The word, of course, being “queer.”

I’ve been getting this reaction, or some variation thereof, when discussing idenity politics with folks at Yale. And my response so far has been to try to explain the politics of reclaimation in gltbq communities, and how they might differ from the use of say, racialized language (Hi, Kramer!). I get a little frustrated that there’s still this weird aura around discussion of queer issues, the one that loves to talk about mawwidge equality and how terrible those bigots are, but gets squeamish if the discussion turns to broader topics. I don’t just mean “sex” and i’m a big beleiver that intrusive discussions of sex are not cool. But talking about the other intersections of queerness with political and social life often gives the hint that some of us aren’t in it for the Het Norm, and may not think that state sanction is the be all end all. So what about these identities that don’t map back onto heterized Alisa and Eve or Adam and Steve?*

If you have a problem using the language that I have chosen to use to describe myself, I have a request. Do not erase that choice by using language that I reject. Do not compromise your own conscience.

Repeat after me.

“Name, who self-identifies as queer, whatever you were planning on saying that I hope are nice things that intelligently reflect upon the nature of queer idenity…”**

This places the contest of language back into queer communities, and absolves the speaker of anything beyond the courtesy of describing a person as they have sought to be described. It’s up to us to create Queerdom, since it’s a lovely and fictitious place anyhow. The only real grievance I have here can’t be with the fact that some folks don’t like saying the word queer. It’s a word with plenty of ugly history to it, so I have been deliberate about choosing it despite that. I still twitch at “fag,” and I know plenty of good folks who use that. So the problem came down to feeling like some people were, because of issues of language with varying causes, were simply bypassing the whole deal. It’s their prerogative to determine their relationship with queerdom, the language thereof, and how they fit into the wider picture of how values, cultures and politics get expressed through sexual and gender idenity.

As long as they are calling people by the names that they have chosen.

-sly

* Heterize - Verb. To apply “traditional” standards and mores to queer cultures, and make them “just like us.” Also, the conflation of middle class white values with the “real” nature of homosexuality that emerges as repression recedes. Example: The Party Boy and Butch Dyke are both stereotypes that scare Het Folks into giving queer people rights in the hope that they will heterize themselves.

** This generally doesn’t work for personal pronouns. Verbally marking them off tends to be the linguistic version of airquotes in that situation. Reserve this for language that you have a problem with as a whole, not just applying to an individual. I’m willing to bet you say “she” or “his” all the time.

Note: The following contains a discussion of white guilt. This is not meant to be a pity fest or a cue for reassurance. I’m trying to, as the title implies, disarm that guilt and start moving forward again.

I mentioned in my last post that I’d made a less than brilliant choice of walking to the subway the last time i was in New York. The story is as follows.

My friend lives pretty far uptown on the east side, and so I needed to get from the Metro-North station at 125 all the way over to the 1 line. Now, it happens (and i suspect this is not in fact a coincidence) that there is not a good way to take the subway cross town that far up. So waiting for the M60, I realize that I don’t know the schedule, and it may not even be running this late. I have no idea where the 101 goes. Feck. I start walking.

Seven blocks in or so, everything is going to plan. People in NYC don’t want anything to do with you. They’d much rather move to the other side of the sidewalk, and just keep moving. The fundamental rule of social compact is not based on interaction, but rather neutral neglect. So when i see a guy walking right towards me, I know something is wrong. As he passes, I keep moving to the left, but he corrects. Slamming his bagged bottle into my right arm then letting it fall to the pavement with a sickening crash, he turns and begins a confrontation.

This is the point at which my heart rate is up, and I begin to realize that I may have done something really, really stupid.

Two guys walking even with me turn just a little and tell me very clearly: “Keep on walking. Just keep walking.” I start to take this advice, but I can hear the man closing in from behind. I’m carrying my backpack, and let’s just say this. I’d tip over pretty easily if i wasn’t ready.

I turn, still walking backwards to keep pace with the two guys who seemed like they might help. The argument that follows is kind of a blur. Something about last bottle, 8 bucks, and a whole lot of angry.

After the other guys say something about it not being my problem, and I repeat an apology without offering any money, he starts to slow. I turn and speed up. I face my helpers for a moment, and feeling infinitely awkward for involving them in a scene they had no interest in being a part of, I say thank you, and walk away quickly.

Enter white guilt. In the rest of the long and chilly walk, I had plenty of time to think. I wondered if I could even remember any of this right. If i saw pictures, could i have picked out the angry drunk guy from the men who helped me? Or had they all been subsumed into a larger cultural image of the threatening black man? Why had I been scared of this walk in the first place? 75 blocks south, would I have even thought about it? Hadn’t humanity actually come through this time? Why was I still shaking? What made me think of this one person as a threat, when the white power that I daily participate in is far more menacing to his existence than he was to mine?

I came back to Yale, and we talked about Malcolm X. As I had been reading, I kept cheering along. It was about time to shake things up, and be decisive, even at the cost of civility.As we talked, I got a ill feeling. In many ways, I’m still an institutional man.

I talked with one of my friends, and we wondered about how we were going to deal with all of this as we try to be white allies in anti-racist work. We agreed on needing a space for us to start defusing some of these issues, emotions, and problems. If the broader conversation is going to keep moving, we need to disarm ourselves before we join. White guilt can be toxic, shutting down discussion, reorienting the space on to white concerns again.

However far I’ve come, I still have my fair share of demons. And they need to go.

Yours in contrition,

-sly civilian

Y’all take a chill. You got to cool that shit off. And that’s the double-truth.

Mister Senior Love Daddy has it right. Y’all take a chill.

Ann Bartow is now threatening lawsuits to shut up Zuzu. If you care about the conversation in the lefty blogosphere, and think that people have a right to protect their idenity so that they can speak freely, get over there and show some love.

I’m shaking angry about this shit. There are a good number of us out there who don’t have tenure, who depend on the conceit of plausible deniability to keep our views out there. I know you can figure me out from this blog, and I’m pretty sure that several folks already have. I’ve had communication from faculty members here that strongly suggest that they believe I’m responsible for this blog. And as long as that dance keeps going, and nobody puts my name in stone next to this blog, I can distance myself if i have to. If i was putting out pro-establishment stuff, I’d have no reason to care. But I don’t. I work out my anger, my disagreement, my challenge to the institutions in these pages. And if you think that those challenges are worth making, if they have a space in the public discourse, you need to respect the right of people to protect themselves so that they can withstand the social, cultural, economic, and political fallout of opposing the status quo. I don’t know about everybody else, but if i had the choice, I’d blog under my own name. I’ve long told myself that the day I get tenure, I’ll start posting my name here. Anonymity is not priviledge, it is the inverse.

As I’ve said before…I don’t give up my name because I’m ashamed of what I say. I do it because the way the system works, I have to choose between having a face and having a voice.

Always do the right thing,

-sly

Edit: Follow up here.

Go read this book. Really. All the cool kids are, and I’ll tell you why.

Our very own Jay Sennett has put together an awesome anthology of reflective work on the nature of idenity, masculinity, change, love, and the human condition writ particular.

I’m still working my way through it, but I wanted to pause and write a little. I figured Jay ought to know that I actually started reading, in the hallowed halls of Yale no less.

So after reading these stories, the thing that struck me the most was when i caught myself casually applying a shiny yellow phallus to my body, not even thinking about it. A look in the mirror brought me back to the reality that everything I had done that morning had radically changed my gendered presentation, and i’d barely spent a moment since waking up not manufacturing my masculinity. And just hanging down the entire length of my chest is this metaphor, this dick.

The yellow tie that has to perfectly related to my waistline, the pants that sit just so and change how i connect to the ground, the collared Brooks Brother’s shirt that draws a new shape of my torso and brings the eye upwards, the padded shoulders in my jacket, the extra half inch in my dress shoes, the part of the hair i have, the absence of the hair i take off my face, the way my glasses frame my face…

The possibility that opens up in these narratives for me is the idea of self-organization. I was organized into a man before I ever thought about it. My entire upbringing, cultural location, and experience produced a man. But what is the relationship between the man I’ve been made to be, the man I’ve been making myself to be, and the one that I want to be? This is where this book has been a really amazing read, one that has given me a lot to be excited about.

These men aren’t going to do my work for me, they aren’t genderfucking the rest of us out of our problems, but they have given us an interesting challenge. What would it mean to be self-organized?

What would it mean to choose our masculinity? What would it mean to be responsible for it?

-sly

A long overdue post, and one I’ve been thinking about for some time.

I’ve looked at appropriation from the other side in this space, showing how the removal and recontextualization of marginalized cultures is part and parcel of imperialism. But I haven’t talked about my people. And as Max Julian puts it, white folk are used to treating other cultures like a damn shopping mall. Where does this stop? Where do we recognize our own Whitenesses (how the hellass do you pluralize Whiteness, but it’s gotta be plural because the whole idea that we’re all the same contributes to the notion of Whiteness as gap or lack that must be filled in with the interesting “other”?) as a source of idenity?

I can’t recall when I first blogged this idea, but a while back, I suggested that White Americans probably have more of a chance of meaningfully connecting with a regional culture than they do with an ancestoral one. We’re likely to be mutts, and depending on when we came over…often long removed from “authentic” immigrant experience. In my case, I’m actually not that far removed on one side (German immigrants to Southern Minnesota), but on the other side…let’s say my sister was eligable for the DAR.

There is some difficulty in remembering such history, although it is certainly worth the effort. One obstacle is the tendancy to family hagiography, and the self-serving family trees that have been created. To be honest, I have very little clue about my heritage going back more than a few generations before it devolves into “we must all be related to someone famous.” Possible entries include Jefferson Davis (Yuck!) and Sam Adams (Hooray Beer!).

But my people…the ones whom I am most ethnically linked? Minnesotans. A strange amalgam of immigrant cultures and historical influences, Minnesota has a distinct culture not only when compared to other regions, but even within the Midwest. This brief series is intended as my love for my cultural heritage, a love both critical and kind. There is much to know about the history of White idenity here, and I’m only going to scratch the surface.

The first thing that I will have you know is that we do not all talk like Fargo. Seriously. Discussing accent is a tricky subject here, and so I’m going to be direct about my position here. I have a light accent, one that is not easily read as Minnesotan. With long “a” sounds and a few regionalisms, I am pointed as Midwestern, but I have never felt that my dialect has been an obstacle, but rather a source of priviledge. So it is somewhat impolitic for me to discuss this with you all, so I will be careful. Raised in the metro area (as opposed to the rural “outstate” or “Greater Minnesota,” I’m an outsider to much of this.

To wit, I hear a prof at Yale (from Texas, but with roots in Wisconsin) make a joke about Minnesota. I realize a few things. I “let” her make the joke because I realize that from the perspective of Yale, she’s a practical insider. I wouldn’t be okay with the same joke if we were here. And I couldn’t tell the same joke (much less be the arbiter of if it was okay or not) if I were in outstate Minnesota. With grain of salt thus in place…

What many people do not initially realize is that we don’t even all talk the same. The “from the city” and “from outstate” difference is first to be noted. The northern outstate/southern outstate difference takes a little more time. Even one of the better done Minnesota movies (North Country) flubbed this a couple times. The North is historically Scandanavian, the South is primarily German. The accents are accordingly distributed. Rural southern accents are a little more gutteral with some loan words from German (although much of this was intentionally suppressed during the Wars.) With strong history of Bund activity, there is fairly visable connections to German culture. The beer is damn good.

Up North, you’re much more likely to hear loan words and adapted Finnish, Swedish, or Norwegian. Again, this all depends on location, as these immigrations happened in waves. Initially quite distinct and avoidant, these nationalities have now largely been combined into a Pan-Scandanavian idenity, though families tend to know and have pride in their specific national ancestory. The rivalry is now quite friendly and through intermarriage less salient, where as previously it had a lot to do with competition for land and resources. If you’ve heard lutefisk jokes, this is where they come from. Don’t be mistaken, as the food is actually quite good. I might pass on the lutefisk, but never miss an opportunity to have krumkake.

Happily, Minnesota does seem to be somewhat aware of these cultural resources as legitimate sources of idenity. Through our anthropologist in cheif, Garrison Keillor, who does half-send up and half-tribute to our state, we seem to have at least a baseline level consciousness that other people recognize us as distinct, as in “You’re from that place, Lake Wobegon, right?”

Yet, the number of people here who speak their ancestoral language is falling, and it is often difficult to connect the kitchy and vaguely empty reproductions to the real thing. Where does that leave an aspiring anti-racist examining and rediscovering his culture?

Part 2 will survey the history of the state, with special attention to white forgetting of conflicts with the First Peoples of the region. If I can get some resources together, I’ll make a separate entry about the destruction of Rondo.

Part 3 will be a look at urban Minnesota, and the development of the Twin Cities. With a whole lot of material (this is my home turf), I’ll try to talk about the historical differences as well as that which makes them “not just another town.”

Part 4 will examine contemporary productions of Minnesotan culture, and look at the resources available for idenity construction. Is regionalism a healthy option?

I’ll intersperse these with my regular blogging, so expect these entries to come over the next few weeks. I’ll try to finish them before I get back to Yale and homesickness completely clouds my judgement.

-sly

What’s that you say? Sly, wearing a…ring?

As we’ve long known, rings are culturally significant gifts. But as we’ve also known, Sly is one to play with the significance of such items. For instance, my faux-engagement for a few months last summer. Serious.

This one is a little more conventional, though the partner and I have no plans of marriage or anything. For starters, it’s illegal in this state, and the real important part is that we’ve been together much too short a time to consider it. But as i type, the claddagh flashes back at me, turned with the heart in and the crown out. I’m owned.

But is it read that way? I go shopping this morning, and I’m a single man walking around with a ring. I’m much more likely read as an owner than anything else. Out of the context of seeing the both of us, a ringed man is identified as a woman owner. And what is it that the partner and I intend? He says that he wants it to be something of his (he used to wear it) to remember him by. Is that how I read my use of this?

As I mentioned, last summer, I gave an “engagement” ring to a friend…and we played with the idea that a man and woman are automatically together if they spend enough time together. It had an odd history, marking both our agreement to perform this kind of burlesque of the normative hetero pairing…and by later absence, our eventual falling out.

Now, I look at this decidedly less ironic piece of jewelry…

What exactly are my investments in these ideas? Am I really pushing back? Or did I just sell out?

-sly

In which I shamefully steal borrow Isaac Asimov’s title.

In this book, Asimov discusses the nature of knowledge and the unfortunate binary nature of our understandings. To a skeptical English student, he explains that the revision of science is not uncertainty, but the revision and improvement of knowledge. Heliocentric orbits are a better understanding than Earth centered ones, but are further improved by knowing that the orbits are ellipses, and even further improved by knowing that the sun is not the center of the universe. Revision is not the destruction of the former, because not all answers are equally wrong. His example (paraphrased here from memory) is a young girl asked to spell “Sugar” for a test.

The are several options. Sugar, sucrose, C6H12O6, shugar, and xhjkly.

Which one is correct? Spelling is almost never graded on a sliding scale, and so like many of our ideas and formulations of knowledge, they get evaluated in right/wrong and good/evil terms. Yet, surely some of these responses display more/different knowledge about sugar than others. Is chemical formula better than phonetic spelling? For whom, under what circumstances?

Thus enter, transphobia and “The Transsexual Empire.”

I’ve been reading Sandy Stone’s rejoinder, “The Empire Strikes Back,” which a really super fabulous blog linked to a little while back. It was either Jay, or B|L, or Piny, or oh, I feel terrible but my memory is like a steel sieve sometimes. Sorry. Feel free to claim credit if it was you.

The point is that Sandy gets to a critical point here, when discussing the narratives of transpeople in the early days of the movement:

No wonder feminist theorists have been suspicious. Hell, I’m suspicious….Besides the obvious complicity of these accounts in a Western white male definition of performances gender, the authors also reinforce a binary, oppositional mode of gender identification. They go from being unambiguous men, albeit unhappy men, to unambiguous women. There is no territory between.

Yet this statement occurs in a work that is deeply affirmative, and explores the consequences of categorizing what the “correct” response to “gender dysphoria” is. Hint, it involves a lot of people telling shrinks the same story because it’s the one that the medical establishment wants to hear. The construction of lives, especially these lives, occurs under the gaze of power. Stone examines critically, but remains committed to finding truth in trans narratives. Not as some deep artifact beneath socialization, but in the trace of the continued negotiation and contestation of gender and sex through embodiment.

Which is why I bring up the relativity of wrong. Because it’s precisely what’s going on in Stone’s work. Without getting into the boogy-person of false consciousness, we can play attention to the cultural frameworks that surround the process of identity construction/maintenance. Given limited choices, these women chose identities that depended on extremely “femme” conventions and ideas of binaried gender. To wit:

Hedy Jo Star, who was a professional stripper, says in I Changed My Sex!: “I wanted the sensual feel of lingerie against my skin, I wanted to brighten my face with cosmetics. I wanted a strong man to protect me.”

To which we can rightly express some concern in terms of this narrative confirming and conforming to sexist notions of women’s identity. But Stone’s project is not to debunk Star’s idea of her life. It is rather to show the conditions, which are still not completely met, under which women have the actual freedom to construct identities that are liberating for themselves and others. We should not doubt that for Star, being a woman as she understood it was a better answer for her than being a man in that culture. Revision as improvement and not erasure is possible…but we have to be willing to see promise in the imperfect.

-sly

I was really hoping to slide by without a real post for a while, but since my piece didn’t get picked up for Carnival of the Liberals (you should still really go see the stuff that did make it…), I actually have to write.

Damn.

Last couple days have been very hectic in a brainless sort of way (i’m writing this in two minute chunks as i do stuff around the house)…but i actually had some downtime this morning, and so as is my custom in waiting rooms, i read some po-co theory.

I’m working (very slowly) through Bhabha’s location of culture, as the blog title and nom de plume might suggest. And i’m trying to figure out my relationship with sly civility, especially as it relates to the culture of Yale Divinity. How much to I invest myself as a person who identifies with that school? In opposition to it?

There aren’t easy answers to this, obviously. But my thoughts so far. One of the things that underlies colonial (broadly defined) discourses is a narcissistic demand for love. As BelleDame discusses here (the comments are interesting, too), one of the ways that patriarchy expresses itself is by the unconditionality of affection which it idealizes in mothers and wives. I still register complaint on the term “mama’s boy” as used in the comments, as the production of the male demand for affection isn’t about bad/over/under loving a son by the mother, but the entire frame of cultural discourse. But I think this is overall, very accurate. The English/European?Western demands not just an obedient subject, but a grateful one as well. It is not enough that the Dobsons of the world insist that we be straight, we must affirm their vision of America as well. Bhabha puts it thus:

The Authoritarian demand can now only be justified if it is contain in the language of paranoia. The refusal to return and restore the image of authority to the eye of power has to be reinscribed as implacable aggression…coming from without: He hates me. …The frustrated wish ‘I want him to love me.’ turns into its opposite ‘I hate him’ and this through projection and the exclusion of the first person, ‘He hates me.’ (Location of Culture. 141)

What does this mean for a Yalie? The institution, like all others, relies continual assent, affirmation, and legitimization. To be opaque to the institution, to be in someway unreadable or resistant to its gaze, is to have the delusion of love go sour, as the selection describes.

Yet this is precisely what I’m planning on. YDS has a lot of institutional choices in front of it. Admissions, faculty selection, communication and decision making…all are up for grabs, and all of them have a say in how this school is structured. The problem is that I, and other students, have a different truth than the school does. The cultural momentum of YDS is the use of a certain language; of function and signification. Power is structured and expressed within that language. For instance, use of gender inclusive language is a “sign” of being in the progressive wing of the school. Using “he” and “him” marks you as participating in the conservative wing. Because gender inclusive terms are mandated, attendance of chapel services is usually self-restricted to mainline/liberal types. We had a service a while ago, blogged by the sponsoring prof here, that raised questions for me.

Using the litany of “male and female” from Genesis, the students who wrote the service affirmed sexuality as part of Creation. As is true of most Marquand services, it was reflective of (and included participation of) queer persons. But all of this is cis-gendered and binary.

So when I say to this school, that I had a problem with that worship service, and that it made me profoundly uncomfortable…they don’t much know what to do with that. Opposing “gender inclusive language” is a conservative trait. Because the school is “progressive” there is no legitimate “left” left after the school makes it’s stance.

I’ve removed the middle term of the equation, where YDS makes it’s definitional authority known, and sets the terms of debate. I give my unqualified answer to the questions of this instution, but without the “syntagmatic supports, codes, connotations, and cultural supports” there is a profound gap of meaning. The disorder of my speech is risky, and the chaotic nature of cultural negotiation may mean that the school will reassert it’s defintional authority over my words despite resistance, and react in ways that are harmful or counterproductive.

But I cannot just start speaking YDSese without cost. The structure of gender and orientation…not to mention, race, class, and a whole slew of other factors…is poorly concieved on an institutional level. I want to be very clear about that last part, as there are certain individuals who are exceptions and speak with great brilliance on such matters. Their alliance, example, and action are critical for me and my understanding of this situation. For instance, and restricting my commentary to senior faculty for the moment…the problem is obviously not with Emilie Townes. It’s in a school that spoken or unspoken, considers the hire of a high profile Womanist scholar active in queer issues as hitting the Marginal Trifecta of race, gender, and orientation…and thus relieving the school of taking further action when it comes to faculty diversity. It is my experience that individual cases of resistance and complication do not dismantle the system that selectively empowers them as exceptions, even if they are powerful and eloquent. But the talking point of many of the old alums is that “faculty just aren’t being choosen right,” and that the “idenity of the school is in trouble.” As a sly civilian in the face of power I say: “True!” But I have a completely different set of ideologies behind that.

When I speak my displeasure about hiring practices, gender language, and the state of the school…I seem to be confusing many people. I am not trying to decieve them, I simply do not share their assumptions and reference points. The words and conceptual vocabulary i use are oriented in a different way, turned away from the dominant discourse of Yale. It is no lie, but I am telling another truth. Am I becoming opaque and unreadable? Does resistance cloak my idenity and speech, leaving a screen on which power projects it’s unmet demand of love?

It is a hard demand to resist. I am here. I am a student who choses to submit to the academic discipline of religious studies at Yale. I owe much of my ability to write, think, and produce cultural commentary like this to the education of Yale and my undergraduate institution. But when the demand for love requires that I destablize and elide my own idenity…what breaks?

-sly

If you can’t catch it from the title…this is about sex, consent, tricky issues, and the like.

If this seems like too much information, not your cup of tea, or might be triggering…feel more than free to find other reading material.

A little while ago, I was reading Corinne’s piece on sexual assault awareness

And I got caught at this quote.

Power and sex cannot be disentangled, and there is so much grey area. Consent is active, it is not silence or doubt, it is the screamed, whispered, and winked yes. It is not saying yes through gritted teeth after saying no seventeen times. …So take back the night, the day, the walk home, the lover’s embrace, and your own ability to say “yes” and “no”. (emphasis added)

Consent is not doubt.

It’s not? It’s not! It’s not…

Rewind some years. I’m talking to the then ex-to-be…and we’re going over everything, in a way that only people falling for each other can do. Every detail of our attraction, our doubts, our fears, our feelings…everything is going back and forth. It hasn’t always been this way. A half an hour before, I was not very talkative. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be saying. I wasn’t at all comfortable talking about the fact that I was seriously attracted to her, and even less so about the fact that she for some odd reason seemed to be in to me.

“What does your head say?”

I could answer that easily.

“What does your heart say?”

Little trickier.

“What does your body say?”

I almost didn’t answer, so I answered very quickly, blurting my response before i could think better of it.

And we went back and forth, repeating our litany of desire to each other.

I had inherited, and then created for myself a view of sex that was predicated on self-righteousness and whole lot of fear. Babies and social diseases went hand in hand, the enforcers of nature, crashing down on unsuspecting libertines. But in the trance of that conversation, these phobias began their slow dissapation. There was no lightning bolt, no sudden awakening. Just new thoughts starting to take root. She can be extremely persuasive when she wants to be, and that kept me from even starting in on anything I might have previously said.

When we finally got time and space to ourselves…I think I knew what was going to happen.

Ready was a different matter. I said some no’s. And I said yes, too. I wasn’t afraid…well, actually I was. Afraid of my own insufficiency, afraid of being alone, afraid I would mess this up. I certainly wasn’t afraid of her…

I doubted. About if I was going to be rejected if I said no…if I would ever get another chance. I doubted if I was ready. I doubted about a lot of things.

The details are hers and mine alone, and so I’m leaving them out. For our story, we need only note that I was left with a lot of questions. I enjoyed myself, even when I thought I wouldn’t. It was awkward. I wasn’t sure I was good enough to her, especially when she was more experienced than I was. Had I wanted that all to happen? Did that matter?

We read the newspaper together the next morning, like an old married couple. And somewhere in that, we kissed…trading a chocolate mint back and forth…and all of that doubt dissapeared. She was still in to me. And she was going to be patient. And I found great comfort and meaning in being in her life. To this day, this is one of my sweetest memories.

Unfortunatly, this was all very short lived. Breakups happen, messy ones take effort. And as I worked very slowly to untangle our lives that had stuck together in such a short amount of time…

The doubts started coming back. Did my consent mean anything if I didn’t know what i was consenting to? How does anyone agree to something for the first time? Would she have really stopped? Hadn’t I said no? And wasn’t the worst of it that I agreed only because I was afraid of rejection?

Three years on…I have a different perspective. I thought what I needed to think then to pull ourselves apart. I was still in the middle of my fear of sex, even if she had broken it’s total hold on me. I was still very unsure of my idenity. I hadn’t yet made meaningful progress in interrupting my own participation in racism, something that haunted the edges of our time together. Simply…I had a lot of growing up to do.

Three years on, I can see more clearly all the issues that danced around me, and the ones that followed her…and I can analyze why things were tricky. But once again, I’m letting go of that doubt. I’m going back to that morning. I had taken the outcome, and used the trust i had built in that moment cover, repair, and re-signify what had happened to get me there.

And I want to do that again. I stand now, and say yes to all those memories. That night, the morning, the breakup, the good, and the bad and everything since. And I’m not just saying this because it is. I’m saying, choosing “yes” to the history we’ve written already. And I’m saying yes to the history we’re writing now. My yes is my trust of who she is, who I am, and the who we were/are together.

This entry is dedicated to someone who knows who she is, in more ways than one…who will always be crazy, sexy, cool…

nostalgically yours,

-sly

Thinking about Greeks? Hopefully you won’t, after reading today.

It’s often claimed, with some truth, but way too much oversimplification, that Greeks didn’t have homophobia, or that it was good to be queer back then.

A sizable number of people will fire back, that’s only if you’re the one doing the penetrating because they get peceived as men, not women. There’s no such thing as ancient homosexuality.

And that’s much closer.

Why? There’s no separation of gender via sex. You can’t have hetero vs homo because everything is between one ontological sex. Your gender is a social position, not a body type.

It’s like this. It’s a contiuum thing.

At one is Male Citizen Elites (think Ceasar, Senators, landowners and friends). They penetrate. Militarily, socially, sexually. They have fun going to brothels and leaving lots of grafitti about how good in bed they are, and that their rivals are cocksuckers. According to the medical anthropology of the day, they are cool, hard, rational, self-governed, and are paying attention to their pnuema (spirit, head, heart) and not their koilia (gentials, belly, desire). Terms vary slightly if your a stoic or a neo-platonist, but it’s basically congruent.

Under them are pre-male, pre-citizen, pre-elites. The boys of the above group. they’re almost men, but not yet. They might form into the cool, firm, self-regulated bodies of their fathers, but only if done carefully. They exersize, they learn (the right stuff, and not wussy, inferior, or emotional stuff), form their voices to sound confident and Male, and do all sorts of self-formation to turn them into men. Because they aren’t, but they could be. It’s hard for the modern observer to get the full ramificiations of this all, but they really aren’t ontologically men yet. They are on a process of formation that will lead them to becoming men. And it’s not just in their heads or about the right thoughts. Everything (physical and mental) that they do affects the form and substance of their body. For the Greeks, this meant nurturing the boy in to adulthood, often by sexual contact. Teachers would have the boys press their legs together, and have intercourse that way. Actual penetration was a bit taboo. For the Romans, this is gross. Being penetrated or even thighfucked can turn a Roman boy into a girl. And it turns the man into a woman, because he’s ruled by his desire, which is of course, feminized.

Quick digression in to Pauline Christianity. Paul says that before faith, they were “imprisoned under the law.” That according to the NRSV and many other translations. Not correct. The law was a “pedagogue” not a jailer. A pedagogue is a slave that teaches high status boys, and is assigned to protect them from strangers kidnapping them and fucking them and thus turning them into women. Off the topic, but it makes the point.

Under them, slaves, women. There’s some weird intersectionality, and so Elite Rich woman might be over some male slaves, but under others.

They’re down here precisely because they don’t have control over their bodies. They are skoas. Vessels or buckets. Recepticals for desire. Males take their desire built up in their koilia, and dump it into a slave or woman, because she’s already been made soft, pentratable, warm, and silly by desire anyways. Their idenity is that they’re fuckable.

So slaves don’t have a gender, they have a status as penetrated. Again, it’s helpful to go to Paul. He warns men not to go after prostitutes and throws a hairy fit about it in 1 cor 5. But shortly thereafter, he tells slaves to stay quiet. How is this connected? Those slaves (male and female) are being used and raped all the time. If they try to stand up for the “moral life” of the community, they get killed. So Paul exempts them from this teaching on desire, so they won’t get killed for refusing to get raped. Ugly, for sure. Practical, maybe.

So yes, there is some of what we would call homosexuality in the Greco-Roman worlds. And some of them (Greeks especially) think it’s a pretty good idea. But it’s a mistake to say they weren’t homophobic, they couldn’t have been like we are. We have a totally different knowledge/construction of what gender and sex are. But the constant factor is that penetrated parties have less control, status, consent, or voice. Women or softmen (a likely neologism of Paul’s that describes bottoms) aren’t Citizens, and they sure aren’t treated like it.

i hope this has been a constructive, if depressing, walk through history.

-sly