Considering Mark Carson, Homophobia & Homophobic Violence

Makeshift memorial for Mark Carson,
6th Avenue & 8th Street

I have been thinking about the recent horrific spate of anti-gay attacks in New York City, including one last night in Hell's Kitchen, and perhaps most specifically about the murder of Mark Carson, a young, African American gay man, who was pursued up a main Greenwich Village street, 6th Avenue, and shot to death in broad daylight. The attacks come as national public attitudes, at least as expressed by polls, suggest an ever-increasing acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and same-sex marriage, especially among younger people. They are occurring at a moment when the President of the United States has repeatedly and openly expressed gay-friend and non-homophobic sentiments, including in his second inaugural address (preceded by an out latino poet, Richard Blanco, delivering the inaugural poem), and most recently at his otherwise controversial graduation address at the prestigious, historically black all-male Morehouse College, which has had its own issues with sexual orientation and difference. We have just had the first male athlete actively playing for a major league team sport, black basketball player Jason Collins, publicly come out, and this weekend, another out gay male athlete, the white soccer player, Robbie Rogers, resumed major league team play for Major League Soccer's L.A. Galaxy. These assaults also are occurring at a moment when one of the leading candidates to become mayor of New York, Christine Quinn, is a corporate-friendly out white lesbian, and another, white Democrat Bill DeBlasio, is married to a black woman who had previously outed herself publicly in the pages of Essence several decades ago. Same sex marriage is now legal in Minnesota and Rhode Island, bringing to a dozen the states and federal districts where nuptial equality has advanced (and, with France's legislative adoption of same-sex marriage, 14 countries across the globe).

This is thus hardly a moment of post-queerness, just as it is hardly a moment of post-raciality or post-racism (or post-classism, post-feminism, post-ideology, etc.). Nor have homophobia, heterosexism, heteronormativity disappeared. We still have many mainstream religions, one of the country's two major political parties, a range of public and private institutions, and the law itself upholding an anti-gay ethos. Yet we nevertheless are living in an era we have never before experienced in this country, nor globally that matter, of widespread queer visibility, perhaps queer hypervisibility, which is to say, out queer people are increasingly present, representing and represented, everywhere, queerness itself, in and as discourse, is widely and actively produced, and the ways that this visibility, and the onward march of equality of all kinds--though primarily social equality--are transforming the society are sometimes difficult to apprehend even as we are living through them. And unlike during prior periods of queer visibility, such as the immediate post-Stonewall period or during the HIV/AIDS pandemic, though negative discourse about homosexuality still circulates and enacts considerable violence, it does so in a changed and changing environment in which some of the key negative tropes and figures of the past (that homosexuality is a sickness or disorder, that AIDS is a gay disease leading to certain death, etc.) are not always or no longer dominant. Moreover, queer representations proliferate. If the official ones, from Hollywood and the legacy TV stations continue to be narrow in terms of race, gender, class, religion, and so forth--to represent queer America, and the world, as homonormatively young, abled, educated, privileged upper-middle-class white men, mostly, and women--increasingly a wider array of representations are also out there, across an array of media, offering anyone who looks (or seeks not to) a glimpse into the far broader and more vibrant imaginaries that exist. We still have a ways to go to present the richest portrait of ourselves, but we are further along than we once were. If it was possible once to say I have never seen or known an LGBTIQ person or I had never seen an LGBTIQ person who looks like me, that is becoming ever rarer. It is still possible, but less so with each passing day.

Makeshift memorial for Mark Carson,
6th Avenue & 8th Street

It is this visibility, this hypervisibility of difference and semblance, and the self-legibility that they enable, that I think are at the heart of these attacks, and the best response, it strikes me, is to continue to increase visibility, to fight for it, to push whatever the short-term costs, because the long-term victory will be to recast and transform, if not fully eliminate, the conditions under which homophobia and heterosexism can function. (This is one of the key insights and grounds for the utter importance of the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia--IDAHOBIT, which takes place every May 17.) The homophobe is often unnerved by the embodiment of his (queer) desires, enraged by the visibility of their enactment and empowerment, in others, others' bodies. (I use the male pronoun throughout here though people of all genders manifest homophobia and heterosexism.) It unsettles him to see, to have to see, to not be able not to see not just a small band of abjected queers, onto whom he can project his disgust as a reflection of his desires, but an ever-increasing circle of queers, some of whom look like him, may be him, are him under other circumstances, whose desires and actions are not being self-regulated and self-policed out of visibility, or regulated and policed by the state or private institutions in the way they once were, out of visibility, who can present and represent and perform their queer subjectivities in ever freer and differing ways, ways he cannot bear to witness, because he may have to see them, look at them, read himself in them. Queer visibility destabilizes his own certainty, any certainty, his own invisibility, queers normativity and makes his own queer legibility that much more likely; it casts the light and reflection back on the homophobe, on the transphobe, because, as the old phrase goes, if you are secure in your sexuality (manhood, womanhood)--as if any sexuality is ever "secure,"whatever that means, as if "manhood" in particular were ever a stable or objective category--why are you getting so upset at what someone else is doing? We often get upset at what someone else is doing even if it has no negative effects on us or anyone else, or even the person doing the thing that upsets us, because we at some level are threatened, read our own actions, our own selves, in what we can barely bear, in what we condemn. This is not merely the epistemology of the closet but another kind of epistemology. What do we start to know if we look at others--and then look closely at ourselves?

And so we see the reactions, based on religion, based on ideology, based on strategies of biopower, based on legalisms, based on incoherence masquerading as a viable system or method of critique, against homosexuality, against gender instability, against queerness even if it is not and cannot be named as such. We see the actions and reactions, rhetorical, discursive, physical, against it. We see how a man (and his friend) pursues another man (and his friend) up a street, in a neighborhood known to be gay-friendly, a "gay" neighborhood, calls out to him and presses him about whether he (and his friend) is a "gay wrestler"--so specific, as if the embodiment of a "type" he may have seen or thought about or dreamt of, that frightens him--as a prelude to striking out, to killing that type, murdering the man who at that moment, in that moment, embodies that image. We see a young man harass another young man he sees coming out of a "gay" club, that he reads as gay, that he questions about being gay ("are you a faggot"?), whom he strikes in the jaw for seeming or being or performing as "gay," for being legible as gay, visible as gay, as a host of friends join in and attack the legibly gay man--what is the young man, what are the young men striking out trying to strike out? What do the bullies who torment queer young people hope to harass or embarrass or brutalize out of them--and themselves? What does the Family Research Council want to quash in its effort to quash everything that it even thinks is queer? What do Fred Phelps's church and its followers hope to achieve by protesting anyone and anything even seemingly connected with empathetic feelings towards anyone, let alone gay people? What are they trying to cancel out because they cannot bear to see--or see in themselves? Of course I am abstracting a great deal here; I am not talking about other fluid intersections, such as power in its multiple manifestations (inflection points), race and ethnicity (inflection points), gender (an inflection point), class (an inflection point), capital (an inflection point), and others. In fact I specifically have chosen not to take up questions of race and ethnicity, since I have noted on more than one online forum that commenters slide very readily and easily onto racist tracks (and tracts), though Jason Collins's coming out, like Mark Carson's murder, have thrown them for (a bit of) a (queer) loop.

Makeshift memorial for Mark Carson,
6th Avenue & 8th Street

Perhaps this is too much (bad, tired, tiresome, shopworn) speculative psychologizing. I am not saying anything many people don't already know, though I must admit I haven't (yet) seen many people saying  this. But also perhaps as a black man, a black gay man from a working-class background who lives with the persistence of racism and homophobia and heterosexism and classism and sexism and other forms of political, economic and social violence, as someone who is always aware of history and histories and herstories that are suppressed or forgotten, as  someone who listened for most of my elementary and secondary school education to Catholic priests and nuns expatiate on the dangers of homosexuality even as I recognized the queerness in those same authority figures, as someone who is always trying, striving to be critically aware and stay aware, while living in the present and understanding it, I know that every success is hard won, is not permanent, is a paving stone on the vaster and longer road to a better place, and that simply supposing that there is an easy or obvious answer to issues like this is always problematic, but also that not looking carefully at what's going, especially with accumulated evidence before you, also is problematic. It is not enough simply to say the homophobes are staring into a mirror and trying to break it, or that they are peering through a window and disliking (and perhaps liking, and thus fearing) what they see. But that is part of it; more mirrors, more windows exist, proliferate. To wit, to see, to look, in the oldest sense of those terms, is to know. It is increasingly harder for any of us not to see, look, at ourselves, or look away, and also not have that other, that reflection, ours, not see us, not look back.

MUTO Manifesto/Exterface Studios

One of the things I love about the Internet, at least as it now exists, which is to say before it is walled off into privatized, unaffordable bailiwicks ruled by a few very rich companies, is that you can surf and happen upon things that you might never encounter if you didn't have the wherewithal to travel, weren't located in a cosmopolitan area or had access to one, didn't know people in the know, and so on.  When I was younger, I avidly visited magazine stores in the various cities where I lived just to browse, sometimes for hours, the offerings on display. I'd flip through magazines from all over the world, news journals, art journals, fashion journals, zines, anything really, just to see what was going on in the wider world that I wasn't seeing in mainstream newspapers or on TV.  So many of these newshops and bookstores are gone, lost to the depredations of gentrification, falling patronage, and yes, the net; a few, like St. Mark's Bookshop, are barely hanging on. The Internet hasn't resolved the economic issues these stores faced, but it has provided another means, at least in some cases, to travel the world without leaving your desktop or, nowadays, your phone or table computer.

I was thinking of this when I came across the digital online  MUTO Manifesto, a year-old French queer periodical based in Paris and affiliated with Exterface Studio, two 26-year-old French art directors who have, in their words, been "working in graphic design since 2000 and photography since 2005." Exterface's previous projects have included editorial and personal photography, exhibitions in Paris, and books published by Éditions Nemo Media and noted gay publisher (NSFW) Bruno Gmünder; and a poster for the  fetish-forward fashion house (NSFW) Slick It Up.  MUTO Manifesto, a beautiful publication now numbering four specially-themed issues, pairs lyric prose with artful photographs of men (including semi and full nudes), landscapes, and other associative imagery.  It's available, like many free magazine publications, via online publisher Issuu.com. So far, MUTO Manifesto has kept things livelier than many a US queer/gay male publication would, and even if you don't read a word of French, it's enjoyable to flip through, but it's even more enjoyable if you do. (You can always type many kinds of non-English texts into Google translate and get a passable translation these days, another great aspect of the Internet, and you can pull up online dictionaries and other translation services too, for free).  I believe you can also download the issues and yes, read them on your desktop, phone or tablet device if you sign up for Issuu.com. Here are few images from the first four issues (1-4). Check them out and browse Issuu.com's roster of publications, which also include books, zines and other texts.  Amid the clutter, there are some gems, like the ones below.

Volume 1: Juvénile Ardeur

Volume 2: Looney Dudes

Volume 3: La Chasse à L'Homme

Volume 4: Agnus Dei

Lit Reading Rising + Robinson at Inauguration + Burris-Franken + Weekend American Canceled

I've flagged and flogged the NEA's 2002 Reading at Risk study so many times (yes, I know it has flaws) that I considered carrying a copy with me on my phone (it's on my computer in .pdf form) to show to people whenever I started talking about it. According to Motoko Rich's piece in today's New York Times, "Fiction Reading Increases for Adults," however, it might be time for all writers of imaginative work and publishers to turn grimaces, at least for a moment, into smiles. As Rich notes:

After years of bemoaning the decline of a literary culture in the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts says in a report that it now believes a quarter-century of precipitous decline in fiction reading has reversed.
The report, “Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy,” being released Monday, is based on data from “The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts” conducted by the United States Census Bureau in 2008. Among its chief findings is that for the first time since 1982, when the bureau began collecting such data, the proportion of adults 18 and older who said they had read at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the previous 12 months has risen.

The news comes as the publishing industry struggles with declining sales amid a generally difficult economy.

The report also finds that while readership isn't as high as in 1982 or 1992, it has increased among all groups, including the one that saw the steepest decline, 18-24 year olds. Other findings include: readership has surged the most among latinos, whites have the highest percentage of readers as defined in the survey, the reading of poetry and drama didn't increase as much as fiction, and reading outside of assigned material for school or work has declined slightly. As with the 2002 report, Rich notes, there are skeptics who question the methodology, which did not separate out the quantity of reading material beyond the baseline or the works read (Rich contrasts Proust and Nora Roberts and online fanfic); nor is it clear what sparked the discernible rise, though Dana Gioia, the NEA's head, suggests that community-based reading efforts (city-wide reading programs), Oprah Winfrey's and other book clubs, NEA projects targeting reading, popular series like the Harry Potter and Twilight books, and librarians (love them!), teachers, and others may all be playing a key role in encouraging reading. The article suggests that reading may also be an economical alternative during our current period of financial crisis, and as anyone who's checked for used books online knows, and writers will certain lament, you can often find some pretty good titles, especially hardcovered remained copies, for anywhere between $1-5. Whether Kindles and other new technologies are having an effect hasn't been accounted for yet.

Whether this is a sustainable trend is unclear. In the article, Elizabeth Birr Moie, an education professor at the University of Michigan, stated that this report was only a "blip," and that other studies had shown trends in both directions. The piece reminded me, though, that this quarter, when I asked my introductory fiction writing students on the first day of class to name their favorite books, almost all of them mentioned contemporary works of literary fiction or creative nonfiction--Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Safekeeping, Sabbath's Theater, Cloud Atlas, Atonement, Disgrace, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, etc.--whereas in some recent years, I have had some students, never a large number but notable, who, though they were very eager to write fiction, said they couldn't name anything, listed a movie instead of a book, offered up works that were probably required class reading (I have assigned at least two of the books above myself), or proffered the Harry Potter series. So perhaps I am witnessing this shift as well, which would be a very good thing. Now, how to keep the trendline moving so that this is more than a blip, and also how to get more people reading more poetry and watching and reading more plays, are some of the next steps.

Speaking of the "new austerity" among the major publishers, here's Rich's account of a vanishing world.

And speaking of new literature, is anyone you know writing one of these?

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So we learned today that out gay Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson, from New Hampshire, will offer a prayer at the kickoff inaugural event at the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday. (H/t to Audiologo for this link.) Whoop-dee-do. Lest you assume that this was a response to the extensive criticism of Barack Obama's selection of Rick Warren, the Prop 8-supporting con man whose stupid, hateful statements and beliefs have been well documented, an Obama "official" team wants you to know that no, it wasn't a reaction the "skeptics." It was already in the works, see, because Robinson had been advising Obama and offering useful counsel, blah blah blah. Well, I'm all for inclusivity, trying to get back on the right track, and so on. But why is Warren still involved with the inauguration next Tuesday? BTW, it made me think of Melissa Harris-Lacewell's article, and consider whether or not they might have done an even better thing by picking an out queer female and/or person of color, like, oh, say Rev. Wanda Floyd, the pastor of Imani MCC of Durham, North Carolina? (She has a piece in the anthology Spirited: Affirming the Soul and Black/Gay Identity, G. Winston James and Lisa C. Moore, Eds., Redbone Press, 2007). underline the fact that the LGBTQ community is diverse and growing more so every day.

Meanwhile, in the race for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee (is there a single woman running?), in addition to Mr. "Magic Negro," there's Ohio's very own Crazy Negro, Ken Blackwell, who apparently is on pope Benedict XVI Ratzinger's tip not just ideologically, but practically as well. A smaller, withered GOP drawn from an increasingly narrow stratum of this country? Sounds great, guys, keep it up!

***

This has probably been noted elsewhere, but if the Democrats in the Senate hope to pass really progressive legislation, they will be in the best position to do so if they seat Roland Burris, who is probably on the farther end of the liberal-progressive spectrum (except on same-sex marriage), and Al Franken, who appears to have won. And, if Governor David Paterson appoints Caroline Kennedy, or at least someone along similar ideological lines, the Senate will then have an increased core of left-leaning and left-centrist members, like Bernie Sanders, Teddy Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Sherrod Brown, and John Kerry, on to moderate Democrats like Claire McCaskill, Jim Webb and Mark Warner, who could be persuaded to sign on to more daring legislation, especially on the economic front, than would be possible otherwise. I was thinking of this as I've been reading about the back-and-forth over the new stimulus, and the criticisms, by leading economists such as George Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, that while Obama has properly and impressively diagnosed the problem, his response appears to be a bit too tepid and deferential to Republican aims. (Yes, I know, he is aiming to be post-partisan, etc.). More liberal-progressive membership, however, could help tilt the balance of argumentation and votes.

I don't know what's going to happen with Burris, especially now that the Illinois House has impeached Blago, or with Franken, though. Burris has sent his lawyers to Washington, where the Senate's counsel are deliberating on his eligibility, while Franken's request to be certified and seated was rejected today. In both cases, the GOP will be energized; Burris won't be viewed as legitimate because of his link to Blago, while Franken sends the right-wing into apoplexy. Short term for long(er) term pain?

****

I was very sorry to learn yesterday that Weekend America, one of my favorite public radio shows, is being canceled, in part as a result of the current economic crisis. One of the highlights of each show was hearing Desiree Cooper, a poet, fiction writer, highly regarded journalist, and fellow CC'er, deliver stories. One of her recent pieces that I particularly liked was part of her "Inside Blackness" series; in it she interviewed another "Cooper," author and journalist Helene Cooper, whose ancestors left the South in the mid-19th century and headed to Liberia. I'll let J's Theater readers check it out, and do look through their archives in general if you've missed this show over the years. I'll certainly miss it.

Stuff

"The process of emancipation from slavery and its effects...." What I typed out yesterday, on Juneteenth. Take, for example, voting rights, and the ongoing attempts to prevent Black and other people of color, as well as the poor, from voting. These activities, written into law, occurred before the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, but they really kicked into gear after universal emancipation and voting rights were guaranteed constitutionally. Over the last six years, in fact, we've had so many examples occurring right under our noses in Washington, and until the Democrats took over and began investigating, few were able to put all the pieces together. Want an example? Here's one (and mind you, this sulfurous character has been nominated by W to the Federal Election Commission--of course!):

WASHINGTON — A former Justice Department political appointee blocked career lawyers from filing at least three lawsuits charging local and county governments with violating the voting rights of African-Americans and other minorities, seven former senior department employees charged Monday.

Hans von Spakovsky also derailed at least two investigations into possible voter discrimination, the former employees of the Voting Rights Section said in interviews and in a letter to the Senate Rules and Administration Committee. They urged the panel to reject von Spakovsky's nomination to the Federal Election Commission.

White House spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore said that von Spakovsky wouldn't comment on the latest criticism. She said he's "preparing a point-by-point rebuttal that will address these issues" and "looks forward to working with members of the Senate during the confirmation process."

Von Spakovsky blocked a major suit against a St. Louis suburb and two other suits against rural governments in South Carolina and Georgia and halted at least two investigations of election laws that appeared to suppress minority voting, one of them in Wyoming, said Joseph Rich, the former voting rights section chief.

The former employees' letter also challenged von Spakovsky's candor during his confirmation hearing before a Senate committee last week, when he portrayed himself as a middle manager in the Civil Rights Division who didn't make policy or personnel decisions. Von Spakovsky, who's served as a presidential recess appointee to the FEC since early 2006 and is seeking a full six-year term, also played down his role in several controversial decisions.

In the letter to California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the panel's chairwoman, the former employees said that von Spakovsky acted as the "de facto voting section chief" from early 2003 until late 2005, spending virtually all of his time on voting matters and promoting "partisan political interests."

"We have never seen a political appointee exercise this level of control over the day-to-day operations of the voting section," they said.

It was the second letter in the last eight days in which former employees of the Voting Rights Section, including Rich and former deputy chief Robert Kengle, urged the Senate panel to reject the nomination. Feinstein told von Spakovsky during the hearing that the criticism from former department officials would make it difficult for him to win confirmation.

Monday's letter included the first allegations that von Spakovsky torpedoed suits and investigations over alleged state, county or local laws that diminish the voting strength of African-Americans, Native Americans or other minorities or prevent them from voting altogether.

Von Spakovsky, the letter said, stripped the voting rights section chief of his authority to open investigations of discrimination without his superiors' approval.

The letter also challenged von Spakovsky's testimony about a letter that the department sent to Arizona Secretary of State Janice Brewer in April 2005. Contrary to his testimony, the former employees alleged, von Spakovsky didn't seek input from career staff members before he notified Brewer that provisional ballots didn't need to be offered to voters who failed to present identification — a reversal of the department's previous interpretation of a 2002 federal election reform law.

You know there's more, both in the article and beneath the iceberg these revelations about von Spakovsky's actions represents. Oh, and his replacement, Cameron P. Quinn, is also not fond of the dark-skinned types casting ballots either....

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More mental decolonization issues to mull, according to Buzz Feed:

Skin whitening is the rage (again) in China, Japan and India.*

This ad is only one example.

And as the article I linked to the other day on DR notes, it's also an issue in parts of the Caribbean, and Africa, and of course, the USA. (Yep, you know AMBI hasn't budged from its choice perch on supermarket shelves all over the country.) Though now you can get all kinds of skin peels that do the work of vitiligo in just a few (or many) minutes!

(Of course I blogged about this almost two years ago.)

And, the US doesn't need to go so far with overt commercials like the one from India, since a persistent and relentless aesthetic aryanism is thoroughly encoded into nearly all of our televisual and mass media. Yet even with this, there are still regular eruptions, as it's never enough for some people.

(On the flip, naturally, there's tanorexia--only don't get too dark [too thin is always in]!)

Remind me again what century we're in?

*Some may note that historically, in some places, an affinity for lighter skin has predated European colonialism, which only managed to make it worse.

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So much hype about Mike Bloomberg's kicking the Republican Party to the curb to become "unaffiliated," and his possible run for the presidency! Oy, the pundits are in a frenzy, a lather, sheer ecstasy! They were as breathless on the local news and radio as on the evening network broadcasts. Judy Woodruff nearly smoked her seat trying not to jump into Bloomberg's lap on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, almost forgetting that the slick Antonio Villaraigosa was swanning right next to him. (For the record, C noted that they would be a particularly formidable combo.) But the media talking heads don't see Villaraigosa as far as any of them can throw him. Instead, they're slobbering over a ticket with right-winger Chuck Hagel, who still manages to vote with the Commander Guy and Cheney every chance he gets. Or will it be Joe Lieberman, neoconservativus perfectus? Really, is Bloomberg going to be the incarnation of Ross Perot, John Anderson, or Ralph Nader?

He was kind enough to throw a wet sheet on the blazing fires of excitement by restating his commitment to be the Richest Mayor-Nanny of New York until 2009. Meanwhile, back in reality, let's not forget that Bloomberg was the bagman for the 2004 Republican National Committee's convention in the City. He chaired the most important event to raise money and convince Americans to reinstall the Worst President and Vice President Ever. He also gave over $300,000 to the hapless New York State Republican Party, which until last November had as its figurehead a real tool, George Pataki. And, in a move that made his authoritarian predecessor Rudy Giuliani proud, he even presided over the rampantspying and thuggery by his police department during that event. He has yet to account or apologize for either. Meanwhile, Manhattan and the Brooklyn waterfront are turning into Dubai, New York's public educational system remains a mess, and those billions can make anybody snap to attention. At least he doesn't hate brown people.

Furthermore, back in the reality outside Mediastan, he would not win a single state outside the Northeast, except perhaps Hawaii and California. Illinois would be pushing it. Seriously. And he's more likely, with his social and economic liberalism (yes, he doesn't hesitate to raise taxes or erect nanny-state policies), to draw votes from the Democrats than the Republicans. Which is just what we DO NOT NEED, 4 more years of the disaster we've had to endure for the last 7. On top of which, he keeps talking about partisanship as if both parties in Congress have been engaging in it these past 7 years. He's a very smart man, so I don't think he missed the fact that the Republicans controlled both Houses of Congress and the Presidency and the Courts during this period, and that the Democrats repeatedly caved into them (except on social security). The partisanship ran one way. It still does. Surely he's not that clueless.

I think the mainstream media's Bloombergomania is yet more confirmation that these overpaid hacks are completely out of touch with the vast majority of Americans, though they still have the power to shape--and warp--our national public discourse.

Please, Bloomberg, fuggedaboutit!

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I am sufficiently grounded in anti-positivist thought never to put too much stock in reductively biologistic explanations of anything. That said, I found the following article, New York Magazine: The Science of Gaydar, which bristles with nodes of problematic reasoning ("gay disease"???) fascinating. And yes, I am going to start looking more closely at hair whorls as I sit on the local trains. I may even photograph some (or hundreds), calculator in hand....

And then there's this one, from this week's Village Voice, about gay kids. (And the mini transgender sensation, hormone patches to "degay" fetuses, and all sorts of stuff that give new meaning to the word "spectacle.") The late author and activist Eric Rofes's quote from a book researcher Dee Michel is editing on the emotional support he drew the Wizard of Oz particularly resonates: "As a child who was bullied for being gender-nonconforming (girlish, nonathletic, studious, emotional) and who often felt trapped and without recourse, these stories offered me a happier ending to my own story."