Boots - a review of the TV series

It's easy these days to succumb to dismay or even depression over the efforts of the oafish Pied Piper in the White House to dismantle democracy in the U.S.A.  Two hundred and fifty years we've been at this project, trying to include more and more of the American populace into our sometimes hit sometimes miss effort to make the Enlightenment ideals in our founding documents a reality.  We are in an era where our steps forward seem to be wiped out by steps backwards.  But... but... I'm writing this on October 18 and the images are coming in of millions in the streets of all fifty states on No Kings Day, so the fat lady ain't sung yet.

It's always useful to be reminded of how far we've come.  It's for that reason I just sat through the eight Netflix episodes of Boots, a series inspired by The Pink Marine, a book by Greg Cope White, about his experiences as a gay man in the Marines in the days before "Don't Ask Don't Tell."  Normally I don't take a lot of pleasure in beating my head against the wall, but I read somewhere that the fact that it was spread over eight episodes meant it was able to track the progress of gay liberation in the military that paralleled the progress in society at large, and who doesn't like happy endings?

There were times when I thought I'd wandered into enemy territory.  Boots is gay history and ultimately a coming out story with a happy ending.  But it is also a full-throated endorsement of the world of macho men and the U.S. Marines.  The story takes place at a basic training camp where "boys are made into men" - i.e., where they learn to shout "kill" at every opportunity and grit their teeth against pain.  I wanted to turn it off at times.  The reason I didn't was that the acting was superb and the gay characters were complex personalities.  There are multiple sub-plots, all shedding light on contemporary American minority groups.  The lead character, Cameron, and his best friend, Ray, join the Marines to get away from home. Cameron is running from his mother's neglect, Ray from his father's pitiless machismo.  They wonder at times if they haven't moved from the frying pan into the fire when Cam gets bullied for being gay and Ray for being a mixed-race kid.  There's a lot of bullying, in fact.  The recruits are not the most enlightened of folk.

I discovered, once I got far enough into it, that one of Boots' producers was Norman Lear. The company is headed by a female captain, there are twin brothers working out family dynamics, a suicide, masochistic leadership, and plenty of examples of selfish kids learning to care for their fellow recruits.The characters grow and mature over time, and that is probably the reason why I couldn't put it down.  It's a superb sociological study of America's difficulty in handling its diversity.  

And lots of jingoism and chauvinism.  You have to take the less appealing with the more appealing.

Semper fi!

Coming out Takei

Some years ago now, maybe thirty, pressures from my job at Keio University in Japan had reached a boiling point and I decided what I needed to clear my head and free my spirit was to drive across the U.S. I had done it twice before and it had worked wonders.  So one summer day in the early 90s I headed out from my U.S. home in Berkeley, California to visit my family and the place I grew up in Connecticut.  Two of my students from my work home in Japan asked if they could come with me. I decided the trek would be better with their company than heading out by my lonesome, so I said yes. 

Not long after starting out, still in California, we found ourselves driving through Manzanar, one of the ten forced relocation camps set up to house Americans of Japanese ancestry between March 1942 and November 1945 when Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, acting on a phantom fear that Japanese immigrants somehow posed more of a wartime threat than other immigrants from around the world, including my German-born mother and the many Italian-American friends I grew up with in the post-war 1940s and 50s.  Both boys were familiar with the name and insisted we stop.

Since our visit, Manzanar has become a monument and a museum to injustice.  But when the three of us got out of the car, the first thing that struck us was that the place had been swept clean of all traces of its historical significance.  There was nothing to see but sand and dust and a bit of desert vegetation.  Nothing to indicate it had once housed ten thousand men, women and children whose only justification for their interment was their race.  Most spoke only English and had never known any home but their Sacramento, Los Angeles or other West-Coast cities and towns.

The boys were outraged at the conspicuous effort to sanitize this ugly chapter in American history, and I felt a deep sense of shame over this obvious backslide in the American effort to form an ever more perfect democracy.

I am married to a Japanese.  He is also an American citizen, which makes him, at least technically, an issei (first generation Japanese immigrant), and we live in large part in a Japanese-American cultural space. So when George Takei's second graphic novel, It Rhymes with Takei, came out this year, Taku ordered a copy and I devoured it in two sittings in two days.  That led me to turn to his first graphic novel, They Called Us Enemy, published in 2020, which I had not gotten around to reading - and finished it off in another day.

George Takei is best known as the actor who played Helmsman Hikaru Sulu in the original version of Star Trek.  He lived as a closeted gay man till the age of 68, fearing that revealing that he was gay would lead to the end of his acting career.  In It Rhymes with Takei, he makes up for lost time by narrating his personal coming out story.  In time, he marries his lifelong partner, Brad Altman, who then takes the Takei family name.  George and Brad Takei have since dedicated their lives to the two causes of gay liberation and raising the awareness of the injustice of Executive Order 9066.

I live in constant awareness of the debt I owe to the lesbians and gay men who paved the way for me to live my life as an openly gay man. When Taku and I got married at San Francisco City Hall in 2013 we not only got to use the rotunda but were thrilled to learn that the ceremony would take place right by the bust of Harvey Milk.  And we saw as icing on the cake the fact that the mother of the woman marrying us had sworn Harvey Milk in when he became San Francisco Supervisor. 

I still use the word "husband" self-consciously when I identify my life partner.  But I use it freely, aware that I get to do so by standing on the shoulders of heroes to the gay liberation movement such as Harvey Milk and Bayard Rustin, the organizer of Martin Luther King's March on Washington.  Since San Francisco is known world-wide as a center - some even call it the capital - of the gay liberation movement, it has been hard not to get jaded with the coming out stories I've listened to and nodded in sympathy with. I've heard many voices suggesting it's time to stop reducing gay liberation to the moment of coming out and simply enjoy the freedom to be openly gay without repercussion.  So were it not for the fact that George Takei also portrays his life as a struggle to process the indignity of Executive Order 9066, I might have put his coming out on the back burner. Instead, reading his two books back to back has caused me to focus on the dark side of American history, now, right at the time when I've been trying to avoid the relentless 24/7 news of the ways American democracy is being systematically dismantled.

My political orientation is on the progressive side of the spectrum, so I share the view that patriotism is both a worthy sentiment and that it involves recognition of the fact that the democracy project involves occasional steps backwards. I get impatient with the folks on the right whose familiarity with the global refugee problem is out of date. But even back in the times when we were among the more sought after destinations for asylum seekers, America's inclination to pat itself on the back was unworthy. And leftists today angry at the Trump administration for scooping innocents off the street and sending them to concentration camps in El Salvador, sabotaging its relations with it neighbors Canada and Mexico and with its friends in Europe and around the world, need to remember the genocide of the American Indians and the long years of slavery and segregation. But also the shameful fact that the uprooting of loyal Japanese-American immigrants on the West Coast was due to a racist inability to see them the same way as we saw German or Italian immigrants on the East Coast, as people who had left their homelands behind and taken on an American identity. There are ways to determine whether an immigrant is loyal. Race is not one of them.

Fully comfortable in my skin as a "good-as-the-next-guy" American despite my gay (and can I add German-American Japan-resident) identities, I feel a yawn coming on when faced with coming-out stories.  So very "been-there-done-that." But as I was reading George Takei's books I found my mind wandering.  A good book can take you up and away from preoccupation with the here-and-now.  It can set you down in a place where you wouldn't otherwise choose to go to.  I found myself seeing the familiar in a new way and focusing on the many whose lives go unnoticed.  

It's easy to become despondent over the efforts of the JD Vances and Stephen Millers of the world to dismantle American democracy.  And easy to overlook somebody like Alan Turing, whose work in breaking the Nazi codes contributed directly to the defeat of Hitler.  Or Oliver Sipple, who grabbed the arm of President Ford's would-be assassin in 1975 and saved his life.  Sipple was then outed as a gay man and his career went into the toilet.  Turing's fate was even more harsh.  He was driven to suicide after exposure of his secret.  Reading It Rhymes with Takei brought me not only back in time to my own coming-out youth; it brought me back to the life of Alan Turing.  George Takei has had the benefit of the years of positive social change that his predecessors lacked, but it still took him sixty-eight years to come out nonetheless.  It Rhymes with Takei and They Called Us Enemy are valuable pieces of the historical record of what men and women, heroic and non-heroic, go through to shake off social prejudice. 

One final comment - about Takei's decision to tell his stories in manga (graphic novel) form.* My years in Japan were crucial to my way of making sense of the world and my years as a teacher put me in a learning environment where education is regularly defined as "leading one out of" ignorance and stale assumptions. As I picked up Takei's graphic novels, I remembered a conversation with one of my students who heard me sneer at the ubiquitous manga in the hands of fellow train companions during my long commutes in Japan.  "Nobody reads anymore!" I complained.  

"You need to broaden your perspective," my student suggested.  "You place too much stress on the written word; you're missing the many ways people today take in information." He was right.  A picture is still worth a thousand words, and a graphic depiction of an event, if done right, can be a powerful means of conveying a story.

I believe that Japanese-American George Takei knew what he was doing when he chose to share his life in manga form.

*"Manga" is the way the first two syllables of the word "magazine" are pronounced in the Tokyo (and standard) dialect of Japanese.  Japanese tends to adopt only the first two syllables of multi-syllabic English loan words.

If you can't stand it, you gotta fix it

I have lots of reasons for feeling good about my decision many years go to make San Francisco my home.  Not the least of these is the fact that when my husband and I got married, back in 2013, we were able to do so in the rotunda of City Hall, right by the bust of and memorial to Harvey Milk. Milk and the mayor at the time, George Moscone, were assassinated in 1978 by a homophobic "all-American boy" and ex-policeman, and became martyrs to the gay cause. In time, the ugly side of the killing receded enough for the contributions of "The Mayor of Castro Street," as Harvey Milk came to be referred to, became a major source of pride for LGBT people.  I no longer get to events like today's march - it's too taxing on these old bones - but I have no doubt that many in the crowd of today's 55th annual pride parade at least uttered his name in passing.

There is icing on the cake that was being able to marry at San Francisco City Hall.  The woman who married us was the daughter of the woman who swore Harvey Milk in way back when he first entered San Francisco politics.  And I have a poster of the film, Milk, starring Sean Penn, posted on my bedroom door, a film I managed to get into as an extra, by the way.

There is an excellent article in today's Sunday New York Times by Andrew Sullivan, in the Opinion section, making the argument that we have gone too far in the LGBT movement by bending over backwards to support the trans folk among us by agreeing to cast off the distinction between male and female as biological categories. If you're "with it" these days, and you're out there marching in the streets and protesting the notion that "gender assigned at birth" needs to give way to gender as a choice, he claims, you're actually providing ammunition to the right-wingers who would "Make America Great Again" and take us back to the 1950s, where a woman's place was in the kitchen, blacks knew not to "get uppity" and gay people lived in closets.

I'm probably exaggerating Sullivan's point, but not by much.  And right on cue, there's a news item out today about how Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, one of Trump's most conspicuous ass-kissers, removed the name of the navy's oil replenishment ship Harvey Milk, allegedly because it should not have been named for woke reasons in the first place. OK.  But then why did he leave intact the names of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Harriet Tubman, Thurgood Marshall, Earl Warren and Robert F. Kennedy, among others in the class of ships named after John Lewis?  Maybe he just hasn't gotten around to it.  Maybe I'm being paranoid that he started with Harvey Milk.

This year also marks the twentieth anniversary of a film that lives within me as possibly the most powerful movie ever made, Brokeback Mountain.  Movie critic Matt Baume has just seen it again and compares the sadness he felt watching it for the first time with the anger he felt this time around.  Have a look at his take on this important piece of cinematic history.  Baume makes the point I wish more people would make.  Following the line the Heath Ledger character, Ennis, utters, "if you can't fix it...you gotta stand it," Baume argues Ennis has that exactly backwards; it should be: "If you can't stand it, you gotta fix it."

Fifty-five years of Gay Pride parades. Things are far better than I every imagined, twenty years ago and before. I'm married to a man and I live in a world comfortable with, even highly supportive of that fact.

But I also live in a country where, as I pointed out in my last blog entry, the president can still insult Germany's chancellor by implying he was a Nazi supporter, and his Secretary of Defense can still remove Harvey Milk's name from a naval vessel because homophobia lives on in the hearts of a critical mass of Americans and we lack the will or the skill to fix it.

The Boyfriend - a review

A gay reality show?  From Japan?  You've got to be kidding.  Could Japan's essentially conservative nature really have undergone this dramatic - not to say unbelievable - transformation in recent years?  I thought Japanese society was an inherently homophobic society.  Not of the thuggish Islamicist sort where gays are thrown off of tall buildings, or even of the gay-basher sort common to many parts of Europe and America, but of a kinder gentler sort, where gays are simply shunned for being just a bit too far over the line from "normal" behavior.

That's one possible reaction many will likely have after watching the Netflix production just out called The Boyfriend. And it was my first reaction, as someone who has spent twenty-four years of his life in Japan in two segments, one from 1970 to 1974 and a second one, after a hiatus of fifteen years, from 1989 to 2006, plus several shorter stays in between. I was an out gay man from San Francisco, but I determined it was in my best interest when I took a job as a professor at a Japanese university to go back in the closet. True, that may have been an unduly fearful decision on my part - and I did come out again in time - but I had plenty of confirmation from other LGBT men and women that I was doing the smart thing.

But - to return to the topic of the Netflix ten-episode series The Boyfriend, there are at least a couple of much simpler, more straightforward explanations for why a reality show with gay characters should suddenly appear on Japanese television. One is that gay liberation is finally catching up with Japan. It's not ready yet to allow same-sex marriages, but five months ago, in March of this year, both a Tokyo district court and a Sapporo high court challenged the ban on same-sex marriage, and it would appear it's only a matter of time. Netflix is probably seizing the moment.  Whether for cynical reasons (gays are still an entertaining curiosity) or profit-motive reasons (romance sells and the general population is now ready for LGBT love stories) I leave for others to figure out.

Another explanation is that it's not a particularly remarkable event in the first place. Japan has traditionally allowed parallel worlds to exist between people in the everyday world and people in the arts. Japan is the land of the geisha, after all, and men in drag appear regularly on modern-day television, especially in talk shows dominated by people known as "talents" - people who dress in unusual costumes selected to push the envelope into shock, outrage or simply silliness. These folk assume the role of soothsayers, supposedly insightful social commentators, although their contributions sometimes get so sophomoric and inane that you find yourself thankful people don't wear shoes inside the house or you'd be flinging them at your TV screen. 

The presence of such a group in this show - call them the Japanese version of a Greek chorus - begs the question of what exactly a so-called reality show is anyway.  And invites the observation that it is anything but real, but rather nothing more than a form of performance art designed to stimulate and titillate a bored audience looking for ever new and original entertainment. The group includes Otake Masaki, who goes by the stage name Durian ("the king of the fruits") Lollobrigida, who comes out in normal male dress at the start but gets more and more into his drag personalities as the show goes on.

The set-up is a simple one: nine unattached gay men, raging in age from 22 to 34, gather together at a resort by the sea for a month, allegedly to find friendship and love - with a camera following their every remark and facial expression.  Believe that's "reality" and I've got a bridge to sell you.  To build a closer bond between them, they are assigned the job of driving off to the beach each morning to sell coffee and cookies to the general public, although "general" isn't the right word, since the number of customers is small enough for the focus to remain on the personalities of the two gay characters in the coffee truck as they interact with customers one at a time, even bringing cups of coffee to their table. Camera running, of course.

An obvious question is why anybody would think you can simply throw people together and expect them to fall in love with each other, or, at minimum, form lasting meaningful relationships. That question is addressed directly by a member of the Greek chorus who makes the observation, "Anybody can fall in love with anybody."

In addition to the nine love-seekers and the "talents" (Greek chorus) there is another important but unseen character: from time to time a laptop dings and somebody opens it and reads a message from on high. This godlike character determines their daily activities, chiefly who will take the coffee truck out on any given day. He (it is a masculine voice) also has them do such things as write anonymous notes as a secret admirer and drop them in the mailbox each one has on their door. On several occasions, the boss-man decides they will have an overnight with a person of their choice who agrees to the arrangement.

As simplistic as the notion is expressed by the authority in the machine (the laptop) that "We hope you will find an irreplaceable partner," the reality performers play along. Rather than understanding that friendships take years to form and depend on observing the other in all kinds of character-revealing situations, they seem willing to believe the observation of a simple act of kindness, or generosity, or even politeness, is sufficient to make one fall in love. It marks them as astonishingly superficial.

At the same time, because the filmed interactions are so sanitized, we only get to see these guys on their best behavior. There is no cruelty, no harshness, no violence, no meanness. If anything, they display the stereotypical Japanese feature of being other-oriented to such an extreme that you need a Greek chorus to speculate over what's going on behind the masks of politeness they are all wearing.

At the same time, they do reveal markedly different character differences over time, giving some credibility to the producer who claims he selected the characters for their diversity of type. Two of the more extreme differences show up in the connection established by the two youngest participants, Dai and Shun, who do (spoiler alert) actually become a couple by the end of the series. Dai is outgoing and assertive (he sends Shun a dick-pic at one point); Shun is pathologically shy and suffers from an obvious inferiority complex. Shun is the kind of guy you'd expect to say, "I couldn't possibly fall in love with somebody stupid enough to fall in love with me."

Kazuto is everybody's first choice of a best-friend type. He comes in on Day One with food and continues to prepare meals for his colleagues - he is a cook and restaurant owner in real life. Another stand-out is Usak, a nationally well-known go-go boy who enters in Episode 2 and leaves early in Episode 5. He has a handsome face and is built like a brick shithouse. He lacks articulateness initially, but manages to bring everybody to tears when he leaves, and clearly has what it takes to break down the cool of Chef Kazuto, who otherwise plays his cards close to his chest.

And I trust my remarks in the previous paragraph reveal what I think the show has going for it, despite the charge of superficiality and banality: the characters may be not all you'd like them to be, but they are by and large sympathetic characters you come to root for. If this program is in fact staged, which Durian Lolobrigida claims it is not but I nonetheless suspect it is, it is well-staged with a well-composed plot line.  And that makes it worth watching. I've heard many non-Japanese comment over the years that they find Japanese too anodyne to actively like or dislike, and that was my first take on Japanese too until I made Japan my home and came to understand that its rich and complex culture makes it a world-class civilization, which contains the full range of human personality differences, unlike the manicured personalities in The Boyfriend.

Watching "gay boys" as they go about looking for love will not be everybody's cup of tea, even if this so-called reality show does turn out to be real. But in notable contrast to all the violence, blood, gore and duplicity in the shows Netflix brings to market, this one is refreshing, uplifting, and in the end, immensely sympathetic. I am not sure I share the Rotten Tomatoes rating of 100%. It moves slowly and youthful indecisiveness isn't at the top of my list of fun things to spend your time on. But if you have the patience, I think you will find it is worth the watch.

The characters are, in order of introduction:

1. Dai, age 22, a college student

2. Taeheon, age 34, a designer originally from South Korea, notably not out to his parents as a gay man

3. Ryota, 28, a model, a barista - considers himself a bisexual

4. Gensei, 34, a hair and make-up artist

5. Shun Nakanishi, 23, musician

6. Kаzuto, 27, cook and manager of an izakaya-type restaurant, everybody's favorite among the group 

7. Usak, 36, a nationally known go-go dancer

8. Alan, 28, a mixed-race (Brazilian/Japanese) guy who grew up in Japan, works for an IT company

9. Ikuo, 22, the late-comer, works in the food industry

Fellow Travelers - a film review

 

A good reason for watching Fellow Travelers is that it stars easy-on-the-eyes Matt Bomer. His co-star, Jonathan Bailey, doesn't need to hide his face, either. Another good reason is that it is a pretty decent history of the history of gay liberation as well as a powerful condemnation of anti-black racism in America from the witch-hunting days of Senator McCarthy and Roy Cohen's manipulation of American fears of communism, and the "Lavender Scare" in the 1950s through the years of the AIDS crisis to the long-time-coming general acceptance of LGBT Americans of the modern day.

Fellow Travelers is both romance and political thriller.  Brought to the screen in eight episodes by Paramount, the 2007 fictional story by Thomas Mallon follows historical events closely enough to come across as a documentary. In fact, there are moments that brought back such ugly memories that I was tempted to shut it down. You'll need to steel yourself against the reminder that America's susceptibility to proto-fascist authoritarianism didn't begin with the current Trumpist effort to replace democracy with a Führer-and fear-centered regime, but has been a risk since 1787, when Benjamin Frankin answered the question, "What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" with the ominous words, "A republic, if you can keep it."

And it's not just the external political scene that makes this a difficult watch at times. The flawed characters of Hawkins Fuller, played by Bomer, and also of Tim Laughlin, played by Bailey, are reminders that heroes can take their time growing into their roles. Bomer and Bailey are first-rate actors, but watching them stumble and occasionally fall is often painful.

I wish the filmmakers might have told the story with fewer jumps back and forth in time; I don't like having to retain multiple story-lines at once. But that's not a criticism as much as a preference, and some will appreciate the way that story-telling method can layer the richness of the characters. Chronologically, the story of the lovers begins when Tim comes to Washington as a theology student and meets and falls in love with Hawk. Hawk is a user and a climber, very much at home in the world of Washington political hypocrisy. We are left to wonder what draws them to each other, Tim the earnest romantic struggling with the demands of his Catholic faith on his sexuality, and Hawk, the diplomat living a double life, with wife and kids at home, and seedy contacts with rough trade when he can get away with it. Hawk personifies the expression "fellow traveler" of the title of the story, someone whose silence in the face of wrong-doing, enables that wrong-doing. Originally popularized by Trotsky to refer to supporters of communism who wouldn't make the effort to actually join the party, it still works today as a synonym of "enabler," the sort of person that tyrants and other miscreants depend on to make their policies socially acceptable.

An important sub-plot is the relationship between Marcus Gaines (Jelani Alladin), a black reporter for the New York Post who runs up against a ceiling keeping black perspectives out of the news and his lover, Frankie Hines (Noah J. Ricketts), a female impersonator, who reminds us that gay life once existed only in dark alleys or on the outskirts of town. Marcus gives up, in the end, and goes to write for Jet, a publication for blacks, tying together the two liberation struggles - for racial and sexual identity. Blacks and gays can make it, as long as they stay in their lane as entertainers and portray stereotypes to maintain the illusion the customers are looking for in theaters and nightclubs, as Marcus learns when he is refused entry to a club where Frankie is performing. A hypocrisy not exclusive to America, but certainly characteristic of its cultural values.

Fellow Travelers has been described as "a journey from shame to pride," if not for the lives of its leading characters, for the evolution in the larger world.  I don't want to spoil the viewing experience for those who want to make that journey, but if you are already familiar with American history from the nightmarish McCarthy era through Vietnam and the AIDS epidemic, you'll be prepared to accept that a journey through history is often a bumpy ride, not for the faint of heart. 

But watching actors bring it to life on screen, as they do in Fellow Travelers, can make it a trip very much worth making, all the same.

photo credit: 

Bad News, Good News

So much bad news has come down the pike of late, you've got to allow me to let out a whoop and a hollar at some really good news. Rotate in your graves, Strom Thurmond, Anita Bryant, Jerry Falwell and all you other sexists, white supremacists and homophobes of yore, as the world gets a look at the Vice-President of the United States swearing in a Senator pro-tem from California yesterday. The new senator's name is Laphonza Butler. She is black. She is married to the third woman in the photo, with whom she is raising a daughter (just in case you missed the fact that LGBT people have family values, too). In fact, all three women in the photo are black women. We've come a long way since the 13th and 14th time the U.S. Constitution was amended: the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, and the moment women were granted the right to vote in the U.S. on August 18, 1920.

"Piano, piano si va lontano" they say in Italian. Literally, "Take it easy if you're going a long way." Meaning you can't rush things if you want them done right.

Sometimes the pace of progress is agonizingly slow. We live in a country where the political right gets away with slapping the label "socialist" on health care for all Americans, knowing that most Americans can't distinguish the word from "communist" and they know a bad thing when they hear one. The Equal Rights Amendment has yet to pass, and it appears to be at the end of a long line of things progressives would like to see happen. We can't stop a self-serving minority from dictating to the majority via the Electoral College and the way voting districts are gerrymandered. Hungary, Estonia and Portugal each have one billionaire each living within their borders. The United States has 735. Not a problem per se, but something to think about when you realize that if you went out and spent $100 on dinner every night of the week, it would take over 2.7 million years (that's 2,700,000) before your check would bounce for insufficient funds. And that's if you have only one billion dollars in the bank. Most of the 735 have more than that. Elon Musk is alleged to have $251 billion, so multiply those 2.7 million years by 251. You get my point.

And put that fact (if I've done my math right - no guarantee there - if not, please set me right) up against the fact that the Republicans were on the verge just now of shutting down the government because they don't believe it should involve itself in helping the 14.5 million American children living in poverty. They prefer to leave that to the market. Oh, and of those 14.5 million, more than 13.1 million are food insecure.

I could go on forever listing all the good news items I've come across lately and line them up against the bad news items. It's part of the art of living how much of each you let into your awareness of the world to spur you to responsible action and how much you keep out to save your sanity. I zeroed in the other day on the fact that parking meters in Berkeley now want $2.75 to allow you to park your car on a commercial street per hour. Highway robbery, if ever there was such a thing. Greedy bastards run the City of Berkeley. Then today I had Darling Daughter Boobie (aka Bounce) get her once-every-three-years rabies shot, a necessary step in getting her dog licence renewed. The cost of that is $40 for those three years. But because I'm over 65 years old, the City of Berkeley lets me register my dog for free. So today I love the City of Berkeley and want to find the person or persons who put that regulation in place and give them a hug and a smooch.

Other good news on the gay liberation front comes from Mauritius, where they just rescinded the law punishing gay people for having sex. Piano piano.

And from the Vatican, where the pope is trying to convince the hardliners in his church to lighten up and allow priests to bless same-sex unions. The hardliners are holding out, reasoning that it's just not right to bless sinners. One might argue that the line they fling around is "love the sinner and hate the sin." But I guess they're not idiots. They know that a good many of the men and women who go to the trouble of standing up in front of God and all the world to declare their love for each other are probably going to do things in the bed at night besides snore.  No matter. Let's hear it for Papa Francesco. Piano piano.

Kevin McCarthy got bounced, good news, and replaced by another one of us Mc people, neither good nor bad news, except that this one is an out-and-out homophobe, bad news, and a guy known for being rude as hell. Check out his run-in with Elizabeth Warren, for example. He also just kicked Nancy Pelosi out of her office, but I don't want to fault him for that, necessarily. Good news is he's speaker only pro tempore, and therefore not third in line for the presidency.

What all is next? Will the Maldives sink below the ocean due to global warming? Will the Ukrainians hold out against the Russian invasion? Will we ever get mom-and-pop stores back instead of putting immigrants into jobs where they get abused by cost-cutting big corporations? We're onto the real possibility that there may be a cure in the offing, and not just a stop-gap medication, for HIV/AIDS. My eye doctor tells me my eyes are good for another year without cataract surgery and Boobie is back sleeping in my bed again, at least when I get to bed before midnight.

Let me end on a positive note. Tangerine Turd, of the political party that touts itself as the family-values party, is now on display as the Big Daddy who taught his two older sons to be bare-faced liars. They may lose the right to do business in New York, and TT père has been legally declared a fraud.  Ditto Jr. and Eric. Dyed-in-the-wool Maga folk will still follow him anywhere, I know, but there is reason to believe their numbers are diminishing. 

Slowly, but surely. Piano piano.

photo by Getty images: 

El Houb - a film review

الحب (El Houb) is the Arabic word for "love." It's also the title of a Moroccan-Dutch film that came out a few months ago about a young man, Karim Zahwani, caught in bed with another man by his father.  The discovery breaks the resistance Karim has long struggled with to come out to his mother and father, partly to free himself of the prison of silence he has been living in, partly to get them to stop nagging him to get married. To say it doesn't go well would be an Olympic-sized understatement. By the time the Zahwani family even begins to come to terms with their son's homosexuality, Karim has holed up in a closet, turned off the water and the electricity and even trashed their apartment. "Knock down drag out" doesn't begin to tell the story.

El Houb is not an easy watch. To start with, if one has lived in Europe or America or in most places in the modern world where homosexuality is now old hat as a topic, one has to go back to a time when LGBT people lived closeted lives of hypocrisy or deception.  The obvious question that comes to mind is why should we waste our time with yet another coming-out story?  "Been there, done that, didn't like it, moved on."

The answer is that along with the fact that, come January 1, 2024, Estonia will be the 34th nation to recognize same-sex marriage is the equally salient fact that it is still illegal in 35 countries, including every one of the Islamic states. That includes Morocco, the country of origin of the immigrant Zahwani family now living in the Netherlands.  Karim's mother has two major concerns: what will the neighbors think?  And how can her son possibly want to do such a haram thing?

I have to admit I was tempted to shut the film down several times. The Sturm und Drang gets seriously heavy and you want to throw things at the screen each time you see a face twisted in agony over the struggle both sides are going through. If Karim were clear-headed on the subject and it were just a question of getting his mother and father over the hump, it would be a lot easier. But a great deal of the agony is watching Karim struggle with his own doubts.

What made me stick with the histrionics - and that's an appropriate term here - was my lifelong interest in what happens when cultures clash. And the knowledge that the actor, Fahd Larhzaoui, who plays Karim, is himself a gay man of Moroccan origin born in the Netherlands. The story will no doubt frustrate you with its surfeit of homophobia, much of it self-imposed. But only if you fail to recognize that it is also, ultimately, a tale of homophobic Moroccans coming to embrace the modern values of their adopted country, and their gay son in the process.

Seen in that light, it's a nice little contribution to the long slow slog toward gay liberation.  Belgian-born Lubna Azabal, of Moroccan origin, plays the mother. Slimane Dazi, a French actor of Algerian origin  plays the father (and he apparently had to work hard to learn Moroccan Arabic to get the role). They are both superb, as is the kid who plays Karim as a boy in the flashbacks.

I watched it on Amazon Prime, but I believe it's also available online at:

https://tubitv.com/movies/100003839/el-houb-the-love?start=true&tracking=google-feed&utm_source=google-feed .

Ten questions - the transgender question - Part IV

People of good will and optimism try not to see the world in black and white - binary - terms. They prefer to describe much of it in grey - and, whenever possible, in glorious colors.  We disparage the pre-modern catholic penchant for dividing women into virginal saints and "fallen" women, consider cowboy movies where there are good guys in white hats and villains in black hats unsophisticated. We messed up bigtime with the one-drop definition of race we use in America, where a person is white unless they have even the smallest bit of African ancestry in them, whereupon they become black.  And why we continue to operate under that fiction is beyond me.

Not that there aren't binaries. Life and death, off and on, yes and no, something and nothing are binaries. So is male and female, although people on one side of the transgender debate now getting so much attention are calling that into question.  Either one insists on the traditional approach to science, which defines truth as something empirically verifiable, or one buys into the recent postmodern fad of insisting all is flux, and (at least in the sophomoric versions of postmodernism so many people go with) there is no truth, but only one person's "narrative" set against another's.  One side (where I stand, at least for the moment) insists that since more than 98% of people are born clearly male or female, this is enough to make this a binary category. The other side argues that the fact that 1.7% of kids are born intersex suggests that we should see this as a spectrum instead. That means the distinction between sex and gender (once defined as a subjective social category) is lost, and one can use transsexual and transgender interchangeably. This view is now so widespread that, as I mentioned in my previous blog entry, the publication manual of the APA, the American Psychological Association, the gold standard for such things, "has determined that the term 'transsexual' is largely outdated." Read: use transgender for both transgender and transsexual, since the distinction between them is now blurred.

This blurring disturbs me, since I see acting as if there is no reason to distinguish between male and female runs counter to common sense and opens the door to all kinds of bad outcomes. If there is no distinction, what justification to we have for women's sports, for example. Or for keeping women from being thrown in jail with men. How do we keep useful track of crime statistics? Or speak of sexual and emotional maturity? Or acknowledge sexism and the power dynamic in any meaningful way?

But perhaps the biggest problem associated with the transgender debate is that there are so many unknowns and so much misinformation. I'm tempted to call this the age of misinformation, in fact, but let's stick with the importance of gathering accurate information and avoid jumping too hastily into the unknown.

So far, I've come up with ten questions that come to mind.  I make no effort to prioritize or evaluate their importance), and I suspect if one tries, one can come up with many more. But here are my ten, for starters:

1. If young people are going to take puberty blockers, how safe are they? According to the Mayo Clinic, "Puberty blockers are not recommended for children who have not started puberty." At the same time, the consensus is that puberty blockers are a relatively new medical procedure, and we don't have enough information on its long-term effects. We need to consider puberty blockers experimental medicine.

2. At what age should we allow kids to make decisions that are at odds with their parents' decisions? What responsibility do schools and hospitals and other institutions have to convey information they learn from children and adolescents to their parents, and at what age?

3. There is evidence that a lot of young people suffering gender dysphoria commonly suffer co-morbidities simultaneously. A much higher percentage than normal are autistic, for example. Many have suffered physical and mental abuse. Ideally, we should learn where the line is between the gender dysphoria and these other problems, if at all possible, and make sure we are treating the dysphoria on the basis of this reliable information.

4. How seriously should we consider the possibility of "social contagion," the term used to signify the possibility young people are calling themselves trans because they are caught up in a fad. There appears to be strong evidence of this possibility. One can feel dysphoria because of external disapproval or internal disapproval. Arguably, the solution to dysphoria derived from external disapproval is likely to be found through therapy, while a strong argument can be made that dysphoria stemming from internal anxiety should elicit strong emotional and other support.

5. Until recently, many people calling themselves trans would consider themselves gay or lesbian.  Bisexuals once had to endure the suspicion many gays and lesbians had that they were simply not yet ready to accept their same-sex feelings as legitimate, and took the bi- identity as a way of looking less confrontational to straight people. Nowadays there is less resistance to the claim of bisexuality. Is the same thing going on with trans people? Are they people whose claims will be increasingly accepted in time?

6. When a person goes from gay to trans, they change identities. How many of them also change sexuality? If a gay man becomes trans, does he then become heterosexual in sexual orientation? Or does he also switch sexual orientations and become a lesbian? This is not a question that anybody needs to fuss over, obviously, but it would be interesting, if anybody looking for a PhD dissertation topic in LGBT studies wants to take it on. It would tell us something about sexual orientation that we don't yet understand.

7. Advocates of a postmodern insistence that "transgender women are women" have to contend with the argument that this approach is skewing the statistics on male crime.  There is only one study I'm familiar with showing that transgender women, i.e., MtF trans people continue to commit crimes, including sexual crimes at the same rate as non-transgender males, and far more than cis-gender women, but it is contested. This raises the question, at what point, now or in the future, should we start taking these statistics seriously?

8. Feminist movement around the world is credited with raising the consciousness around the fact that men are socialized to think it is natural to commit violence against women - they "just can't help it." Such consciousness has led to laws to protect women as well as a change in social attitudes toward that violence. If the distinction between cisgender women and transgender women is lost, and if male-pattern violence continues, how will we keep track of violence statistics with any accuracy? Will this ever matter? If so, when?

9. In the UK, there has only been one institution devoted to dealing with transgender kids, if I understand the scene correctly. And that is the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) of North London's Tavistock Clinic. It is still in operation, but its work took a hit and it was closed down in 2021 when a suit was filed against it by a woman treated there who had a double mastectomy at age 20, and now regrets transitioning, arguing that GIDS should have taken into consideration that her gender dysphoria could be attributed to her mother's alcoholism, her social isolation as a lesbian and depression as much as to gender dysphoria. The decision to shut Tavistock down became a national scandal and the decision was reversed a year later. But the case has led to greater awareness of the risks of acting in the absence of sufficient data on treatments that must be considered experimental. [For a full history of the case, see Abigail Shrier's Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.] There is at present no end of questions about whether and when treatment by puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgery are indicated, and where the lines are between them, The need for clinical  research is urgent.

And finally, one last question. This one is for me personally, and not one to add to the library of general knowledge:

10. Why have so many lesbians and gays and other lefties of a progressive bent climbed on the postmodern bandwagon and taken on the view that one can blur the distinction between sex and gender? It's a distinction we worked hard to make and get the general public to make. Why have they surrendered it so easily? Is it lockstep solidarity with transgender people because they believe we LGBs have to stick together with the Ts? (The Ts that want to claim "I'm a woman if I choose to claim I'm a woman.") If that's the case, shame on them, I say, for making the same cognitive error as the right-wingers, surrendering scientific rigour for political expediency. And it's all so unnecessary, since a man can live as a woman in every way that doesn't involve threatening the safe spaces I believe women have a right to.  I'm with my friend Bill. Ideally, we should create three kinds of spaces: men only, women only, mixed for when separation is unnecessary. Two questions here: Is this even remotely practical? And how many LGB people does this involve, anyway? OK: three questions: Have I got this all wrong? 

As I've said before, there are many approaches one might take to the transgender issue. It is an inherently divisive issue, probably because there's more we don't know about it than there are things we do know.  Most of the time Bill and I can finish each other's sentences. But we've taken very different perspectives on this issue, which fact, when put together with the fact that gays and lesbians generally are sharply divided on this topic as well, is evidence that we're dealing with one of the hottest topics to come down the pike in a long time.   I've taken a legalistic and policy-making approach; Bill prefers a compassionate one. I've been more head; he's been more heart. What we both agree on is that we need to avoid the extremes, such as the far-right Republican view that there should be no government support at all for transgender people. We both find that not just insincere and politically manipulative, but just plain cruel.

I tried to put this topic of how best to approach the transgender issue aside, declaring it's none of my business, and get on with other things. But it's a public policy issue and people's lives and mental health are riding on it, so I believe leaving it to the politicians is not the way to go. It calls for an informed public.

And if you are tempted to say I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill, consider the fact that since 2010 the number of girls referred to the Tavistock Clinic has increased by 5000%.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the topic. 

A Search in Progress (The transgender question - Part III)

My Japanese husband and I got into an argument at dinner the other night over Tokyo's transport system's decision to provide women commuters with women-only cars on the trains during rush hour.  Not a new thing, but the topic of safe spaces for women came up when I shared the blog topic I'd been working on. My spousal unit insisted we should focus on getting men to stop molesting women. I tried to make the point that that's a long-term solution and I'm talking only about a short-term solution, but my husband is not yet fifty and is handicapped by limited powers of logic common to so many youth of today. When we first met, he was in Women's Studies and you might say we've switched places. More miso soup?

Given that men are, what, 100 times more likely to molest women than women men, I'm fully in support of creating safe spaces for women. I say this to establish my take on the transgender issue I've been trying to update my knowledge on the past few weeks. You may remember the story of Lia Thomas, who made women uncomfortable when she removed her pants and showed her male genitalia in a locker room in Kentucky last February. 

And the story only gets better. Thomas beat out all the women on the team and got to take home a trophy that should have been shared with the woman filing the complaint because, she was told, they needed to get the right photo.

*                    *                    *

I remember my mother asking me once, when I was in high school, why I wanted to go to mass with my Catholic friends during lent. Religion was still important in those days, and I remember my father telling me that "we didn't believe all those things" the Catholics believed. "What do we believe, Daddy?" my little sister asked him.

The question was probably the first time I was exposed to the notion that belief was not an individual choice but a tribal one. We believed what our parents taught us to believe. And they believed what they were taught in Sunday School. And we lived in the U.S., a country where people lived side by side with people who believed different things. Some of them wrong. Because it was unacceptable to question the importance of religion, and people were encouraged to proclaim their faith and were looked up to when they did so, the ground was made fertile for the notion of multiple truths. Unfortunately, that freedom, along with the freedom to be stupid, has come back recently to bite a chunk out of our backsides.

It's called postmodernism. Once an academic topic for nerds, like the abstract notions of beauty and justice, we find ourselves engaged in a public debate over the way we define truth. "Show me and I'll believe you" people, grounded in the scientific method, want to limit it to the empirically verifiable; people captured by the postmodern notion du jour insist we have no way of establishing truth in the long run and must make do with the beliefs we have created to make sense of the universe, the "narratives." You know, if you're a Euro-American you're likely to believe that Columbus "discovered" America. If you're a native American, 1492 was the beginning of the end of your civilization. There is no neutral, objective place to stand to judge one of these narratives as superior to the other. You simply have to go along with what Kellyanne Conway, early on in the Trump administration, notoriously called "alternative facts." Wikipedia tells us that within four days of her public definition of truth, the sales of George Orwell's 1984 increased 95-fold.

Where once we looked to religious authority (or daddy) to tell us what to believe we now feel perfectly comfortable, many of us, creating our own truths. What is a woman?  To most people on the political left, the kind of people who got behind the cause of gay liberation and rejected the right-wing rejection of gay people, this means getting behind trans people, as well. And that means adopting the postmodern notion that I get to follow any narrative I choose. I become a woman the moment I declare that I am a woman.

That's why Lia Thomas caused all this ruckus back in February. She got to use that women's changing room in Kentucky back then because Biden, our lefty (progressive) president, got behind the changes to Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits sex-based discrimination, which changes would allow transgender female athletes equal access to women's spaces.

I have to admit that I was, until this transgender issue became front and center, pretty much OK with the notion of taking my cues from my fellow democrats. I live in Berkeley, California, where you don't normally ask people what their political views are. You assume they are democrats unless they tell you otherwise. And they usually don't. You can assume the place is gay-friendly, and nobody has ever asked us to take down the sign in front of our house which reads black lives matter, etc.

But now I find myself wondering how the hell I seem to have gotten in bed with right-wingers. I've made clear that I want to maintain the distinction between sex and gender, for the reasons I just outlined with the Lia Thomas story. This is, to me, not a trivial distinction. At the same time, I don't want to go on record as believing there is no such thing as trans people or that people should not have the right to change their sex and their gender. I just want them to wait until they have reached the age of maturity.

For years to come, we will be trying to explain why the issue of transgender is different from abortion and gay rights, why the left has been sucked into this postmodern nonsense, why when I go to my favorite blogs I find my friends at loggerheads. Richard Dawkins, for example, one of my favorite atheists, has come out strongly against this postmodern truth nonsense. But two other atheist bloggers, Stephen Woodford and Forrest Valkai, jump all over him for it, Valkai even taking the view that gender (meaning "sex") is an inner feeling that one discovers in time. And Woodford, was once himself bounced out of some organization for being "transphobic" before he was let back in. I won't leave links to these many discussions, because I want to not go off on even more tangents, and you can find them easily. J.K. Rowling, like Dawkins, has made strong statements in favor of old fashioned scientific definitions and against postmodern fuzziness, and she now needs bodyguards for her efforts.

In tracking down who's who on both sides - let's call them the distinction makers like Dawkins and Rowling on one side and the transactivist postmodernists on the other - I find myself over and over again in bed with what to me is definitely the wrong crowd. Matt Walsh, for example, a Tennessee conservative, ardently opposed to gay rights, a man the Southern Poverty Law Center has called a "peddlar of fear and disinformation," has made a film entitled "What is a Woman?" I listen to him and find myself nodding in agreement on the trans issue.  How did this happen?

Where this becomes a really important question is when it comes to the issue of "gender-affirming care." Until I started my recent reading, I would nod in agreement with any trans activist insisting that trans youngsters should get all the support they possibly can. They should not have to face hostile therapists trying to talk them out of their trans identities. But then I read of the Tavistock Center, Britain's only real support center for trans youth, being closed down because they were "too quick" to provide blockers and hormones, according to the National Health Service, and I have to push pause. Obviously, there's more to this story than what is found on the surface.

The radicals among the trans activists are no longer the predictable lefties of yesteryear. They line up with their postmodern "I am what I say I am" stance and label their opposition "TERFs" - Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists. Bad guys, allegedly. But the more I learn about these bad guys, the more I identify with them. I'm talking about people like Posie Parker, aka Kelly-Jay Keen-Minshul, a British anti-transgender rights activist and founder of the organization Standing for Women. Her simple, once obvious, definition of a woman as an "adult human female" got her in trouble with the radical trans activists and secured her a place on Tucker Carlson (and how's that for disgusting bedfellows?)

Others in this group include Lisa Selin Davis, who had a daughter who was a tomboy. Pressured to come out as trans, the daughter had to convince her mother that she simply liked rough housing and was perfectly happy being a girl. That led to Davis' book Tomboy.

Another is Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, and the title says it all, as does The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls by Kara Densky.

Another major text in this genre is Helen Joyce's Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality.

This is not an exhaustive list. I had no idea at the start of all this that there was so much stuff to ponder, so many publications, so many nuanced views, and that it has been going on not for just the past couple of years, but for decades now. I'm a real johnny-come-lately to this party.

I don't know where the transgender debates are headed, whether progressives on the left will come to believe they've been duped, as I currently believe they are, at present. Whether I'll turn out to have thrown my lot in with the wrong crowd when I insist that kids should not be making decisions that involve medical alterations to healthy bodies.

I am no longer totally in the dark on this topic, but I've by no means reached the place where I have total confidence I've got a handle on it, either. There is much that I haven't taken up here, such as the fact we've been talking more about trans women, previously known as male-to-female people than about trans (female-to-male) men. And the fact that I've approached things more from a legalistic, or policy-making perspective and dwelt on the exceptional cases rather than the more common issues facing trans people. But I trust others will compensate for my lack of authority and adequacy of coverage.

This is, for me, a search for understanding in progress. Not finished by any means, but I've got to get on to other things.

Be kind to trans people. They've got a lot of shit to deal with.

Getting a grasp on the transgender question - Part I: Language Usage

 L stands for people who identify as Lesbian, G for gay, B for Bisexual and T for transsexual or transgender people. Most of the time, when I talk to LGBT people, I talk to L and G people.  Many of them have had sex with persons of the opposite sex at some point in their lives and that would no doubt make others think of them as B people. In my experience, most were not. Not really. They were L or G people not yet ready to accept themselves as L or G people and trying to "go straight" at the time. I've met very few mature adults who identify themselves as B.  That's totally out of sync with the Gallup claim that over half of LGBT people identify as bi, and only underlines the fact that my personal sample is anything but a sample of the LGBT community; it's a function of the people I hang out with. I am aware that when I make generalizations about any group of people on the basis of their ethnicity or race or sexual persuasion, I am not describing them so much as I am revealing to the world the limitations of my own experience with it. Short of carefully constructed social science data collection, most of these generalizations are based on nothing more than anecdotal evidence.

But I'm still curious about these B-identified people.  Are they "really" B?  Or are they using the term as a mask?  And given the current state of the way we approach things in this country, can we ever trust the answers we might get?  Also, there is a whole set of more useful questions one might ask, if one is seeking to understand sexuality, such as "Did you always identify as L or G or did you once identify as B? If you are B is does your sex interest depend on the individual? The opportunity? 

We already know this applies to L and G as well. Kinsey generated a scale from Kinsey 1 (no interest in the same sex) to Kinsey 6 (interest only in the same sex). It's hard to be precise when dealing with such things as emotions, the sex drive, and in the way our environment has led us to identify ourselves and others sexually.

I've been trying to get my head around this newfound fascination with the world of T. And with the whole notion of identity and how we evaluate self-report data. I am convinced that in questions of sexuality, as with any other American fascination, getting clarity is likely to be beyond reach. Let me elaborate, using the current fascination with the political football that is transgender as a jumping-off place.

The first time I got into a discussion with a T-identified person it didn't go well. They were furious over the kind of questions I was asking. With good reason, no doubt. Naive questions can be charming, like when my niece - four years old at the time - crawled up in the lap of a black friend of mine and asked him, "How come your skin is brown?" But when one adult asks another, "How do you know you are gay, or trans?" the gay or trans person can be expected to think to themselves, "What rock did you just crawl out from under? Where the hell have you been all these years?"

What really pissed them off, though, was the revelation that I was coming from a starting point on the trans question that many trans people find really hard to take. I spent so many years coming to terms with being gay and have fought all my life trying to convince the world that gay men ought to be embraced regardless of how masculine or feminine they presented themselves as. And ditto for women. Whether homosexuality is inborn or nurtured later in life, we should be able to walk and talk in ways that come naturally to us without being considered some sort of freak. Nelly queens and butch lesbians have as much right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as anybody else, in my book. That's where I was coming from and I was convinced my convictions were established on a solid amount of life experience and therefore unassailable.

"If you find yourself waving your hands or crossing your legs in a way society associates with feminine behavior - if you are a man - and people look at you funny, recognize that it's society's problem, not yours," I would preach to my juniors in the LGBT world. "Don't go buying into the notion that you are 'a woman born into the wrong body.' That only gives bigots fuel for their fire. Stand your ground. Don't surrender your right to be whatever you are to another person."

I was what my T friend would tell me is a member of a class of T people's worst enemies: gay men. A man insisting that his experience with sexuality was universal. No better than the most arrogant and narrow kind of heterosexual, the kind likely to persuade your parents to lock you up in a mind-fuck Jesus reeducation camp to make you straight.

In Japan, in alternating semesters, I ran seminars on "liberation theory." The goal was to try to see if there was a common goal among the social movements around the world demanding political liberation, women's liberation, and gay liberation. And note, in passing, I'm talking about a time before the latter two got recast as "feminist movement" and "LGBT rights," respectively.  It was an uphill climb, since "feminism," many of my highly privileged students, both men and women, had decided, was a bad word, referring to those loud aggressive women who "called too much attention to themselves." And lesbians and gays were people suffering from gender dysphoria. I found myself seriously challenged, since I held the view that good teaching involved not dictating meaning and punishing people who thought differently from myself, but getting them to come around to my way of thinking through intellectual persuasion.  I don't know how far I got in creating feminists. With the gay liberation module, I cheated. I bypassed the intellectual persuasion bit and used emotion. I showed the documentary, "The Times of Harvey Milk." By the end of the screening, they were ready to accept that not all Ls and Gs are suffering from gender dysphoria. Many, they came to see, were "bien dans sa peau" as the French say: they "fit quite comfortably in their own skin," and simply want to be left to live a life free from discrimination and rejection.

Unfortunately, I still had a ways to go myself. While it's very much the case that lot of Ls and Gs need to get out from under the view that social rejection of them is proof that they were born in the wrong bodies - or otherwise need to "go straight," that does not mean gender dysphoria is not a real thing. Some dysphoria stems from bullying by people who simply need to shut up and mind their own business. These people you should ignore and not let them run your life. But there is also dysphoria that stems from a powerful inner conviction that life is expecting you to play from a stacked deck.  And are tortured by that expectation and deserve to be helped to get around it.

The line between inappropriate external pressure to think of yourself as incorrectly labeled by the doctor who birthed you and the legitimate conviction that you were incorrectly labeled is probably never going to be easy to find. We will, at least for the forseeable future, always have to do the best we can. My view is that, unless or until a time comes when we find a better way to proceed, we should simply ask the person involved to tell us what sex they want to identify with, embrace it and let them live life accordingly.

Before LGBT people came to find general acceptance in America, we had to listen to bible-thumpers tell us being gay was nothing more than a bad choice. Forgive me, but this gives me reason to think that here, too, this time with the Ts among us, the only decent response to such horse pucky is, "You don't tell me who I am; I tell you. Now piss off."

Unfortunately,  tragically, this country is now suffering from an outbreak of something on the spectrum between a simple outbreak of occasional authoritarianism and outright fascism. And by fascism, I mean, among other things, the twisting of facts for political gain. Roe v. Wade has been reversed, Republicans are trying to keep black Americans from voting because we all know they are very likely to vote Democratic, kids with same-sex parents are being told they cannot reveal that fact in many states when their teachers ask them to talk about their family lives, and in some places even a single parent complaint can lead to a book being removed from a school library. These are ugly times, politically. And T people are the latest pawns on the right-wing chess board.

OK. Buckle up. The next part is probably going to lose me some friends. Because I identify as a sociolinguist and I understand that to mean that I see word meanings as following the actual use of language in society, and not some idealized Language Academy or Dictionary Authority word definition, here's where I run into trouble: 

The T in LGBT stands simultaneously for "transsexual" and "transgender." I see those as two separate things: transsexual as somebody who moves, or intends to move from one physical sex to another, by means of things like puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgery; and transgender as somebody who sees themselves as no longer willing to play the social roles their society assigns their sex to play and asks you to stop using one set of pronouns and start using the opposite ones. Transsexual, I understand to be a biological category; transgender, a social category. The former as scientifically, objectively defined, the latter as socially, conventionally, subjectively defined. Or, to put it another way, your gender is what you and the rest of the world decide to call yourself, your sex is defined by things that can be measured by such things as chromosomes, gametocytes, hormone prevalence, and external and internal anatomy. The distinction in recent times has become blurred by usage, though, and now we read that "According to the APA Style guide, the term "transsexual" is largely outdated...." 

What? Say again?  That means to me only that the APA is buying into the blurring of the two terms.  Pay no attention to what you see, it says. Don't believe your lying eyes. The doctor may have called me a girl because he couldn't see the real me, but I tell you who I am; you don't tell me. It's not only my "gender" that is on a spectrum; so is my "sex."

Remember, I insist that people who identify as "transexual" or "transgendered" deserve to be treated with respect and the same degree of affection one would expect to give those who don't. But I find the political assertion that things can be whatever you say they are makes me uncomfortable because it lines up with those on the far right who speak of alternate facts. 

That, of course, just raises the question, "If that's the case, what do you care? Why are you making such a big deal of this?" The answer is I don't like people who make things unnecessarily muddy. What's called for here is a nuanced appreciation of the distinction between fact and fiction. The postmodern assertion that things are no more than what any person's narrative takes them to be is a big part of the current mess we're in, where we are being led to believe that there is a hidden cabal of people out to run the world. No. Distinctions matter. A proto-fascist president may call himself president and insist Biden stole the election. But that's a fiction. Which, in this case, is a lie.  Confusing transsexual and transgendered may be less consequential, but it's also not an innocent misuse of language.

You see my problem as a sociolinguist. My dilemma. On the one hand I want to use language the way the world actually uses language, and not the way some outside authority thinks it should be used. On the other hand, I want to draw a line when people call a liar a president. And when people are (in my view) too lazy to make meaningful distinctions. I'm a conservative in the sense that I want people to say "fewer people" and not "less people" and use the apostrophe-s for the possessive, and not for making nouns plural.

Am I wrong to see the transsexual/transgendered distinction in this light? Note that I'm hardly alone in this. Have a look at two eggheads I normally give a lot of credence to tearing down Richard Dawkins for saying essentially the same thing I just did - which, given his cred as a world-class biologist - should carry a lot more weight. Shame on these guys and their ad hominem attack on one of the great thinkers of our age.

We need to get this linguistic roadkill out of the road so we can get to the really important stuff of the transgender issue - how to help people transition if they need to and how to stop passing bad laws that get in their way.

But more on that later.

I'll stop here for now.

Confessions of a former church-basher

Over the past couple of years my once favorite pastime, bashing organized religion, no longer displays the vigor I used to put into it.  Most likely that's because it's lost its urgency for me. For one thing, purveyors of organized religion are diminishing in clout of their own accord. A Guardian article from six months ago reported that while there were 3000 new Protestant churches starting up in 2019, (the latest available figures on the topic), in that same year 4500 churches were closed.

For another, since white evangelicals tied their reputation to the Trump train, they are suffering the much deserved ignominy that much of America sees as just desserts. They no longer need me or anybody else to bash them. In fact, my sympathies have effectively taken a 180-degree turn. I now am feeling great sympathy for mainstream Christians, as I did for all the decent Germans of the Hitler period and as I do for Russians during this time of the bitterly ugly invasion of Ukraine. All these folks deserve better than to be tied to nasty people who claim the right to speak for them.

My loathing - I won't mince words, that's what it once was - for organized religion, Christianity in particular - was due to the fact that I grew up a self-loathing homosexual. And I acquired that self-loathing from the teaching and preaching of otherwise decent church folk. I was not bothered by the fact that everybody in the pews was white, or by the fact that women in many denominations could not serve clerical roles. I was neither black nor female. And like the "good Germans" who didn't go along with Hitler and the "good Russians" who have no opinion on the war in Ukraine and insist it's because they are "not political," I found no reason to have an opinion on issues I felt no responsibility for. But coming out as gay was a long laborious process for me, and as my awareness increased over the years of just how central the church was to generating and maintaining homophobia, so too did my loathing of the institution.

What has changed, and to a remarkable and once unthinkable degree, is the slow but certain acceptance of gay people. Not as sinners, or people who are "inherently disordered" to use the phrase slapped on us by the official Roman Catholic Church, but as equals, no better and no worse than other saints or sinners among us.  At the same time, just as the average Catholic in the pews rejects the church's teaching on birth control, abortion and the need for women to be denied leadership roles in the church, 70% believe homosexuality should be accepted by society.  That's an even higher percentage than the 66% figure for mainline Protestants. And, while we're at it, compare that with 36% for both Mormons and Evangelicals.

We're by no means home free. Just as the Supremes overturned Roe v. Wade, they're now kissing up to the homophobic Republican white Evangelicals in whittling away at gay rights.  I see us as mid-way through the battle. True, we have the Supremes to worry about, but at the same time the progressives in the country are still going strong. Sixteen years ago I was on the phones trying to keep California from passing Prop 8. A losing fight. We lost the right for same-sex couples to marry. Then, two years later, we got it back and my now husband and I took advantage of the thaw to marry in 2013. The anti-gay amendment to the state constitution is still on the books, but repeal is on the ballot for November.

My claim that organized religion is the primary source of homophobia in American society is supported by the fact that many churches have been split down the middle over whether one can be both gay and Christian.  Remember how the Southern Baptist Convention got its start? How it pulled away from the Baptist Church over the right to own slaves, a stance they only apologized for in 1995. Remember that? Well, look what's happening these days in many mainstream Protestant churches: The Methodists, for example, second to the Baptists in number among Protestant Christians, lost 1831 of its member churches, mostly in the south (the same places as "conservative" religionists split over slavery back in the day). Not as bad as the 5800 "disaffiliations" they expected, but notable.

You'll forgive me if every time I hear the word "conservative" the little voice in my head whispers, "racist, sexist, homophobic." Conservatives are essential to a balanced society, I know. Lefties can go off half-cocked sometimes. But my heart is with those who eliminated child labor laws and slavery, who gave women the right to vote, and were at the heart of every other extension of human rights to include more and more people and offer them a way to engage more fully in the great American democracy project. People who believe in the possibility of a better world. Progressives.

Not to be outdone by the Baptists and the Methodists is the Reformed Church of America (RCA), the erstwhile Dutch Reformed Church. It too has split in two over the RCA's acceptance of gays in their ranks. The splinter-group, shuffled the letters in their acronym and now call themselves the ARC, the Alliance of Reformed Churches. They continue to oppose same-sex marriage and the ordination of LGBT clergy.

The Lutheran Church, which once claimed my Christian loyalty, is split between conservatives and progressives like all the other denominations. According to a Missouri Synod site: "The position of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, repeatedly affirmed, is that homophile behavior is intrinsically sinful, expressly condemned as immoral by the Scriptures." Contrast that with 

In 1991, the Church wide Assembly passed a resolution stating that, "Gay and lesbian people, as individuals created by God, are welcome to participate fully in the life of the congregations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America."

the position espoused by Lutherans at the other end of the spectrum. 

As for the Roman Catholics, I'm with the Catholics in the pews, 70% of whom are gay-friendly, and not with the official hierarchical church who are not. As for the so-called "progressives" among the conservatives, this statement had me rolling in the aisles recently. A celibate catholic may

have a Catholic funeral and be buried in a Catholic cemetery unless the bishop or pastor determines that doing so would cause public scandal.

Gee, thanks, guys. You get a gold star for trying.

But no cigar.

Christians are all over the map, in other words, when it comes to homosexuality. Christianity in America is a work-in-progress, and for that reason I have decided to cast my lot with the seekers, those listening for "the still small voice of God" and not with those who can't tell the difference between a bible and a hammer.  Both claim to speak for the church. Neither does entirely, and its a buyer-beware kind of situation. The fact that I don't share their faith is irrelevant. I am a fellow-seeker and I find every discovery of common ground with my fellow human creatures a cause for celebration.

For those of you who are still reading and might be interested in more chat along these lines, I highly recommend a discussion between two gay Christians with opposing views on how to be both gay and Christian which I came across recently. The two speakers are Brandan Robertson, a pastor in the Sunnyside Reformed Church in Queens. At the time of this discussion he pastored a progressive Disciples of Christ Church in San Diego.  David Bennett is an Australian Anglican theologian and doctoral student at Oxford.  It's on the podcast, Premier Unbelievable, moderated by the Christian apologist Justin Brierley, who (I mention only as a side note, and in passing) has spent the last ten years taking on atheists.

Two gay Christians, both outspokenly and (apparently) happily gay, one fully at home with progressive institutional Christianity, and one who follows the same line that the Roman Catholic clerical set advocate, that happiness lies in living a celibate life, as do most nuns and priests who see themselves as fully dedicated full-time worshipers of Jesus Christ, with no need of such things as sexual companionship. 

Neither of these guys shares my view that religion is a no more than a form of poetry, as opposed to science, and like other poetry can be written creatively in aesthetically sympathetic ways or clumsily, in ways that lead to the crushing of the soul.  And if they were running for president, I probably would not vote for them.

But I'd be delighted to have a beer with one or both of them at the same time.

Young Royals - a film review

Sweden has a king. He is known as Carl XVI Gustav, with the number in the middle indicating he's the sixteenth Carl but not the sixteenth Carl Gustav.  A bit of trivia I picked up while digging around to find out if there is a Swedish crown prince who might take offense at the portrayal of the royal family in Young Royals, an extremely popular and beautifully done series on Netflix. I'm tempted to call it a "beautifully done series on a gay crown prince on Netflix" but that would tilt all the marbles toward the gay aspect of the fictional story and completely miss the political stuff, which is a fierce condemnation of Sweden's upper class.

Let me pick these things apart, and talk about the gay crown prince, Wilhelm, first, and then the political stuff. Both the (fictional) gay love story and the critique of the (fictional) monarchy and non-democratic hierarchy make this series very compelling indeed. I've watched it twice. And I appreciated it even more the second time around.

To get this out of the way, yes there is a Swedish prince and he was at one time heir to the throne. But on January 1, 1980, the Swedish parliament passed, for the first time in European history, the feminist new law establishing absolute primogeniture.  What that meant is that Crown Princess Victoria, the daughter of Carl Gustav and his wife Sylvia, became heir to the throne, and not her younger brother Prince Carl Philip (note: not Crown Prince; just prince), who had been heir up to that point, because he's the first-born male heir. Carl Philip was only seven and a half months old at the time, so I doubt he took the move as an insult. Instead he has had forty-three years to get used to his sister prepping to become future Queen of Sweden.

But first, let me get to the gay love story. Two Netflix streaming shows have made waves this year, both thrilling the loving bejeezuz out of the LGBT crowd, if I have assessed the scene correctly. As well they should. Both are superbly well-done: well-acted, well-written, unabashedly unapologetically pro-gay, and sweet as honey on sugar cubes. I'll stick to Young Royals for now, and leave Heartstopper for another time.

Wilhelm, usually called Wille (played by Edvin Ryding), heir to the Swedish throne is enrolled at the country's leading private boarding school. His mother, the queen, and practically everybody who's anybody in Sweden's Who's Who of noble families, went there. It is a hotbed of upper class twits who bully the non-upper class kids in their midst. These include the kid from the other side of the tracks, Simon (played by Omar Rudberg, a Venezuelan-Swede in real life). The casting director obviously worked at getting people to play the roles who fit expectations.

It's a coming out story. Both boys are sixteen. Simon has been out as gay for years, and has a wonderfully (divorced but) supportive mother and father, and he's very close to his sister, Sara (Frida Argento), who has Asperger's, a fact which enables her to stir up a lot of dust, furthering the plot in a school where everybody keeps secrets. Wille, on the other hand, is just discovering he has a strong attraction for this outspoken and self-aware classmate, Simon, and in no time they are making out to beat the band. Then there is August, a melodramatic bad guy (Malte Gårdinger), leader of a pack of bullies who follow him because he is a member of one of Sweden's oldest families, a first-class bully - and you can almost see him tying Wille and Simon to the railroad tracks. He is a member of the royal family and when things go sideways, Wille's mother, the queen, calls on August to "help out," thus making things even rougher for her son than he already has it.

The story revolves around the conflict Wille faces in having a life to share with his lover and having to live up to the hetero expectations put on him as crown prince. At sixteen, he's at the absolute edge of endurance and often collapses under the stress. Simon, loving and kindly as he is otherwise, is also unable to manage expectations that he will play second-fiddle to the kingdom and keep his love life secret. Young Royals is all about stress, frustration and hypocrisy. Great material for a powerful drama. The episodes are written with cliff-hangers, and I dare you to try not to binge.

As I implied, it's the political as much as the gay love story, that I find so compelling about this series. It portrays Sweden as a complex mix of what the world thinks it is - the world's most socially progressive country - on the one hand, and an inherently conservative place where people worry about what the world thinks of you and tradition matters. The kids are only in their mid-teens, but their parties are filled with alcohol and drugs and they are open to the world about their sexual interests and proclivities. Even the queen admits to her son that she is not bothered about his homosexuality; it's just that, as crown prince, he has a duty to be hypocritical and keep his sex life secret.

It's a fictional portrayal of the Swedish royals and Swedish nobility, in the same vein as The Crown is about British royals. And it almost dares reporters to knock on the real Queen Sylvia's door and ply her with questions about similarities to Wille's mother, the fictional queen. And ditto for the real Prince Carl Philip. I can just see somebody sticking a microphone in his face and asking, "I know you're married with children, but are you really hiding your homosexuality?" You may want to tell me I'm making too much of this inclination by fans to confuse actors for the characters they play. But I don't think I am. Look, for example, at what this poor kid, Kit Connor, who plays a bisexual lover in Heartstopper, is going through now that he's dating a woman. A whole bunch of gay folk are showing that while they like the L and the G in LGBT, they're not sincere about their support for their B brothers and sisters. (I'll wager these folk are even less sanguine about the T element, as well.) It's homophobes and entirely too many gay monosexuals joining up to be little shits these days. Further proof, for those who still need telling, that LGBT people are just folks trying to make a living and pay their taxes. Some are saints, some are sinners or in-between.

And, in the end, this is the actual focal point of the political side of this drama: in real life, the character of Simon is played by a young man who is openly bisexual. But Edvin, who plays Wille, refuses to talk about his sexuality. He could say, "I'm still trying to figure that out." That might well be the case. But he could also say, "I'm leaving it ambiguous, because if I come down on one side or another I'll just lose the fans from the side I don't come down on. And this is a business. And it's all about keeping everybody happy." So don't blame the fictional queen. There's much to be said for ambiguity and keeping the world guessing.

But while there's no way we can or should avoid the political aspects of coming out to the world, there's no reason we can't celebrate and fully enjoy an absolutely lovely gay love story. Which is what Young Royals is.

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Firebird - a film review

The gay liberation movement, like other social and political efforts to secure freedom from discrimination, is a long and painfully slow process. You don't change people's convictions overnight, and breakthroughs like giving women the same rights as men and blacks the same rights as whites and LGBT people the same rights as straights are not single events. People like to place them in a historical context. It's common to speak of the Stonewall Riots as the starting point of the world-wide gay liberation movement, even though it actually began with countless smaller events many years earlier. Consider the efforts of Magnus Hirschfeld in Weimar Germany, for one. Liberation is a not a single event, but a long laborious process.

In a number of places around the world they still throw gay people off of roofs. Torture and jail them. Expose them to ridicule. The degree of hostility varies with the degree to which the need arises in sexually insecure people to demonize other people's ways of expressing sexual and emotional feelings.  The gay liberation movement has met with tremendous success around the world. Some thirty countries already grant the right to same-sex couples to marry, and more are added to this list every year. At the same time, at the other end of the spectrum, there are countries - remember Iran's former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's hilarious statement: "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who has told you we have that."

I bring this up not because it's new information - it's anything but - but because I want to talk about Firebird, a film I came across yesterday which I think deserves recognition as one of these many markers of the progress of the international gay liberation movement. It has been around for a year and made the rounds of 60 LGBT film festivals, and has appeared in some 500 theaters already, but has only now been released on Amazon Prime. Despite its boosters' claims that it's up there with Moonlight and Brokeback Mountain, it's not. It lacks the wallop and the brilliance. But I hope that won't deter you from giving it a chance.

For starters, it's an Estonian movie, and that alone should catch your attention. Actually, it's a British/Estonian co-production which came into being thanks in large part to British actor, Tom Prior, and the Estonian producer and director, Peeter Rebane. Somebody brought to Rebane's attention the story of Sergey Fetisov, an Estonian soldier in the Soviet Army in the late 70s who falls in love with a pilot he is assigned to show around the base. Rebane, gay himself, was carried away by the story and eventually teamed up with Tom Prior to write the screenplay. Rebane would produce and direct; Prior would co-author as well as act the role of Sergey.

It takes time, but they eventually find Ukrainian actor, Oleg Zagorodnii, to play the role of the pilot, and Russian actress, Diana Pozharskaya, to play the role of Luisa, close friend and fellow soldier to Sergey, whom everybody expects he will marry one day. He doesn't, and to say any more is to spoil the plotline.

How well you relate to this movie will depend on how important it is to you that movies be free of "message," a political or other didactic agenda pushing some cause. If you're like most who believe art only suffers when weighed down by some school ma'arm's finger wagging at you, trying to teach you something, this film will be nothing more than a few moments spent with beautiful people and a full-on romantic gay love story - a little flesh - not too much - all pretty run-of-the-mill these days. IndieWire gives it a B-.

If you're like me, though, you will likely appreciate the stunning progress of the Baltic States (I understand that what is happening in Estonia is happening in Latvia and Lithuania as well, if not quite as fast), now free from the chokehold of the Soviet Union and its successor state, Russia, and becoming more like its European neighbors with each passing day. Where once Sergey's dreams included going to Moscow to study acting, these days Estonians are a whole lot closer to their Finnish cousins and neighbors, and other westerners cheering on Ukraine's attempt to break free of Russian clutches. For the record, I have no personal knowledge of whether LGBT people in Estonia still experience greater hostility than in the west because of holdovers from Soviet times, but stepchild adoption became legal in 2016, gender change is recognized by law, and gays, lesbians and bisexuals are allowed to serve openly in the military. Actually, same-sex activity (between consenting males, at least) was decriminalized in Estonia as early as 1929, almost a century ago.

And a gay Estonian can get wind of a memoir about a love story between two Russians stationed in Estonia and make it into a movie non-gay Estonians can incorporate into their cultural heritage.

But I don't want to leave you with the impression that the film is lacking in value except as a polemic for gay liberation. There are moments of genuine passion, times when the tears are real and the fears of being found out are palpable. And the side story - of a sophisticated slightly older cultured man fostering and bringing a kid from the farm into the life of theater and ballet - is a real treat. They actually brought in a ballet troop and choreographed a scene from Stravinsky's Firebird Suite to show the powerful impact of the older (in his 30s - not that old!) gay man on his younger lover. Also fascinating were the Estonian landscapes and the dull Soviet architecture of the time. One scene is even filmed in Moscow.

In the end, the story has the power of all love stories which make us go to extraordinary levels to keep that love alive. In the end, the location is a distraction to what makes the world go around. Besides money, I mean.

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