GENERATION OF ALL-SORTS

When a person teaches high school or college students, there are two choices (besides getting out).  One is opposing the kids in the name of “education as authority” and the other is joining them in “education by exploration.”  I chose the latter but that was a decade ago.  The ground of contention these days is sexual identity -- NOT desire (whom you love) but identity (who you are -- we’ll assume you’re lovable, but why is that?).  A dignified gay friend from the long-ago past, one in a highly respectable same-sex marriage, sent me an article entitled “Generation LGBTQIA” by Michael Shulman, published in the NYTimes January 10, 2012 issue.  He added a sticky note saying:  “I don’t get it.”  So Sister Mary Helen will try to explain.

The “hook” that Schulman uses to get into his article is (Manhattan-style) through a second level celebrity:  Stephen Ira Beatty’s lovable video on You Tube (“WeHappyTrans: Stephen”).  Beatty is the “21-year-old child of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, which only surprises me because I’m amazed that they married that long ago.  Note that Stephen is “reflexive” (watches and critiques himself) and defines himself via his material culture (action figures and an English teapot -- mixed gender, eh?)

We thought the future meant we’d all wear Lycra form-fitting suits, eat pills instead of food, and travel with jet-packs on our backs.  Try this YouTube vid: “ FTM transition: One year on testosterone”  We knew we were tinkering with contraception/fertility and that cabaret people were playing with gender identity, but no one really thought you could change genders or that anyone would be willing to take drugs the whole rest of their lives to maintain their chosen identity.  In fact, video explanations are really the only possible way to explain.  Words can’t do it.

Last night I watched Glen Close in “Alfred Nobbs,” a story about a woman presenting as a man in Edwardian times, a culture so patterned and driven by denial that it was not hard to do and was certainly motivated by the need to be safe and make a living without being “owned.”  There are quite a few known cases.  It was clearly a bravura vehicle for Glen Close in the same way that Meryl Streep plays cross-gender, but the more convincing performance for me was Maria Doyle Kennedy as the fellow masquerader.  Kennedy has four sons, named  Louis, Jesse James, Daniel and Salvador, which tells you why she’s not intimidated by a bit of cross-dressing.  Her website:  www.mariadk.com

Then I went to Netflix to pick up an episode of “Damages,” the series about Close playing one tough MF lawyer.  Actually, this is an even clearer example of a woman stepping into a male gender stereotype.  The material culture signals are no longer a skirt, but rather eye makeup, tasteful earrings, and expensively maintained hair.  Her psychology and actions are those of an Alpha Male, not a poor old loser like Alfred.  The tailored suits are in much more luxe fabrics.  It’s nearly camp.  So much for social binaries.

So now -- according to the Times article -- identity is spread out over a whole line of acronymics “all the things that fall out of the binary”:  L (lesbian)G (gay) B (bisexual) T (transexual) Q (questioning or queer). I (intersexual) A (ally or friend) or (Asexual, no attraction to anyone.)  I would add P for pansexual and MF for  mind-effer. (Not the street meaning.)  The alphabet ploy eventually stops working, particularly since some desires are defined by the situation and others will flare and wane or transform over time.  Trust me.  Sometimes Friendship is more trustworthy.  Sometimes a good horse is sexier than a cowboy.

Of course, thinking like this is a luxury and a lot of people, like Alfred Nobbs get forced into their gender role and their sexual desires.  Sometimes it’s a matter of appearance.  Notice that the “female” actresses in both Alfred Nobbs and Damages have baby’s faces: big round eyes, rosebud mouths, cute little noses.  We assign women to baby-identities, quite apart from the babies they can conceive and gestate, which was far more appropriate in Edwardian times when women were owned.  It’s interesting to notice that the hotel keeper with her child’s values (greed and control) is played by Pauline Collins, whom some of us know as “Our Sarah” from “Upstairs, Downstairs,”  ever so shrewd and full of mischief.  Big round eyes, rosebud mouth, cute little nose and always watching for an advantage, she wouldn’t turn away a chance at sex -- much less flirtation.

But poor Alfred is forced into his role, which is very much about preserving a zombie-like lack of emotion even when confronted by a red-headed imp of a tiny provocateur.  By contrast, Close's role in Damages is played with a regular kaleidoscope of emotion and expression, slipping back and forth between bland affection and toxic malice.  This is her main "feminine" attribute and it marks her as a “bad mother” character.  Bad mothers cannot be trusted to maintain their affection.  They don’t relate to individuals but to the situation and then in their own interest.  Society WANTS them to be like that, wants things predictable.  Marketing depends upon it.  You must stick to your “platform” in both business and art.

Stephen claims he had trouble ending his vid.  Schulman ended his with a kid named Santiago listing gender possibilities:  “Lesbians, gays, bisexual, transsexual, queer, homosexual, asexual, pansexual, omnisexual, trisexual, agender, bigender, third gender, transgender, transvestite, intersexual, two-spirit, hijra, polyamorous.  Undecided.  Questioning.  Other.  Human.”  Schulman claimed there was applause.

I see two terms are not here.  They are definitely gender-significant with reference to roles and desires that are vulnerable to shifts over time, maybe benign and maybe not.  One is “mom” and the other is “dad.”  Not that a kid should be limited to one of each or that it isn’t possible to be a mom/dad or to swap roles.  A person could have two moms or two dads or three assorted parents sort of like an XYY chromosome -- social mutations.  Mom/dad/nursemaid.  Surrogate/mom or dad.  It works out best if there’s freedom to improvise along some pretty crucial guidelines -- and always, of course, prosperity to a minimum degree.  It’s hard to grow up well in an alley without parents, though some manage to do it, often by sticking together with other kids.  The wolves these days are too busy staying alive themselves to raise any humans.

SHOOTING DOWN LOVERS

In a country where the government has lied to us about issues so major as to draw us into war and recession, where the pharmaceutical industry is almost proud of its ability to deceive and bribe us into taking drugs that may kill us, and where investment firms invent imaginary ways of making obscene profits, it seems strange or ironic -- how else to look at it? -- that the media gets so excited about books that claim to be “true” but evidently are not. The previous recent “deceptions” that have provoked indignation were baffling because the writers had claimed to be much more wicked, poor and suffering than they really were. But this most recent kafuffle is over “Angel at the Fence” by Herman Rosenblat, an innocent-seeming love story about hope and romance that begins in a WWII concentration camp. The publisher, Berkley, is so indignant that they were “deceived” about the reality of this story that they have demanded their advance back: $50,000, which is not much by way of advances but five times my annual income.

Once again, it was thought that Oprah had some magical ability to tell which writers were “authentic” and the thought was proven wrong. What Oprah has is the power to make a writer rich overnight by endorsing him/her on her program. Why would anyone think that a nice lady -- who barely has enough spare time to read because she is so subsumed by the one-woman industry she has become -- has an inside track on who is telling the truth? Do we think that her crew looks everything up in a directory somewhere? Or that she has some sense like the notorious “gaydar” that gives her signals the rest of us fail to pick up?

What’s so evil about telling a mythical love story anyway? In this case the main revealers explain that if all the false holocaust stories are not tracked down and stamped out, the truth of the event will be diminished. They are not the only ones to have this opinion. My uncle, Seth Strachan, was the pilot who flew a planeload of correspondents and editors into Germany right after WWII at the command of General Eisenhower, who said that the world would NOT believe that something so ghastly and inhuman had happened without eye witness acccounts. (Did anyone order the same for the Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima?) I read that small groups sprout up to deny the holocaust all the time. But still, doesn’t “unmasking” Mr. Rosenblatt’s love story sort of seem like killing a fly with a sledgehammer? The relentlessness of Dr. Kenneth Waltzer, who is writing his own holocaust book, and the obvious terror of the publisher don’t quite seem justified.

What else is at stake besides “truth,” whatever that is? I mean, having been interviewed by many people for many decades, I have a high degree of skepticism about ANYTHING that gets into print. Everyone sees through a filter, and the filter that seems most unreliable is the “rose-colored glasses” of the spiritually uplifting genre. Haven’t we noticed how many exemplars of the morally upstanding have turned out to be sitting in toilet stalls at airports?

I’ll tell you something unlikely: the friendship that has developed between Tim Barrus and I. For once the NYTimes didn’t drag him out by the scruff of the neck to be Exhibit A, maybe in part because he barks and bites with such energy that it’s just not worth it. As Nasdijj he was excoriated by two watchdog groups almost as powerful as holocaust definers. One is the Native American literature crowd, who were shocked SHOCKED that Tim was NOT Navajo. They evidently thought it was perfectly likely that a man who says he grew up doing migrant labor rather than going to school could write energetic, vivid prose. The other is a part of the Gay community that doesn’t like defectors and is equally horrified that Tim was not “pure” homosexual, having failed to notice his two marriages, daughter and granddaughter.

In short, the real critics are enforcers of a point of view, powerful people who can affect profits. In fact, the chief judge of the NA Lit qualifications of Tim Barrus is James Mackay who is not American and has spent little or no time on the Navajo reservation. He uses political theory to attack certain NA writing, a practice that has its own unreal dimension. And the attacker from the “Gay” side is a porn writer famous for an essay about dumpster-diving.

What could be more American than small identity enclaves resisting the great media wave of uniformity, which produces movies and books so repetitious that unique little groups become bait for screen writers or novelists looking for something new and (hopefully) shocking. No wonder such groups resist being strip-mined. But why are the unmaskers so often self-interested?

Which is worse, going to the polls to elect our leaders without ever really knowing what the truth is? Or reading books about things that never happened? If you look at it in terms of the stakes, there’s just no question. So why are both phenomena treated with such high seriousness by journalists who are equally as vulnerable to deception, wishful thinking, and the blinding power of money, though their vocation is specifically charged with fact finding?

Back in the Sixties my mother-in-law used to scold me for reading novels because they were about things that never happened. “You should read TRUE things,” she said, though she was never known to be a newspaper reader. So I asked her for examples. “Movie magazines,” she said with perfect confidence. I was drilled in high school how to perceive propaganda, lies and exaggerations particularly used by the Red Russians to baffle and deceive us all. I think Korea was in there, too, but now we exempt South Korea. Still, it was useful training.

But one can step away from the whole problem -- at least with books -- by looking for the integrity of the human message that’s in the story. You’ll have to judge for yourself. Does this piece of writing ring true in terms of life as you’ve known it? Or is this an unreliable narrator whose point of view is controlling what we see and know? Like, for instance, say, Ed Abbey. Or Thoreau. Or Annie Dillard and her notorious night-hunting cat. Or Judy Blunt and her sledgehammer-wielding father-in-law. Are we getting to the point where every book must be accompanied by a dissenting point of view that points out omissions and misunderstandings? Why do we expect more regulation of our writers than we do of our political leaders, doctors, and corporations?

CLIMAX CULTURE (NOT about sex)

When UU Leadership School was devised in the Seventies by Peter Raible, Rod Stewart and Ord Elliott, the key idea was not church history or personal faith -- though those two defining elements were included -- but rather the nature of the institution itself. They were trying to teach us Organizational Design. All three of these men, plus others, were frank institutionalists who wanted the denomination to persist and thrive. They were deeply idealistic but practical at the same time and had made the Pacific Northwest District a laboratory for some of their ideas -- or maybe the PNWD produced the ideas.

One of them was the sustaining of the religious body without constraints from national boundaries, since the district stretched from the California border through Canada to Alaska. In the end, the district was seriously damaged by the political goals of those interested in a different institution: a separated Unitarian denomination in Canada, so the leaders on that side of the border would have more power. They ripped the PNWD in half. (My mother used to say, “for every bug there’s a bigger bug.”)

Anthropologists have a concept they call “climax culture.” No, it’s not about sex, though when I googled the phrase a large number of those entries came up, demonstrating once again that eroticizing and commodification have modern Western life by the throat, if not some other body part. What I’m addressing is the idea that sometimes all the forces, both internal and external, are aligned in such a way to cause a huge flowering of energy and creativity that is so impressive that people ever after yearn to return to it, even though the forces have faded.

Famously, 19th century Plains Indian culture was one of those climax cultures, one that still beguiles us. In fact, it is so vivid that this week a French scriptwriter has been sending me emails asking for “the facts” about Blackfeet, whom she is convinced are still like the 19th century. She looks for tipis and horses. When I chide her that she’s being romantic, she insists that she is not -- only Hollywood is romantic about Indians. But she believes that the Bureau of Indian Affairs is assigned to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and is an instrument of oppression.

Not that it can’t be, but after the outrageous last massacres following the Civil War, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was removed from the Department of War and assigned to the Department of the Interior. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is, theoretically at least, trying to make prosperity, not war. It is also trying to keep itself as an institution alive, as surely as the Unitarians. The Blackfeet tribe is also trying to keep ITSELF alive as an institution. They are all hoping that organizational design is one of the keys: the tribe is currently working through a new constitution. The whole association of American states (USA) is trying to preserve its coherence and effectiveness, and talks of redesigning our election process to get rid of the electoral college, now that technology has changed everything. Certainly organizational design, or the lack of it, has brought down our financial infrastructure.

But these may be small forces that cannot create a climax culture. New technology, esp. sources of energy, are certainly part of the picture. Horses and guns lifted the dog-and-arrow technology of the Plains Indians into enormous effectiveness. For a little more than a hundred years that empowerment captured the imagination of the planet before industrialization (notably the steam ship and the railroad) ended the story. Now the end of carbon-based energy may be ending industrialization.

Not that new technology, even the internet, can change the world as much as a new idea. For instance, the shift in morality after World War II and during the Cold War -- maybe prompted by “anthropology” -- released many gifted and energetic men in San Francisco to experiment with developing a whole new community, as surely as the shift away from Calvinism allowed the ideas of Unitarianism and Universalism to flower in the open as legitimate denominations when earlier they had been heresies.

Like any sudden release of energy, including that of the Plains Indians on horseback waving Winchester 66’s, the first reaction was chaos and horror on the part of those not included, who were invested in maintaining their OWN institutions. Sex, drugs and rock’n roll were the most obvious SF symptoms, but demonizing them has made them so attractive to the rebellious and transgressive that now they are part of the mainstream: sexualization, commodification, pharmaceuticals, and loud music follow us everywhere, even to small Montana towns, even in religious institutions. Some think the big boom in UUism came when birth control was devised. In Portland the Michael Servetus Singles group became an outlet for libertine behavior that would have hurt Servetus himself, that crusty old bachelor, more than being burned at the stake which he was. Certainly the UUA has been eager to reach out to the gay and lesbian community, to the point of sharing space with the Metropolitan Community Church, which is focused on the same demographic and thus in competition.

The point of Organizational Design was to deliberately devise principles and patterns that would manage the energy of change and variousness into less self-destructive channels. How do we keep the libertines and transgressors from driving all the quietly conservative people out of the institution or on the other hand keep all the conservative people from stamping out every innovation, every experiment or new kind of music (folk music, anyone?), every young person who might be the future.

That wildness in counterculture San Francisco gradually formed itself into a flamboyant climax culture now of considerable interest to us and of deep personal nostalgia to the people who were actually part of the mix. Gus Van Sant’s movie “Milk” will never play in Valier or even in Great Falls, but Netflix will soon have the DVD and then many here will quietly see it. Some of the ideas are already mainstream. The dynamics of terrorist assassination are vital to understand today.

How to think “properly” about gay culture is as relevant in small villages as anywhere else, simply because gays are here -- always were. But there are many kinds of homosexuality, some of them bent to the point of being criminal, like assault on children (which can also be heterosexual). Other modes are benign and constructive and always were, for instance, the woman-identified men of the Plains cultures who stayed in the village to help with heavy work, loved children in a protective way, and -- if necessary -- acted as hunters and warriors. This figure is one of the reasons gay men become so invested in Plains Indian culture.

I think that both eroticization and commodification have become cultural dead ends. We need new principles and I think they will be trans-national if only because our problems are. The tiny beginnings are already here but I wouldn’t point them out even if I could, because the status quo would stamp them out.

A CITY WITH A RIVER

When I was working for the City of Portland Bureau of Buildings, we would occasionally get a certain kind of faxed puzzle that architects liked. It was a composite of famous buildings in various cities around the planet. The Empire State Building next to the Space Needle next to the Eiffel Tower next to Big Ben. They had been carefully Photoshopped together to form a sort of meta-city.

Although when conscious I deny much interest in cities, when I dream in “second sleep” after I've been up for a while at 3AM, I dream of them consistently. Almost always on a hillside, always with a river, sometimes with me driving and sometimes walking through. I know where some of the images come from: early Sunday morning drives to preach in Oregon City and lunchtime walks through the streets of downtown Portland, cutting through the big fabulous department stores like Nordstroms or the downtown malls like Pioneer Square -- either the tiered plaza with the waterfall or the glassed atrium. Sometimes I’m remembering The Galleria, an old rebuilt department store with a slightly funkier atrium edged by a coffee shop that was a favorite refuge. Or 23th in NorthWest Portland where the upscale young Californians prevail, or SW Hawthorne where hippies run the shops and sidewalks. I liked them all. I passed through them and they passed through me.

Many of the images are from movies, esp. the BBC productions that I mostly watch and that always begin with a person hurrying down a corridor or a street -- maybe empty at night or maybe crowded in Dickensian detail. (They like to start with a car driving in the country, too, but that doesn’t fit my essay.) So the rooms I walk through in my head at night tend to be in motion, or at least the eye is moving. You know -- it’s life and all that.

I rove though blogs that way, too, but now and then I’m stopped for a long time. This has been the case with Barrus. “Stopping” hardly describes it, though, because he provokes explorations on paths through Google, finding places and books and people and ideas. Strangely, these paths often lead me into clearings or rooms where I’ve been before. So, looking for references to Barrus led me to Jack Fritscher, who was attending Loyola University a little later than I finished Northwestern University with a BS in Theatre. (‘61) Fritscher’s doctoral thesis (‘67) was one of the first on the work of Tennessee Williams. Williams was the dramatist I had loved the most since high school when I read “Summer and Smoke.” In the NU years I was in a production of “Suddenly Last Summer,” which I saw on the stage with Diana Barrymore, and I used scenes from “Summer and Smoke” for acting class. I saw “Sweet Bird of Youth” on the stage with Rip Torn and either Geraldine Page or Vivien Leigh. When I was teaching in Browning, I staged “The Glass Menagerie.”

So I read Fritscher’s thesis, which is posted on his website (www.jackfritscher.com), very carefully. Much of it concerns religion, which I am prepared to address because of my U of Chicago MA in Religious Studies. This is not easy reading. But there were two ideas that really struck me.

Fritscher sets up opposition between Puritan and Cavalier -- I’m not used to the Cavalier point of view being represented as anything but being an un-Puritan. Marty points out an ecological tension between the northern American colonies -- which tended to be small, barricaded settlements on peninsulas, highly defended against Indians, Satan and disorder and not particularly sympathetic to women -- and the Southern plantations of America which were riverside stretches of fertile land, long strips traversed in boats or on horseback, and eased by the labor of slaves and a tradition of gallantry.

When William Ellery Channing went down South from Boston to make a little money as a young man by tutoring, he was so shocked by the crystal, silver and fine furniture that he slept on the floor to keep in touch with reality. Another young Unitarian woman under the same circumstances came around the corner and confronted the overseer whipping a slave man. She nearly went mad trying to reconcile the seeming kindness of these people with the horror of such an act.

Tennesse Williams, born in St. Louis where things could go either way, had a genteel but impecunious mother and a cavalier father, who rode off into the sunset. His life was a struggle to find reconciliation that would allow him a place to live and love. His media was the theatre, which is an “animal” of the city. Written work does not allow the embodiment of dynamic symbolism that is at the heart of a Williams play.

This is quite interesting and I appreciate the insights. I can easily see how the claustrophobic and guarded world of a small cold-weather village closely supervised by church authorities on rigid terms could be both a jail and a safe place. (Valier!) But as the village grows into a true city with niches and labyrinths and neighborhoods, it becomes more graceful and possible for more kinds of people. It can support with population density the audiences necessary for theatre, opera, ballet, fine museums.

But then Jack Fritscher proposed that Christianity has been from the beginning a religion of cities, that Jesus and the apostles wasted little time along the road but went from one city to another to spread their word. I’ve always thought of primitive Christianity as a creature of individual households, gradually developing into small rural congregations, but maybe that’s just because this is the way the American frontier unfolded into denominations. Maybe Jesus was not thinking in terms of baptizing John in a country stream, but rather going into the Temple and driving out the money-changers, then becoming a rabbi in that very temple. Maybe he would have LIKED a Crystal Cathedral full of lambs.

The other striking idea proposed by Jack Fritscher is that a culture begins with intimate communication between two people. This is, of course, in the context of the gay community that formed in San Francisco in the Sixties and Seventies. Two men found each other, became more or less permanently bonded, pulled in others until there was a little circle, enough people self-identified as “belonging” to support a cafe or bar, and it grew from there. Pretty soon it was a movement, a counter-culture, with its signals and symbols, its theatre and publications.

Something similar must have happened in the art world, in the music world, in the religious world, and so on. There is now a burgeoning culture of liberals (or neo-puritans) who form foundations that can support conferences, monitoring, websites, and databases for environment, immigration, health, justice and a host of other issues. The need and justification for a gay community is weakening and, anyway, it has gotten to be a city that has neighborhoods for the burly guys in leather, the benign and funny bears, the monastics, the married with children and so on. It’s not enough to be gay -- what KIND of gay?

If I could really manage Photoshop, I’d love to attempt a montage of those neighborhoods, all gathered into one complex, gorgeous city whose river has lots of bridges.