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.

“May I take your picture?” Whitehead asked us from across the table at Thanksgiving dinner. He was a burly, balding man with a delicate pink button up and a pair of cleanly pressed chinos. Alison and I had sat down near the head, close to where the thin linen tablecloth barley met the mahogany edge. We sat there without much intention of talking to anyone, but as we soon discovered it was difficult avoiding all human interaction.

Alison invited me to spend a few days with her in Rochester Minnesota. So, when given the choice between staying at school and freeloading during the holiday, I chose the latter.

Rochester is the kind of town everyone knows about but has never been to. Situated an hour and a half by car south of Minneapolis, it’s the third largest city in Minnesota outside of the Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington metropolitan area. Perhaps most famously known as the home of the grandiose Mayo Clinic, downtown boasts a relatively impressive array of bars and restaurants while the surrounding residential neighborhoods are mostly quaint, upscale, and sprawling. It’s technically not a suburb, but anyone who has been there (and seen the boxy houses rolling on the hillsides) knows that it sure does look like one.

Alison did not hear Whitehead the first time around; she had been starring off at an old dog in the kitchen, wrapping her hair around her pinky finger, tilting her head to the side with a look of pained ennui on her face. I thought I heard a tiny gasp ejected from her lips when she turned back towards her dinner and saw Whitehead towering above us with a camera awkwardly poised at his face.

We leaned in, smiled, and the shutter clicked.

Whitehead is not part of Alison’s family, and as far as I know that was the first time the two had ever met. There were a lot of people Alison didn’t know at Thanksgiving, for the event wasn’t held at her house, or even a house of her relatives’, but Alison made a tradition of going to the neighbor’s every year, The Ulbricht’s.

The Ulbricht’s were a moderately wealthy couple, both doctors. Mr. Ulbricht was a foppy gentleman in a maroon sweater vest who made sure that everyone’s flute was never empty. Missus Ulbricht wore a knitted sweater underneath a red Christmas apron. They were, I imagine, a perfect sample of an aging Rochester couple—cute, happy, safe, and constantly throwing cocktail parties.

When asked why Alison went to Thanksgiving at the Ulbricht’s she always replied, “the oyster stuffing.”

Whitehead sat back down in his seat and grinned. He asked for our names. Alsion said hers first. When I said my name aloud he raised his eyebrows telling me that he probably would not be able to remember it, which I took to mean it was slightly too foreign. Later on he gave me an index card and told me to write it down.

When I asked Whitehead why he wanted to take our picture he explained, at length, that it was for a journalism project he was working on for his school, a prestigious east coast Ivy. Whitehead looked about ten years too old to be going to school, so I assumed he was doing graduate work. He told us that the project’s goal was to document different peoples’ experiences on Thanksgiving and that we were just the thing he was looking for. “You’re perfect,” he said. “You’re interesting.”

I’m not sure what Whitehead meant by “interesting,” and I was too shy to ask. After all, it was not my place to get offended, particularly when the hosts had been so kind in giving me champagne and appetizers of aged ham, provolone cheese, and access to a mound of crab dip the size of a premature baby. However, a quick look around the room could suggest a possible definition behind that loaded word.

Alison doesn’t dress like a normal twenty-one year old. She’s short and petite. Her hair is dyed dark brown, almost black. Her tortoise shell, square framed glasses sit on her peculiarly cute nose like a twig balancing on someone’s finger. She keeps a green scarf many sizes too big for her nuzzled around her neck. Her black pencil skirt tugs at her hips and presses up nicely against her pert buttocks. Her tiny legs, wrapped in grey stockings meant for an elderly woman, jut out from under the skirt as the limbs of a butterfly do from under its wings.

Alison was quite obviously the prettiest young-adult at Thanksgiving. Much prettier than the red head that recently completed the triathlon—she looked intimidating, and her wool slacks looked uncomfortable (it would not surprise me if they were either, for her face was constantly scrunched up like wad of paper). There was the broad shouldered Marine who constantly had a look of utter confusion on his face. There was the chubby seventeen year old swimmer who had hair that had been flat ironed so many times it looked as though it was going to fall apart at any moment.

So, what Whitehead may have meant by “interesting” was in fact an admission of Alison’s fascinating beauty. She’s naturally seductive, the kind of girl that could go days without showering and still look desirable. Besides, in a room full of crusty socialites it’s easy to see how Alison could be characterized as “interesting.” She’s a liberal arts college student. She’s in to photography and art. She loves Brazil. She has a wonderfully dry sense of cynicism. Of course, she’s “interesting.”

Oh yes, and then there’s me. I’m interesting because I’m not white. It’s the stock line I’ve had to repeat through the years: “Mymotherisfromamericabutmyfatherisfromnepal.” No matter how I spin it, or where I say it, the reaction tends to be generally the same. I haven’t the slightest clue how I wish people would react to me, and I certainly don’t expect something from them, mainly because I don’t know what it is exactly I want. But I can’t help this debilitating feeling of bitterness from rising up in me , boiling, ready to spit like a tea kettle. It never does. I don’t think it ever will.

I got up from the table to help myself to pie and coffee. The dog was still in the kitchen. I sat down next to him, sipping away. He looked like he didn’t want to be pet. This dog was so old, drooling, too tired to move. This dog looked like he wanted to be left alone. But I pet him anyway. I sipped my coffee again and grimaced. It was much, much too weak.