why was I at Denver Pride yesterday, in the midst of a crowd large enough to pass for an emerging nation? Habit, I suppose. I always go to the parade despite my misgivings about assimilation and the increasingly corporate nature of the event.

At times, straight-run businesses and corporations seem to have overrun Pride - especially at the Festival in City Park at the end of the parade route - using our celebration as a tool for gathering that elusive and, in my case, mythical gay dollar. And I won't even go into my rant about the mixed message our GLBT Center sends when they spend big bucks all through the year on substance abuse programs for the queer population yet gladly accept sponsor dollars from Coors and Stoli for the beer and vodka tents.

That would be missing the point.

Cave-made Soundsuits and a Halloween Mummy

Nick Cave is a genius.  I’m talking about the visual artist/sculptor who makes the Soundsuits, not Nick Cave the singer who has plenty of fans even if I’m not among them.  What this Nick Cave does with day-glo colored hair in garishly beautiful combinations sewn into forms that use the human body to transcend the human body, well . . . just looking at them makes me feel like I dropped acid.  What he does with backing, buttons, plastic ties, and bits of yarn makes me shake my head until my mind just gives in to a sense of delight and wonderment. He paints huge round canvases with sequins and beads, and comes up with work that seems as cosmic as a Jackson Pollack to me.

The performance by people wearing his Soundsuits was great fun, if a shade disappointing. The dancing was joyful and cool, but not exactly a revelation. The audience only got to see the softest, most normal-looking (most human) of the bodysuits in action, however. No fifteen foot bear costume made out of old sweaters. No ten foot cages holding sci-fi toys from the Fifties resting on someone’s shoulders. None of the giant hair pieces shaped like tongue depressor. We got the earthier, tribal, funky, easy-to-dance-in outfits, and not the Kozmik, What-Universe-Are-We-In? Soundsuits. Still, I don’t mean to complain. It was sensational. Fabulous.  Eye-opening and mind-blowing. Plus, you could dance to it . . . in it (the craziest club-kid outfit EVER) . . . at least in your mind.

BANNED FROM YOU

It was after 23 years of coming and going that one officer decided to check on me, to single me out as a dangerous person that should not come into one country, that I should be hanged to a line in a policy, to hang to dry. Accidents, even bureaucratic ones, are like this, unsentimental, they happen upon you and leave you panting, bleeding with a body rush. I had not time to be angry or too sad during the sworn affidavit, saying ‘yes’ to anything put before be – so this is how you get innocents to islands and remand centres on charges as thin as the air in that immigration office? I see how it works now, I hope I made your day; you certainly made mine so senselessly. There is le petite drama and emotion in the self-righteous application of the law, any law you invent to keep your false purity, the bloodlines, the protection of the state, and this is what makes it dehumanizing, its vacuity.

Today, I am banned from your country, worse that persona non grata, worse than a whore outcast, a set of fingertips pointing into the space of machines without a motive, an administrative clearance by which you deny me entry to a place where my writing exists, where I have had lovers die, and friendships born – how fucking Christian it feels, that crucified without rhyme or reason I can say that you do not know what you are doing, that one of your officers was irked by my queerness, the tattoos sticking out of my white collar, the things that I work on, the names that I have, the tropical femininity maybe that escapes like marimbas, castanets and chancletas from behind the macho 46 years old exterior that I keep. Asian stocky man, speaking slowly, barely mutters the question “are you HIV positive?”... 

RIP Virginia Prince (1912 - 2009)

Dr. Richard Docter announced at dinner last night, here at the Liberty Conference, that Virginia Prince had died at the age of 96. She was in good health and mentally acute until about a month ago when her health began a steep decline. Docter was her biographer as a well as a friend. I met the grand dame here, in the Philly Airport Hilton hotel, about five years ago, and I am a little surprised by how moved I have been to hear of her passing. She was an imperfect person, as we all are, but rocked where it counted: having the cojones to be an out-transvestite in the 1950s. Her bravery is something we'd be fools, as a community, not to acknowledge. Imperfect, problematic, heroic. You often don't get one without the others. We have lost an important pioneer.

WEIRD AND WONDERFUL

Thursday night, after a long, hard, profitable shift at the Diner, I indulged in the tiniest amount of herb ever, then, with this bowl of borrowed energy, made it to the Eagle. I was just in time for Blowie, a David Bowie cover band. They didn’t look like much as they were setting up. A dirty blond guy in white hippie bell-bottoms did not cut a convincing Mick Ronson figure. But starting off with a half-pub-rock, half-punk version of ‘Queen Bitch’ from Hunky Dory: that was brilliant. The lead singer came out, in a homemade version of that famous spandex pantsuit, the Ziggy number with only one leg and one arm. You’ve seen it. They did ‘Black Country Rock’ and ‘All the Madmen’ from The Man Who Sold the World. They were avoiding the hits, until “Hang on to Yourself,” “Moonage Daydream,” and “Ziggy Stardust.” Then, Mr. Blowie left the stage, the band went into a slow feedback ‘n’ drudge mode which eventually gelled into ‘Station to Station.’ Our Thin White Duke was singing on the bar, now in a black jumpsuit, with a long flap on either side, almost wings. It was Kraftwerk via Bowie, extra side of fairy dust, with the song grunged up and bleeding.

If ya gotta be a tribute band, this is how to do it.

He forced the audience to participate too. Stuck the mic in our faces, stuck his butt out every chance he got, bumped and grinded, and pushed us around until a mosh pit was formed . . . not an easy thing to do, at the Eagle, in 2009. Oh, and a cutie-pie at the door took a liking to me—God knows why—and joined me up front for a bit of grab-ass flirting and stuff.  Huge fun, wide grins all around.

As I went to unlock my bike outside, two young black guys walked by . . . one of whom looked like a collegiate track and field star, he was such a stud-muffin. My eyes couldn’t help but admire him, and—one miracle following another—he returned my attentions. The other young man said, “You guys can use my car.” They coaxed me in (not that hard to do) and next thing you know, this guy and I are taking turns giving each other head. When I came on my belly, both of them dipped their fingers in and ate it all up. Jesus.

May Publishing Notes

The buzz:

In 2010 Seal Press will publish Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman's nonfiction anthology Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation. ** This fall, Dark Scribe Press will publish Lee Thomas’s short story collection In the Closet, Under the Bed. ** Rebel Satori Press will publish Shane Allison’s debut volume of poetry this fall, tentatively titled Twenties. Other new titles include Shy by Kevin Killian, U by Rob Stephenson, Love Hard by D. Travers Scott, Chick Band by Rakelle Valencia, Against by Riley MacLeod, DeVante's Coven by S.M. Johnson, Pop-Up Book of Death by Chad Helder, and our bodies are beauty inducers by jj hastain. ** Alyson will publish Scott Kenan's memoir, Seeking the Kindness of Strangers: My Days with Tennessee Williams, about working with the playwright during six months in 1981. ** Lethe Press will be releasing in early summer of this year the first issue of Icarus, a gay speculative fiction magazine. The inaugural issue will contain an essay by Jeff Mann, fiction by Joel Lane and Jameson Currier, reviews of recent publications, and pieces on the Gaylactic Network, a national fandom organization for gay men.

RIP: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

In a not an unironic juxtaposition, Epistemology of the Closet author Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has died at the age of 59.

#AmazonFail

Honestly, I'm pretty cheered by the response to #AmazonFail: so many people upset about censorship, and censorship of LGBT, sex-positive, and related topics. Not a bad thing at all. There's a reasonably good summation at CNET and at WiredPen (which has the PW report about it being caused by a glitch) (& there's my post from yesterday about it, with links to a lot of the original sources).

A Queer and a Fag Go See Yonder Mountain

i love the Yonder Mountain String Band so much, I miss them already. Two nights was not enough.

They do something for me that the Ramones did, back in 1976:  they make everything that came before sound like history.

Before they even came on, at the Fillmore, the audience was treated to Roxy Music’s Love is the Drug, BTO’s Taking Care of Business, and Chicago’s 25 Or 6 To 4.  Their parents’ music, I think, the stuff they grew up with (I’d bet on it), these young men who have rediscovered bluegrass and made it seem new again.

They are children of the Dead, of course, but there's a lot more going on as well. Sometimes they sound like a trance dance band, using bluegrass to get there.

I hear Roxy Music in their music, Nazareth, Credence Clearwater, and I also hear the faintest ever echo of My Bloody Valentine.  They have layers, Yonder Mountain does.

It’s hard for me to talk about the music they did at the Fillmore, because 90% of the material was unfamiliar to me. I have two CD’s by this band, so I should have been recognizing some songs. In fact, they only did one or two numbers from Town by Town, and none off their most recent set. My jaw dropped on the floor when I realized they were doing No Expectations by the Rolling Stones. Girlfriend is Better was less of a surprise, considering that the String Cheese used to include something by Talking Heads in many of their shows. But starting the second set of the second night in San Francisco with the Allman Brothers’ Whipping Post ?

That’s not just genius, that’s genius with balls.

Blog Diet & Porn: Jerry made me do it.

Dear Jerry: I was just thinking about Blogging as a dirty little secret, something akin to jacking off one does in private but given our technology and a good doze of human ingenuity, one never knows who is watching.

Indeed, these days that we all want to be 'reality stars', we hope someone is. Before reading your evocative piece on porn posted today on April 12, 09, and the distance we used to go to get a fix, I was also thinking I should go on a “blog diet” and write more often here and I thought, “who reads it anyway”, who reads this -- blogging and twittering -- also being somewhat like porn , parlors, arcades in the old times. Many of us do it, like bees, and bunnies, and to think that I always thought I was the only degenerate there, lost forever, so young and addicted to sleaze environments and sex and porn.  Certainly some of it was exactly that, the loneliness and desperation of an immigrant  kid growing up HIV positive, a hangover of that fucking Catholicism and growing up in a political dictatorship, all good excuses for none of my behaviour but strong reasons for all of it, as I have painfully cleared with my dear shrink.

Kansas City Fucking Company

One of the unfortunate aspects of getting older than no one warned me about is the loss of my icons. Death is, of course, inevitable no matter how successful you are, but lately it's as if someone has taken a chisel to my past and chipped away pieces until all I have left is a core of - at best - unreliable memory. Did things actually happen the way I remember them or do I just remember them the way I wanted them to happen? Either way, the memories are there and every time I recognize a name in the obituaries, they come flooding back.

Like Jack Wrangler.

He was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, chiseled hunk of burnin' love - propelling many a session of self-love to a sticky conclusion for me. But this was the mid-70's, and porn wasn't as portable as it is today. Home videos were at least five years away and computers hadn't even entered into the national consciousness as anything other than confusing business machines. There were adult bookstores, to be sure - some with video arcades where you could drop a quarter in the slot and see 2 minutes of a 7 minute 16 mm film loop. Grainy and fuzzy, but porn nonetheless.

Queer Hets

I'm doing a talk soon in Milwaukee about queer heterosexuals, so I've been thinking and writing about the idea a lot. I've written about it before, spurred on by Tristan Taormino's column about it - which was a revelation when I first read it - but I know there are plenty who scoff at the idea and think only same-sex sex can BE queer. I'm not convinced, but then I know a lot of men who like to dress as women and get fucked by their girlfriends, and I know a lot of other people don't.

The question that it raises for me most often is the issue of identity. Is a person queer when they decide they are? Or are they queer because they do queer things? We know there are guys who have gay sex who don't identity as gay, right? So where exactly are the lines between the desires and the sex, or between the sex and the identity?

A PERFECT STORM OF BAD DECISIONS BY HOREHOUND STILLPOINT

I should’ve just stuck with buttmunching.

First paragraph, sentence one:  “So, this guy, last night, stuck his nose up my ass, and with his mouth free, asked, ‘How does that feel, my nose in your butt?’”

Yeah, I know what people want from me. Butts and balls, dick and tongue, ankles, nipples, lats, and thighs, all speaking the language of lusty fag. I’m supposed to open my mouth and swallow cock. Open this mouth and let cum dribble out. Open mouth and remove pubic hair. All or any of which would have been better than the spoken word thing I did last Sunday.

That God damned movie poster for Angels and Demons got me thinking about how my life has been full of both. Demons have been wicked funny and fiercely brutal, but it’s Angels who have no mercy whatsoever. No mercy, in the human sense, I mean. In the Bible ‘mercy’ means nothing but the presence of God. I know it’s tacky to bring up the Bible when speaking of Angels, but in that book, Angels are not Guardians of nice happy outcomes. Angels are messengers who bring the news and it’s not good. A visitation from an Angel means somebody is gonna suffer trials and tribulations. Someone’s about to burn on a stake. Some poor bastard has a date with a cross.

I wrote about skin covered with boils. Wrote about the Void of Hopeless Despair. Blood and pus and black clouds of carbon dust clinging to your day. See?  Not so much fun anymore, right?

Oh sure, there was one bit with Brad Pitt sucking on my dick . . . spreading his ass-cheeks and showing off his pink petunia . . . but it was too little too late for an afternoon crowd in a bar on Lombard Street, with a guy on guitar playing acoustic punk rock behind me.