Feeling like a Man

Interspersed with what I took to be actual reported dialogue from interviews with her, Kenny Melman delivered a morosely exuberant suite of Grace Jones' signature tunes last night at the Starlight Lounge in the East Village.

We were treated to only one of his song-montages, a mash-up of I Need a Man and Send in the Clowns (a song I was surprised to discover Jones had once covered. I need to track that down).

As Melman searches for signs of intelligent life in the wake of Kiki and Herb's departure, he discovers new and fresh meaning in the lyrics to songs like "Walking in the Rain" and Mevlin van Peebles "The Apple Stretching." A friend of mine once speculated that New York in the 2000s would be more like New York in the 1970s, not in terms of disco and glam, but in terms of urban decay, crime, and squallor. Perhaps this part of that zeitgeist.

Anyway, the performance was a model for how to an homage to do a black performer without retaining any of the imitative and insulting shtick of blackface. Shirley Q. Liquor take note.

What is a hate crime?

If its true, as Security Risk says, that America's support for us is strongest on the issue of anti-queer violence, what does that say about Americans? That they hold that we do not deserve health care or retirement benefits from our domestic partners, but will admit that we ought not be beaten to death? This, I suppose, is the view that people want me to "reach out to" and reason with.

I've never liked pinning our political hopes on the social construction of a new form of deviant: the anti-gay murderer. Clearly there are murders motivated by homophobia and lesbophobia, along with whatever cocktail of poisons are circulating in the social bloodstream at any moment in time. James Gilligan does an interesting bit about epidemics of shame causing violence, and proposes treating crime as a public health (and public income) matter rather than a moral panic. I'm wary of 'medicalizing' arguments, but his seem a step in the right direction: that is, away from pathologizing individuals and away from feeding the 'get tough on crime' beast.

To build political consensus around the stigmatization of anti-gay murder as the central crime against us and our rights seems to me to be an error in judgement. "Queers bash back" was one thing, but when the 'moderates' got hold of this issue and manufactured their public awareness campaigns, their hate crime laws, and their Judy Shepards, I began to have doubts. Besides unfolding new vistas for social control, which ought to at least give us pause, it exposes our left flank to inevitable arrows from the likes of 20/20.

I didn't care to watch the show, apparently correctly surmising I would be disgusted by its homophobia. But its important to realize that it was our unspoken decision to deify Shepard, to isolate this as a pure act of hate upon an angelic little boy, as a way of calling an uneasy peace with our pious and bloodthirsty Christian fundamentalist fellow Americans. I went to those vigils, and was simultaneously flummoxed and comforted. Flummoxed that people felt that sentimentally about someone they did not know, that the response to this particular act of cruelty in an immensely cruel world was so out of scale. Comforted, falsely it turns out, by the thought that some good political opportunities might come out of this passion that I could not understand, some thought that this could be a teachable moment.

But now I know better. The problem with "reaching out" to the sentimentally religious is that we do not really understand those emotions and that bloodthirstiness that seems always to hover around their most delicate imagery. Reaching out to them is playing with fire.

2004? Not in Missouri

Get kicked out of school for wearing a gay pride t-shirt? It couldn't happen here, right?

Kehinde Wiley

Sparkle reminds me that I'm expected to sound off on the recent Kehinde Wiley show at the BMA.

Since Sparkle's posting covered most of the ground, I'll just say that its perfectly clear to me that these images are queer, and queer in the old-fashioned sense of transgressing the homo/hetero distinction in sexuality and culture.

The look that Wiley's paintings invite is the look that Wiley casts upon his subjects, the glance with which he hails them in the street or nightclub, the words with which he initiates a conversation, the reassurance with which he brings them back to his studio to pose and thus complete his seduction.

His subjects pose for cash; Wiley ennobles them in paintings that partake (a bit too much so) of a snapshot aesthetic. In the guise of creating "positive images" of black men, Wiley creates something much more significant and disorienting. He glances between the cracks of desire and identification, ornamenting these bodies about whom he wishes to know nothing except that they are young, black and strikingly male. He ornaments them with their own clothes and with their self-chosen poses, but he also ornaments them with ormullo and paisley, roses and, yes, sperm. Call it art-historical bling.

Like the powerful queer art tradition that Wiley both cites and revises (Carravagio and Mapplethorpe come to mind), his brush confesses everything and nothing.

Matthew Shepard revisionism (at last?)

20/20, the ABC News show, is set to air new interviews with the murderers of Matthew Shepard. The report will portray the murder as a drug-fueled robbery gone awry, not a hate crime perpetrated solely because Shepard was gay. The report will allege that Shepard knew one of his assailants, who was himself bisexual, and that Shepard was a methamphetamine user despondent over a recent positive test for the HIV virus.

Sordid, indeed? Perhaps. But was I the only one intensely annoyed by the quite literal deification of Shepard? I remember seeing flyers up around New Haven around the time of his murder, with an artist's rendering that made it resemble the crucifixion. Below was a caption that read "He died for our sins." And of course there is the matter of the most allegorical name, Shepard, since the plaintiffs in Loving v. Virginia.

I'm almost comforted to know that Shepard was a mess like the rest of us. Of course those who already hate us will pile on this one. But as Grace's gay brother said in last week's Jack & Bobby, "I'm not fucked up because I'm gay. I'm just fucked up."

Vincent Gallo v. Michael Lucas

Too many critical drubbings of Vincent Gallo's flic, The Brown Bunny are apparently not enough, so here is one more.

As a bonus, the writers offer a profitable comparison between the tedious tedium of The Brown Bunny and the joyful tedium of porn director Michael Lucas's latest opus. Lucas has been getting a lot of good press these days from Timothy Greenfield-Sanders' book of photos XXX, which is giving porn stars the high-art treatment.

Too much mainstream exposure for pornography is not enough!

Now playing: Terence Trent D'Arby's Wild Card. (Thanks, Michael)

Overheard

Further developments in the ongoing mutation of sexual identities, categories, and meanings.

Overheard at Tisch School of the Arts.

Woman: "Are you a lesbian? Or just butch?"

Her friend: "I'm just a butch."

Pimps down, flows up

The release party for Urb magazine's latest issue, Wednesday night at Joe's Pub, featured the lyrical stylings of West Coast diva Medusa, whose song has been jingling like crazy in my head for days. I loved the fact that she had (very femmey) male back-up singers to do her chorus. Hold up girl, hold up!

Also heard from were the pugnacious Jean Grae, whose personality is more Rogue than Phoenix (obscure X-Men reference), Brooklyn-based Wordsworth, and some forgettable crew who made stale homophobic slurs, of all things, in the process of trying to diss George Bush. File that one under "Folks Unclear of the Concept of Appropriate Responses to the Present Political Crisis."

A great site

Sorry Everybody features a long series of snapshot images of Americans' apologizing to the World for the reelection of Bush. A good one:

The Black community and queers

Black Commentator celebrates the endurance of the "black consensus" in the face of the Republican-led faith-based assault.

"African Americans are approaching that future guided by a Consensus on core issues that has so far remained largely impervious to outside manipulation – although it is subject to diversions and distractions such as the ridiculous debate on gays emanating from a gay-saturated black church!"

Black Commentator (Glen Ford and Peter Gamble) cite political scientist Michael Dawson a lot in the article. They would do well to also read Cathy Cohen, another black political scientist who has conducted a careful study of how black communites, churches in particular, respond to the presence of lesbians and gays and to AIDS sufferers, she asserts, by drawing the "boundaries of blackness" in order to exclude them. The black church may be gay-saturated, but that does not mean black folk are ready to openly embrace their queer brothers and sisters, any more than the fact that the church is women-dominated means that it isn't a bastion of conservative and male-centered gender values.

Although we all celebrate the survival of the black consensus, the idea that queers represent a "diversion and distraction" conflates our actual existence with the right-wing manipulation of us. This is classic scapegoating the black community is all too familiar with. We need to build a new consensus that incorporates queers as fully fledged, and not just "provisional," citizens of black America.

The trouble with our brief against elitism is that it is itself elitist and condescending...

... or so writes Ben Kunkel in a food for thought piece for N+1 magazine. Kunkel punctures the comforting illusion that greater communication with and respect for the "moral values" of the Bush voters is our ticket out of the wilderness. We should instead, he argues, treat Bush voters like the responsible parties they are, and "despise and fear them as we do their president."

While I sympathize with his points, I would also point out that the "brief against elitism" is also a bit of self-flattery on the part of many liberals, almost a form of upward mobility. "Woe is me! I am hated for being so cosmopolitan and gay-friendly. Let me cry into my latte." It is unseemly to engage in too much of this at a time when the nation overall is experiencing wrenching downward mobility. As Tim Stewart-Winter points out, "people in low-wage service-sector jobs can't simply be cast as nameless doormen who give consoling hugs."

As a Michigander, let me also criticize once more the red state/ blue state drivel, which, as Thomas Frank points out, only works to Republican advantage. A lot of the moaning over the election results, my own included, is starting to look like the narcissism of small difference. (The U.S. and Canada, for example, are more alike than they are different, however 'enlightened' Canada may be.) Most Kerry voters are not elite and many live in red states and swing states. Most probably do not read the New York Times. For all I know, many have a lot of cultural or moral values that I disagree with. Lord knows my Mom and I disagree about a lot of "moral issues." But if we tar such people with the same brush as actually-existing Bush voters, then I think we will be in even deeper trouble.

I don't want to go into denying reality here, but in all the swing states and even many solidly red states, what the Republicans won was not a cultural mandate but a razor-thin victory in an almost evenly balanced struggle for power. Due to their electioneering wizardry, they have perfected the art of reliably winning these razor-thin victories, and benefiting from America's winner-take-all system. So I'm not suggesting their victories are some sort of fluke. But I do want to forcibly object to the apparent consensus that this election indicates an overwhelming cultural legitimacy for the far-right that we need to kow-tow to. Now getting us to believe that would be the real victory for Bush.

On the other hand ...

I'm increasingly annoyed by articles like this one, in which the typical Kerry voter in New York City is depicted as a cosmopolite clutching three newspapers, a latte, and, I shit you not, an invitation to Harvey Weinstein's election night party "at The Palm."

Most New York Kerry voters, like most Americans, are working class, do not hobnob with "their European friends," do not console themselves with thoughts of extending their upcoming vacations abroad indefinitely,or have any idea where "The Palm" is. We must stop drinking the red state/blue state kool aid. There is a culture war going on, but it is not between tolerant elites and the bigoted masses. It is between a right-wing elite that spins wedge issues into electoral gold, and a deeply confused electorate caught in the grips of the Stockholm Syndrome. Lets fight the real war.

On the one hand ...

I see the point of maps like this one:

Count the Democrats out?

Steve Perry, of the Twin Cities City Pages on why we should all give up on the Democrats.

Principally, because they are more interested in raising money and placating their big time donors than they are in offering a political alternative to the Republicans. Written in 2002 but still pertinent?

New York isn't America

"... The gap between New York, fearless but outraged, and the rest of the country, fearful and complacent ... "

In the cruelest of ironies, the greatest city in America -- which had suffered the most grievous terrorist attack -- delivered a resounding popular victory against Bush's fearmongering and warmongering, while the wretched evangelicals amid the pastures, with nothing to defend except their anti-gay bile, voted on "terrorism" and "moral values" as their number one issues.