It Gets Better-ment

The queer youth suicides this month have been a serious cause for reflection. For sure, they’ve been an occasion for many of us to look at the violences and despair we’ve survived, especially as once young people lacking any meaningful safety net. Probably the best known response to the suicides this month has been Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign. I certainly see the effort of a huge number of adults that have made videos for the campaign as an attempt to reach out to the unknown and inaccessible not-yet-here-queer youth that seem to only become visible once they show up in a news article about suicide. The “It Gets Better” videos mean to let these youth know that they are not alone, and that homophobia and transphobia are sometimes survivable.

As I considered making one of these videos, these questions came to mind: What is it, exactly, that we hope to accomplish by making videos detailing our own histories of violence and harassment, especially when the intended audience already well knows of these? Do we, as adults, still feel on some level alone and unable to effect these experiences beyond the retelling? What is the role of internalized homophobia in convincing us that we do not have real capacity to take care of people, maybe even people younger than us?

I understand that queer lives are often structured in such a way that we usually don’t know tons of much older or younger folks. This by no means means that we don’t otherwise have the power to make changes in the world that make sexual and gendered difference more livable, and that when we consider how to do this, that young people should not be at the center of this question. And so, I have a suggestion: let’s not simply view the loss of these lives as a chance to remember all we’ve been through. Let’s use that very remembering as a chance to reconnect with a sense of all the work that still needs to be done in the world, and that we have the means to do.

Much of the “It Gets Better” campaign seems to assume all will be well if LGBTQ youth stick it out long enough to leave their communities of origin. In other words, safety will become available when a young person has the means to move to a city or neighborhood with a large LGBTQ population and can reorganize his/her/their/zir life on the basis of an LGBTQ identity, trumping ties to family, community, and place--an exchange that might turn out to have unreasonably high costs to youth of color and immigrant youth. It is presumptuous that an LGBTQ identity should or will become the organizing principal of every LGBTQ person’s life. Even as I am grateful for a life in the queer cultural and political spaces of San Francisco, I believe there are losses that accompany such a shift.

And how should these young people find the means to live apart from the support of their families? Besides rising unemployment, the last few years in California have seen a massive defunding of state-funded higher education. The number of eligible high school graduates in the state getting accepted to the CSU and UC system is falling, as out of state admissions rise. Poor, working class, and some middle class youth who are admitted may find their families cannot afford the new tuition hikes. LGBTQ youth who lack family support are not considered for independent financial aid for six years after high school graduation. And after the transfer of 800 billion dollars of tax payer aid to wall street, there is no serious relief planned for the unmanageable student debt that saddles so many young people post-college.

For those LGBTQ youth who do come to San Francisco, the video campaign’s assumed promised land, they may find a city with no dedicated LGBT-safe shelter, an LGBT Community Center with no dedicated youth space and a youth program which only recently avoided a 100% budget cut, a Castro recreation center which began charging fees for use of the dedicated youth drop-in space, a mayor that can imagine nothing better to do with young people with no place to go than to criminalize them for being on public sidewalks, and a Castro business sector ready to elect a supervisor that supports the same Sit/Lie ordinance.

What I mean to point out, is that the conditions in which “things got better” for some LGBTQ adults in the video campaign have changed, even as they never applied to everyone. What I also mean to say, though, is that there are things that can be done. Things we can do to “make it better.” And that many of these things are not only about reaching out to the individual youth who might refer to youtube in a moment of desperation (though even after all I’ve said, that’s a fine start). Many of the things we can do involve taking seriously the role of adults in making a more livable world for young people and building youth capacity in this regard. This would include prioritizing access to public education, stopping increasing criminalization of youth, seeing the institution of anti-bullying curriculum (not criminalization), and supporting spaces for LGBTQ youth to build relationships, and understanding these as high priority LGBTQ issues.

Sit/Lie: http://www.standagainstsitlie.org/
Questions about the youth recreation campaign: adele.c2p@gmail.com
Questions about LGBTQ shelter project: Tommi at Housing Rights Committee

From the lost files of Portland hipster weeklies:

Underdogging: A Tale of Bittersweet Bicycle Revenge

wire less.

Today I'm thinking about cords and cordlessness.

birthday week.

tonight i'm thinking about loose grips. holding lightly. kid gloves with the world and its coming. camp as beyond orientation; as roaming, placeless, sincere appreciation for being within and alongside. queer not as orientation, or location but as a light-holding and regard of now-ness, memory, objects, bodies. thinking about how i was taught growing up the importance of a having a 'good' handshake, a firm handshake. to look in the eye. to grip tightly. locate. this symbol of erasing history so equals can meet. equals who know how to give a good handshake. if we took each other's hands loosely, what would we be leaving space for?

Pastry Jaunte: A Celebration of the Precious and the Perverse

Chrysaora fuscescens

Last week I went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I might lost myself for a bit while watching some male seahorses tether themselves to seaweed fronds and each other, nuzzling their very pregnant bellies together. But for the most part, I was able to keep my wits about me until I came upon the lit tank of Pacific Sea Nettles.

I love jellyfish. As I knelt inches from the glass, watching their pulsing and undulating forms move through my field of vision, I began to feel as though my heart was filling with a mysterious fluid and beginning a slow rise up through my throat. I began to drown from the inside out.

I knelt there for so long that one of my shoes broke. I had the vague sense at some point that it would be good idea for me to leave, but didn’t feel I had any command over the strange mammalian, land-dwelling body that I found surrounding me.

As I began to breathe myself back, I felt at once a deep sense of belonging to the earth and also a profound sense of being alien, ethereal. What were the odds that I would get such a chance—to inhabit this place—in this way—and alongside such creatures? I watched the jellyfish and understood that they were very much doing their job of performing the curious and delicate mystery of being alive on this planet. And this, in turn, made me want to do my respective job on the other side of the glass just as beautifully.

To be of the earth and to be human is an incidence so rare, so random, so fragile, and so precious that it warrants only one possible response from us: to do it well.

Closet Jock Steps Out

I feel in some strange respect that today was the day I made final peace with my own inner jock. If there is no other way to know for sure, I am going to openly write here about my deepest darkest secret-jock secret, which is my love of the indoor rock climbing gym.

Perhaps it’s become a little easier with age. When I first moved to the Bay Area, my current roommate and I occasionally fronted to friends we ran into on weekends that we had just woken up—like normal gays in their early twenties would have—rather than admitting that already by lunchtime we had woken to consume something made in a champion juicer and ridden bikes for several hours in the Oakland hills.

When my roommate and I began regularly wearing bike shorts, we could not longer pretend we were some bike punks who had decided to meander around a bit beyond our point to point business. Then we moved in together and developed a special “camping crate” that would be ready to go at 5pm on Fridays, and finally fully embraced the title of ‘weekend warriors,’ if only privately.

These days it’s hard to predict what lefty or post-punk queer or random hipster I might run into in a spinning class. My secret-jock life has been not-so-secret for a long time, partly because I do a poor job of concealing it, but also because the juice that makes for a secret expires as my peers begin to think more about self-care strategies in their own lives.

So today when this woman asked to interview me about my membership at the rock gym for her cultural anthropology class, I wonder why I found myself prefacing every response I gave her with some disclaimer about being totally liminal to the culture of the climbing gym. The fact was, I had woken up at 8am on a weekend to “beat the crowd” at the climbing gym. More importantly, this is far from extraordinary in my life. So why did I find myself explaining my own misgivings with my secret sporty side to a random woman who already was so excited about the rock climbing gym that she felt compelled to do some sort of bizarre research project on it?

The whole thing is so absurd, I can only see this strange interview as an opportunity to recognize and perhaps purge some of my own internalized jock-phobia. So to answer one of her questions and come out of the closet:

I own more than one pair of sport-specific footwear. I love indoor rock climbing. And I really love bicycling. They have done nothing but provide me with opportunities for enjoyment, growth, and presence and in return I have refused to acknowledge our bond in other important areas of my life. Worse, I think historically this had to do with a need to disidentify with things that are lesbionic (or otherwise unhip) and this is unacceptable.

I love climbing and bicycling not just for giving me the chance to move my body, but I love them because of what they teach me about my body in relation to the world. Both lend me a new perspective on dimension—on the surfaces of my habitat and the way my body is placed within them and can potentially interact with them.

Rock climbing and bicycling make me highly aware that the world has texture to it, and so fundamentally shift the way I experience what it means to move in the world (I imagine some people feel this way about their iphones). They teach me there is complexity at every scale of observation—that however I try to move through my days here, there is always enough to pay attention to--always things worth noticing and showing up for, fingers outstretched, heart open.

Next, I am going for dual-element sporting. I am going to windsurf. I am super excited and I'm not taking any shit for it.