Allowing space

I have been going back and forth with a very serious decision recently: whether to get social media set up on my phone.

It would mainly be for travel. I used to have a laptop that traveled with me. Once I day I could log on and post the song of the day and any relevant blogs and wish people a happy birthday, but it died quite a while ago. 

Right now I am also posting political content daily through the election as well as trying to stay connected to people. That I might have times when there are a few days with no posting is a concern.

I never worried about using the laptop, but somehow it feels different with the phone.

I suppose this is partly because most people keep their phones on them all the time; something I never did with my laptop. 

It is also because of merging, like Instagram with Facebook, but probably more because Musk ruined Twitter and Zuckerberg is evil and even Google no longer has not being evil in their charter... do I really want to reinforce that connection?

(It is a teeny bit because being in school gave me a new Google profile besides the one that has everything else. That only adds a small level of complication, but does act as a minor deterrent.)

As it is, we have had things come up twice now preventing travel; maybe I just shouldn't be planning on going anywhere.

I am not saying things will never be different. For now, my phone remains mostly just a phone, that sometimes take photos. It's pretty handy being able to call or text from wherever.

While it is technically still a "smart" phone, that part pretty much never works. I know I could figure that out, and I would have to if I were going to maintain social media use while traveling.This decision makes that a moot point.

This means that when I am watching television, I am watching television. 

(I wish my sisters would do that. So often they are there but missing things because their faces are in their phones. I rewind a lot.)

When I am on the bus, I will be reading, or thinking, or watching and even talking to people.

That's not awful.

In church, I... okay, sometimes my mind is wandering rather than me really listening -- there is room for improvement there -- but I am not scrolling my feeds.

Yes, it would theoretically still be possible to be like that with social media on my phone, but it's even easier when the phone has nothing there.

It was also a choice to allow me to have days off from what I am doing, no matter how important it feels. Breaks are important too. 

Pride Month Movies

I feel like it ended up being a very good selection. That was mainly luck, though it is the luck that you get from putting yourself out there. 

Two of them came up when I was searching on George Takei; he narrates Who's On Top and appears in Do I Sound Gay?. The other two were in my Netflix suggestions, I think because of watching Rustin and a Hannah Gadsby special.

I am writing about these in the order in which I viewed them, not in the order they were released. 

Disclosure (2020)

This is about the portrayal of transgender people by Hollywood. 

One of the most illuminating parts was going over the reveal in The Crying Game (1992). The person finding out vomits, and then all of these other films coming after doing that too. They are mainly comic films, like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, but still, it enforces that this is the standard reaction.

That is dehumanizing, but the film is great for showing many of the humans that it hurts.

The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2017) 

I have not found much in the way of books on Johnson, which had been part of my plans. This documentary was a good start, giving more about her life and death, just as it describes.

One of the most emotional parts is a former roommate wondering if his actions put her in more danger. 

I knew there were questions about her death, and this does a good job of laying them out.

Do I Sound Gay (2014)

Filmmaker David Thorpe starts getting very bothered by his vocal inflections; hence the title question. (It is worth noting that this happened just after a breakup, and thinking of getting back into dating may have increased insecurity.) Thorpe works with a speech coach, as well as talking to friends and actors about "sounding" gay.

I found it interesting that apparently a big part of sounding gay was ending sentences upward, as if asking a question. One of the exercises for not doing that was a phrase with a specific cadence: "I am right. I am always right." Now that's a phrase that encourages finality.

It made me wonder if part of it was a lack of confidence, and a way of being deferential to be more acceptable. If that's the case, maybe it is something to work on, but if changing the speech patterns is pursued due to self-loathing, then maybe a therapy other than speech would be better?

(Now I am doing it, but I watched a 77-minute documentary. I should not be that confident making assessments.)

Who's On Top?  (2020)

As indicated earlier, this came up on a library search for George Takei, and I impulsively requested it. I had no idea it was set locally, so that was a pleasant surprise.

Yes, the title sounds like a double entendre. The documentary is about a group of four LGBT people (and it is literally one Lesbian, one Gay man, one Bisexual woman, and one Transgender woman) preparing to climb Mt. Hood together.

I really felt for each of the individuals, learning more about them and what being "on top" would mean for them. Seeing Portland and familiar locales was great. It was even cool recognizing all of the newscasters in the clips of stories of deaths, injuries, and search and rescue efforts on Mt. Hood. 

I may have heard before, but it did not really register, that Mt. Hood is the second-most climbed mountain, with only Mt. Fuji having more annual climbers.

I cannot stress enough how little I am interested in mountain climbing. There are so many other activities you can do with less danger, that don't require going to special low-oxygen rooms to condition and starting at midnight so the sunlight doesn't melt your path. I mean, Touching the Void was pretty horrific, but they were experienced climbers so the movie focused on the unusual things that went wrong. 

These are mostly beginners, so there is more time spent on that process of just getting to where you can reasonably expect to safely make the top. It's not that I was really thinking about it before, but knowing more now, uh-uh.

That wasn't the point of the movie, but understanding it was part of getting to know the climbers. 

The movie was great. It was also the one I watched most recently, and it appears I still have some emotions about it.

Exploring my sexuality

When I am doing a series of posts, it often feels right to go in threes. 

There is a long history of people conflating gender and sexual orientation, though I think there has been progress on that. It may be less common for people to think about the difference between sexual orientation and sexuality; that's whom you're interested in and what you do with them, right?

It may be much more about how you do what you do, and not exclusive to the bedroom.

First of all, I should say that in a lot of my feminist readings over time, I have noticed that for many men sex is mostly about force; not necessarily rape, but how hard even the consensual sex is done. 

I remember one woman who had a boyfriend like that. Later her doctor thought she had been violently assaulted because of the scarring. She hadn't really enjoyed it, but she accepted that was how it should be.

Then you have men who claim women are actually incapable of orgasm; it's the only acceptible explanation for why a woman has never had one with them. There is this new trend -- and it is so ignorant I hope it is not widely spread, but can't be sure -- where there are men saying that sperm alters women's DNA so if you have children with a non-virgin, those children will have traits from other men.

No. That's not how that works.

This mindset of sex being something for dominating and changing a woman (without pleasuring her) is really the same misogyny that pays less because they refuse to consider the work equal, while at the same time demanding more household labor and emotional labor without admitting it is labor.

My point is not to bash men (and of course they are not all like that) but to point out once again that dominator culture ruins everything. (I have spent several posts demonstrating that on the Sunday blog.)

What I am more interested in is how things can be better. Some examples come to mind.

First is the segment "Getting Real" from My Grandfather's Blessings by Rachel Naomi Remen.

She starts at a beach where a recent ileostomy has made her feel worse about her body. The many Barbie-perfect bodies (the companions of wealthy men also there) around her made that worse. Then a middle-aged woman -- older, and a little heavier, but with complete confidence -- sauntered out. All of the men and many of the women stopped and looked at her.

"It was my first lesson in the difference between perfection and sexuality."

She moves on to a patient who had always been perfectly beautiful, then needed a mastectomy, and her transformation. The most important part of it was still about the first woman:

"Real sexuality heals. In its presence I could begin to reclaim my own sense of possibility and wholeness, and I am grateful to this woman for inhabiting her body in this way. Without knowing me at all, she helped me to begin to inhabit my own life."

As traumatic as a surgery that removes part of your body can be, you don't need one to be aware of your own body's lack of perfection. If we think of sexuality as sexiness and believe it requires perfection, that can mess us up pretty badly, even if not as badly as equating sex with domination.

Somehow, we need to appreciate the marvels of our bodies and of each other to get at that healing and wholeness.

Alice Wong's Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire would surely have some food for thought, but right now I am thinking more of Audre Lorde's "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power".

For her, the erotic should be a part of sex, but it was also part of creativity and strength. 

"Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy."

Look, I have given you three options for further reading and they are all worth looking into. Our individual paths toward wholeness may look very different.

I know that I have felt called toward healing for some time. Part of that journey is my own healing, and part of that is bridging the rift with my body that started so young. There are ways in which I am already better, and areas that still require some work.

It's worth doing for yourself too.

The never-ending Pride Month (Pride 2024)

This is not about how Pride Month was officially June and I am still getting through the books I planned on reading (though that would be a completely logical guess).

It is not about how although Pride Month is officially in June but Portland celebrates it in July (because of Rose Festival and graduation and everything). I was more aware of the timing because I volunteered there this year, so it was my first year attending.

This is more about how in my other reading I kept encountering queer authors.

I thought about titling this post "Is everybody gay?", but I was concerned that it could seem derogatory. Instead, I am going to save a really corny and obvious joke for the end.

The pieces started falling into place when I was reading How Far the Light Reaches by Sabrina Imbler.

It would not have been unreasonable to read it for Asian-American heritage, or even science, but it came up because a friend recommended it and I had asked friends for their favorite books because of a reading challenge.

Imbler is queer. 

I might not have even noticed that if more time had elapsed between reading How Far the Light Reaches and The Viral Underclass, whose author Steven Thrasher is also queer. 

Of course, I was also reading Ocean Vuong and Demian DineYazhi in between. 

Now, DineYazhi's work, An Infected Sunset, was inspired by the Pulse Nightclub shooting; I was reading that specifically for Pride. He nonetheless could fit comfortably into my Native American Heritage month reading, and probably will be mentioned when we get to that, just like Ocean Vuong was featured in the Asian-American reading.

The point is that the boundaries are blurring, and I think that's a good thing. 

Often when there are attempts at representation, it is not done with very much thought. So, if we get a lesbian couple where one half is Black and one is of Asian descent, without any insight into how their backgrounds go together, that might not advance us as much as we would like. It will still make some people really angry, and it may help in terms of acclimatization to something other than a white monolith, but there are probably missed opportunities. 

More people from a wide variety of experiences telling their stories and sharing their viewpoints helps in many ways. It can be more honest than even the best-intentioned white straight person checking boxes. 

Consider The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide. A gay Black man is probably going to have a more accurate perspective on that than I could. I encounter inequality in some ways, but there are ways in which privilege shelters me. I want to reach beyond that.

One interesting thing I just learned (from an e-mail from the Movement for Black Lives) is that October is LGBTQIA+ History Month. Now my writing is timely!

Sure, it seems like I should have already known that, and starting in the second half of Hispanic Heritage Month and going right to Native American Heritage Month could present some conflict, but the key is more to learn and remember, not the schedule. (Says the person who is always behind, and is now thinking that maybe October 2025 should focus on queer Latinx and Native American people, but there is a lot of indigenous overlap there anyway.)

If anyone is curious, other queer authors featured during Asian-American Heritage month were Laura Gao (Messy Roots), Trung Le Nguyen (The Magic Fish), and George Takei. 

Around that time period I also read The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson. That was more for science; I don't have a strict schedule there.

Ready for the corny joke?

Maybe the real Pride Month was the friends we made along the way. 

Related posts:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2024/09/spotlight-on-george-takei-apahm-2024.html

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2024/09/summer-reading-challenges.html

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2024/08/graphic-novels-for-apahm-2024.html

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2024/07/spotlight-on-alice-wong.html

Exploring my sexual orientation

Don't get too excited; I'm still straight. I do still have some thoughts.

Part of that has been wondering how much was social conditioning.

I know that I started experiencing sexual attraction when I was a senior in high school. There was a definite flip of a switch.

Before that I'd had crushes, but even before that, I was always interested in boys.

When I was three, I got engaged to the boy next door. There was a boy at church I thought was cute. I knew other boys but they didn't seem to matter the same way. Why? I don't know. This was attraction, but not sexual; why some and not others?

Getting to those crushes, I definitely had types, but I am not sure where they came from. I was capable of being persuaded.

For example, in junior high I liked baby-faced basketball players. I was never attracted on my own to short guys, but I was talked into it, at least once. If other people say someone is good-looking, it must mean something, right?

Then, in college when I fell in love with someone, anyone who reminded me of him caught my attention. 

There was still a pretty specific height range (about 6'2" to 6'4"), but not quite as lean (more football player than basketball), dark hair and piercing eyes. 

The last time I fell in love, it did change my type again. Still tall, but less dramatic hair, a beard (but not a long bushy one) and usually wearing a beanie. Well, you can imagine how often I see that in Portland. It does catch my attention, though I take it in stride more than I did in my early 20s.

I skipped a step. 

I did fall in love in high school. Until writing this, I did not remember it changing the type of guy I was attracted to. I was thinking maybe there was no one else like him, but then I remembered a guy in a commercial, and another one in a movie. Yes, I was noticing similarities. The only real effect was that I have always wished Elias Koteas well in his career. (But it was really just the hair that was the same, and Elias Koteas did not keep the hair.)

Here's the thing that was really important; each of those three times, it was love at first sight. It resulted in attraction, but was more like a recognition.

That's how attraction works for me. As indicated, I can talk myself into an attraction, and have, but I have always regretted it. 

Most importantly, while I cannot necessarily say that they had the same reaction to me, we were mutually drawn together. The more I got to know them, the more I liked them. We wanted to spend more time with each other. Whatever that pull I felt was, it made sense for me to listen to it.

Unfortunately, I was so sure that they would get tired of me that I tried to limit that time, even though there was nothing I wanted more than more time. 

There are two things with that.

First of all, any healing that you can do makes everything else better. I realize lots of people enter relationships loaded down with emotional baggage -- it happens -- but my particular combination of dysfunction was not well-designed for that.

Secondly, having tried various things that did not work for me, I don't have any interest in replaying that. Thinking about online dating or any other type of effort just sounds awful.

If I were to feel that pull again or could reunite with one of my previous loves, that would be a different story, but I'm not looking.

That being said, I do feel good knowing. My examined life is worth living, and I have learned from it.

And, if there is something that is weird about you, or seem impractical or ridiculous, but is actually what specifically works for you, honor that. 

Spotlight on George Takei, APAHM 2024

The downside of having this pause between the other Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage month and the George Takei spotlight is that I have come up with so many more thoughts than I expected. 

Waiting was a matter of necessity. In addition to wanting to catch up on daily song posts, two of the books were only available through Inter-Library loan and it took a while for the requests to come through.

Therefore (in a big departure for me) this post may wander.

After reading his graphic novel account, They Called Us Enemy (2019), and his children's book, My Lost Freedom (2024), I started wondering what else there was:

To the Stars: The Autobiography of George Takei, Star Trek's Mr. Sulu by Geoge Takei (1994)

Oh Myyy! by George Takei (2012)

Lions and Tigers and Bears: The Internet Strikes Back by George Takei (2013)

To Be Takei (2014)

Allegiance (Original Broadway Cast Recording) (2016)

I don't usually include years for books, but timing is somewhat relevant here.

First of all, for the regular autobiography, To the Stars, there is a big gap between it and the other writings. 

It is such a big gap that he was not publicly out yet. It was a really entertaining book and there is so much that was interesting, but it is also weird because he is so publicly out now that you keep waiting for a mention; it just doesn't happen.

Then, at some point, he starts having a real social media presence. That inspired the two books and the documentary, which is largely about his activism and awareness raising. A lot of that is for LGBT issues, but it is also for issues of racism and remembering Japanese internment, so also the genesis of the stage play, Allegiance. 

It is after that when we get the books related to internment but geared toward younger audiences. 

That is all a logical progression. I also discovered a couple of other movies that will relate to the Pride month reading, so in fact Sulu is the bridge.

Here is where my thoughts become somewhat messy. 

First of all, the two books about internet use are not great. Part of that is simply that they are outdated; that is a thing that happens with technology. An older person figuring out the internet is likely to be more interesting to him than to almost anyone else. 

The books are not as amusing as his posts, though he does replicate many of them.

There is also one point of frustration for me.

When I first became aware of his posting, it related to a clip of a person in a store getting up from a wheelchair to get something off of a shelf, and people were mocking that person for using a wheelchair when they didn't need it.

Many people who use wheelchairs and other mobility devices can stand and even walk. They may not be able to do it for extended periods without heart strain or dizziness, or perhaps they are at high risk of dislocation. There may be a lot of pain involved, but there are lots of types of disabilities and health issues. Thinking that every person in a wheelchair is totally paralyzed at least from the waist down is ignorant. Mocking that is cruel.

He got some push back. I don't think he handled it quite as badly as William Shatner, but he didn't come around either. In the books he talks about offending people. He defends humor and freedom of speech, but he got why mocking Japan after the tsunami was wrong. 

It doesn't make him different from many other celebrities. I don't think he's a bad person and I don't dislike him, but I do wish he was better in that way.

The next point of messiness is about Allegiance, though he didn't write that. 

Admittedly, I have not seen it; I have only read about it and listened to the soundtrack.

You have a very close brother and sister falling on different sides of the loyalty question, where the sister resists and marries another resister, and the brother joins the army and serves heroically, but the white woman he fell in love with is killed in a scuffle.The brother and sister are estranged for sixty years until her death.

There are a lot of things that are unrealistic with that. First of all, there was one person shot in an internment camp, and it was an old Japanese man. I don't think it makes sense to make the martyr a white woman. 

Most families seemed to stay close. There are a lot of different experiences, and I don't know them all, but that didn't seem right.

Also, they make a real person the villain, but in what seems to be an exaggerated way. That feels irresponsible and wrong.

I did find some other thoughts on that issue, from people who actually saw it and are closer to the issues, so I am going to let them comment:

https://www.nichibei.org/2015/11/a-jaclers-perspective-of-allegiance/

I'm sure some of it is for dramatic effect, but I still think there could have been a better story there. Maybe it would have better if it were based more on the Takei family.

For more about the internee experience, They Called Us Enemy really is excellent. 

I also recommend We Are Not Free by Traci Chee. She came from a large family, and maybe that made it easier for her to depict multiple different attitudes but where connections persisted.

Finally, in reading about Takei's early acting career, the same names kept popping up. This was fun in a way, because I have my own fondness for Keye Luke and Nobu McCarthy. Then it was a reminder of how much their ethnicity limited their roles, and they were relatively lucky in terms of finding work. 

That reminded me of Nancy Wang Yuen's Reel Inequality, but other things as well. 

There is still a long way to go.

Intro to Pride Month: gender identity

This is something I have had in mind to do for a long time: going through and exploring my gender identity, my sexual orientation, and my sexuality, terms that get conflated a lot.

The necessary spoiler alert is that I remain CIS, straight, and chaste. Nothing is going to be that exciting. It may still be valuable.

The seeds of the idea were planted long ago by pop culture journalist Brett White talking about connecting with his masculinity as a gay man. There were visions of masculinity that did not work, but there were others that did. Bob Newhart became an influence for him.

My underlying theme throughout all of this is going to be that we need to quit dictating how others should act. So, if a gay man wants to be understated rather than flamboyant, that should be allowed. (I mean, being gay is sexual orientation, not gender, and not personality.)

I have not been particularly feminine in many ways.

There were two frustrations (at least) for my mother when I was a child. One was that I had very thick, hard to manage hair. I also underwent a change at around 5 or 6 where I only ever wanted to wear jeans.

It was specifically my introduction to denim. Previously every pair of pants that I had was scratchy polyester, so I only wanted to wear skirts. Mom preferred skirts, so she related to this. 

Jeans felt great, and then that was all I wanted. (Variety in dress has never been a big deal for me.)

One vivid memory is Mom getting my hair cut into a pixie cut, which was much easier to comb, but between that and the jeans I was mistaken for a little boy and mortified.

I still cut my hair short many times in the future, but that was always that was always more of a practical thing. I always hated what salons did, and started cutting my own hair. When you can't really see the back... anyway, once I started it usually just ended up short. Now my hair has its own preferred length, I like wearing it in a ponytail, and that's just how it goes.

I also generally can't stand wearing makeup. I guess it's a texture thing, but I feel it on me and don't like it.

So that feels like a lot of the hallmarks of femininity are things that I ended up ignoring for various reasons, not really playing around with appearance and prettiness. There is a darker side to that.

I did completely buy that girls were supposed to be pretty and attractive; that we owed that to the world.

Learning early on that I was fat and therefore undesirable, the way I survived that was separating myself from it. Someday I would lose weight and then everything would be all right, but until then, just keep your head down. (I have used that strategy in other areas.)

Yes, I would periodically try and fail to lose weight. Yes, sometimes there would be some kind of event and I would try shopping for something nice, and those were the moments when I was most filled with despair. 

Did I get into that "I'm not like other girls" mindset? I don't think so. I knew a lot of girls who were really mean, but I also had good friends of varying levels of attractiveness. I mean, I knew we weren't a monolith, and it wasn't just me who had this problem, but it didn't quite free me from believing that as a girl I should be attractive and this was a painful failure.

Looking at all of that, it seems like I could have had some doubts about whether I even worked as a girl. The thing that saved me, though, was that I knew I was smart, and boys were so infernally stupid.

That is another gender stereotype, which I don't really approve of. It was also because boys acted in ways that were crude and cruel that was based on other gender constructs and what they were told they should be, but I found it repellent, even with some attraction to it (but that's next week).

Ultimately, I am okay with whom I am. It took letting go of a lot of perceived expectations, but it is a good place to be. 

I can't rule out that shopping for a formal gown would still be very hard on me, but that doesn't come up so much now, and I will take that.

Perhaps a better point is a lot of the ugliness and meanness in life comes from telling people how to be with very flawed ideas, much of which is based around gender.

Let people be who they are.