The Intellectual Homosexual

A couple nights ago I attended a book reading at In Other Words, an estuary of estrogen, literature and liberation on North Killingsworth Street (which by the way, has gotten a little scarier since I left for the summer). My friend Kathleen Bryson, who I interviewed for a piece in Just Out last year, was one of the three women reading, as her second novel Girl On a Stick has at last been published. The others were Ariel Gore, who read from her piece in an anthology called Fucking Daphne (I don’t know who Daphne is, but I gather she’s very fuckable), and Nairne Holtz, who read part of her novel The Skin Beneath, about the mysterious death of a woman’s sister. All three were good and each had a different style.

I’d have to say Ariel Gore (pictured above, with her toddler) was the funniest, with lines that drew several outbursts of laughter from the audience. (Example: “You’ve got to like a girl who goes out at 2 a.m. for cigarettes. Even Mark Twain could wait until dawn for a cigarette.” Or: “I’m so glad I got an abortion. Birth is so…1970.” This while Gore’s own bright-eyed, exuberant two-year-old son toddled about near the stage throughout the reading.) Now, it was a superb serendipity that Ariel happened to be reading, because my only contact with her before had been through email, and some months ago she accepted a nonfiction piece I wrote, “Lament For the Disappearing Girl,” for a forthcoming anthology, Portland Queer, of which she is the editor. This will be my first genuine publication as an author (not counting journalism or the zines and self-publishing I’ve done already) and will place me alongside established hotshots like Marc Acito and Tom Spanbauer, so you can’t blame me for being excited! I got a chance to ask Ariel when the book would be coming out and she estimated May or June of next year. By which time I will probably be in Maui or San Francisco, so maybe I’ll have to make a special trip up to Portland to celebrate publication.

“Lament For the Disappearing Girl” is probably the most heartfelt, sincere and somber piece of writing I’ve ever done. It deals with a girl I went to junior high and high school with who died in an apartment fire in Beaverton in 1996, whose name was Krystal Capps. She basically introduced me to the identity I’ve had ever since I knew her, and I never got to really speak with her before she died. By the time I was finally ready and brave enough, she was gone. I wasn’t able to attend her funeral or read a eulogy, so it means a lot to me that this piece is finally going to see the light of day, even 12 years after the fact.

That’s all I’ll say about that for now.

After the reading I joined Kathleen and a number of others for a post-reading glass of bubbly at the house she shares with her longtime partner. Kathleen (sorry this picture is so bad, my camera phone really doesn’t do well unless the lighting is really strong) gave me a copy of her first novel Mush, which I have yet to read, describing it as “grim and dreamlike,” and also loaned me her well-handled copy of a collection of short stories by Angela Carter, whom she describes as one of her favorite authors. I’ve only read the introduction by Salman Rushdie so far, but just based on that and Kathleen’s recommendation, I think I may be embarking on a new literary love affair.

This morning I spent some time in the Portland chat room on Gay.com. Everyone uses pseudonyms on there, but I use my real name - I have nothing to hide. What, am I afraid people are going to find out I’m gay and like meeting other gay guys? I’m not a fucking politician, dig up all the “dirt” on me you want. Of course, considering the fact that I have such a rock star name (which I paid good money for), people probably think it is a pseudonym. Anyway, what I was going to say is that I was pleasantly surprised to find an intelligent, political discussion taking place in the chat room. The last few times I’ve visited Gay.com chat it’s been nothing but the crudest blatant sex talk, as if gay people can’t talk or think about anything except hooking up for a quick fling with an anonymous and marginally attractive stranger. Today people were discussing the Palin/Biden debate, among other things. I tried to catch it at the Baghdad Theater the other night, where it was screening for free, but by the time I arrived at 5:45 p.m. the theater was already full. Disappointing, but then again, it’s great living in a city where so many people are politically aware and interested enough to go watch the vice-presidential debate in a public theater. From what I hear, those expecting lots of entertainment value from Sarah Palin (”Bush in a Skirt”) were disappointed, as she was prepared and obviously reading from notes, and avoided the more hilarious pitfalls of her much-ridiculed interview with Katie Couric. I hear that Joe Biden stated that he did not support gay marriage, which earned him some heat from the gay community.

Now, here’s what I have to say about that. (I know you’re probably sick to death of the “gay marriage” issue by this point, so I’ll try to keep this to one paragraph.) Let the breeders and fundies have the word “marriage.” They created that institution, after all. I’m not going to argue semantics. If I can have a partnership with most of the same rights and privileges as marriage but wrapped in the label “civil union,” that’s fine! Let “marriage” be the word for heterosexual unions whose purpose is breeding and raising children. We need to compromise a little, too. That’s the price we pay for the vast amount of ground we’ve gained over the last few decades.

Of course, in that case, lots of straight people will have to get “civil unions” rather than “marriages,” too.

And that also leaves out the question of gay couples who raise children. Let’s just call those “complicated civil unions.”

I mentioned religious fundamentalists above. More about them to come with my next post. I’m going to catch a matinee screening of Bill Mahr’s new documentary Religulous tomorrow! Looking forward to that. I picked up The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins from the library today. In my seemingly perpetual conflict between spirituality and atheism, the atheism is definitely on top right now.

Or is it possible atheism and what I consider “spirituality” are not mutually exclusive?

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