TWILIGHT AT THE GETTY (fiction)

The Getty Art Museum in Los Angeles.

It was barely dusk with the sun lingering at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.  The two old friends -- only approaching retirement age -- stood side-by-side, looking out over the city.  They were at a wall instead of pipe railings, for which Meier was famous, and they said nothing.  His son-in-law had left them alone in case they did have something to ask or confess or admit.  But there was nothing.  Silence is sometimes eloquence.

The long plaza in front of the building had a reflection pond in it, not deep, but the water was exactly level with the travertine so that if there had been a shower, one couldn’t always tell the solid from the liquid and people walked into the water.  Carefully designed benches had been strategically put along the edge to guide people away.  But they didn’t want to sit.  And they thought they could tell the solid from the water.  At least in the architectural world.

He was a major success in Tinsel Town, making his living off preposterous assumptions that she had long ago discarded.  They had parted ways after college, where they had been film buddies.  Outsiders might have thought they paired off like birds in a courting context, but not.  It was the Fifties and film was a revelation, even if a person weren’t enrolled in a sophisticated university.  Not until Netflix was it again possible for a person with only a computer connection to watch film on that scale again.  The impact on her was now quite different.

He stood gracefully, a handsome man, expensively dressed.  To her older eye it was obvious that he was a gay married to a sympathetic woman.  And so was the son-in-law.  But she no longer defined gay in any kind of confining way -- more as a center from which to act.  But she was slowly realizing that he and his family thought she was also gay/lesbian and that was what had been the tie.

She was a lover of tough, competent, older cowboys -- Western men capable of both ruthlessness and tenderness, even mixed and simultaneous.  She saw that her friend was aesthetic and psychologically guarded.  He’d been in therapy all his life.  Of course, in this town, one had a therapist the way one had a good dentist -- keeping things straight.  To her, he seemed a shadow.  She had no idea what she seemed to him now.  A puzzle maybe.  Maybe that’s why he had sent for her to celebrate this major award he was receiving.

In the past he’d come -- with his wife -- to visit her on the east slope of the Rockies but it was not a success.  Her ancient primitive phone with a cat-chewed cord was not adequate and her old house was so small that the only way he could have privacy for what seemed to be intense arguments was to sit on the front stoop, which was only a cement slab.  When he had insisted on taking her out to dinner, the best place for miles around had only one dusty bottle of champagne and it wasn’t chilled.  He berated the waitress, who was a friend of hers and who looked at her with wounded eyes.

They had driven up to the mountains and the wife said, “Oh, how beautiful!”  But neither of them was really looking and, if they had, they would not have understood it.  They knew nothing about geology or weather patterns.  Living on the LA delta, there was no need.  So now, aware, she tried to look out over the jeweled valley below them where the lights were coming on.  What did he see?   “That’s Universal City over there.  The studio had to sell it to make up their losses on Caesar and Cleopatra.”  

When the town car chauffeur had seen her recognize her name on his placard, he smiled broadly.  He’d wondered what she’d be like.  They chatted on the way to the hotel which she understood later was very bad form.  He was clearly trying to tempt her into telling him things that would help him curry favor.  He laughed merrily when he left her at the hotel where she was rendezvousing with her host, though he wasn’t allowing her to stay there.  He had arranged for her to stay with a famous editor in her “modest” house on Mulholland Drive, thinking that since she wrote, this would be a career advantage.

The desk clerk would not give her the room number or even use the house phone to call upstairs.  Looking inscrutable, he made a soft-voiced call and soon the elevator had opened on her friend.  It was clearly a place of assignation in a strange combination of secrecy and boasting.  The lobby was furnished like a London men’s club.

She was famished but supper wasn’t until 9.  They met his wife and a couple of screen writers and cinematographers for drinks.  She was a very bad drinker, easily becoming confused, and consumed far too many breadsticks.  He ordered her drinks -- all with fancy names, evidently fashionable.  The place was too dark to read faces and no one tried to include her in the gossip anyway.

So her head went off into memories of university, so long ago that women had to be checked in at the dorm by 10PM and no men could come past the entryway, unless they were relatives.  It sounded almost Islamic now.  But there were ways -- duplicate keys to the back door, for instance -- so she met her friend at a nearby all-night laundromat and they took the El into Chicago to the strange places where foreign and experimental films were shown.  Sometimes they were a little sinister or in dubious parts of town, but the viewers were intense.  No popcorn.  She could not have gone to such places alone.

Bonds formed in such a setting were a strong entwining of emotion and rationality, subject and method, personal and universal, subjective and objective.  Liminal, perhaps,  on the threshold, nearly sacred and more felt than could be described, though they spent a lot of time over the days trying to figure it all out.  They were so engaged in this conversation that others thought they MUST be sleeping together.  But they were disembodied.  No one thought of suggesting gay.  They just weren’t sophisticated or experienced enough.

And now, he had -- she suspected -- fallen into a prescribed, expensive, political way of life while she had such a broad understanding of sexuality -- dimensions, practices, accommodations -- that something so binary as gay/straight was as irrelevant as male/female.  Anyway, sexual desire and sexual identity had shrunk in both of their lives, crowded out by success on his side and something on her side that she called “environmentalism” but it was much more sensory than that would imply.

When he dropped her off at the editor’s house, going past the gate by using the electronic code pad like an ATM, he didn’t come in but the woman met her at the door and showed her the bedroom.  It was mercifully plain except for the sheet of glass that was one wall.  The view, like the one from the Getty, was out across the valley, but on that first night there had been a thunderstorm traveling through with actual lightning striking here and there, occasionally exploding something electrical (transformers?) so that sirens -- faint and far away -- would trail throbbing through the streets behind strobing lights of fire trucks.

The two women sat outside a little while, editor with her customary bedtime Ovaltine and guest with club soda to settle an unaccustomed sort of food.  Was that pureed parsnips with caramalized cranberries?  At home she fried parsnips cut into coins and liked them, but never thought of cranberries.  If she had and if she’d HAD cranberries, which the local stores only carried at Thanksgiving, she’d have just thrown a handful into the pan.  Maybe she’d try it.  Someday.

The editor had inquired politely but guardedly about her writing, but was a bit baffled that she wrote about landscapes and natural history -- not politically, either, but in her own way.  “My dear, you really must develop a platform in order to sell, or no one will know what shelf is for your books or how to promote your image.”  Then she saw the guest’s face and -- since she was not stupid -- said softly,  “Of course, books are no longer put on shelves and you are a reality -- not an image.”

Now, the big celebration (ordeal) over and fatigue making the friends mellow, they stood at the Getty as though on the balcony of a Mediterranean villa in some time-out-of-time, their present lives fading to make room for memory.  Had they actually stood together this way on the El platform with stars barely visible through the heat-trembled air and felt merged, empowered and shaken by what they had seen?  Or was that just a kind of derivative memory of the powerful films?

The son-in-law came up from behind and put an arm over each.  “Ready to go?”  They were.  Flying back home, she decided she and her friend were related but different species who had shared an environment -- all those elms and all those paths.  Crocus in spring.

MY TAKE ON DEMISEXUALITY

At last a sexual category I can identify with!  DEMISEXUAL.   Like all the other categories, someone just made up the word so they get to define it.  They say,  “A demisexual is a person who does not experience sexual attraction unless they form a strong emotional connection with someone. . .  When a demisexual is emotionally connected to someone else (whether the feelings are romantic love or deep friendship), the demisexual experiences sexual attraction and desire, but only towards the specific partner or partners.

. . . “Demisexuals are not choosing to abstain; they simply lack sexual attraction until a close relationship is formed.”

I don’t know what this theorist would make of the pattern in which a person has had a deep, physical, complete relationship with someone that can never be duplicated again, often because of never being that young again.  It does discourage more relationships that don’t seem likely to ever duplicate that intensity.  I don’t think that’s demisexuality.  Also, getting a little buzz out of someone who is reminiscent of that first love is not demisexuality.  

I really don’t like the word very much, but it does usefully distinguish between two stages of intimate relationship, and I’m grateful that the “primary” one is the one given attention, that the physical is secondary.  I confess that I’m lacking in the capacity for instant desire.   I mean, I might note approval of a big handsome hairy powerful man, but that would be no reason to hop into bed with him, no guarantee of having any affection for each other.  If I did progress to the point of real intimacy, it would rip me apart when it ended.  Which is another good reason not to get involved again.

But I’m grateful that now I have a label and a “letter” to claim:  LGBTXD.  Until now I was merely an X.   I’m also pleased that there are more points identified on the continuum that is sexual desire, not even mentioning gender identification, because surely a person could be LGBT and D at the same time and surely whether one thinks of oneself as male or female has little to do with it.  One can have emotional connection of considerable intensity and depth with a child, a very old person, a disabled person.  It wouldn’t even have to be in words: it could be in terms of music or art.  D’s, as I understand them, could easily accommodate an epistolary relationship based on the exchange of letters or even a relationship with someone who is dead but who left a written record that may trigger a strong emotional connection.  Our society completely ignores this.  Victorians did not, but they had many occasions to be connected only by letters.

An intense connection in terms of emotion and thinking, which is quite common in an academic setting but certainly not confined to it, can be innocently public.  The delight and intensity of it can please people nearby.  People referring to overheard dialogue with my close friends along these lines have called us “the two philosophers,” not the two lovers.  I haven’t experienced many others wanting to butt in or feeling jealous about it.  But when we came into the same space, I could see the other person light up and feel myself become incandescent at the connection.   I get a little rush from spotting their name in my email.  There is none of the dominance or exclusiveness or ownership that gets into physical sexual relationships, maybe because these talking friendships aren’t a basis of economic dependence or governed by the laws that are necessary when children or property ownership are involved.

The only “problem” with being a D is that no one has figured out how to commodify it, unless you count old-fashioned romance novels -- as contrasted with the contemporary bodice-rippers about hook-up culture where you go straight to bed and then get to know each other.  People conflate sex and love so much that it’s hard to describe a love that isn’t physical, much less orgasmic.  You can pay for sex, but not for Demisexuality.  It happens at a deep level, below consciousness, in “felt” concepts rather than words.  Part of it is the product of prior experiences and part of it is a matter of something sought, something yearned for, a kind of meshing.

Adults having explicit sex with children is problematic, partly because it is forced, partly because it is often physically damaging due to the mismatch of size and strength, and because it requires emotional capacity that can be exceeded or distorted.  It rewires the brain in ways that may be crippling for the rest of life, dropping out necessary steps of development.  It can’t help being one-sided -- but there are exceptions.  I don’t know whether this might be true of D-sexuality that has not become physical.

In fact, I don’t know enough about how D-sexuality (being technically A-sexual until a deep emotional and intellectual connection is already established) eventually becomes overt physical sex.  Is it at a point of crossover to kissing and embracing?  Or must there be full-on fucking to change from demi- to full?  What if one wants to move to the physical and the other doesn’t?  That might apply to an adult relating to a child.  Is it a failure if the friendship just stays a friendship?  Why would it be?

Demisexuality is often a matter of long-distance relationships -- in the past on paper and now via electronics -- that CAN translate into a desire to make real body contact.  Again, if one person feels a strong emotional and intellectual connection and the other is only after some fucking, the asymmetry renders it immoral.  So I would add the requirement of emotional/intellectual equality to any legitimate demisexuality.

That means people need to be really developed in terms of their brain and heart life; children are not likely to handle such a relationship without some risk being involved, not least the grief of an ending.  The adult or dominant half of the relationship must take responsibility for that.

Most people might guess that a relationship based on the exchange of ideas or even shared affinities would be dry and formal.  But I’ve had ecstatic conversations -- even in writing -- about theatre or art.  Ideas can be deliriously Dionysian and if we recognized that more clearly, people would demand more education.  But it’s still not necessarily some kind of foreplay for going to bed.  It can be complete in itself and it can persist without the two people even being in proximity.  It’s not fantasies about lust;  it’s something real happening in the mind.  

The product will not be children but maybe a book, a symphony or a painting.  Even more likely, and closer to my experience, it might be progress in a cause, a new way of seeing, a genuine cultural advance.  Such rewards are not needed as justification for a relationship that exists for itself, as its own reward, which is a wonderful thing -- I sometimes worry that it is getting lost.

DISSOCIATION, AVOIDANCE, HYPERAROUSAL

It’s what -- sixty years? -- since Kinsey asked men about their sex lives and rocked everyone with the news that many of them had sex with other men? This in a time when they were well-advised not to admit it? And now we’re barely getting around to surveying children about whether they’ve ever been sexually abused. They have. In such high proportions -- a third admitted it which means many unadmitted or even unrecognized or repressed victims-- that we’re rocked all over again. And yet why are we surprised when our whole culture mixes sex, power, money, ownership over and over. Now even JonBenet Ramsey’s father is saying maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to dress a little child up like a seductive grown woman and put her on display. Ya think?

Now the research has gotten far enough along to identify three traumatic consequences of sexual abuse for both boys and girls. These consequences re-impose the trauma over and over.

(1) highly distressing intrusive thoughts of the sexual abuse,

(2) avoidance of thoughts, emotions, and situations related to the abuse,

(3) hyperarousal.

Pretty understandable even in terms of ordinary trauma, but with the added element of sex, stakes go up because so much of our idea of morality is bound to sex of any sort. We don’t worry about the morality of money or even about the morality of killing civilians in war, but sex is to us more powerful than religion, indeed it has become a religion with priests of its own. Not that differently than in the most backward shiria law countries who kill girls to rid themselves of dishonor.

In fact, I would say that our whole culture is showing these same three symptoms. To review:

(1) highly distressing intrusive thoughts of sexual abuse,

(2) avoidance of thoughts, emotions, and situations related to abuse,

(3) hyperarousal.

Check out the plots of our media, take a look at our newspapers or the behavior of politicians as zealously reported, listen to the imaginary life of right wing radio hate-mongers. They use the abusive language, they describe and exaggerate behavior, they express distress and scorn, but all the time in the midst of their obsession they insist that we should repress (avoid) such thoughts, emotions, and situations. Good counselors know that repression is a great way to remain attached while pretending not to be. Hyperarousal -- yes, I’m surprised that so many of them need viagra since they so easily rise to rage. But most of them are old men.

These intrusions, often thoughts (eg, self-blame, self-loathing) are then avoided through:

dissociation,

substance use,

or other avoidant-coping strategies.

“This avoidant stance, in sexual situations, can be hazardous as it interferes with the ability to confront risk, negotiate safer sex, and assert safety behaviors. Hyperarousal, chronic activation of the alarm response, interferes with the person’s ability to distinguish safe from unsafe situations. In sexual situations, the symptoms of hyperarousal impede the ability to make accurate and realistic sexual risk appraisals. This may lead to a loss of self-efficacy (or other important social or cognitive variables integral to self-care), as one doubts one’s ability to identify risk or one’s ability take steps to offset it.” (J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr Volume 59, Number 4, April 1, 2012 www.jaids.com | 331Editorial J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr Volume 59, Number 4, April 1, 2012)

Erik Erikson wrote two books that speculated about how some individuals can be representative of their times: “Young Man Luther” and “Gandhi’s Truth.” If a person can epitomize patterns in the culture, why can’t a culture personify the structure of individuals? Are we not now in a period that doubts its self-efficacy, it’s ability to take care of itself? Don’t our politicians doubt our ability to identify risk and take steps to offset it? Don’t we go back and forth between being obsessed with sex and trying to deny every trace of it?

What are the traumas that threw us into this? Pretty clear that 9/ll was a double-phallic cataclysm, two towers destroyed by two airliner jets in a from-nowhere coup. What about the spectacle of a president who got his semen on a dress whose owner flaunted it on television? What about the neglectful and confused destruction of a major, even iconic, city, New Orleans with its promises of blue-hot nights? But maybe it started with the twentieth century wars, for which some of those old men are nostalgic. They were important then.

Looking at these events in such a “high culture” way is a little fanciful but no more so than post-modern thought. In fact, maybe it IS post-modern thought. But it has no particular value unless it suggests some way to address it. Dissociation (a changed consciousness that eliminates awareness of the problem) and substance abuse are rampant but seem ineffective. Projection is the one we like the best -- it’s all the fault of the “other.”

The usual ways of addressing trauma include talking -- which can mean testifying about what happened, which requires a convincingly protected place where the talking can happen. (A court setting is hardly safe but stories written under a pseudonym might work. Or the Internet.) Art is a kind of “talking,” an expression of emotion that resolves the pressure and, given the acquisition of skill, can provide a healing sense of accomplishment. (Our schools are eliminating the arts.)

What about the content of the secrets? Research is demanded because it has become clear that our assumptions are wrong. What we think is true and happening is only a comforting fantasy that describes a set of forces and practices that don’t exist anymore, if they ever did. Family, dependable jobs, homes, retirement funds, investment.

Supply of basic needs (housing, food, medicines) is woefully lacking for too many people in this culture. It’s not uncommon for a troubled family to choose one person among them, often a child or maybe a woman or the darkest person, to be the scapegoat, heap them with blame for whatever happens, and throw them out. The whole culture does this, identifying children to send into the labyrinth where the minotaurs of combat, commerce, and cupidity lurk. We make sure the young have no guiding thread, no map, no GPS, by underfunding schools and indulging in as many wild theories about education as we have about diet.

Young people run from us. Who can blame them? Why are we surprised?

SOLDIER'S GIRL: Review and Reflection

Gender binaries have become so troublesome that social philosophers have begun to reflect on them.  When I say “trouble,” I mean murder.  People are murdered because they don’t fit our notions of gender binaries.  I’m pondering “Soldier’s Girl,” which is a movie version of a real event in which a soldier was bludgeoned to death as he slept -- by his fellow soldier, his dorm mate.  The killer administered capital punishment for loving a person who crossed the binary division -- not just a cross dresser but a transsexual person in the process of going from male to female.  Post-surgery, the relationship would no longer have been “homosexual.”

This script is exemplary in its clarity, its foreshadowing of what we know will happen, and its simplicity in presenting a convincing love story.  Calpurnia (Lee Pace) is elegant, played with dignified grace by a male actor in prosthetic breasts and a wig.  She is not a campy over-the-top swish figure like the announcer at the competition she’s in, but a calm, generous, balanced person whose femininity is more Grace Kelly than Cher.  (Actually, she has shoulders like Linda Evans.  I wonder whether a genital eversion amounts to as much plastic surgery as Cher has had.  Chas (formerly Chastity) Bono knows for sure.)

Barry (Troy Garity) is a simple guy -- not too swift and not very experienced.  I kept thinking about Pierre in the Audrey Hepburn version of “War and Peace,” and found out why when I went to imdb.com -- Henry Fonda played Pierre and Fonda was this actor’s grandfather.  Garity looks like his father, Tom Hayden.  It’s Calpurnia who is reminiscent of Jane Fonda, his mother.

Leggo words, assembled from particles, are unfortunate predeterminers.  “Homosexual” is as misleading as “atheist.”  Both are stuck together from pre-existing concepts and both over-control the discussions.  It is possible to be homosexual while being strongly “male” and possible to be deeply religious while not believing in God (theism).

Gender identity emerges from the interaction of a number of continuums.  To which of the binary are you assigned physiologically?  Even without discussing the chromosomal variations (not just xx and xy, but also xxx or xyy or broken versions with incomplete or doubled sections (sextions?) of chromosomes) and all the bodily and temperamental variations a person can be born with or develop at puberty or have traumatically imposed, common sense and ordinary experience shows that a male can be anywhere on the continuum of “maleness” in terms of size, aggression, and so on.  He can be Conan the Barbarian but if his sperm isn’t dynamic and fertile -- is he a male?  The same for a female.  She can be the most curvaceous and alluring woman of all time, but can she produce healthy babies?  Which criteria are you choosing?  

The aspect that crushes all the life out of discussion is desire in the sense of lust.  Whom do you want to have sex with?  Someone the same sex or someone of the opposite sex?  But those aren’t the only choices or even the controlling choices.  In this movie it is clear that Barry loves elegance, high class presentation, kindness, and Calpurnia does, too, so they meet there, escaping the accusation of "low class."  They are both genuine in the sense of character and they meet there in honesty and acceptance.  She is knowing and he is innocent so opposites can also meet.  These two are not game players.

So what about authenticity and truth?  Who is putting on more of a show in drag, the singers at Visions or the soldiers in camo fatigues at the base?  Is the announcer at the competition more of a cross-dresser than the female sentry at the gate in the beginning of the film?

Our culture makes a binary of gender identity more than others do.  The Navajo defined many roles, some depending on what one wants to do -- the things normally done by women because they are anchored by babies or the things normally done by men who go out to hunt.  In many cultures the priestly/sacred/holy people are not gender-assigned or are considered both.  But they cannot be menstruating women.  It’s the baby part that’s the big divider.  But even then, an assigned nurturer is also a mother even if male.

Simpler animals sometimes have the ability to change back and forth between male and female, maybe depending on the ecology or maybe on whether there’s a shortage of one or the other.  Some animals carry both genders and can fertilize themselves.  There is probably not a lot of pillow talk in those species (angleworms), but people do talk to themselves. (jokes)  Androgeny and/or bisexuality are quiet values in some human contexts.  Think Teresias.

No one understands how it is that an apparent man can be innerly and utterly convinced of being a woman or vice versa.  It is easy to understand that some people don’t fit into the culture’s idea of what they ought to be and how that stigma can cause them to be targets.  Ugly women, pretty men.  Brainy women, ineffective men.

How did the sexual identity of “whom do you desire” get to be so important in our lives?  Haven’t there always been people who liked their own sex better than the opposite one?  (“Liked” being a euphemism for wanting to fuck.  Why so many euphemisms now that kids use the “f” word as much as combat Marines?  What kind of role swap is that?)  Haven’t there always been people who found elements that deeply touched them and made them yearn for fusion with individuals that were not “appropriate”?  (I hate that prissy word.)  One of my favorite movies is “Carrington,” about a totally mismatched couple who were deeply in love with each other though they fucked nearly everyone in sight and the bedpost as well.  

Why is sex the controlling moral dimension in our lives in a time when we can surgically change our bodies, chemically control our fertility, get professional help with relationships, earn money, co-habit with no license, and die for our country without regard for gender?  Is that why?  Is it all this freedom that makes everyone obsess so much about the subject?

Or is it that sex keeps us from thinking about violence and greed?  It’s not that we’re all so sexually hot or why would there be such a need for Viagra?  Pole-in-the-hole is not all there is to sex.  REAL intercourse in the sense of physical intimacy is skin and brain: a million little physical, mental and emotional transactions of sensation that enmesh and bond and console.  Otherwise, it’s friction followed by a sneeze.

There are some fascinating levels to think about in this film but one of the most absorbing -- if trivial -- is the difference between fiction and reality.  The real Calpurnia is certainly attractive, but in quite a different way from the movie version.  The real one is almost cute, a little touch childlike.  The movie version of the military camp is toned-down with a homogenized (they all look sort of cub-like) cast including tolerant hets, Asians and blacks.  Testimony was that the taunts and harassment of Barry were actually much worse.  Andre Braugher is one of my fav actors and always carries with him a kind of moral force not seen a lot in ordinary life.   Barry’s mother is not as I would have imagined her, but no doubt this murder was an experience that changed her.

It is my hope that this movie will help to change a culture lost in hatred and ignorance.  It’s not the only force for good, but it is a vivid and heart-breaking one.

AS MANY GENDERS AS STARS IN THE SKY

An understanding of sexuality/gender assignment that is based on a mere duality, especially one that is enforced by the culture, will always end in conflict, destruction, and suffering. This insistence on duality comes from an intolerance of ambiguity that results from an over-coded society that always wants to know exactly what IS and how much it’s WORTH because they’re afraid of being fooled by an impostor or sold a bill of goods. How can they enforce laws if they don’t know how to define exactly what’s happening? They don’t want to admit that there are things outside their experience -- maybe FAR outside.

When I was working at Multnomah County Animal Control in the late Seventies, there was no law that addressed b*sti*lity -- that is, sex with animals -- because the nice people who wrote out the law had no idea such things happened. When the police were asked to shut down a performer who had an act with Great Dane dogs, they called us to see if they could use the animal cruelty law. We were reduced to asking them about the expression on the dogs’ faces. A woman called to beg us to take away the family cat because her husband would only make love to it instead of her. We wondered about the man’s anatomy but told her she needed a counselor because there are LOTS of cats. He’d just get another one. These are sexual problems that are only problems if they interfere with human life. Mammalian sex, when anatomically possible, is a bigger category than human sex, but no human has sex that isn’t at least half mammalian.

But this is going to be a book review on a much higher philosophical and sociological plane and I’m sure you’re relieved. “Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality and Spirituality” is an anthology edited by Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang. I mentioned it to Alice Kehoe at last Friday’s Piegan Institute seminar (She's in it.) and got a quick lecture on why the title is no good. But the questionability of the title is part of the point of the book. Words always interplay with the reality of the phenomena in question, esp. when webcrawlers are involved, which is why I spell some words with stars to fool the software.

Early “penetrators” into the cultures of the North American people were shocked, SHOCKED to discover that some of the things that Euros thought were disgraceful were quite taken for granted and calmly dealt with in NA tribes. Euros are always inclined to be Latinate and to “conceive” of things in terms of thesis/antithesis -- in this case without synthesis. So they assigned “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” as opposed and mutually exclusive. But the nice thing about Latinate words is that you can build your own: “omnisexuality,” “ur-sexuality,” “meta-sexuality,” or as Fritscher does, “homomasculinity,” or “hypermasculinity” with, of course, female equivalents across the divide. And then there’s “intersexuality” which isn’t used later in this blog to mean sex across the genders but rather people genuinely and medically not assignable on one side or the other. We're talking identity, not partner preference.

But first, the book called “Two-Spirit People” was meant to address BOTH the vocabulary and the divvying up of territory involved in both the reality and the derived descriptions of non-Euro NA tribes before the missionaries told them what their positions ought to be.

Some people became enamored with the word “berdache” which was in part was Alice’s bone of contention. (I can’t help the puns. My subconscious does it.) It’s a very Euro word. Here’s the historiography in a nutshell: “The earliest use of the term Jacobs could find when doing research for “Berdache: A Brief Review of the Literature" (1968) was in the Jesuit Relations (from the 1700’s) where such individuals were condemned. ‘The word originally came from the Persian bardaj [barah], and via the Arabs [bardaj] spread to the Italian language as bardasso [berdasia] and to the Spanish as bardaxa or bardaje [bardaja] by the beginning of the sixteenth century. About the same time the word appeared in French as bardache . . .[and] refers to the passive homosexual partner.” Since these people included “kept boys” or what the Brits call “rent boys,” other people who were homosexual but adult and NOT kept or for sale, did not like the term. “Two-spirit” also has problems since it clings to doubleness.

This set of essays is operating on three levels. The highest level is trying to open-mindedly understand how any one set of folks figured out how to think about their gender inclinations -- not just sex, but for instance who does the dishes, who does the hunting, who does the gardening, and what do they wear? The second level is about terminology: what do you call a dignified, functioning man/woman? Or woman/man? Or is that different? What’s anatomy and what’s occupation? Can there be compromises? Can people move back and forth? Things can be very complex.

The third level is accounts of what a set of rules can do that doesn’t fit an individual, forcing them to suffer and struggle, whether just in their self-image or in significant economic ways like getting a job or making a supportive alliance with someone else that's NOT based on sex.

When I was doing my chaplaincy in a big regional Illinois hospital, over a ten week period, there were two babies born who were between the sexes. At that time there was no book like “Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of Two Sexes” by Gerald N. Callahan, which has been skillfully reviewed in Ms. magazine. The reviewer, Leanne Mirandilla suggests “not only are there more than two genders, but the argument could be made that there are as many genders as there are stars in the sky.” She says “Around 2,000 children per year in the U.S. are born intersexual due to a variant set of chromosomes (not simply XX or XY), or various enzyme or hormone deficiencies.” (I would add “excesses.” There are other matters, such as the uterine environment.)

What I would like to see next would be more articles like “Saga of the unshaven armpit – skins and feminists.” By Gyasi Ross www.indiancountrytoday.com/opinion/.../54554112.html

(“Skins” is inside Indian slang for Native Americans. Don’t use it if you didn’t know what it meant.) This blog is a little mini-lesson about the difference between “matriarchal” and “matrilineal” interwoven nicely with an account of what economics can do to gender roles in a family. Even so do political opportunists and oddballs leap upon anthropological ideas to confirm their own life desires. So who can believe their categories?

Economics rules. You don’t fit your culture, you starve. Therefore, you sham. Which hurts. Wouldn’t it be better to create an economic scene that let everyone eat?

Those two babies? They were surgically and medicinally altered to force them into one gender or the other. That was 1980. Might not happen today.

OUR BODIES, OUR DRESS-UPS

Are transvestites making a fashion statement or a political statement?

This is a follow-up to the post on Colette, which prompted my cousin and I to agree that we both love to wear tailored slacks and man-style dress shirts WITH, of course, jewelry but maybe man-style heavy gold chains. We’re trying to track down a copy of the Threads Magazine #121 which had an evidently VERY popular article on the inside construction of a Colette jacket. Clearly, one of the things that makes male clothing attractive is the amount of tailoring and shaping that goes into men’s suits. I used to linger in front of the windows of Mario’s in Portland, where the slacks and jackets had detailing beyond anything in the women’s clothing. They were meant to be sturdy, convenient and classic. Katharine Hepburn, Queen Christiana, Greta Garbo clothing.

I suspect that may be part of the secret to the appeal of Tim’s “leathers,” too. They are often very detailed and ornamented, always with metal, but they were originally meant to be protection, road armor. I suppose that the original metal armor was often beautifully detailed and meant to convey a message of intimidation, identification, and simple prestige. Certainly the breastplates of American Indians were as much decoration as protection.

How much of a political statement can a person make with clothes when everyone wears unisex jeans-and-t-shirt? It’s pretty plain who’s female and who’s not, but status is close to moot. The clothing indicator I stumble over is in the hospital where doctors, nurses, and aides all wear scrubs. What prompts this tendency towards uni-dressing, the “sweats” phenomenon? (Around here the older women try to reclaim their femininity -- or maybe prestige -- by adding decorations to their pastel sweats: embroidery, rhinestones.)

I’m not just thinking about cross-dressing, but about the whole symbol-system by which we form our ideas of our own and other people’s identities, which in our sex-obsessed society is attached to sex more than anything else. This is a culture that encourages our early teen and sub-teen girls to dress like prostitutes and constantly drags rape into the conversation, while pretending that every male -- no matter how much a child or a non-fighter -- can fend for himself.

By now I hope we all know that gender/sex in the European context is defined in the Manichean way as a polarity, two mutually exclusive categories attributing more power to the male side. Anything that doesn’t conform to that, either in clothing, in sexual desire for others or in sexual appeal TO others, is ruled deviant, perverted, OUT. People who find that not only untrue but also unjust are attracted to other cultures, esp. the NA cultures that missionaries tried so hard to stamp out. This means there’s been a certain amount of reverse assimilation (wannabes), but it’s been muddled and helter-skelter, This book of essays I’m reading, “Two-Spirit People,” (ed. Jacobs, Thomas and Lang. U of Illinois Press @1997) tries to find some order.

In terms of Native American tribes, the two gender categories exist but on the coast most of the tribes defined them in terms of occupation: what you do all day (cook? hunt?); and on the Plains most of the tribes defined them in terms of spiritual calling -- a mystical and personal experience that lifts a person above gender. When I was an animal control officer wearing a deputy sheriff’s uniform and badge (my occupation), I startled women who came upon me in the ladies’ room. But when I was in the ministry (attracted to the things that male ministers do, esp. the preaching, which I interpreted as a spiritual calling that rose above gender and so on), many ministers both male and female were covertly dedicated to proving their sexuality one way or another, straight or gay acting out. It was scary for them not to be either/or. I rather liked ignoring either/or.

It’s interesting that Two-Spirit people are always Native American. There cannot be black or white or yellow Two-Spirits: perhaps the true doubleness is that they are BOTH gay/lesbian AND NA. In fact, they had a struggle in SF with AIM to be GAI, according to these essays. (Translation: American Indian Movement and Gay American Indian, both formal organizations.)

Now there seems to be a progression back towards a more continuous, multi-valent, morphing understanding of sex/gender. The gay men led the way, not least the contingent who insisted on hypermasculinity rather than “lavender” sissy-style roles. Then the lesbians demanded equity -- sauce for the gander means sauce for the goose. Cross-dressers were in there somewhere and now we seem to have reached a point where people can remodel their bodies as though it were clothing. We have also reached a point in environmental pollution when more and more babies are born with ambiguous sexuality -- both or neither sets of organs, requiring medical and social decisions based on their genome. What do you do with a baby that looks normal but tests XYY or XXY?

Most baffling of all we have finally heard some people saying they are not the gender they appear to be: women who insist they are psychologically men and the other way around, entirely without any chemical or physical indicators. They just FEEL that way. Intensely.

In theory we are supposed to be a culture that values individuality and uniqueness almost to an extreme, but then when someone truly unique (Michael Jackson?) turns up, we can’t help thinking of freaks. Evidently it was pretty hard on him, too. Is “child” a gender? That’s the way it seemed to be for Jackson. Little Boy Blue, Little Toy Soldier, The Little Prince, beloved of other children. We still can’t help thinking “pedophile” and shuddering.

Yet who among us has not in childhood played doctor? Even with dolls or pets? Puppenphilia? But that only picks up the dimension of desire and curiosity on the part of the child -- and says nothing of being a bored baby beauty queen, rouged and desired, quite apart from what she might want, which might be playing in the mud. Or maybe we’re talking about a boy who would like to try on an evening gown and high heels if his father wouldn’t hit him for it. They could end up with extinguished sexuality.



When I was little we had a big box -- maybe four feet cubed -- full of discarded clothes we called “dress ups.” For a long time we dressed up innocently. I think it had nothing to with identity and everything to do with theatre. At what point did it stop being innocent? Or did we just lose interest? Or was there a “why not” after all?

After all, we were smooth-bodied, no bosoms, no bottoms, no body hair. Our desires were for food and safety. How much of our cultural preoccupation with sex comes from not having enough nurturing and protection as children and hoping to attract them even in adulthood? How much of our preoccupation or lack of same when it comes to clothes is a throwback to the days when other people dressed us instead of ourselves?