"You are the reason they hate gay people."

No, this is not "why they hate" us.

They hate us because we exist.  They will hate us no matter how much we try to placate them by reifying their gender binary, no matter how polite we are or how monogamous and middle class we are.  We can deepen our voices and not move our hands while we speak and have the goddamn white picket fence and save Cambodian babies from being Cambodian, and the moment we slip up and hold someone's hand or not coerce our child's gender or move into the neighborhood or have our own spaces, our bashing will be justified.

We cannot save ourselves by being like them.  We aren't wrong: that is exactly what they're trying to say!  That we have to fit in.  Why the hell are you buying into it?  Fuck that noise.  They are the wrong ones. Why should giants deign to sit in caves, when they can stride the earth?

The problem isn't straight girls making out with other straight girls.  It's that straight girls can't make out with each other without being reinterpreted as (they are sluts and that is disgusting / they are sluts and they must be sexually available to me / they must be lesbians / they must be bisexual / they are fake bitches) because wow does misogyny and homophobia come in all sorts of delightful flavors.

And we don't care that maybe in a liberated world, we can make out with whomever just because we are alive.  That maybe there can be a world where there won't be environments where men have learned to use alcohol as a weapon and to browbeat women into performing for them and enjoy it, or that the only way a woman can make a living is to appeal to the male gaze in a music video.  That, you know what?, maybe two women can make out to turn on a guy without it being part of a pattern of the coercive commodification of women.

Because it is easier to be mad at two individual women who don't matter than it is to be mad at a system you don't care to take on.

It's easier to be mad at a guy who gets to wear a leather harness and dance down a street once a year, than to stop buying into our coercive political process.  It's easier to say the problem is with our kids, that they just have to wait for it to get better.  It's easier, and in ways, more profitable to buy into the heterosexism and cissexism.  To buy into their misogyny that men acting like women is degrading.  Maybe, if you play along well enough, you'll get to become one of them.  That is the power of the kyriarchy, to make you want to be an oppressor.  To internalize their homophobia, to make you want to fit into this fucked up world.

So, who gives a fuck if some gay dude sleeps around?  You're saying it reinforces stereotypes, when we've been characterized as sodomites and deviants before it was even legal for us to have sex.  You're willing to slap that HRC sticker on a binder, but you're not willing to strip off the hateful narratives they've told about us?  The man's doing it in a world that says a single kiss is too much, and the problem here is him?  Between people mired in their own hateful bitterness, backed up by institutional privileges and structural supports, and some guy having fun, you want to side with the former?

Look around you, look at the choice you have made.

I won't sit here anymore and listen to you parrot our oppressors.  I refuse.

You do not have to run naked with a rainbow flag cloak if that's not you.  Or you totally can if that's how you do.  But the point is to radically, audaciously, genuinely love each other.  I am not struggling for a world where we can resent each other equally.  I want for a world where we can embody James Baldwin's words, "Love him and let him love you.  Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?"  Be brave enough to want that.

I am pretty sure that "Teenage Dream" video has moved to the top second spot on the front page of Hulu solely because of me.  You are welcome, Darren Criss.  You may thank me with many kisses; I shall supply the footstool that is necessitated by how I would tower over you with my 5'8" self.

I just spent five minutes analyzing this picture to determine what makes her smilies cuter than others.  I made lots of samples on a Post-It note.  I think it is the largeness of the eyes, the wide set distance between them, and their nearness to the ends of the smile, creating the impression of a baby's wide, circular face.

Also, I figured out the difference between a chrysalis and a cocoon is more than that the former is made by butterflies and the latter by moths.  Cocoons are not the actual pupae, which is the hard exoskeleton, but rather, the silk case which holds the pupa.  I think this confirms my preference for moths over butterflies.

The lack of obvious perspective in this picture (OF A CATERPILLAR, DO NOT CLICK, YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE) makes the little bugger look the size of a koala, aka about half the size of Darren Criss.

I've also been analyzing this picture to figure out whether this was taken in a UMBC dorm room; the wall, bed, and desk fit, but those are also probably common.  I always doubt the judgement of men who are interested in me; there must be something terribly wrong.  Oh, God, they messaged the wrong person with a very similar username.  There must be a pneumaticfleshlight out there or something.

When I was in a French airport, this guy made eye contact with me and wouldn't look away and I worried over whether this was the Mediterranean eye contact as flirting or the Glaswegian eye contact as prepping for a fight.  What if my face is bleeding.  And if it is, which is worse: That my bleeding face horrified this cute guy, or that it's turning him on?

This is what I have been doing instead of this paper.  What looks like slacking off is actually very rapid processing and synthesis of information.  I promise.

No fucking words.

So, there is a short hallway in the Commons that leads into the Student Org Space, which is where we have the SGA Office and the Student Events Board Office.  The hallway walls were painted into chalkboards this year and this week, SEB finally chalked it to advertise upcoming events.

And guess what's there in one corner?

Tell ya wife
Tell ya children
Tell ya husband
They playing everybody

Are you for real?

So, we have a story about how a black woman was sexually assaulted in her own home, which becomes a story about how a black gay man said something in a funny way.  Where two white men take his words to turn it into a song.  How this became memetic is gross in itself.  The disproportionate sexual violence experienced by black women is erased enough, but to take it to the point where you're literally erasing "raping" and inserting another word to advertise campus events?

I am sitting in the Commons getting increasingly pissed off.

ETA: Here is a blog piece that goes deeper into how the appropriation and erasure occurs here.

This is my life.

1. Text Annie to see if Feminista Death Squad Night was happening.
2. Internet
3. Remember was waiting for response an hour later.
4. Text friend. Uncertain response, decided to just stay in and try to work.
5. Decide to make dinner instead of just eating more raisin bran.
6. Move stuff to room first.
7. Walk back and forth between bedroom and living room trying to remember where I put my iPod.
8. See it next to my computer, plug it in to recharge.
9. Internet
10. Remember dinner, go to kitchen, wonder what to make.
11. Come back to internet to ask Kyle whether to make pasta or eggs.
12. Internet
13. Remember was making dinner, ask Kyle again.
14. Go back to kitchen.
15. See eggs are out, put them back in fridge.
16. Remember mother called last night, promised to call next day.
17. Return to room to get phone, stopped to tell Kyle what I was doing
18. Internet
19. Blog about this.

This all started at 7.

I hate journalism.

So, by now, you've heard about the Rutgers student who killed himself after his roommate (and co) publicized him being with a guy?

The NYT piece originally had this sentence:

It wasn't immediately clear what Clementi's sexual orientation was, and a call asking the family's lawyer about it was not immediately returned Wednesday.

This is copy-pasted because I had an old version up that I copied to a friend's facebook.  I know it's not there now; it's been edited to this:

The lawyer has not responded to requests for comment on whether Clementi was open about his sexual orientation.

So, either New York Times actually thought it was appropriate to call the family's lawyer up to ask if he was actually the gay, or they thought it was appropriate to call to ask if he was open to his family about it and worded the sentence terribly at first.

Either way: What the actual fuck.

I also just noticed that they edited this sentence: "Coincidentally, the university on Wednesday was launching a new two-year Project Civility, designed to get students thinking about how they treat others."  You know what it used to say?  I don't have the actual sentence, but it used to indicate how Rutgers is in a state notable for being run by mob bosses and Jersey Shore (the latter in veiled terms), but it's been working on an unnamed two-year program to improve students' behavior.  Oh.

stir-fry

In this, I am like many ethnic stereotypes of mothers: When I hear people are unhappy, I want to make them food.

My kitchen became smoky as I made fried rice tonight, and I recalled this article about college students or college-educated kids moving into cheap apartments in Chinatown and complaining about feeling alienated by their neighbors who weren't the Model Minority chinks or the (half-white) Asian girlfriends of white hipsters.  They complained about the pervasive smells of fish and 'ethnic' cooking.

I was born in Maryland, right outside of 'the nation's capital', which is a phrase I would hear a lot in slogans on television and radio.  The marble memorials became a place I was more often just forced to visit as we showed visiting cousins around.  I resented the Air and Space Museum.

Though American from birth (though I spent much of my first year in Hong Kong), I was the son of immigrants and a shy boy, so I never really picked up a lot of things other kids took for granted.  I didn't get a lot of American traditions, but I also could not read Chinese characters or really follow the arcane Hong Kong movies or serials and I hated the taste of lotus paste in the moon cakes that came out around the autumn moon festival.

Part of the strangeness of neo-paganism for me was this reclamatory celebration of equinoxes and solstices, when these were already events to have big family dinners on.  I navigated a space between American and Chinese, which were separated identities.

It is hard to explain this: It is not that I vividly experienced and recognized this dissonance as a child.  My life was seamless in moving between school and my parents' home and my grandmother's.  But my life was also a strange mix of peering at the inscrutable lifestyles of my classmates with American families and playing by myself in the long hours at Maa Maa's house as my parents worked.

I found my own way to fill the time there and, later, at my own house where my maternal grandparents watched me.  I carried around massive books of dinosaurs and marine animals and filled notebooks with Pokémon of my own creation.  I played Sailor Moon or Power Rangers.  I did not really know about parties or sleepovers, but I knew all 151 Pokémon and I knew about sea anemones and I knew there was no such thing as brontosauruses because I knew someone got confused when they found an apatosaurus fossil.

And I never knew what a meatloaf really was or what it involved or why it was consumed until a few years ago.  Meatloafs are still strange to me.  Meanwhile, rice was an excruciatingly boring part of every dinner and I didn't understand how my classmates ate dinner or why rice was something that could be unusual or a 'favorite food'.  Maa Maa pursued me to eat the eyes of the fish on those weekends as my parents worked weddings, and my sister was always the one more willing to eat new things.

It never occurred to me that this guy who harassed me was racist.  He would talk about having called my home and my mother picked up to say,  "Flied lice!  Flied lice!"  It was annoying and I ignored him, but it didn't occur to me to categorize these actions as 'racist'.  They just were.  And my mother worked in an office; if anyone was picking up at home, it would be my father.

In time, I would become bitter at the dissonance. As I became tired of the Lincoln Memorial, I became tired of being unable to be American without the 'Asian dash'. And this anger turned inwards in something I only now recognize as 'internalized racism' and I wanted to be Not Chinese. I never recognized or thought about what I would be without my Chinese ethnicity, except a blank ethnicity means whiteness in our white supremacist society, and I think I understood that on a base level.

And it was also more than that.  "I hate being Chinese," I said to my mother once on one of my family's forced walks through the neighborhood to save us children from our fatness.  Her response was quiet and denying and ultimately irrelevant.  It was the summation of my fourteen-year-oldness.

It was me responding to the overwhelming nature of the world, of so many intersecting ways of being and living.  Solving being me.  It was responding to a home I was quietly, desperately needing to escape and to hating my body and to a society where it was so much easier being white and to being simultaneously in and out of the closet.

And in more time, I would come to settle in being a gay/queer Chinese American, with Hong Konger parents and villager grandparents. I would learn to excise my racialization as 'Asian' or this 'Chinese' that subsumed multiple East Asian identities into one ignorant term, my orientalization, my treatment in a racist society, all that from my cultural heritage. I would learn to use a wok and reconnect with a language that is clumsy from me.  How I began to get to this point is a different story, one that involves cemeteries and butterflies.

As the soy sauce quickly bubbled away in my wok, I relished it all.  I felt a wild desire to be living with good friends who will let me buy groceries for the household and cook for them all every night.  I wanted to feed people.  I have a brownie in the fridge that I plan to microwave, but tonight, I really desire a honey bun from my new favorite Chinese bakery hidden in Rockville.  Or a Portuguese egg tart.  Or one of their chocolate croissants.  I think I have to go put that brownie in the microwave now.

It is not about being proud of my heritage, though that is part of it, nor about 'balancing' separate identities.  It's about not having separate identities.  It's about taking all these social forces and identities and assumptions and hierarchies and oppressions and deconstructing them for myself, shedding them like a moth who has pupated for far too long.

I am not free of intersectionality, of course, or kyriarchy or privilege or oppression.  That is not what I mean.  More accurately, I can see it all more clearly, because I can begin to emerge from double consciousness.  What was dissonance becomes integration.  What was resentment becomes recognition.  I can see myself more clearly now, oppressor and oppressed and how neither excuses the other.

I should try to not make fried rice while in my pajamas.  The smell clings to my shirt, my skin.  Though I will launder this smell off, I viciously savor being that guy who fills the apartment and the hall with scary, foreign-smelling smoke.  And I am still that guy when I make IKEA meatballs and pasta in alfredo sauce tomorrow night.

Wiping Off the Whipped Cream: Unveiling the sexual power dynamics of Cazwell's "Ice Cream Truck"

The artist Cazwell is clearly forty years old but he's performing with a bunch of super sexualized twenty year olds, trying to pass himself off as such.  He also talks about the 'school yard' as though he were still in high school (or even younger?) when he is obviously far too old.  Cazwell indicates that he is available on the sidewalk "May to July", the months during which school is out, again implying that he is still a school boy.

The images of a child's xylophone, 'rainbow sprinkles', the iconic ice cream truck are also all part of the process of self-juvenilization.  The performers do not consume ice cream that is more typically considered for adults, but rather, those associated with ice cream trucks and children: red popsicles, ice cream pies, Drumsticks, watermelon Icees.  I am surprised there was not a red rocket popsicle.  There is a transparent veil of innocence over the abundant sexuality, from the obvious metaphors to the sexualization of the simple act of consuming ice cream.

Meanwhile, the song has an extended metaphor of ice cream = sex, using phallic popsicle imagery.  Cazwell persistently offers to buy the object of his affection 'ice cream', implying an imbalance within this sexual relationship.  Although he engages the object ("you") with a semblance of equal standing, in reality, he is the one in charge.  He insists, "Meet me at the ice cream truck [emphasis mine]."  He tells "you" to finish the ice cream before "it melts on the floor."  But in another verse, he talks about the object of his affections as a third party.  "You", 'he", it is all ultimately interchangeable as anonymous sexual objects.

The exploitative aspect of this pursuit is made more apparent through the examination of racialized dynamics.  Cazwell is a white man while many of the young men around him appear to be Latino, perhaps implying sex tourism where the image of the school yard is a metaphor for a sexual wonderland of young, nubile, tan flesh such as some ambiguous Latin American stop for the moneyed white man.  Cazwell's insistence on using his limited Spanish ("Uno, dos, tres, cuatro") indicates his shallow appreciation of the Latino sexual object.  And all the dancers are light-skinned, reflecting that, even as the Latino lover is fetishized, fair-skinned beauty is what is valorized among gay male culture.

The final image is whipped cream being wiped off a brown chest to reveal Cazwell's name tattooed over a nipple.  But examination of the video reveals that this tattoo does not appear on the artist's own chest, but rather, the flesh at the end is one of the brown dancers.  He has branded this silent dancer for himself.

This music video demonstrates the gay male pursuit of youth (conflated with perfection and desirability) through the commodified trading of sex.  If the aging gay man can obtain sex from a beautiful young man, he is essentially obtaining youth from the man, through validation of his own desirability.  And far from an equal exchange in this sexual relationship, the aging gay man predates on the object like a vampire, exerting dominance through his masked but undeniable age, his comparative wealth, his white privilege.