#by describing them with contemporary language of homosexuality

[maxellminidisc]

Greek and Roman power structures are why I hesitate to call most things people call "queer" about their societies queer on the internet or like when people ask the stupid question of "Do you think theyd be into bdsm?" I'm like do you WANT that kind of inherently bad for consent society to be into bdsm???

Putting my thoughts under a read more cause its lengthy and something that I've wanted to talk about for a while now!

Like I'm sure queer relationships with like 1) no weird power dynamic and 2) pedastry existed in these societies, we have always existed, but it would not have been easy. They most likely still would have had to have played the part of a man who followed the rule and roles of what a MAN had to to be considered a man on the surface of society, because if they didnt, they would've been ridiculed and seen as lesser men. A big example of one such rule in the sexual realm is men could not and should not be penetrated; penetration was the domain of those lesser than men, if you were a man who liked being penetrated you were a fucking joke. They would've even been called perverse for not having a weird power dynamic in their romantic or sexual relationship with other men.

Slaves, young boys, slave boys, etc were basically equivalent to women in classical Greek society: they are those below the status of men and thus suitable objects of ones sexual desires. Like think about how fucked up that is??? And on top of that courting was also fundamentally tied to this perception of these groups of lesser status and required guidelines, so seeming genuinely invested and lovesick in ones relationship to these lesser beings was also seen as ridiculous.

Like it was all seen as taboo for the WRONG reasons. They'd would be so confused, ridicule you, or frankly be pissed if you pointed out how awful the inherit vacuum for consent these dynamics are and rife for abuse of power these relationships would have been to begin with because you're basically questioning the standards of classical Greek masculinity.

And I also wish we discussed more how the classical periods in Greece and Rome played a part in contemporary homophobia. Like it's not all 100% the result of Christianity moving into these societies, but more so a chain with Christianity being the biggest domino to fall at the end. Rome in particular was influenced by these sexual and social ideas of class and sexual dynamics in Greece, so the undercurrent of homophobia inherit to those ideas made Christianity all the more appealing for aligning with those already establied ideas.

In the end sex was basically used the same way everything else was to men in classical Greek and Roman society: its about power, gaining power, flexing that power and through this, raising ones status in these societies. It left very little room for partnerships of equals and the little room that was there was probably incredibly suffocating for anyone who didn't want to abide by these rules and standards of masculinity or others of which they were expected to.

[yasminbenoit]

What Is Asexuality? Yasmin Benoit for Teen Vogue

For Asexuality Awareness Week, model Yasmin Benoit answers the question ‘what is asexuality’, and busts some common myths about what it means to be asexual.

I realized I was asexual around the same time my peers seemed to realize that they were not. Once the hormones kicked in, so did a nearly universal interest in sex for those around me. I thought sex was intriguing, but never so much that I wanted to express my sexuality with someone else. I had no sexual desire towards other people, I did not experience sexual attraction, and that hasn't changed.

I didn't learn that there was a word for my sexuality until I was 15, after being interrogated for the millionth time at school about my orientation, or lack of it. After doing some Googling as soon as I got home, I realized for the first time in my life that I might not be broken, that I wasn't alone in my experience, and that it wasn't a defect I had somehow brought on myself. I had spent the entirety of my adolescent life trying to answer people's invasive questions without having the language to explain that I was just an asexual girl.

But even after I found the language, I had only solved half of the problem. We are taught in grade school that we'll become sexually interested in others, but never that not being sexually attracted to anyone is an option. Because we're not taught about it, no one else knew what I was talking about when I tried to come out to them as asexual.

Many don't believe asexuality is real,  and that makes the experience of navigating our heteronormative, hyper-sexualized society as an asexual person even harder. I've spent my life battling misconceptions about it and so have many other asexual people. Now, I try to use my work as a model and activist to raise awareness and change the way our society perceives asexuality and asexual people. This Asexual Awareness Week, I'm busting some of those myths about my orientation.

Now, let's separate fact from fiction:

Myth: Asexual people have no sexuality ✘

Truth: Asexuality is considered a sexuality, just like bisexuality, heterosexuality, and homosexuality. I often phrase it as being a sexual orientation where your sexuality isn’t oriented anywhere—because it isn't actually the same as having no sexuality or sexual feelings. Asexual people have hormones like everyone else. It isn’t uncommon for asexual people to masturbate and there are asexual people who still have sex for various reasons and gain enjoyment from it. Some asexual people are romantically attracted to others, but not sexually attracted. Since asexuality is a spectrum, the ways in which asexuality is experienced can vary in different ways.

Myth: Asexuality is a lifestyle choice ✘

Truth: This misconception stems from the idea that asexuality is a choice and not a legitimate sexual orientation. Asexuality is often confused with celibacy or abstinence, probably because they can manifest in similar ways. In contemporary society, celibacy is often defined as being sexually abstinent, often for religious reasons. Sure, for many asexual people, their asexuality means that they aren’t interested in having sex with other people, but that’s a result of their orientation—not their beliefs about sexual behavior. Celibacy is a lifestyle choice, asexuality is not. Asexuality also shouldn't be confused with being an incel. People don't decide to become asexual because they can't find sexual partners or because of any other circumstances. It isn't a state of being when you're going through a "dry spell," nor is it a choice any more than being gay or straight is a choice. It's just the way we are.\

Myth: Asexuality is an illness ✘

Truth: The assertion that asexuality is a mental or physical disorder is incredibly harmful to asexual people and has led to false diagnoses, unnecessary medication, and attempts at converting asexual people. For example, Female Sexual Interest/Arousal Disorder and Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder — which are characterized by low or absent sex drive — are in the DSM-5 and have been thought of as a medical diagnosis for asexuality. But the difference is that people who have HSDD are bothered by their lack of sexual drive, while asexual people are not. But even the inclusion of HSDD as a diagnosis is controversial — some argue that people who are asexual might feel distress at their lack of sexual desire because of lack of acceptance in society. Asexuality is not the result of a hormone deficiency, or a syndrome, or a physical or psychological ailment. Research has said as much. We don't need to be treated or fixed.

Myth: Asexual people have anti-sex attitudes ✘

Truth: There are asexual people who are repulsed by the thought of sex, or by the thought of having sex themselves. I fall into the latter category. However, that feeling does not necessarily extend to what other people are doing. The misconception that asexual people are against other people expressing their sexuality, and that all asexual people can’t stomach conversations about sex, is quite an alienating one. It leads to asexual people being left out of important discussions about sexuality. It is entirely possible and incredibly common to have sex-positive attitudes and be asexual.

Myth: There are barely any asexual people ✘

Truth: Don't let our lack of visibility and representation fool you. There are a lot of asexual people out there, but many of us aren't entirely out, and some haven't realized that there's a word for what they're experiencing due to that lack of visibility. While research into the asexual population is lacking, its estimated that around 1% of the population is asexual—but that's based on a studies where the participants have likely known what asexuality was and been out enough to identify that way. It's likely there are more asexual people than we know of, but even if we did only comprise 1% of the population, that's still tens of millions of asexual people.

Myth: Asexual people just haven’t found the right person yet ✘

Truth: The idea that asexual people just need to meet the ‘right person’ who will unlock their sexual desire and ‘fix’ their asexuality is one I’ve always found quite perplexing. It’s an argument that seems to be applied to asexuality more than other orientations. You wouldn’t tell a straight guy that they just “hadn’t met the right man yet" as an explanation of why he's attracted to women. I’d like to think that most wouldn’t tell a gay man that they “hadn’t met the right woman yet” either. It suggests that our sexuality is reflective of our company, that no one we have ever seen or encountered has met our standards, and thus we haven’t experienced sexual attraction to the extent that the term ‘asexual’ could be applied.

This assumption ignores and invalidates all of the asexual people who have found the ‘right’ person—the asexual people in happy, fulfilling, loving relationships or who have had them in the past. Because, yes, asexual people can still have romantic relationships, or any other kind of relationship. The validity of a relationship is not and should not be based on how sexually attracted you are to that person. This statement also plays into the notion that asexual people are “missing out” on something and haven’t truly discovered our entire selves, that we are incomplete because of our innate characteristics or our life experiences. This isn’t true either.\

Myth: There’s an asexual demographic ✘

Truth: Even though most people don’t know much about asexuality, they still have quite a specific idea about what asexual people are like. I’ve often heard that, as a black woman and a model, I don’t look or seem asexual. We’re stereotyped as being awkward white kids who spend too much time on social media and probably aren’t attractive enough to find a sexual partner if we wanted to. And if we are attractive enough, then we should tone that down as not to ‘give mixed signals.’ But there is no asexual way to look or dress. Asexual people have varying ages, backgrounds, interests, appearances, and experiences, just like those belonging to any other sexual orientation. So please don't use the term "asexual" as an adjective to describe someone you think is sexually unappealing or as an insult, because that's only perpetuating this harmful stereotype.

Makeup: Margherita Lascala

Photography: Becky Gannon

Hair: Kayla Idowu

Styling: Diesel, Cheimsee, Sixth June, Northskull, Lamoda

[crossdreamers]

What the TV series “It’s a Sin” tells us about the tactics of anti-trans activists today

Over at Twitter Owen Jones reflects on the way the history of bigotry is repeating. The new British TV series It’s a Sin reminds him of how the tactics once used against gay and lesbian people is now used against trans and nonbinary folks.

Owen Peter Jones is a British newspaper columnist, commentator, journalist and political activist. 

It's a Sin is a British television drama serial written and created by Russell T Davies. It is about the queer community in the 1980′s London.

Owen writes:

One of the most important themes in 'It's A Sin' was about gay/bi people and shame - caused by growing up in a society that saw gay/bi people as would-be sexual predators, violators of biological reality, threats to children, immoral, deviants, and generally undesirable.

While HIV rates remain significantly higher among gay and bisexual men, treatments now allow those with HIV to live healthy lives. Alcohol and drug abuse as a response to shame and trauma caused by homophobia is today a bigger problem in Western nations.

It's important to make this point because the evidence suggests that mental distress is even more acute amongst trans people, who are today the most marginalised and oppressed part of the LGBTQ+ world.

Anti-trans activists use the same arguments as the homophobes

Today, anti-trans activists play the exact same songs about trans people: that they are would-be sexual predators, violators of biological reality, threats to children, immoral, deviants, and generally undesirable.

Some of those anti-trans activists responded viscerally to being called out for enjoying It's A Sin. They are furious at being compared to the monsters who victimised gay people, even as they obsessively target trans people in the same papers that obsessively targeted gay people.

Some of them point to their past association with pro-gay struggles, or in some cases simply that they have been to gay bars before, as though any of this gives them a lifetime freedom pass to say whatever they like about other minorities.

But as It's A Sin shows, a society which made gay people feel unwelcome - as burdens at best and as menaces at worst - inflicts terrible damage on gay people. The same is being done to trans people.

However those who, in some cases, spend a genuinely huge amount of their lives talking about trans people as would-be predators or threats to children justify it to themselves, they are inflicting the same injuries on trans people as It's A Sin underlined is done to gay people.

The quadrupling of transphobic hate crimes, the 48% of trans people who fear using public toilets, the trans people discriminated against at work, the quarter who've suffered homelessness, all of this is erased from the "conversation", such as it is.

Even the focus on contexts which don't affect 99.9% of trans people - but which are used to attack all of them - namely prisons and sports deliberately excludes questions like 'Why are there no trans Olympic medallists?' or 'How do we stop trans prisoners being assaulted?'

Inflicting the same damage

The hounders of trans people may hate It's A Sin being used to hand them a mirror. But the anti-trans faction, who operate strikingly like a cult, are not only singing the same tunes - they are inflicting the exact same damage on trans people as gay people have long suffered.

oh and I've set this so only people who follow me can reply because, although anti-trans activists have made a conscious decision to relentlessly and obsessively target me, and I can live with that, I don't want trans people to have to sift through their bile.

“Gender critical” parents who are harming their kids

Some other thoughts. 

 One of the most powerful themes towards the end of It's A Sin is Ritchie's mother being confronted by Jill for the damage she inflicted on her gay son, suggesting that the shame she instilled in him helped drive behaviour that led to his infection with HIV.

"Actually it is your fault, Mrs Tozer," says Jill. "All of this is your fault."  Jill adds: "The wards are full of men who think they deserve it."

She was right. So many of the gay and bisexual men who died often lonely deaths in hospital wards were traumatised by their parents.

Today, most gay people have gay friends who have mental trauma which often leads to alcohol and drug abuse with absolutely catastrophic consequences. Many, all too many, have had friends who've died from suicide. The culprits? Society in general but often parents in particular.

It's A Sin showcased the LGBTQ family, of other LGBTQ friends filling a vacuum left by the absence of a loving family. A big role of that 'family' is to pick up the pieces because of the damage inflicted by parents on their children.

When parents refuse to properly accept their LGBTQ children for who they are, they insert ticking time bombs in many of them. That bomb may detonate in their 20s, their 30s, their 40s, who knows, maybe in their 50s or 60s. But in many of them, it will detonate.

This is why there is a genuine horror watching self-described "gender critical" parents ranting about trans people on the internet. Because I can't help but think, oh god, what if they have trans children. What damage will be inflicted upon them.

In some cases, the bigotry of anti-trans activists - often radicalised by newspaper columnists, online rabbit holes, and somewhat perversely, Mumsnet - will collide with reality. Read this about an ex-'gender critical' activist and their trans nephew.

But in other cases, transphobic parents will stick determinedly to their guns and inflict the same damage on their trans children as homophobic parents have always inflicted on their gay children. We should be clear: homophobia and transphobia are forms of child abuse.

Hiding behind the argument of protecting their children

Both traditional homophobes and contemporary transphobes claimed they were protecting the welfare of children. As anti-gay campaigner Anita Bryant declared: "As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children".

Today's anti-trans activists use the language of 'safeguarding' and often suggest that parents know what's best for their children. This is clearly not always the case. Lots of children need to be protected from their parents. That includes many LGBTQ children.

So when this Times journalist attacked Mermaids, a charity supporting young trans people, for including an 'exit button', suggesting it was 'a major safeguarding breach'. Many LGBTQ children don't have supportive parents and need to hide their identity away from them.

Anti-trans rhetoric echoes anti-gay arguments

Anti-gay rights campaigners long focused on the danger posed by predatory gay men to vulnerable children, and pointed to scandals in, for example, the Scouts and the Catholic Church as evidence. Today, anti-trans activists similarly extrapolate extreme cases to make their case.

In the 1980s, it was claimed an all-powerful gay lobby was putting political correctness ahead of people's well-being. The same language is used about the objectively marginalised trans minority today. The second screenshot is from this weekend's Times newspaper.

That's why so many gay people stand up for trans people. Trans people, of course, are in our shared LGBTQ spaces, and their experiences do differ in important ways - but we see them going through the exact same things we've gone through.

It is, frankly, grotesque that gay people who for very obvious reasons stand with their trans siblings are then vilified as misogynists, or have obvious homophobic tropes about wanting to endanger children's safety thrown at them.

It's also perverse that many of the same people publicly cooing over It's A Sin are the same people trying to hound the LGBTQ allies of trans people out of the media (they can't really do this to trans people because there are very few trans people in the media).

LGB people attacking trans people

As for the LGB people who participate in the hounding of trans people. There have long been examples of oppressed groups who participate in oppression, often against themselves: women against the Equal Rights Amendment and feminism, right-wing black Republicans, and so on.

These anti-trans LGB activists are not only completely unrepresentative of LGBTQ people: many queer bars and spaces bar people who express their bigoted opinions for very obvious reasons: to ensure they're safe spaces for the whole LGBTQ rainbow.

Watching straight people try and foment a civil war within the LGBTQ world by platforming these completely marginal bigoted zealots is actually completely and utterly grotesque.

Finally (!) in the 1980s, almost the whole media was anti-gay, and public opinion was overwhelmingly anti-gay. Today, almost the whole media is anti-trans, but while transphobia is rampant, anti-trans sentiment is not as widespread as anti-gay sentiment back then. There's hope!

But it takes huge courage to speak out in support of trans people in Britain in 2021. One day, there will be TV programmes about the onslaught against trans people. Those who victimised trans people today will be portrayed in them. They'll go down in history as hate figures.

Sadly, it's too late to save all too many LGBTQ people who had ticking time bombs inserted into them both by society and by their homophobic and transphobic parents. They detonated. But we can save others from that fate. So speak up.

Read the whole thread with other comments here!

Read also Michael Cashman: Loss and anger raged in me after watching It’s a Sin – the stigma we faced in the 1980s is now being directed at trans people

Photo of Owen Jones: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

[woman-loving]

Lesbian Unintelligibility in Pre-1989 Poland

Selection from ""No one talked about it": The Paradoxes of Lesbian Identity in pre-1989 Poland, by Magdalena Staroszczyk, in Queers in State Socialism: Cruising 1970s Poland, eds. Tomasz Basiuk and Jędrzej Burszta, 2021

The question of lesbian visibility is pertinent today because of the limited number of lesbian-oriented activist events and cultural representations. But it presents a major methodological problem when looking at the past. That problem lies in an almost complete lack of historical sources, something partly mended with oral history interviews, but also in an epistemological dilemma. How can we talk about lesbians when they did not exist as a recognizable category? What did their (supposed) non-existence mean? And should we even call those who (supposedly) did not exist “lesbians”?

To illustrate this problem, let me begin with excerpts from an interview I conducted for the CRUSEV project [a study of queer cultures in the 1970s]. My interlocutor is a lesbian woman born in the 1950s, who lived in Cracow most of her life:

“To this very day I have a problem with my brothers, as I cannot talk to them about this. They just won’t do it, I would like to talk, but. . . . They have this problem, they lace up their mouths when any reference is made to this topic, because they were raised in that reality [when] no one talked about it. It was a taboo. It still is. ... I was so weak, unable to take initiative, lacking a concept of my own life—all this testifies to the oppression of homosexual persons, who do not know how to live, have no support from [others], no information or knowledge learned at school, or from a psychologist. What did I do? I searched in encyclopaedias for the single entry, “homosexuality.” What did I learn? That I was a pervert. What did it do to me? It only hurt me, no? Q: Was the word lesbian in use? Only as a slur. Even my mother used it as an offensive word. When she finally figured out my orientation, she said the word a few times. With hatred. Hissing the word at me.”

The woman offers shocking testimony of intense and persistent hostility towards a family member—sister, daughter—who happens to be a lesbian. The brothers and the mother are so profoundly unable to accept her sexuality that they cannot speak about it at all, least of all rationally. The taboo has remained firmly in place for decades. How was it maintained? And, perhaps more importantly, how do we access the emotional reality that it caused? The quotes all highlight the theme of language, silence, and something unspeakable. Tabooization implies a gap in representation, and the appropriate word cannot be spoken but merely hissed out with hatred.

Popular discourse and academic literature alike address this problem under the rubric of “lesbian invisibility” (Mizielińska 2001). I put forward a different conceptual frame, proposing to address the question of lesbian identity in pre-1989 Poland not in terms of visibility versus invisibility, but instead in terms of cultural intelligibility versus unintelligibility. The former concepts, which have a rich history in discussions of pre-emancipatory lesbian experience, presume an already existing identity that is self-evident to the person in question. They assume the existence of a person who thinks of herself as a lesbian. One then proceeds to ask whether or not this lesbian was visible as such to others, that is, whether others viewed her as the lesbian she knew she was. Another assumption behind this framing is that the woman in question wished to be visible although this desired visibility had been denied her. These are some of the essentializing assumptions inscribed in the concept of (in)visibility. Their limitation is that they only allow us to ask whether or not the lesbian is seen for who she feels she is and wishes to be seen by others.

By contrast, (un)intelligibility looks first to the social construction of identity, especially to the constitutive role of language. To think in those terms is to ask under what conditions same-sex desire between women is culturally legible as constitutive of an identity. So, instead of asking if people saw lesbians for who they really were, we will try to understand the specific epistemic conditions which made some women socially recognizable to others, and also to themselves, as “lesbians.” This use of the concept “intelligibility” is analogous to its use by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, as she explains why gender conformity is key to successful personhood[...].

For Butler, cultural intelligibility is thus an aspect of the social norm, as it corresponds to “a normative ideal.” It is one of the conditions of coherence and continuity requisite for successful personhood. In a similar vein, to say that lesbians in the People’s Republic of Poland were not culturally intelligible is of course not to claim that there were no women engaged in same-sex romantic and erotic relationships—such a conclusion would be absurd, as well as untrue. It is, rather, to suggest that “lesbian” was not a category of personhood available or, for that matter, desirable to many nonheteronormative women. The word was not in common use and it did not signify to them the sort of person they felt they were. Nor was another word readily available, as interlocutors’ frequent periphrases strongly suggest, for example, “I cannot talk to them about this. ... They ... lace up their mouths when any reference is made to this topic” (my emphases).

Interviews conducted with women for the CRUSEV project are filled with pain due to rejection. So are the interviews conducted by Anna Laszuk, whose Dziewczyny, wyjdźcie z szafy (Come Out of the Closet, Girls! 2006 ) was a pioneering collection of herstories which gave voice to non-heteronormative Polish women of different ages, including those who remember the pre-1989 era. Lesbian unintelligibility is arguably a major theme in the collection. The pain caused by the sense of not belonging expressed by many illustrates that being unintelligible can be harmful. At the same time, unintelligibility had some practical advantages. The main among them was relative safety in a profoundly heteronormative society. As long as things went unnamed, a women-loving woman was not in danger of stigmatization or social ostracism.

Basia, born in 1939 and thus the oldest among Laszuk’s interviewees, offers a reassuring narrative in which unintelligibility has a positive valence:

“I cannot say a bad word about my parents. They knew but they did not comment. . . . My parents never asked me personal questions, never exerted any kind of pressure on me to get married. They were people of great culture, very understanding, and they quite simply loved me. They would meet my various girlfriends, but these were never referred to as anything but “friends” (przyjaciółki). Girls had it much easier than boys because intimacy between girls was generally accepted. Nobody was surprised that I showed up with a woman, invited her home, held her hand, or that we went on trips together.” (Laszuk 2006, 27)

The gap between visceral knowing and the impossibility of naming is especially striking in this passage. The parents “knew” and Basia knew that they knew, but they did not comment, ask questions, or make demands, and Basia clearly appreciates their silence as a favour. To her, it was a form of politeness, discreetness, perhaps even protectiveness. The silence was, in fact, a form of affectionate communication: “they quite simply loved me.”

Another of Laszuk’s interviewees is Nina, born around 1945 and 60 years old at the time of the interview. With a certain nostalgia, Nina recalls the days when certain things were left unnamed, suggesting that there is erotic potential in the unintelligibility of women’s desire. Laszuk summarizes her views:

“Nina claims that those times certainly carried a certain charm: erotic relationships between women, veiled with understatement and secrecy, had a lot of beauty to them. Clandestine looks were exchanged above the heads of people who remained unaware of their meaning, as women understood each other with half a gesture, between words. Nowadays, everything has a name, everything is direct.” (Laszuk 2006, 33)

A similar equation between secrecy and eroticism is drawn by the much younger Izabela Filipiak, trailblazing author of Polish feminist fiction in the 1990s and the very first woman in Poland to publicly come out as lesbian, in an interview for the Polish edition of Cosmopolitan in 1998. Six years later, Filipiak suggested a link between things remaining unnamed and erotic pleasure, and admitted to a certain nostalgia for this pre-emancipatory formula of lesbian (non)identity. Her avowed motivation was not the fear of stigmatization but a desire for erotic intensity:

“When love becomes passion in which I lose myself, I stop calculating, stop comparing, no longer anchor it in social relations, or some norm. I simply immerse myself in passion. My feelings condition and justify everything that happens from that point on. I do not reflect upon myself nor dwell on stigma because my feeling is so pure that it burns through and clears away everything that might attach to me as a woman who loves women.” (Kulpa and Warkocki 2004)

Filipiak acknowledges the contemporary, “postmodern” (her word) lesbian identity which requires activism and entails enumerating various kinds of discrimination. But paradoxically—considering that she is the first public lesbian in Poland—she speaks with much more enthusiasm about the “modernist lesbians” described by Baudelaire:

“They chose the path of passion. Secrecy and passion. Of course, their passion becomes a form of consent to remain secret, to stay invisible to others, but this is not unambivalent. I once talked to such an “oldtimer” who lived her entire life in just that way and she protested very strongly when I made a remark about hiding. Because, she says, she did not hide anything, she drove all around the city with her beloved and, of course, everyone knew. Yes, everyone knew, but nobody remembers it now, there is no trace of all that.” (Kulpa and Warkocki 2004)

Cultural unintelligibility causes the gap between “everyone knew” and “nobody remembers” but it is also the source of excitement and pleasure. For Filipiak’s “old-timer” and her predecessors, Baudelaire’s modernist lesbians, the evasion, or rejection, of identity and the maintaining of secrecy is the path of passion. Crucially, these disavowals of identity mobilize a discourse of freedom rather than hiding, entrapment, or staying in the closet. The lack of a name is interpreted as an unmooring from language and a liberation from its norms.

Needless to say, cultural unintelligibility may also lead to profound torment and self-hatred. In the concept of nationhood generated by nationalists and by the Catholic Church in Poland, lesbians (seen stereotypically) are double outsiders whose exclusion from language is vital.[1] A repentant homosexual woman named Katarzyna offers her testimony in a Catholic self-help manual addressing those who wish to be cured of homosexuality. (It is irrelevant for my purpose whether the testimony is authentic; my interest is in the discursive construction of lesbian identity as literally impossible and nonexistent.) Katarzyna speaks about her search for love, her profound sense of guilt and her disgust with herself. The word “lesbian” is never used; her homosexuality is framed as confusion and as straying from her true desire for God. The origin of the pain is the woman’s unintelligibility to herself:

“Only I knew how much despair there was in my life on account of being different. First, there was the sense of being torn apart when I realized how different my desires were from the appearance of my body. Despite the storm of homosexual desire, I was still a woman. Then, the question: What to do with myself? How to live?” (Huk 1996, 121)

A woman cannot love other women—the subject knows this. We can speculate that her knowledge is due to her Catholic upbringing; she has internalized the teaching that homosexuality is a sin, and thus untrue and not real. The logic of the confession is overdetermined: the only way for her to become intelligible to herself is to abandon same-sex desire and turn to God, and through him to men. Church language thus frames homosexuality as chaos: it is a disordered space where no appropriate language can obtain. Within this frame, unintelligibility is anything but erotic. It is rather an instrument of shaming and, once internalized, a symptom of shame.

For many, the experience of unintelligibility is moored in intense heteronormativity, without regard to Church teachings or the language of national belonging. Struggling with the choice between social intelligibility available to straights and leading an authentic life outside the realm of intelligibility, one CRUSEV interlocutor, aged 67, describes her youth in 1960s and 1970s:

“I always knew I was a lesbian ... and if I am one, then I will be one. Yes, in that sense. And not to live the life of a married woman, mother and so on. This life wasn’t my life at all. However, as I said, it was fine in an external sense. So calm and well-ordered: a husband, nice children, everything, everything. But it was external, and my life was not my life at all, it wasn’t me.”

She thus underscores her internal sense of dissonance, a felt incompatibility with the social role she was playing. The role model of a wife and mother was available to her, but a lesbian role model was not.

The discomfort felt at the unavailability of a role model may have had different consequences. Another CRUSEV interviewee, aged 62, describes her impulse to change her life so as to authentically experience her feelings for another woman, in contrast to that woman’s ex:

“She visited me a few times, and it was enough that I wrote something, anything ... [and] she would get on the train and travel across the country. There were no telephones then, during martial law. Regardless of anything, she would be there. And at one point I realized that I ... damn, I loved her. ... She broke up with her previous girlfriend very violently—this may interest you—because it turned out that the girl was so terribly afraid of being exposed and of some unimaginable consequences that she simply ran away.”

The fear of exposure, critically addressed by the interlocutor, was nonetheless something she, too, experienced. She goes on to speak of “hiding a secret” and “stifling” her emotions.

A concern with leading an inauthentic life resurfaces in the account of the afore-quoted woman, aged 67:

“I couldn’t reveal my secret to anyone. The only person who knew was my friend in Cracow. I led such a double life, I mean. ... It is difficult to say if this was a life, because it was as if I had my inner spirituality and my inner world, entirely secret, but outside I behaved like all the other girls, so I went out with some boys. ... It was always deeply suppressed by me and I was always fighting with myself. I mean, I fell in love [with women] and did everything to fall out of love [laughter]. On and on again.”

Her anxiety translates into self-pathologizing behaviour:

“In 1971 I received my high school diploma and I was already . . . in a relationship of some years with my high school girlfriend. . . . But because we both thought we were abnormal, perverted or something, somehow we wanted to be cured, and so she was going to college to Cracow, and I to Poznań. We engaged in geographic therapy, so to speak.”

The desire to “be cured” from homosexuality recurs in a number of interviews. Sometimes it has a factual dimension, as interlocutors describe having undergone psychotherapy and even reparative therapy—of course, to no avail.

Others decide to have a relationship with a woman after years spent in relationships with men. Referring to her female partner of 25 years, who had previously been married to a man, one of my interlocutors suggests that her partner had been disavowing her homosexual desires for many years before the two women’s relationship began: “the truth is that H. had struggled with it for more than 20 years and she was probably not sure what was going on.” Despite this presumed initial confusion, the women’s relationship had already lasted for more than 25 years at the time I conducted the interview.

Recognizing one’s homosexual desires did not necessarily have to be difficult or shocking. It was not for this woman, aged 66 at the time of the interview:

“It was obvious to me. I didn’t, no, no, I didn’t suppress it, I knew that [I was going], “Oh, such a nice girl, I like this one, with this one I want to be close, with that one I want to talk longer, with that one I want to spend time, with that one I want, for example, to embrace her neck or grab her hand”.”

Rather, what came as a shock was the unavailability of any social role or language corresponding to this felt desire that came as a shock. The woman continues:

“It turned out that I couldn’t talk to anyone about it, that I couldn’t tell anyone. I realized this when I grew up and watched my surroundings, family, friends, society. I saw that this topic was not there! If it’s not there, how can I get it out of myself? I wasn’t so brave.”

The tabooization of homosexuality—its unintelligibility—is a recurring thread in these accounts; what varies is the extent to which it marred the subjects’ self-perception.

[scriptlgbt]

My story is about pirates. The MC is a trans guy and the captain is a lesbian who is some sort of big sister/mother figure to him. It's quite violent. I was wondering if it could be problematic? I know it's problematic to show trans woman being overly violent in fiction but what about cis lesbians and straight trans guys? Also, do you know about real any queer pirates i could read about? And what did pirates think about homosexuality/transness?) How was it being queer in the pirate world?

A conversation that I had, that is relevant:

ME: [PARTNER], do you know anything about queer pirates?

PARTNER: I know that there were many, and they’d sometimes be like -

ME: Sea husbands kind of thing?

PARTNER: Yeah, and one would inherit from the other’s booty, and when it was divided up, they’d share their share of the booty.

ME: [mischievous grinning face]

PARTNER: [nodding] And they might share each other’s booty.

Disclaimer: This whole thing is going to largely focus on what is known as the Golden Age Of Piracy. I’m also not a historian, I just hardcore, love pirates with my heart and soul. This is going to be a long post.

So, this is super generalized, but pirates, and even sea-faring folks in general (see: - or sea, hahahahaha - the LGBT+ history of Brighton in the UK), have tended to have a much higher rate of LGBT+ folks and minoritized people in general, throughout history. As far as most research I’ve done goes. Being in a travelling situation and having the anonymity of being able to move around with chosen family generally has great appeal to folks whose existences are filled with oppression and a sense of not belongingness. This has also applied for racialized people, women in general, impoverished folks in general, a lot of different people who wanted to reclaim a place in the world that ostracized them.

Another fun fact, the use of the term “Friend of Dorothy” as a euphemism for gay folks was investigated by the US Navy. They misunderstood it as meaning that there actually was a woman named Dorothy who could be routed down and coerced into outing her “friends” to the military. Cruise ships and others have also used this phrase to covertly advertise that there were meetings for these folks. (Source: Wikipedia | “Friend of Dorothy”) 

But to get to the pirates, specifically.

Most pirate ships largely had their own code that everyone on their ship had to agree to. Some had things like, “you’ll be marooned with one knife, and no food if you are caught not reporting loot to be divvied up by the crew fairly” and things like that. But generally, whoever ran the ship, the Captain, would get to pick the rules. And with the partial-democracy that comes with the idea of mutiny, and the more notable reliance on the labour of it all, in general, things were able to be slightly more consensus-based than the on-land governments.

There are numerous women who became pirates to take ownership of their lives in ways that weren’t permitted on-land. Anne Bonny and Mary Read are historical figures that might be worth looking into. The two of them shared lovers, sailed together, had intense care for one and other and with their dressing up in masculine-coded attire and the like, there’s a lot to go off of in assuming they may have been romantically involved with each other. If not, at least they had some iteration of what a lot of contemporary folks might find comparable to a QPR.

The concept of “sea husbands” was also called matelotage (or bunkmate) depending on your crew. It was kind of the buddy system, but gayer. With little need to consistently explain it to outsiders, folks at sea were freer to explore the different ways a relationship with another person can be, without so much worrying about how it looks to others at a passing glance. And as pirates, there’s less concern that you’ll get shit from the law for gay stuff Of All Things. 

Buccaneer Alexander Exquemelin wrote: ‘It is the general and solemn custom amongst them all to seek out… a comrade or companion, whom we may call partner… with whom they join the whole stock of what they possess.’  (Source)

It was just normal. They also had a version of health insurance where someone was compensated if they ended up disabled from battle. The compensation of death of your partner also works into this.

As for transness, these kinds of things have had fickle definitions and historically, it’s hard to be able to pinpoint specific people as fitting cleanly into contemporary cultural definitions of transness, because frankly, the past had different culture to now. When it comes to writing canonically trans characters in contexts where the language might have been different, it’s important to focus on making sure that a trans reader can identify the personal connection with that character’s experiences and feelings, just as much as it is to use language to name folks as trans. 

Representation can go deeper than surface terminology and the like, and in cases where the terminology doesn’t necessarily match, it has to. Language like, “I never really felt like a [assigned gender] - I see myself more like [desciption of actual gender identity or name for it].” - is as good as just saying the character is trans in my opinion.

Depending on where the character is from, they also may have just outright had a word in their language for their identity. 

Gender presentation was significantly freer with pirates than it was for folks on land. Things like earrings, frilled sleeves, varied hair length and similar, were not uncommon, although the gendered coding associated with these aspects of appearance had different implications than they do now. Gold earrings on seafarers were there to fund a proper burial if someone’s body washed ashore. Gendered clothing was also coded in more binary ways on land. Folks who wanted to be coded as men could do so by wearing pants and folks who wanted to be coded as women could do so with skirts and dresses. (Tangential but fun fact yet again: dressing in those big poofy skirts usually included massive pockets. They were generally not physically attached to the skirts, but if you wore it all properly you would easily be able to reach into them.) 

Pirates and other seafarers also had clothing referred to as ‘slops’ for cleaning (if they were of the rank that cleaned anyway) which were pretty wide-legged pants that could almost pass for a skirt. 

Material that pirates used for clothing was largely what they stole, but it was cut and sewn into the same shapes a lot of other seafarers wore. At the time, it was largely illegal (under English rules anyway) for people who weren’t the bourgeoisie to wear anything made with nice fabric. Rich people saw this as deceitful, and these laws enabled richer people to not mingle on an equal level with those of a lower socioeconomic status.

As pirates, if you’re already shunning the law, may as well wear full calico suits. (Like Calico Jack Rackham.)

There’s more info on pirate and privateer clothing here. (The link is to a free book in HTML format, complete with illustrations and talk of materials, and how the clothes worn at sea varied from clothes they wore when they came into shore and towns.)

I could write a book on this and still not have covered enough. But the gist is that pirates were a big counterculture of outsiders living their lives. LGBT+ people and racialized people got thrown into the mix (and jumped right in) and experienced much more liberated lives than they might otherwise. That isn’t to say they were flawlessly inclusive - there still definitely were a lot of things people thought of in congruence with colonial beliefs. There was racism and homophobia - but it looked a lot different, and was a lot lighter than you’d think. And there were some ships which banned women, but mainly I think that was because they typically didn’t have the background to hold their ground on the ships, and were considered more of a plus one to certain crew members (who brought them - the rules were specifically about bringing them onto the ship rather than them being there of their own accord) than part of the crew. Sometimes women were part of the crew.

Notably, Anne Bonny and Mary Read were in a polyamorous triad with Calico Jack Rackham. (I think a cis + het historian might argue about this but that would seem like denial to me tbh. There is much, MUCH more evidence pointing in this direction than against it, and it would be extraordinarily hard to argue otherwise.) I would definitely do some research on them!

I also recommend this book (link is the free text on WikiSource), A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates. It is perhaps the most famous contemporary record of the lives of a number of pirates from the time, including Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

As for the sensitivity aspect of this ask, I’d say that what you are describing is completely fine. As long as the violence isn’t used to dehumanize or completely demonize, I would even say that I don’t have any warnings for you about it, or precautions to advise on.

Thank you for this opportunity to infodump about LGBT+ pirates. I hope this is not overwhelming, but I’m also happy to parse out segments of this better upon request. (Our ask will be open eventually, I promise.)

- mod nat

[fymagnificentwomcn]

Ayse was Murad's only haseki sultan but if you look through the dark pages of Ottoman, you see that Murad had also a male lover named Yusuf who was known as "oglanci", he took young boys from the folk and gave them to the Sultans, Pashas.

It’s a bit hard to discuss this issue using contemporary views of sexual orientation/  Homoeroticism was actually surprisingly common in the Ottoman Empire due to the way women were perceived. Walter G. Andrews& Mehmet Kalpaklı in “The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society” (generally this whole book is an excellent source concerning homoeroticism in Ottoman society) claim that it was similar to the situation in Ancient Greece - women were seen as more suitable for sexual love, while men for the higher, spiritual one. Moreover, any respected woman was seen as a representative of whole family’s honour. As such, authors claim that most of Ottoman divan poetry is in fact addressed to (mostly young) men, and the issue is even more complicated because Ottoman (and modern) Turkish are gender-neutral languages. Having fun with men was actually often seen as natural before settling down to have a family.

Also, because of the private nature of relations with free, Muslim women, because it is offensive, both socially and legally, to express publicly one’s attraction to a woman who is not one’s wife (and one’s wife is never a fit subject for public conversation), the love that could most properly be expressed as a public (poetic) love was that between males. Moreover, it seems to have been considered more proper (and less dangerous) for a young man to adopt the essentially submissive, self-sacrificing posture of a passionate lover toward a beloved who was male and, hence, a legitimate wielder of power in a society where men were expected to dominate in the public sphere. Beyond this, we will present evidence that, generally, the culture of the court and court-dependent elites in absolutist monarchies—both Ottoman and European—expressed itself in part as homoeroticism.

Homosexual or homoerotic relations weren’t also punished as severly as in Europe in the same time period:

In Ottoman society, sexual or erotic relations between men or men and boys were seldom punished, especially if they were carried on in private, and homoerotic relations were in a much less serious class of crimes than illicit sexual contacts with women, which could, in theory, result in death by stoning.

And yes the issue of homoeroticism often came together with patronage of young, pretty boys:

In eroticized patronage relations, however, when the beloved is more powerful, richer, and more highly placed, gifts are replaced by devotion and refined entertainment (sohbet [(intimate) conversation], poetry) and sexual gratification by material rewards of various kinds (a caftan, money, a job). Everybody did this, from the top on down. Even the sultan rewarded the pages of his palace school—the beloved boys of his court—on various occasions by having trays of coins scattered for them to scramble after.20 This can be visualized as a system in which scrambles after something.

Ok, this was just a brief discussion of historical backgound, now time to discuss Murad. It’s hard to assign a sexual orientation to him, to be honest. One thing that is pretty much sure is that he preferred male companionship to female companionship; he didn’t like to spend time in harem, while he spent a lot of time with his male favourites and had strong emotional bonds with some of them, and we don’t have stories of similar relationships concerning him and women. Another sultan who is said to have homosexual inclinations, which is Mehmed the Conqueror, was claimed to enjoy sexual relationships with both men and women, but not having strong emotional bonds with either sex (at least Babinger claims so). As for  Murad and sex - it’s just one big mystery. He definitely had sex with women because he did produce several children, but whether he enjoyed it or just forced himself to sleep with concubines to produce heirs - we don’t know. There were definitely rumours about him not not taking women to bed eagerly, like him having a male harem or multiple versions of the story about Kösem sending him boys - one says she sent him concubines dressed as boys, so that heirs could be produced. But those are all rumours.

Now to what sources say about relationships with his male fvourites:

Bobovius stated that: “Murad talked mainly with men, as opposed to Ibrahim, who liked to listen to music in company of his odalisques” and that in these matters: “Sultan Ibrahim behaved in ways compliant with what nature expects of us, as opposed to his brother”.

Musa Çelebi

Swedish ambassador Ralamb wrote that Sultan Murad fell in love with young Armenian named Musa Celebi and after losing him never fell in love again: “Jannissaries took the young man away from him, threatening him, and then tore him to shreds in front of Murad’s eyes, and the Padişah fell into love melancholy”.

Evliya Çelebi mentioned that when during one of the parties someone recited elegy about Musa, Murad openly cried in the company of all other men.

Emir Güne aka Yusuf Pasha

There were rumours about their possible affair, especially since they spent so much time partying in each other’s company, sometimes they even spent together three days and three days in row in Yusuf’s palace, which was often a place for their extravagant parties (source: A New Relation Of The Inner-Part of The Grand Seignor’s Seraglio by Jean-Baptise Tavernier.) Yusuf was clearly disliked by people, not only because of being Persian, but also because of leading Murad the wrong way and encouraging his partying& other bad habits. Naima mentions that after Murad’s death, Ibrahim allegedly said that: “Yusuf Pasha’s life is unnecessary” and confiscated the famous party palace.

Silahtar Mustafa Pasha 

Du Loir described him mostly in connection with rumours about Murad’s death - there were some about him wanting to leave the Empire to Silahtar, but LBR even if Murad did plan to put an end to Ottoman dynasty, the Crimean khan claim is much more believable. Other rumours said that Murad died in Silahtar’s arms or wished so because Silahtar sincerely loved him since their youth. There were also some stories about Silahtar wanting to kill himself out of grief following Murad’s death.

- Joanna

[krisihistoryblog-blog]

LGBT History Month: A short history of a contemporary problem

 Conversion therapy regards to physical or psychological therapy that aims to change an individual sexual orientation or gender identity. The practices often involve electroshock therapy leading to memory loss. 

The modernity of conversion therapy despite all the proof against it is concerning. The issue has been brought to people's attention recently with films going our revolving around conversion therapy - for example Boy Erased. 

American Horror Story season 2 features on of the the main characters going through it, and despite it being a horror show, its depiction of the practice really wasn't far fetched - in fact it was quite accurate. Their realistic portrayal of it actually made it quite hard to watch. 

Lots of people have shared their stories about having been through conversion therapy to major media outlets and newspapers, bringing more attention to the issue.

One of the most surprising things to me while reading about this was the fact that even in England, where homosexuality, same-sex marriage and adoption are legal; transgender people are legally recognised; there are LGBT Pride parades all around the country; there are lots of LGBT campaigns; 45 openly LGBT MPs were elected into parliament - conversion therapy is still legal. 

The Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy, a signed formal agreement, recognises the shared responsibility medical professionals have in opposing gay conversion therapy. Yet as the memorandum itself notes, a 2009 study found that one in six psychological therapists have engaged in efforts to help a client change their sexual orientation. 

At least 698 000 Americans have undergone some form of conversion therapy. It also concluded that a further 20 000 LGBT youths will undergo conversion therapy by a licenced professional, and 57 000 by a religious leader. 

Records of conversion therapy in America date back to the 1890s, when people believed homosexuality could be “cured” by surgery - often castration. In the beginning of the 20th century, psychotherapy became more prominent and that offered a different solution. Some medical professionals concluded that homosexuality was a developmental problem rather than a physical one. After the 1920s, the debates surrounding the causes of homosexuality continued and although people focused more of male homosexuality, they gradually recognised the existence of lesbians. However many, including Sigmund Freud, physician and the founder of psychoanalysis, believed there wasn't a cure for homosexuality. Freud actually believed that everyone is born bisexual and then due to their surroundings becomes either heterosexual or homosexual. 

By WWII, the American government had taken explicit regulatory measures that linked heterosexuality to citizenship, thus ti the benefits that came with it such as access to welfare, government loans, ability to serve in the military. At the same time, legislations were passed which then formed sexualpsychopath laws. These often-targeted LGBT people and lead to them being sent to prison or mental institutions. The American Psychiatric Association officially defined homosexuality as a mental disorder in the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), published in 1952. As a good, lawful American citizen now had to be heterosexual, conversion therapy became more credible. 

As the century progressed the state started forcing individuals who had been convicted of being homosexual to undergo conversion therapy. However, many did it voluntarily out of desperation to fit into the contemporary society or out of fear of the identity which would often cause people their relationship with their family and friends.

 In the UK, the most common type of conversion therapy was aversion therapy. Patients would be electric shock treatment, hallucinogenic drugs and undergo brainwashing techniques. Men would often choose aversion therapy over prison sentences. They'd be shown pictures of naked men and then given a series of electroshocks and drugs to make them vomit. After they would be shown pictures of naked women or taken on a “date” with a young nurse. This is the type of therapy shown on American Horror Story season two.

 Peter Price underwent aversion therapy when his mom found out he is gay when he was 18. He remembers being in a windowless room with an audio tape describing homosexuality “in the foulest language imaginable". He also described part of the treatment: “they then injected me with something that made me violently sick for about an hour and they left me there.” 

Although the treatment's advocates claimed a success rate of 70%, it was obvious it was ineffective and damaging. After pressure from gay rights campaigners and the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, aversion therapy decreased in popularity. 

In July 2017, the government launched the National LGBT Survey and published the results earlier this year. Over 108,000 people participated, making it the largest national LGBT survey in the world to date. The survey focused on “experiences of LGBT people in the areas of safety, health, education and employment”. Some of the report's conclusions are:

 • LGBT respondents are less satisfied with their life than the general UK population (rating satisfaction 6.5 on average out of 10 compared with 7.7). Trans respondents had particularly low scores (around 5.4 out of 10)

 • Two percent of respondents had undergone conversion or reparative therapy in an attempt to ‘cure’ them of being LGBT, and a further 5% had been offered it 

• Two percent doesn’t sound like a lot, but it equates to the number of students in our college- and that’s from a sample which is small compared to the UK population of 67 million. In perspective, if 2% of the UK population has undergone conversion therapy, then that equates to the percentage of the population aged over 85. 

LGBT youths are, and always have been at a high risk of mental health problems such as depression and anxiety which has been supported by numerous reports and studies and being put through conversion therapy doesn’t help that. 

According to a The Guardian article published in 2015 : “People who have gone through conversion therapy face 8.9 times the rates of suicide ideation, face depression at 5.9 times the rate of their peers”. 

Today, organisations such as American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association agree that conversion therapy is ineffective and harmful for those who undergo it. On a legal level, 14 states have passed laws to ban the practice, and some municipalities have passed similar laws aimed at protecting LGBTQ youth. Last year, Theresa May vowed she would take steps to ban it, however the legal status of conversion therapy remains the same. Although obvious steps have been made in the direction of equality of LGBT people, the modern presence of conversion therapy 

[sharingshane-blog]

Why the Bloody Hell a Christian!?

I am religious, self-identifying Christian.  This part of me has had significant influence in whom I am today.  It is not something that I discuss often; yet, it is also not something I keep secret either.  It does usually take people by surprise to learn this fact about me.  I just finished writing a blog post about one of my idols, Emma Goldman, who was a staunch atheist.  I am transgender and bisexual, and I believe it is okay for me to live fully and authentically as myself.  I have date men, women, and non-binary folks happily and without remorse.  I am a steadfast leftist and a large critic of the church not just in the United States but around the world too.  I am also a critic of organized religion in general. I usually advice against looking for savior figures.  That is in part how dictators come to power.  I have extremely close atheist and agnostic friends.  I also have Muslim, Jewish, and even Satanist friends. I have also suffered abuse and ostracization from my church growing up which contributed to a lot of the psychological issues that I possess today.  I do also agree that the Bible does contain homophobic, ethnocentric, sexist, and genocidal content.  It also contains slave apology, human sacrifices, and rape defenses.  So, the question that may be running through your head at this point may be, “Why would you identify as a Christian?”

Well, let me start with why I do not talk about my Christian faith that often.  It is rooted solely in the way people perceive me when I talk about my faith than what I say about my faith.  Since Christianity is so mainstream in the United States, there is already widespread knowledge about the basics of the religion.  When Christians give out little booklets saying, “Did you know Jesus—?” it comes off like they are insulting the intelligence of anyone who is not perceived to be with the “in-group.”  I think sometimes many Christians lose sight of the fact that anyone outside their small group of other think-alike Christians are just as human and capable of cogitative reasoning as them.  Many people outside the realm of Christianity know the basic tenets of the Christian faith, and many even know and understand the Bible better than most self-identifying Christians.  Evangelism in the sense of educating people about the basics of the faith is essentially unnecessary in the United States, and I want to avoid coming off as an evangelist to other people.  When I speak about my faith, I do not want others to perceive me as that evangelist.  I want to communicate that I believe they are intelligent individuals with their own interpretations of spirituality that are completely based on valid perspectives of the world.  It is demeaning and degrading the way most Christians interact with others outside their little Christian in-group.  

Furthermore, there is a level of stigma growing against Christians on the left.  I am a leftist and potentially communist even.  Most of my friends are self-identified as atheist or agnostic.  Also, many of them have dealt with real abuse from the church in the past.  This is also true of my LGBTQ+ friends.  Unfortunately, in these groups, sometimes I must minimize my references to the Bible because it could potentially trigger traumatizing memories.  I can empathize since have also experienced trauma from the church, and I have a difficult time with Christianized language and contemporary worship music. I rather speak of Christianity in a deep philosophical way or in an extremely pragmatic way.  Enough with the bullshit abstract concepts with no explanation redundantly displayed in every single church!  I get that Jesus loves me, a basic tenet of Christianity.  But what does it mean for him to love me? What is love?  Does his love have limits?  But back to the trauma stuff.  Since the church has hurt these communities quite repeatedly in the past, it is absolutely understandable that individuals in these communities have built a stealthy resentment towards Christianity as a whole.  I have been an agnostic twice and sometimes I really do doubt whether I want to be associated with the label “Christian.”  I do possess strong convictions despite minimizing how much I discuss it.  It does still play an instrumental role in my life.

Back to the original question, “Why the bloody hell am I still a Christian?”  Before I move forward, I will not and cannot give objective evidence for the existence of God and specifically the Christian God.  I am aware that many of my views are dogmatic and originate from anecdotal observations rather than factual content.  Many intellectuals cannot agree on a solid argument for the existence of God, so do not expect such an unrealistic feat from me.  If you were to go down the route of a strictly logical path I would say that agnosticism is probably the most reasonable conclusion based on factual evidence.  The best arguments from the perspective of theism are abductive arguments, arguments that attempt to give the best possible explanation for a phenomenon.  Occam’s Razor, the simplest explanation taking into account all the facts is the best explanation, is the method in which to find the best possible explanation for a phenomenon thereby strengthening an abductive argument.  For example, our ability to comprehend and discover science is one such phenomenon in which arguably the best explanation could be the existence of God or at least intelligent designer.  However, there are also many evolutionary explanations for the phenomenon as well.  Next is figuring which is the simplest explanation that also takes into consideration of all known facts.  Abductive arguments never prove that something is objectively true but merely most likely true.  The conclusion is subject to change based on new data that may arise every day.  Only deductive arguments if the premises are true and the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises can give objectively factual conclusions. (Example of a Deductive Argument: If A then B; if B then C, therefore, if A then C).  All of scientific reasoning exists outside of deductive argumentation even scientific discoveries that are blatantly true.

Sorry, I was once a philosophy student, and I hope to return to school again at some point soon (which, by the way. much of my philosophical curiosity stems from my religious background).  My reasons for being a Christian are not objective and not reasons for which you should become a Christian yourself if you are considering the possibility. They are merely justifications for why I consider myself a Christian.  For starters, I deal with intense abandonment issues and chronic feelings of loneliness due to my extensive history of trauma.  The belief in a loving and caring God who will never abandon me has helped fill those gaps.  Of course, that does not mean that I don’t question the reason I have experienced so much evil if such a God exists unless I potentially deny his omnipotence.  That is a valid question.  I remember though, years ago, I was dangerously suicidal and was taken to the hospital. While waiting for a bed to open in the psychiatric hospital, the doctors put me in a secluded room with no intellectual stimulation, just blank white walls, for about 22 hours.  About maybe 16 to 18 hours in and eventually someone gave me a magazine that I would normally not have expressed any sort of interest in except under dire circumstances such as that.  My friend who dropped me off at the hospital is Catholic (one of the good ones) and she gave me a rosary as a source of strength.  I hid it under my scrubs so as the cameras that were watching my 24/7 would not pick it up.  In the room next to me, there was an older man who was belligerent and violent against the nurses.  He made quite a ruckus all night, and it was frankly triggering and disturbing.  I thought I was losing a sense of myself. I clutched tightly to that rosary all night long.  After an ambulance transported me to the psychiatric hospital the next day, two nurses stripped searched me which of course meant that they took the rosary from my hands.  I cried profusely because I felt like that was the only part of myself that I had left. So, there is definitely a sense of identity and strength I get from being a Christian; it is at the very least useful or practical for me to identify as a Christian.  Christianity, particularly the scriptures involving Jesus, is also the reason why I am a leftist today.  It is also surprisingly the reason I became more accepting of the LGBTQ+ community after my extremely conservative upbringing.  Acts describes the early church, pre-Constantine’s conversion in 312 A.D., as being strongly communally based.  People shared food, shelter, and clothing with one another and no one went without.  This strikingly sounds like an anarcho-communist utopia.  The understanding of Jesus as the Son of God was of the upmost importance, and Jesus’ denouncing of the ethnocentric ideology of Jewish religious leaders telling his disciples to go out and tell the world about him brought the gentiles into the community with him.  One of the first recorded converts in the Bible was a eunuch from what is modern Ethiopia.  It was not only a gentile but also a sexual minority.  Jesus had a strong message about community and non-judgmental stance towards others.  He rebuked people who valued power and wealth over other people.  This particularly included the rich, religious leaders, and other people of power.  He told a rich man to give away all his possessions to enter the Kingdom of Heaven which the man left distraught.  He healed the servant of the Roman centurion and it is highly likely according to Biblical scholars that they were in a homosexual relationship given the historical precedent of that time.  Jesus is crucial and central to the Christian faith.  Christianity does not exist without him.  Why else would it be call CHRIST-ianity?  And of course, modern-day Jews and Muslims at the very least recognize Jesus as a great prophet (The Koran also states that Christians and Jews will also be rewarded in heaven alongside Muslims).  What sets Christianity apart is that one of the most basic tenets of Christianity is the belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ.  When looking at Christianity, what is essential is looking through the lens of Jesus when interpreting the rest of scripture, what is human-informed and what objectively divine.  I believe that much of the Bible is divine to an extent but at times grossly misconstrued by human beings.  Christianity has been interpreted in ways in which have wielded immense good and immense harm today.  In other words, it is easy to imagine that this would be true for the history of the Judeo-Christian faith.  It has been used today to justify genocides, but it has also been used to build free clinics for people who do not have access to healthcare (the church I have been attending).  Religion can be extremely dangerous if interpreted in a grotesque way with self-interest plaguing one’s reasoning.  I do not think; however, it is something necessarily intrinsically wrong with religion.

I will probably do more blog posts on this topic, specifically on queerness and the Bible.  With how I interpret the Bible, I can easily justify living openly queer.  I will give a brief synopsis in how I justify the way I live in light of being a Christian.  Most of the verses which speak against homosexuality are in extremely specific sections with absurd rules such as never defend your husband in a fight by grabbing other man’s penis or washing yourself three times after a nocturnal ejaculation.  Maybe, the most substantive verse would be from Paul in Romans and Corinthians; however, Paul has also said that women should never speak in a place of worship which even by most conservative Evangelical Christian standards is too sexist.  We are talking about an extensive history of patriarchy and ethnocentrism, wanting desperately to separate their culture from other cultures by committing genital mutilation and refraining from homosexual acts plaguing the society for many centuries.  The Bible was exclusively written by men in this context trying to interpret something divine.  I do not believe the Bible is inerrant.  The Bible gives little insight in terms of varying gender identities.  It speaks against transvestitism a “crime” one cannot commit if they identify with the gender that they are attempting to express. Transvestitism does not equal transgenderism and equating the two would be an invalidation of a person’s gender identity since you are insinuation that a transgender man for example is really just a woman presenting as a man instead of a man in his own right.  But furthermore, with the increased greater understanding that sexual orientation and gender identity is rooted in one’s being and not a lifestyle which someone follows by their own volition, one must consider the idea of whether anyone could be excluded from Jesus’ community based on some uncontrollable trait.  The obvious answer to this is no, and most conservative Christians would agree with the premise.  However, they either deny queerness is an innate trait, or that it is a mental illness, or a trait that must be suppressed.  The third is absurd, because you would never tell someone to be a specific race in order to be accepted in the Christian community.  It a trans-woman is a woman, then there is no way to change the fact that she is a woman.  Even if she dresses masculine and never medically transitions, she is still a woman. She would actually be cross-dressing technically!  Since gender has to do with one’s internal identity and not necessarily one’s presentation, no matter how much she tries, even if she comes off as a man is not a man. Telling people to suppress their identity has only led to a mental health crisis in the queer community and high suicidal rates.  Is a God who tells people to suppress a portion of themselves that he presumably created for no other purpose but the prospect of getting to heaven one day truly loving?  I would argue not.  I would go as far to say that if you do believe that queer people should suppress themselves, there is the insinuation that God wants to make certain people suffer unnecessarily (unnecessarily is key here, not that we should never have challenges, but we should never have to suffer unnecessarily) and does not truly love certain people.  That last bit is a heretical statement.  

Phew!  That was a lot and thank you for bearing with me through all of it.  Thank you for your time and your patience when reading all of this.  Sorry if it mostly sounded like a bunch of thoughts loosely stringed together.  That is essentially what my life is at this point. I hope from this you may have been able to get a different perspective of what it might mean for someone to be a Christian or why I am still a self-identified Christian.  I also hope that you have been able gain a better understanding of me.  Maybe you have more respect for me or maybe you have lost all respect for me.  Either one is fine.  You may have whatever opinion you want of me.  I have heard it all: delusional, deceived, misled, crazy, etc. That is okay.  It is sad though in the midst of trying so desperately to fight for a completely egalitarian society.  I am comfortable for the most part with the label.  I have found a church that accepts my gender identity using correct name and pronouns.  I had the fortune of being in the church when I came out, so most of the parishioners knew my birthname but still switched out of respect for me at the very least. The official church directory has my preferred name there.  Not every individual is accepting, but the vast majority are including the priest who defended me when someone made some transphobic comments using scripture.  The church has been a source of slow healing for me from all the abuse and trauma I have experienced, and they have helped me during some dark times such as when I was homeless and hungry.  That is what the church is meant to be, a place of safety and love.  I have broken down in tears before during some of the services out of being so overwhelmed by the kindness and acceptance I got from them as opposed to people in my past. In fact, they were more accepting of me than my job who just cut my hours more and I eventually lost the job soon after coming out publicly.  After my abusive ex-boyfriend from back when I thought I was cisgender and straight became a full-blown fascist, I decided to dedicate my life to loving others. This is where it has brought me so far, a staunch Christian leftist.   

[doomonfilm]

Thoughts : Howl (2010)

While recently doing a gig at Cheer Up Charlie’s in Austin, I found myself enthralled by the animations I was seeing on the screen.  The imagery was bold, symbolic, informative and free-flowing, and it definitely got the gears rotating in my mind.  Then, an image jumped out at me, because I recognized the symbol... the inference... I saw Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady portrayed famously as the duo in On The Road, a book that forever changed my perspective on both creativity and the general way one leads one’s life.  I asked the bartender what was on the TV, and that was how I found out about Howl. 

The late 1950′s in America were a time of polarizing transitions, as the ‘wholesome’ lifestyle presented by the country was beginning to take a backseat to a new generation of inquisitive and curious minds set on changing the world.  From the West Coast came a movement of poets known collectively by the cultured masses as the Beat Generation, with their San Francisco Renaissance forever changing the landscape of literature, poetry or otherwise.  Their initial declaration came in the form of Howl, a four part poem by Allen Ginsberg (James Franco) full of shocking truths and colloquial language that perfectly described the angst and disconnect found in young Americans.  From its initial reading at the Six Gallery in October of 1955, to the obscenity trial that surrounded its release via City LIghts Bookstore co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Andrew Rogers), and beyond, the work has continued to remain as influential, polarizing and on the nose today as it was nearly 80 years ago. 

The three-prong approach that this film uses is perfectly balanced in regards to the way it presents events and ideas on both a historical and deeply informative level.  The meat of the film is made up of the court trial, shot very much like a standard court drama with all of the rich, golden colors and intellectual sparring one would imagine as a way to frame and glorify the idea of free speech, and the way it nurtures thought outside of the box.  The story of Ginsberg and his growth to prominent poet are mostly shot in black and white flashbacks, if not flashbacks with muted color, providing a fresh look at a nostalgic time.  The centerpiece of the film is definitely the animated portrayal of the poem Howl, with literal interpretations turned into psychedelic brushstrokes for a bigger picture that slowly reveals itself over the course of the poem’s four parts.  The film is so artistic because of how bold, fresh and groundbreaking the artist at the center of it was... his work was challenging, and therefore, the presentation of his work cannot be run of the mill.

This challenging nature really works for the film, as it seemingly aims to challenge viewers very much in the same way that Howl did both in terms of presentation and substance.  The presentation of both the poem and the film are hectic at the onset, with so much stimulating material thrown at you that you’re not sure rather or not you should relish in it or be embarrassed by it.  It is only after you become awash in the foul language, sexual ideas and observations on the society that you are able to get over personal hang-ups and actually examine them on a base level, at face value.  Much like Ginsberg speaks on his methods for opening the lines of conversation about homosexuality, Howl did the same thing in regards to racial prejudice, how people look at the government, and even provided much needed insight into the eventual era that was the Hippie generation. 

The film itself is shaped very much like a documentary, with the main exception being that actors are cast in all of the roles.  Once you get over the familiar faces and the slightly embellished stylized touches (used tastefully, most certainly), you really find yourself falling right into the crux of the matter in regards to where you stand on if the material is obscene or not.  The insight provided by both those in the court proceedings and by Ginsberg via James Franco’s theatrical presentation of his recorded interviews provide context and a deeper understanding into the poems, the times, and some of the iconic figures that emerged from the times.  As mentioned before, the three distinct presentation styles of the three main story arcs work well with one another, making an already relatively short movie fly by like an intellectual roller-coaster ride.

James Franco is much more measured, calculated and controlled in his portrayal of Ginsberg than he is in most roles, maybe as a sign of respect to the poet and his vast influence.  Jon Hamm is charming, sly, calculating and cunning as the defense attorney, managing to be sharp without ever overstepping the boundaries into the realms of attacks.  David Strathairn plays by the book as the prosecutor, setting up Hamm without ever acquiescing to full victim-hood, and managing to get valid points in despite his inevitable losing status.  Bob Balaban does his usual thing as the judge, giving those reactions that only he can.  Jon Prescott has big shoes to fill as Neal Cassady, but he does manage to bring a magnetic aura to his personification of the legend.  Aaron Tveit is sweet in his connection with Franco, managing to give viewers a true sense of love in their on-screen relationship.  Appearances by Treat Williams, Jeff Bridges, Todd Rotondi, Mary-Louise Parker, Alessandro Nivola and Andrew Rogers round out the main cast.

With Howl, I imagine most people come for the star power and the visual stimulation, as those were certainly the elements that drew me in,  What made me stay, however, was the respect and importance given not only to the work (and the creator), but to its impact.  The film illustrates in every way that it can just how much impact Ginsberg and his contemporaries came to have on modern day culture.

[dyke-bars-never-last]

appearance & inscription within literary reality

"Feminine writing" amounts to saying that women do not belong to history, and that writing is not a material production.

The feminine is the concrete (sex in language).

It is this which makes Nathalie Sarraute say that she cannot use the feminine gender when she wants to generalize (and not particularize) what she is writing about.

Djuna Barnes makes the experiment (and succeeds) by universalizing the feminine ... cancels out the genders by making them obsolete.

The minority subject ... extension into space could be described as being like Pascal's circle, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

This is what explains Djuna Barnes's angle of approach to her text - a constant shifting which, when the text is read, produces an effect comparable to what I call an out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye perception; the text works through fracturing. Word by word, the text bears the mark of that "estrangement" which Barnes describes with each of her characters.

Writing a text which has homosexuality among its themes is taking the risk that at every turn the formal element which is the theme will overdetermine the meaning, monopolize the whole meaning ... and the book become a symbol, a manifesto.

When this happens, the text ceases ... to be regarded in relation to equivalent texts. It can no longer operate as a text in relationship to other past or contemporary texts. It is diverted from its primary aim, which is to change the textual reality within which it is inscribed.

Doubtless this is why Djuna Barnes dreaded that the lesbians should make her their writer, and that by doing this they should reduce her work to one dimension. This would not only be no favor to her, but also no favor to us. For it is within literature that the work of Barnes can better act both for her and for us.

A text by a minority writer is effective only if it succeeds in making the minority point of view universal, only if it is an important literary text.

[mulechurchyard-blog]

What I mean when I say Ex-Gay

“Because you see we boys are like that. We are more afraid of the medicine than of the illness”

                                                                                   Pinocchio,Carlo Collodi

Over the 2015/16 festive period I had two epiphanies: (i) I wasn’t gay and (ii) there is a God.

There was a gap of around a month between the two. During that month, I unpicked my former identity, and I realised that I had been had: the concept of homosexual identity is lie, and the way that the lie is maintained is incredibly complex and damaging. At first, I wondered how I could become a secular voice who could help people see what I had seen, but God had other plans. In a few short weeks he had saved me for Himself, and now I knew that my message would be so outrageous there was no chance of being listened to. I knew what I was like before, and there was no way I would have listened… or maybe I would have listened a little bit, secretly. I might therefore have read on, if just to be outraged.

Having crossed the boundaries between the two worlds, I realised there is a problem to which there are four parts:

(i)            LGBT people do not understand Christianity

(ii)           Christians do not understand LGBT people

(iii)         LGBT people do not understand themselves

(iv)          Christians do not understand Christianity

So, as far debate and dialogue between LGBT people and Christians are concerned, things were never going to go well. As someone who has now experienced both, this blog sets out to address that a bit.

First, to state what I do not support. A couple of weeks back, there was an episode ofRupaul’s Drag Race (which I find fascinating) where one of the competitors broke down crying as he described his Christian parents subjecting him to an exorcism to rid him of a gay demon. That is spiritual abuse. No one can change for the sake of someone else. We each have a cross to bear, and it is our choice in how to bear it. It must be acknowledged that once a child is an adult, then they are on their own journey. Whilst love and guidance remain essential, that guidance must not be authoritarian (in fact authoritarian parenting may have been part of the problem in the first place). It goes without saying that verbal, physical, spiritual and emotional abuse (including shunning) play no part at all. I will write about parenting fully, later on.

However, there are a number of videos doing the rounds on YouTube, where people speak of amazing hole-on-one spiritual experiences where some charismatic preacher lays their hands on them, and they receive the holy spirit and “over-come” their sexuality all the same moment. If that is true, that’s great for them, I suppose, but it lies well beyond the bounds of realism for most. Maybe there is a leap of faith so profound that these people do just change their sexuality through belief, but as Rosario Champagne Butterfield, a Christian writer who also came through homosexuality, says, expecting it to happen is really prosperity gospel territory (the heretical and blatantly untrue belief that becoming a Christian is going to make you well, and bring financial prosperity because God knows you deserve it). What if these individuals discover that still struggle with same-sex desire? Who will they talk to about it? What if they don’t talk about it, and then act on it secretly? Either way, I am afraid to say that the euphoria of discovering God wears off overtime. You discover that you still do get ill, you still make terrible mistakes, your loved ones still die unsaved and you do still experience same-sex desire after all. Relying on Him and trusting Him can become harder. God doesn’t remove us from Earthly reality, he shows us what it truly is and if we understand what He is seeking in us, rather than us just expecting things of Him, He will help us to bear its challenges. That is why the prosperity gospel is absolute pap. There needs to be more credible and accessible explanations and courses of action, for the sake of everybody including charismatics.

It seems to be me, that most LGBT people who come to faith in Jesus, certainly within the UK evangelical culture in which I exist, still talk about experiencing same-sex attraction and choose to be celibate (Those who say that they are following Jesus and actively pursuing an LGBT lifestyle at that same time, aren’t Christians and I am not going to discuss that particular issue here). So, we have the two basic Christian views that seem to float around in culture and imagination:

I)              Over-the-top, all encompassing, instantaneous, spiritual theatrics/histrionics

II)            Celibacy

Celibacy is problematic though as it just says, “This is me and don’t ask question.” Although the way of dealing with it is different, this is basically the same thing as that that mainstream LGBT community says, often with extreme defensiveness, and there is a big reason for that. The thing that LGBT people fear above all other things is self-knowledge.

Self-knowledge is terrifying, because through self-knowledge an LGBT person will see that the person who is hurting them, the person who is humiliating them, who is filling their body with drink and drugs at the weekend (if they are that way inclined), who is causing their mental anxiety, who is generating these feelings of exclusion and who is preventing them from taking their role in God’s created order, is themselves. The sinful world has told them a lie about themselves, and they have believed it. They have not only believed it, they have run with it and through forging community with other LGBT people they have created a self-perpetuating social force that tells them that change is impossible, and any attempt to change is extremely damaging or laughable.

As these communities have sucked men and women in to them, grown ever larger and gained influence, they have taken it upon themselves to proclaim all science and psychology that suggest that homosexual or trans identity is even remotely changeable, linked to other mental health/personality disorders or liable to damage the individual further, have been irrefutably debunked. But they haven’t. My own lived experience show there is profound truths in much of the psychological writings of the pre-“liberation” era that have been excluded from contemporary discourse with such vehemence, it is almost impossible to access them, let alone hear them be discussed with any seriousness. There has been such a force of will and pressure from the LGBT community that they have managed to suppress the thought that these theories could have any truth in them at all. That is because discovering the truth in them is terrifying as it shows them that they are far less in control of their own bodies and minds than they think they are. This terror is as real for Christian LGBT people and those within the mainstream.

We can see this process happening just now with the gender-neutral debate. Previously, no one believed this thing existed as anything other than attention seeking linked in with certain pathologies, but slowly the debate is being crushed. Maintaining the idea that there even is a debate to be had, is portrayed as morally abhorrent. People become afraid to speak out. This is “not even up for debate” stance inevitably seeps in and affects the Christian world just as much as mainstream culture. Hence, I am not satisfied with the celibacy answer, because I think those who pursue it remain within the lie when greater and deeper recognition of your God-created reality is possible. And if full change proves elusive, at least there can come a greater ability to understand same-sex desire/LGBT-identity better and struggle with it less. To all intents and purposes, I am still celibate, and I don’t see that changing in the near future. But it’s not because I am resisting same-sex attraction, but because I am still beset with emotional issues from the past and I don’t feel able to cope with a relationship with a woman (again I will discuss this further later on). But more importantly I am saved, and I am not living within a lie that places a barrier between me and the true nature of reality anymore. In some ways, it is exactly like The Matrix. The world Neo wakes up can seem one hell of a lot harder to deal with than existing within the Matrix, but it is real, and that is profoundly more meaningful that living within the safe confines of a lie. And in reality, the lie is not safe at all. It cleverly disguises it dangers. Addiction issues, mental health issues, suicide, domestic violence, loneliness, anxiety, sexual promiscuity and narcissism are all far more prevalent in LGBT people than they are in the non-LGBT population. Their unacknowledged realties are screaming out against the lie that is being forced on to them, and this is without even going into the more metaphysical realms of damnation and exclusion from God’s Eternal Kingdom that lie will breed in time.

Christian celibacy is better, but it is not yet forceful enough to bring about the culture change that needs to happen. Ed Shaw has written a book called The Plausibility Problem, in which he discusses the problem of presenting celibacy as a plausible lifestyle choice for LGBT people as they seek Jesus. I think it is a huge problem, and it will always remain a minority choice. I think there is a more radical solution that even the church is now too afraid of. God create man and woman to be together. LGBT-identity is a lie, and we need to stop contributing to that lie. We need to undo it. Same-sex attraction is an issue deeply related to LGBT-identity, but it is also separate as it can exist independent of the LGBT-identity. Likewise, same-sex attraction is a lie. It is not part of God’s created order.  We need to undo that too, rather than preach repression. The solution to both lie in language and how people and feelings are described. This process of re-description is deeply disturbing, often very upsetting and above all, terrifying. The road down which I have travelled in the few years has often been hard to bare; and I have found myself gasping with desperation “but who am I then?” To endure such mental turmoil and chaos, the individual must have security in something larger than themselves. Therefore, whilst I believe that coming to faith and overcoming LGBT-identity/same-sex desire are separate things that require separate processes, I doubt that the latter transformation is possible without a total reliance and trust in the peace, love and purpose that God has provided for us.

God and the goodness of his created order are the medicine, but Pinocchio is right, they do seem more terrifying than the illness, even when the illness promises death. That is especially the case when that illness is sin of our own making. So, my last word is this; do not be afraid of the medicine. Although it may seem bitter thing to swallow at first, it is very good indeed.

[writingwithbts]

Differing opinions on language and grammar

Some topics people disagree on and why different opinions are valid

In a previous post, I brought up a topic (oxford commas) and disagreed with it although it is a commonly accepted idea when it comes to grammar. Check it out if you haven’t already!

https://writingwithbts.tumblr.com/post/167785273860/my-favorite-topic-commas-just-kidding-my

In said post, I mentioned that there are different opinions on language and grammar that may contest one another but are still valid.

Before I go on, I just want to say that this post may irritate some people. I’ve made some people very, very angry in the past by talking about this very topic! And, while I operate with the hope that everyone has open minds and open hearts, I know this isn’t always the case. So please, don’t continue to read this if you have very dogmatic views on how language and grammar work because it might just make you angry and I don’t want that uwu

Moving on!

Before I get into my personal views, I want to state that a lot of my views on language and grammar come from deconstruction and deconstructive criticism, which was pioneered by the philosopher, Jacques Derrida. Other big names in deconstruction include: Luce Irigaray and Geoffrey Hartman.

I’m not going to explain deconstruction today, I may in the future, but this post isn’t strictly about deconstruction and it is kind of a hefty topic.

So, I believe that language, and therefore grammar, is fluid and subject to change. The reason I believe this, and not just because I studied deconstruction, is because we, humans, made up language and therefore can do whatever we want with it. That right there is the opinion that irritates people.

But it’s true! Take, for example, slang. There are a lot of words we use today, that used to mean something else: such as, names for animals that are now used as curse words.

One such animal, is the snake. We can use the word not only to refer to the animal, but to refer to a person that is duplicitous; in other words, a person that can, will or has betrayed us. This is also where the phrase “snake in the grass” comes from, because oftentimes, like a snake in the grass, we don’t always notice the presence a bad person until they’ve already bitten us.

But slang isn’t the only way in which we do whatever we want with language, regardless of what others (such as our elders) think.

For instance, some people (for example: Robert Lowth) decided that English should function more like Latin and thus forced Latin rules onto a language that is largely Germanic. Many of his rules are still used in schools today! The most common of which is: that stranding, hanging or dangling prepositions is incorrect or, more accurately, improper.

I did not even know that this was a rule until one professor pointed it out to me, none of my other professors had a problem with it.

Unfortunately, I’m not going to explain what a preposition is, nor shall I explain what preposition stranding is. Not today!

However, I will say this, despite Lowth, and many people still adhering to this rule, since English is Germanic, this rule is unnecessary. In Lowth’s defense though, I do agree that it makes English sound more formal, and therefore I do sometimes follow this rule in my own writing.

Another way in which some people force English to sound more Latin, is in the plural of some words. Unfortunately, I do not know who pioneered this so I cannot point the finger at them.

Some examples of “Lantinizing” plural words are: cacti, octopi and antennae. I won’t argue with antennae but I, personally, argue with octopi all the time. Because English is not a Latin language, it has some Latin influence, but is still, for the most part, a Germanic language. I kid you not, if you look up octopus in the dictionary, most dictionaries have “octopi” and “octopuses” both listed as the plural form because they are both technically correct. The difference being that “octopi” is Latin and “octopuses” is Germanic.

With writing, the key is consistency, so if you’re going to use one plural form, you should stick to that form in that particular item of writing. However, if you want, you can use Latin and Germanic plurals interchangeably in your own life.

Me, personally, I do use Latin plurals fairly often but I like the way “octopuses” sounds better and use it exclusively, no “octopi” for me!

Lastly, I’m going to mention a few different words that are not just words but titles of social issues. I’m not going to discuss the social issues because this is a writing blog but I want to bring them up because I believe that it is important to realize that many, many words have different meanings for different people, even when the meanings are as vast and important as social issues.

The three words in particular that I want to mention are gay, feminist and racist. 

First up, gay. To some people, this word means “homosexual,” but for other people, it is a blanket term, meaning “not straight,” furthermore and however, to some people it still retains vestiges of it’s old meaning, “happy,” and therefore can be used to describe something that evokes strong, positive, emotional feelings.

Next up, feminist. Feminist can mean that someone or something is, well, feminist. But what does that mean? Is it in support of women? If it’s a thing, does it contain mostly or solely women or is somehow about women? Or does the person or thing believe in or contain the deconstruction of gender roles and stereotypes and believes in or advocates for the destruction of the patriarchy for the sake of all sexes? The answer is, all of the above. They may not always be true all the time or especially at the same time. But, at the end of the day, they are all descriptions of feminist.

And, lastly, racist. First of all, it can be an adjective for a person that is, well, a racist. It can also be used to describe a thing that is racist. But, like the previous words, it can have different connotations. Does racist describe a person or thing that engages in discriminatory and/or hateful behavior and/or discourse based on differences in race? Yes. However, does racist also refer to a system in which one race is dominant and therefore all other races are at a disadvantage? Yes.

It might be risky to bring up such hot topics on a writing blog but many people are very decided in the definition of these words, to the point where they will literally fight if someone uses them in an alternate way. And I believe that this illustrates the fluidity of language, as well as the possibility of differing views among contemporaries.

I didn’t bring up BTS at all today, sadly, but before I go, I want to remind everyone to love themselves and to love others. And, in loving yourself and others, please don’t respond to this post with hate. I certainly will not respond to any hate.

However, as always, if you have any questions, I will be more than happy to answer them!

[queerasart-blog]

From Babylonia to Stonewall (Part 2/3) | Issue 1

From Babylonia to Stonewall to 2016, by H. B. and Emilie Parent A brief history of LGBT+ issues

Middle Ages

On sexuality

At first the Christian religion preaches complete abstinence, but when it comes closer to political power it starts developing principles on sexuality and procreation, and condemns all infertile sexual acts, under the common name of sodomy.

Saint Augustin has a radical position on the subject – he condemns sodomy with as much energy as cannibalism and considers it worse than rape or incest.

In aristocratic places, what is shameful is to “sleep with a man as a woman” – again, penetration is what is considered bad.

Sexual acts between people of the same sex are technically condemned but the sentences are vague: people are supposed to do penance and fasting. Women’s sexuality is ignored, it is considered that women don’t have sexual desires and cannot give each other love, two things that are attributed to men only.

In monasteries, rules are made such as young boys sleep together away from the monks, to avoid paedophilic acts, but teenagers sleep in separated rooms and under the surveillance of the monks, to avoid homosexual acts between them.

Latin language also has different terms for love: caritas is the love of God, amor is passion and is generally seen as a disorder leading to lechery – someone loving their wife or husband with passion is bad. Positive terms for love mostly cover strong friendships between men: amiticia (friendship) or dilectio (complicity, affection, which can also describe love in marriage). We can see there a proof of acceptation from male homosexuality, as well as in stories of couples where marriage isn’t consummated (anymore).

Some known homosexual men don’t have any problem with it during their lives, and some women live together without it being brought up. Homosexual acts become a mortal sin only at the end of the middle Ages, when marriage becomes a sacrament.

Islam condemns homosexuality in theory, but it stays a relatively common thing: in Spain during the domination of Moors, we find in poetry many mentions of beautiful young men who attract other men, especially aristocrats.

In Christian Spain however, homosexuality is condemned by castration and prison or penance, unless the man affirms he has been forced to commit “the act of sodomy”. Depending on the areas and the times, proof of a husband’s sodomy can be a reason for divorce for the woman. Under the reing of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, the “crime against nature” can lead to a death sentence.

On gender :

There is no gender in a contemporary understanding of the term, but man/ woman relationships based on structures of domination : woman come from a part of man. The historian Roberto Zapperi notices however the ambiguity of the representation of Adam as a “man who gives life”, as well as the ambiguous representations of the wounds of the Christ, who sometimes resemble feminine organs.

Clerks have a tendency to associate males to the spiritual worls and females to the physical world. A specific form of masculinity starts to develop in monasteries, opposed to the laic masculinity, with the tonsure and the lack of beard for clerks, because hairs are attributed to the father of the family and is a sign of fertile virility, while the monks are forbidden to marry and commit sexual acts.

Renaissance

❖ Montaigne and Etienne de la Boétie are suspected of having a relationship together: “attachment of a man for another man is in itself neither good or bad”, “if I am urged to tell why I loved him : because it was him, because it was me”, “we were half of everything, he was dearer to me than life, I’ll always love him”

❖ Michelangelo has young men as assistants, models and lovers, including a boy named Tommaso del Cavallieri, aspiring architect.

❖ Leonardo da Vinci is even condemned in Florence for “active sodomy” and is alleged a few young lovers like his assistant Salaï or Francesco Melzi.

At this time, sodomy is considered a « sexual sin » but arrests become less and less regular. Henri III of France isn’t homosexual but he is effeminate and this is called out by Protestants. But he has got a lot of relationships with women and seemed mostly attracted to women.

Age of Enlightenment 

❖  The Chevalier d’Eon : advocate and spy for le Secret du Roi, a secret network spying for the king of France, he disguise himself as a woman to go to the court of Russia as Lia de Beaumont, before coming back to serve in the war as a man and then go back to London as a woman. He, or she, continues living as a woman to this point.

❖  Casanova is suspected to have had a few masculine conquests.

In 1791, during French Revolution, the crime of sodomy is erased from the law, because it is decided that the law must not be influenced by religion and obscurantism. Blasphemy, incest and bestiality are also decriminalized at the same time.

Some of the Enlightenment philosophers, like Voltaire, keep condemning sodomy as “going against nature”.

[vcrsndgntns]

Butoh (舞踏 Butō)

Butoh (舞踏 Butō) is a form of Japanese dance theatre that encompasses a diverse range of activities, techniques and motivations for dance, performance, or movement. Following World War II, butoh arose in 1959 through collaborations between its two key founders Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo. The art form is known to "resist fixity" and be difficult to define; notably, founder Hijikata Tatsumi viewed the formalisation of butoh with "distress". Common features of the art form include playful and grotesque imagery, taboo topics, extreme or absurd environments, and it is traditionally performed in white body makeup with slow hyper-controlled motion. However, with time butoh groups are increasingly being formed around the world, with their various aesthetic ideals and intentions.

Butoh first appeared in Japan post-World War II in 1959, under the collaboration of Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo, "in the protective shadow of the 1950s and 1960s avant-garde". A key impetus of the art form was a reaction against the Japanese dance scene then, which Hijikata felt was overly based on imitating the West and following traditional styles like Noh. Thus, he sought to "turn away from the Western styles of dance, ballet and modern", and to create a new aesthetic that embraced the "squat, earthbound physique... and the natural movements of the common folk". This desire found form in the early movement of ankoku butō (暗黒舞踏). The term means "dance of darkness", and the form was built on a vocabulary of "crude physical gestures and uncouth habits... a direct assault on the refinement (miyabi) and understatement (shibui) so valued in Japanese aesthetics."

The first butoh piece, Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours) by Tatsumi Hijikata, premiered at a dance festival in 1959. It was based on the novel of the same name by Yukio Mishima. It explored the taboo of homosexuality and ended with a live chicken being held between the legs of Kazuo Ohno's son Yoshito Ohno, after which Hijikata chased Yoshito off the stage in darkness. Mainly as a result of the misconception that the chicken had died due to strangulation, this piece outraged the audience and resulted in the banning of Hijikata from the festival, establishing him as an iconoclast.

The earliest butoh performances were called (in English) "Dance Experience." In the early 1960s, Hijikata used the term "Ankoku-Buyou" (暗黒舞踊 – dance of darkness) to describe his dance. He later changed the word "buyo," filled with associations of Japanese classical dance, to "butoh," a long-discarded word for dance that originally meant European ballroom dancing.

In later work, Hijikata continued to subvert conventional notions of dance. Inspired by writers such as Yukio Mishima (as noted above), Lautréamont, Artaud, Genet and de Sade, he delved into grotesquerie, darkness, and decay. At the same time, Hijikata explored the transmutation of the human body into other forms, such as those of animals. He also developed a poetic and surreal choreographic language, butoh-fu (舞踏���) (fu means "notation" in Japanese), to help the dancer transform into other states of being.

The work developed beginning in 1960 by Kazuo Ohno with Tatsumi Hijikata was the beginning of what now is regarded as "butoh." In Nourit Masson-Sékiné and Jean Viala's book Shades of Darkness, Ohno is regarded as "the soul of butoh," while Hijikata is seen as "the architect of butoh." Hijikata and Ohno later developed their own styles of teaching. Students of each style went on to create different groups such as Sankai Juku, a Japanese dance troupe well-known to fans in North America.

Students of these two great artists have been known to highlight the differing orientations of their masters. While Hijikata was a fearsome technician of the nervous system influencing input strategies and artists working in groups, Ohno is thought of as a more natural, individual, and nurturing figure who influenced solo artists.

Starting in the early 1980s, butoh experienced a renaissance as butoh groups began performing outside Japan for the first time; at that the style was marked by "full body paint (white or dark or gold), near or complete nudity, shaved heads, grotesque costumes, clawed hands, rolled-up eyes and mouths opened in silent screams." Sankai Juku was a touring butoh group; during one performance by Sankai Juku, in which the performers hung upside down from ropes from a tall building in Seattle, Washington, one of the ropes broke, resulting in the death of a performer. The footage was played on national news, and butoh became more widely known in America through the tragedy. A PBS documentary of a butoh performance in a cave with no audience further broadened knowledge in America.

In the early 1990s, Koichi Tamano performed atop the giant drum of San Francisco Taiko Dojo inside Grace Cathedral, in an international religious celebration.

There is a theatre in Kyoto, Japan, called the Kyoto Butoh-kan which attempts to be dedicated to regular professional Butoh performances.

There is much discussion about who should receive the credit for creating butoh. As artists worked to create new art in all disciplines after World War II, Japanese artists and thinkers emerged from economic and social challenges that produced an energy and renewal of artists, dancers, painters, musicians, writers, and all other artists.

A number of people with few formal connections to Hijikata began to call their own idiosyncratic dance "butoh." Among these are Iwana Masaki (岩名雅紀), Tanaka Min (田中民), and Teru Goi. Although all manner of systematic thinking about butoh dance can be found, perhaps Iwana Masaki most accurately sums up the variety of butoh styles:

While 'Ankoku Butoh' can be said to have possessed a very precise method and philosophy (perhaps it could be called 'inherited butoh'), I regard present day butoh as a 'tendency' that depends not only on Hijikata's philosophical legacy but also on the development of new and diverse modes of expression.

The 'tendency' that I speak of involved extricating the pure life which is dormant in our bodies.

Hijikata is often quoted saying what opposition he had to a codified dance: "Since I believe neither in a dance teaching method nor in controlling movement, I do not teach in this manner." However, in the pursuit and development of his own work, it is only natural that a "Hijikata" style of working and, therefore, a "method" emerged. Both Mikami Kayo and Maro Akaji have stated that Hijikata exhorted his disciples to not imitate his own dance when they left to create their own butoh dance groups. If this is the case, then his words make sense: There are as many types of butoh as there are butoh choreographers.

Most butoh exercises use image work to varying degrees: from the razorblades and insects of Ankoku Butoh, to Dairakudakan's threads and water jets, to Seiryukai's rod in the body. There is a general trend toward the body as "being moved," from an internal or external source, rather than consciously moving a body part. A certain element of "control vs. uncontrol" is present through many of the exercises.

Conventional butoh exercises sometimes cause great duress or pain but, as Kurihara points out, pain, starvation, and sleep deprivation were all part of life under Hijikata's method, which may have helped the dancers access a movement space where the movement cues had terrific power. It is also worth noting that Hijikata's movement cues are, in general, much more visceral and complicated than anything else since.

Most exercises from Japan (with the exception of much of Ohno Kazuo's work) have specific body shapes or general postures assigned to them, while almost none of the exercises from Western butoh dancers have specific shapes. This seems to point to a general trend in the West that butoh is not seen as specific movement cues with shapes assigned to them such as Ankoku Butoh or Dairakudakan's technique work, but rather that butoh is a certain state of mind or feeling that influences the body directly or indirectly.

Hijikata did in fact stress feeling through form in his dance, saying, "Life catches up with form," which in no way suggests that his dance was mere form. Ohno, though, comes from the other direction: "Form comes of itself, only insofar as there is a spiritual content to begin with."

The trend toward form is apparent in several Japanese dance groups, who recycle Hijikata's shapes and present butoh that is only body-shapes and choreography which would lead butoh closer to contemporary dance or performance art than anything else. A good example of this is Torifune Butoh-sha's recent works.

A paragraph from butoh dancer Iwana Masaki, whose work shies away from all elements of choreography.

I have never heard of a butoh dancer entering a competition. Every butoh performance itself is an ultimate expression; there are not and cannot be second or third places. If butoh dancers were content with less than the ultimate, they would not be actually dancing butoh, for real butoh, like real life itself, cannot be given rankings.

Critic Mark Holborn has written that butoh is defined by its very evasion of definition. The Kyoto Journal variably categorizes butoh as dance, theater, “kitchen,” or “seditious act.” The San Francisco Examiner describes butoh as "unclassifiable". The SF Weekly article "The Bizarre World of Butoh" was about former sushi restaurant Country Station, in which Koichi Tamano was “chef” and Hiroko Tamano "manager". The article begins, “There’s a dirty corner of Mission Street, where a sushi restaurant called Country Station shares space with hoodlums and homeless drunks, a restaurant so camouflaged by dark and filth it easily escapes notice. But when the restaurant is full and bustling, there is a kind of theater that happens inside…” Butoh frequently occurs in areas of extremes of the human condition, such as skid rows, or extreme physical environments, such as a cave with no audience, remote Japanese cemetery, or hanging by ropes from a skyscraper in front of the Washington Monument.

Hiroko Tamano considers modeling for artists to be butoh, in which she poses in "impossible" positions held for hours, which she calls "really slow Butoh". The Tamano’s home seconds as a “dance” studio, with any room or portion of yard potentially used. When a completely new student arrived for a workshop in 1989 and found a chaotic simultaneous photo shoot, dress rehearsal for a performance at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, workshop, costume making session, lunch, chat, and newspaper interview, all "choreographed" into one event by Tamano, she ordered the student, in broken English, “Do interview.” The new student was interviewed, without informing the reporter that the student had no knowledge what butoh was. The improvised information was published, “defining” butoh for the area public. Tamano then informed the student that the interview itself was butoh, and that was the lesson. Such "seditious acts," or pranks in the context of chaos, are butoh.

While many approaches to defining butoh—as with any performative tradition—will focus on formalism or semantic layers, another approach is to focus on physical technique. While butoh does not have a codified classical technique rigidly adhered to within an authoritative controlled lineage, Hijikata Tatsumi did have a substantive methodical body of movement techniques called Butoh Fu. Butoh Fu can be described as a series of cues largely based on incorporating visualizations that directly affect the nervous system, producing qualities of movement that are then used to construct the form and expression of the dance. This mode of engaging the nervous system directly has much in common with other mimetic techniques to be found in the history of dance, such as Lecoq's range of nervous system qualities, Decroux's rhythm and density within movement, and Zeami Motokiyo's qualitative descriptions for character types.

Teachers influenced by more Hijikata style approaches tend to use highly elaborate visualizations that can be highly mimetic, theatrical, and expressive. Teachers of this style include Waguri, Yumiko Yoshioka, Minako Seki and Koichi and Hiroko Tamano, founders of Harupin-Ha Butoh Dance Company.

There have been many unique groups and performance companies influenced by the movements created by Hijikata and Ohno, ranging from the highly minimalist of Sankai Juku to very theatrically explosive and carnivalesque performance of groups like Dairakudakan.

Many Nikkei (or members of the Japanese diaspora), such as Japanese Canadians Jay Hirabayashi of Kokoro Dance, Denise Fujiwara, incorporate butoh in their dance or have launched butoh dance troupes.

More notable European practitioners, who have worked with butoh and avoided the stereotyped 'butoh' languages which some European practitioners tend to adopt, take their work out of the sometimes closed world of 'touring butoh' and into the international dance and theatre scenes include SU-EN Butoh Company (Sweden), Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, Kitt Johnson (Denmark), Vangeline (France), and Katharina Vogel (Switzerland). Such practitioners in Europe aim to go back to the original aims of Hijikata and Ohno and go beyond the tendency to imitate a ' master' and instead search within their own bodies and histories for 'the body that has not been robbed' (Hijikata).

LEIMAY (Brooklyn) emerged 1996-2005 from the creative work of Shige Moriya, Ximena Garnica, Juan Merchan, and Zachary Model at the space known as CAVE. LEIMAY has organized and run diverse programs including, the NY Butoh Kan Training Initiative which later became the NY Butoh Festival; Vietnamese Artist in Residency; NY Butoh Kan Training Initiative which turned into the NY Butoh Kan Teaching Residency and now is called LEIMAY Ludus Training). A key element of LEIMAY’s work has become transformation of specific spaces. In this way, the space – at times a body, environment or object – and the body – at times dancer, actor, performer or object – are fundamental to LEIMAY’s work.

Eseohe Arhebamen, a princess of the Kingdom of Ugu and royal descendant of the Benin Empire, is the first indigenous and native-born African butoh performer. She invented a style called "Butoh-vocal theatre" which incorporates singing, talking, mudras, sign language, spoken word, and experimental vocalizations with butoh after the traditional dance styles of the Edo people of West Africa. She is also known as Edoheart.

COLLAPSINGsilence Performance Troupe (San Francisco) was established and co-founded by Indra Lowenstein and Terrance Graven in 1992 and was active until 2001. They were a movement-based troupe that incorporated butoh, shibari, ecstatic trance states, and Odissi. They designed all of their costumes, props, puppets, and site-specific installations, while collaborating with live musicians such as Sharkbait, Hollow Earth, Haunted by Waters, and Mandible Chatter. In 1996, they were featured at The International Performance Art Festival and also performed at Asian American Dance Performances, San Francisco Butoh Festival, Theatre of Yugen, The Los Angeles County Exposition (L.A.C.E.), Stanford University, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and various other venues creating multi-media dance performances.

In 1992, Bob DeNatale founded the Flesh & Blood Mystery Theater to spread the art of butoh. Performing throughout the United States, Flesh & Blood Mystery Theater was a regular participant in the San Francisco Butoh Festival of which DeNatale was an Associate Producer. DeNatale's other butoh credits include performing in the film Oakland Underground (2006) and touring Germany and Poland with Ex…it! ’99 International Dance Festival.

Butoh in popular culture:

A Butoh performance choreographed by Yoshito Ohno appears at the beginning of the Tokyo section of Hal Hartley's 1995 film Flirt.

Ron Fricke's experimental documentary film Baraka (1992) features scenes of butoh performance.

In the late 1960s, exploitation film director Teruo Ishii hired Hijikata to play the role of a Doctor Moreau-like reclusive mad scientist in his film horror movie Horrors of Malformed Men. The role was mostly performed as dance. The film has remained largely unseen in Japan for forty years because it was viewed as insensitive to the handicapped.

The video clip for Madonna's "Nothing Really Matters" features butoh-style performance.

The video clip for Kent's "Musik non stop" also features butoh-style performance.

In Bust A Groove 2, a video game released for the PlayStation in 2000, the dance moves of the hidden boss character Pander are based on Butoh.

The influence of Butoh has also been felt heavily in the J-Horror movie genre, forming the basis for the appearance of the ghosts in seminal J-Horror Ju-on: The Grudge.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa used butoh movement for actors in his 2001 film Kairo, remade in Hollywood in 2006 as Pulse. The re-make did not feature butoh.

Butoh performance features heavily in Doris Dörrie's 2008 film Cherry Blossoms, in which a Bavarian widower embarks on a journey to Japan to grieve for his late wife and develop an understanding of this performance style for which she had held a lifelong fascination.

A portrait of Kazuo Ohno appears on the cover of the 2009 Antony & the Johnsons album The Crying Light.

Butoh has greatly influenced the Sopor Aeternus and the Ensemble of Shadows, the musical project of Anna-Varney Cantodea. Its visual motifs are used in for the project's publicity photos and videos.

The Finnish black metal band Black Crucifixion's 2013 music video Millions of Twigs Guide Your Way Through the Forest heavily features the Japanese butoh artist Ken Mai.

The Video clip for The Weeknd's "Belong To The World" features butoh-style performance.

Richard Armitage cited the dance form as an inspiration for his animalistic portrayal of the villain Francis Dolarhyde (the "Red Dragon") in the third season of Hannibal.

Notable butoh artists:

Akaji Maro

Ushio Amagatsu

Kazuo Ohno

Min Tanaka

Ko Murobushi

Tadashi Endo

Edoheart

Atsushi Takenouchi

Tatsumi Hijikata

Kayo Mikami

[mybeautifulchair]

TO ONE A CENTURY HENCE

I wrote this essay some years ago, but today - in a chaotic state - I find myself returning to the work that it is about. Standing on a landing, I turn my body to read illuminated sentences. It is surprisingly quiet here.

For Comrades and Lovers (2015) is artist Glenn Ligon’s largest neon installation to date. Two lines of illuminated text trace the perimeter of a two-story mezzanine area in the main building of the New School in New York City. Ligon’s hand-blown glass tubes are filled with argon, which burns a striking shade of blue violet. Positioned just below the ceiling, the piece requires you to look up and to turn in a full circle to read it. It is is at once discrete and monumental: each individual letter would fit into the palm of your hand, yet cumulatively the words stretch over four hundred feet.

The words that make up the work are passages that Ligon selected from the 19th century American poet Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. They include the passage that gives this installation its title:

No labor-saving machine, Nor discovery have I made; Nor will I be able to leave behind me any wealthy bequest to found a hospital or library, Nor reminiscence of any deed of courage, for America, Nor literary success, nor intellect—nor book for the book-shelf; Only a few carols, vibrating through the air, I leave, For comrades and lovers. [1]

Here Whitman juxtaposes his poetry with material indicators of success. In fact, perhaps ironically, Whitman has left millions of books for the bookshelf; Leaves of Grass is a classic of American literature. Now this passage drawn from it, which disavows material and institutional success, is a permanent fixture on the walls of a university. The segments of Whitman’s poetry that Ligon included in this work are celebratory and sensual. Ligon includes passages in which Whitman described himself as ‘the poet of the body’ and he revels in that body: ‘my respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs’. Whitman’s claim that he leaves only a ‘few carols vibrating through the air’ is contradicted by the corporeality of his own poetry, which is so much about the body. And in Ligon’s rendition of it, these poems have a distinctive material presence. This materialization is a form of homage that this artist, living and working in 21st century New York, pays to a long dead poet of his city.

Ligon’s work is political. An African American man, his paintings and light installations borrow from historical texts, re-situating historical voices to draw a line between the past and the present that traces the historical structures of racism. From his early text paintings Untitled (I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background) (1990) to his most recent video installation We need to wake up because that’s what time it is (2015). Ligon’s works address complicated and painful histories of race relations in America. While For Comrades and Lovers is less overtly political, it is imbued with political significance because of Whitman’s relationship to broad egalitarian ideals.

Ligon’s appropriation of historical texts augments their meaning with the materials that he chooses to render them in. Some of his best-known works are often barely legible: he has layered literary texts over themselves until they become impossible to read. More recent works have remained decipherable; in these works he has often whittled historical texts down to a single evocative sentence. Untitled (Negro Sunshine) (2005) is drawn from Gertrude Stein’s 1909 novella Three Lives. The phrase references problematic representations of African Americans as happy simpletons. It is written in typewriter font and glows a soft yellow, a warm color that sits uncomfortably alongside the dark historical connotations of the phrase itself. Other neon pieces such as Untitled (If I Can’t Have Love, I’ll Take Sunshine) (2006) are rendered in handwritten rather than typed font, linking the phrase more closely to the unique signature of a body. Ligon’s ongoing use of text since the 1980s is more than appropriation for the purposes of critique; it is also born out of a profound respect for language. He says that his works "make language into a physical thing, something that has real weight and force to it". [2]

As though acknowledging the temporal gaps that his works try to cross by appropriating historical texts, Ligon told those attending the unveiling of Comrades and Lovers that “You never know what the future will make of your work […] You don’t even know if your work will survive you.”[3]

One of Ligon’s best-known pieces, Untitled (I am an invisible man) (1991), hangs in the same room as For Comrades and Lovers. It consists of the first page of Ralph W. Ellison’s novel of the same title printed in black ink on a black page – a visual pun on the social invisibility that the text addresses. [4] Part of the page reads: “I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me”. The work brings the voice of a key African American writer into play and this voice bleeds into the reading of For Comrades and Lovers.

It gives insight into the nature of Ligon’s relationship to Whitman. Ellison wrote an essay titled Hidden Name and Complex Fate [5] which describes the kind of oblique but powerful relationship that a black man living now might have to a white man from centuries past. The story of this writer’s name – Ralph Waldo Ellison after the poet, philosopher and abolitionist Ralph Waldo Emerson – is a personal meditation upon the dual themes of suppression of, and at the same time responsibility to, our intellectual and political forebears. Emerson was a white man of a very different era, who spoke out against slavery and yet, like all white men who have spoken for this cause, had a historically specific approach to the concept of race; it is important to remember the space of privilege from which Emerson spoke.

Ligon never directly references Ellison’s essay. The proximity of Ligon’s Invisible Man and For Comrades and Lovers engages a proliferating set of historical connections. Ligon tugs on many historical threads, the entanglement of which enrich the present moment. The essay offers, by way of analogy, a possible reading of his relationship with Whitman, a white American man who lived in the time of slavery. It is difficult to clearly position Whitman in regard to race: he wrote his great poem to Lincoln; his poetry in general exudes a kind of radical, inclusive empathy; he recounted how he sheltered an escaped slave in his house for a week (a story that resonates with Ligon’s print portfolio The Runaways (1993) which mimics bulletins describing escaped slaves). Yet Whitman’s commitment to the American union was such that he would have tolerated slavery rather than see the country broken in two. He was not pro-slavery but neither can he be called an abolitionist, at least not an unconditional one. [6] While, as Ligon himself reflects, “Whitman wasn’t bound by the prejudices of his day” [7] he remained, like Emerson, a ‘man of his time.’ His attitude towards race was conditioned by broader social attitudes.

Of course Emerson and Whitman knew each other. Indeed Emerson was one of Whitman’s supporters, writing, in a famous letter of 1855, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career”.[8] Their relationship was one of an older poet to a younger one – an intergenerational exchange of advice, endorsement and argument. It was the older, more sexually conservative Emerson who tried to convince Whitman to remove the sexual content from his poetry. Sex, Whitman responded, was at the core of his poems. [9] Indeed there is no way that one could de-eroticize Whitman’s poems, which pulsate with sexual energy regardless of what they are describing. Sex infuses every moment, every encounter, every word.

The erotic dimension of Whitman’s poetry resonates more in our time than in Whitman’s own time, when homosexuality was socially unacceptable. In our time it can be openly celebrated. Thus Whitman’s poems have come into their own in a way that they never could during the poet’s lifetime. Whitman seems to know his future readers. He wrote:

I, forty years old the Eighty-third Year of The States, To one a century hence, or any number of centuries hence, To you, yet unborn, these, seeking you. When you read these, I, that was visible, am become invisible; Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems, seeking me, Fancying how happy you were, if I could be with you, and become your lover; Be it as if I were with you. Be not too certain but I am now with you. [10]

This fragment is not included in Ligon’s piece yet it could almost be the spur for the project as a whole—the call that the contemporary artist answers ‘a century hence’. Though he does not foreground his sexual identity, Ligon is gay. It is important to acknowledge that the queer reading of Ligon’s work goes beyond the artist’s intentions since he has never positioned himself as a queer artist; his politics do not revolve around his sexual identity. Yet it is also hard to ignore the homoeroticism embedded in Whitman’s words, here emblazoned on the wall. The veiled sexual charge of Whitman’s poems is a call for recognition from a time when open recognition was impossible. We might imagine Whitman’s writings as a sort of ‘message in a bottle’ that he sent into the future. Thus Ligon’s illuminated transcription of Whitman’s words is its own kind of letter, a response to Whitman, but one that cannot go back in time to the poet. This cerebral, elegant illumination of Whitman’s text answers Whitman’s call to be recognized at some fundamental level. The words do not lose their sexual charge on the wall.

Whitman projected himself into the future; he imagined himself here among us. When Ligon says that you never know what the future will make of your work, he addresses not only us but also Whitman, his eminent predecessor, reassuring him that the future has made much of his work. Ligon himself makes them concrete, in metal, glass, plaster, electrodes and ignited argon gas. Through their material illumination, Ligon crystalizes Whitman’s carols into something visible, glowing high above our heads, as a testament to survival, a complex work of homage.

Click here to read the graphic version produced when this piece won the Vera List Center for Art and Politics writing award. 

[1] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. Philadelphia: David McKay, (c1900). 108 [2] University of Warwick Art Collection, Untitled by Glenn Ligon, University of Warwick Art Collection, collection database. Accessed from: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/art/artist/glennligon/wu0883/ accessed on 5/23/2016. [3] The New School, Glenn Ligon Unveils “Comrades and Lovers” at The New School, Published on May 6, 2015,http://blogs.newschool.edu/news/2015/05/glenn-ligon-unveils-comrades-and-lovers-at-the-new-school/#.VmmJ6WQrK2w. Accessed on December 5 2015 [4] Indeed this piece does the opposite of the light work For Comrades and Lovers. Where the latter emits light constantly, these words are rendered in black on black – the chemical configuration that absorbs light and reflects almost nothing back for our eyes to register. [5] Ralph W Ellison, Hidden Name and Complex Fate, The writer’s experience, Washington DC: Library of Congress, 1964. 1 – 15. [6] Carl Hancock Rux et. al. Walt Whitman: Song of Myself, Arts, WNYC , 16 November 2005. Radio. [7] Glenn Ligon, interviewed in Glenn Ligon's "For Comrades and Lovers" 2015 | A Site-Specific Commission at The New School, accessed from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWB-zpCBcSA, accessed on 5/25/2016 [8] Rux et. al. Walt Whitman: song of myself, 2005 [9] Whitman, Leaves of Grass. 111-12 [10] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. Philadelphia: David McKay, (c1900). 112

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Contextual Lecture -Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis

Definition 

‘A system of psychological theory and therapy which aims to treat mental disorders by investigating the interaction of conscious and unconscious elements in the mind and bringing repressed fears and conflicts into the conscious mind by techniques such as dream interpretation and free association.’

Oxford Dictionaries online

Art-Psychoanalysis/ Art has similar commons to psychoanalysis and makes psychoanalysis visible.

The Unconscious

The idea of the ‘unconscious mind’ is key to psychoanalysis. The treatment itself revolved around the analysis of various things Freud believed brought it to the surface, including

Free association-Dreams-Parapraxis

Freud believed that unlocking the unconscious was key to curing his patients.

Ice burg theory/ 80% unconscious under the water. It drives basic needs or pleasurable.

The id

our basic ‘animal instincts’ and primal desires - it works on the pleasure principle

The ego

this can also be thought of as ‘I’. The ego mediates between the id and the real world, working on the reality principle

The superego

this can be thought of as ‘the conscience’ and incorporates learned societal values and morals, and works on an idealistic principle superego control the id,

The ego harmonic between the superego and id.

A neurosis is defined as/

‘A relatively mild mental illness that is not caused by organic disease, involving symptoms of stress (depression, anxiety, obsessive behavior, hypochondria) but not a radical loss of touch with reality.’ (Oxford Dictionary online)

Freud believed that these were caused by repressions, both of the pleasure principle and of childhood traumas.

Freud’s Psychosexual Stages

The oral phase (0-1 year)

The anal phase (1-3 years)

The phallic phase (3-5 or 6 years)

The latent phase (5 or 6 to puberty) 

The genital phase (puberty to adult)

The Oedipus complex 

Is one of Freud’s most controversial ideas and one which many people immediately reject.  It is the idea that, during the phallic stage, a young boy (sexually) desires his mother, and therefore wants to remove the father. Irrationally, the young boy believes that should his father find out about these desires, he would remove what the boy loves the most (his penis). This is known as castration anxiety. The young boy then aims to resolve the issue by imitating his father’s masculine traits, and taking on the male gender role.

Free Association Freud’s Couch at the Freud Museum in London

Sublimation-Definition/

Expressing express strong emotions [read - libido] or use energy by doing an

activity, especially an activity that is considered socially acceptable’

‘Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.’  Salvador Dalí

Parapraxis

Something else that Freud believed ought to be analyzed as it brought the unconscious to the surface was parapraxis - or, as they are more commonly known, ‘Freudian slips’. 

Parapraxes reveal that we are not always in control of our own speech or actions, and for Freud, they were telling of repressed desires. 

‘Pure psychic automatism … the dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason and outside all moral or aesthetic concerns’.

André Breton, 1924 - The Surrealist Manifesto

《 The doll 》

The Doll is a hand-coloured black-and-white photograph of a partially dismembered life-size doll sculpture. Partly influenced by Jacques Offenbach’s (1819-1880) final opera The Tales of Hoffmann, in which the hero falls in love with a realistic life-size mechanical doll, Hans Bellmer built his first Doll in 1933-4 and a second in 1935, of which this is a photograph.

Bellmer’s first Doll was an articulated construction of wood, plaster, metal rods, nuts and bolts which represented a young girl. A disquieting sculpture, it embodied a number of qualities of the surrealistobject: subversive and erotic, sadistic and fetishistic. A German artist bitterly opposed to the Nazi regime, Bellmer moved to Paris in the late 1930s where he was embraced by the surrealist group and was described in the 1938 Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme as a ‘surrealist writer, painter, and builder of large dolls.

Hans Bellmer /Purchased 1969 / Object: 635 x 307 x 305 mm. 51kg

The Uncanny

The uncanny, a Freudian term which describes an instance where something is simultaneously familiar and foreign, resulting in a feeling of discomfort. The idea of the uncanny was first identified by Ernst Jentsch in his 1906 essay, On the Psychology of the Uncanny, where he defines the uncanny as being a product of “intellectual uncertainty.” In 1919 Sigmund Freud published his essay, The Uncanny, in which he elaborates on the uncanny through aesthetic investigations. Freud’s aesthetic investigations on this psychological phenomenon have intrigued artists since its publication; from the Surrealists to contemporary art, artists have tried to visually represent and fabricate objects which provoke an uncanny effect.

Dean Barrett, Tied Up, 1983, Fiberglass, wood, acrylic, rope, glass eyes, and false teeth

How valid are Freud’s theories today?

Criticisms of Freud’s Theories

Some of his data is not credible His patients only represented a very small demographic

There is no evidence to support his theories of child sexuality Some of his theories can be damaging to certain groups - such as for instance his belief that homosexuality was a failure to reconcile the anal phase - and his now laughable idea of ‘penis envy’

John Bowlby

John Bowlby (1907-1990) was a British psychologist and psychoanalyst who had a particular interest in child development. He is most famous for his work on attachment theory. One huge insight of psychoanalysis is that the challenges of life start when we are young. John Bowlby traced many problems back to issues with maternal care.

Separation Anxiety

In 1959 Bowlby wrote a very influential book called Separation Anxiety about what happens when there isn’t enough maternal care in a child’s life. If a child is separated for too long, they begin to think all good things will disappear at any given moment, therefore becoming anxious or volatile - or they may become detached as a way of dealing with this.

Secure attachment/ Anxious attachment/ Avoidant attachment

Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan (1901 - 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and philosopher, considered by many to be the most influential after Freud. His work was perhaps more influential in universities rather than consulting rooms across the UK.

Within the arts, he is most well- known for his idea of ‘the mirror phase’

Lacan’s Psychoanalytic Orders  (mirror trick)

Lacan divided the psyche into three orders of experience to do with development, which begins with the mirror phase. Extremely simplified, they are:

The Imaginary: The newborn baby does not realize it is a separate being from its mother; as it gains a visual image of itself (the mirror phase) it starts to understand that it is a distinct object

The Symbolic: The infant comes to realize all experiences are filtered through language

The Real: This is the leftover from our pre-language stages. This is when an experience or thought occurs that language cannot symbolize

I begin tucking him into bed and he tells me “Daddy check for monsters under my bed.” I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another him, under the bed, staring back at me quivering and whispering “Daddy there’s somebody on my bed”

‘This illusion of unity, in which a human being is always looking forward to self-mastery, entails a constant danger of sliding back again into the chaos from which he started; it hangs over the abyss of a dizzy Assent in which one can perhaps see the very essence of Anxiety.’

Jacques Lacan, Some Reflections on the Ego (1951)