Come to my window, and go ahead and drag me out for tax evasion

Exhibit A that the "No on 8" movement has gone totally Walden.

From The Chicago Tribune:

How mad is Melissa Etheridge about California's rejection of gay marriage?
Mad enough to withhold her taxes.

The rocker, married five years to actress Tammy Lynn Michaels, posted a
fiery blog Thursday about the passage of Proposition 8, which limits marriage to
heterosexual couples.

"I am taking that to mean I do not have to pay my state taxes because I am
not a full citizen," Etheridge wrote at thedaily beast.com. "I mean, that would
just be wrong, to make someone pay taxes and not give them the same
rights."

The idea, she wrote, also could extend to other gay Californians: "I am
sure Ellen [DeGeneres] will be a little excited to keep her bazillion bucks that
she pays in taxes too."

Somewhere Ellen is like, "Godammit, Etheridge. Maybe you would stand inside your hell and hold the hand of death, but I've got celebrities to interview and mini-cheesecakes to pass out."

--Punch

16,000 gay people afraid to divorce, intimidated by other gays

The passage of Proposition 8 has had one unexpected side effect. A special group within the LGBT movement—the almost 20,000 gays who were married in the few months between the Supreme Court decision that made it legal and last week’s elections that made it illegal—have reported receiving unusual amounts of pressure. Sam Brown, who married her five-year girlfriend Janet on the beach, received a letter from a former UPS colleague who had been unable to convince her own girlfriend to tie the knot on such a short deadline: “Yeah, it just said. You guys might be the only ones, so don’t mess up.” Brown said the intimidation didn’t stop there. At the capitol rally in Sacramento, she reported “getting the woogily eye” from several unmarried friends who forced her to hold the “My Vagina Is a Flower That Has the Right To Marry Like People Of Color” sign. Janet was not in attendance. Brown suggested this is not the first time Janet has avoided a rally: “She hasn’t come to Take Back the Night since college.” Sam isn’t the only one being coerced. Jonathan Coller, who got hitched to his much older trollish gentleman friend despite unanimous criticism from his young, hot friends and family, reports it is widespread, “yeah, we’re all feeling it. No one’s going to let us forget it. We literally can’t get divorced.” Basically.

--j

Yep, I'm Gay!

It’s hard to keep up sometimes with what’s going on with gays and the Right. What is grouped under “anti-gay” legislation results in seemingly confusing permutations that vary in severity and are only loosely related to marriage. In 2004, Kansas banned not only gay marriage but eliminated any rights queers might have to make contracts with each other (a social death). In this last election, Arkansas banned any unmarried couple from adopting or fostering children, but billed the initiative as anti-gay (not anti-everyone-unmarried). More traditional anti-marriage propositions passed in Arizona and California. (The surprise of California is quaint.) Understanding these permutations doesn’t just require an analysis of the Right’s political maneuvering, it requires an understanding of how we talked about queers and the language mobilized to describe and represent us.

Those of us who grew up queer in the mid- and late-nineties often feel we’ve inherited a political imperative – to be normal, but also to fight the fight we’ve been given. Talk about sexuality in the nineties centered around “choice” (as in, “why would anyone choose something sooooo haaarrrd?!?); and “normalcy” (as in, “I’m just like you. My love is just like your love”). See our spokesperson, Ellen Degeneres, on 20/20 in 1997.

Ellen also reminds us that almost all talk of homos in the nineties was figured through sexual practice and sex acts and not through gender or processes of cultural disciplining. In refusing the label “lesbian,” in fact, Ellen refuses something important about gender as an axis of her identity (remember how she only ever talked about being “gay”?). Something about discussing one’s “femininity” in the nineties was odious to many in the gay rights movement.

(Perhaps because, in 1997, femininity was the province of these ladies.)

So the nineties talk of queerness centered on sex acts that weren’t a choice and that we could perform with normalcy. No wonder we’re saddled with marriage now. And no wonder our contemporary protests often involve queers producing/affirming sex acts by choice and trying to recast them as rebelliously abnormal:
I do not mean to say that as political strategies they [marriage, dyke marches, talk of "choice" and sex acts] are wholly ineffectual. But we need a more historicized understanding of how we inherited the language we did, and the Clinton era is a good place to start.

And because Ellen Degeneres is, after all, the gift that keeps on giving.

--Punch

That Tina Fey makes some good points.

From last week's 30 Rock:
Donaghy: We're not the best people.
Lemon: But we're not the worst.
Both: Graduate students are the worst.

manifest destiny

Dick Cheney, November 3, 2004: “President Bush ran forthrightly on a clear agenda for this nation's future and the nation responded by giving him a mandate.” [Bush won popular vote by 3.4%, electoral by 35.]

Barack Obama, November 4, 2008: “And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn - I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too.” [Obama won popular vote by apprx. 8%, electoral by (most likely) 191)

--Punch

Hope is the Thing with Feathers

When Barack Obama spoke at the 2004 Democratic National Convention I was in Avon, North Carolina, a tiny town in the Outer Banks, with my girlfriend and her family. A few nights before his speech we witnessed a small miracle – tiny luminescent creatures pulled in with the tides, millions of them glowing in the whitewater as the waves crashed on the shore. The moon was new, invisible, and the sea spread out in blankets pecked with the light from the bodies of these creatures. Like stars at your feet.

The day after Obama’s keynote, in a gas station at the very edge of the country – just a thin band of earth, actually, a broken finger of land – in a state that hasn’t gone blue since Carter, the folks were talking. The Charlotte Observer and The Wall Street Journal newsstands were empty. The rain washed cigarette butts over the edge of a metal ashtray. Pickup trucks crawled by on the narrow road between the sea and the sound. A man with stubby legs and a red raincoat said to the girl behind the counter, “That guy is going to be the next president of the United States.”

He probably didn’t realize that as he predicted Obama’s success he also predicted Kerry’s defeat. He probably didn’t even really think he would be right. He was hoping out loud. Emily Dickinson, sweet recluse with a wild heart, said of hope:

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

The traditional reading of Dickinson’s poem, of course, is that “extremity” means extremity of circumstance – the bird of hope asks for nothing even in times of crisis. Yet Dickinson was a great ironist, notoriously dense. When she writes, “never, in extremity,/It asked a crumb of me” she may mean that its not-asking is extreme, that hope asks for nothing in a way so complete that it is absurd. Extreme non-action.

In his victory speech last night, Obama assured the nation that there was much more work to do: “And, above all, I will ask you join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it's been done in America for 221 years — block by block, brick by brick, callused hand by callused hand.” Consider what George W. Bush asked of us in his 2000 victory speech: “I have something else to ask of you, I ask every American. I ask for you to pray for this great nation.”

Hope may very well be the rupture into which meaningful change asserts itself. Hope may be the enabling condition for any number of things: love, recovery, work, politics, war. But as an action it is isolationist. It is very much like prayer. It is a recapitulation of the nineteenth-century concept of sentimentality, especially popular in the antebellum years: what we need, those forebears imagined, was right feeling. Feeling the right way is what will free the slaves; right feeling allows us to sympathize with any number of unintelligible others.

We live with this legacy. We believe we ought to take responsibility for what we feel, but we often do not understand at all the implications of what we do. This, in so many ways, is how contemporary racism works, how discourses about tolerance and self-help rhetoric work, also. Right feeling does not ameliorate wrong actions or produce right ones.

We ought to hear the words of our new president: “This victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change.”

--Punch

Becoming an American Girl in the Season of the Witch

By The Bobby

“Perhaps signifying the holiday’s origins as a marking of the line between life and death, most of these pranks were ‘threshold tricks.’ Assaults on fences, gates, windows, and doorways were most the common.”
- Mark Alice Durant
"Glowing Turnips, Pointy Black Hats and Insomniac Aliens:
The Hybrid History of Halloween"

“When I look out my window, so many different people to be. And it’s strange. So Strange.”
-Donovan
"Season of the Witch"


1979: Chinese Princess*

My kindergarten’s indoor play area featured a painted cardboard house. A group of girls had crowded inside. Wondering what was going on, I started to walk through the cardboard door. “Sorry,” a girl said, “This house is just for princesses.”
“I am a princess.”
“You don’t look like one.”
“I’m a Chinese princess.”
“Well…This house is just for American princesses.”

1980: Princess Leia’s evil twin.

Courtney and I both wanted to be Princess Leia. Apparently in that whole far away galaxy there was only one girl. We remedied the problem by inventing her evil twin. She looked pretty much the same as Leia, but was, you know, evil.

1981: Chinese Princess Redux. The Empress of the Slide.

Courtney and I held court on the platform at the top of the slide. The entry was narrow and could only be accessed by one ladder. If you got to the platform first, it was easy to control who was allowed to get off the ladder and who had to inch their way back down to the sawdust. The fact that we weren’t letting everyone on made everyone want to try.


1982: Flapper (Nobody at Lincoln Elementary School knew what a Flapper was.)
1983: Cleopatra (Nobody at Lincoln Elementary School knew who Cleopatra was either.)

1984-86: Poodle skirt, saddle shoes, etc.

My mother, who came of age in the 60’s, was disgusted, but it was the only safe option during those ugly years. It was “what all the girls were wearing.”

1987: Criminals

Courtney and I shoplifted children’s felt cowboy hats from Payless. We wore them with black clothes and said we were criminals. Danielle was having a slumber party but we ditched it when we discovered that we would be expected to participate in chaperoned trick-or-treating. We wandered around and ended up at our old elementary school playground where a group of sophomores were drinking Boone’s Farm. They were only a year or two older than us, but it didn’t matter. We were in 8th grade and they were in high school – normally we didn’t exist to them. That one night though, they let us sit on the hood of their car and when we asked for a drink they didn’t roll their eyes. They just handed us the bottle. We took tiny sips and dreamed of high school.

1988: Plastic Masks and Peppermint Schnapps

1989: No Costume.

For a year, Amy and I lost interest in the rest of the world. We watched Star Wars or Hard Day's Night.

1990: No Costume. Bonfire

There was a bonfire and barn dance at Alan Calvert’s place. His mother had hired a DJ and made apple cider. Five or six of us snuck away, up the hill to the trailer where Alan’s much older brother lived. He was unusually generous with his stash, and we were sixteen and greedy. Steve asked Amy and me to ask for more pot. I told him to ask himself. He said that if I asked, Alan’s brother would be sure to say yes. I thought Steve was crazy, but tried it and, to my amazement, he was right. We spent the night running through the pixilated woods, laughing our heads off.

1991: No Costume. Bonfire II

Steve and Amy were away in college. The whole football team dressed as cheerleaders. They spent the day grabbing each other’s breasts and asses. I dreamed of graduation.

1992: Mushroom. (Inside and out).
1993: Seasons (Winter).

Spring lost one of her dresses in the back yard (she started with three). Summer laughed so hard she fell off the porch. Fall left early. Winter finally kissed Eric Matthews.

1994: No Costume. Amy puked in the cemetery.

1995: No Costume. The Halloween Debate.

Tim thought Halloween should be genuinely scary. People should dress as monsters, goblins, etc. – and they should really get scared. He was a vampire most years, then a zombie, and then stopped dressing up. I thought Halloween should be about blurring boundaries – trying on a different identity.


1996: Morton Salt Girl.

Tim was working nights. I went to a party comprised mostly of men in drag or dressed as puns (cereal killer) and women in “sexy” versions of stock characters: sexy witch, sexy cat, sexy nun, sexy strawberry shortcake. Brenda came for a little while and left without telling me after an hour. She later told me that she’d stolen some of my prescription sleeping pills and taken them with her beer. She thought it was funny.

1997: Homemade Carnival Masks.

Sky said that as she was walking to meet me, she was appalled to see four tween girls dressed as prostitutes. After a block or so she figured out that they were supposed to be The Spice Girls. We went to Portland hipster bars and pretended to have fun. The other girl, whose name I forget, got too drunk and kept falling on the sidewalk.

1998: Definitely no costume.

Tim and I had left Portland, but didn’t know yet that we were moving to Savannah. We were stranded in my hometown. I took him to the elementary school playground and we smoked cigarettes. I was terrified.

1999: The Ocean.

I was working for a costume designer in Savannah. Her shop was closed because part of the roof had caved in and she was involved in a lawsuit with the landlord. The shop was in an enormous, dilapidated warehouse. The lights didn’t work, but the phone was rigning constantly (it was Halloween). She gave me and Tim keys and flashlight and told us to take whatever we wanted.

2000 – 2002: No Costume.

We’d always turn the porch light off, but kids would ring the doorbell and demand candy anyway.

2003: No Costume. A Variety of East Village Bars.

It’s since become a common place, but Tim and I finally agreed about Halloween. Apparently, once we reached a certain age, Halloween became “Dress as Whores Day.” And not just “dress in a revealing or sexually provocative way” – people can do that anytime. We were among an unlikely group that included some thirty-something schoolteachers dressed in red vinyl bustiers and Lycra skirts. When we asked what they were they supposed to be, they paused and said, “uh. Vampires? Or witches?” Everywhere we looked there were throngs of grown men and women dressed, essentially, as whores. And it made perfect sense.

Viva Dia de las Putas!