drifting toward love

I just finished a book called Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay, and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York, by Kai Wright. This just a great read - engaging us in the lives and stories of queer kids of color (mostly guys) from the poorer parts of New York just trying to get by. The author clearly has a lot of respect for his subjects, describing their considerable strengths and skills along with the mistakes they make. But it also takes time to show us the social history of the areas - the racist real estate practices and government policies that drove people of color and immigrants into substandard housing, for example, and the impacts of gentrification of areas like the Christopher Street piers. Wright also provides some amazing examples of community organizing that we all could look to for inspiration.

I think most importantly for me is also the strong critique served to white LGBT people. This has increasingly been on my radar screen as I get educated on racism and classism among white gay folks. In this book we get embarrassing images of white men fetishizing young guys of color, and white yuppie gays who embrace the precocious queer kid from central Brooklyn when he comes to their art parties, and the rich folks on Christopher Street who see queer kids of color as a noisy menace. Perhaps most striking is the image of walking from New York's gay pride parade down to the piers and noticing the shift in skin tone as well as policing practices.

I guess by now I've lost my starry-eyed notion that queer/LG communities might be a place for greater liberation from racism (and sexism, for that matter), but instead too often I find that white gay people use their marginalization like a badge or a shield to guard against accusations of blatant racism that occur. In this book, we see the flipside of that - kids who are tossed out of their houses or schools - or kids that are kept stuck inside their houses with few visible role models or places to embrace or explore their sexualities and their meaning. Wright provides some important analysis also on the "risk" models of sexuality and HIV education, and on the role of family and community ties for many queer folks of color. I just finished a job application last night that has me thinking about what it means to be "family," in the sense of mutually supportive, loving, multigenerational connections. As gay folks, we have a great connection to the word through the historic use of family as a euphemism for gay. Maybe we should exploit those meanings. There are many glimpses of it in this book.

Kai Wright has another great article at ColorLines.com, on same-sex marriage and race: "A Fragile Union." And another interesting article about Lorraine Hansberry from TheRoot.com. I'm not really sure what the answer to all of this is, but it's certainly not to keep doing what we're doing. As my friend Emily said recently, Obama's presidency is a great time to keep bringing up race - rather than seeing it as an arrival point, this is a jumping-off point for us (white people) in the US to keep looking at race - how far we've come, but more important - where we need to go.

One of the most significant comments of my life.

I posted this on facebook last night, but since some of the people mentioned in it aren’t on facebook, and just maybe they read my blog sometimes, I wanted to post it here:

Many of you know that once a week, I work with an organization called Care Through Touch Institute (CTI), where I do chair massage and acupressure with homeless and low-income folks in San Francisco (in the Tenderloin, for those who know the area).

Tonight my supervisor shared a compliment, which keeps making me cry. I think it's a real tribute to many of the people in my life (many of the women, particularly) who helped shaped me into the person I am. I'm tagging some of the most significant people in my facebook note. My mom and sister and nieces aren't on facebook, but they should know their part in giving me some of the first reasons to care about feminism, before I realized how liberating it is for me as a guy, too. Carol Spangler (who saved my life in high school) should be mentioned here. And of course I want to mention my fiance who supports me in doing work that touches my heart. There are a lot of people who have crossed their paths with mine, who I don't even know by name, too.

I substituted a few weeks ago at a drop-in center whose clients are primarily from a nearby women's shelter. Many of the women there have had some really tough life situations, and a lot have suffered horrible abuse at the hands of men. One of them in particular talked with me about how afraid she was to consider even being in a room with, let alone be touched by, a man - but she wanted to push herself that day, to try to trust me.
My supervisor told me tonight that several of the women told her how comfortable they felt with me, and that I gave them a gift, being a man, giving them a few moments of relaxation and massage.

I am grateful to the many people who have helped to form me. You all have helped me to become the guy who was allowed (who was given the gift) to be in the room with these women. Thank you. I am humbled by the thought of how many people inspired me, had patience with me, taught me from their own wisdom and experience, and nurtured me to be the best person I can be.

gotta love Oakland

Today I came across a new cookbook called Vegan Soul Kitchen, by Bryant Terry. it's a vegan interpretation on soul food that sounds pretty good. Reminds me a bit of Brown Sugar Kitchen's Tanya Holland, who wrote New Soul Cooking, which features healthy, local, seasonal versions of traditional soul food. Growing up on a farm, helping my mom butcher chickens and tend the garden, I'll probably never go vegan entirely, but I'm intrigued by the efforts to match my eating with my values. After all, home-raised and butchered chickens are a far cry from the mass produced variety. I got to checking out Bryant Terry and found yet another Oakland guy who is totally cool and making connections between things like food culture, structural racism, and urban politics. It reminds me yet again why I love this city. There's a whole culture of organizations doing great work around here. I don't know if the Oakland Men's Project is still operable, but I used some of their stuff when I was doing anti-sexism/anti-sexual-violence work.

And then I went with a group of folks to Allen Temple Baptist Church in one of the poorer areas of Oakland. It was an amazing service with great music and message - but most remarkable was how much we felt welcomed and accepted despite obviously not belonging to the regular congregation. Not to mention that Allen Temple does some awesome social service work.

Dunno, I'm just feeling the love for Oakland these days.

The Watchmen and the 80s.

Today we saw The Watchmen in Orinda. My first reaction is that it was just like I expected. Apart from the fact that I wonder if bodies really hit things that loudly (and if they had the volume inexplicably turned too loud for my approaching-30-year-old ears), it was basically just what I expected from a film that very faithfully follows the look and feel of the graphic novel. The violence that made me avert my eyes more times than I can count, but I knew that going in - the filmmakers reproduced images I recognized, as gruesome as they were in the novel.

The only question I had - and this hadn't occurred to me before - was "where was AIDS?" In this alternative world of 1985 where Richard Nixon was still president and half-naked blue men wander the cosmos, I wouldn't normally ask the question. But several cemetery shots featured an angel very closely matching the angel statue in Angels in America. I suppose in the landscape of impending nuclear doom, maybe AIDS didn't make the radar in the same way. It was a curious omission that might have enhanced the dramatic feel of the film. They did, after all, alter Sally Jupiter's (that's Laurel "Silk Spectre"'s mother) hairdo to look more realistic than the novel.

Maybe I'm being nitpicky, but it was almost as if the filmmakers wanted me to ask. Or maybe I'm overly sensitized to angels statues. I don't know if the film was particularly good or bad, but it was impressively faithful to the novel, which was kind of cool.

One last thing: during the flashback scene where Mr. Manhattan remembers how he first appeared in the lunchroom of the lab, a woman in her 60s sitting behind us whispered loudly to her companion "There's the blue penis!"

vicky cristina barcelona

Woody Allen has done it again - another funny movie with a very sour view of humanity. Or at least a sour view of wealthy white jetsetting New York elite humanity. Despite the breezy and yellow-hued feel of this film, it has an undercurrent of pessimism about the way people make choices that lead them (knowingly) to doom. I might be overstating it a little bit, but when I see some of his latest films (Match Point most clearly comes to mind, but also Cassandra's Dream), I see a few innocent people caught up in the tragic circumstances of someone else's bad choices, but even more people caught up in their own bad choices when they have the ability to knowingly make the right ones. Allen makes fun of conformist society elites and the "creative drifter" type who is just the other side of the same coin - a person who lives a romantic ideal that tries to be the opposite of conformity but is actually its own kind of unsatisfactory conformity.

Despite my own fuzzy sense of positive outlook on everything, I immensely enjoy these films and probably get some kind of delight in making fun of these poor characters who seem to have everything but happiness.