Those Disgusting Gay Pride Parades: A Response To Paladino

Admit it, you’re kinda intrigued but also put off by gay pride parades. Maybe ‘put off’ is too strong a term for you. Perhaps you’re, say, perplexed by them? Yes, perplexed – how’s that?

And, frankly, who wouldn’t be perplexed?

Gangs of overweight bull dykes cruising along on their blustering hogs? Rail-thin twinks dithering about wearing nothing but glitter and body paint? Big muscley dudes grinding each other to the drilling beat of unhappy-sounding techno music? And drag queens?! Drag queens everywhere! Ten-foot drag queens. 300-pound drag queens. Drag queens in leather, pleather, feathers, sequins, furs, nylons, raw meat, you name it.

It’s all so weird. Disgusting even.

And that’s the point.

Sort of.

My reaction to my first gay parade was probably not too dissimilar to most people’s. Who are these freakshows and why are they behaving so unseemly, so trashy, so utterly untoward? Just when I thought I had seen the “worst” of it, a whole new level of inappropriateness revealed itself in the flesh (and, my, were there lots of it). Needless to say the whole thing made me feel uncomfortable, confused, dirty. But, above all, it made me feel afraid.

Looking back the fear was innocent enough; some would say naïve even. I was coming to terms with my own sexuality then (still am); and witnessing those “extreme” representations of sexual expression only complicated the whole process. You see, like many others, I could only handle a little bit at a time in what I presumed to be the linear process of coming out. The reality, of course, is that nothing in life is truly linear, especially human sexuality. But linearity is, seemingly at least, safe and somewhat controllable. Even the notion of a ‘process’ can be very comforting.

This comfort, however, comes at a price – a price most gay people recognize early on, not only in spite of but also because of the torment, discrimination and hatefulness they’ve endured. It’s not unlike enlightenment attained through suffering.

And therein lies the paradox of gay pride parades.

Like any other procession (derived, of course, from the word ‘process’), there’s a natural beginning, middle and an end to a gay pride parade – in terms of both time and sequence. But that’s pretty much where the linearity desists. For the parade itself is meant to celebrate the OPPOSITE of linearity. What’s the opposite of linearity?, you may inquire. Well, it can be anything you want it to be – revolution (derived, of course, from the word ‘revolve’), centrality, randomness, chaos, nothingness, otherworldliness, whatever.

You see, those freakshows – with their props and their dancing and their nakedness – are merely acting as embodiments of the idea that nothing meaningful in life is so straightforward or predictable or right. Additionally, and equally importantly, instead of fearing complexity, randomness and unknowingness, the freakshows are in fact humbly, if not joyfully, acknowledging them.

In other words, they’re embracing their perplexity.

(often quite creatively)

When I write that I’m still coming to terms with my sexuality, I really mean it. I believe that, as humans, we are fated or wired to undertake the complexities of our sexuality no more or less so than any other core aspect of our being. Our essence, after all, isn’t something we are granted but rather something we continuously strive toward – openly, respectfully and non-linearly.

So the next time you come across a gay pride parade, whether on the streets or on TV, instead of gawking or judging, take a look at your own openness and humbleness, and be also proud – proud of your own perplexity. It’s what links you to everybody else, including those freakshows; who maybe don’t seem so freakish anymore.

-duardo

John Lennon, I'm Glad You Were Born

I usually write about John Lennon on the day he was killed. Every December 8, I tend to write some post about how much he has meant to me in terms of my own understanding of human nature and how I, as a teenager, often used Lennon in particular and The Beatles in general as a way to relate to my father and as a framework for my own world view. That may sound odd, or a little misguided, and it probably was. However, I still, many years later, think that there are some good lessons to be had in his story and a certainly valuable message in his music. Perhaps, these lessons and messages are more needed now than ever, or perhaps it just feels like it. Whatever the reason, I feel that it is important to think about them today.

There are several lessons to be gleaned from Lennon’s life story. Chief among them may be that no one is perfect and that it is foolish to expect perfection from ourselves and others. I know that we all have a tendency to deify Lennon as a holy martyr and I think that this is a natural tendency. The man was murdered at the height of his apparent enlightenment and we seem to have frozen him in our memories as forever being the person he was on that cold night in New York City. However, there is something greater to be gained by understanding that John Lennon, as a person, did some pretty horrible things. In his early career, he drank, fought and cheated. He also left his first wife and son without much support while publicly worshipping his second wife and second son later on in his life. It is uncomfortable to think about Lennon this way, so we often don’t. This is a mistake. You see, by understanding his imperfections, we can begin to understand our own. No one is perfect, not even rock’s greatest deity, and that means that we should cast a forgiving and understanding eye on those who seem exceptionally flawed, including ourselves. I firmly believe that Lennon himself was greatly aware of his own shortcomings and had to reconcile them within himself before he was able to effectively move on.

In addition to the understanding of our own nature which can be gained from looking at his life, Lennon’s music can offer us some valuable and powerful reminders in a time when the negative static which surrounds us is at a fever pitch. We are constantly inundated with messages about what we should be doing and the heights to which we should aspire. Often, these messages take the form of telling us to aspire toward success defined as financial gain. We are constantly being urged to earn more, buy more, save more, spend more and consume more. We are, we are told, intrinsically defined by what we have. It determines our social status, our ability to thrive and our own value. Of course, it would be a misnomer to declare that there is not a need to earn enough money to have what we need, and a greater misnomer to look at Lennon as an example of an ascetic lifestyle, but there is something to be said for his message that the material trappings by which we define ourselves are not as important as we think they are. Perhaps, by renouncing the value of our possessions in Imagine and urging us to re-imagine our definitions of success in Watching The Wheels, Lennon gives us a springboard from which we can reexamine what we need and how we are to get it. It is easy to forget that our basic needs are pretty simple and to become caught in a frame of mind which dictates that we need more and that our own individual needs are more important than those of others. The bottom line is that our needs are simply to have food, clean water and love. We do not need the trappings of modern consumerism. We want them and that is OK, but we ought to try to remember the difference as we go through the world.

Finally, I think that Lennon’s message is one of self definition. Through both action and words, he tells us that it is, ultimately, our job to define and redefine ourselves as we would like to be defined and that no externality can form this definition. We cannot successfully define ourselves by that which we possess or that to which we belong. It is tempting to use labels and syllogisms as definitions for ourselves, but that sort of external identity often fails to address our individual needs and actions. Sure, we can all carry signs and rally against our similarly identified enemy, but at the end of the day, that just adds to the aforementioned static and leaves us with the same sense of loneliness and disenfranchisement that led us to seek out the external identity in the first place. Through songs like Revolution, Lennon reminds us that we all do, in some way, want to change our world, but that change does not come through hatred or vitriol, no matter how tempting it may be. Instead, if we follow ever evolving message behind the music, it might be more fruitful to look for an internal revolution wherein we redefine our identities to include the fact that, as that great man once said, “we all shine on, like the moon and stars and the sun”, and we do this not by turning a hateful eye toward that which threatens our ideologies, but by reminding ourselves to simply love. We need to, as we move forward, love ourselves, love others and love our world. This is not easy or simple or even totally attainable, but every little step we take could be the one which moves us closer to what John Lennon once asked us to imagine.

-Shannon (Who is well acquainted with the touch of a velvet hand like a lizard on a window pane)

Sometimes, It Just Needs To Be Said

I was going to write and post a piece on being a dick on and around college campuses, plus one on the role of the wonderweb in our culture. I will still do that, I promise, but something on my facebook page caught my eye. Well, two somethings really. You see, my network of friends tends to use the site as a way to share news, ideas, artwork and other little items. This is particularly true for my gigantic extended family. Often, facebook serves the function of a huge breakfast table for us, where we are constantly passing the paper back and forth and discussing its contents (O.K. I admit it’s usually more like bickering than discussing, but you get the point). Anyway, given the content of these two items, and the reaction they prompted in me, I felt as though it would be worth it to put those other posts on hold and discuss something urgent.

In the course of 20 minutes, two separate news articles have popped up on my newsfeed. Both detail the suicides of thirteen year old boys who were bullied by classmates and other peers. One, a young gay man, hanged himself in his backyard and spent nine days on life support before dying. The other shot himself in the head after enduring years of bullying*. I cannot state the following enough: They. Were. Both. Just. Thirteen. Years. Old. Take a minute and let that sink in. Imagine yourself at thirteen. Imagine the thirteen year olds you know now. Imagine anyone at that age deciding that their entire futures could hold nothing for them outside the pain of being bullied. Now, what are you going to do about that?

I know it may be easy to dismiss these stories as tragic one offs or random occurrences, or to point toward the victims individual differences, or even to simply look at the articles and consider how terrible some middle school kids can be and then move on with your life, but I think we’ve all been doing that for too long. I think we tend to do this because it is positively gut wrenching to consider how we, as adults in the world, tend to allow bullying and torturing to occur right beneath our noses. I wish it was easier to examine these issues with ourselves in mind, but it is not. We also might be tempted to turn events such as these into niche events which only affect a subset of kids, such as in this case where both victims were gay, and begin a campaign of protection for that particular subset. While I do think that campaigning for any group which is discriminated against is totally worthwhile and necessary, I do not think that such an action would really help us in this particular discussion.

You see, I believe that we all have an active role in perpetuating the mentality that anything which is different, or cannot be related to ourselves in some way, is, at best, something to be merely tolerated, and, at worse, something which is worthy of our scorn. We have learned, as a society, that it is polite to ignore differences, to avoid examining them and discussing them, and we have also, perhaps as a result of this, learned to tolerate others when they are hateful. Time and time again we are warned not to get involved in that which does not already involve us, and I think that it is this sort of caution that is helping to perpetuate a complex and widespread problem.

I am certain that, over the course of our adult lives, we have all witnessed an interaction or overheard a conversation which did not sit right with us. Perhaps it was a relative or friend using a racial slur, or a stranger using hateful speech. Maybe you’ve witnessed a fist fight between kids. I am certain that we have all, at one time or another, turned a blind eye or deaf ear to this and continued on our ways. I think this is particularly easy to do in situations where teenagers are being horrid to one another because it is easy to dismiss these occurrences as being typical of kids who are trying on different personas. I understand that kids often break away from their parents and seek out their own individuality by vacillating wildly to the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, so it can be easy to simply ignore these behaviors.

However, I think that, when we ignore that girl at the mall who thinks it’s hysterically funny to call another girl a whore or that boy at the bus stop who seems to punctuate every insult levied at a friend with the word faggot, we are doing these kids, and ourselves, a disservice. This also rings true for those times when a relative or friend uses an epithet in jest and we merely avert our eyes and make an internal excuse for their language and behavior. You see, whenever we allow this sort of hateful language to permeate our environment, we are sending a subtle message to kids that it is O.K. to be hateful. Sure, it may be uncomfortable to confront someone, but it has got to be less uncomfortable than contemplating the death of a thirteen year old child.

Perhaps we don’t intervene because we don’t feel as though we can really affect any change. I can understand this as well. It is easy to get caught up in the idea that we are helpless to change another person, much less the world. However, let me share something with you here. I was bullied mercilessly once upon a time. I was teased, chased, beaten and even had my clothes ripped off. Most of these things happened on busy city streets, in broad daylight. If even one adult had stopped to help me it would have meant the world to me at the time because it would have meant, in the very least, a moment of respite. Furthermore, as an adult, I can look back and understand that my tormenters were just as scared and insecure as I was, if not more so and maybe that is key. By ignoring kids when they bully out of their own insecurities, we merely perpetuate those fears when we ought to be modeling what a truly secure adult does when they see something which they know is wrong.

I know that this is quite a ramble, but what I am trying to say is simple. It is time for us all to grow up, be adults, and take control. It is not enough for us to simply avoid being bullies in our own lives, but we must do whatever we can to confront hatred and vitriol when it stumbles into our paths. We are all beings in this world, and we are all responsible, be it actively or passively, for how it operates. Can we please all agree to be a little more active in helping to stop tragedies like the ones that I have mentioned from occurring?

_Shannon (Who has nothing witty to say about this)

*To learn more about the boys mentioned above, follow the links below.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7220896.html

http://www.kget.com/news/local/story/UPDATE-Police-say-no-charges-in-death-of-gay-13/fMemM4pc3Uiy_h8gvyac3w.cspx?p=Comments

PLUG. SHAMELESS PLUG.

Our friend Jen has a beautiful fashion blog over at http://lamachinerie.tumblr.com/page/2. Go look at it for hours. Be prepared to swoon.

-Shannon

How TO Be A Dick: Restaurant Edition

I was going to begin, as promised below, writing a regular column explaining how not to be a dick. However, when I thought about it carefully, perhaps I had it backward. Maybe, and I have a ton of anecdotal evidence to support this, people want to be dicks. Who am I to tell them they can't? Well, if you ask them, I am a no body and should mind my own f**king business. We all know that is out the question, so I decided to give advice, instead, on how to be a dick. Enjoy.


Ten Easy Steps To Being A Total Dick While Dining Out


1.Please respond to all questions by staff with total non sequiturs. Examples of this include responding to the host/hostess's greeting of “Hi. How are you”, with a number or the word “boof”, and responding to your server's inquiry into your well being with something like “Ice Tea!” or “Bread!”. Bonus points if you can make it through your entire meal without ever responding appropriately to a direct question.

2.Never, ever, for any reason, use a complete sentence when addressing a staff member. This rule builds nicely off of tip #1. Basically, you want to respond to each new question, comment or inquisitive glance with a one word response such as “fine!” or “Steak!”. Advanced diners are capable of not only following this guideline, but of reducing most responses to mere grunts.

3.Once you've mastered the skills listed above, you can graduate to the advanced class of diners by gradually replacing words and grunts with gestures and signs. Signal the host that you've got two people in your party by simply waving something like a peace sign in the air (that's two fingers held aloft for those of you who don't know). Need a new drink? Easy. Just wave your glass in the air like you're having a seizure in your dominant arm until someone notices and fetches your refill. We all know the sign for “check please”, so always be sure to invent some sort of new, unintelligible sign for that so you can progress more easily to step 4.

4.Always, always be annoyed by anything and everything that occurs during the course of your meal. If your well done steak takes more than 3 minutes to prepare, you should immediately begin squirming, sighing, looking at your watch in an exaggerated manner (bonus points if you're not actually wearing a watch) and gesturing wildly for attention. If your food comes out quickly, make a dramatic show out of moving your salad or bread plate out of the way before suspiciously examining your plate for signs of error. Should your server pick up on your annoyance and offer to hold your food for you until you are ready, huffily inform her that you know she will just let your food rot under a heat lamp and that is unacceptable.

5.Eat every single thing you are offered with gusto and joy. Be so enthusiastic about this that whenever a staff member comes near your table to ask how you like everything, your mouth is so full of food that they cannot understand a single word you are saying and must duck to avoid being splattered with your half masticated wild wing zingers. Then, when you've licked your plate clean, proceed to loudly comment to your dining companions that you've tasted better slop in a greyhound bathroom. Since you'll be doing this as soon as your server turns his back, he will turn around and ask again if everything is ok. Tell him it is with an odd smile before finding and cornering the manager on duty and berating them endlessly about how awful the food is. Refuse any form of compensation for this and threaten to never return. Repeat this step with the free desert they bring you.

6.There is never, ever, ever, enough alcohol in your drink! This is easy with froufrou girl candy drinks like strawberry daiquiris because they are specially formulated so you can't really taste the liquor. Don't let this stop you though. Take half a sip, smell your drink dramatically and begin hysterically berating the bartender for trying to rip you off by not putting enough booze in there. Repeat this step over and over until you are sipping straight 151 through a straw. Alternately, order a single malt scotch, down the whole thing rapidly and then proceed to scream that you've been poisoned/given dummy liquor/ it tastes like burning until a manager comes over an offers to comp your drink.

7.Not a drinker? Easy. Simply come up with some bizarre concoction of soft drinks and give it a random name which is only known to you. When you receive a blank stare of confusion from your server, become agitated by their stupidity at not knowing what you are talking about and proceed to explain said drink as slowly and clearly as possible. Visualize explaining the ingredients to the love child of Corky from Life Goes On and Helen Keller. For example: “*sigh* A. Tom. Arnold. Is. One. Third. Coke. One. Third. Lemonade. And. One. Third. Coffee. Creamer. With. Exactly. 7. Ice. Cubes." When the server delivers it, utilize the skills in step 6 to repeatedly send them back and forth from the kitchen.


8.Always treat the staff as though they are nothing but sex objects. It doesn't matter if you're dining at The Four Seasons, Hooters, or IHOP. They are all there for you to flirt with, hit on and fondle. Cute waitress? No problem. Touch her every time she comes to the table, becoming more aggressive each time. Pepper your comments about the food with comments about how much more delicious she would be. Never give this up. If she stops coming to the table and, instead, sends a male coworker, start hitting on him. See a cook you like? Go on and on to your server about how hot he is. Use archaic expressions like “I wouldn't kick him out of bed for eating crackers.” Repeatedly try to get your server to get his number for you. Alternately, hit on your server by showing off how much more wealthy and educated you are. Do this by telling her at every possible moment that she would never have to wait another table again if you could have her. This last one works best if you are wearing a dirty wife beater and have not showered for a month.

9.Tipping is for fools and you know it, but you're going to hold the tip over your server's head for the entire time you are dining. When he greats you, tell him you want a perfect experience but not to worry, you will “take care of him”. If your server forgets something or your food comes out wrong, loudly proclaim “there goes your tip, sweetheart.”. Reference the tip at every single possible moment. Then, when the bill comes, leave nothing. Best. Practical. Joke. Ever.

10. Finally, now that you have made your night out a thrill for all involved, it's time to go home. You're probably pretty full, drunk and worn out by now, but don't forget the final step. Retain your receipt. Why? Because most mid level restaurants have websites where, with a tiny bit of effort, you can send comments to the owner/corporate office and receive free stuff in return. Simply type in the listed URL, log in and begin collecting free food. This is more effective if you have nothing at all positive to say, so simply pretend that your steak took too long, the food was awful, your drink was wrong and the server was cold and you'll be dining on easy street for a very long time to come. Bonus points if you can actually get someone fired or demoted in the process.

-Shannon (Who Changes Her Name To HeyYouGirl Every Time She Goes To Work)

Coming Now: How Not To Be A Dick, Or Some Unsolicited Advice On Etiquette

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about etiquette and how it can be a helpful guideline in navigating awkward or uncomfortable situations, as well as a source of confusion and amusement, depending upon the source of advice. I have been toying with the idea of starting an etiquette column in the blog for a while now as I seem to be encountering more and more serious breaches of etiquette in my daily life as a student, waitress and human being. Obviously, as you are reading this, you can figure out that I have decided to go ahead and do it. However, I want to point out that I am not going to be discussing which fork to use or how to properly unfold a napkin. Although I can tell you those things, and will if people want me to, I don't feel as though they are the most important elements of etiquette and feel very strongly that an unnecessary focus on them takes the focus away from the truly important central idea behind etiquette. Basically, etiquette is all about kindness and furthering a sense of people respecting others as human beings. In other words it can be a helpful way to know how not to be a dick, which, as anyone who has ever been in public knows, can be a very tricky thing. On that note, I will be taking a few posts each month and focusing on a specific instance or set of instances where it seems as though many people struggle to understand how they should conduct themselves. If there are specific things which you want to know about, simply comment on a post and I will do my best to answer. I am a bit of a nut for these things and have collected a great many antique and modern books on the subject as well as having a great deal of experience working with the general public and observing behaviors. I am not an expert by any stretch, but my interest in the topic is one that makes it fun to research and gain understanding. So there you have it. Without further ado, the first addition will be posted above.

Are The Pixies Our Beatles? Or How One Band Might Be That Which Makes Us Look Good

There are, essentially, two kinds of people in this world: those who like music and those who LIKE MUSIC*. The first group is comprised mostly of those who will listen to whatever is available with interest and occasionally buy an album or attend a concert if the band or artist is catchy enough. These are the sorts of folks who make things like top 40 radio and easy listening possible. They want something that is catchy and fun and blends well into the background. Most of the American population is comprised of such people so, obviously, they are not the focus of this post. The second group, those who LOVE MUSIC with 10,000 exclamation marks, are the sorts of people you see twitching outside the record store at 10:59am on new release Tuesdays and overhear bragging about that totally sick super secret show they managed to see one time by accident. These people don't have favorite bands so much as obsessions which can be categorized, sub categorized and cataloged into top and bottom fives by theme, subject, genre, sub genre and key. I find those in the latter group to be fascinating and often quite pretty**, but that is also not what this post is about. This post is about the fact that for most music geeks, there are at least one or two bands that stick with them for their entire lifetime. Despite their fickle, new music seeking, nature, every music geek I know has some perennial obsessions which follow them everywhere.

For me, The Pixies are one of those bands. I can't even remember when I first became aware of them, but it seems as though they have always been there, rotating perpetually through my internal soundtrack and serving as a kind of musical reference point in my personal history. They have, at times, been a source of awe, a source of pleasure and a source of release. What they have never been, until this week, is a band that I have been successful at seeing live. My inability to attend a Pixies show was not for lack of desire or lack of trying, but it just never seemed to work out. Until, that is, a The Dead Guy mentioned to me in passing one night that he wished the Pixies would get back together and tour again (along with Primus and Tool). I laughed at the idea that night and was shocked the next morning to find an email from ticketmaster announcing that not only had The Pixies reformed for a tour, but that tickets for the local show were going on sale in 25 minutes. This news was red alert important to me. So much so that I bolted through the house in my underwear to secure a credit card with which to purchase tickets and purchase them I did.

In the weeks leading up to the show I became increasingly excited and concerned. What if they were too old to be good? What if my seats sucked? What if I was eaten by a dingo on the way to the show? Alas, none of those things happened and I was treated to what was probably one of the best shows of my life. I should point out, however, that they are indeed old, but they definitely do not suck. They don't jump around a lot of stage or engage in wild theatrics, but that's kind of what we all love the Pixies for anyway, right? I should also point out that none of the seats at the Tower are bad, famously so, and that ours were especially not bad. And finally, in the disclaimers section, I need to state that, as far as I know, there are no dingos in North America, so that was never really a true threat.

Anyway, so there I was, seated primly in my big girl seat in a grown up theater and commenting to my partner that I felt so sophisticated seeing a band in a place like that, when stage lit up and Salvador Dali's film Un Chien Andalou began to play at alternating speeds and resolutions as the house lights went down. After 10 minute or so of eye ball slicing and attempted molestations, the screen went blank, the room went quiet and then exploded and the Pixies were on stage. It was at this moment that I realized just how lucky I was to be there, seeing a band that I thought I would never get to see.

In keeping with tradition, I won't say much about the set, except that anyone seeing the tour can expect to hear more than just songs from Dolittle, despite the fact that the tour is billed as The Pixies Perform Doolittle. Instead, I will say that I had a pretty emotional reaction to the show. Basically, this all started two nights before, when I saw the Breeders and was sent into a spiral of gratitude at how far removed I have become from the insecure and overweight 13 year old girl I once was. With the Pixies, I could not help but think about how many times they provided a soundtrack for the adventures and experiences that have helped me to become who I am. They have been with me through prom night disasters, gonzo like explorations of the American highway system, squat house sleepovers and a million awkward, clumsy, and downright embarrassing moments. Their albums and singles have been played, discussed and argued about over beers, in bars, in the woods, at parties and over some elicit substances for nearly 20 years.

It's this kind of longevity that makes them true giants in the cluttered landscape of modern rock fandom. As our generation moves as awkwardly and clumsily through adulthood as we did through adolescence, I can not help but think that The Pixies are, perhaps, one of those bands that will end up like The Beatles or Jimi Hendrix to baby boomers in that they will always be on the radar of our consciousness and the consciousness of those generations which come after us. Our media is cluttered with articles and soundbites about the failure of generations X and Y to move forward, settle down, settle in and grow up. Perhaps, and I truly hope I am right here, we will one day look back on The Pixies*** as one of those bands which are so embedded into our culture that everyone grows up with some knowledge of them, however peripheral, because in a cultural climate which is full of disposable icons and dissipating fads, they deliver something which, I think, all human beings are hungry for: a musical reference point for that which is good about us when most of focus is on that which has failed.

-Shannon (Whose Manta Ray is Alright)

*There is, admittedly a small subset of this group which is comprised of people who claim not to like music at all. They are obviously robots and not to be trusted.

**I may or may not be referring to myself here.

***See Also: REM.