I am the shadow of the waxwing slain

Let’s start this off with a little story. You and I live in Smallville. There are only 2 restaurants in Smallville—a burger place and a Chinese buffet. Now, everyone usually goes to the burger place cause it’s all-american, and they like the food. Most people like the food enough that they don’t even go to the Chinese restaurant. But you and I, we go to the burger place, and try it, and we don’t like the food at all. Nothing against burgers, but it’s not for us. So the next day, we go get chinese food instead. And it’s really good. Especially when compared with the burgers. So, while everyone else gets burgers we get fried rice. They may think we’re a bit weird, but whatever, we’re all happy.

A few weeks later, I go on a vacation to metropolis, and WOW—they have ALL kinds of restaurants. So I go to a Japanese restaurant, and a Thai place, and a Korean restaurant, cause I know that I like Asian food, so I figure I’ll try some more kinds out. And it turns out that Japanese is nice, but it’s no Chinese, and I’m not really a big fan of Korean, but WOW, Thai is truly amazing—it’s my favorite so far. So I go back home, and I tell you about Thai food, and you’re intrigued but you don’t understand why I’m not so hot on Chinese food anymore. Because you can’t have tried Thai food, so you can’t know if you like it or not. You just don’t have the opportunity.

Well, this past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s conference on Creating Change as part of the delegation of the NWA Center for Equality. I was expecting that what I would get out of it would largely be training—this is how you lobby for this, this is how you respond to this kind of discrimination, this is how you get your center operating efficiently. To this respect, I was not at all disappointed. I received all forms of helpful training.

But that wasn’t what I took back from the conference. The name of the conference, “Creating Change,” is as much about changing the people who come as it is changing the world they come from. All of the bathrooms at the conference are gender-neutral, to create the most comfortable environment for transpeople. However you may feel about a Gender-Neutral Restroom, it is truly a different experience walking into a bathroom and seeing a row of such different people. You just don’t see that in Fayetteville.

But, let’s get to the workshops. I tried to split my time between workshops that interested me (mostly on queer youth) and workshops that would benefit my leadership as a newly-elected member of the Board of Directors for the Center (mostly on volunteering, leadership, etc…). Very first workshop I attend, they ask me to introduce myself, where I’m from, and my preferred gender pronoun (PGP). Not quite sure what a PGP is and being the first person to speak, I introduce myself as “Mister Jon Cox.” I feel like everyone is looking at me weirdly. They probably weren’t, but I was right to feel odd: everyone else introduced themselves, saying “I go by she/hers, he/his, they/theirs, vi/hir.” By the end of the conference, it seems that most of us had pencilled our PGPs onto our name tag. I went by he/his.

It was odd to me. We don’t do that in Fayetteville. It’s not that we don’t have transpeople here, as I know a few, but we just don’t think about it—we’re not to that point yet. (Now, I don’t think that when two New Yorkers meet, they ask what the other’s PGP is, but I figure two queer New Yorkers very well might, whereas two queer Arkansans probably wouldn’t.)

Furthermore, there were many workshops on sexuality, and not just the various dichotomies of straight, gay, bi, whatever. There were workshops on leather, on polyamory, on kink. My initial reaction to these was rather conservative: “Wow, I can’t believe they’re having workshops here on polyamory.” After all, people frequently say that gay marriage will lead to polygamy (among others). Shouldn’t we be avoiding these hot-topics?

Of course, I soon came to realize that the answer is absolutely not. Think back to my story about burgers and Asian food. Burgers represent heterosexuality. Most people try it, because it’s what’s generally expected, and they find that it works out for them. They’re happy with burgers, so they don’t try anything else. Some people don’t like burgers, though, so they try the other option—Chinese food (representing in this case, homosexuality). Chinese food, they realize, is what they prefer to burgers. They stick with their Chinese food.

That’s where we are in Fayetteville. We’re pretty small, we’ve got (mainly) the two restaurants.

Of course, when you go places that are bigger, there are more restaurants. You’ve already figured out that you might not necessarily like what you have more than everything else, so you try other food. You might realize that you’ve been eating Chinese this whole time, cause you like it, but once you have Thai food for the first time, that’s your food. You could never have it before, so you never thought about it.

That’s what Creating Change was for me—a bigger selection of restaurants. I never really thought about the other types of food, because they were never there for me to think about. But in bigger cities, they are. And so it suddenly makes sense to me that there would be sessions on polyamory at a conference on LGBTQ rights: it’s not that queer people are more likely to be poly, it is that we have had to experiment from the beginning to find out who we are. Some of us are poly. Because most heterosexual people aren’t dissatisfied with their first experiment, they have no reason to try anything else. They could just as easily find themselves as polyamorous. They’re just not used to finding out which options fit them best.

As a caveat, my restaurant analogy makes it sound like you pick whichever orientation you like the most—that’s not it, at all. You don’t pick. It’s who you are. You just discover it.

When I went to Creating Change, I had a pretty standard LGBT view of sexuality. I didn’t use the word ‘Queer,’ which you will now notice me using. The change? Queer isn’t really found much in Fayetteville yet, because most of us didn’t know too much about it. My experience at Creating Change has shown me what queer is, and I’ve come to realize queer aspects of my own personality.

I have come out of the conference with a new look at myself (and others), and a renewed commitment to serve the center, this time in a way that is much more open and which will hopefully allow others to realize whoever they are.

Today, January 18, 2010, is a Federal holiday, held in honor of the Civil Rights advocate Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior. It is one of eleven Federal holidays, the other ten being New Year’s, Inauguration Day (when applicable), Presidents Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veteran’s Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Three of these days are cultural (New Year’s, Thanksgiving, and Christmas), three are related to war (Memorial, Independence, and Veteran’s day), two to foundational fathers (Presidents and Columbus days), and two to Civil Rights struggles (MLK and Labor days). It is unusual in that it recognizes a single individual rather than the entire movement—Labor day honors all workers, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day seems initially to only honor just one of the Civil Rights leaders.

While it is true that Dr. King is probably the most influential (and definitely most remembered) leader of the Civil Rights movement, it is important to remember the he was assassinated in 1968—after the passage of the Civil Rights act of 1965, but a decade before the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act. And though history may seem to show that the Sixties are the defining decade of the Civil Rights movement, it surely must also show that the Sixties didn’t fix everything.

We have this notion in America that the Civil Rights movement is historical—it is something we study, it is something we have a museum dedicated to. This is an utter fabrication. Inequality in America is still widespread. Though we have, for the first time, an African-American President, we also have just one African-American in the Senate (Roland Burriss, the controversial appointment to fill President Obama’s empty Senatorial seat). To this day, there have only been six African-American Senators. There have been two African-American Justices of the Supreme Court, and, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one Hispanic. There is still racial inequality in education, in prison, and economically.

And that’s assuming that Civil Rights is just about race. Women are still, to some extent, marginalized in politics. And, as a gay man, I am subject to some of the few existing constitutionally viable discriminatory laws. Whatever your rationale is for opposing Gay Rights, it is fundamentally denying a right to someone—exactly the problem that has always plagued marginalized groups in America. You may not think that I deserve the right to marry a man and adopt a child, you may know it to be a fact. But 100 years ago, people knew for a fact that African-Americans were inferior and thought that women did not deserve the right to vote. To say that no one believes these things today would be false, but to say that to believe them publicly is to cast oneself in a light of ignorance and hatred would be true.

And yet, it is a lesson that no one ever seems to learn—you may deny people in this country fundamental rights, you may enforce against them an increasing number of oppressive laws, but they will fight, and they will win, and history will view you as hateful, oppressive, bigots.

By celebrating Martin Luther King Jr., Day as a remembrance of his service to the minorities of this country, you are acknowledging that the fight for Civil Rights is over. It isn’t, and it never will be. Don’t just go to a vigil for Dr. King. Keep alive his message by fighting oppression everywhere—discrimination is still enshrined in law in this country.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’

Let’s help make them equal.

See also my post on the Civil Rights Museum

This Christmas feels different to me (or perhaps differently). Gone—as usual—is the excitement. I think the last time I felt that was in 2003. It’s Christmas, and I’m a Charlie Brown, searching for some other meaning. Not some meaning lost; some meaning found. I have found it, but I do not have it. I am trying to make it my own.
It’s been bittersweet. Incredibly so. The end of this semester has; nothing has turned out as I wanted it to. That should upset me, I guess. I began the semester with a goal, and I failed that. But I’m still working at it. It has morphed so much, it has come to consume me. It had been one fleeting moment of awe and I have been living in it since August.
We all want our Christmas miracle; this year, I know what it is. And miraculous it would be.

To whom that my lips have uttered those words,
I meant them. But when I feel them today
I just worry and fret, because to say
them now is to mean them, and hope they’re heard,
hope they’re internalized, hope that they’re known,
and hope that they resonate somehow, for
it is all I can say. I wish no more
than to mean them, and to make them my own.

But for me to say them, you must listen.
Listen, for now I speak: what once was a
quest, a game, has shown me many things
and given me a life I can’t hasten.
You must know that when I think, when I say
those words, they are from the joy you bring.

I make this claim not to be outrageous, but because it affects the way I go about my daily activities downtown. I met someone for lunch today, on Dickson. I was lucky enough to catch a parallel parking spot right in front of our restaurant, so I didn’t bother going to the WAC lot. The only difference between those spots and the WAC one? They have a two-hour time limit.

After lunch, we decided to go to the library. Now, normally I’d just walk to the library from Dickson, as it’s only two blocks. But I had my car with me. So I got in my car and drove the two blocks to the library’s parking garage. I mean, sure, I could have just moved to the WAC lot, but what’s the point? It made more sense to drive to the library.

I’ve had the same problems with the square before. Free parking on the square, two hour time limit. What would otherwise be an on-foot excursion is limited by the fact that we have to move cars every so often. This was especially an issue when I hung out at the square a lot during the summer of 2007.
Thankfully, these aren’t usually issues on Saturday, when most pay parking is free. You can just dump your car and walwk around at will. Of course, this leads to another problem: congestion.

I’m not really sure what the best option is, I just know that not having a consistent place to park downtown where I won’t have to move my car (the WAC being one, of course, but they frequently fill up and are flirting with going for-pay) reduces the distances I walk and increases the ones that I drive.

Granted, I’m about to move to Center street, so I’ll be downtown. My car usage should decrease by about 80%, and I couldn’t be more excited.

In my article in the Traveler last week, I wrote of growing hypocrisy in the conservative coalition that, until recently, was responsible for the governance of our country. I received various responses, from those claiming that I don’t understand republicanism to others saying that only moral conservatives want to ban gay marriage; fiscal ones don’t usually care.
What is funny, however, is that the supposedly negative feedback that I received actually just enhanced my point of view, that is, that conservatism is not Republicanism (but rather a faction of it), and that there is no one conservative mindset. There are, more or less, two main factions of conservatism: social conservatism and fiscal conservatism.
Social conservatives are those who seek to quell various moral transgressions. They’re the ones who supported the Stupak amendment to the House’s healthcare bill because, at least, they’re not supporting abortion. Fiscal conservatives are the more libertarian-leaning ones; they’re the ones who repealed the banking restrictions put in place after the Great Depression (and arguably caused our current situation), who support deregulation, who feel the federal government exercises too much power and is too large.
Neither one of these factions is overwhelmingly large, and neither are they restrained to Republicanism (the aforementioned Stupak amendment is, in fact, named for a Democratic senator and was voted for by 63 other Democrats). The two are not mutually exclusive, in that a person can believe quite strongly in both moral and fiscal conservatism, but they do make uneasy bedfellows in larger scale applications.
As I expressed last week, the union of social and fiscal conservatism often results in hypocrisy, usually due to the actions of the social side. Social conservatives will endorse some government regulation (say, against abortions) that, from a fiscal point of view might seem like unnecessary use of governmental force. The situation, as it currently exists, is almost like in a parliamentary system: in order to keep one party out of power, two smaller parties form a coalition government and share the gains.
Coalition governments, however, usually do not last forever, and there is evidence to suggest that the current conservative coalition is, in fact, beginning to disintegrate. Remember the primary season for the 2008 election? There was no candidate that appealed en masse to republicans. Evangelicals had Huckabee, but the rest was rather awash and we somehow ended up with John McCain.
And even in the most recent elections, look at New York’s 23rd congressional district. There were three candidates: Democrat Owens, Conservative (of the Conservative Party of New York) Hoffman, and Republican Scozzafava. Republican celebrities such as Sarah Palin and Fred Thompson endorsed Hoffman over the Republican candidate, to the extent that the Republican candidate withdrew from the race and endorsed the Democratic candidate, who proceeded to win. It was the first time a Republican had lost the district in over 100 years.
Neither form of conservatism holds enough sway to control the direction of our country. They are both, however, opposed to various liberal gains, and, when working together, have much greater influence (albeit at the expense of hypocrisy). They seem, at the moment, to be at odds.

I
When I’m driving far from home
I always jump the gun, and exit too early,
or I compensate and drive past my turn.
Regardless of how, I always miss
from excitement or my attempt to curb it.

When I drive myself back,
once I pass through the tunnel that marks where foreign lands become home
I always go too fast.
I’ve gone this way many times before.
No one patrols it.

I cannot curb my want.

———

II
I’ve known nothing more lonely than driving home,
on I-40, through the desert, at 2 AM.
Even my conscience is asleep.
Every gas station: a haven.
“One forty-eight.” The price of my “gourmet” coffee.
Also the friendliest words I’ve heard in an eternity.
15 minutes have passed. Or maybe 15 miles.
Or maybe both.
But here I am, alone at 2:15
on the long, long road. Driving,
going for no reason.
Not even the thought of home comforts me.

When first I saw you, I had but one want,
One desire: to become your new friend.
Friend, I say. The kind of friend that you wake
Up with each morning, not the kind you break
Bread with. I want for us to share a house,
Though more: I wish for us to share a heart

And so I tried to burrow to your heart
To make you feel some same measure of want,
So that you’ll hold me within, as I house
You within. I would replace the boyfriend
I ignored you telling me of. I’d break
You two apart, so together we’d wake.

Ah, and what pleasure it is when I wake
Next to you, and bask in beauty. My heart
Beats so loudly that I fear it will break
Your gentle slumber. Of that, I’ve no want.
I succeeded in becoming your friend,
But am just that: a mere guest in your house.

I love to be your friend, but I still house
A wish to comfort you after his wake.
Did I just wish death upon your boyfriend?
That is too strong. Perhaps a change of heart?
He could go evil, so that you would want
Out. At least you two could take some small break.

For, every single day, my heart does break
When you invite me over to your house
For lunch or for dinner, but not out of want
To sweep me up. Still, I’m caught in your wake
And still, still, still, I hold you in my heart
And still, still, still, you hold me as a friend.

And though you consider me your best friend,
the word “best,” not “boy” makes me want to break
Into the fortress that you call your heart.
‘tis the only place I wish to be my house.
What a lovely place it would be to wake
Up, and no longer be driven by want.

I shall always be a friend in your house,
Forever stuck in your wake of heartbreak.
Forever shall my heart be filled with want.

You can make plans, but plans must not work out;
to commit something does not make it so.
To express what you must is not to shout,
but to, though use of secrets, make him know.
And if you fail, and when you fail, you fail.
And if you try not, and do not, likewise
you fail, but, with no success, cannot bail.
You cannot give up, and that is your vice.
And so you transmit to him your failure
or try at least, so you may make him feel
if not some measure of love, then anger
or hate, sorrow or lust, of something real.

But know who you are, how little you are
for, even when close, you are yet afar.

There you are. You cannot sleep, but in a way, you are glad. Being awake lets you relish the moment; being awake lets you see him. He’s lying on his side with his back to you. His shoulder has three freckles on it; a therefore sign on his back.

It’s just an arm, but it’s ten inches away from you, and you have never seen something so beautiful before. This moment is everlasting torture and you love it. And you want to touch him; to feel him. You want him to feel you, so you reach your hand out, to scratch his back. Your fingertips stop just millimeters from the white fabric of the A-shirt that fits around him so tightly. And in that moment, you’re worried to wake him. Not from the touch, but from the sound of your beating heart. And you try to forget last night, but you can’t. You remember whispering into his ear how much you want to kiss him, and his pained protestations. And the pain in his voice comes rushing back to you.

How can you tell him how you feel? If there is one thing in the world you’ve never been more unapologetic for, it is the fact that you want him. And nothing pains you more than knowing that he has to choose, and he doesn’t have to choose you, and probably won’t. And you want to be selfish and tell him to choose you, but you know he’ll hate you if you do that. And you wonder what’s greater, the pain you’ve caused him or the pain he’s causing you. And you want your pain to be greater, not to make his less, but because it’s the only part of him you can have.

He’s turned over now. When you see his face, you know instantly why you’ve fallen in love. Awake, you can’t have him, you can’t kiss him, you can’t tousle his hair. You can’t make him dinner or make him cry or make him fall in love. So you let him sleep, because it’s the only time in which you will ever have him.

I jotted some quick verse down on an envelope I had in my car one night.

1.
In backalleys I wander
which, in this town,
is a challenge
—we have no backalleys

The moon is gibbous
were I sitting how many thousand miles to the east;
tomorrow in time,
the moon would be full

But from my alley, here,
now,
       I cannot tell if it is waxing or waning.
And for as long as I sit,
it shall never be full.

 
2.
In the act of mapping a territory
it ceases to become wilderness.

To name this
would be to destroy it.