February 12, 2010

Vivid dreams. I’m holed up in a big hotel room in Russia, making difficult phone calls to discover the origin of my recurring phlebitis– it seems someone began long ago to pour a kind of worm into a fountain at Akron University, and that’s where it all started. In the dream I rack my brain to discover how knowledge of the source equals knowledge of the cure. The helpful Russians are all the time giving me phone numbers that I don’t know how to use.

Gray dawn, after a succession of gray dawns.

There is an actual time conflict, thank God, with the chorus fundraiser, but I wouldn’t be there anyway. The fact is that I don’t want to be represented to the public by drag queens. A straight man doing drag as a vaudeville act is funny. A gay man doing drag is vicious. A gay man doing drag defuses the straight word’s anxieties about men loving men by saying, “don’t worry, we’re really just girls after all.” It makes us clowns and eunuchs, snowy-white step-‘n-fetch-its that the straight world would never take seriously. You were right all along; we’re not really men. It’s as homophobic as a Kansas preacher with a gays-to-hell billboard.

I have friends who’ll say, “Oh! But drag is fun.” Maybe it is. So’s dressing up in leather or Marine uniforms or cowboy hats. Do that instead. Let them be a little afraid.

Light snow, coming down fast.

Ginger sent me a picture of her son Sean– 10 years old–in her Christmas card. A smiling kid in a red t-shirt, against a green wall. He has his mother’s eyes. I keep the photo by my keyboard as a kind of anchor. I don’t know what’s being anchored to what, but there it is.