[ week 38 | 50 ]
A biting something of fragility and non-perpetuity.
Friday, 18.03
Yes, it is funny to think that, much as gynephilic mechanics the world over love hanging their Snap-on Tool girls up on those grease-smeared walls, so might gynephilic morticians the world over look up from stuffing cotton balls into the rank, metallic-smelling mouths of their cadavers and wipe a latex-gloved hand on a smeared apron (best not to look too closely at what it’s smeared with, if you’re nervous about such things) before flipping back a page of their Cofani Funebri wall calendar not so much to check a date as to remind themselves once again what it is that Miss Maggio-Giugno is almost wearing as she’s standing there by that coffin.
No, really. It’s a valuable selling tool. Helps bring the brass fittings into focus.
[ # ]
Things I’ve meant to do, and yet.
Thursday, 18.13
Well, no, not the total list; we’d be here all night. But I have been meaning to note that I’ve been reading Clean Sheets’ group blog lately, and that I really want to go plow through Samuel Stern’s amazing journal and get caught up, much as I also keep meaning to read all the email Dobbs has been sending me, ever since I asked him to start; it’s interesting stuff, more intimate somehow than an online journal (for all that it’s much the same basic experience when you break it down—oh, those signs and signifiers), but also the more easily procrastinated, and yeah, yeah, I know I’m late to the dogpile, but let’s throw one more link to Susannah Breslin out into cyberspace and see what happens.
Maybe I should update my links page, or my sidebar over there. —Maybe I should get around to updating and overhauling this whole dam’ site, you know? I’ve got that naughty French postcard with the girls reading the Kama Sutra in the park...
Sorry. I thought it was funny, anyway. Maybe you had to be here.
[ # ]
You need any help carrying those?
Thursday, 06.58
The winners of the 2002 Golden Clitorides—the Hugos of online free-as-in-beer pornographic prose and poetry—have been announced. Go, shake someone’s hand.
(The “sour clits” joke got dropped as being in poor taste. No, really. It’s an honor just to have been nominated and all that. Do I look like I’m sulking?)
[ # ]
Billy and Chuck didn’t get hitched, and I’m not feeling too good myself.
Wednesday, 23.47
The dangers of blog-skimming: “So,” I said at this party, apropos nothing much at all, just a lull in the conversation that needed filling with some bit of trivia or other, “did you know that a couple of male wrestlers in the WWF are going to get married?”
“The WWE,” says somebody, since of course they lost that lawsuit with the World Wildlife Federation and had to change their name, and someone else says, “Wrestling?” and someone else says, “That’s a load of crap, that is,” and someone else says, “They’re out of tonic in there, dammit.”
And I’m frowning at the guy who said it’s a load of crap. Because all I knew about this at the time was a little squib I read about it over at Daze’s. Did I bother to follow any of his carefully assembled links? Nah. Sounded half a lark, but only half, and I was busy with something else at the time. “Two and a half millennia after the Greeks first grappled with the curious homoerotic aura of wrestling, Billy and Chuck have spent the current WWE season overtly flirting with one another—delighting the audience and taunting their opponents with their blooming togetherness.” That was all I needed to know: a bit of trivia filed away in the sticky bottom drawer of my mental filing cabinets, to be hauled out the next time there was a lull in the conversation.
So when this guy who said it’s a load of crap starts to talk about how insulting it is and how they’re played as villains and jeered and hissed and no one’s cheering their blooming togetherness and how this is hardly a step forward for the gay community I’m momentarily taken aback. And I mean on the one hand: duh. I certainly hadn’t expected this to play in Paducah. But that’s hardly the point: wrestling’s got a long history of raiding Liberace’s closet (and playbook) to suit up Gentleman Thises and Handsome Thats—heroes and villains, the lot of them like LA glam metal bassists on serious steroids. Wrestling has always had its queer content. Whether it’s utterly unconscious or deeply closeted or openly toyed with or dragged out and villified, it’s there. (Sweaty, mostly naked men; powerful women. Go figure.) —Billy and Chuck getting hitched: that’s just another wrinkle in the continuum, right? Whether it’s intended as an insult or not, it’s out there: the image of two men getting married in a wrestling ring would hit TV screens all over the country on a Thursday night, and we all know that no matter what someone intends when they craft a book or a movie or a television show or a fake gay wedding, the audience will take it on their own terms and do with it what they will, and take it places the artist or writer or producer or shameless huckster never imagined. (Which is why it’s always better to say it than not, and why censorship never works; if we want to look for it, we’ll find it. But I’m in risk of a massive digression, so.)
But this guy at the party is still glowering and here am I at the other hand: he is perhaps not without his point. I hadn’t done my homework, had I? And I’d been imagining a perhaps more queer-friendly version of the ceremony than was, perhaps, intended—not, you see, being cognizant of the manners and mores of the WWE; we live these days, after all, in Liberal Media Land, where the homosexual agenda is covertly pushed on our children and staunchly bigoted American values are sneered at by multicultural squads of wisecracking youths. But this guy at the party is vehement and I’m suddenly struck by a different and perhaps more accurate image of what a WWE gay wedding would look like, in a tiny ring in a giant sports arena filled with the sorts of mullets you wouldn’t be seeing when the local women’s basketball team played, all of them booing and hissing and yelling and hurling plastic beer cups as two big men with the curiously soft-looking muscles you get when you actually use them instead of just cutting and buffing them in the gym and wearing pink or yellow or baby blue trunks and knee-high wrestling boots mince towards each other on a pink shag rug and the music they’d be playing wouldn’t be “I Will Survive,” or “I Am What I Am,” you know?
And it’s not that he’s saying they shouldn’t say this or do this or show this, but he is saying it’s a load of crap, and what we’re talking about is maybe closer to the remote bashing by proxy of a couple of married guys by millions of drunk mittelamericans, to descend for a moment into rank hyperbole, and so it’s maybe that this guy glowering at not so much me or even what I said but at this idea, it’s maybe that he has a point. Because even though there’s a curious sort of thin, elitist pride to be gleaned from being so hated and villified by the ’phobes, even by proxy, and even though there’s something of an affirmation in seeing gay guys everywhere, even as villains in wrestling, and even though there’s the queasy quasi-camp value of laughing at how badly the straights parody queers parodying straights—even though the audience can take some small part of what they need and want from any entertainment, and turn and twist it to their own purposes, well, that doesn’t mean they will. And we’re only human, after all.
And anyway, it doesn’t matter much anymore since they didn’t go through with it. All a publicity stunt, they said. Our manager made us do it. We aren’t really queer. —All this as part of the storyline. And forgive me if I bring up a certain Russian pop phenomenon, whose first American single, I’m pleased to report, is doing something-or-other on some chart somewhere, but note the striking similarities: we aren’t really queer; it’s a publicity thing; our manager makes us do it—all part of the storyline.
Wrestlers; lolitapop.
And I’m thinking further of having watched Queer as Folk—the British, not the Yank, that is—and at the end of the final half-season or concluding movie or whatever there’s a making-of, which we watch, and I’m mildly whizzed to discover the actors who played Stuart and Nathan and Vince in and out of bed all copping to the fact—a little sheepishly, to be sure—that they aren’t, well. You know. Gay. Queer. Like that. (And even so: I would kick a hole in a bucket for Aidan Gillen, just so’s you know.)
—Or would I?
Because I’ve also been reading what Heather’s had to say about whether or not she’s too damned normal to be a sex writer, and while it’s really about the very real problems of tokenization and ghettoization in the hothouse world of big(ger) money smut—the idea that, if art is about sex, then it must necessarily be deviant, or degraded; that there is no “normal” art which deals with sex—still, her opening salvo rings true, because you see me over there? The balding white guy with the thickening gut and the wedding band and the concommittant Spouse and the mortgage and the day job that pays for the computer and the olive bread and the not half-bad plonk and the books? I mean, if Heather’s got doubts, then what the fuck am I doing, daytripping from way over here in the very lap of heterosexual privilege?
(“If we were really in the lap of heterosexual privilege,” says the Spouse, “I wouldn’t have a job. I’d have hobbies.” —She is not without a point.)
Because it’s all well and good for me to write about sex this and desire that and to dish about gorgeous men I’d kick holes in buckets for and to flirt shamelessly at parties (because I think that the guy who was glowering was also glowering at me, a little, because I have this tendancy of letting his wife bum smokes at parties, but then again I might be flattering someone in that particular equation overmuch) and it’s all well and good for me to pontificate on the pop-cultural impacts and vectors of a faked gay wedding during a televised wrestling bout, because end of the day I go home to my Spouse and our safe and enclosed and monogamous and exclusive and perfectly normal heterosexual relationship. Sanctioned by an ex-minister cop and everything. When was the last time I kissed a boy? Well, see, I can’t do that. Not anymore. I’m married, after all. (But talking about it I can have that edge without putting his cock where my mouth is, you see—)
—And then today the Burrito Guy gets on the bus, the one with the well-worn creased straw cowboy hat like an artful taco shell on his head, and he’s wearing overalls and a sleeveless white T-shirt; there’s the tattoos on his forearms which are just the right degree of wiriness, and his eyes, and I don’t think I’m going to try to describe what his grin looks like, but what it does to me—oh, the limbs are loosened, and I get a quick flash of what the skin in the notch where his jaw meets his neck will taste like, and I cross my legs and look out the window and smile to myself and cock an eyebrow at the folly of it all, or at least my own particular folly.
And anyway: my ability or inability to pontificate on the pop-cultural impacts and vectors of a faked gay wedding during a televised wrestling bout has much less to do with how queer I “really” am or may be and much more to do with the fact that I don’t give a rat’s ass about wrestling and the WWF or WWE or whatever-the-fuck.
So at the party? With the guy glowering and all? And somebody asking if I really meant to defend, like, you know, wrestling? I said something about always playing the Devil’s advocate and something even stupider about how anyway it was sort of mildly cool that even homophobic jerks had to admit to the basic idea of a gay wedding and that was some kind of step in some vaguely forward direction from some indeterminate time in the past when, you know, they didn’t, and then somebody changed the topic which was probably a good thing, because I tend to get mad loquacious when I’m drinking gin and tonics without the tonic.
So Billy and Chuck didn’t get hitched. And Julia and Lena don’t really share a hotel bed when no one’s looking. And none of the Queer as Folk were queer. And I’m thinking dark thoughts. Laughing at them, but still.
The Chameleon’s Dilemma. “Sooner or later someone will figure out I’m not really—”
I dunno. The Porcelain Twinz are back in town. Maybe I’ll go pretend to be a reporter and finally get that interview this time.
