Wait, My Dear: For You Have Dropped the Glove I Just Slapped You With.

The great epochs of our life are where we win the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.


                                                                    --Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, but as discovered/read on the first page of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany




When I was a child, my father would always walk on the side of the sidewalk closest to the street. When asked why he did, he told me, simply, that it is what gentlemen do.

My child's mind raced to imagine the root of such chivalry:  Perhaps the implication that one would catch the harshest hit of a car spun out of control across the sidewalk was considered gentlemanly.

I liked that.

It was the day I decided that I would become a gentleman.


(pause)


A woman who dresses as a man who dresses as a woman who enjoys fucking and not fucking and literature.

What is the threat of it? What is it that makes people love and hate and love again, only to hate?

I have no idea.

I am pondering the Dandy, and the antiquated lace that lines my heart. Hand written letter above email.  A present in the mail in replace of the splooge of necessity.

I take my time.

In that way, I am old fashioned.

Flamboyance in a slightly timeless manner.

Your mean words will not hurry me, nor will they keep you warm tonight.

Sugar Coated Assholes (Literal; Figurative)

I've just completed reading Cross Examinations of the Oscar Wilde Trials: A Comparison, which consists of what it sounds like: Transcripts of the cross examinations in the three trials involving Oscar Wilde. (What can I say, here? I'm a history-fascinated pansy with access to the materials of a legal library.) Of course we know that Wilde was famous for being well spoken and witty, but it is incredible to read how articulate he managed to be in the courtroom, under the rapid fire queer-outing interrogation of Mr. Edward Carson.

Although I knew that they had brought in some of the pieces he had written, I never realized how heavily his art was used as an attempt to create a case against him.  There's an entire section of the cross examination of the first trial that focuses strictly on Wilde's writing, and they go through everything: novels, plays, letters... entire segments and even single phrases are interrogated.

Mr. Carson reads heavily from The Picture of Dorian Gray,  but one of my favorite moments of classy smartass-ness (aka resistance) is in relation to a letter that Wilde wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas (aka "Bosie", the most infamous of Wilde's boys).  Mr. Carson is reading excerpts of the letter in order to imply to the members of the courtroom that Wilde's relationship with Bosie was "indecent":

Carson:  "Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry."... Is that a beautiful phrase?

Wilde: Not as you read it, Mr. Carson. You read it very badly.



While answering questions about supposed rent boys (Oh, to be a rent boy once again...) and rumors of stained hotel sheets, and while in the midst of a sturdy, glorious rain of cigarette cases, Oscar still manages to even achieve cross examination fashion cattiness (Here he is being questioned about a particular lad):

C. Were you fond of this boy?
W. Naturally.  He had been my companion for six weeks.
C. Did you take the lad to Brighton?
W. Yes.
C. And provided him with a suit of blue serge?
W. Yes.
C. And a straw hat with a band of red and blue?
W. That, I think, was his unfortunate selection.
C. But you paid for it?
W. Yes.



There is nothing in the world like a fashion-catty daddy.


(pause)


Ah, Oscar...


You may be many things, but you are far from tragic.


Each time I plume my back pocket with a flowering handkerchief
and each time I slide that last bit of notch to my Windsor knot



I will think of you.


That bit of wrist that is exposed
between
the end of a glove
and the beginning of one's sleeve



I will think of you.








k.

(photo credit: Lydia Roberts on Flickr)

Glory Be to the Poised Princes and the Bruise-Knuckled Femmes

Last night I went to go see Xiu Xiu. It was incredible. Crass and beautiful and gay and broken. The first song they played was "Fabulous Muscles".

Click here and play it. If you can, open another tab and have it playing in the background as you're reading this.

If you are familiar with the song, chronologically, Jamie sings about someone cumming on his lips. Later in the song he sings about a 'star filled night kneeling down before...your deformed penis". Here I must vent a bit:  The moment he sang the word "penis", half of the girlfriends in the room had a quick veil of panic glide past their faces and, quite literally, clung to their boyfriends. They began randomly kissing their boyfriends "passionately" for the duration of the song.

As no surprise to me, while kissing their girlfriends, the boyfriends kept their gaze locked on Jamie as he sang.

(pause)

It made me think of a particular strand of homophobia that I experience. For me, it is perhaps the most painful kind of homophobia~ at least emotionally. It has to do with some straight people peripherally in my life- specifically some male partners of female people in my life. It's difficult to articulate. I get along with the man. I get along with the woman. But when the three of us are together, there is an aggressive suspicion that the man has with me and his female partner. Like if she and I talk "too much" together, or laugh "too much" with each other. That's when these weird homophobic comments start. "You two are acting like you're going to make out." "Oh, do you want me to leave the two of you alone?" "You're not going to leave me for her, are you?"...Things that completely do not fit the situation and things I can almost guarantee would never be said if they did not know I was queer and if they weren't a straight person who is mostly around straight people. But these are the same guys saying that "gay people should be able to marry" and "end homophobia" and all of that partially mainstream jargon.

And when it happens, it freaks me out. This guy who was normal and funny and silly the day before is now interacting with me in this aggressive manner fired by that typical and tired narrative of "If you're gay than you must like my girlfriend" and "queer as lecherous recruiter" shit.

Sure, I could go into an analysis here of how it devalues my friendship with the woman and blah blah blah, but won't. I don't have the energy. For me, it's just, well,... depressing.

 (unpause)

Other than that, the show was amazing, and the temporary world that flourished within it- needed. Gorgeous queers in the audience of a thousand genders and well fitted jackets. Fingers jeweled with too many rings because, well, they should be.

Here is to the lad standing next to me with the gorgeous and lithe hands that he kept, for the duration of the show, gently clasped over his awed and open lovestruck mouth: So beautiful a cage that held your adoring lips.

be well; be loved

k.

(visual credit: Egon Schiele: Self Portrait)

Claiming That The Sailor On Top Of You Is a Martha Stewart Linen: The Art of Debate

A quick, nerd-fun piece I wrote for a theater-related class. (Somebody else's class, yes. Full disclosure: I was doing someone's homework for them.) The assignment was to write a brief dialoge between two characters to demonstrate two perspectives on the question "Was Angels In America a tragedy in the classic sense?".

Scene: The kitchen of a Dunkin Donuts; 5am. Coworkers Brad (26 years old) and Jim (49 years old) are starting to make the donuts. They have had a one night stand with each other the night before and after a brief bit of awkwardness, are now happily slinging dough and intellectualizing.

JIM: (Pouring a flour like substance into an industrial sized mixer) I don’t know Brad. I think the only thing tragic about Angels In America was the reality of Roy Cohn’s politics. I mean, …haven’t you ever read a history book? That man was an asshole- plain and simple. Ethel Rosenberg being executed and Cohn playing a huge part in that…now THAT’S a tragedy.

BRAD: (Has elbows on the steel industrial table in front of him , chin in his hands. He rolls his eyes, stands up and grabs a baking sheet) I’m talking “tragic” like in a classical sense, Jimbo. Think about it: Human fallibility, mortality, death, dying…it’s all in there. Roy Cohn is an example of all these things: He has all the power and connections in the world, he boasts that he can have the president’s wife on the phone with the snap of his fingers: but that’s not going to save his ass from dying of AIDS. He can call it cancer, he can threaten his doctor, can have access to all the AZT in the world but, in the end, he’s just another man who is going to die of AIDS.

(A pause.)

JIM: (Playfully throws some flour at Brad to break up the seriousness. Some flour gets on Brad’s nose) What would you know about the era this play was written in, anyway? You were, what...an ultrasound at that point? (Laughs to himself, pauses, then suddenly becomes serious, himself.) For me, it’s different. I was a 30 year old man living in New York when this play came out. Up until a year prior, with the whole Magic Johnson thing, people just talked about AIDS as a “gay disease”. And because of that, there was no mainstream dialogue about what was happening in the gay community because no one cared. This play gave voice to a point in the 80s when no one knew what was happening: Gay men were dying left and right and no one knew why. THAT’S “tragedy”. This play? It was inspiring. Igniting. It started that absent mainstream discussion. Not just of AIDS, but also of the complexity of relationships -gay and straight alike. Sure…there was death and people facing their own mortality, but what play doesn’t have that? We’re human. We die.

BRAD: (Beginning to stuff a pastry funnel into a donut to squeeze filling into it): Well, tragedy doesn’t necessarily have to involve a literal death, you know. I mean, Aristotle described tragedy as being the downfall of a well meaning hero more or less. Look at Louis, for example. He’s a tragic character. He loves Prior. He means well. On some moral level he wants to be able to stay with Prior but, in the end, he doesn’t. He can’t. And so, he fails. No matter what we as the audience want, or what he as a human with guiding principles wants- he fails. (Tosses a donut to Jim, who catches it.) You know who didn’t fail last night, though? (Smiles slowly, in a flirty fashion). You. When we read Jean Genet’s play The Maids out loud to each other. (Wiggles eyebrows)

JIM: (coming towards Brad, putting the donut he has just caught up to Brad’s mouth) Oh, yeah? (Pushing his body up to Brad’s).

BRAD: (Pushing closer to Jim) Yeah…

JIM: (Shoving the donut into Brads mouth to Brad’s surprise) Well, bite me. (Smirks. Walks past Brad and pushes open the two steel doors that lead out to the front counter of the store).

(end scene)





I'll leave you with a clip from Genet's The Maids. I just read an article about him and how he would protest his plays (The Balcony, in particular) being produced by most directors because they weren't performed in as perverse and disgusting a style in which he intended and would get taken out of the theaters by the cops. Gotta love him.

Keep in mind that these two female characters were written by Genet with the intention that they should be played by men playing women; watch from 1:11-1:44.


The Maids/Jean Genet.


And with that a good, good night.

K.

photo credit: This is a still from Rainer Werner Fassbinder's (film) version of "Querelle" written by Jean Genet.

Sound in Time

I've been reading a book of a huge ass collection of John Steinbeck's letters. In one of them, he is responding to a letter his son wrote to him when he was a college student and thought he was in love for the first time and didn't know what to do. In the letter, closer to the beginning he writes:

There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you -- of kindness and consideration and respect -not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn't know you had.

He goes on. But at the very end, the very last thing he says to his son is:


And don't worry about losing. If it is right, it happens. The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.




And he's right.




Each one of those last sentences.




Every tic-toc second of life proves that he's right.







k.


Photo: Art piece by Su Blackwell inspired by The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino

24 Hour Collaboration: Part I

[Breaking from the norm with a longer piece. This was the product of a collaboration with Allison. We had only/exactly 24 hours to have a finished product, so this is it. I'm trying not to go bonkers over all of the editing/changes I want to do with the writing. In any case...

Instructions: Open another tab on your window, go to this site. Have good headphones. Press play. You can have it playing before you read this, while you read this, or afterwards. It is meant to be in conjunction with this piece.--k.]


(pause)





























I am ready to believe that the sensations I derived from natural fornication were much the same as those known to normal big males consorting with their normal big mates in that routine rhythm which shakes the world. The trouble was that those gentlemen had not, and I had, caught glimpses of an incomparably more poignant bliss. – V.N.



Ah, Maurice. You were always so impossible. The fiber on the surface of that black water. How I would stare into it at night and wait for you to emerge from behind me in its reflection. Your scent of lilac and dirt. It was my hand that slapped your pretty face. The puff of powder that scattered from it when I did. But there were other times. Surely, you remember. There will forever be a link between you and my brother, and it disgusts me. It has nothing to do with your genitals.

That night amongst the trees when I met you, the light was a syrup of a particular green. A spoiled emerald of sickness and unnatural things: kidnappings and crime scenes. You materialized. You wore the garb of another time although when, exactly, was unnameable. It was part of your charm.

You, with your tailored lines and your wrist grip tight. Eyes of silver moving water: liquid mercury spilled upon fallen fir; the slightly sexual fear of being lost in the woods.

(pause)

It was a strange relationship, existing only within the reflection of mirrored surfaces although mirrors, themselves, proved fruitless. I would practice for hours to train my body to interact with yours-which I could only see behind me while looking just past myself in lakes, in windows, and in the filth I would pour out just to see you. I would learn how to arch in order to reach back, to touch you, to go against my instinct and move in a direction opposite than that which my brain had intuited me. Over time and with turbulent patience, it became second nature. What I could not see of you, I could feel, and this was more than enough in its sensation.

Saint Sebastian,
How your perverse arrows left us craving
the exact moment
of puncture
Sucking our tongues in savor as we imagine
arrow
after arrow
all the while
body bound to a tree
and still, you stood your ground.

Maurice would stand behind me, attentive in the way one is at night- uncertain of what surrounds them. He would not be touching me, but I could feel the warmth of his fingertips just beside the pulse of my neck. There was a tempt that he enjoyed. He never knew exactly how to tell me what it was that he wanted, and for this I would spend nights with my fingers on the insides of his arms reading the inverse of the Braille that ran through his veins. There was a way his blood would scream, and for me, it unrolled the song of a thousand sirens.

I would awake sometimes at night, a perfumed envelope slipped under my pillow. I would press it to my face, intoxicated with its scent, and descend back into velvet folds of sleep. When finally, I awoke, I would have its mark on my flesh for hours: the ribbed-shell pattern of his communique.

Oh Maurice, with your feline-like cheekbones and sideways moving eyes, how were you able to see me amidst all the shadows cast to hide me?


There is a silence that rocks me
a breathing
Saint Sebastian will look at you
plainly
to see what it is you are proud of
and what it is you are not willing to hide.

Every time I would see you in the reflection of the water, every time you managed to slide up next to me as I gazed, I could hear the sound of a heavy, metal vault being closed. The finality of sound. The zipping up of that long, black bag; the closing of a mouth.

I wanted only to see you. Face to face, and fully looking into your eyes.

The temper one has when an alarm is sounding is the inability to be calm. Each strike of sound grates deeper into the furthest tips of the nervous system. Eyes pulsating in the same rhythm- a burning that begins inside the forearms (closest to the elbows), the sides of our faces, and our chests. There are urges that I can’t quite control, but need you know of them? It is the difference between sliding my arm into that of a man, and sliding my arm around the tiny waist of an androgynous creature living just out of reach.

Maurice, I am sorry. When you fell, I meant to catch you. We were dancing: My lad’s front against your gentleman’s waist. Surely, you could feel my intention. Surely you saw my grasp reach into a desperate fist for you just after your quick descend.

I meant to catch you. There is always that one look, a shift, that pulls us from such a moment of ecstasy, into a final dawn. Our eyes met without surface for the first time.

(pause)

There are times now, when looking into the puddles of the most scum-filled allies, that I sense him. Swear I see him slip away from behind me. I turn to look him full in the face, and there is nothing. [Perhaps a rat- that sleek animal that reminds us that something is willing to eat our waste, and disease us in the same movement. Such strange influence these creatures have.].

At times I feel him breathing into both my ears at the same time, and it is only this that alerts me to what is not possible.

















.

Elegant Movements in the Dark

Tonight marks one night closer to Devil's Night*, and a small handful of days closer to Day of the Dead. This page of the calendar has always proven to be stitched with bad deeds (although, 'artless vandal' as they may appear to the external eye, some of these acts constitute as flirting).

Amidst the fires and mischief, the glass separating the living from the dead thins, and it is always this time of year that dreams flicker visits from characters and entities whom have long since seen their last performance.

Perhaps I welcome it this year.

More than most.

There is something more amply certain under my feet, and thus, I feel the ability to lean. As one does when receiving communion, or a secret: such confidential information passed from between parted lips. It is such laced breath that fills the ink-spill sky of these last October nights that usher in November.

What is it that we shall see drop from the silhouettes of branches as we walk, and what fingers will brush the softness of our cheeks as we sleep? The visitors of the next few nights (who arrive and depart in the fashion of an antique camera flash) arrange themselves in answer. Lean in so that you may hear them: Such beauty displayed in their disembodied gloves that reach for our chins to push them aside and breathe their stories into our earthly ears.



-k.

*= It wasn't until the past few years after getting confused and offended looks at my mention of it that I realized it was a Detroit specific experience and name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Night




(photo credit: MaliciousGlamour on Tumblr. Also: General shout out to the brilliance of http://yvonneconstance.tumblr.com/ - if you do not follow Yvonneconstance, you need to begin right now.)

Snickerdoodle Cookies Warming in the Oven, or, How Ever Did That Blood Get on the Floor?

It is October, the month of unanticipated flames of every sort. The change in light is reason enough to be up to no good and with a well-fitted coat, I accept the challenge. Last night was spent making out in the back seat of a parked car on a side street before getting my hair back in place, smoothing the front of my shirt, and slipping into the door of a dimly lit bar just in time to meet a friend I haven't seen in too long a time.

These days I am convinced that the smell of freshly lit matches follows me everywhere, and that my footsteps on the pavement are amplified simply for suspense.

I've been thinking of the perversion of domesticity, lately. I remember years ago some friends of mine made a zine entitled Perverts at Home that I truly loved. It was photographs of the two of them doing pervy things all during the course of a day in a home with all of its homely duties (doing the dishes, making cookies, wearing aprons...). I fear I may be aiming to replicate this in the next few months (which would be problematic, at best), but throwing caution to the pecan-roasted October wind, and simply stated:

Here is to those of us who know there may be more behind the warm cinnamon of a kitchen that tends towards an over-use use of bleach.


k.



Photo credit: LesNeutres on Tumblr

Hypergraphia Upon Parched Tongue

There is a type of creativity, of the sewing together of thoughts with fine wire, that can only occur with no one around. I can hear the slightly angry mumble of the television upstairs, but it is something different than a person being in the same room or just outside the door. It feels good. Long overdue. I can hear the hum of the light in my room, perhaps more clearly now, having just listened to the antique drum machine for about an hour. (It helps me concentrate, but more so, it changes what I am perceiving around me.)

The fall is beginning to lace itself with the fingers of winter, and it is serving only to remind me of the loneliness of my lost jacket. Perhaps it will reappear. I would like very much to be reunited with it: I fear my stubbornness and childish loyalty to hope may leave me cold and sick quite a few more times before the winter is through with us. But we shall see. The autumn leaves have barely turned their frail faces to us, and there is so much more to hope for.




k.



photo credit: maliciousglamour tumblr; photo of Anjelica Huston