As a middle school teacher, I asked questions—lots of them—to keep my students engaged. It’s a tougher task than it sounds; you’re never quite sure what your hormone-charged students will say—or if they will say anything at all. One valuable trick I learned to make sure my pseudo-Socratic method worked was called “wait-time.” I would ask a question, and then—the impossible—I’d wait. I’d stand there, watching an ocean of blank or unreadable faces, letting a heavy silence flood the room, anticipating a wave of potentially wrong answers as seconds drip by one slow drop at a time: Did they understand my question? Are they following along? Am I teaching the best that I can? Am I a travesty? Is this lesson a tragedy? Panic! At the Classroom.

Miraculously, at the end of the pause-that-would-last-forever (or ten Mississippi seconds, at the most), the Red Sea would part and reveal a hand in the air. If I was lucky, there might be two. And if I was doing my job, the student I would call on would be close to a right answer. Wait-time allowed my pupils to think and debate about possible responses while I recollected my thoughts about how to follow-up and lead the class. Ta-da: the fruits and labors of sitting—or standing—at the edge-of-your-seat without saying anything at all.

In the dating game, I’ve found a similar phenomenon: the wait-time between your date and your call, between your call and his call, between dates and dates later, between dates and nights and the bent knee proposal to forever. How long is too long? Or, perhaps more appropriately for an antsy and impatient guy like me who operates on five-year and ten-year plans, how soon is too soon?

You’d think it’d be easier when you don’t have thirty middle schoolers staring back at you. You’d think that because you’re an adult and you’re dealing with an adult, that these waiting periods would be less of a strategy and more a consequence of the busy bee lives we lead.

False. In dating, wait-time is a wait-game. It’s not fun, but it’s the rule; it’s a political move to be taken despite everything we say about love. That stuff about listening to your heart and then acting on it? Bullshit. If I listened to my heart, time would not be in the way of me and the people I want to date. My mind would draw unswervingly straight lines from thought A (“Wow, I really enjoyed hanging out with that guy”) to thought B (“I should ask him out again”) instead of tweedling over to paranoia-laden distractions like thought A.2 (“The ball’s in his court, so I’ll wait for his call”) or thought A.83765 (“I shouldn’t seem too excited, so I’ll wait exactly 48 hours”).

The wait-game is torture. Instead of doing what wait-time does in the classroom—giving students and teachers time to collect their thoughts into articulate arguments—all that the wait-game does is allow the butterflies in your stomach to multiply. Is it fair that they get to reproduce while you sit by your phone waiting for the chance to reproduce?

Throwing wrenches into an already sweaty situation is what I like to call the technological hierarchy. How much value should I place on a call versus a text? An email versus a text? An instant message versus an email? A Facebook poke versus a G-chat drop-in? Do waiting periods of non-communication differ depending on how I want to communicate with you next? Can I poke you two days after a date, or is it more efficacious to have a G-chat conversation after three days or a phone call after five days?

I’ve always felt like the wait-game has been detrimental for me. In my first dating experiences, I remember wanting to talk on instant messenger whenever I could; this stemmed out of a naïve understanding of love as togetherness—if not literally physical, then at the very least, conversationally. I soon learned that this was something called clinginess. I discovered that personal space and time was valued in the early phases of dating; love would be something to be planned around later on, but if you were just dating, you were supposed to let the tension between you and your eyed-one come to a slow boil. You couldn’t just jump into the deep end of a relationship; every cup of coffee or glass of beer you shared on a date was but a small contribution of water into a pool you had to fill. And you had to digest before attempting the next serving.

I’ve worked on this. In each of my relationships, I’ve tried to remind myself not to get too excited, not to always make the first moves, not to, as I desperately want to, wear my heart on my sleeve. I’ve been told that the acceptable thing to do is to keep it in my chest where it belongs, under layer and layers of pretense called, “Getting to know you.” (Some people also wear alternative layers called “hooking up.”)

But if love were about chemistry, sparks, and connections that either are or are not, then why put yourself through the wait-game? To prove to yourself that these are feelings that last? To make that which is after the wait worth so much more? Why do we put these connections on hold instead of understanding that what will be will be—and still will be whether accessed now or later?

When I was a teacher, I knew exactly what I was gaining by waiting. As a dater, though, I’m lost for words to explain my purposeful word loss: what exactly do I get aside from lost time?

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First I’d like to apologize for not being around as much and missing my last few entries on this awesome blog. The majority of you don’t know but I’ve been living in Guatemala for 3 months learning Spanish at www.plqe.org which is an amazing school full of ex guerrillas and leftist politics that I suggest going to if you’re interested in learning Spanish. Suffice it to say my experience has been incredible and simultaneously solidified my political beliefs while expanding my desire to change the world in the very ugly and very blatant face of white patriarchal capitalist dominance.

The story of Guatemala is typical in Latin America and the people of Latin America, especially the women, pay for it the most. The short story is this: Guatemala was and is a country of indigenous Mayans and for several hundred years white people have been enslaving the people and raping the women and continue to do so to this day. I saw my first slave on the street here and I’m sure I’ve seen more without even realizing it. When I drive by the land in buses and see all the beautiful mountains and volcanoes and jungles and forests I also pass by coffee plantations where people work 15 hours a day for 3 dollars on land that US corporations stole from them and then forced them to work on. Many of them are slaves via indentured servitude. The last 50 years of hell here is quite literally the sole responsibility of the US. The government staged a coup and then put in motion a series of military dictators leading to what the UN now calls a genocide against the Maya of Guatemala. At this time the person who killed the most amount of Mayans still holds a place in government and while America continues to enslave and exploit the people here in Guatemala we do the same to ¨illegal¨ Guatemalans in the US and dare to blame them for their own actions while we drove them out of their own country through exploitation, murder, and rape. Slavery exists and I see it more now than I ever have and I hate American culture, the government, money, and corporate power more now than I ever have. But that´s not what I´m going to talk about.

What I am going to talk about is the story of my host family in Guatemala. Guatemala has largely been colonized culturally due to religion and its culture severely injured due to dictatorships. Every night I walk home from school I pass by evangelical churches where people are having seizures thinking God is talking to them. Misogyny is ever present due to the heavy control the church has over gender norms, women’s sexuality, the sanctity of marriage, contraception, abortion, etc. Condoms are evil, abortion is illegal, women are harassed and rape in the street in broad daylight, and the police and army all contribute to, not help, any of these problems. I, however, thought I was lucky in my experience here. I got a host family for the past 3 months that was my age, the wife 21 and the husband 25. They have a baby that is 8 months old and utterly adorable. My dad played Radiohead songs on his guitar and we took turns playing my Nintendo DS at night after talking for long periods of time about life and how much police suck. Everything was awesome until the first time they had an argument. My host mom left for a week and they got back together afterwards and I moved back in with them. My host dad’s mom apparently had been disrespecting and interfering with their marriage and my host dad wasn’t defending his wife to his mom. It was ongoing enough that one day she left for a week. When she came back I thought everything was going to be ok, I hadn’t realized due to the length of time I’d been there, the language barrier, and other things that their problems were much greater than some family feuding and I came to learn that had been the fifth time she had left.

A few weeks later I really started to find out was going on. My Spanish kept improving and I got closer and closer to them. They asked me to be the godfather to their baby because they liked me and respected me and wanted someone responsible to be a third parent to their child. It was definitely a great night and I was incredibly flattered.

After another bit of time my host mom left again for a couple days though this time she was just visiting her family. My host dad did not believe this and while she was gone spent the days complaining about her and saying how she wanted him to change and blah blah blah. At first I bought into some of what he was saying because, after all, men aren’t ALWAYS the problem (or so I thought ha haaa!!!). When my host mom came home everything seemed more or less ok but a day or two later I woke up and went into the living room and saw that their door was open. My host dad wasn’t around and I walked by the door and saw my host mom very obviously crying. I asked her what happened and she told me that my host dad, the guy who talks about revolution and changing the world and who plays music and is into art and has a new born baby girl, had hit her. At first I thought maybe I was just mistranslating because confusing things like that had happened before and made for hilarious stories. But no, I checked with her again, and I had heard correctly. I talked with her for a while and apparently the baby had fallen over and scratched and bumped her face. He blamed her, hit her, then left the house and called HER mom and told her that my host mom was a bad mother and hurt the baby. The baby fell by accident and nothing more.

So explain to me what the fuck is going on? I had no idea. After keeping her company longer and talking to her more my host dad came back home. I asked him to go for a walk with me. We got outside and began to talk. He complained and whined about how it’s not fair, how she wants him to be different and he doesn’t want to live with her and blah blah blah. I told him none of that matters, that he has to apologize to her for what he did, and that he’s wrong for it. He was saying she was immature and doesn’t talk to him and he started saying all this weird stuff like he TOLD her she wasn’t ready for a baby that she was too young and blah blah. So I told him why the hell would she want to talk to someone who hits her? We went back to the house and he left again. I spent the day with her running errands outside and I asked her if she wanted to have a talk about their problems with my girlfriend and I present to create a barrier and to make it more calm and she said yes if her husband wanted to. I spoke with her husband on the phone and he asked me where we were and I said we were out walking. He said that it wasn’t good for her to be out with the baby, the baby is fragile, she shouldn’t leave the house for that long, all in this weird controlling tone. It was very strange and I told him everything was fine that the baby was fine and she had to run an errand. I asked him if he wanted to talk with us all present that night and he said maybe the next day, but he didn’t really want to, that it was embarrassing. He told me he’d see me later that night or the next day.

My girlfriend and I kept her company that night and stayed over and made food and watched movies. We tried to be supportive and I think it worked fairly well but unfortunately my host dad came home drunk in the middle of the night and woke me up because he was in the kitchen. I was worried something would happen but I didn’t hear them fighting or any noise so I fell back asleep. In the morning I said bye to my host mom while my host dad slept and went to school. A couple hours later I got a call from my host mom crying saying she was leaving immediately to go to her family’s house. I told her to come meet me at the school. A couple hours later she came and told my girlfriend and I what happened.

Apparently when my host dad finally woke up they started arguing again and, while she was holding the baby, he hit and strangled her. Not only that but the night before he had asked her to sleep with him ¨one last time¨ before they got divorced. What the fuck is that shit??? I was fucking furious and I really couldn’t do anything except do whatever my host mom wanted. I was sure that he felt more comfortable hitting her while I wasn’t around which just made me want to beat the crap out of him more. Testosterone aside I had to help my host mom pack her bag for the baby so I went back to the house and stayed near her while she packed so she would feel safe while her husband, my former friend, awkwardly meandered around the house. The next day she came back and I helped her move out her furniture and everything else with her father, who doesn’t know what happened, just that they’re getting divorced, and her two younger siblings who also don’t know (her mom and her older female family members do).

Already he’s called her and told her he loves after demanding to both me and her that he wants to get separated immediately because he can’t take her any more. Oh and I forgot to mention that my host dad called her a prostitute and then called his mom to come over and call her a prostitute and tell my host mom that she was ruining her son’s life after he hit and strangled her. Also he apparently told her she wasn’t allowed to have friends once they got married – no fucking wonder she’d want to leave all the time to go home where she can TALK to people who aren’t fucking assholes. And he wonders why she didn’t want to talk to him!

It’s utterly insane how much things change. I never would have imagined any of this happening after first knowing them for a couple months. It’s horrifying how hidden serious problems like these can be. He’s already called me asking why I’m mad at him and I haven’t spoken to him since saying I didn’t want to talk to him. I visited my host mom with my girlfriend in her hometown and she is a lot happier. Part of her is still holding onto the belief that they might get back together after a while if he changes. I want to talk to her one last time before I leave and try as best I can in my non fluent but functional Spanish that he’s not going to change and he’s a fucking bastard who doesn’t deserve her or anyone and talk about feminism and that there are men who aren’t assholes. It’s hard to say all this due to the language barrier, the cultural barrier and the norm of men cheating and abusing their wives here in Guatemala. Would she even believe me? Every man she’s known has been an asshole, as far as I know I might be the only non asshole man she’s ever met. Her father cheated on her mother and her two younger siblings are kids of another man. The statistics about men in Guatemala make the US look like heaven in some ways. Which, consequently, is pathetic since we are largely responsible for a lot of the patriarchy entrenched in the culture here. All I can do is try and help her in any way I can.

So yeah, this has been one hell of a trip. Trying to help someone in a personal matter like this in a country and culture you only know a little in a language you’re learning to speak is extremely hard. But it’s just as interesting to see that the same problems and same themes exist pretty much exactly the same in other parts of the world and that people aren’t all that different anywhere. Sorry if I haven’t done that much analyzing in this post but I’m hoping the story speaks for itself and makes us all think about how to deal with things on such a personal level. If you have any suggestions or know of any books in Spanish I could buy for her about this sort of stuff please leave a comment. Thanks!
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It's Christmas! You know what that means!! BUY YOUR WOMAN JEWELRY OR YOU ARE A TERRIBLE BOYFRIEND/HUSBAND. (And it also means only heterosexual couples buy each other gifts in the world of mainstream TV commercials.)

Now, I enjoy jewelry. And my husband has gotten me a couple items of jewelry as gifts, and I certainly appreciated it. But holy crap, what kind of mindless idiots have worked on the marketing campaigns for mall-jewelers for the past ... well, forever. Their ads are offensively heteronormative and wastefully consumerist.

Click for some videos.



Funny satire:



Unfunny actual viral marketing from JCPenney:



Personally, I would not be offended if my husband got me a double bagged vacuum as a gift. But that's probably because he vacuums more than I do. Or if he got me RAM with a note that said "thanks for the memories." That part of the "commercial" killed me. It was sweet and thoughtful and practical, but NO, it's not shiny and expensive and showy. Because all straight women want is shiny, expensive, showy stuff that has no real practical application other than making other women jealous when you scream "HE WENT TO JARED!"

I really hate when the world of consumer goods reduces straight women to money-grubbing whores with no sense of sentimentality or practicality. Yes, I do like the occasional shiny, pretty thing, but I also love practical, useful, thoughtful things. Maybe I'm not a true member of the girls club. But that isn't the first time I've thought that.


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Thanksgiving is one of the few chances I have to see my grand-nephew, Mason. The kid's just getting into everything, and he's got the same brown hair that I and my nieces have. There is no doubt in my mind he'll be a heartbreaker someday.

I look at my two nieces, Heather (Mason's mother) and Savannah, and it occurs to me that we all have roughly the same look -- a pile of brown curls, and dark eyes that peer from underneath.

Of course, it takes a certain amazing, powerful love to take someone who doesn't happen to be biologically related to you into your home and give them the support that their closer relatives in the world cannot -- but there are people who would never dream of having children, partly because they think they couldn't love a child that wasn't related to them. Evolutionarily, they might well be right -- but the point is moot for so many who are gay, lesbian, or transgendered; they face certain obstacles in the process of conceiving. Gay men and transwomen have a certain lack of womb and eggs, and gay women and transmen are of course sperm-free. Personally, even though I used to promise myself that I would adopt, if I ever wanted kids, I have found myself feeling deep loss that I'll never be able to feel what it is like to have another life growing inside me, due to being born male. (Also, for a long time, I didn't realize I'd ever start on estrogen, and wow, is the resulting increased awareness of the biological clock loud. I've already found myself daydreaming about what the baby's room is going to look like in extreme detail -- already picked out what kind of mobile I want over the crib! -- and it gives me pause every time it happens.)

Science, as so often happens, may be filling the void sooner than I ever thought it could happen. A recent BBC article talks about reactions to a technology that allows anybody with bone marrow to create sperm. Lesbian couples the world over can just pick whichever partner they wish to provide the spermatozoa, and voila -- egg plus sperm, and you've got insemination materials.

There are some current limitations, of course -- there's not an egg production process that would provably work in humans yet, and if both the egg donor and sperm donor are XX, there's no chance for a Y chromosome to stray into the equation, and hence no chance of a boy. (Whereas a couple that are both XY using the same technology for egg production would have 2/3rds male children to female children, because there are two combinations of their genes resulting in an XY configuration, but only one in an XX). Further, it does involve drilling a bone and making a marrow withdrawal, not exactly everybody's idea of a fun weekend.

Having said this, I couldn't see why -- as the process became less and less specialized -- that eventually people might not be able to have kits for generating sperm or eggs, ones that can be purchased at a local store and used with a blood sample to generate a few billion sperm or a couple dozen eggs for the user.

Back at my mother's living room, I'm pretty sure I'm not stable enough to take care of a child any time soon, personally. Also, I muse as I watch my niece Heather finding it very difficult to move with her enormously bulging 8-month-pregnant body, maybe not being able to do that isn't such a bad thing -- for now, anyway.

And who knows -- once I'm ready, maybe the science will allow me to actually bear the child, instead of just watching other people do it.
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Sincerely,
ts


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Richard Rorty’s 1998 work, Achieving Our Country, reads like the masterplan of Barack Obama’s successful presidential election campaign. In the book, Rorty calls for a reconfiguration of the American Left. He argues that, since the 1960s, progressives in the United States have been engaged in a cynical and detached ‘politics of spectatorship’. Inspired by Continental and poststructuralist philosophers, such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault, left-wing intellectuals have become disillusioned spectators of their country, unable to have pride in any of its achievements and exhibiting deep cynicism about the possibility for any real change (short of a wholesale elimination of the United States and total rejection of all its social institutions). The Left portrayed America as an incorrigible genocidal, imperialist, racist, sexist and homophobic nation, and thus, undermined progressives’ will to meaningful agency in favor of a detached and profound skepticism: what reformist change could possibly matter when the whole enterprise of America is so beyond repair? At the same time, the American Left became a purely ‘cultural Left’ by focusing on ‘niche’ issues and ‘sadist’ social structures, such as racism, sexism and homophobia, while avoiding discussions about what really matters: economic inequality, selfishness and class oppression.

Rorty’s critiques of the Left’s ‘politics of spectatorship,’ and its sole focus on ‘cultural politics’ were adopted very successfully by Barack Obama’s campaign. From day one, Obama emphasized ‘hope’ for change and the ability of all people to exercise agency both for their individual gain and for the common good represented by their country. He also provided a replacement narrative of American history, which took pride in what the country had achieved (the Constitution, civil rights, and winning the Cold War), but viewed its ‘ultimate morality’ as still achievable, as expressed in the need to strive towards ‘a more perfect union.’ Thus, Obama restored a ‘will to agency’ to the U.S. Left: he provided a revision of the standard depressing and pessimistic left-wing historical narrative by portraying America as an ‘imperfect, but perfectible nation.’ Furthermore, he avoided divisive issues in the campaign, while focusing on the common good and bread-and-butter economic issues that had a high probability of diminishing some of the profound material inequalities that exist within the country. Overall, the Obama campaign seemed to follow – word-for-word – Rorty’s advice for the American Left: (1) restore hope in America and inspire people to exercise agency; (2) focus on economic issues and avoid polarizing ‘cultural’ debates.

While I agree with Rorty on the need to replace the ‘politics of spectatorship’ with a ‘politics of hopeful agency,’ some of his other claims are highly dubious. First of all, his insistence on a distinction between ‘real (economic) politics’ and ‘cultural politics’ is crude and will not help us achieve unity on the Left. Rorty implies that the ‘victim politics’ of queer rights, feminism, disability and racial justice is somehow secondary to (and separate from) ‘real’ concerns about economic inequality and caste stratifications in U.S. society. This view echoes Alan Sokal’s critique of postmodernism as supporting a trendy focus on superficial ‘identity politics’ that cannot concretely benefit the working class.

Nevertheless, the notion that ‘identity politics’ has no relation to economic justice is a false one. Take the example of queer rights: how could a movement that questions the sexual and gender restrictions that we place on ourselves not have anything to do with a critique of economic injustice and exploitation? As Judith Butler points out in her article, “Merely Cultural,” queer activism is important to a movement for economic emancipation because it undermines and problematizes one of the key institutions by which caste and class distinctions are maintained: compulsory dyadic heterosexuality. Why have sexual restrictions in the United States focused so much on limiting peoples’ ability to form intimate relationships across class and racial divides or within their own gender? Because such relationships could very well undermine the caste system on which economic inequality is based. To (re)produce this system, people cannot legitimately copulate with those that the system is designed to oppress: they must seek relationships among ‘their own kind’ (class and race), and those relationships must be heterosexual ones that can produce offspring to carry on and (re)produce the caste distinction. The queer movement’s questioning of the sexual restrictions we place on ourselves (and its re-thinking of the general purpose of sexuality) can, thus, legitimately contribute to action against economic inequality by opening up space for a breakdown of the sexual mechanisms by which classes and castes are (re)created.

Secondly, Rorty falsely blames the postmodernist or ‘cultural left’ for failing to engage with unions and the American poor, who have now become a hot constituency for Pat Buchanan and other radical right-wing populists. At least in the case of the queer rights movement, I do not think that the ‘cultural left’ can be blamed for this discrepancy. Radical groups, such as Queer Nation, Act-Up and Gay Men’s Health Crisis have focused considerably on critiquing social injustice in all its forms. It is the mainstream, assimilationist gay rights movement (which reached its zenith in the 1990s and 2000s) that has compartmentalized sexuality issues away from the broader Left-wing social and economic critique. As I demonstrated in this previous post, assimilationist gay activists have sought to portray homosexuals in the least offensive way possible: as a group that will not engage in ‘radical leftism,’ that will support the class and caste structures of corporate America, and that will not work to eliminate racial injustice and sexism. Thus, responsibility for ‘compartmentalizing’ identity politics away from forming broad alliances against social and economic injustices falls squarely on the shoulders of assimilationist social movements.

Overall, Rorty is right that a ‘politics of hopeful agency’ must replace the detached spectator-like cynicism of the American Left, and we are very lucky that President-elect Barack Obama has championed this agenda. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the work postmodernists and identitarians have done should now be pushed to the side in favor of a ‘real’ economic politics. In order to build unity on the Left, we need to develop an understanding of how the various injustices in our society – economic, sexual, gendered, racial, and disability-based – work together and reinforce each other. We cannot suppress our differences in order to build unity; we must instead build unity on the basis of our particularity and diversity. Only then, will a comprehensive and truly hopeful Left-wing politics be possible.


***For More Information***
Definitely have a look at Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country and Barack Obama’s campaign website for evidence of a reconfiguration on the American Left. For a very intelligent reply to Rorty and other critics of the ‘cultural’/postmodern Left, have a look at Judith Butler’s “Merely Cultural.”
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Sincerely,
ts


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Jason Tseng joins us from The Bilerico Project:

At 6:30pm on W 65th St and Columbus, I joined thousands of fellow queers and their allies in a protest before the Mormon Temple in New York City. I didn't have extraordinarily high expectations for the night. I had a headache from work and wanted to sleep. But I felt compelled to participate in the growing national momentum in opposition of the recent passage of Prop 8.

Now, I consider myself an activist. I have worked at the local and national level for arts, queer, and gender advocacy. But all of my activist experience has been fairly white collar: writing grants, researching for reports, organizing service programs, etc. I had never been to an honest-to-god ol' fashion protest. I knew from the facebook event that had circulated like wildfire to expect around three thousand attendees. I was ready for that. I know what a crowd of three thousand people looks like.

What I was unprepared for was a much larger crowd (I've heard estimations topping at 10,000 with conservative estimates saying at least 6,000!) and the sheer scale of the demonstration. Pouring out over three to four blocks around the Mormon Temple, chants of "Shame on you!", "Tax this Church!", and "Gay, Straight, Black, White! Marriage is a Civil Right!" soared through the air. Even more amazing, this entire event was organized and constructed outside the formal endorsement or agenda of a large formalized organization. This is grassroots at its best.

The night was definitely an exciting one. I even caught a glimpse of a few celebrities in the mix. Whoopi Goldberg, being the most prominent... but I think I may have caught a few former Project Runway contestants and our good friend Andy Towle, over at Towleroad at the head of the march (video of Andy in Father Tony's post from today). As the protest swelled around the Mormon church, demonstration leaders led the raucous and lively crowd on a march down Columbus Avenue towards Columbus Circle. With police flanking the protesters with mobile fences and trying to herd the demonstrators into Central Park, members of the protest started chants like "Pens are for pigs!". Finally, all assembled together in the southwest corner of Central Park beneath an oddly homoerotic fountain statue, the protest reached a fever pitch as chants rippled through the crowd, spreading and multiplying as gay, straight, bi, queer, trans, and whathaveyous joined in the clarion call for equal rights.

However, being the perpetual devil's advocate and idealistic cynic, I was moved to question why this outpouring of outrage and civil action now? Why were we not mobilized like this nationally before we lost in California when it might have done some actual good. Showing solidarity in the light of an unfair loss isn't quite the same as mobilizing proactively to ensure victory. An activist friend of mine who accompanied me on the march and was a very strong, vocal leader in the crowd, taking the initiative to start the rallying chants, was impressed and encouraged by the turn out for this event, but wondered about where all these people were when activists try to mobilize for other important issues, like class, race, immigration, etc.

I thought my friend had a point. One of the more popular chants that rang out in the night was "Gay, Straight, Black, White! Same Struggle, Same Fight!" While I appreciate the sentiment of queer activists calling upon the history and energy of the civil rights movement, this has also been a very charged issue when dealing with communities of color, especially African Americans. Conflating these two movements (as many of these social justice movements tend to be rhetorically homogenized: from reproductive rights and suffrage, to Ghandi's anti-colonialism and King's civil rights movement) is problematic. Queer people do not face the same struggles and hurdles as the civil rights movement did. They may be similar, and are often times opposed with similar language used by the status quo powers-that-be, but we in the queer community should be careful not to try and co-opt the Civil Rights struggle as our own.

By doing so, I believe we ignore the very real problems with racism that the gay liberation movement - and the current gay rights movement - have been plagued with since their inception. Large swatches of the gay political electorate have been driven by "liberal" affluent gay white men who have historically directed the course of gay politics towards a distinctly generic "color-blind" philosophy which ignores the confluent problems with race and sexuality. The problem with being color-blind is that when you choose to ignore color everything tends to become white.

As a brief addendum to all those gay leaders out there: by working on diversity initiatives and with "communities of color," you have to work with more than just black people. There are many colors out their in the rainbow of our society that consistently get left out of the conversation.

But, all the rambling aside, I was really pleased and honored to have been able to participate in this call to action. For all my fellow New Yorkers out there, there will be another demonstration at City Hall on Saturday, November 15th at 1:30pm. Be there or be square.
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Quantum of Solace, the latest in the James Bond franchise opened on Friday. It was the usual Bond-fare - dreamy Brit actor, sexy women, fancy gadgets, big guns, high body count. It was the stereotypical straight man's wet dream, although I'm certain other people (like this straight woman) enjoyed it. But it still left me with a sense of defeat when it comes to gender roles in cinema.

One thing that was mildly refreshing in this Bond film is that it had a degree of revenge, over a lost love. Meaning in the world of Bond, women weren't just play things. But because of the way things turned out with that love (she betrayed him and then killed herself to save him), and knowing that Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace are supposed to be the beginning of the Bond story, perhaps that is supposed to explain why women are so expendable in the movies. I did get a small amount of satisfaction that in Quantum, the female lead not only had her own (tiny) back story, but that she also got to kill someone on her own (for her own reasons), and she didn't sleep with Bond. But she lived. The expendable minor female character that Bond did sleep with merely tripped a man down the stairs to help Bond, and she ended up dead. I'll admit that I'm no Bond expert, so I had to check with my husband to see if "sleep with Bond and end up dead" is consistent in the other movies, and according to him, it isn't. Whew. But the movies are still so overboard with gender stereotypes. Although I do appreciate Judi Dench's character, M. She seems to go against the stereotypical expectation. But maybe as gender roles have changed since the Bond franchise was first introduced, the gender roles in Bond movies can get a bit more progressive.


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You can’t give a response to “What’s your type?” without having to answer to race.

The usual responses I hear include personality traits (like “funny,” “laid back,” or “intelligent”), facial hair attributes (such as “clean-shaven” or “five o’ clock shadow”), and occupational affiliations or interests (for instance, “someone who likes to cook” or “not a lawyer”).

But then things start getting tricky. People try to dodge the question of race by talking about skin tones: “light-skinned,” “dark-skinned,” “brown-skinned,” or “caramel complexion.” They worm around being explicit by mentioning attributes like “blue eyes and blonde hair” or social circumstances like “someone from the hood.” And my all-time favorite circumvention? Straight up without being straightforward: “Someone who looks like me.”

Sometimes, though, people try to be honest: I had a friend begin listing personality traits, interests, potential job positions before glimpsing around and, with his eyes low, moving his lips only oh-so-much to produce in the quietest little whisper, “White.” Why, I thought, should he keep his confident answer to himself? Why are we afraid to proclaim our preferences (and I do believe they are preferences, as opposed to orientations) if we are so, it seems, stubborn about them?

I don’t think I knew how concerned people were about the race of their mates until I went to college. When I was growing up, my parents would indeed make flabbergasting comments about the racial make-up of my friends; I am Asian, and most of my closest acquaintances were black, with a sprinkling of every other race and ethnicity to boot. They would advise me to be careful about whom I hung out with, that I should work more to find a group of friends that reflected my roots. Sometimes, my sister—much bolder than I am—would tease my parents: “What if I came home with a white boyfriend? What if I came home with a black boyfriend?” My mom would shake her head, release a touch of nervous laughter, as if to say, “Why would you say such a thing?” Certainly, I thought, this was a generational gap. My parents were simply too old-fashioned to understand my teenage ideal of a post-race dating society. I would need to go to college to be with peers who would understand.

Surprisingly for me, college provided me with the opposite of my expectation. Same-race relationships pervaded most of my small liberal arts community—so much for being liberal, I thought. “What’s your type?” was more rhetorical than inquisitive. In a social scene dominated by Greek life, I found that most whites dated whites, most blacks dated blacks, and everyone else needed to figure out if they were “more white” or “more black” to see where they would fit in. White European or Australian international students, for example, had for their dating pool both the larger white community and each other; a young Asian woman from the hoods of New York, on the other hand, gained street credibility among black students and was able to socialize in that world.

I remember noticing but two attributes that helped students transcend the prison of mate-racing: language and sports. Students who shared an interest in speaking a language—Spanish comes especially to mind—bonded with other students who also spoke the language; here, race played second fiddle to the assumptions of heritage or cultural awareness that came with linguistic talents, whether by birth or high school AP class. Similarly, students who played the same sport on separately gendered teams achieved camaraderie through practices and long-distance conference tours. While this forged a handful of interracial relationships—frequently between a black student and a white student—this also caused interracial-related drama: Why should a white student take a perfectly good black student out from an already limited black dating pool? Why would a black student give up mating options within his or her race for someone who represented the dominant Man?

From my experiences in college and beyond, I’ve found “What’s your type?” to be even more twisted in gay circles. I tend to fit responses I hear into two extreme poles: there’s almost always white, and there’s almost always fetishist. At one end, there fits the aesthetic type sold to us by Abercrombie, American Eagle, JCrew, Armani Exchange, and the rest of the big brand names: white, usually muscular, men. Yes, okay: sometimes there are tokens. But almost always: white. This is what people end up seeing on most of the major porn networks: Sean Cody, Randy Blue, Corbin Fisher—if it’s popular in gay porn, it’s probably white. On the other end, “What’s your type?” gets very specific: Asian. Thin Asian. Latino. Hung Latino. Black. Dark Chocolate. On this side of the spectrum, minorities become desired because they’re, well, minorities—but specifically, minorities with a certain typed physical presence. Men value them explicitly for everything that supposedly comes with being their race or ethnicity; behaviorally, this may come to obedience, machismo, or strength. While the most popular gay pornography sites may not celebrate these ethnic caricatures to the extent that they sell whiteness, searchable porn databases like Xtube drip with clearly-labeled fetishist options, creating categories like Asian, Black, or Latino. Easy access to whatever color—and stereotyped culture—that you want. The cultural baggage is important: if you fit the color but not the trait, then maybe you won’t be as popular among these ethnicity fans. Or, maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll come off as mixed and straddle two potential ethnic markets—if you can pass as mixed white/black, for example, you might be viewed as a mate with training wheels for someone who wants pure white or pure black. No matter what, though, you still seem to be defined by your relationship to these umbrella categories of primary racial colors.

Obviously, as both my dating and pornography options demonstrate, my teenage dreams of a post-race mating scheme didn’t quite play out as I had imagined. I think, however, that that’s a good thing. Years later, the idea of concocting a colorblind world is not only naïve, but also dangerous; not acknowledging that there are differences in treatment and perception simply based on the color of one’s kin is the absolute ignorance of, well, the history of the world. And to think that love, dating, and attraction are immune from these prejudices—or, worse, hide those beliefs with cushy syntax and fancy hints—is to simply perpetuate this post-race fantasy.

I’m not saying that we should assertively proclaim our mating preferences and publicly narrow our options down to our gut’s raced reactions to “What’s your type?” But what does need to happen, I think, is for us to say, “Well, this is my type…” and then it follow-up with the very personal acknowledgement, “And this is probably why…” For many of us, that will be a hard thing to do. It forces us to shed a thin beam of light on the tightly-stacked structures cemented within our social selves. And even more uneasy is the feeling of, “What now?” after we see what’s been built inside of us, oftentimes without our permission at all. I do not know where we go from there. I do not know what to do with the rubble that unsettles when we realize we’re programmed against our will to love who we love. Our responses to “Why?” will not take care of that; they do not justify what we do, but they do, at the very least, do something. “Why?” steps us toward a more productive conversation than one about the pinning down of necessarily (and, I still want to believe, unnecessarily) essentializing characteristics and markers.
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