uncle sean

Maybe it's morbid, but right this moment I'm thinking about uncle Sean.  My mother's only brother to survive 'Nam.  He ran a clothing store in Birmingham.  And then one day he disappeared.  Gay men disappeared in the south.  Also men (& women) of my mother's generation, people associated with the Weather Underground, also disappeared.  My mother was associated with the W.U. for a bit.  Mainly because she'd lost two brothers already.  Sean was somebody I don't clearly remember.  He has a face like a forgotten Polaroid.  The light falling on his mustache being forgotten by the photograph itself, by the photographers, by time.  It falls across his glasses like it's being poured from around the edges of blackout curtains, it falls in funnels through the lenses onto eyes that hide their colour.  Were his eyes hazel?  Like my mother's, or like mine?  Did we all have that trait of eyes that were never green, nor blue, nor the colour of cut fall grass?  Everyone knew Sean was gay.  Most of my mother's friends were, too.  One day Sean didn't show up to open his clothing store.  After a week we were all pretty certain he was missing, but no-one knew why.  The bills were paid.  The store wasn't in anything resembling debt.  As far as my mother would speculate, Sean wasn't into anything with anyone.  He was a pretty quiet, unassuming guy.  He had been an artist, and then he stopped, and fashion became his life.  A disappointment to his mother, and an inspiration to his sister, and a ghost to his nephew.  My parents stopped talking about Sean after a year.  And then he never came up again.  A story without an ending.  As simple a mystery as ever lived.  One day is A.  The next day is not-A.  Sean.  No Sean.  My mother never knew.  So I don't know.

Mystery as hereditary trait.  An heirloom enigma.  Why did he leave?  Did he leave?  Or did he get pulled over by a cop, one night in Alabama.  Did he meet someone strange?  Did someone take him from us?

Uncle Sean is a locked, sealed room, labeled 1981-1982?  I don't have the key for it anywhere.

Trust me, I searched.

promiseland: shadowfucks

Well into it now, darlings.  Reading a John Rechy I've not sampled before, the extremely catholic & angry about it Rushes, about the meat-packing-district era of paved-over, punk, drugged-up NYC.  Which has led to visiting online interviews with Rechy, and realizing how much philosophically I have (or perhaps had?-- dunno how postdated that last interview was) in common with him.

The commonality being anger, chiefly.  Anger as gleaned from reflection.

Sexually I've always resented arriving after the party had been officially Crashed by AIDS.  I've never lived in a world without the equation sex can, may, potentially-possibly-probably equal death.  Of course it's always been thus, because sex has always been sus.  You can't have sexuality without the wild variety of individual wants, and Want is what tends to make things suspect, don't you think?

In the wake of the heteroflexible--  & in terms of Pop Culture, largely cis & consequently internally conflicted (no matter how loudly the Free Love generation declaimed its proud feminism) --60s...  In the wake of the heteroflexible 60s, my people decided to get hep and claim Free Love for themselves, so the 70s were when we tried to really make the scene.  We fucked as publicly and loudly and politically as we could.  We clamored, darling, craving that Big Brass Ring, straining for it.  We wanted what the hets had:  cheap cynicism, and comic cruelty, and clone conformity.  Christ knows why.

I mean, we already had camp.  So what was there to add?  The ability to bang a rail & a stranger & wake up on a strange, slightly sticky couch?  The ability to be as fake & frail & fucked in the head as any long-suffering, highly-medicated housewife?  What were we after, in the 70s?  

Don't invoke freedom.  Freedom's just another word in a Kris Kristofferson song.

I don't know that we knew what we were after, in the 70s, any more than Hunter Thompson knew what he was invoking when he ranted about The Great American Dream in 'Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas'.  I think we know, now: in retrospect.  The Great American Dream took Hunter S. Thompson's head off, a great many decades too late to bring him any peace or sense of higher moral purpose.  Imagine waking up one day to discover you're best friends with Johnny Depp and George Bush senior's shitweasel child is the president.  That, friends, is a hangover guaranteed to end your life.

But back to the 70s:  "my people"--  what a crock of shit that phrase is --were partying, hard & fast & loose as only a strict diet of booze & cocaine & poppers can get you.  The gay world of America was wide awake & getting weird every chance they could get, even as my parents were have a meet cute in a squamous drug den.  Because everyone has to meet somewhere, so why not make a buy while you're doing it?  Somewhere around the time I was being conceived to the sound of the Allman Brothers Band--  not gonna let 'em catch me, no --John Rechy was teaching at UCLA and working on two-or-three novels even as he hustled himself for fun & finance.  Because the grindset mindset has always been a thing.

I'm looking at Rechy's 'Rushes', and I'm thinking what an angry book this is.  Righteously angry.  The anger isn't simply with catholicism & false contrition--  as I read it, both central themes of Rechy's novel --the fury at the heart of this hungry little book is with The Internalized Oppressor.  My name for it.  Rechy calls it something else, in interviews; he doesn't outright call it The Collaborator Within, but same-o, same-o.  Rechy's anger (& mine, inasmuch as we may share it) is with wanting to exist in the Straight World, with all the straight world benefits, all the trappings & illusory certitude of rôles.  Anger with wanting to believe in lies, with Needing, with being compelled to need to believe in lies.

It's anger with not feeling like you exist, as a complete creature.  One must have the status, the glamour, the trappings; then, and only IF one can afford to tip considerably & graciously, can it be yours.  For a limited time.

There was definitely a limit on the 70s.  For Rechy, you can read it in the first chapter.  On page 16:  "....a heated gust of wind shoves loose trash against the curbs, where plastic bags overflow with packed garbage.  Piled to be picked up, the bags are like corpses after a deadly plague.  New free-form sculptures on the landscape, [he] thinks."  In the New York Rechy describes, the garbage strikes are coming.  The city, about to declare bankruptcy.  The party, at its nadir.

It's in these shadows Rechy fucks around.  He's writing a stage play.  Or is it a novel?  Whatever, Rechy reasons: no reason to not combine the impulses.  Isn't that what all this art shit is about, anyhow: combining impulses?  Understanding sex, explicating sex, expressing sex?  Art and sex live & die on the same altar, he seems to be saying, and I dig that.

Of course all this stuff is the 70s, and PROMISELAND is about the 60s, five minutes after James Dean died, but it's all the same snowball, toward the center.  The outer layers of jagged ice and accumulated filth as the generations tumble down, down, bearing ever more heavily down, that's just what your grandparents & your parents added.  For decoration.  The cold dead center of my thing, that's James Dean's much-denied sexuality, the hard-rockin' rebel who empathizes with his sissy friend.

The 60s weren't friendly to "my people".  You can see that all over Rechy's work.  I first read 'City of Night' in '95, pissed off to have only then learned about Sachenhausen & the origin of the pink triangle, and what I encountered in that book staggered & awed me.  The idea of a world before the STD that decimated the gay population of New York, the idea that you could just, y'know, hook up.  Of course the life of the hustler wasn't glamorous:  I'd already learned that from Burroughs, and Wojnarowicz.  But it was luminous, nonetheless, blackly lit as the streets of 'Taxi Driver', and enticing, oh, so enticing.

The idea that you could share a cigarette, and then a kiss, with a stranger, and find something more actual & alive than cityCityCITY all around you.  The notion that a passing conversational & physical connection could re-shape your world so much more thoroughly than some tacky drug.  The possibility that if you fucked in the shadows it wasn't mundane, or morbid, or moribund.  The shadows might fuck back, and moreover, the shadowfucks might even be... fun.

That's what Rechy brought me, with 'City of Night'.  And I value that.

But more than that I value what Rechy has in 'Rushes', and that's the anger one experiences in looking back on a Scene and discovering that the good-time-had-by-all was not only not-shared but also mainly not-accessible-to-the-majority, because THERE WAS NO MAJORITY, in the gay scene or in the straight world or anywhere else, for that matter.  The consensus is, there is no consensus.

Do gay men want love, or do they want their fuckparty exclusive, no bitches or sissies allowed?  Do queers want acceptance, or do they want political power?  Do we want art, darling, or do we want the artifice of eternal adolescence?

Shit if I know.  All that's certain is this book is where my head's at today, contemplating a whole lotta chaos & context.  Somewhere in the middle of trying to type all that tripe my husband asked what I was writing, and I didn't say "Read my blog."