4 Ingredients in My Identity

1

Sitting on Alexis' porch I am surrounded by the most copies of Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider that I have ever seen in one place. A group of Durham movement folks has come together for the first "Summer of Our Lorde" event to discuss the uses of anger and the experience of racism; to read an essay from a book that saved my life because it had changed someone else's and they had passed it on to me.

2

Sarah Vaughn's "When Sunny Gets Blue" playing in the dark of an apartment somewhere in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Raleigh, or Durham: When Sunny gets blue, his eyes get grey and cloudy, then the rain begins to fall. Pitter patter, pitter patter, love is gone so what can matter? No sweet lover man comes to call...Just one gendered pronoun tells me I am not alone and not the first...and pretty dreams rise up, where the other dreams fell through...

3

Belia, Alba, and Aleh all laugh because we've all seen But I'm A Cheerleader. We don't all know each other or live in the same place but we are all laughing together, in the same generation.

4

I sit on my kitchen floor while Kenya cuts open a cigar, carefully dumps out the tobacco, adds the herb, and rolls a blunt in a state of meditation. She tells me, in a voice that speaks past me like the wind on its way somewhere, what it takes to make a change in our own lives. Soon the children will come back from the playground and we will take the gingerbread out of the oven.

A Movie From My Childhood

So there I was wondering how to pass time on one of those unemployed days. I was too saturated with social theory to do any serious reading and I didn't have a good novel in which to get lost. And, since it was raining, I couldn't pass time by going anywhere. Even if I had wanted to go walking in the rain the fact that I was babysitting my neighbor's dog precluded any longterm absence from the house (I couldn't bear to see her sad eyes when I closed the door behind me).

Naturally, my mind went to thoughts about movies I could download on my brand spankin' new internet connection. But what to download? I found myself on the netflix website looking for inspiration. Inevitably I decided to browse through the gay/lesbian theme. I couldn't help myself. I knew it was probably a narrow selection of bad movies with the same theme. I had browsed that section when I had a netflix subscription. But I felt compelled. It was the same kind of inexorable pull as opening a refrigerator every 10 minutes looking for something to eat even though you know that nothing is in there that wasn't there the last time you looked. The hope, I suppose, is that increased hunger will make you see things differently.

But luckily, on this occaison I immediately saw something that caught my eye, a film entitled But I'm a Cheerleader. I went into a flashback. When I was a pre-teen I had seen this movie one odd sunday at my grandmother's house (my memory feels like a sunday, though I can't be sure). It was on TNT or some other movie channel that you only watch because nothing else is on. I remember the title screen and the opening music being totally unattractive. What, after all, could a movie about cheerleaders have in store for me?

As fate would have it my boredom won out over my aversion and I didn't change the channel. I soon discovered that the movie wasn't about cheerleaders as normally portrayed in high school coming of age movies. Oh, no! This was a comedy about a cheerleader whose parents and friends suspect that she's a lesbian and send her to a crazy rehab camp. The movie is chock full of hilarious scenes of "heterosexual simulation therapy" and gender reorientation exercises.

Seeing the title in the netflix browser brought back my memories of the movie and I wondered why I had never remembered it before. I saw it long before I had come out and way before I was able to think of my Queer identity positively. Watching the movie again (I watched it online since no one seemed to have it available to download on Acquisition), I realized that this movie offered some positive counter-narratives to the heteronormitive discourse. Of course from my Queer radical stance today I would critique it as a largely middle-class, white because it ignores the roles of race and class in gender and sexual identity. But back when I first saw it it was probably the first time I had ever seen a satirical commentary on heteronormitivity from a lesbian perspective. I wondered to myself how in the world it had made its way on to TNT, which usually shows action flicks and old westerns and I wondered if any other Queer youth had seen and been influenced by this movie.

The movie does have funny parts. It's pretty corny and there's little depth to the characters but it's not meant to be a profound drama. It doesn't make it onto my list of favorites, but I'm glad I watched it again. This time around my favorite part was probably realizing that the cute Filipino gay wrestler is the same guy who plays Rufio in the movie Hook. Back in the early 90's, when I first saw Hook (a wonderful version of Peter Pan with Robin Williams), I had such a crush on Rufio. Back then, of course, I didn't know that this feeling was called "homosexual," but I did know that my interest in Never Never Land was less about the idea of never growing up and more about Rufio and a place where boys lived with other boys and weren't expected to fall in love with girls.

Anyway, the guy who plays Rufio in Hook (Dante Basco) plays a gay athlete in But I'm A Cheerleader. How rewarding to see my childhood movie crush making out with another boy! That alone was well worth the watch. If you want to see the movie yourself you can check it out here. I don't promise you'll like it, but for me it was a warm memory that I almost forgot.

PS: for all you Avatar fans, Dante Basco is also the voice of Prince Zuko.

Poems for the Erotically at Risk

Blogs are terrible places to write poetry. The formatting is so SHITTY. Anyhow, I am determined to share these poems and get folks' feedback. I'm really trying to workshop them so please sit with them for awhile before getting back to me....or tell me what your first responses are and then sit with them again to get another taste. The subject matter is kinda heavy which makes analysis hard sometimes. But I trust you fabulous folks can find a way to engage the poems as both my own expressions and as tools needing refinement. Here's the link to the document with the poems.