Category Archives: GLBT

April Links Roundup: Contested Histories

Happy cruelest poetry month, April, etc.

Speculative fiction pioneer Samuel R. Delany, who is still going to gay sex parties at age 80, wants you to stop treating the terms “literary fiction” and “high art” as synonymous. One is a genre description, the other is a value judgment. He explains in this 2019 interview with John Plotz at Public Books:

SD: …There’s a reason why the term “science fiction” jelled around 1922.

JP: So that makes Frankenstein not science fiction?

SD: No.

JP: Making The Time Machine not science fiction.

SD: With all due respect, I think that’s a crock of shit. They’re gothic novels. And the gothic novel is a perfectly good and reasonable genre. There’s no point in snatching it out of one genre. The gothic novel has enough problems maintaining its own dignity.

JP: You use the word paraliterary a lot.

SD: The paraliterary genres in the mid-20th century were specifically those that if you asked someone on the street, they would say: That’s not literature. That’s science fiction, westerns, mysteries, comic books, pornography, for example. Now, I think any of those can rise to very high art. The fact that it is a separate genre means that it has its own way of becoming. That there are people who can do something with it, and then there are people who don’t do very much with it.

JP: But the point of the classification would be that, even if someone becomes great in that field, it’s not like they earned the title of literary.

SD: Yes, although there are some writers who have—Theodore Sturgeon, for example, who I think is just one of the great writers of the mid-20th century and whose collected stories create one of the best portraits we have of the world from that time through to the end of the century. And some of it was science fiction, some of it was very borderline science fiction, but it’s a great art. I would much prefer to see him in a Library of America edition than Ursula Le Guin: whom I liked personally very much, but don’t think was anywhere near as interesting a writer.

I agree, it’s weird that no one talks about Sturgeon these days, because he was such a big deal when I was devouring every book in my high school library’s sci-fi section in the 1980s. I recommend his novel More Than Human, about a found-family of people with various paranormal abilities and cognitive impairments who together make up a superhuman gestalt consciousness.

A historian friend sent me this provocative long read from the London Review of Books, “The Shoah after Gaza” by Pankaj Mishra. According to Mishra’s account of post-WWII Jewish identity formation, the first generation after the Holocaust did not want to make this great trauma and humiliation central to their self-understanding as Jews. It was only in the 1970s that Zionists within and outside Israel started to emphasize the Holocaust as a moral trump card to silence criticism of how the Palestinians were treated.

[Israeli Prime Minister Menachem] Begin, who had organised the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in which 91 people were killed, was the first of the frank exponents of Jewish supremacism who continue to rule Israel. He was also the first routinely to invoke Hitler and the Holocaust and the Bible while assaulting Arabs and building settlements in the Occupied Territories. In its early years the state of Israel had an ambivalent relationship with the Shoah and its victims. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, initially saw Shoah survivors as ‘human debris’, claiming that they had survived only because they had been ‘bad, harsh, egotistic’. It was Ben-Gurion’s rival Begin, a demagogue from Poland, who turned the murder of six million Jews into an intense national preoccupation, and a new basis for Israel’s identity. The Israeli establishment began to produce and disseminate a very particular version of the Shoah that could be used to legitimise a militant and expansionist Zionism.

…Primo Levi, who had known the horrors of Auschwitz…and also felt an emotional affinity to the new Jewish state, quickly organised an open letter of protest and gave an interview in which he said that ‘Israel is rapidly falling into total isolation... We must choke off the impulses towards emotional solidarity with Israel to reason coldly on the mistakes of Israel’s current ruling class. Get rid of that ruling class.’ In several works of fiction and non-fiction, Levi had meditated not only on his time in the death camp and its anguished and insoluble legacy, but also on the ever present threats to human decency and dignity. He was especially incensed by Begin’s exploitation of the Shoah. Two years later, he argued that ‘the centre of gravity of the Jewish world must turn back, must move out of Israel and back into the diaspora.’

Current rhetoric about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Mishra writes, prevents us from calling the genocide in Gaza by its true name. This is not to deny the unspeakable suffering of the Jews under Nazism, but to question the political uses to which it’s been put. In fact, this very point was made by Jewish critics of ethnic cleansing in Palestine in the 1960s-80s.

In 2024, many more people can see that, when compared with the Jewish victims of Nazism, the countless millions consumed by slavery, the numerous late Victorian holocausts in Asia and Africa, and the nuclear assaults on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are barely remembered. Billions of non-Westerners have been furiously politicised in recent years by the West’s calamitous war on terror, ‘vaccine apartheid’ during the pandemic, and the barefaced hypocrisy over the plight of Ukrainians and Palestinians; they can hardly fail to notice a belligerent version of ‘Holocaust denial’ among the elites of former imperialist countries, who refuse to address their countries’ past of genocidal brutality and plunder and try hard to delegitimise any discussion of this as unhinged ‘wokeness’. Popular West-is-best accounts of totalitarianism continue to ignore the acute descriptions of Nazism (by Jawaharlal Nehru and Aimé Césaire, among other imperial subjects) as the radical ‘twin’ of Western imperialism; they shy away from exploring the obvious connection between the imperial slaughter of natives in the colonies and the genocidal terrors perpetrated against Jews inside Europe.

One of the great dangers today is the hardening of the colour line into a new Maginot Line. For most people outside the West, whose primordial experience of European civilisation was to be brutally colonised by its representatives, the Shoah did not appear as an unprecedented atrocity. Recovering from the ravages of imperialism in their own countries, most non-Western people were in no position to appreciate the magnitude of the horror the radical twin of that imperialism inflicted on Jews in Europe. So when Israel’s leaders compare Hamas to Nazis, and Israeli diplomats wear yellow stars at the UN, their audience is almost exclusively Western. Most of the world doesn’t carry the burden of Christian European guilt over the Shoah, and does not regard the creation of Israel as a moral necessity to absolve the sins of 20th-century Europeans. For more than seven decades now, the argument among the ‘darker peoples’ has remained the same: why should Palestinians be dispossessed and punished for crimes in which only Europeans were complicit? And they can only recoil with disgust from the implicit claim that Israel has the right to slaughter 13,000 children not only as a matter of self-defence but because it is a state born out of the Shoah.

Jewish Currents had an interesting article last month about Israel’s dependence on underpaid Palestinian labor. Jonathan Shamir’s “Between Exclusion and Exploitation” details how the state is balancing competing pressures from security hardliners and Israeli businesses. Give them just enough work permits to keep the economic frustration from boiling over into violence, but not so many that they become an organized labor force who want equal rights. Meanwhile the BBC reports that enterprising Israelis are already planning beachfront resorts in Gaza once it’s cleared of its pesky inhabitants.

For some in the Israeli cabinet, the Palestinian territory – now drenched in blood – is ripe for resettlement. That includes Israel’s hard-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir – a settler himself.

In late January, he made his way through a packed conference hall, slowed by embraces and handshakes. He was among friends – about 1,000 ultranationalists pushing for a return to Gaza at the event entitled Settlement Brings Security.

Mr Ben Gvir, who favours “encouraging emigration”, was among a dozen cabinet ministers in attendance.

“It’s time to go back home,” he said from the stage, to loud applause. “It’s time to return to the land of Israel. If we don’t want another 7 October, we need to return home and control the land.”

At the Yale Review, Paisley Currah surveyed two new books about the anti-trans backlash from notable queer theory writers: Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender? and Jules Gill-Peterson’s A Short History of Trans Misogyny. Butler focuses on the intellectual incoherence of arguments for an immutable binary, while Gill-Peterson takes a materialist approach, looking at how gender and racial classifications are invented to subordinate certain populations.
Gill-Peterson finds the psychological approach, which Butler exemplifies, useful but partial. It might explain violence against individual trans women, but it cannot account for why trans misogyny initially arose as a violent instrument of governing. Trans panic began with an assault in colonial and settler states on what was perceived as sexualized femininity in male-bodied people. The psychological phenomenon that motivates individual violence did not precede state violence but followed it…
As scholars have demonstrated from a variety of angles, it has been politically and economically expedient throughout history to deem certain populations improperly gendered and sexually corrupt. These designations provided chattel slavery and vulner­able mobile labor for capital and granted states the opportunity to consolidate their sovereignty by unleashing immense violence on these groups. Sylvia Federici’s work, for example, recounts the social, political, and economic losses women experienced with the emergence of early capitalism, which relegated women to unpaid domestic labor. In a similar fashion, Gill-Peterson outlines how the dispossession wrought by slavery and colonialism shunted trans-feminized people of color into cities, where they monetized trans femininity through the service economy and sex work.
Something that stood out to me from this article was the link between transphobia and hatred of personal freedom. This is our supposedly liberal Pope Francis: “Releasing identity from the grip of the body leads to a ‘radically autonomous’ conception of the individual as one ‘who can choose a gender not correspond­ing to his or her biological sex,’ as the Vatican explained in its 2019 document ‘Male and Female He Created Them.'” Stop and think about that. Why is autonomy such a dirty word? Is God a narcissistic parent? The issue isn’t even what we do with our freedom, but the affrontery of having freedom at all.
Besides which, choosing to actualize our queerness is not this caricatured break from all communal accountability or formative interpersonal influences. That’s not humanly possible. What we’re doing is leaving communities that don’t let us grow, and joining different ones. That’s what the church can’t tolerate.

March Links Roundup: Baby Got Humpback

In the spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of…blowholes. “Humpback sex photographed for first time–and both whales were male,” The Guardian newspaper reported in February.

Despite decades of research on humpback whales, sightings of the male’s penis have been rare. Copulation by the species had not been documented by people – until now, when two photographers captured images of a sexual encounter between two whales off the coast of Hawaii.

The sighting, confirmed by scientists in a newly published study, occurred in January 2022 in waters west of the island of Maui, where two whales approached and circled a boat before engaging in sexual activity about three to five meters below the vessel.

Both of the whales were male, which makes the photos, taken by Lyle Krannichfeld and Brandi Romano, the first evidence of homosexual behavior in humpback whales as well as the first sighting of sex in the species.

In other queer animal news, a green honeycreeper was sighted in Colombia with a rare mutation called bilateral gynandromorphism. In plain English, that means that one half of the bird’s plumage is electric blue like a male, the other half emerald green like a female. The New York Times appreciates how fashion-forward our community is: “This Bird Is Half Male, Half Female, and Completely Stunning”. See pictures at the link.

It is not entirely clear how the condition comes about, but one leading theory is that it results from an error during the production of egg cells in female birds. Female birds have two different sex chromosomes, designated W and Z, while males have two Z chromosomes. An error during egg cell production could result in two fused or incompletely separated cells, one with a W chromosome and one with a Z chromosome.

If those fused cells are fertilized by two different sperm, each of which carries a Z chromosome, the result might be a bird with the WZ chromosomes of a female in some cells and the ZZ chromosomes of a male in others. “And so you get a bird that’s half and half,” Dr. Spencer said.

These stories remind me of a recent episode of the podcast Straight White American Jesus, where hosts Bradley Onishi and Dan Miller offered a decisive takedown of conservative Catholic “natural law” theory–the theology that (allegedly) deduces the purpose of human sexuality from observations of biology. Surprise surprise, that purpose is heterosexual procreation, only. But why is it, the podcasters asked, that such Christians’ ideas of biology are stuck in the era of Aristotle, or at the latest, Thomas Aquinas? No amount of evidence of homosexuality in the animal kingdom, let alone modern human psychology, can make a dent in their cis-hetero-patriarchal idea of “Nature”.

Let’s just keep on with the gay links a little longer. I resonated with Jarek Steele’s personal essay “The Club” at Electric Literature, subtitled “In a bathhouse meant for cis gay men, trans is transgressive”. Steele and his trans male friend decide to integrate their local bathhouse in St. Louis, a space that traditionally “wasn’t meant for my eyes, the eyes of a man who was assigned female at birth.” For the author, it wasn’t about looking for a hookup, so much as feeling present in his body, being accepted as a gay man in a place that’s been central to their culture. “What I wanted was uncomplicated. I didn’t need acrobatic sex or a million orgasms. I just wanted to be in the room.” He describes a flirtation there that didn’t end in sex but was healing nonetheless.

Before I stopped using women’s restrooms, I was used to people talking and holding the door for each other. It took practice to master the art of men’s rooms. Walk in. Stall. Hurry. Sink. Hurry. Walk out. No looking or talking, especially at Lowe’s or even the YMCA. Maybe I was just like that because I was afraid to stop moving. Maybe they were too busy trying not to be seen to notice me anyway.

But here was a place built for anonymous sex, where looking and touching was the point. It was a temporary ceasefire with rules for those desperate to be touched without consequence, and even though Steven and I hadn’t come here to hook up, I felt a crushing tenderness toward these awkward, average, strikingly beautiful middle-aged men who came to an anonymous place to stop diverting attention, to stop feeling poisonous. Just like me.

…As I followed Steven silently back through the shadowy maze toward the locker room, a stranger emerged from around a corner. We passed each other there in the dark hallway in that bathhouse in a manufacturing district in St. Louis, late morning on a Tuesday in February. This anonymous man’s friend, if he was a friend, had turned away. I slowed to let him pass. He reached up and stroked the hair on my chest, a passing glance before we walked away from each other. I wanted to take his hand. I wanted to touch his face. I wanted to be gentle. I wanted not to be gentle. Every second of my life lived in that tender stroke of my chest in the dim light of the most nakedly male place in the world, where I had trespassed and had been wanted.

Meanwhile, Anastassia Gliadkovskaya, at the website Fierce Healthcare, reports on a potentially deadly form of exclusion: “Denied care: Trans men struggle for inclusive gynecologic healthcare”. She interviewed a patient who was turned away from several OB/GYN offices in New York City because he identified as male, which meant that his ovarian cancer was not diagnosed until he had gender-affirming surgery. Although such discrimination is technically prohibited, many medical programs still give insufficient training in gender-inclusive care, causing doctors to feel ill-equipped for such cases.

Noah Communoah’s blog Communotes, which I discovered via Daniel Lavery’s Substack, posted an article about his deconversion from Christianity that struck a chord with me. “On the Christian Question” talks about Noah’s journey into, and out of, an attraction to a hardcore faith that promised justice for his trauma.

My best friend at Simon’s Rock was Wren (pseudonymized as usual), a transmasc MCR fan and fellow fledgling anarchist. We were both survivors, and vocally so: we were not doing well. Wren was Catholic, raised in a secular family but committed to a feminist veneration of Mary— and to the transcendence of soul over body. (I’ve since learned that the latter is a gnostic heresy). At the time, neither of our bodies were a particularly hospitable place to be. We were both coping with dysphoria and rape trauma, and had turned towards Tumblr communities that were proudly sex-negative. So I experimented with the religion of Simone Weil and Catherine of Siena, of which Wren had long been a disciple. And I tried out Christianity too…

…I had serious misgivings about the basic Lutheran doctrine of solo fide, justification by faith alone. I thought that non-Christians should get to go to heaven, of course. But more than that, I thought that evil Christians should be damned to hell.

My dad is a miserable, controlling man, prone to outbursts of rage and deeply averse to any kind of therapy. He has two coping skills— exercise and prayer—and relates to both of them in excess. One of my last memories of him, right after he beat up my sister, involves him praying for forgiveness and then going for a run. He didn’t bother apologizing to us.

I found it hard to believe in a god that could forgive him.  I fantasized about hellfire for him and the other men who’d hurt me, recited Psalms for the destruction of my enemies. At the same time, on this mortal coil, I had recently embraced abolitionist politics. It made intuitive sense to me; the court system facilitated my dad’s abuse, and the cops abused my girlfriend for trying to escape her own violent home. But just because I knew policing hurt survivors doesn’t mean I was ready to give up on punishment. Hell was an eternal prison sentence, but one administered by a perfectly fair and wise judge. I secretly believed in a kind of purgatory, where thoroughly rehabilitated offenders could someday access heaven. But I knew my dad never would…

…My theology changed when my politics did, which changed with my relationship to trauma. I saw the survivor advocates I trusted, who encouraged me to see my abusers as monstrous, get outed as interpersonally violent themselves. I saw autistic and mad trans women accused of spurious abuses, then “held accountable” by removing every resource they had to survive. I read Against Innocence by Jackie Wang; I did EMDR. I just didn’t want to torture my abusers anymore.

So Christianity became something new. By this point, I had lived on my own for about four years, then returned to my mom’s house for disability care. I joined a local ELCA congregation that advertised as progressive and affirming. I made friends with the pastor, an incredibly sweet woman who I still think of fondly. And I started reading about queer theology: Jesus as dissolving the human/deity binary, the God character as a BDSM top, Paul as a sex-repulsed asexual. I loved the possibilities of textual interpretation, but I was still terrified of getting it wrong. After all, the Bible had to mean something specific, right? Otherwise what’s the point?

I quit Christianity without much fanfare. I just started HRT, moved to New York, and for the first time really felt comfortable in my skin. It just didn’t make much sense to go to church anymore. There was nothing I needed there.

I look forward to a future post where Noah explains his conversion to Judaism!

I admit it, I’m one of those bad people who can never remember the difference between Naomi Wolf (second-wave feminist author of The Beauty Myth turned alt-right conspiracy theorist) and Naomi Klein, the Canadian filmmaker and progressive political analyst who had to write a whole-ass book about repeatedly being mistaken for Naomi Wolf! In response to Israel’s bombing of Gaza, Klein has generously shared two chapters from Doppelganger on her website about “trauma-forged identity politics”. These chapters discuss “how the Nazis were influenced by European colonial and racial segregation in the Americas—and how a failure to reckon with those connections shaped and misshaped Israeli history, and contributed to exiling Palestinians into an unbearable purgatory.” It seems to be human nature to mirror our enemies instead of reflecting on ourselves.

In Memoriam: The Poet Spiel

Friend of the blog Tom W. Taylor a/k/a The Poet Spiel passed away on March 1 at the age of 82. In recent years he had suffered from vascular dementia, though he remained active with his creative work. His most recent major publication was the retrospective anthology of his visual art and writing, Revealing Self in Pictures and Words (2018). He is survived by his longtime partner, Paul Welch.

Spiel was a prolific, irreverent, multi-genre artist whose oeuvre included poetry of gay male love, lust, and childhood trauma; vivid animal prints and graphic designs inspired by his travels in Africa; and gritty stories about trailer-park elders and war veterans. His aesthetic could be shocking, satirical, or grotesque, but these techniques were always directed at inspiring empathy for the downtrodden and outrage about American inequality.

The bio he provided for a 2022 retrospective at the Sangre de Cristo Arts and Conference Center in his native Pueblo, CO reads:

Internationally published artist/author Tom Taylor aka The Poet SPIEL (b. 1941) savors the past, dares the future, swallows the present; steady hand, open heart, countercultural, passionate, sardonic, sometimes absurd.

As a child, the artist’s temperament was already edgy and precocious. For survival in the farm world he’d fallen heir to, making art allowed him to discover that he could freely create his personal child-view of a complicated world where everyone was bigger and smarter than he. Amidst his 8th decade on earth, coping with losses associated with predementia, art is the friend which has withstood the petty and the foolish, the graceful, the garish, and the grand of a diverse career in the arts.

As a child, Taylor discovered he could make a sunny picture, a sad picture or a pretend picture. He could define the ME of that moment—happily wishful, pissed off, and lonely, hungry for something he did not know. Making art, as work, as play, as sustenance and medication, has rescued him from drowning in the chaos of his troubled and hungry mind, destined to express the manic-depressive disorder he’d inherited from his mother’s blood. A family curse, indeed; but one with coping tools he’s acquired through introspection and decades of talk therapy so he is able to work it through by painting or writing it’s discomfort to more easily recognize it, then, better cope with its horrors. It’s taken him a lifelong pursuit to become reasonably competent at understanding why he is the way he is and how to accept his Self.

Taylor considers making art to be his best medicine and his safe place.

I was honored to feature Spiel’s artwork on the cover and section title pages of my most recent poetry book, Made Man (Little Red Tree, 2022). He enthusiastically accepted me into the brotherhood of queer male writers. Here’s some bonus art that didn’t make it into the book.

Enjoy these highlights from the poetry he’s shared at Reiter’s Block over the years. “birdchild” was his favorite among his many poems. I have a soft spot for “queers for dinner”.

“a suite of dirty pictures”

“The Baptism” and “Touching”

“birdchild” and “witness”

“Absent Member”

“queers for dinner”

February Links Roundup: Do You Know You’re a Rat?

The groundhog may have seen his shadow today, but did he recognize it as himself?

You may have noticed the cute “rat selfies” making the rounds on social media last month. CBC Radio has the backstory about Canadian artist Augustin Lignier, who built a photo booth for his rats Arthur and Augustin to make a point about the addictiveness of social media. The critters were rewarded with food for pressing the camera lever, but soon took pleasure in the action for its own sake.

Arthur and Augustin produced dozens upon dozens of selfies, trying out different angles like real social media pros. But Lignier says they didn’t seem to get any fulfilment from the images themselves.

“I try to show them the images on the screen, so directly after they took the picture, they can see their own selfie,” he said. “But they don’t recognize themselves, you know.”

Philosophers might well debate whether this is a cognitive limitation or a form of enlightenment. The joy is wholly in the act of creation, not the judging and self-promoting ego. For us human artists, that kind of present-moment focus would be a relief, at least some of the time!

I upgraded to the paid subscription to the Straight White American Jesus podcast because I’m obsessed with their lively combo of theological and political analysis of the Christian Right. But their cult-busting mission also extends to the left-wing wellness culture whose paranoid views end up converging with QAnon on topics like vaccines and gender-affirming care. I recommend their July 2023 crossover episode with Conspirituality podcast hosts Julian Walker and Matthew Remski.

I thought of that episode when reading this Alexandra Middleton essay in Electric Literature on Jacqueline Alnes’ memoir The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour. “When so much seems unknowable about the very body you live in, it feels nice to stand on a firm platform made from rights rather than wrongs, even if the very platform itself is a false reality,” Alnes writes about how she fell for extreme diet fads after being struck with a mysterious neurological illness. “Thinking about how many people are failed on a regular basis by U.S. health care systems, it feels totally valid that someone would click on a link to fast for 30 days to cure their diabetes, which I react viscerally to on surface level. But on a human desperation, I want to feel well and these systems are failing me, charging me thousands of dollars a month for very little care, level? 100% get it.”

Ky Schevers writes about a similar example of the horseshoe effect–radical feminists adopting reactionary views on gender–at her trans rights blog Health Liberation Now! Schevers has had an unusual life path, first identifying as a trans man, then becoming a detransition activist, and finally breaking with that community and denouncing their cult-like practices. She now identifies as transmasculine and genderqueer, with she/her pronouns, according to her Wikipedia page. Her longform article “‘A spiritual war in a way’: How Detrans Radical Feminists Influenced WPATH” goes into great detail about how her former community helped introduce stricter gatekeeping into transgender healthcare. Some money quotes if you don’t want to read the whole thing:

Though many [detrans radical feminists] are disillusioned and distrustful towards therapists and other medical professionals and may view the medical system as a whole as part of the larger patriarchy, they’re still very willing to influence it in whatever way they can, especially if they think it will lead to less people transitioning. Many did had negative experiences with medical providers during their transitions but instead of working to improve care they believe that medical transition or even the whole medical system is irredeemable and needs to be shut down and replaced with some kind of alternative healthcare. They’re similar to other people who had negative experiences with healthcare who end up in alt-health cults, who also often end up believing in conspiracy theories and/or reactionary ideologies…

…Gatekeeping only makes sense if you think you can reliably develop a process that will correctly sort out “real” trans people from people confused about their gender. But what if trans people, even those with intense dysphoria, can be psychologically manipulated just as much as any other group of people? Why would trans people be immune to conversion practices or cults?

Following the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack in Israel, there’s been a disturbing amount of groupthink among Jews and those who claim to be our allies. The state of Israel is assumed to represent the values and interests of the Jewish people, and criticism of the former is deemed prejudice toward the latter. I welcomed this contrary perspective from Seth Sanders at Religion Dispatches: “Despite Conflation of Israel with Judaism, Anti-Zionism Is More Kosher Than You Think”.

For 2000 years Jewish prayer has hoped ardently that the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) would soon be redeemed by God and led by His Messiah; some even made pilgrimage to visit or dwell with others in the Holy Land. But there is surprisingly little evidence that Jews also always longed for a sovereign State of Israel (Medinat Yisrael) or to be a Middle Eastern political power. It turns out the idea may be shockingly recent, but its novelty is hard to see because we stand on the other side of such a radical transformation in thought. The shift from Holy Land to sovereign secular state has been rendered almost invisible.

…[T]he greatest Jewish philosopher of the Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn, wrote in 1770 that “The Talmud forbids us to even think of a return to Palestine by force. Without the miracles and signs mentioned in the Scripture, we must not take the smallest step in the direction of forcing a return and a restoration of our nation.”

It turns out that opposition to a Jewish state isn’t an isolated theological quirk but a central conviction among Jews for most of the history of Rabbinic thought. It’s contained in the Talmud itself, expounded by Rashi (the most important Jewish Bible interpreter, whose interpretation every Jewish Day School student learns first), and detailed by Maimonides, arguably Jewish tradition’s single most influential thinker…

This Messianic view is anchored in the Talmud, which says that the Jewish people must swear to keep faith in God’s plan for the world. The messianic end, when God will redeem all of reality, is a goal so desirable as to be like a bride in waiting for marriage. Thus it is in a mystical commentary on the Song of Songs that Israel is first commanded to swear three oaths: not to “ascend the wall” to where the Messiah (the Bride) waits, not to “rebel against the nations of the world,” and not to “force the End [times].”

Meanwhile, in our nation of so-called Judeo-Christian values, a lot of our food suppliers (including brands with “progressive” vibes like Whole Foods) are taking advantage of modern-day slave labor. AP News reports: “Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands”.

Intricate, invisible webs, just like this one, link some of the world’s largest food companies and most popular brands to jobs performed by U.S. prisoners nationwide, according to a sweeping two-year AP investigation into prison labor that tied hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of agricultural products to goods sold on the open market.

They are among America’s most vulnerable laborers. If they refuse to work, some can jeopardize their chances of parole or face punishment like being sent to solitary confinement. They also are often excluded from protections guaranteed to almost all other full-time workers, even when they are seriously injured or killed on the job.

The goods these prisoners produce wind up in the supply chains of a dizzying array of products found in most American kitchens, from Frosted Flakes cereal and Ball Park hot dogs to Gold Medal flour, Coca-Cola and Riceland rice. They are on the shelves of virtually every supermarket in the country, including Kroger, Target, Aldi and Whole Foods. And some goods are exported, including to countries that have had products blocked from entering the U.S. for using forced or prison labor.

Many of the companies buying directly from prisons are violating their own policies against the use of such labor. But it’s completely legal, dating back largely to the need for labor to help rebuild the South’s shattered economy after the Civil War. Enshrined in the Constitution by the 13th Amendment, slavery and involuntary servitude are banned – except as punishment for a crime.

That clause is currently being challenged on the federal level, and efforts to remove similar language from state constitutions are expected to reach the ballot in about a dozen states this year.

Some prisoners work on the same plantation soil where slaves harvested cotton, tobacco and sugarcane more than 150 years ago, with some present-day images looking eerily similar to the past.

Discovered via poet [sarah] Cavar’s newsletter, this essay by Rachael Allen in the journal Too Little/Too Hard challenges the association of “Difficult and Bad” in how we critique writing. Allen talks about dual consciousness as a person of working-class background in literary academia, and argues that ideals of “accessible” writing may underestimate the self-taught intelligence of housecleaners and laborers like her father. When such voices do make it into mainstream publishing, they’re pressured to perform a simplified and traumatic life story that will flatter the benevolence of upper-class readers. “There is a pervading, top-down and patronising mythos of the ‘general public’ or ‘general reader’ – an idea peddled about who can tolerate what under the premise that general audiences aren’t able to manage complicated concepts, formally or linguistically innovative books, or other challenging works, precedents for what is deemed to be accessible set by the middle-class anti-intellectuals that decide it.”

Also on the topic of literary gatekeeping, I recommend this piece in Chicago Review, “Small Press Economies: A Dialogue” by Hilary Plum and Matvei Yankelevich. They call on indie bookstores, review outlets, and distributors to stop disadvantaging small press books in their economic models and attention. I can attest that these barriers are very real.

HP: There’s a failure to understand small press and indie status as a political status and responsibility. For example, look at IndieBound, an organization that represents independent booksellers across the US. They promote a short list of new books every month, selected by indie bookstore staff—a coveted honor that can help launch a book nationally. Understandably, indie bookstores and sites like IndieBound emphasize the importance of independence: you should buy from the brick-and-mortar, rather than from Amazon, and support local community and economy. You should make a little sacrifice on price to protect something you’d miss if it were gone.

But the vast majority of the books IndieBound promotes and celebrates are published by the Big Five. The same is true at too many indie brick-and-mortars. Their uplift of independent, noncorporate business stops at the door—they ask you to buy indie and pay more, but that’s largely not what they do.

MY: So how is that store serving its readers? If you’re a reader and small press books aren’t on the shelf, you’re going to buy what’s on offer. But let’s say you’re into locally and responsibly farmed food and your co-op only carries Cal-Organic, wouldn’t you be concerned?

HP: If you don’t support local farmers, they disappear. People understand that and get why they should buy produce at the farmers market. What’s keeping readers from supporting small presses, and the diverse communities they serve, in similar terms?

MY: It seems to me they can’t see it that way because those presses are hidden from view by structural and economic barriers. On either side of the barriers, institutions, corporations, and small presses themselves often pretend these barriers don’t exist—they’re normalized by the market. Very few literary consumers know that their beloved local indie bookstore is (with very few exceptions) beholden to corporate distributors. Few can imagine what’s missing from those shelves and therefore from their potential reading lives. What’s missing is countless titles from 400 SPD presses, and who knows how many others that don’t have distribution at all.

Two Poems by Perry Brass

Prolific gay novelist Perry Brass’s books include Trial by Night, King of Angels, and the self-help volume The Manly Pursuit of Desire and Love. This spring, he will be collaborating with my friend John Ollom on a poetry and dance performance entitled “Threads” at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance. (Stay tuned for ticketing info.) Perry has kindly allowed me to reprint two of his new poems below.

I Will Ask Mike Pence to Kiss Me

I know it. I know it. That face
blank as the moon excites me,
makes me feel all hard
inside. He is such an Eagle Scout,
such a serious contender for
the face of crime control.
He looks so grave, so sober,
like Daddy as an undertaker
that somebody needs to juice him up,
lighten his loafers, make him glow,
make him show a little pulse,
make him show he’s got jism
at his fingertips. So,
I will volunteer my time,
just to get Mike off his pedestal,
that one eons lower than his
former boss’s,
the one whitewashed in Indiana, the
one presented to him by the American
Legion, the Kiwanis Club, the Rotarians,
and the K. of C. The one
he’s glued to by Alien tape. OK,
I will unglue him. Undo him
perhaps. Just you wait, Mike.
Just you wait. Kiss me!

****

O’Shae

You were killed barechested at
at a gas station
in Brooklyn by a kid who didn’t
like tall black men dancing
at night, with the light stark

and cutting around them, making
deadly halos out of the silence
surrounding Beyoncé’s songs, that
blasted through time that stopped,
and confronted
an anger that had nothing to do
with your dance.

But with you, tall
and beautiful, articulate of body,
wise of eye, soft of mouth, long
fingers, wide shoulders, black chest,
and there you were
with the kid shooting you on his phone,
and you stepped up
into that void of hot summertime
while others watched until you
fell—
stuck, bleeding—and your friend
Otis held you and pressed the blood
with his hand until the ambulance
arrived—and we were all crying,
all of us there, all of us seeing,
your friends and ten siblings
and family and rows and rows
of marching people crying.

Only knowing when you died
at Maimonides Hospital that
a real part of us had known
death too, had felt it deep
in the rolling rivers
of your life
with strong hands carrying your body.

For O’Shae Sibley, murdered the night of July 29, 2023. His friend Otis Pena tried to stop the bleeding with his hand. 

January Links Roundup: Animal Lovers

Welcome to 2024! I’ve been storing up a lot of Palestine links, but let’s start the year off with something enjoyable. Stay tuned for cancellable political takes in a future post.

The Winter 2023 issue of Orion, the environmentalist literary journal, profiled illustrator John Megahan’s contributions to biologist Bruce Bagemihl’s groundbreaking study of same-sex relationships in the animal kingdom, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Journalist Lulu Miller was both charmed by the sensitive drawings and angered that these many examples had never before been compiled or discussed in mainstream biology teaching.

Thumbing through the book’s pages, it’s hard not to giggle. This is the Noah’s ark you never heard about. There are male giraffes necking (literally, that’s what scientists call the courtship behavior); dolphins engaging in blowhole sex; and rams and grizzlies and hedgehogs mounting one another in such intricate detail you can almost feel their fur or fangs or spines.

But awe creeps in too. Somewhere around page 453 maybe, with the kangaroos, or page 476 with the bats, or nearing page 700 after the umpteenth species of warbler. How were we not told?

The deeper I’ve fallen down this rainbow-colored rabbit hole, the more I’ve come to understand that my shock at the breadth of queerness in nature is a symptom of a horrible miseducation, of centuries of science bullying the abundance of queerness off the record, of an internalized homophobia that sometimes still whispers in my ear that I, a queer woman, do not belong on the tree of life. Bruce Bagemihl’s book with Megahan’s illustrations accomplished a kind of feat of alchemy. They took two millennia worth of outliers, scooped them all together, and in so doing revealed that which had been labeled as “unnatural” to be natural. This book helped to shift a scientific paradigm; its width is humbling, its bibliography, muscular. It taught me how the seemingly humble act of compilation can be a kind of activism.

I’m not alone in seeing the book this way. When Biological Exuberance was published in 1999, reviewers called it “revolutionary,” “monumental,” and “a landmark in the literature of science.” It was listed as a Best Book of 1999 by Publishers Weekly and the New York Public Library. It would even go on to be cited in a brief for the Supreme Court case of Lawrence v. Texas (2003) as a scientifically rigorous refutation to the belief that homosexuality was a “crime against nature.”

Every generation thinks they’re ahead of their sexually stodgy ancestors. Well, Harry Roy and His Orchestra were singing about “My Girl’s Pussy” in 1931. Yes, it’s exactly what you think.

1984 Carnation Fancy Feast Cat Food Ad - Darlings | eBay

If pussies are too tame for you, consider xenogenders. In their June 2023 post “What it Means to be Slime,” Substack author NubileConcubine reflects on identification with imaginary and nonhuman creatures, and how this can express the mysterious and idiosyncratic aspects of gendered embodiment. They discuss the debate within the queer community about whether custom genders are “cringy, immature, and unreal.” This plays into the fraught relationship among transness, neurodivergence, and disability, a topic discussed at length in my current trans book group read, Cameron Awkward-Rich’s The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (Duke University Press, 2022). Hat tip to poet [sarah] Cavar for the link.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze | Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights

This headline from The Guardian (UK) can’t be beat: “Uproar as after-school Satan club forms at Tennessee elementary school”. Those wags at The Satanic Temple are at it again, spotlighting violations of church-state separation by demanding equal access for non-Christian religions. Or, as journalist Erum Salam’s sub-header (rather disappointingly) clarifies, “Satanic clubs, whose members do not worship the devil, usually formed in response to presence of religious groups in schools.”

The After School Satan Club (ASSC) wants to establish a branch in Chimneyrock elementary school in the Memphis-Shelby county schools (MSCS) district.

The ASSC is a federally recognized non-profit organization and national after-school program with local chapters across the US. The club is associated with the Satanic Temple, though it claims it is secular and “promotes self-directed education by supporting the intellectual and creative interests of students”.

The Satanic Temple makes it clear its members do not actually worship the devil or believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural. Instead Satan is used as a symbol of free will, humanism and anti-authoritarianism.

Satanic after-school clubs are usually established in a school district in response to the presence of religious clubs, such as the Christian evangelical Bible group the Good News Club. The temple says it “does not believe in introducing religion into public schools and will only open a club if other religious groups are operating on campus”.

I’m all for anti-authoritarianism, etc., but if we don’t get to wear funny costumes and light candles, count me out.

When Satan Club went to school: What's behind the group that created controversy in Chesapeake – The Virginian-Pilot

Apropos of nothing, I just really liked this poem by recent Pulitzer Prize winner Diane Seuss on the Green Linden Press website, “Little Fugue with Jean Seberg and Tupperware”. Older woman with zero fucks to give–not exactly bitter but definitely tired of being sweet.

…Love, that little wood tick. That tick-in-the-ass.
Say the word enough times inside your head,
it will fall out of its meaning
like a stillborn, plop, into the toilet.

In the January 2024 issue of the Catholic magazine America, Eve Tushnet profiles Awake, a laypeople’s organization that helps survivors of clergy sexual abuse. This grassroots movement is stepping in where the institutional church has failed.

The word awake signifies a change, a new awareness of one’s surroundings. Sara Larson’s awakening came in 2018, following the Pennsylvania grand jury report on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and the revelations of then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s long history of abuse. She says the news left her and other Catholics she knew in the Milwaukee area “concerned and hurt and frustrated, and wondering what we could do to help.” In March 2019, a group of people began meeting in Ms. Larson’s living room to discuss ways to respond. They called the group Awake, and it didn’t take them long to settle on an answer.

That August, Awake made its first, formal, public act: an apology in the form of an open letter to survivors of abuse. Ms. Larson says that the group decided to issue the letter because “many apologies that have been given by church leaders feel inadequate.” Awake, she says, “realize[d] that we as members of this church, as the body of Christ, could apologize as well, and make a public commitment to stand in solidarity with survivors and to work for transformation and healing in our church.”

Four years later, Awake has grown into a nonprofit organization, and its response to the abuse crisis has grown, too. The group’s mission is “to awaken our community to the full reality of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, work for transformation, and foster healing for all who have been wounded.” The group now does advocacy work and offers many programs that address the needs of abuse survivors…

Awake was born out of a conviction that survivors are members of the body of Christ: that Catholic prayer, the sacraments and all that the church can offer still belong to survivors, and that they deserve to experience the church in a way that restores, nourishes and heals. Awake also recognizes that, ultimately, survivors follow many paths of healing and discovery.

Awake welcomes members from a variety of faith backgrounds, and with various relationships to the Catholic Church. Some of Awake’s members have always been practicing Catholics. Others no longer have an interest in Catholic practices. But many have an ambivalent relationship to Catholic prayer, sacraments and worship settings. Awake strives to respect each of these perspectives because, for people against whom Catholic spiritual practices were weaponized for grooming and abuse, it can feel as though only a thin veil separates one’s present safety and healing from the trauma of the past.

Eve’s novel Punishment: A Love Story is a triumph of Wildean wit. Go get it–for the love of God, Montessori!

In the Massachusetts Review, Koa Beck’s essay “Nanny of the State” describes how becoming an authorized foster parent forced her into uneasy complicity with a carceral system.

Parents are presented with a highly individualized plan by the court to help establish a “safe” home to which their children can return without state intervention. The tonality of the courts underscores this approach: if they can get and stay sober, if they can establish a clean, secure place to live, if they can maintain a job, if they attend therapy, they can reclaim custody of their children. Everything is on them.

his isolated framework to dissect why parent and child should be separated is further reflected in the infrastructure of the courtroom: parenthood is literally evaluated on a case-by-case basis, like there are no deeply rooted, long-standing factors as to why this has happened. The siloing presents the story as if it’s isolated to this parent and this child. No two cases are identical, but many grow from identical circumstances. Homelessness overlaps with substance abuse in a poverty spiral where little to no access to mental health resources or food security or affordable housing inevitably means ricocheting into addiction or violence or both.

Blame is singular where it should be structural: Why are these parents struggling with basic needs? What about their life and their challenges render them incapable of parenting on a fundamental level? What about their inability to secure mental health services or economic security at critical stages has yielded this reality?

Reiter’s Block Year in Review: 2023

I finally feel cuter than my cat. Photo by Ezra Autumn Wilde; shirt by Robert Graham; body by Pioneer Valley Plastic Surgery.

2023 was another year of huge spiritual and material shifts. I am now a certified Priest of Witchcraft, having completed Year Two of the Temple of Witchcraft Mystery School in September. I manifested the three big things I’ve been working towards for years: top surgery, adopting my own cat, and a publisher for my second novel, Origin Story, which will be out from Saddle Road Press this summer. In case you missed it, my essay “Double Incision Diary” in Solstice Lit Mag describes how my witchcraft practice made my surgery a sacred experience.

Theodore “Big Pussy” Cavalieri DiMeow lives for snacks.

Our family visited Los Angeles, Cape Cod, Boston, and New York City this year. Shane has become the star pupil at Hilltown Sled Dogs, a camp where young people learn to train Alaskan Huskies. I wish they operated a junior high school! Shane’s other happy place is Home Depot. He is teaching me how to use a leaf blower and a power drill.

Adam and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary with tickets to Barns Courtney‘s rock concert at Irving Plaza in Manhattan. It was a Dionysian experience, with the energy of a pagan religious revival. We didn’t go in the mosh pit, though.

I did not publish many poems this year, but I wrote a lot of weird new ones about butts. There’s still time to sponsor me for 30 Poems in November. We raised over $75,000 for immigrant literacy and job-training programs at the Center for New Americans! I achieved my personal goals of raising $500, writing 30 poems, and avoiding my novel.

Some books that made an impact on me this year:

Psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou’s provocative book Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (New York University Press, 2023) restores mystery and risk to our encounters with one another through limit-pushing sex or controversial art. Saketopoulou proposes that we should not pathologize trauma survivors for seeking out states of “overwhelm”. Wounds have an erotic charge, and going towards this taboo experience can free up our energy for new ways of processing what cannot be cured. It’s liberating to acknowledge that there’s no undamaged state to get back to, because then we can move forward without so much fear of contamination–what she calls “traumatophobia,” or the goal of avoiding triggers at all costs. Therapists are not immune from pushing a patient toward a tidy but illusory closure because of their own discomfort with witnessing trauma.

In fiction, I’m currently enjoying The Best Mystery Stories of the Year: 2021, guest-edited by Lee Child. This series curated by Otto Penzler and The Mysterious Bookshop has been hit-or-miss for me, with some years’ entries stuffed with sad literary stories with a crime in them, rather than real whodunits. This edition will satisfy fans of old-school detection, and also has a good gender balance of protagonists and writers. If you’re feeling more literary, check out King of the Armadillos (Macmillan, 2023) by my fellow St. Ann’s School alum Wendy Chin-Tanner. Based on her father’s life story, this bittersweet novel follows a Chinese immigrant teen in the 1950s who’s sent to a leprosy hospital in Louisiana, and his father and brother left behind in Brooklyn, who must balance traditional family duties with the forbidden loves offered by the freedom and anonymity of America.

2023 was an encouraging year to be an old guy. Henry Kissinger died at 100, bringing joy to the world. Charles III was finally crowned at 75, with Camilla by his side. The guy paid his dues. But “The Crown” is still boring since Princess Di is gone.

“And now, at last, I shall be King of Engl–“

November Links Roundup: Angels and Dirtbags

The monthly link-o-rama is on the late side because I’ve been busy writing 30 Poems in November as a fundraiser for the Center for New Americans, an immigrant literacy and job training nonprofit in Northampton. I’ve got another $134 to go towards my target amount. Chip in today and receive a cute picture of my cat Theodore in your inbox, plus a handmade thank-you note (USA addresses only).

In this month’s issue of The Baffler, Joshua Craze examines the pitfalls of foreign humanitarian aid in “The Angel’s Dilemma”. Why have conditions not improved in war-torn, impoverished South Sudan despite billions of dollars in aid since 2011? The NGO industry creates a permanent underclass of refugees who are not allowed to migrate where the work is, let alone have a say in how donors’ money is spent. Craze challenges the aid community’s assertion that their work is apolitical, noting that American disaster relief was a major instrument of foreign policy to create client states during the Cold War. Later, during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, NGOs became a shadow government in destabilized countries, answerable to the US or the EU rather than the locals.

While helping my son research a history project on Henry Ford, I discovered historical novelist Allison Epstein’s hilarious Substack, Dirtbags Through the Ages. In the irreverent style of Daniel Lavery’s Texts from Jane Eyre or Dr. Eleanor Janega’s Going Medieval, Epstein adopts a gossipy modern voice to talk trash about notable figures from the past. “The Dearborn Ultimatum”, Her post on the spiritual forbear of Elon Musk is subtitled “The Top 10 Reasons I Would Punch Henry Ford in the Teeth if I Saw Him in the Street and Nobody Would Blame Me”. Besides his notorious anti-Semitism, Ford is “why work sucks so bad”:

Henry Ford’s auto factories were pioneers of the assembly line, which took us from an artisan-based economy where skilled workers could perform fulfilling labor to a dehumanized system where you do the same repetitive task over and over until you want to drown yourself in the sea…

The assembly line is also to blame for mass production and by extension consumer culture. What I’m saying is, it’s Henry Ford’s fault that companies are hounding your every breath trying to make you buy things you don’t need, and that there’s an island of garbage in the ocean three times the size of France.

And don’t get her started on his square-dancing fetish!

Electric Literature recently shared an excerpt of editor Zeke Caligiuri’s intro to the prison writers’ anthology American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion (Coffee House Press, 2023). A former inmate at Minnesota’s Stillwater Prison, Caligiuri describes how a writers’ group thrived and revived itself behind bars, despite opposition from the authorities

It was exhilarating, until decision-makers in the facility realized the threat that artists and poets pose to the ideas of the captivity business. After only a year and a half, the group was disbanded. It was my first lesson in how easily good things in prison get discarded. Watching art and culture go away can create a bleak and hopeless landscape that will jade and obscure a person’s faith in creative community. It was a pattern shown to us repeatedly…

[The Stillwater Writers’ Collective was] created because our small cohort agreed that, at some point, someone or something was going to come along with opportunities that we had been waiting for throughout the long stretches of our collective incarcerations. There was agreement that as a community we would need to be ready so that the blessing we felt was supposed to be ours wouldn’t get passed along to somebody else. We believed it would be a crime for the story of writing in the Minnesota state prison system to be told, or written, without us. Just as the foundations of these old structures had been laid by the hands of the imprisoned, we were trying to lay a new literary and intellectual foundation.

…Time in the life of a writer, or a prisoner, is an emergency. Incarcerated writing communities provide for us what we can only assume they offer to non-incarcerated writing communities: peer support, friend- ship, competition, rivalry, and shared stakes in the success of their members. These communities offer reminders of time and the emergencies time represents. Classes get canceled and cut. In 2005, our whole education department shut down for months and every computer in the joint was wiped and scoured. Stories, essays, poetry, and even an anthology of our work disappeared from the universe. There are lockdowns, seizures of materials, intentionally, and sometimes collaterally. There are surprise transfers that leave us without computer access, and we must figure out how to keep the things we need most. We, who are working hard to mend some of the wounds in the social and familial fabric of our lives, live with a stopwatch to create evidence that will show something redemptive within us.

Nigerian-Canadian writer Vincent Anioke’s flash fiction “At World’s End” in Fractured Lit fulfills the promise of its unbeatable first line: “I’m giving Kayode Last-Name-Pending a pretty accomplished blowjob in the back of my rented Subaru when Jesus Christ returns.” That’s all I’m going to say.

Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance, so get inspired by OutHistory’s “Introduction to Transmasculine People in the U.S. Press, 1876-1939”, provided by Emily Skidmore, author of True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (NYU Press, 2017).

October Links Roundup: 78 Degrees

Happy Spooktober!

Pumpkins by Shane.

My inner 12-year-old would like to remind you that October 2 is the 571st birthday of King Richard III. Follow efforts to clear his name at The Missing Princes Project.

78 degrees is how hot it’s expected to be today in Northampton. Thanks, global warming! It’s also a reference to the godmother of the modern Tarot renaissance, Rachel Pollack, whose book 78 Degrees of Wisdom blended psychology, mysticism, and and literary iconography to inspire deeper relationships with the cards. At Xtra Magazine, Jude Doyle assesses Pollack’s legacy as a pioneer of trans-inclusive feminist spirituality:

Here, from Pollack’s self-designed deck the Shining Tribe, is her description of the Emperor: “A number of modern tarot decks have taken on the issue of patriarchal culture. They have tended to see the Emperor as a kind of villain, with gentle, childlike males as an alternative. Such images both belittle men and demonize them.” Instead, Pollack offered, women who drew the Emperor card might try to see themselves in it: “It might be a strong experience to imagine ourselves as the Emperor. What might it be like to contain and express such power and determination?”

The Hierophant is changed to the gender-neutral “Tradition,” and that is that. It seems to be as close as Pollack ever got to a direct rebuke of her peers’ transmisogyny. Yet that tiny tweak—don’t look for male power, look for your power—changes everything about how people see these cards, and therefore, how they think about gender and power when reading them…

…Her biggest contribution to women’s spirituality, The Body of the Goddess, waspublished in 1997. For a trans woman to write a book on Goddess worship in the mid-’90s was gutsy. For a trans woman to call that book The Body of the Goddessis fucking bonkers. It’s mind-blowing. It gets more so when you open the book and find that Pollack’s Goddess not only likes trans women; she is one herself.

Pollack doesn’t ignore menstruation or childbirth as aspects of female embodiment, but she doesn’t stop there either. She also locates trans and gender-fluid goddesses throughout mythology. Some—like the intersex goddess Cybele and her likely transfeminine priestesses, the Galli—are canonical. Others are creative interpretations of existing myth: Pollack notes that the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite, is “created” when a male God named Ouranos loses his genitalia. Afterward, Ouranos essentially disappears, and a brand-new, very feminine Goddess arises to replace him.

Even trans guys get a turn. Pollack tells us that Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, madness and ecstasy, was raised as a girl and was sometimes known as “the Womanly One” for his feminine looks and unusual kindness to women. In a 1995 essay for TransSisters, she gets even more detailed: Dionysus “went mad in adolescence,” was cured by Cybele, and went on to become an androgynous he/him whose myths portrayed him liberating people of all genders from the patriarchy. At rituals, Pollack tells us, “his male followers would dress as women, [and] his female followers would strap on large phalluses,” suggesting that liberation took a highly recognizable form.

Humorist Daniel Lavery is another of my favorite theologians, capering madly along that line between farce and horror. See, for instance, his questionnaire at The Stopgap, “Do You Think the Creator God Is Doing a Good Job, or Should Be Replaced by a Big Sheep or a Demiurge?” Bring back the formless void!

Gay provocateur playwright Joe Orton (1933-67) apparently had a sideline in altering library books to add satirical and bawdy images, then sneaking them back onto the shelves. You can see samples from the collection online. Not that I’m recommending you do this…

But there’s a hole just waiting to be filled.

“It’s both mystical and humiliating how your novel can know things before you yourself know them,” says the author of the queer coming-of-age novel Idlewild in this recent article at LitHub, “James Frankie Thomas on Discovering His Trans Identity While Writing Fiction”. Yeah, I know how you feel. Thomas describes a writing workshop, pre-transition, where the teacher and classmates criticized him for being coy about a self-insert character’s gender identity:

In all seriousness, I prided myself on my well-observed portrayal of teen girlhood in the early 2000s—specifically the way teen girls back then were consumed with the desire to be gay men. That was something you just never saw in fiction about teen girls, but Idlewild was going to change that. From the very first page, on which I introduced Fay as “a gay dude trapped in a female body,” I plumbed my memories of my own adolescence for universal truths about teen girlhood…

“Why not make it explicit from the start? What’s gained by withholding such important information about the character?”

And I wasn’t allowed to speak, so I just had to sit there and take it over and over. I was so flabbergasted, I bet you could see a giant cartoon exclamation point floating over my head. How had my entire workshop read my novel so wrong? Stranger still, how had they all read it wrong in the exact same way? There was only one possible explanation, something I’d long suspected but never dared to admit out loud: Everyone was stupid except me.

For what it’s worth, I also see myself in Richard Siken’s new poem “Pornography” in DIAGRAM Issue 23.4: “I want to fuck everything but I don’t want to be touched.”

Perhaps this is related, perhaps not: In the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry, researchers Kristen Bottema-Beutel et al. question the objectivity of neurotypical researchers in their paper “Anti-ableism and scientific accuracy in autism research: a false dichotomy”.

Autism research focuses almost exclusively on autistic people’s perceived deficits relative to non-autistic people, and researchers rarely acknowledge that autistic people have strengths and abilities in addition to impairments, and exist in contexts that enable or disable functioning. Autistic people are often inaccurately described as missing core human capacities, and as incapable of social reciprocity or contributing to shared culture. Deficit construals persist even when autistic people show strengths in domains that would otherwise be considered positive, such as transparency, rationality, and morality.

The researchers argue that we can move away from these negative presumptions without sacrificing accuracy. They survey some now-debunked but still influential theories of autism’s causes, such as vaccines and insecure maternal attachment, which were considered objective but were demonstrably influenced by sociopolitical forces (e.g. backlash to mothers working outside the home). They also suggest that due to neurotypical researchers’ assumptions, common autistic behaviors like hand-flapping and echolalia have been dismissed as meaningless compulsions, when truly open-minded observation would reveal their communicative functions and nuances.

Speaking of repetition, this Missouri Review essay by Caitlin Horrocks, “Lullaby Machines”, reminded me of the hallucinatory early months of parenting the Young Master. Horrocks reminisces about trying to work, sleep, and stay sane while playing the same lullaby album 20,000 times. When Adam and I were reading up on parenting, one of the sleep-training books told us to keep a consistent routine. Baby Shane seemed to respond to this Spotify album of Celtic Harp Lullabies. Well, we played that thing on the iPad in his room every night for three or four years. We took it with us when we traveled. I used to joke that someday, as an adult, Shane would be at a harp concert with his boyfriend or girlfriend, “Woman of Ireland” would start playing, and he would have a Pavlovian urge to fall asleep and/or poop his pants.

Listen at your own risk.

Hot Pink Heteropessimism

If anyone was primed to love the Barbie movie, it was me. But I didn’t.

Sure, I got a kick out of the dazzling pink re-creation of Barbie’s homes and outfits, and the jokes about obscure and ill-advised real Mattel dolls, like boob-growing Skipper and pregnant Midge. Somebody has to buy me a Palm Beach Sugar Daddy Ken, right now!

sugar daddy ken doll, mattel, barbie boyfriend

Transition goals!

I would have enjoyed “Barbie” far more if it hadn’t tried to say Something Serious About Feminism, because what it came up with was a very 1990s gender-binary utopia where all women are girlbosses and all men are idiots. That a film about male uselessness also has zero queer pairings, either in Barbie Land or the Real World, feels like both a failure of nerve and a bleaker assessment of gender relations than you’d expect from its relentlessly inspirational vibes.

Gender studies scholar Asa Seresin coined the term “Heteropessimism” in a 2019 article in The New Inquiry. Seresin defines it as a mode of discourse where male-female coupling is both inevitable and unsatisfying, even politically suspect. It masquerades as feminism without actually improving anything.

Heteropessimism consists of performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience. Heteropessimism generally has a heavy focus on men as the root of the problem. That these disaffiliations are “performative” does not mean that they are insincere but rather that they are rarely accompanied by the actual abandonment of heterosexuality. Sure, some heteropessimists act on their beliefs, choosing celibacy or the now largely outmoded option of political lesbianism, yet most stick with heterosexuality even as they judge it to be irredeemable. Even incels, overflowing with heteropessimism, stress the involuntary nature of their condition.

The movie’s Barbie Land is an alternate reality where Barbies have all the prestige, intelligence, and possessions. In the Barbies’ social life, the Kens are either mocked and excluded, or tolerated like endearing but none-too-bright puppies. When Barbie and Ken visit our world, she’s crestfallen that the dolls’ feminist fantasy world didn’t do more to inspire social change. Meanwhile, Ken discovers that real-world governments and corporations are run by men just as stupid as he is. He leads a short-lived patriarchal takeover of Barbie Land that mainly consists of bros drinking beer and explaining “The Godfather” to their girlfriends.

Notably, when the status quo is restored, the Kens’ legitimate grievances are still ridiculed. (Seresin: “A certain strain of heteropessimism assigns 100 percent of the blame for heterosexuality’s malfunction to men, and has thus become one of the myriad ways in which young women—especially white women—have learned to disclaim our own cruelty and power.”) With an obvious wink, the female president promises to allot them spaces in the halls of power…exactly to the extent that women have it in real life, i.e. not much. I guess what makes this a fantasy is that the men react with sentimental tears rather than incel violence.

Seresin suggests:

In this sense, heteropessimism is, to borrow Lee Edelman’s phrase, an “anesthetic feeling”: “a feeling that aims to protect against overintensity of feeling and an attachment that can survive detachment.” Heteropessimism’s anesthetic effect is especially seductive because it dissociates women from the very traits—overattachment and “the overintensity of feeling”—for which straight culture is determined to make us ashamed. That much heteropessimist sentiment is delivered in joke form coheres with Henri Bergson’s idea that comedy delivers “a momentary anesthesia of the heart.” Unlike traditional comedy, however, heteropessimism is anticathartic. Its structure is anticipatory, designed to preemptively anesthetize the heart against the pervasive awfulness of heterosexual culture as well as the sharp plunge of quotidian romantic pain.

If everything in Barbie Land is supposed to be a feminist role reversal of our flawed world, the Barbies’ indifference to their lovesick Kens seems to offer relief from the pervasive pain of coupling with a man who exercises power by not giving a shit about anyone. But if you ask me, a utopia full of man-babies is too much like the world we’re trying to leave behind.

At our trans men’s support group last weekend, we read aloud some passages from the 1995 memoir-in-essays S/HE by Minnie Bruce Pratt, the recently deceased lesbian poet and partner of Leslie Feinberg. In one piece, Pratt mused about how it felt patronizing when a man opened a door for her, but exciting when a butch woman did it. One scenario carried the assumption of superior male strength, the other had the potential for playing with gender roles between equals. Coming from a Southern feminine upbringing, in her generation, Pratt must have seen a lot of chivalry-as-patriarchy. But I was like, I’d be thrilled if the average young man today opened a door for anybody. Modern heteropessimism is at least as much a reaction against the kind of men who make up the essay collection The Bastard on the Couch–educated Gen-X and millennial guys who feel infantilized by their wives’ competence, and have decided to lean into the privileges of being useless.

There have been several think pieces about queer-coded elements of “Barbie” but I’m tired of settling for that. See also, “Across the Spider-Verse” and every other superhero movie that appropriates the emotional arc and metaphor of being closeted. Straight storylines with a gay aesthetic are as old as Puccini. It’s hard to beat Madame Butterfly for heteropessimism! The effeminacy of the Ken doll is so well-known that Autostraddle ran a humor piece “75 Lesbian Ken Dolls, Ranked by Lesbianism” when Mattel redesigned the doll in 2017 with a slimmer, more androgynous look. In the Barbie movie, though, this effeminacy is only played for laughs, as proof of the Kens’ immaturity and inferiority. It was hard to enjoy this movie because it would have given me massive dysphoria not too many years ago. Dysphoria that didn’t have a name for itself, other than “there’s no place in the world for the thing that I am.”

I made Stylin’ Stripes Ken my Facebook profile picture the year before I came out as nonbinary.

Beachy Tropical Shirt Ken is the 25-year-old trans guy that all of us dad bods with T-induced hair loss are sooo jealous of.