K.M. Soehnlein

Mark Leno for San Francisco Mayor: A City in Crisis Needs Leadership

Friday night in SoMa. We meet a friend at a bar on Folsom, and while we’re on the sidewalk we nearly get hit by a guy zipping by in one those new scooter things. Then we walk to a restaurant, going down Stevenson passing at least a dozen people actively openly injecting drugs, surrounded by strewn possessions and garbage, blocking the sidewalk, spilling into the street. On a wild corner of 6th Street, a disheveled dude shouting loudly is mocked by a cop in a passing patrol car, who mimics the dude’s voice out the passenger side window. 

The restaurant we eat at is filled with young people, mostly men in the casual dress of the tech sector, ordering delicious craft beer and housemade sausages; the human misery just outside has vanished in the social din. We take a Lyft to a gay bar that’s filled with young men and women, a really diverse crowd, dancing to Rihanna and Cardi B—an explosion of joyous celebration. I talk to one young guy who tells me he lives in Freemont, and a woman who just moved to El Cerrito. Unlike me, they weren’t around when there were still rent-controlled apartments to be found in the SF city limits. Two blocks from home, our night ends with a sudden eruption of violence: we have to intervene when a young woman is being stalked by a crazed man, eyes buzzing with crack or meth or schizophrenia, who out of nowhere punched her, pulled a knife on her, and followed her for blocks. 

This is San Francisco. 

Life in SoMa, where I’ve rented an apartment for the past fifteen years, is the best and worst of the city. We have great neighbors, a slice of urban community. People on my block know each other and look out for each other. This neighborhood has always been a barometer. Whatever’s going to happen in the city at large shows up here first. The overpriced housing market, booming. The gentrification of working class neighborhoods, unabated. The deep fissures in the safety net, heartbreakingly obvious everywhere on the sidewalks. The start-up “disruptors,” who often seem oblivious to how innovation intersects with actual lived experience in the city.

In the past couple of years, it’s all intensified. Daily, I see screaming screeching insane people who need intervention, medication, help of any kind. People passed out with needles in their bleeding arms. Half naked people wandering around completely out of their minds. Car windows are smashed on every block, the glass spilling into human feces. Civic Center BART staircases are blocked by opioid transactions. Meanwhile a new population of people who move here for well-paying jobs with no connection to the social fabric of San Francisco floats from their overpriced apartments into rideshares then into gentrifying eateries, eyes always cast downward at their devices, seemingly blind to everything falling apart right around them. I meet people at parties who tell me they're waiting to cash out so they can go back to where they came from and buy property.

To my eyes, San Francisco is in crisis. The heart of the city is an inequitable disaster zone. No one’s officially called it that, but come walk with me on a Friday night and see what I see.

It’s simplistic to blame Ed Lee, our late mayor, but I do. Under his watch the buildings got taller and the streets sank into chaos, while he displayed no leadership at all. Can you think of one moment when Ed Lee addressed the city’s citizens and acknowledged the challenges we face every day? Our next mayor, to be decided in just a month, inherits this mess. I don’t know how anyone fixes it, but it seems crucial to pick the right person to change course and start to lead us out of the abyss.

I’m voting for Mark Leno. I believe he is the best candidate to confront San Francisco’s problems. His platforms make the most sense to me. He’s prioritizing the “homeless” crisis—really an intricate web of issues including drug abuse, mental illness, and policing as much as housing—with a very detailed plan. He’s gotten a lot done in Sacramento as a state senator and member of the assembly. He works with people across the aisle. He’s a leader in the LGBTQ community. He's not taking money from corporate Super PACs. I’ve heard him speak in a number of different situations large and small, and he’s always persuasive and captivating. I want a good communicator for Mayor, someone who can address us with honesty and clarity.

In our ranked choice voting, I’m putting Leno first and Jane Kim in my second slot, because I agree with her positions on the issues, and I think she’s a fighter, though I have questions about her campaign’s “clean streets” message, which doesn’t seem like a plan. I don't have a 3rd choice. Not London Breed, whose campaign is backed by the sleaziest developers in the city, Ron Conway and all the other corporate lobbyists who supported Ed Lee and exacerbated the gap between the haves and have-nots in this city. But frankly, Kim and Breed have been on the Board over the last few years and neither of them strike me as leading us out of crisis.

San Francisco politics confuse me. My friends who work in city government all express the same frustrations. It’s hard to get things done. The Board of supervisors is factionalized. The bureaucracy is a swamp. There are vocal specialized interests who block advancement at every step. We need someone who can guide us through this. Based on his past record and his future plans, I see Mark Leno as that leader. Leno for Mayor. 

 

Adrienne Rich: "...the worst affliction / is not to know who you are or have been..."

When news of the death of the great lesbian poet Adrienne Rich arrived today in the form of a tweet, I was stunned.

Stunned that this vital poet—still actively publishing in her 82nd year—could be gone. Stunned because Rich's 50 years of poetry—thoughtful, sensual, beautifully composed—is so at odds with the world of social networking, where everything is trivial, inane and sloppy. And stunned because it felt like a kick to the gut, and I had to stop what I'd been doing to figure out why.

 The New York Times reports her books of poems have sold over 800,000 copies—an extraordinary number in a culture that "doesn't get" poetry. For many of us, she was the lesbian feminist poet, the one we were told to read in our youth (by feminist professors, leftist activists and lovers hoping to transmit the passion in her lyrics)—the one we continued to turn to, because she gave voice to outrage and hope, showing us a clear-eyed, moral view of the world.

For those of us who write, she was a model: a commitment to the idea that art is necessary. I doubt I'd be the writer I am today without The Fact of a Doorframe, or Your Native Land, Your Life, or What is Found There, or Dark Fields of the Republic, books that make the case for poetry on every page. I discovered her exactly at the moment when I was trying to figure out what kind of writer I wanted to be. She provided instruction.

Tonight in the literature class I teach at USF, I talked about what she represented. In the classroom, I don't talk enough about the role of the writer. The responsibility of the writer. I talk about craft—characterization, point of view, prose style, tone—as if any of that matters without substance. We ask of the stories we workshop, "What's at stake?" But we don't often ask of ourselves, what's at stake for me as a writer in the world? Why does it matter that I do what I do? 

Tonight, I read this poem to my students. It's from a series in Your Native Land, Your Life called "Contradictions: Tracking Poems," which I believe is one of her masterworks. Each section is numbered, and each tackles the way "our lives will always be / a stew of contradictions." The poet's canvas here is epic—international politics, imprisonment, government corruption—and simultaneously private—"My mouth hovers across your breast / in the short grey winter afternoon." In this section, she turns her attention to Writing:

27.

The Tolstoyans                      the Afro-American slaves

knew this:                  you could be killed

for teaching people to read and write

I used to think the worst affliction

was to be forbidden pencil and paper

well, Ding Ling recited poems to prison walls

for years of the Cultural Revolution

and truly, the magic of written characters

looms and dwindles              shrinks small             grows swollen

depending on where you stand

and what is in your hand

and who can read and why

I think now the worst affliction

is not to know who you are or have been

I have learned this in part

from writers              Reading and writing

aren’t sacred             yet people have been killed

as if they were

 

The daily grind of the internet can be a graveyard, with tombstones of the famous erected as fast as the news hits. But I don't think I've ever seen a poet "trending" on Twitter for twelve hours. Something happened today: we turned to each other and acknowledged that Adrienne Rich's life—her work, her personal-is-political worldview—mattered. Her death is undeniably a tremendous loss, but it is also an opportunity to talk to each other about what she still has to say to us, and where we go from here.

Eleven Writers, One Story Cycle

Introducing Temporary Shelter: a collection of interwoven stories that I edited and wrote with ten writers in my seminar at the University of San Francisco's MFA in Writing Program. 

Buy the book on Lulu.com. If you're in San Francisco, come hear us read on Saturday Dec. 10, from 7-9pm, at Epicenter Cafe.

Below is my introduction to the book, about the process of collectively writing our "story cycle": eleven writers each writing one story set in contemporary San Francisco, with characters and events appearing in multiple stories that crisscross and overlap in all kinds of surprising ways.

--

Introduction: In Need of Rescue

“…what seemed essential to San Francisco was the fog. The sense of this place where a curtain of fog is pulled over and pulled away and then pulled over...it brings with it a feeling that something different is happening. …It's a city where extreme inquiry has always had a place.”—Jennifer Egan 

Tough times lead to tough stories. In 2011, as the writers of this collecton were hard at work, tales of turmoil reached us daily: around the world, protests in the street; in the headlines, further economic collapse. Little earthquakes shook the Bay Area all fall, the planet itself in a state of adjustment.

One night in November, trouble literally arrived at our door. In the middle of class at the University of San Francisco, we heard a bang, then a louder bang and then breaking glass. There on Fulton Street, in full view, a car was upside down, roof on the asphalt, carriage exposed, shattered glass everywhere. A reckless driver had hit a parked car, and the impact flipped his vehicle over. As we went outside to witness, firemen and paramedics arrived on the scene. A man staggered from the wreckage, spitting blood but belligerently refusing the help of responders. That he was intoxicated became clear; whatever else was going on with him, we could only guess.

Life imitates art. This accident came at the exact moment we were discussing our story cycle, the book now in your hands—a collection filled with car crashes and firemen, belligerent drunks and blood on the street. I’m sure I was not the only writer in our group who entertained the magical thought that we had willed this driver and his rescuers to our door—the real San Francisco endorsing our fictional version.

When we, the eleven writers included in Temporary Shelter, began to imagine this project, we found that many of us were drawn to tales of rescue. There were physical rescues—all those firemen, and also children pulled from harm, and drifters dragged in from the cold. There were those in need of emotional rescue—an accident victim in a state of post-traumatic stress, an awkward blind date attempting right itself, an elderly woman recuperating her dignity with an uncharacteristic act of boldness. And there were figures perhaps beyond rescue: a marriage marred by secrets, young men punched bloody, a bird with a broken wing.

Our goal was to create a story cycle, whose pieces could stand alone but were interconnected to suggest a greater whole. Story cycles are usually written by a single author, like Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker, which charts the Haitian diaspora through disparate lives linked by one family’s brutal past, or Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, with its circle of characters linked to San Francisco’s punk-rock music scene in the late 1970s. We read both of these books, and more, and along the way we created one of our own.

Each story began as an idea—or image, character or event—set in contemporary San Francisco. Each went through multiple drafts, with much sharing of pages and many group discussions aimed at making our stories cohere. Some connections were planned from the start: a startling event in a bar told through the mind of its instigator in one story, appears in another from the point of view of a witness; the couple managing an apartment building near the Panhandle show up in the background of two other stories about the other people living there. Further connections came with revision: a narrator speeding down the freeway notes in passing a roadside accident, featured elsewhere as a central event; the lonely boy who plays his trumpet for money around San Francisco has an encounter with a lonely girl being ignored by her father in Golden Gate Park. What was remarkable to me, the collection’s nominal editor, was how our separate imaginations were drawn to the same themes. As the world shook around us, we seemed most drawn to trouble, to those causing it or those upended by it—characters in need of rescue and shelter.

Our story cycle seems to be asking, Who are we, in the midst of all this trouble, and what do we do about it? Jennifer Egan’s notion of “extreme inquiry” seems right for these tough times, and the authors of the stories in this collection are up to the task. Their renderings of characters in crisis suggest the varieties of action, denial and escape that we embrace when we have no choice but to consider making change. Like all serious fiction, these stories offer points of identification and entry instead of easy answers.

Meanwhile, the fog rolls over San Francisco, and the fog rolls out again, reminding us each time that in the end, all shelter is temporary.

 —K.M. Soehnlein, December 2011

 

 

The Safeway

A video has been posted of a reading I did on Sept. 11, as part of an event called Buffet Flats, a salon that mixes queer performance with the San Francisco local food & urban farming movements. The salon was held in the "Tenderloin National Forest," a magical garden and gallery space built up from a formerly scary, dead-end alley in the midst of the 'hood.

I wrote a piece called "The Safeway" especially for this night -- it's a mostly-true memoir of going to Safeway on 9/11, in a post-attack panic about the end of the world.

Shout-outs to Seth Eisen of Buffet Flats (that's him in the finery, introducing me), Mark McBeth for taping and posting the link, and my pal John Vlahides, to whom the story is dedicated.

 

Jane Smiley, An Appreciation

I delivered these remarks to introduce the writer Jane Smiley at the Lone Mountain Reading Series, held at the University of San Francisco on March 2, 2011. I'm printing them here by request.

All writers need models, not just the ones we admire from history but the ones who walk among us, living the writing-life we aspire to. Tonight I’m very happy to be able to say a few words about a writer who has been such a model for me.

I first encountered Jane Smiley’s fiction as perhaps many of us did, with her breakout 1992 novel A Thousand Acres. I was at that time getting serious about writing, and I went to see Ms. Smiley read at Three Lives Bookstore in the West Village of Manhattan. Three Lives is one of those small wood-paneled stores with indirect lighting that smell like chamomile tea. It was crowded, I sat on the floor, and I listened as she read a series of passages describing the Iowa prairie, the thousand-acres upon which the story took place. She evoked the novel not with a chunk of the plot but with a string of images, opening my eyes to the symbiosis between landscape and story—an early lesson for me in how a place could operate like a character in fiction, alive with active verbs and insistent adjectives. Alive with language.

Language for Smiley is insistently precise, peppered with humor, always demanding your attention. No matter where or what she writes about, I find myself caring an awful lot.

If you only know A Thousand Acres, you’ve got some catching up to do. She’s written a dozen books since then. You need to read her novella, The Age of Grief, in which the marriage between a husband and wife, both dentists, falls apart over the course of six weeks and the husband, our narrator, only 35 years old, tells us:

"It seems to me I have arrived at the age of grief…[when]…the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and of the rest of the world have broken down, after all—all that schooling, all that care…[and] we think, if they were feeling what we were feeling, how could they stand it?"

You need to read Moo, the very funny campus satire which observes of a fictional university:

"The collection of stone buildings had evolved into a web of offices where secretaries sat under bright lights, and near them, much more dimly, sat administrators whose grasp on things was tenuous at best. The secretaries were connected by computer. The only people who talked on the phone anymore were the administrators, whose whole lives, like those of chimps, were made up of nit-picking, stroking, and jockeying for dominance."

And you definitely need to read Horse Heaven, which is what Tolstoy might have written if he’d had a sense of humor and a passion for Thoroughbreds. This novel is expansive and humane and full of insight into the relationship-dynamics up and down the rungs of professional horse racing, which turns out to be an economic and social system so intricate and storied it might as well be the Russian aristocracy. You could call Horse Heaven the Great American Racetrack Novel. Or you could just call it great.

Many of you have read—if you've taken a class with me—13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. It’s a historical survey, an examination of the craft of novel writing and also a kind of moral boost for writers—not so much a how-to as a why-you-must. In it she offers a brief memoir of her attempt, in the wake of 9/11, to overcome writers block by sitting down to read 100 novels in a year.

(I only managed to read 55 books last year, and I was really, really trying.)

But that’s part of what has made Jane Smiley a model to me. She seems to push her intellectual inquiry further, and her curiosity deeper, than so many of contemporary writers bother to go.

I was reminded again of this when she appeared last week on Oprah talking about A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. Smiley wrote a biography of Charles Dickens—among everything else—and she talked about Dickens as a writer of “extreme states of mind.” She compared Madame Defarge to an abused child—oppressed not necessarily by her family but by a corrupt culture—something that you could see opened up the book all over again for the Oprah audience.

One senses that Jane Smiley cares about her audience, which is certainly related to what makes her such an inspiration. I’m very pleased to be in the audience tonight, to hear her read and answer our questions.

After this Smiley read from her latest novel, Private Life, and then took questions from the audience.

 

Letting Franny Speak: Taking Inspiration from Salinger

 Everyone knows The Catcher in the Rye, but the J.D. Salinger book that’s meant the most to me is Franny and Zooey, in part because it’s literature’s greatest brother-sister story. Classic fiction gives us plenty of brothers-in-arms; contemporary novels have pushed sisterhood to the forefront. But fiction about the brother-sister dynamic is rare. I say this as someone who spent the last three years writing a novel about a brother and a sister, looking for models beyond Franny and Zooey—a book I’ve loved since high school and long wanted to emulate—but finding nothing else out there.

 The Catcher in the Rye has been universally embraced (just yesterday, the NY Times' Michiko Kakutani dubbed it a “pitch-perfect portrait of adolescence”). But it’s always struck me as an unlikely classic: the portrait of an almost tragic figure with broken mind, possibly one that won’t be repaired. Holden Caulfield narrates his story from an institution, where he’s come to “take it easy”; at the end of the book, despite a hint that his rest-cure has worked, he’s still unable to commit to what he’s going to do next. This is a novel that puts the isolated hero through a series of tests that in the end seem to be stronger than he is. 

In contrast, Franny and Zooey details a spiritual crisis that is confronted—apparently successfully—by a family forced to take care of one of its own. Ex-vaudevillian parents and their seven brilliant children, former stars of a radio quiz show called “It’s a Wise Child,” (I wish I could have heard that broadcast, just once!), the Glass family is shattered by death. There’s a brother lost to World War II, and more centrally, there’s saintly Seymour, a kind of depressed, childlike guru—he’s the one in Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish ” who shoots himself in the head while his wife sleeps in bed next to him.

Franny and Zooey tells of the youngest Glass siblings over the course of two episodes: Franny’s nervous collapse in a restaurant, followed by her convalescence on the couch in the family’s ramshackle Upper East Side apartment. Zooey is at first reluctant to address his sister as she mutters a half-coherent mantra on the couch. But in the conversation that is the centerpiece of the book, handsome Zooey, with his stylish flop of black hair and his cigarette balanced on the soap dish, sits in the bathtub, as his comical mother, Bessie, in her bathrobe on the other side of the shower curtain, rattles on in her musical, italicized speech (“You could use a haircut, young man. You’re getting to look like one of those crazy Hungarians or something getting out of a swimming pool.”) 

It’s Bessie, a heroic mother if ever there was one, who convinces Zooey that Franny’s situation can’t be ignored; it’s Zooey who determines the plan that will restore Franny to vigor. Then brother and sister, each too smart for their own good, banter back and forth, pushing each other's emotional buttons in a way that only siblings can.

In the book’s final pages, redemption emerges in the form of Salinger’s hybrid-Buddhist/Christian/Jewish philosophy of kindness and oneness. Salinger plays on the old aphorism, “It ain’t over ’til the Fat Lady sings,” by giving Zooey the words to convince Franny of her connection to the world: “There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t…the Fat Lady.”

I haven’t made much of a secret about the fact that I undertook my new novel, Robin and Ruby , inspired by Franny and Zooey—wanting to capture the simplicity and elegance of its form, the compressed period of time it covers, the microscopic attention to gestures and conversations. But as I wrote, I started to feel that there was something unsatisfactory in the way that Franny’s collapse was a problem that had to be solved by Zooey; it was too much like the hysteria always befalling brilliant women in mid-20th-centruy fiction (think The Bell Jar or The Interior Castle). Did we need one more book about an unstable woman being saved by one of the men in her life? 

None of the women I knew were in need of rescue. It seemed I had to respond to Salinger on my own terms. My story was set decades later, on the other side of feminism; my Ruby was going to be taking women’s studies classes in college; she was going to tell her boyfriend if she was unhappy with him (unlike Franny, who tells her beau how much she misses him while guiltily thinking that she doesn’t miss him at all). Ruby would do what Franny couldn’t, which is get herself out of her own trouble, and perhaps even hand over a bit of wisdom, or at least a fuck-you, to her bossy older brother.

It’s perhaps too didactic—to self-consciously corrective—to claim that writing Ruby’s story was a way of “letting Franny speak.” I had other inspirations as well—the 1980s as a social moment, the Jersey Shore as a setting. But it’s absolutely true that over the past three years of writing this novel, I’ve felt myself involved in a long conversation with J.D. Salinger, in particular the Salinger dedicated to exploring how a brother and sister might muddle their way through their early twenties together. Perhaps that’s why his death yesterday felt like a kick to the gut; even though the man had retreated from the world long ago, his novel remains, despite some of its last-century elements, so vital.

Franny and Zooey gave the world a cast of characters that Holden Caulfield might deem phonies or snobs. But I’m not sure Holden’s opinion is the one that matters to me. The Salinger tale that ends in institutionalization or suicide leaves me cold. The Salinger that ends with its heroine recognizing “just what to do next,” as Franny does here, is the one I return to again and again. You can follow Holden to the duck pond; I’d rather be in that cluttered Upper East Side apartment, smoking cigarettes in the bathtub and bantering with Bessie, doing my part to help get Franny off the couch.

 

 

To Be Gay With You

This week’s gruesome and brutal murder of a gay 19-year-old in Puerto Rico, George Jorge Mercado (pictured), is the latest horrifying reminder that violence against LGBT people is on the rise worldwide. Is there any consensus on why this is happening? Conventional wisdom says that the growth of the international queer movement, pushing visibility and civil rights, has intensified the backlash, but the sheer dehumanizing ugliness of the attack in Puerto Rico—which makes Matthew Shepard’s murder 11 years ago seem nearly tame in comparison—makes me wonder, do we really even understand homophobic violence?

This question had been on my mind since last week, when I saw a San Francisco performance by the British group DV8 called To Be Straight With You. DV8 combined its hallmark physical theater with audio culled from man-on-the-street interviews spouting blatant homophobia, and more personal testimony from people who had been victimized by anti-gay violence. Some of the victims were refugees from countries like Iraq, Zimbabwe and Jamaica, where anti-gay hostility is so culturally accepted that queer people are often forced to seek asylum in places like the U.S. and Britain, which offer some degree of legal protection.

The vocal collage in To Be Straight With You created for me a sense that anti-LGBT violence is a global crisis, something akin to “ethnic cleansing.” (Indeed, in Jamaica, where homophobic culture flourishes through the hatred inspired by murder music from singers like Buju Banton, one community recently declared a Gay Eradication Day, demanding that gays and lesbians leave the town or "suffer the consequences.") Is there any other population in the world today who can be put to death in 7 countries, as LGBT people can in Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen and parts of Nigeria and Somalia? That these seven countries are all Islamic and bound to Sharia law explains why DV8 put a particular, though not exclusive, focus on homophobia among Britain’s large Muslim population. The question of how organized religions promulgate this global crisis was the underlying thesis of the entire piece.

Religions are kept alive within the structure of the nuclear family. What DV8’s stage piece drove home was how the nuclear family is more often than not the conduit for organized religion to transmit homophobia. The strongest moment of To Be Straight With You featured one dancer jump-roping nonstop (above) while voicing the reminiscence of a Muslim queer boy in England who, after coming out, was chased down and stabbed by his father, with the help of his older brother. The boy survived, retaining enough sassiness and strength to find his way to gay pride parade at age 14.

Familial homophobia is the subject of writer Sarah Schulman's new book, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, which Doug Ireland in Gay City News has dubbed "one of the most exciting gay liberation texts to appear in years." The same night I was watching DV8 in San Francisco, Schulman (pictured) was delivering the prestigious Kessler Lecture in New York City. Among Schulman's assertions is that homophobia—long understood to originate from the fear of one’s own innate or latent attraction to one’s gender—is not a phobia at all, but a "pleasure center." She writes:

"...homophobes enjoy feeling superior, rely on the pleasure of enacting their superiority, and go out of their way to resist change that would deflate their sense of superiority. Homophobia makes heterosexuals feel better about themselves. It’s not fear—it’s fun."

I think Schulman's on to something, but I think there's more going on. The attack in Puerto Rico, the Shiite death squads who patrol Baghdad for queers to torture and kill, and the exhortations to violence by Jamaican dancehall singers are all based on something that seems deeper than “enacting superiority.” The leap to violence might best be understood by research done at the University of Arkansas in 2002. Psychologists noted that anti-gay feeling is often less a matter of  fear than of disgust. Homophobes have been trained to see gay people as dirty and contagious—something diseased than can spread. Arkansas researcher Jeffrey Lohr notes,

"While fear causes a 'get me away from that' reaction, disgust manifests as 'get that away from me.' These different emotional reactions can lead to very different behaviors, according to Lohr. 'The same emotions that mediate attitude can mediate behavior,' he said. 'If fear mediates avoidance, other emotions may mediate attack.'"

The oft-quoted Bible verse used to support violence against gays, from Leviticus, refers to man-lying-with-man as an "abomination," with its connotation of disgust and loathing, and says, “blood shall be upon them.” Does anyone need any clearer example of how a religion can propagate anti-gay violence—comparing the way some people naturally love with a disease that needs to be wiped out? In DV8’s piece, a young woman from South London claims not to be prejudiced but says of gay sex, “It’s nasty." Disgust like hers is the end result of ancient tribal dogma turned into scripture by organized religion, propagated within family structures and unquestioned at the street-level by poorly educated youth.

Can art adequately address this kind of entrenched disgust? One of the feelings I was left with, amid many, after watching the DV8 show, was that it had created an argument for the importance of tough penalties for hate-based violence. The good news is that after years of trying to enact federal hate crimes laws, our Democrat-controlled Congress finally succeeded. Last month, President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Just as significantly, Obama signed legislation that finally lifted the ban on HIV-positive travelers entering the U.S., a law that had been on the books for 22 years. For all the shortcomings of the Obama's actions on gay civil rights, these two laws strike me as an especially important tandem victory, as strong a stance as any world leader has taken to ensure not just that gay people are protected under the law but that this country actually can serve as a kind of safe haven for those who have nowhere else to go.

After signing the Hate Crimes Act—which, it's worth noting, also includes religious belief as a protected class—Obama spoke from the podium [video], saying,

"You understand, that we must stand against crimes that are meant not only to break bones but to break spirits. Not only to inflict harm but to instill fear...No one in America should ever be afraid to walk down the street holding the hand of the person they love."

I was particularly moved by his inclusion of that final phrase. Perhaps the best way to confront the global crisis of hate that we are facing is to remember we are fighting for our right to express our love.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Henry Louis Gates

So the president, a professor and a cop are having a beer in the White House…. No, this is not the set-up to a joke, it’s actually happening: the unlikely event leading today’s news cycle. This little photo op—the aftermath of the arrest of black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his home, by white Cambridge police sergeant James Crowley, an incident that’s been making front page news for a week—has been framed by President Obama as a “teachable moment,” an example of how dialogue can tamp the flames of racism and mistrust. Gates himself probably understands full well why he’s participating in this meeting. In the introduction to his book Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, he writes, “I distrust the rhetoric of crisis.” As the center of the crisis has moved from Gates-as-victim to Obama-as-loose-canon, while Crowley stands firm, unapologetic, there’s been a whole lot of rhetoric from all corners. And so, as seems to be the doctrine of this president, it’s better to talk than to fight, even if the talk will be limited to what can feasibly be spoken under the glare of camera-flashes.

Perhaps Obama is once again demonstrating political agility, showing everyone how this kind of thing is done: Let’s clean up this little mess so we can get back to the bigger issues, like this whopper of a health care bill I’m trying to get passed. But there’s a risk to today’s event, the risk that the whole thing looks less like teaching than like backtracking—an attempt to unruffle the feathers of the law-and-order types who were vocally pissed when Obama said Crowley “acted stupidly” in ordering Gates out of his home and arresting him for disorderly conduct. In that sense, Obama seems to be doing the very thing that he’s been doing for months, to the frustration of many of his supporters, which is backing off his original strong, truthful language in order to “calibrate” for the sake of making sure everyone is a little bit satisfied at the end of the day.

In this case, the truth—that it was “stupid” of the Cambridge police to arrest a man in his own home for being disorderly, since in fact his “disorderly” behavior had been prompted by their insistence that his presence in his own home was suspicious—was apparently more than Obama could get away with speaking. This strikes me as absurd. As Jol’s New York Minutes noted:

For the Cambridge police to demand an apology from the president for calling their utterly inept actions ‘stupid’ is akin to a restaurant's demanding an apology from a food critic for pronouncing a pot of feces stew ‘unappetizing’ upon first bite.

But the story of Gates’s arrest has been, from the moment it rocketed into the news, a story of competing narratives. There are of course the contrasting versions of what happened that day between Gates and Crowley. But there are also the larger cultural narratives at work: the irony of the scholarly, elderly professor living in a good neighborhood but mistaken for a criminal by a neighbor; the narrative of the victimized black man, who no matter how successful he is—or, in Gates’s case, how elderly, disabled (he walks with a cane) or close to (or inside of) his own home he stands—is still a target for the cops; the narrative of the “uppity Negro,” dragged to the stockades when he tries to claim his power (a narrative that not only pertains to Gates’s arrest but to Obama’s backtracking); the narrative of snobbery: Gates the upper-middle class, well-connected, college-educated man speaking down to a civil servant (he allegedly yelled at Crowley, “Do you know who you’re messing with?”); the narrative of the good cop who for all his best intentions nonetheless can’t surpass the historical biases of his profession, can’t admit he’s wrong, won’t apologize and so, in the end, has to be pacified with that manliest of American beverages, a domestic beer.

The supreme irony for me is Henry Louis Gates himself: the author of, among other works, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, a series of essays about American black men who rose to cultural prominence and thus came to signify something about their race. After a lifetime of looking at black men’s lives, Gates himself is the black man in the spotlight, being looked at from every possible angle, being reduced from an individual to a symbol: of race, of class, of masculinity, of scholarship and education. The situation attached itself to ready-made narratives; were Gates to write about this incident, he’d likely return the protagonist some of his specificity, which is to say his dignity. Perhaps he soon will.

I just read Thirteen Ways, after finding it in used bookstore the very day the Cambridge police held a news conference to defend Crowley against Obama’s use of “stupidly.” I’d previously read Gates’s work piecemeal (most of the essays in Thirteen Ways were published first in the New Yorker, in the 1990s), but it seemed important to read the book all the way through, to look not just for insights into the lives of the men he profiles—James Baldwin, Colin Powell, Bill T. Jones, OJ Simpson, Louis Farrakhan, Harry Belafonte, Anatole Broyard and Albert Murray—but to glean Gates’s larger, unifying argument, and to figure out what that might say about Gates himself. Could I learn a little about him through his writing about other men like him?

As is often the case with essay collections, the accumulated topical writing coalesces to create an autobiographical portrait of the author, and the portrait that emerges here is far from the loudmouth firebrand that some coverage of the arrest has attempted to create. Gates’s writing is analytical, occasionally lyrical and posited from a belief in cultural integration. He is most attuned to fellow writers like Baldwin and Murray, who wrote about race not from a position of separatism or victimhood but from the notion of how the races share a common human fate, and a common responsibility. He’s least sympathetic to Farrakahn, whom he notes as intelligent and charming and then piece-by-rational-piece takes him apart, for his anti-Semitism, his loony paranoia and his squandered claims to leadership. As for Broyard—the former New York Times book critic who spent his entire adult career taking advantage of his light skin coloring to pass as white, not only in public but to his own children—Gates finds him a bit sad, and certainly misguided. When it comes to racial identity, Gates notes, “You cannot opt out…. Racial recusal is a forlorn hope…racelessness is never a possibility.”  

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man was published in 1997, and it bears the faded tint of yesterday’s news—the Million Man March, the Simpson Trial, the rise of Colin Powell’s political fortunes after the first Gulf War. But its focus on the narratives that attach themselves to the lives of prominent black men, and his attempt to retrieve individuality for his subjects from those narratives, seems absolutely ripe for the situation today. I haven’t read anything that Gates has written about Obama’s ascendancy, but I suspect that he’d approve of how Obama was handling not only this personal incident, but current affairs in general. “Black America needs allies more than it needs absolution,” Gates noted back when Bill Clinton was being facetiously referred to as our “first black president.” Perhaps that was why Gates has stepped away from suggestions that he might sue the Cambridge police, now that the possibility of bonding over a brew has emerged. At the same time, the pull to see his blackness as a pure experience never to be understood by white oppressors—blackness as, essentially, a more authentic identity than whiteness—is something he admits is difficult to resist: “You might inveigh against, say, the ideology of authenticity, but in some measure you participate in it all the same.”

Weighing these competing pressures, he asks of his various black male subjects, “How does it feel to be a paradox?” I suspect not only Gates but Obama, too, is living out that paradox once again today, while the rest of us sit back and look at them, trying to decide what they mean.

What If? Ten Years Without John John

Monday is ten years since John Kennedy Jr.'s plane disappeared somewhere in the stormy waters off New England -- that's half a generation without John John, once everyone's favorite Kennedy, the chestnut haired golden boy whose pedigree and stunning looks made it all too easy to attach so many hopes and desires. Sigh. The mind reels with "What if?"

What if we could had him around during the Bush years, a dashing, progressive figurehead for the scattered Left. ... Maybe George, the political-junkie magazine he'd been editing, would have resisted the post-9/11-with-us-or-against-us rhetoric that so much of the mainstream media fell prey to, and served as a voice of clarity during those manipulative, Rovian days. ... Maybe he'd have been tapped by John Kerry in 2004 as a vice-presidential candidate, saving us the disaster-in-the-making of that other pretty-boy Johnny, then-Senator Edwards, who brought so little to the ticket and has since been forced to slink away in scandal and disgrace. Maybe with a Kennedy on the ticket, we'd have been spared four more years of W. What effect would a living John F. Kennedy Jr. have had upon the political opportunities for Barack Obama two years ago? ... Even if everything else had gone the same, it seems certain that JFK Jr. would have been the one hand-picked to take over Hillary's Senate seat, sparing us the ignoble public flame-out of his sister Caroline, under-equipped for the public spotlight during the brief attempt made to ensconce her in the halls of power, where she so clearly never wanted to be. (Had JFK Jr. lived, would anyone know who Kristen Gillibrand is today?)

Yes, yes, I'm romanticizing. The passage of time has that effect, especially on a fiction writer. Ten years ago I wasn't so squishy-headed about the whole thing, when I chewed through the media coverage of John John's disappearance in a piece I wrote for the Cubby Missalette called They Killed John-John: "The Famous Show" Claims Another Victim. Click that link and follow the essay all the way to the end, where, for kicks and giggles, you can hear Message to John John from the Gays, an underground Cubby Creatures recording featuring a wispy-voiced, tuneless me warbling "Where did you go, in your little plane, Johnny K?"

The Angry Writer

Something is going on right now with writers. Writers are getting angry. Angry about bad reviews. More to the point: writers are venting their anger against their critics in a public way. In the past week, a writer I know used her Twitter account to vent (her word) against a New Yorker reviewer by posting "may she rot in hell"—and two relatively high-profile incidents of writers mouthing off about their reviewers have rippled out across the inter-twitter-web. "Mouthing off" isn't quite right; these writers see themselves as striking back. Writer-versus-reviewer is not particularly novel. But what seems notable to me about these latest incidents is that writers are simply fed up with people talking smack about them. Writers understand the consequences of a bad review; frankly, it's pissing folks off, and they're using technology to respond in self-defense.

Incident number one: Alice Hoffman. The New York Times reported last week on Hoffman's "Twitter outburst" over a Boston Globe review of her novel The Story Sisters:

Reviewing the book for The Boston Globe on Sunday, Roberta Silman wrote: “This new novel lacks the spark of the earlier work. Its vision, characters, and even the prose seem tired.” In a series of Twitter posts, Ms. Hoffman fired back with her own opinion. “Roberta Silman in the Boston Globe is a moron,” she wrote. “How do some people get to review books? And give the plot away.” Ms. Hoffman also lambasted The Globe and went so far as to post Ms. Silman’s phone number and email, inviting fans to “Tell her what u think of snarky critics.”

By Monday, Ms. Hoffman had evidently deleted her Twitter account. “I feel this whole situation has been completely blown out of proportion,” Ms. Hoffman said in a statement forwarded by her publisher...

Incident number two: Alain de Botton. After critic Caleb Crain pointed readers of his blog to a review he wrote of de Botton's Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, a review that accused de Botton, among other things, of "mean-spiritedness," the reviewed author found a forum for his strike-back: not Twitter, but Crain's own blog. In the comments section, de Botton wrote:

Caleb, you make it sound on your blog that your review is somehow a sane and fair assessment. In my eyes, and all those who have read it with anything like impartiality, it is a review driven by an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and perversely depreciate anything of value. The accusations you level at me are simply extraordinary. I genuinely hope that you will find yourself on the receiving end of such a daft review some time very soon - so that you can grow up and start to take some responsibility for your work as a reviewer. You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that. So that's two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review. You present yourself as 'nice' in this blog (so much talk about your boyfriend, the dog etc). It's only fair for your readers (nice people like Joe Linker and trusting souls like PAB) to get a whiff that the truth may be more complex. I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.

"I will hate you till the day I die." "She's a moron." "May she rot in hell." Wow. One can only marvel at this kind of venom, being unveiled in such a public way, and with so much sanctimoniousness. De Botton does himself no favors by claiming that he is backed up by "all those who have read [his book] with anything like impartiality," as if he is the judge of who has or hasn't read his work with "impartiality." The irony is that to the outsider, Crain's write-up of de Botton's book reads like the kind of classy old-school review that every author hopes for; if such a review turns out to be negative, you're supposed to just suck it up as par for the course. In reality, the classy old-school review is a doomed species. So every review one manages to score carries that much more proportional weight.

In the end, de Botton, like Hoffman, recanted. Sort of. De Botton claimed, on another website, that he mistook his posting for "private" correspondence, saying metaphorically that it had been "inadvertently broadcast" to a wider audience than he had imagined.

I suspect that "outbursts" like Hoffman's and "naive" responses like de Botton's are the signs of a larger frustration most writers are feeling, not only about mainstream criticism, but with the at-large and ad-hoc culture of criticism that we all live with now. Writers are more beleaguered than ever, not least because we are more at the mercy of opinion than ever -- so many motherfucking opinions! The rant-and-post reviewer, on Amazon, on a blog, in a tweet, invests nothing more than a few minutes of his or her time, and the writer, who has put in a lot of time, has to live with the spleen. What writer can't relate to de Botton's plaintive wail: "that's two years of work down the drain"?  And what writer didn't feel for Alice Hoffman when in the end she retracted, with this bit of humble pie: "Reviewers are entitled to their opinions and that’s the name of the game in publishing"?

This is a dilemma that strikes me close to home. I got a shitty review from Robert Julian in the Bay Area Reporter for my second novel, You Can Say You Knew Me When, one that appeared early in the book's life and thus (as I saw it), managed to poison the climate for the novel's release. But I didn't—I couldn't—go on the offensive against Julian, no matter how much I thought his reading of my book was shallow and off-mark; because Robert Julian was the very critic whose enthusiastic review of my first novel, The World of Normal Boys, was among the earliest and strongest boosts I'd received. How could the same guy who loved my first book so much hate my second to the same degree? I didn't understand it; neither could I attack him for meanspiritedness or anything else. It seemed best to simply ignore him, and what he'd written about me, but it wasn't easy, knowing that the review was out there, casting its influence. Once the sting of his slam wore off, I came away with the understanding that a review, good or bad, is no more the "truth" than any other single opinion. But you still have to live with it.

The ability for the single opinion to find a platform, and an audience, is what writers are so pissed off about. Every opinion gets heard today, whether on Amazon or Twitter or someone's Facebook page or some random blog. Opinions get dashed off all the time, and writers suffer for them, and people like Alice Hoffman and Alain de Botton—and my writer friend who used her Twitter account to wish her reviewer a hellish afterlife—all seem to be saying at the very same moment: You're entitled to your opinion. And I'm entitled to offer, in response, a very loud Fuck You.