Invert(e)

Hit with a 2x4

No, I wasn't gay-bashed - though that might have been preferable.

I was laid off yesterday.

Yeah, I know - along with 100,000 other people. But I don't have to worry about their households. It's one thing to get fired and know it's because you've done a lousy job, but I was great at my job. Both the managing editor and the editor-in-chief love my work - and they still want me to have a voice in the paper, doing freelancing and blogging for them. I'll be paid freelancer's wages, but I won't have the security of a steady job. And even though I know my situation's not unique, that's not a comfort.

I just applied for unemployment yesterday in the hopes I'll be able to get by with that and the freelancing money until they hire me back. The editor-in-chief swears this is only temporary and that he's going to hire me back when the page count goes back up, but he can't tell me when that will be. No one can. Our page count has gone from 60 to 48 to 30 in less than six months, and who knows if that's bottomed out or not? The Rocky Mountain News is shutting its doors, and even Westword (our Village Voice) says their arts section is only going to be every other issue for the forseeable future.

QueerType February Publishing Notes

The buzz: Next month McFarland & Company will publish Mrs. Ziegfeld: The Public and Private Lives of Billie Burke by Grant Hayter-Menzies, which will include material on the actress’s alleged relationship with director Dorothy Arzner. ** In April, Alyson will publish The Mariposa Club by Rigoberto Gonzalez, about four guys in their last year of high school. ** Cleis will publish James Lear’s The Low Road in September. ** This spring, Lethe Press will reprint So Fey: Queer Fairy Fiction, an anthology edited by Steve Berman. St. Martin’s will publish Kevin Sessums’s I Left It On The Mountain, which picks up where his memoir Mississippi Sissy left off, exploring the author’s life once he moved to New York City; from his time at Vanity Fair to hiking up Mount Kilimanjaro. ** Beacon Press will publish David Plante’s The Pure Lover, a memoir of love and grief, tracing the life of Plante’s longtime partner Nikos and his death of brain cancer, this fall.** Performance poet Megan Volpert has published her second book of poetry, the desense of nonfense. ** MLR Press has just published a new novel by Storm Grant, Gym Dandy. ** New Press will publish Sarah Schulman’s The Twist: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, exploring the family as the place where straight and gay people first learn homophobic behavior, in 2010.

THERE IS A GOD

And I just went to church.

Labelle took me.

It’s only January, but I may have already attended the concert of the year. It was unbelievable. I saw stars, doing things I’ve never seen anyone do before in any show. My jaw dropped to the floor and stayed there for two hours. It was like seeing David Bowie on keyboards and Iggy Pop rushing out from the wings to scream ‘Raw Power.’ It was like hearing Grace Jones’ voice as this big guy in a gorilla suit leapt around on giant movable stairs, and then seeing him pull the gorilla headmask off and it was Grace Jones her own damn self. This was every bit as good as seeing the return of The New York Dolls, thirty two years after they broke up and started dying off.

Back To Now.

No Homecoming

I left my mother in a state of bliss, and I have learned not to get angry for what she wasn’t able to give –she gave much for someone born from nothing – for what she is not able to give now, not a glimpse of feelings, or what she will never give. I left her a girl without preoccupation, a delicate pet stashed in a nursing home in Santiago. I left the vessel being, the mother virgin, the low whore, and all those crazy cultural notions Latinos have of women. I left the woman who shaped my manhood and my queerness and whom I have come to inhabit in a bizarre little manner –why fight fate? She passed the torch that spits plumes of fire, the fire that giggles while consumes the flesh and the papers and the radiant pavements of Santiago, she gave me a slight penchant for the oddity.  I sit at airports, always going because stopping is death, she told me that, airports like enchanted castles getting more and more sumptuous as I move north, veritable cities, malls, people squat in them like friendly ghosts peering into flat screens for departures, purchase fake souvenirs, make many cell calls to the others outside telling them they are making progress, they are living fruitful lives. Airports and hospitals are anterooms for nothing, limbo.

What I Learned from Updike

John Updike died yesterday at the age of 76. He was massively prolific writer, with 50 books and countless articles to his credit. Part of my grief is knowing that he was the kind of writer who could have kept going, well into his eighties and beyond. His body gave out—lung cancer—but his mind only grew sharper with time.

The first novel of his that I read was The Centaur. I was a college freshman at the time, and had always wanted to be a writer. For me, Updike was the very model of the author who could not only write, but write beautifully. To write like that, to turn out such lovely, lyrical sentences—that became my life’s ambition. (Note to self: in your next lifetime, please choose an easier goal.)

 

Updike was fortunate to begin his career in the 1950s, when mainstream publishers still cherished good writing. Today, these publishers couldn’t care less about writing; all they’re interested in is presold commodities—books by or about celebrities. Talented fiction writers are no longer nurtured by these publishers, and as a result they’re harder to find.

 

Franz Wright ended a recent poem in The New Yorker  with these lines: “Life has taught me/to understand books.” I love Updike because he taught me to understand writing.

 

 

 

HORE FOR EXTRA ACTION!!

Sitting on the platform at the BART station of 19th and Broadway, my ass is still astonished and tingling from the slightly traumatic joy of being felt up by a girl. Yep, her hand rubbed all over my butt for at least five minutes. Shit, she tried to give me a reach-around through my legs, but she only got as far as grazing my balls for two seconds.

Not for lack of trying, though.

Her other hand got busy with a guy I assumed to be her boyfriend, but who knows? She looked about eighteen to me, which is why I call her a girl, but the salient point remains how turned on she was.

We ALL were.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

(Much thanks to my friend Veronica.)

Old Suede Gloves: Asphyxiation Games in Buenos Aires

  The whisper of this hot evening smothers my senses. I like asphyxiation games, if you know what I mean, and Buenos Aires feels like a pair of old suede gloves on my mouth, underneath my bewildered eyes. The hand fits, slowly, and I feel the material a bit worn off, but I’m not scared, it’s an object of adoration.  It is mere coincidence that I had walked down to Corrientes Ave, glorious and grimy tall buildings, like old 42^nd street in NY when I saw it the firs time in the mid eighties but more film noir than that. I chose a show with an old local star that is very symbolic to gay men, Nacha Guevara, playing Eva Perón – what else? – in the homonymously titled show Eva. It was an unfortunate artistic choice but a perfectly emblematic moment. After all, I came to deal with age and aging and the haemorrhaging of memory (the whole ordeal of my mother and Alzheimer’s if you have read the previous entries to this trail of tragicomic tears).

From Wanna-be Hero to Good Ol' Hore in Twelve Easy Paragraphs

I don’t make resolutions, but I do have intentions for 2009. Intention number one is to meditate my way back into the experience of samadhi, which of course is not an experience and no one ever leaves samadhi, but you get the idea. Intention number two is to run track at the YMCA enough to get this body into the best shape it’s ever been in, and to hell with the aging process. Mind and body: together, strong, and on track. Ahhhh.

Desires for 2009: well, I’d like to find a way to make a real difference in the world. And get paid for it. What I’d love to do is write speeches for the Sierrra Club and other green organizations, speeches that would inspire people and energize people, and be shocking and funny since that is what works. You really only have to go to one demonstration/rally to understand instantly that there are a lot of people making speeches who need a lot of help.

The other thing I’d like to do is sit with people who are dying. I’m not talking about being a nurse or a caretaker (too squeamish for that stuff, to be honest), I mean sit in loving contemplation with a very quiet mind in the presence of someone in his or her last few hours in this or that body. No TV, no conversation about the Oscar nominations or the latest heat wave, no turning away. It’s a holy moment . . . and family members do not always know how to hold this moment. To put it mildly.

"I Do!" is out and on Amazon

It's our labor of love, about love and for love! "I Do! An Anthology in Support of Marriage Equality" is out from MLR Press.

I think of it as our labor of love because none of us are getting paid for the stories or for our intense efforts in getting the book published, publicized and in front of the public. The effort was spearheaded by Alex Beecroft who continued with the project in spite of (or in tribute to) the death of her mother, and she was ably supported by so many others who also appear in this anthology.

Me? Oh, I'm in here as well with a labor of love of my own - a story called "Templeton's in Love," which I've already written about on this blog. The whole anthology is about love, in fact, with offerings from such terrific authors as Fiona Glass ("Salad Days": A fennel bulb causes havoc between two lovers in this 'kitchen-sink' style romp.), Storm Grant ("Lust in Translation": A dedicated cop rescues a stoned-out hooker leading to sex, drugs, and a blinding reaction. It's a hard road from false arrest to true love.) and  Erastes ("The Snow Queen": Everything wonderful happens when it snows. Josh loves the winter. He wishes his heart were ice after Sam died, but when he meets Sean he feels it threatened by an unexpected warmth.)

Hore on the Clock

I did have the most incredible weekend, but . . . God, that was already forty eight hours ago! If I tried to write about it now, the words would be Dead On Arrival. There would be no energy, no sense of urgency, no rush to share, as if I were an eight year old again dying to show this amazing thing—whatever it was—to my dad or a friend or whomever might be within range. The moment has passed. Sorry.

Chalk it up to another lesson learned: if I don’t blog about an event within twenty four hours, it’s probably too late.

Besides, we have a new President, and everything is going to be different now. Please, dear God, let everything be different. Looks like this administration’s first order of business is to get the timetable ready for pulling the troops out of Iraq. That’s a hell of a good start. President Obama:  wasn’t it just a few months ago that people were saying, well, Americans could possibly be ready to vote for a black man as President, but not one with a name like Barack Obama? I think the future has officially arrived.

Not coincidentally, in most movies and books and concept albums about the future, it usually occurs after Armageddon. That’s what the Bush administration delivered. There is not an enemy in the world that could have brought America as low as Bush managed to bring us. What outside force could have trashed our economy so thoroughly, or nibbled away at our Constitution so sneakily, or demoralized the citizenry so utterly with justifications for torture, with deficits on top of deficits, with bailouts after bailouts, and letting the poor people of a beloved city drown and starve and lose everything and not do anything about it . . .

But that was all yesterday. So yesterday.

Today, we’re in the shit, but the First Lady looked great, and it does feel like a brand new day. We’re going to have to do a million things right to make up for all the wrongs, but today, I am not ashamed to be an American. I’ll try to be better too; I will try to stay more current. I promise to be as filthy and funny as possible in this new era. I promise to be as subtle as possible with the spiritual stuff. I promise to break my own rules with all the panache I can muster.

Historia, Obama and Gas

 

I was having my second serving of porotos granados with pebre (Chilean version of salsa) when Obama was becoming president. I will be gassy later. A historical day, for sure. I went to dispose of my mother’s earthly belongings in the little house in Pasaje Rio Limari, Villa Bahia Catalina. Earthly belongings as they are called although she is not dead, she will not be back here – is there such a  thing as celestial belongings?  My mom's neighbour for fourteen years, Sra. Patricia, who was her caregiver for the last two years, cooked almuerzo for my friend Jorge and I. It was lovely, beans and a sort of cornmeal, tomato and onion ensalada chilena. It was a heavy-hearted task because having one’s own house is the third world dream, and we had it, it might be the only thing I ever own, and now it was time to undo it all. When we arrived there, her two little dogs, Luna and Lulu, had been euthanized a few minutes earlier. I was spared that pet-masacre poblacional, although I firmly believe in euthanasia, for all.

Smokin' Hore

I’m back.

Pretty much.

I’ve been playing with fire—AGAIN?!—this life almost went up in smoke. It still might.  #%&*# addiction.  People are always saying to me, weed? There’s nothing wrong with a little herb. It’s not even a drug. It’s natural. Harmless. Alcohol is way worse. Pot ought to be legal, and in San Francisco, it practically is.

I don’t disagree. It’s just irrelevent. There’s nothing wrong with running the vacuum cleaner either, but if you’re doing it morning, noon, and night . . . and when you’re not actually doing it, you’re thinking about doing it . . .  and all other activities sort of fade into the background . . . well, that sure as hell seems to fit the definition of addiction to me.  And speaking of running the vacuum cleaner, I haven’t cleaned my apartment in so long, it’s being taken over by dust bunnies, stacks of paper, and piles of chaos. It’s discouraging, and overwhelming, and guess what?  It just makes me wanna get stoned. Damn it.