It Gets Better!

In 2005, Time magazine published a wonderful article entitled "The Battle Over Gay Teens" (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1112856,00.html). I found it illuminating at the time as I wandered in an ether of uncertainty, beginning to realize the tangibility of my sexuality, no longer a far-off abstraction that couldn't possibly apply to me.

Funny, perhaps tangential anecdote: the first day of sophomore year, I had Geometry class second period and my teacher was talking about planes. He said "the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plane" and then looked directly at me and said, "Hayden, do you know what movie that's from?" Being the culturally-literate person that I am, I didn't want to disappoint, but I really didn't know! Don't ask how I got to age 15 without seeing My Fair Lady, but it happened. (Truth is, I still haven't seen it, which I suppose, to someone, means I'm not really gay.) But I remember the sense of dread that I felt, not only because I didn't know the answer, but because knowing the answer might make me gay. The logic isn't there, but when you are on the verge of coming out, every gesture and action is scrutinized as something that might out you, something that might make you "too gay" and therefore unacceptable to others.

But I think there is a tendency to be self-congratulatory about sexuality. The article concluded that fewer gay children are growing up less traumatized than past generations. Truth. And who couldn't be happy about the recent legislative success in New York? Meanwhile, media depictions of the Westboro Baptist Church (whose politics I despise, so please don't mistake me) or really anything in Tennessee make people who espouse "anti-gay" views into Neanderthals. But even as queerness becomes more "mainstream" and gay people progressively gain rights, there is still plenty of internal suffering. The existence of a stronger, more visible community does not preclude the personal anguish that exists. The suicide of Tyler Clementi is the only necessary evidence.

But it gets better and not just because there's a super cool project that says so (http://www.itgetsbetter.org/). It gets better because we can laugh at silly stuff like not wanting to say something that might out you, like not wanting to wear something because it gives off the wrong perception. It gets better because you realize you can choose how out you want to be. It gets better because, while your sexuality might be the most complicated part of you, it's not the biggest part of you. Once realized, sexuality is subsumed by the whole. You are you.

We All Have Things to Learn

I went to the Portland Pride Festival today. It is my third year in attendance and, as usual, I was accompanied my one of my fruit-flies (female friends who are magnets for gay men). We watched a great parade, ended up holding the flag and marching when it seemed like there weren't enough people, and walked around procuring free stuff. I'm torn between my favorite freebie: the small condom case (condom included) that attaches to your key chain or the carabiner with a measuring tape inside.

A recent Facebook status by one of my friends reminded me that not everyone likes Pride. Indeed, I use to hate the idea of Pride. I thought that it gave people an excuse to act "super gay," that we don't need cordoned-off days or weeks to celebrate different groups (in fact, I still feel that the biggest flaw in celebrating certain demographics allows us to forget them the rest of the year), and that there was little substantive value in Pride. My friend believes that Pride diminishes (or does not celebrate) monogamous, long-term relationships, but rather glorifies partying and ultimately ends up having a negative effect on the perception of gay culture.

I might tend to agree with this perception if I hadn't seen so many gay couples and their children at Pride today. As for the people who are "super gay" (by that, I think he means drag queens and flamboyant individuals), the negative perception of them comes from people who don't understand them or don't want to understand them. For a long time, I didn't understand them. I also didn't understand people of ambiguous gender identity, queer identity (I didn't know anything outside of gay or lesbian until early in my college career), and the rampant discrimination against queer people that takes place on a daily basis. I was just a white kid from suburbia who had grown up going to Catholic school and church his whole life and only new that he gay and very little outside of that. But we're all learning, all the time and I am proud to say that by getting to know the diverse people who attend Pride, I have a better understanding of myself and one of the communities to which I belong.

Pride does some things really well and I want to talk about those:
It brings together people of different religions, races, genders, and socio-economic backgrounds. It reminds us we co-exist along queer people everyday; they work in grocery stores, banks, auto dealerships, hospitals, etc. We are reminded that our sexuality, the most complicated part of an individual, can exist in tandem with a "normal" or "average" person; it undercuts the idea of queerness as deviance. As much as Pride may be a salute to a counterculture, it also illustrates the way in which queerness has become integrated into our culture without assimilating.

Camille Paglia has observed that the rainbow flag with its strict geometric lines does not speak to the broad melange of people who identify as queer in some way. It's true. That is the one thing I would change about Pride; let all the colors blur and blend the way the people at Pride do.

Howl & Some Thoughts on the Writing Process

I just finished two films about writers: Howl (2010) and Sylvia (2003). The first features James Franco, Jon Hamm (of Mad Men fame), and David Strathairn (of Good Night and Good Luck). James Franco plays the famous Allen Ginsburg and the movie cuts between an interview, an obscenity trial (Ginsburg was not on trial, but his publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, another poet as well, was), Ginsburg reading his epic in a smoky bar, and animations drawn from the poem. The second features Gwyneth Paltrow as the tragic Sylvia Plath and Daniel Craig (of James Bond fame) as her unfaithful husband, Ted Hughes.

I enjoyed both films in their own way. Howl, I think, was a selfish film in that it seemed to be more about the artfulness of it all, and thus about James Franco's ability to make film. If I didn't know anything about Franco and his pursuit of MFAs and PhDs as well as his Museum of Non-Visible Art (don't ask), I probably wouldn't have been as irritated. But all I could think about through the entire film was how much was trying to be done: a portrayal of Ginsburg as the writer, a historic account of puritanical 50s America, and a feat of animation in which poetry literally becomes imagery. There was so much going on; the movie became a portfolio to Franco saying 'look at all the different things I can do, I'm an artist not just some one-dimensional man, some actor.' Perhaps most frustrating was Franco as Ginsburg hammering out line after line of "Howl" with ease at the typewriter, vomiting up lines thick with metaphor with ease. It simply is not how writers, even great ones like Ginsburg, write or wrote.

Sylvia, by contrast, nailed the writing process. We see both Plath and Hughes hunched over at their dimly lit desks at night, grabbing their hair in frustration, thesauruses thrown open, searching for the right word. Hughes might find some inspiration from his bike rides, but he doesn't compose great work unlike Franco's Ginsburg who, with what seems like a few short wandering around Brooklyn (though admittedly there is greater depth to the plot), wrote "Howl." Plath as well slaves away, slogging through the crap to get to the good stuff all while raising children. We can't help but be impressed by the accuracy of the writing process, appreciate how much Plath's and Hughes's struggle for great writing (and greatness) mirrors our own.

New Beginnings

When I created and began writing my first blog, it was about politics with a tendency toward American foreign policy. That was two years ago. I found myself becoming disenfranchised or simply disinterested with politics. I realized that I can like foreign policy without making it what defines me. Since then, it's been a gradual epiphany toward recognizing the value in loving art, history, literary studies, Native America(ns), poetry, anthropology, and generally whatever fancies me. A professor once told me that people who I believe in interdisciplinarity (mind you, I don't know if I am one of those people or I'm just doing what I want because it pleases me and I want to be a well-rounded individual) rarely ever touch the surface of anything or make any significant strides in modes of thinking. I'm not out to make this blog my rebuttal to her myopic statement; I want this newborn thing to be beautiful and for me as well as for other readers.


So here goes:
I'm reading an article by Louis Menand that appeared in The New Yorker last week (this week's issue is the summer fiction issue and it features a story by Lauren Groff who went to UDub-Madison with a friend of mine, Jacques Rancourt. I will link to both of them soon. Here's the link to Menand: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand) and he's talking about the value of college. He points to the higher income of people with a bachelor's degree: $83,000 versus someone with a high school education, who on average makes $31,000. Menand seems to be making a big leap from the "value" of education to income; though I don't doubt that a college education is beneficial (how can I?), I think I'd rather have little to no debt and make $30,000 than have a quarter of a million dollars (or more! the thought makes me nauseous) and make $80-85,000. Perhaps this is naivete, but the idea of debt makes me incredibly unhappy and I think I'd rather have to worry about living on/with less than worry about vast amounts of debt. It also bothers me than the inflationary status of higher education is normalizing the idea of debt, especially long-term debt. When 22% of awarded degrees are going to business students, the thought of debt seems to parallel the way we treat our environment and economy: it's okay to use up natural resources now, we'll figure it out later; it's okay to speculate on housing and the value of "derivatives" and other forms of non-existent money, we'll figure it out later; it's okay to spend piles of money on my undergraduate degree, I'll pay it back later, it will all work out. That philosophy of "we'll figure it out later" distresses me personally, but it correlates to the way we behave and suggests that we need to start changing the way we think about the "value" of things.