The White Peril 白禍

Ghost of a Flea has a post up that shuttles from Kelly Osbourne to Kylie to Sharon Osbourne to Madonna. Here are the first two:

While people have been rather mean about Kelly Osbourne's figure she turns out to be an admirer of Kylie Minogue's. Echoing the considered observations of countless communication studies essays I have read, Kelly believes that "sex really does sell". Kelly is right to credit Kylie some of her success to her pixie-like proportions but Kylie also claims a vast gay fan base to whom her pixie-like figure is secondary to some nebulous something else. This something else is what Kelly might better spend her time cultivating than surgery and botox and so forth.

I thought Nick was going a little overboard warning a woman of twenty-one off Botox, but according to the linked article, apparently not. Sheesh. I've always thought it was excessive for Kylie herself to use Botox. She's not even forty.

Via Gay News, I saw this DP article about an actor who spoke at Asian Pacific American Heritage Week. (I was a bit confused about that. I thought Asian Pacific American Heritage month was May and was wondering whether I was going to have to go all ethnicity-admiring and diversity-appreciating on Marc's ass for the second time this year. But I think last week was just a Penn event, so I can keep liking my Asian friends in the boring old individual way.)

The actor, who apparently used to be on Law & Order, was faced with a problem: he is (1) a racial minority and (2) a faggot--but not (3) a woman, and therefore does not qualify for the PC Triple Crown. I thought he found an ingenious solution to this appalling deficiency:

Wong conveyed the confusion of his childhood in San Francisco when he interrupted an anecdote about his struggles as a young Asian-American with, "Oh, I forgot to tell you that I was a homo," eliciting peals of laughter from the audience.

Encouraged by a "colorblind" drama teacher, Wong discovered a passion for the performing arts as a child.

Later, Wong encountered Asian stereotypes in the acting world for the first time when he was cast as a Chinese stowaway in a play outside of school.

"It was the most shocking thing that I have ever experienced in my life," Wong said.

Though Wong changed to a different role after speaking with the director, this experience was the beginning of his "racial anorexia."

Wong highlighted the intensity of this internal conflict when he said, "At least when you're anorexic, you can starve yourself. What can you do when you have this face?"

See? He was, like, anorexic, and what's more princessy-feminist chick than having an eating disorder brought on by patriarchal pressure? All right, FINE, he was a metaphorical chick, but in this world of contingency and différance, we wouldn't want to be reinforcing false binarisms between the literal and the figurative.

I have to say that I'm not quite sure what the anorexia comparison is supposed to, you know, mean. He wanted to destroy his Asian self, I guess? There's a potentially interesting question lingering in there about where typecasting shades off into stereotyping. No one bitches that Kristin Scott Thomas is, as much for her sky-goddess coloring and bone structure as for her actorly skill, frequently called upon to play uptight women of Northern European extraction with emotions simmering beneath the surface.

I can see, in an instinctive sense, how casting Asians in boxed-in roles is somehow worse, but it's hard to explicate. Surely one doesn't have directors telling actors to Charlie Chan up their accents. There is definitely a tendency on the part of casting directors to figure that everyone with slanted eyes and dusky skin is interchangeable, which is how you end up with Vietnamese, Korean, and Taiwanese women all playing Chinese roles in The Joy Luck Club. But that doesn't seem to be what Wong is talking about. And what, pray tell, is a "generic Asian waiter"? It's not as if there were meaty, three-dimensional waiter roles available by the dozens for white actors. If troubled Korean gang members exist, I'm not sure why they shouldn't be featured in teleplays, as long as their individual identities are fleshed out.

Wong, as befits the occasion, doesn't seem to have been much concerned with individual identity:

After struggling with his race and sexual orientation during most of his life, Wong has gradually come have confidence in himself.

"Ironically, the two things that I loathed about myself were the things that were rich about myself," he said.

Yes, we should all learn to derive our sense of the richness of our personal identities from the boxes we check on census forms. An inspiring example for today's college youth, that is.

I guess I hadn't been reading Ace long enough to know much about her coming out. She's posted about it at Gay Orbit and at her place. (It's the same post, but she may get different comments for each.)

I was way luckier than I expected to be. I was brought up in an extremely conservative Sabbatarian Christian sect--you know, people who weren't members of the church were collectively known as "the World," and we had two-hour services every week. You took notes when you were considered old enough, which in most families was around twelve or so. Just about every week there was at least one mention of how vigilant everyone needed to be against Satanic influences on their children in which homosexual activism figured prominently.

So when I settled in my mind that I was definitely, permanently gay, my options were very clear and very polarized. I figured my parents would tell me that they still loved me but that we weren't going to be able to have any correspondence anymore. For about a month--not very long, I guess, though it seemed like an eternity--I flip-flopped over whether to tell them, but I come from a pretty out-with-it-already kind of family, so I decided to come out and just deal.

I told them just after New Year's in 1996. The next three days were notable for their lack of relaxed family fun, but when I went back to New York, it was with the understanding that they weren't going to disown me and I wasn't about to go all druggy and bathhousey. After that there were a few awkward moments--I've never in my life eaten very much at one sitting, but after I was out, there was a sudden danger that my not wanting a third slice of shoo-fly pie meant I had an eating disorder because, you know, Cherie Bank on Channel 10 did this report that said a lot of Men Like Me do. Over the next few years, I figured out the rules: I can mention a guy I'm dating or talk about my boyfriend, but gay issues in general are a no-go. I mention the word gay--nay, use the letters g, a, and y within any five consecutive words--and the subject is changed. Not pointedly, but resolutely.

When I wanted to bring Atsushi home two years ago, everything was fine. I mean, it was so fine it was kind of spooky. They put us in separate rooms, of course, but they spent the whole time doing their mischievous/playful/intimately ribald thing, which they don't do around people they want to distance themselves from.

My mother even tried to challenge Atsushi to a drinking game, but he doesn't drink. This was at the "Japanese" steakhouse in one of the malls near where I grew up, BTW. You know, run by a Korean family, with Chinese calligraphy all over the place and Polynesian drinks on the menu. The chefs joke and juggle knives. You can get chow mein noodles instead of rice. Atsushi found the whole thing a lot of fun but utterly bewildering, and the 'rents never let him forget it. "This isn't the Japanese you get in Japan, huh, Atsu?" Mom guffawed at one point. "Yeah, I bet you're wishing you'd gone ahead and gotten a beer now!" Dad chimed in. Right about then I took a long drink of vodka and started to hope that maybe they could find it in their hearts to like him a little less. They let him go without too many more incidents, though. Since then, they always tell me to give their love to him when we talk or write back and forth, and they send him Christmas presents.

Normally, I try to leave my parents off the blog because they aren't here to give their version of events when it differs from my own. (Well, that and it's not my place to tell their stories.) I'm only giving them walk-on parts now because I wonder whether things would have worked this way three or four years after I came out. It was never my intention to use my Japanese major to move to Japan; I came here and liked it and then fortuitously discovered that my grad school mentor and I were incompatible, but I would have been in New York for another five or six years if I'd stayed on track. It's hard to say what would have happened in a reality that never came to pass. I'd been out for six years when I brought up the idea of bringing Atsushi home, so the fact that the gay thing wasn't going anywhere was pretty apparent. Time was probably the biggest factor, along with a willingness to be persistent without being pushy.

Given Madonna's dogmatic pronouncements about spirituality lately, it's nice to see that she's still capable of self-questioning on some issues of true import:

When asked about her gay icon status, she admitted she "hopes" she is still the biggest gay icon of all time.

However, she also reveals that she agrees with Kylie Minogue's summary of the Australian superstar being the princess, and Madonna the queen.

"That's very good," she says. "We like it that way."

...

The former Material Girl [%#$@*!--SRK] also hit back at criticisms from Boy George that her Kabbalah religion is homophobic.

“He’s just got a bee in his bonnet,” she says.

Oy. I can just hear her delivering that last sentence in her phony not-quite-plummy-so-let's-call-it-pruny "English" accent.

The Kylie part is very sweet, though.

As far as whether she's still a gay icon goes, if my corner of Tokyo is any indication, that's a question that needn't even be asked. The other night, a few of us ran into a guy who hadn't heard the single yet, and before we could stop ourselves, we all stared at him as if he'd just landed from Mars.

Personally, my position is that, despite my uncritical devotion to Madonna, this album had better be good. Two years ago I paid money for an album with her posing as Che flippin' Guevara on the cover, and the music did not compensate. Fool me twice, and all that.

I do like "Hung Up," though IIRC, Erasure had the bright idea of doing a tweaked cover of "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" like, two decades ago. (They tweaked it by grafting a bit of "Money Money Money" onto the beginning. For all I know, they also grafted a bit of "I Do I Do I Do I Do I Do" onto the end; I've almost never been able to listen to an Erasure song all the way through.) Madonna usually isn't the major trailblazer she seems to think she is, but she rarely leads off with concepts that are frankly tired. Then again, given her output over the last few years, we should be celebrating the fact that she's seen fit to deliver a hook without burying it.

(Via Gay News)

Cathy Young has posted a long and very, very good response to Maggie Gallagher's guest-blog entries at the Volokh Conspiracy. Gallagher has also responded to Young. Something near the end of Gallagher's post took me aback in a big, bad way:

I too share your hope that we can have SSM and simultaneously figure out how to increase the likelihood that children in this country are born to and raised by their own married mom and dad.

That first part came out of left field for me--I assume it means that Gallagher figures that SSM is inevitable, anyway, so she hopes we can make the best of the change. But she's been saying for some time, unless I've read her incorrectly, that she thinks support for gay marriage has been slowly starting to wane lately. In that light, it doesn't seem likely that she would be regarding it as an inevitable development. At the same time, while I've never read her as anti-gay, she can hardly mean that she's looking forward to the advent of gay marriage. I don't quite know what to make of that bit.

Young is also right that Gallagher didn't present her arguments very fluidly, but it's hard not to sympathize with her. The crux of the pro-gay marriage argument, on the part of many of its supporters, can be delivered in a snappy sentence: "Conventional marriage isn't always about pro-creation, and gays fall in love and want to provide for their families just like straights--what justification is there for not treating their relationships the same legally?"

The crux of the argument against gay marriage is not as easy to put succinctly, involving as it does all the messy hormones and impulses and choices and things that are involved in taking a child through the two-decade transition into someone who's healthy, self-reliant, and ready to assume a place in adult society. Half of the evidence involved is probably boring even to the research psychologists and demographers who generate it. But that doesn't mean it's illegitimate.

Eric has also addressed--I hope I don't sound self-infatuated linking this, since the post in question begins by citing me approvingly; I'm not really going to deal with that part--some of the issues raised during Gallagher's guest-posting stint:

I think this "if you disagree with me, you're a bigot" meme has gotten really, really tired. The problem is, the more time people spend talking only with each other and not with people they disagree with, the more likely they are to be convinced that not only are they right, but that their opponents are more than wrong; they are evil, bigoted, and analogous to Nazis.

The irony involved in reflexively dismissing people with opposing arguments as "bigots" would be delicious were it not for the fact that the practice has so coarsened public discussion of...well, just about everything. I sometimes think it should be banned, the way your ninth-grade English teacher banned the passive voice from your first few expository essays--not because it was incorrect in and of itself incorrect but because it was too easy to get lazy and overuse.

I was going to comment directly at Riding Sun, but I started to run long and didn't want to look like a blowhard. Well, also, my thoughts turned kind of gay (from where? you may well ask), and I didn't want to hijack what was an essentially straight thread before it got started.

The question is a perennial one:

As I've noted before, foreign men who come to Japan often find themselves much more popular with the local ladies than they might have been in their native country.

...


More than ethnic preferences, income levels, or any other factor, I suspect it's Japanese women's desire to "opt out" of their country's smothering salaryman-wife straitjacket that keeps non-Japanese guys in demand.

That's part of it, but I don't think it's all of it, or else you wouldn't see the same things in gay life. And do you ever! The things a perceptive commenter noted below the original post give a fuller picture, I think. Much of it can be boiled down to the fact that Japanese women can't really read Western cultural signals. "Doesn't that gorgeous, animated, articulate woman in the Escada suit and perfect makeup realize that the man she's with is a complete loser?" Well, no, obviously she doesn't. (cf. Rainbow Surfer Dude's wonderfully deadpan item 2: "Less need to be 'interesting' since the language barrier pushes down the upper limit of conversational complexity.")

Also...this conversation comes up not infrequently with friends of mine. A little while ago, several of us foreigners--in a group that included Japanese guys who date foreigners exclusively--were talking about why our relationships with Japanese men had tended to be with those who did not usually date non-Japanese. One of the Japanese guys present asked rather astringently what was wrong with preferring foreign men.

Obviously, nothing is, fundamentally. It's just that many gaisen Japanese, especially those who only want to speak English with you all the time, like the idea of dating a man who's always going to feel kind of baffled and clueless in Japan and need to be, you know, taken care of. I suspect, from the way I've seen many couples interact, that the same holds true for a fair number of foreigner-dating Japanese women--and I don't think that contradicts what Gaijin Biker wrote about their not wanting to be sentenced to a life of nothing but household drudgery. You can expect your mate to pitch in around the house and still want to be the one who calls the shots and is always one step ahead in terms of planning your lives together.

Added on 28 October: Thanks to Bilious Young Fogey for the link, though I must say that parenthetical makes me feel kind of square.

You know when you're working out and the destressing feels great so you push yourself really, really hard? And then a day and a half or so later you get a memo that reads, "TO: Stupid Bitch / FROM: Voluntary Muscles / TEXT: Repeat after me: 'I. Am. Not. Twenty. Anymore.' / END"?

Yeah.

I'd rather talk about other people's idiocy rather than my own, so let's change the subject, shall we? I can never understand why people don't live the way they say they want to live. Some problems are external--e.g., "My boyfriend's cheating on me, and I can't decide whether to let it blow over or to make an issue out of it"--and clearly difficult to negotiate. Where to draw the line between accepting your mate's imperfections and being a doormat is not always easy.

But the practice of causing your own problems and then wondering why you have them? What is up with that? "See, I'm an honest person, and my relationship with Kazu is...you know, I want it to be totally pure. I don't really cheat on him, you know, in terms of mind space? Totally his. I mean, really. But I figure once in a while if I hook up, it doesn't detract from that. I think maybe I should tell him, but I don't want him to think I'm not devoted to him. Like, I think he'd take it the right way and not think that screwing around on him affected the meaning of our relationship, but it's kind of a risk, so I haven't said anything. It's such a hard position, you know?"

No, honey, not really. It's not all that hard to find someone who's willing to have an open relationship; even a sizable proportion of straight marriages work that way in Japan. If that's what you want, you make it a criterion when you start dating. If you want to change the terms of an existing relationship, you do it. (Since Japan still recognizes the value of subtext and euphemism, it's often possible to get this accomplished without a cruel direct hit.) If your partner doesn't accept the change of terms, you either dissolve the relationship or find a way to accommodate each other without deception. Exposing your partner to the potential hazards of microbes and psychological baggage that you expressly promised to protect him from is not a sympathetically flawed action taken in a no-win situation.

Jason Kuznicki at Positive Liberty has posted a lengthy response to Maggie Gallagher's guest posts at the Volokh Conspiracy on gay marriage (via Gay Orbit). Kuznicki's commentary is worth reading in full, especially if you don't want to have to slog through all the comments at the Volokh Conspiracy to figure out what the main counterarguments being offered are.

I don't feel like reproducing my last year and a half of effusion on the issue, especially since it's all available under the marriage debate category on the left there. I do think that one of Kuznicki's points is worth responding to anew, though:

Meanwhile, Gallagher has also neglected the opposing argument, namely that same-sex marriages might actually strengthen the institution of heterosexual marriage. Although the empirical data on either side is scarce (and although this scarcity gives weight to the go-slow approach mentioned in the last comment I linked), still, I think there is at least a conceivable causal mechanism to explain why same-sex marriage might do a lot of good to the institution of heterosexual marriage: If we as a society send a message that marriage is a universal goal, one that admits of no exceptions and knows no gender lines, then it is reasonable to think that more people of all sexual orientations will want to get married.

But if large numbers of people–gays and lesbians, for example–are told that they do not need marriage, or that marriage cannot help them, or that they are unworthy of the institution, then some marginal number of straight people, especially those who identify most closely with gays and lesbians, will almost certainly come to have contempt for the institution of marriage and to see it as antiquated or irrelevant.

I'm perfectly willing to argue that homosexual relationships are no less moral than heterosexual relationships, that contribution to civilization in the form of the creation and upkeep of artifacts is just as important as contribution to civilization in the form of the creation and bringing up of children, and that the law should not be throwing obstacles in our paths when we try to care for our partners within the relationships we've chosen.

However, I've always found the argument above, even in the carefully qualified way Kuznicki presents it, to be ridiculous. The vast majority of people do not view homosexuality and heterosexuality as the same; that's true even among those who believe our relationships are just as valid (word of the week, apparently) as theirs. Despite all the changes in medicine and in the family structure over the last century, there simply remains no chance that a homosexual couple will suddenly finding itself producing a child that needs eighteen years of intensive looking-after. The number of people so bohemian in outlook that they regard their gay friends as facing the same real-life sex-related issues in all respects is so small that "marginal" hardly does it justice.

My friends hardly constitute a scientific sample of the population--good thing for America we don't!--but I doubt their attitude is untypical. A few years ago on our e-mail group, I tried to get a discussion about gay marriage going...and failed utterly. The replies were along the lines of "Of course, I think you and Atsushi should be able to get married--why the hell wouldn't i?" Even so, my friends' expressed preference has been for marriage; there have been a half-dozen weddings since we were in our late twenties. (The result, BTW, is that I'm now friends with [even] more Jews than I was in college: three of the girls converted in order to marry three of our Jewish buddies. Talk about populations that recruit!) If forced to choose between showing solidarity with gay friends and providing the most stable possible environment for their own children--assuming that's the choice they actually have to make--most people are obviously going to side with their kids.

This is why we love Eric. Notice, dear children, that it's possible not to hold feeling comfortable as the very highest value in the universe:

There weren't too many role models for me, which is probably why I'm such a nut. I was a fan of the Grateful Dead, and in my Marxist days I tended towards misguided idolization of the Black Panther Party leadership. Years later I came to adore a certain crazed junkie writer. But these weren't really role models. I thought of my own sexuality as crazy and uniquely non-conforming, and while I might not have always been comfortable with it, I always thought I had to be my own role model. I've never felt validated, and I never wanted to be validated. The conventional concepts of gay and straight annoyed me then, and annoy me now. Not only is the right to free choice in sexual matters being negated, it's increasingly being seen as an oppressive concept.

I wouldn't take it quite that far myself, of course. Civilization has had millennia to build up knowledge about what does and does not tend to work for people for people who want to live happy, productive lives. There's nothing cravenly conformist about heeding the wisdom of those who came before you (or those who are still around and have more experience than you do).

But things are just a bit out of hand these days, with the assumption in the air that no one can figure out how to live his life unless there's an available "role model" with the exact same characteristics. This is America; we're supposed to be a nation of pioneers. But no. It's considered unfair to expect someone to follow a path that hasn't already been machete-cleared, leveled, and bricked over in a tasteful herringbone pattern by someone else.

Eric's talking more about private life than about public life, but the idea's the same. Sure, we all need friends, and most of us like the feeling of belonging to a kind of "community" (even if the frequent, gruesomely cheery political use of that word gives us the heebs). But personal liberty means that you often have to make decisions that are specific to your own circumstances and don't have much precedent, and I'm not quite sure how the Logo Network spells salvation.

Unlike Eric, I'm pretty much a central-casting gay guy. But it was mostly my parents who were my role models for what kind of adult I wanted to be. When I came out, it was among my college friends, who were all straight. I certainly went through a lot of pain over acknowledging that I was a homosexual, but I don't remember getting flibbertigibbety over my "role" as a gay man. I mean, hello? You find somewhere with eligible men and get started flirting.

That the eligible men may be in a different city just means that you may have to make a tradeoff between staying in familiar surroundings and capitalizing on opportunities elsewhere. That happens to straight people all the time, too. Basic issues about persona are pretty universal, too: Am I good at initiating conversations, or do things work out better when I let someone come to me and break the ice? Does my demeanor seem friendly or unfriendly to people who don't know me? Do I like being the center of attention or mixing quietly with people in the crowd? Most people figure out what their best fit is through trial and error, and the error part is occasionally painful or embarrassing. These things happen.

Simply knowing that there are other gay people around is undoubtedly a comfort, and an important one, to gay youths. But figuring out you're gay is the beginning of the journey, not the end. The rest of it--making your way as an adult--is basically the same for everyone, regardless of sexual identity. That some people make feeling "validated" their highest priority doesn't mean the rest of us are always obliged to indulge them.

Jonathan Rauch's column for National Journal is up at IGF. It's about a gay wedding in Massachusetts. I still think there are important unaddressed questions about gay marriage as policy and as an institution. Rauch mostly leaves aside those questions this time out, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. His focus is on the reactions of family members. He delineates, with a few well-chosen strokes, how Beckland and Pope are starting out--both the resources they have and what they're going to be contending with:

Laura's parents, Lee and Ludene, both in their early 70s, have shown up at their grandson's wedding on the advice of their priest, who counseled support for their family even if they could not condone a same-sex marriage. They say they are open-minded Catholics, but today's event has pushed them to their limit. "I feel that it's wrong," Lee volunteers. "I don't think it's real. I kind of wish it hadn't happened." He loves his grandson, no doubt about it. But "this is hard for me, to see it happen." Ludene, who believes that marriage is for procreation, struggles to find a more conciliatory note. "We're living in a different age," she says.

Jamie's two younger brothers are enthusiastic about the marriage. It never occurs to them to regard a same-sex marriage as anything but real. His father, Kim, has been supportive all along. But his paternal grandparents, Jim and Carol, are guarded as they sit on a bench awaiting the ceremony's start. "We love Jamie, and I'm not going to drive a wedge in the family," Jim says. Carol mentions that both are Christians who are close to the Bible. "This will be interesting," she says. "I'm not the judge."

Rauch has in the past written about the social pressure required to make marriage work and how it would make gay marriage a benefit to society; he's done so in ways that push forward abstractions and skate over specifics, which I think weakens his arguments. It will be interesting to see how what he learns about people's concrete experiences from here on will affect his views.

I may not like the way gay marriage has been pursued politically, but of course it turns me to mush to see two of our men (or women)--who clearly had to go through some major crap to right themselves--find happiness with each other. Congratulations and best wishes to them.

(Oh, and Jonathan? Sweetness? Honey, Jamie could be your son. There's no "just about" about it. He was born when you were eighteen, and maybe most of your fellow rising Yale freshmen weren't having kids then, but plenty of Americans were. It's considered pretty early in most places, but not all that early. I was born when my father was twenty, and it never raises an eyebrow when I meet other people of working class extraction.)

Presumably for National Coming Out Day, the Washington Blade ran two editorials last week (at least on-line) about coming out--one by Log Cabin Republicans' Patrick Guerriero, and one by the National Black Justice Coalition's Keith Boykin.

Boykin's criticisms, especially, are aimed at people who remain closeted in order to play both ends against the middle:

If you don't come out, then you can't complain. You can't complain about homophobic politicians who want to take away your rights. You can't complain about bigoted ministers in church. And you absolutely cannot complain about the direction of the gay and lesbian movement.

...

Too many of us are good at offering critiques without offering help. "Why are there so many 'queens' in the movement? Why aren't there any people of color? Why are they talking about marriage, the military, hate crimes, AIDS, or fill-in-the-blank issue that 'real people' think activists shouldn't be talking about?"

Well here's another question: Why aren't you doing something about it? Posting an anonymous comment on someone's blog is not enough.

I'm not saying the activists shouldn't be criticized when they do something wrong. But I am saying we need to be participants instead of observers in our own liberation. If you don't like the way things are going, then come out and be visible so you can be the change you hope to see in the world.

Yes, yes, yes--with a side of sauteed morning glory greens. (One qualification: I don't see anything wrong with commenting anonymously on blogs. A person who's out in real life could still have legitimate fears about identity theft, for example, or be interested in protecting her relatives' privacy rather than her own.) But I can think of few more annoying gay personality types than the ones who piss and moan about how poorly our public advocates are handling things...and then expect sympathy because they "can't" come out at work or to the 'rents or to their friends from college. I think Boykin strikes exactly the right balance. Honorable people who are really willing to make the trade-offs that going along to get along requires recognize that they've disqualified themselves from bitching that our activists aren't doing enough to make the world safe for them. Honorable people who want to bitch that our activists aren't doing enough recognize that the way they live shouldn't offer cravenness as an alternative course of action.

I've discovered something worse than being told you look like Tom Cruise.

I don't mind that a lot of guys think some celebs are cute whom I find unappetizing--different strokes and all that. Also, as a white guy in Japan, you get a lot of hyperbolic comments comparing you to celebrities you only resemble in the most rudimentary terms of coloring. If you're dark, you look like Tom Cruise. If you're fair, you look like Brad Pitt. Now that I think of it, I haven't happened to be involved in this discussion when one of my black acquaintances was present, but I'm going to bet they get told they look like Denzel Washington. Maybe Will Smith, but my money's on Denzel.

Anyway, the point is, I have dark hair, so the script calls for Tom. If someone deviates from it, that generally means that the comparison is heartfelt rather than formulaic. Which is why this line nearly gave me a coronary: "You look just like Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love."

"Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love"?

JOSEPH FIENNES IN SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE?

Blech. Ew, ew, ew. Just, ew. That is not a way to get in well with me. Not.

Ew.

A belated happy 80th birthday to the UK's inimitable former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, which occasioned this week's second gay-shiver-of-pleasure-inducing comment referring to her:

Another guest, actress Joan Collins, said she adored Thatcher.

"She is the 'Iron Lady,' and I want to be just like that when I grow up," Collins said.

[sighs] Oh, and this is a good place to point out that Susanna, a lady of considerable gravitas herself, has written a very thoughtful post about what general patterns in differences between the sexes mean to individuals trying to live as well and happily as they can.

Occasionally, the Andrew Sullivan who inspired so many of us a decade ago reemerges to write a reflective, even-handed piece about gay issues. This is the latest. It's a bit verbose, and the social-climby lens through which he views cultural life manifests itself frequently, but I'll take a little A-list smugness over Bush-betrayed-me screechiness any day.

Slowly but unmistakably, gay culture is ending. You see it beyond the poignant transformation of P-town: on the streets of the big cities, on university campuses, in the suburbs where gay couples have settled, and in the entrails of the Internet. In fact, it is beginning to dawn on many that the very concept of gay culture may one day disappear altogether. By that, I do not mean that homosexual men and lesbians will not exist--or that they won't create a community of sorts and a culture that sets them in some ways apart. I mean simply that what encompasses gay culture itself will expand into such a diverse set of subcultures that "gayness" alone will cease to tell you very much about any individual. The distinction between gay and straight culture will become so blurred, so fractured, and so intermingled that it may become more helpful not to examine them separately at all.

There's much less psychological need now to define yourself against society when you figure out that you're gay, and a lot of mainstream straight people would find it strange if you did. It was my half-dozen or so closest college friends, all straight, who convinced me to stop warring against my own identity and come out. The friends I feel most assertively gay around are a straight architect couple--I was delighted to learn earlier this week that they're moving back to Tokyo from their home base in San Francisco--who are constantly joshing with me about my clothes and their friends in the Castro and the difficulty of getting the perfect piece of pottery for the entryway table. I don't know that I'd take things as far as Sullivan does in that last sentence above, but the main point is a good one.

Smiler of the day: Joe Riddle at Ex-Gay Watch on choice:

We ought to begin every argument over gay rights on that footing: Do we choose to be gay? Absolutely! And we love it! Who the hell are you to tell us we can't be happy?

For context, it might be helpful to separate two entangled notions of "choice." Do humans have a choice about who attracts us sexually? No, of course we don't. Attraction is a chemical, biological phenomena, not subject to conscious will. Do we have a choice about whom we have sex with? Do we make choices about our sexual conduct and identity? Yes, of course we do. To say otherwise is silly.

While it deserves to be pointed out that choice rhetoric is misused by gay activists, too--Virginia Postrel, when she was still editor of Reason, wrote a wonderful editorial on that subject--Joe clarifies things from the opposite direction. I think it's great that programs exist for miserable people who want to change their behavior, but the mere fact that they're using their sexuality for ill and pain doesn't mean that more mature types can't use it for good and joy.

Off to Shinjuku for vodka and fag talk with a friend.

We've finally made the decisive transition to fall. The rain is chilly rather than just cool, and the sky is slate grey without that warmth around the edges that says it's going to heat up again in a day or two. I'm glad Atsushi was here this weekend; it sucks when there's a major seasonal change and I don't get to go through it with him. Talking about it on the phone isn't the same.

I made another big transition this weekend: we finally rented Lost in Translation, so now, when the googolplexth person asks, "Tokyo, huh? So, have you seen Lost in Translation?" I can say, "Uh-huh." It was good. Sofia Coppola has a nice feel for actors. Bill Murray was very convincing as a venturesome soul who'd been tired out by decades of routine. Scarlett Johansson's one of the few starlets now operating who know how to be luminous without twinkling at the bleeding camera. That chick who was supposedly an old girlfriend of Giovanni Ribisi's was hilarious (though, sad to say, plenty of Yale grads do talk that way).

As far as the Tokyo setting goes, there's no way I could have experienced it the way people who don't live here do. My Japanese isn't perfect, but I never felt disoriented by the words on the signs or the dialogue. Sometimes, the Japanese was frankly distracting: the shot that establishes Murray's character as a star, when you first see the Suntory billboard with his picture? Right below it is an ad for hair removal. I guffawed, which I don't believe was the reaction sought. (At least, nothing in the movie looked like an in-joke with Japanese speakers.) The cab driver also seemed to be taking a strange route to get from Narita Airport to the Park Hyatt--who would go through Shibuya? I mean, who would go through Hachiko?

That part was kind of fun, actually: Shibuya and Shinjuku are the neighborhoods in which I spend a good 90% of my time. The other neighborhood mentioned by name, Daikanyama, is on my train line; I sometimes walk there to pick up lunch because it's only seven minutes or so from the office. My chiropractor is in Omotesando, where Johansson is shown on the subway platform. The gigantic Shibuya intersection that Murray and Johansson cross as if they were playing Frogger is five minutes from my office in a different direction. In fact, until Atsushi was transferred and I moved my stuff conclusively into our apartment, I lived right in that neighborhood, in one of a very few apartment buildings surrounded by the Pachinko parlors and bars and stuff. Loved every minute of it.

Actually, one of the cool things--movies are good at this--was the way Tokyo looked like Tokyo but without the dinginess. The Park Hyatt isn't dingy, of course; the interiors and views looked exactly as they do in real life. But the outdoor scenes--you could see the jumble of incongruous grey buildings and power lines and pylons and stuff, but it always moved by fast enough that the grit and crud weren't visible. Not that Tokyo's a dirty city by any stretch, but it is dusty and frequently tired-looking. Coppola and the actors saw only the jittery vitality. In that sense, I guess, I was able to see the place as non-Tokyo-dwellers do. (Some of the idealization strained reality to breaking point, though--just try finding a Tokyo karaoke bar that has "Brass in Pocket" and "More than This"!)

The movie wasn't, in any case, a disappointment, as one always fears when a gajillion people have said, "Oh, you absolutely have to see it!" Just in case, though, I did that thing where you rent a hyped-up movie you haven't seen and an old favorite you know you'll enjoy so the night won't be a total wash, you know? Atsushi hadn't seen Cruel Intentions, so it was kind of fun to watch him react to the adult-free, idealized Manhattan, let alone Sarah Michelle Gellar as a sociopath. Ryan Phillippe was okay, as always, except when he had to talk--or, more precisely, when he had to evolve as a character. One emotion per movie seems to be about his limit.

The funny part of the night was that after watching all this stuff about mopey, lost people who come this close to having an affair, and then about unsupervised teenagers engaged in elaborate revenge-screw plots, it was time to call my beyond-wholesome parents to wish them a happy 34th anniversary. (Did I mention that we'd also gone to the Moreau exhibit earlier in the day? When will Japanese museums learn about such obscure concepts as proper lighting, one is moved to wonder? Anyway, that was another hour and a half spent contemplating studies for paintings of Helen and Salome and the like.) It's probably a good thing the 'rents weren't home; I could hear how strange my tone sounded when I was talking to the answering machine. When we got up this morning, Atsushi, who devotes a good deal of energy to nudging me out of my lapses in filial piety, pointed out that there was still time to call them again before they went to bed and the day ended on the East Coast. By then, my mood had returned to normal somewhat.

Of course, I had to send him off an hour or so ago. At least this weekend I was able to feed him for three days. He says he's eating fine in Kyushu, but I don't buy a word of it. What do the old bags in his company's dining hall know about taking care of Atsushi? And let's not talk about the reheated food from 7-Eleven. Just three more years of this separation crap to go.

Even after the back-and-forth in the comments, I think Michael's being unnecessarily harsh and dismissive toward this Purdue junior. I do take Ace's point:

That was the part that got me...why would he yield to others to define and direct him as to which group he fits in? I pointed it out to Michael, not to be critical of the author, but because I'd love to believe that no young gay person will ever have to end up like Roy, and that gays--young and old--have so much promise for the future that we should all be grinning like fools, comfortable in our own skin.

Perhaps because I haven't been e-accosted by the Roy to whom Michael and Ace refer, I don't see his shadow everywhere.

To me, the letter writer just sounds like a college kid. He's immature and a bit too ready to inflate a petty campus personality conflict into a cosmic struggle, sure. That's college life. Graduation cures that for most people. They hit the real world and realize that they're the same size fish in, suddenly, a WAY bigger pond, and they make the necessary adjustments. It makes no sense to imply that some particular guy who's barely cracked his 20s might be on his way to a morose, whiny middle age because of a single letter to the editor.

Atsushi flies in tomorrow--have I ever told you how much I love the way Japan has bank holidays practically every month?--so this time around, I'm making the over-sugared French toast.

I also went shopping today. It's been a while since I greeted him at the door in a new outfit, and with fall pretty decisively, if anemically, here, another cool-weather shirt is always useful. Having been told by a stranger yet again this week, "You're from the States? Really? You look so European!" I decided to go Pointedly All-American.

Man, what is up with even Brooks Brothers's making (1) no-iron shirts that (2) have ostentatious logos on the chest? If you don't want fusty, old-fashioned clothes that need pressing, why go to Brooks Brothers? (Actually, it's not the lack of necessity of ironing that bothers me. It's that this wrinkle-free stuff doesn't look crisp even when it is pressed.) If you do want clothes that crassly announce how expensive they are to everyone else on the subway, why not go to Polo? At least Burberrys has enough of a sense of shame to have created diffusion labels to market all its label-on-the-outside goods under.

Unfortunately, the green + purple + orange plaid on offer was too utile to resist; being a secondary colors kind of guy, I'll be able to wear it under every sweater I own come November, and no one will be able to see the embroidered Golden blasted Fleece then anyway. That the cute sales guy told me the shirt was flattering had nothing to do with my handing over my credit card. No, really.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

Eric likes the Constitution State's Supreme Court's ruling on a First Amendment case a few days ago. (Well, the actual opinion is here.) Eric refers to a prior post of his:

Whether the imputation of homosexuality is defamatory these days is open to question, at least in some places.

Should it be?

If the imputation of homosexuality is defamation, then is that not itself an outright admission by the tort system that there is something so dreadful about homosexuality that we will allow you to sue others if they accuse you of it?

I'm kind of hors de combat on this particular issue, of course. I don't think people should get away with telling lies, but I don't see identifying someone as homosexual as some kind of smear in and of itself.

At the same time, I wish there weren't this sort of blanket statement (from Michigan's Between the Lines) from the opposite end of the spectrum. It's representative of what we hear in the run up to National Coming Out Day every year:

Readers of BTL's editorial pages in the past have heard us say it before, but it bears repeating: come out, come out wherever you are.

...

It is difficult to imagine how one could argue that staying in the closet enables a person to live a full, rewarding and emotionally healthy life. Heterosexuals, for example, would never dream of keeping their wives and husbands, boyfriends and girlfriends and even children a secret from their coworkers, neighbors, family and friends.

Oh, wouldn't they? People have been known to keep marriages secret for the sake of not angering parents who didn't give permission, or not giving the appearance of a conflict of interest if they met through business. Those arrangements aren't the hetero default setting, but you can't say straight people would "never dream" of keeping their relationships a secret.

Besides, everyone is subject to intrusive questions these days. I know more than one single straight person who's heartily sick of being asked when he's going to get married or why she hasn't settled down and had children yet. "Maybe if people thought I was gay they'd shut up and give me some peace," one exasperated career-focused acquaintance said to me once.

I don't want to slush things together to the point of being obtuse about the real issues that remain. I assume, though I haven't run about polling people, that most closeted gays would prefer not to have to be secretive about the relationships that matter to them most. Being known as gay, risky though it is, means that you don't have to mask something important about yourself when interacting with people. I think it's great to have public voices reminding closeted gays that, if they meet a hostile reception when coming out, their gay friends will stick by them and they won't be left to deal with the fallout alone.

But some people really do think that their sexuality is an individual matter and appreciate the way remaining unmarried allows them to avoid opening their private lives to public scrutiny. Why is it hard to believe that the way they live is "full, rewarding and emotionally healthy"? If you value personal liberty, you believe that people get to choose their own trade-offs, even if those trade-offs wouldn't suit you. The only people I think should be pressured into coming out--not, just so I'm clear, forcibly outed, but pitilessly encouraged to put their money where their squalling mouths are--are those who bitch that our public advocates haven't yet made it safe for them to do so. It's not Michelangelo Signorile's job to take your risks for you, honey.

People who have been reading me for a while will know that, suddenly and without warning, I occasionally deliver a rant the length of War and Peace about what my gay friends are doing to make themselves miserable. If you're just here for the Japan stuff (more of that coming tonight), you probably want to skip this post altogether.



There. I feel much better.

Several days ago I received a wonderful e-mail from reader Leslie W. She gave me permission to post it:

I wonder if gay guys have the same problem I do, being a lesbian who is amazed at how antagonistic literally every lesbian I know is about our not being let into a terribly boring party we're so desperately trying to crash! I just don't get this fixation on marriage as against civil unions. Though not religious in any institutional sense, I do respect the rights of traditionally religious people and do not see it as overarchingly "mean" for them to express the belief that marriage should be between a man and a woman. I also don't mind when people of that ilk assert that sex with someone of the same gender is sinful. Of course, I don't think that--and I always tell such people that it's OK to have that viewpoint but that they should check out Romans 2 before they ponder what punishment to inflict. But why should I be concerned with what they feel, much less with what they say? That is, unless what I'm really seeking is their absolute approval--cheap grace, you might say. If my rights as a citizen are genuinely threatened by a rightist religious agenda, I'll be among the first to man the barricades. But I'm very tired of the false oppression that so many lesbians claim as their lot in life, and I'm extremely weary of the us-them dynamic that permeates my milieu surely as much as any other.

Right. Just a dozen or so years ago, Bruce Bawer could write the following:

Committed gay couples exist by the millions, and it is unquestionably in the state's interest that homosexuals live in such couples rather than live alone and sleep around; why shouldn't the state, then, recognize those relationships as it does heterosexual commitments? For the state to do so would not deny to anyone the right to consider his or her marriage morally superior to my domestic partnership--or, for that matter, to anyone else's heterosexual marriage.

Note the lack of assumption that recognition of our relationships must call them marriages and, in every last finicking little respect, treat them as exactly THE SAME as straight relationships, lest some gay person's self-esteem be dinged. When was the last time you heard a gay public figure talk that way? Now it's all about enshrining our love for each other in state policy.

BTW, Leslie, and anyone else, if you're looking for sensible lesbian writing, check out Ace Pryhill. She supports marriage rather than civil unions, but I agree with her about big-picture issues of what legal recognition means and how it relates to individual responsibility.

Oh, and while I'm on the subject of e-mails and policies, it appears that this is a good time to formulate...well, an e-mail policy. I think this post from a few months back should get the point across.

I think this is the worst part: the time exactly between Atsushi's last visit and his next. In the few days before we see each other, I do the giddy-with-preparation thing. Right after he leaves, my worries over whether he's eating and sleeping right are animated by the fact that I've just been able to spend a few days taking care of him.

It's during the in-between time that I get--it isn't depressed. We're in a great situation compared to a lot of couples. It's just that my senses are slightly deadened. I don't do the slovenly-atavistic bachelor thing, of course. I just finished bustling around the kitchen to Mozart's 40th, making myself tea and poached eggs on toast with my usual homemade gravy and heating up some frozen ratatouille to go with it. (It's always funny how listening to music while cooking affects the result. One memorable weekend, Atsushi decided that he had to listen to, of all things, the death scene from Don Giovanni. Over and over and over. And this being a Japanese apartment, the living/dining/kitchen/non-bedroom space is all together, so I was auditing, as it were. I swear, my lasagne ended up viciously peaked and valleyed as if it were resisting being pulled into the pasta underworld. Since I poached today's eggs during the second movement of Mozart's 40th, they came out rather serene and perfect.) This afternoon will be sheet laundering. Atsushi's side of the bed no longer smells like him--just like sheets that need to be changed. And it's a very sunny fall day anyway. Good for airing things.

Since it's 1 October, I will also ritually listen to this album. It's amazing how silly half-superstitious fanboy habits don't desert you even when you've been a stodgy adult for a decade. It's almost a shame about the weather. I mean, that it's not a very good backdrop to the music. It's certainly cooler than it was a few weeks ago, but there's no real nip in the air during the day time. You don't get a sense that nature is hunkering down for winter. Not yet. (Of course, given the candy-assed winter we get in Tokyo, it's not really any wonder. As a transplanted Pennsylvanian, I miss snow, and the ubiquitous sleet and freezing rain hardly make up for it. I miss deer and maples with big leaves, too.)

Even so, I'm trying to speed it along a bit. The sweaters are within easy reach. See, weather gods? Sweaters--like what you wear when it's chilly. I realized, reaching for a short-sleeved job on one of the first cool days last week, that my favorite orange pullover, which it was stacked on top of, is almost exactly five years old. I bought it when Atsushi and I were I-think-we're-kind-of-dating-but-I'm-not-sure-ing. I figured that for a drive in the countryside (one of our first outings), it was best to aim for a sort of all-American rugged-but-potentially-huggable thing. Not sure whether it worked, though the ultimate result was clearly in my favor. I wish Atsushi were closer, but you can't have everything.