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Traveling through the Red Sea

On the road in Red America.


I set out in late May on a leisurely journey to the American West by car. Among other things, I wanted to witness first-hand the political reality of Red America — a reality I don’t often confront in the blue isthmus of Austin, Texas. My journey started in Austin and ended up in San Francisco, two cities known for their liberal inclinations, though neither is far from Republican strongholds. Austin and San Francisco are both high rent, hip towns populated by a lot of people that fit my demographic — young, white, college-educated liberal Democrats — who, truth be told, have little interest in penetrating the mentalité of the conservative heartland.

As New York Times columnist David Brooks might say, they’d rather vacation in Tuscany than Tucson.

Red America shouldn’t have been such a mystery to me. After all, I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a place John Gunther called “the most conservative city in America,” in Inside USA. Tulsa is the kind of place where the first question people ask outsiders is “What church do you go to?” Voting Republican is not something you decide to do out of free will; it’s a civic obligation, like getting a library card or picking up litter.

Still, the shock of the November election remains with me. Even though I grew up with them, and count of them as family members and friends, I still wonder: Who the hell are these people who reelected George W. Bush?! If, as Thomas Frank claims in What’s the Matter with Kansas, Americans are suffering from a “species of derangement” that allows them to vote against their own best interests, what does this derangement look like on the ground?

This is my travelogue of the people and places of the Red Sea:

Somewhere around Mason, Texas, the inevitable happens. I have been listening to the Austin-based NPR affiliate, KUT, when the crackle and hiss of the weak signal becomes unbearable. I push the dial further to the left, hoping to hear more about the scandal of the day, the “Downing Street Memo,” which supposedly proves that the Bush Administration was attempting to “fix” intelligence to support the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

After weeks of ignoring the memo, journalists were starting to pay attention. The memo was the “smoking gun” that proved the Administration had deceived the American public in the run up to the war.

I listen for more, but no luck. Monopolizing the left side of the dial is what sounds like a college rock band, with a low-fi sound and a jangling guitar riff. When I listen closely, though, I hear earnest lyrics about Jesus and the young rocker’s personal relationship with the Lord. It is “alternative Christian,” a bizarre palimpsest of the Pixies or Nirvana, but with saccharine lyrics about being reborn in Christ.  

I push the dial rightward, hoping to get another slice of the airwaves — maybe more on the Memo. Here I encounter Toby Keith, a fellow Oklahoman who has his own take on international affairs. In a song called “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue,” Keith warns “the terrorists” (whoever they are in west Texas) that he will personally “put a boot up your ass / it’s the American way.”

AM radio isn’t much better: Rush offers predictable rants about Hillary, Hannity vents about liberal judges, and a particularly vile shout show host named Michael Savage offers his $1.02 about “politically correct” professors. Nothing about Downing Street.

In the afternoon, hunger overtakes me. I am in the vicinity of Llano, Texas — pronounced “Laan-ah” by locals —  and the world famous Cooper’s BBQ, so I make a detour. I once read a book by Larry McMurtry in which the Texan said that he would drive 100 miles for a good steak, so I figure a half-hour’s detour for the thickest pork chops ever carved from a pig is worth the trip.

Cooper’s has approximately seven 20-foot-long rows of BBQ pits that smoke every conceivable kind of meat: sausage, brisket, chicken, turkey legs. I think you can even get ostrich. You point to the meat you like, and a huge man in Wranglers pokes it with a sword-like instrument, dips it in some sauce, and then throws it on a plastic tray. If you get your food to go, the good people at Cooper’s put it in an over-sized cardboard box — the kind that liquor stores often use. They encourage you to take an entire loaf of white bread, a 20-ounce Styrofoam cup of beans and a roll of paper towels — for free! It is all excess and dressed-down decadence: what Texans like to call “Texas-sized.”

It is also wasteful and inefficient, of course, but to call attention to the vast amounts of waste generated would come off as un-Texan, and by extension, un-American. A pickup truck in the parking lot has a bumper sticker that reads: “Piss off a liberal: Be happy!” Some eating establishments might be wary of offending patrons by announcing their politics, but Cooper’s has a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker affixed to the front door.  

Two pounds of pork chops later, I am back on the road. Long stretches of nothing. Dusty, low-slung towns. Few people visible outdoors, apart from Mexican construction and lawn workers. Even as I write this, I sense something’s wrong with my observation. Texas is now a “majority-minority” state and Hispanics are the largest minority, so of course I would see a lot of brown-skinned folks. It’s just that I don’t see any white people. That’s not a problem, of course, but as I approach the border, I see bright blue “Viva Bush” yard signs. My stomach churns pork.

Contrary to popular belief, a handful of counties outside of Travis (where Austin is located) voted for Kerry last year. Most are along the Mexican border. About seven hours west of Austin, I am in one of these counties: Presidio.

The county seat is Marfa, home to just over 2,000 people, but disproportionately famous for at least three reasons. One is a bizarre phenomenon known as the Marfa Lights, mysterious lights that flash on and off near a distant mountain range. Another Marfa attraction is the Paisano Hotel, where James Dean stayed while on the set of Giant, his last movie. Still another is the work of minimalist artist Donald Judd, who took over an abandoned Air Force base and converted it into a permanent art installation. The installation also houses an artists’ colony that attracts artists from around the world. At the Marfa Book Company, a sleek, cool downtown coffee bar/bookstore, I hear German and Australian accents.

The influx of artists has an odd effect on the locals. Down a side street, I spot an old white church that has been redecorated to look a cross between a Las Vegas-style wedding chapel and an artist’s studio. Pure kitsch. As I get out of the car to snap a photo, an old cowboy in dusty jeans, cowboy hat, and western shirt, nods to me. I am sure I have committed some faux pas.

“Hey, why don’t you take a picture of this?” he says, pointing to his scrappy house and rusted-out pick-up truck next door.

We talk and I find out he is the ex-sheriff of Presidio County, and — surprise — a Democrat. Now he works part-time as a cop in Marfa. Contrary to the stereotype of a redneck, he embraces the artists.

“As long as they pay taxes, let them do what they want. It’s good for a little town like this,” he informs me.

Outside of Marfa, and all along the New Mexico/Arizona border, I see more green U.S. Border Patrol SUV’s than civilian cars. I take two-lanes as close to the Mexican border as I can get. Twice — once in Texas and once in New Mexico — I see billboards spray-painted “The Minutemen.” The border feels militarized and eerie. It is blazing hot, and there are no signs of life except for the occasional torn piece of clothing on a barbed wire fence, probably left by an immigrant suffering from heat exhaustion. I begin to worry about breaking down: there are no towns for 50 miles and no cell phone signals.

On the way to California, I see sprawling towns all along the border that lack any visible water supply: El Paso, Las Cruces, Yuma, El Centro. Theses are booming places that feel part Mad Max, part Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Cruel, lifeless places that look like upscale versions of Falluja.

But the biggest surprise is that, in the middle of this blighted Red Sea, there are signs of life. Flagstaff and Tucson in Arizona. Santa Fe, New Mexico. Here I see people actually walking. Flagstaff, I read in the local paper, is resisting the invasion of a Wal-Mart Supercenter. Santa Fe, for all its hokey New Age vibe, has a unique character. I see more Subarus (the most popular car for Democrats) in Santa Fe than anywhere else in the country.

Days later I arrive in Las Vegas, a place I hope to never see again. This where the American species of derangement becomes a virus, making people look and behave like they’re on a Fox reality show for the living dead.

After four days of traveling I finally feel the cool breeze of the Pacific. I have come up from California’s Central Valley, a flat place of urban sprawl, smelly farms and unbearable heat. Another Red space.

On the horizon, I spy the red Golden Gate Bridge and thank God that the sky is still blue.

I think I’ll fly next time.

STORY INDEX

The writer
Russell Cobb, InTheFray Assistant Managing Editor

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Commentary

Cake before breakfast

A Mother’s Day lesson about the non-traditional family.


Brian Michael Weaver and his son enjoy some time together.

“Go home tonight and ask Mom or Dad to help you find your homework,” I said to a second grader in my class. He belongs to one of those “conventional” nuclear families with a mother, a father, and a sister — all biological. His parents are high school sweethearts who still hold hands and make each other laugh.

Two children in my primary class differ from this mold. One is an adopted child. Family conflicts prevent the second, Brianna, from living with her biological parents. She, instead, lives with her aunt — and her aunt’s female partner.

Brianna had overheard me when I told her classmate to “ask Mom or Dad to help you find your homework.” It wasn’t the first time I had made this faulty hetero-presumption, the “mom and dad” slip. An administrator had once pointed out a similar mistake. That time, in a letter to my pupils’ parents, I suggested that children raid “dad’s closet” for white-collar shirts to use as scientific smocks the following week.

How many other children with same-sex parents or caregivers have teachers who take for granted the momanddad childhood experience? Did it register on Brianna’s radar? How would the women raising Brianna react?

I should know better. After all, I am the adoptive, gay father of a kindergarten son at the same school.

And yet it took a Mother’s Day art project to jar me into recognizing my own insensitivity to adoptive parents and children within the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. I was teaching students how to make “coupon books” for their moms, when, a quarter of the way through, I remembered Brianna.

For whom would she be making Mother’s Day gifts? Would it be her mom, her aunt, her aunt’s partner — or all three? My mind raced through the rest of my students’ family situations, and I was relieved that she was the only student for whom I needed to adjust the lesson.

I knew that one of my other students was making a coupon book for her adoptive mother. Still, I called her adoptive parents to warn that Mother’s Day may “strike nerves” among adopted children. At that moment I realized that my own son also would be making a Mother’s Day gift in his kindergarten class for the first time. I had neglected to prepare my own motherless child for this holiday.

Not to worry.

My son’s teachers, brilliant as they are, had asked their students to make their Mother’s Day gift for a “VIW” (“Very Important Woman”). At first my child claimed to remember his mother, whom he hadn’t seen since birth. He recalled, or so he said, a mother who “made cake before breakfast” for him. Logan strongly notices and feels the turmoil of not having traditional parents. Consequently, it is no surprise when he invents and imagines facts about his birth mother, perhaps to give his family life some semblance of normalcy.

But that day in class, when he had to make a Mother’s Day gift, he settled on making his gift for a VIW whom he sees on a regular basis — his “Baba” — my mom.

No room for “my two dads”

I had taken pains in some cases to “train” my school community to understand that the fact my son has a gay dad does not mean he has “two dads.”

I’m reminded of how teachers used to treat Jewish and Christian holidays as a bit of a balancing act: “Can I use Christmas stickers on anything in class during December? If I do, should I use equal amounts of Hanukkah stickers? What about Kwanzaa?”  

In 10 years as an educator and three years as a gay dad, I’ve seen political correctness toward LGBT families grow from a quiet seed to a more paramount issue monitored and negotiated in our classrooms and communities. As my own son’s teachers taught me, there’s finally room for parents, students, and teachers to negotiate the definition and parameters of family.

One thing, however, is not negotiable between my son and me, when it comes to our family structure: There will never be “two dads,” even if I were to find a male partner.

After all, I am the dad — the one now making cake before breakfast!

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS >

OutProud
The National Coalition for Gay, Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender Youth advocates and provides queer teens with resources and support.
URL: http://www.outproud.org

Gay Parent magazine
The oldest free nationally-distributed publication dedicated to LGBT parenting
URL: http://www.gayparentmag.com/

ProudParenting.com
An online portal for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender parents and their families worldwide
URL: http://www.proudparenting.com/

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Commentary

Seeing Rainbows in Black and White

Best of In The Fray 2005. The movement for same-sex marriage may not be the latest incarnation of the struggle for civil rights


Although I have crossed the 40-year mark of adulthood, the territory that accompanies being black, female, and lesbian poses a continuous struggle 37 years after “Stonewall.” Still, as the gay marriage debate escalates, I’m not convinced the civil rights claims at the forefront of the gay and lesbian political platform echo those of the African American civil rights movement, as so many claim.

Historically, the gulf between the heterosexual and homosexual populations have been wide; however, members of both groups will likely agree that sexual preference outside the norm can be a liability. Since the loss of a major media market career and intentional exclusion from gay and lesbian social circles have peppered my perspective, I might inflame the men and women to whom I am connected by sexual preference. In fact, my take on the matter may land a little too close to the majority’s opinion for their comfort.

Earlier this year when the California Supreme Court announced that withholding same-sex marriage licenses was unconstitutional, throngs of gays, lesbians, and their supporters in every corner of America basked in the momentary victory. Countering this positive development, the gay community in Houston (where I live) sustained a slight slowdown in political momentum when the “good ‘ol boys” in the Texas House sent a proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage to the State Senate for consideration. Subsequently, the Senate has decided that passage of the same sex marriage ban will be a voter-driven issue.

Additionally, the reaction from civil rights organizations has divided many African Americans. In a shift from the bastion of homophobia long associated with the black community, the California chapter of the NAACP made public its support for a bill that will legalize same-sex marriage statewide following this significant ruling. Undeniably, the wheels of justice are in motion but in reality’s bigger picture, securing full-fledged marital equality for gays and lesbians remains an uphill battle.

The marriage ban is a glaring inequity but more opponents might soften their stance if given clear-cut evidence of the severe threat it poses to the gay and lesbian concept of family. Consider today’s locked doors of legality for gays and lesbians who lose partners to death. In some instances, surviving partners lack legal protection to ensure equitable distribution of property and financial assets. Even then, next-of-kin who are void of compassion may retaliate with judgmental weapons blazing in an all-out lifestyle objection slugfest.

Under similar circumstances where children extend the gay or lesbian family, it is not uncommon for partners to suffer the humiliation of having to relinquish parental privileges. Though the legally binding partnership has its inherent advantages and disadvantages, most gay and lesbian couples in marriage-ready relationships are still eager to sip the bitter with the sweet. Unfortunately, a large segment of heterosexual America sees us as mere sexual beings, nothing more.

Still, since one’s choice of battle must be weighed carefully, my glass is not raised in celebration of victory without sizeable reservations.

It troubles me that the gay marriage movement is flimsily packaged by white gays and lesbians in the civil rights rhetoric written by African Americans. Banning same-sex marriage is not equivalent to Jim Crow laws, which made blacks second-class citizens.

Admittedly, I was remarkably naïve when I started unraveling the fabric of gay and lesbian culture. If racism was absent anywhere in America, I was certain it did not exist in the gay and lesbian community. After all, I had firmly latched onto the “We are Family’’ bandwagon as an unofficial gay and lesbian anthem during the heyday of disco.

Then, reality set in. On numerous occasions, I was asked to present multiple pieces of identification to enter predominantly white gay establishments. Then, I overheard the friend of a white associate whisper “you didn’t tell me she was a nigger” immediately after a chilly introduction in a local lesbian bar.

While gender and color are tangible, sexual orientation is not always so easily classifiable. The African American gay and lesbian community is extremely diverse; many don’t fit the stereotypical mold of “limp-wristed queens and diesel dykes.” In fact, some have gone to great lengths to remain in the closet for fear of career collapse and/or social retribution. Having experienced the former, I now never give my professional colleagues confirmation of my lesbian membership.

Some years ago, my career at an NBC affiliate was destroyed from the fallout of an unfounded and disparaging accusation directly related to my sexual orientation. I made what I considered to be a harmless remark that women in sports are often mistaken for lesbians to a female subordinate. Several weeks passed and I had no idea that news executives were conveniently churning my comment to seal a sexual harassment charge behind the scenes. Their action was even more suspicious since my termination came on the heels of a threat to legally resolve a clear case of gender discrimination with respect to compensation.

Perhaps some will conclude that I guided the career-slicing dagger when I insisted on more insightful media coverage as opposed to the endless footage of frolicking gays and lesbians to commemorate a celebration of Gay Pride. In the conservative minds of my peers, I assume the assignment editor directive I issued flung the closet door wide open.

I tried to revive my career several times but bad news travels fast in network-affiliate TV circles. Matters worsened when a highly regarded African American media coalition I had hoped to enlist dismissed my case as a “domestic issue.” Rising above the “trumped up” charges that ousted me from my newsroom perch was a slow and painful process.

Unlike some white gays and lesbians who push others to come out, I do not feel compelled, as a black lesbian, to follow an agenda that may feed microscopic inspection or voracious speculation in and out of the workplace. As the societal and political tones indicate, the waters of racial and sexual discrimination are still deep.

In fact, subtle or overt racism is never far from my daily experience. More often than not, race and gender prevail as magnets of discrimination long before sexual orientation. The burden of having to prove one’s worth when outfitted in black skin remains unchanged. Unfortunately, this burden is not alleviated in the gay community.

A paved road for white gays and lesbians does not necessarily smooth the bumpy road gays and lesbians of color are forced to travel. Systematic separation by class and color within the diverse gay and lesbian community is a well-kept secret that thwarts unity for all under the rainbow umbrella.

Some white gay and lesbian powerbrokers who head prominent organizations designed to protect our collective interests rarely deem it important to reference or rectify the social and political division that has long been in play. One would think that an examination of the weeds within our own yard would merit a discussion agenda entry at least.

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Debajo del arcoiris

A queer youth prom in Mexican American Chicago.


Giovanca performs a dance number to a Spanish-language song. (Elizabeth Gawne)

Though Andreas Villazane, 22, was his high school’s prom king — its first Hispanic prom king, in fact — the night wasn’t quite complete.

“I didn’t go to prom with my boyfriend because I was afraid of what people would think,” he says, touching the collar of his coral dress shirt. He looks up and smiles. “We couldn’t go to prom together, so we got to do it tonight.”

Villazane sits at a confetti-spangled table behind a bevy of red and black balloons, taking a breather from the dancing at Noche de Arcoiris (Night of the Rainbow), a queer youth prom held in Pilsen, Chicago’s largest Mexican American neighborhood. Behind him, in the Mexican Fine Arts Museum’s West Wing, the few wallflowers watch the crowd from the sidelines. Fledgling drag queens test their heels on the dance floor, from time to time touching the ends of their hair. A girl in a red salsa dress, grinning, elbows a male friend towards a tall, dapper boy in a fedora, and a slightly older white lesbian couple, one in a suit, the other wearing a midnight-blue gown, grin sheepishly at the boys grinding on the dance floor. Two girls share a tender kiss.

The event is hosted by WRTE 90.5 FM’s Homofrecuencia, the country’s only Spanish-language queer youth radio show, as a reclaimation of the beloved and benighted high school ritual. It is, to the best of their knowledge, the first time a queer prom has been held in Chicago outside of the North Side’s Boystown, Chicagoland’s mostly-white gay mecca. “That’s part of the point,” says Homofrecuencia producer Tania Unzueta,. “We want to create a safe space for us within our own communities. We want to be who we are, where we live.”  Unzueta says the invisibility of Latinos in the queer community inflicts a crisis of identity on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and quuer Latino youth. “It implies this dichotomy,” she sighs, “that gay means white, and Latina means heterosexual. If youth can’t see gays within the Latina community, and Latinas within the gay community, it affects their image of themselves.”

Rafa and Giovanca, the newly crowned Noche de Arcoiris’ prom king and queen, mug for the camera. (Elizabeth Gawne)

Between songs — mostly top-40 hip-hop and dancepop, with a dash of salsa — Unzueta goads promgoers to sign up to compete as prom king or queen. “Gender doesn’t matter!” she adds. “Sign up for whichever one you want.”  Later, as the contestants strut and dance onstage, one of the kings-to-be seductively strips off his tie, and suggestively begins to unbutton his shirt. “No, no!” shouts Jorge Valdivia, WRTE’s general manager — but he’s laughing through the reprimand. “We want to keep doing this prom!”  

About half the dance’s attendees are high school students or recent graduates; the others, older queer singles or couples seeking to revisit, and reimagine, their own high school proms. Alicia Vega is a board member of Amigas Latinas, a Chicago-area group for Latina lesbians founded in 1995 that was instrumental in promoting and supporting the event. She looks in wonder on the starry-eyed couples entwined on the dance floor. “I’m genuinely amazed that these youth are able to come out at such a young age,” she marvels, her dark eyes twinkling. “I couldn’t imagine taking a girlfriend to prom.” Vega didn’t come out until college, and didn’t meet other Latina lesbians until she encountered Amigas Latinas.

With other Latinas, she says, “there’s an automatic connection. There’s a lot of cultural issues we share, particularly involving family.”  That most Latinos are  Catholic plays a large part in their experience of homophobia and heterosexism, as do cultural expectations surrounding marriage and children. “It’s like that in Hispanic culture,” comments Helen Guerrero, a Northeastern Illinois University freshman. “Parents think your purpose is to have a job, get married, and have children. Especially if they’re religious.”  Unzueta adds, however, “some parents don’t understand that being a lesbian doesn’t mean you don’t want children. Then again, they don’t understand that if you’re a woman” — straight or gay — “you may not want them either.”  These combined pressures make “school and home … very different worlds,” she says. Even Jose, a high school junior whose mother is lesbian, is out to friends but not to his family. “It hasn’t really come up,” he says quietly.

Onstage, amid students’ hooting and cheers, Valdivia and Unzeuta finally select a prom king and queen: Rafa, a slim boy with a winsome smile, and Giovanca, a dazzling drag queen with round, doll-like eyes. Valdivia places a purple tinsel crown on each of their heads, grinning. Earlier, Giovanca performed not one, but two drag numbers in the evening’s show, which also featured the hip-hop moves of the Chicago Gay Youth Center dance troupe, a performance by Andres de los Santos, the Midwest’s only Spanish-performing drag king, and the brief heartfelt remarks of Carlos Tortelero, director of the Mexican Fine Arts Museum. “This is always your home, remember that, okay?” Tortelero says. An unassuming man with warm blue eyes, he made the rounds of the room during the prom’s catered Mexican dinner, shaking the hands of everyone in sight. Giovanca remained the crowd’s undisputed favorite, however: Flaunting sculpted legs, flawless lip-synching and flashy dance moves, she, too, rounded the room, taunting and flirting with men and women alike.

Giovanca, out of drag, is Victor Gomez, a Homofrecuencia radio contributor and host. Gomez nonchalantly strips off a slinky red dress and sleek brown wig as we talk backstage before the event. “There aren’t enough resources for queer youth in Pilsen,” he remarks. “There aren’t places where they can meet each other, support each other. When you have to go outside your community to get that, it seems unfair. The North Side isn’t always somewhere you fit in.”

Arreguian and Guerrero met and began dating at their Catholic high school. (Emily Alpert)

Guerrero echoes his comments. “Around here there isn’t really much for anyone who’s into the same sex,” she says, pushing her dark curls back behind her ears. She adjusts a dainty string of pearls over the neckline of her black lace dress. “You don’t meet anyone unless someone introduces you to them.”  She’s accompanied by her girlfriend, high school junior Yolanda Arreguian, who she met at her Catholic high school. I ask her how she knew her girlfriend was gay. She narrows her eyes satirically, and gestures demonstratively to Arreguian, who wears a dress shirt and tie, her hair short and spiky. Short of butch/stud visibility, word of mouth is the main way queer community is built in students’ high schools, particularly those where conservative or religious students have prevented the formation of gay-straight alliances.

“I’m the only openly gay student in my high school,” says Arreguian. Behind her glasses, hers is a direct and candid gaze. “I don’t care who knows, and I like being out.” At her Catholic high school, Arreguian actively organizes masses and attends religious events. “I might not agree with what Catholicism says about homosexuality, but I haven’t lost my faith,” she contends.

Over a massive cake, frosted with Homofrecuencia’s inverted-triangle logo, I marvel to Unzueta at the confidence of Arreguian and the other youth I’ve met. She nods, but reminds me that these teens “are comfortable being here to begin with. There’re others we still need to reach, who think they’re the only gay Latina people in the world.”  In contrast to Guerrero and Arreguian, who say “weird stares” are the worst they endure at their Catholic high school, other students have suffered unremitting taunting and threats at their schools. Some have dropped out.

I ask Arreguian how she developed the confidence to be an active, openly gay student at her high school. “I figure that being Latina alone gives you so many stereotypes,” she begins. “There’s stereotypes about being Hispanic, about women, about gay people, and I break all those stereotypes. I’m a Latina getting an education. I’m a girl getting ahead in life. I’m a tomboy and I’m proud of it.”  She grins. “I like telling people about it, because so many stereotypes can be broken by us.”

Guerrero taps her arm, ready to return to the dance floor. “And I think the fact that I can come out here with my girlfriend and not have everyone’s eyes on me is wonderful,” she adds, before Guerrero pulls her away from the table to dance.

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS >

Amigas Latinas
URL: http://www.amigaslatinas.org/

Boystown.com
URL: http://www.boystownchicago.com/

Homofrecuencia
URL: http://www.wrte.org/homofrecuencia/

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The perfect couple

A look at just how far Michigan State University has come since its anti-gay purges in the 1950s.


The perfect couple on a spring break cruise in  March 2004. Photo snapped by Lindsey’s mom, who considers Todd her “adopted son.”

I met Todd on a curb outside a Target store. When I heard a high-pitched squeal reminiscent of sixth grader, I instantly knew I found a friend. It was all part of Michigan State University’s freshman orientation. They welcomed us with shopping bargains; I came home with a catch.

When Todd, my friend Danielle, and I exchanged phone numbers on the bus ride back, I knew Todd wouldn’t call Danielle; he would call me. Unlike Danielle, Todd and I both knew our exchanges weren’t a regular pick-up attempt. He called that weekend.

Todd was born and raised in Chassell, Michigan. You’ve probably never heard of Chassell because it’s located so far north in the upper peninsula of Michigan that Todd could basically reside in Wisconsin. Although Todd doesn’t have a yooper (the name by which downstate Michiganders refer to Upper Peninsula dwellers) accent for some odd reason, when he’s feeling festive, he will whip out his impersonation of an average yooper’s slang: “Aaaaayyyy, let’s go in da howuuuse.” His hometown is so small that Todd graduated with 23 people, including himself, and had to drive an extra 20 minutes every morning to get to the closest school that had a pool for swimming practice.

“They don’t like anyone who’s not like them,” Todd says of his family. “White, middle-class Americans.”

I imagine the conservative and religious Sauvola clan embracing me, fawning over the perfect daughter-in-law, except for the fact I’m gay.

Why don’t they have straight rallies?

Although fast friends, Todd and I took two months to come out to each other. Our discomfort showed in our hesitation at attending the annual Gay Pride rally held directly across from my apartment  complex. Despite a little skepticism — “Do they have straight rallies?” we’d asked each other — we walked over.

There were men in leather g-strings, protestors outside the fenced area screaming we were all going to hell, and the two of us— confused, new to the scene, and somewhat bothered by the fact that there were 3-year-olds present.

Quickly, however, we came to appreciate the sense of unity a Pride rally can provide. Everyone there was either LGBT, or accepting of our lifestyle, and damn, it felt good.

Michigan State has come a long way when one considers that 50 years earlier, rather than gay pride rallies, two massive purges took place on campus, in dorms where Todd and I might have lived. Police ransacked gay persons’ homes, arrested them, and forced them out of college.

Witnesses told of friends who were handcuffed and taken in for lie detector tests to determine their sexuality — as well as their future careers. Two professors were “excused” from their teaching responsibilities, while nearly 30 men were harassed or contacted by the police.

Today the campus, like much of America, has changed. According to Michigan’s Triangle Foundation, voting statistics from the 2004 election show MSU’s campus town of East Lansing as one of only two cities in Michigan that voted for equal gay rights on marriage. Despite this seeming embrace of acceptance, the history of both the city and university reflects a continuing struggle of the kind of repression Todd and I still face on an almost daily basis.

During the 1990s, when Todd and I were mere 8-year-olds, not even thinking about boys or girls, MSU assembled a task force on LGBT issues. Between 1990 and 1992, the task force dug through old campus newspapers and personal accounts — a total of 100 people, middle-class folk, gay, straight, old, young, faculty, staff, and students, offering their private thoughts and experiences — to unearth a history of what happened on MSU’s large midwestern university from the ‘30s through the present.

In the 1930s, MSU’s campus (then Michigan State College) had nothinglike the amount of tolerance it has today. In fact, if you were gay, you guarded your secret and kept a watchful eye out for any undercover surveillance. According to the task force report, the closest establishment to same-sex bars back then was the Black and Tan Club on Shiawassee Street in Lansing. The B and T Club was not a gay institution, but something equally risky — a place where black and white people danced together, and where, emboldened by this barrier crossing, the occasional homosexual person would show up. The gay revolution, however, didn’t begin to appear until the 1950s.

In that era, despite the hatred toward gays, there was still hope for a place of their own, the task force reports, and two bars opened thei doors to the homosexual public. The Quick Bar, and later, Woodward, gave small groups a place to go, and more began to follow. These bars not only gave gay people a place to relax, and socialize, such as Spiral — the hippest gay bar in downtown Lansing — does for Todd and me, but they also allowed LGBT folk to open up and meet other people like themselves. The task force reports that after the bars opened, groups of people would meet in their homes and have private parties, expanding their gay networks.

Coming to terms

My own upbringing mirrors the slow adjustment of MSU and the state of Michigan because it has taken me years to accept my own sexuality.

I was born in Flint, Michigan, notoriously known for its run-down General Motors plant, Michael Moore, and the forever deteriorating image of the city since the car factory shut down. My parents, both GM employees, relocated when I was in fourth grade from Burton, Flint’s nastier sister city, to Grand Blanc, a ritzy, well-off city that’s known for the annual Buick Open — a golf extravaganza Tiger Woods and other pros play in. I went to Goodrich Area Schools, situated a few miles up the road from my home, in the middle of acres of corn fields. Corn isn’t really exciting, and neither was Goodrich.

It’s been hard for me to open up and be myself. In sixth grade I already knew something was “wrong” with me when I fell asleep dreaming of a female criminal whom I, the undercover agent, was supposed to hunt down and cuff. I found her in a corner in an abandoned warehouse, and all I could fixate on in my dream was her breasts. At the time, I didn’t really know what homosexuality was, so I told myself it would be alright. I would be alright.

Right I was about my sexuality; wrong I was about it being alright. After dating a dopey gothic boy almost my entire my freshman year of high school, I started to date a girl. I met her in the hallway one afternoon after lunch period. I had heard rumors she was gay. She was a year younger than me, and even our first conversation flooded with flirting. She told me, “The rumor’s true,” and walked away, telling me she’d see me later.

We kept our relationship secret from most of the school, but everyone pretty much knew we were dating. When you live amongst the corn, the corn has ears, and those ears pick up small bits of talk all day long. We never faced any hatred, however; Goodrich was pretty laid back. But, on the other hand, I felt I was separating myself from my family. I had to come clean with my mom, my confidant, so I wrote a page-long letter dishing everything to her — my relationship, my feelings for women, my fear she would reject me. I left it on the table, and slept between bumps and knocks in the house, constantly waking with the lump in my throat suggesting that my mother was at my door.

The next morning was the worst of my life. My mom cried, told me it would be alright, told me not to lie to her anymore, and told me a lot of other do’s and don’ts. She said we would get through the awkward stage, as long as I didn’t lie to her about dating people.

The last part didn’t take. I continued to lie to everyone at home, then in college until my sophomore year. But that was before I met Emily.

Emily came along months after Todd. In fact, when I first laid eyes on Emily, it was Todd who listened to my lovelorn descriptions of her. He was my personal relationship advisor, giving me the nod or shake of the head when cute or interesting ladies walked down the street. In my eyes, Emily was perfect — quiet, reserved, fashionable, and edgy. There was an aspect to Emily that was so mysterious, I couldn’t help but want more.

After Emily’s roommate, Katie, and I paired up for a project in history class, my interest was piqued. Katie constantly bitched and moaned about how irresponsible Emily unplugged her alarm clock at least once a week. I laughed and wondered how someone could deal with such a jerk, but after Emily and I started going out, I didn’t mind the alarm clock being unplugged every now and then.

Throughout all of this, Todd was by my side, slipping homemade cards featuring dancing butterflies under my door whenever love’s roller coaster took a dip.

It was during that freshman year when, down in the dumps and seeking an escape from MSU life, Todd and I headed out to the only 18-and-over joint that was also gay-friendly — Spiral Video and Dance Bar. We ventured out alone, and ended up at a table with another couple. They bought us tequila shots for the rest of the night and we danced in a foursome on the sweat-soaked floor. After being driven home drunk by the even drunker
couple, Todd and I declared Spiral would be our new home away from the dorms, and that’s where we would spend our weekends, dancing the night away.

Stolen pride

Emily, Todd, and Spiral were part of my coming out. Life on campus also allowed me to grasp my gay roots. Everyone was so liberal and open; there were signs hanging in dorms for meetings with other gay students, and the people I came out to never dropped their jaws in disbelief. I am so thankful I wasn’t on MSU’s campus during the 1960s, when life wasn’t a root beer float with whipped topping.

Fortysomeodd years ago was the breaking point for both homosexual people and campus administrators. Before then, there was no reference to homosexuality or gay arrests in any police report, on or off campus. But in the decade famous for its massive protests of the Vietnam War, it was evident gay people were gaining a voice and the police were clearly on guard. In 1960, “homosexual activity” was added as a category for complaints through MSU’s Department of Public Safety. Within a year after the category was added, nearly a dozen complaints and six arrests were made for what police referred to as“people engaged in or attempting to procure homosexual activity.”

As arrests continued through 1962-1963, campus landmarks were renovated in hopes of altering “physical arrangements to discourage the recruiting of homosexuals.” The campus student union had its basement men’s room remodeled in hopes that gay people would stop meeting there. Yet the handfuls of hidden spots on campus where heterosexual people, such as beneath the Belmont Tower, met remained intact.

In 1969, after police raided the Stonewall Inn — a dark and dingy predominantly gay club in Greenwich Village — campus groups become electrified by the resistance put up in New York. They admired their gay brothers and sisters who resisted the police force, and they too wanted to take a step into the accepting future. It was then, after Stonewall, that a weekly discussion group for homosexuals was formed off-campus, and MSU became one of the few universities across the country to have a gay organization.

Another positive step toward acceptance happened when the Gay Liberation Movement was registered as an on-campus student organization on April 27, 1970, and following it, the MSU Radicalesbians. Not far behind was a human sexuality course, taught by Eleanor Morrison, which focused on the components of sexual orientation and had assigned readings by lesbian and gay authors. MSU was becoming more accepting.

But progress for gay people is usually followed by repression. On March 4, 1972, the Michigan Gay Confederation established and planned the first Gay Pride Week on MSU’s campus. In June 1972, the start of what was to be Gay Pride Week provoked the first confrontation between MSU administrators and the Gay Liberation Movement.

Jack Breslin, MSU’s Executive Vice President, denied the organization permission to hang a banner at one of MSU’s campus entrances.

Complaints were filed with the MSU Antidiscrimination Judicial Board on the basis of sexual discrimination. In lieu of the complaints, Breslin responded, “I honestly believe that it is well within the powers of the MSU Board of Trustees to refuse permission for activities promoting lifestyles which are clearly at odds with the general atmosphere of the university.”

Arguments ensued regarding whether homosexuals should even be allowed to file complaints with the Judicial Board, and eventually the Board of Trustees decided complaints could only be filed by gay people if they were related to job discrimination. Through all of this, the banner was still not flying, and the first Gay Pride Week had come and gone.

Finally, in 1973, on-campus gay groups were allowed their banner recognizing Gay Pride Week. Kind of. Before the week began, administrators announced that the poles were going to be removed for “maintenance reasons,” the banner’s ropes were cut, and the landmark vanished from sight.

Downward spiral

Todd and I used to joke during our freshman year that if we didn’t find partners, we’d settle down together, get married, and fake the rest of our lives. If we were straight, we’d be able to do whatever we wanted. Todd and I could kiss by campus landmarks and no one would think twice about it. We could go into lingerie stores and buy handfuls of bras and underwear for me, and the clerk wouldn’t hesitate to serve us. If waiters asked the question, “One check, or two?” and we replied, “One,” they wouldn’t smile sly grins and think to themselves, “I wonder if I can get both of them home tonight …” It happens to Emily and me all the time.

Usually, though, we can find safety from the wandering eyes and glaring stares when we go to gay bars. So, a few weekends ago, Todd, Emily, and I went to our old favorite, Spiral. We still go to Spiral after all these years because it has a New York feel in our very non-New York town. When walking in, the industrial feel of the nightclub is punched out in tall, metal chairs adorned with red velvet on the cushions. Candles burn, little lounges are filled with red velvet couches, the bathrooms have red velvet curtains instead of doors, and the overall feel is pristine and modern.

Emily and I were sitting, sipping our glass-bottled beers, when a man approached Emily to tell her she was beautiful. She smiled, thanked him and proceeded to ignore his presence. You get these creeps all the time at the gay bar — men out to woo a lesbian.
The man finagled his way into a seat next to Emily and continued to tell her she was gorgeous. I tried shooting him a no-trespassing look, letting him know I was the only one who was going to eat sushi that night. There’s nothing more frustrating than a straight person trying to convert your lover. Instead of throwing a big fuss, though, I just pulled Emily onto the dance floor.

All of a sudden, I see him again. He’s talking to Emily, and I can tell by her uneven smile that he’s still telling her she’s beautiful, still trying to get into her pants, still being a pig.

“We’ve been together for two years,” I hear. “I’m sorry, I’m not interested.”

Emily’s smile is waning and my patience is growing as thin as the air on the packed dance floor. My friends, who can feel my tension, form a human wall between Emily and the man. It’s literally me, Emily, two friends, and the man trying to squirm his way into our dance circle. We’re still trying to keep our cool, dancing, but the man persists. He gives my friends the finger, picks my girlfriend up, raises her to the ceiling, and puts his face in her crotch.

I don’t remember if I shoved the guy, grabbed Emily, or if he just let her go, but we spilled off the dance floor in one fluid motion. I found Todd and his date and explained the whole situation; disbelieving, Todd and his date gallantly offered to kick the guy’s ass. I couldn’t stop thinking if Emily and I had been a straight couple, the man wouldn’t have had the nerve to so aggressively try and break us apart. I was surprised by the depth of my own anger. I hated this interloper and, if I didn’t want to be banned from my favorite gay bar, might even have entertained the idea of macing the bastard’s eyeballs.

And this is still the life we live, every day. We’re constantly battling to open ourselves up, dealing with a society that still wouldn’t mind repressing us and all the while politely doesn’t understand us. MSU has given Todd and me the chance to become who we are, and become more assertive along the way. We might not be 100 percent open, but we’re getting there.

Without the help of MSU’s understanding student population, or the Pride festivals Todd and I still venture to today, I might still be resting in the proverbial gay closet — a place where no LGBT person ever likes to hang out. And those pride festivals Todd and I used to feel weird about? We go to them every year, in as many cities as we can. Last year, Todd spent the night at my apartment, and when we woke up, the park across the river was filled with white trailers, rainbow flags, and tons of people. People just like us. We got dressed and walked over together.

This time, we stood by the fence where the protestors were and laughed at them. We ate elephant ears and strolled around the various vendors. We were happy children were there, because after all, when I have kids, I’m going to want them to see all sides of life. But most important, and closest to my heart, my girlfriend broke her pact of never showing public displays of affection and held my hand. And for the first time ever, I finally felt complete.

STORY INDEX

TOPICS > RESOURCES

Michigan State University’s LGBT website
Resources, event listings and services for students, staff and others.
URL: http://lbgtc.msu.edu/

ORGANIZATIONS >

Triangle Foundation
One of Michigan’s organizations serving the LGBT and allied communities.
URL: http://www.tri.org/

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Photo Essays

Daddies’ little girl

Growing up under the shadow of discrimination.


Click here to enter the visual essay.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few years examining how my upbringing has shaped me into the person I am today. Like most people, I know that my family and friends played an integral role in my development, but only recently did I realize, and accept, the extent that my parents influenced my core self. I can trace my relationships, my career choice, and my fundamental beliefs directly back to my mother and father and the way they lived.

I wanted to explore this personal realization further and find out how it applies to a growing social demographic in this country. Same-sex couples have been raising children for decades, but this family dynamic has been thrust to the forefront of our culture in the last few years.

When I began my relationship with the Huddlestonsmith family, it only took a few visits to conclude this family was no different from any other family I had met in Midwestern America. They welcomed me in, insisted I join them at the dinner table, and shared their home with me in every way. But as familiar as this household was to me, I often heard about the discrimination David Huddlestonsmith, his partner, Dave, and David’s 11-year-old daughter, Katie, experienced living as a same-sex family. This was something very foreign to me.

I wanted to understand what it was like to live in the shadow of discrimination. More importantly though, I wanted to find out what effect this discrimination had on Katie, a child feeling the societal response to her father and his partner’s lifestyle.  

I quickly found out Katie had adapted her life as a result of her unique upbringing.  David, Dave, and Katie had very open relationships, sharing all aspects of each other’s lives with one another. Katie, however, was much less open with people outside of her family. Aside from her teachers, a few friends, and their parents, she didn’t volunteer information about her gay father and his partner. She once said, “I know at least five boys [at school] that would tease me if they knew.”

I worked on the project, off and on, for about a month and a half. In that time, I saw the love the Huddlestonsmith family expresses. I saw the struggles David dealt with living as a gay man. And I saw Katie’s success in the classroom, and the admiration she has for her father and his partner. But I only scratched the surface. Katie’s development will evolve as our society does, and her future is dependent on our cultural willingness to accept her as a child of a same-sex couple.

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Commentary

Finding defiance in a sparkly rock

From conflict-free diamond rings to same-sex weddings, the institution of marriage isn’t what it used to be.


My friend took one look at the blurry digital picture I sent her of my new engagement ring, and wrote back, “It sorta screams ‘I sold my sex life for this sparkly rock!’”

A couple of years ago, I would have agreed with her — there are precious few things in the world less queer, less transgressive, than an ordinary diamond engagement ring.  I had always seen the engagement ring less as a symbol of undying love than a visible token of male ownership of female sexuality, and a material manifestation of the matrimonial monogamy.  

I was never the traditional kinda girl — I never imagined the ring, dreamed of a wedding, or named my bridesmaids, not even in my head. My thoughts on commitment everlasting were always less “happily ever after” than “what a fucking disaster.” Commitment to me was not just settling down, but settling, period. It was the first step on a journey that would end, inevitably, with me as a harried housewife in the suburbs growing bored and bitter, reduced to chasing children and swapping recipes, voting Republican and worrying about Capital Gains taxes. A diamond ring symbolized the beginning of that descent.

But I have recently discovered that everything is not as it appears to be, and that wearing a diamond engagement ring is a little different when you’re a dyke. For one thing, there is no question of male ownership in a girl-on-girl relationship, and for another, monogamy is easy to take when your toy drawer rivals your sock drawer in variety of colors and styles. And after three years with my partner, the whole commitment thing didn’t seem to be so bad after all. I had begun to see the appeal of getting all of our friends and family together to celebrate what we had found.  

But beyond all those arguably schmaltzy justifications, there was a compelling political reason to want to announce our relationship to the world. For the last few years, gay relationships were coming under increasingly hostile attacks under the slash-and-burn morality of the Bush Administration. By proclaiming our commitment, by getting engaged to be married, we were not only celebrating our relationship, we were making a radical statement about our definition of marriage. And while gay marriage was once firmly in the territory of Human Rights Campaign assimilationists, it had moved into the province of radical queers at the very moment the Right denounced it as moral depravity worse than sodomy (which had just been officially sanctioned by the Supreme Court.)  

In that light, marriage started looking pretty hot. I’ve always been a sucker for subversion. I discovered the potent aphrodisiac power in defying social norms when I first came out as a lesbian. When attraction meets activism, the act of locking lips is more than simple titillation; it becomes a portal to self-liberation. I spent a few very liberating years shoring up my lesbian-activist credentials.

There was the poet from Smith with a penchant for cheap Thai food and sleazy sex.  There was the Swedish kickboxer getting her PhD in French Studies at New York University. There was the Hungarian girl whose red Doc Martens were always flawlessly shined. There was the one I called “Rock Star Girl,” who claimed any of six different professions depending on the day, and was never without her Gucci shades, a flask of rum, and a fat spliff. There was the surly butch with a Long Island accent living off unemployment in a slummy loft with her three dogs and six cats. The Army lawyer, who cried into her beer on our first date. The Singaporean stewardess whose tiny back was a sea of ocean-themed tattoos. The gym teacher whose mastiff puppy snored louder than she did. The masseuse, the vet, the ad exec.

Canadian hers-and-hers engagement rings: all the sparkle without the blood.

Given the rate at which I was going through girls, it was statistically inevitable that I would eventually meet someone I liked more than the others, someone who I would keep around for longer than it took to dig cab fare up out of the couch cushions. This one defied the reductive epithets I was given to using for the women who passed through my life, and after trying one or two, I allowed her to have a name, her name: Alex. After her name, I gave her space in my apartment. Room in my coffee cupboard for a box of tea. A carton of milk in my dairy-free fridge. Space in my underwear drawer for her boxers.

It was all downhill from there. Soon after the merging of the underwear was the merging of the apartments, the acquisition of pets, the purchasing of joint property. So after three years, four apartments, two dogs, and two cats together, we got engaged. But then there was the problem of diamonds. If I am vehemently nontraditional, Alex is the exemplar of all things tried and true. For her, there is no such thing as a diamond-less engagement.  

And this is why we are meant to be together — because compromise is the highest expression of love. And even though I had come to view marriage as a revolutionary act, I had told Alex I could still not get down with the diamond: They have long been a primary source of income for both insurgent groups and brutal dictatorships, funding genocide and civil war in diamond-rich countries like Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Congo, and Angola — and more recently, of course, they were linked to terrorism through al-Qaeda. Knowing all that, instead of presenting me with a ring as she was down on one knee, Alex handed me a plane ticket — we were going to Canada, she explained, so we could pick out some rocks that could broadcast our engagement with a PC pedigree to match their dazzle.

Canada is one of the only places in the world that offers a laser-inscribed proof-of-origin on its rocks to show that they have not come via a war-torn country where they contributed to human rights atrocities. Canadian diamonds were not dug up by the hands of children. They did not come at the cost of miles of agriculture in a famine-struck land.  They do not come at the cost of human life or dignity. But they look just like every other diamond in the world.

That’s the funny thing about this brand of activism I have come to embrace. On the surface, it looks a lot like the very institutions it seeks to reform. Fiancée sounds a lot like fiancé, Alex sounds a lot like a man’s name, and a conflict-free Canadian diamond looks just like any other rock. The defiance is in the details.

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Commentary

Ña Manu

Best of In The Fray 2005. Like a card shark, Paraguay holds its secrets close.


View of the shore
An aerial view of Fuerte Olimpo, Alto Paraguay, looking south down the Rio Paraguay. On the left is Matto Grosso do Sur (Brazil). The hills are called the “Tres Marias.”

Ohi heta secretos Rio Paraguay kupepe che aguera hatava che yvyguype.

There are many secrets along the Paraguay River I will take to my grave. And not because I don’t want to tell them.  I used to think it was only Guarani that kept me outside looking in, but it’s more than the language. People here are born knowing everything about this place; history speaks to them though the water and the stones and the dust.

I lived here three years but I’m as clueless now about how this country works as when I first arrived in 1999: a Peace Corps volunteer with two words of Spanish and a dim idea that Paraguay was somewhere hot and south and vaguely venomous. And where they sent me, to the wild northeast Chaco that is the watershed of the great swamp called the Pantanal, the secrets bubbled up from the riverbed and swirled around me. I’d reach out and each time they would float away.

It’s nine a.m. in Fuerte Olimpo when Lalo and I tiptoe up the skinny gangplank of the cargo launch Ña Manu. It’s now doing double duty as a passenger ferry since, during the years I have been away, the other boats working the northern Rio Paraguay have sunk, cracked in half, or been confiscated for unspecified, unsavory crimes.

Which makes the owner Doña Manuela very happy. This morning she is practically bursting out of her pink leotard with joy. For a three-hundred-pound woman she is surprisingly nimble and as strong as any man; she helps her rather dimwitted young stevedores stow sack after sack of rice and hard biscuits in the hold. We’re told the Ña Manu will leave Fuerte Olimpo punctually but this is Paraguay. And, though I don’t know it yet, Ña Manu has special guests.

When I lived here, I never took the Ña Manu. She is tiny by river standards, about seventy feet long, and the only places to sit are deadly caranda’y palm benches running the length of each side. There’s a bathroom — a box with a hole and a hose — and… oh, I don’t know, I always thought she was too dirty and spooky and creaky, though certainly Carmen Leticia (“the jewel of the Río Paraguay”) and the Cacique were no motor yachts. But at least they looked like they could carry more than two extra people and they weren’t wrapped in brown tarpaulin.

Ña Manu is basically a floating shanty. You don’t burn from the sun, you just braise in the brown oven bag. She has no set schedule, and she’d stiffed us on the way up to Fuerte Olimpo, leaving a day early from Isla Margarita where the distance across the river between Paraguay and Mortinho, Brazil is no more than two hundred meters. No other lanchas were due for days. But Lalo’s friend Eladio was taking his empty cattle chata past Olimpo to Bahia Negra so we hitched a ride and made it upriver that way. All this, I suppose, should be enchanting. But coming back to visit this country that still troubles me and that I still consider my true home, it only seems sad and exhausting.

When we pass through the tarp flap in the stern onto the main deck, I see far too many passengers. Five men sit lined up on one of the long benches on the starboard side. A sixth, younger than the rest and like Lalo, tall for a Paraguayan, sits on a perpendicular bench with his back to the wheelhouse. Lalo walks over and shakes hands with each of them. I’ve seen this before; I’ve learned to shake hands at parties and funerals, but doing it on a boat seems like only a guy thing.

Seems. What do I know? I decide to be a Paraguayan woman about it and give it a pass.

I sit down on the opposite bench next to a Chamococo woman with a baby that can’t be more than a week old. The six men have a look about them: they belong together somehow. The oldest is maybe fifty; the youngest twenty-five. They have small travel bags and most are dressed fairly formally: button-down shirts, belts, a gold chain here and there, boots. All are quite dark though they don’t look Guaraní or Chamococo, meaning they probably work in the sun, maybe cattle hands on estancias.

Other passengers arrive. All the men who just got on go to the bench and shake hands.  Mba’e la porte?  Upepi nde ha?  How’s it going?  Where’re you headed? They all know these guys. There’s a little jostling, a little baring of teeth for position — two old women with cigars commandeer the only two comfortable chairs. The doe-eyed crew scampers around trying to avoid Doña Manuela’s wrath. Husband and pilot Ramón has been found, dragged out of his girlfriend’s bed near the port and unceremoniously thrown into the wheelhouse, so we’re good to go.

It’s a six-hour trip downriver from Olimpo to Isla Margarita, which isn’t so bad compared to the thirteen it takes to get upriver. From Asunción the capital to Olimpo, and then up to Bahia Negra, it’s five days.  Sometimes there are buses that go halfway up the river. But this time I don’t have five days to get to Olimpo.  I don’t have, like I’d always had before, all the time in the world.  This time I’m just a tourist, and Paraguay has responded with washouts and road closures and river transport dropping like flies. So Lalo met me in Asuncion and figured out a way for us to loop through Brazil and come out at Mortinho and only have the thirteen hours up to Olimpo by boat.  And now we have to get back downTo get me home. He does this for me because he still loves me.  He treated me like shit when we lived together in Olimpo.  He is atoning.

Lalo waits for me to visit every year.  Who knows what he does in the meantime. He’s a good guy, big and sunny and friendly; everyone likes him. When we’re in Asuncion people think I’m the Paraguayan and he’s the European, so fair-skinned and healthy and well-spoken. But a little lost, like me; a few too many vices. So he is destined to live on cattle ranches and on the river, looking and calculating and waiting for the next opportunity. One of the reasons I come back to Paraguay is that Lalo no longer considers me an opportunity.  I’m just a woman he knows, who loves this part of the country as much as he does, who needs help getting to its farthest corners, because she doesn’t, after all, really belong here.

Cargo vehicles wait for the arrival of the cargo boats at Fuerte Olimpo, the main port. The rocky and steep terrain of the town above the main road makes it impossible for any vehicle other than a donkey cart to pass. (In the water are camelotes.)

An awful lot of Policia Nacional seem to be making this trip.  Lalo is staring ahead, grinning, knowing I’ve figured out that something’s up. One of the policemen I know; the other two are new to me. So much time has passed. This was my home, this inhospitable web of marsh and palm forest where nothing grows except what is meant to grow. Yet people live here and their life is hard. My life was hard. And I still miss it. Whatever it was.

I’m staring at the six men. There’s another one; he could be a crew member but I’m not sure. If he’s not, he has a future in crime with his slits for eyes and too big jaw. Even his teeth look criminal. And almost immediately after we shove off, I have to pee and must squeeze past this character to get to the bathroom, such as it is. He politely locks me in, because the door will not stay shut from the inside and I think, surely there are worse ways to die than in a shit-filled toilet on a cargo boat in the middle of the world’s largest continuous swamp. But he lets me out and shows me his teeth and I go back to my bench where there are seven other passengers now, not including the cops.

We’re all facing the five men on the opposite side, except the young one facing the stern. A cop comes over and rather roughly pushes him to one side so the cop can sit down.

Finally Lalo can’t stand it anymore. “Do you know who they are?” he asks me.

I want to punch him. Do I know who they are. Christ.

They are the cattle thieves, Lalo tells me, cuatreros who have finally been caught after two years of robbing their neighbor, Lalo’s employer, Don Miguel Arevalos, whose estancia is about thirteen kilometers outside of Olimpo’s centro. The chase and capture has been covered widely in the national press.

With the thieves, in a relatively clean, yellow oxford shirt, is the would-be buyer of the stolen cattle. The oldest man — the one with the gold chains — is the leader, but it is the youngest who looks the most worried.

He’s “lo más famoso,” says Lalo. “Because he hasn’t fallen yet. The others have all been caught before.”

But they are all, I think, a little too jolly. No one’s guffawing, but they’re joking and drinking tereré and chatting with the cops. Everyone seems to be friends here.

“You don’t get it,” says Lalo. “Everyone robs. Everyone. These guys just rob more.”

The police, while they have a boat, don’t have a budget for gas, so they use public transportation to take prisoners to Concepción, where they will be arraigned and stand trial. It seems that Big Jaw’s going down for attempted murder with a knife. He is presently roaming the decks, gabbing with the crew. None of the passengers looks particularly alarmed. “He’s sorry he didn’t kill the guy,” Lalo adds, and from the way he says it I know he’s not speculating. He knows this for a fact. And there it is again, that thread of connection that Lalo’s attached to, that all Paraguayans are attached to — a word on the street, a nod, a glance — it all moves past me and beneath me unnoticed, like the piranha and dorado passing under the boat’s hull in the brown water.

The police have brought along evidence: one saddle and two white grain bags that hold dried skins and ears, to show the brands and ear cuts. Eight cows were recovered; Lalo says Don Miguel knows of at least thirty missing. Two hours downriver, we arrive at Puerto Sastre where the buyer lives. He is let off to go home and get lunch and some clothes.  The rest are from Olimpo and have all their stuff with them. Other passengers board the boat. Motocerristas — men who cut fence posts for estancias along the river —are let on with their chainsaws and post-hole diggers, which at a shriek from Doña Manuela the hapless crew stuff into the hold. More hand-shaking. A few Chamococo come on as well, with big suruvi in grain bags. It’s illegal to fish in the river this month but no one turns in a Chamococo. They are barely alive and barely remembered.

Before, when Paraguay was all quebracho forest and swamp, they were nomads; now they’re exiled to the river’s edge with no home to get back to so they stay on the river and starve, and ride the lanchas, and are quiet. They speak a language that they know no one understands, so they simply gesture gently and smile. They smile at the cattle thieves; they could care less who took what from who. And of this whole story — of the big estancia and the thieving and the knowing and shaking hands and getting on and getting off — only I am out of place, only I am something not right.

I was living in Fuerte Olimpo when Don Miguel’s son Caludio hired a witch doctor to put spells on the corners of their land so the thieves could not enter. Neither Don Miguel nor Lalo could talk sense into him. “You have to ride out and count your herd — two, three times a week. You have to fix fences and patrol borders. Caludio wants to stay blind. He knew who was doing it; he just didn’t want to see,” Lalo tells me now. I once brought Caludio amulets from Asunción to help him with his spells. This was when I didn’t know that he already knew who the thieves were. It seems even the blind know more than me.

As we head out into the river again all the thieves open their lunches, prepared by wives or girlfriends. The cops have returned to the boat with empanadas. One of the thieves produces a cake, cut into six pieces. From the way the cake has been prepared, I can tell there was a party last night to send off the thieves and this cake is part of the leftovers. I have bananas and bread; Lalo has cheese and honey and buys a milanesa from a kid in Sastre. We drink tereré afterwards and I pray that dehydration has set in so that I don’t have to use the bathroom again.

By the time we’re well beyond Sastre, Manuela is done shrieking at the police for leaving the thieves unguarded on the boat while they bought empanadas up the road. As far as I can tell everybody finds this pretty amusing, even her.

It is about a hundred and ten degrees on the river and the lancha is galloping along at about eleven knots. My back is killing me. Camelotes crawl by, not yet in flower but trailing yards and yards of rubbery root and leaf as the upper Chaco has received about eight inches of rain this week and the river is high and fast. Twice we stop to let the crew disengage a particularly big clump from the propeller. The hum of an old diesel engine, even this one, is quiet and soothing. Above it I can hear the big green and blue parrots calling to each other in the trees. Occasionally a canoa, a small handmade fishing boat, slips out of a clump of hu negro horsetail in a small riacho, the boatmen tending some plastic bottles with hooks streaming down, baiting paku.

I can make fun of Ña Manu, I can talk about filth and discomfort, but with Paraguay on one side dark and scrubby, and Matto Grosso del Sur on the other all endless palm forest, I can’t say it’s ever been too much to bear. I have stared at this river five days at a time, over and over. I have never been bored here.

The thieves get off with the police at the second-to-last stop, Carmelo Peralta, and I have to tell Doña Manuela that they forgot the evidence. More shrieking. Much appreciative nodding by the cop who knows me. A dirty glance from the thief with the cake. I have entered the story now.

A typical cargo boat. This one is the Cacique, one of the better models. (Ña Manu is smaller.) Cacique’s route runs from Asuncion to Bahia Negra.

Ña Manu heaves herself around to Isla Margarita and anchors for the night, and Lalo and I pay a ninety-year-old man to row us across the river to Mortinho in his yellow-and-green canoa. This is the only way across. Mortinho is a bigger town and we need to catch the bus here to do the twenty-hour loop through Brazil and back down to Asunción. Brazil has roads; Paraguay has, at this moment, mud.

In Mortinho, we round a corner and sitting in front of a hotel having tereré are four men I know from Olimpo: José Belén Gonzales, a council member I worked with; his cousin Martin Suarez the veterinarian; two other guys I know but not by name. Just hanging around. In Brazil.

Lalo starts to grin. Asks a couple of polite questions that are not all that polite.

“How’d you get here?”

“Deslizadora.” Motor boat.

“Whatcha doing in town?”

“Oh … you know, heh-heh, a little business.”

“Staying long?”

“Er, no, we’re going back to Olimpo tomorrow.”

“Ya, Ya,” says Lalo, which is sort of an ‘Of course, I see,’ non-threatening, low-key, but these fellas are spooked.

José Belén looks ready to die. He can’t look at me. He never was a big help as a consejal but as far as I know he didn’t hate me. In Olimpo, I spent weeks trying to teach him and the other consejales how to read the town’s budget so they could know where the money went. On this visit trip back, Lalo informed me with a smirk that I’d done a good job and now all the consejales know how to track the money… right out of the budget.

Lalo does not do what he does best — plop down for a good long mindless chat. I have already braced myself for an hour of Guaraní. Instead he asks them in Spanish where we can find Brazilian reales since we need to pay for the bus and the banks are closed. Martin says “Oh, Vincente’s got them,” and gestures towards the corner where I see a locked door. José Belén starts to say, “But Vincente’s closed —” but Martin shoots him a look and says with clenched teeth, “No, I’m sure he’s open,” and José Belén shuts up. Lalo grabs my arm and we scram.

Lost. I am lost.

Lalo says, quietly, “Aha,” and this is what he tells me he has figured out:

José Belén owns the estancia next to Don Miguel. Each has about twelve thousand acres. The thieves are José Belén’s hired men. José Belén knows they’ve been stealing cattle from Don Miguel; there are still about twenty-five on José Belén’s property. Martin is José Belén’s cousin and knows Vincente who is a buyer. The other two are involved but who knows how. They are in Mortinho because two small chatas are berthed here and they need to ask around and hire one to take up the river, load the cows, and sell them to Vincente to make enough money to pay the thieves’ lawyer in Concepción who is on Martin’s payroll. That’s why the thieves looked unconcerned. They knew José Belén was already here, working things out for them.

“But how will a chata sneak up the Río Paraguay and load the cows?” I ask.

Lalo gives me a look that says, you know the river. You know how you can get lost in it, with its miles of riachos and twists and thickets and hidey holes. A chata can easily slip in below Olimpo without anyone noticing…unless Don Miguel and Caludio have been tipped off and know it’s coming. “Then,” says Lalo grinning, “things could get interesting.”

So we find a phone and call Miguel who is somber, then gleeful, then somber again, because Caludio will be absolutely no help, clinging to his yuyos and amuletos till he’s kicked in the teeth by a ladrón himself and left to die. But we are thanked, and defense plans are put in motion, and I will extract some small piece of satisfaction from all this. And it is that even though I knew nothing, nothing at all — I would have sat through a boat ride with felons thinking they were off to a business meeting and never been the wiser — José Belén and Martin thought I knew everything. In that one moment, all the secrets were handed to me. They thought I knew; they thought I deserved to know. And that, ultimately, is what keeps me coming back here — a nod, a recognition, a tiny opening through marsh and water, that I can slip through.

Related links:

Waterland Research Institute. Essays from a collection entitled The Pantanal: Understanding and Preserving the World’s Largest Wetland. Juan Maria Carrón provides a wonderful overview of the Paraguayan Pantanal, its people, and the dangers facing it. Also see the essay by John F. Gotlgens for a frightening look at what multinational corporations and monetary institutions are trying to do to the entire South American watershed.

International Rivers Network. For more information about Hidrovía and what the IRN and local NGO Rios Vivos are trying to do to stop this project.

Hijo del Hombre and Yo El Supremo, by Agosto Roa Bastos, Paraguay’s most influential novelist.

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Commentary

Kevin’s basement

With all their progressive tendencies, punk-rockers can seem pretty cool — even sexy — to the queer eye. But their love for The Clash hardly guarantees them a homophobia-free persona.


The band engages in homoerotic male bonding for homophobes while they play at CBGB’s in New York in 2002.

Kevin’s house is small, drafty, and dirty. It sits in a poor neighborhood in upstate New York that straddles the line between rural and suburban. It’s early spring and it’s still freezing and grey: the fields, the roads, the faces. Down in Kevin’s basement, however, it’s hot as summer and warm with flesh tones.

His basement smells like body odor. The room is packed with boxes and there’s a sharp scent of mildew and kitty litter, but it’s body odor that dominates: the scent of sweaty boys working hard.

I’m sitting on an ancient brown couch, just a few feet from the amps, and close to where Greg stands at the microphone. I feel guilty taking pleasure in their smell; I fear them noticing how happy it makes me, and then never speaking to me again. It’s a big deal to me that they’ve let me sit in on their band practice. It’s my third time here, and Kevin’s basement might be my new favorite place. It’s warm, safe, and full of handsome boys sweating and spouting off radical rhetoric and contempt for the cool kids.  

“What did you say there, Greg?” says Kevin between songs. “In the next to last line of that verse? ‘Something something chicken, something something living?’”

“What the fuck is wrong with you man?” says Kevin to Greg. “Chicken?”

“So the song’s not about eating meat? I can’t understand a word you’re saying. I don’t know how you’re going to convince all these kids to become vegans when they have no idea what the fuck you’re saying,” he says as he stomps off and pretends to look through a cardboard box full of family photos.  

“Oh my fucking God! The song has nothing to do with eating meat! God! The line is, ‘I don’t want no part of the world you’re building.’” Kevin turns to me and asks, “Does anyone else in this room have any idea what the fuck Greg is saying when he sings?”

The only people in the room who aren’t in the band are Amber, Greg’s girlfriend, and me. Neither of us are objective observers. She’s in love with one of them and I’m in love with all of them. So we both say ‘yes.’ Gary, the bassist, wants no part in the conversation. His contribution to the scene involves scowling and occasionally grumbling rude remarks as he sits on the amp.

Some fans get in on the homophobic fun while watching the band at CBGB’s in New York in 2002.

Amber sits next to me on the couch and quietly flips through magazines. If she enjoys band practice as much as me, she hides it well. I say: “So what’s the word, Amber?” When she says, “Not a whole lot,” Greg yells, “Quiet in the peanut gallery.” He then winks slyly at her to cover up his chauvinistic impulses with humor.

As much as the closet Stalinists — Greg, Kevin, and Gary — mouth feminist rhetoric, they have a bad habit of telling Amber to shut up when she talks. But it’s different for me. I’m a boy; I’m allowed to have an opinion.

“Oh man, Simon, you should have seen it,” Kevin says to me between songs. His tone reveals that he cares more about retelling the story than informing me. “That kid Bolevice, the guy we always talk about? You should have seen it — he came to school the other day wearing a Metallica t-shirt! Can you believe it? I asked him what was up with that. Then I figured, hell, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he was being clever about it, and you know what he said? He said, ‘Metallica’s punk, right?’ Can you imagine?”

Actually, I can imagine because at my own school that’s me. I’m Bolevice, the corny poser loser the other boys make fun of.  

“So … he likes a band you guys don’t like and that’s a big problem?” I reply. “Why?”

“Hell yeah, man!” says Greg, who can articulate better than Kevin why mainstream culture and its followers lack independent thought. “He wants to come to shows, talk about how punk rock he is, and how he agrees with all the stuff the Dead Kennedys talk about, yet then he turns around and supports bad corporate mainstream music that kills individual creativity and independent labels.”

“Oh,” and I shut up. Of course I agree with Greg; that’s why I love Kevin’s basement so much. We see eye-to-eye: We hate big money, big business, big music. Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart , meat. Capitol Records, and Green Day. We hate sports and the jock thug misogynists on the football team. We despise the way people exert power over the weak: in sweatshops, in armies, in government, on the bus. Yet lately they have started to freak me out, not because they’re a clique — that much was obvious from the start — but because they can act just as mean as the jocks that beat me up in the locker room. They boast about fighting prejudice, but somehow faggots don’t fit into their list of oppressed peoples.  

Walking my high school halls, ducking projectiles, and headlocks, and boys yelling “faggot,” I always wanted to find people who thought like me. I used to lie alone on my bed in the dark, listening to The Sex Pistols or The Clash, and think that I’d eventually find a group of people who would accept me even if I was gay or liked commercial music. I felt happy and relieved when I finally met these three guys, even though they went to another school, but now I’m starting to feel less welcome and less valued by them.

Practice is winding down: They’ve gone through every song they know and now they’re playing around with a new riff. I’m thinking of the long drive home: the empty wasteland of dead depressed Columbia County. After we all leave, Greg and Amber will go off somewhere to fool around — although not to fuck because Greg’s practically a monk now with his new Hare Krishna/vegan/hard-line communist beliefs. He has negative views about non-reproductive sex. I’m avoiding this topic of conversation with him because I have a feeling he will say some pretty ugly things about gay sex.

I’ll begrudgingly drive 20 minutes out of my way to give Gary a ride home so as to not give him any reason to like me less. Then I’ll drive home alone, past the gray cold winter fields and the dilapidated houses. Afterwards I’ll go to my room and jerk off to memories of Kevin’s basement — the smell of boys and the guitars ringing in my ears. Kevin will stay in his basement and play Nintendo and watch television, or watch pornography — straight pornography.  

Sitting on Kevin’s filthy couch, not wanting the afternoon to end, I focus on the sight of Kevin drumming. His shirt’s off and his face shines from sweat and intensity. He bites his lower lip with the same sort of joy, concentration, and pleasure your face shows when you get a blowjob. I focus on the ecstatic look on his face and I imagine my own face buried between his legs.  

STORY INDEX

TOPICS > FEMINIST THEORY >

Information about feminist theory. Published by Kristin Switala.
URL: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/enin.html

TOPICS > CORPORATIONS >

“Is Wal-Mart Good for America?”
By Frontline. Published by WGBH Educational Foundation. November 16, 2004.
URL: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/walmart/etc/synopsis.html

Citizens Monitoring Coca-Cola
website designed to monitor the actions of The Coca-Cola Corporation. Published by Campaign for Justice at Coca-Cola.
URL: http://www.cokewatch.org

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Commentary

From tomboy to ‘that lesbian soccer player’

When sports and stereotypes collide with “coming out” on the playing field.


(Phoebe Sexton/Daily Free Press)

When I was little, I loved that people called me a tomboy. Even the name “tomboy” made me feel strong — all the privileges associated with being a boy without having to be one.

My best friend hated to be called a tomboy. In all honesty I didn’t think she qualified. She poufed her bangs and cared about having a bump-free ponytail. Sometimes she wore cute jean shorts to our softball practice. She also took dance lessons and liked it. So it angered me that people thought we were both tomboys. It brought my tomboyishness down a notch or two.

Beth Ann moved away from Kansas in sixth grade. By then she was getting too old to be caught doing pliés in right field. As first base-tomboy, it was my job not to let anything get to her. But sometimes I had to miss games for soccer, and she’d be left solo to pick up grounders or circle underneath pop flies.  

She and I ran into each other ten years later in an H&M department store in Manhattan. I was on a weekend trip to New York from Boston, where I had just finished my fourth and final season as a soccer player. She was auditioning for a Broadway chorus line. We were 22.  

Beth Ann had moved away right at that hazy time when girls who are tomboys become girls who are probably going to be lesbians. Around that same time boys who play sports become Gods. Quarterbacks. Point guards. Short stops. They are all revered.  It doesn’t matter if they can’t spell the name of the position they play. Boys become men on the playing field.

At this transitional time when I was 12, my soccer career took off. I played on two club teams that traveled around the country and on a state team whose players had the opportunity to advance to the national team. I basically lived in my uniform until I won a scholarship to play in college. Then I really lived in my practice shorts, my team sweats, and all the other gear they gave us.

I don’t look like a lesbian. That’s what all my friends and family told me when I came out to them. My dad actually said to my brother, “But she doesn’t look like a gay.” Which is to say that I did not fit the stereotype of a lesbian the same way I did the stereotype of a tomboy. I had long blond hair when I came out. I pierced my ears after my last soccer game, and I wore dangly earrings. I wore dresses, sometimes, and heels. And I liked that.  

People noticed these things, but nobody seemed to notice that I had never, except half-heartedly under extreme peer pressure, expressed any interest in boys or men. It somehow slipped by that, at college parties when girls teased about kissing other girls, I was perfectly serious. I didn’t look like a lesbian, and so I could not actually be one.

During the summer before I went away to college in 2000, I coached at a local soccer camp. On registration day I sat at the table for the youngest age group and welcomed nervous moms, dads, and their oblivious toddlers.

One woman approached, pushing her son in front of her. She had read about my college plans and soccer scholarship in the coaches’ bios in the brochure.  

She stood over me as I handed her four-year-old a size three ball and tiny t-shirt.

“Congratulations,” she beamed. And then she leaned in closer to whisper. “But aren’t you afraid that, you know, there will be a lot of lesbians on the team?”

If I had met the woman four years later, I would have told her that there weren’t any lesbians on the team, except for me, and because of her question — and the stereotyping and attitude it reflected — I spent four extra years in the closet.  

I waited until after I finished soccer to come out because I was terrified of being “the lesbian soccer player.” I let my best friends think that I was asexual and uninterested because I didn’t want them to think I was looking at them in the shower. All my life I had avoided stereotypes and stereotyping successfully. Although I was a tomboy, I wore skirts. Although I was smart, I sat at the “cool” lunch table. Nobody could quite nail me down.

I loved the competition, the pressure, the excitement, the commitment, and the skill that soccer demanded of me. But here’s a confession: I also needed soccer because people aren’t suspicious of the mysterious way a team of girls loves each other. A team of girls can touch, giggle, cry, sleep on each other’s shoulders, and kiss each other’s cheeks without arousing cries of lesbian. They can be angry and scream and shout at each other without drawing whispers of why does she care so much?  Americans love the intensity of sports — even women’s sports — and so, insignificant details like falling in love are not always noticed. I made it through undetected.

The woman at my registration table and her honestly fearful question represented my first personal experience with homophobia. In my back-and-forth struggle trying to decide when I should come out, it never occurred to me that my teammates might be afraid of me.

When my brother found out I was gay, he asked me if I was going to cut off all my hair. He thought I was going to suddenly morph into his default image of a lesbian.  

I wish I had allowed myself to be “the lesbian soccer player,” if only to prove that not all lesbian soccer players are the same. But I waited until I could avoid that very stereotype before coming out.

And when I did come out, those who knew me — including all of my former teammates — found a louder, freer, more intimate version of me.

A lesbian former soccer player, yes.  And many other things as well.

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News

The making of an American

A Brooklyn pool hall reveals how to pose as a native son in 2005.


Where young Americans are made: The 9 Ball Pool Club on Coney Island Avenue, Brooklyn.

“Immigrant” is a four-letter word in Brooklyn schools. Much worse than “nigger.”You can call your best friend a nigger if he says something stupid, but to call someone an immigrant is to brand him a misfit, an intruder, someone who doesn’t belong.

Brooklyn is 40 percent immigrant, according to the Newest New Yorkers report, published by New York City’s Department of City Planning in January. In Midwood, the Brooklyn neighborhood south of Prospect Park, most immigrants come from Russia, Ukraine and Pakistan. Each country is well-represented in the trash-talking that goes on at the 9 Ball Pool Club on Coney Island Avenue.

At the pool hall, the teenaged sons of all those Russian, Ukrainian and Pakistani immigrants mix with boys from everywhere else: Afghanistan, Puerto Rico, Palestine and Bangladesh. Catholics, Jews and Muslims. White, brown, and black. They start to drift in from 2 p.m. when Lasha, one of the hall’s owners, opens its doors. Usually they hang around the two San Francisco Rush 2049 video machines by the door, one kid racing his virtual car, others hanging over his shoulders and backseat driving. Lasha sits behind his counter in the far corner of the hall and listens to Russian radio. When the place fills up a little, he switches on the television suspended from a corner of the ceiling that seems to only play MTV music videos.

The All-Americans

On a blustery afternoon in January, Fat Cat and Rabbi Rooski are waiting for someone with money in his pockets to walk through the pool hall door.

Seventeen, born in the United States but with parents from Puerto Rico, Fat Cat has shoulder-length brown hair, a round face and a short, round body. His voice is like a girl’s — a soft and sibilant Hispanic whisper — but each of his eyebrows has two parallel notches shaved out of it — a well-known gang identifier. Fat Cat is an “O.G.” — an Original Gang-member — so you don’t want to try calling him a girl.

Rabbi Rooski is from Ukraine, tall with short-cropped blond hair below a backward-turned baseball cap, and a slightly pimply face. The Rabbi came to the United States nine years ago, when he was eight. His real name is Edward. “Ed-waard,” he tells me, stretching out his name in a put-on Russian accent. (He normally speaks strict New Yorker.) “My name is Ed-uaardo. I come from Uu-kraine: The mah-therland of mah-fia country.”

The two boys are looking for pool partners willing to share the cost of an hour at a table. A tall, dark-skinned boy opens the door to the hall and instantly, the Rabbi is on him. “You got any money?” he asks. The boy, startled, shakes his head and walks right out.

“I’ve got money!” 13-year-old Ahmad from Pakistan pipes up. Ahmed “talks too much shit” according to Fat Cat. He’s been playing San Francisco Rush with Geis but he’d rather shoot pool with the big boys and this afternoon, the big boys can’t afford to say no.

I chip in a couple of bucks as well and together, three cool teens and one 29-year-old reporter, the four of us have enough money — $8 — to pay Lasha for a rack of balls.

Geis who has been abandoned by Ahmed, walks over to watch our game. From Yemen, Geis arrived in the States when he was less than a year old. He’s 13, short for his age, and thin. Geis prefers Bob’s Store, a video arcade down the street on Newkirk Avenue to Lasha’s, because arcade games are a lot cheaper than pool. But Bob gets angry with kids who loiter around his place and shouts at them when they start to fool around. Lasha is a lot more relaxed about a bunch of kids hanging out at his pool hall not doing anything. He shouts at the kids to be careful with his sticks, or to stop playing when their time runs out, but they never listen.

Fat Cat (right) with his friend David outside the Newkirk Avenue subway station.

The Non-Americans

The boys call Lasha an immigrant. It doesn’t help that he wears tight-fitting, brown corduroy pants and a beige, long-sleeved, turtleneck t-shirt with a sleeveless, brown leather jacket on top. He is a heavy-built bear of a man, who arrived in the United States from Georgia three years ago and has yet to acquire an American fashion sense or accent.

“Can you be an American if you weren’t born here?” I ask the boys, just to be sure.

“No!” Fat Cat and Ahmad reply immediately in unison. “Then you’re an immigrant.” To them it’s an either/or situation — American or Immigrant — you can’t be both. (They all see themselves as American.)

“You can try,” suggests Geis, but his undertone sounds doubtful.

“Can you tell just by looking at someone if he’s an immigrant?”

“Yeah,” the boys say confidently. “It’s the way he looks, the way he speaks, and all that. His dress is different. His voice.” They point out Shanl who’s been standing on the periphery of our conversation, quietly listening.

“He’s an immigrant! For sure!” they shout, happy to have found another one.

“How can you tell?”

“Just look at him!”

Shanl retreats inside his jacket and his eyes dart between the boys and me. He wants to be an American — he tells me afterwards that he is one — but he’s wearing the wrong kind of clothes: a white-and-blue striped, cotton polo t-shirt underneath a black jacket with a fur-trimmed hood. His jeans are the wrong shade of blue and his black-and-white sneakers are a no-brand variety. The other boys are in North Face, Nike and Sean John. They talk with a Brooklyn accent: the softened T’s, the rounded vowels. Shanl, who arrived in the United States from Pakistan a year ago, has yet to master this style of talking. He rarely speaks but when he does, his voice betrays his recent arrival.

Kamal (bottom) with his “brothers” (left to right) Asif, Mike, Angel, Chris, and Louis in the basketball court of Kamal’s old primary school: PS217 in Midwood.

“So what if you was born here?”

An American teenager living in Midwood, Brooklyn needs to have seen the new Usher video and the latest Will Smith blockbuster. An American teenager needs to know the rudiments of pool and basketball and football. He must know who is in which gang — whether it’s the Crips, the Latin Kings, or that Afghani gang across the street. He’s got to know how to talk — not to parents or inquisitive female reporters — but to other kids. Talk slang, talk back, talk big. An American teenager needs to have a command of the various accents of his neighborhood so he can make fun of friends’ backgrounds. In Midwood, that means being able to fake a passable Russian accent and a bad Pakistani one.

But there are immigrant children who can do all this — who look and speak like Americans — but who refuse to call themselves American.

When Kamal Uddin, a short 17-year-old, walks into the pool hall, in his bright red jacket and his slicked down fringe, he makes it a point to shake the hand of all the boys there. He tells me each of their names and the schools they go to. He grabs Fat Cat round the neck and tells me that Puerto Rican Anthony is his cousin. Wasif, from Afghanistan, is his best friend. Then he leans close and whispers that he used to have a crush on Geis’ sister from Yemen. As soon as the words come out, he straightens and says it was rather she who had a crush on him. He says there are no cliques drawn along ethnic or racial lines in the mixed pool hall crowd. “There’s just like a brotherhood thing, you know?”

But when I ask Kamal if he thinks of himself as an American, he says no. He tells me how after September 11th, the kids in his school started calling him names because of his brown skin and his Muslim faith. They started calling him an immigrant. Kamal says he never answered back. But one day, his principal heard one of the kids teasing him in the hallway. “You know what?” the principal reprimanded the girl, “You’re not a citizen either. You’re an immigrant too. We’re all immigrants except the Native Americans.”

Since that day, Kamal has worn the badge of an immigrant with pride. And that too is a peculiarly American trait. “I was born in Bangladesh. That’s my country,” he tells me. “I can’t just come to another and say, ‘This is my country.’ Nobody can come and tell me that this is my country. So what if you was born here? You still have a background, you know? Those people who are born here, those are the people who say, ‘Yeah, I’m American straight up. American, born and raised.’ But come on, so what? You still have a background. We’re all immigrants. Speak the truth, we’re all immigrants.”

STORY INDEX

TOPICS > IMMIGRATION IN NEW YORK >

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The Council of Peoples Organization
URL: http://www.copousa.org

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Photo Essays

The Tao of the street

Navigating life in western China.


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The Chinese word Tao means path or way, or street. This idea is the root of the Taoist religion. While most places in China aren’t that religious these days, life here is filled with streets, and the streets with life.

The way can be difficult to navigate. I live in a small mountain city called Wanzhou, which is on the banks of the Yangtze River, in the Sichuan region of western China. The river and the mountains combine to prevent any street from being straight. I spent months getting lost whenever I strayed from the main roads. There are stairs everywhere, making each walk an exercise in three-dimensional thinking.

In all these wanderings I have yet to find a street that’s been far from the click of mahjong tiles. Mahjong is a tile-laying game that occupies almost everyone’s free time. And free time is in great supply. The streets are loaded with small shops and all of them have more  employees than it seems they could possibly need. Unless they are needed precisely to defeat neighbouring shop employees at the game. Players at green-topped game tables congregate in parks and alleys and spectators gather. But it’s not just mahjong on which people spend their time. Cards use less expensive equipment and can be played with a stool and lots of shouting. People talk about Sichuan people having fiery tempers to go with the spicy food they eat. Big — yet good-natured — screaming matches often ensue.

There are more sedate pastimes. Old people sit and watch kids running by or meander through parks. The gentle clicking of metal spheres being slowly rotated in hands often accompanies these walks. I’ve been told that rotating these spheres is a way to maintain longevity. Another common technique is walking backwards in circles. Many of those old pedestrians seem as aimless as me. They’re just walking to see what there is to see, especially the ones walking backwards.

In Wanzhou sunny days are rare. But when they do occur, the kite flyers come out. Carefully spaced old men, tethered to their contraptions far above, line the banks of the Yangtze. These are the kinds of kites on which I can imagine trying to send a person into space. Those sunny days also turn into impromptu flag ceremonies when people can actually expect their clothes to get dry.

While Wanzhou is a small city, it is technically part of Chongqing, a huge metropolis a couple of hundred kilometers upriver. Chongqing is known for its spicy food. I’m assailed with more than the jingles of fast food restaurants when I travel through the city. Independent vendors attack your sense of smell directly as they fry up noodles or potatoes or anything you can put on a stick. The spiciness that wafts from tubs of takeout causes your mouth to water as beautiful girls try to find places to sit and eat. Or at least I tell myself it’s the peppers. Then the burning coal they use to cook on the street, where there are no gas lines or electricity, always give me coughing fits, and the girls are out of sight by the time I recover.

I also coughed in the mountains, where people burn yak dung in fireplaces and incense in offering pyres. The idea of a path takes on even more significance in Lhasa as Tibetan pilgrims circumambulate temples, prostrating themselves all the while. On the ground around the Jokhang Temple the rasping of the pads that protect the pilgrims’ hands and knees sliding over rocky tiles is omnipresent. But you can get away from all of that; get above it all with monks who’re listening to the rituals happening below.

Then it’s time to find the way home. Even though my apartment is away from the noise of the street, all that stuff is waiting just outside. The paths are filled with life.

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