Alas, a Blog | Feminist, anti-racist, pro-fat, plus whatever else we feel like talking about.

Blogging My Summer Classes: Changing Times and Words You’re Not Supposed to Say

Posted on June 24, 2012 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

My wife and I went last night to a farewell gathering for one of her cousins, who is moving with her husband to California. We were at Bar 13 in Manhattan, a place I havent been to since I gave a couple of readings there about five or six years ago in the series that maybe they still hold on the first Monday of the month. Originally, the gathering was supposed to be in a different place, where my wife’s cousin had booked a private room, but through a series of misunderstandings that room turned out not to be available, so what was supposed to be a small, intimate and emotional goodbye gathering, turned into the packed rooftop space at Bar 13, where were wedged in shoulder-to-shoulder with people almost all of whom looked to be at least twenty-five-years younger than I am. We spent most of the time standing near the bar talking to relatives, getting jostled as people walked back and forth, and while it was a little bit disappointing, it was also interesting to watch the goings on. I have not been out in a place where college-age and under thirty people go to party in a long time and so, during the lulls in conversation, I put on what a friend and I used to call our “anthropologist’s hat,” and just observed what was going on.

Mostly, of course, things havent changed all that much since I was in college. People who go out to drink and dance are people who go out to drink and dance, but one thing caught my eye, and I really had to force myself not to stare: two young men at the end of the bar were nuzzling each others necks and then tentatively kissing and then deep into a fully passionate make-out session, and nobody was paying any special attention to them, not even the people who stepped up to the bar next to them to order drinks. The guys were so into each other that it was beautiful to watch, but what really astonished me, in a giddy, happy way, was that everyone around them was responding as if it were a normal thing to see, no differently than if if a heterosexual couple had been doing the same thing. Even five years ago I don’t think that would’ve been the case, and I think I can say pretty safely that ten years ago it would never have happened–at least not in a place with as mixed a crowd as Bar 13’s rooftop had last night

So this got me thinking about how times have changed, about the kinds of progress that have been made in terms of gay rights, women’s rights, civil rights and so on, and I remembered how happy I was after the conversation my freshman composition class had about the speech on race that Barack Obama gave in March 2008 in response to the controversy surrounding his former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. What made me happy was not their analytical responses to the speech itself, but the way the conversation proceeded, specifically the way the white students in the class did not get at all defensive about the idea that, as white people, they simply did not have to worry about race and racism the way the Black students in the class had to. Ten years ago that defensiveness would have been a huge stumbling block. Now, it’s entirely possible that the luck of the draw just happened to hand me a class filled with more or less progressive (in terms of race at least) white students, and I am certainly not going to argue that this one anecdote indicates a sea change in how we deal with race in this country, but it was hard for me not to notice that this conversation was markedly different from the ones I used to have and, at least to myself, celebrate it just a little bit.

The conversation took an especially interesting turn, at least to me, when one of the white students in class asked what has become one of the most predictable questions in these discussions, Why is it okay for Black people to call each other the n-word, but it’s not okay for white people to do the same thing?” At this point, I inserted myself into the discussion–which had been moving along quite well without me–and suggested that we ought not to be afraid, in a context like this, where no one was calling anyone names, where someone asked an honest question and deserved an honest answer, to say the word nigger out loud. To be afraid to say the word, I suggested to the class, would be to give it a kind of power it ought not to have. The Black students in the class, all of whom I would say are younger than twenty-five, especially the African-Americans (a couple are from other countries) nodded their heads when I said that, and some of the white students did as well, and then the Black students started to tell stories about their experience with the word, from being called a nigger by white racists to their parents and grandparents responses to the word to the one African-American woman who talked about how she uses the expression “my nigga” to refer to both her Black and white friends.

None of the Black students had a problem saying the word out loud, while some of the white students continued to say the n-word. I found this fascinating as an example of language politics in action–and I’m not going to say more about it than that since I didn’t ask people to talk about why they did or did not use the word–but what really moved me about the conversation was watching this mixed-race group of relative strangers talk about racism not as if it were no big deal, but as if the fact of its being a big deal were so obvious that it hardly merited comment (if that makes sense) and so the discussion was one of the most honest, least contentious and constructive discussions of race I have ever witnessed. This too, I think, would not have happened ten or even five years ago, though, as I said above, whether this experience in this class is suggestive of anything larger than this experience in this class is a question I am not qualified to answer.

And of course this question of what words are and are not appropriate makes me think of the official silencing of Michigan Representative Lisa Brown for her use of the word vagina on the House floor in Michigan about a week or so ago. Here’s the video of her remarks, which I think provides all the context you need:

I’m not going to go into detail about the whole story, since you can read plenty about it elsewhere, and I am not so sure I have much to add to what has already (more or less predictably) been very well said, though to read what I think is a brilliant response from a slightly different perspective, check out this blog post on The Dirty Normal. But it strikes me that Brown’s statement is a perfect example of what it means to make the personal political. Or, perhaps more accurately, to refuse to avoid dealing with the fact that the political is also always personal, that there are real people, with real bodies, whose lives are really at stake in the laws we make concerning reproductive rights; and that to expect a woman-with-a-vagina to discuss a law that involves her body, without making her body–and I mean here her own body, not some abstract body-with-a-vagina that she shares with all women like her all over the world–part of the discourse, is to impose on her a kind of self-alienation that ought to have no place in a democracy.

The words we use to talk about ourselves and about each other are also the words we use to give meaning to our bodies, to what it means that we exist physically in the world. In this sense, the issues surrounding the word nigger are not so different from the ones raised by Lisa Browns statement, or at least the responses of the Republican men in the house to that statement—even though nigger and vagina are in so many ways universes apart–and I would venture to say that if you examined how easily the people at Bar 13 were able to accept the gay couple making out at the bar you would find that it was in part rooted in a change in the language through which they understand the meaning of the homosexual body. And that is a very, very good thing.

Cross posted on Because It’s All Connected.

Posted in Abortion & reproductive rights, Education, Race, racism and related issues | 3 Comments

Blogging My Summer Classes: Literature of the Holocaust

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

I have just finished reading the first set of essays written by my students in ENG 261, Literature of the Holocaust. The prompt asked them to consider whether or not they think there is an obligation to remember the Holocaust, with an emphasis on the word obligation, and to connect what they think to the characters in the story “Missing Pieces,” by Stanislaw Benski, which I found in the anthology Here I Am: Contemporary Jewish Stories from Around the World. It’s a fascinating story about a Polish man, Gabriel Lewin, who survived the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews because he happened to be vacationing at his brother’s in America when the war broke out. The problem is that no one in Poland–he returned when the war was over–believes him, and this embarrasses him. Indeed, the feels so much the outsider that he goes out of his way to marry a woman who also spent the war years elsewhere, and then goes to the extreme of creating an alternative identity for himself so that he can pose as a “real” survivor. His wife, Rose, agrees to create an alternative identity for herself as well, and the story goes on to explore the profound implications of this kind of “memorializing,” contrasting Gabriel and his wife with Gabriel’s brother who, from his safe perch in the United States, tells Gabriel that it’s best not to dig up memories of the war years, and a woman named Janeczka, who was orphaned during the war and spends a great deal of time trying to reconstruct a picture of her childhood from the fragments of memories that she does have.

One of the most interesting aspects of the story to me is that Gabriel and Rose’s responses to the false memories they are creating are gendered in somewhat stereotypical ways. For Gabriel, the point of creating a false history for himself is to cement his standing in the community; he is concerned not with the emotional content or consequences of the stories he constructs, but with how he can use them to establish his bona fides, so to speak. Rose, on the other hand, actually begins to feel the “memories” she is creating for herself, so much so, in fact, that she finds it hard to sleep at night when she realizes that, given the kind of person she is, she probably would not have survived the life she is creating for herself. This dichotomy, between the emotional woman and the status-conscious man is not really explored in the story, but it made an interesting segue into the next three stories I had my students read: “The Block of Death” and “Esther’s First Born,” from the memoir Auschwitz: True Tales From a Grotesque Land by Sara Nomberg-Przytyk and “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” by Chaim Grade. (The text I am using, the includes these three stories is Truth and Lamentation: Stories and Poems on the Holocaust.)

The first two stories, the ones by Nomberg-Przytyk, deal with women’s experience in the camps, specifically, childbirth and sexual exploitation by men. In “Esther’s First Born,” a pregnant woman insists on giving birth in the hospital, despite the fact that it will mean her certain death, since Joseph Mengele will not allow any newly born Jewish children, or their mothers, to live. One of the most disturbing discussion we had in class was about the significance of his logic:

Orli had told me once how Mengele explained to her why he killed Jewish women together with their children. “When a Jewish child is born, or when a woman comes to the camp with a child already,” he explained, “I don’t know what to do with the child. I can’t set the child free because there are no longer any Jews living in freedom. I can’t let the child stay in the camp because there are no facilities in the camp that would enable the child to develop normally. It would not be humanitarian to send a child to the ovens without permitting the mother to be there to witness the child’s death. That is why I send the mother and the child to the gas ovens together. (87)

In response to this most decidedly inhuman logic, when a woman gave birth–and this had to happen in secret and, if you can imagine, in complete silence–the doctor would kill the baby as soon as it was born, telling the mother that it had been born dead. In this way, at least the mother would have a chance of surviving. The story presents Esther’s decision, to have the baby in the open, even–and, actually, especially, after she learns about what I have just described, is presented in the story as its own act of resistance, despite the fact that she ends up being sent to the ovens with her baby.
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Posted in Anti-Semitism, Gender and the Body, Jews and Judaism | 1 Comment

Interview with Cynthia Dewi Oka

Posted on June 20, 2012 by Julie

Remember how, long, long ago, I was starting a small press? Well! Dinah Press is getting a slow start, but we’re getting ready to release our first two books–Other Life Forms, a novel by moi; and nomad of salt and hard water, by Cynthia Dewi Oka–this November. To whet your appetite, I have posted below an interview that our editorial collective conducted with Cynthia. It is a gift for you, because I think you’re neat. My favorite line: “liberation struggles are only as powerful as the voices that they nurture, and in turn, give them purpose. I think poetry is one of the means through which we can nurture our voices and break the asphyxiation of colonized language.”

(Meanwhile, I realize that it’s been a long time since I’ve really posted anything here. I’ll be honest, I worry that my blogging gland has dried up, but I’m hoping that’s not the case. I just finished library school on Saturday, and grad school took a lot out of me, so I’m hoping that I have a little more energy for blogging now that I’m finished writing papers. Although I am having a baby this September. We’ll see how this works out.)

Enjoy! The interview (and, ahem, our store) can also be found on our website, dinahpress.com.

Who are you?

poet.
young mama.
grassroots educator & organizer.
working class, queer, migrant
of Javanese & Chinese descent.
daughter, sister, Bali-born and raised.
visitor on unceded occupied Coast Salish Territories.
survivor.

What project are you currently working on?

I recently completed my first book-length manuscript, a collection of 47 poems that testify to experiences of migration, loss, violence, young mothering, resistance and love through the body-in-making of a particular kind of mythic figure, reflected in the working title nomad of salt and hard water. Like a nomad, the scrip travels back and forth through historical, mythical and contemporary times, and across various geographies – island, desert, coast, hard corner streets. The nomad is the poet and anyone without a “here” and “there”, anyone whose terrain is exile. This has been a project of recovery and revelation – of the ruptured self in conversation with its own displaced blood, songs, histories, legends. I’m very happy with this project and am looking forward to sharing it with readers!

What kind of relationships do you envision between publishers and authors? What do you need from those relationships in order to feel supported?
I envision a relationship between publisher and author that is characterized by respect and mutuality, with the shared purpose of delivering the book to the people who need it (including folks who can’t afford to buy the book). I think that authors should be involved in publication and distribution, and publishers should be involved in editing/revising to strengthen the book. It also seems important to me that publisher and author are on the same page about what the book is, what it can and can’t do in the world, how to amplify its reach in the spaces where it does have legs, and what kind of readership is ideal. I think that the author should have final say in the presentation of the book, and that the publisher should expect their input to be taken into account in that final say.

Writing is often portrayed as an individualistic act. How do you conceptualize writing’s place in your life?
I am first and foremost writing to save my own life. It is because of an individual choice to commit that a book gets completed. I have to decide to wake up before dawn to write, because I work two jobs and I have a young son, and after the sun rises, time does not belong to me. I have to believe that the poems are more important than anything else I could be doing otherwise, and that I have the right to write them. I have to submit my voice to the gauntlet of craft so I can do justice to the poems I want to write. And I have to live with the consequences of all these choices. So I think in terms of responsibility, writing is a a profoundly individualistic practice. It requires an individual surrender to the process.

But. In everything else – content, technique, inspiration, its very conditions of possibility – writing is inevitably a collective practice. And it is not only horizontally collective, but also vertically, as in through time. nomad of salt and hard water was generated, revised, and re-incarnated several times over the course of 8 months with the immediate support and critique of an incredible crew of poets, who I have to acknowledge here – Sevé Torres, Hari Alluri and David Maduli. But it was also made possible by an entire community & school of writers of colour, VONA, which gave me the boldness to want to be a poet at all. Then, there are the teachers who believe in you enough to make you want to be better at being yourself – Suheir Hammad and Willie Perdomo have been those lights for me. Every single poet of colour I have ever read, studied and through whose language (lifeline) I have pulled myself out of self-refusal – Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Joy Harjo, Mahmoud Darwish, Martin Espada, Aracelis Girmay, Barbara Jane Reyes, Chris Abani, Patrick Rosal, A. Van Jordan, Nikki Finney, Patricia Smith, Matthew Shenoda, just to name a few. Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who gave definition to my history, supressed by 33 years of dictatorship, from a concentration camp in Buru Island. My mother, who works the assembly line 48 hours a week for minimum wages and daily conjures meals out of her sweat and prayer. My sister Gladys and best friend mia, both of whom co-parent my son. My son, Paul, who forgives me each time I tell him I have to go work on a poem. The truncated and persistent sounds, shapes, music and traditions of peoples I belong to and those that have been generously shared with me by other peoples who were never meant to survive.

I see writing as inherent to liberation struggles because writing is essentially about documenting and defining survival. It is about connecting a specific voice to universal currents. All of us are moving through a historical world shaped by colonization and its pillars – capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, racism, war/militarism, the nation-state, ableism, and so on. We are differently positioned, facilitated and blocked in our movements, and our very understandings of what those movements might mean are profoundly different – but we all move in alliance with and subversion of that world. I am a poet today only insofar as oppressed peoples have organized and fought for their voices and lives to matter. I am a poet only insofar as I have land to live on, and presently, it is land that has been wrested from its original and rightful guardians through genocidal violence.

At the same time, liberation struggles are only as powerful as the voices that they nurture, and in turn, give them purpose. I think poetry is one of the means through which we can nurture our voices and break the asphyxiation of colonized language. In poetry, language is an event where multiple journeys, including silence, are initiated yet controlled by the economy of a form and the skill of a poet. I chose to stop organizing while writing nomad because I wanted to discipline myself to the demands of the poetic craft. I wanted to learn how to honor feeling and experience, how to let them speak for themselves, because in articulating their specific origins and destinations they lead us to something less like the categories we have to operate with(in) and closer to ourselves.

Posted in literature, Writing | Comments Off

Nicholas Kristof Reports on his Trip Through Iran

Posted on June 20, 2012 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

I’m glad to see reporting coming out of Iran (here and here, both by Nicholas Kristoff) that is based on a journalist’s first-hand encounters with ordinary Iranians. It’s not just that it’s important for readers in the United States to discover that–gasp!–Iranians are indeed ordinary people, essentially no different than we are; it’s also that this kind of coverage seems to me a fundamental sign of respect. I recognize that the Iranian government itself makes it nearly impossible for Western, and perhaps particularly American, journalists to gather the information that makes these kinds of columns possible, and so it is not journalists’ fault that they are, generally, unable to write them. At the same time, however, the media in the United States is at fault for presenting coverage on Iran that not only does not acknowledge the gaps in their coverage, and therefore in their knowledge, but that also allows those gaps to stand for something other than the absence they are: an assertion by omission that the coverage we are getting from our media is also, somehow, coverage of ordinary Iranians. Kristof’s columns are a necessary and long-overdue correction.

Cross-posted on Because It’s All Connected.

Posted in Iran | 2 Comments

New Mexico Court Says Photographers Are Legally Required To Photograph Same-Sex Commitment Ceremonies

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Ampersand

I wanted to comment briefly on Elane Photography vs Willock.

The case is pretty simple. Vanessa Willock emailed Elane Photography asking if they’d photograph her and her partner’s same-sex commitment ceremony (New Mexico law doesn’t recognize gay marriages). Elaine Huguenin emailed back saying “we do not photograph same-sex weddings, but again, thanks for checking out our site! Have a great day.”

Vanessa Willock did not, it seems safe to infer, have a great day. In her later testimony, Willock reported feeling shocked, angered, saddened, and fearful by Huguenin’s response. She couldn’t bring herself to contact other photographers, because she was anxious that she’d get a similar response. (She did eventually hire a photographer recommended to her by a friend.)

Willock eventually complained to the New Mexico Human Rights Commission, asking for an injunction ordering Elane Photography to stop discriminating against same-sex ceremonies. Willock refused to ask for any “actual damages,” but asked for and was awarded her attorney’s fees, which were about $6000. (You can read the New Mexico Human Rights Commission’s ruling here, in pdf form.)

* * *

A few points about this case.

1) I’ve often seen Elane Photography cited as an example of why we should oppose marriage equality. That argument makes no sense. New Mexico doesn’t have marriage equality; therefore, lack of marriage equality will not prevent legal conflicts of this sort.

2) I agree with Eugene Volokh, who argues that the decision should be overturned on First Amendment grounds: “It seems to me that the right to be free from compelled speech includes the right not to create First-Amendment-protected expression — photographs, paintings, songs, press releases, or what have you — that you disagree with, even if no-one would perceive you as endorsing that expression.”

3) It’s wrong for Ms. Huguenin to discriminate against same-sex ceremonies, but this isn’t a wrong that should have a legal remedy. I’d say the same if Ms. Huguenin was discriminating against Jewish weddings, mixed-race weddings, or weddings of fat people. Artists, even commercial artists, have a legal right to decide what to say (or not say). The proper remedy for Ms. Willock would have been to let her friends and family know that they shouldn’t hire Elane Photography and why.

4) Those in favor of this decision tend to invoke a slippery-slope argument: “if photographers are allowed to refuse to photograph same-sex ceremonies, then we have to allow hotel owners to refuse service to gay couples, doctors to refuse to treat gay patients,” etc. This argument assumes, mistakenly, that it’s not possible for the law to make some sensible distinctions in this area. For example, most state anti-discrimination laws define “public accommodation” more narrowly than New Mexico’s law does, and this hasn’t led to any of the predicted “slippery slope” effects.

Posted in Homophobic zaniness/more LGBTQ issues, Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans and Queer issues | 44 Comments

Father’s Day Thoughts

Posted on June 17, 2012 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

My father was not around in any significant way for most of my life, and I say this as a description, not an accusation. He absolutely could have been around more than he was, and the fact that he wasn’t had a great deal to do with his own shortcomings; but it is also true that the context set when my mother divorced him in 1965 or so made it much more difficult for him to be around. He was twenty-two-years old at the time, a relatively brand new father of two young boys–I was three; my brother was a-year-and-a-half–and there were no models around for how non-custodial parenting might be something other than scheduled visitations (which for my father were quite generous) and child support payments. In other words, whatever his personal shortcomings might have been, the system also set him up for failure in almost unavoidable ways. And my mother didn’t help. Shortly after she married George, the man who would be step-father for eight or so years, she persuaded my brother and me that we should call George Dad when we were with him so that he would feel more comfortable, like he was truly part of our family. My brother and I liked George, and–I can only speak here for myself–I thought Dad is only a label. Using it to refer to George did not confuse me as to who my real father was or diminish my love and commitment to him; and I wanted George to feel as welcome as possible. We agreed to what my mother asked and, as a result, referred to my father Larry around the house. You can imagine how well that went over with him.

I have no idea if my mother consciously intended to slight my father–though given what I know of their history, she probably did–but I do know, because I remember how it felt, that my father very consciously took his anger out on us, making us feel guilty for calling George Dad and betraying him. Even for this, though, I don’t really blame my father. He was very young, not much older than twenty five, if at all, and when I try to imagine how I would have reacted at his age, at that time, it’s hard for me to be certain that I would have handled the situation any better. For his part, George, did his best to be present in my life as a father. I don’t think he was at all trying to replace my father, but he was the adult male in my household and he felt that responsibility very keenly. He believed in corporal punishment, and I know he was violent towards my mother, but he was, far more than my father (and I will say this again: through no fault of my father’s) the adult male from whom I received actual parenting.

When my wife and I decided to start trying to conceive, I sought out my father after nearly ten years of not talking because I needed for him to answer some basic questions about my life and the part he has played in it. That was a little more than 13 years ago. Since then, our relationship has been a complicated one, fraught with a tension that is probably inescapable, given our history. When George, who left us when I was twelve or thirteen, and who came back into our lives when his daughters, my sisters, insisted that he do so, I was at first thrilled. He was the only man who had been a consistent father-figure for me ever. Over time, though, I came to realize that he would not, or could not, it’s not clear to me which, reconnect with me as anything other than a child he had known a long time ago. There was nothing in the way he talked to me that suggested he remembered that he had once been a father to me, that he had any of those feelings left in him at all. I say this too as description, not accusation. When George died not too long ago, the fact that we had not reconnected at all in this way made me very sad. It sill does.

I am writing this, though, not to talk about father-absence per se, but rather because I have been thinking about myself as a father and how healing it has been to be for my son what neither of these two men could be for me: fully and vulnerably and givingly present. For this, for him, I am deeply thankful. It has been, for the past thirteen years, the best and only Father’s Day present I have needed.

Cross post on Because It’s All Connected.

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

The Earle/Eagle Theater and The Betsy Ross

Posted on June 16, 2012 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

I don’t remember where I had to go, but I was happy to be taking the subway. The route I took is a route I’ve been taking for more than thirty years now, going back to when I was a teenager and I would come on my own to visit my grandparents, who lived in the building next to the one where I live now, or to work at the Jewish Center of Jackson Heights catering hall, which was owned by Max Weber, a good friend of the family. He gave me my first job as a busboy when I was probably younger than was legal, and I continued working for him well into my teens, eventually becoming a waiter and (underage) assistant bartender. The Jewish Center, which at that time was on 82nd Street just south of 34th Avenue, was very familiar to me. I went to nursery school there, when Miss Muriel was my teacher, and I took my first Hebrew School classes there; it was where I learned to pray. My grandparents were very active and so a lot of people knew who I was; I was Bob and Ann’s oldest grandson.

I think I made fifty dollars the first night I worked for Max. I remember because my grandmother was shocked that he had paid me that much, while my mother was thrilled that I now had money I could use to buy some of my own clothes. I don’t remember if that’s what I spent my money on, but I know that our financial situation was such that it would have been a big help if I had.

Usually, when I had to work late on a Saturday night, I would sleep at my grandmother’s and go home the next day, and the route I walked to the subway always took me past what was then the Earle Theater on 37th Road between 73rd and 74th Streets. My mother tells me that when she was a kid growing up in Jackson Heights, the Earle was called the Eagle, and it was an art movie house where she went to see all the latest foreign films. When I was a teenager, though, it was a porn house, and I remember walking past it time and time again wishing I had the courage to buy a ticket. I never did, and then, according to The New York Times, in 1995—by then it was showing gay male porn only—after health inspectors shut the Earle down, the theater was bought by three Pakistani businessmen and turned into a venue for the latest films to come out of Bollywood. This was not surprising given the “Little India” that is located on 73rd and 74th Streets between 37th and Roosevelt Avenues. I never went to see any of the Bollywood movies that played there either, and now I’m kind of sorry that I didn’t because the Earle/Eagle has gone out of business, done in, as I understand it, by a film production strike in Mumbai.

There’s no way to stop change, I know, but this theater, even though I never set foot inside, is part of my internal map of Jackson Heights, part of how my memory structures the meaning of this town I live in, and so it makes me sad to know that it’s been replaced by a food court.

Not that there’s anything wrong with food courts, but this area is already chock full of Indian restaurants, Pakistani restaurants, Tibetan and Nepalese restaurants, Desi Hallal Chinese restaurants; and right across Roosevelt Avenue there is a very good Korean restaurant next door to a Vietnamese place–not to mention the more standard fare: pizza places, Dunkin Donuts and more. So it’s not like there’s a paucity of places for people to grab a bite to eat, but even if there were, the closing of the Earle removes from the 37th Road the last landmark connecting this place to who I was when I as younger.

Just a couple of storefronts down from the Earle/Eagle was The Betsy Ross—which was later called The Magic Touch—one of several gay bars that were in the neighborhood at the time. (There was also The Love Boat and Billy the Kid, which I vaguely remember walking past at the time, but I have no memory if they were also on 37th Road or if they were somewhere else in the neighborhood.) I didn’t know this—there was no way I would’ve known this at the time—but 37th Road was apparently known at the time as “Vaseline Alley.” I don’t remember which of the storefronts to the right of the theater was The Betsy Ross, but this is what the block looked like just before the Jackson Heights Food Court marquis went up. (The image is from cinematreasures.org and was uploaded there by KenRoe.)

The Betsy Ross was the first gay bar I ever went to; indeed, I think it was the first bar I ever went to period, since I was underage—I was sixteen; the drinking age at the time was eighteen—and the people I hung out with at home just didn’t go to bars.

I ended up there because John—at least I think I remember that was his name—the newly hired bartender at the catering hall, whom I’d been assigned to help at the party that night, asked me if I wanted to go. I was asking him what his job was during the day.

“Well,” he said with a smile, “I used to be a cop, but they kicked me off the force.”

“Why?”

“They had their reasons,” was all he would say, though I asked him one or two more times. Then he changed the subject, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What’s her name?”

“Kristin.”

“How long have you been going out?”

“About six months.”

“At sixteen years old,” he responded, “that must seem like an awfully long time.”

I agreed that it did.

When it was time to leave, Michael said, “If you want to talk some more, I know somewhere we can go.”

We walked out of the Jewish Center, and he led me to The Betsy Ross, where we took a booth on the far side of the dance floor. I know we started to talk about Beth, and I know that another man joined us in the conversation, but I don’t remember anything from the conversation. What I do remember is the two men who got up to dance, weaving their bodies together far more smoothly and erotically than any I’d ever seen a man and woman dance together. It made me think of water moving into water. John reached across the table and tapped me on the shoulder, “Richard, you realize you’re in a gay bar, right?”

“I do now,” I said.

“And that’s okay?”

“Sure.”

“I knew you’d be cool about it,” he said, and then he reached out and put his palm flat against my right cheek in a touch that was so soft and gentle I caught my breath a little. “I’m not a cop anymore,” he smiled sadly, “because I’m gay and I refused to hide it.”

I don’t remember what I said in response or even if I felt particularly sad or angry for him, though I have no doubt that I thought it was unfair. I was much too interested in watching the dancers, who must’ve seen me staring because they waved as they sauntered by when the dance was finished, and then John raised his glass to them and smiled, and I did too. Then, at some point, I told John and the other man we’d been talking to that I needed to go home. We said goodbye and I don’t think I ever saw either of them again.

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Ron Rosenberg Of Crystal Dynamics Proves That Sexism Will Continue To Rule The Lara Croft Reboot

Posted on June 12, 2012 by the angry black woman

Ron Rosenberg Of Crystal Dynamics Proves That Sexism Will Continue To Rule The Lara Croft Reboot

[Trigger Warning: Discussion of rape in the post and possibly the comments]

I know I shouldn’t be surprised to find misogyny rampant in the video game industry. But to find it rampant, unashamed, and proud of itself? I guess I still shouldn’t be surprised.

Yesterday gaming site Kotaku posted a short interview with Tomb Raider executive producer Ron Rosenberg. Crystal Dynamics, the company behind the game, was eager to get the word out about it at the E3 gaming convention last week and to let the world know that the Lara Croft we’ll see in the series reboot isn’t going to be as buxom as before. Instead, she’ll be at the beginning of her career and the player will get to see her grow into the badass she’ll become. But until she does, the player will “want to protect her.”

DANGER, JILL ROBINSON.

It gets worse. Not only will Lara exude helplessness and the need for the invisible man at the controls to protect her, the creative team is pulling out a not-so-creative old hat trick for female character development: rape.

In the new Tomb Raider, Lara Croft will suffer. Her best friend will be kidnapped. She’ll get taken prisoner by island scavengers. And then, Rosenberg says, those scavengers will try to rape her. “She is literally turned into a cornered animal,” Rosenberg said. “It’s a huge step in her evolution: she’s forced to either fight back or die.”

Yeah, turning women into animals who have to fight for their sexual purity is awesome. Am I right?

I just want to facepalm over and over again until this leaves my brain forever.

Rosenberg’s language reveals him to be the skeezy sexist he pretends not to be with all this bullshit here:

“The ability to see her as a human is even more enticing to me than the more sexualized version of yesteryear.”

You can tell he’s going for the female-positive cookies. He promptly loses him in the very next breath:

“She literally goes from zero to hero… we’re sort of building her up and just when she gets confident, we break her down again.”

Yeah, you can’t have those women getting too confident.

In general, this narrative of the hero building and building toward being a badass who is then cut down just as she gets too confident is a pretty common one going all the way back to mythology. The problem arises when you consider that male heroes are almost never “broken” by rape or the threat of rape, but female characters almost always are. And that’s misogyny.

Why can’t Lara be captured and almost eaten? Sure, that has some sexual overtones to it, but is something different. Or hey, how about she’s captured and beaten up or nearly killed, just like a male character would be, then overcomes this to escape?

Nah, that would be something like right.

Beyond that, what is this business about the player feeling a need to protect Lara? Why is that necessary or needed? Oh right, because she’s a girl.

Though I’ve seen no media from this new game, I’m going to guess that the characters who attempt to rape Lara will be black or brown peoples. It’s just a guess since fail seems to be the default setting for this game company.

This is one of the many reasons why I’m glad I’m not a gamer.

Ron Rosenberg Of Crystal Dynamics Proves That Sexism Will Continue To Rule The Lara Croft Reboot — Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman