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.