Hey, Mr. DJ – put a record on, I wanna dance with my past… If I can’t do anything else, then I’ll dedicate my artistic mission toward describing what it’s like to grow up somewhere between the bourgeoise and the rebel… If I can’t seem to make it through to the populace; if I can’t make it to the print presses or the airwaves; then maybe I’ll just have to settle for letting the folks who surf the ‘net know how I feel about how I was raised to feel…
I’m not the only one. Neither are you. If you’re alive enough to read this right here and right now, then you’re one of us. You’re one of those who was raised on the Myth of A Star Is Born. It doesn’t matter of it’s Streisand or Garland you associate with the role. The truth is, if you remember either (or worse, like myself, if you remember both), then the Star in question is none other than yourself.
Rising to fame is the late 20th/early 21st Century equivalent to an immigrant’s arriving from another land, after passing through Eillis Island, onto streets paved with gold. It is the current American mythos. It is the umph upon which the majority of several industries have been thrust, and then built.
Don’t know what I mean? Then take a look-see at American Idol, or So You Think You Can Dance, or even at the mothers of all “Reality” TV: The Real World or Survivor. They encapsulate, in less than 60 minutes (gotta reserve ample time for commercials, after all), the sheer reductivist version of Darwinianism that America likes to call its own.
It’s survival of the fittest, that is. Which equates, in camera-ready terms, to an unspoken unilateral agreement to put to contest only the most beautiful of people. Hence the first line of Darwinian deliniation, in American terms, equals beauty – according to how the camera sees it. (Beauty has, after all, been determined differently according to various variables throughout Western history; i.e.: how one looks whilst lounging along a riverbank or on a chaise, or how one appears on stage.) Don’t tell me Richard Hatch isn’t handsome. True, he might not look like Tom Cruise, but if his nose had cast any unnessecary shadows on that, the first of the screen tests before any of the contestants had landed on the first of the Survivor islands, then you can be damned sure he’d never have gotten the opportunity to saunter around, however robustly, in his birthday suit.
See, these days (ever since the dawn of Hollywood and the utterly critical aspect called depth-of-field), beauty has been determined less by one’s facial features and more by the lack of them. Because features cast shadows, and shadows – in the film/video world – are problems. It started somewhere around Garbo and has continued right up to Pamela Anderson. The former had no features whatsoever, other than what the camera gave her, and the latter? Ditto – except for her “titto’s.” You see, bodily features are just fine. It’s the close up that’s the problem. Unless, of course, you’re utterly featureless. Then it’s no problem at all.
Which is not to say that one can’t possess any physical features whatsoever. Quite the contrary. Coloring is critical (no matter what any make-up or lighting “artist” wants to tell you), as is the shape of one’s head. Lash length is a factor, as is one’s ability to raise one (and only one) eyebrow. And of course, there’s the ever-important head width, and forehead hieght, and jaw structure, and chin size, and then the eventually adjacent neck length. These factors work together in an indescribable and transcendant ability to suggest meaning and context when framed within any of the industry-standard Pythagorean ratios. (“Letterbox” and “pan-and-scan” are the primary two – have a ball looking up these terms, among others, those of you who’ve magically managed to avoid encountering them).
Factors that no longer matter include but are not limited to: height, stature, strength, endurance and – let’s certainly not forget – intellect (the capacity to which one would need in order to memorize an entire script so that one might perform it from beginning to end without ceaseless interruptions and/or retakes). (Note: WEIGHT remains a critical factor, as in, “the less the better.”) Otherwise, today’s cinematic standards of beauty remain identical to that of previous generations.
So, if you’re “on board” for the pursuit of the current American mythos, sooner or later you’re going to have to evaluate yourself on this beauty scale. If you’re lucky enough to be honest enough with yourself not to try to compete with the likes of Cameron Diaz and Antonio Banderas (don’t know why I jumped immediately to the pseudo Latin American talent pool for that comparison, so in the interest of racial equality, let’s also throw in Halle Berry and Denzel Washington; and then Angelina Jolie and Colin Farrel), then you’ll be immediately prompted to recognize yourself as a “character actor.” Good for you. You’ve just joined the ranks of Rhea Perlman and Danny DeVito (who happen to have been married at one point – don’t know if they still are).
I don’t care if you’re an actor, a musician, or even a writer or a fucking painter – at this point in history, America wants all of its celebrities to be pretty. If you’re not pretty, then you’d better be friggin’ funny, like Marty Feldman. Or you’d better be rich. You can be as ugly as you want as long as you’re funny or rich. But no one ever got rich by being ugly (Feldman is no millionaire – he’s not even still alive), and getting rich AND famous is what we’re talking about here… So if you’re ugly and rich and famous by now, that means you’ve been working at it for a good 30 years or so and your time has just come… Kinda like “The Donald.” (So fire me already. I wasn’t even gonna apply.) If you’re just ugly and famous right now, just wait a few months… (Case in point: Every day I see “de plane,” but when’s the last time we saw Tattoo?)
Still willing to pursue today’s American dream? Then you must be talented.
Ha, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!!!!!!!!!!
How nice for you. So one of these days, as they say, your ship will come in. If you just keep plugging along, despite all the odds against you and despite all the cosmetic surgery that your “younger-than’s” and “lesser-than’s” are currently undergoing (not to mention the subsequent contacts that their surgeons will be able to put them in touch with), then you might just be able to make a name for yourself. You might just get through to the populace. And then maybe – after all that work and if the Good Witch of the North just happens to meet you at an art opening or a movie or theatre premiere after she’s downed a few too many Cosmopolitans – you might just become a star. Well, then, of course I apologize for sounding too cynical. Of course you were right in persuing the mythos of our time. Good for you. You beat the odds.
I’m sorry – just who are you again?
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
September Mourn
While June, July and August of 2005 will forever in my mind be remembered as one of the best summers I’ve ever had, I must confess, the ensuing September was one of the worst months I’ve ever had. Call it anticlimax if you will, but there’s more to it than that. Much more.
I’ve alluded to and even discussed to some extent my tenuous relationship with my parents. Well, I suppose the time has come to elaborate. And I suppose I’ll start with the terse clinical description that sums up so much of the dynamic: I’m the only child of two ‘50s generation staunch blue-collar-made-white-collar Irish Catholics from Massachusetts. If that doesn’t paint some sort of image, I don’t know what will.
I went to visit said parents during the last week of August – supposedly for a “vacation” from the vacation I’d been indulging in since late May…
If there’s a delicate way to put this, I can’t find it. So I’ll just come out with it. My mother has been sipping her way into a steady, sustained, self-destructive stupor since I came out to her way back during the barely post-Cro Magnon era of the Reagan administration (e.g.: 1987). Yeah, it’s been that long. Grudge much? If you ever feel the need to look up the term “false expectation,” then by all means, do. When you do, you’ll find pictures of both my mother and myself next to the definition. She’s the progenitor and I’m the result.
At first the situation was (pardon the pun) relatively easy to deal with. I’d taken care of that. I’d moved all the way from New England to California. I’d put distance between us. Not just physical distance, but cultural distance, too, as I knew my parents perceived California to be “the land of the fruits and the nuts.” Whenever I heard that experession (as I did, many thousands of times over Walter Cronkite’s delivery of the evening news, TV trays in place; TV dinners upon them), I had two – apparently opposing – reactions. On one hand, I immediately understood my parents’ undercutting reference; but on the other hand, deep inside me, a semi-latent fascination with all matters radical perked up and took notice… I suppose that’s largely how I came to equate California with my eventual freedom.
So, when the proper time came (yes, it had to be the “proper” time, as I was still very much New English on the outside), I annouced to my circle of college friends, shortly after graduation, that I was going to move to San Francisco. (Would now be the best time to mention that graduation came with a few thousand bucksaws from my parents, which, I’m sure, they’d envisioned my banking until I needed to buy an engagement ring or put down some money for a home? OK. Consider it mentioned. Yes, I understand how my parents might have come to view this as “insult to injury.”) Of course, the rote repsonse in parts New English back then – and probably still is – “Oh, you’ll be back.”
But I never came back. Even now, almost 20 years later, I still haven’t come back. While I might have returned, finally, to the east coast, I have in no way returned to New England. And despite my disinclination to ever say “never,” I’m pretty sure I can remain honorbaly inclined to say I’ll never go back there. NYC is as close as it gets, baby.
Instead of coming back, I came further out. My 10 years in San Francisco resulted in my evolving from an uptight Irish Catholic prick, albeit an already quite homosexual one, to a radical leftist queer sexworker. (Yes, “sexworker” – that’s what we whores are referred to in more civilized social circles.) And as my consciousness soared, that of my parents remained stagnant at best. Actually, I think it digressed, because I wasn’t there to be “in their face” enough to whittle away at their defenses.
It was easy enough to hide my true self from them whenever I mad my bi-annual trips “home.” After all, I’d been hiding myself from them all my life – and they’d come to expect that – so what difference did it make? But there was a difference. There grew between the three of us an undescribable, inescapable tension. It was as if we lived constantly with the impending threat of an Irish Catholic denial implosion. (No, of course it couldn’t have been an explosion. That would’ve been too explicit.)
By the time my decade in SF was coming to a close, I was coming into my own. I’d broken away from the bourgeois strings of 9-5. I was supporting myself as a sexwoker so that I could write, produce and star in my very own one-man shows. I worked one show to death, playing it at venue after venue until finally I landed a gig at “THE” venue and was written up in several of the Bay Area weeklies – and favorably, I might add. Soon after all this happened, I felt the chill of San Franciso’s glass ceiling, so I knew it was time to move on. It didn’t matter that the rest of the Bay Area had become a warm an nurturing womb. What mattered most was my progression, for better or worse.
So I progressed to Los Angeles, for several reasons, not the least of which was love. Yes, indeed, the cynical whore had found love, in the form of a visual artist from Salt Lake City who’d taken to homesteading in South Central – right around the time of the Rodney Kind riots. How cool is THAT? (Heh.) I rationalized the move in as many self-interested directions as possible, but whenever I got (amidst all the moving and shuffling and sanding and scraping and prepping and painting and repainting and touching up and re-touching) a moment to myself, I realized I’d moved to that god forsaken lot in Los Angeles for love, plain and simple. Hell, I had entered my 30s, so I figured that’s what it was time to do. Settle down and all…
Yeah, I was there to find an agent and maybe do some commercial work. Yeah, I was there to continue playwriting and launch gigs at venues in a bigger pond. And yeah, I did some of that. But most importantly, I was there because I’d found a soul mate.
When I told Mom and Dad about my newfound interest in domestic bliss, they were actually happy. Even if it couldn’t be a wife, I’d at least found a spouse. That’s how they saw the situation. So for a brief while they changed their icy New English tune to one of almost veritable support. In that area, at least. But as for the artsy-fartsy bohemianism? That they still couldn’t handle. See, I’m what most conservative parents might call a “double whammy.” Not only am I gay, but I’m also a bohemian. For real. This ain’t no adolescent phase (much like the queerness wasn’t, either). This is my life. This is moi. This is who and what I am. I’m the rare statistic that parents dread. I didn’t outgrow either phase.
Now, in the interest of ostensible fairness, let’s then hear some sympathy for my folks. All together now: “Awwwwwwww…”
See, the funniest thing about my folks (“funny,” as in deep-dark “weird,” that is – it’s nowhere near funny “ha-ha,” except in the deepest and darkest of ways) is this: They have never been able to think of my gayness as something that has happened to me; they can only perceive it in terms of how it has “happened” to them. For all the “It’s just not a lifestyle I would’ve chosen for you” and “If there was only something we could’ve done to prevent this from happening to you,” notions they might have sent my way, I’ve never once heard from either of them any statement remotely resembling, “Well, if that’s who and what you think you are, then I suppose I’ll have to support that.” Their most compassionate explanations and descriptions have been replete with prejudice and blame. And I don’t, at this point, think I need to spell out exactly against whom they are prejudiced and whom they blame.
So: in a nutshell… Ever since the fall of 1987, immediately after I’d packed everything I could fit into my 1981 VW Jetta and driven across the country to move to SF, my mother has been depressed. She has been so depressed that she developed not only one, not even two, but three types of cancer – each related to her sex and maternity: breast, cervial, and uterine, respectively. And a few years after she’d had several surgeries and “beaten the odds,” dear ol’ Dad came down with prostate cancer.
Now, I’m not one to victim-blame, but am I the only one who sees a weird sort of subconscious, repressed Irish Catholic poetic justice in this picture? Which is not to say, in using the term “poetic justice,” that I think it’s just that my parents have fallen prey to these diseases, but I do – especially as a writer – see a literary pattern of sorts.
Flash forward to the August just passed, the final week during which I visited my parents on “vacation.” Not only did I once again have to face the living image that has become my alcohol-soaked, post-chemo’d Mom – who’s taken to sleeping until 4pm so that she might stay up until 5am sipping white wine from a box and watching Nick at Nite – but I also had to listen to Dear Ol’ Dad’s justifications as to exactly why I was honor-bound to nod and smile whenever she dished out one of her insults (a/k/a, in their heads, “truisms”). In their heads, there’s nothing wrong with our relationship. As it turns out, even though homosexuality never factored into their personal equations, they both hated their mothers. For them, hating one’s mother is status quo. I think that’s the thing they ultimately believe is most radical about me – that I refuse to accept continued abuse from my mother.
But that doesn’t stop her from dishing it out. And it doesn’t stop him from supporting her in doing so. That’s what I learned, during a one-week stay last August back at the homefront. After all these years and after falling under the false assumption that moving “back east” would bring me closer to the parents I’d abandoned almost 20 years ago, I finally came to the realization that I wasn't the only one responsible for our alienated dynamic. In fact, my parents were not only equally to blame for setting up the dynamic, they are apparently quite content with keeping it intact. So when I returned to Brooklyn, after a somewhat longer than brief escape to Party-Party/Never-Never Land, I eventually came (down) to the point of recognizing all this.
Mom hasn’t recovered and most likely never will recover from realizing that I am gay. And her response to the matter has been to take what we Irish like to call “the low road” – denial, anger, and blame. Dad plays the part of the codependent in this case, silently supporting Mom’s behaviors through not making any attempts to change them. Why? Because ultimately he agrees with her position, so he can’t muster up the strength to argue with it.
I am a faggot in my parents’ eyes. As ‘50s generation staunch blue-collar-made-white-collar Irish Catholics from Massachusetts, that’s the only perception available to them. To question that perception would open them up to questioning every other perception that contributes to their sensibility. Like the Roman Catholic church, they espouse to love the sinner but hate the sin.
And that’s a sin I can’t even begin to love any sinner for.
Therein lies the conflict between me and my parents. That’s the reason why I fall into 30-day depressions after each visit I make to Massachusetts. I do my best to recognize that their reaction is not my responsibility; that how they feel about who and what I am ultimately has nothing to do with the essence of who and what I am. But it hurts to visit them. It hurts to see the devastation that the unwillingness to reconsider a sensibility will do to a body (or two, or three, or more – all the way up to a society). THAT’s what pushes me into a chasm of depression. That’s why September was such an awful month for me. And that’s the demon I need to battle next.
“Next!”
I’ve alluded to and even discussed to some extent my tenuous relationship with my parents. Well, I suppose the time has come to elaborate. And I suppose I’ll start with the terse clinical description that sums up so much of the dynamic: I’m the only child of two ‘50s generation staunch blue-collar-made-white-collar Irish Catholics from Massachusetts. If that doesn’t paint some sort of image, I don’t know what will.
I went to visit said parents during the last week of August – supposedly for a “vacation” from the vacation I’d been indulging in since late May…
If there’s a delicate way to put this, I can’t find it. So I’ll just come out with it. My mother has been sipping her way into a steady, sustained, self-destructive stupor since I came out to her way back during the barely post-Cro Magnon era of the Reagan administration (e.g.: 1987). Yeah, it’s been that long. Grudge much? If you ever feel the need to look up the term “false expectation,” then by all means, do. When you do, you’ll find pictures of both my mother and myself next to the definition. She’s the progenitor and I’m the result.
At first the situation was (pardon the pun) relatively easy to deal with. I’d taken care of that. I’d moved all the way from New England to California. I’d put distance between us. Not just physical distance, but cultural distance, too, as I knew my parents perceived California to be “the land of the fruits and the nuts.” Whenever I heard that experession (as I did, many thousands of times over Walter Cronkite’s delivery of the evening news, TV trays in place; TV dinners upon them), I had two – apparently opposing – reactions. On one hand, I immediately understood my parents’ undercutting reference; but on the other hand, deep inside me, a semi-latent fascination with all matters radical perked up and took notice… I suppose that’s largely how I came to equate California with my eventual freedom.
So, when the proper time came (yes, it had to be the “proper” time, as I was still very much New English on the outside), I annouced to my circle of college friends, shortly after graduation, that I was going to move to San Francisco. (Would now be the best time to mention that graduation came with a few thousand bucksaws from my parents, which, I’m sure, they’d envisioned my banking until I needed to buy an engagement ring or put down some money for a home? OK. Consider it mentioned. Yes, I understand how my parents might have come to view this as “insult to injury.”) Of course, the rote repsonse in parts New English back then – and probably still is – “Oh, you’ll be back.”
But I never came back. Even now, almost 20 years later, I still haven’t come back. While I might have returned, finally, to the east coast, I have in no way returned to New England. And despite my disinclination to ever say “never,” I’m pretty sure I can remain honorbaly inclined to say I’ll never go back there. NYC is as close as it gets, baby.
Instead of coming back, I came further out. My 10 years in San Francisco resulted in my evolving from an uptight Irish Catholic prick, albeit an already quite homosexual one, to a radical leftist queer sexworker. (Yes, “sexworker” – that’s what we whores are referred to in more civilized social circles.) And as my consciousness soared, that of my parents remained stagnant at best. Actually, I think it digressed, because I wasn’t there to be “in their face” enough to whittle away at their defenses.
It was easy enough to hide my true self from them whenever I mad my bi-annual trips “home.” After all, I’d been hiding myself from them all my life – and they’d come to expect that – so what difference did it make? But there was a difference. There grew between the three of us an undescribable, inescapable tension. It was as if we lived constantly with the impending threat of an Irish Catholic denial implosion. (No, of course it couldn’t have been an explosion. That would’ve been too explicit.)
By the time my decade in SF was coming to a close, I was coming into my own. I’d broken away from the bourgeois strings of 9-5. I was supporting myself as a sexwoker so that I could write, produce and star in my very own one-man shows. I worked one show to death, playing it at venue after venue until finally I landed a gig at “THE” venue and was written up in several of the Bay Area weeklies – and favorably, I might add. Soon after all this happened, I felt the chill of San Franciso’s glass ceiling, so I knew it was time to move on. It didn’t matter that the rest of the Bay Area had become a warm an nurturing womb. What mattered most was my progression, for better or worse.
So I progressed to Los Angeles, for several reasons, not the least of which was love. Yes, indeed, the cynical whore had found love, in the form of a visual artist from Salt Lake City who’d taken to homesteading in South Central – right around the time of the Rodney Kind riots. How cool is THAT? (Heh.) I rationalized the move in as many self-interested directions as possible, but whenever I got (amidst all the moving and shuffling and sanding and scraping and prepping and painting and repainting and touching up and re-touching) a moment to myself, I realized I’d moved to that god forsaken lot in Los Angeles for love, plain and simple. Hell, I had entered my 30s, so I figured that’s what it was time to do. Settle down and all…
Yeah, I was there to find an agent and maybe do some commercial work. Yeah, I was there to continue playwriting and launch gigs at venues in a bigger pond. And yeah, I did some of that. But most importantly, I was there because I’d found a soul mate.
When I told Mom and Dad about my newfound interest in domestic bliss, they were actually happy. Even if it couldn’t be a wife, I’d at least found a spouse. That’s how they saw the situation. So for a brief while they changed their icy New English tune to one of almost veritable support. In that area, at least. But as for the artsy-fartsy bohemianism? That they still couldn’t handle. See, I’m what most conservative parents might call a “double whammy.” Not only am I gay, but I’m also a bohemian. For real. This ain’t no adolescent phase (much like the queerness wasn’t, either). This is my life. This is moi. This is who and what I am. I’m the rare statistic that parents dread. I didn’t outgrow either phase.
Now, in the interest of ostensible fairness, let’s then hear some sympathy for my folks. All together now: “Awwwwwwww…”
See, the funniest thing about my folks (“funny,” as in deep-dark “weird,” that is – it’s nowhere near funny “ha-ha,” except in the deepest and darkest of ways) is this: They have never been able to think of my gayness as something that has happened to me; they can only perceive it in terms of how it has “happened” to them. For all the “It’s just not a lifestyle I would’ve chosen for you” and “If there was only something we could’ve done to prevent this from happening to you,” notions they might have sent my way, I’ve never once heard from either of them any statement remotely resembling, “Well, if that’s who and what you think you are, then I suppose I’ll have to support that.” Their most compassionate explanations and descriptions have been replete with prejudice and blame. And I don’t, at this point, think I need to spell out exactly against whom they are prejudiced and whom they blame.
So: in a nutshell… Ever since the fall of 1987, immediately after I’d packed everything I could fit into my 1981 VW Jetta and driven across the country to move to SF, my mother has been depressed. She has been so depressed that she developed not only one, not even two, but three types of cancer – each related to her sex and maternity: breast, cervial, and uterine, respectively. And a few years after she’d had several surgeries and “beaten the odds,” dear ol’ Dad came down with prostate cancer.
Now, I’m not one to victim-blame, but am I the only one who sees a weird sort of subconscious, repressed Irish Catholic poetic justice in this picture? Which is not to say, in using the term “poetic justice,” that I think it’s just that my parents have fallen prey to these diseases, but I do – especially as a writer – see a literary pattern of sorts.
Flash forward to the August just passed, the final week during which I visited my parents on “vacation.” Not only did I once again have to face the living image that has become my alcohol-soaked, post-chemo’d Mom – who’s taken to sleeping until 4pm so that she might stay up until 5am sipping white wine from a box and watching Nick at Nite – but I also had to listen to Dear Ol’ Dad’s justifications as to exactly why I was honor-bound to nod and smile whenever she dished out one of her insults (a/k/a, in their heads, “truisms”). In their heads, there’s nothing wrong with our relationship. As it turns out, even though homosexuality never factored into their personal equations, they both hated their mothers. For them, hating one’s mother is status quo. I think that’s the thing they ultimately believe is most radical about me – that I refuse to accept continued abuse from my mother.
But that doesn’t stop her from dishing it out. And it doesn’t stop him from supporting her in doing so. That’s what I learned, during a one-week stay last August back at the homefront. After all these years and after falling under the false assumption that moving “back east” would bring me closer to the parents I’d abandoned almost 20 years ago, I finally came to the realization that I wasn't the only one responsible for our alienated dynamic. In fact, my parents were not only equally to blame for setting up the dynamic, they are apparently quite content with keeping it intact. So when I returned to Brooklyn, after a somewhat longer than brief escape to Party-Party/Never-Never Land, I eventually came (down) to the point of recognizing all this.
Mom hasn’t recovered and most likely never will recover from realizing that I am gay. And her response to the matter has been to take what we Irish like to call “the low road” – denial, anger, and blame. Dad plays the part of the codependent in this case, silently supporting Mom’s behaviors through not making any attempts to change them. Why? Because ultimately he agrees with her position, so he can’t muster up the strength to argue with it.
I am a faggot in my parents’ eyes. As ‘50s generation staunch blue-collar-made-white-collar Irish Catholics from Massachusetts, that’s the only perception available to them. To question that perception would open them up to questioning every other perception that contributes to their sensibility. Like the Roman Catholic church, they espouse to love the sinner but hate the sin.
And that’s a sin I can’t even begin to love any sinner for.
Therein lies the conflict between me and my parents. That’s the reason why I fall into 30-day depressions after each visit I make to Massachusetts. I do my best to recognize that their reaction is not my responsibility; that how they feel about who and what I am ultimately has nothing to do with the essence of who and what I am. But it hurts to visit them. It hurts to see the devastation that the unwillingness to reconsider a sensibility will do to a body (or two, or three, or more – all the way up to a society). THAT’s what pushes me into a chasm of depression. That’s why September was such an awful month for me. And that’s the demon I need to battle next.
“Next!”
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