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WC77 - Race & Identity

WC77 – Kosher Rice Queen

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Lchaimfortune

Confessions of a Kosher Rice Queen
by Anonymous

This is a companion essay with "The Gay Jewish-Asian Thing"

The first time I heard the term, I’d just finished hooking up with a guy I met on AOL. “So, are you a Rice Queen?” he asked, mopping up some of the fluids.

“Huh?” I replied. But then I figured it out, and started to laugh, proceeding to loudly deny that I was any such thing. Even though, as my trick pointed out, we’d met in GAM4GWM.  What was I doing there, if I wasn’t a rice queen?

Rice Queen: White guy who likes Asian guys. I get it. (Later I learned the term ‘Potato Queen,’ which is the reverse.  I didn’t like being thought of as a potato.)

Am I one? For a while, I thought of Asian guys as being “just for practice.” That’s what, growing up a nice Jewish boy in middle class America, we were told shiksas (non-Jewish girls) were for: Practice. When you’re done practicing, you find yourself a good JAP and settle down in the suburbs—that’s JAP, Jewish American Princess, not Jap, the Asian slur. It’s a dehumanizing idea, of course, that a certain kind of person is an object "for practice," but then, what about being a nice, closeted Jewish boy in middle class America wasn’t dehumanizing?

The concept transferred easily to Asian guys, because of the sense of Otherness, just as there had been about shiksas.  Plus, for whatever reason, they were easier to score.
But I think it was always more than that. When I was still in my coming out process, I was attracted to Asian guys for reasons that I suspect most Rice Queens are, but refuse to publicly admit it: we Potatoes saw Asians as being like girlie-men. For someone still struggling with sexual attraction to men, Asians are kind of, you know, in-between. Those lithe Japanese boys, the skinny Vietnamese kids. So smooth…so boyish…such tight asses, and small cocks. I mean, they’re almost girls, aren’t they?

So runs the stereotype and, I think, so runs the subconscious thought-process. They’re smooth, so that means they’re effeminate, so that means they’re almost feminine. Maybe Asian boys really are for practice—practice for how to be Gay. Of course, this, too, is dehumanizing, and outrageous, and something close to racist. Which is why it is never spoken.

Since my taste for rice has endured well past my coming out, I think there’s more to it than that, thankfully. What I’ve come to see is a little more subtle, and more personal: that all these smooth, smart, geeky boys resemble no one so much as myself, when I was sixteen and scared. Their bodies look just like the ones I desired as a teenager—the studious, slim, smooth Jewish yeshiva boys, pre-vulgarization, pre-college, still very much dreaming of their mother’s wombs.

Let me be clear that I neither buy into nor condone the stereotyping of Asian men as effeminate, or small in size, or bottom in position. But, having said that, let’s also admit that most stereotypes have a grain or two of truth about them, and this one is no exception, at least in my experience. There’s a reason we gravitate toward certain types, even as we hopefully realize those types are generalizations, not prescriptions.

And, obviously, stereotypes work both ways, not least when two men are looking to meet a certain "type." One time, a Japanese guy I was with said he admired Jewish men because “there are so few of you, but you control, like, the whole world.” Another time, a Korean guy told me that his parents said he could only marry another Korean—except if the girl was Jewish. He said, “It’s because you’re so smart, and good with money. You’re much smarter than most white people.” You, plural, I assumed.

My own projected image of the young, innocent Asian as doppleganger for my younger, more innocent self is quite at odds with another myth: that of the mysterious, mystical, inscrutable Oriental. If my dates are any guide, I’m far less scrutable, and more mystical, than most of the Asian tricks I’ve met. I sit long meditation retreats at Buddhist monasteries, I love Zen architecture and design. While I have no illusions about the genocidal Chinese government, I probably do have a few about the enlightened Tibetans. I try not to be one of those silly European Asiaphiles—but I can handle the criticism.
Yet when I’m with some Vietnamese boy, I’m not thinking of Thich Nhat Hanh, or even pad thai. My thoughts are mostly superficial: legs, hair, chest, dick. And a little emotional: vulnerability, lightness. But nothing deeply connected to religion, history, or culture. It’s almost as if the two myths never touch one another.

Or maybe those ‘superficial’ thoughts are actually clues to something that lies deeper than Chinese food or pagodas. On the cultural level, yes, Jews and Asians share an Otherness to mainstream WASP culture—but it’s an Otherness very different from the experience of African-Americans or Latinos.  In our myth, we basically made it; in theirs, the struggle goes on.  Jews love to whine about anti-semitism, of course, but, well, we actually do control a disproportionate share of wealth. And we see in Asians the traits which got us here: brains, hard work, bookishness, determination. Let the Italians get tough and the WASPs drink their gin and tonics. We got into Harvard because we earned it—and we see in Asians the “new Jews.” It isn’t just that Jews have always loved Chinese food. We see ourselves in them.

But there is something still deeper at work. Jewish men aren’t just Other to WASP culture—they’re Other to straight culture as well. Jews snicker when they read about Goldstein, the Jewish wrestler. We idolize the few who have broken into athletic superstardom—Sandy Koufax has a permanent seat on our collective bima. And we love to note the secret Jewish names of famous Hollywood actors, closeted kikes who have passed for WASP. We know that the typical Jew is a book-reading intellectual; that’s why Gene Simmons’ Israeli accent is so funny to us. Israeli machismo is a joke precisely because it is Jewish machismo, which is an oxymoron. So when queer Jews look into the Oriental Mirror, they see themselves not only culturally, but physically, sexually as well.
Like Judaism’s medieval rabbis, who glossed "athletic" as "wicked," I find machismo to be a turnoff.  Like the Kabbalists, I think androgyny is hot. Security and confidence are overrated; I crave vulnerability. I think, when I look into the brown eyes of my Asian lover and hold his delicate fingers in my hand, I see a reification of my own Jewish resistance to the norms of goyish masculinity. To hell with blue eyes and Aryan cocks. We’re turned on by the tentativeness, the fragility, and the intellectualism, because underneath those shared traits, hiding under a tantalizing shell of shyness, there is a deeper affinity. If those smart boys are anything like me, they’re horny as hell.

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane.   We are a reader-supported journal and need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going.  So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

The author lives in New York City.

Dan Vera, Updrafts, WC77 - Race & Identity

WC77 – Updrafts by Dan Vera

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Danvera_sep_2Updrafts
Edited by Dan Vera

The exchange of thoughts is a condition necessary for all love, all friendship, and all real dialogue.
Jorge Luis Borges

The Christian Right says bring back the melting pot. Restore ‘traditional values.’  Re-institute prayer in schools. Preserve the primacy of Western civilization (the only one that matters anyway). And not least, protect that critical bedrock of American greatness: ‘the American family.’  Such pronouncements reveal an intense, even pathological desire to perpetuate a thoroughly obsolete myth of America, and through this, a repressively orthodox system of sociocultural entitlement.    Marlon Riggs

Third World populations are changing the face of North America.  The new face has got that delicate fold in the corner of the eye and that wide-bridged nose.  The mouth speaks in double negatives and likes to eat a lot of chíle.    Cherríe Moraga

If I have one word for fellow Christians, I would ask them to keep their eyes on the love of Jesus, and not to confuse the blood at Calvary with the KoolAid of homophobia in America.  We have to call into question our own particular prejudices that we inherit, that have nothing to do with the loving gospel of Jesus.  That challenge is to the Black Church precisely because we have too many Black folk who are suffering because of the inability to talk about sexuality.    Cornel West

Question: I have always felt that feminism/gay rights was piggy backing off the civil rights movement. I will never forget and never forgive feminists for basically throwing Fannie Lou Hamer out of their movement because of her deep opposition to Abortion. Your movement is profoundly, to use your own neologism, classist and I suspect racist.

Suzanne Pharr: I think that there is deep racism and classism within the women’s movement, and the gay and lesbian movement. But I also think there are individuals and organizations in both those movements that have gone to the line on the issues of civil rights. I wouldn’t say that we piggybacked on the civil rights movement. I would say we’re a daughter of the civil rights movement. It gave birth to the women’s movement, the gay and lesbian movement and to The People With Disabilities movement. I think we should never use the scarcity model when thinking about civil and human rights. That is, we should not think that if someone else gains civil rights protections, that it will take away something from me. We are seeking a democracy here, trying to build one, and it’s going take a large sense of generosity and tolerance and inclusion.    Suzanne Pharr

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors.    James Baldwin

I love the wry motto of the Paleontological Society (meant both literally and figuratively, for hammers are the main tool of our trade): Frango ut patefaciam — I break in order to reveal.”    Stephen Jay Gould

There is a very advantageous position among leftist writers who live in capitalistic countries who enjoy all the benefits of democracy and great profits they earn while attacking democracy while they live in a democratic country.  Maybe if those writers lived in a communist country from where they could not get out – they might change the way they think. Since living there, they would not be able to write a word!  So for us, who suffered so much in Cuba,  it’s infuriating to see people enjoy all the security that comes with democracy – getting pleasure attacking it and becoming rich from doing this!    Reinaldo Arenas

We’re always constructing ourselves, so I don’t think there’s an end to it.  in fact, to me it’s liberating to not think of identity as some organic property that we have to find and stick to, but actually something that is constructed, or that’s imposed, that we can then counter by taking a different route and re-dressing it, and the re-dressing it again.  It’s like having every possibility at your fingertips, as opposed to some natural sense of who we’ll be imprisoned by for the rest of our lives.    Todd Haynes

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane.   We are a reader-supported journal and need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going.  So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

Updrafts is a regular feature of  White Crane.  If you have a little bit  of wisdom to share with us, send it to us at dan@gaywisdom.org

Andrew Ramer, Columns, WC77 - Race & Identity

WC77 – Praxis by Andrew Ramer

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Andrewramer_sep_3Racing to the Finish Line
(and probably/possibly being politically incorrect at the very same time)

Praxis by Andrew Ramer

When I was a little boy growing up in New York City I would hear older relatives using two different terms to talk about what I eventually realized were the same people: “Americans” and “White People.” As in, “White people eat white bread. We eat rye. Americans take their hats off in church. We keep ours on in synagogue.” Mind you, these aunts and uncles of mine were all American born. And while their English had a certain inflection that even without the Yiddish sprinkled through it would have given them away as New York Jews, English was the language of their education, the language they dreamed in, and the only language that they passed on to their children: “Yiddish not spoken here.”

A few years ago someone wrote a book titled something like, How the Jews Became White. While I’ve never read it I can only imagine that the author’s conclusion was similar to mine. Some time in the middle of the last century, when the dominant culture decided to consider the possibility that “Negroes” were human, the color bar slid over and suddenly people like my relatives, who spoke of Americans and White People, found that they were now also talking about themselves.

About a decade ago I wrote an essay that I only showed to one other person, the by me (a Yiddishy turn of phrase) Very White (i.e. British-descended) Lesbian member of a small writing group I belonged to. I called the essay: “Things we’re not supposed to talk about.” Her slightly horrified response to it was, “Andrew, you’re really not supposed to talk about that.” In it I discussed my opposition to legal marriage for same-sex and two-sex couples, my lack of sympathy for the late Princess Diana and Mother Theresa, and I decided to tackle the subject of Race and Smell. This is what I had to say:

Many years ago when I had a practice doing bodywork, a Japanese client very nervously told me after our second or third session that the only reason she could work with me in my little office was that I didn’t smell bad like most white people. She thought it was because I was a vegetarian, and didn’t “stink” from eating meat like most whites. She also told me that she and her Japanese friends called white people potatoes, this “Because you’re pale, lumpy, shapeless, and you all look the same.” (The “But I’m not white” part of me was offended. The newly white part of me was amused.)

Tobias Schneebaum, one of the great uncelebrated Gay American Jewish authors, (of Keep the River on Your Right and several other amazing books,) tells a similar story, of being accepted by natives in the jungles of New Guinea because he didn’t smell bad. I don’t know what white people smell like, or Jews. (Growing up in the 20’s my father didn’t think of himself as white but he may have smelled bad to some of his non-Jewish classmates, because my grandmother sent him off to school each day with garlic around his neck, to ward off a terrible disease called “Spana-mana Jesus” that’s spread by Christians.) But I have noticed that some black people smell different to me than anyone else. This smell somewhat reminds me of how my wool sweaters smelled when I was a boy and got rained on on the way home from school. Which makes me wonder if the smell I detect has something to do with differing oil gland secretions.

Some black people don’t have this smell and some have it very strongly. An African American friend told me he wears heavy scents to cover a smell he can’t detect himself, afraid that white people will otherwise react to it. I have found that this smell takes me some getting used to with some people, but not everyone. Sometimes, like fragrances, I like one person’s smell but not someone else’s. On a few occasions I’ve smelled it in the air on an empty street where someone has passed a moment before, smell lingering like perfume. (But I don’t think I’m supposed to say this, and I’ve never asked anyone black, “Do I smell?” Do I smell bad to you? Not my personal smell, but my white person smell. Even though I’m still not entirely convinced that I’m white, and I’m not a vegetarian anymore either.)

There’s only one other group of people I’ve met who have to my nose a distinct smell. I’ve met a few Indians, and briefly dated one, East Indian not Native American, who have an odor somewhat like a subtle blend of muted spices, similar to the smell of certain cooking spices, but not exactly, perhaps what happens to them when they’ve run through a human body: a mixture of pungent, tangy, and a bit sweet too, that registers differently to my (possibly class and race inflected) nose than the smell of some black people.

I can’t believe I said all of that. But I did. Again. In public. Which makes me remember an afternoon about fifty years ago, when I was passing through the kitchen of one of my best childhood friends (Jewish but not yet white.) His mother and Matty the “colored girl” who cleaned for her five days a week were sitting over coffee and cake, chatting, gossiping, and laughing like two best friends. But when the “girl,” who was a decade or so her senior had gone, my friend’s mother took the cup and plate Matty used to the sink, poured a tiny amount of bleach on them and scrubbed them as if they had been contaminated by someone with a rare and fatal contagious disease. I was shocked, stunned, having never seen anyone do anything like that before in my own home or family. And yet, some part of me understood what she was doing, picked up I’m sure by things I saw and heard out in the world.

I get very dark in the summer, perhaps from my lingering Sephardic genes. And I remember a time when I was six or seven and trailing behind my Aunt Rachel and Uncle Bob as they walked through the turnstile into the crowded Long Island beach club they belonged to, which had only very recently allowed newly white Jewish people to become members. But the very white and blond young man behind the turnstile stopped and said, “Little boy, you can’t go in here.” I panicked as my aunt and uncle continued on ahead of me. Finally I called out and my aunt came back. To this day I can remember the look on the face of that (cute) young man when my aunt said, “This is my nephew.” He sneered then shrugged and let me through. But even at that age I could read his look, which said, “Lady, I know this is your cleaning girl’s kid. It’s nice of you to bring him here, and there’s nothing I can do to stop you, but don’t do it again.” Maybe I understood because of all the times I’d heard my parents play and talk to my brother and me about these lines from a song in South Pacific: “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear. You’ve got to be taught from year to year. It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear, you’ve got to be carefully taught.”

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane.   We are a reader-supported journaland need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going.  So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

Andrew Ramer is a writer and educator.  He is the author of numerous books including Revelations for a New Millenium, Little Pictures: Fiction for a New Age and the Gay classic  Two Flutes Playing: A Spiritual Journeybook for Gay Men  from White Crane Books.

Ramer lives in San Francisco. Praxis is a regular feature of White Crane.

Columns, Gay Health, Jeff Huyett, WC77 - Race & Identity

WC77 – Owner’s Manual

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Just Say Hello
Feeling Welcome as a Health Concept
By Jeff Huyett

Many of us live in a state of dis-ease. This is not to say that we have an illness that eats away at our body. But we often exist with feelings of nervousness, worry, and just not feeling comfortable in our surroundings. The focus of these columns has been the exploration of the concepts of health. I like to challenge us to think outside the dominant paradigm of our capitalist, sickness treatment model of health care. When we view wellness as a dynamic, multi-faceted state toward which we strive, we must attend to our selves and also to the world outside ourselves with which we interact each day. We have all had the feeling of “not belonging” somewhere. How do these feelings impact our health, especially when they are a recurring sensation?

Recently I visited friends in Puerto Rico. We spent lots of time walking around and going out to eat. During the course of our excursions, I noticed that most of the other Puerto Ricans would nod or say “hola” to my friends. When I mentioned this, one friend said, “Isn’t it great! When I lived on the mainland, I missed that most. People here, all over the island, greet me. I don’t get that anywhere else in the US.” It reminded me of when I moved from a moderate-sized city in Missouri to rural Kansas. When my family would drive down a country road or small highway, people would lift a finger off the steering wheel, wave or nod. At first, we were tickled. But then we realized that this was a great way of making us feel comfortable in this place. It said, “Hi, I see you, I’m here with you, have a good day.” It is a ritual that I see expressed in country Kansas still today.

As queer people, we may sense feeling “out-of-place” over and over each day. There are seldom times when strangers nod or wave welcome to our big Gay self. Naturally, we don’t want to feel this dis-ease so we try to adapt. We may just avoid places or situations in which we don’t feel welcome. We may alter how we act or look or even lead a dual existence. In our “Gay places” we are one way, in “straight places” we are different. What work it is to keep this up! That is where coming out is a lifetime experience. We try to find places of comfort and ease. Often, it is about deciding not to really care about how people perceive or react to us. We can change how we respond and react. We try to control our own internal processes as a way to feel comfortable. But again, so much work!

Some of us don’t adapt so well. We get stuck in culturally imposed values and often turn them in on ourselves in hurtful ways. We begin to develop maladaptive ways to feel comfortable. It can happen on all realms of our being. We may drink or use drugs, including prescribed versions. Our sex acts may express themselves in ways that respond to our homophobic culture. Instead of acting on our desires in public, like straight people can, we may keep our sex in dark places out of any view of others. We may build muscles to appear more strong and manly—more “straight.” These acts of hiding may fuel our shame and guilt; compounding our dis-ease. Sometimes just “keeping up appearances” is plain exhausting.

Workplaces are another place that queer people can face daily challenges of feeling unwelcome. We all have the experience of near-mandatory participation in wedding or baby showers. We endure talk about fiancés, boyfriends or girlfriends, bridezilla experiences, often without being able to share in the same way. Sometimes, though, we should just share. In “butch” work environments we might have daily fear of disclosure of our Gayness and the impact on our colleagues. We can even fear for our safety.

As a nurse, I’m keen to the impact of these issues on one’s health. It can present itself in so many ways. So I assess queer patients for maladaptive behaviors. Identifying these types of health patterns gives information about the work to become healthy. Typically, there aren’t a lot of physical disease states that occur specifically related to our Gay sex. But our health is impacted by homophobia or transphobia and potential maladaptive behaviors develop.

What is your comfort zone about being Lesbian, Gay, bisexual or transgender? How much work do you put into “passing” in the greater world? How do you get support around being LGBT? Who knows? How is your family?

LGBT health and political activists are aware of the impact of homophobia on an individual’s health. The last three decades we’ve witnessed their work to make our society more civil and welcoming to queer folk. Mainstream culture has responded to this activism in positive ways that lets us be Gay in more places. Clearly, there is plenty of work yet to be done. Some of this happens on grander, policy and legal levels. But much of it happens in our individual relationships with the non-Gay people around us. When we are comfortable and authentic with ourselves then we can share that with the majority straight public.

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane.   We are a reader-supported journal and need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going.  So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

Owner’s Manual is a regular feature of White Crane. Jeff Huyett is a nurse practitioner in NYC. His clinical work has primarily been in Queer health with a focus on HIV, rectal and transgender care. He is the Radical Faerie Daisy Shaver and is involved with the development of Faerie Camp Destiny Radical Sanctuary in Vermont and can be reached at JeffANP@aol.com

Bo Young, Reviews, WC77 - Race & Identity

WC77 – Review of Sin, Sex and Democracy

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Rvu_burackSin, Sex and Democracy:
Antigay Rhetoric and the Christian Right
By Cynthia Burack, SUNY Press
ISBN: 978-0-7914-7406-8
Reviewed by Bo Young

My own personal prophet, Noel Coward opined that “We have no reliable guarantee that the afterlife will be any less exasperating than this one, have we?” Well, no. Not that I’m suggesting I found it exasperating that with a title like Sin, Sex and Democracy, I half expected to see Stephen Colbert leering from the cover, clad in some a red, white and blue leather dominatrix outfit wielding a star-spangled cat-o-nine tails. No…this is a scholarly examination of the tactics and language of the Christian Right by Cynthia Burack; she’s not kidding, and neither is the Christian Right. I have to keep reminding myself: you have to take seriously the people who take this Bible thing seriously. They (and their source material) are dangerous.

Burack, an Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at Ohio State University, makes it plain that, whatever the stripe, the rising Religious Right has one goal and one goal only: theocracy in the United States. Their theocracy. She explains how, using rhetoric, they dissemble and “strive to have their political and theological beliefs misidentified by the broad public.” The frightening thing is how far along they’ve dragged us all on this road to the perdition of their own making, how effective this tactic is.

Burack maps the triumphalist path(ology) and has put together the essential reader for anyone interested in the political implications and the maniacal agenda of the religionists. Language is important, and she has the ears to decipher and is offering us all the Religious Wingnut Decoder Ring. As she warns in her introduction, “Political discourse is a form of pedagogy, and those of us who do not appreciate the complexities of conservative Christian pedagogy will have a more impoverished understanding of American politics than those who do.”  This is not theological debate. This is the unholy alliance of politics and religion met on the field of rhetoric. He who gets to the words, first, defines the word, and thereby defines the battle. Obsequious public piety crossed the lines of unseemly long ago and entered the realm of appalling. And GLBT people continue to present too tempting a target for the theocrats to pass up. There will be no Murrovian “Have you no shame?” moment in this battle. The answer is no.

Burack’s assay of the religious right is most interesting when she examines how the supposed religious movement presents itself as one thing when it is truly another. The obvious one is how they present and package themselves some “moral majority” but in fact have no claim to any measurable morality (and so long as proper public self-abasement is exhibited) like any snake oil seller, they maintain the key to their own absolution and “forgiveness”). Whatever the hypocrisy, fall in line and all is forgiven.

They present as underdogs, when they hold as much sway, now, as corporations (and with whom they are in league, of course). They cloak themselves in the sheep’s clothing of Democracy, but are hell bent on asserting a theocracy. Indeed, Burack shows that Christian conservatives “profoundly mistrust democracy, identifying liberty with license and with the satisfaction of individual interests through enslavement to selfish desires.” Which is precisely what they’d have everyone believe about Gay folk.

Professor Burack has an anthropological eye, as well as a politicians (and an ear for humor, which would seem to be indispensible when mucking around in this stuff) and discusses the La Haye’s Left Behind series and the weird world of Jack T. Chick’s comic book tracts which most of us have encountered at one point or another in some interstate highway bathroom or stuck under the windshield wiper on our car.

In the current campaign cacophony about the black Reverend Jeremiah Wright (and why has no one pointed out that he’s only living up to his biblical namesake when his speech reaches for the jeremiad heights?) when not even a sliver of the same attention is being paid to John McCain’s white Reverend Hagee and to white Pat Robertson’s blaming of all Gay people for Katrina and 9/11, it is refreshing to see Burack taking on these snake oil salesmen and holding them up to the same purifying light of day.

Burack has written a readable and fascinating appraisal and charting of our enemy within and the language they use to persuade. She asks “Do we hear what they hear? And once we listen for their vision of the good, what kind of sense can we make of it?” She makes sense of it and if you truck with these folks, you would certainly be well advised to read her assessment.

We’ll close with a reading from the prophet Noel Coward, once again: “It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

Burack’s book is an honest appraisal of political deceit.

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane.   We are a reader-supported journaland need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going.  So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

Bo Young is the publisher and editor of White Crane.  He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his fere and two hair children.

Reviews, Toby Johnson, WC77 - Race & Identity

WC77 – Review of The Starry Dynamo

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Rvu_davissonThe Starry Dynamo:
The Machinery of Night Remixed
By Sven Davisson, Rebel Satori Press
ISBN 978-0-9790838-0-8, 249 pages, pb.
Reviewed by Toby Johnson

Sven Davisson produces Ashé Journal of Experimental Spirituality, a parallel of White Crane with a Foucaultian queer post-Gay edge. He’s a creative writer, a reporter with a wry sense of storytelling, a scholar (with a degree in Queer Theory from Hampshire College) and a poet.

The Starry Dynamo is a collection of diverse writing. It opens almost like a novel with a short story, the sub-eponymous “The Machinery of Night,” that tells of two Gay teenagers  meeting for what turns out to be a sexual adventure. Davisson’s intro begins: “This work is driven by a critical analysis of love, control and control structures.” Consistently then, that budding romance  transforms into a story about accidental death.

The most interesting and experimental piece, titled “Mutilations,” involves incest and child sexuality and abuse. It’s written in a way that violates all traditional “unities,”: place, time, person. And, in doing so, poignantly and beautifully captures the feeling of being “mutilated” the author means to communicate  in the story, whether fiction or non-fiction.

Following is a series of essays about a variety of topics: the Indian guru Rajneesh and the rise and fall of his compound in Oregon, the French Symbolist poets, Oscar Wilde, the Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs and several about the ideas of the French philosopher of sexuality Michael Foucault. I want to especially recommend this book for these specific chapters. I found I understood Foucault better while reading Sven Davisson than I have ever before (i.e. that at any given time and place in human history ideas about sex—and sexual orientation—are influenced by a vast array of factors of history, politics, culture, economics, etc. and so always have to be understood in context).

This is an interesting and—to use Davisson’s own term, experimental—book that deserves to be read, written by an important character in the long term history of Gay consciousness.

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane.   We are a reader-supported journaland need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going.  So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

Toby Johnson is the author and editor of countless fine books like Gay Spirituality, and Charmed Lives.  He is also former publisher of White Crane Journal and currently Reviews editor. He lives in San Antonio Texas.  Visit him at www.tobyjohnson.com

Reviews, Toby Johnson, WC77 - Race & Identity

WC77 – Review of Jesus in Love: At the Cross

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Rvu_cherryJesus in Love: At the Cross
By Kittridge Cherry, Androgyne Press
ISBN978-1-933993-42-3, pb, 304 pages.
Reviewed by Toby Johnson

We’ve previously reviewed Kitt Cherry’s Art That Dares: Gay Jesus, Woman Christ and More and Jesus in Love, Part I. Now the second half of this mind-blowing, provocative and fascinating life of Christ has appeared, At the Cross. Like the first part of the story, it’s a first-person narrative from the point of view of a Jesus who is a modern, psychologically and sexually (and homosexually) sophisticated ego-person who is able to relate his experience in terms understandable to 21st Century readers. This approach makes Jesus much more real than the mythological character of traditional religion. But, adding to the amazing quality of this book, Cherry’s Jesus is also the very character of that mythology, the “Son of God” incarnate, who is occasionally distracted by having to hold the cosmos in existence and keep the planets spinning round the Sun. The interplay of these two portrayals makes this book ever more fascinating and insightful about the real message of Christianity.
As the subtitle indicates, the second half of the story involves Jesus’s death and resurrection and role as “world savior.” I was especially struck by Cherry’s presentation of Jesus taking on the sins of the world. She manages to make it both realistic and mystical—the way a good myth should be able to do! As he is dying, this Jesus actually reviews all the sins of humankind, both past and future, and one by one forgives them, finally even forgiving himself for the arrogance of thinking himself God.

The two books of Jesus in Love truly transcend the Christian myth. This is a way of looking at Jesus  that demonstrate the ability of Gay/lesbian consciousness to see deeper and wider into the nature of religion and spirituality. This is Jesus the way you’ve always wanted him to be. The books are very readable and entertaining. And you won’t be able to resist telling your friends about them. (I can testify to that personally.) They are so “outrageous” in the best possible sense, they need to be enjoyed and shared.

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane.   We are a reader-supported journaland need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going.  So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

Toby Johnson is the author and editor of countless fine books like Gay Spirituality, and Charmed Lives.  He is also former publisher of White Crane Journal and currently Reviews editor. He lives in San Antonio Texas.  Visit him at www.tobyjohnson.com

Dan Vera, Poetry, Reviews, WC77 - Race & Identity

WC77 – Review of Edward Field’s After The Fall

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Rvu_field_2 After The Fall: Poems Old and New
By Edward Field
University of Pittsburgh Press, 160 pages.
ISBN-10: 0822959801
Reviewed by Dan Vera

The appearance of new poems by Edward Field is always a cause for celebration. The master poet begins his most recent collection, After the Fall: Poems Old & New with a series of poems that serve as gutsy ars poetica on the engagement of the poet with the world. Under the title “What Poetry Is For” Field surveys the landscape of the wartime Bush years. Some of the poetry is time-sensitive and will soon (hopefully) read to the future as a time capsule of our era. In “Letter on the Brink of War” Field bears witness to what the unjaundiced eye sees at the beginning of a disaster he has lived through before:

They even talk of shock and awe–
another term for blitzkrieg’s sturm and drang–
and instead of Jews, the roundup of Muslims,
But you have to ask, Who’s next?

“Homeland Security” extends the theme by offering an analysis of the police state tactics faced by those who raise suspicion. Field has a way of writing that delivers a punch with the deftest of comic timing. It leaves you smiling and wincing at the same time.

What I have always loved about Field’s writing is its utter lack of pretense and its firm conviction in telling the truth.  Beauty is not the word here.  Breathtaking is.  You read a marital poem like “Oedipus Schmoedipus” or the searing indictment of Jews complicit in the current administration’s wrong-doing "But what are Jews doing in this government? / Wasn’t civil liberties always a Jewish passion?" and you understand why Plato wanted poets banned from his Republic for their insistence on telling the truth.  There is also humor. Lots of it —whether writing on aging in “Prospero, in Retirement,”  or his apologia to his lover who must live with “the poet” in “Mrs. Wallace Stevens,” Field always delivers.  Take “In Praise of My Prostate” in with Field celebrates his body’s resiliencies:

and you still expand, your amazing flowers
bursting forth throughout my body,
pistils and stamens dancing.

When you’re dealing with a great poet, the beauty of a volume of selected works like this—especially for the uninitiated—is its ability to offer up new work that captures your affections, and also present the earlier work that serves as confirmation that this genius has roots and, even better, offer a past catalogue of volumes to seek out. Here in one gem of a book are the poems I have loved for many years.  Field’s “The Life of Joan Crawford” from his 1967 volume Variety Photoplays, “From Poland,” and “Mae West” are here too.

As he did in his memoirs published three years ago, Field continues his clear-eye seeing and saying of the world. I believe he writes with the clear understanding that there is a beauty to be found in honesty.  With After the Fall Field somehow gives courageous permission to be more honest in our lives.  As if saying life is more fun and more compelling by facing the truth of oneself.  In all its beauty. I truly believe it.

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane.   We are a reader-supported journaland need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going.  So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

Dan Vera is managing editor of White Crane.   He lives in Washington, DC where he writes poetry, organizes readings and publishers books of poetry.  Visit him at www.danvera.com

Reviews, Steven LaVigne, WC77 - Race & Identity

WC77 – Review of So Fey

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Rvu_bermanSo Fey: Queer Fairy Fiction
Edited by by Steve Berman
Haworth Positronic Press, 370 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1560235903
Reviewed by Steven LaVigne

In his masterpiece, Peter Pan, Sir J. M. Barrie tells us that “Every time a child says, “I don’t believe in fairies, somewhere a fairy falls down dead.”  Fortunately, I do believe in fairies and so do the 22 authors who contributed to So Fey.

This is an outstanding collection, because without a direct chronology, the reader time trips from modern times with the hero of Tom Cardamone’s “A Faun’s Tale,” who discovers the pleasures held within Central Park’s Rambles, to Delia Sherman‘s medieval “The Faerie Cony-Catcher,” as the queen of Elfland (borrowed from Purcell’s Faerie Queen) and her handmaiden lead their prey, a smith, into gay sexual fulfillment. The queen of Elfland makes another appearance in Sarah Monette’s “Three Letters from the Queen of Elfland,” as a young wife is drawn to the queen, in spite of her husband’s pleading to stay with him.

Three tales focus on tragic love with objects from nature: Danny finds a tragic love with his perfect man in Kenneth D. Woods’ “The King of Oak and Holly;” a monk is fascinated by Craig Laurance Gidney’s “A Bird of Ice,” and an Asian princess discovers love in the Tolkien-like, “Year of the Fox” by Eugie Foster.

Some of the pieces collected here are drawn from or are renovated versions of classic literature. The myth of Orpheus and Euridice is used by Holly Black for “Coat of Stars as Rafael,” a young gay dancer, Rafael, returning to his hometown and visiting a strange underworld where he makes a bargain to reconnect with his deceased love. Laurie J. Marks’ “How the Ocean Loved Margie” borrows from the same Celtic tale which John Sayles used in his film, “The Secret of Roan Inish.”

Two stories toward the end of the volume held special interest for me.  Because I recently completed the first volume of His Dark Materials, The Golden Compass, I loved Lynne Jamneck’s “How Laura Left a Rotten Apple and Came Not to Regret the Cold of the Yukon.”  Told in first person, Laura leaves Manhattan for a place called Poniwok. There, she finds herself attracted to Gwen, the town’s police sergeant.  At first rejecting her friendship, Laura finds herself fascinated by the woman who shows her the Northern lights.

Borrowing the names of Jane, George and Michael from P.L. Travers, Joshua Lewis was inspired by the aforementioned J. M. Barrie in his lovely piece, “Ever So Much More Than Twenty” (the words Wendy uses tell Peter Pan that she’s no longer a child). In this enchanting story, Michael’s daughter, Jane, recommends that they return to the cabin of her father’s childhood. It was in the magical woods that both Jane and Michael encounter the joys of his youth, as they both encounter a fairy who is every bit a modern incarnation of Barrie’s most famous hero.

A sublime experience for any gay reader, So Fey has 22 remarkable stories you’ll return to on a frequent basis, and if you don’t already, will have you believing, once and for all, in fairies!

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane.   We are a reader-supported journaland need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going.  So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

Aside from his role as a regular contributor and reviewer for White Crane, Steven LaVigne is also a teacher, playwright, reviewer and director who lives in the Twin Cities.  His work appears regularly online and he frequently adapts literature for children’s theatre.  His most recent play, based on the Arabian Nights, was presented this past summer.  He’s presently doing research for a new project.

Bo Young, Reviews, WC77 - Race & Identity

WC77 – Review of Forgiving the Franklins

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Rvu_forgivingthefranklinsForgiving the Franklins (DVD)
Written, Directed & Produced by Jay Floyd
Grinning Idiot Entertainment – 2006
Starring Teresa Willis, Robertson Dean, Aviva,
Vince Pavia, Mari Blackwell, and Pop DaSilva as Christ
Reviewed by Bo Young

OK. This one is never going to make it to the malls, which is a shame, because that’s precisely the audience that needs to see this satirical parable of modern fundamentalist self-righteousness. Well…maybe not the audience that needs to see it, but it sure as heck it the audience you’d want to see it, if for only the moment when they ran screaming from the theater, their heads exploding from the sheer sacrilege of it all.

I don’t really know from sacrilege anymore, but I sure as hell know from sacred cows and this movie grinds up every Christian sacred cow and turns them into quarter-pounders with cheese. Think Will and Grace crossed with Six Feet Under. Your basic Sears catalogue suburban family, stiff with their religious piety…suddenly dead. Literally, hit by a truck, only the daughter is (you’ll pardon the expression) left behind. The other three…her deeply frustrated mother, her stiff (and yet somehow humpy) board of a father (who have intercourse without ever opening their eyes) and her big pretty football playing brother (who listens to Gilbert & Sullivan in his car CD player, to give you some idea of the subtlety of the script) wake up in a vast arid plain of the afterworld, a little disoriented, a little confused to see a decidedly third-world looking guy taking an axe to a large wooden crucifix. Like I said…subtlety isn’t one of the strong points of this script, as entertaining as it is.

Anyway, the dark-skinned Jesus, in one of the more delicious visual metaphors, proceeds to remove “bloody apples” from the backsides of the brains of the three undead family members, who quickly find themselves back in the hospital with nary a scratch. Their just-this-side-of-bulimic daughter, who wasn’t hurt as badly in the accident is still limping around on a crutch. Ah metaphor.

The script is a ham-fisted from time to time as if the director and writer were “trying to make a point” and sometimes the jokes seem a little bit like shooting fish in a barrel. That said, there is a hilarious discussion of the pros and cons of teachers having sex with their students around the family dinner table at one point which is no small feat to pull off humorously. Male teachers and football playing students, that is. And again, this story gets a little ham-fisted.

But frankly, if LOGO had real balls, they’d turn this into a regular, ongoing television series. It has a TV sitcom feel. And while it’s a very funny movie that takes predictable turns, they’re fun to watch.

My favorite line is when the mother is talking to her self-righteous fundamentalist (is that redundant?) “best friend” and says, “When you talk about God, you sound like one of those women on the talk shows who’s still in love with the husband that beats them.”

The ending has a twist that I wasn’t so sure I liked that seems like the writers just didn’t know what to do with the characters after a while. But at least the daughter loses her crutches.

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane.   We are a reader-supported journaland need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going.  So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

Bo Young is the publisher and editor of White Crane.  He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his fere and two hair children.