“This is a life different from anything I had imagined.”

Excerpts from “None, I think,” a poem by Lise Menn:

“This is a life different from anything I had imagined. 

You are not here, you will never be here again.

There is no point in waiting for you.

You are, of course, everywhere, 

In this house full of our lives together.

But all thoughts of you are recollections.

There is nothing more to anticipate.

Everything about you is back, back, in some past, dreamed or remembered.

I live in a strange, quiet place.”

These are fewer than half the lines of Lise Menn’s poem about life after her husband died. I recognize in them my own experience. I did not know how to imagine a life without my husband. I did not try. Despite the oncologist’s dire prognosis, Kent seemed to be doing okay. He was alive. I wanted to live with him while he was alive. Even now, I don’t know what I could have done to prepare for his death. 

When Kent was first diagnosed with cancer 14 years ago, he found an estate attorney to make him a living trust. In the early weeks of this year Kent asked a lawyer friend for current recommendations so that I would have someone to help me administer the trust. Because of the trust no court had to get involved. That was Kent looking out for me. 

Kent and I were together for 30 years. Kent was my only long term relationship. We met when I was 28. Back in my teens and twenties I was mostly alone. I didn’t have a series of boyfriends. I wanted one. I wanted a lover very much, and I felt terribly lonesome. I did make friends here and there, and I didn’t live a sexless life. But I didn’t get the intimacy I yearned for. Not until Kent. 

I’d been going to a board games night at the LGBT community center in Berkeley. The people there were nice enough, but I wasn’t spending time with them beyond the games. (I was surprised when I’d hear others laughing about going sailing together or some other outing.) When Kent showed up he was taken with me right away. Six years older, he was close to my age. He displayed a sharp wit and I liked looking at him. Kent had had boyfriends before me. I don’t know how long he was with any of them, but I got the feeling he was the marrying kind. Relationships break up. I think my longest was three months, but if you add up all the time he and I were actually together it was more like two weeks. 

Kent liked to tell a story about how we met. We were playing Trivia Pursuit. We may even have been on the same team, and this question came up: “In the 1980 election who was the dream team?” Kent was bowled over when I knew the answer. Some politicos thought it would be amazing to have presidential candidate Ronald Reagan choose ex-Pres Gerald Ford as his running mate. That would be a dream team! I was fourteen at the time, but I was paying enough attention to politics that I picked up this tidbit. It didn’t seem to me a president would want as his VP a former president. You want the vice president (and everybody else) to be clear on who’s in charge. Ronald Reagan had the same thought, I guess. 

30 years of memories is something, isn’t it? I feel lucky I had all that time with him. He is everywhere in this house full of our lives together. But Kent is not here. And I have to figure out a new life without him. You may hear me saying the same thing next month or a year from now. I really don’t know. I am the one in the present, the one who has to look to a future. I want a lover. I want company. It seems so strange that any person coming into my life will be wholly different, not Kent at all. 

source: 

The Widows’ Handbook: poetic reflections on grief and survival

edited by Jacqueline Lapidus and Lise Menn

2014. Kent State University Press, Kent OH

clothes Arabs wear

I'm reading Zeyn Joukhadar's essay about singing opera and she describes a staging of Rossini’s Aureliano in Palmira. When she gets to the costumes I run up against vocabulary unfamiliar to me:

“Fagioli wears a thobe with an agal and white ghutra; Aleida dons a white abaya with gold embroidery and bell sleeves.”

Thawb or thobe (Arabic: ثَوْب lit. 'dress' or 'garment') is an Arab dress for the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula, also called dishdashah, and kandurah, kandoora or gandurah in varieties of Arabic. A long-sleeved ankle-length traditional robe, it is mainly worn by men in the Arabian Peninsula, Jordan, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, North Africa, and some countries in East and West Africa, with regional variations in name and style.

An agal (Arabic: عِقَال; also spelled iqal, egal, or igal) is an Arab men's clothing accessory. It is a black cord, worn doubled, used to keep a ghutrah (or keffiyeh) in place on the wearer's head.^[1] It is traditionally made of goat hair.^[2]

The ghutrah (غُترَة), keffiyeh or kufiyyeh (Arabic: كُوفِيَّة, romanized: kūfiyyah, lit. 'coif'),^[1] also known in Arabic as a shemagh (شُمَاغ šumāġ), or ḥaṭṭah (حَطَّة), is a traditional headdress worn by men from parts of the Middle East. It is fashioned from a square scarf, and is usually made of cotton.^[2] The keffiyeh is commonly found in arid regions, as it provides protection from sunburn, dust, and sand. An agal is often used by Arabs to keep it in place.

The abaya (colloquially and more commonly, Arabic: عباية ʿabāyah, especially in Literary Arabic: عباءة ʿabā'ah; plural عبايات ʿabāyāt, عباءات ʿabā'āt), sometimes also called an aba, is a simple, loose over-garment, essentially a robe-like dress, worn by some women in the Muslim world including most of the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of the Horn of Africa.^[1] Traditional abayas are usually black and may either be a large square of fabric draped from the shoulders or head or a long kaftan. The abaya covers the whole body except the head (sometimes), feet, and hands.

OK. I’ve seen these garments in pictures and movies, but I never knew their specific names. Each seems to have more than one name, in fact. 

All the definitions are from Wikipedia, and there are pictures at the links. 

source:

“Catching the Light: reclaiming opera as a trans Arab” by Zeyn Joukhadar

This Arab Is Queer: an anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab writers

edited by Elias Jahshan

2022. Saqi Books, London UK

“You will ‘fail’”

“You will ‘fail’ often, by your own impossible standards, where ‘success' is never defined except as an abstract sense of bliss.” 

— Omar Sakr on the path of the poet

source:

“Tweets to a Queer Arab Poet” by Omar Sakr

This Arab Is Queer: an anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab writers

edited by Elias Jahshan

2022. Saqi Books, London UK

If John Waters made a sequel to The Wizard of Oz

John Waters says he has been invited to speak at all sorts of different events. In this excerpt from his memoir/self-help book, Mr. Know-It-All, Waters remembers one unusual event. He wondered aloud what might have happened in it were he to have made Wizard of Oz II: 

At a Wizard of Oz celebration in Chicago, I described my dream sequel of Dorothy returning to Kansas, and when she can’t stop ranting about her trip to Oz, Auntie Em loses patience after months of telling Dorothy, ‘It was just a dream,’ and Uncle Henry puts his foot down and forces his defiant niece to see a psychiatrist, who gives her shock therapy, but even that doesn’t cure Dorothy of her yearning to return to the magical land. 

Did no one tell John that he was describing the opening scenes of the Disney-studios sequel to Wizard, Return to Oz? That movie came out 40 years ago! Maybe John did hear about it, but then convinced himself the ideas were his own; I mean, who could believe Disney would put out a major motion picture in which innocent little Dorothy is strapped down for electro-shock therapy? There are good things about Return to Oz — the costumes are great! — but that opening sequence still gives me the willies. 

The rest of the plot is all Waters:

She tries LSD, but these hallucinations are not the same as the poppies of Oz. Mushrooms, too, but there’s no great and powerful anything much less a wizard. Finally she sniffs poppers and it works! She’s back in Oz. The Scarecrow is old but still brilliant, the Tin Man is a yoga instructor, and the Cowardly Lion is now a drag queen named Roara. They give her the Wicked Witch’s magic broomstick and Dorothy flies back to Kansas, starts cross-dressing as Margaret Hamilton, and opens a gay bar called the Yellow Brick Load.

source:

Mr. Know-It-All: the tarnished wisdom of a filth elder

by John Waters

2019. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York

John Waters, political actor

When you meet a celebrity while traveling what do you do? John Waters sat next to one, but was circumspect. He didn’t fanboy gush or, well, the opposite of that. But then, Waters didn’t know which celebrity he was seated next to. 

Seated in first class next to a gentleman who never made eye contact the entire coast-to-coast flight, I kept thinking, ‘I know this man, but who is he?!’ His signature suspenders and Brooks Brothers-type suit rang a bell, too, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure it out. When we landed and everybody started exiting the plane, other passengers who recognized me started laughing and one said, ‘I couldn’t believe you were sitting next to [Supreme Court Justice] Clarence Thomas that whole time!’ I thought, ‘You’re kidding me.’ But, of course, it was him. That lying bastard! ‘I believed Anita Hill!’ I wanted to yell. 

Once he knew what chances he’d missed, John Waters thought about what he should have done:

During the flight I should have nonchalantly ordered a Coke, and when it was served, started picking at something imaginary on the can before turning to him and saying, ‘Excuse me, is that a pubic hair on my Coke?’

source:

Mr. Know-It-All: the tarnished wisdom of a filth elder

by John Waters

2019. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York

“a worldwide punishing squad”

After my last blog post offered up a rather meager serving of hope for LGBT progress in Africa, you might wonder if there’s something more you can do. Well, John Waters (you know, the Pink Flamingos writer/director) has given it some thought.

“It’s illegal to be gay in seventy-six countries around the world,” John Waters says. How can that be changed? The gays have gotta rise up! Waters makes a few suggestions on how we could do that. 

Let’s drop a massive stink bomb on Uganda and have our own [gay] navy ‘Seal and Squeal’ squads round up all the American Christian evangelical preachers who went there and provoked Uganda’s parliament to try* to pass a bill to impose the death penalty ‘for the offense of homosexuality.’ We’d spray their thinning hair with industrial strength hair spray and light a match. Voooom! Off with their hairdos. Then we’d track down the snitches who obeyed the other, more liberal Ugandan law that required heterosexuals ‘to report a gay person to authorities within twenty-four hours of hearing of their homosexuality of be jailed for up to three years in prison.’ Why this twenty-four-hour grace period? I wonder. So straights could get their hair done, flowers arranged, homes interior-decorated before the most obvious of their gay merchants were hauled away? Fag hags would be forced to go underground, where they would form their own railroad of resistance to smuggle out queers and lesbians of all degree of butchness, man of whom would later form the Lavender Avengers, who would lead a worldwide punishing squad of queer revenge.

_______

* "Try” no more; Uganda has the evil law on the books. 

source:

Mr. Know-It-All: the tarnished wisdom of a filth elder

by John Waters

2019. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York

Cause for hope in Africa? Or just more lies ...

LGBT news out of Africa is often bad. In spring of 2023 Uganda enacted a new death-to-the-gays law. The first attempt several years ago got struck down by the Ugandan Supreme Court. Ghana’s legislature just passed — by unanimous voice vote — a whole new anti-gay law. The president of Ghana hasn’t yet signed it. Do the politicians who enact these laws really consider queer people a threat? Or are they pandering to an anti-gay populace? Are they merely trying to distract observers from the lousy jobs they’re doing? Whatever the motivation, laws like these have only one effect — pain. They certainly don’t help anyone.  

Chike Frankie Edozien quotes Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria’s former president, at a London conference saying about an anti-gay law he himself promulgated:

“When it comes to equality, we must all have the same rights, we must all have the same rights as Nigerian citizens. In the light of the deepening debates for all Nigerians and other citizens of the world to be treated equally and without discrimination, and with the clear knowledge that the issue of sexual orientation is still evolving, the nation may at the appropriate time revisit the law.”  

Were Jonathan’s words in London a good sign or just pandering? He probably got asked about the law. I imagine Jonathan knew that justifying himself by condemning the gays in a forum in London would not go over well. 

Just days after his pronouncement came the grisly massacre of forty-nine gay people by a deranged gunman at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. [The ex-president of Nigeria] sent out a message of condolence to the grieving families via Twitter. That small gesture … understandably confused [readers, Goodluck Jonathan having been responsible for] an extremely anti-gay law for which there had been small public clamor.

When the anti-gay law in Nigeria was originally enacted there was criticism by at least two African presidents. Former presidents, anyway. “[F]ormer Mozambican president Joaquim Chissano came out forcefully against it.” Fetus Mogae, former president of Botswana, also spoke up for LGBT equality. “A change in attitude is underway," Edozien says. “The fact that Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Djibouti, Guinea Bissau, Cote d’Ivoire, Niger, Mali, Lesotho, Mozambique, Sao Tome, the Seychelles, Rwanda, the two Congos, the Central African Republic, and South Africa don’t criminalize their gay citizens leaves me hopeful.”

Unlike Uganda in its embrace of American hate-evangelist Scott Lively, South Africa refused entry in 2016 to “Steven Anderson, a pastor at Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona” who was plotting an anti-gay crusade. “South Africa ha[s] again led the way, becoming the first African nation to expressly ban someone from entry because of his homophobia.”

This isn’t my first post about a former African leader saying something hopeful once he was no longer in power. Check out this from Feb 2023: Human beings who can do what they like 

source:

Lives of Great Men

by Chike Frankie Edozien

2017. Team Angelica, London UK

how they amused themselves

Of two 9th century Chinese poets:

“They both lived in poverty because of poetry until their deaths. And yet all their lives they amused themselves by writing lines about their suffering.”

source:

Mei Yao-ch’en and the Development of Early Sung* Poetry

Jonathan Chaves

1976. Columbia University Press, New York

*Sung is a ruling dynasty in China

word of the day: mummer

word of the day: mummer

lines from “Up into the Clouds Music” by Li Po, translated by Elling Eide

Flowery canopies hang down to his lower lashes,

A lofty mountain looms over his upper lip.

Not seeing his strange, uncanny form,

How could you know the Lord of Creation?

The Great War was this mummer’s stern father,

Primal ether this mummer’s elderly kin.

definition (dictionary.com):

1. a person who wears a mask or fantastic costume while merrymaking or taking part in a pantomime, especially at Christmas and other festive seasons.
2. an actor, especially a pantomimist.

from the editor’s notes:

This poem describes a Wen-sang performance, a kind of mummery with music, dance, and song that served as the grand finale for certain rather elaborate musical entertainments. … The poem was probably commissioned by the sponsor of the celebration and may have been recited during the performance.

So a mummer is an actor, a performer in a theatrical work. The mummer of the poem is supposed to represent a non-Chinese person, thus the “lofty mountain” which is Li Po’s metaphor for a big nose, the editor says. The “flowery canopies” are long eyebrow hairs. The poem is too embedded in a Chinese cultural context to be easily understood in translation. The editor uses 24 footnotes to illuminate obscure references. 

I wonder at the translator’s choice of “mummer,” such an obscure word in English. I didn’t know what it meant. When translators choose unusual words in their target language to bring over meaning from the original language, I balk a bit. If the appropriate English word is that obscure you could leave the word in the original language and append a footnote, as translators sometimes will. “Li,” for example is a term for measuring distance that is often left untranslated because there is no precise English language equivalent. On the other hand, if the translator’s word was chosen because it was the closest equivalent in the target language, the translator going from Chinese jargon to English jargon, then ... 

source:

The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature

edited by Victor H. Mair

1994. Columbia University Press, New York

gay men and Oz

“What is it about gay men and The Wizard of Oz?” [a student asked.] Thirty or so pairs of eyes focused on me. … Never a teacher to discourage genuine curiosity, I searched my gray cells for record of a study on the subject. It was an unsuccessful split-second search. I fell back on my natural insight, born of years of watching The Wizard of Oz since its first showing on television, and even more years of humming ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ whenever things got tough.

… “Most of us little gay boys felt as if we were growing up in black-and-white Kansas, when what we really wanted was to live in the Technicolor place where people wear funny hats and pink taffeta and burst into song and dance whenever they wanted without anyone thinking it was weird or sissy.”

… I challenge [skeptical gays] to listen at your next party … and count the number of references to Oz in the conversations.”

It’s a theory. I have better thoughts on the queer-friendliness of L. Frank Baum’s books than for the MGM movie. In his community college English class Robert Gorman makes no mention of the Oz books. Perhaps he never read them. 

I didn’t fall in love with the MGM Wizard of Oz. It wasn’t my Oz. Oz was the books. That’s where I went to be transported. 

That said, the movie is an excellent piece of filmmaking. Besides the big Hollywood musical treatment, all of which works, the MGM movie retains the essence of Baum’s book — Dorothy’s agency. The little girl is the leader. I think it’s also important that the qualities her friends seek are ones they prove they already have — smarts, courage, love. Dorothy gets home, naturally, but she gets there because she has acquired the power to do so, not because she is helpless and has to be rescued. The male authority figure turns out not to be the source of power, but a sham. 

Why would gay men identify with a girl? Because she is worth identifying with. She’s not arrogant; she’s practical. She’s doesn’t intend to take over; she’s just living her life, trying to help her friends and herself. Dorothy remains ordinary, and yet shows how powerful that can be.

source:

The Empress is a Man: stories from the life of Jose Sarria

by Michael Robert Gorman

1998. The Haworth Press, New York