youarethecity

youarethecity

I am sitting at my brother's desk waiting for Thanksgiving dinner and crying my eyes out. I miss my mom every major holiday. But this time my grief is less about her and more about the way other people in my family feel free to treat me now that she is gone. My mother and my stepfather got married when I was 6. He always treated me like a stepchild, explicitly. This was made worse by the fact that he and my mother had a really rocky marriage and he took some of that resentment out on me. Since my mother died , he has had moments of concern and generosity but mostly I am really uncomfortable visiting the house I grew up in. I only go there because my brother and sister (my mom and stepdad's children) are so important to me. Anyway, to make a long story short, when my  bus was late coming into my hometown last night, my sister and my stepfather were having trouble figuring out which one of them was better able to fit the pick up into their schedule. And my stepfather spoke to me in such a vitctimized accusatory tone , about everything from the fact that i didn't know the towns in Jersey we were passing to the bus route the driver was taking, that it was clear to me that not only was he not invested in my presence at all, he didn't have the most basic respect for my status as the sibling of his children, or the child of his dead wife. I know nobody wants a transcript of the specific fight, I guess I am just saying that since my mother died, I never know where I am really welcome, where I am just tolerated and where I will feel excluded at the last minute. My  brother and sister love me but right now, they are not the ones with the houses or kitchens or the ones who make the plans. And the only fully adult person from my childhood who needed me with her, who knew I belonged to her, is dead. And sometimes I just feel like an intruder, everywhere I go. Does anyone else relate to this feeling, because I feel doubly like an alien right now. I feel like a spare part nobody needs AND my repressed family is making me feel crazy for even minding.

1)     There is no one thing that makes you or anyone else happy. Everyone is cobbling together little aspects of their life to feel like the center holds.
    a) this is completely in keeping with the beautiful randomness of the universe, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts etc.

    b) this is a tragic existential waste. Everything is window dressing and the window looks out into blank space forever.

2.) Life is full of purpose and meaning, everyone has their one answer, they just have to find it.

    a) except me.

    b) actually it's one the tip of my tongue.......


I am less depressed than the above makes me seem but I have been blue and tired since last August or so. And I can recite you 4 or 5 things that I think of as actual sources of grief but I don't think any of them are quite it tonight. I want something but nothing seems worth wanting. Maybe because I have so many of the things I have been dangling in front of my own nose for so long. I have an apartment in New York and if it has roaches right this second, it also is rent controlled. I have a job  helping people for which I am paid fairly decently.

I am filling ill at ease in most of my friendships later but that is a chicken and the egg phenomena in relation to everything above. I am genuinely sad about my room-mate moving out. I feel like a big source of the continuity, the gestalt of my daily life is set to be disrupted and i am anxious about it. And most of my lovelife revolves around someone I see every 12 weeks and whose viability as a long term partner I feel ill equipped to assess. So there are *things*.

But still. I guess by now I thought I would feel this sense of arrival and cohesion in my life. I thought my group of friends would feel secure and intimate and that we would all rally around each other. I thought helping people at work would be less draining. I thought once I had more sex I would feel more attractive. Mostly I just thought I wouldn't be confronting this sense of weightlessness and futility at my age. And whether it's the core reality of human existence or depression, I want to feel it less.

I am treating my depression is the thing. Therapy and drugs and prayer and occasionally diet and exercise. So, the only next step I can come  up with is to treat the boredom. And this is where it gets tricky because everything is boring! No offense guys.  And the things that entertain me for a minute....honestly they remind me of my mom. I always thought as a kid that my mom was wasting her time, in pretty much everything she did except a brief stint of college classes. My mom did beautiful crafts of all kinds, painting and embroidery and stained glass. She gardened and rode her bike. She had bird feeders. She went to work out classes. And when I read over this list now it sounds like a pretty full life. But there was something frenzied about her search, it was so often done in the spirit of self help (we had all those books)  so I assumed she thought there was something missing. And I believed there was, maybe because my stepdad didn't stimulate her enough, maybe because a woman her age without a college education offended me, maybe simply because I could sense her sadness.  All I know is I didn't think she was feeding herself good things. I thought she was taking stabs in the dark and always missing whatever would have made her okay. And I feel like I will feel that way no matter what I pursue.

And if what I am calling depression is really loneliness, so what. Both me and my mother were/are tremendously lonely but I also know that other people don't fill that hole. For anyone. So is what I want *more* of anything? More of something in particular, or more of everything?  Or do I just want to pause and let things fill themselves in and show themselves for the penultimate plenty they are? And how is being content  to wait out my sense of pointlessness different from cultivating depression?

And the whole time I write this, some part of my brain is just playing some kind of ever chiming, ricocheting pinball  that sounds like "social work grad school, can't afford it, MFA really can't afford it, wish i could just have a baby, can't impose this on a baby, hate my job but have to pay rent, don't want to get stuck in better job if what i really need is to move, are my friends really friends or just acquaintances, wish i was married, maybe i should go on a meditation retreat, need a project, can't write, can't force myself to write just because i'm bored, that will produce garbage, arrrrrrggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Today's poem, for S. who I think never liked Salinger. But nonetheless:

Catcher in the Rye
by Laurie Lico Albanese

I read anything
I can get my hands on

Old Yeller, Little Women,
Black Beauty

Reader's Digest Condensed Novels
that turn up in our house
after Aunt Martha dies

Little House on the Prairie
Harriet the Spy
over and over again

my mother's hidden copy
of The Happy Hooker

and finally
Catcher in the Rye
all those phonies
all those bastards
all those assholes
lined up on the page
where I can count them
savor them, run my fingers
over Holden's rage.

I was recently reminded that it is National Poetry Month. I am trying to participate in NaPoWriMo. (Yes, why should people who write from margin to margin get all the fun-during national poetry writing month, you vow to write a poem a day.) But inspired by tgstonebutch, I will also be adding a poem a day I love to my livejournal. Bonus! This seems like a painless way to get back in the livejournal habit.

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/antholog/funkhous/shirt.htm

Notes on This Poem
I was given this poem in a by-submission poetry class at Vassar, taught by Eamon Grennan, a fairly prominent Irish poet. I was ecstatic to have been accepted into this class and rereading the poem makes me remember what it like when your childhood dreams come true. I've had other childhood dreams come true since then but I think for it to feel uncomplicated and magical you still have to be a child when it happens. I was only 19 when I took this course.

I was also a virgin when I first read this poem. Those of you who are close to me know I have a very complicated relationship with that word but to clarify: when I was nineteen years old I had never been naked in front of a lover. I had never seen or touched the genitals of anyone I had dated. My sexuality felt looming, ever present but also quiet, private, internal. I felt like a sexual being every second in a way I never have since but it took the form of unspoken brushes of heat and possibility with places, people, words and objects.

So I felt tremendously turned on and also recognized by this poem. And during the nine years since I have carried around a compressed version that pops up whenever I touch clothes on the rack that suggest sexuality to me:  "She bought the shirt because of the man she imagined taking it off her."

I was responding to one of those okcupid messages I get every so often, where a gay girl says "I don't usually respond to bisexual girls but you seem cool..." And as I was theorizing on my feet in my reply to her, I realized something. For all my whining, I actually love, not only being bisexual, but the word bisexual. Here's why, lifted from my message back to her.


I agree that bisexuality has terrible connotations. In a way that makes me more determined to use it. Even though "queer" says more about my tastes or my politics, I think it is important to have a word that simply means "I have sex with men and women". Because as much as I love the collective aspects of being queer, a big point for me is sexual autonomy, the right to embrace all aspects of your sexuality without being told you "broke the rules". I think our culture makes it really hard to be a true sexual adult who can deal with desire in a straightforward way. Being bisexual and taking each situation as it comes without inventing a new word to please my peers every time has been really important in getting me to that point.
 

My friends will perhaps feel as emphatically about the accuracy of the highlighted items as I do.

 

Romantics have sensitive feelings and are warm and perceptive.

How to Get Along with Me

• Give me plenty of compliments. They mean a lot to me.
• Be a supportive friend or partner. Help me to learn to love and value myself.
• Respect me for my special gifts of intuition and vision.
• Though I don't always want to be cheered up when I'm feeling melancholy, I sometimes like to have someone lighten me up a little.
• Don't tell me I'm too sensitive or that I'm overreacting!

What I Like About Being a FOUR

• my ability to find meaning in life and to experience feeling at a deep level
• my ability to establish warm connections with people
• admiring what is noble, truthful, and beautiful in life
• my creativity, intuition, and sense of humor
• being unique and being seen as unique by others
• having aesthetic sensibilities
• being able to easily pick up the feelings of people around me

What's Hard About Being a FOUR

• experiencing dark moods of emptiness and despair
• feelings of self-hatred and shame; believing I don't deserve to be loved
• feeling guilty when I disappoint people
• feeling hurt or attacked when someone misundertands me
• expecting too much from myself and life
• fearing being abandoned
• obsessing over resentments
• longing for what I don't have

FOURs as Children Often

• have active imaginations: play creatively alone or organize playmates in original games
• are very sensitive
• feel that they don't fit in
• believe they are missing something that other people have
• attach themselves to idealized teachers, heroes, artists, etc.
• become antiauthoritarian or rebellious when criticized or not understood
• feel lonely or abandoned (perhaps as a result of a death or their parents' divorce)

FOURs as Parents

• help their children become who they really are
• support their children's creativity and originality
• are good at helping their children get in touch with their feelings
• are sometimes overly critical or overly protective
• are usually very good with children if not too self-absorbed

A conversation me and the boy had about therapy and love.  Simone is my therapist.

stevetheliving:  simone does seem to play a little
loose with protocol which i think is a good thing

mollymalone:  i always feel a little betrayed that i
can't live there but i don't think that is because of her
looseness.

mollymalone:  it makes me feel like a person.

stevetheliving:  right and it makes her like a person
rather than a tissue-dispensing robot

mollymalone:  basically what she says is that all
relationships have limits. and therapy is a way to talk
about taking what you can from a situation and
processing the disappointment.

mollymalone:  she pretty much feels the
disappointment is inevitable because we all want the
world to be a big soft place of perfect love and
forgiveness. we all want what we didn't get as
children, or what we got as children.

mollymalone:  basically growing up is learning how
to accept some fundamental fall from grace and be
a good person anyway. i am trying to feel like there is enough
love out there for everybody even if i am chemically incapable of feeling it right now

I spent the weekend at the home of another not quite ex, my friend Emily, and now I am thinking about houses. I am thinking about the houses of people I miss. And I am thinking about fall.  There was just enough rusty edges in the light today to make me realize that this summer isn't as motionless as it appears.

I always get nostalgic when the seasons change but autumn hits me more directly.  All day I have been trying to dig up why that would be.  I  remember my mother being so tickled and attentive every first day of school, taking pictures of me in the driveway at 7:15 am. I remember the sense of promise in never-worn sweaters and backpacks without notebook fringe in the bottom.  I want to feel something starting with that kind of bite and sharpness. And I want to feel that crescendo of being welcomed back into the world the way I did every year at school. I always felt at home at school.

Which brings me to houses. In the same way I have loved schools, offices, empty lots, even certain doctor's offices, the houses I loved the most in my life were never houses where I lived. They were always transitional spaces, spaces I remember entering and exiting with all of the bodily excitement of seasons changing.  My best friend Kate's house in adolescence was at the end of a bumpy dirt road, on the grounds of an old campsite that had been in her family for fifty years.  It was full of things I didn't have at home, family pictures, wineglasses mixed up with the tumblers, a woodstove and a piano. In all my memories of that house it is just getting dark and I am pretending I live there.

I feel similarly about Emily's house. It never stops being novel to me in its ordinariness and it's safety.
She is small and pale and scrubbed to a shine and I think of her house the same way. Unobtrusive, graceful. There is plenty of clutter but it seems to speak of  an art of living, a balance of necessity and luxury. I took a shower in her big bright bathroom and dried myself off under the skylight and I felt at once so at home and so mystified by what it would take to feel that way in my own house.  Likewise, what would it take for the thrill and familiarity of this fall to feel like mine, as if that sense of possibility were meant for me?
This entry is partly about loneliness and partly about depression I guess. But loneliness and depression as real lived experiences that are attached to my five senses and space and time. That's a start.

I miss you, my livejournal. I miss my paper  journal. I miss the part of my brain that writes about things not imemdiately in front of my face, like my clients. See you tomorrow?

While I intend to use this lj for more or less complete pieces of writing, the sheer exercise of getting stuff down feels good to me now.

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The Daily News or the Post had two pictures of Britney Spears in it yesterday. One was an admittedly unflattering shot of her with a puffy, red face and outgrown dye job. The other was a stereotypically gorgeous shot from a few years back: gold dress, eerily consistent tan, sparkling hair. The basic thrust of the article was that Britney had everything and fucked it up with alcohol, drugs, ingratitude, sudden outbreaks of white-trash genetic conditions, unclear.  It also described a recent performance? club encounter? charity appearance? (forgive me if my lunch break glimpses of a paper I hate leave me a bit vague)  during which a man in the crowd convinced those assembled to start chanting "whore" at her. Repeatedly. She then, well the paper says "collapsed". Which the paper then diagnosed as some kind of drug response. Sure. 

All of this got me thinking about how fucked up the fame machine is. Not that I am saying anything terribly original to you all. 
It  just amazes me how impersonal celebrities' personal crises really are. Celebrity news thrives on making each downward spiral seem like a sudden revelation of a deeply personal failing when it is so clear to me that celebrity itself is the means of production as it were. It is practically a chemical reaction. Take a poor young girl from a small town. Hand her oodles of money, surround her with much older, more savvy people who all stand to benefit from her in some way, pile her with obligations  to be sexy, no innocent, to be in this country, no that, to stay out later and do more drugs, to go home early and read the bible. Throw in a total excess of sexual attention, much of it motivated by greed or starfucking. How the hell is one supposed to be a responsible, self-respecting adult under those conditions? How is one supposed to hold on to any semblance of one's core personality?

And yet what sells the magazines is the idea that we really know  Britney now. The arrogant pretend-intimacy of seeing her at her supposed worst is just as integral to the industry as the ability to imagine ourselves a sweet little blond who gets whisked away to a mansion. As I have said about prominent women before, it sucks to be a symbol, it sucks to embody other people's illusions and disappointments and misplaced needs. That's being whored out on an existential level.  Whoever that prick in that nightclub was, he was in the neighborhood of some kind of cultural truth when he threw out the word. Isn't that what lots of johns want, to idolize someone, then demean them, then moralize at them for coming across demeaned? And a copy of the Post is only 50 cents.

Note: I have been thinking about social and economic class lately, largely because of my conversations with Steve. I can't tell yet how much we really disagree, which makes me anxious, which makes me pedantic. Even though if I've learned anything since college it's that saying something with moral conviction doesn't make it true. (Although saying things without moral conviction doesn't make you a better intellectual either. More on that later.) I recently came across this essay I wrote almost exactly a year ago for a class on these issues. It's better than I remember and more open-ended than I have allowed myself to be lately. Enjoy.

Honest Living: Race, Class and My Integrity in Turn of the Century New York

The Halcyon Days
When I was a Vassar student, a friend of mine and I had our own version of Bill Clinton's "It's the economy stupid." We said "It's class, stupid." It was our way of figuring out which of the social ills we'd studied that day as a sociology and political science major, respectively, were most fundamental. If we could only grasp one thing about the increasingly complicated and unjust world, we pretty much agreed on this: the distribution of resources in this country was fucked up. If we could get to bottom of have and have not, then maybe we could actually see the light at the end of the tunnel in terms of racism and sexism and all those other conflicts big and small. It was about who was allowed to have, why it was the same people all the time, what having meant. Each time we had this conversation we resolved, passionately and vaguely, to do something about that. 

AMERICORPS
My first job in New York was not a job at all. At least that's what they told me at the training conference, not to think of it as a job, rather as a "service committment". Personally, I think if they can fire you for not showing up, and then you don't have money to pay rent, it's a job. I was a volunteer coordinator/curriculum developer/girl friday for an arts-based mentoring program. I took the train all over the city bringing permission slips and film projectors and boxes of pipe cleaners and little old women and third grade children from place to place. On Saturday morning, I commuted two hours to an arts program in Queens. I worked over 40 hours a week. I made 743 a month. Before taxes. (Oh yes, my "stipend" from my non-job was taxable.)

I was a...Teenage Werewolf! No, of course not. They can afford to eat meat.
I was an Americorps VISTA. 

Before I took the job, I had my doubts about working, however distantly, for the Bush administration.
After I took the job, I worried about having enough change to do laundry.  Which is not to say I don't have ideological problems with Americorps. At the time, I could recite them the way some women can tick off their children's birthstones. Here are some:
 
Americorps VISTA workers do not have most of the rights of other white-collar, full-time workers. (Neither do adjunct professors, temps, people who work multiple part time jobs, etc. Granted.) We work for less than the minimum wage. Our health benefits are largely fictional, with very few  practitioners ever having heard of our tiny, specialty HMO. At the end of our "term of service", we are
fired without being eligible for unemployment and without a grace period on our dubious health care. 

Americorps provides low wage labor for non-profits who would otherwise have to create sustainable, living wage positions. I'm not saying these non-profits would be able to provide these positions or that they wouldn't choose out of necessity to simply shrink the programs VISTAs are hired to expand. However, for a while there in New York City, there wasrelatively little incentive to develop entry-level non-profit positions. For a bit everyone I knew with a job like mine was a VISTA. 

Americorps, when it was made visible by Washington, played into the illusion that volunteerism could ever replace well-funded social service organizations with permanent, well-paid staff.

Williamsburg
For my first twelve months in the city, I live in Williamsburg, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn, ten minutes from the east village. It is the first time I have lived in a neighborhood with an internet cafe or an independent bookstore. It is also the first time I have lived in a neighborhood with Spanish speaking residents or minority-owned businesses. I find the close proximity of these things more disconcerting than I would have expected. I feel distinctly unwelcome in Williamsburg and then wonder if that's just white guilt talking. I feel guilty about feeling white guilt, ever since a friend at a Vassar had a sign-off quote on all her emails that said “The funny thing about guilt is that it is still focused on the oppressor.” 

I am aware that the influx of young white artists and this students is at least half-negative for my Dominican and Puerto Rican neighbors. I don't understand the economics of gentrification enough to know exactly why, however.
I wonder a lot whether there is a way of being useful and positive in the neighborhood that would make me feel better about my presence. What I think bothered me the most was not the larger dynamics of rent control or population changes or anything like that. What bothered me was being in such close proximity to others without any sense of warmth or shared destiny or interdependence or concern for one another. The working class and poor people of color were a community and the hipsters were one (to the extent that we were interested in being such.)  We were all like vaguely hostile fish, our schools parting and swirling but never really mixing. Like all we had in common was living in polluted water.

Panhandlers
I give to panhandlers. Not if I'm tired or feeling threatened or extra-anxious about money. But generally. The only arguments I have heard for not giving money to people on the street strike me as suspect. There's the whole “They'll just use it for drugs or alcohol” line. Personally, I accept that a hardcore addict might need their drug of choice more than I need mine. (Sushi, at last check.) 
I don't think anyone ever started the recovery process because someone conveyed to them that drugs were wrong by withholding their spare change. Nor should it, really. The older I get the more I realize that my politics are about resources being public and lifestyle choices being private. Not that I think some people don't fuck up their lives for no good reason. But I don't believe anyone's money, theirs or mine or the government's should be used to convey how we as a society feel about this or that fuck up. Money is for filling needs, period.

Panhandlers Again
When I lived in Ireland during my junior year in college, I used to befriend homeless people all the time. First off, because Irish public spaces are often so chatty that a little thing like vastly different life circumstances won't necessarily prevent someone started up a conversation with you. I also worked with homeless kids in a transitional housing unit so I was feeling pretty comradely. 

I think the single biggest difference between that time and anytime since is that I was in a foreign county. It wasn't a citizen, I wasn't responsible, I wasn't the more fortunate, or if I was, it was as a representative of the U.S., widely regarded as the luckiest place on earth. 

Medicaid
First of all I'm using the wrong term. I'm actually enrolled in Family Health Plus. Family Health Plus is another public health program but it's for people who make too much money (ie any) to be enrolled in Medicaid. 

I make about 1200 dollars a month. That is a little less than double the upper income limit, even for Family Health Plus. Luckily since I am a nanny and work off the books, my employer could lie for me. I didn't feel great about this but it was that or ignore a lump in my breast, chronic digestive problems, the fact that I hadn't gotten a teeth cleaning in four years. So off I go the Family Health Plus Enrollment office. The gentleman working there is very nice. However he follows through on his training and asks me my income four ways til Sunday. By hour, by week, by hours per week, by month, by year. Even though I am there to commit public benefits laws, I am humiliated by being accused of any criminality. Then I get the drug questionnaire. “Do you ever miss work due to drugs or alcohol use?” “Have you ever been arrested for drug possession etc?” I am told that they need this information to refer me to various rehabilitation programs when I receive my enrollment materials. For all I know this could be true. Nonetheless I was never given a drug questionnaire when I was enrolled in private health programs.
My Family Health Plus card arrive three months later. My name on the card is misspelled. I call the Department of Social Services. I call them. I'm given several different numbers of people who might be able to help. None of them can. All of them treat me as I have made up some previously unheard-of dilemma to irritate them. There is a general consensus that I have done something wrong at some point in the process, although I am never told what. I suspect my real mistake was having the audacity to need the public services (the provision of which is these ice queens' job, but I digress.) Eventually I am told I have to bring all my ID and such back to the office to prove that I am really me and really entitled to benefits.
Frustrated, I later relay this entire episode to my room-mate at the time. She had just quit a job (an Americorps gig actually) working with women on AFDC helping them set up home daycare businesses. She says immediately “Well, the kind of people they deal with all day, I'm not surprised.” 

My immediate response is to think “Well, that's a classist remark. I hope she never said anything like
that to her clients' at work”. It takes me a minute to realize that as of enrolling in a public health program, the kind of people she means is me. I grew up in the middle class suburbs, and then went to Vassar, where I worked very hard dispelling my own classism. It never occurred to me someone could make a classist remark about me.

CARE
Being a client of social services does not stop charity canvassers from stopping me on the street,
Occasionally they are policy organizations and I can get off with just signing the petition. Most of them however expect you to buy a membership and commit to 25-35 dollars a month. 

A guy my age or a little bit younger stopped me on the sidewalk a few months ago. His organization was called CARE, his staff polo shirt was yellow. I listened to the spiel and then said, truthfully, that I'm often left with ten or twenty dollars for a few days between paychecks. Therefore I don't sign up for anything where money is automatically withdrawn from my account. “I don't know how any given part of the month is going to be” I say. He points out my bottle of water, and tells me if I cut out little purchases like that, I could help third world children. “Some people never know how any day is going to be” he says. He notices that I have the child I nanny with me and seems to relent “Of course if you have children, I understand.” I tell him that Ben isn't my child, but he is the kid I nanny for two hundred bucks a week. He tells me I really need to think about how much I have compared to most of the world. He is still talking as I walk away. I'm furious. Not least of which because I could have been him. There was a time when I though you could tell by looking at some one what they had. That it was not only acceptable but just and necessary and noble to tell strangers what they should do with their resources. I don't feel that way anymore.
I can't quite be irritated with people who assume I have money to spare, though. I still assume that. It affects my spending, it affects the role I assume in various interactions. For example, there is a nanny solidarity organization in New York City, mostly domestic employees from the Caribbean advocating for better protections. I don't join, or even try to help out. I assume their problems are not my problems. Partly because I am very happy with my employers. Partly because I am, permanently and forever in my head, the oppressor, as my friend's email said. My social identity is that of a middle class Vassar girl. That's how I'm perceived, unless I'm calling DSS. Really, I'm happier that way. If I had to choose the stigma of being poor vs. the stigma of being spoiled, I'd still take the latter. I didn't know that about myself four years ago. 

Wish List
I keep a list of things I will buy when I start making more money. I have confidence that will happen. I may be wrong. Still, I believe that, and I regard the belief as a privilege. On the list is things like new bras and stockings or new sheets. Also a new laptop and trip to Israel. These things seem equally plausible to me. Which is to say that some day spending two grand on a vacation seems like nothing. And some days spending thirty dollars on underclothes seems absurd. 

On a more metaphysical level, what I wish for is to be accountable to a community. To be able to talk about where I'm at economically and give and receive aid to people in similar or dissimilar situations. To not feel like difference means guilt or shame or silence or resentment. I want a safe place to talk about all this. I am not naïve enough to believe that resources will ever be equally distributed. Therefore money will probably never be just money. Yet I would like it to be a tool for community building, not just a symbol of what keeps us apart. It turns out that's more complicated than I thought.

I have been struggling anew with my awareness that I live in a society that tolerates an incredible amount of violence towards and humiliation of women. Most of all I've been swallowing rage that we all know this, even a lot of men know this, and yet one feels so ridiculous and redundant bringing it up. I have been trying my best not to let these thoughts dominate my conversations with my new boy because I don't want to sound like "hey, winter's cold. have you noticed winter's cold. that sucks for me, what are you going to do about it?"

Except that the relationships of power in our society are not natural. We are just accustomed to them. And here's an example of what it feels like to be a woman, out in the cold.

I work in a bookstore so I have been seeing the new movie-themed cover for The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy. I didn't realize that the whole of the story is about a young woman's stalking and incredibly brutal murder in 1947 Hollywood.
Once again, the fact that the details are somewhat bizarre and over the top make what should be a sobering, horrifying and not that unusual story ripe for glamorous film treatment. Here's the cover of the new paperback/movie poster.



Here's the image and text I will be displaying wherever I locate said poster or book.

MY NAME WAS ELIZABETH SHORT.
THEY'VE MADE MY MURDER SEXY.





The ability to articulate horror, fear, disgust, anger is sometimes the hardest thing. We all want to be so civilized even when civilization treats us savagely. This is the best way I can express where I stand today.

Another friend of mine has just decided that ze doesn't want a gender pronoun to be applied to hir. I'm slightly disgruntled, partly because of what this preference is already doing to my use of language. (Ze? Jesus Christ.) Partly because, for all my desire to surround myself with outrageous people, some small-town part of me recoils at anyone "making a scene".

Also, I'm really jealous.

****************************************************************

One of my first memories of having or wanting, a sexual identity, not just experiencing pleasure or desire: My high school's social activism club carpooled to the local college to see a series of monologues about the AIDS epidemic.
The last monologue was in the voice of a gay man. The character was witty and impassioned. The actor was fine-featured, sharp-chinned, longish-haired, flat-chested. Feminine, but boyish. Probably, now that I think about it, gay himself. Male.

I wanted to sleep with him. I wanted to be him.

Vanyel, the queeny young wizard from Merecedes Lackey's fantasy novels. Tom Hanks' character from Philadelphia. (The only time I've ever found Tom Hanks sexy.) Justin from Queer as Folk. Alan Cumming. Ben Shenkman in the guise of Louis from Angels in America. The vast majority of my gay male friends and coworkers. I wanted to sleep with all of them. I wanted to be all of them.

The be/fuck intersection occurs on several levels. I wouldn't have sex with most of my gay male crushes as a girl even if such things were possible. I want to touch these men as men. I want to know if kissing a guy as another guy feels anything like the two configurations I'm used to. To experience being penetrated as a male, or to channel the desire I feel into a hardness and a rush of liquid on my lover's body. To be inside someone with the most sensitive part of my mine.

In other words, I'll admit what is prurient about this. Even though, despite my comfort with sex confessions, despite my head full of transgender affirmative theory, it still embarasses me somehow.

Yet in some ways, it's harder to articulate what's not prurient.

I see old queens, or old masculine men that are nontheless veteran queers, and I see how they've reinvented growing old.
I see twenty-something or younger men, some upstanding advocates for their people, some starlets in their own mind, and I see how they've reinvented being young. I envy the drag queen her power of transformation, they way she lets femininity out at the shoulders and makes it new. I envy Chelsea muscle queens for making built and buff seem faggy. (Add a sentence or two here.)

It's more than a little possible that a few cliches have crept into my image of gay men. I'm reminded of what one writer calls "the myth of the exceptional homosexual". It's not as if the gay male me would be any more likely to compose a symphony or paint revelatory pictures or dance ballet. We don't all get to be Leonard Bernstein or Andy Warhol.

I can't help wondering why I am dismissing the legacy left me by Gertrude Stein, _____________, and __________________.
Is it because my gay and lesbian history books are crammed full of boys? Is it because some very unqueer part of me believes that you need a cock to be a genius?

My therapist nearly choked on her mid-session sip of water when I told her I regretted not being born a gay man. When she recovered she said "Yeah, cause they're soooo happy."

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Yet the longing remains. Longing doesn't care what the grass on the other side of the fence looks like up close. It certainly doesn't care about lesbian invisibility. I watch a gay man kiss his boyfriend or gather together a herd of grade school kids or take the mic at a rally and I feel my heart pulled towards something familiar and unattainable.

It's the way I feel when I see happy little girls with big faces like mine, especially if they're around eight or nine, the age when I was unhappiest. It's the same strange nostalgia and sadness I feel looking at pictures of my hometown before I was born. It's the way exhilaration sometimes turns to something stiff and tense when I listen to a great musician or a watch a graceful athlete. It's the knowledge that even if I started now, there are certain things I cannot be. The trade-off was made too long ago and I don't remember choosing.

Next life, I think. If there was something of myself I could put aside now to guarantee my place, I would.

***************************************************************
Back to my newly genderless friend. Ze's not the first person in my life to start shedding his or her assigned gender. Maybe in a year or two, this friend will start transitioning to male. I move in circles where testosterone injections are becoming so common, we can't be bothered to say the whole hormone; it's just T please.

I don't have to wait until my next life. I could make the desire a whole lot less hypothetical. The sacrifices, the ones I was so keen on making on some cosmic level, could be less hypothetical too.

I can't imagine doing it. I'm not prepared to give up the chemistry that currently keeps me going, however bumpily. I love my body with its bulges and slopes. I love the looks I get in a low-cut shirt, the way getting my period will cure whatever little ailments I've been nursing, the way being turned on drapes my body in a soft mesh of pleasure from my earlobes to my knees. I love being one of the girls in a lesbian bar or crying about boys on the couch. I can't imagine telling my father that his daughter isn't exactly his daughter. I can't imagine never giving birth.

So I compromise. I read a lot of literature written from a gay male perspective. I write some too. I go to parties in drag. I find boys who say things like "You don't need a dick to be my boyfriend." The last time my best friend and I talked about strap-on shopping, she said "You can let the guy choose what he'd like to be used on him. But if you need to have your cock, then pick one out to just be yours." She said it with no judgment, like I was neither a freak or a faker. I almost cried.

I don't know if we really have multiple lives, unless we choose to rebirth ourselves in the middle of growing up. I've done it before and maybe I'll one day feel the need to do it again. In the meantime, I know that part of being an adult is knowing that every choice precludes other choices. Queers believe everything is possible. And it is, but not simultaneously.

I've been thinking lately of my favorite Tillie Olsen short story. A woman is describing her teenage daughter, a girl with a lot fewer life choices than me, but the same kind of hunger for what may or may not still be possible. "Let her be" the mother says. "So all that is in her will not bloom. In how many does it? She will find her way". Yes she will, and so will the he within her.

The copy reads "We have always been a part of this community. Gay and straight, we play ball together and see each other at the barbershop and church. It's time to treat us with the love we deserve."

This ad just appeared in my subway station. I smile every time I see it. It appeared shortly after the Ali Forney Center, an advocacy and housing group for homeless queer youth launched a campaign directed at the parents of young GLBTs. The parents and children pictured were people of color, as are the majority of Ali Forney's clients. The copy on these ads, which seem not to be available online, stressed that having a queer child can bring up feelings of shame, guilt and fear but that these relationships can be healed, possibly with help from the folks at Ali Forney. Remarkably, it acknowledges that a parent, in a moment of terror, may kick their kid out of the house, while still presenting AFC as an advocate for both parent and child.

What strikes me about both of these campaigns is that they acknowledge the homophobia in Black and Latino communities without the racist undertones one senses when white queer groups address homophobia among folks of other races. Both assert that gay people of color have always existed, that gay identity is not borrowed from white gay history, that queers of color can defend themselves and that straight people of color can rise to the challenge of taking care of their own. Most powerfully, they both resist the unspoken assumption that queers of color must flee to more enlightened white spaces. Even if, as the Ali Forney posters acknowledge, families might be temporarily split. Even if, as the wearepartofyou.org ads acknowledge, black gay men have to demand their own safety. They insist that being part of a family or community of color is an existence worth fighting for.

This is my inaugural entry of this blog. I am writing from my dilapidated Bushwick apartment on a Tuesday morning at the tail end of summer. In the news, Israel is beginning to pull out of Lebanon. Last week World Pride 2006, Jerusalem's attempt to host an international GLBT parade was canceled for safety reasons, although the seminars and meetings went on.

Like most of the Americans with whom I associate, I feel this sense of global accountability. As a citizen in a country that is both more or less democratic and a superpower, don't I have just a sliver of power? I persist in believing that if I made some forever-undefined ethical gesture as a person, my government would know I was serious and stop all this bullshit already. This is the lingering effect of my college education, which possibly planted an irrational core belief for every one it dug out. I no longer believe free markets will make everything better. The Revolution-Fairy on the other hand? She's real all right, that's why you have to leave your guilt-ridden American heart under your pillow.

Sometimes this way of looking at the world breaks open in funny ways. My room-mate and I were cooking dinner and discussing all the available interpretations of this latest war in Lebanon. We were getting frustrated that we couldn't come to an agreement amongst ourselves, much less broker one between Olmert and Hezbollah. Genuinely frustrated, I mean, sighing into our cutting board and spaghetti strainer respectively, when the Onion-like summary of our evening came to us. "Twenty-somethings fail to resolve Mideast Crisis Over Pasta." Failed utterly. I thought of the most memorable palm card I ever saw, even though it advertised nothing more significant than another graphic design company, It said "I Am So Sorry About Everything."

Last night on 1st Avenue, I could smell pot smoke for four blocks. Which may be the eau de 2006. It's too late to stop most of the earth-shattering changes of this last season of history and too early to know just how we'll be called upon to fix it. It feels like the last few hours of a party that got wild, then destructive, then sad. Someone's asleep on a deck chair and someone's crying. And if it's your house, you sit around because you can't really start cleaning until everyone's gone home.

Pass it here.