mitchellkuga

[mitchellkuga]

The White Lotus is as clueless about Native Hawaiians as its characters.

This article was originally published by Vox 

The HBO series is a scathing roast of white privilege. But does it realize it succumbs to the same point of view?

As someone born and raised in Hawaii, there are certain Native Hawaiian folk songs that feel capable of time travel. Vivid melodies that transport me to my father’s white truck as he drives me home from volleyball practice, sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, his jeans streaked with dry cement. Or waiting backstage to dance at keiki hula competitions, the air humming with tuberose and hibiscus.

Chief among those songs is “Hawai’i Aloha.” Familiar to anyone who’s grown up in Hawaii, the revered Native Hawaiian anthem is sung en masse, our hands interlaced, at the end of concerts and formal gatherings. ʻOli ē! ʻOli ē! A declaration of what it means to be local.

An a cappella version sung by The Rose Ensemble closes the second episode of The White Lotus, HBO’s dark ensemble comedy about rich American tourists vacationing at a luxury resort in Hawaii. The limited six-episode series has been critically acclaimed for poking fun at the excesses of the ultrawealthy, its humor gorging on sarcasm and wit.

So when “Hawai’i Aloha” is used to score a poignant montage right before the credits, it felt like the show’s rare attempt at sincerity: The resort manager, a recovering addict played by Murray Bartlett, has a relapse, while a hapless teen (Fred Hechinger) vacationing at the resort witnesses a whale breaching the water, and something in him blooms. E Hawaiʻi e kuʻu one hānau e, the song starts, or “O Hawaiʻi, O sands of my birth.” My reaction was visceral: a gut punch of nostalgia, followed by excitement that a show set in Hawaii was showcasing Hawaiian music.

But by the second verse, I started to squirm. It was an unsettling feeling that followed me throughout the series, whenever I heard “Aloha ‘Oe,” or Kapono Beamer’s “Hukia Mai A,” or “‘Ohi’a Hua Palaku” by The Sunday Manoa. These songs were employed as counterpoints to composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s percussive theme song and score, which brilliantly illuminates the social tensions simmering throughout the show. (He’s described his whirring instrumental compositions as “Hawaiian Hitchcock.”) By contrast, soothing Hawaiian folk songs are employed intermittently as release valves, a way of conjuring the notion of an idyllic Hawaii. But having grown up here, hearing those songs in this context embodied a different sort of tension for me: how Hawaii is often both revered and erased when interpreted through a foreign lens.

Part of my confusion was not always understanding the show’s intentions; in a series that’s purportedly satirizing white privilege, was using Hawaiian music to soundtrack the spiritual epiphanies of entitled tourists meant to be ironic? Or was it intended as a meta-commentary on the continent’s consumption of native land, culture, and people? Is the show that self-aware? If not (and if you have to ask, the answer is probably no), The White Lotus has a different set of problems to contend with, using Hawaiian folk music the way it uses its few Native Hawaiian characters: as hollow plot devices in service of illuminating the inner lives of the series’s mostly white protagonists.

There are two local characters used to bookend the show. The first is a timid White Lotus trainee named Lani (Jolene Purdy), who goes into labor in the middle of her first shift; she doesn’t want to leave work because she needs the money. After giving birth in the hotel manager’s office, she disappears, but the disruption accomplishes a crucial plot point — sending her boss (Bartlett) into a drug-fueled bender. The second is a hunky bellhop and luau performer named Kai (Kekoa Kekumano), who starts a fling with a guest named Paula (Brittany O’Grady). Their relationship is an opportunity for the show to explore issues of Hawaii’s colonization, which it does but only tepidly, via one stilted conversation that feels ham-fisted next to the rest of the show’s dialogue.

Kai and Paula’s chat happens on the beach at dusk, their faces blanketed in shadows, just after the pair have emerged, passionately, from the ocean. We’re four episodes in, but it’s the first time we really hear Kai speak, and he’s feeling nostalgic. He tells Paula about his childhood spent picking seashells, feeding pigs, and pulling taro — a Hawaiian 101 pastiche so basic, I half expected him to break into a spontaneous fire dance. Paula giggles: “You’re just so real.”

Somehow, the conversation pivots to a vague CliffsNotes synopsis of how Hawaiian land was stolen. Kai uses Hawaiian words like lo’i and konohiki, as if Paula knows what they mean. King Kamehameha is mentioned, stripped of any context. Kai is a clumsy and lazy symbol of colonialism in a moment that could have taken greater care to humanize what it means to be Native Hawaiian living in modern Hawaii.

Elsewhere, locals appear as exotic fodder and naive natives to further white characters’ enlightenment. Take one unbelievable scene where Hechinger’s character, Quinn, a 16-year-old gamer who’s developing a spiritual relationship with nature, watches a group of locals paddling in their canoe. “Aloha ’Oe,” the popular Hawaiian anthem written by Queen Liliʻuokalani, soundtracks his awe.

The next day, Quinn approaches the five paddlers who — as welcoming natives stereotypically do — invite him into the canoe. “Man, you one slow haole,” teases one in his pidgin accent, just so you know he’s really local, as Quinn struggles to board. I don’t know if the show realizes it, but the scene — mimicking every corny cinematic depiction of Hawaii, from North Shore to 50 First Dates — is one of The White Lotus’s best claims to satire.

Compared with the tourists, whose lives we follow with intense scrutiny, locals in The White Lotus are reduced to bit parts. This disparity mirrors the current realities faced by Hawaii residents, many of whom feel they are being treated secondary to the needs of visitors. In July, a drought on Maui led to water shortages for upcountry Maui residents, whom county officials threatened with a $500 fine for using water for nonessential activities, like watering their lawns; meanwhile, water usage at resorts and hotels remained unchecked.

Since opening back up to tourism, Covid-19 cases throughout Hawaii have skyrocketed. A month ago, the state was averaging 50 new cases per day, but with tourists visiting at pre-pandemic numbers, that number has jumped to 541. Hotels are once again at capacity, leaving local Covid patients without rooms in which to quarantine.

It’s not that The White Lotus isn’t hilariously successful at illustrating the evils of white privilege and consumption. When O’Grady’s character expresses disgust at having to watch native Hawaiian dancers perform on land that was stolen from them, she’s met with a rich, white shrug. “Obviously, imperialism was bad,” responds Steve Zahn’s character, a sad-sack dad, over dinner. “But it’s humanity. Welcome to history. Welcome to America.” By scraping at imperialism, The White Lotus mimes a moral center but never engages the topic beyond mere gesture. How could it, when the locals and Kānaka Maoli are depicted in only a single dimension?

Showrunner Mike White is certainly aware of the complicated social dynamics at play in a place like Hawaii. After making Enlightened, the cult-favorite HBO show featuring Laura Dern, he bought a house in Hanalei, Kauai. As he recently told the New Yorker:

“Mark Zuckerberg has a place there. And I’d be, like, Ugh, those guys. They own the world! And then I was, like, I am that guy. The people who live there [in Hanalei] and have lived there their whole lives, they’re all being displaced. And it’s a small enough place that you can kind of hold it all in your head in a way that you can’t in a place like L.A. It’s a complex place, and I didn’t feel like I could tell the story of the native Hawaiians and their struggles to fight some of their battles, but I felt like I could kind of come at it from the way I experienced it.”

That experience — an esteemed, white Hollywood showrunner living part time in Hawaii — feels indicative of The White Lotus’s point of view. It’s good to know your limits, but how successful can a piece of satire be if it replicates the very power structures it purports to satirize? There isn’t a shortage of prestige television shows that take privilege as its muse. But imagine if more took seriously those who bear the brunt of that privilege.

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Published by Vox. 

[mitchellkuga]

A Movement in Mu’umu’u

This story originally appeared in the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of Flux Magazine 

Charming, nostalgic, occasionally awkward, the classic island garment finds itself embraced by a new generation of islanders. 

I am reaching for a pint of blueberries at the Whole Foods in Kailua when, amidst the humdrum of athleisure, I see it: a classic mu‘umu‘u. The ankle-length dress is faded, flowy, and floral—demure even, if the affect wasn’t so loud. It is the same style of mu‘u worn regularly by my kumu and tūtū, but seeing it on this twentysomething casually shopping for carrots feels destabilizing, a collision of references. I do a double take. She’s paired it with chunky sneakers and an insouciance I can only describe as punk, like she’s dressing at me. I smile behind my mask, the urgency of my to-do list temporarily consumed by memories of keiki hula competitions, the air fragrant with pīkake. 

Chalk it up to the frequency illusion, but over the next few months I will see echoes of this woman—young, fashionable, and wearing old mu‘umu‘u—strolling the farmers market, picnicking at Magic Island, and filling gas. As a recent headline in The Times UK exclaimed: “The muumuu is back (yikes).” But don’t call it a trend, at least not in Hawai‘i. Instead, enthusiasts on Instagram are calling it a “muuvement,” one rooted in joy, sisterhood, and a reckoning with the garment’s colonialist past.

“Wearing mu‘u was my way of staying joyful in spite of the anxious energy that came from being in a pandemic,” says Annemarie Paikai, a 33-year-old Hawaiʻi-Pacific resource librarian at Leeward Community College. “Lately, I’ve realized that it has become a type of armor for me. I’ll often put one on for the day when I’m feeling anxious or uncertain and just need to be surrounded by that muʻu comfort.”

Lise Michelle, a 23-year-old weaver, started collecting mu‘u after returning home to O‘ahu in 2016 from Marine Corps training in South Carolina. “Muʻu played a role in rebuilding my idea of self, which was lost while I was on the continent,” they say (Michelle uses they/them pronouns). “The shapelessness of the muʻu allowed me to be whatever I wanted underneath it, and under my muʻu were five other sets of arms, hands working to ulana (plait) my healing and hurt.”

For others, the draw is more aesthetic. Meleana Estes, a 41-year-old lei maker and creative director in Honolulu, collects mu‘u for their bold, graphic prints, favoring those from the flower-power era of the 1960s and ’70s. “To me, wearing a mu‘u elevates you,” she says. Her collection numbers somewhere in the fifties, which causes “huge closet problems,” but she can’t let them go. “There is a mu‘u for every mood,” she says.

Today, local brands like Sig Zane, Kealopiko, and Manuheali‘i are making new, contemporary mu‘u. But for enthusiasts, the garment’s revitalized appeal lies primarily in looking backwards. Shadi Keehuweolani Faridi, 35, highlighted the eco-friendly, zero-waste ethos behind buying secondhand mu‘u, pointing to the superior quality of the old-school construction, along with the allure of stepping into a garment with history. This focus on sustainable fashion extends to a culture of giving. At Hana Hou, the boutique she co-owns in Hilo with her mother, Faridi started a mu‘u share rack where customers can take (or give) a free mu‘u, but as a sign on the rack notes, “You betta rock it!”

Mu‘umu‘u means to “cut off” or “shorten,” referencing both the garment’s length, which traditionally ends around the ankles, and its absence of a yoke. Introduced to Hawai‘i by Christian missionaries in the 1820s, and initially constructed out of leftover sheets of muslin in monotone colors, the mu‘u was first worn as a slip under the more formal holokū, a loose, seamed dress with a yoke and usually with a train. Before the arrival of Europeans, the predominant form of dress for Native Hawaiian women was the pā‘ū, a kapa skirt whose lack of coverage the missionaries believed not only “painful to the eye, but injurious to the soul,” according to Agnes Terao-Guiala’s book, Hawaiian Women’s Fashions. It wasn’t until the 1940s that the mu‘u started to be thought of as outerwear, and by the second Hawaiian Renaissance in the 1970s designers both local and foreign began approaching the mu‘u as a high-fashion garment, experimenting with colors and incorporating influences from Japanese and Chinese apparel. From pākē mu‘u and pleated mu‘u, to party mu‘u and sunback mu‘u, “there was a muu for every figure, a muu for every pocketbook and muu for every time of day,” declared a magazine article in Paradise of the Pacific.

Today’s mu‘u renaissance is seemingly flanked by two adjacent moments: cottagecore and the pandemic.

But unlike cottagecore—think teenagers on TikTok lounging in vintage prairie dresses that are meant to evoke the tranquility of the English countryside—wearing mu‘u in Hawai‘i doesn’t conjure the same sense of escapism. (Irony, too, feels beside the point.) Instead of retreating into fantasy, enthusiasts like Paikai are taking to Instagram to wrestle with the garment’s oppressive history. 

On January 17, 2021, the anniversary of the illegal overthrow of Queen Lili‘uokalani and the Hawaiian Kingdom, Paikai expressed her feelings around the garment’s potential for shame and struggle. “While wearing muʻumuʻu may not be an obvious form of resistance, in many ways that’s what this movement does for me,” she wrote. “It allows me a space to push back on cultural norms, honor my people, and live in joy—which is an act of resistance too.” 

The revitalization of the mu‘u also upends its popular perception as schlubby work-from-home attire, as depicted in the 1995 episode of The Simpsons titled “King-Size Homer.” The episode follows Homer as he dons a mu‘umu‘u after gaining 61 pounds so he can qualify for disability and work from home. (The Westernized pronunciation of the garment, which bulldozes both ‘okina, doesn’t help either, evoking the mooing of a slovenly cow.) The muʻu as it’s being worn today feels more indebted to the spirit of streetwear, a garment that’s meant to be contemporized, malleable, and seen—and not just on social media.

Fueling the renaissance is Mu‘umu‘u Month, started by Shannon Hiramoto in 2014. Every day for the month of January, Hiramoto posted a photo of herself on Instagram wearing a different mu‘u—some days to work, other days to the bowling alley or the beach. It was a playful nod to the 40-year-old’s childhood growing up in Hanapēpē in the ’80s and ’90s, back when mu‘u were worn more frequently. Slowly but reverently an unexpected community of mu‘u enthusiasts developed, connecting through the #muumuumonth hashtag and emboldening each other through photos, comments, and likes.

Posts under the hashtag range from quippy to essaystic, with participants often sharing the labels, eras, and provenance of each mu‘u. Hana Hou co-owner Faridi, for her part, takes a playfully diaristic approach. In one post, a swirly lime and forest green mu‘u brought back memories of her family’s old ’70s Datsun pickup truck. Dubbed “Da green machine,” the truck had a “puka on the floor so when it rained you had to cover it with your slipper,” Faridi wrote. In another post Faridi, wearing a cinched teal mu‘u by Elsie Krassas, waxed reflective, “These muʻu teach me to stand up straighter (working on it), practice my grace (working on it), and slowwww down....”  (“Broke da eye! ” user @kuumorningdew commented.) 

“The people who participated in Mu‘u Month this year are all badass ladies,” says Faridi, who started participating in earnest in 2019. She says finding a digital community of fellow muʻu wearers felt galvanizing, a way of belonging to a tapestry of similarly minded women. “I noticed that a lot of us are introverts,” she says, which makes counting the actual number of Muʻumuʻu Month participants difficult—many of their profiles are set to private, she points out, or have been deleted altogether. Through Instagram, “we kind of fed off of each other like a sisterhood,” she says.

Sometimes these relationships transcend the digital space. In January 2020, Hiramoto organized a mu‘umu‘u brunch at Gaylord’s, located on an old plantation in Kilohana, Kaua‘i. Muʻu designer Barabara Green spoke, and proceeds from a silent muʻu auction went to the Kaua‘i Historical Society. But the gathering was mostly a chance to talk story and connect with fellow muʻu lovers. Around 70 women showed up, all dressed in muʻu.

In 2021, Hiramoto estimates that over 200 people participated in Mu‘umu‘u Month in some capacity, the largest number to date. “The first year was just for fun,” she says. But each January, “more and more intention became attached to it, and things started to emerge—just new thoughts and new feelings and a new way of going through the world and bridging with other people that I didn’t expect. [Wearing mu‘u] continues to gift all these different ways of experiencing life.”

January just happened to be the month that Hiramoto, then the owner of the clothing store Machinemachine, was gifted an excess of vintage mu‘u. But Mu‘umu‘u Month turned out to be the perfect start to each year, she says, likening the 31 consecutive days of wearing mu‘u to a juice cleanse.  “It wasn’t my intention, but every January I’m letting my armpit hair grow and my leg hair grow, because for the most part it’s covered up,” she says. “Like why am I doing those things? It’s a moment of pausing on a lot of those habits, and maybe some habitual thought patterns too.” 

 Even after seven years, Hiramoto sometimes has to give herself a pep talk before slipping on her mu‘u and stepping out the door. As everyone I spoke to mentions, casually wearing a mu‘u today takes guts, inviting wayward looks, sassy comments from that one coworker, and random conversations with strangers. But she’s learned to welcome these interactions, which have come to color her otherwise hermetic days as a craftsperson. “I like pushing out of my comfort zone,” she says, describing wearing mu‘u as a form of exposure therapy. “I gravitated towards the arts because of my introversion, but for me it got to the point where it was holding myself back from building community. And I desire community and people so much.” 

Inspired by Mu‘umu‘u Month, Christy Werner has a collection of around 40 mu‘u—she’s lost track of the exact number at this point, giving and loaning mu‘u throughout the years to anyone who expresses interest. “I trust a mu‘u goes where it needs to,” she says, “even if sometimes I’m a little sad to no longer have it.”

She noticed her 3-year-old son also reacts differently to her in mu‘u, cocking his head or petting her dress. Recently, he picked one of her mu‘u from the laundry and proclaimed that he wanted to put it on. “And he proceeded to have a dance party in it,” she says. “There really is just something about a mu‘u that is magical.”

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Published by Flux Magazine. Photo by Zoe McConnell.

[mitchellkuga]

How Rina Sawayama Turned Pop Inside Out — And Built One of Its Fastest Growing Fanbases.

This story originally appeared on the June 2021 cover of Billboard Magazine.

With her genre-obliterating sound and gripping lyrics about identity, Rina Sawayama became one of the most exciting queer voices in pop. Now she’s making room for anyone else who feels like an outsider. 

A few years ago, Rina Sawayama was starting to wonder if she was unsignable. There was the casual racism, like the time she found out that a senior record executive jokingly referred to her as “Rina Wagamama” behind her back. Or that time a major-label A&R executive backed out of a deal at the last minute, leaving her scrambling to cover lawyer’s fees she had planned to pay for with her advance.

Her infraction? The demo for “STFU!,” a thrashing, nu metal romp that sounds like the reincarnation of Limp Bizkit if Fred Durst were JoJo. The song’s chorus — “Shut the f–k up,” intoned over and over again in a feathery singsong — was both absurd and intimate, aimed at the very sort of person in the industry who thought replacing Sawayama’s name with that of a Japanese-inspired British restaurant chain was funny. From the label’s perspective, though, “STFU!” was too stark a departure from the R&B-inflected minimalism of RINA, her 2017 EP. She remembers feeling “devastated” when the deal fell through, looking around the Los Angeles studio she was renting for the month and wondering how she was going to afford it. But at no point did she ever question her vision.

“I was like, ‘F–k off,’ ” Sawayama, dressed casually in a gray hoodie, says over Zoom from her London flat on a recent afternoon, her laughter revealing a sliver of blue braces. The Japanese-British singer, 30, had spent her 20s toiling independently in London’s underground music scene, playing small clubs and fine-tuning what would become her boundary-pushing approach to pop. So by the time she started pursuing a record deal, she knew she was on to something: “I think that’s the benefit of me waiting so long. Had I been younger, I might have been like, ‘Oh, no. I need to change my sound.’ ”

Then she took a meeting with British independent label Dirty Hit. Founder Jamie Oborne had a different reaction to “STFU!”: He couldn’t stop laughing. “It was bonkers,” says Oborne. “It was such a collision of different cultural elements, of genres.” He also knew a thing or two about developing misunderstood acts. When he launched Dirty Hit in 2009, his first band was pop-rock powerhouse The 1975, which “every label in the f–king world seemed to pass on twice,” he says. Sawayama signed to the company in 2019 — and became the pop-star outlier among a rock-leaning roster that now includes Pale Waves, Wolf Alice and Beabadoobee.

“I often say there are two types of artists: artists that have to do it and artists that want to do it, and Rina is the former,” adds Oborne. “She can’t be anything else other than Rina Sawayama.”

“STFU!” became the lead single from 2020’s Sawayama, her debut album and one of the most critically lauded releases of the year. (It appeared prominently on over two dozen best-of lists last year.) It felt like the foundation for a new kind of pop star: unabashedly queer, unapologetically Asian and completely unconcerned with genre conventions. Sawayama’s identities don’t just inspire her music — they permeate its DNA. On “Chosen Family,” a shimmering, gospel-tinged ballad, she sings about finding solace in queer friendships, especially in the face of rejection from loved ones. On futuristic tracks like “Tokyo Love Hotel” and “Akasaka Sad,” she explores her relationship with Japan as a U.K. transplant — her family emigrated from Niigata when she was 5 years old — who feels both protective of and disconnected from her culture.

Her material is often dark and deeply personal, but she wraps each song on Sawayama in the pageantry of pop music. “Rina is a pop-art chameleon,” says friend Elton John, a longtime fan who duetted with her on a new version of “Chosen Family” in April. “Her debut album is a clever and confident kaleidoscopic odyssey that zips and zooms through a compendium of pop music genres. She exuberantly changes gears from track to track and keeps the listener guessing where she’s going to go next.”

Genre fluidity is essentially the norm today, but Sawayama takes the concept to dizzying new heights: She’s less interested in blending sounds than in pushing each to its extreme. Throughout Sawayama, she pivots with ease from New Jack Swing to stadium rock to slinky club beats. Time-stamping it all are influences from the Y2K days, back when Korn and Britney Spears vied for the top spot on MTV’s Total Request Live. “I love the chaos of that era,” says Sawayama, who in conversation is enthusiastic and quick to laugh, usually at herself. She stresses that her affection for these sounds is in no way ironic. “I always get asked: ‘Who are you listening to at the moment?’ I’m like, ‘Kelly Clarkson? I don’t know if you’ve heard of her? Um, Katy Perry’s first album?’ ”

There’s an exhilarating whiplash in hearing her go from “Dynasty,” an Evanescence-inspired rock anthem about intergenerational trauma, to “XS,” a snappy critique of consumerism that evokes Spears’ frothy collaborations with The Neptunes. In less skillful hands, the transition would crumble into mere pastiche. Sawayama’s approach, however, feels reminiscent of code switching, something many queer people — and more specifically, queer people of color — know intimately: the ability to flit between presenting queer and straight, constantly modulating identities depending on circumstances. “That’s part of the magic of Rina, the fact that she was able to stitch it all together,” says Dirty Hit A&R manager Chris Fraser. “Her identity brings it together. She wants to exist in the mainstream world, but on her own terms.”

Sawayama has yet to produce any major hits, but her music has turned her into the rare artist equally adored by underground auteurs and A-listers like Elton John and Lady Gaga, who will feature Sawayama on her upcoming Chromatica remix album. Sawayama won’t spoil what song she’s on, though as a longtime Gaga disciple, she was hardly picky. “If they said, ‘You need to cover ‘Chromatica I,’ ” — the first of the album’s instrumental interludes — “I’d be like, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it!’ I’ll just sing the whole orchestra: dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum!”

Like Gaga and her Little Monsters, Sawayama has been intentional about cultivating her passionate fan base, the Pixels. On her 2018 tour, she offered special wristbands to audience members who had come alone so they could find one another and build community. She’s also a savvy creator on YouTube, where she posts not just behind-the-scenes footage and performances but also guitar lessons and makeup tutorials, all branded as “RINA TV” with algorithm-friendly, vlogger-style titles like ��How to make a MUSIC VIDEO in 5 STEPS.”

“Showing the creative process can be really exciting for people who, like me, had no idea how to do this,” she says. “I learned so much from being independent, but I really wished I knew so much before. It would have saved me a lot of time.”

The conversations she fosters in her music — what it means to be queer, what it means to feel torn between homelands — are ones she continues outside of the studio, too. Last summer, she signed an open letter asking the U.K. government to ban conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ youth. More notably, her criticism of the citizenship requirements for some U.K. honors, including the BRIT Awards, has inspired new eligibility rules that recently opened up nominations to musicians like her — immigrants who have spent much of their lives in the United Kingdom.

Sawayama makes music about feeling like an outsider and fighting for agency; that she wields it back at the music industry, making room for other outsiders in the process, cuts to the heart of what makes her so exciting. It shows in the video for “STFU!,” which begins with Sawayama out to dinner with a white guy. As he stabs at his sushi, he unleashes a string of microaggressions, from comparing her to Asian actresses to expressing surprise that she sings in English. At one point, he asks, “Have you been to that Japanese place… Wagamama’s?” Every remark is something Sawayama has heard before from real-life dates, strangers or, yes, label executives.

The freedom to make such artistic decisions, says Sawayama, makes her feel “really lucky that [I’ve been] able to do me, 100%. Because if I wasn’t, I don’t think I’d be proud of where I am now.” Which is a fairly unique position: She’s a kind of cultural critic embedded in the front lines, a pop scholar using the diva playbook to punch up at the industry that has tried to pigeonhole her.

It’s a role that’s unlikely to change, even as she enters the next phase of her career and advances toward pop’s molten center. Sawayama is working on her second album, which she promises will mine even more left-field references from decades past. In the fall, she’ll finally embark on a rescheduled tour of the United Kingdom and Ireland, playing some venues that are double or triple the size of those she planned to hit pre-pandemic. (A North American tour, originally scheduled for later this year, is now booked for next spring alongside other European dates.)

“I feel like Rina is going to explode once people start going to shows and seeing her,” says Oborne, adding that her success has played a big role in the label’s recent expansion, with new offices in Los Angeles and Sydney. She’ll also make her feature-film debut in 2022, starring alongside Keanu Reeves in John Wick: Chapter 4.

Sawayama’s rise has even inspired those who didn’t get it to reach out to congratulate her — including the A&R executive who pulled the plug on a deal after hearing “STFU!” It felt good, says Sawayama, but it wasn’t quite good enough. “I was like, ‘Next time I see him, I’m still going to demand that money,’ ” she says with a laugh.

Rina Sawayama had two goals for her U.S. TV debut, on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, in October. She wanted to convey a sense of stakes: At that stage of the pandemic, remote performances often felt as slickly produced as music videos — so instead, she designed a performance that relied on a few camera cuts to capture the feeling that anything could happen if the viewer stuck around. “Rina was like, ‘It has to be live, but it has to be capital-L live,’ ” says Tom Connick, product manager at Dirty Hit. “ ‘You have to really hear my vocals — I don’t want it to be super polished.’ ”

Her second mission: “I’m going to try to get the straights and the locals,” she recalls thinking — in other words, win over the masses. “And then I came out with that f–king outfit.” She’s referring to her Marie Antoinette-goes-to-the-fetish-shop number: a red leather bodice and garter-style harness with opera gloves and opulent costume jewelry. “My entire team was like, ‘Babes, I don’t think you’ve nailed the brief,’ ” she says. “It was so high drag.” Vogue called the look “a performance in itself.”

Sawayama traces her sense of theatricality to her days at Cambridge’s Magdalene College, where she studied politics, psychology and sociology while singing in a hip-hop group called Lazy Lion. “I thought we were the second coming of Black Eyed Peas,” she says. “I wasn’t nearly as iconic as Fergie, but I was trying.” At times, however, she struggled. She has called the university culture of Cambridge “horribly patriarchal” and felt isolated and stereotyped as an international student during much of her time there. But in her senior year, she fell in with a group of queer creatives, including the drag band Denim, which gave her a much-needed sense of belonging. Sawayama, who has been open about her experiences with depression, credits that scene with saving her life.

Their sensibility — proudly camp with an academic twist — has become a defining feature of her music. “I’m inspired by drag because people wear their trauma and insecurity and celebrate it or make a character out of it, and that’s really what I wanted to do with the album,” she says. “I wanted to talk about these things that have caused me so much pain — so much expensive therapy bills — and make it into something that just sounded like a pop song, to make people want to really listen over and over to what was being said.”

After graduating, she worked a series of odd jobs in London, sometimes two or three at a time, to independently fund her music: selling ice cream sandwiches out of her friend’s truck, working as a nail technician at a high-end salon, logging a few months at an Apple Store before she got fired for modeling in a Samsung ad. Pursuing music full time often felt like a distant dream. “When I started out, I was like, ‘What do you do as an artist?’ I had no idea how to release things or why it’s important to release songs or albums,” she says. “I didn’t grow up around the music industry. I have no connections.”

A photographer friend introduced Sawayama to Will Frost, who had worked in music publicity and now manages her along with day-to-day manager Caspar Harvey. At the time, Sawayama was content to just put out singles. Frost, she says, stressed the importance of planning for a larger body of work and thinking long term.

“Even when the money was running out, I had such belief in how successful Rina could be that we had to just keep going independently and not make any decisions that didn’t feel right,” says Frost. “It shows now in everything she does, whether it’s the fearlessness in the music or being outspoken on any topic she is passionate about — they’re all possible because of those formative years and the resilience she developed.”

Frost connected her to Adam Crisp, the singer-songwriter and producer who works under the name Clarence Clarity. Though it took a while for them to click — “The first song he did was ‘Alterlife,’ and I remember being like, ‘Ugh! That’s too much!’ ” — his maximalist tendencies turned out to be a perfect match for Sawayama’s instinct to, says Crisp, “blow the lid off everything” as a performer. He ultimately co-produced all but two of Sawayama’s 13 tracks. “He always brings a slightly cooler reference,” says Sawayama, “which is helpful, because I’ll be like, ‘Remember Avril Lavigne’s fourth track when she did this?’ And he’ll be like, ‘Yeah, but did you know that’s a rip-off of Radiohead?’ ”

Instead of sanding down her influences into one neat package, Crisp helped her embrace their contrasts. “We’ve got a running theme of face-melting guitar solos that pop up all over the place and really audacious, ridiculous key changes,” he says. “That’s the kind of stuff we both like, particularly Rina: putting things in places that have no right to be there.” In the end, he notes, “the most ridiculous idea wins.”

Plenty of pandemic albums sounded like queer dance parties incarnate, from Dua Lipa’s disco trip Future Nostalgia to Gaga’s ebullient Chromatica. But Sawayama felt the most purely communal: a celebration of all the ways queer bodies can come together in their own hallowed spaces, whether that’s moshing to “Dynasty,” strutting down imaginary runways to “Comme Des Garçons (Like the Boys)” or swaying sweatily side to side, with interlocked arms, to “Chosen Family.”

That has made the lack of live shows as tough for the artist herself as it has been for her community. “I think a song is complete in terms of its writing when it’s performed and fed back to you through the audience, when you hear them singing it. It’s almost like a comedian testing their material,” she says. “For me, it’s important how people’s bodies move to the songs because as a pop writer, you’re essentially carrying people on this journey.”

Still, Sawayama never considered pushing her album back. So during lockdown, she focused her promotional efforts on social media, pivoting her album-launch event to a last-minute YouTube party and releasing new episodes of RINA TV. “We had to be super adaptive with the album coming when it did,” says Connick. “Especially when we went into lockdown, a lot of our marketing ideas were shelved and canned pretty much overnight. So we had to very, very quickly figure out what it was we wanted to do.”

Sawayama has learned what many pop stars have in the streaming age: The albums that make the biggest impact are the ones you can keep breathing new life into. In December, she released a deluxe edition of Sawayama featuring live versions, remixes (including one with Brazilian drag superstar Pabllo Vittar) and the dopamine-spiking dance-pop single “LUCID.” For the one-year anniversary of the album in April, she put out the new version of “Chosen Family” with John. (“Will was like, ‘We should get Elton on a song,’ ” recalls Sawayama, “and I was like, ‘You’re f–king insane.’ ”) The same month, she also filmed a Tiny Desk concert for NPR, which felt like a counterpoint to the bombastic Fallon performance: a stripped-back showcase for her operatic voice.

Not everything on her wish list went according to plan. In her first meeting with Dirty Hit, Sawayama said it would be her dream to receive the prestigious Mercury Prize, which is awarded to a single album each year. But last summer, she realized she was ineligible for both that honor and the BRIT Awards, the U.K. equivalent to the Grammys. Both are run by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) trade group, which at the time required solo artists to have British or Irish nationality. Sawayama has spent most of her life in the United Kingdom but is not a citizen — she’s on an Indefinite Leave to Remain visa. There are pathways to citizenship for those with such visas, but she would have to give up citizenship in Japan, where her parents now live and which does not allow for dual citizenship.

Realizing she was locked out was heartbreaking. “When you’re an immigrant, you kind of move through life being masked and shielded to the fact that not everyone is welcoming of you,” says Sawayama. “And that was a moment when that veil came off.”

One phrase in particular kept running through her mind: Am I not enough? “I’ve lived here for this many years, I went to Cambridge, I pay taxes here, and I’m still not good enough,” says Sawayama before backpedaling — as if realizing she has boxed herself into the model-minority myth. “You can still be an amazing person and belong to this country without those things, too. But I think I’ve conditioned myself to believe that I’m not deserving if I don’t have those things, which is the reason I work so hard.”

After waiting a bit to gauge whether she had been truly snubbed — “Can you imagine if my album was s–t and no one was talking about me, and then I was like, ‘Excuse me, I should have been nominated’?” — she did an interview with VICE calling attention to the eligibility requirements, which she labeled a form of artistic “border control.” A day after the article was published, the hashtag #sawayamaisbritish started trending on Twitter in the United Kingdom.

Eventually, BPI chairman Ged Doherty reached out to Sawayama to explain that he didn’t realize how restrictive the rules were, she recalls. (“Rina is an incredible artist, and we are grateful to her for raising her concerns,” Doherty wrote in a statement to Billboard.) A few months later, in February, the organization announced some changes: Any musician who has been a resident in the United Kingdom for at least five years is now eligible. Soon after, Sawayama was shortlisted for the BRITs’ 2021 Rising Star Award. “Telling my mum was amazing,” she said in a teary-eyed video responding to the nomination. “She was so proud.”

She ultimately didn’t win, but getting a seat at the table was its own kind of victory. In April, Sawayama attended the 2021 BRITs ceremony in a purple Balmain couture gown with an impossibly long tulle train, looking every bit the belle of the ball. On Twitter, she posted a photo of herself on the red carpet with the caption: “sawayama looking v british tbh !!!!”

“Ri-na! Ri-na! Ri-na!”

“Who’s Gonna Save U Now?,” a crunchy, ’80s-style rock jam on Sawayama, opens with the sounds of an imaginary crowd chanting her name. Even before she released an album, Sawayama always had grand visions for her live show. Her first official concert, celebrating the arrival of her 2017 EP, was at the 150-capacity East London venue The Pickle Factory. As she listened to fans singing along to her music, she recalls, “I literally thought I was selling out a stadium.”

“She only ever thinks in mega pop-star terms because that’s the world she grew up loving,” says Frost. “When she was playing to 300 people, it was always outfit changes, choreo, drama — how can we make this tiny venue with this small fan base feel like they’re at an arena?”

On her tour this fall, Sawayama won’t be playing arenas, but she will perform at her biggest venues to date. She’s relishing the creative opportunities that come with a larger stage and hopes her show will offer a safe space for a fan base that spans a diversity of backgrounds. “I feel like my entire live team is queer. It’s like a lovely queer family,” says Sawayama. Directing the tour is her friend Chester Lockhart, the musician-actor who also directed her Tiny Desk performance. “Me and Chester always talk about live shows — we’re obsessed with iconic shows of the 2000s.”

In the meantime, Sawayama has been back in the studio with Crisp recording her second album, which she says will explore other influences from the Y2K era and beyond, including ’90s rave music, The Cardigans, No Doubt and Bon Jovi. “That’s what’s so fun about music from the ’90s and 2000s — it’s so broad,” she says.

At first, writing new music felt terrifying: “I was like, ‘I have f–king nothing to say, I haven’t lived life, I haven’t met people.’ ” Not being able to tour the first album also made it hard to start thinking about the next. “Mentally, as a songwriter, that’s hard,” she says, “because I haven’t gotten [Sawayama] out of my system.” But after getting into the studio with Crisp earlier this year, Sawayama slowly found her voice again. In two weeks, they cranked out 14 songs. A writing trip to L.A. is also in the works.

The staff at Dirty Hit believes that, with the right timing and positioning, this next album could finally push her into the mainstream. But they’re not in a rush. “We haven’t taken anything to radio in America yet for a reason: I want to build an undeniable foundation first,” says Oborne. “I feel like we’re almost there.”

For now, they’re letting Sawayama lead the way. “We’d love for her to become a Main Pop Girl,” says Connick. “But I’m trying not to focus too much on any particular model or existing success story and just continue what we did from 18 months ago, which was to facilitate Rina being Rina.” It’s a common refrain among her team — “Let Rina be Rina” — that speaks to both her singular artistry and the general strategy at Dirty Hit. “We’re not really selling music,” says Oborne, “we’re selling identity.”

A few years ago, Sawayama contemplated going simply by the name Rina. “I’ve always been conscious that my surname is an inconvenience,” she says, recalling her earliest days in British school, when staff would regularly butcher her name. “I would be in floods of tears. That anxiety of someone trying to say my last name as a 5-year-old was the most excruciating thing.”

In the end, after talking it through with her team, she decided to keep it. “I think it’s important for people to instantly recognize that it’s a Japanese or Asian-sounding name,” she says. “But in the future, I’m definitely not counting off dropping the surname — if I become iconic enough.” For Sawayama, maybe the question is not if, but when.

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Published by Billboard Magazine. Photo by Zoe McConnell. 

[mitchellkuga]

How Tumblr Porn Let Gay Asian Men Be More Than a Fetish

Published by Out Magazine

Porn is riddled with racism and Tumblr was one of our last safe spaces.

One time, at a party in college, someone asked me if I was dating my roommate, a close friend who happened to be, like me, Asian. I laughed. “God no. What would we do, bump pussies?”

It was a stupid throwaway line — self-hatred masquerading as gay party banter. But ten years later it’s something I think about. This line came with a horrifying cliff of subtext — the reducing of queer female desire, the presumption that my roommate was a bottom (he’s not), the conflation of sexual roles and the function of relationships. But my intended point was a conviction I casually perpetuated as an irrefutable fact: that all gay Asian men are bottoms.

At the time, it didn’t matter that I lacked any of the sexual experiences necessary to determine whether or not I even liked getting fucked. Society had decided that for me. The person I was talking to was white, by the way, and looking back I suspect I was also looking for his approval, positioning myself as someone who, with a self-incriminating wink, was in on the joke.

The joke being me. I didn’t learn the joke so much as absorb it like osmosis through the pores of my skin. A fact as American as apple pie: I was neutered both sexually and socially. Of course this was coded in nearly every form of popular culture, that East Asian men, even the straight ones, are failed men. Which meant I had failed twice. My intrinsic bottomhood, though, was most evident in the only depictions of gay Asian men available to me at the time: the dizzying, electrifying, and often dismal galaxy of online porn.

Tumblr’s ban on adult content, effective today, feels particularly devastating—it was one of the few spaces where Asian men could see themselves depicted with any sort of sexual agency, even doing the unimaginable: topping. I was a teenager in the early 2000s, a bygone era of pornography. (We had dial up then.) But the images of the early aughts have largely endured: gay Asian men exoticized as objects of servitude for the pleasure of mostly white tops. Gay Asian displays of sexual dominance are so rarified that last year the podcast Nancy dedicated nearly an entire episode to Brandon Lee, porn’s “first Asian top,” who is viewed as a kind of sexual unicorn.

The first time Joel Kim Booster remembers seeing gay Asian men in porn was in college, when an internet search roped him into the esoteric realm of Japanese imports. “No shade to my friends who may be into this, but it was so weird,” says the Korean-American comedian and writer. “Everyone was wearing gas masks and all the dicks were pixelated. I didn't specifically seek out Asian porn for a while after that.”

Joel grew up in an adopted white family, in a predominately white suburb just outside of Chicago. “I think my tastes were definitely shaped by Baywatch and gay porn in tandem,” he says. Online, the first porn he consumed after “famously dabbling in Pokémon erotica” was from a site called Straight College Men, which mostly featured toned white Adonis types. He was 13 or 14 then, but to this day, the 29-year-old remembers one model named Chip. “It's not exactly a revelation to say that for a while, white with an athletic build and forgettable faces became sort of the baseline for what I was into as my sexual desires began to form,” he says.

When he got to college, stumbling onto videos featuring black and Latino men under tabs like “BDSM,” “Military,” and “Tattoo” helped expand his desire. “That kind of casual diversity really did affect how my real world tastes began to shape,” he says. “I think for me, it's about not only the racial diversity, but the genre diversity. I wish some kid going through the ‘Bear’ tab could just happen to see an Asian guy in that mix. How would that change how he thought? Sometimes I want to see two fucking jacked Asian men wrestle in singlets. I know if I search ‘wrestling’ in Pornhub, I won't just happen to see that.”

Instead, Joel turned to Tumblr, one of the few platforms he found that hosted relatable depictions of gay Asian men. “The heroes who ran some of those Gay Asian porn blogs would find stuff outside of the normal channels,” says Joel. “It took me years to realize that it wasn't that I wasn't attracted to Asian men, it was that I wasn't attracted to a pixelated dick in a gas mask.”

Other sites he looks to include PeterFever, a porn studio run by the actor Peter Le, with the stated mission of producing “gay Asian porn fantasies” predominantly featuring Asian men and other men of color. “I think PeterFever is doing the Lord's work,” says Joel.

Though he hesitates to draw a definitive line between porn and how he’s perceived sexually—  “Attraction is a complicated thing to dissect,” he says, “and I'm not a social scientist, clearly”— Joel does notice that prospective partners often make assumptions. “I don't want anyone to think it's wrong to want to bottom, I love to bottom,” he says. “But I love to fuck too, and I'd like to see that. The number of strangers who assume I'm a bottom—I do think some of that is racialized assumptions. I've literally had men say ‘You're so hot, but I'm a bottom’ and it's like... ‘Well great, what's the issue?’”

The LA-based Canadian-born pornstar Damian Dragon, who’s part Northern Indian, Japanese, and South Pacific Islander, has experienced similar assumptions. Growing up in the ’90s, he identified exclusively as a bottom, spurred in part by mostly white partners who expected him to be “more into the servitude of them, rather than being pleasured myself,” he says. “I just sort of fell into those roles, until I realized that I wasn't comfortable in those roles and then kind of evolved into topping more. It's a lot of fun to see life from both sides and be able to flip back and forth and have that fluidity.”

On screen, with his shaved head and tattoo-adorned body, the 48-year-old cuts a domineering figure. On PeterFever, he’s often cast as a top. The studio’s mission was a big reason he returned to the industry last year, after taking a nearly decade-long hiatus. In 2009, he says “it was hard for me to connect as an Asian man with people who were filming porn at that time. I didn’t feel like I found my place. It was a little bit disparaging.”

The way he sees it, there’s a long way to go, but he’s noticed a perceptible shift in the industry within the last few years towards diversifying mainstream depictions of gay Asian roles. And audiences are responding.

“I didn't really realize how much of an affect I had on other Asian men until I started working with PeterFever,” he says. “They have a very large Asian base of viewers and I started getting notes via various social media from all over the world just thanking me for not portraying the stereotypical Asian man in the gay porn industry. It really meant something to me, that I am doing something in my own small way to help them see something within themselves.”

Despite his apprehensions, he re-entered the industry with a renewed intention. “I knew I wanted to portray Asian men who are gay in a really positive, strong sexual light,” he says, “especially when not a lot of Asian men feel that way.”

Topping, of course, is not the only means to sexual empowerment. Seen through the lens of heterosexuality, there is a false binary of “masculine” tops and “feminine” bottoms, with too much onus on the penis. But bottoming, without racialization, can be a position of sexual agency. Submission, too, can be a thrilling stance of power.

Tumblr was once a repository that expanded these narrow parameters of gay Asian desires. But that’s gone now, and we need more diversity. Divorcing the subtext of bottomhood from broader cultural attitudes feels nearly impossible to me, bottoming being as much a sexual position as a social one. Within the cultural imagination, Asian American men, gay or straight, are bottoms. This mirrors other myths, like that of the model minority, which casts us as submissive sidekicks, happy to mold our identities around the needs and phalluses of white men, and by extension, America at large.

Like Joel and like Damian, I wanted to feel like I could decide to be top or bottom, a privilege only afforded to white cis men. I didn’t want to feel like I’m buckling to expectations by bottoming, or defying them by topping. My response at that college party years ago conceded both a sexual bottomhood and a political one—it was the latter that hurt most. In eight quick words I had limited not just myself but my community. I had bottomed out.  

Published by Out Magazine. Photo by Hao Nguyen.

[mitchellkuga]

A Stay at the Taco Bell Hotel in Palm Springs

Published by Conde Nast Traveler 

Does the fast-food tycoon have any business running a hotel in Palm Springs?

I went to bed hungry at the Taco Bell hotel.

To be fair, I checked in at 10 p.m., an hour after the kitchen had closed. As a chalupa fanatic in high school who now eats Taco Bell maybe twice a year, drunk, I entered the pop-up hotel feeling apprehensive about participating in a Taco Bell commercial come to life. I imagined entering into a Baja Blast of Fyre Festival bros fist-pumping around mountains of Mexican Pizzas and Quesoritos and Triple Double Crunchwrap Supremes, which I wrongly assumed could all be delivered via 24-hour room service. In Taco Bell parlance, I was expecting a Diablo but got slapped with a Mild.

When I arrived, small groups were congregated quietly around the pool, the only visible food a single tortilla chip glistening on the pool’s floor. I struck up a conversation with someone named Tyler who had the Taco Bell logo shaved onto the side of his head; he said I could find him on YouTube by searching “Taco Bell Singer.” Another person in the pool introduced himself as the Taco Bell Sommelier. Around 11:30 p.m., a hotel staffer very politely asked that we go to our rooms. The Fire Pool had closed thirty minutes ago. Live mas?

What was The Bell: A Taco Bell Hotel & Resort? On one hand, it was a four-day takeover earlier this August of the V Palm Springs, a fully functioning hotel kitted out with more than 70 Taco Bell-themed rooms, and a Taco Bell menu, gift shop, and salon. On the other, it was a massive scale tribute to Taco Bell’s sauce packets—Mild, Hot, Fire, and Diablo—which came in the form of room keys, pillows, yoga mats, pens, portable phone chargers, towels, cookies, pool floaties, hair accessories, keychains, wall paper, sunglasses, framed art, board shorts, bikinis, and a Fire sauce packet ribbon cutting ceremony with Palm Springs city council members. Existentially, it was a marketing stunt that elevated readily accessible Tex-Mex into a highly exclusive lifestyle experience, providing Instagram catnip to Taco Bell fanatics who travelled to the scorching foothills of Palm Springs from 21 different states. Rooms, starting at $169, sold out within two minutes. Security was tight. Only those with reservations were allowed onto the premises.

As bonkers as it may all seem, it’s a logical step for the fast food chain founded in Irvine, California, by entrepreneur Glenn Bell back in 1962, when tacos were just 19 cents. Today, Taco Bell is no longer just a restaurant, but a place to get drunk, go shopping, and get married, though not necessarily in that order. And for four glorious days, it was also a place to live. (It’s not even the first time: In 2016, Taco Bell transformed one of its restaurants in Canada into a one-night-only “steakcation” equipped with bunk beds and couches to promote a new menu item called the Steak Doubledilla.)

I woke up on Friday, put on my Fire sauce board shorts, and made it to my hair and nail appointment at the Taco Bell Salon, housed in a makeshift hotel room. Two hours later, I emerged with braids called the Cinnabon Delights and a gel manicure that involved tacos and the word “FIRE.” I looked like an investigative journalist who had gone too far.

I snagged a seat at the bar behind the pool, ordered a pickle-green $14 cocktail called the Cucumber Crush and struck up a conversation with three women sitting next to me. “When I was in high school… every day I would get in my friend’s brown Camaro and we would drive to the Taco Bell drive through to get lunch,” said Michelle, a sports journalist based in the Bay Area. “I am just a way back Taco Bell girl,” she said. Michelle was most excited about trying the exclusive food items, but cautioned, “We will have to pace ourselves. I know I bought Tums.”

Everyone here is connected by a harrowing two minutes on June 27 at 10 a.m., when tickets for The Bell went live on Taco Bell’s website. Ashley and Ethan, a married couple who work at an education company in Gainesville, Florida, told me they had “an army of our college interns” lined up on computers. When one got through, she froze in shock. Nick employed 12 of his workers at West Diagnostics in Detroit to stare at their phones and hit “refresh” on his command. Jon had two screens open at his job in human resources and compared the experience to being on drugs, while Raj, a Chicago-based data consultant, used his three monitors and said he “pretty much blacked out” once he got through. He inadvertently booked three nights (most guests could only snag one) and later questioned if that was too much time. “I thought it was kind of easy,” said Van, a marketing consultant for car dealerships in Orange County, who was there with her boyfriend. “But we're sneaker heads. We're used to that process.”

Everyone here is also connected by a feverish love for Taco Bell, and beyond the $88 Taco Bell bikini tops and $10 Fire Fades were tender stories about love and youth and home. Tarun, the aforementioned Taco Bell Sommelier, told me that when his mother immigrated from India to Perryville, Maryland, in 1981, Taco Bell was the only vegetarian fast food option that reminded her of home. “Now it's a hip thing, but growing up it was just something that you ate,” he said. “Like how do you feed a family of four? Taco Bell was the thing for Indian immigrants.” He was there with Priya, who he took to Taco Bell on their second date. They got married a week and a half before we met at The Bell. “My mom wanted to come,” said Tarun, who’s based in Washington D.C. “She said, ‘If your wife can't go, I'm coming.’”

By the end of the day, the effect of living in a “tacoasis,” to borrow The Bell’s jargon, was by turns exhilarating and kind of normal, the way that relaxing at a hotel feels kind of normal. Around the pool, which was the centerpiece of the hotel, people mostly lounged and ate and drank, the way you’d do at any hotel in Palm Springs. You’d kind of forget that you were participating in a brand experiment until the famous Taco Bell gong sounded and waiters wearing see-through fanny packs stuffed with sauce packets emerged carrying trays of free food. Or the pool was cleared for synchronized swimmers wearing Fire Sauce bikinis.

That suspension of reality is what made The Bell such a genius brand activation and only a subpar hotel, at least for this crabby journalist with a tenuous relationship with the franchise (and fast food in general). When that Taco Bell gong sounded and full-grown adults cheered, I felt the unexpected stirrings of what it meant to be 15 again, eating Mexican Pizzas at the local mall in Hawaii. And when I posted what felt like my 2,000th Instagram story, I got a narcissistic glimpse of what it meant to have access to an experience that felt FOMO-inducing and ephemeral. And when I spoke to the sixth South Asian person who told me that Taco Bell was their gateway into American cuisine—and by virtue, American culture—I understood how a fast food chain could represent something more than just food.

I left the hotel that second night more than full, having scarfed down only-at-The-Bell menu items that included breakfast tacos, the avocado toast-ada, jalapeño chicken poppers, and the fan favorite, a toasted cheddar club served between layers of chalupa bread and a side of nacho cheese. I had entered The Bell hungry, and a true skeptic. But when I checked into another hotel a few blocks away, I sat around a pool free of errant tortilla chips and hot sauce floaties and half-expected that gong to ring. Sadly, it never came.

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Originally published by Conde Nast Traveler.

[mitchellkuga]

Some Libraries Are Facing Backlash Against LGBT Programs — And Holding Their Ground

Published by BuzzFeed News

Recipient of 2019 NLGJA Excellence in Online Journalism Award 

Drag queen storytimes and other LGBT programs are meant to create safe spaces for the queer community. The librarians running them are getting death threats.

On a rainy Thursday afternoon in October, Bella Noche sashayed into the reading room at the North Forest Park library in Queens. She wore a teal wig that matched the color of her sequin top, and strappy gold stilettos. The audience of about 20 children, ages 3–6, and their caretakers erupted in applause. As the noise settled, Bella Noche eased into a chair and read three books, which playfully addressed themes of diversity and acceptance, starting with Julián Is a Mermaid. The picture book by Jessica Love tells the story of a young Latino boy mesmerized by the sight of three women dressed as shimmering mermaids.

“I love mermaids!” yelled one kid after Bella Noche introduced the book’s title.

“I love mermaids more!” yelled another.

“I love mermaids more than anybody!” yelled a third.

Parents chuckled.

“I am a mermaid,” said Bella Noche, who pinned a large, bright orange crab to one side of her hair. “Does that mean you love me?”

“No!”

Bella and the parents laughed. “OK, we’ll work on it.”

Between books, she led animated singalongs, challenging the children to “catch a bubble” — cheeks puffed dramatically, mouths closed — whenever it got too noisy. She concluded the hour with crafts, including excerpts from The Dragtivity Book, a coloring book co-produced by Drag Queen Story Hour and Sez Me, an LGBT web series for kids. The coloring book featured activities like “Find Your Drag Name!” After the event, a librarian told me this was one of the library’s most well-attended storytimes, a particular feat considering the torrential rain.

Author Michelle Tea started Drag Queen Story Hour in 2015, shortly after giving birth to her son Atticus. As a new mother, she suddenly found herself at events like storytimes at her local San Francisco library, which felt welcoming but “really straight,” she said. The writer, who identifies as queer, imagined a storytime that promoted diversity and inclusion, with a pinch of camp — a family event that reflected her own family. “There is just a sort of flair with which queers do anything,” she said. “It's just a certain sense of humor, a sense of the fantastic.” So Tea, in collaboration with RADAR Productions, organized her own fantastic take on storytime at a library in the Castro, one of the country’s most historic LGBT neighborhoods. The concept was simple: a drag queen reading queer-inclusive children’s books to kids. “It was a huge hit,” Tea said, “and then it just spread.”

Today, Drag Queen Story Hour has 27 official chapters in cities ranging from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Bristol, England, and it has inspired countless unofficial offshoots. Readings have taken place at schools, bookstores, and museums but have mostly found a home at public libraries. For Tea, the pairing makes sense. “Librarians are the unsung heroes of our culture,” she said. “They are constantly fighting for our freedom of speech. They are on the front lines.”

Each chapter of Drag Queen Story Hour runs independently through grassroots organizing, but there have been attempts to scale. Last year, the New York chapter established itself as a nonprofit, and it has since received funding from the New York Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library, and two city council members. These resources go toward purchasing books, paying drag queens, and funding training programs — two hour-and-a-half sessions that teach drag queens to talk effectively to children and their parents about gender identity and drag.

“We really wanted to make sure we were presenting an inclusive, open definition of drag,” said Rachel Aimee, a freelance editor who’s the executive director of the New York chapter. “We didn't want to define it as a man dressing up as a woman, because that's not the case for every drag queen and we didn't want to reinforce the gender binary. That's why we felt it was really necessary to make sure everyone was on the same page.”

This mission of inclusivity has inspired other programs. Recently, Aimee started a training program for Drag Queen Story Hour specific to autistic kids, in partnership with the New York Public Library and in collaboration with a friend who runs a blog reviewing books for autistic children.

The program’s expansion has been fueled by high-profile media attention, drawn in part from the wow factor of two seemingly disparate communities converging. “People think librarians wear glasses and ‘shhh’ people all the time and aren't friendly,” said Todd Deck, a member of the American Library Association’s GLBT roundtable. “And people think drag queens are wild and crazy — but the truth is they have so much in common as far as storytelling, community building, imagination. A good children's librarian is really crafty, and I believe a lot of drag queens are pretty good with a hot-glue gun.”

As the program has expanded to more conservative parts of the country, drag queen storytimes have been thrust into the crosshairs of the culture wars. Protestors have gathered outside of libraries in Mobile, Alabama; Columbus, Georgia; and Port Jefferson, New York, with Alex Jones and other right-wing shock jocks condemning the program. For the most part, attacks on programs like the Drag Queen Story Hour have been scattershot attempts from religious groups or lone zealots — like an Iowa man who recently filmed himself burning LGBT-inclusive library books by a lake — who’ve been far outnumbered by supporters, and events have proceeded as planned.

But in Lafayette, Louisiana, backlash against the program has proven effective. In September, both Lafayette Public Library and Lafayette Community College indefinitely “postponed” a drag queen storytime, citing safety concerns. The library had received pressure to cancel the event from Joel Robideaux, a top Lafayette official — and lawsuits filed by Warriors for Christ and Special Forces of Liberty alleged that the Lafayette Public Library violated the First Amendment by promoting “human secularism”; following that logic, if public libraries hosted drag queens, they should also permit room rentals for all religious groups. The person spearheading the lawsuit, Chris Sevier — who previously sued the state of Alabama to legally recognize his marriage to his laptop — framed the lawsuits as a matter of equity, not hate. “Our objection is not against the LGBTQ community,” he said. “It is against the library’s actions.”

Aside from unfounded and bigoted concerns that drag queens are predators thrusting children into a state of gender confusion and homosexuality, attacks against drag queen storytime have stirred debates about library neutrality and what responsibilities a tax-funded civic institution has in serving its community. In July, this debate reached a fever pitch when the American Library Association introduced a revised interpretation to its Bill of Rights, stating that if libraries rent meeting rooms to charities and nonprofits, it cannot exclude “hate groups from discussing their activities in the same facilities.” (A representative from the American Library Association said the revision was “not connected” to Drag Queen Story Hour.) Outcry erupted, and ALA’s council has since rescinded the revision.

At the heart of the debate is a central question that has challenged the library community for decades: What is the role of a library?

Public libraries as we know it have always contained the promise of democracy — institutions tasked with connecting all people to a wealth of information, free of charge. When Scottish American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of over 2,500 libraries at the turn of the 20th century, he imagined a space that would "bring books and information to all people.” He also waxed poetic: “There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.”

For their part, librarians have looked to the American Library Association’s Bill of Rights, which emphasizes the values of equity and access, best summed up by this statement from library consultant Matt Finch: “Libraries are innately subversive institutions born of the radical notion that every single member of society deserves free, high-quality access to knowledge and culture.”

But by virtue of existing in America, public libraries have historically failed to live up to this promise. When public libraries began proliferating in the South, African Americans were denied access by laws that weren’t formally overturned until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Discrimination also affected libraries at their most “objective”: Under the Dewey Decimal Classification system, used in over 135 countries, LGBT nonfiction was classified next to books on incest and sexual bondage, in sections titled “mental illness” and “abnormal sex relations.” This wasn’t amended until 1996. Under its new heading, “sexual relations,” the books are shelved next to books about sex work, suggesting that sex is the defining aspect of the lives of LGBT people.

Within the fantasy of the library as a democratic third space, librarians are tasked with being objective civil servants, a notion that rankles many in the field. In library school, “a lot of us get fed the line that libraries are neutral, which is a very dangerous and inaccurate piece of rhetoric to give librarians,” said Ingrid Conley-Abrams, a school librarian who previously worked at the Brooklyn Public Library for over seven years. “Every program we offer or don't offer, every book we shelve or don't shelve, is a stance. So this notion that libraries are neutral is hurtful nonsense. Libraries, as long as they are run by human beings, will always have some sort of mission.”

The Task Force on Gay Liberation was founded in 1970, a year after the Stonewall riots, by librarians Janet Cooper and Israel Fishman. The next year, they threw a party at the American Library Association’s annual conference in Dallas that featured a “Hug a Homosexual” kissing booth, a radical (for its time) attention-grabbing stunt that proclaimed gay people’s existence to the library world. The task force, which has since been integrated into the ALA as the GLBT Round Table, fought to make libraries more inclusive for gay and lesbian library users, creating gay and lesbian bibliographies and combating discrimination against gay and lesbian librarians, who sometimes risked losing their jobs when coming out.

In light of the current political moment, librarians across the country are expanding that fight, with an uptick in drag queen storytimes and other queer-inclusive programming to send the signal that libraries are safe spaces for marginalized people. But some librarians said that these events, for all their messages of inclusivity, are not enough.

“If the drag queen needs to use the bathroom at your library after their reading, are they going to have trouble accessing a toilet?” asked Conley-Abrams, stressing that she is “100% in favor of drag queen storytime” but noticed that some libraries were using the program as a stand-in for the quieter, but just as important, work of affirming queer library users — like abolishing gender-segregated bathrooms and library card applications. “If you've got ‘male,’ ‘female,’ and ‘other’ [on your application], you're literally othering queer people, which is not a good look,” she said.

Many of the librarians I spoke to emphasized the importance of visually proclaiming libraries as safe spaces by developing a diverse selection of LGBT-inclusive books in easy-to-access areas, building extravagant displays for PRIDE month — “You couldn't walk anywhere without being knocked out by a quote from Harvey Milk,” said Conley-Abrams — and organizing community groups like queer book clubs, gay-straight alliances, and teen pride parties.

But in more conservative parts of the country, where attacks against drag queen storytimes have been most aggressive, creating a safe space for queer library users can be an act of discretion. Todd Deck, a librarian at the rural Tehama County Library, three hours north of Sacramento, said that community bulletin boards advertising queer-friendly events — typically placed in prominent areas in urban libraries — are most effective in areas of his library with less foot traffic, particularly for LGBT youth. He also emphasized the privacy afforded by self-checkout machines in small towns where “maybe your mom is best friends with the clerk.” “In a rural space, most likely everybody is connected in really beautiful but also really tricky ways,” he said.

Caring for LGBT youth can sometimes mean caring for people who are experiencing homelessness; they are 120% more likely to experience it than their non-LGBT peers. Julie Ann Winkelstein, a professor at the University of Tennessee who specializes in libraries as safer spaces for LGBT youth experiencing homelessness, stressed the vital role that libraries play in the lives of a particularly underserved demographic. Beyond loaning books, Winkelstein said LGBT youth experiencing homelessness are in need of other vital resources that libraries offer but are seldom recognized for: a sense of community, shelter from extreme weather, and access to resources for employment, housing, legal advice, and social workers.

“You have young people coming in who are carrying a huge amount of trauma — they need to be in an environment where at least it's not expanding on their trauma,” said Winkelstein. “They need to be in a place where they don't see something that feels anti-queer or anti-homeless,” which includes an excessive amount of negative signage — “It’s very triggering for a young person who already experiences a heck of a lot of ‘no’s’ outside of the library” — uniformed security guards, and address requirements for a library card.

Above all, librarians who identified as LGBT stressed the importance of being out at work. This can be communicated through accessories like queer-affirming pronoun buttons — “I'm not really a big button person, but some librarians are obsessed with them,” Deck said — rainbow pins, and bracelets. But mostly it’s about being confident in your own skin.

“The best thing you can do for kids is to be yourself as confidently as possible, which I know sounds really cheesy, but it's very, very true,” said Conley-Abrams, whose hair, cut short on the sides, is dyed a pinkish orange. “Because kids can't be it unless they see it, and kids have to see that there is a place for them in the world. And if they're just seeing homogeny they may worry that they have to completely change themselves in order to just be in the world, which is really scary. I am a symbol of someone who doesn't really look like other people at school but I still have a job and I'm a happy person and I found a place. And even if they're not just like me maybe I'll remind them that they'll have their place too.”

In May, when librarian Jennifer Stickles announced an event at the Olean Public Library, in a rural part of western New York, called Drag Queen Kids’ Party, she anticipated some pushback. The head of youth and adult programming wasn’t naive about the politics of Olean, which voted heavily in favor of President Trump. “We knew that there was going to be a few people who would call and complain,” she said. “We didn't know it was going to get as bad as it got.”

A post from the library’s Facebook page explaining the event — “teaching the children about acceptance, gender stereotypes, and that being different isn't a bad thing” — went viral locally and attracted a flood of negative comments, some of which, Stickles said, equated the program with rape and threatened to burn down the library. For weeks leading up to the event, the post galvanized conservatives: A local pastor barged into the library and told Stickles that she would burn in hell; people called the library saying that she shouldn’t be allowed to work with children because she identifies as queer; and neo-Nazi Daniel Burnside announced that the National Socialist Movement would be protesting the event. Stickles said that when she called the police department to organize security, they advised her to cancel the event.

The day before Drag Queen Kids’ Party, a local reporter called Stickles to ask about the death threats issued against her — threats that she was unaware of. After hanging up the phone, she stood alone in her office overlooking the parking lot. “The walk between my office to my boss's office is the only time I thought for a split second like maybe I should reconsider,” she said. After talking it over with the library director, Michelle La Voie, Stickles made her decision: “I have to. There's no way I'm calling it off.”

After a night of tossing and turning — “I got an hour and a half of sleep. I was so nervous. It had just gotten to be too much,” she said — Stickles pulled up to the library, bracing for a scene. What she encountered shocked her.

“Just rainbows everywhere,” she recalled. Over 200 supporters flooded the front lawn of the library, many of whom arrived three hours before the event to deter protestors, including a group of drag queens who drove down from Buffalo. They waved pride flags and held signs advocating acceptance and diversity. Protestors, for their part, amounted to “mostly little old ladies from church,” said Stickles, and neo-Nazis who stayed in their vehicles and drove around the library yelling obscenities. Inside, over 70 children and their parents crammed into a reading room to watch Flo Leeta read two books and lip-synch songs from “Frozen.”

Two weeks later, connections fostered at the library led to Olean’s first public Pride event: a picnic in the local park. About 100 people showed up. “I've never been around so many gay people in Olean,” Stickles said. “We're doing our best to keep the momentum going and make the whole community more inclusive.” A few people from the picnic started a group called Cattaraugus County Pride Coalition, and they’ve already discussed securing a permit for Olean’s first ever Pride parade, in 2019.

It was an unexpected outcome but one that Stickles sees as integral to her role as a librarian. “That’s the job of the public library,” she said, “to fill a need when we see it, you know?”

Backlash against programs like Drag Queen Story Hour have cast libraries as dynamic centers for civic progress, inadvertently reanimating conversations about who tax-funded institutions are responsible for serving — if the library is really for everyone, does that include hate groups? — and spotlighting the role of librarians as stewards of access and inclusion, a role that many have double-downed on since the election of President Trump.

“It's more an act of rebellion than it was before,” said Michelle Tea. “Under Obama, [Drag Queen Story Hour] just seemed like a really fun program to do — it was just fun — and it still is that, especially for the kids, but I think that one of the reasons why it is so popular right now is people are looking for things to support in space of what is happening to our culture, where so much hate is being emboldened.”

In Queens, as kids colored pages from The Dragtivity Book, Bella Noche stood to the side and reflected on the crowd, which seemed distracted at times. “This is a genuine audience,” she said. “If they're not interested, they will not hesitate to ignore you. It's cool winning over an audience of children, but also their parents — they’re protective over their kids. Their kids are the whole reason why they're here.”

She recounted an interaction with a mother after one of her readings. The mother’s son of about 7 years old approached her excitedly: “Mommy, Mommy, I know what I want to be,” he said. “When I grow up, I want to be a drag queen mermaid, too.”

📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚

 Photo by Eugénie Baccot.  

[mitchellkuga]

Ocean Vuong Explores the Coming-of-Age of Queerness

Published by GQ 

In his debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the author turns queer desire into the weather. He opens up about capturing the messier moments during gay sex, Crazy Rich Asians, and being ultra-basic.

By his own admission, at least on Instagram, Ocean Vuong can be summed up in four words: “very libra. ultra basic.” Three years ago, when he started teaching poetry at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, his students often rationalized his opinions by pointing out that he was a Libra, leaving Vuong, who was more familiar with Chinese astrology, feeling “so exposed.” He did some homework on the traits of Libras. “One of the factors is there is a lot of pent-up emotions that have very few releases,” he says, laughing, a week before the release of his debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

The ultra-basic? “That's just growing up poor,” says Vuong, 30, who was born in Ho Chi Minh City before immigrating to Hartford, Connecticut, when he was two. “That's just growing up and eating mayonnaise and Wonder Bread sandwiches. But it's ultra-basic. We can take basic to a celebratory extreme.”

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous takes place against this backdrop of ultra-basicness, a Connecticut of mobile homes, bathrooms with “pea-soup walls,” and corner stores littered with food-stamp receipts. Framed as a letter from a 28-year-old son, Little Dog, to his illiterate mother, the novel doesn’t advance so much as unravel, freeing threads that examine queerness, class, race, and the inheritance of trauma. Throughout, Little Dog attempts to make sense of his identity through the fractured history of his mother, who works grueling hours at a nail salon, and his schizophrenic grandmother, a former sex worker in Vietnam. He begins a relationship with a boy named Trevor, who’s addicted to oxycodone, while working on a tobacco farm. In writing about America, Vuong has ultimately written a novel about American failure. “The one good thing about national anthems,” Little Dog writes, “is that we’re already on our feet, and therefore ready to run.”

GQ spoke to the writer, who won the T. S. Eliot Prize for his 2016 collection of poetry, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, about astrology, Pride, and writing about gay sex.

GQ: As someone who identifies as “very Libra,” why do you think astrology has become so popular within the queer community?

Ocean Vuong: You know, I love astrology because it gives you a framework to demystify and un-shame certain parts of yourself, even things you think are flaws, even things that the world might pathologize you for. Astrology deems it as part of your makeup, and then you can deal with it with a language that isn't shameful, which is why it has been so important for queer folks. Instead of saying you're emotional, you're terrible, you're deceitful, you're wrong, you say, Well, you're a Libra. [laughs] And now there's a home for it. We create these homes for ourselves.

Sex is a notoriously difficult thing to write about, and something you do quite vividly throughout this book, capturing the whiplash between desire and shame. I'm wondering if you had any guides through the process, particularly as it pertains to writing about gay sex?

There are a few guides, to be surprisingly honest, but David Wojnarowicz is the one. A lot of times it was just his diaries, particularly his tape journals [Weight of the Earth] that were just released, and the essay “Closer to the Knives.” He's the only writer that really just said it, unabashed, uninformed by the literary etiquette that we are often asked to perform. I read a queer book recently where the writer describes walking into a room, and it just said, "Love was made there." I thought, Okay, sure. Why have we been so whitewashed?

For so many queer folks, this is where we have the most agency. Sometimes we don't have a say in what we do for a job, how our families see us, but we do have a say about where we find pleasure, who goes inside us and who we go inside of. That's when we have a choice, and I wanted to stay there, in a place fraught with fear, terror, shame, but also power. So the sex scenes are repeated. They're elongated.

Desire is a force that coils and brews a storm in us, even when we're just looking at somebody. I wanted to turn desire into the weather, to stay in a moment of potency.

I found it quite radical, especially when Little Dog loses his virginity, and you address the messier moments that can occur doing anal sex. It's so familiar to gay intimacy and yet rarely acknowledged, particularly in literature. What compelled you to write about the underbelly of gay sex?

I specifically wrote that for queer folks. There are rare moments when I know who my audience is. I'm not a writer who likes to write for specific people—I don't like to be a representative of any group—but in that moment I felt like there has to be a moment of recognizability and, further, that that quote-unquote messiness or failure is not wrong. It's part of the coming-of-age of queerness. It's also a moment of mercy. A moment of bodily failure is actually a moment where the queer bodies are their most real. Where they are absolutely standing alone on their own two feet and they start to rescue each other in that moment. Not because they are marginalized or ostracized, but because they are so outside of the frame they find their own power.

Do you recall the first time you ever saw your queer Asianness reflected in a piece of art?

Alexander Chee would be in literature, which sounds absurd because he's contemporary, but that would be the first. But the most emblematic was Happy Together by Wong Kar-Wai, because they were untouched by whiteness, and that's so rare. It's so rare. Not to mention it's just a beautiful story. The energy was always violent and toxic, but they were on their own terms.

I wonder if that specificity can exist in America.

I went to see Crazy Rich Asians here—I didn't love the movie, I thought it was boring—but I walked into this theater in western Massachusetts, and it was packed full of mostly white people at 11:30 in the morning. I sat there, and the first song that came on was traditional Chinese opera. The movie didn't even begin—it was just the song and early credits—and I just sobbed. Because I never thought I would live to see anything like that.

Do you have a thing in your closet, an item that makes you feel the most queer?

I purposefully like to wear asymmetric earrings, one dangly, one stud. It's the one moment when I say I'm purposefully off-kilter. I want people to be disoriented by my face. Even just conceptually, I find joy in having one side be different. Even my eyes, one of my eyes is different than the other. It took me a long time to find joy in that.

I’m curious about your relationship to events like Pride, particularly as a Buddhist?

Well, as a Buddhist, it's almost at times contradictory to notions of pride, because pride is related to ego. Hardcore Buddhism would say there is no such thing as the self, that the body is merely a hotel room we try to care for and then we leave. And in some sense I think that's true. In another sense I think now is one of the most important moments to rethink Pride’s relationship to queerness. A lot of the Pride parades have been hijacked by late capitalism, the commodification of the queer body to sell Chase bank accounts. We've had fucking rainbow Doritos, for God's sake. Now let's talk about safety, health-care rights, laws to protect each other. To me Pride has to quickly translate to care. And if we don't have that trajectory, that bridge from one to another, I'm not that interested.

You write from the perspective of Little Dog, a successful writer: “They will want you to succeed, but never more than them. They will write their names on your leash and call you necessary, call you urgent.” Who is “they,” and what is the leash you’re referring to?

In general, "they" are people in power, the gatekeepers, and ultimately that framework surrounds whiteness. I didn't want to write a story that folks could just get lost in on vacation and move on. I wanted the mirror of a breathing queer writer of color in the world to be reflected back onto the reader. That's a moment when the writer himself really contemplates what it means to be successful, and how success is not necessarily a clear destination. It doesn't mean you've arrived. I mean, you got somewhere, but it's not necessarily—it's not freedom. You're not free of whiteness. People start to project their project and their sense of history onto you. You're still on a leash, no matter where you go.

The moment you're quoting there is actually a moment when the book collapses, and that was important to me; to write a queer narrative is to write purposeful collapse into that narrative. In a lot of the Western canon we ask for cohesion, particularly of queer bodies, and what I want to ask is how can we write cohesive stories when our lives do not get the privilege of cohesion? In order for a queer writer of color to write a cohesive story is to ultimately write a lie.

Speaking to this collapse, your book joins a lineage of queer narratives with a tragic narrative arch. Do you feel like you are in conversation with that lineage?

It was propelled and informed by that lineage, but I don't consider it a tragic story. As a writer, I knew I didn't want to write a tragedy. I wanted to write about American failure. Because when we think of the tragedy, we think of it in relation to the queer body: The queer body fails, and therefore it's tragic. But what I want to reframe, perhaps, is that American masculinity is a failure in itself in which no one thrives, including the characters in this book. People are lost to opioids, which is an American failure. It's not necessarily looking at queerness as tragedy, but that America as we know it is in a tragic trajectory. That's why it was important for me for the book to not end on death; it literally ends on the laughter of an Asian-American woman. That's the last line.

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Published by GQ. Photo by Doug Levy. 

[mitchellkuga]

Writing My Love Story at the Strand, New York’s Most Iconic Bookstore

Published by Condé Nast Traveler

A place where fantastical stories have the potential to come true.

When people find out I got married at The Strand Book Store, the typical response is “You got married in a bookstore?!” But the real shock is that I got married at all. Growing up in Hawaii, I never thought about marriage. Like boat shoes and taking IPAs very seriously, marriage was a thing for straight dudes. Plus I was low-key Buddhist, so what does “forever” mean anyway?

But one sleepless night, after four years of dating, Adam turned to me in bed. “I think we deserve the rights and protections that married people are afforded,” he said, looking me in my eyes. “I want to bury you.”

It was a proposal I couldn’t refuse.

Suddenly, we were tasked with planning a wedding, a life event most people are programmed to envision since childhood, and one that neither of us had previously considered. We waded through an infinite sea of scenarios, from a late-night function at a Brooklyn nightclub to a gazebo overlooking a Hawaiian waterfall. We were sure we wanted to spend our lives together. Far less clear was how we wanted to celebrate that decision.

After arguing about our different ideas, we toured the Strand’s rare book room. Located on the third floor, the handsome space sells limited-edition books by day, before transforming into an event space for book launches and private parties at night. On first glance, it managed to feel sacred but not pious, sentimental without being hokey, and utterly New York (aside from the fact that it was somehow reasonably priced). This is where we would get married, we decided, amongst friends and family and an $800 first edition of Ulysses.

Though gigantic—2.5 million books, both used and new, organized neatly across four sprawling floors—the Strand is still an independent, family-owned bookshop. It was founded in 1927 by a 25-year-old Lithuanian immigrant named Ben Bass, who borrowed $300 for a lease on a stretch of Fourth Avenue formerly known as “Book Row.” During the depression, he slept on a cot in the store’s basement. In 1957, Ben’s son moved the Strand to its current location, two blocks south of Union Square on the corner of 12th Street and Broadway. Of the 48 bookstores originally on Book Row, the Strand is the only one left standing. In the age of Amazon, its status as a literary cultural institution in the heart of New York City feels like a feat of magic.

So does finding love in this city, or planning a wedding for that matter. It’s not like there’s a template for a gay wedding in a bookstore between a Japanese writer from Hawaii and a Jewish artist from Toronto, a vastness that left us daunted, but also granted us permission to play. We mostly wanted to throw a party, one that reflected the contours of our relationship. So on the night of our fifth anniversary, in a room full of rare books, a friend sang Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro,” from the opera Gianni Schicchi; another read an original poem that referenced Michelle Branch lyrics, Corinthians, and Yoko Ono’s tweets; and another lip-synched Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” in full-blown wedding drag, before DJing songs by The Pointer Sisters and TLC. We ditched a dress code, urging guests to come however they felt best, which meant I wore a second-hand Comme des Garçons jacket studded with black pom-poms and a white ginger lei. Dinner was a pile of pickled pineapple, spam musubi, dashi-soaked brisket, and a surprise 10:30 p.m. delivery from Williamsburg Pizza. Our friend Hector, a queer Buddhist with a Rubeus Hagrid-esque beard, officiated. Standing in front of an arch of balloons shaped like a chain, he started the ceremony by asking everyone to tie a red string around someone’s wrist, an imprint of a vow, both yours and ours. In other words, we all tied strands at the Strand. Everything feels fated, mutated into literary metaphor, if you think about it hard enough.

I first wandered into the Strand bookstore seven years before. I was 23, a recent transplant from Hawaii, aimless and alone. Like the glorious odor of a divey gay bar, I found the smell of the used books comforting. You know the one. Musky with notes of soil and discolored paper, fragrant with possibility.

After strolling, wide-eyed, from aisle to aisle—18 miles of books, as the slogan goes—I bought a copy of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. For the next month, I wrapped myself in the story of two Jewish cousins forging a creative life together in Boerum Hill, the small Brooklyn neighborhood where I happened to be crashing on a friend’s couch. I was thrilled to recognize the street names and guideposts that populated the book, a recognition that made this big new city feel a little bit smaller, and made forging my own creative life in Brooklyn feel a little more possible. As I struggled to piece together a life from that couch, I took the literary coincidence as a sign that I was exactly where I needed to be.

Throughout the years, the Strand became a rest stop, a meeting place, and a guiding light. It’s where I bought my grieving coworker The Year of Magical Thinking after her best friend died. Where I sourced Pema Chodron’s pocketbook during my Saturn return, cheered on friends at their book releases, and discovered queer writers like Jean Genet, James Baldwin, Eileen Myles, and Alexander Chee, who provided roadmaps in the dark. It’s where I purchased that emblem of New York bookishness, a Strand tote bag, which I see nearly every time I take the subway. There’s a reason those ubiquitous totes are such a popular souvenir for both locals and passersby—they are a comforting reminder that even the more improbable stories come true, even the ones about you.

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Illustration by Tomi Um

[mitchellkuga]

My Native Tongue

Published by Southwest The Magazine 

I was raised on Hawaiian Pidgin English, a melting pot of a language that reflects the islands’ history, but it took me years to fully appreciate its importance, not just to local culture but my own identity.

I don’t know if there’s a sound that captures what it means to be from Hawaii quite like Hawaiian Pidgin English. Sure, there’s the voice of the beloved Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole, singing coolly over his ukulele about the white sandy beaches and the “colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky.” Or the rhythmic cadences of the ipu, a percussive gourd that soundtracked the hula lessons I attended at the local Y as a child. Or the soothing trance of waves tickling the shore of Ala Moana Beach Park at dusk while my siblings and I waited for Fourth of July fireworks. But nothing reflects Hawaii’s confluence of cultures, its medley of immigrants, quite like my father’s voice barking, “Eh! Das all hamajang!”

He was referring to my tile work, which, to be fair, was all hamajang: messed up, crooked, disorderly. What did he expect? I was a broke Syracuse University student, back home in Honolulu for the summer and working with my dad to fund an expensive semester abroad in London. I didn’t know how to tile a pool, a skill my father had perfected decades ago, during summers helping his own father run the family pool company. Down in the scorching pit of a concrete hole, I saw a different side of my father, whose mode of communicating tended to err on the side of silence. Here, leading a team of laborers from as far as Micronesia and as near as Waipahu, he gave directives, criticisms, and the occasional compliment in the staccato inflection of Hawaiian Pidgin.

“Cherry,” he’d drawl, the few times I managed to do something right. He’d stretch both ends of the word to sound closer to “chair-ray” and employ it when something looked impeccable. I’d savor that verbal pat on the back for hours. Other words were less descriptive. “Try pass the da kine,” he’d say, gesturing toward a pile of tools. Through the powers of clairvoyance—“da kine” is said to derive from “the kind,” a common Pidgin catchall for “whatchamacallit”—I mostly understood what he was asking for. When I returned with the wrong thing, he’d clarify, “No, the da kine da kine!”  

Growing up in Honolulu, I didn’t learn Pidgin so much as absorb it; the language was as inherent to the texture of my upbringing as rubbah slippahs (flip-flops) and Spam. It originated on the sugarcane plantations that proliferated throughout Hawaii during the turn of the 20th century, leading to a burgeoning economy that brought immigrants from China, Japan, Portugal, Korea, and the Philippines despite less than ideal conditions. To communicate, plantation workers fused pieces of their native tongues with Hawaiian and English, creating a dialect to match an unprecedented convergence of cultures yearning to connect.

Though its origins are proudly blue collar, Pidgin in Hawaii is ubiquitous. Brash, sharp, and comically evocative, I heard it most frequently in the taunts hurled on my elementary schoolyard (“You so lolo,” meant someone was stupid), peppering the cadence of my aunty’s garage parties (“Brah, you stay all buss,” meant someone was drunk), and marinating the tongues at barbecues on the beach (“Ho! Get choke grindz” meant there was food, and lots of it). It’s the dialect favored by local comedians, who brandish its self-aware, anti-establishment humor as both identity and weapon: for locals only. It’s how we “talk story,” catching up over plate lunches in between the clinking of Heine-kens. It’s Standard American English dressed in an aloha shirt, trading its monocle for a pair of sunglasses. Construction workers, police officers, and bus drivers all speak it. So did my dentist. It’s not so much a reflection of local culture as the culture itself, as it is one of the fundamental things that makes Hawaii Hawaii.

To the foreign ear, it might sound like botched English, a gross simplification that ignores words like “are” and “is” (“You stay hungry?”), flips sentence structure on its head (“So cute da baby”), and employs colorful slang. “Broke da mouth,” for instance, is used when food is so “‘ono,” or delicious, that your mouth breaks, and “talk stink” means to engage in the odious art of bad-mouthing. But the Pidgin that locals speak today isn’t slang, broken English, or even technically Pidgin—defined by Merriam-Webster as “a simplified speech used for communication between people with different languages”—which might be the most Pidgin thing about Pidgin. Instead, generations of locals (some who speak exclusively in Pidgin) elevated what was once considered hamajang plantation talk into its very own form, replete with its own set of rules. Linguists define it as a creole, a separate language that was recognized as such by the Census Bureau in 2015.

Ididn’t grow up embracing Pidgin. After Pidgin-ing out on job sites, my father would code-switch back to “proper” English at home. Growing up, this fluidity felt central to the language, the almost subconscious ability to distinguish when it was appropriate to wield its power and when to stash it in your back pocket. Not understanding this difference had its consequences. My mother, who grew up on Kauai and moved to the “big city” of Honolulu to attend a private boarding school, recalls her high school history teacher ordering her to stand in a corner and stare at a wall. Her offense? Saying “da kine.”

This stigmatization traces back to those sugarcane plantations: Pidgin as broken English for the uneducated immigrant. The Hawaii State Board of Education has repeatedly attempted to ban Pidgin from the public school system, with former Gov. Ben Cayetano once declaring Pidgin “a tremendous handicap” for those “trying to get a job in the real world.” Growing up, I wore my Pidgin lightly, fearing that indulging in its subversion was a one-way ticket to nowhere, a way of limiting myself to the bottom of that concrete pit.

In the ’90s, a wave of writers and activists fought to combat this perception, sparking something of a Pidgin Renaissance. Through poetry, novels, and essays, writers like Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Lee Cataluna, and Darrell H.Y. Lum positioned the once dismissed dialect as literature. Emerging out of that shift stomped Pidgin theater, Pidgin dictionaries, and a Pidgin Bible, dubbed “Da Jesus Book.” “Talking li’ dat” (“like that”) even managed to penetrate the most resistant institution: academia. At Syracuse University, to my shock, I studied Yamanaka’s seminal novel Blu’s Hanging, which mines the Pidgin of its protagonist to spotlight the underbelly of working class Hawaii. In 2002, the University of Hawaii at Manoa established The Charlene Junko Sato Center for Pidgin, Creole, and Dialect Studies, dedicated to conducting research on “stigmatized dialects.”

A leading voice in the movement is Lee Tonouchi, who’s often referred to as “Da Pidgin Guerilla.” In the late ’90s, as a student at the University of Hawaii, Tonouchi had an epiphany while reading a poem by Eric Chock, who co-founded Bamboo Ridge Press, the leading publisher of Pidgin-centric writing. Titled “Tutu on the Curb”—“tutu” being Hawaiian for grandparent—Chock’s poem is expressive and comical: “She squint and wiggle her nose / at the heat / And the thick stink fumes / The bus driver just futted all over her.”

“I remembah being blown away by da Pidgin,” Tonouchi, who writes and speaks exclusively in Pidgin, says by email. “I wuz all like, ‘Ho! Get guys writing in Pidgin. And we studying ’em in college. Das means you gotta be smart for study Pidgin!’”

Tonouchi started flirting with his native language scholastically, first in his creative writing class, which got him thinking: If I can do my creative stuff in Pidgin, how come I no can do my critical stuff in Pidgin too? Over time, he started writing his 30-page research papers and his entire master’s thesis in Pidgin, “until eventually I just wrote everyting in Pidgin.” Part of the decision was practical. As a kid growing up on Oahu, he felt perplexed by the books he read. People no talk li’ dat, he thought. “Writing how people sounded seemed more real to me,” he says.

Since graduating, Tonouchi has dedicated his life to establishing Pidgin as its own intellectually rigorous and poetically descriptive language. He’s published multiple books of Pidgin poetry and essays, written a play in Pidgin, and co-founded Hybolics, a literary Pidgin magazine that’s short for hyperbolic, used when someone is behaving like a snooty intellectual: “Why you acting all hybolic for?” Perhaps most groundbreaking was an English class called “Pidgin Literature” that he taught at Hawaii Pacific University in 2005. It was regarded as the first of its kind: a college course fully dedicated to fiction and poetry in Pidgin. Yes, brah. He even lectured in Pidgin.

Over the years, Tonouchi has noticed a decline in Pidgin, particularly among the young. “When I visit classrooms as one guest talker, I see that we kinda losing da connection. Simple kine Pidgin vocabularies da kids dunno,” he says. “I tink Pidgin might be coming one endangered language.”

There was a period in my life, after I moved away for college, when I scrubbed Pidgin from my lips, my tongue colonized. “You talk so haole,” my mom would say half-jokingly, employing the Hawaiian word for “Caucasian.” I knew my tongue should loosen, should adapt to the inflection of my aunties and uncles, to the comforts of poke and Mom’s home-cooked shoyu chicken. I was home for the holidays, surrounded by friends and family, but instead my tongue stiffened, intent on proving that I had transcended the confines of the tiny island I called home. I was acting all hybolic.

It took me years to realize that shunning Pidgin meant shunning where I was from, the food I ate, the beaches I roamed, the people I loved. Today, it’s hard for me to fathom a Hawaii without Pidgin. Particularly in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods, how else would locals, with a single sentence, signal their localness to one another?

On a recent visit home, I went to the beach. Oahu’s North Shore is a disorienting mix of sunburnt tourists and the very local; having lived in New York for more than seven years by that point, I imagined I looked like a cross between the two. As I sat in front of the crashing waves, a tanned surfer with sun-bleached hair approached me apprehensively to ask for a bottle opener. “Try wait,” I said, rummaging through my beach bag.

It was barely perceptible, but his face flashed with the comfort of recognition: He was talking to a kama‘aina, a local. After I handed over the bottle opener on my key ring, he had one more question. “You like one beer?”

[mitchellkuga]

Let Me Analyze That Bussy Published by MEL Magazine 

Bussy, boogina, pooter clat, goochata… For the gay community, pet names for the anus can reveal a lot about who we are — and our place in a heteronormative society

My friend recently said the word “bussy” over dinner. This shouldn’t have come as a shock considering we were two gay men talking about sex. But the portmanteau of “boy” and “pussy” was uttered so casually — something to the effect of, “and then he ate this bussy up” — that I almost didn’t realize it was there, wilting next to a spicy tuna roll and a carafe of sake. Time slowed as I acquainted myself to the acoustics: the hard and guttural bus, the sí a definitive yes, though everything in my body was saying no. 

Like “schadenfreude” and “late capitalism,” there’s a literary quality to “bussy,” in that I’m far more used to reading the word than hearing it spoken aloud. It’s most familiar to me on the freaky back channels of Gay Twitter, a way for mostly cis gay men to comedically revel in their messiness. 

My friend, who’s in his 20s and aggressively identifies as a bottom, said “bussy” to signal that he was a Fun Gay, the vernacular equivalent of whipping out poppers on a crowded dance floor. I am, on the other hand, the type of gay man who hears the word “bussy” over dinner, squirms and then writes an essay about how uncomfortable it makes me feel. 

Because there is so much to hate about “bussy” — starting with the way it qualifies the vagina as something inherently gendered. To that end, some argue that it translates to “butt pussy,” though I’m under the impression that might be another instance of straight white culture cannibalizing gay black slang — and I oop! 

It actually derives from the Latin mussy, or man pussy, which whiffs of the same misogynistic pussyfooting as “murse,” “man bun” or “guybrator,” because yes, I want something up my ass massaging my prostate but — no homo — only if it looks like a contraption out of Star Trek. Around five years ago, however, “mussy” was banished to whatever purgatory words go to die, replaced by the younger, more effervescent “bussy,” which caused a friend to wonder, “When did my mussy become so old and obsolete?”

There’s an inherent slapstick to “bussy,” in the way cis gay men employ it to express horniness without actually being sexual. BuzzFeed frequently uses “bussy” as a gag on its video segment “Thirst Tweets,” in which celebrities like Taron Egerton are made to read tweets like “Taron Egerton is a white boy that I trust to destroy my bussy,” followed by the actor innocently asking the camera crew, “What’s a bussy?” There’s also a rap song called “Bu$$y” (“Make this bussy cream like a Twinkie when you’re in my tunnel”), and an anti-hemorrhoidal soap called BUSSYBOY, which Azealia Banks released in 2018 with the promise to “lighten and tighten” (though one user claimed the soap burned his butthole for three hours).

Like most stupid things today, “bussy” feels generational and purely of the internet. As MEL’s Alana Hope Levinson put it in a piece about the word “benis,” “millennials love to play with words because our brains have been poisoned by the internet.” These words serve a purpose though, she points out, as signposts of belonging: “Now that there’s so much content everywhere, you need ways to signal who you are, or your community.”

So it wasn’t a total surprise to see that in pockets of the internet, some trans and gender-nonconfirming folks were embracing “bussy.”

“It felt perfect to me,” says Dennis Norris II about the first time they heard the word “bussy.” The 34-year-old writer, who identifies as a nonbinary femme, first tried to make “boogina” happen in 2007 after watching Noah’s Arc, the dramedy about four gay friends living in L.A. When it came to Noah, the show’s lead, Norris says, “I’d never identified with someone so deeply because I’d never seen a black gay effeminate character be taken seriously like that on TV.” Hearing a character on the show tell Noah “You let him get your boogina?!?!” was an “oh my god” moment, explains Norris, because “it was the very first time I understood that I could feminize my anus.” 

But try as they might, “boogina” didn’t stick. “Then I heard ‘bussy,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s the real term.’”

Norris says they use “bussy” with “everyone,” from kiki-ing with friends to discussing sex on their podcast, Food 4 Thot. They see aggressively identifying with the word “as a way of moving beyond bottom shame,” adding “I’ve always been very femme, and for most of my life, I’ve been told that that was undesirable.” 

“Bussy” also serves as a litmus test for new partners. “If a guy really is so turned off by hearing the word ‘bussy’ come out of my mouth in reference to my own body, he’s probably not going to be someone who feels good taking me on a date when I’m wearing a very short dress, sparkly heels and a full face of makeup — which is how I like to go out,” says Norris. “So it’s usually indicative of a larger thing.” 

In bed, Norris says they actually prefer referring to their anus as “pussy,” but they notice that “bussy” tends to go over easier, calling it “gateway language” for sexual partners. “Bussy” also feels more anatomically correct. “At the end of the day, I’m a male-bodied person — I have a penis, I don’t have a vagina — and sometimes I feel like it’s not fair for me to co-opt the word ‘pussy.’”

Twenty-eighty-year-old Cherry Iocovozzi first heard of “bussy” in 2014, when the Fly Young Red song “Throw That Boy Pussy” (in which the Houston rapper exclaims, “Hold it open, I’ma eat it like a Pac-Man”) went viral on gay Tumblr. Because Iocovozzi identified as female at the time, “bussy” mostly seemed “like a funny word that gay men could use for their buttholes,” they say. “I’ve always seen it as a word that didn’t have a lot to do with me until I started transitioning and identifying more with masculinity and maleness. Then me and my trans guy friends started using it, mostly in a joking context, but also when we were having more serious conversations about sex and intimacy.”

Today, Iocovozzi identifies as nonbinary trans masculine and says “bussy” has become a way to refer to both their anus and vagina, especially when talking about their sexual health with friends. “It’s 50/50 front or back hole,” they say. “It just depends on the context of the sentence to figure out which one you’re talking about.” When it comes to their front hole, Iocovozzi says “bussy” feels appropriately less gendered. “Not that I believe words like ‘penis’ and ‘vagina’ are inherently gendered,” they clarify. “It’s just an easy way to talk about a subject that’s hard to talk about, so you bring a little joke to it. It’s like, ‘Yeah, my bussy itches. I think I have a yeast infection or whatever.’” 

They have yet to bring “bussy” in the bedroom, but aren’t opposed to the possibility. “I might giggle, but if the person is hot enough, why not?” they say. “‘Bussy’ will definitely go down in the history books. It’s an iconic word.”

Through this lens, “bussy” belongs to the lexicon of queer vocabulary meant to deconstruct and reimagine the possibilities of gender, often with a playful nudge. The anus, after all, isn’t a vagina — though I do worry that applying a hetero framework to queer sex urges some bottoms to glorify their assholes supposed vagina-like qualities, like self-lubricating (as a friend recently insisted theirs could).

Because those claims simply don’t check out, according to Evan Goldstein, an anal surgeon and founder and CEO of Bespoke Surgical, a practice specializing in gay men’s sexual health. He tells me that while the rectum does produce a thin mucus meant to assist in the passage of stool, which can activate during anal sex, “those glands produce very, very little amounts of that mucus.” In other words, he says, “It’s not this self-lubricating component.”

So what’s behind the numerous online accounts claiming, somewhat boastfully, “My bootyhole is capable of ‘self-lubricating’”?

“It’s from trauma,” says Goldstein, explaining that when the rectum and colon are irritated — most commonly from over-douching, double penetration or fisting — it produces a thick layer of mucus to protect itself. “You could have a rip-roaring chlamydial infection, and the only manifestation is increased mucus. And you’re like, ‘Great, my bussy is leaking and everyone loves it!’”

Goldstein points to the added appeal for tops, similar to squirting scenes in straight porn where a typically internal expression of pleasure, like the female orgasm, is made legible. “Tops are like, ‘Oh, I made his ass cum,’” he says. “But it’s clearly some element of a problem. I understand why people are bringing that terminology over, because they feel like [the anus] is a sexual organ: People love to lick it and play with it and love for it to produce something that shows that it’s being stimulated. I want people to keep whatever is going to get them off, but you have to look at that critically and see if there’s something harmful you’re doing in that action.”

What a word like “bussy” ultimately reveals, then, is the lack of available language for what the anus becomes when it’s purely a gateway for sexual pleasure, resulting in a queer buffet of word salads. Lateef Abdullah, a 26-year-old fashion stylist, says he prefers “pooter clat,” “goochata” and “boogina,” explaining, “I say what comes to me and stick with it.” Henry Lau, a 40-year-old designer, favors “shitoris,” “tropical fantasy” and “‘garden of eating’ — when it’s fresh.” “I like funny creative words,” he says. “It’s a way to be smart about the banal and finality of words.” 

Meanwhile, my friend J Cagz, a 33-year-old nurse, embraces a much more straightforward option: “hole.” She acknowledges, though, that it’s a case-by-case basis. “I don’t care what they call it as long as I’m getting some,” she says. “Just kidding. One time this guy called my ass a ‘fart burger,’ and I was like, ‘Absolutely not.’”

[mitchellkuga]

How Corporations Harness — and Hijack — the Idea of the Museum

Published by Hyperallergic

The trendy adoption of the word “museum” has the potential to undermine the trust placed in cultural institutions, perhaps altering our relationship to culture, art, and commerce in the process.

Once upon a time, museums were repositories for the objects and stories that defined human history. But these days, they are also places to pull out your smartphone and photograph yourself. On Sunday, the Museum of Selfies opened in California. In 2016, the so-called Museum of Ice Cream was one of the most popular selfie spots in the world. And the most Instagrammed restaurant in America, The Sugar Factory, recently announced that it will soon open a Museum of Candy.

For Instagram lovers, these developments may be cause for excitement. But the trendy adoption of the word “museum” has the potential to undermine the trust placed in cultural institutions, perhaps altering our relationship to culture, art, and commerce in the process.

The Museum of Candy, founded by a Kardashian-endorsed restaurant chain with enough capital to lease 30,000 square feet of prime Manhattan real estate, appears to be the largest such project yet. It will be housed in the 19th-century church that became The Limelight, the sprawling Warholian nightclub of the 80s and 90s. In a press release, the Museum of Candy promises plenty of picture-taking opportunities: “the largest selection of candy in the world for museum patrons to photograph, study and most importantly EAT!” Clearly, the organizers were careful to build selfie spots into the space: “Looking to take a picture in the Gumdrop Room, or lose your children temporarily in the candy cane fashion show while you are mesmerized by the candy and gummy bear-making process in the candy café?”

The design of selfie-driven “museums” seems to align with other experiential selfie spots like Color Factory, 29Rooms, and Dream Room. They revolve a highly successful business model: sell tickets for $35 to people itching to Instagram themselves, then immerse them in hyperpigmented landscapes funded by corporate sponsors.

The key difference is  that recently, more and more spaces have been harnessing — or hijacking — the term “museum.” Early selfie-driven museums tended to be temporary projects, often founded by plucky millennials. In 2015, at the Museum of Feelings in New York City, “visitors explored five responsive rooms on an unexpected, immersive journey.” The space was an advertisement for Glade, the maker of bathroom sprays. In 2016, the Museum of Ice Cream was the 10th most instagrammed museum in the world.

The 34-year-old co-founder of the Museum of Selfies, Tommy Honton, said the space hinged on the word museum. “When we got that name, Museum of Selfies, it just hit. You’re going to catch people’s attention immediately with that title,” he told Hyperallergic. Honton seemed to relish the potential for controversy. “You’re going to definitely draw ire or support or confusion,” he said. “There are some art magazines that are going to call us the downfall of humankind.”

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When the Museum of Sex opened in the Flatiron District, in 2002, the New York State Board of Regents denied its application for nonprofit status. The institution claimed that it wanted “to preserve and present the history, evolution and cultural significance of human sexuality.” The Board seemed to think that the subject matter, or its presentation, didn’t deserve the title museum.

The Board’s sensitivity makes some sense. Museum is a loaded word. Organizations like The American Alliance of Museums and the International Council of Museums (ICOM) uphold rigorous standards for accreditation; the official designation “museum” can increase credibility and access to government and private grants. ICOM defines a museum as “a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity.” Not surprisingly, selfie spots aren’t typically accredited; for them, the title “museum” is self-proclaimed.

Throughout history, the notion of what constitutes a “museum” has evolved alongside culture. The term derives from the Greek mouseion, which translates to “seat of the Muses.” In the 3rd century B.C., these were places designated for contemplation, similar to modern-day universities and libraries. In the 17th century, museums functioned as cabinets of curiosities, private collections where wealthy Europeans housed cultural artifacts obtained through their travels to exotic places. It wasn’t until the 19th century that the museum took on its present-day role as a public-facing institution with cultural and artistic authority.

Today, fueled in part by technology, many traditional institutions are continuing to reinvent themselves. “The notion that we have of museums today is different than it was even 20 years ago,” said Glenn Wharton, a museum studies professor at New York University. He connects these shifts to the evolution of the word “curator.” “You can curate a menu at a restaurant now. It’s used much more widely than ever before,” he said. “With the changing role of museums, the power of the curator has been challenged.”

In his book Ways of Curating, the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist connects the activity of curation to modern life at large. “There is, currently, a certain resonance between the idea of curating and the contemporary idea of the creative self, floating freely through the world making aesthetic choices of where to go and what to eat, wear, and do,” he writes. Obrist thinks the Internet has sped up “the proliferation and reproduction of ideas, raw data, processed information, images, disciplinary knowledge and material products that we are witnessing today.”

In other words, there’s a sudden influx of stuff, and a greater need to organize all of it. “This contemporary resonance, however, risks producing a kind of bubble in the value attached to the idea of curating, and has to be resisted,” he writes. “Curating follows art.”

                                                            *  *  *

To create the Museum of Selfies, Honton and his partner, Tair Mamedov, drew on their experience as game designers in LA’s immersive and interactive community, namely in escape rooms. “You want to make sure people’s adrenaline and dopamine levels fall and rise around certain things. When they turn a corner, that corner is an opportunity to surprise them,” said Honton. “We’re basically drug dealers. You’re doling out these emotions, and if it’s done well, people can walk out with this beautiful experience, having felt a curated, fully realized experience.”

He stressed the importance of context in the museum’s displays. A lifelong lover of museums, he spoke breathlessly about the self-portraits of Rembrandt and Albert Dürer in relation to selfies, about etchings on cave walls and the 19th-century daguerreotype. “If you put a bunch of pretty stuff in a space, that’s not a museum,” he said. “With us, using the world ‘museum,’ we wanted to make sure we held true to that.” He also wanted the museum to appeal to a wide audience. “I work with at-risk youth. I’m around a lot of people who don’t find museums accessible,” he said.

Still, it is hard to separate these newfangled museums from commercial interests. A ticket to the Museum of Selfies costs $25. The Museum of Ice Cream’s sponsors include American Express, Dove Chocolate, and the dating app Tinder, which created a room called “Tinder Land,” inviting visitors to sit on an ice cream sandwich swing for two. At the future site of the Museum of Candy, a 150-seat Sugar Factory restaurant will feature “the brand’s signature 24-scoop King Kong Sundae, monster burgers and insane milkshakes along with the smoking alcohol-infused candy goblet drinks.”

The founder of Sugar Factory, Charissa Davidovici, originally agreed through a PR representative to an interview with Hyperallergic. But the representative abruptly canceled when I expressed an interest in the finances of the company, saying: “We will have to pass on the interview at this time as Sugar Factory doesn’t talk about their finances and investors.”

Wharton, the NYU professor, acknowledged the need to be critical of these relationships to heavy-handed commercialism. Though he doesn’t see it as a giant leap from more traditional institutions flouting “thinly-veiled corporate sponsors of exhibitions” on its museum walls. Banks, telecom companies, and oil behemoths have all lent support to major museums. “If that’s not an advertisement, what is it?” said Wharton. “I think that’s more dangerous.”

Still, it’s striking — if not exactly surprising — that for-profit ventures are borrowing the trust and authority symbolized by museums. “As a capitalist society people are going to co-opt trusted institutions, or the ideas that trusted institutions represent, for commercial gain,” Wharton said. “It’s just the nature of our society.”

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Published in Hyperallergic.

[mitchellkuga]

Garth Greenwell Wants Us to Stop Policing What Stories Are ‘Relevant’

Published by Medium 

His new novel ‘Cleanness’ challenges what it means for a story to be ‘universal’

In 2014, when Garth Greenwell was an MFA student at The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a professor he revered — “and continue[s] to revere,” he says — dismissed a short story he’d written about cruising for sex, saying that it “read like a sociological report on the practices of a subculture.” Greenwell was shocked, in part because the critique seemed to pivot on a loaded question: What makes a piece of art “universal”?

“To this professor, something like Congregationalist ministers in rural Iowa” — as Marilynne Robinson explores in her novel Gilead — “did not feel like a subculture, but instead was representative of universal human experience,” says Greenwell “in a way that gay men having sex with each other in a bathroom did not.” He has been writing urgently against that proposition for his entire career — including in his sophomore novel, Cleanness, out January 14.

Greenwell’s 2016 debut novel What Belongs To You was critically celebrated, winning the British Book Award for Debut Book of the Year and longlisted for the National Book Award. It opens with a man cruising for sex in a public bathroom in Bulgaria, beneath Sofia’s National Palace of Culture. The novel is told from the perspective of an American abroad, an unnamed English teacher who pays for sex with a hustler named Mitko. That transaction sparks a murky relationship rooted in profound inequities, providing a particular lens into the politics of contemporary Bulgaria as it stumbles out of its recently communist past. It also urges the narrator to examine how growing up gay in the South informs his current relationship to desire, shame, and belonging.

Cleanness is a kind of sequel to What Belongs to You, finding the American abroad in a more conventional relationship, with a Portuguese exchange student he refers to as R. Greenwell once again examines the pageantry of sexual dominance and submission with frank, tensile precision. “I was interested in how we use the idea of cleanliness as a concept,” he says over the phone from Iowa, where he’ll teach a fiction course at the Writers’ Workshop this spring. In chat rooms, for instance, “Are you clean?” is a way of asking prospective partners about their HIV status. Greenwell had come to regard cleanliness as a “devastating ideal.” Before he was a novelist Greenwell studied poetry; the word “cleanness” is an allusion to a medieval poem written in the late 14th century that interprets the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, or what Greenwell calls “the nightmare version of cleanness.”

“It does seem to be a fact of human life that we long both to be clean and to bathe in filth,” he says. “And what I hope the book leads to or suggests by the end is the possibility of a life that can accommodate both urges in a way that doesn’t require the eradication of a huge chunk of ourselves or our desires.”

Greenwell belongs in the ever-evolving canon of gay literature, a canon that has significantly expanded since he discovered queer writers like James Baldwin and Jeanette Winterson in his youth. He found their work “lifesaving,” allowing him to reject the presumption that the “only possible shapes for my life were being a child molester and dying of AIDS.”

Some might find it limiting to be thought of as a “gay writer” writing “gay fiction.” But Greenwell accepts the designation. Instead of constricting his work, he considers it a key part of its expansion. “Art achieves universality through devotion to the particular,” he says. “My serious, firmly held belief about art is that any human experience can open the door to all human experience.”

Greenwell has been ruminating on the concept of “relevance” lately, particularly as the word gets thrown around on Twitter, as a colloquial and often catty form of critical discourse. In writing about gay sex, he himself somewhat benefits from the current hunger for stories from underrepresented voices. Other writers find themselves out of vogue. Greenwell recalls hanging out with his friends at Prairie Lights, his local bookstore in Iowa City, and casually shooing away a novel based on its jacket copy: “Do we really need another story about a middle-aged guy who’s thinking about cheating on his wife?”

But he rejects his own impulse to dismiss the book in question. “That is as false as what that professor at that writing workshop said to me,” says Greenwell, calling such judgments “anti-art.”

Greenwell, 41, lives in Iowa City with his partner, the poet Luis Muñoz, who runs the Spanish MFA program at the University of Iowa. Though he admires Iowa City’s rich literary history and its self-awareness as a city of literature, he finds it a difficult place to write. In cafes, he can often feel the novels being constructed around him. Greenwell instead prefers the solitude he found in Bulgaria, where, like his protagonist, he moved to teach at the American College of Sofia in 2009. It was there, feeling completely disconnected from the literary world, that he first started writing fiction, drafting what would eventually become What Belongs To You.

In Iowa, Greenwell often tries tricking himself back into that literary isolation. It’s partly why he writes his books longhand rather than on the computer, where the rest of the world feels too close.

“I really do experience making art as failure,” he says. “I have a very highly developed sense of humiliation, and for me to feel comfortable failing in the way I need to fail in order to write anything that’s meaningful to me, I need to feel like no one knows what I’m doing, [like] no one cares what I’m doing.”

Greenwell calls Cleanness a book of fiction, rather than a novel or story collection. He sees its nine sections as a song cycle, or “nine centers of emotional intensity that are set in relation to one another,” he says. He modeled the structure of the book after Schubert’s “Winterreise,” the 1828 song cycle for piano and voice set to poems by Wilhelm Müller.

Music was Greenwell’s first education in art. As a high school student in Kentucky, he failed his freshman year of English — in part because his father had kicked him out of the house for being gay at age 14. Singing provided temporary solace. His choir teacher recognized something in Greenwell’s voice and introduced him to opera, giving him private voice lessons after school. At the end of his freshman year he handed Greenwell an application to Interlochen Center for the Arts, an arts boarding school in Northern Michigan.

“He knew that I was really kind of having suicidal sex. I was just so extravagantly promiscuous and unsafe in the parks of Louisville, and I think he was the one adult who saw this kid was really in trouble,” says Greenwell. “He was the first person, certainly the first adult, who suggested that my life might have any value.” Transferring to Interlochen on a scholarship his sophomore year and escaping the turmoil of his family life was like “flipping a switch” and he went from nearly failing to being an A student.

Though he transitioned from opera to poetry while in college, at the University of Rochester, Greenwell says opera bears a greater influence on his writing than the novel, informing his expansive, experimental approach to syntax — “singing opera is often using very few words over a long period of time” — and the suspension of his prose. “When I’m writing, I never think of other writer’s sentences,” he says. “I think about music. The shape I’m writing into is the shape of Jessye Norman singing a phrase of Strauss’s Four Last Songs.”

Is the work of Richard Strauss, the German composer born in 1864, “relevant” today? Perhaps in so far as it helps Greenwell to create work that aspires to be “urgently communicative” in 2020. “In my experience of art I often feel that I’m being called to tune myself to a particular pitch,” he says.

Relevance, as Greenwell sees it, also has nothing to do with popularity. He calls such preoccupations “the death of an artist.” With the release of Cleanness looming, he’s not indifferent to book sales. “I would love if I could pay for my house,” he says. “But I hope that I never have the false idea that whether my book sells a million copies or 10 copies has anything to do with the actual artistic value of that book.” Those numbers have so much to do with chance, subject to the vagaries of a fickle publishing industry.

Instead, Greenwell’s true mark of success is clear: “When a 15-year-old kid in Kentucky pulls Giovanni’s Room from a library shelf — that’s the real life of literature.”

[mitchellkuga]

The Queer Dance Party That Became a Slaysian Celebration

Published by them

Brooklyn banger Bubble T was founded in response to the exclusionary vibe of other gay spaces.

The news started with a whisper, then built to a roar.

“Wait, wait — did you hear? Solange is here.”

It was around 1 AM on a Friday night in December, and a group of partygoers in the backyard of Bushwick’s Secret Project Robot huddled around a blurry picture on an iPhone. They paused to consider the image, zooming in and out, their necks craning.

Someone gasped: “That’s her! Oh my god, Solange! Supporting our slaysians!”

The singer was there for Bubble_T, a dance party celebrating queer Asian visibility. And the mere suggestion of her presence pushed the already rollicking night — picture a festive Bushwick nightclub that evokes the intimacy of a queer Bay Area house party, but make it fashion — into another realm.

An hour earlier, the venue’s 2,000-square-foot sprawl had reached capacity, forcing a line down the frigid block. On stage, the rapper Slay Rizz performed in a velour Santa-style mini.

“My name is Kay Rizz, aka Slay Rizz, aka the Philipina princess” — here she rolled her tongue dramatically — “aka the Slaysian Mother, originally trademarked,” she exclaimed with a wink. Her set included a Tagalog version of Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow” and the refrain “If it ain’t foreign it borin’,” which she delivered in a raucous call and response.

Since its inception in May, Bubble_T has delivered a series of semi-monthly roving dance parties that fuse live performance, design, and drag. A typical crowd skews towards Asian men, but includes a cross section of lesbians, trans femmes, gender nonconforming artists, and drag queens in full regalia, all from an array of ethnic backgrounds. As Bubble_T’s Instagram bio states: “🍚 WHERE 🍚 ASIANZ 🍚 RULE ☯️ BUT ☯️ EVERYBODY’S ☯️ WELCOME”

The party is free and often sports a loose, tongue-in-cheek theme, like “COSPL_A_ZIA” for Halloween, or the lei-heavy “TROPIKP_A_ZIA,” with Spam musubi available for purchase. In September, Bubble_T was invited to throw a party at MoMA PS1; the party’s collective — Nicholas Andersen, Karlo Bello, Stevie Huynh, Pauly Tran, and Pedro Vidallon — transformed one of the galleries into a glittering, free-wheeling karaoke room, inviting attendees to take the mic centerstage.

Hosts have included the chef and artist Angela Dimayuga, Lucky Rice’s Jacky Tang, and Humberto Leon, the creative director of Kenzo and co-founder of Opening Ceremony. The “Bubble_T Fam,” as they’re known, also extends to independent companies like Massive Goods, which spotlights beefy Asian bodies from erotic gay manga, and CFGNY, the Vietnam-inspired fashion collective.

“It’s a network. It literally has nothing to do with us at this table,” said Andersen, sitting with most of the collective at Little Mo, a restaurant in Bushwick. Huynh and Vidallon are Bubble_T’s resident DJs, Bello performs at the party under his drag moniker Bichon, and Andersen is responsible for its immersive decorations. Despite the hard work and collaboration it takes to throw an event of this scale, Andersen maintains that it’s all in service of a higher good: “We’re just offering our time to organize a spreadsheet,” he said. “But in the end it has nothing to do with us.”

And yet, over the din of Donna Summer, Humberto Leon was quick to emphasize the party’s organizers. “I think the group of people who put this together each bring something totally different to the party, which makes it intentional, with a point of view. I think there’s something really nice about being part of a party that has a point of view.”

That point of view is evident in the party’s name, stemming from the Taiwanese drink dotted with tapioca balls that comes in an array of mostly Asian flavors, bold colors, and diverse textures. After all, bubble tea exudes an air of campy celebration, and the party is a testament to a uniquely Asian invention that’s gained mainstream popularity in the states without losing ties to its cultural roots. And gays love spilling tea.

On Instagram, the Bubble_T account posts stills from Asian karaoke videos and films like Happy Together, the gay Hong Kong romance. These images get filtered through a distortive prism, as if encased behind glass. “It exists as a document because as Asian Americans we can’t access the original Asia,” said Andersen, who’s half Filipino. “It all exists behind a veil. We don’t really know what it is, but it’s heartbreak — and then being gay on top of that.”

Conversations at Bubble_T itself tend to hopscotch from the comical (“I am healthy, bitch. I eat rice!” was overheard in December) to the political. Tenaya Lee Izu, a 25-year-old non-binary artist, told me the party is the first nightlife experience where they “didn’t feel the need to rigidly identify as a specific sexuality or gender. Because I don’t particularly feel like anything at all.”

They stressed the importance of a pure celebration like this, particularly for a community that often views joy with a patina of guilt. “Because the spaces that we’re invited to be openly Asian American — important in its own way — are to talk about trauma or immigration history or how difficult it is to negotiate immersion in America, which I think is really limiting. A lot of queer POC narratives that are acceptable are the ones in which we suffer. But Bubble_T is a really happy space.”

“It’s not okay to be ‘normal’ if you inhabit all of these minority identities, but once a month this party helps me feel really normal,” they added, “and that’s really amazing.”

Feeling “normal” can be difficult at other gay parties, even those with similar intentions.

Shaobo Han said going to gay Asian parties in Hell’s Kitchen felt limiting. “I didn’t study accounting, I didn’t study law,” said the 27-year-old co-founder of Syro, a feminine shoe company for men. “The first few times at Bubble_T it felt like ‘Oh, there are people who don’t look at me and think I’m weird.’”

The party has also helped Han celebrate other queer Asians, a struggle in predominantly white gay spaces. In college “we were all trying to come up and be ‘the one,’” he said. “It was only recently where it was like wait a minute, it could be all of us. The pie is huge.”

Steven Le, 35, emphasized Bubble_T’s Asian-centered drag performances. “Seeing Bichon perform was so cute to me, because she embodies this Mary J. Blige hip-hop amalgam of street culture, but is also unapologetically Asian about it as well,” he said, wearing a T-shirt that read “you were brainwashed into thinking european features are the epitome of beauty.” “It was eye-opening for me to see someone embrace all these aspects of themselves, instead of compartmentalizing like I had been.”

But as the party has swiftly expanded, fueled in part by media attention and celebrity hosts, day one supporters expressed concern that Bubble_T’s audience was becoming a gentrified version of its formerly unapologetic self. To that point, I overheard someone scoff “there’s a lot of white people here” to a friend at December’s party.

“I think my discomfort with how many white people are here is aligned with how trendy it is to go to QTPOC spaces,” said Izu. “It’s like, just let us have this cool thing, because it’s a really really cool thing for the people involved.” Han echoed this sentiment: “We live in America, where there’s a lot of white people and everyone wants to get in on the cool stuff, especially in New York. But I really miss when there were more Asians.”

By 3 AM, Solange, another ripple of the party’s popularity, had left, unseen by most partygoers. The presence of a straight cisgender black woman may seem superfluous to Bubble_T’s mission, but it is actually central, for the same reasons that black activists have always been central to the ways in which other minority groups have been able to carve out political agency. It’s in this vein that Bubble_T owes a certain debt to other queer collectives of color, like Papi Juice. Back in 2013, the quartet started throwing Brooklyn-based parties with the intention of creating a safe space for queer and trans people of color, mostly black and Latinx.

2016’s masterfully prescient A Seat At The Table established Solange as the torchbearer for a generation of people of color living under the misery of Trump’s America. The album centers on injustices: “I’m weary of the ways of the world,” she sings, wounded but resolute. But throughout she is also an agent for healing. As I looked around the room and and witnessed a sea of queer bodies who looked and loved and moved liked mine, I also thought of another lyric, which she delivers a few lines later: “I’m gonna look for my body yeah, I’ll be back like real soon.”

Photo by Hao Nguyen. 

[mitchellkuga]

Spam Is Making A Comeback At Hip NYC Restaurants

Published in Gothamist

On a recent Monday night at New York Sushi Ko, between courses of braised pork belly with dollops of yuzu foam and aged, wild caught blue fin sushi, chef John Daley reached over the bar to present a bowl of Spam fried rice. Topped with seared ahi and flourishes of fresh pineapple, the dish was a far cry from the hangover breakfasts of leaner times—and an unexpected lowbrow pop on the restaurant’s $135 special one-night tasting menu.

“Is it just regular Spam? Like from the can?” asked LauRenn Reed, one of five diners seated at the 7-seat sushi bar. All were partaking in an offbeat, Hawaiian-inflected night of Daley’s omakase, which loosely translates to “chef’s choice.” “Fresh from the can!” joked Daley, a former chef at 15 East who spent a couple of years living on Maui. “And sourced locally from the nearest bodega.”

“Gosh, I haven’t had Spam since the eighties,” said Reed, staring into her bowl. “I grew up with it. I’m not anti-Spam at all. It just reminds me of poorer days.” There was a gap in conversations as palates processed the orchestra of flavors to the loose swing of reggae pouring out of Daley’s speakers. The Spam—diced and roasted—popped through with salty bursts.

“It’s so good though!” Reed declared. “It reminds me a little bit of oxtail. So savory. I’m thinking of all the ways I could eat it.”

The final course, a plate of sushi, included Spam musubi, a Hawaiian staple composed of a slab of fried Spam affixed to a bed of rice with seaweed. For an added level of authenticity, Daley wrapped it in saran wrap, a nod to the Hawaiian street food available at local gas stations and 7-Eleven. Next to fish sourced from Tsukiji Market, it’s easy to interpret Daley’s use of Spam ironically, a suggestion he’s quick to dismiss.

“No, no, no. If I wanted to be funny I would’ve opened a bar,” explained Daley. “I love my food. I love Spam. I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t love it.”

A little after 11, a group of four walked in, shedding their coats for the waiter.

“Yo John! You still doing the Spam thing?” asked Leah Cohen, a contestant on Season 5 of Top Chef and the chef at Pig and Khao. “Got it!” Daley fired back.

Amid a food scene populated with grass-fed beef and humanely butchered pork, it’s surprising that this brick of protein has been popping up on New Yorkers’ menus. This isn’t an artisanal, organic or house-made variety. It’s a gelatinous block of Hormel canned meat; sliced, glazed, and fried without a hint of irony or intended shock value. And in pockets of New York known for more refined palates, it’s garnering a surprisingly enthusiastic response.

“For a lot of Asians it really is soul food,” said Mike Briones, the owner and chef of Suzume, a small, candlelit ramen and sushi bar located in Williamsburg. Last fall, Suzume began serving Spam musubi as a special, a nod to the few years Briones spent living in Honolulu. The reception has been overwhelmingly positive. “Usually it’s one person at the table who understands Spam, and then the other person will try it. People are ordering it and asking if we’re going to put it on the menu and taking it to go.”

It’s been a long and unlikely journey from Spam’s humble origins, as a product born out of the Great Depression to a special featured at a trendy Brooklyn restaurant. Produced in Minnesota, the blue cans of blended pork shoulder and ham debuted in American grocery stores in 1937, peaking in popularity during WWII, when troops stationed overseas referred to it as “Special Army Meat.” Since then, the pink brick has been associated with harder times, the outcast of preserved meats, left to linger in the dark recesses of the cupboard. A Monty Python skit from 1970, in which two diners are confronted with a Spam-centric menu, gave birth to “spam” as electronic junk mail; an inescapable annoyance.

In Hawaii, which consumes around 7 million cans of Spam each year, the connotations are more sunny. An annual Spam Jam festival sees a main street in Waikiki closed to traffic in celebration of the beloved street food. Local McDonald’s serve Spam breakfast with eggs and rice. In New York, framing Spam around the context of Hawaii is a logical way to highlight its tasty attraction.

For Daley, who grew up in New Jersey eating Spam for breakfast, the luncheon meat felt synonymous with riding the bus. He vowed to never eat it again, even after moving to Maui for a couple of years as an adult. “But you live in Hawaii long enough and you end up eating musubi one day,” explains Daley. “You have $2 left, one beer and one musubi. And it’s like ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ It’s absolutely awesome. Once I had it, I was hooked.”

The consensus amongst chefs is to avoid the desire to elevate Spam into a more refined product, and instead focus on pairing it with the right ingredients. Briones said it took a while for his cooks to figure that out. For Suzume’s Spam musubi they experimented with fancy glazes and different cooking methods before Briones interjected, explaining that the relationship between the Spam, rice and nori already composed the perfect umami, or harmony of flavors. In short, when it comes to Spam, less is more.

Spam isn’t just popping up as a surprise item on otherwise upscale menus. Onomea, a Hawaiian restaurant that opened last August in Williamsburg, serves Spam musubi and Spam fried rice next to other humble island staples, like shoyu chicken. For Hawaii born Cystalyn Costa, Onomea’s 24-year-old owner, incorporating Spam on the menu was a no-brainer. “You can’t open up a Hawaiian restaurant without having Spam on the menu,” she said. “Spam is Hawaii. Hawaii is spam.”

Comfort and familiarity was also what inspired the Spam fried rice at King Noodle, which opened last July in Bushwick. Owner and chef Nick Subic grew up in Michigan eating Spam omelets on Christmas morning as part of his family potluck. The warm bowl of pan-fried Spam sprinkled over a mound of rice, eggs and green onions comes served in a less familiar setting: psychedelic track lights illuminating walls coated in day glow graffiti. “To me it’s one of the most simple and comforting dishes on the menu,” said Subic, a former chef at nearby Roberta’s. “We just want it to be something on the menu that when you try it, you go 'Oh yeah, that’s delicious.’”

For a more experimental approach there’s Maharlika, a Filipino restaurant in the East Village that serves—in addition to other dishes with Spam “fresh from the can"—beer-battered Spam fries. Chef Miguel Trinidad came to his fries the way most people come to Spam: he was running out of food. At the last minute, a wedding reception that Maharlika hosted jumped from 50 guests to 75. In a pinch, Trinidad battered leftover pieces of Spam and threw them in the fryer. "Everyone went nuts,” he said. The next week it was on the menu. “I wasn’t ordering enough Spam. I would order a case, 12 cans, and it would be gone in two days. People were just coming for the Spam fries.”

While Spam’s reputation may always precede it, it’s clear that New Yorkers are starting to recognizing its virtues, thanks to a small but growing handful of chefs and business owners, a feat in an increasingly health conscious food scene.

“At the end of the day, it’s not good for you,” said Briones. “Personally I’m really healthy. All the protein here is as hormone and biotic free as possible. Except for the Spam. But it’s good for your soul.”

🍙🍙🍙🍙🍙🍙🍙🍙🍙🍙🍙🍙🍙🍙🍙🍙🍙🍙🍙🍙🍙🍙🍙🍙🍙🍙

[mitchellkuga]

Celebrating the Humble, Greasy, Un-Instagram-Able Hawaiian Plate Lunch

Published by Saveur

The plate lunch is more than just a takeout meal; it's a universally beloved, island-wide symbol of Hawaii's diverse culinary culture

“We’re leaving at 6 a.m. tomorrow,” my dad said, handing me a pair of his mortar-stained jeans. I was a broke college student at Syracuse University, back home in Hawaii for the summer before an expensive semester abroad in London. I spent those next three months mixing concrete and cutting tiles, paving the dreams of rich people’s fantasies: swimming pools overlooking the ocean. My dad’s twin brother owned the company. It was the only reason I was allowed to handle a powertool.

The work was grueling, and the only respite was our lunch break, which usually consisted of soggy homemade sandwiches, extra-hard-boiled eggs, and fish cakes that I would gulp down alongside a Monster energy drink. But every so often we’d head to the closest drive-in and pick up a plate lunch: two scoops of white rice, macaroni salad slathered in mayo, a choice of meat (always greasy), piled into a styrofoam container. I’d order the cold ginger chicken, pale pieces of naked thigh that I’d douse in a potent concoction of green onions and ginger, then drizzle with a thin coat of soy sauce, its magic contained in the tension between cold chicken and hot rice, between savory and bland.

We’d slump under the shade of a nearby tree on the side of the road, hands caked in dried cement, barely speaking, a shared communion over achy muscles and food, a duo of dirty misfits. Except my dad was doing this to survive; I was doing this to prance around Piccadilly Circus.

What I didn’t know was that by eating plate lunch on the side of the road I was extending the lineage of the mostly Asian immigrants who’d sailed to Hawaii well over a century ago to toil in fruit plantations and labor in a burgeoning sugar economy. The plate lunch is an amalgamation of these immigrant tastes, the outcome of plantation workers taking culinary staples from Asia and transforming them under the strain of limitations that only working-class people living on islands can understand.

From Korea you have meat jun, thin strips of beef wrapped in a crispy sweet omelette and dunked in soy sauce spiced with gochujang, a twist on the beef pancake known as soegogi-jeon. From Japan, shoyu chicken, thighs boiled in a pot of soy, mirin, and brown sugar, not unlike the glaze used for teriyaki, and served with a topping of diced green onions. If you want to get local local there’s laulau, a slab of pork cloaked in taro leaf that’s traditionally cooked in an underground oven, called an imu. And of course, the infamous loco moco, a single beef patty supporting two eggs, sunny-side up, all showered in gravy.

Today, non-working-class people, like Punahou graduate Barack Obama, also grind plates of loco moco, but that’s the nice thing about Hawaii—rich people eat Spam too. The local food is also less concerned with cultural distinctions. Drive-ins seamlessly serve Hawaiian, Chinese, and Filipino-inspired fare side by side, without attracting the ultimate side-eye: “Fusion.” I don’t know if Hawaii is a melting pot, but it’s definitely a plate lunch.

Which is all to say that the plate lunch is impervious to food trends. You won't soon find one filled with plant-based meats or turned into a calorie-conscious grain bowl. Unlike poke, the sort of Hawaiian ceviche proliferating on the mainland faster than you can say “Chipotle,” the plate lunch is too heavy to traverse the entire Pacific. And too ugly. Social media wouldn’t have it: too gelatinous, too drab, too messy. Too many carbs. So leave it where it is, to be eaten on the side of the road in Hawaii. No food pics, just a quiet respite.

🍱🍱🍱🍱🍱🍱🍱🍱🍱🍱🍱🍱🍱🍱🍱🍱🍱🍱🍱🍱🍱🍱🍱🍱🍱🍱

Illustration by Alex Testere. 

[mitchellkuga]

On Writing for the Muses

Published by The Creative Independent

Astrologer and author Chani Nicholas on the connection between astrology and storytelling, having the time and space to fully be a mess before you finally hit your stride, and understanding the audience you're writing for.

Your voice as an astrologer is so distinct. What was your journey as a writer?

I certainly don’t know anything about grammar and sentence structure—I was a really bad student. [laughs] I was in my daydreams all the time and I didn’t pay attention and I wasn’t good at homework. I also didn’t write consistently for much of my life, but I always remember when I would write things people would say, “Oh, that’s really beautiful, you’re a really good writer.” I had this natural need to express myself, but I never thought of it as any kind of way forward.

When I went back to get my bachelor’s in San Francisco I thought, “Would I really want to be as an essayist? Well, that’s stupid—you know you can’t make money doing that.” And that’s when I started to write astrology. I realized this is a way that I can actually write. So I put my passion for all the things I was learning about into the form of astrology. It helped me build a habit of writing consistently and it was that habit that eventually turned into everything else. It really just started with the habit of showing up at the same time every month or every week or, in the beginning, every full moon, that really hooked me into the relationship with writing.

Would you say the essence of your voice was there from the beginning?

Yeah, my weird sentence structure and all that? [laughs] That person never changed.

Your book opens with a love letter to your wife Sonia Passi, who is the CEO of FreeFrom, [a nonprofit dedicated to financially empowering victims of domestic violence]. How does your relationship inform your work?

It’s very necessary for me to be part of some sort of social change in order for me to feel, somewhat, like I can sleep at night. My ability to support her and her work in the ways that I can helps me to feel engaged. That is a really healing part of our relationship. She also works on chaninicholas.com with me. Within FreeFrom, Sonia is an incredible leader—she’s gifted in a lot of ways, but that’s one of the ways in which she’s extraordinarily gifted—so she teaches me how to be a leader in my own life and business, and about how to create the best kinds of habits for work culture. We don’t just want the work that we do to go out in the world and only help the people that receive it—we want ourselves included in that equation, we want the actual workspace to be as healing as the work that is being produced. It has to happen at home first. She’s taught me about that.

And then there’s just the basic… well, it’s not basic, but I’ve never had somebody believe in me the way that she believes in me. Someone who has that kind of watchful faith, who’s that mindful. It has helped me to take risks I don’t know if I would have been able to take otherwise. It has helped me to develop in ways that I didn’t know were possible.

A lot has been said about the particular resonance astrology has with queer folks. I’m curious about the other side of that equation: if being queer informs your approach as an astrologer?

What I learned from some of the elders in the queer community—whether they’re Black feminists, indigenous feminists, POC feminists—informed everything that I am. It informed how I see the world and everything that I write. If it’s any good, it has someone’s teaching in it that I’ve gratefully received. So my queerness, I mean it should be clear: I think we have to push back against the currents that are trying to sweep us up and say, “Fuck this. This is actually the way I need to take up space in the world.” Even if we can’t take up that space externally, for safety reasons, I think it’s really important if we allow ourselves to take up that space internally. Astrology supports that, because it only ever speaks to your essence in a nonjudgmental way. So as queer folks living in this place in history we need these systems of knowledge that support our understanding of ourselves to say, “You are you. This is exactly what was meant for you. This is exactly who you’re supposed to be.”

How do you interpret the link between astrology and storytelling?

The story that we have about ourselves—and about each other, but it’s essentially about ourselves—is so incredibly important. Astrology is a map of your life. It tells a story of your life and if we can work with it in a way that feels affirming and also in a way that challenges us—not to stay complacent, not to stay in places that are comfortable or quelling our creativity—then it can be used to help us tell our story in a really wonderful way.

Like, everybody knows what Saturn Return is now—the story of our Saturn Return is always so magnificently perfect for that person’s chart. Even if it was extraordinarily painful and challenging, it’s something that helps us to shape, contextualize, tell the story of our life and the choices that we had within that story. It’s still a choose-your-own-adventure. Astrology would say, “Okay, this is the story that we’re in. What are you going to choose within this setup?”

You mention being a late bloomer in the introduction to your book. What did you gain from leaning into your calling later than is culturally expected?

I was such a mess in my twenties and thirties. Like I really, really wasn’t ready. The moment I was ready for it, I felt like it came. I needed all those years to heal. I needed all those years to figure myself out. I’m not someone who naturally has a really thick skin, so learning in public for me, like it is for a lot of people, was really challenging. I’m really glad I lived out a lot of mistakes offline. I’m really glad that I wrote a lot of awful things that didn’t ever see the internet. I’m glad that I got to, you know, like really fuck up and find my way through it. And I don’t know if that’s a cop out or not, but I just needed that time to not be inside the fun house of success. Because success does not make you happy, it just magnifies what’s already there.

Personally, I needed to be really humbled by doing work that I didn’t want to do for a long time. It was a way of me developing my spiritual practice. In jobs that I hated, I would pray or do affirmation and breathing exercises all day long, because I was so miserable that if I didn’t I was sure to get fired. [laughs] Working through the despair was a big part of my journey. Working through the despair of not having “made it” and having to learn how to love and value myself anyway, even though I hadn’t fully established myself in any kind of way that felt really meaningful or connected to me. And then it took me a long time.

My whole story really is about disconnection and abandonment. You know, the childhood story. And so the astrology came along and I kept refusing it and rejecting it, but it was the one thing that, when I started to get into it and write about it, was the one place I felt connected, and it never abandoned me. I had to learn how to not abandon myself and not abandon it. And the more I turned to it the more I felt this internal relationship with it. That was like a lifeline for me internally. It was like, there’s something here, there is energy here. I can keep putting energy into this, and it keeps feeding me.

So much of your business depends heavily on digital platforms. What is your relationship to social media and how do you avoid burnout?

Oof—I get so burnt out. I really do. So like, 90 percent of the time I’m posting something that I’ve created out of the need to create it, and probably 10 percent of the time I’m forcing something and posting it because I feel bad that I haven’t posted something. I’m not as consistent as, you know, I should be for business purposes. I don’t post every day, I don’t do all that stuff. But I do feel like it’s a creative outlet for me that’s kind of compulsive. I know that when I feel pain or when I feel my own kind of sorrow, the way that I feel back in control is to be creating something. That is where I find my agency and maybe it’s where I distract myself—which I don’t think is such a bad thing—but it is from a place of wanting to be able to do something about either how I feel or something that I’ve come to in therapy. [laughs] Like, oh, that thing! Yeah, how can I bring that in? How can I communicate it to people? Is it useful? Is it relevant? Do I make another fucking meme about something or should I just shut up?

Do you have any tendencies as an astrologer or writer that you find yourself actively fighting against?

As an astrologer, I’m always trying to understand what I’m not witnessing or how I’m not seeing the picture. As a writer I’m always trying to think: If this is a square and I turned it on a corner, it would be a different shape—how could I look at it from that additional angle? I really feel like I’m trying to learn how to be a better storyteller, how to point to things that are in support of what I’m trying to illuminate, like rabbis do. I’ve heard a lot of rabbis tell incredibly woven tales: they start with, “It happened on a Saturday,” and then they transition to something that happened in the world, and then they go into a cloud and it’s like, “Oh my god, how do they do that?”

How do you balance the day-to-day tasks of running a business while still giving yourself the necessary space for creativity? Do those two things feel separate or are they pretty intertwined at this point?

My god, that’s a lot of what I’m doing right now. We’re trying to create, again, habits. I’m trying to help Sonia help me help the people we’re working with. I’m not good at it and it’s been total chaos mode and just flying by the seat of our pants, trying to figure it out and fit it all in.

I’m at the space now where I have to block off creative time—it has to be just itself. And then I have to have time for meetings, for email, for all of the other business things that have to be separate from the creative time. Otherwise it’s too easy to let yourself be distracted by all the busyness of the day. I really have to quarantine my creative time. I’m really trying to carve that out in my everyday schedule, Monday to Friday.

Why did you decide to write a book?

I’ve thought about that many days. Why? [laughs] You know, publishers started reaching out to me in ways that made me feel like, “Okay, it sounds like a time to write a book.” I know that writing a book in terms of being a business legitimizes you in some way. And then I felt like there wasn’t a book for beginners to learn the core principles, to understand the meaning of your chart in a very fundamental way. There wasn’t a book I could point to that I didn’t feel was kind of problematic in some way—which is also fine, people can read around things, but I wanted to write my version of it, my kind of updated version. It’s the book I wanted people to read when I was teaching courses.

How do you define success in your work?

Success is feeling like I didn’t let panic or fear ruin my day. That I was able to be present and thoughtful, and that I was able to show up. That I was able to be in the day and creatively, thoughtfully responding and not reacting to what was happening. Because every day something chaotic happens and I need to be able to roll with it in a way that doesn’t tax the fuck out of my system.

How have you been doing that lately?

Well, I fail a lot and I talk about it with my wife and friends. If I fuck up with somebody then I make sure that I apologize right away, or change the behavior right away, or a combination of both. And then I’m trying to remember to breathe. Just take a couple of deep breaths and feel my seat in the manic-ness of everything. That’s the thing I think that helps me the most.

You’ve said in a previous interview: “I actually just write to please the muse I’m writing for or with.” Who is that muse, and do you ever write with a specific audience in mind?

I’m always writing for my people. You know, like I’m always thinking about those people who I don’t know yet or maybe never will, and those that I love and those that I respect and those whose work I know but might not know personally. I’m always having conversations in my head with the things that I’ve read during the day, or have read during my lifetime that have shaped me in some way. Those are all my muses.

And then there’s just an energetic presence when I’m writing that we’ve all experienced some version of. I’m trying to get in line with it. And when the sentence lands in the way it wants to, there’s an energy or lightning or something. My friend Barry Perlman describes it as a little ding-ding-ding. [laughs] Like, yes, you got that. You got the golf ball in the hole or whatever. It doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does, it feels so epic.

[mitchellkuga]

Was Narcissus A Homo?

Published by Cakeboy Magazine

On Obsession & Self-Negation In Queer Narratives.

Was Narcissus a homo?

I’m asking because there’s a strain of narcissism that courses through queer narratives, like that scene in Circuit when a tweaked-up musclehead makes love to his own reflection in a full-length mirror, or when Alia Shawkat eats out Broad City’s Ilana Glazer and for a split second her face morphs into Ilana’s. Or, when Andre Aciman writes in Call Me By Your Name: “Is it your body that I want...or do I want to slip into it and own it as if it were my own?”

There’s historical precedent for this phenomenon, too, tracing its roots all the way back to Plato’s Symposium and spanning millennia to its contemporary iteration: the Boyfriend Twin Tumblr. I ask because I am a card-carrying homosexual with no interest in fucking someone who looks like me.

This does not make me a better person. To the contrary, I should probably see a therapist. Finding pleasure in our queer reflections contains the possibility of self-possession, like that scene in the broadway production of Fun Home when a young Alison Bechdel encounters a butch-y delivery driver with a ring of keys attached to her dungarees. Triumphant, she breaks out into song:

“Your swagger and your bearing And the just right clothes you're wearing Your short hair and your dungarees And your lace up boots.”

My own “Ring of Keys” moment came at a college house party, but instead of breaking out into song, my stomach clenched. This could’ve been because the basement was smelly and the beer was Rolling Rock. Mostly it was because I had seen myself reflected in the snowfall of a central New York winter—metaphor, but also January in Syracuse is a fucking tundra—and I did not like what I saw. He had the same bone structure, the same jet black hair, and the same crush, as evidenced by the white hand slithering around the waist of his ripped Cheap Mondays.

I don’t remember if we talked that night, but I do remember talking about him the next day, when said crush messaged me on AIM. I asked him about the new boy. He mentioned that he was from Taipei, that he was cute, and that his English “isn’t the best.” I wish I could say I called him out—“How many languages do you speak, asshole?”—but instead I twisted the knife: “Yeah, he seems really Asian.”

In five swift words I had melted into the snow. There was an imaginary quota for gay Asian bodies and, as far as I was concerned, I had already filled it.

I know self-tokenizing, or harming people within your own marginalized community, isn’t reserved for gay men of color—in the ‘60s, before they were friends, Andy Warhol and David Hockney competed for kooky gay token in a straight male art world—or queerness in general, as exemplified by Lil’ Kim and Nicki Minaj, or the feud between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. We’re friends now, me and the boy who seems "really Asian," but for over a decade I’ve carried the shame of this experience as if it were singular, my own queer yellow burden.

Now, when I look into Narcissus’s pool, a sentimental version of me thinks about that quote from Marianne Williamson (minus the religious drivel): “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” I also think about how easy it is to sabotage our own colorful reflections against the backdrop of whiteness. Whiteness like a clear pool of water after the snow melts—and we all know what happened to Narcissus.

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