The invention of Heterosexuality

The most powerful paragraph I have read in a while:

The idea of heterosexuality as the master sex from which all others deviated was (like the idea of the master race) deeply authoritarian.  The doctors' normalization of a sex that was hetero proclaimed a new heterosexual separatism - an erotic apartheid that forcefully segregated the sex normals from the sex perverts. The new, strict boundaries made the emerging erotic world less polymorphous -- safer for sex normals.  However, the diea of such creatures as heterosexuals and homosexuals emerged from the narrow world of medicine to beconme a commonly accepted notion only in the early twentieth century. In 1901, in the comprehensive Oxford Dictionary, "heterosexual" and "homosexual" had not yet made it.

--From The invention of Heterosexuality. Jonathan Ned Katz. 1990. Socialist Review v.20, n.1

The article challenges the idea that the category of heterosexuality is natural and timeless.  It was invented at the same time as the category of homosexuality (in North America and Europe).

What Makes A Man

My mum and I we live alone 
A great apartment is our home 
In fairhome towers 
I have to keep me company 
Two cats, a dog, a parakeet 
Some plants and flowers 
I help my mother with the chores 
I wash, she dries, I do the floors 
We work together 
I shop and cook and sew a bit 
Though mum does too I must admit 
I do it better 
At night I work in a strange bar 
Impersonating every star 
I'm quite deceiving 
The customers come in with doubt 
And wonder what I'm all about 
But leave believing 
I do a very special show 
Where I am nude from head to toe 
After stripteasing 
Each night the men look so surprised 
I change my sex before their eyes 
Tell me if you can 
What makes a man a man 

Round 3 o'clock or so I meet 
With friends to have a bite to eat 
And conversation 
We talk and empty out our hearts 
On every subject from the arts 
To liberation 
We love to pull apart someone 
And spread some gossip just for fun 
Or start a rumour 
We let our hair down, so to speak 
And mock ourselves with tongue-in-cheek 
And inside humour 
So many times we have to pay 
For having fun and being gay 
It's not amusing 
There's always those who spoil our games 
By finding fault and calling names 
Always accusing 
They draw attention to themselves 
At the expense of someone else 
It's so confusing 
Yet they make fun of how I talk 
And imitate the way I walk 
Tell me if you can 
What makes a man a man 

My masquerade comes to an end 
And I go home to bed again 
Alone and friendless 
I close my eyes and think of him 
And fantasize what might have been 
My dreams are endless 
We love each other but it seems 
The love lives only in my dreams 
It's so one-sided 
But in this life I must confess 
The search for love and happiness 
Is unrequited 
I ask myself what have I got 
And what I am and what I'm not 
What am I giving 
The answers come from those who make 
The rules that some of us must break 
Just to keep living 
I know my life is not a crime 
I'm just a victim of my time 
I stand defenceless 
Nobody has the right to be 
The judge of what is right for me 
Tell me if you can 
What makes a man a man...

First three days in Nairobi

I don’t have internet at home. Its like death.  The two highlights of my day are getting to work because I get to check my email and getting off work because I get to check facebook at the café around the corner from where I live.  My employer has blocked facebook from her internets.  It makes me so sad and desperate, I find myself checking the incesssant facebook email-updates that I had filtered to trash in my gmail account a long time ago. I check them for any sign of life - any sign that the faceworld misses me as much as I miss it.  Alas, it seems that facelife goes on without me.

At least I have a full-length mirror.  This is a luxury I have gone without for the last 10 months.  I had forgotten how much fun it is to dress up and dance with beyonce in the mirror. In my CT apartment I had the heels, wig, mirror and youtube.  In NYC I had the heels (had to ditch my wig), the youtube but no mirror. Now I have no heels, no wig, no youtube but I have the mirror.  I think I am fine with just the mirror though.

I live slap-bang in the middle of expat city.  There are all kinds of expats here, you can see them in the morning with their laptop-'concealing' laptop backpacks.  I am one of them.  I am sitting in a café just around the corner from where I live - amidst all kinds of suites, probably from the embassies around here... or the NGO industry.

I can only remember one time I felt so foreign - that was in Argentina a few years ago.  I know less Swahili than Spanish… and as my Washington Heights Neighbours would attest, I don’t know a lot of Spanish at all. I know "Jambo!" (hello!) and I try to use it often. Also, I try and say "Asante Sana" (Thank you very much) whenever possible. I have yet to use "Karibu" (you are welcome) and "Sawa" .  I can tell that somehow my own language and Swahili are related, but that doesn’t really help me understand things that people say.  I have been told that my name sounds like Kisii which is a language from somewhere in the west of Kenya.

I have been trying to watch Kenyan TV.  I don’t understand a lot of it. There is an advert for something called "Maasai Service". It features a tall beautiful-looking Maasai man draped in a pink cloth standing on one leg with a staff in his right hand and a small radio held to his ear in his left hand. There is singing in the background. What does it mean? I don’t know. But I think I like it. I also watched an episode of "Spider" last night - it is a Nollywood soapie. There is nothing more fun than a Nollywood soapie.

I had been depressed the other day because I thought that Kenyan eggs (to be clear, eggs from Kenyan chickens) and Kenyan bread taste really weird and un-nice. My first meal in this land was an egg sandwich I made from supplies bought at a convenience shop around the corner.  I went to a real supermarket today, and bought fresh stuff.  It turns out the eggs were actually just going bad (one was green when I cracked it yesterday) and the bread was low quality.  I made myself some toast using better bread today and I was very happy with it.  I am gong to have an egg sandwich tomorrow morning with the eggs I bought at the Uchumi supermarket - I expect that I will be pleased with the whole thing. I also got some Koo baked beans, and Nederberg Lyric (my summer white wine).  These are two things that made life livable while I was in Cape Town.  I am so excited, I think I will wait for a special occasion.  I forgot to get Tusker - Baada ya Kazi. I have always wanted to taste this beer  - all the cool Kenyan kids at UCT seemed to have a Tukser T-shirt (do they hand it out with SA study permits? I don’t know).

Today when I asked my boss and my boss's boss whether its ok to drink tap water, they laughed then they said no - I should boil it.  I felt ashamed to admit that I had had two whole glasses yesterday and they were delicious. Im still ok though, and I have drugs at the ready.

Bend that Gender

To my flaming homo's - this is why your fabulousness is important to all of us:

"Fat dykes, transpeople, intersex individuals, cisgendered people, muscle boys, crones, people with disabilities, bears… everyone's body is political, even yours.  Queers have been at the forefront of contesting expectations about the ways bodies should look and function that are enforced as if they were natural…

Why do we demand that individuals belong to one of just two sexes? Why should your gender conform to the sex assigned to you at birth? Why are some bodies valued in the marketplace more than others? How do beliefs about physical ability limit our capacity to appreciate the diversity of bodies? How can we free ourselves from the very concept of the ideal body?

In raising such questions, we fight to see ourselves and others in new and positive ways. How do you look? And what are you looking at?"

--A Caption from one of the displays at the GLBT History Museum, The Castro, San Francisco



**Picture of RuPaul from http://www.rickey.org/rupauls-drag-race-absolut-drag-ball/

First impressions of San Francisco

Beautiful Murals

Trams

Breathtaking views on a clear day

Alcatraz

Sharing room with interesting strangers

(hair on the shower floor)

Street music