High Cholesterol

Overheard on my block tonight: "You act like a boy so I'm going to fight you like a boy."


Right now I am looking at this picture where I'm riding piggyback on a new friend. You can't see it in the picture but we are in front of maybe a hundred cheering queer people who are out in the park for a day of games, dress-up and socializing. We are on our way to collect a tiny prize for our field day team as part of a very promising evolutionary current in the local community ecosystem. Suddenly I'm thinking back to a certain day in high school. After school I was walking to my car and somebody threw a rock that hit me on the left hip and bounced off. It was about the size of a baseball, probably a chunk of broken concrete and gravel. That shit was everywhere where I grew up, paving a new parking lot or strip mall that would go unoccupied. Somebody threw a rock at my crotch. I never saw who threw it but I wonder where are they now? Sometimes I still think about all the people who convinced me to feel so alone and subhuman that I wanted to kill myself when I was little more than a kid. Now I have my share of problems but my life turned out all right. How did the conformity you so passionately enforced work out for you? I imagine your cholesterol is sky high and your wife left you and your house was foreclosed and you lost all your hair. I wonder if they do anything differently now in my old high school, if the teachers and children there have heard about Lawrence King or Sakia Gunn. I think about how fortunate I was to suffer only the most minor of forms of violence, the rocks, spit and insults. It would be great to one day feel more compassion for people in my past, but for the moment I just know I need to release all this rage I tried to swallow for so long.

Shit List Day 2: Gays Aspiring to Marriage

The day after the NY marriage decision, the Michael Kors store had HRC logos all over their window. Behind the window was a display of wedding cakes topped with bride-bride and groom-groom decorations. At the dyke march I saw lots of great subversive signs, but right outside the Michael Kors store I saw somebody with “Cuomo-sexual” written on their back. The juxtaposition embodied much of what has been troubling me.

Could you be more of an unquestioning minion of the state? Could you more openly discredit the hard work our people did in favor of praising an opportunistic (and social service-cutting) governor? I could have grabbed this person by the neck, repeated “no” very firmly, and smacked them on the behind with a rolled up newspaper. Queer people! Please do not behave like lap dogs. We are not on this earth to form a market group or as a voting block for inadequately progressive politicians/corporate shills. Have some self-respect. We’re not here merely to vote or make campaign donations to Cuomo. I could have broken the window at Michael Kors and shit in their display.

Even as a child I wanted more relational options than the two I was taught: married or old maid. I realize that some of my more difficult feelings about gay marriage go all the way back to being indoctrinated to believe that if I didn’t get married then I would die alone. From my earliest memories, I rejected this dichotomy. I knew there had to be something better.

Some gay people want to get married, often for child custody, citizenship and/or healthcare, and sometimes for romantic reasons. Many of us do not want to get married. Of course our marriages should be recognized, but that still doesn’t make marriage something to aspire to. Nothing will convince me it is a good idea to force my most intimate relationships into more conventional frameworks; I am much too proud of how hard we work at breaking free from monogamy, jealousy, possession and patriarchy. I enjoy my queer relationships, writing, art, music, humor, fashion, films, house parties, political activism, made-up families, academic theory and counter culture. I love the queer culture boom happening right now. I hope a million new organizations, collectives and households form. Bottom line is that I like my friendships and love and culture as they are, totally queer. And I feel no less protective of this community than any other doberman would.

Number 19

One evening I started to develop intense pain on the left side of my jaw. I went to bed hoping I could sleep it off and woke up needing to see the dentist immediately. He took some x-rays and could not find anything wrong. He tapped on individual teeth with various instruments but everything hurt. He asked me if anything happened, if I fell or anything hit me in the face. Nothing like that happened. The dentist thought maybe it was just an infection so I got some antibiotics and hoped for the best.

A couple days later, I was back. Still no sign of tooth decay, and nothing wrong on the x-ray. My dentist sent me for a second opinion, to a specialist. I went to the specialist's office by the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge and she took an x-ray and examined my mouth. She said #19 was cracked and asked me if anything happened, if I got hit in the mouth or got into an accident or anything. I said no. She said, "Even a long time ago? Even when you were a little kid?"

Well, yeah, when I was little, my brother punched me in the face. But that must have been something like 25 years ago at this point. Was it on the left side? Fortunately fist fighting was not a regular occurrence, so I remember it clearly. I had my back against the inside of the front door of the house. My brother is left-handed, and I blocked 3 predictable lefts in a row, but he surprised me with a right to the jaw. That would be my left side. He is seven years older than me. I must have been around 10 or 12 years old at the most. I remember not feeling anything. My mom was there. She took me for a walk. She didn't prevent it from happening and she didn't discuss it with me afterward. We left my brother at home and went for a walk.

At some point during that walk I realized my mouth was throbbing. I didn't say anything. There was no doctor or dentist visit. My mom, brother and I acted as if it never happened. The privacy of the patriarchal household allows for an infinite number of atrocious events to go unseen and unregulated. Often I am sincerely grateful that things never got worse than they were, because there was absolutely nothing stopping them from escalating. The possibility was always there.

The second opinion dentist said I needed a root canal and more likely an extraction. She said some other things that didn’t register after the word "extraction," and put an x-ray into an envelope for me to bring back to my dentist. So I wandered out of her office back into Chinatown, thinking about all this personal history.  My own dentist couldn’t see me immediately, so I had some time to spare for walking and thinking. I walked further downtown to my dentist, whose office is near City Hall, and he still felt reluctant to drill because the x-ray didn't actually show anything. He said once we open the tooth, there is no turning back, and he couldn’t live with himself if he opened a live tooth. (Really, Dr. Chen is a great dentist and quite a perfectionist.) But after some consideration, we it was root canal time.

Drilling down, he found that the tooth was completely dead inside and had been for a very long time. When I got punched, #19 cracked down the center from front to back, which is why the crack didn't show on the x-ray. My dentist explained that when we are young, the body is very resilient. "Your tooth was broken, and your body created a seal around it. First the damage was contained and then the tooth died. It was still functional until getting this infection." I am convinced the infection happened now because at age 36 I finally have sufficient strength to allow this injury to see the light of day. The tooth had to be literally opened up and exposed in order to be repaired. So I have to open up too and acknowledge what happened. Christopher punched me in the face hard enough to break a tooth.

I learned that a root canal is a process and not a single procedure, so I was walking around for about a month with this old injury opened wide.  The dentist would check about once a week for whether the infection had cleared, each time putting some antibiotic powder into the drilled out tooth and covering it up with a bitter wax barrier.  Finally when the infection was gone, he sealed up the roots and the top of the tooth with care that the seal hold the two halves together. I’m almost grateful that I had to go around for a while, conscious of this opening, part of a history that needs to see the light of day in order to heal properly.  It’s still in question as to whether this tooth will last long enough to get a crown or whether it will eventually need to be extracted, but knock on wood, it’s doing pretty well right now.

When I told this story to my team at work, somebody asked light-heartedly if I was going to call my brother. I responded that he is in a residential mental institution. This is accurate but not a response to her question. The real response is that I won’t call because I no longer have a relationship with him. If he were out in the world today, I would similarly choose not to have any relationship with him, and in fact take measures to prevent him from getting my contact information. It was only when I was younger and living with my parents that I had no choice in the matter.  When I was in my early teens, him being institutionalized relieved me of the burden of having any relationship with my brother. I could attribute the lack of relationship to being institutionalized. But at this point it is my decision and I know it is the right one. I don’t need the mental institution as an excuse, and I don’t constantly worry about him potentially being released the way I did during his early years there.

My brother was hospitalized a number of times through out my childhood. Each time he was discharged from the mental hospital after a short stay, we didn’t talk about it.  He would be gone for maybe one or two weeks and my mom and dad and I acted as if nothing had happened when he got back.  I didn't get any explanation for why he was there and I didn't know what treatment he was getting and I didn't know what was expected to change as a result of the hospitalization. I heard terms like “brain damage, learning disability, manic depression.” Somehow I knew I wasn’t supposed to ask. There were always some topics that were taboo.

After these periodic hospitalizations, no one asked my brother what it was like and no one said welcome back. Nothing marked the event or encouraged any improvements in his mental health, nothing acknowledged what he experienced or ostensibly got out of the psychiatric care he was getting, nothing changed in anyone’s behavior or relationship to him. So surprise, his mental health did not improve. I only remember a sense of relief when he was gone. Years later, after he was gone and my mother was herself hospitalized for depression it was the same pattern again, no welcome home, nothing discussed.  But this time we met with the doctor and he said we should be “supportive.” I don’t think we knew what that word meant.  I was a teenager and honestly did not know what it looked, felt or smelled like to be supportive. I was literally puzzled over that word.

It’s not that I think talking about my brother or mom’s mental health would have made them better or would have made my life better. But I do believe banning talk of them made things worse. As a kid, I wanted to bring stuff up all the time but was threatened with trips to the psychiatrist myself whenever I tried. So I became very adverse to bringing up problems directly or asking for what I need in relationships, and this aversion kept me out of the psychiatrist’s office and kept me on the self-styled “sane” side of the family with my father.  This so-called sanity was characterized by silence, isolation and rugged individualism, all qualities associated with conventional masculinity. I became the strong/silent type, an unhealthy archetype if there ever was one.

The reluctance to speak came with me when I moved away from my parents.  And it became a strong contributing factor in two subsequent relational train wrecks: First when my ex-girlfriend brought a straight white monogamous male into our queer poly household and I did not take up the fact that his values and behavior were totally out of sync with the vision for our house. Second when she started to demonstrate values and behaviors herself that were in direct conflict with what was once our shared vision of queer utopian kindness, honesty and responsibility. Both times I waited until the situation was a total crisis to clearly and directly set limits and expectations for how I want my life to run, specifically for the way people can and cannot behave towards me. Since I grew up with somebody whose behavior was profoundly unacceptable, and my desire for things to be different was pathologized, it is no surprise that part of me believed I should just tough out other people’s mendacity. This undercurrent of silence is still present, but now a bigger and louder part of me is committed to dealing explicitly, even strategically, with the unacceptable shit in all areas of my life. Mendacity!

My brother was a minor the first time he was arrested.  He and my mom and I were eating at Burger King in the mall. The two of them were fighting and he flung everything off the table on to the floor and stormed out. I can't remember or imagine what I thought of the whole thing, but remembering this incident makes me also think about how the two of them fought constantly.  Something happened with the security guards and the police were called, the mall being outside the privacy of the patriarchal family home.  He spent the night in jail, and I don’t know exactly what happened but I know “resisting arrest” was one of the charges.  Within a few days he was briefly hospitalized and then released.

One event that stands out in my mind was a time he came home with broken glasses and a bloody broken nose. No explanation given. It turned out he had been to see a girl that night. What registered for me immediately was that a girl had prevailed in fight with him. Only on second thought did I consider the reason she resorted to hitting him that hard or more likely with some object. He often talked about what he wanted to do to girls. I cannot think of any other time in my life I have been so happy to see a person physically injured.

When my brother turned 18, my father kicked him out of the house.  My father had been very vocal about counting down the days and when it finally happened, I was so relieved. Shortly after my brother got his own place, he was arrested again.  He had some kind of fight with his landlady, a fight that resulted in her son calling the police on him. This time the court system did not release him and he was hospitalized instead. As far as I know, he has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Eventually he went to the institution where he resides to this day.  I don't know the name of it and I have never visited him and I do not plan to visit him. For years I felt like I couldn't tell anyone about this decision because they would think I was heartless, or maybe because I believed that I was heartless. The broken tooth gave me a reason to look back through adult eyes and really understand for the first time the reasons for my decision to end my sibling relationship entirely.

 

Catherine Opie, Girlfriends

Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of never before seen work by photographer Catherine Opie... “Girlfriends” combines brand new color photographs with a selection of black and white photographs from Opie’s archive that have never been printed. In this new series she explores the nature of butch-dyke identity through portraits including those of public figures such as k.d. lang and Eileen Myles as well as friends and partners who have appeared in her work throughout the years.

The photographs positioned directly across from the entrance are of Daniela Sea and Kate Moennig.  These actors are familiar from the L Word, so anyone coming in to the gallery to see lesbian representation is given an easy entry point in faces they recognize from TV.  In her photo, Daniela Sea presents as herself, not her character, maybe to remind the viewer we may be seeing actors but we are not looking at fiction.  My initial experience of this part of the gallery was an urge to hurry through, thinking to myself, I have looked at these faces enough, I don’t need to look at them here.  But I wonder how more straight-leaning art world visitors felt about these two.  I wonder if Daniela Sea and Kate Moennig served as sentinels of the portal into Cathy Opie’s particular variety of queer representation.  Maybe for some visitors, these two faces provided a gentle welcome and permission to stare at the butches in the gallery.  For me, I pretty much hurried past them to get to the good stuff.

Getting stared at/glared at/looked over/given the hairy eyeball is something of a foundational experience of being butch.  And yet, so is invisibility.  Here in the gallery we are allowed the pleasure of staring at butches, evening staring long enough to be considered rude or inappropriate.  Further for some is the pleasure of both looking and being seen.  The contradiction of dirty looks and invisibility is stirred up here.  But there is more at play than technically excellent photography and queer representation. As the gallery grew more and more crowded on opening night, the room with filled butches looking at butches looking at pictures of butches, like a hall of mirrors or an alternate universe.

The combination of new and old photographs show the same people younger and older, showing the viewer something rather personal of the subjects. In our lives, the people we are close to age along side us, and when Cathy Opie shows us the same subjects over the course of years, we feel a connection to the subjects.  Maybe we feel the kind of connection we do to friends and family.  It gives the show a kind of intimacy and familiarity.  I have never met Pig Pen.  I watched Pig Pen in Hallelujah, a documentary about Ron Athey, I had seen Cathy Opie’s pictures of Pig Pen at the Guggenheim.  The stunning photo of Pig Pen at the center of the gallery stopped me in my tracks.  I felt simultaneously like I was seeing this person for the first time and like I was seeing an old friend... whom I’ve never met. Opie’s portraits often show queers as royalty surrounded by bold colors, but this one shows a saint with slightly bowed head and glowing backlight. (Image below, with my snapshot from opening night.  Notice the little bit of space gallery goers give this portrait, maybe a little subconscious reverence, maybe just a gap in the crowd.)

Many of the pictures feature butch people in wide-open spaces, outdoors, with a visible horizon.  A vertical person within a horizontally infinite space.  Butch standing by the ocean, in the woods, or mountains.  The spaciousness is so vast that much of what is pictured is sky reaching back out of site, woods filling the entire frame, a road trailing off into the horizon, the ocean trailing off to meet the sky.  The subject is at home in the frame, and it gives the impression they could move limitlessly in any direction.  There is this sense of freedom to being the only person in the frame, existing only in relationship to oneself, able to go near and far or anywhere in this wide-open space.

There is a room of all black and white pictures where the point of reference is Robert Mapplethorpe.  I can’t really remember exactly how I first heard about Robert Mapplethorpe, but I have loved him since high school.  The idea of revealing such classical beauty in expressions of sexual perversion was as exciting to me then as it is now. No one could deny that his photography was captivating and beautiful, but of course there was always controversy attached to his work.  A friend with a more liberal mom had the book Mapplethorpe, published in 1992, a year before my graduation from high school.  The book is enormous and heavy in more ways than one, and I studied it in a celibate teenage stupor until it became synonymous with queerness in my mind.  So the black and white room added yet another familiar touch point in the gallery for me.  (See the images below, Mapplethorpe's Self Portrait 1978, followed by my snapshot of one of Opie's self portraits from the black and white room.  Love the whips!)

The first time I saw photography by Cathy Opie was at the Whitney Biennial in 1995.  I was visiting the museum with my college aesthetics class, professor included, and had no idea about what we were going to see.  There was the now-classic self-portrait where she is wearing an S/M hood and has the word “pervert” freshly cut into her chest, still bloody.  Her shoulders and arms are crowded with needles piercing her skin.  There was also a picture of Ron Athey in thigh-high boots, and I recognized him immediately from his interview in Details magazine, also in 1995.  I studied that interview and still have the magazine where he talked about sexuality, pain and transcendence.  (It would be another ten years before I was fortunate enough to attend one of his performances, see image below, a treasured digital keepsake of mine!)  This interview and Opie’s photographs provided me with a window into the world I knew I needed to move into and set up my permanent residence.

When I went to see Catherine Opie: American Photographer at the Guggenheim in 2008, there were some self-portraits displayed together: The infamous Pervert picture. Another one where she is nursing, with the word "pervert" visible as a well-healed yet perfectly legible white scar.  (Admittedly difficult to see in the digital image below, but very clear in person.)  In a third photo she has her back to the camera to show a fresh cutting, similar to a child’s drawing of a family with the house and the parents and the sun shining, only both parents are drawn with skirts.  Reviewers seemed to think the proximity of these pictures represented some sort of progression, but I think it does quite the opposite.  The desire for family is present in the bloody cutting, and the perversion is visible in the image of motherhood. Here, I thought, is a vast and expansive observation about being a lesbian.  There is no contradiction, no before-and-after.  Our lives include all this and more.

I have never met Cathy Opie.  I attended a talk she gave at the NYC homo center during her show at the Guggenheim, and I saw her talking with friends at the Girlfriends opening.  It is curious that someone I do not know personally could evoke such a powerful sense of familiarity and inclusion.  I imagine that speaks to the experience of being part of a queer community that at its best shares more than individual relationships.   

Abigail Ottoman

Sloan: How old were you when you came out?

Abigail: I was always attracted to boys and girls, and for a while I thought everyone was like that. At eighteen, I knew I was queer, but I only came out to a few people. I had my first girlfriend at nineteen and came out to my family. It was horrible; my parents cornered me and asked me lots of questions. My mom was really disappointed and things were tense for a while, but she and I have continued discussing sexuality for the last fourteen years, and she’s come a long way. Now I take her to queer film screenings and Gay Pride.

SL: What was it like to be queer then?

AO: Since I was under 21, I wasn’t able to go to gay bars.  The only other way to meet queer people was through activism, so I joined this social/political group at the William Way center call Grass Roots Queers. The people were at least a few years older than I was, so, I didn’t really make friends but everyone was very caring toward me. I usually ended up collecting tickets and doing this and that at events. They wouldn’t let me drink at the parties, so I was very conscious that they saw me as a kid, but they were very supportive.  There wasn’t any way to look for people my age who were queer except at school, and I went to a commuter college in the suburbs that was pretty straight, though I did meet my first girlfriend there.

SL: Coming out and becoming an activist are almost inseparable experiences for me too.  Was there a gay student organization at your college? 

AO: There was a listing for a gay organization in the campus directory, but when I tried to find out about meetings, I found out it was inactive.

SL: It was the same at my college.  There would be a table set up for the gay group at campus events, but no one would stand behind it or even near it.  How did you go from being a young queer activist to being a professional dominatrix?

AO: I was looking for some kink and glamor. I did it because I felt like it, and had no idea that I would continue doing it for so many years. It just seemed like something fun to try.

“How did you get into this?” is something that everybody has asked- clients and acquaintances alike. I think the question is more interesting than the pat story I’ve told hundreds of times, so I’ll spare you. While everyone’s origin story is unique, there are basically two types of story: I took up sex work from a place of empowerment and curiosity or I took up sex work out of desperation and powerlessness. People want to know which category my story fits into so that they can either comfortably ask for titillating details or feel scandalized and superior. It isn’t a neutral question.

SL: Good point.  Tell me about your shows at Charlie’s Dream?

AO: Charlie’s Dream was a sex emporium, where you could buy movies, magazines, sex toys in the front, then in the back you could see girls in a peep show, and there was a bar with a stage for sex shows, and then there was a theater where we did our show on stage.  It was small stage with theater seating.

Our shows were very dramatic, each one had a very specific role play theme and yet usually ended the same way, with some sort of dildo action whether they began as I would be wearing a diaper being baby sat by a mean babysitter or I would be a patient in some sort of sex hospital or what have you.  Office and school scenes were my favorites.  It was me and another woman who is still in the business and we did our show on Saturday afternoons for about six months.  Our last show was a vampire theme.  We used red lights and I was covered in fake blood and I drank all these shots of vodka before the show.

SL: I loved Charlie’s Dream. I will never forget that place. I think it was kind of my dream too.  But while that show lasted 6 months or so, you spent years doing sessions with clients in various venues.   What is something you learned from this larger experience?

AO: One of the most important- and least talked about- parts of sex work is doing consultations with prospective clients. For me, it involved walking into a tiny consultation room, sitting down across from a complete stranger, and starting a conversation that was intimate yet professional. I had a few minutes to find out (or figure out) a client’s fantasy and immediately match his enthusiasm for it, while expressing professional competence, confidence, and sexiness in a way that was calculated to appeal to that particular client. Being able to communicate well by listening, making eye contact, asking questions, and smiling is more important than knowing intricate bondage or how to use every piece of equipment possible. Expertise is important for maintaining a regular clientele, but you have to have communication skills first and foremost.

SL: What was the work itself like for you?

AO: I did dirty things all day and intermittently hung out with a bunch of other women who were into hanging out and doing dirty things.

I was just thinking about this today-- I collaborated with people on creating situations in which they could focus solely on sexual pleasure. I got to be with so many different people while they were having an orgasm, which is a really special time to have with people. I didn’t have to deal with any other aspects of their lives or emotions, just their desire for and expression of pleasure.

I was very choosy about the kind of clients and sessions I wanted, and I was lucky enough to make enough money that way.  I preferred some clients to others and some activities to others, but I was very aware of that. I was lucky in that I was able to be choosy enough to tell clients that I didn’t think I was right for their fantasy if I didn’t want to do what they wanted. Of course, it wasn’t always so simple; sometimes I needed to take clients I didn’t like or connect with, but I was careful about making compromises I could live with, which I imagine is part of every job. I got to sit down with people and talk about how to create the most fulfilling hour of their day, and then carry out the plan. To spend my workday that way was amazing.

SL: What kinds of things happened in your sessions?

AO: Fetishes, fantasy role-play, bondage, dominance and submission, etc.  I did things that are as weird, disgusting, sadistic, and humiliating as anything you can think of, but I was always focused on honoring my clients’ wishes as respectfully as possible.  Sometimes it also meant doing very silly or vanilla activities.

There are so many ways to explain what professional BDSM is. People always want to know if it’s prostitution, and every dominatrix says no, but it’s actually a really challenging question. There’s a judicial checklist of financial and physical situations that in various combination are illegal, but the items on the list are extremely vague, so one session you might be doing something that is considered prostitution and the next you may merely be committing tax evasion.

I could give you a long list of alternately titillating and disgusting activities, but I’d rather say that I worked with clients on negotiating and fulfilling their (often secret) desires. Feeling pleasure may be easy, but expressing the truth about what you desire- talking about what you want, how you want it, and what kind of person you want it to be with, can be very difficult for people. We’re taught that a very narrow range of feelings, thoughts, sensations, and activities are acceptable. Everybody is turned on by something that others might find strange.

ACT UP NEW YORK: ACTIVISM, ART, AND THE AIDS CRISIS 1987-1993

The exhibition chronicles New York’s AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) through an examination of compelling graphics created by various artist collectives that populated the group, including Gran Fury, Silence=Death Project, Gang, and Fierce Pussy. The exhibition also features the premiere of the ACT UP Oral History Project, a suite of over 100 video interviews with surviving members of ACT UP New York that offer a retrospective portal on a decisive moment in the history of the gay rights movement, 20th-century visual art, our nation’s discussion of universal healthcare, and the continuing HIV/AIDS epidemic. The exhibition ACT UP New York provides an opportunity to reinvigorate a debate around the realities of HIV/AIDS today, and about the links between visual art, political activism, health, and human rights.

In October I went to Cambridge and saw the unprecedented exhibition ACT UP NEW YORK: ACTIVISM, ART, AND THE AIDS CRISIS 1987-1993.   I took a lot of pictures in order to include them here as a treat for friends who are too far away or otherwise unable to make the trip.  I feel so grateful that I was able to visit and fortunate to know both co-directors of the ACT UP Oral History Project through my involvement with MIX NYC.  I am not sure that I would have been aware of the exhibit otherwise.

On the way to Cambridge I was thinking back to the time I called in to the Brian Lehrer radio show and talked to the woman who screened the calls that day, World AIDS Day.  I was not on the air, but I was telling her that Brian Lehrer has been talking for 20 minutes about whether or not the “stigma of AIDS” has decreased without once mentioning homophobia, without naming the fact that Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome was originally called Gay Related Immune Deficiency.  I was literally choking on the words, saying this was all wrong, historically inaccurate, an inexcusable omission.  Where else do we think that stigma came from?  She said she would let Brian know.  I am no expert on this history but at least I know what I remember...

A central theme of the exhibition is the intersection of art and activism, and much of the exhibit amounts to an archive of visual activism and oral history.  The exhibit spans two separate galleries. The first gallery contains the ACT UP Oral History Project and some large-scale visual art, including a fabulously wheat pasted women’s bathroom by Fierce Pussy.  The upstairs gallery has a timeline of milestones, films installed on a loop with a single bench to sit and watch, and a display of posters and stickers.  There are also some prints of the original posters available for visitors.  The film installation includes work by DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activists) and United in Anger: A History of ACT UP by Jim Hubbard, co-founder of both MIX NYC and the ACT UP Oral History Project.

Upstairs, I got totally caught up in the film installation and found myself watching it in its entirety.  One of the films included an expose on the biased media coverage of the 1989 ACT UP and WHAM! (Women’s Health Action and Mobilization) Stop the Church action at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Watching this transported me back in time.  It made me realize that even within the incredibly homophobic coverage of the action, enough truth squeaked through to have a powerful impact on my life’s direction.  This is no overstatement.  I was a kid and learned about the die-in from TV, but even with this very condemning media coverage I still identified with the protesters.  At 15 in my parent’s house, I came to life for that brief footage. It was one of those pivotal life moments.  

At the exhibit here in the present, I learned that the media got this footage from a participating activist, edited the hell out of it and excised reproductive freedom entirely from their coverage.  But even in that limited, incomplete footage, I had seen my queer future, and shivered in my suburban closet.  Through the haze of media disapproval and selective reporting, I saw not only the commitment and integrity of the protesters but also what they were up against.  I was an angry teenage girl seeing people stand up to those sexist old fucks in the church, confronting Cardinal O’Connor as nothing more than a creepy old man who had so much say over the stories we tell ourselves about sex.  He had so much say over what little conversation there was about HIV/AIDS.  Seeing Cardinal O’Connor step over bodies was the perfect non-metaphor for what was happening.  This action was more than symbolic, it was literally true.

For context, three years prior to the Stop the Church action, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote: “When civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase.”  I heard a portion of that statement in one of the videos, and I felt compelled to track down the exact quote and read it a couple times in an effort to understand the depth of the immorality we were and are up against. 

A time line covers a full wall in the upstairs gallery.  Reading it filled in some gaps in my memory and many more gaps in what I even knew about in the first place.  This history is hardly collected anywhere and certainly not taught to anyone.  Seeing the time line was more than informative, it was powerful.  One of many new things I learned was how in 1992, ACT UP held a political funeral in DC and a procession of 11 people scattered the ashes of their loved ones on the White House lawn.  This event was noted on the wall and there was film footage too, and it really blew me away.  I have been trying unsuccessfully to think of a comparable moment in history.  The only image that comes to my mind is the Memphis sanitation worker strike where some carried signs that read "I am a man."  In both cases people were demanding their humanity be recognized and thereby confronting the deepest roots of the specific injustice at hand.

1981

1991

I watched some footage of a group decision-making process in the midst of an action. A group of protesters at City Hall was trying to come to consensus about whether or not to block traffic to the Brooklyn Bridge.  Some were ready to go, others wanted to wait for more media to arrive to maximize coverage.  Showing even such a minor disagreement is critical to preserving a real history.  There was also some footage of non-violent civil disobedience training.  It was great to see this collaboration documented, to keep away the mythologizing of spontaneous demonstration when there is so much planning, training, debate, and plain old hard work that goes in to making art, protests and demonstrations.

Downstairs, the ACT UP Oral History Project is set up with 14 monitors each displaying a different set of full-length interviews for a total of 102 interviews, many over an hour long.  Each monitor is set up with 2 pairs of headphones and two seats.  The arrangement lends itself to listening with a friend.  The set-up itself seems to request that you share the interview and enter into a conversation, rather than passively listening or keeping what you hear to yourself.  It suggests not only learning but also engagement.

The interviews contain personal stories and the larger story of collective action making a difference.  In one interview I was watching, the person being interviewed recalls a specific action at a Republican fund raiser.   Off-screen interviewer Sarah Schulman, co-founder of both MIX NYC and the ACT UP Oral History Project, asks questions like, "Who else was there, what were their names?"  With this line of questioning, we are hearing not only one individual’s history but also learning our shared history, who we lost, what they did, what ideas they had, what art they made.  And we witness their grief.

The oral histories are now available to students to use in their research projects and available for scholarly study through Harvard University.  And I have some hope that the attention of this particular school has the potential to act as an intervention into academic amnesia about the HIV/AIDS crisis, or maybe even staunch the flow of our history from being drained away by the likes of national public radio.  Maybe amnesia is not the right word, it is more deliberate ignorance of both recent history and the current crisis.   The preservation of these oral histories is in direct defiance of the way our lives and realities are so often ignored. In this way, it seems to be a direct continuation of the work of ACT UP in demanding to be seen, acknowledged and recognized as people.

The protest posters and other art in the exhibit detail a clear connection between healthcare, AIDS activism and reproductive freedom.  The connection is rarely made explicit today, so it was very refreshing to see it plainly demonstrated that when the state attempts to control our sexuality through the restriction of any form of healthcare or information related to sex, we are NOT free.  One of my favorite aspects of the politics represented here is the refusal to compromise on how everything is connected to everything else.  The fact that so much of the art was created by collectives speaks to this sense of connection.  In many different ways the artists and activists declare that our lives, our bodies and our sexuality are deserving of respect, honor and care.  Not just some of us, not just the wealthy ones, not just the monogamous couples, not just those of us with kids.  This message of connection and inclusion could not be more relevant to the current healthcare legislation that would exclude funding for abortion. 

In the words of Gran Fury, “Corporate Greed, Government Inaction, and Public Indifference make AIDS a political crisis.”  ACT UP could have taken up any one of these strands to fight against, but chose to go after all of them and more, all the while exposing the racism, sexism and homophobia at the center of the crisis.  All the art and documentation in this exhibit points to the possibility of working on the details and the big picture all at the same time.  The group affected changes in both the law and the culture.  I was really struck by how the activists could see and define the roots of a crisis in real time, right as it was unfolding.  ACT UP took on not only the church, not only the government, not only the pharmaceutical industry, but also the belief systems in our culture that perpetuate and permit the deaths of huge numbers of people at the so-called margins.  All these documents, posters, interviews and stickers comprise a legacy, a legacy of values like responsibility, loyalty and commitment.


The feeling I took away from the exhibit was nothing less than a moral obligation to continue to work in the same way, by identifying the root causes of injustice and going after them while at the same time not losing track of the real world details that need to be addressed on a daily basis.  The feeling mirrored the time I saw the Stop the Church action on the evening news 20 years ago, but this time there was also a rare sense of external recognition of my cultural identity as queer person.  The disapproving lens was gone, temporarily lifted to reveal a space full of visible, audible expressions of who we are, what we do and how we love.  The exhibit provides a mirror where we actually show up as a community with some shared values and shared history, demanding to be fully recognized as human beings without any qualifications, without trotting out today's tired argument that we are fully human because of how similar we are to straight people, because we have jobs and go shopping, etc.  No "because" at all.  Just respect.

National Equality March

During the 1993 gay March on Washington, I was just finishing high school and knew I was queer but was years away from coming out. My history class had a trip to DC immediately after the march and I remember stealing furtive glances at all the queers who were still lingering around town. My class went to observe congress and I set off the metal detector with my steel toe boots. Jesse Helms was on the floor of the Senate and I already despised him, for his contempt for people with AIDS and for generally being a racist shit. At the time, it seemed like more than half of everything in the media about queer people were quotes from Jesse Helms, railing against Robert Mapplethorpe and fighting against funding for AIDS research. Those are the two things I remember from my high school class trip to DC, Jesse Helms and homos.

When the 2000 March came around, I was out of the closet and living in a queer household in Philly, preparing to move to NYC with my two girlfriends. The “Millennium March” was organized top-down by the conservative and assimilationist Human Rights Campaign. It was lacking a clear political agenda and had corporate sponsors out the ass. Notice how even the name “Millennium March” describes neither the people marching nor the reason for the march. The main event was a huge concert to raise money for HRC. There was no question in my mind that I would not be in attendance. I wrote and circulated a zine criticizing the whole thing as a distraction from our real movement, our local work, and the connections and intersections between queers and other marginalized people.

And now 2009, another gay Equality March on DC. HRC was just one of many participating group this year, so I briefly considered going. I even felt kind of guilty about not going. Maybe I missed something historic. From what I read in advance about the National Equality March there was a lot going on and even though HRC was present, lots of smaller groups were also hosting workshops and many individuals were scheduled to speak. The platform included multiple issues, and activists I respect were involved. So I felt favorably about the March, at least more than I had in 2000. Maybe it would have been inspirational and refreshing to see committed activists from around the country.

Then I saw seven pictures from the March featured in the NY Times. Two of them really hit me hard. The first shows marchers with home made signs bearing the message: “Just like you! Equality Now!” This depresses me because sameness should never be the qualifying factor for being considered equal. Equal does not mean identical. “We worship and parent. Just like you!” What if we don’t? I do not worship and I do not parent. “Just like you” is an inherently unfair and dehumanizing measure, like “normal” or “regular.” And who exactly is the “you” here? The “you” is some imaginary idealized person living in a fictional family structure that is a reality for only a tiny minority of people in this country, gay, straight or otherwise. The “you” is some person who only exists on TV, but hardly even there anymore. Liberals talk about valuing diversity, a word boils that down to diverse, as in diverge, as in differ, as in different as in NOT just like you. Respect for differences... A revised sign: Nothing like you! Equality now!

A second picture from the NY Times featured a guy with a sign that read “Obama- Where’s MY change?” This guy snapped me out of my anger at the people in the pictures and made me realize I was actually angry at the newspaper itself. The Times must have been searching for the single most asinine message at the March. When they found this guy, they took his picture and featured it as one of just seven images selected to represent the day. The Times has an enormous power in choosing which images are seen and thereby influencing how we are represented and perceived. They first chose a message of assimilation and followed it with a message of self-centered entitlement. The accompanying article was no better, quoting a few folks from the crowd, failing to mention the many workshops, caucuses and speakers at the event. I was taken in at first, falling into my routine critique of the mainstream LGBT movement for aiming low, for mistaking marriage for progress, for being exclusionary, self-centered, entitled.... Until I saw this picture and became severely pissed off by the media representation of my people! This time I am not buying it, I do not believe the closeted/apologist “Just like you” and I do not believe the narcissist “Where’s My Change” dude. Sure these folks are real, but the NY Times trivializes our larger struggle by spotlighting only the most superficial messages. The editors show queers their opinion of us through what they select and what they exclude from being fit to print, and we should hold them accountable for the absence of substance in their coverage of our movement.

Imagine that the Times had quoted Urvashi Vaid’s speech as the message of the March.Imagine that instead of the where’s-my-change guy, the Times used Urvashi’s words to represent us. Here is the movement I know and love: “I'm not just here to stand up as a lesbian. I'm here as a woman. I'm here as an immigrant. I'm here against racism. I'm here for health care for all. I'm here for freedom of expression. I'm here to change the status quo."

School, Part 3

In middle school, I was very conflicted between wanting to fit in and wanting to be myself.  I just wanted to wear military surplus clothes all the time but I feared the consequences of emphasizing my masculinity.  I was already butch enough that I could not get through a single school day without my gender being commented upon by someone.  I developed a crush on an older girl.  She had short hair, wore camouflage pants to school and still managed to have friends.  I didn’t see how it was possible.

At my mother’s insistence, I attended weekly religious classes at a Lutheran church.  The class was a miserable collection of pre-teens, every last one of us enduring the drudgery because of our parents.  I doubt there was a single kid in that class who actually believed in god.  At the end of a year of old testament education, one of the this boys in the class asked me with sincere curiosity, “So why did your parents give you a girl’s name?”  Sometimes I tried to make light of these situations.  And every time something like this happened, I wondered: Why is it that when somebody gets your gender wrong they are never the ones who look stupid? 

What I learned in middle school were rules and taboos.  There are rules for being a man and there are rules for being a woman.  And then there is this big fat taboo against ambiguity.  I understood that my gender issue was unspeakable because the pronoun accidents and misunderstandings were never addressed directly.   In a 7^th grade math class, a substitute teacher asked me, “Are you in the right seat?  A girl is supposed to be sitting there.” She was not apologetic, she simply moved on.  I was the one in the wrong, even though she had just broadcast to the class that she thought I was a misbehaving boy who had stolen the seat of some good girl.  Laughter ensued, and if I had my way, I would have smote her on the spot.  Instead, I grew out my hair.

These experiences solidified my belief that while I did not belong among regular people, I also did not want to belong among them.  In response to my gender, people proved to be incapable of permitting the slightest deviance from stereotypical gender roles.  Each time they opened their mouths to me, I could see their frustration and inability to understand who or what I was.  It made them angry and impatient.  I did not have these words at the time, but I knew I was failing their expectations and frustrating them.  I also knew there were only two gender options and somehow I was ill suited to both.  On top of that I observed how deviating from gender roles produces disgust in others, real physical revulsion.  It was inconceivable to the adult denizens of my childhood that I could be a butch girl, so instead they looked at me and saw either a boy, or a disgusting girl, or an immature tomboy who needed to grow up already. That was a lot for a kid to deal with, so looking back now I understand how I spent a few years being fairly well shut down and distant from everything.

A friend’s mother literally asked, “Couldn’t she try to be more feminine?” I alternated between sharing their disgust with myself and being filled with rage at the confinement.  Folks proved themselves to be severely limited in their imagination and limited in their ability to see gender rules as just rules.  All I could see were rules, rules I could not keep.  Seeing gender as a set of made-up rules was one of the pivotal understandings in my life thus far because it shone a bright light on all the other norms that are taken for granted in our culture.  And it wasn’t just that others pressured me to obey the rules, it was that no one else seemed to understand that the rules were rules.  I imagine they thought, “This is just the way things are and always have been and always will be.  Girls don’t act/look/think/talk/dress/walk/behave that way.”  Sometimes the messages were direct and sometimes they were subtle.  Yet there was such universal agreement to these rules that usually no one even bothered to write them down.  So it wasn’t just that I was disobedient of gender rules, it was that I didn’t make any sense.  Men are like this, women are like that, anything else does not compute.  Anything else evokes disgust.  Becoming queer was not a matter of declaring my attraction to women, but more a permanent disengagement from following a given gender track, the simplifications, the either/or choices, the rules.  It felt liberating to realize this, but it also felt disconcerting and alienating.  But once that light came on, liberating, disconcerting or come what may, there was no turning back.   And I could not help but see that when the rule keepers weren’t criticizing me, they were busy attempting to control the bodies and sexuality of other girls with a similar set of rules about who is a whore, who is a slut, no abortions allowed, who is too fat, etc.

Later on in high school, we periodically held pep rallies to celebrate our treasured sports teams.  At the last pep rally I attended, this boy spit on me from the bleachers above where I was sitting by myself.  I do not remember if any words passed between us.  I only remember realizing there was spit in my hair, the long hair I had been growing since eighth grade in order to stop being mistaken for a boy, in order to minimize my surface differences from other girls.  When I think about simply walking out of the school building at the start of each subsequent pep rally, I feel these quiet exits capture the essence of my high school experience.

My senior year, I was awarded a scholarship based on my standardized test scores.  The corporate sponsor of the scholarship was the company where my father worked.  There was a dinner to be held at a nice restaurant with the principal of my high school, my parents, and some people from my father’s office.  Ordinarily, my parents barely noticed or commented on my clothes.  My mom had taken me dress shopping a few times because I had to dress up for orchestra concerts.  I hated having to wear a dress and always wore what ever I wanted outside of my time with the viola.  When we were getting ready to leave for this scholarship dinner and I came out in a black blazer I had bought for myself in the men’s department at macy’s.  I thought I looked OK.  My father insisted that I wear a dress and he was so mean and angry about it that I don’t even think I objected.  I very well may have, because we argued all the time back then, but what stands out most in my memory is the clarity of his contempt.  He was disgusted by me and ashamed for his colleagues to see me.  Now I understand that this was his problem and not mine. But at the time I absorbed it and felt disgusted and ashamed of myself too.  I wore the dress.  I barely spoke at dinner.  Instead of refusing the shame, I had made it my own and believed that I deserved it. 

Recently I told this story about my father for the first time, over dinner with a married friend and sometimes mentor.  He was asking me why I do not want to marry my girlfriend and I was attempting to talk about my coming out process with the gender police and the confinements of normalcy.  I described how walking away from traditional family values was a commitment to myself to make the best life I could imagine.  But another detail slipped out in the telling, which I had not previously articulated to myself or anyone else:  Growing up, I never really knew for sure if I was going to make it.  It was interesting to me that this came out spontaneously in the conversation, because I have consciously been working on ways of talking my past and simply telling the personal stories I haven’t told before.  It came out of my mouth as an additional detail, an unsightly little mess that plopped onto the dinner table.  I felt like part of me left the table for a few minutes to observe what would happen next.  I had admitted to uncertainty about the prospects of my living to adulthood. 

One of the reasons for my uncertainty was a lack of options I could live with.  Living a regular life, with a regular relationship and a regular gender was unattainable, repressive and ultimately undesirable.  So I never sought to broaden or revise regular to include me.  I never wanted to redefine normal.  I just wanted more options.  Now I know queers need to live in this world, not in an imaginary perfect world.  People need to live in this world without their bodies and genders and relationships being questioned and scrutinized and criticized and examined constantly.  Or even debated...  It feels like shit to have the substance of your reality subject to debate.  Queers need rights and protections under the laws we have now, not just the laws we imagine in a revolutionized future.  And yet to this day there remains no clearer or more persistent theme in my life than the need for more options.