The Daily Dose

My readers might be surprised that I often draft The (who knows if it will ever live up to its name) Daily Dose of the Good (And Not So Good) Words by hand, with a fountain pen. Writing longhand is a sensual, sometimes mystical, experience for me. Sometimes it is close to a religious rite. Ideas flow as my hand slides the instrument across the page. My wand makes a magic of letters strung together into words strung together into sentences; sentences that have strung up a little bit of meaning.

The nib of my fountain pen is broken, and I cannot get into the groove. To misquote a Bo Carter blues song, “my pen won’t write no more.” I had to switch from the frustrating fountain pen to a pencil, and while I know it is good to not caught in ruts; that I should be able to work some magic with any number of instruments, I must admit that it isn’t quite the same. I want my pen to work. I want my words to flow.

The broken nib of my pen makes me think of George Alan Rekers, the anti-gay ex-gay gay scholar and “activist” recently caught traveling with a “Rent Boy.” In true Southern Hyperbole round-about storytelling style, I won’t come back to the image of the broken nib until (much, much) later on. Many of you know the details of the story: Rekers goes on a trip with a “Rent Boy,” claims that he hired “Lucien” to carry his luggage and when Lucien comes clean about what he was hired to handle- “the long stroke” is not in the porter handbook, though we could argue that Lucien is a type of pullman- Rekers is caught with his “liar, liar, pants on fire” down.

I encourage any readers who are not up on male escort services to give the Rent Boy website a peek. I think there can be no doubt that Rent Boys are expert baggage handlers.

Though jealousy may be a sin, I’m jealous as hell. I want some Rent Boys to join my ever growing (I wish) Army of Alter(ed) Boys. Why should preachers who are against hot bi and homosexual men get to hire them?

Let us pray.

(On your knees).

Please god-that-we-may-or-may-not-believe in, pretty please with sugar on top, send a sugar daddy or momma (or multiples in any combination) Bishop Bishop’s way so she may hire hotties to carry the metaphorical luggage of Bishop Bishop’s Mission to save the whole wide world and little old you.

Perhaps, I should pull an Oral . . . Roberts and claim that god will suck me (excuse me while I fan myself) up to heaven if y’all don’t give me enough money to hire a couple of Rent Boys to go on tour with me. Operators are standing by. (Seriously, y’all give me enough money, I’ll finally go on a super-fantabulous revival tour, and I promise- cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my . . .- I’ll hire some Rent Boys).

But enough about me, back to Rekers. With a slew of abbreviations for academic degrees behind his name, Rekers is a co-Founder, with the infamous James “Focus on the Family” Dobson, of the Family Research Council, an organization known to be pro-beat-your-children-to-prove-you’re-the-boss-and-‘cause-god-gets-off-on-it and against anything and everything about homosexuals getting married, having/adopting children, having rights, breathing.

Rekers also is an officer of NARTH (National Association of Research & Therapy on Homosexuality), which has a gay old time trying to turn the gay into the ex-gay and trying to take the Les out of Bos. He has testified in court against gay adoption in Florida, against gay Boy Scout leaders and published lots of articles about how to correct “gender disturbance” using what some have called aversion therapy.

Rekers is up to his armpits in that famous river in Eygpt, the one that you can, without a doubt, step into twice, denial. Rekers is quotes in a Salon.com article saying,

If you talk with my travel assistant that the story called “Lucien,” you will find I spent a great deal of time sharing scientific information on the desirability of abandoning homosexual intercourse, and I shared the Gospel of Jesus Christ with him in great detail.

Of course the old saw “Jesus spent time with sinners” is, in this case, more of the plaintive whine “Jesus made me do it.” It is easy to be angry about the hypocrisy of this man who has done so much harm. It is easy to mock him as Stephen Colbert did, which, truth be told, I found laugh aloud funny. And I think that the George Rekers Luggage Carriers, Inc. Facebook Fanpage is genius.

It is easy to be angry; it is easy to mock. I have done both. I’d like to suggest that we also let ourselves see and feel the heartbreak of his fucked to hell life.

The Family Research Council, motivated by the unsurprisingly unChristian desire to not be associated with anyone “tainted,” promptly put up a message disavowing any connection between Rekers and the Family Research Council. And NARTH, while not as cold blooded as Family Research Council, is awkwardly shifting away from the splash that Rekers has made “falling on the baggage carrier.” As of May 11th, Rekers has resigned from NARTH.

I imagine that right now, in between spates of self-righteous sputtering of denial, he feels lonely and ashamed.

Part of me grieves for how twisted up with hate and confusion Rekers must be. He has put a nib on his life that won’t let his ink flow. The ink still is there but all he gets from his pen are ugly scratches and jagged words. He marks up his life page, he marks up our collective pages with poor penmanship.

But he is not solely responsible for the broken nib on his pen. There were/are forces beyond his control that screwed on that broken nib and make it difficult for him choose a new one. He is a 61 year old Southern Baptist. When has it been safe for him to be who he is?

I am not absolving him of responsibility, but I think it is important to remember just how fucked up we still are about anyone who does not follow the straight and narrow. I knew people, back in the early 1990’s, who tried to commit suicide when they realized they were gay. Many young people, because life unfortunately isn’t an Ugly Betty dramedy, don’t have a Marc St. James in their life to help them accept who they are. And considering how many LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning) youth still try to commit suicide, too often successfully, specifically because they are afraid of what it means to be LGBTQ, perhaps we can, for a moment, be sad that the combination of a cruel culture, a lack of supporting allies and something in his personality meant Rekers hated himself enough to write that hate in big bold letters on other people’s lives.

George Alan Rekers cannot flow.

I mourn for the man he could have been. I mourn for the man he will not be. Perhaps he will find some redemption. Perhaps he will realize that his pen doesn’t write, that his ink doesn’t flow, that it is time to put a new nib on his pen.

Replacing his broken nib would not erase all the marks against him. It cannot erase all the harmful marks he has made. We write our lives with indelible ink. We cannot erase our pasts, but we can make new sentences for ourselves. If he chose to fix his pen, if he chose a new nib, it might set an example for other young men and women poised to take up pens with broken nibs with which to write their lives.

He could help write a new story for all of us. I doubt that he will, but I pray that his does.

Please god that I may or may not believe, please let George Alan Rekers accept who he is, in all his horrible and wonderful complexity. Give him and us a new, never completely clean slate to write on. Help him repair the awful damage he has done to others. Heal the awful damage done to him. Give him the strength to take off the broken nib, to put a new nib on his pen. Let him right his life. Please let his life flow.

Amen.

Awomen.

Pretty please with sugar on top?

I am being pricked by Cupid’s arrow (and my consciousness of not living up to your or my own expectations) to send y’all a little love in the form of the next Daily Dose. We continue our scriptural study of the romance genre. I study the romance genre as I would passages from the Bible because I believe that it has as much, if not more, to tell us about our lives.

Today, we break (into) Hymen’s ring to contemplate the meaning of virginity, to ponder what it means to be unsploit and then sploit and to wonder why what is essentially a mucous membrane has been so damn important.

Before I plunge into our subject, I need to fill those of you not familiar with the subgenre of historical romance in on some important plot elements. In almost every single historical romance, with a few notable exceptions, the heroine is a virgin, and the hero is significantly more experienced. The hero, more often than not, is a rake.

Rake, as used in these novels, is almost but not quite synonymous with slut. Rakes aren’t as dirty as sluts despite the fact that to become a rake you’d have to spend a whole heck of a ton of time with sluts. We could find this troubling, but of course, that was the way is was way back in the day; we don’t have to worry about silly sexual double standards now.

Back to the plot. After many hot tete-a-tetes, the rake pops the heroine’s sweet little cherry. Most of the time, the hero bursts through Hymen’s gate in one, surprisingly easy, thrust. The heroine experiences some pain on the loss of her innocence, but generally, and also surprisingly, not very much. The hero gives service to his lady by removing this culturally and sometimes physically significant roadblock, so the heroine can ease on down the road of sexual satisfaction.

Of course, it isn’t quite so easy. There are repercussions for the loss of innocence. In many versions of this oft-told tale, the piercing of her maiden mucous membrane (versus ones found elsewhere in her body) happens before the knot has been tied. Many wacky shenanigans ensue in which the heroine almost becomes a fallen lady, which would mean that she’d have to join the ranks of the sluts and slatterns who made sure that our rake had sufficient experience to initiate our heroine in such a delightful way. But it all works out in the end, and they live happily ever after in conjugal bliss.

Now it would be easy to mock the formulaic plot devices of historical romance, and a lot of it is, frankly, more than a little disturbing. But I’m certain y’all realize by now that I’m not interested in just setting up straw men to knock down, though admittedly I almost always rough ‘em up a bit.

I would be shirking my duties to truth, if I let you believe that the prominence and importance in these novels of women losing their virginity was solely a function of the historical conditions of 19th Century England, when the vast majority of these novels are set. No, it has much to say about what we think and believe and want now in the 21st Century.

Let’s push a little deeper.

Our question should be why, in this day and age of supposed sexual liberation when young teens are dressed like strumpets by advertisers and told to strut their stuff to sell us shit we don’t need, why is this storyline so common? What makes it so compelling?

First off, I’d like to remind you that smutty romance novels are fantasies. And then I’d like to ask you, who doesn’t find cherry popping hot? Male or female or transgendered, gay or straight or bi, all of us probably enjoy projecting ourselves into either side of the virgin initiated by expert scene. Of course, I tend to like cherry popping scenes that involve older women instructing younger people or the even more luscious initiation of a strap-on to a man bent over a table, but I realize that few if any historical romances will be written with my predilections in mind. (Authors take note, there is a niche in the market that desperately needs to be filled).

Part of the potency of all this, I think, is that for many of us our first few fucks were painfully awkward and/or just plain painful. The awkwardness of fumbling for condoms and lubrication or even the need for them is edited out of pornos, so that we can be carried away. The awkwardness of piercing a woman’s maidenhead or if she doesn’t have one due to an active lifestyle of horseback riding, etc., the awkwardness of just getting into what is generally a very tight space is excised. It can be nice to go along for the ride with the characters and have an easy first time.

Virginity is prominent in these novels, because women still are taught to regret, Sex and the City notwithstanding, their sexual experience. The fantasy is that we would find our love before we tasted the fruit of another (or others), and he would claim us. We would forever belong to him. There would be no pesky memory of previous lovers; there would be no comparisons to be made. Never, that I know of and I’ve read hundreds of these novels recently (see how I sacrifice myself to help save you), does the newly de-virginated heroine go on to find fulfilling lust and/or love with another man.

Part of the heroine’s appeal to the jaded palate of the hero is that she is not like the sluts he regularly cavorted with. She is lusty but not learned; she rarely asks directly for what she wants. (Some of this is that we are lazy and scared of our own desires and do not want to have to ask or tell our lovers what we want/need from them). Women who do ask and are skilled in bedroom games generally are set up as villainesses. Women who are forthright about pursuing the hero for sex will lose him in the end to the less direct, less honest, unskilled heroine.

Perhaps because I identify more with the sluts, I find the prevalence of this particular storyline upsetting. At what point does the heroine become the sexual experienced woman who might disgust the hero? Is it after a few years of marriage, when she’s become skilled at fellatio? Is it when she might actually know enough about her body to tell her husband that he hasn’t quite gotten his tongue right where she wants it?

I may be asking too much. I would like more trashy historical romances that have hot cherry popping scenes and celebrate sexually experienced women who know what they want and get it from a variety of partners without being punished. There is nothing wrong with wanting to imagine the first time as magical and important and life changing. But it would be nice, if we also could envision that the 500th or 5000th time as magical, important, even as life changing.

For those of you who have been following The (Not Yet Despite the Best of Intentions) Daily Dose, you know that I relish tongue in cheek exaggeration- the image of my cheeky tongue is quite tasty, is it not?  I believe that there is a place in our intellectual adventures for hyperbole, for exaggeration, for the purposeful yet ethical misunderstanding of something- some artwork, some text, some idea.   

We learn not only by careful attention to what we think is right in front of us.  We learn not only by playing by the rules- the rules of the thing we think is in front of us, the rules of a class, the rules of the academic enterprise, etc. and so forth.   We also learn by the mischievous and even malicious twisting and turning of something.  Bend it out of shape.  Pull off its wings.  Snap its back.  Not all violence is bad- sometimes it gives back more than it takes away. 

Besides, understanding is just the flip side of misunderstanding and is just as violent. Both are constrained by a game of rule following and rule breaking.  Neither one is freer.  Neither one is truer. Neither one is more fixed.  They are different ways to approach something. 

This will be provocative.  Of course, with that sort of promise is just as likely to fall flat. The tyranny of hydraulics has impeccable timing, but I am getting ahead of myself.  Remember that tongue firmly planted in my cheek?  Good.  And I warn you now, I will mix metaphors- the previous slash and burn Daily Doses used an (over)extended thematic of trails and blazes and hikes, oh my.  Now we go deep-sea fishing.  Let’s rock the boat.  Let’s cast our nets and see what gets caught. 

Instead of going to class, let’s go on a date.  And I don’t mean one of those dates looking for love in all the wrong places.  I am not writing a love letter.  We want to score.  We want to get some.  We meet Badiou or Derrida or Judd, or some other someone/something, we really, really want to get to “know.”   We literally do not meet them in the flesh; we meet the body of their work.  Though, in some ways we literally meet them in the flesh, at least our flesh meets their text or art or idea, but that channel hides lots of rocks that could break our hull so we will chart another course for now. 

More often than not we meet a small part of the body of their work.  It is playing dirty to call someone a fetishist.  But I mean no insult when I say our date, our encounter, with a small part of a body of a work is sexually charged.  Badiou’s void just begs us to try to penetrate it.  We never will, because his void is the ultimate cock tease.  I speak, of course, of the academic cock that we all hold in our hands, regardless of our supposed biological sex or culturally constructed gender.  We all strain toward the void, wanting to get inside it. 

There are ways in which our encounters, our endeavors to keep going (and going and going and going) are extended circle jerks. We surround a text, an idea, an art work- we strain toward it, eager, hungry, wanting.  We cannot touch it, and we are not alone in our hard straining towards. We spend lots and lots and lots of words trying.  And we look at the words others have spent trying to get inside something.  If you recoil at my imagery or think it an insult, then I ask you to think long and hard about why you have that reaction.  I mean no insult.

I pause for a moment.  The tension and anxiety builds, and so I lash out to deflect imagined blows.  If Paul McCartney can place an animatronic sculpture of a creepy, middle aged man fucking a knothole in a tree in a pretend public park into the art gallery, and we take and talk about it seriously, then I can place the image of a not quite middle aged woman wearing a strap on and trying to fuck the knothole in Badiou’s text into the classroom and expect to have it taken and talked about seriously.  I get to be an intellectual bad boy, too. 

But I have to be careful.  I am getting tangled in my own net.  I twist and turn.  I am deep-sea fishing.  It is risky.  I might fall off the boat into icy waters. I want to catch something in my net; something I can never hold.  And my net is woven with sexually charged imagery.  That is the net that comes to my hand.

The reason for all this sexually charged imagery is because I wonder about the untouchable void out of which the next not quite touchable void emerges.  The imagery is gendered in ways that could replicate ideas I find troubling.  It is not an uncommon trope to imagine intellectual pursuits as an unmessy, disembodied birth, a strange abstract with no heat or color, no taste or noise. 

What if instead of a void that we try to but cannot penetrate, we are penetrated by an encounter?  We take it in.  We envelop it.  We cannot capture it, but we momentary hold its motion.  It slides in and out- moving, seldom resting, never staying.  Slick, warm, wet.  It marks us.  We mark it.  It comes, and then it goes.  The thing we took in, that we asked to penetrate us, cannot stay.  But it leaves behind sticky traces of the encounter.  And parts of us cling to it even though we no longer hold its movement. 

I am not interested in replacing the disembodied void that gives birth bloodlessly with my envagination that holds but cannot capture the in and out maneuvers of some thing. I want an expanded field.  A bigger net. 

Much of academic discourse is like bad sex.  There are rigid rules about what you can say and what you can do, and too often, it is deadly boring because people are afraid to take risks because no one likes to be laughed at when their pants are down, literally or figuratively. Now there is a (very good) place for rigor, and marking and limiting our field of inquiry means we explore things in depth. A boundless field of possibility will remain forever unplowed. Rules give us a place to play.  The narratives we use to talk about ideas are necessary fantasies.  But we have to be careful, to not get caught up in thinking that there is only rule set, in thinking that there is only one right way to play this game. 

There is more than one way to skin a fish. 

We might need to be open to the notion that sometimes we need to spice up our intellectual life by greeting ourselves at the door wrapped in saran wrap.  We might need to be willing to be ridiculous; to cast our net in shark infested waters.  There is nothing wrong with the missionary position that most academic work takes; it is just important to remember that it is not the only position.  Other positions are not better, you don’t have to be kinky to have a good time, but rigor without rigidity is something to strive for.

It is not just because I am a sadist and enjoy imagining you squirming in your seat, and I do very much enjoy the image of you squirming in your seat, that I weave my net with sex.  I want to give y’all a gift.  I want my willful distortion to be so out there that you can’t help but think, “Damn, if she can do that, then what I want to do and say shouldn’t be a problem at all.” 

Here I am an idealist. 

I want each and every one of you to feel like you have the right to take in, envelope, envaginate any art work, any text, any idea. Let fluid motion get you and it wet.  Be greedy like Derrida, try to capture everything in your net knowing that you can never keep your catch. You must release it.  You will be left with traces.  The net you use is not the same one that Derrida (or Badiou or any other thinker) used though you might weave some of his rope into your web.  I imagine that almost no one will try to weave my ropes into their nets.

You must remember that you did not spin most of the rope you use to weave your net.  The fibers were selected and spun together by conversations that stretch back for generations.  I say this because what you capture in your net, what you choose to take in, what you mark with your wetness, is not just determined by you.  You are not so much outside of the net, using it as a tool.  You are caught in it.  I am caught in my net.  I writhe in it.

Despite being as much caught as a catcher, we still must try to catch things in our nets.  Go fish.  Just remember that the net you use, the net that uses you, limits the type of fish you will find squirming in your net.