Letting them know they can be anything they want to be

   One of my son's favorite things to do is to grab a bunch of small stuffed animals, tuck them inside his shirt, and then ask one of us to pull them out gently while he commenses  regular rhythmic breathing (ie. "Hee hee hee whooo... Hee hee hee whooo...")
   "Why do you like to pretend to give birth so much?"

   "Well because I want to be a woman."

   "I see.  [This after the fit he had the other day to cut his hair to 'be a boy'] ...and do you think giving birth is the best part about being a woman?"

   "Yes."
   "Don't you know you can be anything you want to be?"
   "I can't make a baby."

   "What if I showed you a man who got pregnant?"  [I show him a picture of Thomas Beatie.]

   His eyes widen.  "That's... so... cool!"

   "I tell ya Kody, you'd make an incredible woman.  And I don't say that to a lot of men!"

Oh you're not homophobic huh?

You know what is totally infuriating about people who consistently claim they are not homophobic?  How utterly homophobic that makes them!

I mean, on some surface level I understand.  You rationalize, confuse, inundate a person with the truckload of bullshit you've told yourself about it so long you now believe.  But since oppression is a kind of continuum, I kind of look at it like this:

They say they're not homophobic to me.  But we live amidst a blatantly heterosexist society.  We don't even just live in it; we were born into it.  I had a hard time coming out in large part due to my own internalized homophobia, and that is despite being totally confounded over the expectation that some guy would ever honestly make me weak in the knees.

So I try to empathize.  I think of racism.  I am a college-educated urban liberal raised by other college-educated urban liberals.  I was never taught to in any way regard any other skin color as inherently better or worse than me.  And I can never imagine the occasion where I'd feel it necessary to announce that wasn't racist.  Just the other day, I'm driving up my own block and I realized I'd just done a double take at a dark skinned teenager walking by.  There is no defending that move.  It wasn't conscious but I recognized in seconds that it was tremendously problematic.  I didn't offer up excuses to myself and I won't pretend them here.  To be perfectly honest, it's only now dawned on me to really feel bad for the kid on the off chance that he saw and recognized me make that move in my car.

Why then - how then am I to accept this shallow apology from an insult bandaged with a "this is not homophobic" title?  How do you know it's not?  Why would you care?  How little must you think of my social location and what I've been through to muddle through it's complexities, that you feel comfortable in the amount of time and energy you've devoted to this analysis?  How can you possibly separate your experience from the thousands of years of oppression that paved the way for our current locality?  Why do you care what I think of it anyway?  

Could it be that in some way you know it is?  It's the most homophobic people that turn out to be gay you know.  Yet the more you tell me you don't care?  The more I know you do.  Perhaps you really can't see it.  And believe it or not, I forgive you. The unique perspective - that internal understanding is the reason why I know God made me gay.  It was so that I could truly know His message.  - Not that "He" was the only way, or that "God" is this or that, but love.  I know love.  I see it.  I feel it.  I'm in it.  I know it and I follow it.  And as much as I know and love you?  I know your announcement doesn't come from it.  Niether does this: Shut the fuck up.

But it's okay.  You'll learn.  We both will.

Is 40 a new adolescence?

I hated being a teenager.  I pretty much hated everything passed the ripe-old thinking/reasoned 7.  I just hated to watch as life chipped away at the illusion of invincibility all around me.  People died.  I realized I was going to die.  I watched others disintegrate in the wakes, and still others day in and day out trudged their way off to jobs I couldn't imagine any of them wanting when they were children.

   I mean on one hand, being a teenager was great in that it has a certain euphoria.  First love, first kiss, coming out, first time away in your own - all very potent, horrifying but intense feelings!  Life somehow becomes worth living when you add a little dash of high drama.

   Things changed pretty drastically from 19 to 20.  Maybe it's the embrace of a new decade in life but I remember marveling in the almost overnight perspective shift.  I stopped doing things other people's way and while I don't currently subscribe to every philosophy I embraced then, just the declaration of independence was enough.  

   Maybe that same shift will occur at 50?  I imagine I'll be looking ahead to retirement by then.  The true duration of a decade will be apparent and it would be nice to be done with the banal.  If I make it that is.

   But 40 is an age where I hear about people dying a bit more often ...and with a little less hoopla about it.  I don't think even 50 is so common as at 40 the complications seem more severe.  By the time you've made it to 50, I think your constitution has been adequately tested.  Even a heart attack is less likely to be fatal.  It's just hard that once I sort of came to terms with the reality that I've lived this long, I have to face that statistically dwindling positivity.

   So there it is.  Feels like 40 is a new adolescence.  I'm scared and emotional again, more appreciative than I ever have been in my life as well as more in control (or just more aware of what isn't in my control).  Looks to me like another 10 years of high drama are in store.  Hopefully, there will be more high than low (but not that kind because who needs the headaches!)  I do have little bit more faith and wisdom now than I did before embarking on my teen years.  Well, a very little bit.

My Queer Eye on my Queer Life (Thoughts on Disney's Frozen)

Ok, so I need to take a break from my regular, concealed, judgmental, mundane, soulless life as an English teacher and address a charge I believe to be didactic and oversimplified.  

Somebody I know and respect just decided to watch Disney's Frozen recently and proclaimed it "didactic and over simplified."  I'm simply bursting with a few thoughts on this movie now from my perspective.

Ok, first of all, it is run by a Mouse.  And, let's face it, these movies are not meant for the most mature people on Earth.  What I LOVE about Frozen comes from its many many many interrelated connections to my life, ...and everybody's!

Let's begin with what struck me as a weak point of the plot: the seeming randomness of Kristoff's connection to Anna.  We begin with a vison of (an orphan?) happily apprenticing a bunch (of ice seller, master, and deliverers?) in like, the artic?  Ok, hold on a sec - this is Disney.  The orphan is male - wait, what?  Aren't they straying a bit off the forgotten damsel POV necessary to lure in all the desparate-for-connection house moms on maternity leave out there?  YES!  Wow.  Irony.  I love irony.
The truth is that just about everything I see that is wrong with the world stems from judgement as didactic and simple as that is.  I mean, we're put here to learn, no?  The one snippet of wisdom I instinctively feel a real kinship with from the Christian Bible is "Judge not least you be judged."   You'd think the Christian Right would appreciate irony as much as I do.

It's a good thing then that Kristoff's whole life was changed when he followed a trail of ice in the woods that led him to his adoptive family!  How else would he have known the truth (that his adoptive family (the rock trolls) were the only ones who could help (and hinder) the entire conflict of the story later) as he held his true love limp in his arms from her freezing heart.  Good thing he loves ice - no?  Who designed this???  Because it wasn't one person.  People don't stick with such complexity this long.

See, I have a sister.  Well, she's a cousin actually, but our parents married.  Breathe.  My mother died and afterwords my father married my mother's sister, who already had a kid - my cousin/sister - I mean step-sister/cousin.  Wait, what?  (Don't you hate how complicated these hetero's make family connections!?!)

So, my sister has blond hair and blue eyes.  She likes dresses, and boys, and anything simple and common.  Growing up was a nightmare with her constantly claiming my things - my toys, my boyfriends, my father...  The truth is, I love her.  It's the kind of love you don't realize is there because it stems from some alternate plan that was laid before you were born.  After all, we don't choose are family - right?

But I stopped speaking to her.  See, I dare say it's complicated.  But simplified, I felt my talking to her enabled several other problems that I couldn't fix, or deal with.  So in the end, I felt not talking to her was the best thing I could do to love her.  This isn't so complicated, right?

So I'm watching this movie, Frozen, with my sister's first daughter and well it's nice to see blond and brunette sisters being represented on a big screen.  The premise nags at me however.  See, Elsa is the one who runs away to the mountain to express herself freely and protect the ones she loves?  She's the silly blond!  But I have to agree with my friend, the message is imposing - the ice, the fear, the direction this is all going is being witnessed by my niece, who is sitting next to me in this theater.  My niece, my sister's daughter is a beautiful, intelligent, dirty blond 7 year old who I always think of as my first practice kid, and who has known me to be the family "ice" princess (who loves her dearly) the majority of her life.  She's often asked me to start talking to her mother, even when she's mad at her.  But I know that when she's older, she'll understand all the complications I'm not sharing here, and... well forgive me.  She's a better person than I am.

So where was I?  Ah yes...  The didactic and simple.  It's difficult, given the freedom, to write a focused blog.  As an English teacher I routinely break every rule I normally purport in these.  But the tools are the same - metaphor, irony, mood and tone - all interesting ways we use to simplify the complex classics and to complicate them.

But above all, irony is always my favorite.  There's nothing more entertaining in life, I think, than the unexpected.  We laugh, we live, and we learn only when we push passed the limit of our own tolerance and expectation.

I watched that climactic moment, when Elsa held Anna in her loving arms absently and didactically judging Disney for playing with the scene in such a way that we're all actually thinking 'If only they'd kiss.  Wait, what?!?'  After all, they are the ones who truly love each other.  That would be too far, however, for Disney to ever go considering the masses - but haven't they already gone way beyond that threshold?

They do play with that edge, though don't they?  The Christians know it.  The only reason I agreed to take my niece and wife and kids to see this sure-fire blockbuster hit movie this early in the overly priced big dark room with the excess of oily popcorn and germs was because of all the hype I'd vaguely heard around it.  I never even saw the four second shot of the same sex family in the sauna or comprehended Sven to be an image of beastiality.  I appreciate it later, however.  Especially the depiction of the total superb-butch Dad politely flinging Kristoff out in his cold, entitled, wanna-be ass the one moment he decides to go all trite masculine!  And Sven, the playful nose-eating Vanna White pet?  Awesome!  That's hysterical!!  I remember when queers could only be joked about in the media.  Well we're not exactly beyond that stage, but this is just a joke too, no?  Besides, Sven is clearly consenting to it.  (Joke!)  You go Disney!!!  Too funny.

Even Olaf is a portrait of irony.  The little warm-hug-loving snowman turns out to the devoted wanna-be gayby (I think we may need to start claiming it) you keep thinking will turn out to be the Sam-sidekick hero but really just remains a comical side plot.  Ever try to build one though?  Not an efficient design.

The thing is, real life is the most interesting art I know.  It's made by a Maker I couldn't possibly ever really get know - no matter how many claim to.  And to me, Frozen captures real life and all it's absurd ironies better than most of its predecessors.  And I loved The Little Mermaid and Nemo.  But in Frozen I can see the continuum that is us - all of us from the liberal to to the conservative, from the blond to the brunette - it's woven in the marriages of opposites, and union of not-so-opposites.

Where else can the truth be found amidst the complexity of hearts "frozen" by their worse fears, "true" loves, or led by a vague dwindling faith in humanity and hope for a recovered deluxe-model ice sled? 

In truth Anna is all personality while being "completely ordinary."  

And her and Kristoff are perfect for each other even as she lures him blindfolded into a poll.  Elsa, meant to be the banished witch of the mountain, is really me, except prettier.  I love the complexity of that ice palace even as I can't follow the design of its structure.  I even can see the message a little clearer right now after a fairly perfect Christmas spent in my house where I actually wound up consenting to invite my sister.  All went well enough, and I wound up feeling more fulfilled and free for having done it.  So in the end, I guess I needed to be beat over the head with the simple yet didactic message of Frozen, before I really learned to appreciate the complexities.
The one thing I know is that the show strikes a cord.  As much as I heard the critique of the music before seeing the movie saying Disney had gotten to Broadway running a series of very "forgettable" songs in a musical.  I forgot about that until the last time I was in a park where they showed the movie for free on one of those giant inflatable screens.  Hundreds, probably thousands, of family's huddled together on the their picnic blankets belting "Let it go" at the top of their lungs last summer had me secretly giggling at that critic.  What better way to help normalize families like mine?  Situations not normal?  

But who knows if my perspective would help my friend appreciate the movie.  Some of these opposites remain conflicts for very deeply rooted reasons and neither facts not opinions can often sway any of us in either direction.  Truth is, we make most of our decisions using a different organ than our brains, so one point from the movie is indisputably true: "The heart is not so easily changed.  But [shrug] ...the head can be persuaded." 😉