SK Multi-Hyphenate

Bachmann Glittered: 5 Reasons It's a Good Thing

1. Glitter satirizes her hyper-femininity, a key cause of her popularity.

2. Glitter has become a decidedly queer object. Deployed by queer activists upon a decidedly anti-queer figure, Bachmann's anti-queer record and discourse are exposed—and visually so, which yields maximum media impact.

3. A glittered Bachmann is a queered Bachmann. Via crafty activist sleight-of-hand, Bachmann becomes the figure of her ire for a moment—nay, permanently, given the visual evidence.

4. The glitter action shows that the Republican 2012 presidential field can't escape their anti-queer records and discourse—indeed, that the electorate will be reminded of their hateful positions and speech.

5. Glitter is fun!

Other reasons why a beglittered Bachmann is a good thing? Post them in the comments!

'Boyfriend 101': Essential Tips

While procrastinatingly excavating clutter from around my apartment today, I found Jim Sullivan's classic Boyfriend 101, subtitled A Gay Guy's Guide to Dating, Romance, and Finding True Love. I totally forgot I ever consulted such a thing, although my first thought was that I must have just skimmed it. But, no, I actually annotated the book, up till page 23; after that the marginalia disappears.

Here's some of what I marked up when I read the book four or five years ago. These tips may be useful to you singletons out there (a category that no longer, natch, includes me).

• "But dating is more than a means to an end. It can be an end in itself. It's a process that I ask you—and you should ask yourself—to be open to." (xi)
• "I had to tell him it can sometimes take more than a few dates to feel sexual attraction. Besides...he should not close himself off to the possibility of meeting men who might become friends." (xii)
• "Sex is a wonderful thing, but a must for the conscious dater is to get to know a man before having sex." (xv)
• "You're having a date when you meet a guy at a specified place and time in pursuit of the possibility of future romantic involvement. The operative words are possibility and future; throw the notion of immediate gratification out the window, because delayed gratification is part of the new paradigm." (Emphasis Sullivan's, 4)
• "The inner teenager is the playful, shy, sexy, seductive self-conscious, scared, and romantic part of us that wants to go out on dates, but may not possess the social and emotional skills to do it." (5)
• "If you're waiting for your prince to come, the length of the wait may surprise you. Ninety percent of men are not going to approach you—you're going to have to approach them. Even gorgeous guys need to make the first move." (12)
• "Of course, rejection takes on added weight when we've been intimate—have shared a deep part of ourselves—and then get that awful call: 'I like you but I don't think there's a match.' This can cause anyone to go temporarily insane." (16)
• "Ultimately, though, the best answer to rejection is a four-letter word: 'Next!'" (16)
• "You can keep dating fun by not focusing on the outcome—'Will he or won't he be my future husband?'—and, instead, staying 'in the moment' with your date. Suggest to your date fun places to go (an amusement park, a wrestling competition) and do (drive to the ocean, go horseback riding). Stop seeing a date as a talkathon in which each man spills his guts for an hour or two! You can talk and have fun at the same time." (17)
• "'Being' with someone, as opposed to 'being seen' with someone, takes precedence." (23)

Indeed, boys, it does—it really does. Apparently this last tip was the most impactful for me, because I didn't make another check mark in the margins for the remainder of the book. Who knows if I even read to the end? But if you'd like to, let me know—I'll give you the book for free. After all, as Sullivan observes, "Carl Jung said that when we take an action, there must be some positive payoff down the line or the subconscious will sabotage future action" (12). In other words, let me let you help yourself and snag that man!

Glenn Ligon and the 1968 Memphis Strike

Glenn Ligon’s 1988 work Untitled (I Am a Man), a replica of the sign carried by striking Memphis sanitation workers in 1968, is a prime example of his appropriative strategy. Not an original sign itself, nor an identical reproduction of one, Ligon’s painting is rather an appropriation of the sign, so that the words “I Am a Man” simultaneously exist in three separate but related contexts: the original historical context in which the message emerged, the context in which Ligon rendered that message, and the context in which a viewer apprehends the message. Indeed, Ligon sought to show in Untitled (I Am a Man) the “changing notions of what it means to carry a sign that says ‘I Am a Man’”—a kinetic discourse that, for him, is represented in part by the cracks on the painting’s surface. “The piece was made using oil paint and enamel paint mixed together, and that’s not a good combination,” Ligon has explained. “The minute I made the painting it started to crack, and given the subject matter, I thought that was interesting.”

Memphis 1968 is remembered as the place and year of Martin Luther King’s assassination, but the reason the civil rights leader came to Memphis—the sanitation strike—is less often recalled. On February 1st of that year, two black sanitation workers were accidentally killed when they were sucked into the compactor of a garbage truck. The tragedy underscored the inequity of the sanitation business, which was run by whites but carried out by an almost exclusively black workforce under vile, discriminatory conditions. As historian Michael K. Honey writes: “Hauling garbage was the kind of work the city assigned to blacks only." The men’s deaths were the proverbial last straw: eleven days later, on Lincoln’s birthday, some 1300 workers went on strike. The message they held aloft for the next two months—“I Am a Man”—responded as much to longstanding discourse that marginalized black people as less than human as it did to daily put-downs of “boy” from white supervisors. “‘I Am a Man’ meant freedom,” one sanitation worker recalled. “All we wanted was some decent working conditions, and a decent salary. And be treated like men, not like boys.”

One has to wonder, of course, which men were excluded from this effort to attain “freedom,” given that in 1968, one year before Stonewall, queer men of color certainly faced a double bind of delimited manhood—and this historical tension surely informed Ligon’s appropriation of the slogan in 1988. Indeed, the historical moment of the making of Untitled (I Am a Man) was suffused with its own tensions around queerness, not least because of the AIDS crisis and the rise of the Christian right, which found easy targets in “gay art.” (Ligon’s first professional exhibition was a 1989 group show—the same year a Mapplethorpe solo show was famously cancelled at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. due to conservative outcry.) Ligon’s painting, then, highlights racial, gender, and sexual oppression—and the intersectional work performed by these fields of power—in two separate historical moments.

Furthermore, Ligon’s appropriated, reworked image excavates the historical centrality of queerness—of twinned homoeroticism and homophobia—to racial oppression at large. Eric Lott identifies this dialectic as the basis of minstrelsy, and also as a chief reason for the failure of “a possible interracial labor alliance” in the nineteenth century—a failure whose implications lingered long into the twentieth century. (Memphis’s political leaders, after all, refused to recognize the sanitation workers as members of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; the standoff only ended when the city finally conceded such recognition.) To my eyes, the specter of this dialectic, of this lost promise, haunts the Ligon painting. The work’s formal elements even record this fissure: oil and enamel mixed together results in surface cracks.

But what I also see in Untitled (I Am a Man) are the cracks, as it were, in today’s historical moment, in which the presence and power of a black man in the White House has spurred thinly veiled racialized opposition in the form of the tea party movement and persistent questions about a putatively missing birth certificate. Interestingly enough, the Obamas, perhaps in a gesture to their pathbreaking role, picked a Ligon to adorn their private quarters. A part of the same series that includes the Hurston quotations, Black Like Me No. 2 (1992) foregrounds a line from John Howard Griffin’s 1961 memoir Black Like Me, about the white author’s experience of darkening his skin and traveling the South as a “black” person. “All traces of the Griffin I had been were wiped from existence,” the canvas reads—a lesson about how flimsy the notion of racial essentialism, and a politics based on it, is.

Further reading: Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign; Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class

Glenn Ligon's America

NYT slide show.

Ligon (after a preface) on "Untitled (I Am a Man)," 1988.

'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' Repealed!

My take for New York mag's Daily Intel on today's Senate vote repealing "don't ask, don't tell" 17 years after it was enacted—and 41 years since Stonewall. Gay rights have come a long way, baby. We used to hate the military!

Triptych on 'Hide/Seek'

Rich; Cotter (review); Cotter (commentary).

Difference and Desire in DC

At the National Portrait Gallery's landmark new show on queer portraiture, "Hide/Seek," a kid about five years of age wandered up to the above painting by Romaine Brooks of British writer Una, Lady Troutbridge, and asked his parents, "Who's this guy?" "It's a girl," his dad said, then turned around and led his family out of the exhibition.

The Tyler Clementi Vigil at Rutgers-Newark

Rutgers President on Tyler Clementi's Suicide

Today at 4:28 p.m. Rutgers University president Richard L. McCormick issued the following LGBT-affirming statement on the loss of first-year student Tyler Clementi. In the Rutgers-wide email, McCormick reiterates the university's commitment to "the moral imperative of an open and egalitarian community" and notes that the country's second gay college student association was founded on the campus in 1969. McCormick also says he'll be meeting with LGBT student leaders to identify "areas in which Rutgers can better support the needs of this community." Altogether, I think his statement strikes the right notes for this tragic moment. It was certainly heartening to me, a new member of the Rutgers community as an MFA fiction student at the Newark campus.

As McCormick notes, there will be a vigil for Clementi this Sunday at 7 p.m. on the New Brunswick campus's Brower Commons. There will be another vigil for Clementi this Monday at 7 p.m. in Essex Room East of the Newark campus's Robeson student center. I'll be at that one.

McCormick's email in full:

Members of the Rutgers Community:

The Rutgers University community is mourning the death of first-year student Tyler Clementi.  We grieve for him and for his family, friends, and classmates as they deal with the tragic loss of a gifted young man who was a strong student and a highly accomplished musician.  Our community is preparing to hold a candlelight vigil on Sunday evening at 7:00 p.m. at Brower Commons on the College Avenue campus.  This silent vigil will be an opportunity to come together in this difficult time to reaffirm our commitment to the values of civility, dignity, compassion, and respect for one another.

This tragedy and the events surrounding it have raised critical questions about the climate of our campuses.  Students, parents, and alumni have expressed deep concern that our university, which prides itself on its rich diversity, is not fully welcoming and accepting of all students.  They have expressed to me and to other Rutgers faculty and administrators the urgent need for every student to be able to live and study without fear of intimidation, discrimination, or threats to their privacy.

Rutgers has a strong history of social activism on behalf of diversity.  It was here in 1969 that the second gay college student organization in the country was founded.  In that same era, student protests led to expanded opportunities for students of color at Rutgers.  In the 1980s, our students spoke out forcefully and effectively against apartheid.  We also have a proud legacy of world renowned research on women and the preparation of women for leadership.

By its history Rutgers University is thus committed to the moral imperative of an open and egalitarian community.  That work continues today.  Last year Rutgers opened an LGBT resource center and established our first LGBT scholarship fund for undergraduate students.  And while we are working toward the creation of additional safe spaces in response to student concerns, we must make every space at Rutgers safe. Accordingly, I pledge that we will work even more closely with our student leaders to make certain that our campuses are places where students of all races, faiths, cultures, and orientations feel accepted and respected. 
In order to hear directly from our lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students, I am arranging to meet with student leaders of the LGBT community.  When we gather, we will discuss what they identify as the areas in which Rutgers can better support the needs of this community.

Let me also urge your participation in Project Civility (projectcivility.rutgers.edu), a two-year conversation on our New Brunswick campus about the meaning of respect and how we treat each other.  The critically important issues of personal privacy and the responsible uses of technology, which have been brought into sharp focus this week, are among the timely topics that Project Civility will examine.

Rutgers is an imperfect institution in an imperfect society, but we are always striving to find better ways to make every student feel comfortable and fully empowered.  We have the opportunity and the obligation to be a model for universities across the country.  Let us work together to make that happen.

Sincerely yours,

Richard L. McCormick

President