The White Peril 白禍

There was a not-too-bad article in The Japan Times a few days ago--how often do I type that?--about what real, live Japanese gays think of Masaki Sumitani, a.k.a. Hard Gay. The writer can't resist drawing hammy attention to what a broad-minded sensi-hetero he is, which is a little trying:

How right can it be to satirize people who are so marginalized in Japanese society that they have effectively no freedom to respond?

An official at Yoshimoto Kogyo Co., Hard Gay's promotion company, said neither the comedian nor the company intend [sic--dude, find yourself a persnickety-grammarian fag friend and get him to explain the finer points of correlative conjunctions--SRK] to insult anyone.

Still, the logical thing seemed to be to ask some Japanese homosexuals what they think of Hard Gay--whose handlers, by the way, say that he is straight and has a girlfriend.

What did he find when he asked around? Some gays think Hard Gay is funny. He makes them laugh. Some gays think Hard Gay is mocking homosexuals. That makes them sad. And some gays don't pay much attention one way or another. He makes them feel bored.

A real revelation, huh?

It's hard to fault the reporter, exactly. Being in the position of weighing the positions of people whose world he doesn't inhabit, he probably figured it was wise to keep asking around until he got one yes, one no, and one neither on the issue raised just to keep all the bases covered. Also, if you're a foreign reporter who wants to find out what gay people think about this or that, you probably have little choice but to wander to Shinjuku 2-chome, choose a prominently gay shop with an open front door (implying that non-regulars are welcome), and start talking to the guy behind the counter. Or to look up gay organizations in the phone directory and start dialing.

Unfortunately, that kind of approach produces the same problems that "researchers" who are taken more seriously get into when they conduct "studies" by trawling for subjects at bars or in classified ads, and they're worth looking at. While he got a set of varied opinions, it's questionable whether he talked to a representative sample of gay Japanese people.

Guys who own gay shops and bars are, obviously, those who have elected to work as well as socialize in gay life. Gay organizations have relatively low memberships, too--partially because a lot of people would be scared to be on their mailing lists and things, but also because such organizations just aren't very popular in Japan. (Most people have their hands full conforming to all the expectations within their companies and neighborhoods. The last thing they need is another group to be beholden to.) And obviously the sorts of people who are going to join a study circle dedicated to solemnly working out their feelings about a TV character are going to constitute a self-selecting sample. The Japan Times was therefore talking to a sample of the gay population that had an unusual amount of energy to devote to sitting around thinking about the meaning of homosexuality in society.

That doesn't mean there was nothing to learn from them. Their opinions are as genuine as anyone else's--though the reporter doesn't seem to have cared much that the guy from the Sapporo organization he talked is transgendered and not even gay. But experience leads me to suspect that the representative opinion was the one relegated to this throwaway paragraph:

Other gays felt pretty much the same, he said. "We don't really talk about him [Hard Gay] much."

I don't know a scientific sample of the gay Japanese population myself, probably, but my acquaintance would seem to square with that. I have quite a few friends who hang out in little pub-like Shibuya gay bars and rarely venture to Ageha or 2-chome or other more high-profile places. They tend to be ordinary office worker types who don't know many foreigners besides me. The other Japanese guys I know are those who like foreigners and hang out in 2-chome at the handful of foreigner-friendly places. Many of them have spent significant time in the States or places in the British Commonwealth and thus can compare gay life here to gay life in other places.

And I've only ever heard Hard Gay mentioned twice. Once, someone told an acquaintance of mine that he looked like him, which he does (his facial features, I mean). Another time, when I went out in a black T-shirt of somewhat unforgiving cut, one of the bar guys cracked that I was "looking very Hard Gay." ("No, he just looks like a homo as always," a friend piped up.)

Otherwise, nothing, even at gatherings where uncensored bitchy opinions are flowing freely about anything and everything. The implication of the article's conclusion, that there are a lot of gay Japanese who would protest about Hard Gay's image if they felt at liberty to, doesn't strike me as plausible. If pressed, I guess most people I know would say that while Sumitani's antics are a bit much, at least the stereotype he's reinforcing is one of vigor rather than nelliness, and you can't expect things to change in Japan overnight.

Even the acknowledgment that gays exist in Japan represents progress. Open homosexuals are at a disadvantage here, but so are career women and ethnic Koreans. This is a society that values conformity above all, and everyone is used to the fact. Everyone here has secrets. In general, if you preserve the expected public face, no one is going to interrogate you about your private life. We can question whether it should have to be that way in an ideal world, but the gay guys I know all pretty much seem to accept with equanimity that that's the way it is for now and that it's a trade-off they can live with.

I would just like it to be known that I'm all topped out on Alans. My best friend is named Alan. There's a reader and commenter here with whom I sometimes correspond named Alan. There's another Alan--from the same city in the UK as my friend, no less--whom I've now met enough times that it's going to be considered rude pretty soon if I don't remember his name. And a few nights ago I met yet another Alan who's here in Tokyo indefinitely who will also, presumably, tire quickly of being told, "Sorry, man, I forgot your name again."

Major cognitive dissonance here.

I mean, when you're an American my age, you expect to know 90 Michaels (of whom, if you're gay and hang out with people in the Tribe a lot, only 15 will go by Mike), 80 Brians (bonus points for being able to remember who's an i and who's a y), 60 Jasons, and 50 Stephens (including the Stevens and Steves, naturally). You never start to greet someone you know casually and think, Wait a minute--this can't be Brian; I already saw Brian an hour ago. If you don't know multiple Brians, you don't get out much.

Also, if you live in Japan...well, the language only has forty-odd syllables, so you quickly become accustomed to not referring to Shinji or Jun or Taka in a conversation without making it clear whom you're talking about before proceeding.

Alan, however? Perfectly nice name. I've come to associate "Hey, Alan" with a feeling of "Am I ever glad to see you, honey!" and warm greeting back of "Hiya, darlin'." But I have trouble remembering names so as it is, and even though I'm aware that there can be clustering in perfectly random statistical samples, who knows four Alans? Anyway, the Alan-storage synapses in my brain are now officially full.

So if you're a gay guy called Alan and plan to be running into me in the near future, please distinguish yourself by changing your name to, say, Fred first. Or, if that seems like too much trouble, go hetero.

Much obliged.

What would you think if you read something like this from a professional psychologist (via Eric Scheie)?

Personally, I'm skeptical about turning gay people straight. But shouldn't the client be the one to choose, not the APA? The APA has decided that the answer is no.

Not only did the APA deny CE (Continuing Education) credit to professionals attending the annual NARTH conference in November, stating that "The program content is not consistent with APA policy" but the APA is attempting to declare therapy to modify sexual orientation unethical (National Psychologist, March,April 2006). Nicholas Cummings and Rogers Wright, authors of Destructive Trends in Mental Health,talk about the APA's attempt to silence those who disagree with their positions.

There are plenty of possible responses to Dr. Helen here. For example, despite the APA's generally liberal political bent, perhaps it has honestly noticed that "reparative" therapists don't seem to be able to produce much beyond Carol Gilligan-level anecdotal evidence that their conclusions are grounded in reality. At the same time, she is clearly taking the position that people should be free to pursue happiness their own way without paternalistic interference. Bully for her for championing individual self-determination and raising thorny questions about a subject a lot of people reflexively avoid, right?

Well, not if you're downtownlad. If you're downtownlad, Dr. Helen should be named in a class action suit. She's a closed-minded conservative. She should also have another heart attack. And everyone who agrees with her is not only a moron but a stupid moron. There are probably a few more gems in his avalanche of comments there, but you get the general idea.

I've had downtownlad blogrolled for a while; I miss New York, and his posts about the City are often good reads.

Not so his stuff about gay issues.

His coming out was pretty recent and, by his own very moving account, rocky. As far as I'm concerned, people who haven't been out long get some leeway if they're a little touchy and extra-combative about gay stuff. But no one in his mid-30s gets enough leeway to accommodate looking forward to someone's next heart attack. I don't care whether you just came out ten minutes ago and were driven from your parents' house by your entire knife-brandishing extended family--if you've been an adult for over a decade, you are supposed to know how to handle yourself in public, and if you're not up to it, you keep still until you've regained your equanimity. When you cross a line or two--I've certainly been known to--you apologize and discipline yourself not to do it again.

Would that it were only his tone that was objectionable, but the content doesn't entirely wash, either. There are few beliefs propagated by some of my fellow homos that drive me up the wall more than the idea that the pain and isolation we experience up until we come out exhausts our full lifetime ration of misery and that, therefore, it's society's job to make us feel good about ourselves from that point on. No, no one ever actually puts it that way, but the implicit belief that any questions raised about gay life are in and of themselves anti-gay or [yawn] homophobic seems to govern a lot of the public debate.

But life doesn't work like that for ANYONE. Fat people, Mormons, and folks with Appalachian accents who move to the big city come in for their share of callous judgments, and they're expected to deal. If they decide they'd like to change, no one goes bananas trying to prevent them, even in cases in which it seems they'd probably be happier just accepting themselves.

Homosexual behavior only began to be decriminalized very recently. No one should be bowled over by the fact that a lot of people still have strong positions against it. Or by the fact that some people are unhappy being homosexual themselves. Or by the fact that parents who wish their kids weren't homosexual will try everything they can to remold them--the same way pushy parents who want their artistic kids to become lawyers or want their bookish kids to play on the football team do. One need not like such situations to acknowledge that bureaucratic fiat is a bad way to try to address them, especially when it's alloyed with identity politics. As Eric sensibly says:

The issue was once whether there's a right to be gay. Over the years that has morphed into the crazy idea that if you are gay, you must always remain gay because it is your identity, and that the slightest disagreement with this idea constitutes the direst threat, and actually causes harm. This makes no sense, and I think it's a form of intolerance motivated by a type of insecurity similar to (although not as extreme as) what we've been seeing in the case of people who went ballistic over the Muhammad cartoons.

A settled mind is generally a resilient one. People who have chosen their way of life by working candidly through their own inner conflicts and making peace with the elements do not, as a rule, get all edgy at the very idea that someone else might find happiness by making the opposite choice. As gays, we're a population that's almost impossible to study without sampling biases, so people have to do the best they can with fragmentary information. That's life. It is infantilizing to try to insulate people from reality rather than encourage them to meet it head-on. Is this what our elder brothers and sisters broke their heads against convention for three decades ago?

What would you do without your friends, right?

Yesterday I turned thirty-four. Dinner was arranged by the manager at a favorite bar of mine. I grew up in a religious sect in which you didn't celebrate people's birthdays--if we're not going to celebrate Christ's, we're not going to celebrate yours, right?--so I'm always a little uncomfortable with the idea of having attention lavished on me just because I happened to emerge from the womb the same day on the calendar as Taylor Dayne.

At the same time, you don't tell people you value that you don't feel like having the party they want to give you. So we went out for Thai food. Morning glory stems, and chicken satay, and green papaya salad, and chicken green curry, and all that. Yummy as always. Predictably but hilariously bitchy present from my friend A. Some incense--proper incense and no scented candle crapola--and some sweets. Made out like a homosexual bandit.

And then we went to GB. Cake. For me? Thanks, guys. Really. It's great. Very prettily covered with strawberries.

Very prettily.

You all know I'm allergic to strawberries, right?

Or I probably am. A few years ago, I ate a fruit salad, and my throat swelled up, and I had to go to the emergency room and they had to shoot me up with adrenaline. The doctors gave me the interrogation about what I'd consumed immediately before getting hives. Judging by what I was used to eating and, I can only assume, by what kinds of fruits tend to be responsible for allergies, the dermatologist on overnight duty told me that it must have been the strawberries or the star fruit. Or it might have been a one-time reaction brought on by stress. I'd lived in Japan for five years by that point, so I was used to hearing doctors make pronouncements along the lines of, "Maybe next time you eat strawberries, you'll be fine. Or you could go into anaphylactic shock and die. Do you really need to eat strawberries and find out?" Clearly not, especially since the sight of them now makes me vaguely nauseated.

Pretty much everyone I know knows this. I'm known for it. In fact, I mentioned it again a week or so ago when the guys asked whether I had any of those weirdo foreigner-type food preferences. Then they must have forgotten, which is perfectly understandable.

So last night the strawberry cake appeared. I smiled (sincerely) in gratitude and cut the cake for everyone (sincerely) and said it looked delicious (sincerely--I mean, they were very ripe, luscious-looking strawberries...that nauseated me, but I was editing that part out). I then, sotto voce, asked my friends sitting next to me to change plates with me and hork my slice so I didn't look as if I'd not eaten my share. One problem: the guy who'd gotten the cake--I've known him for years and he kind of has a soft spot for me--was tending bar right in front of us. Consternation. Pushing cake around on plate a bit, beaming with what I hoped looked like the anticipation of pleasure. Ooh, spied a friend on the opposite side of the bar. It would be rude to eat up my cake before going over and greeting him, especially since he's making a-toast-to-you-on-your-birthday signals at me. (His version of "Happy birthday!" consisted of "You don't look a day over thirty-six, baby!" These queers, I tell ya.)

Finally! An opening. The guy who'd been in charge of getting the cake went to the bathroom.

It was like one of Lucille Ball's sitcom machinations, only it actually worked. I shoved my plate in front of Friend 1, who inhaled the strawberries arrayed thereon. Friend 2--A. himself, who comes to my rescue way too often--was on lookout. When the toilet door opened, I was ready: sitting all calm-like with my fork idly mashing the remaining bits of cake. Since we'd all been complaining about how full we were from dinner, I figure it didn't sound strange for me to say, "Thanks a lot, man--it was beautiful" and push away my not-quite-clean paper plate.

I wasn't lying. It had been beautiful.

Added on 9 March: I seem to have done the forget-how-PowerBlogs-works thing again and revised this post from a window I reached through the Back button and not by choosing the Edit function the right way. I think I've caught everything redundant or fragmentary.

Brokeback Heap-o-Hype may not have won Best Picture, but its inevitable bunny parody is up (via Ghost of a Flea).

Richard Rosendall's newest column posted to IGF is on the verbose and meandering side, but he outlines the strategic problems in the current push for gay marriage or civil unions pretty well. One passage that puzzles me, as things like this always do:

Being in love, I sympathize with those who are unwilling to wait for a more conducive political climate. Unfortunately, wanting equality now does not make it so, any more than demanding my two-minute egg instantaneously will make it cook any faster. But while we remind our compatriots that our struggle is a long-term one, we must deal with the reality that some gay people will ignore us and go charging off making messes that the rest of us will have to deal with.

Not just the rest of us, though--those who come after, too. After all, that's what makes the "long-term" part important. The problem, to extend Rosendall's metaphor, is not just whether we get our eggs as fast as we'd like but whether it ends up that gays who come up in future generations get any eggs at all.

And that very first participial phrase suggests that Rosendall is also not attuned to one of the other crucial dividing lines in this debate: those who see public policy in the role of validating love and conferring dignity on people vs. those who simply want the government to get out of the way while they arrange to take care of each other.

The latter consideration is important enough. Last month, after the New York state legislature voted to allow people to make burial decisions for their domestic partners, Ex-Gay Watch posted about this astonishing bit of argument through cheap expediency by Robert Knight of Concerned Women for America:

"Family has been given preference for a reason," says the pro-family leader. "And to say that grieving parents, for instance, just have no rights over what happens to their child's body is a perversion of the law."

Interesting. I assume that if a single woman brought up in a Muslim (or Wiccan, or atheist) family converted to Christianity and then formally designated someone she trusted in her new congregation to take care of her body, CWF would say that the law should allow her parents to give her a non-Christian burial anyway?

The fact is that our country wouldn't even exist if men and women of principle had not been willing to leave behind traditions of their elders that they could not in good conscience agree with. It's a shame that estrangement within families sometimes happens, but it's a fact of life in free societies for plenty of reasons besides homosexuality. While we can all agree that community living involves duties, the idea that an adult's registered instructions regarding the disposal of his or her own body should be overridden as a sop to his weeping relatives should be chilling to anyone who professes to prize liberty.

Speaking of sentiment, framing the discussion about marriage or civil unions in terms of how much we loooooovvvvve one another only invites people to think of the issue in terms of feelings. Does it still need to be pointed out that most people's feelings about homosexuality are ambivalent at best? Even gay marriage advocates who have meatier arguments about rights and responsibilities to make frequently slip into lugubrious pronouncements about needing marriage for "validation."

All that notwithstanding, Rosendall's essential point is sound: On the gay side, we need to look for ways to give each other a fair hearing and find points to cooperate on, even as we acknolwedge that, in a free society, gay advocacy is never going to be "unified."

Whew. Fever-pitch week. Friend whose boyfriend dumped him a few weeks ago decided to break Rule #1. He--not making this up, guys--showed up at our hang-out looking for my friend. Found him. Proceeded to tell him, "You know our friendship is very important to me."

"It's not that I don't care about you--you know that, too, right?"

"I miss having you around."

"You have no idea how hard it was for me to break up with you."

You can imagine the rest. I showed up about halfway through this particular scene and took a post on the opposite side of the bar until it became clear that it was Intervention Time. I put on my best clueless-American-being-heartily-friendly act and wandered over. "Evan! [blink-blink] Have you been here the whole time? I just got here ten minutes ago." I gave him the chance to give me the look that says, "Now isn't a good time" and got the look that says, "Help!" Luckily, he's a strong-minded guy, so he just needed an hour or two of being listened to. I still entered the weekend kind of drained.

Luckily, Atsushi was here, which always improves things. When we went out for dinner last night, we were, purely by chance, given a private room at the restaurant. That was not only nice but also useful, since when the waiter brought our lamb ribs, he deposited moist handtowels next to the plates and said, in that gravely expressionless waiter voice, "To enjoy it to the last morsel, you'll have to pick up the bones and eat the meat off them." So Atsushi and I got to sit on opposite sides of a table and watch each other hungrily sucking meat off bones. Put me in a very...you know...primal mood.

Speaking of primal--or rather, atavistic--I also polished off While Europe Slept. Yet another reason to be glad Atsushi was nearby, since reading deeply disturbing stuff like that is always easier when your man is reassuringly at the other end of the sofa. And it was disturbing, though a lot of the reportorial details are familiar if you've been paying attention to the news over the last several years. Some passages also seem to be adapted from this essay of Bruce Bawer's a while back (not that that's a problem). In a way, the flat-out atrocities and terrorist acts weren't as rattling as, say, this passage on p. 57, which made me snarf my Earl Grey:

In many Western European countries, indeed, some laws are different for natives than for immigrants. For native Swedes, the minimum age for marriage is eighteen; for immigrants living in Sweden, there is no minimum. In Germany, an ethnic German who marries someone from outside the EU and wants to bring him to her to Germany must answer a long list of questions about the spouse's birth date, daily routine, and so forth in order to prove that the marriage is legitimate and not pro forma; such interviews are not required for German residents with, say, Turkish or Pakistani backgrounds, for it is assumed that their marriages have been arranged and that the spouses will therefore know little or nothing about each other.

I live in a country in which there are different rules for natives and foreigners, but here--quite justifiably, as far as I'm concerned--the laws favor, you know, the natives. (I try to hold out hope that the normally-exacting Bawer is misinterpreting something in the German legal code, but the phrasing he uses neither is ambiguous itself nor seems to refer to the kind of policy that could easily be misrepresented.) Sheesh. (See also this by the Grand Stander.)

Added on 6 March: My parents and I kind of have an arrangement whereby they treat Atsushi like one of the family but we don't discuss gay stuff head-on. I'm amused, though, by the way their Christmas present to him always manages to seem subliminally racy. Here's this year's:



Yes, yes, "Intercourse, PA" is a cheap schoolboy joke. But still, my parents live at the edge of Pennsylvania Dutch country. Every town significant enough to have a crossroads has some little collective of farms that makes jelly and relishes. There's nothing easier than NOT choosing the ones made in, of all places, Intercourse.

Of course, my thinking is probably affected by last year. This was what arrived for Atsushi for Christmas 2004:



As I said at the time, to the extent that I could form words while laughing, "I would call this a coded message of approval for our relationship, but I'm guessing there wasn't quite that much subtext intended."

As Michael says, The Onion knows exactly what it's doing...only...every straight man I've ever encountered has finished the sentence "If I were a gay man..." with "...dude, I would so totally HAVE SEX ALL THE TIME." I feel the omission of that particular soul cry lends a false note to the proceedings.

But the article, now a few years old, is still hilarious.

To switch to the comfortably out, Atsushi comes home for the weekend tomorrow. Since I have the day off and have the time to prepare something, I was going to ask him what he wanted for brunch, but I know the answer already. His favorite dish is plain broiled chicken--that's what he always asks for, even when I tell him I'm willing to go to National Azabu to get a turkey for Thanksgiving or try to find a goose for Christmas. I like a man with an appreciation for the austere.

Well, with pan gravy. Drippy, luscious pan gravy with way too much of the fat from butter.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

Too much time, too little to do!

No, wait. That's not it.

Anyway, quick link to this Open Source radio interview with Camille Paglia about the resignation of Larry Summers from the presidency of Harvard (via Rondi Adamson).

I haven't actually heard her speak for a decade or so, so I was interested to hear what she sounded like at fifty-nine. Believe it or not, she's mellowed. I mean, she talks at a more leisured pace. Of course, you can still tell she's spent her entire life chatting with artfags--Girlfriend italicizes all her adjectives: everything is "extra-orrrr-dinary!" or "un-pah-latable!" But she actually talks slowly enough that you can digest what she's saying now. She certainly didn't the few times I heard her lecture in college, which was part of the fun.

Even more, I think, than Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bawer, or Jonathan Rauch, Paglia gave me a feeling of assurance--her media fame was skyrocketing on the other side of the city while I was in college--that you could be bookishly gay without being either a picturesquely noble AIDS sufferer or a high-strung spoiled brat. I'm glad she's still materializing to talk about educational reform and PC perniciousness sometimes, because the problems she was addressing in 1991 are still with us.