And Another Thing....

Growing up too fast

So, I'm about a year behind the country in TV watching.

Well---maybe more than a year. For example, I've just finished Season One of the Sopranos.

Yes, I know how it ends.

Tonight, I saw America's Got Talent for the first time, and I looked up past auditions on YouTube and came across the audition of Bianca Ryan. She blew me away. She blew everyone away, right? Because here was this little 11-year-old girl, she gives a little wave when she comes onstage, she's wearing no makeup, she has a little half ponytail on the top of her head.

I used to wear a little ponytail like that. I have pictures (not electronic ones, sorry).

In that first video, she is an 11-year-old with a powerful, soulful voice like a 25-year-old. It is a full voice. You listen to her, and you think, that girl has a gift.

Then Simon Cowell tells  her - change your shoes, change your hair, change your dress, and you'll win this tournament.

She does and she does. By the finale, she has makeup, a sophisticated haircut, a slinky dress. She looks like she's lost some weight.

And now, after singing for the President, after singing at Walt Disney World, she is Bianca Ryan, a new Britney, a new Christina. No more little girl with a gift. Instead, a sexed-up young adult who sounds like everyone else on the radio.

She's still talented. I'm not saying that. I'm just wondering why, if someone has a gift, we need to make her sexy and adult instead of letting her be the age she is.

Isaiah Washington Wrongly Fired

I still can't get over the fact that higher-ups in ABC fired Isiah Washington at the end of last season.

I'm a Grey's Anatomy fan. I'm also gay. Isaiah's use of the word "fag"--twice--offended me.

But hey, he did everything humanly possible to make amends. He said he was sorry. He said he was wrong. He filmed a commercial for GLAAD.

At that point, there should have been forgiveness. There should have been redemption.

Gays and lesbians didn't call for his firing --it was an economic decision based on his volatility. But it can only hurt us, and sour our tentative relationship with straight African-Americans who see themselves as being punished by this.

Yes, words have consequences. And they should. But this punishment is so out-sized compared to the crime that there is bound to be a backlash.

Pride is a Party

This week's column.....

   

Pride is a party.

And every year, someone asks if there shouldn’t be something more behind it—more activism, more seriousness, a little less nudity, a few less feathers.

Maybe that’s the wrong question.

Maybe Pride should be seen less as advancing our movement and more as something that brings us something more intangible: happiness.

In philosopher Jennifer Michael Hecht’s delicious new book “The Happiness Myth,” she says that an essential ingredient of a happy life is group celebration.

“Happiness requires some public processing of grief and fear. More than any other people in history, we are enabled by our culture to feel independent,” she writes. “But we really aren’t independent; we are a pack. …Sometimes a pack needs to bay at the moon together.”

Hecht gives a list of the things that make a happy celebration happier: costumes, ritual gestures (think YMCA!), music, sexuality, expressions of loss and victory, shouting, touching, nudity. And she calls Gay Pride “the best new holiday.”

She adds, “The great happiness tonic is a large group of people who are both dedicated to a hope and willing to do some frenzied celebration and other festive ritual.”

This is interesting, right? Because we never think of happiness as enough, not really. We look a little skeptically at happiness unless it is hard-earned and combined with a little virtue, a little asceticism.
We believe someone who says he is happy because he goes to the gym. We’d laugh and roll our eyes, though, if that same guy professed that his happiness came from a daily intake of ice cream.

So it is with Pride. Some people are able to dance on floats, be with the music, drink in the sunshine, roar happily over beads and boas. Some of us look at those people and shudder.

But why?

A good contrast to a Pride Parade are the Dyke Marches that are also held across the country. A Dyke March is serious and is usually about a serious issue, like universal health care. There is pleasure in it, because it is exciting to walk with a group who shares your beliefs; there is pleasure in chanting and making noise and exposing parts of yourself that are normally safely clothed.

I love Dyke Marches. I love their solemnity, their ferocity. But I’ve got to admit, I like Dyke Marches a little more when the radical cheerleaders show up in their bouncy skirts, or when the Lesbian Avengers eat fire, or when women start dancing unselfconsciously to the primal beat of many hand drums.

We need Dyke Marches.

But we need Pride Parades, too.

And those of us who skip them because it’s too crowded, too hot, too drunk, too same-old, same-old, should rethink.

Hecht makes the point that thinking about doing something isn’t the same as actually doing it. And showing up to these sorts of group celebrations are essential to our long-term well-being.

So, come to Pride. Wear a boa. Drink a little, if it doesn’t harm you. Dance in the sunshine as each new song floats by. Put your hands up and scream for the cute men and women who are waving.

Instead of worrying about how political the parade is or isn’t, about how those outside our community perceive us on our day, let yourself be carried on the drug of group ecstasy and so transported into euphoria and joy.

Activism is important and has its place. Seriousness is important and has its place, too.

But Pride doesn’t have to be about anything in order to be worthwhile. It is not about how others see us. It is not about advancement. It is about rejoicing in community. It is about releasing the stress of the past year; of letting go the weight of worry that comes with being a minority community that is still battling every day for our basic rights.

So join me. Let’s dance wildly together in the streets and throw our heads back with release. Let’s sing YMCA, complete with gestures. Let’s bay at the moon.

As Hecht says, “What becomes clear is that it is not enough to come out of the closet; you also have to leave the house.”

Jennifer Vanasco is an award-winning syndicated columnist based in New York. Email her at jennifer.vanasco@gmail.com and read her occasional blog at jennifervanasco.com.

 

Living Away

I was thinking about my mom today, living so far away in Virginia.

When I talk to her, she seems lonely. Not unhappy-lonely necessarily, but adrift.

I understand, of course, because 13 years ago I moved away to Chicago, far from anyone I knew, to find out who I was beyond the ties that bind.

The answer?

Still myself. Still the same anxieties, the same strengths.

We live in a periapetic society, where we are told to discover ourselves on the road. But maybe the answers aren't on the road at all--but in our own communities and our own families.

Shout out to Laura

LD was in town this weekend, and last night she met me at Ginger's, in Brooklyn.

It was Brooklyn Pride, and girls from the borough and beyond pressed against the bar, dancing (despite the hated cabaret laws) to everything from disco to hiphop.

She was herself, taking pictures, singing along, laughing at the ridiculous things people say in the course of ordinary conversation - it's the most beautiful form of nostalgia, to connect with an old friend and find that they are still everything you loved about them.

Afterwards, we headed to Manhattan to the Duplex, to catch up with some of her friends. We hung out in the piano bar, and LD  got up to sing New York State of Mind. As always, she glowed on stage, bringing passion and longing to a song so familiar it's easy not to hear it anymore. The crowd was appreciative. A guy shook her hand.

In all, a good night.

Kevin Spacey has chops

I saw Moon for the Misbegotten Wednesday night. And sure, Eve Best - up for a Tony - did just fine.

But Kevin Spacey was revolutionary, taking Eugene O'Neill's alcoholic rich boy and making him a complex bundle of nerves and  subterranean passion. He brightened up the stage. I know he's not what people usually think of in that role; but he brought new light to it.

Afterwards, I did something I never do: waited by the stage door. All three stars kindly, patiently signed autographs. When Spacey had my playbill, I said, "You really showed your chops tonight."

And he paused, looked me in the eye, and said seriously, "Thank you."

It reminded me how much we want that from celebrities - to be seen.

Instead of Red State or Blue State think "Disco Ball"

This week's column posted here because---yep, too lazy to use iWeb.

    You've almost got to feel sorry for the Right.

    OK, not that sorry.

    But their situation has gotten so dire that an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week actually tried to spin gold out of hay by saying that all the conservative infighting is GOOD. Because it shows DIVERSITY! And FREEDOM OF THOUGHT!

    And the fact, according to editorialist and Hoover Institute fellow Peter Berkowitz, that Democrats are "increasingly untroubled by debate or dissent" just points out that they have lost their ability to grasp the complexities of the modern debate.

    The Right's internal dissention, on the other hand, shows nothing less than a steady intellectualism and is an example of how "defending liberty involves a delicate balancing act."

    Excuse me. I need to take a second to shake with laughter.

    OK.

    I'm back now.

    Basically, Berkowitz' is saying—without actually saying it—that walking in lockstep showed unity of purpose when conservatives were talking in tandem, but lack of nuance when Democrats present a united front.

    Good spin, Peter Berkowitz. That's why they pay you the big bucks.

    Of course, this is not what's actually happening. Democrats are as divided as they ever were—there is no consensus on gay marriage, despite what Berkowitz says in the op-ed; support for abortion rights isn't always clear; figuring out how to balance economic prosperity with stewardship of the earth is a deep debate.

    What's changed is not the Left. We might seem more unified, but that's because it's always easier to be the underdog. We're still fighting.

What's changed is the Right—which is now facing, as Berkowitz says, "uncertainty about George W. Bush's legacy and the reality of their own errors and excesses." It's as if they've suddenly woken up with a power hangover, and are now looking around in horror at the disaster they've made. Legalizing torture, screwing up the balance of power in the Middle East, practically institutionalizing corruption: that's the result of the Right's power-drunk binge.

More importantly, though, what's changed is the Center. Whereas for a while they were content to be painted as the dopey, NASCAR-watching, flag-waving patsies of conservative Christians, now they, too, have woken up. Conservatives tried to tell Middle America that Evangelical rule would keep the country safe from threats inside and out and lead us back to an imagined golden era of God and Country.

What Middle America realized, however, was that even though they like to think of themselves as Godly and flag-waving, what they actually are is a people who will do anything to get themselves on reality TV. The Center of America is not red—it is gaudy, star-spangled, fame-hungry, and far more quirky and untraditional than our American myths would have us believe. Forget red. Even forget purple. Think "disco ball."

America is not a land of traditional families and church-goers. They're there, of course, but they're a relatively small segment of society. America is a land of communes and cults, of single mothers and polyamorous families, of academics and cowboys and immigrants and celebrities and lawyers and Starbucks baristas. The diversity is what's normal.

Finally, the Center looked around, thought about what the Right is saying about them, and said, "Hey—what you're talking about has nothing to do with the way I live my life. I've been divorced; I haven't gone to church in 10 years; my brother is gay."

That doesn't mean that liberals are doing a better job of capturing our native idiosyncrasies. We're not, really. What we are doing is helping create a more expansive myth of American inclusion. We're broadening the tent. And so, in this cycle, more Centrists are turning leftward.

To their credit, it's good to see prominent conservatives from across the party publicly reflect on where their movement is and where it might have gone wrong. It's refreshing to see that they, too, are shocked to be known as the party of hate and narrow-minded paternalism. This is not where they wanted to be.
And it's a good lesson for liberals. Because the pendulum has swung back, and it's likely we will find ourselves in power in 2008. Will we become drunk on it, like the conservatives did, and rule with arrogance?

Or will we continue to keep the debate open, realizing that debate is, indeed, the cornerstone of democracy, that hearing all points of view is the only way we can try to encompass the great strangeness of America?

How we answer that question will decide whether Democrat '08 leads us up into prosperity – or down into the Bush-league.

Jennifer Vanasco is an award-winning, syndicated columnist. Her occasional blog is typepad.jennifervanasco.com; email her at jennifer.vanasco@gmail.com

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Overheard in New York

This week's column

Because I'm too lazy to put it up on my site....

Journals

                

   

   

The chain of events seemed perfectly reasonable at the time.

My mom was moving, and the remainder of my childhood dietrus—my plastic horses, my kazoo, my favorite picture books—needed to be moved from their place in my childhood closet. So did my box of journals.

I’ve kept a journal since I was 6, when a friend of my grandmother gave me a small, white Hello Kitty diary as a present. I wasn’t sure what to write in it at first. I noted the weather. I explained what my parents had done that day, and who I played with and what we did.

At some point in elementary school, I read the “Diary of Anne Frank” and became obsessed with the idea of journaling as a historical record. I tried to be in my journal as I wished I were in life: a girl who sat up straight, spoke kindly to others, made her bed and studied hard.

That didn’t last long.

Eventually, my journals became the private “Room of My Own” that they become for most of us. It was the only place where I allowed myself to have rages, to take mental revenge, to record secret joys, to imagine a future so delicious I couldn’t bear to speak about it to others.

My journals were the place I first circled around the thought that I might be gay. They were where I tried to understand the feelings I was having for other girls, and eventually they were where I meticulously recorded the reactions my friends and family had to me as I came out.

I’m a writer. Writing isn’t just what I do—it’s who I am. Writing, and then reading and re-reading what I’ve written, is how I make sense of the world and how I create the story of myself that I tell to others.

When I lived in Chicago, my journals were scattered everywhere, in boxes and drawers and shelves and old backpacks. But right before I moved back home to New York, I collected all of them in one place. My Hello Kitty journal was there. So were my books of high school questioning and post-college resolution. They were so precious to me that I didn’t hand them over to the moving company; I walked them to my car and drove them across country.

They were the first thing I brought into my mother’s house when I came home. I left them there when I moved into Manhattan, figuring they’d be safer at home than in my new, tiny room.

But my mom was moving. So I got that box and the other boxes remaining at my mom’s and brought them to my apartment, where I left them on the landing while I decided what to do with them.
That weekend, we were having a party, and on a Wednesday night when I came home from work, my roommate said, “Hey, I moved those boxes of yours into the basement so they wouldn’t be in the way.”
OK, I said, and I admit I felt relieved. I didn’t have room for my box of journals. Not under my bed. Not in my closet. It wasn’t clear if we had storage in the basement of my building, but I figured they might as well stay there for a few days. Maybe I’d just leave them, accessible but not likely to be stumbled over in the middle of the night.

On Monday, I went to check that they weren’t getting damp—and they were gone. My other boxes were, too, but I didn’t worry about those.

Childhood books I could replace. My journals I could not. I knew that to lose my journals would be like losing the best friend that had known me from childhood, the friend who could oversee what she knew of my life and point out hidden patterns and forgotten revelations.

I called the super. He threw the boxes out, he told me. They were unlabeled; he thought that they were trash left by previous tenants. He reminded me, gently, that we had no storage.

My journals are gone.

I still can’t quite believe it. I look under my bed again and again, as if the situation might have changed somehow, as if they will magically appear if I just wish hard enough.

Those collected books were where I narrated my life. Losing them was losing the long line of words that kept my life together.

Philosophers sometimes talk about life as a river, how the river itself stays the same though each individual point is always rushing with new water, always changing.

Losing my journals is like hiking along that river and looking back to see that the entire bed behind me is dry.

What can I do but keep writing? I started a new journal yesterday. Its blank pages were a reprimand, a reminder, a warning. Whether it is a caution to keep better track of my written words or not write them down in fragile books at all, I don’t know.

Jennifer Vanasco is an award-winning, syndicated columnist based in New York. Email her at jennifer.vanasco@gmail.com. Her occasional blog is at jennifervanasco.typepad.com.