Filling in the Maggie & Hopey blanks

I could rave about my newfound love for Locas all day, but I doubt that would be a very productive post. Jaime Hernandez queers the genre of graphic fiction as much as possible. Nothing goes undepicted or unsatirized – sexuality, Latina stereotypes, body image, sexual assault, feminism, music, drugs, magical realism -- even graphic novel stereotypes. For now, though, I’m interested in a few scenes that depict Hopey and Maggie’s relationship. Contrasting the scenes that appear in the beginning of the collection (ie. “Hey, Hopey!” pgs 46-48) with scenes from the second excerpt of the collection, there is one giant gap in the narrative that makes me want to read the 200+ pages I skipped: How exactly does Maggie and Hopey’s best-friendship become a relationship (more accurately, the classical “confused bisexual-girl” stereotype situation where Maggie is torn between Ray and Hopey)??

My interpretation of “Hey, Hopey” – certainly not the only possible interpretation – is that Hopey is queer, and she likes Maggie, but they don’t have a sexual relationship at that point. Maggie seems to prefer men. Although Hopey doesn’t deny that she and Maggie have a sexual relationship, she certainly doesn’t affirm it. She lets their relationship status remain ambiguous, using it as an opportunity to teach her brother: “I mean, just ‘cause me and Maggie live together and sleep in the same bed doesn’t mean anything. Just ‘cause we hold hands while walking down the street doesn’t mean shit!” (47). Hopey wants her brother to stop criticizing her preference for women – one day, she hopes, he’ll “accept things for what they are” (47) – he’ll stop trying to prove that she and Maggie are sleeping together; he’ll stop labeling her as a lesbo.

If the situation is so purposefully ambiguous, then why am I trying to prove that Maggie and Hopey aren’t having sex? Unfortunately, I’m hung up on sexual details, even though they’re supposed to be irrelevant at this point in the narrative. As I read the first 100 pages of the Locas collection, I noticed that there didn’t seem to be any sexual tension between Maggie and Hopey. This definitely isn’t because Hernandez can’t portray the sexual tension between his characters; I actually thought that was a strength of his style (case in point: bottom of page 11). I think it’s because there simply isn’t a sexual connection between them in the first 100 pages or so. For example: page 98 is a perfect opportunity to show that Hopey is really attracted to Maggie. They’re in bed together, and Maggie is topless, and instead of any visible tension, they’re both wrapped up in discussing the nights they spent passed out or in jail. Skip forward to the next excerpt (pgs 337-426), and Maggie and Hopey have clearly been in some sort of sexual relationship. Maggie has a girlfriend (Hopey) and a boyfriend (Ray), and she goes on a search for Hopey. When she and Hopey are reunited, they attempt to have a threesome with Ray’s ex-girlfriend, but Maggie balks and ends up watching Hopey have sex with the ex. This sparks a conversation about how Maggie “really got used to being normal for so long with Ray” and that she was “planning to get married and have babies someday” (421). Hopey points out her use of the word “normal” – here, Hernandez once again uses Hopey to portray a queer viewpoint, and Maggie is cast as the stereotypical mainstream confused bisexual, torn between her interest in women and her desire for a “normal” heterosexual life.

Anyway, to make an increasingly long post short, I’m extremely interested in seeing how Hernandez built the sexual relationship between Maggie and Hopey. It originally became a teaching point for queer friendships and ambiguous sexuality, and somehow evolved into a teaching point for Maggie’s somewhat stereotypical struggle with bisexuality vs. Hopey’s embrace of queerness. Above all, I’m curious about how Hernandez managed to create these complex teaching points without compromising the believability of the sexual connection between Maggie and Hopey.

Cruising Utopia and New Queer Cinema

I am only halfway through Cruising Utopia, but I already have quite a few perplexing thoughts about it.

First, a thought left over from last week: I’m not sure that Go Fish fits anywhere into Munoz’s idea of a staged utopia. Go Fish, to me, fits into so many of the lesbian stereotypes that I’ve seen on The L Word. The women freak out when a "lesbian" sleeps with a man – there isn’t much room for fluid sexuality. Contrived conversations about pressing lesbian issues also seem to prescribe too much to mainstream culture rather than suggest any kind of queer futurity. For example, Max complains that cutting her hair would make it seem as if she’s trying too hard to be a lesbian, but not cutting her hair means that she isn’t doing what she wants to do because she’s afraid of being stereotyped. Where’s the glimpse of queer futurity in that dilemma? I wonder how Munoz would analyze this film, which is supposed to be an example of the New Queer Cinema movement.

Second, I’m interested in two of the comments that Munoz makes at the beginning of Chapter 6 (“Stages”). He mentions that queer people, especially when they choose to not have biological children, do not have a future in the eyes of the dominant culture (98). I feel that there are many heterosexual people who “do not have a future” because they cannot biologically reproduce. Also, I wonder if there are other possible definitions of straight futurity.

The second concept in “Stages” that stood out to me was that “the real force of performance is its ability to generate a modality of knowing and recognition among audiences and groups that facilitates modes of belonging, especially minoritarian belonging” (99). This comment seems to be much closer to the characteristics that Michele Aaron lists in her introduction to New Queer Cinema. Although Munoz writes an entire book about how queer art points toward utopic queer futurity, I am not entirely convinced. I wish that I knew more about the artists that he discusses at great length, but I’m not sure how many of the queer artists we have studied in class are consciously calling for the queer, pacifistic, communal utopia that Munoz describes. I think, overall, that Cruising Utopia is far too theoretical for my liking. I prefer the characteristics of NQC that Aaron listed:

- NQC gives voice to the sub-groups contained within the lesbian and gay community.
- “[T]he films are unapologetic about their characters’ faults… they eschew positive imagery.”
- They “defy the sanctity of the past” by portraying queerness in historical settings.
- They “defy cinematic convention in terms of form, content and genre.”
- These films sometimes “defy death” (5).

This criterion for what makes a film “queer” are much more conservative than Munoz’s theories about queer futurity, but I think I have found most of Aaron’s criteria in every book/film we read/watched for class.

Swoon as metaphor to AIDS crisis?

In “Aids and New Queer Cinema,” Monica B. Pearl analyzes Swoon as a film that subtly comments on AIDS. At the surface, Swoon portrays Leopold and Loeb’s murder of a little boy in 1924, specifically emphasizing the queer relationship between the murderers. On a deeper symbolic level, Pearl claims, the film is about control over death (31). It tries to make a “senseless” murder seem beautiful. Most importantly, the film is “a meditation on responsibility” (32) – Leopold and Loeb are “unashamed and unapologetic” for their premeditated murder; the murder might seem senseless to the viewer, but it makes perfect sense to them. The anachronisms interspersed throughout the film – Pearl cites a walkman and a telephone – make the film ahistorical, and therefore relevant to today. From these few points, Pearl concludes that Swoon is an AIDS film.

Tom Kalin, Swoon’s director, is no stranger to AIDS activism – he was a member of both ACT UP and Gran Fury. It is safe to assume that this film was directed by someone conscious of AIDS issues over responsibility. I am not convinced, however, that people with AIDS should ever be symbolically compared to psychopathic murderers. In addition, I don’t think the murder of a small boy has the same metaphorical implications of transmitting HIV.

If I assume that the film can be taken as a “meditation on responsibility,” then what exactly does Kalin suggest about responsibility? Loeb and Leopold are aware that they are committing a crime, and that the little boy they choose to murder is entirely innocent. The murderers would be most accurately compared, then, to HIV positive people who continue to have unprotected sex with other (innocent, unknowing) men, even though they know they’re transmitting a deadly disease. If HIV positive people who knowingly commit that indirect murder are “unashamed and unapologetic” for that murder, then does that make the sex artistic? Is that “exerting control” over death? What about the little boy, who symbolizes the person who unknowingly becomes HIV positive – where is his control over his own death? Does admitting responsibility for knowingly transmitting HIV make the crime alright?

I'm definitely failing to understand what this film is trying to say about AIDS. This makes me question Pearl’s analysis of Swoon as a critique of the AIDS crisis. To what extent does Tom Kalin consciously construct the Loeb and Leopold murder case as parallel to the AIDS crisis?

cool for you? confusing for me.

Eileen Myles is also a poet. Her memoir-ish novel often reads like poetry. It’s beautiful at times. At other times, it’s difficult to penetrate her prose, but easy to imagine the acid trip that undoubtedly produced it. I particularly liked her style of connecting two seemingly unrelated sentences with short one or two word comments. The connector sentence could be commenting on the previous sentence or the following sentence. For example, “All the rich girls’ parents would worry about them and send them to therapists. I’m so screwed up, they’d wail. Pathetic. Cuase then the kid would wind up convinced” (13). What exactly does pathetic refer to? The crying rich girls wailing that they’re pathetic to their therapists? Or the fact that the girls eventually become convinced that they’re screwed up? Another example: she describes her friend Janet – “She was smart enough, she wasn’t ambitious.” Are they two separate comments? She’s ‘smart enough,’ but she also ‘wasn’t ambitious.’ Or are they related? She was ‘smart enough’ to know not to be ambitious. Final example: in the only description of a woman who she has a sexual relationship, Myles paints a vivid snapshot of them lying on a raft and talking about which one of them should get pregnant. “Years later, well about one, I learned that my girlfriend was having an affair with a man that summer. It really chills me. The August light. All that reflection on the pond” (111). What exactly chills her – is it the fact that her girlfriend cheated on her with a man, or is it that strange scene – discussing her pregnancy at age 41 on a raft - that haunts her?

Myles suggests, both indirectly and directly, that the answers to these questions about ambiguity is: “why not both?” She has a conversation with a man who takes her to a football game; he tells her that he “was at a point where he was going to have to become either a Jesus freak or a fag” (131). “He was weak,” she decides. “People who think there are two choices are even worse off than me” (131). These confusing poetic phrases are often a testament to that idea – why string words together in such a way that they can only possibly have one logical meaning? Why not leave the meaning purposefully clouded? Why not have one sentence relate to two sentences, connecting their seemingly incongruent topics together by sandwiching an ambiguous connecting sentence or a comma in between them?

The protagonist in Cool For You seems to follow this advice – she does not force herself into neat little boxes; she is Irish, Polish, Catholic, white, alcoholic, not-straight, a poet, not wealthy. She sometimes self-identifies as queer, other times self-identifies as lesbian. At the same time, however, I was slightly confused by how her refusal of picking between two choices related to her notions about her gender expression. At many points in the novel, she claims that she wanted to be a boy. The favorite son. She was always a tomboy, and her mother – also a tomboy – felt threatened by that and decided to send her to ballet classes. “Being a woman,” to her, means getting her period, and she devotes a chapter to how much she hates that experience. She rarely says anything that could be interpreted as positive about the feminine aspects of her body. In this way, I did not get the impression that the protagonist felt she had more than two choices about her gender identity; she did not seem to enjoy being a woman, and instead wanted to be a man. Not androgynous, not both woman and man, sometimes woman, sometimes man – but a man. I’m really curious about how you felt about her constant descriptions of wanting to be a man – does it suggest gender duality or androgyny? How (if at all) did her ideas about her own gender identity and gender differences in general affect the way you read the book? Also, on a less-related note, what did you make of the drastic differences between her descriptions of sexual experiences with men and women? Her experiences with men seemed disgusting, cold, and unfulfilling. Her experiences with women seemed to be little more than fantasies; she did not describe sex with women. What did you make of the lack of pleasure in the novel?

week 7: queer time makes sense now

I didn’t begin to grasp the concept of “queer time” until I read a specific passage of Close to the Knives. (The passage appears on pages 87-89.) David Wojnarowicz describes the division between the “World” and the “Other World.” He has “always felt like an alien” in the Other World. This is the mainstream world – “the world of the stoplight, the no-smoking sign, the rental world, the split-rail fencing…. [t]he bought-up world; the owned world.” Because he has “been born centuries late,” he has been denied access to the Other World, which is the World of “earth or space, choice or movement.” What exactly does he mean by being “born centuries late?” I think this implies queerness; he cannot fit neatly into “calendar turnings” of measured space and time, and he does not belong in the consumer world.

This passage flips the common conception of “the Other” on its head. Simone DeBeauvior separates gender into man – “the One” – and woman – “the Other.” Usually, minority groups are discussed as “the Other,” because they are othered or marginalized by the mainstream group. Wojnarowicz , however, describes the mainstream world as the Other World and the queer world as the World. This unconventional twist moves the traditionally marginalized group to the center. Instead of reaching for the World, Wojnarowicz situates himself in the World, rejecting the Other World– he chooses queer time over straight time.

Wojnarowicz also point out a potential paradox in queer time. “[T]here’s the World where one adapts and stretches the boundaries of the Other World through keys of the imagination. But then again, the imagination is encoded with the invented information of the Other World.” Perhaps queerness is creative enough to stretch the mainstream’s boundaries, but queerness is still conceived of in the language of straight time. In this way, the queer world is dependent upon the other world; a queer world radically restructures the mainstream culture.

I think that Wojnarowicz’s attempt to demonstrate queer time is very effective in Close to the Knives. It is a memoir written in a series of essays rather than linear chapters. The essays are often dreamlike, jumping from scene to scene, dream to reality, exaggeration to realism. The content of the memoir is not unlike much of what we’ve already read for this course – full of drugs, hustling, and sex with faceless strangers– but there is something special about the construction of this memoir. Wojnarowicz taps into queer time by breaking all of the conventional rules of biography and grammar, and despite breaking all of the rules, the prose is still beautiful.

I also wonder if somehow this queer narrative is more true to “nature.” By stepping outside of linearity and strict, boring realism, Wojnarowicz captures more of the human thinking process. If I want to write a “realistic” story about my life, I attempt to dissociate from my present state of mind and look back at that event as if it’s a movie – otherwise, it would be difficult for someone else to picture the story. This is not the “reality” of how my memory usually works – normally my mind jumps all over the place, jogged by present perceptions and interrupted by random thoughts. I do not think linearly or logically in every day life. Therefore, reconstructing a story of my past requires a far departure from the way my mind normally operates. This is what I think Wojnarowicz means when he says that “the invention of the word ‘nature’ disassociates us from the ground we walk on” (p88). Despite the queer structure of Close to the Knives, I think it is more close to the nature of the human memory and thinking process than any “normal” biography – the kinds of biographies that usually achieve commercial success in the Other World. As I read Close to the Knives, I wondered if we’re taught to write and tell stories in ways that are unnatural – logic and sequence are learned behaviors, and queer time is really more natural.

Wojnarowicz’s transition from this paragraph to the next paragraph perplexes me. I think this is the first time he officially names AIDS; in previous chapters, it was a nameless disease. My interpretation of this second paragraph is that the spread of AIDS shows him that he is not the only one walking outside of the Other World – the thousands of people who walk in the World with him finally start to become visible. The AIDS crisis was awful – and that is a gross understatement – but it increased visibility of hundreds of thousands of people who were excluded by the definition of “acceptable” sexuality, allowing them to find each other and band together on common issues. I think that he might mean something much more complex than that when he compares the feeling to “pressing one’s eye to a small crevice in the earth from which streams of ants utter from the shadows.” What else could this final image in the passage mean?

cherry lips

Girl Boy Girl drops a lot of famous names - one of them is Shirley Manson, the lead singer of Garbage, a band that was popular (I think they were popular?) in the '90s-early '00s. "Cherry Lips" is inspired by JT LeRoy's novels. I listened to this album when I was 12 or 13 years old - and now that I know the background of this song, it makes much more sense. I also think that the video has one interesting touch - Shirley Manson has bleach-blond hair. Because she is usually a brunette, I wonder if she deliberately did this to look more like JT LeRoy or more like the "delicate boy" she's singing about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqaUZkf52fs

The invention of JT LeRoy - Necessary? Scandalous?

After reading Sarah, I began to read Girl Boy Girl. I couldn’t understand why Laura didn’t publish the novel as Laura; why did she feel a need to create JT LeRoy and claim that Sarah related to the author’s experience? As I read Girl Boy Girl, I noticed Laura’s habit of saying things about JT’s personality that would embarrass Savannah/JT. (For example, she tells Mike Pitt that: “ ‘JT did a photo shoot last week for the first time and he put on lipstick. It was fucking brilliant! And you didn’t fuck the photographer. I was so proud of you, JT.’ Then she said in a conspiratorial tone as if I weren’t there, ‘He used to have sex with anything that paid him a compliment’” (80).) Laura is an example of an author who misrepresents who she truly is to her readers. Don’t all authors - and politicians, movie stars, anyone who has a very public career – recreate themselves to some degree? Usually, that might just mean downplaying their flaws. Laura might think that by creating a very flawed JT, she is doing the opposite of that – she is creating a more complex, believable character. With that line of reasoning – it’s impossible to truly know any author – I started to wonder why the public was so disturbed when JT LeRoy turned out to be a fake. Of course, the reason why JT LeRoy became a mass media scandal is blatantly obvious – hoaxes are often newsworthy.

The question of why Laura felt the need to create JT LeRoy sparked other questions for me, as well. What would have happened if Laura had published Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things as herself? I’m willing to bet that critics would have dismissed her, claiming that she didn't know what she was talking about. People would have scrutinized her slang and her buzz words. She was a married woman, not a transwoman or a prostitute; how could she possibly write an accurate portrayal of a trans character who is a truck stop prostitute? The fact that JT LeRoy speaks from personal experience seems to be all that people needed in order to praise the novels without questioning them. What perplexes me is that both of the novels are fiction – why would they need an authority of truth? I’m assuming that Laura’s novels, though very interesting, wouldn’t have gotten as much publicity if they weren’t marketed as written from true experiences. This could, of course, be a wrong assumption. Watching Gus Van Sant’s rendition of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things perhaps helped me see why people would hypothetically care if the novel was rooted in the author’s experience. Almost every single scene in that film was difficult to watch. I watched these horrible abusive scenes played out on screen, and I wondered who would be sick enough to even think about some of these scenes. Perhaps hearing that the author who thought of the scenes was writing from actual childhood experiences would make me a little bit more sympathetic; if experience wasn’t at the root of the scenes, I would maybe think that the author is sick in the head and shouldn’t be around little children. I understand this point, but I’m still thinking about pseudonyms and alter egos – was JT LeRoy necessary for the success of Laura’s novels? Was the scam that Savannah and Laura concocted really much more than an extremely exaggerated version about the fabricated personalities that most public figures have?

Before Night Falls: a radical theory of sex

As I read Before Night Falls, I was disgusted by some of the sex scenes. After the descriptions of bestiality in the first few pages, I tried to keep an open mind. A few scenes still got under my skin, however – namely incest with his cousin, being molested by his uncle, and his estimate of 5,000 sexual partners by 1968. Despite my aversion to these scenes, I was disappointed that none of them appeared in Julian Schnabel’s film. I think that this feeling of disappointment relates to Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex.” Gayle Rubin claims that there is a small window of socially acceptable sexual behaviors, and all other sexual behaviors are seen as sexually deviant. As homosexuality becomes increasingly more socially acceptable, the line between socially praised and socially condemned sexual behaviors is increasingly blurred. Rubin argues that monogamous, long-term homosexual relationships are acceptable. Bestiality, promiscuous gay sex, fetishes, incest, man-boy love/ cross-generational love, and transsexuality are all deviant behaviors.

Arenas’s memoir certainly crosses this line into “deviant behaviors.” Arenas does not pass negative judgment on these scenes – he says that most young boys from the countryside participate in bestiality, he was turned on by his uncle, and the interactions with his cousin were just childhood games. After his first lover, he doesn’t mention being in any other monogamous relationship, and having sex with thousands of men doubles as thousands of acts of rebellion against Fidel Castro’s repressive regime. Most of this is conspicuously absent from the film version. One particular part of the novel that I found striking was where Arenas discusses his refusal to have sex in prison. “Making love with a free man was very different from making love with an enslaved body behind bars…. There was no beauty in the act, it would have been a degradation” (179). This point - a point that directly connects Arenas’s feelings about free love as antirevolutionary – is also missing from the movie.

The film version certainly includes some naked men and portrays one sex scene (in Arenas’s explanation of the four types of gay men in Cuba); it doesn’t completely ignore sex. I think that Schnabel’s decision to exclude the more graphic images of sex from the movie has both positive and negative effects on viewers. Viewers are much more likely to sympathize with an Arenas who doesn’t engage in what Rubin categorizes as unacceptable sex. Because they aren’t turned off by graphic scenes of incest, bestiality, and promiscuity, they can tune into the “real” linkage between sex and rebellion. (By omitting Arenas’s refusal to sleep with men in prison from the movie, however, Schnabel misses out on a golden opportunity to make this linkage.) On the other hand, omitting these scenes waters down the viewers’ experience of Arenas’s life. These sexually-charged childhood scenes are formative scenes in Arenas’s life. The movie excludes large chunks of Arenas’s memoir, but because the author’s political views are radical and his views about love certainly fit into Rubin’s radical theory of sexuality, the movie isn’t as radical as it should be. By toning down the sex, the film fails to portray many of Arenas’s truths.

Love like Quinces

“ ‘Thin Bin, how would you define ‘love’?’…. I point to a table on which several quinces sit yellowing in a blue and whit china bowl. I shake my head in their direction, and I leave the room, speechless.” (36)

“Quinces are ripe, GertrudeStein, when they are the yellow of canary wings in midflight. They are ripe when their scent teases you with the snap of green apples and the perfumed embrace of coral roses. But even then quinces remain a fruit, hard and obstinate – useless, Gertrude Stein, until they are simmered, coddled for hours above a low, steady flame. Add honey and water and watch their dry, bone-colored flesh soak up the heat, coating itself in a n opulent orange, not of the sunrises that you never see but of the insides of tree-ripened papayas, a color you can taste. To answer your question, GertrudeStein, love is not a bowl of quinces yellowing in a blue and white china bowl, seen but untouched." (40)

Binh’s tactile definition of love sharply contrasts with that of the anonymous narrator from City of Night. That passive capacity to receive someone else’s love does not fit into this fruity, metaphorical concept of simmering passion that must be coaxed and nurtured into existence. The brief bursts of sexual scenes peppered throughout The Book of Salt are rarely explicit, but the passion in those scenes is more tangible than the flat, graphic pictures that City of Night’s narrator uses to illustrate his empty desire to be wanted by many people.

This quote fits into the novel in several ways. First, it demonstrates Binh’s habit of generalizing the rules of food into the rules of life. Second, it appears in the chapter where Binh describes his inability to master French, which forces him to define his world by what it is not rather than what it actually is. Just as he tells GertrudeStein that a pineapple is “not a pear,” he tells her that love is not quinces constrained to a china bowl. We are reminded that love is exactly what Binh does not have; it is “seen but untouched.”

Binh (again, much unlike City of Night’s narrator) often describes his sexual fantasies. When his brothers fantasize about the clothesline girls, he imagines their bodies melting away to reveal “just their desires, strong, pulsating” (58). This, rather than the image of heterosexual sex, is something he can relate to. Eventually his desires materialize; he has rich fantasies about men. If he knew that Miss Toklas and GertrudeStein would entertain so many beautiful men, Binh remarks, he wouldn’t have required payment for his services. He waits for his “scholar-prince.”

Despite all of the time he devotes to building these grand fantasies, Binh cannot reap the fruits of his labor for more than a few fleeting scenes. He justifies this lack of permanency by explaining that sex is not bound by time - “there is no narrative in sex, in good sex that is. There is no beginning and there is no end, just the rub, the sting, the tickle, the white light of the here and now” (63). Does this explanation that good sex is timeless – that even if it seems brief, it is full of a depth that can’t be harnessed by normal space or time – complement or contradict his definition of love as a fruit that must be “coddled for hours above a low, steady flame”? In other words: Binh says that “love is not a bowl of quinces… seen but untouched” – does he attain this love in his brief (yet endless) passionate encounters?

Masculinity, Passivity

In John Rechy’s City of Night, masculinity is a complex concept. For hustlers, there are many rules about what it means to be ‘masculine.’ Hustlers can have sex with men without compromising their sexuality, as long as they do it for money and play the masculine role. As a hustler who claims to follow these rules, the narrator is perceived as masculine. At the same time, the narrator’s behavior is often passive. He doesn’t approach scores; he always waits for them to proposition him. The narrator prides himself in this passivity. He often mentions his desire to be needed by lots of people. In the final pages of the novel, however, when the narrator’s mask is stripped away, his passivity remains. His mask crumbles when he warns two scores that “I’m not like you want me to be, the way I tried to look and act for you: not unconcerned, nor easygoing – not tough: no, not at all” (341). The scores leave him; “[t]hey had sought something else in me – the opposite from them; and I had acted out a role for them,” the narrator explains (341). In this scene, which echoes many similar scenes throughout the novel, it is clear that scores do not want him, at least, not for what he really is – they want the masculine mask that he wears. Is the narrator ‘masculine’? Perhaps. He is often perceived as masculine. Does that perceived masculinity mean that he fully controls his sexual interactions? No. His success as a hustler depends upon his ability to construct a masculine mask that people are willing to pay for.

The narrator’s passive attitude towards picking up scores certainly doesn’t translate into sexual passivity, but it manifests itself in interesting ways in other parts of the novel. Although the narrator forms several character sketches throughout the novel, he does not form a clear picture of his own character. Readers can’t picture what he looks like. He reveals his name to other characters, but never to his audience, although his frequent use of “you” suggests that he is aware of an audience. Instead, readers must piece together the narrator through other characters’ impressions of him. Even most of those impressions aren’t very revealing – the professor correctly guesses his weight, height, age, and other measurements – but we aren’t informed of those measurements. The narrator describes his need to feel wanted by many people and his inability to form intimate relationships, but Jeremy offers a much deeper psychological interpretation of the narrator. In this way, the narrator’s method of describing himself seems almost passive; instead of providing us with direct characterization, we see him reflected through other character’s comments.

Even the narrator’s definition of love can be seen as passive. Through his conversation with Jeremy, the narrator decides that “choosing someone to ‘love’ you – to be loved by” or “accepting” someone else’s love is a form of love (362). He does not point out that this type of love is contingent upon someone loving him. Although he chooses to accept someone’s love, it still seems like a rather passive role.

These three examples of the narrator’s passivity – his approach to hustling, indirect self-characterization, and definition of love – add a great deal of complexity to his masculine mask. Is this passivity compatible with the masculine mask? In some ways, it seems compatible; many hustlers wait for scores to approach them. In that case, is the passivity part of his mask (is he intentionally passive, as he claims?) or is it a fundamental part of him that also works against that masculine mask?

Queer?: Striking a balance between inclusiveness and exclusiveness

I read the first two chapters of Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia while I was on a plane going to Dallas. “Queerness is not yet here… we are not yet queer” (p1). Queerness, for Muñoz, is a “potentiality,” something that we can dream about but never attain in this lifetime. The unattainability of queerness was a difficult concept for me to understand semantically– I automatically wondered how someone could identify as “queer” if queerness doesn’t yet exist. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say “I dream of being queer” or “maybe someday I’ll be queer”? The introduction seems to suggest that identifying as queer is not really about a current, concrete sexual identity; it is about a having a specific dream for a future world. What exactly does Muñoz’s queer utopia look like? Although he categorizes it as a “concrete utopia,” it is difficult to find a concrete definition of what exactly this utopia is in the first two chapters. One of the most definitive sentences of the queer utopia appears at the very end of chapter one: “an LGBT position that does not bend to straight time’s gravitational pull” (32). Muñoz criticizes the LGBT movement’s attempts to operate within the heterosexist system without trying to dismantle it; two examples of the LGBT movement bending to “straight time” are the struggles for same-sex marriage and for the abolishment of military policies such as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

I attended Creating Change conference at Dallas. Creating Change is the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s annual conference on LGBT Equality. I spent a weekend in a hotel with about 3,000 other LGBTQQIAA (am I forgetting any letters?) people. Workshop leaders often joked about operating on “queer time” (everything began about fifteen minutes late). For the first time in my life, I could safely assume that everyone I encountered was queer unless they specifically “came out” to me as a straight ally (only a few did, but I suspected a few others who weren’t quite out of the closet). Was I encountering something similar to Muñoz’s vague definition of a queer utopia? I think so.

Leaving the hotel was a bit unsettling. I was on an escalator, and when I looked behind me, someone was taking down the gender neutral bathroom signs that marked every bathroom on the conference floors. De-creating change. When the other four Princeton students and I started to recap the conference before the plane took off, people in the seats around us got visibly upset. Queertopia was over.

This is where Muñoz lost me. Perhaps marriage and the military are “straight” institutions, but how can ignoring these inequalities or claiming to be above these “mainstream” issues make the millions of people who enjoy those institutions understand why they should be interested in a queer utopia? How can a queer movement attain a queer utopia without the help of the hundreds of thousands of LGBT people who do want marriage and military equality? Maybe my ideas for creating change are limited because I normally operate in “straight time,” but I’d much rather slowly fight for equality within the system than live the rest of my life outside of a system or build a new, entirely “queer” system from scratch.

As Gayle Rubin’s radical theory of sex suggests, a possible definition of “queer” is one that encompasses all of the groups that are subordinate to the pinnacle of the hierarchy of sex – vanilla, missionary position sex that occurs in a bed between a man and a woman who are in a long-term, monogamous relationship. In this definition, “queer” seems to be an extremely inclusive term. Muñoz’s conception of “queer” seems to narrow the movement down to people who want to live entirely outside of heterosexual institutions – and what exactly is a heterosexual institution? If the present world is a straight one, aren’t most of the institutions created in this world also “straight”? What makes an institution “queer”? As Muñoz seems to suggest through carefully selected excerpts, is a queer utopia also a communal world (and what makes communism queer)? Before reading Cruising Utopia, I conceived of the queer movement as an inclusive movement that fights for all LGBT equalities, regardless of how radical they are. I don’t see how a small, radical, isolated movement can reconstruct the entire world to fit a queer utopia. Also, I am not convinced that a queer utopia hinges upon the destruction of capitalism. Comparing Muñoz’s definition of a queer utopia to Rubin’s broad definition of what it means to have a radical sexuality (which boldly advocates the abolishment of the stigmatization of pedophiles) leads to a larger question: is the queer movement an exclusive group of radicals who have a common set of sexual, social, political, and economic ideals, or is it an inclusive group that encompasses all sexual radicals? Creating a movement involves striking a careful balance between inclusiveness and exclusiveness – a too exclusive movement finds few allies, and a too inclusive movement will watch members walk away from a movement that fails to properly define them.