better

Continuing with Schulman's Ties That Bind.
After the first couple of chapters, I find my argument (rather than my agreement) with Schulman developing. I've taken a number of days to figure out where our difference would be.
As I've written below, one difference is simply that I have not led a gay life, and never could lead a lesbian one. She's very much concerned about the experience of homophobia corrupting lesbian relationships. It's just something I don't/can't know about. Schulman is the only writer I know for whom this is a major topic - altho I trust her and see enough congruence with other people's writings and experience that I can't doubt it. Maybe this is why later in the book she identifies her writing work with Philip Roth's, which would not have been my first guess. Like Roth, a secret that her in-group would rather keep out of sight just makes for a more interesting area to explore.
I guess I have absolutely nothing to offer in comment on that topic... I didn't know it was so, I wish it weren't so, I don't know what to do about it, aside from the general.
Schulman's overall recommendation for what is to be done, I think, can be summarized as (continuing the work of) eliminating the onus placed on homosexuality and directing attention to an actual source of cruelty and victimization, homophobia. She and I would be as one on this. I think that just as it is impossible now, after much cultural work, to regard racism as a sin which can be diluted by other better qualities, or excused as part of the overall person's experience, we have to do the cultural and personal work that will make homophobia an unpopular, distasteful, disfiguring characteristic in the eyes of society, family and friends.
The work of stigmatizing racism is not yet done. The work of stigmatizing homophobia has barely begun. The sign of this is the ease and frequency with which homophobia is forgiven in personal and social situations; again, contrast to racism. As a marker, look at the heroes of TV and movies - you could not possibly have a hero among whose failings was racism. Sometimes the opposite for homophobia.
The book makes an excellent moral case for interfering with homophobia, but Sarah would go on to make legal and psychotherapeutic intervention a requirement. That sounds awfully official. To put it less so, therapist and family counselors as well as representatives of law should be required to take action against homophobia in the same way they would against, say, child abuse in a family, or harrassment in a workplace, or cruelty in a marriage.
When I put it that way to myself, this doesn't sound bad at all. But I think she errs in the degree of intrusion into what's commonly known as private life. She addresses this - that it is a social and moral error to allow a cloak of privacy to cover injustice and abuse - in reasonable terms. But I think for one she is suggesting a change in the culture that dwarfs even erasing homophobia - to let sunshine into possibly every corner of family life. I am not certain that such exposure would be tolerable or good - and it would mean an enormous degree of openness to examination, lest abuse be missed. And I am certain that allowing government or bureaucracies further into the regulation of family life is a terrible idea.
To alter the general understanding of homophobia as something resulting from homosexuals into something imposed by homophobes, great, and effective. To test for compliance, not so much.
I don't think it's laxness of thought that moves Schulman in this direction. I think it may be life experience - and this is absolutely not to say that admitting such weakens her argument. On the contrary, it may strengthen it, as real testimony of real human suffering. One of the things I've admired in Schulman's writing, open in her nonfiction and evident in her fiction, is that she works very well in the field where political and personal overlap. I've never been able to work creatively from that place, only the (seemingly) purely personal.
I think the prospect of dying before the extinction of homophobia and the making right of its injustices is something that upsets her greatly. And I would speculate more on that if I knew her better or this was even less of a public forum.
And I think here is the biggest difference between Sarah and myself. She is an optimist. It may sound funny to so describe someone so while considering their treatise against the infliction of human misery, but she is an optimist and knowingly so:

Why, after all, try to explain what exclusion and punishment feel like, and why they are wrong? Somewhere in the choice to communicate lies a profound optimism and pure belief that people don't want to do evil, and if they realize what they are doing, they will stop it.

I don't have much belief in the willingness of people to examine themselves, identify wrongs, and work to change. We are lazy and selfish - and I write this as a buddhist - it is our nature as conscious vulnerable creatures. I don't think we as a whole desire to do evil - I just think we are weakly motivated to see it in the first place and do something about it in the second, esp at any expense to ourselves.
Sarah, in the course of writing her book about human cruelty, and with possibly a more particular and general experience of it than my own, expects better of human beings than I do. She is an optimist. Which might well make her much more different from me than being a lesbian.

untying

Continuing with Sarah Schulman's Ties That Bind.

Again I have the experience from reading her books of seeing a truth I know re-affirmed from a very different angle.

I am often attracted to LGB people (and I don't mention Ts only by reason of limited experience) who I have found are idiosyncratic thinkers about life and society, in things small (what's a good book) and large (who's killing whom). Of course, there is no reason I shouldn't be, and I have the same attraction to free-thinking straights (by definition, not homophobes). But it's interesting to be a straight-ish man who's utterly pro-queer and whose best male friends are not straight, to look at some of his very close relationships with Ls and ask, not just why I've been close to them but also why have they been close to me?

The answer is that I really really like people who think things through. As a child I thoroughly, almost embarrassingly absorbed the conventions of my family and milieu, simultaneously thinking the world a very strange place to be living in. I have had to think a lot of things through in order for my world to be a place I can live in. And I think that a tremendous part of my liking for queers is that LGBTs have to think their way through quite a lot to make their world livable at all.

With the same simultaneous capacity, sometimes LGBTs are an us to me, and sometimes a them. It would be by no means a lie to describe myself as bisexual, but how true is it? I have had fun fooling around with men, I was certainly attracted to them when I was younger, during my twenties and thirties bi was the first word that I would use to describe my sexuality. However, and somewhat dismayingly, I found men less and less attractive over time while my attraction to women sustained. I had a lot invested in the queer-ness and cool of being bi. It was not easy for me to accept my non-central status on the Kinsey scale. But I really like telling the truth. And not only is my attraction to men near-invisible nowadays, I also think it would be arrogant for me to say "us" when talking gay. I haven't lived the life. As much as I can feel it and think it, I haven't lived the life.

The motto - It's a Black Thing. You Wouldn't Understand. - had a period of great mainstream circulation. A lot of white people resented it (and I won't even begin to analyze why because I do want this post eventually to come to an end). But I didn't. I've rubbed shoulders and more with black people, my reading is not circumscribed by race, I loathe racism and seek to root it out in the greater society and in myself - but I simply have not lived as a black American.

Anyway, I do tend to like the out Ls I meet, and when they like me in kind, I think it's because I realize they've had to think their way through to the place of relative sanity they're in, and my respect for that is evident. 

It's also true that most people, Ls, Gs, and even Ss, assume I'm gay when they meet me.

I tried to figure this out once. I had met a number of men at a new workplace who I assumed were gay and been wrong like, three times in a row. So I thought, what is this that's reading to me as gay? And the commonalities I saw were: well-spoken, courteous, non-primitive towards women. And if those are the things that lead people to class me as gay, I'm fine with that. (There's of course much more on an intuitive level going on.)

Usually I don't correct the assumption unless I feel the truth's at stake. When I do, my reasons are all the same and different: with Ls, because I know many straight men have weird agendas with lesbians and I don't want the relationship on a mistaken basis; with Gs, to let them know they're talking with a straight-ish comrade, maybe not one of them but unquestionably with them (there's that "them"); with straights, to let them (another "them" - exactly who is it that I really think I'm an "us" with?) know the truth, which includes being pro-gay or pro-queer, word-choice depending on which is going to do the most to push social freedom another fraction of an inch.

So here I've gone on and on. Why? Because from the moment I knew that I would be writing about Sarah and her books, I knew that I would not feel intellectually honest unless my particular wanderings across the spectrum were acknowledged here. For a number of reasons probably having to do more with the intimacies of NYC than anything else, I haven't been conversationally out to Sarah (hi, Sarah) as straight, gay, queer or other. It's not that I have to have a particular identity - but I do feel I have to be out as who I am.

That's not easy. Internalized homophobia is so pernicious. I was absolutely shocked to be reminded of this in a conversation I had at work yesterday, after writing and practically while revising the previous post. As I was talking with two fairly conventional male co-workers, I could see my mind take a sudden swerve to avoid a perfectly natural place to mention gay affiliation. (I won't be more specific because I'm horribly embarrassed and the kinship would suffer - the kin would be hurt - if I was.) What a motherfucker fear of shunning is! Maybe I was more vulnerable to the phobia because I had been thinking about it all morning, but it still was not my shining hour. There's another reason I hesitate to use "we" when I say gay - it's not an essential part of my sanity for me to show queerness in the conventional world - it only feels very urgently to be the right thing to do.

And here we are, where thought and feeling cross. The attractive quality I often see in queer folk, the one that I appreciate in myself, I've always described as thinking things through. I've often thought that every young adult who hasn't had to come out on some basis should be required to take a twelve-step program, whether addicted or not, just to make them, for once, think things through.

Because I think so much about thinking, it was a change of perspective for me to read in Ties That Bind:

The capacity for feeling, strong enough to overwhelm social expectation, is at the root of the homosexual identity. The transgression is what coming-out is all about. Without having experienced the coming-out process themselves, straight people often do not have a model for such a fierce level of resistance.

Feeling, says Schulman, not thought. Not the same as thinking. Something new for me to feel about.

raft

Sarah Schulman is best known for her novels and plays, but also writes provocative non-fiction. I've just read the first chapter of her book Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, and as usual, she has opened up another way of looking at things for me.
She talks about the power of shunning - and it's interesting to put it that way - "the power of shunning" underscores that the power goes to the one who shuns. You can say "the power of love" and "the power of being loved" and both ways power is endowed upon the receiver. In the case of shunning, the power is always on the side of the one who shuns and subtracted from their object.
This, I think, is one reason she puts a great emphasis on third parties taking responsibility for weighing in with the shunned and against the shunning. This goes somewhat against the American grain - why, shouldn't any person be able to stand up and adequately supply her own defense? Well, no. It's exhausting, it can wear you out and kill you, and even if successful, it only helps a few and not many. Schulman believes in the moral responsibility of the crowd, and how it manifests through the actions of individuals. (And I have been seeing more and more clearly that the great - maybe I should say successful - exhorters to individualism and selfishness in our age always seem to have institutional support.)
One particular aspect of shunning that she points out is within isolated and embattled groups, esp gay community and institutions. It can gain you favor with the powerful, to shun in common; it can create your own safer-feeling in-group; you may feel yourself elevated by pushing another down (crabs in a bucket).
I see another example of this going on. The organizers of Toronto's gay pride march have "have forbidden the activist group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA) from marching in the parade under that name." As Sarah has pointed out (I paraphrase), hasn't the gay community experienced enough of cutting people off? More directly, isn't this a case of exerting power through shunning?
Now I read that the Madrid gay pride march organizers are forbidding an Israeli group from marching because the mayor of their home town, Tel Aviv, has not apologized for the raid on the flotilla to break the Gaza blockade.
Let the political terms cancel each other out, and you're left with the power of exclusion. So seductive. Esp, it seems, to those who have been at the mercy of others (much as we may wish that this would increase empathy, not decrease it). It may be part of what keeps the Palestinians and the Israelis at an impasse, both of them having been shunned alternately or simultaneously by their neighbors.

(Disclosure: Sarah and I are neighbors, acquaintances, and somewhere in the vicinity of friendship. I liked her books before I discovered she lived down the block.)

sin

I watched Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist recently. I first saw it at the Uniondale Mini Cinema on Long Island with my boon college companion, Franklin, sometime after its American release in 1971.

I was a little too young and unformed to grasp the film at that time. I suppose the trials of a self-loathing, self-fearing cipher in Fascist Italy were far from the aspirant experience of a post-hippie lamb such as myself.

One scene did stay with me, in which 13-year-old Marcello is seduced away by a chauffeur, taken to an abandoned villa. Once the boy cannot escape, the man takes off his cap to let his long hair fall around his shoulders. It's shocking against the masculine propriety of the chauffeur's uniform.

I don't think I again had such a sense that a movie character was in deep, deep trouble until I saw Blue Velvet, and we met Frank's idol, Ben - Dean Stockwell in face powder, lip-synching "In Dreams." (Face powder figures in the chauffeur's self-image as well, and for song, Madame Butterfly.)

Is it homophobia that makes both these characters so memorable, so dangerous? That's not something I think I'm much prey to. But after all, Marcello is a boy, and Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle Maclachlan's character) is an innocent, already deeply in danger. And exciting as it may be, the first pass a boy experiences from a man carries a charge of peril, no matter if the boy is excited, or queer, or not.

Marcello, who shoots the chauffeur with his own pistol and escapes, grows up terrified that he will be discovered as a murderer. His defense is to fit in, to conform, to become invisible, never to be distinguished from the crowd.

When his society turns murderous, his safest disguise is as a socially approved murderer, unquestionably a creature of his government. He volunteers to spy on and, likely, kill his old philosophy professor, who has escaped to Paris. He'll mask the old crime with a state-sanctioned murder.

The visual scheme of the film is astonishing. If I had a second life and a couple of years put aside, I'd love to do a scene-by-scene breakdown of the movie. For a taste, you can find a dance scene, featuring Marcello alone in a crowd, posted on YouTube.

I also saw something I thought plainly evident in the film, but not acknowledged by the action or the characters, and not referred to by Bertolucci in the DVD interview.

Marcello imagines that his sin was forced upon him by the chauffeur, that all would be different if not for that seducer. The action of the movie supports that belief. He would have been a normal man, a better man, a safer man, if not for that.

But immediately before the chauffeur finds him, we see a crowd of children bullying a boy lying on the ground, who turns out to be Marcello. "Take down his pants" (or something like that), one of them shouts. The children crowd around. Adults, perhaps even parents of some of the bullying children, watch without interfering, reinforcing the sense that there might be something proper in this singling out, this punishment previous to any crime.

I can only think of original sin. Marcello was marked long before his transgression. When he goes to confession (after decades without), the priest tells him, "You, my son, have always lived in sin." Yet this extremely conscious, very visual film doesn't (so far as I can tell) give us a different source for Marcello's actions, in the events of the film and its conclusion, or in his own mind.

It also works to think of Marcello's mark outside of a Catholic context - as a psychological or spiritual flaw sensed by the children and adults - or the kind of need that can draw an attentive child molester. (Marcello's parents are themselves spectacularly flawed.)

Perhaps original sin is so taken as a given by Bertolucci, and by Alberto Moravia, who wrote the book it's based on, that it would have been as gratuitous to point out as breathing or circulating blood. (The book ends differently than the movie, says Bertolucci.)

This sin of omission (if that is what it is) doesn't mar the film. I've given you no spoilers. You can watch it keeping original sin in mind or not, the experience doesn't suffer.

unthinkable

You can bet that right at this moment, as you read this, somebody is being gang-raped, immobilized, electrocuted or beaten for displeasing an armed authority. Probably more than one somebody.
Similarly, right at this moment, a minor child is being beaten, abducted, sold or bullied for the sexual pleasure of an adult, or the accompanying profit. Probably more than one child.
We hate thinking about these things. We hate the idea of them happening to us or somebody we love. We hate the thought that we might be forced to witness an innocent adult or child forced into agony.
As the mind works, picturing and witnessing are not all that far apart.
I think this makes it more difficult for us to keep charities that deal with such things in mind. Acknowledging, picturing, witnessing the terrible - these are more disturbing than feeding, medicating, legislating.
I try to counter this by making The Center for the Victims of Torture and the Somaly Mam Foundation my primary charities. The links in this paragraph go right to donation pages at these sites - you don't have to read details about their work unless you want to.
The CVT operates healing centers in Minneapolis and St. Paul, as well as in Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Jordan. The Somaly Mam Foundation rescues child sex slaves in Cambodia, and offers healing, education and possibilities for the future to them. Somaly Mam herself was sold into servitude and prostitution as a child.
I feel I offer a little healing myself, knowing that someone who has been through hell might feel a little better today because of my contribution, or contemplating a silk bracelet woven by a rescued child.