Jun 11, 2011
Apr 9, 2011
taking care of business in the gay bay, staying one step ahead of the yelp-pocalypse.
a lot is up for me right now. this city and the rest of it.
one. my girlfriend, who is a high school teacher is dealing with some intense collisions between homophobia and racism staged through a shit-show of multiculturalized admin fumbles that assume a liberal tolerance of homo life but not without re-amassing racist assumptions, compounded through a general abdication of administrative responsibility that relocates the onus of dealing with bullshit onto basically, the queer dealing with homophobia. without being able to say too much about this, it's just really infuriating to watch white admin treat homophobia among staff of color as anachronistic, and the views and actions of people of color as external to the liberal, whitened, multiculturalism of an institution and its progress rather than dealing in a way remotely becoming of their salaries. the good news? my gf has serious skills and dedication and worked with all involved to reconcile this in a way that is accountable to her students, herself, and the people she works with, and manages to locate overcoming homophobia somewhere on the terrain of shared commitments to justice rather than alienating, liberal progress narratives.
two. i’ve been spending some time sorting through effects and responses with a friend who was trans-bashed in the mission last week. while on the one, the ability of this friend to politicize and direct responses, locate healing and transformation in a world while at the same time not forgetting herself and her own needs is teaching me a lot by example. at the same time, i am feeling aware of the eagerness of a gay-stablishment to make an example of the city’s competent application of anti-hate law enforcement strategies that can locate all problems of queer safety with a few, easily pathologized and criminalized bad characters without lending acknowledgement of the (compounding) issues that put queers--no less trans women--at risk, starting with the same increasing criminalization and policing. hello, sit/lie? yet, i’m realizing that no great ideas about community-determined responses as alternatives to state responses to violence seem to capture the fact that sometimes the state just responds without request, and with serious constraining effects on our ability to determine our own responses. btw, for info about supporting this friend, check here.
three. i’ve been looking for apartments. in the mission district, where i’ve lived for the last five years. my own race and class privilege, as well as having been pretty stable in an apartment with good neighbor and landlord relations for several years, have insulated me from the rental-market side of the ongoing epic of san francisco becoming a sanctuary city for the rich. the long and short of it is: we've been rejected for lots of apartments and haven't moved. maybe this isn’t so strange, but as someone who has never offered to lay down so much for rent, i really had no idea how cut-throat this process was, or that when one actually agrees to pay what they ask and qualifies, that you can still wind up without an apartment again and again.
this is generally how the terrifying process has gone so far: mercury willing, receive craigslist and padmapper alerts through a certain mobile apple device all day. read lots of ads that note their preferred proximity to google shuttles and new restaurants. call all decently affordable options immediately. show up at odd times for open houses lasting 15 minutes alongside a dozen other people and turn in exhaustive printed portfolios that include everything but a copy of our birth certificates. cringe as all white, all straight (no exaggeration) couples and dot-com workers show off offer letters from pay pal, apple, google, and zynga, tell their love-at-first sight stories from undergrad days at elite colleges, and talk endlessly about their appreciation for the sf 'cultural scene' to prospective landlords. get rejected again and again and feel ambivalent slash awful over compounding circumstances of who is already not among these white, professional-class, childless couples (we are among these) and being the only queer couple slash being women who work in the public sector and don’t make dot-com male-earner wages and want to live in a neighborhood where we work with young people slash that queer women have lived in for some thirty to forty years but realizing instead we are getting rejected for apartments that have no heat.
it is producing some intense ambivalence about being here for me. i feel super connected to this city, politically invested, involved in the lives of young people i work with, and able to think experimental queer adulthoods (i have earthquake plans that include people a gay mini-generation younger). i want to live here (why i don’t move back to oakland is a whole separate reflection). on the other, the apartment hunting and my recent practice of coffee shop studying alongside start-up workers have left me ultra-aware of how this city is increasingly (okay, its been going on for a minute) designed for this set of people that move through the world as though they were constructing one endless, giant, offensive yelp review. (munira sent me a really good example of this today re: the terrifying and amazing Lemi Ponifasio dance performance we saw on thursday). there’s a lot to love, but i can’t help but sometimes look around, survey the damage, and think, “shit is hitting the fan, and i’m going to be stuck alongside people whose worldly relations function like a yelp review? am i sure this is this a good idea?”
i suppose part of what commitment looks like is intervening on the same evaluative and consumptive impulses by sticking around for what needs to be done. which is why i’m feeling inspired these days by long time queer activists like tommi mecca, who after so many years of seeing the remaking/dismantling of a queer politic in this city are still out there, working for housing justice, mobilizing folks, and building meaningful connections with young people.
which brings me to four. the twitter deal. a bunch of folks have already spoken well to this being a queer issue as it literally declares a redevelopment zone for new businesses to settle tax-free in the tenderloin, home to so many residential hotels--housing, among other people, lots of queer seniors and poor trans people. worse, this deal was cut by some of among the city’s most progressive supervisors, scared into a twitter tax break by the company’s threat to pull out of the city on account of not being able to justify the expense of payroll taxes. zynga also threatened to do the same. this is a tax break that will cost the city tens of millions of dollars. like, neoliberalism is so totally pervasive that even some of the most progressive in city government can’t imagine anything better in this moment than massive trickle down schemes that rob the city and displace residents of the last affordable neighborhood with even more dot-com employees guided by mobile devices towards the holy grail of good cocktails.
and, long as i've been sitting on this post, five, six, seven, eight: nursing hip bruises from a cop confrontation following an attempted banner drop in support of the far-too-long-closed queer youth space at the eureka valley rec center at the castro "townhall," which was actually more like watching 15 (all male) talking heads explain their revenue shortages for 2 hours....high stakes kinda epic confrontation with a queer basher at a crowded party...the possible closure of longtime leatherbar, the eagle, in exchange for some condos...and some hardship over the (possible) virtual-to-actual transitions of hypothetical babies that helped land april an eighth plague of (internalized, in this case) homophobia.
finally, i’m working on a group project at school that is really challenging me to carve out space to talk about the political consequences and possibilities of the lives we live without dismissing the political realities and histories that form those lives in the first place. realizing that even though we may be able to trace the intersections in the lines of power that criss cross, perpendicularize, and paralell in their pummeling of varied and related ‘us’es' that it does not mean we always know what to say to each other about this when we try.
one. my girlfriend, who is a high school teacher is dealing with some intense collisions between homophobia and racism staged through a shit-show of multiculturalized admin fumbles that assume a liberal tolerance of homo life but not without re-amassing racist assumptions, compounded through a general abdication of administrative responsibility that relocates the onus of dealing with bullshit onto basically, the queer dealing with homophobia. without being able to say too much about this, it's just really infuriating to watch white admin treat homophobia among staff of color as anachronistic, and the views and actions of people of color as external to the liberal, whitened, multiculturalism of an institution and its progress rather than dealing in a way remotely becoming of their salaries. the good news? my gf has serious skills and dedication and worked with all involved to reconcile this in a way that is accountable to her students, herself, and the people she works with, and manages to locate overcoming homophobia somewhere on the terrain of shared commitments to justice rather than alienating, liberal progress narratives.
two. i’ve been spending some time sorting through effects and responses with a friend who was trans-bashed in the mission last week. while on the one, the ability of this friend to politicize and direct responses, locate healing and transformation in a world while at the same time not forgetting herself and her own needs is teaching me a lot by example. at the same time, i am feeling aware of the eagerness of a gay-stablishment to make an example of the city’s competent application of anti-hate law enforcement strategies that can locate all problems of queer safety with a few, easily pathologized and criminalized bad characters without lending acknowledgement of the (compounding) issues that put queers--no less trans women--at risk, starting with the same increasing criminalization and policing. hello, sit/lie? yet, i’m realizing that no great ideas about community-determined responses as alternatives to state responses to violence seem to capture the fact that sometimes the state just responds without request, and with serious constraining effects on our ability to determine our own responses. btw, for info about supporting this friend, check here.
three. i’ve been looking for apartments. in the mission district, where i’ve lived for the last five years. my own race and class privilege, as well as having been pretty stable in an apartment with good neighbor and landlord relations for several years, have insulated me from the rental-market side of the ongoing epic of san francisco becoming a sanctuary city for the rich. the long and short of it is: we've been rejected for lots of apartments and haven't moved. maybe this isn’t so strange, but as someone who has never offered to lay down so much for rent, i really had no idea how cut-throat this process was, or that when one actually agrees to pay what they ask and qualifies, that you can still wind up without an apartment again and again.
this is generally how the terrifying process has gone so far: mercury willing, receive craigslist and padmapper alerts through a certain mobile apple device all day. read lots of ads that note their preferred proximity to google shuttles and new restaurants. call all decently affordable options immediately. show up at odd times for open houses lasting 15 minutes alongside a dozen other people and turn in exhaustive printed portfolios that include everything but a copy of our birth certificates. cringe as all white, all straight (no exaggeration) couples and dot-com workers show off offer letters from pay pal, apple, google, and zynga, tell their love-at-first sight stories from undergrad days at elite colleges, and talk endlessly about their appreciation for the sf 'cultural scene' to prospective landlords. get rejected again and again and feel ambivalent slash awful over compounding circumstances of who is already not among these white, professional-class, childless couples (we are among these) and being the only queer couple slash being women who work in the public sector and don’t make dot-com male-earner wages and want to live in a neighborhood where we work with young people slash that queer women have lived in for some thirty to forty years but realizing instead we are getting rejected for apartments that have no heat.
it is producing some intense ambivalence about being here for me. i feel super connected to this city, politically invested, involved in the lives of young people i work with, and able to think experimental queer adulthoods (i have earthquake plans that include people a gay mini-generation younger). i want to live here (why i don’t move back to oakland is a whole separate reflection). on the other, the apartment hunting and my recent practice of coffee shop studying alongside start-up workers have left me ultra-aware of how this city is increasingly (okay, its been going on for a minute) designed for this set of people that move through the world as though they were constructing one endless, giant, offensive yelp review. (munira sent me a really good example of this today re: the terrifying and amazing Lemi Ponifasio dance performance we saw on thursday). there’s a lot to love, but i can’t help but sometimes look around, survey the damage, and think, “shit is hitting the fan, and i’m going to be stuck alongside people whose worldly relations function like a yelp review? am i sure this is this a good idea?”
i suppose part of what commitment looks like is intervening on the same evaluative and consumptive impulses by sticking around for what needs to be done. which is why i’m feeling inspired these days by long time queer activists like tommi mecca, who after so many years of seeing the remaking/dismantling of a queer politic in this city are still out there, working for housing justice, mobilizing folks, and building meaningful connections with young people.
which brings me to four. the twitter deal. a bunch of folks have already spoken well to this being a queer issue as it literally declares a redevelopment zone for new businesses to settle tax-free in the tenderloin, home to so many residential hotels--housing, among other people, lots of queer seniors and poor trans people. worse, this deal was cut by some of among the city’s most progressive supervisors, scared into a twitter tax break by the company’s threat to pull out of the city on account of not being able to justify the expense of payroll taxes. zynga also threatened to do the same. this is a tax break that will cost the city tens of millions of dollars. like, neoliberalism is so totally pervasive that even some of the most progressive in city government can’t imagine anything better in this moment than massive trickle down schemes that rob the city and displace residents of the last affordable neighborhood with even more dot-com employees guided by mobile devices towards the holy grail of good cocktails.
and, long as i've been sitting on this post, five, six, seven, eight: nursing hip bruises from a cop confrontation following an attempted banner drop in support of the far-too-long-closed queer youth space at the eureka valley rec center at the castro "townhall," which was actually more like watching 15 (all male) talking heads explain their revenue shortages for 2 hours....high stakes kinda epic confrontation with a queer basher at a crowded party...the possible closure of longtime leatherbar, the eagle, in exchange for some condos...and some hardship over the (possible) virtual-to-actual transitions of hypothetical babies that helped land april an eighth plague of (internalized, in this case) homophobia.
finally, i’m working on a group project at school that is really challenging me to carve out space to talk about the political consequences and possibilities of the lives we live without dismissing the political realities and histories that form those lives in the first place. realizing that even though we may be able to trace the intersections in the lines of power that criss cross, perpendicularize, and paralell in their pummeling of varied and related ‘us’es' that it does not mean we always know what to say to each other about this when we try.
Mar 15, 2011
the olympic rings of the mind
jung's olympic rings organize all knowable information and humanly achievable athletic feats into mysterious cosmic yoni matrix vessica piscuses that can be used as the basis for forming perfect pentograms that will keep evil away forever, ok?
Oct 25, 2010
Oct 6, 2010
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
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
Aug 11, 2010
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