Been a Long-Ass Time Since I've Rocked and Rolled

And I'm doing so now with my "Gay Unicorn" Avatar, courtesy of Yahoo!

Lord, I'm bursting with so much more to tell you, but for now, I want to get down at my virtual gay pride parade. Join me, won't you?

My Patriotism Is Surging

God Bless The U.S. Gays
by Cansel, after Lee Greenwood

If tomorrow all the things were gone
I’d worked for all my life.
And I had to start again,
with just the memory of our strife

I’d thank my lucky stars
to be livin here today.
'Cause dykes and fags still stand for freedom,
and they can’t take that away.

And I’m proud to be a gay American,
where at least I know I’m free.
And I won't forget the queers who died
who gave that right to me.

And I gladly stand up,
next to you and defend us all today.
'Cause there ain’t no doubt we love this land,
God bless the US gays.

From the lakes of Minnesota,
to the hills of Tennessee.
Across the plains of Texas,
From sea to shining sea.

From Detroit down to Houston,
and New York to L.A.
Well there's Pride in every American heart,
and its time we stand and say

That I'm proud to be a gay American,
where at least I know I'm free.
And I won't forget the queers who died,
who gave that right to me.

And I gladly stand up,
next to you and defend us all today.
'Cause there ain’t no doubt we love this land,
God bless the US gays.

And I’m proud to be a gay American,
where at least I know I’m free.
And I won't forget the queers who died
who gave that right to me.

And I gladly stand up,
next to you and defend us all today.
'Cause there ain’t no doubt we love this land,
God bless the US gays!

NOLA stars...

...shine a little brighter in my heart. Even though it's been dragged through the mud, the city still has an uncanny ability to put salve on the wounds the rest of the world gives us. That's a sign of home. There's still beauty there, the spirit is still there, all the things I still love about it. The spirit of the people: humor even in the face of disaster. Listen, baby, you gotta know how to laugh and have a good time, appreciate the small things. A locket that was saved, a stranger smiling at you with kind eyes, that song on the radio.

Before I drove out, I heard "Only Love Can Mend a Broken Heart" by Aaron Neville on the radio, and I started crying like a baby. It kills me to leave you, but I'll be back, NOLA. You will never see the last of me, not till I rest in your serl.

Miss you, New Orleans

"Wanna go back home, go back home, go back home...to my used-to-be." (From a song whose name I can't remember by the Neville Bros. on an amazing compilation called "Miss You, New Orleans" or is it "Love You, New Orleans"?)

Those words are a lot more poignant after seeing some of the remnants of Katrina that still remain on the streets of the greatest city in the United States. Oh my heart.

These people's pursuit of the American Dream ripped to shreds and thrown into the street, just lying there almost a YEAR after the disaster, as the next hurricane season looms over them, a possible repeat offender lurking in storm clouds. God DAMN this administration and the city and state governments (in an Old Testament, fire-and-brimstone sense) for what they've done to these people. Normal, average people who worked so hard to buy those houses, to turn them into homes, to put their lives into them. Now those homes are ghosted with those lives and you can only wonder what became of the dreamholders, the landholders who have become displaced people because nature turned its knuckles on them and their governments turned their eyes away. Where are they? Are they alive? What's left in their hearts? Do they burn stronger or have they burned out? Light to guide them. Please, light.


Then I came home to revise the haiku I'd written for Jolene and Bryan's wedding tomorrow. Here they are. Beauty and love do still thrive, regardless of the thrashing.


5 Haiku for Your Wedding

1.
Your hearts were gypsies,
looking for warm-lighted homes.
Your arms, open doors.

2.
Two: solid, treelike.
Your roots tangle to make shoes
that stain your bare feet.

3.
Hands clasped, you both leap
without fear into the light.
Blossoms pave your way.

4.
Lifelong seduction:
At home in each other's arms.
You have made a nest.

5.
Tequila, vodka.
Hot Brooklyn courtyard, summer:
Van Halen approves.

Femme on the Streets, Butch in the Sheets

Today the subject is gender and sexuality. I'm obsessed with it. I keep reading about studies and books online. The whole concept of a gender role, a sexual role. It all adds up to mere stereotype when you think of trying to fit yourself into some narrow space defined by other people. Groups tend to do it: they're all clubs formed for the sake of inclusion, but there's always the inverse. Inclusion necessarily creates exclusion when you congregate. That doesn't mean I'm against congregation, by any means. It's a beautiful thing. I just know that the group I most identify with are displaced people and exiles. Point is, everyone's usually looking for some kind of home, a mirror to soothe their own conflicts. Among the most rugged individual, I think we'd be hard pressed not to find someone who's looking to make the "other" understand. Even the "Other" needs understanding. So I sympathize with the Other. The outcast, the misfit. That's my phat society. Those are my loves. The writers who explore it and had lived it.

So, beyond that, I was reading about transgender teens, which sparked all kinds of other thoughts and curiosities: intergenders (hermaphrodites) and us inverts (homos) and heteros who don't fit, bisexuals, crossdressers, fetishists...oh on an on. Then it starts to feel like we all have so much in common. I wish I could get to what I'm actually trying to say, but the more I talk about it the less I know what I aim to say, except that I feel like we're all -- I don't care who you are -- displaced people on the plane of sexuality. We're all true individuals and at some points feel a little weird if we let ourselves be absolutely honest about what we're feeling at those heightened moments of clarity. Life is surreal during those moments. So crystalline it almost doesn't make sense.

And how weird to bring such private things public as a way of defining oneself. Some can't avoid it being noticed, in the case of gender and hormones and appearances, but for the rest, we speak, so the private then becomes public. God, the line between politics and privacy, between turn-on and statement. When we really just all want to feel good. Why do some of us have to fight so hard for that simple, sweet desire?

I found good links that made me think of this stuff. Here they are:

Resources I bitched about not having after seeing Brokeback Mountain (ie, hope and encouragement)
http://glaad.org/eye/brokeback_mountain.php

She's Not There -- book about a writer going from male to female
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/shesnotthere/

There are more, but I'll elaborate later. I'm tired. And SO excited about my escape from New York and my first return home to New Orleans since before Katrina. More later.

I love to laugh!

And this is what does it these days. Mostly bad dancing. I'm culling moves for the wedding I'm going to. Gonna blow 'em away!

Dorktastic!

Superhero Guy and Bad-dressing Hip Hop Guy with Fiddlers

Liza on Larry King

Finnish MTV

Gay Aliens

Lesbians with Small Dogs

Are D and I destined to be like Una Lady Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall? I guess only if we get dauschaunds. So I suggest terriers.

Romaine Brooks was too hot for Natalie Barney

Known for her excess,
Lady Barney was atop
Luscious Ladies Hill.

Ms. Brooks cavorted
like the rest, but above them
was she: a cherry.

Listen well, sweet ladies,
and I will share this truth:
It's talent that makes you hot--
Much more than loads of money.
It's not the dough, but sentiment,
that fills the pot with honey.

Lush

Vietnam was green.
Lushness like he'd never seen.
He came home empty.

My soldier uncle,
dying deaths before he died.
19-years-old, gone.

Saved by death, some say.
Delivered from hell on earth:
His war legacy.

Who says war is art?
If art is made by a gun,
OK -- high art, then.

Curse this ugly art,
glorifying loss and gore.
You keep your glory.

I'd rather have my uncle,
living when he was alive.

haiku for donna

When unveiling you
my hand has a thousand eyes;
they blink, you open.

Forte

Damn you, Kate, for turning me on to the haiku! What a pusher you are. Now I am utterly, unassailably addicted. Thank you! I think I needed this form without knowing it.

On a different note, I was reading some news this morning and realizing how uninformed I am about Middle Eastern culture and customs. Though I'm probably more informed than a lot of Americans. I appreciate Rumi and Sufi-istic Persian poetry, know that Persian isn't Arab (but am not undeniably sure what the distinctions are--read it once and can't recall the details). But one study of the culture that floored me, which I thought about this morning, was a fascinating book I read called Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi. It's a story of a woman who'd grown up in poverty, without parents, left an abusive marriage and raised herself up by becoming a prostitute--a wealthy one. The story is framed by the author setting up an interview with Firdaus as she waits to be executed for stabbing her pimp to death. It's an amazing story: Firdaus is amazing and strong and expresses no remorse for killing this man who took her business away by suddenly claiming her as his own. After she'd become so successful on her own, despite the sacrifices, at least she was free. When that was taken from her, she felt she would do anything it took to defend it and get it back. The system got her, but her spirit remained prideful and unremorseful. She saw it to be a corrupt system that would destroy her if she let it, but she wouldn't let it. That was worth her life.

In this time of unrest and uncertainty, it is amazing to see how resilient some people remain in times of strife, especially when strife is your life. Other subjects and figures I'm thinking of this morning that are of great inspiration:
Phoolan Devi The Bandit Queen. There was a movie of that name made about her life. She was assassinated a few years ago.
Hotel Rwanda See it if you haven't. It's one of the strongest films I've ever seen.
Dorothy Allison's essays Skin

Thank you, those who have strong spirits. Forte.

Lights and Webs

1.
Turn off all the lights
to see what turns on inside:
Fireflies blinking codes.

2.
Your hands make a web
that now catches my body:
a delicate net.

"La via del tren es peligrosa. No salga afuera."

1.
Spring is a street name
where concrete flowers blossom
and birdsong is steel.

2.
Spring bundles the night
in bridges' iron cables:
City held hostage.

3.
Lyrical staircase,
destination breeds romance:
rude train whistle blares.

4.
Rails shoot into caves;
manmade darknesses swallow
long snakes of boxed light.

5.
Thighs: a field aflame.
Heart: corn, ready to be husked.
Hands: mend the ruins.

6.
Not a haiku

Dust. Rocks. My heart lies here,
passing, waiting for the rain of your voice.

7.
Also not a haiku

March heralds snatch spring back
to their breasts, dangle one more
death, before bruising me with
an assault of sprout and green.

8.
A warning I like the sound of

La via del tren es peligrosa. No salga afuera.
Train tracks are dangerous. Do not get out.

Kate-Inspired Haiku

1.
Tonight, the city's
blunt teeth scrape loudly upon
the roof of my heart.

2.
Night, your clouds promise
what your mouth can't deliver
until morning comes.

3.
If I were an ox,
spring would not hold this sweetness
I taste on your neck.

4.
If I were to burst
into blossom at your feet,
would you deny me?

5.
Landscapes burn away;
hearts beat on just the same.
It's love that suffers.

6.
The mind staggers on
after the heart's surrender.
White flags fly; grass grows.

Green for Spring

My love D and my friends Kate and Laura--just by virtue of who these ladies are--are inspiring me to sally forth into a more poetic blog. I live in my head half the time as it is; this should be a reflection.

I'm excited to walk down a path strewn with more theory, more graphic art talk, more discussion of traditional poetic form. Normal life doesn't have places for these thoughts or discussions. Instead (if you work in American pop corporate culture as I do), we talk about celebrities and TV. This is my Heart's Inbox.

Growth. It hurts. My life is following symbolic patterns: after death, rebirth; after winter, spring. After a season of loss, life. I'm stumbling through, babbling. Cursing discourse. Praising prose. Bite the thorn, kiss the rose. Or kiss the thorn, bite the rose.

For now, I roll down a grassy knoll, and think about being barefoot next to a picnic table, being three and towheaded and wearing overalls. I have cake on my mouth. And my dimpled hands are reaching forward as I fall into a pillow of green, exhausting myself with laughter, chubby cheeks aching as the giggle commandeers my face. My tummy flies as I tumble, devouring the scent of heaven.

Oh. Ah.

"Living in Twilight"

I believe I'm getting to that age where tragedy, sickness, and mortality become more common in one's life, when you start to get a familiarity (if never an actual comfort) with sad events, like you do with an article of clothing--one that is not your favorite, but keeps hanging around.

The point is, yes, death is part of the cycle of life, and I firmly believe that the dead are just beginning a journey that we living only get glimpses of in our lives. And I don't actually believe that the events following death are that bad for those passing over. But they sure are hell on those of us left.

In the course of two weeks, Donna's boss and friend (only 40 years old) was hit and killed by a car; I got news that my aunt has breast cancer; and I just learned today that my Vietnam vet uncle had a heart attack and is now technically brain dead. It made me think of that ELO song "Telephone Line." I was listening to it last week and was struck by the depth of the lyrics (it could just be about waiting on hold, in the dead air of the purgatory of telephone land. Or another kind of purgatory. In any case, nice metaphor, especially for a silly pop song): "Give me some time, I'm living in twilight."

My uncle is neither living nor dead, but living in twilight. Probably the weirdest possible place to be, his journey delayed. It must be like in the song, waiting on the phone, waiting for someone to speak or answer, for something to happen. It must feel like dangling on the end of a string over an unknown abyss. Weird. All day I was thinking about this song, sick home from work. Then I get a phone call from my mom telling me that my uncle's tests register no brain activity.

If you want to know how I feel, listen to ELO for me.

Brokeback Mountain: Where Is the Love?

We were anxiously awaiting our visit to the movie theater to see the the reportedly great gay love story
Brokeback Mountain. My first response was: Good, a gay relationship is acknowledged in the mainstream media as an actual romantic love story; then the thought: Thank God things are different now. But the next day, after some talking about it, I woke up thinking: But really, are things all that different? Matthew Sheppard's brutal murder happened remarkably recently. And then, where was the relationship for Ennis and Jack? Is an outing every few months a few times a year a "relationship"? That doesn't take away from the obvious torturous love, but in this day and age, haven't we heard this sad story enough? Or is this the first time the injustice of American society's homophobia is being looking at with a sympathetic arm wrapped around the homo couple?

Or is it? Why is Heath Ledger getting all the praise for portraying a character who is so afraid of his desire that he refuses to live life as a whole human being and dampens down any desire he has, and Jake Gyllenhaal being totally snubbed for playing a character willing to risk something for his love? Jake's character is the real queer, Heath's will never admit it. Is that why he is more sympathetic to the largely straight audience that is lauding the film?

I liked the movie. I see it as another Romeo and Juliet, in a way. Lovers kept apart for ridiculous reasons, simply because the people around them won't accept it. Also, it's like a Holocaust movie: let us pay homage to those who suffered in the past and vindicate them, legitimize their humanity. But what I don't buy is the liine about it being a great love story. It is a chronicle of pain and hatred and fear. It dangles love right behind the threat of murder. If you love like this, it seems to reinforce, be prepared to die for that love, that unnatural love. It is kind of a sucker punch when you go in expecting a love story where the main characters at least get to have some love.

Now here are the two things that stayed with me like sand kicked in my mouth ,and gritted against my teeth unpleasantly when I got up the next day.

1. In this day and age, don't we need some truthful images that are empowering, encouraging and loving? Does this movie also send a message to our attackers? That it is their duty to uphold their violent homophobia? Oprah Winfrey was talking to Dave Chapelle on her show last week about having some KKK guys on her show to "expose" them, and then she said she realized that what she was actually doing was spreading their message. She chose after that to present a world that she wanted to see. I think I want to see more of THAT kind of work and attitude in the future. It's also truthful to show success stories, and show those who fight against this hatred and win. What if Ennis had conquered his fear and let himself "ranch up" with Jack? What if they didn't have to die, emotionally or physically? And that's NOT a fantasy world. No, it's not. It's what a lot of people have done, and thank god for them, because they've helped a lot of us come out and live openly and pursue love. Embrace the love that takes hold of us instead of being tortured by it, wanting to quit the person who planted it in us.

2. On the movie's site, the only interactive section they have is a "share your stories" database. One guy told his "Brokeback" story: but he and his beau ran off together to Hawaii. They pursued Jack's dream, and here they are, alive and well. I feel like it's socially irresponsible to address such heavy-duty themes and not point the way to help, especially when hate crimes are alive and well all over this country. There's no light: you feel so alone and in danger after seeing this film. You feel like you're a target if you're gay. But so much progress has been made since then--couldn't they at least link to some coming-out hotlines, safehouses, or organizations to help with this kind of desperation? At LEAST pay some lip service. The world is changing. And we can help it keep changing. To be safer, more inclusive--at least offer more of a safety net and be out and proud and never be ashamed of who we love and let others love who they want to. It's a much brighter world if we condone all forms of love and do what we can to eradicate hatred.

Here are a couple of interesting links I found on a quick Google search:
I think I might be a lesbian:
http://www.youth.org/yao/docs/i-think-article-lesbian.html

I think I might be gay
http://www.youth.org/yao/docs/i-think-article-gay.html

Empowered = SEXY