August 8, 2024

Dark, disgruntled sky– the fingers of Hurricane Debby reaching into the mountains.

Almost finished with the re-write of Songs Strong Against the Powers of the Air. Forty pages shorter than it was. It amazes me how many tangents I can allow, how many detours I don’t notice the first few times through. 

Wild GMC planning meeting last night. B has very definite ideas about what we should do, and is not easily talked out of them. His ideas are largely good, and save us the trouble of coming up with things on our own, so we’re satisfied with tweaking and modification. For me, the idea of Drag Christmas is DOA, but we hammered at it enough that it may be toned down enough. The scenario, as I understood it, was this: Boy wants to put on a dress; dad and others make him feel bad for wanting to put on a dress; three ghosts (ala The Christmas Carol) visit and convince him it’s fine to put on a dress, and that is the true meaning of Christmas. I pointed out that our last concert was about fighting to be what we want to be in the face of opposition, and we don’t have to hammer that theme home every single time. B thought we do have to hammer that theme home every single time. As a widely proclaimed “gay author,” I have fought the idea that our spiritual journey ends when we assert our “authentic self,” which seems most often to be indicated by putting on a dress. That is the start of our journey, not the goal of it. I never want to hear another “coming out” song, see another “coming out” play as long as I live. I roused passions when I pointed out that The Christmas Carol (supposedly our paradigm) is not about Ebenezer Scrooge’s finding his authentic self (and putting on a dress), but precisely about losing self in favor of concern for the other. Not identity, but compassion. Or, to put it another way, the authentic self is found when we stop obsessing about it and turn our attention to service. The idea that Christmas celebrates the birth of Christ or the turning of the year or the joyful excess of Yule all are set aside to honor– I’m not even exaggerating this– the climatic and culminating drag show. The shallowness of very educated people can be astonishing. Or, perhaps the narrowness of the purely secular gaze continues to astonish me. The suggestion that anything has a metaphysical or non-transactional or selfless or outward-gazing element simply fails to read. 

Lunch with SS. He met R in Berlin, where she gave me credit for teaching her “how to think.” If so, then mission accomplished. 

As I type, the USA trails Serbia in basketball. Serves us right.