Reteaching Gender and Sexuality, Computer Sickness and Why I Haven't Been Blogging!

I haven't been blogging much this month: I noticed that in any given month, I end up having roughly 12 posts. In November, there have been 7 posts so far, which is quite amazing. And yet, I somehow feel removed from the blog, and dear blog, I miss you.

So to catch up on why I haven't been blogging much:

-- It's thesis-crunch time. My final draft needs to be sent to my external examiner on the very day that school re-opens in January (failing which I don't graduate unless I can pay 3000 bucks to the university in fees, which I won't be able to afford since I already owe them the same amount and that'll lead me to being kicked out without graduating, and being kicked out of the country too.) So, the heavy writing and editing has been on, and it's been good (though I wish I could still "buy" more time, quite literally!)

-- When I woke up this morning, I felt sick: sick of my room and above all sick of my computer. Just the thought of the screen in which I stare for so many hours, just the sound of the keyboard as I type makes me sick... Never thought my relationship with hardware would reach that point. I hereby coin: computer sickness!

-- My Gmail account got hacked last night and spam mail was sent to all my contacts. These include personal contacts (which is fine), other personal contacts (such as old lovers and/or flings that ended up being bad sex) that I don't want to be in touch with, not even if it means spamming them... And professional contacts such as the University President, the Dean of Graduate Studies, supervisors, professors, colleagues, old colleagues and potential future PhD supervisors. I managed to trace the I.P. back to China (who ever thought I had such geek-power?!) but there's nothing much that I could do about it beyond that. I changed all my security settings for all my accounts, and I can only hope that it doesn't happen again.

-- When I haven't had a life that's directly connected with technology, I have been dancing a bit, doing some theatre too, and discussing issues of transphobia, homophobia and racism in Peterborough. Me is not happy with the way things are going these days and I'm getting worried for my security and for quite a few of my friends' security. [We're also thinking up a plan of action for January.]

-- I have also been thinking about myself as cisgendered.  Must have been that documentary we watched for Trans Day of Remembrance: it is called Southern Comfort (link here) and it is about Robert Eads, a female-to-male transsexual man who is dying of ovarian cancer. As he puts it himself in the film [and I paraphrase here]: "It's ironical how the only female part that is remaining in his body is in-fact what is killing him." I don't know what to say about being cisgendered, or able-bodied for that matter, other than... I do acknowledge my privileges. Might be a faggot, might be a bit black and a bit brown, might not be from a wealthy family, might be from an island lost in the middle of nowhere, might be the first of the family to have gone to university... But damn! In the midst of all that, I've had things easy: I'm fully able-bodied and cisgendered too.

-- Now, as always when there is a decrease in blogging flux, I try to make it up to you my sharing something super-awesome. Here is my something super-awesome! This beats all "It Gets Better" videos by a clear mile. And I think it's in line with what happens with Kurt in yesterday's episode of Glee (for the Gleeks out there): It's not about telling those kids that it's gonna get better [*] but it's about making sure it does get better right here, right now; it's about reteaching gender and sexuality, right here, right now...

[*] On the note of "It Gets Better" I would also like to share this fantastic article by Jasbir Puar that pretty much echoes my thoughts on it (and particularly on Dan Savage's video that did make me feel depressed.)

Luka and the Fire of Life

There are just very few things that I obsess about and even fewer things that I follow blindly. One of these things may just be Salman Rushdie.

His latest Luka and the Fire of Life was launched just a few hours ago, and it's with great thrill that my pre-ordered copy came in the mail just now, on the day of its release. I normally don't obsess about such things, but Rushdie does things to me, to my imagination, to my play of words, to my aesthetic sense, to my literary sensibilities... While I think his novel, Shame (1983) is one of the best literary narratives that I ever read (if not the best), the first novel of his that I read was Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) which he wrote for his son Zafar, to whom he dedicated it. Luka and the Fire of Life, he wrote for the twelfth birthday of his other son, Milan, to whom he dedicates it.

Quite interestingly, Luka and the Fire of Life picks up from Haroun and the Sea of Short Stories and it narrates the story of Haroun's little brother, Luka, who needs to go and steal the ever-burning Fire of Life in order to save his father, the story-teller.

There is something about words, and there is something about them taking a literary form that in turn becomes a gift of love. Oh Rushdie... *sigh!*

What Online Dating Does [part I]

Arguably, I do end up writing a lot about technology and desire: intimacies fascinate me, be they intellectual, sexual, emotional, physical, distanced; I have a huge degree of lust for the human body and as much for a human mind; and post-modernity has it that we live in a techonocratic world that now structures and restructures our human interactions, the language we use, the ways we carry our body and the way we think, all through (amongst others) this fascinating phenomenon now called "online social networking." This post may not be "serious" (yet) but it remains serious to the core: why the hell doesn't online dating do the work for me?

Part I.

[I should preface this by saying that I have two online dating accounts on two extremely meaty gay websites (gay and meaty website: is that a tautology?!) In the course of the past few years, I did meet 2-3 guys off these websites who are now very dear friends and/or lovers to me. So I don't discard it as a meeting point at all. Whether this meeting place is as good as any bars, parks, libraries, streets, clubs is debatable and I shall leave this aside for now.]

So, here's why online dating doesn't do it:

1- "Hi. Wassup?"

There was a time when I used to reply by saying "what's down there is up!" but I don't even bother now... Wassup? Well either you work your intellect and come up with a better ice-breaker or you tilt your head up and tell me what you see (most probably, the ceiling anyway.)

2- "Wassup, dude?"

Now, who the hell are you to eff-ing "dude" me?! Big mistake: people may "bitch" me, but nobody "dudes" me!

3- "Only white men."

I'm divided on this one. On the one hand, I am tempted to think that it's okay to state one's preferences, just like many men like to stipulate "only tops" or "only bottoms" but while we're at it, why not specify everything: "only nipple play," "only non-stinking feet," "only non-smokers," "only if you are not ticklish," "only 5ft7 to 5ft8," "only if you have a hairy chest," "only if you trim your pubic hair," "only if..." and "only if..."

So, on the one hand, I don't mind the clear discrimination that excludes a section of the online-daters (we all have preferences, right?) but I do wonder: where do we draw the line? And is it okay to say "only white"? I'm personally not sure, it makes me uncomfortable, but maybe that's because I'm black. [In the midst of all that, I also wonder: what happens to being surprised? Read here.]

4- "No fatties."

This, I cannot take! This is plain offensive. Who the hell are you? Just another little jerk who's caught up in a gym-oriented, totally normative obsession with a body image? This disgusts me and makes me cringe: too much shallowness to handle.

4- "Straight-acting."

I'm freaking queer: there's no chance on earth that I can act straight. And you want me to still act straight while sucking you off?! The straight actors are always deal-breakers for me, which basically erases 80% of the men on those websites from my pool. No exaggerating: I tried to keep a count and roughly 80% of the profiles mention straight-acting.

5- "Be ripped like myself."

I often wonder why all those gym-obsessed men don't all simply have a community of their own, where they just frequent each other, fuck each other, have muscle-kids with each other and create a nation-state of their own while they're at it. I'm amazed by the number of men who want "gym buddies" on those sites. If I'm here, it's to date, to fuck, to mate, to make friends, or to have a drink and keep warm on a cold night. I'm not here to become your "gym buddy!"

If you have never been on one of those sites, imaginary reader, you may be interested in knowing that the majority of the pictures on those websites are of six-packs. After a point of time, it gets so generic, it's boring. The worse part is that you never get to see their (probably low self-esteem riddled) face that hides behind some skin... Now, forget trying to find a personality behind the six-pack: it's pretty hollow out there!

And don't get me started on men who have pictures of themselves flexing their muscles... (I gotta end this post here: I'm suddenly feeling sick! That's what online dating does indeed!)

The Chart of Non-Monogamy

Somewhere, in the middle of all this, is me. I don't quite know where... Probably where polyamory, BDSM, casual sex, dating around and the 100 mile rule meet and diverge. I just call it "queer intimacy"-- makes it simpler!

Small Town Queer/Small Queer Town

Fellow blogger, FT, recently started a new blog called Small Town Queer. The blogging project aims to demystify the fact that "not all queers live in cities like San Francisco or Toronto. Some of our hometowns aren't big enough to have a scene or a gay bar." I find the idea honest, interesting and socially, politically (and queerly) very important. Queerness is not all about the big city.

Incidentally, I've recently come to the realization that I am by now a small town queer myself: a small town queer living in a rather queer small town that goes by the name of Peterborough, Ontario... It seems surreal that after two years of living here (the smallest place I've ever lived in), my life has taken radical turns for the better: I'm definitely more queer than I've ever been, I have crossed boundaries that I had established for myself (socially, politically, physically, sexually), I developed a deeper understanding of queer, racialized, and disabled embodiment, and I've pushed the experience of my intimate relationships to unchartered terrains. Framed differently, I feel I started "to transition" (in all the possible senses of the word) in this wicked little town.  

In "Friendship as a Way of Life" (1981), French philosopher Michel Foucault claims the following: "To be 'gay,' I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible marks of the homosexual, but to try to define and develop a way of life." Indeed, the reason why it's called "queerness" and not simply "homosexuality" is because it's a way of life that extends far beyond the square of a bed. Though this way of life may be known as a mainstream consumerist urban hedonistic one, being gay/queer is not just about the big cities; a queer "way of life" encompasses alternative modes of alliances, subcultural practices and non-mainstreams forms of representations, all of which can be rural.

In In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), queer/cultural/literary theorist, J. Halberstam unpacks the concept of "local homosexualities" by bringing our attention to queer narratives that unfold, and are grounded in nonmetropolitan settings. For me, this is what Peterborough has come to represent: the demystifying of the urban fantasy that homophobic violence is concentrated in rural areas. In Halberstam's words, "[s]ome queers need to leave home in order to become queer, and others need to stay close to home in order to preserve that difference." And that's what Peterborough has come to symbolize for me: a queer space puts into question the gay imaginary that demands that one comes [out] to the big city, quite literally.

Last week, I saw Rae Spoon on stage at The Spill, a small artsy cafe/bar here. I discovered Rae Spoon rather randomly last winter when a former lover took me for a night out in Toronto, the big city. It was love at first sound. Rae is a female-to-male transgender singer and song writer from Alberta who, while undergoing his transition, did not have recourse to any hormonal treatment so as to conserve his singing voice. The first time I heard Rae, I was immediately taken by the poetic narratives of being trans (and transitioning) in the Canadian prairies. Through his music, I was transported to a site of geographical and cultural relevance that I had never experienced: rural Canada. Through Rae's lyrics, I lived, however remotely, the experience of the small town queer...

What I didn't realize the first time around was that I was in my own ways a queer stuck in a small town. What I didn't realize either was that I was also a queer trying to constantly run away from this small town by spending as much time as I could in Toronto, the big gay city par excellence. However, sitting at The Spill with a few loved ones, lying my head against those red bricks, rocking my neck to Rae's music, drinking beer that I couldn't afford and that my friends had bought for me, realizing that I knew most (if not all) of the crowd who had turned up on that night, watching the happiness, soaked in golden light in everybody's sway, and above all, knowing that if anything happened to me right then, right there, there'd be a riot of people to stick up for me . . . 

. . . That's when it hit me: this small town (that doesn't even have a gay bar) is queer in many more ways than I thought it was, and this town has also come to embody the real meaning of queer relationships and queer families as that where a community and/or collective come together for days, months, years, and live together independent of blood ties or sexual attraction. In other words, this town has become my family, and on that night, blessed by the music of Rae Spoon, The Spill became a home for this family of queers, queer-identified, queer-allies and queer-friends.

Support The Blog [final round of voting]

First things first: thank you to all of those who put in a ballot for The Queer Behind the Mirror at the Canadian Blog Awards.

Great news: The blog has made it to the final round of voting in three categories: "Best GLBT Blog," "Best Culture and Literature Blog" and "Best Blog Post." If you want to keep showing your support to the blog, please click on this link if you think the blog deserves a title in any of these categories this year.

I thank all of you.

Yours queerly,

Amak

P.S: Poll closes on October 26 at noon. 

The Short Journey [sonnet]

Lipstick stains on the rim of a mug;

Down to the depths, red, her long legs,

Shoed in the darkness of coffee dregs,

Plant a kiss on the brim with a shrug.

I smell you with my tongue like a drug;

A whiff smirks, in love, a breath begs

For the lock of a kiss that pegs

Your being onto mine: our tongues snug.

You remember the tip of a blade of grass

Where we found a pearl made of glass;

The sun had furled itself at dusk,

Covered our love in its husk?

On the rim of that mug, the tip of that blade

Was a (too) short journey: our love frayed.

Tomorrow, The Train [poetry]

Amidst crumpled leaves, the ring of a bell.

The afternoon train passes
Like voluminous thunder
Boiling
To a soothing flame
A kettle

Cradles us, steady rhythm.

The rhythm-- anchored

A moment in time

Immovable-- a rock, a wooden track.

Metal wheels screech to a slower pace,

A ripple flows and disappears...

It passes.

The bell no longer rings
Hot bubbles in the distance

Yet--

The imprint, alive, amidst the leaves,

The pebbles, the wooden bridge.

Tomorrow, the train will be back.

A Ballot for the Blog [Nominated at the Canadian Blog Awards]

I'm very happy to announce that The Queer Behind the Mirror has been nominated for the Canadian Blog Awards 2010 in the categories "Best LGBTQ Blog" and "Best Culture & Literature Blog." Besides, this post, Blue Crystal [sunday evening] has also been nominated for the "Best Blog Post" award.

If you think this blog has been bringing you enough queerness and enough of literary and cultural interest, and if you particularly liked the piece Blue Crystal, I hereby urge you to go to the Canadian Blog Awards by clicking here, and to vote for The Queer Behind the Mirror.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank whomever nominated the blog and I thank whomever will vote on behalf of the blog too!

On Being Surprised: The Technologies of Intimacy and the Intimacies of Technology

Last week on QueerToday, Anthony L. Carter posted this article about ‘unacceptable risks’. He says: “I was 36 the first time I had sex in public. I had no idea this was an option... I truly thought people went to the park to read, the restrooms to pee and the malls to shop.” Mr. Carter went on to question the potential dangers and risks involved in cruising.

Cruising: Isn’t it actually an inherent part of queer lives, almost a rite of passage? Isn’t it the thing we all need to do to feel that we’ve arrived, that we’ve finally ‘made it queer’, in the same fashion that our families don’t consider us adolescents till they hear the acute crack in our voices, in the same way that we dare not call ourselves teenagers till the physical traces of pubic hair reveal themselves on our bodies? I’ve lived in three continents so far, and in each case, the act of cruising was seen as that liminal space where one finally gives in to one’s ‘forbidden’ desire, the moment where one finally comes, quite literally.

Speaking of the nature of cruising, Mr. Carter adds: “Nothing like a romp in the great outdoors to set your heart a thumping, your mind to shutting down and the belief that you have thumbed your nose at the man, polite society, and have truly gotten away with something dastardly. Oh yes online or in person, the concept of free, noncommittal sex (hookups if you’re 30 or less) serves a number of functions. The connection can be explosive, entertaining, instantaneous and most importantly if the person is a pain in the ass you never have to see them again (...) It’s free and always available. Nobody is at these spots not wanting to be sexual. A bit of negotiation and you’re off and running...” Above all, I am tempted to add: cruising is anonymous!

Anonymity is indeed key in the functioning of others as simple bodies, there, exposed, to be seen and to be courted in order to satisfy one’s own desire. The potential dangers stay closeted and the dirty secrets behind this anonymity may (or may not?) make the experience of cruising more attractive: Who are those men? Are they married? Do they have children? Are they compulsive rapists? Did they just get out of jail? And what about STDs?... The possible horror narratives are endless, and yet, we’ll push them at the back of our minds, ignore them and assume it’ll just be exciting sex... And then... And then let’s forget about it and pretend it never happened.

For many queers of my generation, ‘hook-ups’ as we call them have always been mediated through technology. Acquaintances younger than me have often looked at me like an old piece of junk that should belong to a gay-museum when I told them about my earliest experiences cruising in public. For many indeed, the practice of cruising in a park seems so far removed from history that it belongs to an archive that simply cannot exist. “Why would anybody do this?” is a question that often comes up. The rite of passage has changed: we live in an age where coming out with one’s desires has to be mediated through the use of technology.

I was roughly 16 when I started to think through my desires and the possibility of carrying them through. At the time, I used to live in Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean. Since my raging hormones were driving me crazy, I thought of parks, public toilets, beaches, malls and all those places where I used to see ‘those boys’ roaming around on Sundays after church. I would walk by, discreetly, pretending I was there by mistake, looking furtively and building potential scenarios in my head. I stayed in the borders, an observer never daring to enter the center. I was skinny, I had pimples, I had an oily skin and an awfully low self-esteem, and I was conscious of all that. And then, I found the one thing that would save me: a screen behind which I could hide.

It was a new trend at the time, but it did it for me: I felt secure and above all, I feel reassured that I did not have to expose my skinny body and my low self-esteem to public scrutiny. Online chats (for there were no dating ‘website’ accessible to me yet) for many teenagers like me were a blessing at the time. I was out to my friends, but not to my family and I lived with the constant fear of being outed to them. On the local chat-room, we would hide behind screen-names such as ‘gay15’ or ‘gayboy or ‘gayhottie’ or ‘gay-whatever-you-want’ and we would wait till somebody started chatting with us. Of course, we also lied when we had to, about our ages, about how sexually knowledgeable we were, how sexually knowledgeable we were willing to become... We lied about how tall we were, how big ‘it’ was, but we didn’t lie when we said we were looking for a long-term relationship. In our heads, being 16, the raging hormones and a potential relationship were one, as long as it involved a lot of sex.

Over the years though, the chat-rooms gave way to online dating websites. By then, we had started filling boxes: height, size, sexual preference, fetishes, looking for... And in many cases, we now had enough confidence to show ourselves, to post our best pictures and flatter our egos. However, it didn’t take me long to be appalled by the number of closeted cases I would find on dating websites. I began asking myself: is online dating a blessing or a curse? On the one hand, it opened up doors to articulate and seek satisfaction for our desires. But on the other hand, it kept us closeted; it said: stay there, don’t come out, don’t ever even call yourself gay. Just meet them, fuck and come back home to a normal life. For me, online dating was a glass closet: a place to where we could show ourselves and yet remain hidden.

Besides the closeted aspects embedded in seeking fulfillment of intimacy via the medium of technology, it is also pertinent to think through how technology actually structures and regulates our desires and relationships. We live in a society where we are used to getting what we want. We want new jeans that are blue, slightly faded in certain spots, tight at the waist but large at the calves with embroidered patches on the back pockets; what do we do? We want a chicken burger with cheese and fried mushrooms, ketchup, mustard sauce and lettuce; what do we do? In both cases, we order what we need and we get them.

This is what online dating does for us; it allows to finally specify our desires and ‘order’ the partner that we want: I want him at least 6ft tall, blond with olive skin, with dark eyes and a six-pack. I want him to be interested in sciences and comics and I want him to be able to cook and be a non-smoker. Where else could I find him and ‘order’ him other than on a dating website? From the moment we start putting ourselves in small boxes, and describing our attributes and desires in other boxes, we can order our potential partners and let ourselves be ordered too, like pizza to be delivered. Online dating solves many problems for us; it does the weeding and the selecting: I no longer have to deal with the guys who are not my type feeling me up at the bar anymore, I no longer run the danger of being cruised by men I am not primarily attracted to, I no longer have to fall onto a guy who doesn’t share my taste in music...

And yet, I ask: did online dating really solve the problem? Did we actually get rid of the ‘bad weed’? If such is the case, how come so many of us are still cruising for somebody compatible online, just like another generation used to in bars years ago? I think the solution lies in realizing that there is a clear distinction between desire and the fulfillment of desire. You know those days when you crave for a chocolate brownie and you crave it so much that you rush to a pastry shop and buy it? But then, once you eat it, you think: “Is that it?” and your taste buds remain unsatisfied?

Online dating entails the same process. We shouldn’t confuse our fantasies with the actual realization of those fantasies. There is a need to realize that the people we dream up as potential mating partners may only be so perfect and exciting only because they seem so in the ideal state that we conjure them into being. How many of us have actually woken up on Sunday mornings feeling frustrated that the perfect date didn’t turn out to be so perfect?

Sure, we have preferences, we have desires, but we seem to forget that human interactions express themselves in interesting uncanny ways. Ever remember going to the shop for looking for that particular pair of faded-blue jeans with embroidery on the back pocket, but coming out of the store with plain black denims because you unexpectedly fell for them and realized they were perfect in their own ways? Well, cruising is about that too: letting ourselves be surprised by other human beings and what they may have to offer.

Often, our dating and mating partners and our longest relationships are to be found where we least expect them, in the desires that we thought we didn’t have. There is an element of surprise in human interaction that online dating can take away if you let the medium act this way. This is not to say that online dating is to be totally ruled out, but maybe is it time to loosen those boxes a bit: make them bigger, make them more inclusive and in the process, make the squares and rectangles a bit circular too?