Track Mangoes

I seldom hear my own name. Generally I've been referred to by saccharine terms of endearment. My family has given me many, my favorite being "Poo-Goo," a play on the Tibetan "Pugu," meaning "Kid," most frequently used in a pejorative sense. In elementary school I was referred to as "Jensy," and "Jensy-Poo." In middle school I was known as "faggot" or "that kid who wants to turn you gay." Upon moving into the liberal inner-city, my friends, many of whom were gay, referred to me as "Jenzabelle" and "Nippolean," a play on Nepalese (my heritage), Napoleon (my penchant for the french language), and Nipple (?). When a fatty scholarship subsumed me into the thightly knit circle of Portland's private education, having developed a reputation as a Libertine, I was often referred to as "Pacific Rim." In college I've heard "Jensicle," "Jenzelle Washington," and "Jenzle Bear." Most currently my roommates refer to me as "Dick," "Douche," "Boiye," "Papa Parrot," and "Baba Hadoor," a play on my Nepalese given name, Bamba Hadhur.

The terms of endearment given by our parents is no mystery, "Little One," "Young One," etc. Yet the nicknames manifest in yet stranger cultural ways, such as the quintessentially American habit of referring to our presidents by their initials. This power of the nickname to dismantle the materiality of an object has been widely studied by post-structuralists and perhaps explains the phenomenon of the human desire to refer to genitalia through grade-school abstractions, even late into life. Naming, for these paranoid theorists, is a violent act.

The Bible tells us the most secret name of God, the Shem Ha Meforesh, could be uttered only by the high priest in the afternoon of Yom Kippur. Alone he enters the Holy of Holies and there would say the name. Rope tied around his ankle, so that, should he die while in the Holy of Holies, he could be gotten out. No one else, of course, was permitted to enter, for the power of God would slay the unholy. Hence, if the high priest was insufficiently cleansed or impure of heart he would die upon entry. Just like the lot of us.

I am hard pressed to find any individual who, when asked if they would enter the Holy of Holies, would not, for a moment, in the very least, pause. For the question is not Would You Go In That Room, but Are You Pure?

Take the tale of Rumpelstiltskin. Trapped in a tower a girl must complete the impossible task of spinning flax into gold in three days time, or ELSE. All hope is lost until a dwarfish creature helps her along in return for her first born child. The flax spun to gold, the daughter marries the Evil King and bears a child. Little Man comes back and demands the child payment for his services. When the daughter just-can't-let-go the little man strikes her a deal: "Guess my name and I'll leave you alone." Upon realizing that every man in her life is, in fact the oppressor (the father who sold her, the king who raped her, and the little man who deceived her) she guesses his name and is free from strife. What is this but the myth of psychiatry?

To say one's own name is more painful than any act of self-mutilation. For, when we refer to ourselves by our own names, a sociologist would tell you, we conceptualize our being on terms that we have seldom created. The deeper aspects of our self-image come even more powerfully from our experiences with other people. And just as the rape victim who wonders "was my skirt too short" knowing-the-self can be used to oppressive ends. But this is no mystery.

What is mysterious is the extent to which such a "looking glass self" reaches into what a Christian might call the "soul." For our very consciousness is not, as Cooley would have us believe, social. Or at least not purely social. For that pause upon entrance into that Room Where God Dwells is a reflection upon this fundamentally American question: is there something inside me which is authentic?

It comes as no surprise to me, then, that secular humanists believe in the power of the ritual act of religion, the value of the "community," solidification of the tribe, identification with the totem, all outside of a regime. Of course these people, addled by Foucault, belive in the power of the tribe: they don't believe in god. At least not in a meaningful way. And it is certainly not that they don't believe in God. A true atheist sees the bloodshed that religion has brought upon the world and runs through the streets preaching the path to salvation. No, these secular humanists believe in nothing at all, save for, perhaps, the benefits of circle songs and potlucks.

"But wait!" you will say, and you are right. Anyone who has spent a modicum of time in an American Studies course knows that no one in their right mind would ever say, "Everything is pretty good." To do so would be blasphemy. Instead we say, Your bigotry, your racism, your hatred stem from your ignorance and your backward way of life is detestable. And these people who act as the butt of our own hatred are the supposed monsters. That is, in the very least, debatable.

Perhaps this is what Lady Gaga is trying to tell us, that we are, all of us, in fact, monsters paving the path of our own destruction, and since we are on the verge of killing ourselves through war, and famine, and environmental crisis, through hate crimes (from the left and right), and destitute we should at least look good while we do it. She is, I feel, a pop Oscar Wilde. Well, not her, per se, but the army of gay men that are employed full time to keep her standing.

As Freud taught us, the resistance is the neurosis itself. And it is not the employment of the name itself that is oppression, nor is it simply our awe of the secret name of god, but the manipulation of our awe. So as the government assigns colors to levels of threat we must come to the understanding that such a stratification is the avowal that there is, indeed, no threat at all, or that if there is a threat there is little to nothing we, or the government, can do to stop it.

Simply "owning" the name does not remove it from that system of oppression we so often like to think we're in. My love of referring to myself as a "fag" does not change the fact that others will think it unseemly, just as Malcom X disowning the name given to him by the white man does not solve the problem of racism in and of itself. It's never enough to "take it back," whatever that means. For the construction itself is far more powerful for the absence of its content.

How the political climate has constructed the gay male object of desire.

Is it an accident that Asian pornography became popular in the post-Regan aftermath? Is it an accident that Eastern European boys became commodified in gay pornography after the fall of the Berlin Wall?

With white-gays skyrocketing into strata of gentry and the solidification of a unified queer identity for men, came what Nicholas Radel calls “transnational gayness"--a sugary, dogmatic principle that is a “a celebration of gay identity as gay identification with the other.” The men who mouth these political clichés insist that gayness itself can transcend national and geographic distinctions. That gay man over there is the same as this one here because they both have anal sex.

Have we learned nothing from Gloria Anzaldua? who once said even the term "queer" erases our differences and marginalizes our individual struggle. And that's precisely what "Transnational Gayness" does: it conflates gender, which is plastic, with nationality, which is imagined.

Gay men obviously don’t take the idea of transnational gayness too seriously. Pornography demonstrates the West’s representation of Eastern Europeans as the exotic-white-other, in search of identity, shape and focus, given to them by the jolly white westerner--nothing, I'm sure, you haven't heard before. It can escape you, particularly in moments when watching something like the infamous Bel Ami production Out of Athens. Here, the protagonist, quite randomly, meets a Greek tour guide who cant actually speak English, but who takes him on a tour. Ah Yes! The Greek pan leading whiteys through the maze of architectural ruins so he can have his COCK SUCKED. And there are more. Boy (1995), Viz (Tom Kurthy, 1995), and Sauna Paradiso (George DuRoy, 1994) all feature young men from the formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe and take place in the friendly yet foreign setting of the bathhouse (an originally European locale still foreign to most heterosexual men and indeed many gay men). In My Polish Waiter the protagonist reaches out to a nubile boy from the service staff, who again speaks little English. This veiled desire is emphasized and emblematized by a pivotal scene in which the waiter performs an exotic polish dance.

Gay sexuality itself, as an epistemological category, needs to be understood as a significant factor in the crisis of representation occasioned by the collapse of communism. The films aforementioned portray desire-objects (twinky, economically disenfranchised, nearly mute, slightly depressed Europeans) as having been there all along, waiting found in wanting. Their space becomes his space, the space of the transnational gay man.

The collapse of the Iron Curtain has lead to the reshaping of gay male desires. In the aftermath of the fall of communism, the U.S. has looked down at Eastern Europe as the locus for chaos and confusion. Within a post-Cold War framework pornography is tremendously recuperative. Nationality, politics, and sexuality maunder in order to keep the wires of culture smoothly functioning. The utopian vision of gay transnationality (might I add, a Leftist fantasy?) that energizes these films, a vision that is important to contemporary constructions of same-sex desire, obscures the extent to which the production of gay films about Eastern Europe is part of a larger, capitalist expansion into Eastern Europe in the post-Cold War period.

This reading of transnational gayness as being intimately connected to the political climate carries over quite nicely to other objects-of-desire as well. Take the mysterious Asian-effect: the phenomenon of some white men to only date and fuck Asian boys. Can we draw some connection between the Asian effect and political aftermath?

Yes. If the obedient, sexually curious woman was the trope before the Vietnam war, the obedient sexually starved woman was the stereotype after the Vietnam war. During the war the sex industry provided Vietnam with a new source of income. The business carried over to other south Asian territories, particularly Thailand, where they still flourish today. But the Asian American identity would not conform to the obedient prostitute stereotype up until the Regan administration. Asian Americans in America were used as the puppets for racial politics form the 1960’s in the dying flames of the civil rights movement, particularly on the West Coast. We throw around terms like ‘model minority’ today as if it had always been in place, but truth be told the american-asian object of desire didn't become such a model until this time. The Asian American was held up as a punching bag for resentment: When in 1965 The Negro Family publication came out, it accused black families of experiencing financial subordination due to “a lack of family values.” Asians were the opposite, according to conservative pundits. Asian success stories popped up in The New York Times Magazine and The U.S. News and World Report as "proof" of minority families pulling themselves up by the imagined bootstraps. If they can do then why can't you? seemed to be the tenor of these pieces.

The rhetoric seemed to carry over into my middle school too, where Asians were actually taunted for being good at things. Go figure. That particular brand of racism didn't do Asian slackers, such as myself, much good. For then the question became: Gosh, they're good at math, so why aren't you?

Of course in middle school I had no idea that my fate had long been determined during the Johnson administration. During the Regan administration, innovative technology caused massive job cuts, the conservatives insisted that a return to traditional values was a cure-all for these socioeconomic problems. Vietnamese shrimp wholesalers, Korean greengrocers, and Chinese computer whizzes were recognized as the epitome of ‘family values.'

The white-bourgeois-gay-male American identity cannot construct itself outside a framework of entitlement. Gay men have often had to sacrifice much of their personal lives in order to bare the burden of being able to sleep with whomever they want. Does this, and this is the question that boggles me, excuse them from proclivities such as the Asian effect? I have had to loose so much to be able to sleep with men that it's okay if I'm a little picky. After Millet, we know that the way we have sex is political, but for gay men it's a different game, particularly when removed from the discussion of Birth Control. As the Gay American Man stands on the edge of a cultural abyss, looking down into a pit of normalness, Transnational Gayness points to something rotten in the state of faggotry.

When Mrs. Klimbacher asked me whether or not she should worry that her four-year-old son asked her to buy him an Easy-Bake oven, I told her that she probably didn’t have to but that it might feel nice if she did.

I started babysitting for Mrs. Klimbacher’s fraternal twins, Richie and Hans, three years after she divorced her husband. From an early age Hans exhibited a fondness for football, while Richie preferred far more delicate endeavors. On a crisp fall day I recall seeing Hans on the front lawn, red leaves stuck to his black fleece and woolen cap. He circumambulated the grass, tossing a Nerf ball and reciting football penalties. Now I don’t claim to know much about football, but I know the things Hans belted out into the autumn air had absolutely no meaning whatsoever; they were simply a hodge-podge of phrases referees might say, like “First down!” and “Five yard penalty!” I then recall going into the house, setting my shoulder bag on the kitchen counter, and scouring for Richie. I found him sitting at his mother’s vanity and applying her makeup to his face. He had one of her silk scarves wrapped around his forehead like a turban and smelled distinctly of her Crabtree and Evelyn sandalwood perfume.

The thought crossed my mind then, and it would continue to cross my mind as I babysat for the Klimbachers, that Richie may have been—brace yourself—gay. When I watch Richie lavishing in beautiful things, the necklaces and the Sunday hats, I cannot help but contemplate the inborn difference between him and his brother. While Richie was pretending to be cat woman Hans was killing Nazis in the backyard. How, at such an early age, could two boys differentiate their tastes so stridently?

Richie never has expressed an interest in men or in anything technically homosexual. Yet I cannot help but observe my tendency to color him thus. He was born, I think, not as a homosexual, but with a hyper-sensitivity to color and form, smells and sensations. I know he will grow up with homosexual tendencies, but I also know he was born with good taste. Is it a coincidence that so many of our brothers are tainted with such a cursed flaw?

When I babysit for Richie I never discourage him from playing with beautiful things. I think it might traumatize him if I did. Instead, I tell him that, yes, that smells delightful, and yes, that looks fantastic, and yes, he does look dashing in fire engine red. I do this because, to him, the vanity is a temple—a sanctuary from a world that discourages his odd form of expression. Why should I hinder him from playing with his mother’s makeup, which, to him, is essentially paint on the canvas of his face.

On my night walk with J, a tradition we have started after dinner, we came across a dead squirrel that had been run over by a car. I took out my lighter and held a small vigil for it. Though the vigil was short lived. Once I lit a flame the squirrel's figure could be seen, and it was ghastly, to say the least. It had been sawed in half by the tire of a small car. What is more was that its innards had been pressed out of its mouth, tearing the skin at the lips, like an overstuffed tube of toothpaste.

That is how I felt when I read this: http://theater2.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/theater/reviews/06slipping.html?ex=1265774400&en=0137d902ee299cde&ei=5087&WT.mc_id=TH-D-I-NYT-MOD-MOD-M110-ROS-0809-PH&WT.mc_ev=click

In ancient Greece small penises were coveted over large penises. This particular aesthetic preference, though strange to our modernized afro-fetishized culture, fit in perfectly with the characteristically Greek adoration of the beautiful boy.

Pretty boys (and their small penises) represented what could be beautiful about the more Apollonian side of human existence. The seething Dionysian, found in the expression of the Gods, ie nature, and the portrayal of animals, who, consequently had large penises, was something to be conquered. The calm, cool, collected Apollonianism of the Greeks sought, more than anything else, to subdue the Dionysian, but in a way that did not require brute force, the way Neanderthals subdued nature. Apolloniansim sought to, in effect, subdue Dionysianism with beauty, put it in a frame, to colonize nature with human brilliance.

The beautiful boy aesthetic carried on in western art for hundreds of years after. The want for big penises really emerged with the advent of pornography, which didn't exist (as we understand it today) until the Victorian Period. It is no accident that pornogprahy was created at the same time major archeological digs uncovered thousands of erotic artifacts from Rome to Pompeii. Up until that time a penis was simply enough to get you up and out. We weren't so blasé, not immured by sex as we are now. It was around this time, with the emergence of pornography, that the mode by which the western cultural apparatus viewed the beautiful boy shifted to something more sinister.

I used to date a man who's entire artistic oeuvre centered around the sinister aspects of the beautiful boy aesthetic, how it has hindered culture at least as much as it has helped it, how it has decimated as much emotional material as it had created. He thought he was cutting edge. But the main idea around which he centered his work, that being the "beautiful boy as destroyer" aesthetic, was entirely not his. Indeed this idea is quite old. It, in fact, was the precursor to European modernism. Case in point: Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray."

After the ACTUP riots (oh and they were riots) during the later part of the AIDS crisis, around 1987, the "beautiful boy as destroyer" aesthetic was no longer interesting as cultural material. The pearly faces of the Stonewall demonstrators showed a much more politically involved way of being and manner of expression. With the maundering of beautiful boys and politics came the idea of the sissy boy as badass, and, consequently, queer culture, for a short while, merged with punk culture, which, for all intents and purposes, was stolen from street culture, which had been there all along (punks just gave a name to it).

The Death of Matthew Shepherd complicated things. Here we had a beautiful boy who was the victim of homophobia, tied to a fence in a Jesus like pose...the story was ripe with meaning. In demonstrations queers held up his face on posterboards and demanded justice. His face became a symbol for all gay justice. And for awhile we used his image ethically. But as it happens with all images, people began to fetishize his position of martyrdom. Beautiful boys essentially reverted to the old Greek way of being: they represented something already dead, something temporal and delicate, like a wilting flower, ready to be plucked. In a way Matthew Shepherd holds a cultural place that is enviable. He, like a Lancelot, died in his prime and is remembered in state of perpetual youth. Lucky him.

Yet cultural consciousness never forgets. And we cannot forget the tenor of modernism, the sinister side of things, the multiplicity of consciousness that complicates any straightforward view of any one thing. (Damn you modernism, you make life so difficult.)

This is why Gay Martyrdom is about to end. Gay culture is, like western culture, is experiencing a postmodern renaissance thirty years late. And then, it's fitting. The cynicism and reductive attitude of Postmodernism was preceded by the eclectic sixties, in which academe and art tried to get back to its roots, sampling from all over the world, experiencing a kind of cultural nirvana, a connection that we find almost comical these days. Peace and love and vegetables. Et cetera.

The peace and love for Gays is over. The contemporary sincerity, think Cascade AIDS project, SMYRC, the "we are just like you!" rhetoric of the nineties, coupled with the radical sexual questioning on college campuses in the naughts, and now it follows of necessity that gay culture will begin to explore the ineffable sides of sexuality, the maddening emptiness of queer expression. Where is our nihilism, some ask. Don't worry your pretty little heads off, I say. It's coming. And when it does, when it does, I don't think you'll like it.

What I am saying is that Gay culture is on the verge of apocalypse. Gay will no longer mean gay. Straight will be a moniker of mundane inanity. Naming is violent, but we will, as postmodernism did for art, find that it poses a satisfying artistic paradigm.

Gay culture is becoming normalized. When it does, when gays become straights, are allowed to marry "just like everyone else" then a subculture will form. Nope, no Golden Era for the Fags. No time in which we will revel in the goal we have sought so long, equality; but when we finally get what we are looking for we will suddenly realize that it wasn't all it was cracked up to be and then we must ask the really hard question: if equality isn't really what I want, then what do I want. My answer to the question we as a queer culture have yet to ask is this: the point is to experience the existential pain of the question to which there is no answer.

To quote Plath, sometimes if we are wanting many things it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing at all.

"We have all of you courageous plaintiffs to thank: Go get married, live happily ever after, live the American dream."
--Des Moines attorney Dennis Johnson, who argued on behalf of the gay and lesbian couples

Maybe we weren't ready for Iowa to become what some conservatives have been calling "The New Gay Mecca." As Iowa joins the ranks of Connecticut and Massachusetts I can't help but wonder if it's all worth it. Is the "American Dream" really something we should want?

"It's a big win because, coming from Iowa, it represents the mainstreaming of gay marriage. And it shows that despite attempts to stop gay marriage through right wing ballot initiatives, like in California, the courts will continue to support the case for equal rights for gays. Once again, Iowa is leading when it comes to political dialogue in the country." --Richard Socarides, an attorney and former senior adviser on gay rights to President Clinton

It certainly does represent that.

"This is an unconstitutional ruling and another example of activist judges molding the Constitution to achieve their personal political ends. Iowa law says that marriage is between one man and one woman. If judges believe the Iowa legislature should grant same sex marriage, they should resign from their positions and run for office, not legislate from the bench ... Along with a constitutional amendment, the legislature must also enact marriage license residency requirements so that Iowa does not become the gay marriage Mecca due to the Supreme Court's latest experiment in social engineering." --U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa

The same thing recently happened in OR, where the judicial system decided to amend the law. It didn't last very long and, as I hear, there is already legislation moving to repeal the new marriage laws. How long will it last? How long can it go? And Must we follow Iowa? We're all very aware of Iowa's somewhat archaic relation to civilized depravity. We judge them for it. But the Iowa marriage law was simple and understandable, saccharine in its ability to provide a kind of eerie calm to the state. What is more, it was overwhelmingly supported by Iowans. Gay marriage will have to be a consensus. Despite what liberals tell you, gay marriage IS a threat to the institution of marriage, an institution that has been essentially monopolized by the Judeo-Christian establishment. Homosexual couples who want to be accepted into that kind of institution should consider the what it means for Conservatives to accept it. Right wigners think that homosexuality is an existential threat because it is an existential threat to society as they know it. We ought to be sensitive to the fears that we induce in conservatives. We are crushing their world, and in Iowa, we are doing it unfairly.

"Gay-porn star Brent Corrigan testified in court on Friday that he was approached by murder suspect Harlow Cuadra on MySpace -- to ask about producing a film together. Twenty-two-year-old Corrigan, whose real name is Sean Lockhart, is at the center of the Luzerne County, Pa., trial of pornography producer Cuadra, who allegedly attempted to lure Corrigan away from slain rival Bryan Kocis, owner of Cobra Video. Kocis was found dead at his Pennsylvania home in January 2007 -- he had been stabbed 28 times, and a fire set to his home burned his body beyond recognition. Cuadra is charged with his murder."

If I ever write a novel it will have all the themes presented in that paragraph. Full Article.

When I came out at age twelve my sexual-preference didn’t feel like a choice. Biology seemed to confine me in pubescent shackles and all I wanted was any male that would (sexually) give me the time of day. I wouldn't have called myself promiscuous ("but who knows?!") and finding a sexual partner proved tricky in the dominantly Christian suburb where I lived. Luckily, at thirteen, my family moved to inner city Portland where I could surround myself with gay culture.

After a two year binge on gayness [where I was constantly surrounded by like minded people (read: the well meaning progressives) who taught me that--above all else--I was a normal teenager,] I realized that, ironically, it has been conservatives (Christians, Mormons, Jews and the blue collared, like the loggers on my mother's side of the family) who have always upheld the unique role homosexuals play in society. The liberal idea of homosexual equality, to me, is far more bigoted and backward than anything I've ever heard from an "ignorant" "anti-gay" conservative.

Gay men are cultural refugees who have power and wealth in things that have no price. Their legacy and contributions to society can be traced from late 19th century photography back to the dreamy statues of the Greeks, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, through Romanticism, the Pre-Raphaelites, and up into the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. They are, it seems, responsible, in effect, for western aesthetics. (That's right, I said it, FUCK Georgia O'Keefe.)That makes gay men powerful sentinels of aesthetic culture.

Are Gay Men hyper-sensitive to art? Could it be in born? Like a kind of autism, could sensory stimuli overwhelms the gay-male brain? How do we explain, in a rural family, why there will sometimes be a boy who Sticks Out, a boy who is uninterested in paternal pursuits, like throwin-the-ole-pigskin-around? Instead of Tonka Trucks and building blocks he is hypnotized, overwhelmed, by the lushness of his mother’s clothes, the silks and the linens, the seductive scent of her perfumes, sandalwood, vanillas, orange blossoms and rose buds, and struck by the vibrancy of her make up, the deepness of the mascara, the pastel shadows, and the violent beauty of a streak of lipstick across a palid face. Makeup, to him, is simply a paintbrush. How do we explain this behavior in children? It's an international and timeless phenomenon.

Of course claiming that gay men are born hyper-sensitive to art makes me sound like I'm saying all gay men are pansies. It's like saying black people are born hyper-sensitive to (INSERT STEREOTYPE HERE TO AVOID THE RACE POLICE). But maybe something about their biology does, perhaps, predispose them to take a liking to art? There. Now it's less acerbicly worded.

I've worked with children in my church and in summer camps. I’ve noticed that this nascent fascination with aesthetics, for boys, often couples with a predisposition towards sensitivity and/or shyness. This predisposition leads, inevitably, towards a failure to bond with peers, particularly the ones uninterested by paper and string. This disjunction causes a feeling of Otherness which is tantamount to the gay experience. It's a uniquely gay Otherness unlike racial exile. I want to, almost, call it "queerness."When gay adults claim that he or she has been gay since childhood what they are remembering is, in effect, this particular kind of Otherness, this queerness, rather than the actual sexual attraction.

Because of this it seems odd to me that gay activists would align themselves so stringently with biology. The widespread desire to find a biological basis for homosexuality is still moot (I doubt we will ever find a substantial biological foundation for gayness) and, furthermore, will lead to claims that gay people are deformed at the prenatal level. The desire itself is symptomatic of an over-politicized social climate. The left actually believes that finding the “Gay Gene” will force everyone to submit to the rhetoric of “acceptance.” Quelle fascisme!

The LGBT community needs to stop harassing Christian people. Gay people should also get over Christian hangup on male gayness. The tradition sees homosexuality as an existential threat because it is an existential threat if you follow the rules in the bible! And besides, if Gayness is the antithesis of Puritanism (which, go with me, I think it is) gay men owe a lot to the church for how it has influenced gay culture: decadent, colorful, and lubed up like KFC chicken. (Then, when I think of the alter boys in Catholic churches, the contra altos in the choir of Europe, and the statues of young'ins lashed, crucified, bleeding, naked, I can't help but think that the church also owes something to gay culture...).

The Gays found their crack-pot prophet and he was nastier and crazier and ten times more insane than Coulter and Limbaugh. Yes, his name was Chris Crocker. Crocker was the crazed messiash from the woods, who spent all his life silently collecting Britney paraphanellia until finally the Lord called him forth to speak, to SHOUT from the highest mountain the internet had to offer, and he did. Chris Crocker told everyone to leave Britney Alone and the scary thing that nobody wants to admit is that they did. He broke the silence long enough to shout the truth and tell America something it didn't want to hear: it needed Britney.

But I digress.

Wihtout crazy people like Chris Crocker gay culture will fall into genteel dandyism, no longer the radical social experiment it once was. A truly progressive gay culture should not be a middle-class, elitist posturing with a paternalistic attitude toward the religious working class’ “ignorance.” I hate it when people insist that "We are the educated ones, and your homophobia comes out of deep ignorance."

Gay Culture has historically been the only true believer in the fact that sexuality is highly fluid. They've constructed their entire culture around the outer limits of sexual spectrums, fetishisms, fantasy, taboo and permiscuosness.

It occurred to me early on in adolescence that the feeling, the fright and excitement, the visceral fury of the simple idea of having sex with a woman, was something I had not experienced since, say, I was thirteen and trying to have sex with men. I grew nostalgic for that sensation of the badness of outer sexuality and I had grown weary of men. Gender didn't seem to matter so much anymore, the excitement of something new and "forbidden" was overwhelmingly appetizing. I had also constructed an entire identity that was GAY and unchanging, so to have sex with a woman would be like I was straight and having sex with men. Was I an in the closet straight man? However, like a sixteen year old, I was terrified to peruse anything even though I wanted many things quite badly. WHAT IF I WAS WRONG? Better to just stay in the closet. Keep having sex with men.

If sexuality can be this fluid how are we, then, to concede that gayness is strictly biological? To deny fluidity of sexual preference is to abandon the work academics have put into the study of gender and sexuality. Sex is temporal and always on a continuum, coming in and leaving like the tides. It permeates every relationship, even familial, every dream, every word that comes out of our mouths is in someway touched by sex. How can we find a GENE for this? How can there possibly be one biological factor, nay, one UNWAVERING biological factor that determines our sexuality from birth until death?

We can change our sexuality. Yes. You heard it: sexual conversions are theoretically possible. Though they may not be pleasant or desirable or even valuable, and though Christian fanatics may use this fact against queers, sexual conversion must be, at least theoretically, possible. We are, in effect, more comfortable knowing that sexuality is genetic, rather than letting it loose to the chaotic powers of God.

Instead of mooing about equality the Left should look long and hard at its approach to gay politics. At the same time, we, as they sexually lost, should seriously reconsider our affiliation with the left. While the staunchly gay should question its die-heard pursuit of marriage rights and special legal protection. If that's really what we want then we should at least stop to discuss how gay culture will be affected and if we want that or not. Additionally, gay men ought to embrace their culture’s character in spite of its tendency towards sexual promiscuity and drug use. I say appreciate it BECAUSE of its sexual promiscuity and drug use! To be gay is to be an outsider. To be an outsider is to be an artist. To be an artist is to be hated by society at large most of the time. Join the club.

Even if you think homosexuality is an inborn trait it does no good to seek the approval of government, the Judeo-Christian establishment, and other contenders who know very little about queerness. I'm adopting the view of Parker who once said, "heterosexuality isn't normal, it's just common." We've got to start thinking and behaving along those lines instead of validating the Right's queer-fears and degrading our culture by asking for their approval. I'm not calling for separatism, (though a continent of gay men wouldn't be half bad) but I am calling for enlightened militancy. We’ve got much bigger fish to fry than marriage.

Since homosexuality is a choice, there is no need to harbor self-hatred by thinking that our choice to love who we want to love is somehow wrong. It’s fabulous and truthful and totally against all the rules. Love is radical. And it’s how culture survives in the face of obliteration.