Somebody Who, Somebody Who

The locker room at the Brooklyn YMCA was cruisier than usual. Whitney Houston’s funeral was playing on the TV. At first, only the locker room attendants gathered around. Hard-faced black and brown men, who rarely showed emotions, didn’t care who saw them today—their eyes wet. Whitney was someone’s mother, sister, daughter, high school crush, and lover. Whitney was a friend from the neighborhood, a girl made good. Attention must be paid.

Normally the sound of the Attendant’s walkie-talkies would crackle through the locker room. Today there was radio silence, allowing the sound of mourning to carry through the lockers, into the saunas, around the corner and into the showers. Lament was everywhere. Desire followed.

Some guys, fresh from the shower sauntered over to the TV. Wet white bellies dripped water, heads shook in recognition. Celebrities eulogized. Brown broad shoulders quivered at sermons. “Is Bobby there?” a high-pitched voice asked, red-faced from his work out. “ He will be,” a deep voice promised. The crowd around the TV ebbed and flowed, but the attendants stood watch the whole time.

Any other day a fast blowjob in the showers, or a quick jack off in the sauna would be an indulgence in the physical, a borrowed piece of flesh. Today was different. A few years ago, a locker room attendant sued the gym after he walked in the sauna and saw two men having sex. He told the Court it traumatized him, that he no longer felt safe at work. It created a division between the attendants, and the clients who knew about the case. There was confusion, and a reordering of the hierarchy of oppressions.

Between the guys who cruise each other, the lawsuit gets whispered around; as bait, as warning. It works and it works. Sex continues, now with one eye towards who is coming.

But not today. Today nothing had to be quick; nothing had to stay rooted in the pretense of urge. Mouths lingered, eyes stayed closed, arms worked slower, chests stayed pressed, and hands relaxed. Today was not about getting off without getting caught. It was about being together. Whitney provided a cover, diverting attention elsewhere. She created a cause for us to want more from each other, to allow emotions to show. A woman like us had died, alone in the bath, survival instincts shot. A half eaten turkey sandwich just in reach. Attention must be paid.

A friend tried to shame me into caring so much about Whitney’s death when millions of people die every day from the gluttony of a system that privileges stars like her. My friend is not wrong. There is something sick but our daily ambivalence to other people’s suffering. But there is no shame in mourning Whitney. Lamenting her passing, is about other people’s pain, and our own. Whitney is the projected creation of our lives. Why was her cracked out Vegas hotel room tabloid fodder? Because that downfall is ours, if success, and circumstance had allowed. Why was her relationship with Bobby followed with such fever, because we have loved wrong too and wanted it back bad.

“ You think I am crying for Whitney?” I said, “Than your a dammed fool.”

In the YMCA shower I kissed a stranger long and hard, our wet bodies slid through and past each other, because life is short and we were together. Because else our desire is disrespected, our bodies questioned, and what we do with them held as suspect. His warm breath in my mouth, his ass in my hands was a tribute to the living, a connection to the dead, and a declaration that something better is possible.

For twenty hot minutes, as the choir sang, and Whitney’s life was celebrated, I rejoiced in my life, sharing it with a man I might never see again.

Keep the Lights On: Walking with Ghosts

Meatrack (2011), Ted Kerr

Walking With Ghosts

The meatrack is a small forest tucked behind the beach and sand dunes of Fire Island. It bridges the gay and queer summer communities of The Pines and Cherry Grove. It is where people go to meet, have sex and make art. It is a place where dry bones breathe.

The first time I went through the meatrack I followed the sunburned neck of pioneering contemporary artist AA Bronson. I was working as his assistant; accompanying him and artist Ryan Brewer as they scouted locations for an art project they were doing involving rituals, and the use of a long black, Victorian Comme Des Garcons skirt AA had recently acquired.

As I kept on eye on AA’s long white luminescent beard, I struggled to take in everything. I had been hearing about Fire Island my whole gay life – the adventures of Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and Christopher Isherwood, as well as how, according to Larry Kramer, the island and it’s hedonistic vibe was the sign of the gay man’s demise. It was heady to be walking on the shifting ground, moved by the intense weight of emotions washing over me. As soon as I stepped into the rack I felt very unalone.

Ryan followed close behind me. Every time I held back bamboo branches from hitting his face, he acknowledged me with a kind smile, his warm Michigan accent clear without having to utter a word. He was wearing a black rock band t-shirt he had cut into a tank top. The tougher us gay boys look, the sweeter we actually are. I could tell he was nervous. Regardless of our stated purpose, to be in the meatrack was an admission of liking sex, to wanting it. Growing up in the shadow of the AIDS crisis, HIV in our midst, being open about our desires can be an arresting experience. While the openness of Fire Island can buffer the fear – in Ryan’s eyes I could feel my own sense of being overwhelmed.

AA has been coming to Fire Island for almost two decades, the first time back when he was a part of General Idea, the three-man art collective he started with Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal. Starting in the 1960′s they worked as a unit to free themselves as they said, “from the tyranny of individual genius.” They created portraits that poked fun at patriarchy, put on beauty pageants that never occurred, turned AIDS into wallpaper and published FILE, a collaboratively created art magazine.

When Felix and Jorge were diagnosed with HIV in the early 90′s, General Idea moved back to Toronto from New York. aa learned how to care for the dying and stayed with them in the apartment they shared. Since their passing in 1994 aa has been learning what it means to be without them. He has amassed a diverse network of friends, students, collaborators, and huggable lovers who offer and look to him for guidance, inspiration, love, and friendship.

As we toured around aa regaled us with tales of the magical forest’s history (which is what he calls the meatrack, also known as Judy Garland Memorial Park); A rock band played once, someone held exercise classes last summer, many pornos and music videos have been shot over the years, celebrities have enjoyed anonymous encounters and countless people have bumped into old friends, made new friends, and experienced their bodies in new ways for the first time. As aa spoke I could hear the crash of the nearby ocean and the erotic rustling of bodies never too far away.

Sex is not something separate on Fire Island; it is the breeze that blows through everything. The longer one spends in the meatrack, the more it becomes a series of inviting staging grounds connected by well worn paths, and less like a frustrating maze. Throughout, black plastic garbage bags hang from trees – the heavier they are with empties and condoms – the busier the spot. Garbage acts like a recommendation “I’ve been here and I liked it”.

Walking, my feet raising the sand, I thought about how many men had given their semen to this earth. The ground beneath our feet soaked by the queer spirit – AIDS, lust, frustration, and love. While walking we crossed a rich green marsh, planks of driftwood covered the wet earth. A small metal plaque with a dedication was affixed to one of the planks, reading something like “Steven Smith, 1948-1994, To The Best Cocksucker Around.”

On the other side of the marsh is a cul-de-sac of sorts – an outdoor den where half walls of shrubs enclosed the space. A big blue sky creating a dome overhead. Nestled in the corner the day we were there was a white lawn chair. It emanated an erotic charge – the rolled back eyes of men in ecstasy could be felt just by looking at the cheap white frame; sitting down could stun you into orgasm. Nearby a heaving garbage bag pulled down on a branch. aa brought us here knowing it was the perfect spot for the art collaboration. Ryan agreed. They stood planning as the sun started to drop below the trees.

That night over dinner at his place aa asked us our ages, he having just turned 65. “32” I said, “in my 20s” Ryan offered. There was silence. At first I didn’t get what aa was after. The three of us just sat there, taking in each other’s red flesh. Then he said it, “ interesting to see who is not here.” The gulf between us filled up the room. We were quiet for a while, thinking about all the men who died for sex.

A week later the three of us got up early, soon after the summer sunrise, and made our way to the cul-de-sac in the forest. Ryan propped up a hand held mirror in the branches of a fallen tree. From the white chair, aa switched from film to video and back again, capturing Ryan as he covered his skull with thick black make-up. He stopped filming to help Ryan put on the skirt we hung next the garbage bag. By mid morning Ryan was twirling, whirling dervish style through the meatrack, the black skirt kicking up sand, aa with a hawk’s focus, guiding, and leading him on. With every move, the story changed. I stood and watched. Ghosts were everywhere.

12th Street: Queer Kid, Reviewing Tango

Reviewing Justin Vivian Bond's Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels

Queer kids take their own lives all the time. For some reason last fall the media took notice and focused on the suicide of nine teenagers.

In response sex columnist Dan Savage, with partner Terry Miller, started the It Gets Better Project (IGB), a viral video intervention reaching out to bullied lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender kids through computer screens. Using their own lives as examples, Savage and Miller aimed to convince young queers that regardless of their current situations, their lives could improve – that one day they too could be successful. The project caught on. Everyone from small town hairdressers to Hilary Clinton posted a message. People breathed a sigh of relief – the kids would be alright.

Not everyone was a fan. For queer theorist Jasbir Puar, the best part of the campaign was “the many [who] have chimed in to explain how and why it doesn’t just get better”. Writing for the UK’s Guardian newspaper last November, Puar pointed out the narrow ways in which the project defines ‘better’ – monied, upwardly mobile, white, able-bodied, gender conforming, wrapped up in capitalism, and maintaining the status quo. Critics of the campaign asked – does it get better for those who can’t or don’t want to fit in? What about those who want better than better?

I thought about these questions while reading the new memoir Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels, the literary debut of New York performing sensation Mx. Justin Vivian Bond. In the book published by Feminist Press, Bond recounts what it was to be a queer kid with a fluid sense of gender, coming of age in the suburbs of America between Vietnam and AIDS. Like any good memoir, it’s not just the story of the Bond but also those around v (“V” is Bond’s preferred, gender-free pronoun).

Early on in the book we learn that a man named Michael Hunter, a boy Bond grew up with and had an ongoing sexual relationship with, gets arrested for impersonating a police officer. Without hitting the reader over the head, Bond sets the stage; here are two babies raised as boys. One would go on to become a legendary gender bending Tony nominated performance artist (Bond). The other would end up arrested for a failed attempt to embody our culture’s idea of the masculine (Hunter).

Born a few decades later, Hunter and Bond would have been the prime target audience for IGB. Instead they had each other, a few close girlfriends (in Bond’s case), and a cast of adults that didn’t know what to do with children that were different. When Bond’s Mom discovers the grade-school Justin wearing her lipstick she shouts “Boys don’t wear lipstick” raising the ire of young Justin who understands already such simple labeling does not apply.

A few years later, feeling conflicted after fooling around with boys at camp (including Michael Hunter’s brother) Justin confides in v’s Mom. Mistake. She called the other boys’ parents, and insisted they come over to talk about it. The parental tête-à-tête was not for the sake of the boys but, as Bond realizes later, was for Bond’s mom to assert “she was, in fact, a good mother.” When Justin’s Dad learned about the camp adventures he shared with Justin that, “curiosity was normal, and that even though I should never do it again, it was over and I shouldn’t feel bad.” Feeling relieved Justin left the house thinking, “I wasn’t going to hell after all. I was just a normal boy who had done something that lots of kids do.”

“But then I turned the corner…” One of the named boys was there and promised Justin that from here on in life was going to be hell. It wasn’t over, Justin was soon to be known as the local “cocksucker” – gossip spread by parents and kids alike.

A few years later living up to the reputation, Justin was caught giving head to a broken legged Michael by his mother Ms. Hunter. Not wanting to get summoned by Mrs. Bond again, she demanded Justin go home and tell her what happened, “and you tell her that this time it was your fault, you sick freak!” By then, Bond knew better, aware to stay safe secrets needed to be kept from adults who could not handle the truth.

But what about Michael sitting there with his busted leg and his aching teenage penis unable to escape his mother’s glare? As the book draws to an end we learn Hunter has had many problems, spending much of his adulthood trying to win over the approval of others. Bond on the other hand, rebelled from suburbia, took Justin’s life and has been giving the world Mx Bond ever since.

The take away from Hunter and Bond’s stories is not, as one might assume, how hard it is to grow up queer in America. Or even what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Rather Bond’s memoir illustrates how much harder adults can make life for queer children, often while trying to make life better.

Tango gets to the heart of what It Gets Better fails to understand – you cannot have well-adjusted children if you have fucked up adults. From Justin’s parents, to Michael’s mother we encounter adults who are unwilling to see their kids for who they are. Confronted by their children, the parents abuse their power. Instead of taking on the tension, they work to instill the culture’s heterosexist and uncritical idea of normal into their kid’s minds. It’s not that the Bond’s or the Hunter’s are bad parents – it’s that they didn’t know better.

Queer Kid: Revewing Tango: My Life in High Heels and Backwards

It Gets Better functions the same way. Each video can be seen as a how-to-guide for young queers coming up, or as a catalog of all the ways adults have learned to struggle to survive. The question is not just for whom does it get better – but how, why and at what cost?

While it might seem unfair to criticize IGB for all the good it has engendered, those it fails deserve more. As adults getting out of the way and working on our shit, while trying to create support for generations to come seems like the best we can do. Along the way we can share our visions, and help each other make them come true. Bond ends Tango with a future I think many of us are be happy to be working towards,

“I do hope that a time will come when queer children can be themselves without any questions, able to experience the same dramas, heartaches and joys that any other kids would have to go through, no more and no less.”

NY Press - August 10, 2011

author photo by Zachary Ayotte

What Is a Boy?

I could hear the sound of footsteps and voices before I could clearly see anyone. It was well past midnight and I was cutting through Prospect Park on my way home. As a white, 32-year-old gay Canadian, America was still offering me surprises and lessons around every turn.

Soon details emerged, peach skin, long hair, hips, shorts and the smell of sweet shampoo: teenage girls. They shared a similar bent-in posture, making them appear roughly the same height, a soft mountain range coming my way.

Before our paths converged, one of the girls looked up, sensing they were not alone. With a canopy of leaves diffusing the park lamp a few meters away, her young, soft-looking skin was tinged green. Without seeming to put any thought in to it, her big brown eyes narrowed as she wondered out loud, “ Are you a boy?” Then she paused, biting at her chapped lips, considering her options. “Or a girl?” The three other girls—now looking like witches to me—took in my 140-pound 5-foot-6 body, my angular face framed by my slightly receding hair line, and repeated the question ad nauseam, “ Boy or girl? Boy or girl?” There it was, hanging like a slack elastic band between us, growing tenser as we started to move apart. It was not the first time I had been interrogated about my gender.

When I was in high school, maybe the same age as the four girls, I made it to the final round of my city’s speech and debate competition. It was held at a school theater across town, the kind painted all matte black to give the impression that you could be anywhere. For my speech, I recalled a conversation I had with Stan, the owner and manager of the fast food place where I worked. One night while cleaning the grill I asked if he ever awarded employee of the month honors, something I had seen in movies. In response, he lectured me like the sage I had made him in my mind, “Don’t care about such things. Think bigger. Who would you rather have as a boss for the rest of your life, me or yourself?” The crowd applauded enthusiastically.

Goodwill hung in the air even after the three winners, none of them me, were announced. People gathered to shake my hand, smile at me the way older people do when they feel pride in a young person. One lady who had watched me intently as I delivered my speech pushed through the crowd, making her way to the snug circle I had the center of. She stood close, put her hands on my shoulder, took in a breath. The crowd leaned forward. “I have to know...” she smiled “Are you a boy or a girl?”

The crowd broke quietly and quickly. The woman’s face still in mine, I mumbled, “Boy.”

Standing there, I noticed all the little cracks and chips in the black matte paint, creating little fractures and fault lines that made it impossible to think I was anywhere but where I was. I was shocked that there could be something unknown about me. As a kid who everyone knew was gay, the idea I could possess mystery was surprising. The fact I might have to answer for it, confusing and upsetting. What did it matter if I was a boy or a girl? Were there other options?

Lately, I will be on a train and an elderly person will bump into me. Without looking, they will say, “Sorry miss,” or “OK dear?” Even once, “Watch it girlie.” After a few of these encounters, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble began to click. People don't see gender. They read, feel and sense it. We construct gender. It does not matter if I look female, male or androgynous. It’s that they—the seniors, the teenage girls, the lady from the debate competition—sensed that I was not a man in a way they understood men. In the same way I sensed the teenagers before I saw them, people sense me—and what they sense is sometimes unclear.

When someone questions my gender, they are not really questioning me. They are coming up against their own ideas, their own constructions of what a woman or a man is, and what exists beyond these narrow distinctions.

Growing up, I was lucky to have a good support system of friends and family who helped me understand and enjoy my sexual orientation. This foundation enabled me understand that gender, like sexuality, can be fluid. So when the teenage girl in Prospect Park asked me if I was a boy or a girl, it seemed important not to answer within the limited choices provided. Instead I did what I wish I had done more than 10 years earlier. I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Still figuring it out.”

HYPERALLERGIC: Towards Transparency and Justice - December 27, 2010

Towards Transparency and Justice, Learning from Wikileaks and Wojnarowicz

What do Wikileaks and the art world’s response to the censorship of David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire in My Belly” by the Smithsonian have in common? More than may be apparent at first.

Both make public what elites want to keep secret. They illustrate how little, if anything, can be hidden anymore and demonstrate how the more something is concealed the more the demand for it to be revealed grows.

What the complex and seemingly unrelated stories of Wikileaks and the censorship of “A Fire in My Belly” at the National Portrait Gallery’s Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture highlights is how insiders, or those with insider access, can use their privilege to unsettle the status quo when it isn’t working anymore.

In the case of Wikileaks, while the media focus is on its founder Julian Assange, the 22-year-old US Army Private Bradley Manning, who is believed to have been responsible for providing the classified cables to Wikileaks, has been held in solitary confinement for five months and is largely absent in the media coverage. Manning allegedly (let’s remember that) downloaded the sensitive information from his workplace onto discs and then supplied them to Wikileaks. Since he has not been charged and has no access to the outside world — nor the world to him — his motivations are unknown. Regardless, he may have changed how diplomacy and information will be shared forever. In an open letter, filmmaker and liberal activist Michael Moore has even wondered if the war in Iraq, which was built on deliberate governmental lies, could have been avoided if Wikileaks had existed a decade ago.

Similar to Manning, AA Bronson is using his access to the heights of the contemporary art world to disrupt the comfort of a national museum that doesn’t appear to be accountable to the public for their actions. Two weeks ago, Bronson requested his work “Felix, June 5, 1994” (1994/99) be removed from Hide/Seek as an act of solidarity with Wojnarowicz. By making this request, Bronson implicated the National Gallery of Canada who loaned the work to the Smithsonian and has forced them — and Canadians — to question their role in the affair. Bronson has added a new dimension to the story by using his voice as an artist participating in the show and refusing to be complicit in censorship through silence and apathy.

Bronson is eroding the authority of the Smithsonian to censor and asserting his privilege of being a participant in the exhibition by asking to be withdrawn from the show. He is also challenging the idea of censorship — the idea that it ensures something will not be seen — by understanding that his request will mean more people, and a more diverse population, will see the work at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. It does not matter that the Smithsonian is not honoring his request.

Censoring “A Fire in My Belly” makes it possible that all work from the show — especially the more radical work that rattles the conservative cages of right-wingers — will be given a new life by those who may need it the most, queer angry kids on the internet. In the face of having both the National Gallery of Canada and the Smithsonian not honor his request, Bronson is working with his lawyer, sending daily emails to the Washington institution, and, in the process, evoking “his moral rights under American and Canadian copyright law.”

While art may be a commodity to some, Bronson is emphasizing the moral dimension to art and reminding us that art is not just a thing but also an expression of being. Bronson is turning censorship inside out by asking for something that is already exposed to be concealed. By highlighting censorship, and the ridiculousness of the Smithsonian’s actions, Bronson is challenging notions of authority in the arts institution and essentially saying, why do you only get to decide? Nothing can be hidden, not anymore.

In the end, the legacy of Hide/Seek may as yet be decided but it is already a groundbreaking show giving witness to the experience of LGBTQ people. Moreover, the exhibit has helped to twist the meaning of censorship in America. If censorship once only meant suppression, today censorship gives more attention through controversy.

Bronson and Manning have both helped to liberate information from institutional oppression. They have called attention to different ways of expressing dissent. Each age brings with it new types of fear and oppression. What leaked cables and a film that portrays ants on a crucifix remind us is that from cave drawings, to the printing press, to the singing of the haunting melody “Strange Fruit,” each age will always give rise to new ways of bearing witness. The challenge now is how do we support early adopters of the evolving language of resistance and use the methods ourselves. They are simply showing us tools that we’ve had all along.