K.M. Soehnlein

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.

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 Michael Jackson Generation

My first reaction to Michael Jackson’s death was a kind of ironic detachment. I called my friend Gary, and we immediately went into deconstruct-mode, trying to predict how the media narrative would play out. He foresaw the outpouring of mass grief for one of the most beloved pop stars ever, on the level of what happened after Princess Diana’s death; I anticipated a “Behind the Music” tabloid treatment: the King of Pop falls from the heights, becomes an inscrutable, unfathomable recluse hounded by lawsuits, permanently tainted by charges of child molestation, entirely irrelevant as a music maker. Pure tragedy: he’d gone from being a celebrity artist who touched everybody to being a public leper, gruesome, isolated, untouchable.

But soon I was combing the internet for his music videos and footage of his live performances, wanting to push aside the Michael of the last twenty years in favor of the Michael who ruled the twenty years before that. My initial detachment revealed itself to be a kind of shock and I realized that I was, against my own sense of rationality, deeply affected by the end of his life. Suddenly I was weeping over his astonishing performance of "Billie Jean" at the 25th Anniversary of Motown -- the event that introduced the world to the moonwalk. I was posting links to articles and texting friends for their reactions. Turned out my behavior was like a lot of other people’s, so much so that within hours more than one friend was complaining on Facebook about the flood of posts concerning Jackson’s death; some were using the crisis in Iran as a point of comparison: why is Michael Jackson’s death more important that what’s going on in the world? But of course it wasn’t more important, just different.

For two weeks, I’d watched in outraged horror the government assaults upon civilians in Iran, including the footage of one young woman, an innocent bystander named Neda, dying on camera after being slain by a police bullet. In comparison, grieving the death of a wealthy, famous person is a kind of indulgence, somewhat unseemly, and probably an example of herd mentality. Intellectually, I understand such complaints, but they do nothing to explain the way we actually go through life, attaching emotional significance to the music that accompanies our memories. We are all part of the herd, and we don’t always know what connects us until we realize it is gone. Put another way: Neda’s death in Iran is a shocking outrage against humanity; Michael’s death is a loss felt personally.

It’s not that much of a stretch to say that I came into consciousness as a 5-year old listening to The Jackson 5 on the radio singing "A-B-C, easy as 1-2-3" -- it’s a song that’s always been with me. It’s not a stretch to say that puberty was firmly anchored by MJ’s Off The Wall album, released the summer between middle school and high school, which I played on vinyl repeatedly with the girls in my neighborhood, practicing our dance moves to "Rock With You" and turning ourselves into teenagers. Or that Thriller was the soundtrack to my entire senior year of high school, and how even then we knew it was a big deal to be eighteen and alive and dancing to this music, which everybody seemed to love.

Nor is it a stretch to say that what happened to Michael Jackson in the eighties was a kind of horror show that felt like a betrayal. How was the boy who recorded the happy soundtrack to my generation's childhood replaced by the scary, ghostly figure whose music seemed to get sappier even as he became more frightening to behold? (I think the first time I ever heard the expression “a parody of himself” was in reference to Michael Jackson.) How did the yearning in his voice and the astonishing self-possession of his dance moves become the primal scream and bloated spectacle of his world tour concerts? More to the point: Why would this beautiful young man slice his nose off his face and bleach his skin? Did he want us to look away?

There were plenty of ways to try to pop-psychologize — his lost childhood, the likely abuse, the way our adoration pushed him into the very void we now saw so abhorrently, to say nothing of the complexity of race and skin color, which I couldn’t even pretend to truly understand. Like many people of my age, in adulthood I stopped paying attention, letting the so-called King of Pop do whatever it was he was going to do, like buy a ridiculously oversized, child’s fantasy mansion and hide away in it. Like marry a woman who was the daughter of the previous King of Pop, a union that seemed both preposterous and sad, a blatant bearding for Michael’s unmistakably queer energy -- his sensitive feminine voice held in balance with masculine fury and powers of seduction. By the time he was dangling his baby out a hotel window in front of reporters and parading his children around in public wearing what looked like burqas, he seemed just too fucking crazy to waste any thought on. Unreachable.

Now he’s dead, probably from too much prescription medication administered in his elite isolation, and we’re all fixated on him again. We can look again, not just at the nightmare Michael but at the life as a whole. Part of what makes this very public death feel like a private loss is that what seemed like a betrayal all those years ago was really just someone else's sad story, but there was no way to grieve. His death contains the recognition of that past loss -- of the talented kid who shepherded me and my friends through the '70s and early '80s, who fell apart before our eyes.

But mixed in with this is the unexpected joy of returning to the music, which never really went away. Last night, spontaneous MJ dance parties broke out all over the world. I experienced that communal outpouring at a gay bar in the Tenderloin, when the DJ slipped into Rock With You, and the dance floor immediately filled up, and we all busted out our best moves again, still carrying inside of us our younger selves, who learned to dance to that song all those years ago, before we grew up and forgot who taught us how it was done.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance

At the Lincoln Memorial yesterday, openly gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson delivered a "prayer for our nation and for our next president" [text] that was as radical as any I've ever heard at a public occasion. Calling on a "God of our many understandings" he launched into an unlikely list of blessings: tears, anger, discomfort and -- my favorite -- "freedom from mere tolerance," which seemed to strike at the heart of so much bigotry, especially of the variety that gay people experience. Remember when Sarah Palin, during the v.p. debate, insisted that gays should be "tolerated," as if that was the best that we should expect from our leaders? The video of Robinson's speech is currently on YouTube; catch it now before HBO takes it down.*

Also infusing the pre-Inauguration event with activist fervor was the legendary folk singer Pete Seeger, whose joyous rendition of This Land is Your Land, with Bruce Springsteen at his side, included a timely verse about the ills of private property:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;

Sign was painted, it said private property;

But on the back side it didn't say nothing;

That side was made for you and me.

After a long campaign, and these many months where Barack Obama has had to continually remind us that there's "only one president at a time," I couldn't be more ready for tomorrow.

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* UPDATE: Towleroad reports that Robinson's invocation -- already being dubbed "controversial" because of its inclusiveness -- was not shown by HBO, based on a decision by the Obama Inauguration Team to have Robinson speak as part of the pre-show before the president-elect even took the stage. So was Robinson's inclusion, in the end, a kind of "mere tolerance" on the part of the new administration? After Elton is following the story.

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* UPDATE 2: Robinson's moment to be included HBO's rebroadcast of the event [After Elton].

Links I've been clicking

"...the first notable rock book of the young year": So tell me, who do you have to know to get invited to contribute to a book of stories inspired by Sonic Youth songs? I want in!

"...a clarion call of frustrated outrage": David Denby publishes a volume attacking our culture of snark. New York Magazine smacks him down.

"...I can start 2009 with one sin fewer on my head": After taking a hit from lit bloggers everywhere -- including me -- New Yorker writer George Packer reconsiders, and apologizes, for his damning of inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander. Call him the anti-snarker. Not to mention a class act.

The Kitt that roared

She was Catwoman. She was seventy-something feline vamping for Isaac Mizrahi. She was a cougar before there was a word for it, prowling for younger men. She was Eartha Kitt -- one of the most remarkable popular entertainers ever. Once you saw her -- cat eyes, purring voice, exaggerated slinky persona -- you never forgot her.

And she might have been an even bigger star, had she not, 40 years ago, been a voice of political dissent.

As John Nichols chronicles in The Nation, Kitt's defining moment was one in which she didn't purr but roared, standing up to Lady Bird Johnson at a White House luncheon during the Vietnam War.

"You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed," the singer told the First Lady and the 50 other women at the luncheon. "They rebel in the street. They don't want to go to school because they're going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam."

The First Lady reportedly burst into tears.

The president was furious.

Kitt was blacklisted. She was investigated by the FBI and CIA, and ended up on the "Enemies List" of Johnson's successor, Richard Nixon. 

Kitt spent the next decade performing mostly in Europe...

It's the combination of this political steel beneath the veneer of pop frivolity that branded Kitt a certifiable diva in my mind.

The passing of a celebrity rarely leaves much of a mark on me. Compared to the loss of a friend, or the news of a tragedy affecting everyday people, the death of a famous person is often little more than a curiosity. But Eartha Kitt's death on Christmas Day has been a reminder to me of how many beloved entertainers died over the past year: George Carlin, Paul Newman, Estelle Getty, Isaac Hayes, Bettie Page, Suzanne Pleshette. Maybe it's just the end of the calendar year, with its inevitable retropsective tone, but I'm aware, right now, that the 20th century is really receding into the past, as a generation of presences who shaped my childhood in different ways -- images on screens large and small, regulars on talk shows, unforgettable music on the radio -- fades from the landscape.

Everyone's Odetta Stories, continued

The gifted San Francisco choreographer Stephen Pelton has been inspired many times to put dance to Odetta's music. He writes:

I saw her perform for the first time at Trinity Church in New Haven in 1980 -- I was 16.  I was feeling very estranged from everyone in those days...  We got there early on a rainy rainy night and sat in the front pew and I just could not believe that I was finally in the same room as that voice.  I was not the type to hang around backstage after shows, but I knew I had to. ... I went up to her dressing room which was upstairs at the front of the church. I was the only one waiting to meet her but I didn't want to bother her so waited for what felt like hours, but she didn't come out.  I summoned the courage to knock and heard this tiny, high voice say "Come i-n." It was a very long narrow room and at the end of it she sat at a small dressing table cradling her forehead in one hand.  I said, "I'm so sorry to disturb you, but--"  She looked up with a big in-breath, "I saw you!" she said in that same voice that seemed way too small.  "I just wanted to thank you -- your music means so much to me." She opened her arms and said, "Now, come here," and everything just became like that scene in Bugs Bunny when he's been inhaling ether and is moving in super slow motion -- and I'm crossing that long room and her arms are open and waiting for me and I more or less fell right into them.  I left that room ready to go on....

Stephen told me it was "the hug that saved my life."

Everyone's Odetta Stories

Daniel Handler writes an unadorned first-person story in today's Salon about the terror of playing accordion for the legendary folk singer Odetta on a Stephen Merritt record. Odetta died last week -- a true loss, as there was talk of her singing at Obama's inauguration.

I first decided to learn about Odetta after I saw a movie called Dogfight in the early 90's that starred Lily Taylor and River Phoenix. It's set in San Francisco in the early 60's. Lily's a plain Jane who dreams of becoming a folk singer, and in one scene she's showing River magazine photos that she's taped to her bedroom wall. She points to a picture of a fierce-looking black woman and says, "That's Odetta. She has the most beautiful voice."

I'd heard of Odetta at that point -- I think I knew that she sang at the 1963 March on Washington -- but hadn't actually heard her. I went out and bought a best-of CD and was so taken by the singularity of her voice, which sounded classical and ancient, almost old-English and yet definitely had a deep-South soul. There was a mournful quality and also a playfulness in places. I tried to find out more about her, but of course in those pre-Internet days it wasn't easy to just learn everything there is to learn about someone in the snap of your fingers.

Now you can hear Odetta on a handful of YouTube clips, including this short one from an old Newport Folk Festival and this completely mesmerizing live performance of House of the Rising Sun, from 2005. The New York Times links to a 20-minute documentary that came out a few years ago.