Promiscuous

1. If a young man is promiscuous, we say he is sowing his oats; if a young woman is promiscuous, we say she is a slut; if a homosexual of any age if promiscuous, we say he is a neurotic example of low self-esteem.

3. A person who is promiscuous professionally is a prostitute. Most people who are promiscuous would be shocked if you called them a prostitute, however, because they do not think of themselves that way, simply because they do not charge money.

— Andrew Holleran, "Notes on Promiscuity"

La Vickstrix and Ms. Clinique crash landed on my garret last Saturday night for Cold City Pride, toting at least one roll-aboard and several discreet bags for one night’s stay (La Vicks brought her computer, under the silly misapprehension that she would actually get work done). Honey, what is a girl without her potions and lotions? We went out to a very civilised and expensive sushi dinner with La Nena, a friend and colleague of Mr. Gordo, who works at Cold City Museum. While she made eyes at some blond hunk-ette, the boys, er, girls, dived into the unagi like there was no tomorrow, a lesson learned from Mr. Gordo and his large family— you eat quick or you starve. Once, in Caracas at a family dinner, I watched in dismay as the fried plantain plate was passed in the wrong direction (e.g. not in my direction) and by the time it arrived chez Moi it was, needless to say, empty. La Nena may have missed out on the barbecued eel, but she made it up for it by eating Mr. Blond Hunk-ette— with her eyes! I preferred the unagi, personally.

44. The third law of promiscuous physics is: The thousandth trick is not what the first one was.

After dropping La Nena off chez Elle, we ventured downtown to the local Bear lair for their Pride party, which of course was a crush. Prancilla was there, as well as some students (!), a couple of staff from Cold City U., and other assorted gay varieties from the hinterlands and Cold City itself. The designated driver, I mostly observed as the queens paraded back and forth with beer bottles or cocktails, the music loud but nobody dancing. It wasn’t exactly a stand-and-model scene, but most people stuck to their tribes. Ms. Clinique’s eyes were wide with wonder, while me and La Vicks, definitely old hands, feigned interest. Once you’ve walked the gauntlet at the San Francisco’s famous Bear bar the Lone Star (aka the Loin Stare), this was small potatoes. But I think the spectacle of various genres of gay men prancing back and forth on this summer stock stage was too much for her, and Ms. Clinique soon claimed tiredness as she dragged us out of the bar and back into the car, for a midnight stop at my boutique supermarket for chocolate cake muffins, which we consumed upon returning to the garret, as La Vicks concocted a “whole milk” mix out of my 1% and half and half.

5. Promiscuity is thought of in two ways: as having many, many different partners; and as having no standards for the people with whom one sleeps. The second type is comparatively rare, however, and is held in contempt by the first. The worst thing we can say about someone is that he/she will sleep with anybody.
6. But the truth is that many of us will sleep with almost anybody.


Sunday dawned bright and early, especially considering the strange sleeping arrangements of fitting three queens into the garret. I still don’t know how La Vicks ended up on the bed, with Ms. Clinique in a sleeping bag on the floor and me crunched into my separate dressing room on a mattress pad on the floor, but these, as they say, are the mysteries of Divahood. We were scheduled for a brunch at the household of the ex of Zilla, the paramour of Prancilla, but when we rang them, showered and powdered, at the ungodly hour of 9:00 am, Prancilla was cleaning her house, ETA unknown, and we decided to go out for breaky on our own. After a decidedly wholesome (and whole wheat) meal at Upscale BoBo Diner, we were off to Pride!

Now, this was my first Cold City Pride, and while I tried to approach it with an open mind, my expectations were low. And they were met and in fact exceeded in the race to the bottom of the barrel of Prides I have been to, sad to say. At one point, I turned to La Vicks, as we sweated it out under the sun, and asked, “Where the hell are the drag queens?!?” The Dykes on Bikes were thrilling as usual, but after that, pish! Politicians shilling for votes, car dealerships, a company specialising in home renovation (good grief), banks, corporate sponsors, anemic floats for bars and clubs, and the ubiquitous HRC, marching down the street like Hitler Youth with white teeth and big, vacant smiles, waving huge equality flags and garnering almost as much applause as the various PFLAG contingents. I felt like a teenaged Cassandra in an afterschool special: No, girls, don’t applaud for their flags (and besides, my bumpersticker has faded all to shit; feeling ambivalence criticising HRC but having their damn [faded] sticker on my car)! No worries, I was handed another one by a smiling pod person. HRC: Crack for gay “assimilationists.”

Oh, sure, there was a small, pathetic leather contingent, and some genderqueer hippie youth, but the only absolutely fabulous things about the parade were a) the weather, and b) a campy gay cheerleading squad, which while they certainly couldn’t compete on ESPN, were at least dudes in skirts (and such cute skirts too). In response to my earlier query on the missing drags, La Vicks turned to me and said dryly, “Oh, this just reflects the modest and mainstream nature of this area.” Well, damn. I coulda had a V-8! Cold City Pride was as wholesome as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on Wonder bread with a nice, tall, cold glass of milk.

9. Americans, products of a consumer society, with a short attention span, a bent for instant gratification, inculcated by advertising, and a fairly lonesome society, are made for promiscuity.

As the parade meandered by, long in the tooth, La Vicks and Ms. Clinique got the bright idea to go shopping, so we wandered through a big department store nearby where La Vicks bought a pair of cute sneakers and Ms. Clinique plunked down some major cash on a “sale” at Pink. I think she got, like, one shirt, a tie swatch, and a pair of cuff links for $200. I examined my cuticles (need work) and cursed sleeping on the floor and no longer being 22. Then we had a joyful rendezvous with Prancilla and Zilla at the festival, where Prancilla was clearly energised beyond reason, doing stripper dances while excitedly singing C + C Music Factory’s “Pride: A Deeper Love” as the rest of us slumped into our respective benches. I guess exercise does indeed give you more energy; I’ve read that. By the time La Vicks and Ms. Clinique packed up their goodies and decamped, I needed a nap. Pride, as they say, goeth before the fall, which in this case was back into my bed, smelling of La Vicks’s terribly expensive cologne. A promiscuity of the senses had me overwhelmed, as I swooned into the soft embrace of my IKEA sheets.

16. Before the plague, promiscuity was a growth industry.
17. Before the plague, promiscuity was the sore point of homosexual life. Why—even gay men wish to know—did homosexuals convert liberation into promiscuity?
18. No one knows.

Now that the confetti has been cleared, Cold City sanitation workers have removed the “Beer Garden” from the park, and the queens returned to their rural towns or suburban condos, I have been processing a bit about Pride, and catching up on my blogrolling, terribly neglected of late, where I discovered Centre of Gravitas had a round-up of Pride-themed blog entries (including, nicely enough, my own). Upon reading his links, and thinking of my own ambivalent feelings regarding the celebration in Cold City, I began to ponder some of the circular and seemingly endless debates regarding LGBT identity.

79. In youth, promiscuity bestows the rapture of poets and saints.
80. In old age, it means haunting the truckstops on I-75.

I wholeheartedly agree with CoG that Queer Pride still matters, but I’m not sure what that means exactly anymore. I personally identify with the queerer, sex radical elements of our community, with a certain aesthetic and sexual and cultural promiscuity, so to speak. This is at the same time that I have a somewhat quotidian image in my self-presentation: I am unpierced, untattooed, wear my hair in a short, masculine style, and generally wear similar or the same clothes most American men wear. In fact, I think I am probably a little boring visually: cute, maybe, but not Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. I am hesitant in this description due to the politics associated with “str8 acting, str8 appearing” in the gay men’s community. That is not what I want to reify here, but it gets to the crux of the matter: what is normal? What is queer about the Queer? Are we just like heterosexuals, or somehow essentially, elementally different? And more importantly, how do we measure this? Sexual practices? Sartorial choice? Personal politics? Economic activism? Place of domicile? Intellectual imagination?

This is, in many respects, a very tired debate, but one apparently we are unable to dispatch with a silver bullet or a wooden stake. This year’s spicy variant seems to be the Hedda Lettuce controversy at Boston Pride, which I stumbled upon at Pelican in her Piety while following CoG’s hyperlinks. I consumed the controversy like StarZilla needs a job. My first, visceral reaction was that the censuring of Lettuce was outrageous! I was truly, deeply upset, especially considering some of the reactions of Lettuce’s critics to the conundrum. It made me think that the imagined divide between sex radicals and mainstream LGBT folks was unbridgeable, a chasm of misunderstood concepts and mutual suspicion. Certainly, elements of l’affair Lettuce point us in that direction.

8. Sex is a pleasurable experience repeated many, many times during our lives that, if experienced with the same person each time, is considered responsible, adult, mature; if experienced with a different person each time, is considered promiscuous.

Yet, still, this binary is ultimately false. In truth, many if not most LGBT people bridge the divide in strange and idiosyncratic ways. I think for men in particular a lot of these questions, natürlich, revolve around sexuality, promiscuity, and HIV. In essence, and franchement, are you a slut? In this sense, Lesbian and Gay Liberation, in its radical sixties form, was meant to free us from the bonds of cultural notions of sexual purity and moral wholesomeness, the vicious dyads of virgin/whore, normal/abnormal. Lesbians and gay men of the 1970s worked, in remarkably different ways, to reimagine what constituted queer sexuality (although they didn’t necessarily use that term), rejecting conventionality and attempting to reconceive the universe of human relationships along a homophilic and homosocial trope.

24. People were promiscuous in the past for a simple reason: "Sexual practices are banal, impoverished, doomed to repetition," Roland Barthes said, "and this impoverishment is disproportionate to the wonder of the pleasure they afford."

For men, this meant the development of a sexual hedonism in the cities of the developed world fueled by urbanism, the gay ghetto, gay sensibilility, literature, travel, drugs, industry, and pornography. The radical political aims of this culture of sexual hedonism were muted for most participants (in favour of the corporeal), but remained alongside and embedded within the orgiastic, promiscuous dimensions of urban gay sexual life. Nowadays, of course, we associate this phenomenon almost exclusively with the HIV crisis, and the mass death of gay men in the eighties and nineties. Recently, I screened A Very Natural Thing (1974) for a course, one of the first normative representations of contemporary liberated gay men. My students could not remove the equation of seventies sexual hedonism from death via HIV disease, no matter how much I tried to get them to move their minds into the historical moment of the immediate post-Stonewall period. Not only was this an exhausting pedagogical exercise in frustration, but also spoke to the ways in which the gay men of today are themselves the battleground for the fear, loathing, and disgust that HIV triggers.

22. Men are now telling other men in the new cities they've moved to that they never were promiscuous.
23. (Gay men now suspect each other of promiscuity.)

Leaving aside the dismal fact that these feelings neatly dovetail with mainstream heteronormative discourses regarding deviant LGBT sexuality, what they offer us is exactly the complicated legacy we inherit, which is to suggest that the desire for normativity among certain segments of the LGBT community is both cover for the trauma of HIV and heteronormative violence, as well as perhaps an inchoate desire for a certain grounding in a chaotic social world of trauma, exclusion, and marginalisation.

I can understand these desires, and even reflect them in some ways, but where I become irritated is when they become hegemonic and totalising. To return to l’affair Lettuce, the fact that some LGBT people now consider Pride to be a "family-friendly" event (in the most reactionary, Disney sort of way) was profoundly depressing. Firstly, because I loathe the culture of protection that we as a society have embraced and impose over our children, which is both deeply patronising as well as historically and socially myopic. Secondly, and more to the point, this event purportedly honours revolution and resistance, not blandishments for corporate crumbs and smiling, happy, consuming (LGBT) families. Maybe we need to have a 'normative' Pride, say, maybe, on Labour Day weekend, which can be like Candy Land for grown-ups and children alike. Until that time, we will continue to struggle over the meaning of Pride, but when the drags, leather queens, and skirted male cheerleaders are banished, I’m outta there (having a V-8 instead, apparently).

65. Promiscuity fails to satisfy that most important need—for intimacy, rootedness, shelter.
66. Promiscuity supplies these in small, ecstatic doses.

This is most prominently because I believe in a catholic promiscuity of the world. As Prancilla and I have been quoting to each other the legendary Venus Xtravaganza whenever we were trying to figure out where to eat over the last week: “I’m Hungry!” And I am hungry, for sensuality, visual spectacle, aesthetic amusement, political engagement, human connection. In this sense, I inherit and honour the sexual and social promiscuity of my gay brothers of the current and past moment. This extravagance, this overload of sensuality in food, feeling, emotion, sensuality, and color (and yes, sex), has never sat well in our Protestant culture of ascetic denial. Or rather, more pointedly, it doesn’t fit within the appropriate parameters of socially accepted indulgence. Listen to some normative queens discuss their home renovation projects on Fire Island or upstate and wait for your head to explode. This is promiscuity, of capital, of money, of unnecessary things, but is has the moral approbation of society, so therefore is OK.

41. The average person thinks other people have sex with him because he is good-looking, sexy, special, attractive. In a promiscuous world, however, we are picked up mostly because we are breathing.

The simple fact of the matter is that I don’t want to be “normal,” and I don’t mean this in the annoying sort of youth culture of resistance way. I mean, having a chicken bone through your nose nowadays is practically normal, since you can get one at any suburban mall. What I mean is often I feel, because I am gay, because I am an intellectual, because I am contained within an indeterminate and misrecognised racial body, that I am, to put it mildly, a freak. In some ways, my sexuality has the least to do with these feelings of dislocation within mainstream culture, although like all social oddities, I am culturally bilingual out of necessity. Some of us just pass more easily than others.

39. Promiscuity offends that deep desire W.H. Auden said was not merely to be loved, but "to be loved alone."

This is reinforced by the fact that I have always been drawn to similar folk. Mr. Gordo? A poetic oddbin who walks into walls because he’s gazing at the clouds (dans les nuages literally), and has been known to shed tears over a good soup. The Fierceness? Her mind is driven by such a deep and powerful intellectualism it sets her apart from even other academics. The Voice? She listens to music I delicately would describe as “The Brian of HAL” and actually likes it. When I first saw my lesbian henchwomon Skanque Huore, it was my first month at Sadistic College and she was lumbering to class in a black suit with a pressed white shirt, a short haircut, and a countenance that screamed, “Hello, I am your lesbian caretaker for the evening.” She described her look at the time as being “portly gentleman.” I knew instantly she had to become my bestest friend, and in short order she did.

Perhaps incorrectly, I don’t consider these individual idiosyncrasies, like having a preference for Madras after Labour Day, but rather essential, innate differences that set people apart, that makes them keen observers of the society around them, that gives them a critical sensibility that is skeptical of platitudes and Horatio Alger, that seeks confrontation, that is curious, unsettled, roving, travelling. Does that mean, like Venus and Octavia in Paris is Burning, that I don’t also want the house with the picket fence, the Golden Retriever, the adopted baby, the washer and dryer set? Perhaps. But I want it on my terms, which does not mean constrained by the façade of respectability, per se. Viewers often cited the scene where Octavia and Venus speak of their desire for fame and domestic bliss as “sad,” but upon a recent viewing of the director’s commentary, Jennie Livingston addresses this by describing these desires as essentially American, and I think that indeed they are. What makes the scene sad for so many viewers is their inability to imagine these profits and gains of the American Dream accruing to two pre-Op transwomen of colour. And that is itself a sad commentary on how we imagine access to the common dreams of our society. Why the hell not, after all?

69. Promiscuity is the school of hard knocks, the parent that abuses all its children.

In some of the commentary around the recent gay bashing of Kevin Aviance, some gay people have implied that Aviance brought it upon himself by being so flamboyant, by being so gay, so out, so public. This week, IHE had a "Views" piece by a closeted gay man who revealed his sexuality in a campus interview and subsequently was “outed” publicly outside of the interview process, contra to institutional confidentiality guidelines. As I wrote in the commentary for the piece, the author’s contention struck me as problematic: what does it mean to come out but want to keep it a secret? Recently, on an online thread on Cold City Pride, I made some commentary on how boring the parade was and how it was reflective of the local politics of the community, using the acronym “LGBT.” Another gay man responded strongly to my use of the acronym, claiming he had nothing in common with “those freaks, fat bitches, and trannies.” Um, OK. These three threads of thoughts and commentary come together within the idea that if LGBT people act and behave “normally” and with discretion, then homophobia will disappear overnight and we can join the masses in the malls. But heteronormativity is an ideological system that does not rely on the referent, but on the sign as a whole. Therefore, the actual body of the LGBT person is indeed the battleground for these debates, but in an almost wholly abstract way. The figure of the LGBT person is more important than the sartorial choices of any given individual.

85. It is pointless to feel guilty about promiscuity, so long as you enjoy(ed) it, and harm(ed) no one. One may after all have brought joy into the lives of others and it was, let's face it, a great adventure.

Again, the repetitive circularity of these profoundly disturbing and misinformed opinions is depressing. This past week, alone and pondering these issues and a little depressed because Prancilla was on the east coast helping her mother move, playing dutiful daughter and subsequently unavailable for lackadaisical fun, I watched The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. I always like this film, but thought as well it was a little light. But it was just the ticket to resolve some of these issues in my mind, precisely because it is about a fantastical journey of two gay drag queens and one transsexual into the heart of l’Australie profonde, a confrontation with image and reality and danger and discovery. In the process they discover something about themselves and their place in society, as well as their clique as a community of sorts.

As Bernadette tells Felicia after he gets her ass kicked for being a drag, “It’s funny. We all sit around endlessly slagging off that vile stinkhole of a city (Sydney), but in some strange ways it protects us. I don’t know if that ugly wall of suburbia has been put there to stop them from getting in or us from getting out. C’mon … don’t let it drag you down. Let it toughen you up. I can only fight because I learned to.” Urbanism and the socio-cultural (as well as sexual) promiscuity it promotes has always been essential to modern homosexuality, the pollution of contact reinforcing communal LGBT identity and placing it in a context of cosmopolitan values, sophistication, ephemerality. Many of us still imagine ourselves within these values. However, increasingly, such as in Cold City, LGBT people have broached the wall, are living amongst heterosexualia. The gay ghetto of lore and loathing has, at least in Cold City, disappeared, as my Bear barber tells it, “when everyone moved to the suburbs.” And I personally miss that here, the gay supermarkets and kiosks and bars and hardware stores and cafes and juice joints, all bounded and identifiable and safe, if a somewhat illusory safeness.

62. Promiscuity is the last true adventure, the last ecstasy, the last rain forest of industrial-consumer man.

But for many other LGBT people, who cannot imagine, like their heterosexual counterparts, living within sight of their neighbors’ windows, such neighborhoods are repulsive. Following this, maybe the culture wars within the LGBT community are more akin to the general differences in taste culture, sensibility, and politics that affect and deform American quotidian life. In other words, this suggests that our differences are less about sartorial choice and sexual practice and self-presentation and more about the larger worldviews and perspectives that currently divide the American populace, less about sexual promiscuity and more about socio-cultural promiscuity, contact, pollution, connection. In other words, following Bernadette, how do some of us learn to fight (Which battles? Against which of the forces arrayed against us? Why do some of us have to fight more than others? How does this change our self-conceptions of socio-political standpoint?)? How does that affect where we find ourselves, as well as where we desire to be? Gay exceptionalism inspires many of us, but these debates reveal as well in many ways the very fact of LGBT banality. Too bad our vociferous and hate-mongering critics can't seem to swallow that jagged little pill. We ourselves, LGBT people both exceptional and banal, seem to have enough problems doing it ourselves.

Proud Mary, Keep on Burning!

The high holy weekend of global gayness is upon us. Yes, Mary, it is Gay Pride Weekend in most North American cities, as well as several cities in Europe. This is of course in honour of the Stonewall Rebellion (Riots), the events of the weekend of June 27th, 1969, when not for the first time, but perhaps most prominently, contemporary lesbians, gay men, and transgender people stood up to the casual, pervasive, and insidious discrimination and institutional abuse which had characterised lesbian and gay life since the interwar years and the development of urban LGBT subcultures. Paradigmatically, Stonewall is the LGBT Declaration of Independence, or as the infamous campy saying goes, “The hairpin drop heard ‘round the world!”


David Carter’s excellent history of the events surrounding the disturbances at the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s Greenwich Village in 1969 details the elegant fact that lesbians, gay men, and transgendered folks were all present at the birth of our contemporary movement for liberation (We were all there for the party!), which speaks nicely to both the inclusion of different stakeholders in our movement as well as to the difficulties of building movements across differences: after the brick is thrown, how do we figure out where we are at, what is the plan of action, where do we want to be headed? These are questions contemporary LGBT folks have pondered and debated and fought over, and that continue to challenge us to imagine ourselves both as individuals in an incredibly individualistic society as well as placing ourselves both in space and time as inheritors of a legacy of struggle and connecting to each other through perhaps overly abstract notions of community, similarity riven by difference, and coalition building, as well as the idiosyncratic love we have for each other, across differences of gender, sex, identity, race, and politics.



It has been a long, strange trip, that is for sure. From Lesbian Separatism to the HIV crisis, Anita Bryant to Matthew Sheppard, bathhouses to gay marriage, Harvey Milk to Brandon Teena, "off our backs" to "on our backs" to off and on simultaneously, we continue to struggle, continue to ponder, and continue to live our quotidian lives in a house full of questions, choices, pathways and decisions and, ultimately as well, of danger. And, for the most part, we still try and look our best while doing this complicated dance.


I went to my first gay pride parade, in Los Angeles, in 1987. A gay friend from Prestigious Eastern University, who also lived in LA, took me in his convertible VW bug, and we spent the day along Santa Monica Boulevard in a very eighties/West Hollywood moment. All I really remember is how annoying the festival was (I had a terrific headache), and how intimidating and fragile the buffed and tan porno queens seemed, and how I had to lie about my sunburn to my mother, as I was still in the closet. Well, almost twenty years and many prides later, a part of me always feels like, “Pride? Ah, whatever…” You seen one drag queen on a flat bed truck gyrating to booming mindless disco, you seen ‘em ALL! But, simultaneously, there is a feeling of excitement, potential, and community that surrounds this particular time of year, a vibration of sorts, even if its particular power had been blunted by the reality of being openly gay for twenty years. I am gay everyday, right?


As my friends and I have discussed on many occasions, pride is but one or two days. The challenge and joy is living LGBT “pride” year round. And what exactly does that mean? When I was in my twenties, and feeling deeply alienated from gayness, I often thought we needed more “gay shame,” and by this I meant more introspection on the subculture we, especially gay men, had created and nurtured, of sexual hedonism and sexual economies, of the way in which our sexuality led us to devalue members of our community, and prioritise bodies and appendages over people and community. Older now, and yes wiser, I am more sanguine about that aspect of gayness, and see how the sexual economy of hedonism is but one part, still problematic, of the bigger picture of gayness, of the complications of human sexuality, and the thrill and disappointment of community building in most forms.

But community exists and persists, regardless of the pressures both internal and external to its existence. In honour of those LGBT people, both personal and known as well as public and abstract, who have most influenced me, I salute you! A sentimental roll call:

The Fierceness (and the Suisse Miss)
La Connaire (and the Bear Shrink)
Mahku
La Donna (and whatever boy you’re loving right now)
Big Sis
Miss Prancilla (and Zilla)
La Vickstrix (and Ms. Clinique)
Ktrion (and L*)
The Voice (!, and Miss Hockey)
The Printmaker
Ms Butch (Scott M.)
Skanque Huore (and whatever girl you’re loving right now)
La Martina
Gilliam Girl (and the Divine Miss M)
Mi cuñado Quique y su pareja Oscar (mi Tía)
Mi cuñada The Beautiful Lisa

Andrew Holleran
Larry Kramer
Jill Johnston
Judith Jack Halberstam
Lillian Faderman
Ethan Mordden
Mattachine Boys
Women of DOB
Richard Rodriguez
Cherríe Moraga
John D’Emilio
Randy Shilts
Gloria Anzaldúa
Harvey Milk
Audre Lorde
Pat Califia
Susie Bright
Sylvia Rivera
Jennie Livingston
Todd Haynes
Vito Russo
Craig Owens
Sylvester

And to all the Dykes on Bikes, Mikes on Bikes, fairy Queens, drag illusionists, lipstick lesbians, tranny boys who have stolen my heart (OK, maybe loins), fabulously sexy butches, Radical fairies, realness girls, gay accountants, divine femmes, lesbian mechanics, shop girls and bears and cubs everywhere, let’s be proud, Mary! ¡Adelante!

A mi mono caraqueño, en este momento en tu ciudad de rascacielos de vidrio y pobreza y carreteras y felicidad y amistad: te mando besos ricos en el avión de amor. Te quiero tanto, mi feo.

Songs to Learn and Sing

The Pet Shop Boys released their latest album, Fundamental (along with the special edition two-disc set Fundamentalism), three weeks ago in most of the world outside of the United States, where it briefly rose to the top of the European charts. The US release has seemingly been delayed by the question of distribution. Rhino will release the album in the US this coming week, both on compact disc and digitally via ITunes (it is now available for download on ITunes). The fact that the Pet Shop Boys are one of the world’s most popular acts but relatively unknown or barely remembered here only signifies on the strange cultural self-involvement of the US market. If your average American were to remember anything about PSB, they would most likely chalk them up to an eighties one-hit wonder, for their song "West End Girls," which dominated radio airplay in and around 1985: a distant memory, slightly campy and certainly not au courant, in short, a joke without a punchline.


However, for many North American gay men, the latest release from PSB is a moment of celebration. For arguably PSB are the sirens of developed world pop culture gayness, more meaningful than Will and Grace and deeper than Dan Savage (although admitedly that wouldn't take much), their songs over the years have traced a cartography of gayness that is a rich vein of allusion and metaphor, covering the multifaceted nature of contemporary gay identity: relationships, love, sex, tricking, HIV, homophobia, fame, shame, and illusion. In honour of their latest release, which Skanque Huore generously got me on her recent trip to the UK, I thought I would share some thoughts on why I think PSB are one of the brightest stars in the gay cultural firmament, not only in my annoyance at the delay in a US release (which I would typify as American cultural narcissism), but also as a recognition of their importance in my own development as a gay man, and the manner in which I imagine my world, through the effect of their music.


Emerging with similar gay pop scenesters like Soft Cell and Bronski Beat in the early eighties, one of the most interesting things about PSB is their longevity. Neil Tenant and Chris Lowe, the two gay men who compose the Pet Shop Boys, have been making music together for almost 25 years. Originally thought of as “gay lite,” due to their coyness regarding their sexuality in comparison to the openly gay songs of Soft Cell (have a listen to "Bedsitter") and Bronski Beat ("Small Town Boy," natch), they have continued to make music in ways that have, over the years, become openly gay and in many instances quite thoughtful (NB: As have Marc Almond and Jimmy Somerville, former front men of Soft Cell and Bronski Beat respectively; Boy George, the other [more] prominent gay/gender-queer figure from this time, is a whole category unto himself).


New Wave music (roughly 1980-1987), in general, was a gender-bending phenomenon that challenged the male-centred rock music that had dominated the airwaves of the seventies. Influenced by punk, Glamrock, emerging electronica, and disco, New Wave embraced the concept of spectacle in a way quite different from, say, Rush or Journey. Flouncy shirts, make-up, eyeliner, girls’ shoes, and big hair typified the scene, which spoke to particular listening communities (teenaged girls, gay boys, sensitive str8 boys) that, in some ways, hadn’t been spoken to in a few years (since David Bowie). The primary vehicle for this emergent spectacle was of course, the innovation and mass diffusion of the music video, and it is no accident that New Wave and the birth of MTV occurred at roughly the same time. At the top of this heap of glitter and eyeliner and trash would be Duran Duran, followed by other no doubt familiar names, such as The Cure, Culture Club, the Eurythmics, Tears for Fears, Depeche Mode, Spandau Ballet, Joy Division/New Order, Dead or Alive, the Thompson Twins, Ultravox, The Human League, A Flock of Seagulls, Thomas Dolby, and Howard Jones.


All of these bands and performers featured elements of gender-bending performance, some decidedly explicit, such as Boy George of Culture Club, Annie Lenox of the Eurythmics, and Pete Burns of Dead or Alive. Looking like aliens in thick eyeliner and shocking hair colours, they pranced around in glamourous locations to their heavily electronic music, seeming new and fresh and powerful. To gay boys listening far from England, they offered a vision of possible and plausible and sophisticated sexualities that were incredibly different from the array of choices we were being given at home, in the schoolyard, or the gymnasium. And while most of us didn’t go out and start putting on eyeliner or wearing skirts or dying our hair (although some of us indeed did), the images cleared a space for us to begin to construct an alternative vision of ourselves, not as fathers or football stars or preppy boys or “str8 looking, str8 acting,” but as explicitly, outrageously queer.


The Pet Shop Boys came to this game later, and in a less pronounced way. But elements of their development gesture towards why they remain vital in a way that these other bands, many of who still make music, haven’t. One was their uncanny ability to project ambiguity in their lyrics, so that heterosexuals and LGBT folks could find a niche. Another was their profound and growing investment in production and visuality. Their music videos were never glam productions in tropical locales like Duran Duran, but more like independent films, esoteric and intellectual and difficult. They seem to have taken Mulvey to heart. This would shift and change over the years, but a sort of outrageous intellectual visuality typifies their career, along with a significant interest in dance trends and electronica both in Europe and North America, all of which speaks to certain sophisticated urban gay tastes and habits.


I don’t specifically remember them coming out, but by the time of their 1987 single “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” with the fabulous Dusty Springfield, it was pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that they were, to put it colloquially, Big Ol’ Fags! Firstly, because Dusty was such an LGBT icon in the UK (and to a lesser extent in the US), their collaboration with her was a signal to the cognoscenti. I myself had listened to my mother’s old Dusty albums as a tween and teen, along with her diva collection of Chaka Khan and Rufus, Angela Bofill, Roberta Flack, the Supremes, all of who spoke to me through their agency and visual glamour. Who knew that they were wigs on the tops of those heads? I did, in a big way. PSB continued this gay collaborative trend with Liza Minnelli in 1989, producing Results, which is a surprisingly good album, at least for Liza (not a big fan here; I know, turn in the Gay Card now!).


It was around this time (the late 1980s and continuing into the early nineties) that their lyrics, especially on their B-sides, started to get more explicitly gay. Some of these songs, collected on their anthology Alternative (1995), clearly speak to gay life in powerful ways: cruising (“A Man Could Get Arrested,” “Was That Was It Was?”), the closet and coming out (“Jack the Lad,” “Hey, Headmaster,” “Bet She’s Not Your Girlfriend,” “Your Funny Uncle,” “Some Speculation”), romance and love and breaking up (“You Know Where You Went Wrong,” “A New Life,” “Miserablism”) and gay hedonism (“Shameless,” Decadence”). The lyrical voice in these songs is wry, critical, telling. The fact that they are B-sides also indicates that this voice is semi-private, meant for true listeners and fans, not radio. Their bigger hits of this time period, after the US/UK success of “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” (“It’s a Sin,” “It’s Alright,” “Being Boring,” “Left to My Own Devices,” “DJ Culture”) are either very pop or pointedly political (in particular “It’s a Sin,” “It’s Alright,” and “DJ Culture,” a criticism of the first Gulf War akin to Baudrillard’s idea of virtual war).


The disappearance of PSB from the US charts parallels their openly gay breakthrough, starting with Behaviour (1990) (with the excellent “Jealousy” and “This Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave”) but really reaching full fruition with Very (1993), which for all intents and purposes is their first explicitly gay album. I remember the incredible excitement that greeted the release of the album, because it spoke to immediate concerns and realities of gay life that were, at the time, felt viscerally. In particular, the track “Dreaming of the Queen” addressed the nadir of the HIV crisis in the community, the feelings of helplessness and tragedy that many of us felt in the years before HAART therapy, (Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy, aka the AIDS “cocktail”). The lyrics of the song are still haunting:

Dreaming of the Queen
visiting for tea
You and her and I
and Lady Di

The Queen said: 'I'm aghast
Love never seems to last
however hard you try'
And Di replied that

'There are no more lovers left alive
No one has survived
so there are no more lovers left alive
and that's why love has died
Yes, it's true
Look, it's happened to me and you'

[…]

I woke up in a sweat
desolate

For there were no more lovers left alive
No one had survived
so there were no more lovers left alive
and that's why love had died
Yes, it's true
Look, it's happened to me and you

Here PSB is playing off a study at the time that demonstrated that many Britons regularly dreamed of Queen Elizabeth, but used this fact to great dramatic effect, by collapsing the Queen of England into the figure of the gay Queen, as well as deploying the royal romance scandals of the period ("the death of love") to represent the actual deaths of thousands of gay men across the world from HIV disease, and the effect of this crisis on the gay mind: desolation. Other tracks on this album, especially “I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing,” “Liberation,” and “Young Offender,” openly speak of gay life, love and desire, but for me, “Dreaming of the Queen” remains the signature song of the album and the moment.


By the time of the release of Bilingual (1996), HAART therapy had demonstrably changed the equation of HIV disease in the gay community (for those with the financial wherewithal or adequate insurance), and their songs here begin to address the recovery of gay life post-HIV crisis nadir. They address this interstitial resolution by exploring survival, a theme present in the work of gay literature as well (I am thinking here in particular of the work of Andrew Holleran and Ethan Mordden). One of the remarkable things about PSB is that their music covers not only the good but also the bad that confronts the gay community, in a genre (popular music) not known for its political qualities, as well as the specifically gay aspects of socio-cultural politics and experience. Their song “The Survivors” ponders this question of survivance in ways similar to other voices in gay cultural production:

[…]

(The survivors)
Our heads bowed
(The survivors)
At memorials
for other faces in the crowd

Teachers and artists
(it's never easy)
and Saturday girls
in suits or sequins
(it's never easy)
or twinsets and pearls

[…]

Many roads will run through many lives
but somewhere we'll survive

What I like about this is that PSB connect the communal (“other faces in the crowd”) to the individual, acknowledging the essentially collective nature of the HIV crisis for gay men, as well as expressing a profound investment in survival, in making it through, in a recognition that not only is survival possible but necessary.


Fundamentalism is an interesting disc that I have been listening too pretty much non-stop since Skanque Huore’s package arrived (along with a Clarins Men roll-on from Heathrow's duty-free shop, so delicious). I would say I like half of it so far, especially the songs ("Minimal," "The Sodom and Gomorrah Show,” “Integral”) that speak to their roots in electronic dance. In particular, “Minimal,” apparently the next single following “I’m With Stupid” (a pointed critique of the relationship between Tony Blair and George Bush), is an excellent primer in sophisticated electronica, more New Order than New Order, and highly listenable. Continuing their focus on explicit aspects of gay life, “Luna Park” is a haunting testament to the gay cruising grounds of parks and public spaces on the eve of HIV, and their remix of their classic “In Private,” originally covered by Dusty (the remix by Shep Pettibone is magnificent, and as hard to find as political coverage for pulling out of Iraq), is here brilliantly redone with Elton John.


As I listen to this new album and their oeuvre, all handily digitised on my Mac, I reflect on the fact that Neil Tenant’s voice is like a map of my life, as recognisable as my own, and therefore one of those sonic triggers that both takes one back and forward simultaneously. This, of course, speaks to the power of music in general, but in the example of the Pet Shop Boys, their career trajectory also matches my own as a developing and maturing gay man, and it makes me glad and feeling lucky that we gay men have a voice, however unappreciated on this side of the pond, that speaks to our socio-cultural condition in our own language, from a position of innovation, creativity, vitality, and above all, survivance.

Sleeping with Mr. Gordo

Find your own pose!

Spotted this at LaustiChirps and decided, “Why the hell not?” My results confirm all I know about myself as a co-sleeper, which is remarkable considering how positively strange the questionnaire is. I wouldn’t have been less surprised had there been a question like “Do you prefer Chunky, Smooth or Extra-smooth Peanut Butter?” Well, I suppose we can leave the mechanics of such questionnaires to the scientists, and appreciate the results.

One of the joys of finding Mr. Gordo was that we are excellent co-sleepers, which in point of fact and no doubt as many of you know, can be one of the biggest obstacles to the perpetual happiness and joy of couples everywhere. And I don’t mean the simple things like stealing the blankets, I am talking about the significant differences in sleep patterns that mean that you wake up with your date/trick/erstwhile boy/girlfriend on the couch (or alternatively, you on the couch, or even more alternatively, you in your apartment and he/she in his/hers).


Sleeping with Mr. Gordo is like a really good Vanilla: smooth and subtle and delicious and quietly satisfying. Vanilla as a flavour gets a bad rep as boring, basic, uninspired. But for those of us with our minds on the exquisite differences and similarities in the realm of the sense of taste, a quality Vanilla is sublime and delicate, and has been utterly ruined by the commercialisation and synthetic mass-production of the flavour. In fact, like pepper, another ubiquitous flavour regarded as somewhat quotidian, Vanilla has a distinguished and complicated history as one of the major foundations of global capitalism and trade. It is easy, in our world of extreme taste sensations, both of the palate and in the realm of the socio-cultural, to forget there was a time when the flavouring of most food was the water it was boiled in, and how the drive for flavour fed imperialism as well as a greater consciousness of the world.


In any event, sleeping with Mr. Gordo is akin to this lost, secret history of Vanilla, in that you don’t know what you got until it’s gone. Mr. Gordo and I shared a bed pretty much every night for almost three years, and we became used to our patterns and rhythms in unconscious ways. Before him, I thought, given my history as an only child, it was difficult sleeping with another person because I was not used to sharing the bed. But in fact, it was because I was not paired with appropriate co-sleepers. It also helps that Mr. Gordo is hearing impaired (He would probably say “challenged,” if he said anything at all), so the mutual racket we make (snoring… there, I’ve said it) goes blissfully over our heads, because we are both deep sleepers (and plus, he can’t hear).



Two gordos, intertwined like gloriously fleshy and hairy bathing beauties, is a pleasure I can only have when he is here or I am there. Oh, sure, I’ve returned to my single-sleeper ways, in my little garret (pictured above, for your delight). After all, I’ve slept alone for most of my life. But returning to the heavenly slumbered embrace of Mr. Gordo is one of the best parts of being together again.


On a passing note, I received my student evals for last semester yesterday, and because I have been dealing with more pressing matters at school, only gave them a passing glance, which is good, since if I had more time on my hands to actually be focused on them, I might be a little more freaked out than I am. Our evals are incredibly scientific, with frequency tables and statistics galore and percentages that can make the mind spin (and call for a careful observation of these figures). Overall, not bad, and my scores are high, but it’s the comments that always get me. Invariably, at every institution I have taught at, they have always been divided between enthusiasts (“Keeper! Cold City U. needs more professors like this!”), middle-roaders (who actually tend to offer useful comments and critiques of the course structure while avoiding ad hominem statements), and playa haters (“I didn’t like the class because I didn’t like him”).

I have come to the conclusion that I am the sort of professor that tends to trigger strong emotions and therefore, reactions, in students, and take the good with the bad in this regard, with a rather Zen-like calm (now, for there was a time when student evals would send me into a tail spin it would take weeks to recover from). I also understand the course evaluation process as deeply, profoundly flawed, and problematic in its institutional use value. I am just grateful the critics haven’t moved on to RateMyProfessors.com to exude their bile, unlike some of my former students at Sadistic College. Cold City U. students typically have neither the time nor direction to waste their energy spewing online, as they tend to be more grounded in life and work than the processes of education, and the tiresome navel-gazing that sometimes entails. But even with my Buddha pose, some comments are funny in their chutzpah.


The same student who said he or she did not like me also said, under the question on course improvement, “Find a new profession.” I could offer a deconstruction of this comment, the profound depths of misunderstanding it represents, both of the teaching process as well as the training of intellectuals and professors, the state of the profession, the rise of consumer economies in the university, the challenge of teaching race and sexuality, the fact that this is my fourteenth year of teaching university, and all that. But why waste one’s breath? Upon reading this comment, I just thought, as I tossed the file onto a pile of documents that have needed filing since October, “Well, thanks for the advice, and fuck you too,” and left it at that. That, in my mind, is the most appropriate answer to a statement like that. I’ve moved beyond the messy processing of student commentary that, especially in this instance, is so obviously useless in any regard, other than as a barometer of how out of whack things have become in the Shop. This may not be the most erudite response, but what can I say, it has been a long year, my garret is hot and humid, and I'm cranky. So, sue me.

Keep your eyes on the prize, which at this moment, in my hot little garret, is sleeping again with Mr. Gordo, in his hot little garret, very soon.

Algunos viajes

I spent today in a bit of a haze, muddled thinking and slow movements. This was not due solely to the heat which has settled over Cold City, perfectly pleasant in the shade or in the embrace of my northern-facing garret, which receives no direct sunlight, but positively unbearable under the full glare of the sun. No, it has to do with the fact that I have a sleep deficit from an entire week of having to wake up early, either to catch a plane, rent a car, or attend a panel. Yes, darlings, I have been a conference road warrior, and I have the scars to prove it.

First off, I for one would like to know when did all available flights move between 5:00 am and 6:30 am? The abstraction of an “a.m.” following a seemingly random time between 4 and 7 on an itinerary becomes a very ugly thing in reality, especially if you have decidedly nocturnal habits, such as yours truly. En route to my summer conference, I went to bed, following teaching that night, dinner, goodnight telephonic kisses to Mr. Gordo, and packing, at about 2:00 am, to sleep for a whole hour and twenty minutes, when I had to get up, shower, and schlep to drop off the car at Prancilla’s house and take the train to the airport to catch my flight to Green Town, the site of my conference. Additionally, my original return to Cold City was at the decent hour of 11:20 am, but a cancellation meant I had to spend the night in Philadelphia and had to depart, again, at the ungodly hour of 6:30 am (the airport shuttle fetched me at 3:45 am).


The time when flying seemed glamourous and sophisticated seems a little distant when you arrive at the airport with bloodshot bug eyes, grabbing blindly for a coffee like a mole, and chain smoking on a bench outside to load up on enough nicotine to get through security and make your way onto the slim aluminum tube that promises to carry you, rumpled and stale and grumpy and bored, to wherever your destination may be. Needless to say, I’m not sure 5:00 am is anyone’s star turn, except for infants, the elderly, and the perpetually chirpy “morning persons” that go about their business while decent people such as myself catch up on their beauty sleep. This sort of nocturnalia is really only accessible in North America, which through electricity and the phenomenon of a 24-hour world, keeps the lights burning bright for those of us who decide we have to refill a prescription, wash our whites, or pick up a tin of ridiculously expensive Illy Espresso Grind after midnight. I think I would curl up and die if I lived in a good city like, say, Geneva, where everything is shut on Sundays and after 6:00 pm (7:00 pm for the Migros) every other day. How would I ever get anything done? I would need an assistant to run errands while I slept the days away.

In any event, I travelled east for a small academic roundtable in my field of study, which was, as we academicians coyly say, interesting. I have never been to Green Town and its big university, but have applied several times, to no avail. Aside from the pleasure of what turned out to be a small and intime academic gathering that supported several compelling conversations (Money Quote Day #1: “…melancholic identification with the lost object”), and the opportunity to meet intriguing faculty members from Green Town U. as well as other institutions up and down the east coast, a large part of the thrill of going to small academic conferences (as opposed to the annual national professional gatherings which are rarely pleasurable, much less thrilling, unless you count the meaningless casual stress sex) is that one finds one’s voice again, outside of and different from the caution we exhibit on our home turf. As well, one can see (if one is paying close attention) those same stresses and fractures in the faculty from the host institution, in conversation, commentary, and socialising, although sometimes to catch those signs is akin to hearing a dog whistle.

So, with this freedom in mind, I actually spoke my mind and attempted an honest dialogue, which I think was received well by most participants, although did cause some tension in the closing panel, which was devoted to a discussion of the future of the field, always a somewhat unpleasant task, as it brings together the changes and tensions in the field that are especially pronounced between academic generations. In particular, there was a moment of tension between myself and Provost Diversity (an older faculty of colour who is now in administration at Green Town U.) over my critique of the use of “activist-scholar” in our field. In short, and as I have intimated before, my problems with the use of the term “activist-scholar” in the institution have to do more with the self-aggrandisements associated with such a state of grace rather than the actual descriptive, especially in terms of its symbolic value for both the self-described “activist-scholar” as well as the university, which may make a sour face in public but behind the scenes loves such performativities of resistance, especially from those it employs and pays to be different, and hence, resistant by definition.


Unbeknownst to me, this was also a moment when one is riding roughshod over institutional particularities that one is unaware of when one doesn’t work at said university. There was a history here, and my comments touched a nerve. Oops. I was also struck by the new/old trick of dismissal in the academy (at least my version of it), which is to declare any statement you disagree with as binaristic and didactic, and therefore, impossible. This was one of the sticks used against me, by both Provost Diversity as well as others (Acolytes? The afraid? Who knows or could even possibly tell?), when it was clear to anyone who was listening that I was not trying to call into question the particular association of activist and scholar as a linguistic formation, but rather as a socio-political circulation. The smashing of shibboleths (of which the “activist-scholar” constellation is decidedly one in my field) has always been a favourite pastime of mine, but I would hope that such efforts are not exclusively destructive, but lead us to greater critical thinking. I mean, I think if I liked the sound of my own voice that much I would be a lot more famous by now.

But this binary critique sleight of hand is intriguing, for on the face of it speaks to some sort of greater synthesis of socio-cultural conditions that I would agree with, certainly on the level of paradigm. But in my recent experience, the accusation of binaristic thinking doesn’t promote the alternative of a holistic synthesis of dyads or even the holding of different conditions in tension or accommodation, but rather maintains the old dyads and conditions under new PoMo descriptions. A good example of this is identity essentialism: we “know” identity is constructed and sustained through discourse, but many of us still believe (sometimes) in the emotive power of identity essentialism and identification, and (again, sometimes) we use our new tools to reinscribe the old understandings. Everything nowadays may be “contingent,” “interstitial,” “intermediate,” “tentative,” “always already,” but in the end, it’s the same old story (we are still known, on some level, to ourselves and for others, in the old essentialist ways), for both ourselves and the continued dominance of white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and all those other yucky things. Whether this speaks to the power of hegemony in structuring our beliefs or the power of the emotive as it is structured through oppression, I cannot say for sure. I will acknowledge that the questions my field confronts are serious, deep, entangled, emotional, and are therefore difficult by design.


If I had to elaborate, I would say that my approach to the dynamic of academics setting themselves up as social revolutionaries is grounded in a practical understanding of our working conditions: we labour in institutions with reactionary politics. Nobody likes a troublemaker, universities perhaps even less so than Capital, which at least on the face of it (and as opposed to the university) prizes initiative. Ergo, the “activist-scholar,” especially if employed by R1 universities, is someone “always already” inscribed in a system of meaning, a reactionary politics of cooptation that makes such a formation, on a certain level, an oxymoron. So, in this pragmatic way, I think we need to exhibit more caution over the ways in which we imagine ourselves within this particular machine. Does this mean activism isn’t or cannot be corollary to scholarship?

Of course not, but that doesn’t mean slapping a label on oneself automatically turns one into a radical. Let’s face it, writing dense theoretical texts with catchy titles and inscrutable logic while basking in the glory of fame and power in the Shop is hardly revolutionary outside of the realm of the academic symbolic. Is it an accident that the “activist-scholars” one knows most often are also the most successful in the Shop? How many “activist-scholars” do I know who have clawed their way up the academic ladder by selling their difference in both their work and their presence on campus? OK, probably not enough to fill a Dixie Chicks concert, but enough to make the example stick. Whose blood is on their hands? Whose face did they step on in their effort to get to the middle? Ambition is fine, even Machiavellian ambition (the kind the academy tends to breed). I just don’t want the pretension of social change or social good attached to it uncritically: “Not only are they bastards, but they are doing it for a good cause too! Don’t you suck (even more)?!” Give us a break.


I might hasten to add that this is not a call for academic monographs to assume the dimensions of the kindergarten primer. This is not an anti-intellectual screed. The highly specialised language we speak amongst ourselves has a place and use value that can be erased in these criticisms (anyone remember Alan Sokal?). The very language of this blog works on the multiple levels of the life of the contemporary academic: theoretical, pop, colloquial, dense, personal, thick. This is also not some antediluvian Marxist fantasy of pure revolutionary action. It is not meant to privilege the actions, important nonetheless, of those working in the “real” world, organising folks or collecting signatures or holding a placard in the rain someplace while I sit in my garret, pecking at the keyboard. Their actions are not necessarily more important or real than those of us working in the realm of ideas. No, this is rather a call for us to “wake up to ourselves,” realise something about the material world we inhabit (namely, the university), look in the mirror, and be as honest as we can with ourselves and others while working under difficult conditions and with limited resources.

In retrospect, aside from probably ruining any chance I may have had of ever landing a job at Green Town U., the lasting impression I have of this moment is how difficult it is to actually foster conversation and dialogue in the academy, how entrenched the battles between older/tenured and younger/junior faculty seem to be, but also, how nice it is to be able to just be out there, to say what one wants to, without worrying that Professor Grey Beard or Provost Diversity is going to remember this moment down the line.


The ridiculousness of these long memories isn’t that you are killing Professor’s cat, or keying Provost’s fancy BMW, or besmirching their names in public, but rather that you deign to actually offer an opinion, polemic perhaps, but an opinion nonetheless. And I guess in this sense you are besmirching their name, for you are calling into question their worldview, their sense of cardinal direction, and that, I have found to my peril, is deeply threatening to many faculty members. It is uncredentialed knowledge, and must be banished, along with its messenger. How tiresome! Aside from how positively lifeless this response may be, what is really reveals is how the Guild paradigm of apprenticeship in the university is utterly bankrupt, along with mentorship and the art of mentoring, if we define mentoring as anything but a ceaseless towing of the line. It is also at moments like this when the mask slips off that one has to wonder what the hell we are doing in the Shop? How does it keep running? What are the risks of this Potemkin village of eggheads tinkering with their all-important knowledge machines while Mammon lords over the world? Maybe that is the point, certainly a view held by people like Todd Gitlin (not necessarily my own). “Activist-scholar” indeed! In any event, as I said before, it was interesting…

I also had two moments of social serendipity on my voyage, one of which was seeing an old college chum, Ms. E., after many years. Ms. E. and I knew each other, were friendly, but were never really "friend friends" in a close way. Rather, we were entangled in each other’s social webs and networks at Prestigious Eastern U., a not unpleasant connection. I still have a picture of her from those years, a close-up I took one summer, during my pretentious photography phase. Like all of us, she has changed, grown, but still resembles the girl in the photo, now in storage in Skanque Huore’s garage. In fact, I have a private notion (as opposed to our popular culture, which seemingly has its gear stuck at the age of 24 as the ideal) that people grow more fabulous as they age, mature, grow into themselves, and the thirties and forties are when this maturation starts yielding real results. To wit, while Ms. E. was always pretty, now she is beautiful, womanly, sophisticated, brilliant, thoughtful, confident, introspective, with a rich, embodied voice. She has had a certain amount of academic fame, has done well, but like all faculty of colour, is cautious and tentative about the direction of the future, both personally and professionally.


We had the opportunity to have a brief brunch before I left town, and this conversation touched me in powerful ways. We had, of course, a certain amount of catching up, but I was struck by how similar our states of critique of academia and academic life were, even though we are in different places in the university spectrum. This correlation of experience and thought made me think of Forster’s maxim, “Only connect!” and the joy of making the connection, of meeting like-minded fellow travellers on our journeys, the beauty and pleasure of interlocution, of dialogue, of sharing. In Forster’s imagination, the connection the Schlegel sisters were seeking with the world, with ideas, with feeling, was opposed to the simplistic imperial brutalism of the Wilcox family. In the end the Schlegels and their vision win the day, however temporary or narratively engineered such a victory may have been (it was fiction, after all). And it was to these victories that my mind wandered after our brunch: how can the humanistic vision win the day, against powerful and ignorant forces arrayed against it? Another way of thinking this through is how can we actually find ways to think, to live as thinkers and intellectuals, in institutions increasingly dedicated to not thinking? How can we imagine a better place for ourseles and, perhaps, for our profession, that is, like fiction, a bit of a dream, the potentials of what is possible, and not (simply) some dreary documentary (we have had quite enough of that, it is called life). Most of us struggle to find our niche, but the important part is not to be afraid, of fighting or, alternatively, of leaving. Helen and Margaret show us one way to do this. Ms. E and myself are trying to find others as well.


The second moment of serendipity, briefly, was my unexpected layover in Philadelphia, a city I have always loved: home of American liberty, one of the historic and lively centres of the Black American diaspora, full of good memories. After a somewhat disappointing wait at the US Airways counter for rebooking, I rang up S. and J., the parents of my compadre Mr. Polemic (the father of my God child) who live in Philadelphia. Gracious as always, they immediately invited me over for the evening, and I made my way on SEPTA to their warm and beautiful home in Elkins Park, where J. greeted me on the street. We sat on the porch for a long time, catching up and chatting about Cold City, the past year, plans for the summer, then going in the house to find S. and snack on cheese and crackers and apples and tapenade. They always have such delicious things to eat, as they are consummate nibblers. I passed a lovely evening in their company, and was grateful for the generosity and companionship of this unexpected layover, as well as the surprise opportunity to see them again before summer back east.

The garden was beautiful, the food wonderful, the bed comfortable, the air relaxed and pleasant. The pleasure of connection again reinforced grace à the technological glitches that determine our lives. Even in the machine, beauty is possible.

The Academic Culture of Recognition: A Comment

In the context of my summer course, I have been thinking a lot about the concept of mimesis, which my handy Microsoft Word dictionary defines as “the imitation of life or nature in the techniques and subject matter of art and literature.” My students have been working through Laura Mulvey’s argument on visual pleasure and narrative cinema, and I have been pushing them to specifically begin to question what it means to end our visual gratification, our unthinking scopophilia, when we analyze visual culture. In this sense, recognising mimesis as a technique is quite important, because it allows us to see the constructed and essentially ideological nature of representation, the scrim upon everything we “see,” especially in popular culture.

While I’m not sure if the Chronicle of Higher Education counts as popular culture for anyone outside the Royaume of Eggheads, this critical technique of mimesis, of recognising the constructed nature of representation, is notoriously hard to communicate to students, flooded as they are by images and messages and their own naïve sense of reading this wave. And it was to mimesis that my mind turned when I read in yesterday’s Chron an article by Gary A. Olson (for the column “Heads Up”) urging us, his fellow eggheads, to inculcate a culture of recognition in the university (NB: The article, posted in the Careers section, is not behind the Chron’s firewall).

The article is pithy and compassionate, with Olson urging faculty to reflect on how we can reward our colleagues and ourselves in an “economy of scarcity,” and how given the paucity of dollars in our little sinecures, praise is crucial. He writes:

[…] Even well-endowed institutions find themselves in a constant struggle to find enough money to do everything they want to do. That economy of scarcity extends to salaries: most academics and administrators are not compensated at the level that their education, skills, and experience would garner in business or industry.

In the absence of sufficient real capital, the cultural capital of the academic world -- recognition -- is especially important. We live for -- and thrive on (whether we admit it to ourselves or not) -- the recognition of our colleagues, peers, disciplines, and institutions. Strangely enough, however, institutions can be stingy when it comes to handing out praise. At times, it seems scarcer than dollars.

That is especially unfortunate because the longer someone's outstanding efforts go unacknowledged, the more that person is likely to become alienated.

This is an interesting passage, rich with meaning, and it's not like I have a beef with Olson's advocacy in general. I mean, who doesn't like being appreciated? But several things struck me at once about it, not the least of which is the Pollyannaish tone of this revelation, the hand wringing behind wondering why and how institutions can be stingy with, in this case, praise and recognition that are essentially free, right? Another would be the implication that salary (i.e. money) can make up for most horrible institutional situations (which I think is largely true, to a certain extent), and then replacing capital with recognition as the system of reward in the Shop.


To quote one of my favourite lines from Roseanne, “Are you new?” Why, pray tell, would institutions and colleagues be stingy when it comes to praise, why would they insist on hierarchies and lines of demarcation between units and staff in ways detrimental to the health of university life? One factor here seems to be that money and recognition tend to go hand in hand in the university, as elsewhere in our socio-economic lives. It is not that universities have no capital, and therefore replace capital’s values with a fuzzy but tangible concept of recognition. Negotiating skill and one’s institutional hotness factor, except in the most unionised institutions, are famous for leading to widely disparate rates of compensation for essentially the same (or lesser) work. Universities never have any money until, suddenly, they do. Course release, lower teaching loads, higher salaries, and larger start-up funds for certain faculty but not others have to come from somewhere (in other words: you, schmuck!), they are not neutral on the balance sheet of the institution. No, this simple division of the poverty of the university and the riches of Mammon is just not sufficient to capture what exactly is going on.

Olson is right in his observation that our academic culture of recognition is the fundamental basis of the profession, through peer review, evaluation, tenure and service. But he also seems to be channeling Eve Harrington in her utterance, “If nothing else, there's applause... like waves of love pouring over the footlights.” To paraphrase, we may not be rich, but we’re loved. One of Olson’s strangest and most disturbing examples is of a faculty woman who worked for 25 years to garner the respect of her colleagues. He writes,

A senior professor at a large public university told me a similar story. She felt ignored, even disrespected, by her colleagues despite making every effort to become a more integral part of her department. Eventually she abandoned all attempts to "join" her department and, for 26 long years, hunkered down and concentrated on her research, producing groundbreaking scholarship. Despite her fame, her departmental colleagues continued to dismiss her accomplishments. It was only when her university conferred on her the status of "university distinguished professor" that she felt part of the institution -- a full quarter of a century after she began her career there.

How absolutely pathetic! I mean, HELLO! Get the door! As the Voice would say, "Lady, you have issues"! Why would anybody be so masochistic? Get it together and get out of that dump, Mary! In my experience, recognition and fiduciary rewards are symbiotic. You publish, you make a “name” for yourself, you kiss the right ass, you ignore the right others, you bargain with your Dean or the roulette wheel of the academic job market, which is notorious for its basis in trend and hotness factor and sycophantic economies, and you come out on top. For some lucky few (including, in Olson’s example, those with the wherewithal and agency to recognise the necessity of moving on, clearly), it is a teleology of reward. For the rest of us, the relatively nameless and faceless drones, the structure of the university is apparent in our quotidian work lives, captured best by Margo Channing: “You are in a beehive, pal. Didn't you know? We are all busy little bees, full of stings, making honey day and night. Aren't we, honey?”


Olson’s concern that these disparities in recognition lead to alienation seems to be almost besides the point, or to put it down more sharply, to avoid the ethical dimensions of institutional justice. For his use of the term alienation has an emotive, fifties-like flavour here, along the lines of how do we go about solving the problem of teenage delinquency: individualistic, non-systemic, cosmetic. He calls for more recognition, for everything, in a manner that risks becoming like the current primary school policy of rewarding every child in games and contests because everyone is "special." When I was finishing my doctorate, I billeted with a faculty family with whom I became quite close, and their two young sons would regularly bring home, to my chagrin, certificates and plaques and ribbons, mostly for just showing up. “Oh, everyone got one,” they would say laconically, as they tossed whatever it was in some pile and ran off to burn the heads off Barbie dolls. Well, if everyone gets one, what is the point? Why bother? Oh, right, to make us all feel special. Even these boys, with their primordial six-year old brains, could see the ridiculousness of these rewards. These fuzzy politics of institutional “love” may indeed be valuable in the raising and education of children, but for those of us who are grown-ups, who can see the disparities between people in our work lives in material ways, the sop of a ribbon for everybody seems especially weak. Working actively towards economic justice in the academy seems to be more useful than divining new ways to make everybody feel special.


But the politics of recognition in the university are wrapped up in both economic and symbolic values. Olson cites the “stingy” nature of the reluctance to extend recognition to colleagues in the university, but really goes no further in exploring this phenomenon. Extending or refusing recognition is a game of power, played most often by those with something to prove or something to lose, and if you don’t know the rules of the game, you are toast. The simple fact of the matter is that colleagues and deans and provosts use the carrot and the stick in enforcing the accepted norms and guidelines of the institution and the profession.

Don’t make too much noise, be nice, be professional, work hard, don’t complain, respect your superiors, know your place, don’t rock the boat, don’t be too smart, don’t be too dumb. And if you get out of line, we will banish you from our conversations, from our dining rooms, from our collegiality, from promotion and advancement, from a decent office, from requested courses and times. You’ll be so over you’ll feel like Mariah after the breakdown. The implication here being that one has no choice over the matter. You got to play to stay. But why stay in a shithole? It’s like Mom’s truism: “If they treat you that way then they’re really not your friends anyway.” So true, but how do we forget this?

The stick is what, I think, most of us feel in our institutional lives, although we also taste the carrot, some more than others, but still. I am reminded of a recent thread at Confessions of Community College Dean on what makes a good Dean. Dean Dad writes:

How do you spot a lousy dean? It’s tough, since sometimes what looks like a lousy dean is, in fact, a capable manager dealt a crappy hand. Still, there are telltale signs. Is your dean prone to public displays of temper? Does s/he change direction on a dime? Does s/he play favorites? (NEVER NEVER NEVER do this.) Does s/he cut a lot of backroom deals? Have you caught her in a lie? (If so, did she ‘fess up?)

As you will know, my experience at Sadistic College was marked by a horrible Dean who exceeded all of the lowest expectations mentioned in Dean Dad’s post, and then some. But it wasn’t just the fact that the Dean of Sadistic College is a horrible manager, but that this management happened in the context of a remarkably sadistic culture of punition. The stick of punishment, of never being good enough “for us,” of “we hope you can stay,” was an institutional truism. What makes people stay in milieu like this? If I have to be truthful with myself, I probably would have stayed, had I not been shown the door.


A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush, even if the bird you have is dead and putrid. Is that really it though? What drives the academic to lump it and suffer, like Olson’s accomplished professor, hoping against hope for recognition? Could it be that Stanley Fish’s argument about academics is right, that we are masochists because it makes us feel better about ourselves, our sacrifices turning us into morally superior beings? But moreover, what cultural glitch, what retardation of civilization, what missed step in human evolution, legitimizes this approach? The unspoken ghost rattling its chains in Olson’s commentary regarding the withholding of recognition, present but unnamed, is both the human capacity for unkindness and specifically how that tendency plays out in the academy. People are mean, we know that, but so many of us can’t reach the point of drawing a line: I will eat shit until this point. As the Fierceness was once fond of saying about academia, “These motherfuckers want you to eat shit, and not only eat shit, but smile while you’re doing it.” And I think that’s about right, depressingly enough. I'm a realist: I know you have to eat some shit sometime to survive in any institutional context. But we don’t have to accept that bargain completely and exclusively, in spite of the fact that many of us feel trapped by the dialectics of labour, exploitation, and elusive agency, even as we attempt to resist this sadistic game. Humiliation is part of it, if not the game itself.

Recently, the fantabulous Sfrajett recounted a hasty exit from her office, trapped by a locked door on one side and a celebration party of which she wanted no part of on another. Her hilarious and poignant post speaks to the manner is which we have to negotiate the tricky spaces in which our presence is invisible, in which our labour goes unrecognised, in which we are expected to eat shit and like it. She writes:

The entire room is full of people chatting with their reception faces on. Earnest, leaning into their cake and napkins. I see to my horror that someone I used to know is in the room, talking away but facing the other direction, away from my door. An ex friend, the one who dropped me a while ago and who decided not to say hello to me in the hotel lobby at MLA (ok--to be fair, I decided then not to say hi either). Trapped! What can I do? Slink by in my damp and unflattering t-shirt, heavy, defeated? Me, the adjunct; her, next year's director of Gender Studies at Elite University, both of us the same age. Once we were young hopefuls. We double-dated with our respective spouses. I fed her cat when she went away, a lifetime ago.

[…]

It will be ok. Have.To.Get.Out.Now. I fumble with the lock, feeling like any minute someone will see me, stop me, and lead me back to the Room of Shame. Can't people see me? Isn't anyone wondering what I am doing here at the end of the hall? At last I slide the bolt across and fall out into the open air, choking with panic.



This Helen Lawson moment made me think of the many times I have avoided, often to comic effect (hiding in a bush to avoid someone is probably the most memorable), the enforced collegiality that masks the brutal power and economic dynamics of the Shop. While I would have wished that Sfrajett actually did pull a Helen Lawson, going out the way she came in after Neely O’Hara flushes her wig down the toilet, sometimes survival is all about making it through, not in a cinematic moment of glamour like Hollywood’s “shit-kicking Amazons,” in Daniel Harris’s memorable phrase, but in a more literal, practical way, to live to fight another day. Did I have a Helen Lawson moment at Sadistic College? Well, upon departure I didn’t trash my campus house and I didn’t shit on my desk (both actual incidents of other faculty shown the door), so I guess I did leave a decidedly unfair and uncomfortable situation as elegantly as I could, which is to say limping, wounded, upset, doubting. But as you can see, I have lived to see, and fight, another day. Quoting RuPaul, “Look at the Bitch now!” She has a job, she managed to keep the wonderful Mr. Gordo through the crap times, she has department and college colleagues who respect her, and who never, ever say “we HOPE you can stay” except in the sense that they hope I'm not on the market, and she is looking mighty fine with her summer extra-short buzzcut. Does this mean I am perfect? Certainly not, but it does mean I am now at a place where I am appreciated, recognised. There are better places, one just needs the gumption to get off their duff and go find them.

What Sfrajett’s narrative reveals is agency, the agency of refusal. The Vreeland aphorism of “Elegance is refusal” seems key here, but I think the reverse is true as well: Refusal is Elegance. And this is what I love about Sfrajett’s narrative, and all the moments in which we finally decide enough is enough, and more importantly act in our best interests. But this is a lesson that will never be learned through a ribbon for being special. I don't want a cheap certificate from a lying, cheating Dean, I want a more equitable workplace! The symbolic recognition the Shop offers us, in both its pleasures and pain, is not enough, for we must also have our eye on the material and ideological meanings of this recognition as well. This consciousness calls for action, of transformation or refusal, but action nonetheless.