space density

I have seen pictures of spiral galaxies, glistening whirlpools of stars, and I always took it for granted that (somehow) the matter in a spiral galaxy was concentrated in the very visible arms. Not so:

The spiral arms are delineated by a high space density of particularly luminous stars and luminous interstellar clouds. Elsewhere in the disc the space density of the stars and interstellar clouds is no less; it is just that they are not as bright.

I suppose someone has a guess why matter separates into luminous matter and less luminous matter (which is not “dark matter,” right?).

source: Pluto: sentinel of the outer solar system by Barrie W. Jones

Go, Gay Nephews!!! Go, Gay Brothers!! (And you girlfriends, you're great, too!)

So I'm reading this morning's NY Times article about the tight campaign (mostly orchestrated by Governor Cuomo, the Times says) that finally brought marriage equality to New York State, and I come across a sentence that makes me do a double-take.

Let me set the scene. Senator Kruger is a Democrat. When a bill came up two years ago, he voted against marriage equality. According to the article, marriage advocates saw him as a lost cause, figuring it was more likely they could turn enough Republicans than that they could get Kruger. But there was something marriage advocates didn't know about Kruger. He was getting blowback for the anti-gay vote in his own home:

The gay nephew of the woman he lives with, Dorothy Turano, was so furious at Mr. Kruger for opposing same-sex marriage two years ago that he had cut off contact with both of them, devastating Ms. Turano.

You mean Senator Kruger, who is living in sin, gets to veto whether other people get married? Yet he's realized the error of his ways because he needs to repair the relationship between his unmarried partner and her gay nephew!

OK. So I'm remembering reading that Governor Cuomo's wife has a gay brother or sister, and wife has been pushing Cuomo to get gay marriage legal already. To clear up my fuzzy memory I reread the article looking for that part and find I am mistaken:

The pressure did not let up at home. Mr. Cuomo’s girlfriend, Sandra Lee, has a gay brother, and she frequently reminded the governor how much she wanted the law to change.

It's not Governor Cuomo's wife who is pushing for equality but his girlfriend.

Let me paraphrase. Straight legislators were lobbied to support marriage equality by their unmarried partners who were concerned about their gay relatives inability to marry. Yay!

“translate that estrangement”

Todd Ramon Ochoa:

The task of translating is not so much to transform the difference, which is to say the difference from Spanish to English, as much as it is to communicate the difference poetry generates in its own tongue. … Translation is not to … bring foreign language under control … Rather, I see translation as the turning of English into a foreign language unto itself, which is exactly what poetry is doing: it’s creating a foreign and strange turn in whatever language it is written in. It’s vital to also translate that estrangement.

source: an interview conducted by Hania Hussein in Berkeley Poetry Review #39

tradition

A couple weekends ago we went to a matinee of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the new 3D movie of the Chauvet cave paintings. The paintings are more than 30,000 years old. And they are dramatic, fully realized, not at all primitive. Clearly the artists who created them had practice and were working in a tradition.

Although I found Werner Herzog, the filmmaker, an irritating presence (and Kent found the 3D nausea-making), I became intrigued by the paintings. When Gregory Curtis’ recent book on Ice Age era European cave paintings passed under my nose at the library I decided to give it a try.

After listing a number of similarities among paintings found in caves from France to Spain Curtis says:

The immutable similarity in themes, colors, and techniques shows that the cave paintings were the creation of artists working in a cultural tradition that survived for more than 20,000 years. … [A]s painting is both an art and a skill that must be learned, and as there was a single acceptable style to which the painters had to conform, the skills of painting must have been taught.

The paintings are the physical remains of a sophisticated culture? A civilization that lasted 20,000 years? Can one talk about civilization without cities? The paintings reveal a continuity that can’t be coincidence. These were people who knew how to transmit consistent and well-defined ideas across millennia. Today we have a hard time comprehending the mindsets of people a hundred years removed from us. A culture a thousand years old seems weird and foreign, even if we can trace our ancestry to the people. The painters decorating a cave in 10,000 B.C.E. were comfortably working in a style their brethren of 10,000 years prior would have known and approved.

sourceThe Cave Painters: probing the mysteries of the world’s first artists by Gregory Curtis

Tasp or Taze?

In The Ringworld Engineers Larry Niven posits a pleasure Taser. Imagine you are a cop and you are faced with a man brandishing a weapon, maybe holding somebody hostage. The man is clearly in pain, angry, anguished. But also dangerous. And you have to neutralize that. So you point your Tasp at the man and remotely stimulate the pleasure center of his brain. The tension goes out of him. He relaxes, smiles. He laughs at the gun in his hand and lays it gently on the ground.

Or, in Niven’s more innocent scenario: “A dour stranger wanders past, rage or misery written in the sour lines of his face. From behind a tree you make his day. Plink! His face lights up. For a moment he’s got no worries at all.”

Lemmings

Chris Palmer has been involved in producing nature documentaries since the early 80s. In his history of the genre Disney’s wildlife films come in for praise and criticism. I know I saw Disney stuff growing up, some of the movies staples of the classroom. My mother’s criticism: Disney cuted up the animals, making up stories and putting words in the animals’ mouths. Palmer agrees with that. He also discusses instances where the Disney filmmakers forced or tricked animals into performing for the camera.

The most infamous example of misleading information in a Disney film involves that scene from White Wilderness in which the lemmings jump off a cliff en masse – or so it appears. … So memorable were these images that even today many people believe that lemmings engage in blindly self-destructive behavior. But the whole scene was fabricated. A 1982 investigation by reporter Brian Vallee of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation revealed that Disney filmmakers had forced a few dozen lemmings to run on a snow-covered turntable and even threw some into the sea to create the dramatic scene. … Some species of lemmings do become overpopulated, do migrate in swarms, and sometimes do drown crossing streams, but they never jump off cliffs suicidally.

Lemmings. The narrator of White Wilderness claims that there has long been a legend of suicidal lemmings. Having read the debunking of the Disney version of the “truth,” I wonder how ancient this legend is. Did the Disney filmmakers create it out of whole cloth?

The Urban Dictionary includes a very contemporary definition of lemming, “A lemming refers to a purchase/wished-for-item which results from reading an enthusiastic post about a new fabulous product. Overcome by compulsion, readers follow like lemmings diving off a cliff.”

That gibes with other definitions. Lemmings are creatures who, without thought for themselves, will follow a leader right over the cliff. It ain’t true?

There’s also a Snopes article on White Wilderness, which backs up Chris Palmer and adds a few details. The film’s narration claims the rodents are swimming out to sea, for instance. Snopes says no, the footage was grabbed “in Alberta, Canada, which … has no outlet to the sea. Lemmings were imported …” The water the poor wee critters are bobbing in? A river.

You can watch (or rewatch for the umpteenth time), the lemmings snippet from White Wilderness on youtube.

Let me conclude with a couple lines from a poem I wrote in high school:

Where did you go?
The edge of the world where the sea falls off and the lemmings stop to ponder their fate before plunging.

source: Shooting in the Wild: an insider’s account of making movies in the animal kingdom by Chris Palmer

remember to write your memoirs

Three memoirs I’ve lately liked:

A Round-Heeled Woman by Jane Juska.

Chasing the Sea: lost among the ghosts of empire in Central Asia by Tom Bissell.

The Blue Bear by Lynn Schooler.

I suppose I should say something to convince you each is worth a try. A capsule review. A summary sentence even. I started to. I swear.

Instead let’s wish my brother many happy returns of the day:

Happy Birthday, David!

Almost six and a half years of Dare I Read, too.

Ode to Joy

Kirk Read’s account (from his How I Learned to Snap: a small-town coming-of-age coming-out story) of acquiring a copy of The Joy of Gay Sex by Edmund White and Charles Silverstein:

I feverishly ripped the bar codes out of the book so that I wouldn’t trigger the sensor gates on the way out of the library. I’d seen library clerks demagnetize books before by rubbing the spine across a black metal slab. The spine, too, had to go. It was full of alarms. I ripped the cover off altogether and shoved it into the trash can, then covered the evidence with handfuls of paper towels. I stuffed the book under my jacket and into the waistband of my pants. A friend and I had shoplifted hundreds of dollars worth of cassettes in the pockets of our camouflage pants, the covers of tennis rackets, and long shirt sleeves. [Yet] I’d never stolen anything that mattered so much.

… What can I say?

I’m appalled? I can identify with the desperation, though, and the terror of being suspected. If suicide is a way to escape the opprobrium society (even our loved ones) heap on the gay, theft is a minor transgression if it means survival?

I got my own copy with an employee’s discount when I worked for a Christmas season at Books Inc in Santa Rosa’s Coddingtown Mall. 1985. The year I came out. I was twenty. Would I have had the nerve to buy the book over the counter? Maybe. Maybe not. I was checking out from the local library books on gay topics (though they hadn’t the pictures). I’m pretty sure I’d managed a couple gay magazines from a Santa Rosa magazine shop by this time. A couple of them of the pictorial sort …

cowboys and pistols

From a capsule tour diary of the Sex Pistols 1978 U.S. tour, their final tour:

Jan 8: Randy’s Rodeo, San Antonio, Texas

… The band take the stage around 11pm, Lydon wearing a ripped tartan suit and his Tom of Finland gay cowboys T-shirt. The band are pelted with popcorn, beer cups, hot dogs, whipped cream, bottles and pies. Sid premieres his ‘Gimme A Fix’ DIY chest tattoo, shouts, ‘You cowboys are all a bunch of faggots!,’ has his nose bloodied by a beer can and brains a troublemaker with his bass.

Oh the irony! Sid Vicious calls the Texans faggots while his bandmate Johnny Rotten (Lydon) wears a tshirt of two affectionate cowboys with their gigantic cocks hanging out.

I snatched the image from PaulGormanis.com. That’s not the tshirt, which was sold in Malcolm McLaren’s shop SEX, McLaren being the Sex Pistols svengali, but the source image for the shirt’s design. It is not, says Mr Gormanis, a Tom of Finland drawing, but one by Jim French.

If you’re curious, there’s more to read at JohnCoultArt.com (“SEX specialised in transgression … selling fetish and bondage clothing, and with a variety of erotic material on its hand-made shirts.”) and PaulGormanis.com (“’The whole drawing was simply jacked. … McLaren and [Vivienne] Westwood made a whole bunch of money … stealing it.’”)

You can spot the shirt itself in a 1980 image of Boy George, pre-fame.

source: Andrew Male, Mojo: the music magazine, July 2009

Kiss Me …

The Green Day tour has come to Osaka, Japan. Aaron Cometbus, old friend from the early days and longtime chronicler of the punk scene (& theorist), was invited to come along and write about the experience. Japan is the last country on the Asia tour. For the first time everybody parties together. It’s a small bar and musicians and crew fill the tiny dance floor. One of the Green Day guys takes over the DJ booth to play “scathing, straightforward punk.” The party gets a bit crazy with more than one injury, but the spirits, Aaron insists, remain high and friendly. There is a pause as a song winds down then:

Billie motioned me to join him on the dance floor. Over speakers came the notes that never fail to give me goosebumps: the opening chords of the greatest song of all time, ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ by Generation X.

Dancing in the middle of a maelstrom was different than with just one person in the middle of the room. I deferred, but Billie knew me better than that. ‘Please drag me out onto the dance floor’ is what I really meant.

He did, and everyone else gave us space.

I’d needed to shake off the self-consciousness and lethargy … Touring with Green Day had been great because I got to dance – but only to the band, not with them. Once upon a time, Billie and I had danced together at every show. …

Dancing together was sexy, it was sweet. It was everything that friendship – and being on tour – should be. It was the prom night I’d never had, done right. …

As the song concluded, [Billie] wrapped me in his arms, leaned over, and gave me a long and tender kiss.

Does it matter that Billie Joe Armstrong has a wife back home (does it matter when he kisses girl fans on the stage?) or that Aaron has a girlfriend?

Jon Ginoli of Pansy Division says that when they were invited to open for Green Day on the first tour after Green Day released its major label debut the Green Day boys all said they were bi. That doesn’t seem to manifest in a boyfriend for any of them, but it does say they are more healthily open than so many who lock down thoughts & feelings they think they’re not supposed to have. And in some cases, as in Aaron’s account, a man can demonstrate affection physically that’s tenderer far than the usual het boy punch on the arm.

source: Cometbus #54: In China with Green Day by Aaron Cometbus

pile of reading

Because I can keep one book going for a long time I checked my last pile post to see if I was still working on one I’d listed then. I am. Another of them isn’t in the pile anymore but I’m not quite done with it. The 1000+ page anthology Voices Within the Ark: the modern Jewish poets edited by Howard Schwartz and Anthony Rudolf is leaning against my personal anthology binder, the poems I’ve copied out by hand over the years. There are still four or five placemarks where poems wait on my decision. Well, let’s get to the list:

Wishbone poems by Priscilla Lee
This was the fifth volume in an ambitious poetry series Heyday Books began back at the turn of the millennium. “The California Poetry Series celebrates the great diversity of aesthetics, culture, geography, and ethnicity of the state by publishing work by poets with strong ties to California. Books within this series are published quarterly.” I bought this copy at a slashed price from Joyce Jenkins, the editor of the series (& of Poetry Flash), when she had a table at last fall’s small press event at Berkeley City College. When I asked what killed the series Joyce said the publishers didn’t want to compete with themselves. Small press publishing often does not pay for itself. Poetry more rarely than most. Putting a book together often involves applying for grants, it seems. Joyce said Heyday Books wanted to apply for the same grants for other titles that Joyce was applying to for the poetry books. Despite all the gushing over poetry I remember at the series launch, when it came down to a book of poems or a book of something else – a guide to California trees? a memoir of Paris in the early years of the twentieth century? – the poems didn’t have the upper hand. Anyway. Wishbone is a mix of family & personal history and odd, fantastic characters. Lee doesn’t offer an easy dividing line between the real and the unreal. “There are stories / about people making love in empty houses, / but this isn’t about that. We stand awkward, / the emptiness all around us.”

In Southern Light: trekking through Zaire and the Amazon by Alex Shoumatoff
Written in the early 80s. The author goes to the Amazon to try to track down the truth behind the story (& legend?) that gave the river its name. Was there really a tribe of female warriors? Probably not. But there seem to have been indigenous myths about women-rejecting men that came close enough to European legends that the two versions of the warrior woman story reinforced each other even across the cultual and language divides. In Zaire Shoumatoff visits a friend who is studying and living among African pygmies. Shoumatoff finds the pygmies so shy they won’t make eye contact, but when he records some of their singing they laugh, delighted, and will sing in response to the playback.

The World Split Open: four centuries of women poets in England and America, 1552-1950 edited by Louise Bernikow
The anthology was published in 1974 and Bernikow’s introductory essay partakes of the period’s angry feminist critique. Fine with me. I like that sort of unapologetic anger at injustice. The demand was that an educated lady be modest, Bernikow says of the English Renaissance. “Her virtue was to be praised and therein lies the problem, for more poets have been lost to ‘virtue’ than to death in childbirth or early starvation or disease in factories and mines. … Women knew quite well that if one woman signed her work … she opened herself to moral and social abuse.” I’m just to the poets who span the divide between the 17th and 18th centuries. This sort of strictly formed verse rarely interests me, unfortunately. Written by man or woman, it hardly matters. I want to expose myself to (force myself through) some older poetry in order to have a better grounding in the history of poetry. My favorite bit so far is probably this passage from a “A Nocturnal Reverie” by Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720): “When the loos’d horse now, as his pasture leads, / Comes slowly grazing thro’ th’ adjoining meads, / Whose stealing pace, and lengthened shade we fear, / Till torn-up forage in his teeth we hear …” Stomping sounds in the dark, scary, until the listener identifies the horsy munching of weeds and feels relieved.

This Is Reggae Music: the story of Jamaica’s music by Lloyd Bradley
The book was originally published in the UK as Bass Culture: when reggae was king. This spring I went through several CDs of reggae music from the 60s and early 70s and really enjoyed the experience so I wanted to read more about what made the music. Bradley’s writing has a casual feel and I often lose interest. I can only make it through a few pages at a sitting.

The End of Major Combat Operations by Nick McDonell
Published by Dave Eggers’ McSweeney’s Press, I was hoping McDonell would have something new to say a war that was winding down. If he does, I haven’t gotten to it. He pretty much offers up the usual depressing stuff – people telling you stories you’re not sure you can believe, the interpreters (“terps”) who were essential to the success of the mission (which is what?) but who the U.S. abandons, etc.

Kundalini: the evolutionary energy in man by Gopi Krishna
This is the book that was in the pile on January first. I’m now about halfway. Gopi Krishna meditated so much and so long he released the Kundalini energy coiled in the lowest chakra – and it almost drove him mad!

Quarterly Review of Literature, Poetry Series IV edited by T. & R. Weiss
This is a hardcover that contains book-length sections by five poets, including the Polish Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska, and the first book by Jane Hirshfield. I like both of those poets. I’ve gone on to the next, Christopher Bursk. “I was hurt deep back into history, / and timed my torture. / It took ten minutes to make Zarthor appear / in the body of Richard Ainsbruck, / a boy held back twice. / I borrowed the long brown hair / and merciful eyes of a girl … / I could make the pain from one lash / endure for twenty minutes …”

The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
I started reading Bechdel’s self-syndicated Dykes to Watch Out for in a local gay free paper not long after it began, apparently. I’ve looked forward to being able to reread the whole thing. I think this collection includes all the strips since it became a narrative.

La Perdida a graphic novel by Jessica Abel
There are some library books that aren’t in today’s pile of reading because I’ve barely begun them or haven’t begun them at all. La Perdida is one I’m a few pages into. I like the idea of reading an American expat’s account of living in Mexico City.

Cometbus #54: In China with Green Day by Aaron Cometbus
Aaron Cometbus knew the Green Day boys when he was an elder – he was 24? And they were just pushing out of their teens? One notes that his daughter is the same age he was when he met Aaron. Having just reread Jon Ginoli’s Deflowered: my life in Pansy Division which includes tour diaries from the time PD supported Green Day, just as Green Day’s major label debut is making them Big, I was curious to read more about where GD was today. Aaron is a cranky purist and had a falling out with Green Day over their stardom (“selling out” in punk DIY parlance). But they recently reconnected and Green Day invited Cometbus along on their Asia tour. Aaron seems to have gained some perspective over the difference between pursuing your dreams (and stepping over some ethical lines) and giving up your dreams altogether (is it really better to be so uncompromising you stop creating?) …

The New Yorker, November 19, 2007.
Just finished an article about how low birthweight predicts heart disease later in life. Makes me wonder how skinny a baby I was.

Mojo, August 2009
A music magazine out of Britain. Comes with a free compilation CD, usually thematic. I’ve been working my way through the issues the library owns. Just finished an interview with Bob Dylan, the last pages of which have been torn out. “The land created me. I’m wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I’m more at home in the vacant lots.”

The Best American Comics 2007 edited by Chris Ware
Most of the work in this is excerpted from longer stories. Which is not entirely satisfying. Not that different, I suppose, from the ever unfinished story you get when you read a regular comic series. I’ve even read some of this before, the pages from Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, the Adrian Tomine. Still, it’s a handsome book and it was remaindered so I feel like I got a deal.

be your own DJ

I played DJ for myself, picking songs from around a thousand cassettes and five hundred records. I’d dubbed hundreds of albums from friends and padded my collection by repeatedly sending in fake names to record clubs. When I received the twelve free albums or tapes, I’d write the company a letter saying no one by that name lived at this address.

I don’t suppose playing DJ for oneself is unusual. As a teen I didn’t have very many records to choose from but I found songs that went together, I thought, and played them in my preferred sequence so often, lunging for the stereo’s needle arm to catch it before it could touch the next track in order to put on the exact song that should follow, that when I hear certain songs by one artist I frequently think of the song by another artist that it went with. “Medicine Show” by Big Audio Dynamite going into Martini Ranch’s “Reach,” for instance.

The quote above is from Kirk Read’s How I Learned to Snap: a small-town coming-of-age coming-out story. I never could have or would have engaged in such subterfuge – theft, isn’t it? Not that I didn’t think I ought to take advantage of the 12 records for a penny that the record clubs always claimed you could keep after canceling your membership – no obligation! I suspected I would not be on top of it enough to get the cancellation in on time.

Now that it is far easier to grab your free digital musical files via the internet or rip songs from cheap or borrowed CDs, is it ethical to do so, ethical in a way that it wasn’t when it was 12 heavy vinyl record albums that came in the mail?

notes toward an autobiography by others, part 10

untitled

this afternoon
i thought of the acid
that has been festering
in the fridge for months
but instead
i took a nap

when I woke,
i had one of those headaches
creeping up the back of my skull
which you only get from sleeping
too much in the middle of the day

-- Heidi E. Cooper

Late last year I attended a small press gathering at Berkeley City College. After I’d walked around the tables and bought a few wares, I sat to chat with a friend, my back to the table where people had put out giveaways. A small young woman with a pixie cut came in and dropped a stack of a tiny photocopied chapbook. I saw this out of the corner of my eye. When she stepped away I scooped up a copy and dropped it in my bag.

When I read the poems I nodded along to “untitled // this afternoon / i thought of the acid …” Totally, I thought to myself. This is so me.

I wrote to Ms Cooper, asking her if I could put the poem up on my blog. She said I could. “I had that small free pile sitting out for about 10 minutes before snatching them all up myself to hand out directly to folks,” she wrote me. “I am almost certain you are the only person who snagged one while they were sitting on the freebie table.”

Well. Happy happenstance!

source: A Collection of Poetry & Prose & Photos, a self-published chapbook by Heidi E. Cooper

Where are you on the tongue?

It is only in the past decade that the redoubtable ‘map of the tongue’ has begun to fall out of circulation. The diagram, which dates to the early twentieth century and can still be found in some medical textbooks, places the taste buds for sweetness on the tip of the tongue, those for bitterness at the back, the ability to taste salt on the top edges, and sourness on the bottom edges. … In fact, all the regions of the tongue are capable of recognizing sweet, salty, bitter, and sour flavors, as well as savory tastes, which had been left off the original map altogether.

I remember that silly tongue map from the grade school science textbook. I remember thinking it was absurd the second I laid eyes on it. It’s easy enough to test. Point your tongue and touch a bit of salt to it. Do you taste the salt? Bet you do! I recall pointing this out and being given some amazing nonsense about how the molecules of salt flavor must have instantaneously been transported to the edges of my tongue.

The quote above is from The New Yorker, May 12, 2008, D.T. Max’s profile of the chef Grant Achatz.

Falling vs. Gravity

When you launch something into orbit … you have launched it, via rocket thrust, so powerfully fast and high and far that when gravity’s pull finally slows the object’s forward progress enough that it starts to fall back down, it misses the Earth. It keeps on falling around the Earth rather than to it. As it falls, the Earth’s gravity keeps up its tug, so it’s both constantly falling and constantly being pulled earthward. The resulting path is a repeating loop around the planet.

I don’t get it.

I mean, “falling” in this instance is something different from gravity’s “tug”? If I jump out of an airplane I will fall to Earth, right? I thought I was falling because of gravity’s tug, because I was being drawn toward the center of greatest mass. The orbiting body is falling away from the Earth (“around the Earth”?) yet being constantly tugged back toward it? “It starts to fall back down,” Mary Roach says. What prevents the object from finishing what it started?

If gravity is strong enough to slow the launched object’s forward progress, why isn’t it strong enough to pull that object back home?

How can an object “miss” the Earth? That’s a pretty big target, especially right up close. Has a barn door beat by orders of magnitude.

Mary Roach is attempting an explanation in layman’s language, avoiding math, which, admittedly, I wouldn’t understand either, but what does “falling” mean here? Although a gravity-free experience is often termed “free fall,” what does falling mean if there is no destination for the fall? If there were no atmosphere (with all its buffeting) would your fall toward and ultimately onto Earth be a different experience from gravity-free falling? If you weren’t looking toward it would you know you were falling toward anything?

source: Packing for Mars: the curious science of life in the void by Mary Roach

The right of traditional hate is great

”What tipped me over into sobbing,” [E.J.] Graff later wrote in the Boston Globe, “was when the Unitarian Universalist President Rev. William Sinkford said, ‘By the authority vested in me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts . . .’ At long last, the government was recognizing officially, openly, proudly what was already true between those two, and so may others.”

Ms Graff was weeping at one of the first weddings after same sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts.

I don’t know if anybody teared up at my wedding. Nobody ‘fessed to it. If anyone did, I doubt it was over our Unitarian minister invoking the authority vested in him by the state of California.

But that was something I needed from him. Kent and I were getting married. Legally. The state was explicitly involved – and approving. I wanted the state to say to me, to us: YES

“Yes,” is not what the state has had to say to gay people. “No,” is the usual word. “No,” and “Go away,” and “You are not wanted.” Hets marrying take it for granted that marriage is not just what their parents want for them, not just what their friends or older relations think they ought to do, but marriage is something the state wants. The state wants it for them. The state approves, likes what they are doing.

It was bitter when the voters turned around and slapped us with their NO, their Proposition 8. “No,” the voters said. “You are not human enough. You are not what we want. Go away. Fuck you. Drop dead.”

Well. We are still married. Still married legally. In California, at least. The California Supreme Court decided that those of us who’d trusted them to read our equality into the California Consitution , those of us who got married in those few months it was legal back in 2008, we would not be betrayed. It is, on the other hand, bitter the right of the voters to attack, to hurt, to encode fear & lies into the law was, according to the California Supreme Court, deserving of greater deference than those flimsy new-fangled notions of justice and equal treatment the Constitution windily espouses. Those same sex couples who did not marry in 2008 get the old familiar NO. The right of traditional hate is great.

source: Travels in a Gay Nation: portraits of LGBTQ Americans by Philip Gambone

Barney Frank outs Sam Rayburn

In Philip Gambone’s interview with Massachusetts Congressional Representative Barney Frank, Frank recalls that, shortly after he came out publicly, House Speaker Tip O’Neill said to him, “ ‘Oh, Barney, I’m so sorry. I thought you were going to be the first Jewish Speaker,’ meaning that as an out gay man I couldn’t become Speaker. I could have told him that there had already been two gay Speakers: Joe Martin and Sam Rayburn.”

The office building for Congressional Reps is named after Sam Rayburn. Rayburn, according to Wikipedia, “was a Democratic lawmaker from Bonham, Texas, who served as the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives for seventeen years, the longest tenure in U.S. history.”

Joseph Martin was a Massachusetts Republican and served as Speaker in a couple two year periods in the 40s and 50s.

I don’t know where Barney Frank got his information on the personal lives of these two men. But, you know, on this I’ll trust Barney.

source: Travels in a Gay Nation: portraits of LGBTQ Americans by Philip Gambone

The Hotsy Totsy Club

I know Lillian Faderman for her histories of lesbians in the U.S., Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers : A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America. (Someday I will read them!) I didn’t know Lillian Faderman put herself through school working as a stripper.

When I read that she’d stripped at the Hotsy Totsy Club I said to myself, “The Hotsy Totsy Club is a strip club. That explains the name. I’d always wondered about its cute/racy, quaint/titilating name.” I’ve passed the Hotsy Totsy Club lots of times going up San Pablo Ave to Target or Abby Pet Hospital. From the outside it’s a dark little box. No windows. One neon sign, not too garish, the name and nothing else.

Having looked up their website I wonder if perhaps the Hotsy Totsy Club is a strip club no longer. (Faderman’s stint there was all the way back in 1958.) Nothing about stripping on the Hotsy Totsy Club website. Alongside the logos for Best Neighborhood Bar 2010 (awarded by the San Francisco Chronicle) and Best Dive Bar Renovation 2009 (awarded by The East Bay Express), the homepage does offer, “Transgressive cinema, adults only, always free,” so there seems to be something Hotsy-Totsy-ish still afoot.

source: Travels in a Gay Nation: portraits of LGBTQ Americans by Philip Gambone

“a conversation across boundaries of identity”

[O]ver time and with exposure, people learn to live amicably with gay and lesbian people. Indeed, he says, because of the presence of openly gay people in the world, a ‘perspectival shift’ occurs, one that breaks down old prejudices and barriers.

That’s Philip Gambone’s paraphrase of Kwame Anthony Appiah. Gambone interviewed Appiah for his Travels in a Gay Nation: portraits of LGBTQ Americans.

While I agree with the idea (mostly), I am troubled to recall Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s accounts of neighbors butchering neighbors, even celebrating the execution of blood relatives, that occurred in Rwanda and in Bosnia. These monstrous acts took place despite the future victims living cheek-by-jowl with their future killers. I remember Goldhagen describing an ethnically Tutsi woman being murdered with her half-Hutu babies by the relatives of her Hutu husband. I remember elsewhere reading accounts of Bosnian Muslims being driven from their homes by Bosnian Serbs beside whom they’d lived their entire lives, some of whom they’d fed at their dinner table, had considered friends.

Appiah does advocate a little bit more than mere proximity, it seems. Gambone says in his book, Cosmopolitanism: ethics in a world of strangers, “Appiah emphasizes what he calls ‘conversations across boundaries of identity’ – the imaginative engagement with the experience and ideas of others – as a way to help people get used to one another and thus develop more harmonious relationships and happier lives.”

In Rwanda and Bosnia, Goldhagen says, an intragroup conversation existed among the future killers that persisted over time and which derogated the ‘others’/their future victims, and regularly fixed on these ‘others’ the blame for Hutu or Serb misfortunes. Perhaps a “conversation across boundaries of identity” would have helped?

Born to Run

One of the books that garnered a big waiting list at the library last year was Born to Run: a hidden tribe, superathletes, and the greatest race the world has never seen by Christopher McDougall. I can’t say as I was all that interested in the book’s main subject – footraces – but a couple years ago K & I visited Mexico’s Copper Canyon. Before the trip I read up on the Tarahumara Indians who live in the Copper Canyon. There wasn’t much to read. While we were there we bought finely crafted little baskets offered by Tarahumara women at the entrance to our hotel and at canyon overlooks. I heard that Born to Run was about Tarahumara runners, among other things, so I thought I’d pick it up when the waiting list evaporated.

Although McDougall’s goofy persona grated on me at first, I soon got into the cast of characters – runners, Indians, scientists. Turns out it’s quite a fascinating pop science book, too, offering the argument that the human body evolved to run. No, not speed. Endurance running. Faster animals will tire before we will. It is, one of the scientists McDougall consults says, theoretically possible for a human being to run an antelope to death. The antelope will wear itself and overheat after a few hours and the human thumping along on its trail can just step up to the poor antelope panting in the dust and dispatch it. I’m not going to lay out the evidence here; it’s fun following McDougall as he puts it together.

The marathons McDougall discusses stretch to a hundred miles or more. Over that kind of mileage women, it seems, can compete in the same class with men. Here’s a charming little example:

[A]t the 2007 Hardrock 100, Emily Baer beat ninety other men and women to finish eighth overall while stopping at every aid station to breast-feed her infant son.

100. That’s 100 miles. In the Colorado mountains.

I wonder if baby Baer noted a difference in the milk.