The pressure to choose

As per this Calvin and Hobbes strip, I suggest that the terms of a conflict, that is, the way that a conflict is described, is actually a composite part of the conflict itself.

For example:

To describe a conflict as, say, having to choose between condemning homophobia (and thus alienating a swath of, hypothetically, more sexually-conservative Muslims) or condemning Islamophobia (and thus alienating a swath of atheist or anti-religious gays).

The above description in itself invites the reader into identifying with variations of the "Good and Ethical Subject".

I am either the Good and Ethical Subject who sides with the gays,
or the Good and Ethical Subject who sides with the Muslims.

It is not enough either, to propose the following rhetorical alternative to this conflict, which is the existence of the gay Muslim (who acts as a mediator between the aforementioned parties).

i.e. "What about gay Muslims?!"

Those who are invested in the terms of the conflict will bear no such thing.

"He has to choose!" both fundamentalists will proclaim,
"He has to choose between his homosexuality and his Islam!
Homosexuality or Islam!
He cannot do both!"

**

In a way, both the gay Islamophobe and the Muslim homophobe are caught in the same ideological trap: of Ethnocentrism, or the belief that it is my own collective (which absents the ideological Other) that is more worth protection from intrusion or harm than yours or more accurately, theirs.

In other words, it is not that Muslim homophobia or gay Islamophobia should be uniquely addressed as issues (true as this assertion may be in particular contexts), but that they are both expressions of a common commitment to ethnocentrism, a universal human propensity that, while developmentally appropriate in certain contexts, becomes dangerously pathological when mired in an inability to be creative in an increasingly pluralist and diverse world... Ethnocentrism must be adequately attended to across the board, in all of its variations. 

Part of dealing with this is to actually notice the ways that organising around minoritarianism (i.e. identification with the oppressed minority) is always contingent, in part, on an unwitting capitulation to the terms of this disenfranchisement. 

Far from blaming the victim, I intend to point this out as a route to true freedom. As a gay man, the way for me to truly eradicate homophobia is not only to target it and address it in others (e.g. the homophobic Muslim), nor even only to address it in myself (i.e. dealing with my own internalised homophobia), it is to also truly cultivate the possibility for a larrikin betrayal of my own identity, a sincere abandonment that intends no nobility but can simply bear a privileged and detached witness to the categorical lie.

My true freedom, as a gay man, is in my ability to cease to be a gay man.
Not in ceasing to desire other men, or having sex, but in ceasing to allow these particular desires or actions over-determine the formation of my personhood, at the same time that I would advocate it should not be over-minimised or repressed either.

Incidentally, of course, this is an incipient narrative in the evolution of gay discourse, as it evolves its own "queer" trajectories, its postmodern leanings toward the blurriness of sexual categories (not only of homosexuality and heterosexuality, but also of manhood or womanhood, of the boundaries between what-is-sex and what-is-not-sex). In this case, going more deeply into my "gay-ness" can actually present the means by which I can reject its original terms and liberate new possibilities for coalition and freedom.

Note:
This strategy is not the same as the abandonment of commitment to people or communities, but only an abandonment of the drive to see people, including our own people, only as variations of "Self" or "Other".

Perhaps, to radically re-envision people as always "Both Self And Other"...?

"I am a gay man and not a gay man. I am homophobic and not homophobic. I am not Muslim... and I am Muslim!"

Or perhaps, more accurately, "Neither Self Nor Other"...

"I am neither a gay man nor not a a gay man. I am neither homophobic nor not homophobic. I am neither not-Muslim... nor am I Muslim!"

And this is what liberates me to be free to be contextually and communally relevant, as new and emerging forms and definitions of community are constantly defining and redefining what it means to be a People...

...I radically embrace my brethren, through my abandonment of "brethrenism".

***

To put it another way, freedom can be liberated not in the attempt to answer seemingly irreconcilable situations or bridge seemingly irreconcilable communities (e.g. between the Islamophobic gays or the homophobic Muslims), but, as per the Calvin and Hobbes strip, to deny all terms and conditions.

Every ideology and every community can be a straw target for intellectual game-playing...

I suggest a form of a-politicism (i.e. "this is meaningless and impossible to answer"),
an abandonment of identity politics...

...to embrace the impasse,
the impossibility,
the irreconcilability,
the restless nature of the dualism,
to reject its ideological premises,
to make room for something quiet and more enduring to take its stead...

...Relationship. Friendship. Comradeship.

Class struggle.

Decolonisation.

***

I look forward to that time when we have the strength, the conditions, and the collective will to properly reject even this aforementioned claim, to liberate more inventive, relevant inquiries and insights.

HIV Prevention for Gay Men (in Australia)

I wrote this piece October 2010...

So the situation around the industrialised world
is that HIV seroconversion rates are generally rising again
in gay men (and other men who have sex with men, or "MSMs," to use HIV Educator parlance...)

I reckon that HIV prevention work has become stuck in a bit of a defeated, lethargic deadlock...
Our work needs to become more 'holistic'...
in that, even though we understand that the biological transmission of HIV
occurs within the context of specific ACTS,
and often confined disproportionately to specific 'at-risk' groups of people (MSMs, injecting drug users, sex workers (though not so much in Australia), and migrants from high-prevalence countries),
we cannot remain oblivious to the contexts and social circumstances
which condition the possibility for these acts to occur,
and indeed, precipitate the emergence
of even the desire to act in the ways we do...

In other words, we need to question the biological reductionism/determinism
implicit in hegemonic forms of HIV prevention,
which pay only lip service
to the idea that interventions should come in ways
that would be 'culturally appropriate' for the communities targeted

We know:
Unprotected anal sex with casual partners is increasing among gay men...
This is correlated with a rise in HIV infections,
though they have stabilised in the past few years here in NSW...

There is a lack of vision, I believe,
among the 'old guard' of HIV educators,
who see a reduction in HIV seroconversions as too lofty a goal
and who are content to celebrate the stability of seroconversions
at a rate that is EXTREMELY low, by world standards.

Yet, I believe:
If gay men are increasingly choosing not to use condoms,
our JOB as HIV educators is not only to help look for or name
other methods of HIV Risk Reduction Strategies (RRS)
to assist these men in making safe(r) choices about their sex lives
given their CURRENT sexual decisions in the contexts and cultures they exist...

It is ALSO our job to question and interrogate
the cultures in which unsafe behaviours become desireable
the cultures which precipitate and give rise to the
desireability of these behaviours...
in particular, and especially
unprotected anal sex with casual partners.

No, our job is not to be moral police, of course...
However, we do need to start talking ethics.
Our work needs to be informed by ethical conversations.

Should we remain forever amoral about gay men's sexuality?

I suspect that many of us have become wedded
in significant and unacknowledged part
to the continuing existence of HIV
to justify continuing in the line of work that we have become most familiar with.
many of us have had the experience of being sexually active gay men
synonymous with HIV
and, as such,
may well perceive the discontinuation and eradication of HIV
as a legitimate threat to community.

I write this not to mock or to belittle
...
this is not a cultural trend that is unique to gay people;
it does not make us uniquely pathological...
the experience of victimhood-as-identity is a real, complex reality for many of us,
and indeed, there is even an intelligence in this:

For one, and this is the most obvious one,
we have been and are often still victimised...!
We are victimised by homophobia, internal, interpersonal, and institutional
that make it such that the unique health concerns we have
are stigmatised, marginalised, or ignored completely.
For some of us, perhaps even a whole generation of us,
many of our partnerships, friendships, and even the experience of full participatory citizenship
have been based on organising around this victimhood, and in spaces that existed BECAUSE we were marginalised.

There are REAL, psychological traumas that we can and will face
should we be willing to question this weddedness...
Though I believe that the time is right to do just this,
and rigorously,
we need to do it with a lot of patience,
naked honesty, compassion.

Should we be able to do this,
and by this, I reiterate to mean:
rigorously addressing our ressentiment identities with
patience, honesty and compassion;
we may arrive at some interesting insights.
I will share some that I have come to:



1. As gay men, we are male-socialised

This means that we are socialised into patterns of self-understanding and behaviour
which often take on the form which we believe
will legitimate our claim to rightful masculinity
this can look like
having a lot of diverse sexual experiences
with a lot of different people
which we may associate not only with physiological pleasure,
but also with masculine-gender approval... and these two pleasures
are not necessarily separable...
Some of our risk-taking behaviours
may conform with our own deepest notions and expectations
of ourselves as men...

At the same time, there is an increasing over-reliance
on certain types of technologies and discourses
in order to bolster this sense of our gendered selves
which may actually, in my opinion,
be becoming incredibly toxic.

For example, the increasing abuse of viagra to treat erectile dysfunction,
the chronic abuse of alcohol and other mind-altering substances in order to engage a sexual freedom/release from the social constraints that hold us back from what we believe to be our gendered/animal-authenticity,
in order to be and remain hard,
in order to associate our "presence" in sex to be deeply associated with hardness,
vigour,
athleticism,
etc.

Yes, these lead to high risk behaviours.
I believe we need, AS HEALTH PROMOTERS, to interrogate and question the ways that our culture has been forming around androcentrism, misogyny, and an unhealthy over-fetishism of hard, racist and sexist masculinity.
It is not enough to simply state, "these are the acts that men are engaging in... now how can we ask them to do it more safely?"
It is important for us to ask questions of Why?
and to not accept that the typical qualitative responses of "for pleasure" are enough...
We must be willing to dig deeper,
"And what is the role of pleasure in our lives? What, if any, is our entitlement to pleasure? Where does that come from? Is pleasure the most central goal in our sex lives?"


If we interrogate ourselves in this manner, we may find out some things, which will require further interrogation...:

a. As human beings, we are typically fettered by our attachments to pleasure and avoidance of pain. For gay men (in Sydney), these attachments express themselves in certain patterns unique to our experience here... We can trace patterns of consumption, attitudes, behaviours that may well indicate the nature of these attachments.

Are there institutions, spaces, and health promotion ideas that can be uniquely suited for gay men to address this issue in a safe way?


b. This interrogation is OUR JOB IN OUR OWN LIVES AS GAY MEN. We need to do this for ourselves first and foremost, and in an ongoing way, before we can even consider this as a viable stance for others.


c. This is also our job as HIV Educators.



2. The strategic mobilisation to promote the use of condoms among MSMs was revolutionary.

This revolution was based on a number of different circumstances:
--> People were dying of AIDS(-related illnesses),
and this was debilitating and confronting...
--> Condom use was NOT ALREADY NORMATIVE in our sex lives
--> Culture at large was not particularly accepting of homosexual sex in the first place.

Mobilising around condom use amidst these circumstances has led to several equally revolutionary outcomes:
--> Fewer and fewer people getting infected with HIV
--> The concept of the gay community increasingly being taken seriously by government (at least in Australia)
--> The concept of "gay health" being more accepted as a legitimate concern not only to public health officials, but also to gay men ourselves (that our health was worth thinking about and mobilising around)
--> A proliferation of the discourse of gay sexuality and non-normative gay relationships being taken more seriously

Given that this original mobilisation around HIV/AIDs and condom use was disproportionately headed by gay men ourselves (along with our wonderfully supportive allies), this was truly the synthesis and formation of a powerful new ethics and politics of sexuality.

We noted:
Our sexual behaviours, in their current, unfettered forms,
are killing us.
We need, thus, to CHANGE OUR BEHAVIOURS
and fuck what society thinks, we NEED THE MONEY TO FUND THIS MESSAGE.


Now that is some powerful stuff.

However, at this point, at least here in Sydney, I believe we have grown lethargic and complacent, even "impotent" in our efforts.
Now that HIV is less of a death sentence,
and, at least here in Australia, free/extremely cheap and highly subsidised anti-retroviral treatments mean living longer, healthier lives with HIV,
this is correlated with increasing risk-behaviour among gay men...
More and more gay men are engaging in unprotected anal intercourse with casual partners (UAIC) at least some of the time.

In Australia, although seroconversion rates have remained stable since 2007 (around 1000 a year),
they are about a third higher than they were at their lowest point in mid 2000s (the highest ever was in the mid-1990s).

What we do know is that gay men have been engaging a wide variety of different non-condom-based HIV Risk Reduction Strategies (RRS) to inform our sexual decision making around unprotected anal sex.

These include:
Serosorting (choosing partners of the same HIV sero-status as yourself)
Negotiated Safety (HIV negative partners choosing to have agreements in their relationship to have unprotected anal sex with just each other, conditioned also by getting tested both during and after the window period of their last unsafe sexual encounter, and with a commitment to ongoing communication and re-negotiation of the agreements in their relationship)
Strategic Positioning (choosing to top instead of bottom, as this poses a marginally lower risk of getting HIV)
The use of Undetectable Viral Load (in HIV+ guys),
and Withdrawal from fucking before ejaculation
in order to lower the risk of a seroconversion happening between partners.

This is all fine, and good, and important to engage and talk about as health educators.

But I believe that it is pathetic that we imagine, as health educators, that this is going to be either especially revolutionary, or even especially efficacious in our efforts.

Why?

One...
Gay men have been doing this from the beginning, albeit without naming these strategies with the 'industry' terms as I have defined them above. By simply naming these strategies as a reality, we are not exactly calling for a shift in behavioural patterns en masse into lower risk behaviours.

Two...
While the correct use of Risk Reduction Strategies may lower our collective risk for another explosion of seroconversions in our communities, I do not believe that this is a brave enough goal. Nor, if it is true that gay men are ALREADY employing these strategies, is this even a GOAL for HIV educators.

Of course, I recognise that circumstances have changed since we first mobilised around condom use:
--> Fewer and fewer people are getting, let alone dying of AIDS(-related illnesses) in Australia
--> Condom use IS NORMATIVE (a majority of gay men use condoms a majority of time with a majority of their partners)
--> Culture at large is increasingly accepting (though not fully) of homosexuality

It is NO SMALL FEAT that seroconversions are not only stable in New South Wales, but also at an incredibly LOW level... (at a rate of about 1:14, when we compare with what is going on in the USA)

Still, I believe we can have loftier goals for HIV education.

When Michel Sidibé, the Executive Director to UNAIDS, came to visit Sydney recently, he praised the Australian response to HIV for both our grassroots movement as well as our government's swift cooperation with gay activists and commitment to harm reduction.

Sidibé ended his speech by suggesting a goal for New South Wales:
To completely eradicate seroconversions.

I take this very seriously.

Is this possible?

Let us dream this.

What would it take?

It would take a revolution in our community, and this is, as I said before, not only about addressing sexual behaviours, but also interrogating the cultural reasons we are wedded to specific behaviours as some of the most authentic expressions of selfhood.

I am expediently taking the stance:
OK, let's not immediately make a commitment to behavioural change as a community.
But let us promote and FUND dialogue, not just in our gay communities,
but with EACH OTHER as health educators,
around the issue of ethics and pleasure.
Let us stop fetishising either extreme of sexual conservatism or sexual liberalism as inherently appropriate approaches to sexuality. We also know that condom-based harm reduction alone is no longer the middle way for health promoters.

So now what?

I believe we need to start focusing on advocating for many other things.
HIV should be one of a whole gamut of health concerns that we should consider in a broader umbrella idea of "gay health."

This means we need to address, AS HIV Educators, not only high risk BEHAVIOURS,
but also high risk CONDITIONS & CIRCUMSTANCES.
We need to dare to devote a lot more of our $ that is being designated to HIV prevention into SOCIAL JUSTICE and holistic health needs.
We need to address bullying, homophobia, legal barriers to full equality (in marriage, military, property laws, etc.).
We need to address our drug addictions, our sex addictions, our ressentiment.
We need to address ongoing oppressions from within and from without our own community, including homophobia, transphoba, sexism, ableism, adultism, racism, classism, and so on.
We need to address white supremacy, male supremacy, capitalist/bourgeois supremacy, etc.
We need to listen to the voices of young gay men
who are saying, quite loudly,
that we want not only the sexual freedom and liberation that we are grateful to previous generations for having won for us, in terms of the liberalisation of sexual choices,
but we also want emotional security, friendship, intimacy.
We are upset about the ways that urbanised, consumer gay culture is intoxicated by sex. We are upset about how young men's beautiful bodies are exploited for marketing and selling us gay badges. We are angry about entering a working world which demands our physical, emotional, and intellectual labour but promises us not satisfaction but exhaustion and intoxication.

If we are serious about HIV prevention
we must recognise that preventing HIV is only of marginal interest for most gay men in our lives. HIV no longer = Death, which is AMAZING.
At the same time, No-HIV does not = MORE LIFE either.

Far more important to me, as an HIV Educator
to promote a life worth living,
not just a disease worth preventing.

reductio ad absurdum

by the marvellous Australian poet, cartoonist and mystic,

Michael Leunig

Say my name, say my name

Reading this post in PERIL, linked to on a previous post by shinenigan, got me thinking more about something that happened to me yesterday.

A friend (and colleague) and I were talking about the many situations in which schools will allow a student to informally change their name, without having to go through some process of filling out forms and getting approved by the school bureaucracy (or even more burdensome, having to go to court to get an order of name change).

This was in the context of making the case that if schools allowed students to easily change their names, they should not be singling out transgender or gender non-conforming students for especially burdensome name-change requirements when they requested to be called by their preferred name.

As some background, my colleague is White. We were talking with another attorney who was Chinese (like me). My colleague and I were quickly listing the contexts in which non-transgender students might ask for, and routinely get, an informal name change: in the case of a divorce, a student might change their last name to the custodial parent's; a student might prefer to use their middle name; a student might prefer to use an abbreviation of their full name (e.g., John instead of Jonathan, Nick instead of Nicholas). Then my colleague added that a student with a non-Anglo name might choose to take on an Anglo name.

This brought me up short. I was a little stunned, to be honest. I don't think that my colleague was intending to bring up the entire background of "othering," of Asian people feeling never quite at home in a country (indeed, because of colonization, a world) full of Anglo names. I wanted to say: let's be clear - informally taking on an Anglo name is not a preference, it is almost necessarily a (somewhat bitter) compromise. The deal is: I'll take on a less "foreign" sounding name, and you accept me as fully a member of this school community. Unfortunately, of course, since racism persists (yes! even among schoolchildren!), the deal is never made good on.

Anyway, that's sort of what was running through my head, but I didn't say anything at the time. Partly because I didn't feel that strongly about it right then (or am I numb to the pain of racism?), and partly because I didn't want to get into a whole discussion about it at the time (it was lunch!). Today, I decided to send an email to my friend about it. Here's what I wrote:

I just wanted to drop you a note about one of the examples you used when we were talking informally . . . about situations in which students get a school to acknowledge and respect a preferred name. You gave as one example that some students with non-Anglo names would adopt a name that's easier for people to say. I totally agree that this is a not uncommon practice, and that you are right that many teachers probably are almost even relieved to make the switch to the more Anglo name, but I wanted to let you know that it brought up the whole history of racism and xenophobia in this country for me.I didn't feel THAT strongly about it at the time (or I would have told you right away, of course!), but it did make me somewhat uneasy, and when I was thinking about this later, I thought I'd let you know. Part of me feels like, even though it's actually a great example of a common reason for students to use a preferred name over the name given at birth, that it risks bringing up that whole history for someone in the room. We were talking about it informally in a small circle of friends, so that was obviously less risky!However, I think that if we use this example in public (and I kind of want to at some point), we should acknowledge that part of what's going on there is a kind of compromise with a racist society, and that this is something people of color do all the time to have some safety or to not constantly be overtly "othered". I'm sure there's some less "heavy" way to acknowledge that, of course, and would love to get your ideas.I thought that you did a great job acknowledging a related issue with gender identity and medical intervention (that some trans people decide not to change their bodies in a particular socially-prescribed way, acknowledging that it's society that has a problem with their bodies, not them, and that all people deserve respect for their gender identity whatever medical intervention they have or have not had).

"Modern Day Gender Equality – Uniting or Alienating?" panel discussion @ University of Sydney

What a privilege!

I was invited to speak at the University on a panel on "Modern Day Gender Equality - Uniting or Alienating?" It was hosted by the Women's Collective at the University of Sydney, and I was one of 5 panelists.

It was a real honour! I was sharing a stage with several remarkable people:

Professor Raewyn Connell, from the University of Sydney, an absurdly prolific writer on gender relations (and recently on masculinity) and international professor,

casual professor and media spokesperson Jane Caro

Alan Cinis, a Greens Council member for the district of Leichardt,

and

Nina Funnell, who is a journalist and researcher at the University of NSW (at the moment, I think she is working on a project on "sexting," or cell phone sex-text messaging, among young girls).


***

I had 3 main initial observations of the evening as the scene was set and began to unfold...

1. The audience was composed mostly of young people, presumably university students.

2. Amazingly, while a majority of the audience was female, a good quarter of the room was male (as far as gender-reading goes, anyway)! It was amazing! It has never been my experience, when I was at university, to see that large a proportion of men interested in an intellectual discussion on gender.

3. I was, as far as I know, the only queer person and person of colour on the panel, Les Sigh...

[16/08/11 update: Professor Connell is a trans-woman... my apologies for my cis-gender presumptiveness!]


***

The panel discussion was arranged in a Q&A style, with the facilitators Kate & Georgina posing questions for us as panellists, and then us choosing to respond or not.

A variety of issues were discussed...


Raewyn Connell



Professor Connell was quietly intellectual. While she contributed the least in terms of stage time, I felt that she always had incisive points to make. In particular, I was really pleased at her continuous nudging toward an intersectional (in terms of sexuality, class, region, etc.) and global (transnational) understanding of gender equity.



Jane Caro



Caro focussed primarily on the continued work that needs to be done (in the name of feminism) in order to achieve full equity for women, particularly in the public-professional domains, where women are still underrepresented in positions of high political power. While I definitely appreciated her important re-emphasis on the work that needs to be done in particular around the reclamation of the identity politic of 'feminism' away from stereotypes around 'man-hating' and 'bra-burning,' etc. (especially given my current professional work on young gay men's issues, and most of my social circle being men), I did take issue with one of her points around feminism being the world's MOST noble cause. I chipped in with my two cents about anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, etc. social justice issues. Caro, quite charitably, responded with an acknowledgement of the extremity of her polemic (she used to work in advertising). Then she also spoke out about the specific, somewhat unique nobility about feminist, and gay and lesbian social justice causes, as they involve often having to speak out against the oppression that is often perpetuated by our own very loved ones, our immediate family (rather than, say, an oppressive boss, or slave owner, etc.). She called this challenge the unique 'nobility' of gender- and sexuality-based social justice movements.

I suppose I tentatively concur.



Nina Funnell



I related well with Nina, in part because I'd actually worked with her previously on a Men and Feminism workshop that we co-presented at last year's "F Conference" (on Feminism) in Sydney, and in part because she is also my contemporary in terms of age. She talked about the meaning of 'mainstream media' and her support of affirmative action, women's autonomous spaces, and the ways that we might consider moving away from conceptions of the 'media' as a strictly monolithic entity.



Alan Cinis



I must admit that I did not relate to Alan's words quite as much as I would have liked; I think this was in part because, as he himself admitted, that he had some trouble hearing or understanding the questions, but I suspect it's in part because I disagreed with the fundamental position he was taking, which was encouraging a sort of individualism... In response to the question posed "Does affirmative action around gender work?" his response was Yes and No (true enough), but that we best understand it by looking at the individual merits of people, rather than simply through gendered lens (somewhat true... but of course the point here, one that he did not address, was the problem of both unconscious and structural sexism, so that the very merits we supposedly herald in all persons are ignored or passed over when they are traits exhibited by women applicants, if any even apply at all!).

At the same time, it was really good to be in the presence of another man who was at least willing and wanting to engage on the issue of gender in a way that was critically self-reflexive (he talked about his relationship to a former acting career, and the specific sorts of expectations of male as compared to female actors).



Me



When I first spoke, I first acknowledged my very real nervousness around being surrounded by quite conventionally 'successful' individuals (two university professors, a politician, and a journalist). Whew! But fortunately, I felt like my area of interest and focus was on the role of men in feminism, something which most of the other panellists had not categorically prepared talks around.

My 3 main points:

1. Our role as men is to listen to the concerns of women, and to engage and support feminist projects which are about the emancipation of all people from oppressive gendered systems (which, as they stand under patriarchy, disproportionately disenfranchise women and materially privilege men).

2. Part of this engagement is also about rehabilitating ourselves from problematic conceptions of masculinity. I mentioned the importance of male 'safe spaces' where we can allow ourselves to love other men without alcohol, and without homophobic/heteronormative qualifications (i.e. without the "No Homo" bullshit).

3. Not to misattribute our alienation as men to the important work that feminists have historically done (which, indeed, have paved the way for us to have language around this very alienation).

I also talked a little bit about the profit-driven industry of pornography and its role in enslaving men by commoditising our sexual desires, selling them back to us (i.e. selling us DESIRE itself), and then numbing us to relationships (rendering us socially awkward) by habituating ourselves to levels of stimulation that are usually unmatched by our interactions with others in-person.

This was also the first time I have EVER spoken about porn in this way in a public/group setting. It was an interesting exercise in humility, and also some good training for how I might want to bring it up in the future (without coming across as anti-sex, anti-depictions of sexuality, anti-pleasure, etc. etc.) Anyway, I think I did a decent job of conveying this point, and this was my covert anti-capitalist critique of the evening...

Professor Connell very wisely raised that these 'crises of masculinity' (of which my fretting about porn was but one example) have been going on for a long time in history, and that it is not uniquely in the age of feminism that men have started worrying in this way. I did suggest, in response, that while men have obviously waxed lyrical about our concerns which were unique to us as men across history, I don't think that we have, trans-historically, framed these concerns in emancipatory language (about our liberation as men from the problems of our socialisation into male gender, as gender, and as part of a larger project of gender equality and full liberation per se).

Also, inspired by Martin Luther King's rhetoric on extremism ("What kind of extremists will we be?"), I discussed the problem of assuming that "unity" is necessarily better than "alienation," when indeed, to be unified in support of oppressive systems (e.g. heteronormative patriarchy) is a LESSER unity, requiring first that we be, correctly, alienated, in order to then later unify under something more grand (e.g. queer-/feminism), which itself will be a unity that will meet its limits (e.g. racist/classist/nationalist assumptions, etc.), require a later alienation, followed by broader unity (e.g. under intersectional, self-reflexivity), meet its limits (e.g. impotent immobility), unify under something more grand etc. etc. ad infinitum.

And throughout all this, never compromising on the insights gained from previous unities and alienations...

We pick our alienations, and then we work with them accordingly. I suppose this was my attempt at speaking 'integrally' (integratively) without strictly using the language of Integral Theory (fucking trademark).

Lastly, in response to an audience member's question-comment on how men have been stunted because of a lack of clarity around changing gender relations, Nina first spoke out and said "Yes, these are some of the ways that patriarchy has crippled men."

And I responded to the question-comment by recalling this incident:

In Wynyard (the 'yuppie central' financial district of Sydney), last year, there was a photographic exhibition featuring the works of a female photographer who had travelled to different parts of the world taking pictures of different people. The exhibition was held in a public space, and also featured some inspirational quotes and captions under some of the photographs.

One of the photographs featured full frontal nudity of smiling black children. This was obviously considered unproblematic enough by the City of Sydney that the exhibition would go ahead without reprieve.

What I expressed to the audience about my experience with this exhibition was that:

1. What if the photographer had been a man?
2. What if the children had been white?

A great blog post by Ray Harris explores just this very issue:
The Naked Child in Art : Ethnographic Photography


Conclusive Reflections?

All in all, it was a really fantastic evening, with some really interesting and stimulating conversation, and I was very much honoured and grateful to have been invited to speak. As often, we never get to share all that we would have liked, and it is sometimes really challenging to cater a set of really complex perceptions and queries to a mixed audience... I personally would have appreciated an Acknowledgement of Country (of the traditional Aboriginal owners of the land upon which our gathering was held), but I think I lacked the political tact to know how to bring it up after the fact of the event's formal commencement.

It does feel incredibly good to be able to share some of my thoughts on feminism, gender and manhood. I feel especially good that I did not speak from a place of ultra Reactionariness (in terms of aggressive ranting about white privilege, heteronormativity, etc.).

It has been precisely 6 years since I graduated from university with a degree in Gender Studies, and I really cherish these opportunities to be able to speak on, educate and learn more about these issues, especially since I have had WAY more life experience since university!

Muchos Gracias to the University of Sydney Women's Collective!

Faeries, Bears, and Leathermen

I am currently reading a book that my friend J lent me, called "Faeries, Bears, and Leathermen: Men in Community Queering the Masculine" by Peter Hennen.

The basic idea is that three uniquely gay/queer male cultures, in particular the Radical Faeries, the Bears, and the Leathermen cultures, have partially been constructed as responses to, reactions against, and/or repudiations of the ways that gay male sexuality has historically been linked with effeminacy.

These three groups engage the 'problem' of stereotypic gay male effeminacy in three different ways. For the Radical Faeries, it has been through a deep embrace of the feminine through adorning dresses, communal-Goddess worship, female-kitsch (e.g. the sacralisation of Barbie dolls), etc. For the Bears, it has been the embrace of a 'regular joe' type of masculinity, with the fetishisation of larger, hairier, beer-drinking bodies, and with the Leathermen, it has been through the re-appropriation of costumes and sometimes sado-masochistic impulses historically associated with violent masculinity.

Hennen is careful to avoid pathologising any one of these response-styles, and is quite clearly grateful for having been given the opportunity to participate in the various social spaces and rituals of belonging that each community has constructed for its members. At the same time, Hennen hints at a deeply troubling dialectic that underlies the ways that these gay male communities and identities have been constructed. In particular, with regard to the fact that they, at least in his North American experience, these three groups tend to be disproportionately White, and are concurrent with many other male-centric movements that organise around the 'reclamation' or glamourisation of masculinity without either questioning the fear of the feminine or any other unconscious roots of their undying loyalty.

I am personally troubled by hegemonic masculinism in gay culture(s). I am nervous about the way that gay male culture in general has conflated manhood with the repudiation of the feminine, and indeed, with the repudiation of even our own association with 'gay,' as it has historically been linked with effeminacy. Thus the ubiquity of "str8-acting" as a self-descriptor or as an identity deeply invested with gay male desire.

Secondarily, I am also interested in the way that whiteness is also hegemonic in these communities in the USA which, unlike masculinity, Hennen has largely not interrogated. White masculinity seems far less rooted in ironic play or reclamation.

Questions/Crises of masculinity have occupied me for awhile. In a Euro-centric hierarchy of masculinity, the Grecian male model has been somewhere at the top, whereas, in my experience, the hairless Asian body has been feminised and placed somewhere at the bottom.

I long for spaces I might comfortably exist in. Spaces which do justice to my gendered/racialised identity and body, and in which I can explore a self-communal expression with others in a shared, sacralised experience of sexuality. Spaces which allow for and embrace my capacity & need for critical awareness...

A monastery for colonised whores?

Buddho-Erotik

an old post...

1
Dancing as religious ritual, the slow uprooting of anxieties (self-consciousness, other-consciousness) into endorphin blissful rush of collapsing dualisms. Drug-free Ecstasis! Body as its own narcotic, all capacity for empowerment and godhead rushing forth from within, neither monotheistic nor pantheistic, neither solely under the jurisdiction of aboriginal cosmologies nor postmodern psychonautic fetishisms of altered states of consciousness. Dance as the primordial movement, the Soul (if indeed, it is YOUR convenient metaphor) as shaken And stirred. Drink That!

2
Or else the surprise a man has, after 20 years of marriage, in finding out his wife has professional, emotional, spiritual, and yes perhaps even Sexual desires beyond his capacity to fulfill. The tragic misnomer of (civil)Marriage mistakenly Romanticised without thought to its materialist history (woman as property of man, man as 'breadwinner,' utilitarian legalisms with little care for the romance behind courtship). Forget MARRIAGE, we need a generation of Lovers!

3
The phenomenon of wanting to know more about a porn star: When objectification (primarily root-chakra sexual orientation) isn't enough. When personality needs to be thrown in the mix. When love must become involved. Or worship. Porn stars as our contemporary Gods and Goddesses, sex celebrities, all springing forth from the same imaginations that created Zeus, Inanna, Kali.
Ejaculation as the Anti-climax, if indeed there was no Play prior, nor love between lovers. Surely we are not only bodies, as we are not only minds, nor even only souls. Dissolve dissolve, and we no more need porn stars as we might need a caffeine fix (some addiction necessary to fuel some other addiction, to Manhood? Productivity? Or even our attachments to secret shame!); Forget it! We might imagine a new myth!

4
Music as love making, the melding of players that transcends Sexual orientation. Instead, music taps into the latent masculinities/femininities hidden under sexed bodies, transmutes the urge to orgasm into lovemaking. Plays on aggression and submission, sound and silence, assertions and refrains, repetitions and innovations... Hence: The Bliss of making music as PROCESS, rather than performative product. Nothing wrong with theatre, clearly, for indeed that is a catharsis in its own right. But within the privacy of a relationship, there is generative power in music as interpersonal communication, rather than preparation for Objective display. "Let's jam!" I say, from the Me that is Lovemaker-Sage... I let the Bard speak his truth at some other convenient time.

5
"The Matrix" as theology. Neo as Bodhisattva figure, realizing the futility of samsaric existence within The Matrix of the mundane. Morpheus as Buddha-figure (the first to discover the truth of samsaric-Matrix), transmitting his teaching to those who may be prepared to forgo this illusory world for the higher consciousness, breaking free from the bonds of cyclic existence. BUT THIS IS NOT BLISS! Neo is not Happier with Truth, simply Ennoblised by this. But is this ENOUGH? Like the dude who WANTS to return, to taste the steak, to feed on illusion; We too are addicted, we forgo truth everytime, no matter what our intuitions may tell us, simply because it is TOO DAMN HARD. What support might we look for? How may we Re-program, so we too might dodge bullets with ease?

6
Language is the original colonizer, with its grammatical pressures, its dogmatic vocabularies, its limits within the technologies of throat or papyrus. We must learn to speak if we are to interact, but then we forever lose our touch with the solitude of silence. But even here I have been thoroughly colonized, for that I have even a CONCEPTION of silence is conditioned by my capacity for Language. There is no PRE, no prior, no before language. And any mystic would dare tell us that there is no During, nor After, even. Language itself cannot be spoken of (nor kept silent on) without continued inculcations into further illusion. So forget the goal, and just play with poetry!

7
Where does loneliness reside in the body? Is it in the heart? Or perhaps in clammy extremeties, hands wrung in nervous tics, The Longing to Grasp, without the wisdom to learn the freedom of the Ungrasp (for there is nothing beautiful to be Held without our fathoming equally the beauty of Letting Go). The foolishness in us that wants a Love Permanent is the same foolishness in us that takes all we already have for granted!
Unconditional Love? There is no-thing unconditioned, no-thing without cause. I cannot HAVE unconditional love for another; I can only invest, indefinitely, in creating the causes and conditions from and in which love might more easily arise, 'effortlessly'! I must not, however, mistake those rare, precious moments of spontaneity as springing from some romantic Unconditioned!

8
In a prior life, I was a Diamond. But a single carbon atom wanted individuation, wanted to break free from the boring familiar, wanting to procreate instead with exotic elements, wanting to form new molecular civilizations, wanting new bondage (double-bondage? triple?).

9
Why make love? Love can make itself! My only job is to breathe as much as I can, consciously, until finally I expire.

Coming Out / Inviting In

Jamil and Hassan

I feel inspired after reading this piece by Lebanese Muslim Australian narrative therapist Sekneh Hammoud-Beckett. The piece explores her work with gay Lebanese Muslim "Jamil" and his (str8) brother Hassan. Hammoud-Beckett explores the problem with the model of "coming out" as the normative framework through which gay men are expected to express or experience authenticity in their lived sexual identities. She explores a different framework: "Coming in" or "Inviting in," which is a way that Jamil repositions his experience of sexual identity in order to reconcile with his brother.

As Jamil speaks, as quoted from Hammoud-Beckett's piece, "Even if I don’t tell certain members of my extended family about my sexuality, I don’t view myself as in the closet, in a dark place that I must escape from. Far from it, this ‘closet’ is full of precious things, like things you could never afford to buy! It’s my treasure chest. The way I see it, rather than me needing to move out of the closet, to make my sexuality public to everyone, including my grandparents, instead I get to choose who to open the door to, and who to invite to ‘come in’ to my life."

I LOVE this idea. Of being complete in and of myself, already fully integrated (not visioning my life from a perspective of victimization). This feels especially true in my own exploration of some of my own multiple, 'core' identities; in particular, being gay, Asian, and Buddhist. The normativity of the idea of "coming out" has, over time, lost much of its meaning for me.


Staying In

Perhaps it can be 'inside here' that I choose to remain, where liberation can be found. It's raining outside... I'm not 'closeted' per se, but private... being close to the source of Me and cherishing it as a treasure. Only few will get to see, and only those I invite into my life, this 'treasure chest' of my sacred self. This, of course, does not pertain only to my experience of my homosexuality, even though that may seem, of all the facets of my identity, the most obvious one I would choose to be more calculative about either 'outing' or inviting people in to see...

The pressure here becomes less of my need to 'come out' and encounter stereotypic, pre-set ideas of what it means to be Me in all my myriad forms... whether it be the politically conservative, non-English speaking, "Asian" community, or the sex-crazed, drug-obsessed, limbic-driven "gay" community, or the gender-bashing, hyper-leftwing, anarchistic "queer" community, or the quietist, insular, pacifistic "Buddhist" community, or the privileged, elitist, self-indulgent "uni" community... etc. etc. etc.

There is no "out there" to come out to that can be the most accurate reflection of my selfhood. Indeed, there is no inherently existing self that can "Come Out" anywhere to begin with. That is part of this (urban) myth of coming out as authentic self-expression.

At least as interesting is to "invite people in." Not so much to 'see the true me,' but rather, to co-construct a space in which the interaction of the expedient Self and Other becomes a synthesis of identities in a framework of intimacy, rather than ostentatious publicity. Inviting my non-Buddhist queer friends to see the part of me that experiences my sexuality in stillness, and that imagines their own receptivity beyond defensive, ironic posturings... inviting my straight friends to see the part of me that holds another man's hand, while cherishing the opportunity to imagine their own relational vulnerabilities... inviting my Buddhist friends to understand my ambivalence (at best) toward heteronormative spiritual spaces while seeing that they too, like myself, are doing their best to alleviate one another's sufferings... inviting my American friends to see my life in Australia, while understanding each other in shared vernacular...

In each circumstance, some new part of me is revealed ('outed'), and yet, the very rubric by which I am measuring these encounters is precisely that of an invitation to create something new together, on terms that assume my wholeness to begin with... The house has already been built...

And when you are invited into someone's home, it is not at all appropriate to insult the host.