hotbed?

The home of my youth was a hotbed of emotional repression.
So was everyone else's - i know.
Okay, how about this? The home of my youth was a hotbed of sexism, homophobia, and...racism?
Hmmm. Well, i've got MY attention.
The first two conditions are something i rebelled against...though perhaps not as assertively as i ought. Self-image is a tricky thing - we can fool most of the people most of the time, and no one more than ourselves. My self-image as a humyn rights hero might be at odds with the image others have had of me.
And perhaps some were...right?
Let's travel back to a place called 870 Weber. A nice home in the northeast suburbs, with a pool in the yard...a magnet for teenage friends and good times. Among the five kids, there was a choral all-star/academic achiever, an instrumental all-star, three theatrical all-stars, and one guitarist with a basement band. No sports stars, but hardcore play and spectator devotion.
When mom left, the signs had been on the wall and it seemed the only sane choice. I saw it through feminist eyes - mom needed the freedom she'd been denied under both father and husband.
I was eighteen. The split hit my brothers harder, perhaps affecting their ability to form adult relationships. Big sis was already nearly through college, and gone. Thus, 870 became testosterone central - for the next decade, a place of food and funny films, barbs and bros, nicknames and games. I lived there on and off for five years after college, partly to be there for my brothers. Joyous it was...with no dark side, to us. No physical violence. The drug use (alcohol, pot, eventually psychedelics) was the domain of my brothers, and always seemed under control. As for the sexist or homophobic energy, i always assumed it was simply the reality of every suburban home.
Recently though, one of my brothers opined that we had a toxicity conspicuously absent in most of the homes of our peers.
He might be right.
For without a doubt, 870 was a place of aggressive, chauvinist heteronormativity.
Like all boys in a greed-based patriarchy, we'd been taught (inside the home and out) to banish any weakness or differentness. These things were pounced upon. We called it "rikking" - verbal slams crafted with humor and flair...and in retrospect, without mercy. One brother was a bit out of shape, and perhaps overly fond of electronic entertainment. I dubbed him "chair", a name that stuck. Is an apology long overdue?
Being the oldest brother and verbally-inclined, i helped found the rik movement. To me, it was good-natured fun. An expression of love. I'm sure it was, on some level...
But the emotional repression was more pervasive than any of us knew. Males didn't share feelings, they used sports talk to sublimate and impersonalize such things.
And woe unto anyone who strayed from the norm. I tried to craft my riks in a feminist way, but such control was conspicuously absent in everyone else. Much of that stemmed from our father, in the degradation of anything feminine. Equating womynhood with weakness.
"GINA BOY!!" "PUSSY BOY!!" And yes, "GAYBOY!!"
Is it possible i used either of those first two terms (or something similar) in my early teens, before i realized their malevolent underpinnings? One brother assures me i didn't, but i'm not sure beyond a shadow of a doubt. In any event, by the time of the great testosteronization, i was the only one not using any of them. Did my protest extend beyond silence? I'm pretty sure at some point i directed a calm diatribe at father and brothers. Did it have any effect? Maybe. Could i have done more? It's never been my way to correct or control. People do and think what they want. Plus, advice-giving has a pernicious side - we're all constantly trying to re-shape the world in our own image. So i've always tried to maintain a dignified silence, in a world full of people overeager to tell each other what to do. We're all great idiots. I try to shut the hell up.
There is much strength in this approach, yet also perhaps a weakness, in a world so damaged. It's only in recent years that i've allowed myself to be more vocal in expressing what's right or wrong. I still mostly restrict that to impersonal writings, though.
Did mother or sister perceive the female-trashing? How could they not?? Well, no gloria steinems, they.
The homophobia took longer for me to perceive and reject. As a pubescent, i found homosexuality so objectionable i thought i might have a violent reaction the first time i met someone gay.
A violent reaction.
Me.
Avowed pacifist by sixteen. Content to go to jail rather than war. Never struck another humyn in my life (except a bullying older sister when i was nine).
A violent reaction.
Behold the power of cultural taboo, that even as gentle a child as myself, imagined doing violence.
I was seventeen when i finally "met" a gay person. In a community theater production, i found out one of my companions was gay. I had worked joyously with him for many weeks, and the revelation was the least disturbing thing imaginable. Not that i'd suspected, but...he was so wonderful, it was a perfect non-issue.
But Weber would not have been welcoming, i fear. In our circle of friends, there was one who had less-than-macho energy. He was teased. I thought he was great, and would have defended him had anyone earnestly disrespected him...yet nothing seemed amiss to me. Even as a fledgling humyn rights advocate, i couldn't perceive that the ribbing might have been hurtful. Ribbing is how we expressed love. Perhaps he ultimately avoided our house. I don't know.
As for the chauvinism, it's not like there were never any female friends around. There were. Were they disturbed by, or aware of, the sexism? If so, it didn't show.
Rampant homophobic sexism. To me, it wasn't virulent, just annoying.
But...racism?
Our home??
There are some things sitting on the tip of our nose, that we never see.
In my heart, i recall being anti-racist as early as i was anti-feminist. As an adolescent, MLK was one of my heroes. Gandhi, too. By my mid-teens, i daydreamed about an asian womyn being the love of my life.
I'm a white boy from the suburbs - what do you want?
In my twenties, we learned that one of our neighborhood parents had belonged to a white supremacist group. We were all shocked.
There was one black family in our neighborhood, with a son near my age. I might have befriended him, but he seemed way too cool for me.
As a child, i remember being viscerally turned off by my grandfather's racist jokes. I recall a more benign, yet still quite racist joke appearing in our midst years later, perpetuated by my father, or maybe even my mother (Years later, i discovered my seemingly-progressive mom drew the line at interracial babies. Just too problematic for her.).
My youngest brother recently pointed out some of the more unsavory, racist WASP-normativity that went unchecked. One of our friends was from Guatemala. Our father called him "guatemala al". No one else called him that, but we accepted it. We understood that dad was abrasive, but we loved him as best we could, and he could be great fun. Al didn't seem to mind, yet in retrospect, did he ever want to say, "Yes, i'm not from Iowa. We can SEE that. Does it NEED to be pointed out?"
And...
Something i'd forgotten entirely. One of my brothers, for a while, had a set response if someone asked him to do some work. He'd fix a playful eye on you, and say...
"What color am i?"
I cringed, but accepted it. I assumed he was being ironic. He always seemed the gentlest among us.
Can you imagine a bigger "benefit of the doubt"?
We were sheltered kids in a changing world, trying to make sense of everything our culture was throwing at us, in the first full bloom of the mass media age. We knew our grandparent's generation was fundamentally, horribly wrong. We were suspicious of our parents.
And yet...870 was a place spilling with warmth and welcome. Had one of us brought home a non-white lover, they would have been embraced (son/daughter double standard notwithstanding). Had one of us brought home a gay lover...they would have been accepted. Probably. Had one of us brought home a trans lover...brains would have short-circuited.
All this begs the question - was 870 a place of genuine racism, or just clueless, careless language? More the latter. I don't think you'd have found malevolence in our hearts. Ignorance (plus double standards and entitlement, in most of us)...but not malevolence.
Small comfort for those we might have hurt. Nor can i swear that all of us were ultimately able to equally overcome our bad socialization...

politically incorrectal self-exam

It appears i have three viewpoints that qualify as politically incorrect.
In no particular order...
1
If you were to assemble the hundred least-racist americans, would they have anything in common? As you looked over that enlightened assemblage, would any subtle unifying factors jump out?
You betcha.
They'd be white.
Every single one. How do i know?
Because white people grow up with the luxury of not knowing they're white, and indeed not knowing they're any color at all. Though all this is swiftly (in the big picture) changing, being white in America is normative. Therefore, white people are free to form their points of view from a cocoon of relative objectivity. Non-white folk on the other hand, whether subtly or grossly, have their skin color smacked into their faces virtually every day of their lives.
To wonder whether someone is racist is ridiculous. The answer is YES. Everyone is, in varying degrees.
Including, and especially, people of color.
White people are free to see racism impersonally, and hopefully become intellectually mortified. People of color carry around a blanket of anger/confusion/shame. Their anti-racism is a cry of pain, but visceral rage and objectivity are almost diametrically opposed.
2
Homosexuality/transsexuality are not as simple and inevitable as political correctness dictates. Preference and identity are genetic? Yes, i believe that's true...but in a limited way. Our personalities are profoundly shaped by the constant avalanche of social conditioning we receive from the moment we're born. We live in a culture of sexual repression, and one way this manifests is in how we provide adolescents zero sexual outlet (and often zero input as well). What happens to a humyn denied any expression of so powerful a drive as sex?
Nothing good.
Enter the word "maladaption", used so aptly by desmond morris. We often take our general adolescent sexual embargo and amplify it by keeping males and females apart in non-sexual contexts too. Different locker rooms/bathrooms, gym classes, sports/activities, camps, even schools. As any behavioral anthropologist will tell you, we bond with whatever's available. We imprint with whomever's around. Put anyone in a single-gender environment, and there's gonna be a whole lot of maladaptin' going on.
Baby, we were born that way?
Yes. And no.
3
There's an open mic i attend, with a host i love. One of his recurring intros is "Y'know what we need now? Some feminine energy. So let's bring up..."
I can't imagine ever sexually stereotyping a performer like that.
And yet...
Men and wimyn be different.
I've struggled with this one. Early on, i took the position that gender personality differences were purely cultural. And though that's largely true in the big picture, because all differences overlap...differences are real. And inborn. Wimyn are more verbal and social, men more thing-oriented. There are many fascinating differences, small and large. When are these differences a straitjacket to rebel against, and when are they something to accept, even celebrate? It's going to be decades before there's a comfortable answer to that question, because so much of our society is still enmeshed in patriarchal oppression and repression.
I'm not betraying the PC agenda. I was railing against gender-specific personal pronouns decades before it became popular...and still do.
Yet men and wimyn be different. Having seen maleness from the inside, i prefer the company of wimyn. Yet i know wimyn who prefer the company of men, and that's perhaps a valid response too.
I get the non-binary agenda. I celebrate it. Yet to a certain extent, this is a binary world and always will be, until we evolve past our current reproductive reality.
I often make an effort, in my art, to manifest non-binary language and attitudes. Other times, i go deeply binary, in my quest to make people see or laugh.
So...am i a PC hero? Anti-hero? Both? Who can tell...

swimming the stormy PCs

A comedian takes the stage, and looks out.
"It took bill cosby and michael jackson to make me realize that r. kelly...not so bad. I mean, come on, who among us has never peed on a teenager? Tell the truth. TELL THE TRUTH."
The audience laughs. Well, maybe.
That thought popped into my brain recently. Making oneself laugh is surely one of the keys to sanity in an insane world. I considered doing the bit at an open mic, but then i realized that by lumping these people together, i had possibly, unintentionally defined them by their skin color. So i thought of substituting woody allen. But that didn't feel as funny - i have a harder time being outraged by woody.
Just now, should i have said "woody and soon yi", to avoid denying her an active role in her own life? If i just say "woody", am i contributing to the message that something bad happened, and the accountability lies with him? Would that be victimizing a womyn who rejects her "victimization"?
The comedy sprang from some poetry that had been gestating in me, something like "eldridge cleaver is raping white wimyn, and flipper committed suicide" (flipper, or kathy, possibly killed herself due to captivity-induced depression).
But the comedy doesn't feel right, because of the accidental racial overtones. One shies away from expressing outrage over any actions of people of color, because one feels one should only be outraged at white folk...and also because you might be accused of having a racist agenda. Racial concerns have a tendency to impose themselves. Which, we must remind ourselves, is mostly a good thing. All political correctness stems from a place of good and necessary intent. Awareness grows, and change follows. But it can be so hard to speak openly without risking being misunderstood, and not just over race. Feminism, ethnic sensitivity, gay & binary awareness, speciesism, fighting an obesity epidemic without looking like a body-shamer...as tina fey said (approximately),"Just opening your mouth these days is playing landmine hopscotch".
It's strange to realize that i myself am capable of saying the wrong thing, or something that appears wrong. I know i'm much closer to being gender- and color-blind than most (let's assume that's a good thing). As one example, i just started watching "A Handmaid's Tale", and a housemate railed against it as feminist claptrap. I got his point, but it had never occurred to me that anyone might perceive the show as feminist, because i didn't perceive the hero as female. I just saw her as a person.
Another example, one in which i was suddenly on the wrong side of the moral argument even though i think i was on the CORRECT side (or more correct, perhaps...there can be layered, even contrary, levels of correctness). I recently heard a poem, in which the author excoriated her ex for not wanting to be identified by his skin color. She was outraged that he would deny his racial heritage. The PC crowd clapped their affirmations.
But...wait! Not defining yourself by skin/ethnicity/gender...isn't that a GOOD thing? Great, even?
Going back to my standup, the original words in my head were "Who among us has never peed on a teenage girl?" Those who appreciate the perverse dysfunction of our society, may have an initial laugh response to those words, though it probably takes only a couple seconds to cringe. But when you're creating comedy or art, you have to be able to go all the way to the edge...that's the only way you'll discover what's too far. Fifty years ago, maybe one artist in a hundred was capable of going to the edge. These days...one in a thousand? Just a thought.

playin' in de-banned

When i was a teen, my comedic hero was george carlin. His messages of anti-hypocrisy and anti-censorship resonated in me with clarion force, and he remains more brilliantly funny than any humyn i've ever heard. In all the subjects he took on, there was only one that made me pause - his contention that you can joke about anything. His example, rape, pushed the limits of my youthful idealism. I did my best to agree with him, even though i couldn't conceive of any context in which i would joke about rape. Over two decades later, i finally caught up. My brother, an ethical vegan, had decided he was going to eat shrimp again. Considering this, i asked whether he was going to take a toothpick and rape them first.
I recently moved to San Francisco, to offer the world my voice as a humorist, essayist, musician, and poet. I chose this city because my views on nature, politics, religion, and sex are so ahead of the curve, that i figured i needed the most famously progressive city in the world.
Within my first month, i got banned at an open mic for performing a piece that was labelled "racist". To say that i was stunned is an understatement - in my writings and personal life, i could roll out a parade of evidence attesting to my anti-racist cred. But i knew my writing could be challenging - indeed, i wouldn't give a spit for it if it weren't. Who said that if art doesn't make you uncomfortable, it's not art? And mark twain said (i paraphrase) that all the protesting, politicking, and proselytizing will never change the world one tiny smidgen as much as laughter.
The piece was one i'd never performed publicly. It's so audacious that when i'd finished writing it, i shook my head in giggling wonderment for a few minutes, not convinced it was even mine. I wasn't sure what it was, except perhaps subversively, ridiculously brilliant. The message was twofold - an indictment of how we let words control our emotions, and a grand attempt to pour humor on something horrible (racism), thereby taking away some of its power. I'd always been offended by the notion of "bad" or "titillating" words that automatically incite a certain feeling in us, regardless of context or intent. An intelligent person controls their words, not the other way around.
My piece centered on "the N word". Comedian/activist dick gregory might give me a dirty look for even uttering a phrase so apologetically wishy washy as "the N word". Whatever words you use, say them or don't, but trust your intent. In my piece, which on the surface has nothing to do with race, i never actually said the word. I walked right up to that hot emotional button, and enacted a dance of humor and freedom, circling the word relentlessly, never touching it, but never backing away. I offered up the piece as one possible anti-racist tool or tactic.
Part of the inspiration had been a dave chapelle sketch, a spoof of "Leave it to Beaver", which was even more in-your-face. If i danced around that six-foot button, dave stood next to it and kept dropping five-pound rocks.
Many in the black community have re-claimed that word, often coarsely...but sometimes eruditely or artistically, and the effort itself has noble parallels. You don't have to go far, especially in this city, to find a homosexual who decided that no one would ever again hurt him with the word "fag". "Cunt" has also been the subject of reclamation and empowerment.
I chose that setting, an anarchist bookstore, as the first and perhaps only place i'd do the piece. I didn't know whether it would accomplish what i wanted it to (or more to the point, i wondered whether only a black person could get away with it). I chose that audience as the most hip and progressive i'd find. I chose a night when there were both white and black in the crowd. I had total faith and fearlessness.
And in that performance, my instinct seemed right on. I knew i had the crowd...i could feel a vibration of uncertainty, but people were smiling and laughing and right there with me. When i finished, the reaction wasn't forced or faint. Over the crowd's applause, a black man in the front row stood up and hugged me (partly, as it turned out, because he wanted to protect me from any possible backlash).
And then when i got home, a text came banning me. I didn't get upset, or protest. If you're going to wear the shoes of a provocateur, you've got to be unafraid to take lumps. I had nothing but faith in the good intentions of the MC who banned me. I chose to believe that everything would work itself out. I didn't even approach people who'd been there to ask, "Were you offended?" When people approached me, i spoke openly. One fellow, not knowing i'd been banned, enthusiastically told me i should do the piece there again.
I realized that were i black, i probably never would have been banned. If so, there was tremendous irony - a non-racist performed an anti-racist piece, inciting another non-racist into a racist act.
Whether my piece was brilliant or crap, is beside the point.
Laughter is healing.
Art is dangerous.
Brilliance and fearlessness are two different things. When you have both, you might change the world.
Or get yourself shot. Could go either way.

Postscript: Four months later, i was unbanned...but not because of any conviction on the part of the MC, i fear. He's trying to re-establish goodwill in the artistic community, after two subsequent bannings have caused a backlash. I don't know whether i'll return, especially since it's conditional on my not making anyone uncomfortable. It's sad, as i'm quite sure that he believes in (and indeed practices himself) the disturbing imperative of art.

racism is colorblind

My friend wants to kill me.
Why?
Because i'm white.
This isn't some acquaintance-come-lately, mind you. Penny and i have known each other for decades, and for most of that time we've shared profound intimacies.
Nor is she the homicidal type. She's a poet, journalist, and spiritual nurturer. I've never heard her raise her voice in anger.
We're differently pigmented, and talk about race issues often. We even wrote a play together about an interracial love affair, in which the lead characters were loosely based on us. She has certified me as an honorary black person, which i treasure more than any college degree.
Before i go further, let me say that i'm almost certainly misrepresenting her. I don't remember exactly what her words were. As she was speaking them, i let them flow off my back. Words can be so clumsy, especially when trying to enunciate conflicting, contradictory feelings. I was trying to hear only the spirit of her words. I didn't treat them as a big deal, because they weren't. I wasn't surprised at all (which may have surprised her). Did she say she "could" imagine killing me, or "had" imagined? Probably the former, but i wouldn't think less of her if it were the latter.
Of course she can imagine killing me.
She's black.
I'm white.
End of story.
If you'd like to believe that maya angelou or martin luther king never had any dreams of caucasiacide, then you've spent a lifetime avoiding the realities of this world we share - or rather, this world we refuse to share.
Especially maya. I wouldn't be surprised if she had actually gone ahead and offed a couple of whities - it's the quiet ones you've got to look out for.
I'm not speaking to you, by the way, as a white person. I stopped identifying with my skin, gender, or nationality a long time ago.
It's hard to imagine that penny now has any deep secrets left (but i wouldn't mind being surprised). Thanks to racism, it took only twenty-five years to unearth this one.
Forgive my stating the obvious, but these are confusing times. Or perhaps "confused" is the better word. We are all such a horrible mess of fearful, selfish, violent, superstitious social conditioning. Most of us don't have the first clue as to how broken we really are.
You think things are bad?
Child, things passed "bad" thousands of years ago. Things aren't bad, they're apocalyptically barbaric.
So i'm not here to sell hope. But if you find hope in what i'm about to say, that's fantastic.
Racism isn't natural. If humanity survives another century, that will be patently obvious.
How did american racism come about? Not easily, and not accidentally. Nor was it a creation of white people, it was a creation of rich people. Let's take a walk back in time. In the early years of american slavery, there were slave revolts. Most of us have at least a little awareness of that. But it's a shame we don't have a time machine, to go back and see these revolts. The visuals would be more unexpected and moving than words alone could ever be. Let "slave revolt" images flow through your mind - you're picturing a mass of brown-skinned people moving across the land, waving torches and pitchforks perhaps? Now freeze the image. Erase every fifth black person, and replace them with a white person, wearing, waving, and shouting the same things. Let the image play again.
That's better, isn't it? Still horrible, but better.
Who were those white people?
Indentured servants. Slaves in all but name. Penniless, white europeans who paid for their tickets to the new world with a contract signing away their lives. The only difference between an indentured servant and a slave was the awareness that seven years later (give or take) they'd be free. Otherwise...the housing, the food, the degradations, the beatings, the rapings, were often on par with the black slaves of the time.
If you were to live just one day under such conditions, not knowing if it was going to end, your life would never be the same.
When rich people saw what was happening in these revolts, they resorted to one of the most ancient strategies - divide and conquer. In order to shatter the natural sympathies between poor whites and slaves, they began a campaign of dehumanization. Using the social media of the time, they called blacks beasts and sub-humans, so that the now artificially-elevated poor white people would be less and less inclined toward the racial sister and brotherhood that had been natural to them.
Your white slaves are unhappy? Keep telling them they should be glad they're not a nigger, and eventually they'll believe it.
Racism isn't about color...unless you count the color green.
Now fast forward back to modern times. If you're still not convinced, let's let science pitch in its two cents. Sociologists have concluded that racism is not natural. It's possible that some sort of "us against them" tribalism is part of our nature, but even if so, it's quite colorblind in practical terms. Studies of large groups show this - the best example being the sports stadium. In a sea of humanity, if you wear the colors of a certain tribe (or "team"), you'll be accepted by others of that tribe, eagerly and unfailingly. People won't see skin differences.
Of course, penny may still kill me.
But that's only to be expected.
I've thought about keeping a photo in my wallet of her and i hugging, so that my life might one day be spared when a black death squad has me at gunpoint. But then i realized that the sight of a white man hugging a black woman might make a black man kill me even quicker. Then i thought about keeping a photo of me hugging my new friend mack, but the death squad might just conclude that i'm gay, and kill me for that.
And you wonder why i avoid money? With my skin and gender, i've already got two of the biggest death squad targets in the world.
If i were a rich white man, i might have to kill myself...just on general principle.

"Good Hair"

-written and produced by chris rock
2009
It would be hard to overstate how much hope i had for this film. A documentary about the things black women do to their hair, prompted by chris' young daughter coming up to him and asking "daddy, why don't i have good hair?" In the world of straightening (and now weaves), black women have been horribly torturing themselves inside and out for many generations, striving to live up to a barbie doll world...but the time has long since passed when this problem can be blamed solely on the mass media images we're sold every day. Malcolm x was railing against this problem in the sixties, correctly identifying it as nothing less than racial self-hatred. It's about trying to be white, and every intelligent person in the world has long been waiting for black women to love themselves as much as we do. But if anything, the problem only gets worse. Black girls learn at an early age to devalue themselves. Many mothers start straightening their daughters' hair at the age of five, or younger.
So my hopes were sky-high. This film had enormous potential as a trigger for sanity...something hip, funny, and scathing from one of the world's most beloved comedians. And the movie is occasionally brilliant. Chris shows the health risks and searing pain involved in exposing a human being to sodium hydroxide, the chemical in "relaxers". He serves up the staggering impracticality - how straightened women must avoid water, and weaved women may NOT BE TOUCHED, even in the most intimate circumstances. He exposes the conflicted attitudes in the black community, plus the staggering economic burden black women choose for themselves (and the fact that most of that money goes right into white or asian hands). He provides a global view of black women's willful servitude, and indian women's compulsory servitude. But ultimately, chris backs off from taking any strong stand. He could have made a film that changed people's lives, but it's like his HBO bosses told him not to offend anyone - especially housewives in Iowa. He interviews maya angelou, and DOESN'T ask the hard, obvious question - WHY would she start straightening at the age of seventy, when she had seemingly spent a lifetime making the racially proud choice? He similarly soft-serves al sharpton. I love that he interviews a black actress who keeps it natural, but an untouched afro would have been a better choice than coils. There's a brilliant group talk in a barbershop in which chris gets one man to admit that some black men prefer white women because they can have more intense physical intimacy. He finishes the film with a half-hour segment covering the most famous annual black hair show, but it's wasted time. A far better (and funnier) choice would have been to stage a mock game show, in which four black women (one straightened, one weave, one afro, and one bald) would be seated on the stage, facing away, in booths where they cannot see or hear each other. The contestants then have to choose which head they want to run their fingers through. Any contestant who picks the weave triggers alarm bells and a klaxon shouting "DON'T TOUCH, DON'T TOUCH, DON'T TOUCH", and is expelled from the show immediately.
"Good Hair" - a good movie that should have been great.
Postscript: A friend tells me that there may finally be a growing movement of young black women rejecting the straightened/weave world. Is it possible i was too hard on this film? In either case, hallelujah brothers and sisters.

wikedenial

My first and perhaps last attempt to contribute to the wonderful world of Wikepedia has crashed and burned, perhaps because the site is run by politically correct fascists? During the Revolutionary War, the british (in a move that was admittedly probably more pragmatic than idealistic) promised freedom to any colonial slaves who ran away and fought against their former masters. There are no records of how many slaves took up arms, but it might have been a very large number. Knowing this, i edited "freed slaves" into the appropriate "Belligerents" column on the war's main page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War. It was removed almost immediately. This is particularly curious because elsewhere on the site, they freely admit that slaves joined the british ranks, in higher (probably ridiculously higher) numbers than those who agreed to fight for their oppressors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans_in_the_Revolutionary_War. Have i been blacklisted (HA...get it? "Blacklisted"? Hysterical!) from Wikeworld, accused of adding erroneous data? I hate to think that, not least of all for the fact that i would have added something wild and patently false, had i known my fate. Is it too late to edit into the Wikeverse the fact that the british fought pantless, in the hopes of confusing their foes? Or that Abraham Lincoln had an invisible childhood friend named Rastus Pookie Tigerbones? Or that there's a branch of the KKK in Alabama who eschew white in favor of Star Wars sheets? Sigh.

sisteripples

Do we attract specific realities with the power of our thoughts?
Does life send us messages?
Such musings are generally a haven for the feeble-minded. But there are moments...
Within one week of writing an article about all the brown-pigmented women who have ever been connected with me romantically or sexually (http://nakedmeadow.blogspot.com/2011/05/sisters-sisters.html), i had a perfect storm of black women swirl into my life on the very same day. I have one close black female friend, whom i talk with perhaps once a month. In other words, days, weeks, and sometimes months go by when i have no intimate contact with a black woman at all.
And again, pardon my temporary diversion into pigment-awareness. I normally could write ten pages about a friend and leave you no clue as to their skin (or even gender). This skin is not who we are.
But black woman coincidence had a field day in my life, the very same week i spent hours writing about black women.
I had a rainy day morning moving job in Brooklyn. My partners were late, so for the better part of an hour i worked alone with the client. She was so adorable it almost hurt. Bright-eyed intelligence with a smile so warm and genuine. She had natural hair about two inches long...a quality that all by itself will have me following any such black woman around like a puppy. An instant comfort level in our connection made for more open talk than normal in a professional setting. Did she know that i found her adorable? Yup. Would we have flirted, had she not been newly-married? Throughout the move, whenever our team broke up, she and i were together.
After eight hours of sharing her energy, i went home and awaited my "date". I met that evening with a friend of a friend of a friend, an introductory meeting that had been set up with procreation in mind. This woman wanted very much to have a baby. She needed a father, not a daddy. She had tried IVF unsuccessfully, and was coming around to the idea that we "play god" with our bodies at our (and our offspring's) peril...an idea i happily reinforced, sharing with her all i had learned about the newest science of sexuality. She wanted natural conception, and was open to having me be as little or as much a part of this child's life as i might want. As i get closer to embracing the notion that raising children may not be a part of my life, opportunities such as this have been on my mind.
We talked for four hours. It was comfortable and easygoing, for the most part. She said so many of the right things. She's an educator from central Jersey, and fairly progressive. She's a member of a close group of friends who consider themselves family, a kind of organic family that is central to this country's future as the monogamous family unit fades away. I knew this child would have a nice support system.
The only hard part of our evening was at the end. She wanted to know whether i'd do it. She wanted to know right then. I hate rushing decisions, i wanted to spend more time with her. Perhaps the biggest thing holding me back was that there was no rush of hormonal attraction. I'm leery of anything that doesn't feel natural. She said our lack of animal attraction might be a plus for this situation. In another coincidence, i had just the previous day written an article about America, attraction, and fat...and she was indeed overweight. There were one or two other tiny elements. She did wear makeup, and her breath hit me wrong once or twice. I promised she'd have an answer within the week. The next day i wrote her saying that if she needed a definite answer, to assume that it wouldn't happen, but i left the door wide open for her to visit with me again. I sensed she would move on, which has proven to be so. In the days and nights since, i've wrestled with the spirituality of my choice. My impulse toward selflessness, my (admittedly immature) desire to spread my genes, my desire to act "naturally", my urge toward radical sharing, my testosterone screaming in my undersexed head as always...i'd be lying if i said that i haven't thought about writing her, and telling her to come to me.
Maybe the thing that held me back even more than simple attraction, was the thought that i might feel a post-coital loneliness more pronounced than non-coital loneliness.
I truly don't know.
And the third coincidental occurrence that landed on my head? Remember that friend who calls once every month or two? Guess who called, literally within one hundred seconds of my date's arrival?
Most of us are so overwhelmed by life's meaninglessness, we ascribe meaning where it never belongs. In the days that followed, i wondered...was my client's presence that day a reminder of what it should feel like when you make love? Was Penny's call a shout from the universe that she is supposed to be my first black lover...that i need to balance that account before i can engage in other transactions? Did i somehow summon her and my client that day? Plus another black woman i had powerful flirtations with on the subway a few days after?
Probably not, at least not in any mystical sense.
But just in case...beautifulprogressivesillyathleticasianwoman, beautifulprogressivesillyathleticnakedasianwoman, beautifulprogressivesillyathleticnakedasiantwins...
You'd better go. I might be at this a while.

sisters' sisters

How can i write this article? It's wrong, it's atrocious, it's...not me. I'm about to lump people together based upon nothing more than THE COLOR OF THEIR SKIN. And i don't mean "people" in the abstract, for some treatise on race relations. No, i'm going to categorize people i've personally known, based upon nothing more than pigmentation.
Me.
The would-be genderblind, colorblind crusader. The guy who chastises African-Americans for being overexcited about Obama. The guy who cries inside as 99.999% of black women on a romance website identify themselves by skin color before you've even opened their ad.
Me.
In my feeble defense, they did it first. I've been asked by women of color, "Have you ever been with a sister?" You can reject their premise (which i do) but at a certain point you have to acknowledge that virtually everyone in this society DOES identify themself by their skin. And the vast majority of those possible few who don't, were afforded the luxury of being born white.
Also in my defense, there is a certain extent to which skin differences are more than skin deep. Differing socializations. Differing body chemistrys. It would be fun to make a scratch n' sniff book that asks you to identify six scents corresponding to six different people (white/black/asian male, white/black/asian female) who have been laboring in 100 degree heat all day.
So, to risk further disillusioning the unwashed mass of crickets who follow me, the answer to the aforementioned question, my sisters, is...no. I, Captain Colorblind, have never been with a sister. Reverberations of shock may now pass through you.
But let's not make a thing out of this. I may have a lot more life in front of me than behind. That said, i will now reminisce about my black "almost were" lovers, for no other reason than the goofy coincidence that passed through my mind recently...just one of the million and three idiotic thoughts that pass through all our minds on a daily basis. That coincidence? Based on my life, when it comes to romance BLACK WOMEN ALWAYS COME IN PAIRS. Which is not to say that black women favor threesomes, but that every significant romantic black connection of my life has always had a second woman attached.
For the purposes of this article, i define "been with" as a relationship involving oral, anal, or vaginal pentration. My own definition is much broader, but i'll use this one today because it's relateable for most people. By this definition, i have remained on the outside of "been with" by only the teeniest margin. There was the woman i spent one amazing night with, our naked bodies and genitals rubbing and sliding against each other while we kissed in bliss. I lost that relationship by trying to slow things down. There was also the "mulatto" (yes, we actually have that word in our language - but the one that really kills me is "octoroon") i held while she brought herself to orgasm...another wonderful, wonderful memory.
But by strict definition, i ain't "been with".
The first pair was a mother and daughter i lived with. I saw the mother naked twice, and was affected enough to fantasize about her, even though we had NO spiritual compatibility. With absolutely no romantic preamble, one day she asked me whether i wanted a child. Her daughter was a youth in the full flush of first sexuality, who would look at me with such intensity there could be no denying her intent. I was drawn to her with a power that was nearly overwhelming. It's possible i may spare a little dream about her even on the day of my death. I imagine going back in time and saying yes to the mother's proposition, only to stay within the family's sphere, to ultimately be with the daughter (there's a reason why that book by Nabakov is one of the greatest ever).
The second pair were sisters. I shared a spiritual romance with the first one before we met. When we did meet, we became close physically. After a week of holding and sharing, she suddenly told me she was ready for me to be inside her. But i knew that our friendship wasn't yet on firm ground, and chemistry-wise her pheremones didn't feel quite right (which is more than a fancy way of saying that i wasn't crazy about her smell...but it includes that). The moment i met her sister, i felt a carnal pull that feeds my fantasies to this day, and i'm almost entirely sure i affected her the same way. We never had the chance to be alone together.
As i thought this week about these women, my friend P came to mind, and i relievedly realized i wouldn't be writing this silly article, because there was no other black woman making a triangle with P and i. But then i remembered her sister! P and i have been friends for a long time, for most of which she's carried a torch for me, an "elephant in the room" we've never acknowledged. I love her spirit, but was never strongly attracted physically, and knew that differences in our rhythms would make any attempt at conventional romance a disaster. But when someone carries an undying torch for you, your fantasies can't help but go there. One of the things that stays my tongue whenever i get one of my urges for complete honesty, is the memory of how instantly attracted to her sister i was, the one time we met. I'm pretty sure it wasn't one-way. Sibling relationships are almost always fraught with some bizarre competitiveness, and i'm sure it would mess with P's mind to know how i felt about her sister, no matter how much time goes by.
There you have it. Black women. Pairs. Anyone have a line on what's going on with that?
That was rhetorical.

spirit steps south

(I've carried the weight of this article inside me for most of the past month. The heavy hand of sadness my constant companion and constant conflict. I've not known whether to write this story now, or decades from now. There is a person on this planet who has asked me to never share this, even anonymously. This person will never know whether i've honored her request. For the sake of her friendship, i would silence this chapter of my life, but she has withdrawn any love she once felt for me, and with it, a proper understanding of her request. More painful than hiding a part of my life is the thought that my silence would be an affirmation of her shame. In the week i lived with her, she walked in beauty and grace. In sharing this story, i rend another tear in my battered heart.)

A few months ago, a woman in Florida responded to an online romance ad of mine. She would later tell me of the enormous act of nerve it took for her to hit the "send" button on her reply. We began a correspondence that culminated in meeting six weeks later. She told me she had been a sexual "hermaphrodite" for three years, wanting nothing to do with males ever again. I called that sensible. She'd had three long relationships, each one ending when the male wanted to marry. For the past year, she'd been making multiple attempts at in vetro fertilization from males of "superior" stock, determined to start raising godlike children. To that end, she drove an enormous car and lived in a big, empty house.
You might ask why a self-professed hermaphrodite would be browsing a M4W romance site in the first place. I asked her after we met, but the answer that came back was so indistinct that i recall no part of it.
In my ad, i invoked a woman who didn't know the color of her own skin. When she identified herself as black in her initial response, i called her on it. She said i was right. But race issues ever did and perhaps ever would overshadow her life (it's a million times easier for a white person to forget their color). She admitted that any time she'd ever seen an interracial couple, she'd looked upon them as traitors, and that before she met me, if anyone had suggested that she would one day be intimately loving with a white man, she would have reacted violently.
She worked as a nurse, and had a huge family of sisters and brothers, with a father a bit like George Jefferson. She had caused much consternation among them for her attempts to have children without a man. I shared some insights i'd learned, as to why artificial insemination has such staggering failure rates. The body knows what it wants and what it doesn't, and for much smarter reasons than science yet understands. When a woman is attracted to a man, her body is pointing her in that direction because of immunological advantages for potential offspring. We play god at the risk of our unborn children. I wasn't trying to change her mind...but knowing the marathon pain of IVF, and how the body dies a little every day without intimate touch and healing sexuality, a little dream was born in me, to be the natural father of her children. I of course had no idea whether i wanted to raise these children...but if children were her crusade, i wanted them to be born of love.
We had one phone call during our pen-palship. On a sad day for her, i asked her to call. I read her a story, written by a woman going through IVF. After a marathon of failures, she finally gets a fetus that doesn't abort. It's beautifully-written, and in choosing that story i pointedly wasn't trying to force my own beliefs. The next day, she wrote that she'd decided she was done with IVF.
And as we wrote, a cybercrush was being born. We agreed to let it flow, keeping one eye on the reality that a cybercrush in no way prepares you for the real world. She fell in love with the idea of my lovemaking. I told her of my gentle ways...of the sexual communion of being inside someone for an hour or more, without mad thrusting to ejaculation. She said all the sex in her life had been short, and a bit painful.
She also told me she was an addict.
A workout addict.
Truly. A few years back, she'd been fat. She'd lost forty pounds, and wanted to lose forty more, but had reached a point of frustration, after a year of working out three hours a day had only gotten her halfway to her goal. She said she ate no sweets, a modest breakfast, and then just an apple and nuts throughout the day.
During our correspondence, she had cosmetic surgery around her breasts, to remove excess skin. She maintained that it wasn't cosmetic...and as she was going through such pain, i didn't have the heart to correct her. When we were together, i told her that any surgery which has no medical purpose is cosmetic. After a little debate, she accepted my point.
So much pain in her life...so of course my weakness for the wounded ones drew me to her. Plus genuine spiritual connection. She wanted to be more open and free, and able to run naked in the rain. She didn't believe in marriage. It turned out she was open to polyamory (or possibly only polygyny...what she actually said was that she could imagine being with a man who had other mates). I was also drawn to her because she was so profoundly enamored of me. She said she'd never dreamt that a white man like me might exist. I tried to tell her that i was just like everyone, full of vanity and conceit. She wasn't buying it, but i knew there would be time to convince her.
After a month of letters, i'd impacted her life profoundly...she'd abandoned IVF, and reversed a lifetime of racism by dreaming of loving a white man. I had to meet her...all of these changes were too sacred to not pursue into the real world.
In practicality, i knew there were any number of reasons why we mightn't be compatible as lovers. The lack of self-love inherent in cosmetic surgery is alien to me, and we seemed at different levels of spiritual growth. There was also an imbalance in how much we'd "seen" of each other. She'd seen many photos of me, yet i'd pretty much seen only one image of her, a distant shot from when she was at her fattest, which didn't trigger an attraction response. She also straightened her hair, a spiritual/physical turnoff for me. We discussed all these things, at least a little.
But the time had come to leap off a cliff. If she could leap by inviting a strange man to stay in her home, how could i not leap in return? I knew the dangers...she was walking on thin ice, trying to step beyond a whole lot of pain and gender/race hatred. She assured me that she trusted me implicitly...that any direction my spirit turned, she would cherish me 100%.
There's also a big part of me that just needs to jump off cliffs.
The only thing she made me promise was that when we first met, we would share one of those hugs that has no end.
No problem.
I had no time constraints for my visit, other than a ten-day maximum. She told me she was going to tell her family that she would be out of town on a business trip. Secrets shatter my spirit. We talked about it, and understood each other's perspectives better. The one concession she made was that she agreed to tell one of her sisters the truth. As the trip neared, i suggested we live out a dream i'd had for years. When we met, we would speak no words. Only once the sun had risen on our second day, would we talk. She agreed.
I arrived at the Homestead bus stop, and we hugged...not as long as i'd imagined, but still nice. In the car, it became apparent that she wasn't going to be able to handle not talking. She tried, but words kept slipping out. I finally freed her of the burden. After some pleasant talk, i mentioned the spiritual truism that words are a sign of someone not at peace with themselves. She laughed.
Her house was less rustic than i'd imagined. She'd talked of a lake, but i hadn't pictured a gated community. She had a bidet (which she never used!). I was in heaven. She told me she always slept downstairs on the sofa, and that she never felt comfortable in the master bedroom, where i'd be sleeping. None of the other bedrooms had any furniture. I'd imagined us making love on that bed. After talking for a while, i went up for the night. She joined me a bit later. I was naked, and we held each other. As we caressed, i became erect. She was on her stomach and i was on her back. She said she could feel my erection through her clothes, and asked me to move it faster. I did so. After a while i fell asleep, and she returned to her couch.
The next night, as she felt my erection again, she said she wished we could go further, but she felt so self-conscious, and needed to wait until she was slimmer. I smiled and shook my head. Of course she was being silly, but...i already knew that my physical attraction and spiritual desire for her weren't strong enough to support an ongoing sexual relationship, so i didn't mind that she wasn't ready. It would give us a beautiful window where we could just be intimate and loving.
We had six days of profound beauty without walls, even more so than i'd dreamed. She was so present and free. We shared our lives. Every night, she asked me to read some of my writings to her. One night, lying together after a perfect moment, i gave her the gift i'd brought from home...a felted scarf made in South Africa by one of the women a friend of mine is teaching trade skills to. She wore it everywhere the next few days. She suddenly felt self-conscious about the gift she'd gotten for me. She said she was going to return it, it was all materialistic and wrong. I nudged her into telling me what it was. An IPad. I told her i was touched, assured her i saw myself using one someday, and that any gift from her would be perfect.
One afternoon, we were sitting on the couch, and she was going on about how surprised she'd been at the softness of my hair. I knew there was an element of that she didn't appreciate yet. I took off my pants and put my legs across her lap. She was entranced, and gently explored my penis as i became erect. That was the single most beautiful moment we shared...knowing how far she had come to be living in that moment. She loved my size, and said it would be perfect in her. The next day, she asked if she could put oil on my penis. I happily agreed. She masturbated me, and i was able to push myself into having an orgasm...a verrry surprising occurence, as the tightness of a vagina has been the only way any woman has been able to make me come in a long, long time. My pushing notwithstanding, it stands as the only time a woman has ever masturbated me to orgasm. The next day, she oiled me again. I knew that she very much wanted to see me ejaculate, so i offered to masturbate for her. She sat between my legs as i went to work. For a while it just wasn't happening, so we talked. Finally i got it going. She moved her head closer, and asked if i wanted her to lick me. I wasn't expecting any kind of penetration, so i smiled and said "No, that's okay." When i ejaculated, she was amazed...she didn't think there would be so much.
We went garage saleing and thrift shopping, a passion she kept secret because her family wouldn't approve. I found her THE PRINCESS BRIDE, which she'd never seen. I found an album i love by the Notting Hillbillies, which she fell in love with. She shared her comic porn collection. I was a little surprised by it, and delightedly so. Most of them were plotless dreck, but there were two i liked, one about witch sisters, and one called "Alrayne", i think, which is just exquisitely drawn. She was extremely surprised at how i loved certain "black" TV shows, like CHAPELLE'S SHOW. She said she never watched any show that didn't have at least one black character. I laughed and called her on her racism. She disagreed. I constructed a counter-argument, and she relented.
I told her i too was surprised at the softness of her straightened hair. And she did make me understand a certain practicality to it. Natural black hair can take thirty minutes to comb out. Straightened, only five. But she conceded that there were a significant percentage of black women who straightened because they thought their natural hair "ugly". For me, once that admission is on the table, that's the end of the story. Malcolm X was right, and straightening is racial self-hatred. Why why WHY would anyone then choose it?
Especially when natural black hair feels soooo amazing.
She had another cosmetic surgery planned, to excise excess skin on her lower body. She'd also had a nose job a couple years before. I asked her what she might say, if her daughter one day found a picture of the "old" her, and asked "Mommy, am i ugly?"
One day, she took me to work, doing outpatient consultation with an AIDS patient. His mother confiscated me to help her on the computer. A beautiful afternoon.
Occasionally, she had a sad moment, telling me she was going to miss me. I told her not to do that...that by drawing that thought unto her, she rendered me already out the door in one corner of her mind. Doing so, she wouldn't be able to commit her entire spirit to our togetherness.
I had been working on her to lower the "secret" factor of my trip, and one afternoon she asked if i wanted to visit two of her sisters, and two nieces. I was thrilled. On the way, she told me that no one in her family had ever had a white lover. The scene at the door was nice. She was nervous, but kept it together. One niece was a toddler, and the other around six. The first sister was friendly, and when the second came down the stairs, there was an immediate spark between us. It was sexual, and the look in her eyes told me she was entirely comfortable with that. We chatted and visited for a bit, ending up in the backyard, where the older niece became quite taken with me after i climbed a tree. We lounged on the grass. When my friend said it was time to go, her sister said we'd only just gotten there. She made us promise to come back for a meal. I was delighted, and my friend was happy too. Back in the car, i told her that it was possible she didn't know her sister as well as she thought, and urged her to ask whether she'd ever been with a white man. The next day, she found out her sister had had two white boyfriends in college, whom she'd kept hidden. Bringing about that conversation was the second-sweetest joy of my trip. I told my friend that i'd felt a sexual spark with her sister. If that seems strange to you, gentle reader...if it seems dunderheaded or insensitive, well, i almost agree. Even at my semi-advanced level of spiritual development, i can't declare myself entirely free of the emotional minefield that surrounds our lovers being attracted to a sibling, or vice versa. But you must understand the state of grace my friend and i seemed to be in. We were sharing ourselves with no perceptible barriers. Perhaps subconsciously i needed to test that, but mostly i just wanted to offer up all of myself for her...feeling that if i held anything back, it would come back on me, creating the same energy in her. If you find contradictions with that position later on, well, i do too. We humans are all so broken, that always knowing the right thing to do is perhaps an impossible dream.
I had fantasies about her sister the rest of the trip, imagining beautiful shower sex. I wanted to give the sister my contact information, to explore our connection and talk about all my friend had been going through. I decided, however, that reigning that desire in was the wiser choice. And through busy scheduling, we never saw her family again.
The next night, she came to me in bed, clothed as always. We were spooning, and i was erect. She told me she was ready to have me inside her. My spirit eyes went wide. In those few seconds, i had to process one of the toughest choices of my life. Understand too, some of the ancillary energy that was swirling my brain around. At that time, i was reading one of the most amazing books i've ever found, "Sex At Dawn", a study of human sexual nature. I was tapping into a scientific basis for ideas i'd always been drawn to...the idea that radical sharing is the "natural" state of humanity. In foraging societies we're able to study, any form of withholding is a social evil, and no one is "so self-important that satisfying a fellow tribesman [is] less gratifying than personal gain". How could i possibly not give this woman ANY happiness it might be in my power to give?
But i knew we were still on thin ice...added to the imbalances between us was my attraction to her sister.
So i told her we didn't have the right balance yet.
Whether i made the right spiritual choice, is something i may live my whole life never being sure of. Had i already done wrong by not telling her about my lack of physical lust? I rationalized it with the idea that i was trying to operate on a higher spiritual level, and that i didn't want to shut doors...we might be coming to a better place of balance, and even if we weren't, how many walls might be created by a pre-emptive"no"?
She seemed to take my decision as easily as she had taken everything that week. But in her talking the next day about how other women would have been so insulted, i knew that she was struggling a little. Still, we were okay.
The wheels fell off the following day.
We survived the family hurdle, and i thought we could survive anything.
I was wrong.
The friend hurdle laid us low.
While at work, she opened up to a group of friends about what she'd been doing. They were scandalized, and in one way, i absolutely agreed with them. I didn't like their being upset that she'd let down her walls, but they were also horrified at how she had been putting me on a pedestal. I'd been gently chiding her about that for several days. She was catering to me too much, spiritually and literally. I still couldn't make her believe that i could be vain and foolish.
Whatever combination of words they laid on her did their job. Her walls had gone so high that nothing could top them. We talked about it, but kept coming back to her telling me i didn't understand who she was, and when i pushed her to explain, met only silence. She was in a state of shame and self-loathing. The best she was able to manage was one morose joke about wanting to have a neuralizer, like in MEN IN BLACK, to erase the last week forever. She held back from being overtly hostile, and threw me one or two bones about how she still thought i was spiritually advanced...but she peppered that with vague allegations about my shallowness. The only time i became impassioned was when she reduced me to my skin color. I told her that if she didn't understand that "white male" is not how i perceive myself, then she'd misunderstood the most important piece of me. She said the biggest thing i'd misunderstood about her was that her wanting intercourse had not signified any desire to have an ongoing sexual relationship. Yet i knew that a part of her spirit had been in that place, and that she'd happily imagined me "bringing her home" to meet my family. There were little glimmers that not everything had been lost. She said she would probably return to in vetro...but that she was open to having a romantic relationship with a man. But only under conditions of total emotional control. I tried to tell her that the need for control comes from a place of fear, and was that the emotional legacy she wanted to offer her babies? It's unlikely that anything i said at that point could have touched her, though. I tried to lighten the mood, saying i had NO idea how i was going to write about all this. I'm not one for regret, but a part of me wishes i'd never said that. She asked me to never write about us. I told her my reasons for hesitating to promise that. I made my own feeble attempt at a joke, saying that subconsciously she must have planned everything that week to lead up to that precise moment, because "hurting whitey" was her darkest dream, and she must have realized that no request could ever wound me so deeply as forcibly silencing my voice. I think she understood my maudlin attempt at humor. That night, while i was eating, she fell asleep, and her feet came to rest on my lap. That unconscious act gave me some tiny measure of healing - the thought that subconsciously she hadn't been able to convince herself that she hated me. She dismissed that idea out of hand the next day.
When she dropped me off at the bus station, i had about an hour's wait. She sat in her car. She'd given me a present, which she told me to open on the bus. After a couple minutes, i told her she was obviously so unhappy, and that she didn't need to wait.
As my bus pulled away, i unwrapped the gift.
A bookmark.
A little part of me hopes we'll laugh together again one day, with that bookmark nearby, doing what it was made for.
A foolish dreamer walks on.

(Afterword: Despite the pain that came with the writing of this piece, i realized something midway through - this is the first time i've been able to breathe in the month since i returned. For better or worse, sharing my life with you has become my very breath.)

squanto's thanksgiving message

The story of Thanksgiving is the most central story in the american saga. It set the stage for all that was to come. "Europeans bring civilization to a savage land" became the catch-all rationale for everything that followed. And i was there. My name is Tisquantum. Many of you know me as "Squanto".
There are small myths and large in the history of any land. And things that get forgotten. Did you know, for instance, that at the height of the slave trade, 10,000 native american slaves were exported in a single year? I know...for i was one. I was first abducted by a british captain as a child in 1605. I spent nine years serving several masters in England, until one returned me to my home in Massachusetts. Less than a year later, i was enslaved again, this time to be sold in Spain. I escaped and made my way to England, where i convinced a captain to take me home. I walked back into the village of my people, the patuxet, the very same year the Mayflower sailed into the harbor.
One small american myth is that we natives were hunter/gatherers. Many of us were farmers. We all became hunter/gatherers when it became necessary to run from europeans at a moment's notice. Faced with kidnapping, killing, robbery, and rape, you might head for the hills too.
One of the bigger myths about the birth of this country is how europeans "tamed the wilderness". They didn't...because they didn't have to. The pattern was set in Plymouth. When i walked back into my village, there were only corpses to greet me. Everyone had been killed by one of the european diseases. The pilgrims moved in. They didn't have to clear any forest, or remove rocks from the ground to make fields for planting. I joined them, because i had no one else.
What made America so different from what was going on in the rest of the world? The period of european imperialism saw every single continent unquestionably dominated. So why didn't Europe settle Asia or Africa? Because the good spots there were already taken.
But when the Mayflower landed, America was becoming a ghost town.
Before european diseases swept our shores, the population of the Americas was as high as 100 million. But we had no immunities with which to fight back. Getting a flu was a death sentence. School books teach that the most devastating disaster in history was the Black Plague. 30% of Europe died, in just two years. People believed it was the hand of God. Crops went unplanted, social restraints were disregarded.
The epidemics that struck New England in 1617 carried a mortality rate of 90%. The survivors scattered, carrying death inland, where populations that had never seen a white person were leveled. As a result, it would be fifty years before the invaders met any real resistance. In the words of Plymouth governor William Bradford, "It pleased God to afflict these Indians with such a deadly sickness, that out of 1000, over 950 of them died, and many...lay rotting above ground."
The second great myth was "the frontier", which is thought of as a moving line on a map. But there was no border - the frontier was profoundly multi-cultural and interracial. A striking example of this was a town in northern Ohio known as "the Glaize", where french, africans, british, and members of at least six tribes lived together. They all celebrated native holidays, St. Patrick's Day, and Mardi Gras. It will surprise no one that escaped blacks ran to the arms of the natives. What may come as a surprise is that europeans were also defecting. Innumerable laws sprang up, to punish whites who "went native". The pilgrims even made it a crime for a man to wear long hair. If you've ever wondered why Granddad calls Billy a fairy when his hair gets a little long, we may have just found the reason.
This defection of men and women was mostly one-way; myself and Pocahantas notwithstanding, natives were not trying to get into white society. Ben Franklin himself said, "No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies...there is no Force; there are no Prisons, no officers to compel Obedience, or inflict Punishment." Perhaps the most alluring part of native life was the lack of hierarchy. History's famous native american leaders were not leaders in the way you understand them. Though some tribal positions were hereditary, anyone could rise to a position of prominence, and no one was denigrated or ignored, including women.
And therein may lie the greatest myth of all, the idea that native american culture has been killed. When one culture absorbs another, both are forever changed. Each one of you here today is far more native american than you've probably ever considered. Native ideas most certainly made their way back to Europe, to thinkers like John Locke, who would write of "life, liberty, and property". Is it a coincidence that America's "founding fathers" embraced such radical ideas? All evidence suggests that the settlers were not driven by social experiments, but profit. A small minority came for religious freedom...even on the Mayflower, the pilgrims were a minority...but religious freedom is not the same thing as democracy.
My own time with the pilgrims was neither long nor happy. I was a go-between with the nearest tribe, the Wampanoag, who never trusted me because i was not one of their own. Less than two years after the Mayflower arrived, i was overcome by a sudden, bloody fever. A victim of either disease or poison, my spirit finally came to rest.
But on this day of Thanksgiving, in this country where any man or woman is free to go to any school, to work at any job, to express any opinion...it is perhaps entirely appropriate to give thanks to those who first lived in this beautiful land, and honor them by carrying in your spirits and manifesting in your deeds the best part of their desires and dreams.

no umbrella

I want the bald woman
I want the white woman not raised by whites

I want the scarred woman
I want the asian woman who wants an equal

I want the sweaty woman
I want the black woman who doesn't straighten

Don't be black
Be human

Don't be a man
Be human

Don't be a jew
Be human

racism shmacism

My father and i recently had a talk about the evolution of racism in the generations of our family. In the midwestern and northeastern U.S.A. where i grew up, racism was a simple matter of black and white. Not that my hometowns wouldn't have discriminated against other non-whites, but there really weren't any around. There were barely any blacks. In the sprawling Philly suburban neighborhood in which i spent my teens, there was one black family. They had one child, and i never spoke to him (no, not for that reason...he was a year older than i and played the electric guitar, so he was well out of my own coolness league). There were more blacks in my high school, as many as 10%, with other minorities adding another 3%. I didn't really have any African-American friends, but that was probably because almost none of them ran in my band fag/theater geek circles. Racist jokes or sensibilities just weren't a part of my generation, however. I don't remember them in any peer group i was ever in, and as far back as i can recall, my grandfather Morty and Martin Luther King, Jr. have been my two greatest heroes.
I dislike clumsy, self-conscious terminology, but understand the need for it, so i'll sometimes say "African-American", and sometimes say "black". I remember being a teen and earnestly telling my sister that it was now correct to call black people "brown", because, well, i guess i had heard it somewhere, and it sounded right. I look forward to the not-so-far-off day when skin distinctions will pass out of our vernacular altogether.
My Dad remembers his own grandparents' emphatically racist humor. Not only was it overt and unapologetic, i get the sense that they wouldn't have understood why someone would even ask for an apology. The first racist joke i ever heard came from my maternal grandfather. Even at the tender age of five or so, i remember that moment clearly. In retrospect, the fact that i never loved him like my other grandparents probably began on that day. My parent's generation seemed to be one level of tolerance advanced. Dad has had black friends, and one black girlfriend. There were still barriers, of course...the idea of marrying a black woman was something that he never would have considered. And he has lapses which he doesn't perceive as racist...during the recent democratic primary, he shared a Sambo/bimbo joke. My mother has told me that she would be troubled if i were to have children with a non-white woman.
In my own more non-racist generation, i'm so forward-thinking that i only half-jokingly can't conceive (ahem) of having children with a white woman. Sorry, Mom. I might even enjoy bringing some half-Asian children home, just to tweak her a bit. And of course that's a silly position, as i'll fall in love with, well, whomever i do, and if children come then i'll be thrilled whether they're yellow, white, or all rainbow-speckled. But if the ultimate elimination of racism will only come when the human race fucks away skin differences, then i want in. Let's get to the gettin'!
An incident on my recent trip home for the holidays is what set all these thoughts in motion. I have a cousin who had a child with a black man. Their relationship didn't last. The child, a girl named Ashley, is now a teen, and i'll always feel a special bond and care for her because i was the first person in my family after my cousin to meet her when she was an infant, and because...well, she's a living embodiment of hope and tolerance, but as such she's maybe had a tougher life than some. She's light-skinned enough that in another time, she might have "passed". But that time is not so far gone that there aren't reminders and awkward moments, even in forward-thinking homes. My step-brother John had met Ashley on numerous occasions over the past decade, but had no idea that her father was black. On my recent trip, at a gathering at which he and Ashley were present, he was following a line of conversation and said, "Well, there ain't nobody here but us whiteys." John, with his impish humor, was not speaking racistly. But my eyes widened imperceptibly as i looked around to see who else had caught his gaffe. I suspect my uncle caught it, though he gave no sign. And Ashley herself, i can't imagine that she didn't suddenly feel self-conscious. I didn't have a chance to talk to her about it, but I hope to, the next time we're together.
All evidence to the contrary, i'd like to hope that my Mom made those racial comments about babies just as some sort of skewed, reverse-psychology attempt to motivate me into giving her ANY grandchildren. But if my generation is as non-racist as it seems, doesn't it make you almost giddy to think about where coming generations will take us?
May i start grooming our first female agnostic bisexual Asian-American president?
And, um...may i groom her both figuratively and literally?

what's my tongue in2

Four men sat at a fire
The talk turned to the flesh…

They had each discovered
One of the keys to the kingdom of carnal utopia
The four eternal gems in the universe of woman

Plato held forth in hushed tones about the white woman without a pole up her ass

Socrates orated reverently on the hispanic woman who has rejected the church

Aristotle spoke wistfully of the asian woman who cares not for money

And Vizzini cackled happily about the black woman with that little touch of white blood

They all made a pact
Never to share
These mysteries rare
Holy grails, holy grails…

2005

born in 1968

Your beauty was not merely heaven's tears
wrenched from that anguish
you could not flee

The soil that found your tears
took the life you gave
and returned it to the seeds it sheltered
The seeds rose, striving to become

Your beauty was not merely that sadness inescapable

For as the morning mist rising to the sun
Your tears rose
Striving to touch
Striving to teach
Striving to become
Lifting to places yet unknown

-decicated to MLK
1997