Tuesday, June 28, 2011

A Complaint

House Bill 229, the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, passed in Tennessee by legislaters Dunn and Campfield:

“Human sexuality is a complex subject with societal, scientific, psychological, and historical implications; those implications are best understood by children with sufficient maturity to grasp thier complexity. Notwithstanding any other law to the contrary, no public elementary or middle school shall provide any instruction or material that discusses sexual orientation other than heterosexuality.”

These claims do not necessarilly follow. Perhaps what these bill makers are aware of at some level is if they were to spell out, logically, their decision-making process, it would be riddled with prejudice and irrationality.

While implemented, the bill encourages adolescents, leaving the “child sphere” access to information about heterosexuality, but delaying mention of homosexuality until they are already well into the “adult sphere” of high school. By banishing homosexuality to the later of high school instead of the graspable present-- we are placing a multitude of other implications on the nature of homosexuality.

We all have become unconsciously habitual-ized to the association of the word “adult” with things that are “dirty,” “unknowable,” and unsafe for children. Consider "Adult super stores." They are understood by everyone to be places that sell licentious sex-products and porn videos—we are clued in by the one operating word in this title: “adult.” And just as “adult superstores” are topographically located on the margins of towns, off the side of the interstate, away from homes—we are similarly locating homosexuality as outside day-to-day experience. By now legally casting homosexuality into this category we are perpetuating a fear. A fear of otherness, AIDS, and immorality: a fear that we have created. As Donna Haraway reminds us

“Biological and cultural determinism are both instances misplaced concreteness— i.e. the mistake of, first, taking provisional and local category abstractions… for the world, and second, mistaking potent consequences to be preexisting foundations.” [1]

By marginalizing homosexuality we are producing consequences within the population-- and in turn mistaking these consequences as inherent facts of matter. This is about justice. Heterosexuality isn’t any safer than Homosexuality, yet because we tell kids this is so, than we make it so.

What I am saying here is something most people already know. In fact the objections to be found with this sort of legislation cited above and this sort of thinking in general are so many and so obvious that perhaps many of us get tired of combating the same blindness with what feels like duh- answers. In this grey world moral-ambiguity, this sort of legal decision-making is one of the few things that is so unequivocally wrong. What are the words I am looking for with all of this? Oh, here they are: Fuck this Shit. But, fuck it any way you want.



[1] Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto.

The Henley Street Bridge is Closed but I Could Still Use the Gay Street Bridge to Visit South Knoxville

The road went straight up I swear, straight up so that my car, though a v-8, still said you've got to be kidding me. When I was in Martinique, our tour took us through road capillaries, yellow and blue buttoned homes futon as cultural sites of interest. Here it is not much different with me, oogling at the neighborhoods over the bridge like a bird foul scratching at the corn kernel
saying how about that. Each home popped up like a well made picture, they even added the rust to the pink tricycle, a slightly different shade than the dogwood blossoms. I didn't make eye contact with the woman at the mailbox, the shirtless man belly up in the yard, the dark face looking out the door window. My car was a gondeleir rigged on a track of Dollywood's newest hot attraction: Take the Car Through Appalachia.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

the love tunnel

This is how you feel love. Its simple. There is a love tunnel that you imagine. Along the wall there are alternating white and pink stripes like a candy cane. The colors swivel up like a fun house room. And at the end of the tunnel, you place a picture of who ever you want to love. The picture can be anyone.

Friday, June 17, 2011

"Disclose/withhold
Disclose/withhold
Disclose/withhold
Diswith/closehold
Diswith/closehold
Diswith/closehold"

--Fifteeenth Chapter (.blogspot)

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

P.J.'s heterotopia

Space: PJ's

Formal entry procedure: reciept=authentification for "coffee shop" zone.

Rules of "Coffee Shop"
-Use internet.
-Private/public person, is one available for interaction? Or closed to social advances?
-Look tired, busy, and/or forlorn
-Find romantic interest

If I enter into the coffee shop heterotopia, and my purple sweater falls off the back of my backpack, is that within the theory of abjection? My sweater was once "of me"-- then fell off without my knowledge. When the man in line behind me got my attention to return it, I felt embarrassment, as if I had dropped my dung unawares, or left a slime trail. If I had shed my sweater conciously, I feel like that embarrassment would be absent. The sweater acting outside of my control, yet of me, is the source of the discomfort. Frankenstein a hightened form of this with his monster on the loose?

A coffee shop like PJ's holds many incongruities inside its boundries: CNN shows me footage from Iraq; the woman on the phone beside me is speaking Spanish; everyone's internet windows are open to images and illustrations from around the world.



we woke up

We woke up with the umbrellas scattered around us. Carol was last to open her eyes, but the first to speak. That was one sick thunderstorm last night she said as she pushed some umbrellas off her legs. I wanted to agree but I also wanted to disagree so I didn’t say anything. Lets clean all this up said my best mate, Poppy, and we reset the rest of the umbrellas. Thanks for the download everyone said to me but I was already ready to get out of there.

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Times When I was Little that I Thought I was Molested But Actually Wasn't

1. At daycare, B.'s little brother who was my age. He did not know how to fasten his pants back up after the bathroom. He waddled into the playroom, concerned. I looked away out the window. Dirty foods by memory-association: apple juice, cheerios, and hot dogs without the bun.

2. Always my play-friends' little bothers. At R.'s house. I was five and leaving to go home. He was two and busted in naked. This mother laughed at him hugging me-- but me, a baby and brother-less, was shocked into red silence. I could not go back to that house which was blue/gray painted wood which was my favorite type of house. I did not tell my mother.

3. At the neighborhood pool. I was seven. He was K.'s stepbrother (back when I think, divorce and remarriage was still new and strange for me). He was six and this was on purpose. We were playing Marco Polo, and he squeezed my butt. The move was too confident and precise to be a blind and desperate gesture. I noticed also that his mother smoked cigarettes. Through naivety and upbringing, I associated the two evils as probably related. No one else I knew smoked besides my Godmother, whom I loved deeply. I did not go to the pool with K. again.

Epilogue.
In fifth grade, we had a puppet show to tell us about abuse. We were instructed that if someone touched us in embarrassing places that we should tell an adult we trusted. I burned for days with guilt for not speaking up. And for many years, I worked hard to convince myself that these events never happened.


Tuesday, June 7, 2011

the shaping place

New Orleans, as a city, funnels you. People here act a way that they wouldnt somewhere else. Each bent and gridded street shoots us around in a predetermined pinball machine. New Orleans is why M.'s romantic interest starts flirting and kissing other girls when she leaves town, why W.'s hook-up doesnt call; it is the overwhelming rule of the realm. We take the avenues allowed to us, start and stop on Rampart, Deacator, Camp, and Claiborne to find ourselves under shady trees or in a small store-- getting lost in the museum of New Orleans where each public statue, drunk pisser, and well-walked pooch is an homage to the idea of New Orleans. Its such a simple list to agree on, memorize, and recreate. We all perform New Orleans in New Orleans becuase New Orleans demands it.