Can You Help Me Find Tina?  

What is crystal methamphetamine (aka Tina) to the queer community?  

It is part of our reality.

This is an invitation to you, my brothers and sisters and those identified in trans- or non-gendered terms, to be real - to tell the truth about your lives to one another, relentlessly, and also to relentlessly refuse the trap and dead end of their lies - the trap of their mendacious discourse about our lives - the discourse that always tells the same story - the story that heterosexual life is to be emulated, that we should want marriage and families and ridiculous and creepy styles of self-presentation and all of their sad baggage. 

I need for you to tell the truth, and this telling the truth is essential to revolution.  The name of this essay is not in vain nor is it merely stylistic.  Finding Tina is finding the truth.  Your gay brothers are dying slowly, are checked out from reality because of their pain, or respoinding to it with desperate attempts to go somewhere else, because heterosexist life does not offer enough or the right things and offers a surfeit of the wrong ones. They are dying from H.I.V. infection because their methamphetamine use prevents them from taking care of themselves; they are wandering the streets and wandering through the interstices and alleys of our society, brain-damaged,  with speech impediments and cognitive impairment and diminution of attention due to the effects of methamphetamine.  They are the living dead whose mark is the capital T.

They are not to be cast aside.

They are us.

The addicts, the many methamphetamine addicts that comprise a significant part of us, they are an essential part of the truth of our lives and of our reality.  And yet, the regime and its queer adherents and rah rahs bury this and other essential and important elements of our reality by disfiguring them with delusions.  The ongoing crystal methamphetamine "Tina" epidemic among us, I will venture to say, is our real life. Tina is the truth.  Marriage is a lie.

 Our real lives and desires do not have much of anything to do with theirs, and this is the hard truth, the revolutionary truth.  I want to ask you to stop supporting those who demean us by their very existence and who want us to validate their mechanisms of abuse and control, mechanisms like marriage and the end of public sex and public sexual spaces.  Your queer comrades need you. The revolution needs you.   I need you to tell the truth of our existence.  I need your help.  Let me state again, and risk misinterpretation, that the truth of our lives is in many ways addiction to methamphetamine more than it is heteronormative desires like marriage or family, yet every day our reality, our discourse, our lives are being thoroughly buried by the regime, and this is why we must work to unbury our lives, to know them, to build from our reality from the truth.   

This seeking and finding and uncovering of the reality of queer lives is itself a type of revolutionary work, and it takes unity and concert.

Let’s work together.         

So, I ask again.  

Can you help me find Tina? 

 

 

 

From the Concepts Series

On the Colonization of Concepts:

Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, attempts to replace all democracy, including its superior forms, with liberal democracy, and she does this by building up a poor argument that has become a typical one, that the Nazi regime and the 'Stalin regime' can be grouped together as 'totalitarian', as despotic and dictatorial.

This argument is, among other things, subjectible to skepticism from those who feel the oppressions and falsities of liberal democracy.

Notwithstanding its pomposity and success, Arendt's theory of 'totalitarianism' with regard to the Soviet Union is really a reaction to Stalin's rightly saying 'no' to Zionism. One thing we can say is that, ironically, the reactions to Stalin's saying 'no' to Zionism have now themselves become the forces undermining liberal democracy from the anti-democratic direction. But that is another story.

And, Arendt's conflation of regime types and her anti-Stalinism are beside the point of the real narrative of a detrimental totality anyway.

I say 'detrimental' totality because totality itself is not necessarily detrimental but can actually be necessary and valuable to liberation and justice.

If we stick for a moment to the idea of a detrimental totality however, that is, to the idea of a detrimental totalitarianism, we should implicate much more correctly than the 'mass man' of totalitarian theory the heterosexual political regime and its adherents, and thereby perhaps rescue the term from its origins in Carl Schmitt, himself an anti-liberal loved by liberals, and thusly help bring the term 'totalitarianism' into a more correct and less mendacious narrative.

Why should right-wing heterosexuals like Arendt and Schmitt have anything to do with the idea of totalitarianism when they have so little to do with reality?

These fatuous oafs of heteronormativity who portray themselves as clever neologists sail along in boats that are false concepts riding over seas of false discourses.

However much this is the case, and all LGBT/Queer recognize the falsity of dominant discourses, the term 'totalitarianism' is valid in the heterosexual discourse at least in its abstraction and neutralization, in its general idea of something all-encompassing.

We can rescue, co-opt, and colonize the term and idea however, by first merely bringing it from irreality and misdescription into reality, into the reality of the totalizing nature of heteronormative desire.

Heterosexist desire is founded on the obviously false importance, false centrality, false necessity, and absurd valuation of heterosexual desire. This desire however, is as totalizing as it is false: it demands and commands that all of reality, and certainly all of desire, be forced into its falsity. All queers know this absurdity, the absurdity of living under something both falsely valued and total.

Even, however, if heteronormative desire is total, its forms and styles are not constant. Heterosexuals can jump on the bandwagons of 'free love' or 'marriage and family' as forms of heterosexuality without changing at all the totalizing nature of the regime of falsity that heterosexuality is.

Although Stalin did not "fabricate a structureless mass" as Arendt falsely claims (he merely stood up to Zionism, and this was outrageous to Zionists), the heterosexual regime, an actual structureless mass, keeps its power over, above, and beyond all of its specific iterations ("gay friendliness", "the extended family", "swinging", "a man and a woman"), and thus more properly fits the ideas of totality and totalitarianism. Its structurelessness lies in its total nature.

Heterosexual desire is total.

Under its totalitarian regime, queerness can only serve as its amusement, appendage, annoyance, or sometimes, when heterosexuals get either bored or charitable, as its neutralized challenge.

Totalitarianism is, as a concept, falsely conceived and falsely taught in universities far and wide in its Arendtian description. Its reality is buried in the actual and current totality itself, the totality that is the heterosexual political regime (of force, abuse, rule over, fraud, and other traditional political forms).

This is not an apology for Stalin, despite its having recently come to light that Stalin was involved in homosexual love triangles and in cross-dressing. It is rather more that we make outrageous demands of the heteroesexual regime.  These demands are not actually outrageous, but only seem so, because they, like everything else, are comprehended within a false reality of understanding.  

With that all in mind,  I demand that 'totalitarianism' be used henceforth in its proper form, as a description of the political regime that enforces heterosexual desire.

 

Thanks to Shifty, Lefty, and Scheistée De Leon for their comments and input on this blog entry. 

A Brief Note on American History

There is no real evidence that Increase Mather was heterosexual.  

Confessions of Old Hessians

A mantra of my generation was 'rock and roll will never die', also expressed as 'long live rock and roll' and otherwise.  But now it seems that rock and roll has died, in that it does not have the cachet or popularity it once did. 

I think though, that rock and roll has been connected to 'coolness', and that coolness, originally a necessary posture of the sensitive and honest person, has died.  In the ridiculous conservative culture that we now live in in the United States, no one is really cool anymore.  Ridiculously cheesy people only knock off coolness, is the fact of the matter.

Those who adopted rock and roll as a motif and spiritual center have always been in some important sense outsiders, and yet, gay males, as outsiders par excellence, seem to have adopted rock and roll spiritually and musically and culturally less so than straight males, and I can only begin to wonder why this is so.  When I look at gay males who are into rock and roll, I find that I remember many who seemed especially troubled.  But there are so many gay males who are quite troubled  but nevertheless did not adopt rock and roll as a spiritual center and did not have rock and roll as a strong musical preference. And so I feel that I might reject any thesis about gay rockers that starts from the premise of our being generally more troubled than other gay males.  So what is it about gay men and rock and roll?  I mean, why is the gay rocker such as myself, so solitary?  I suppose it is the case that even straight guys who like rock and roll are in the minority - I mean straight guys who really like rock and roll and have always had rock and roll music as a significant part of their music collections and their lives. 

Has gay preference been dictated too much by weak disc jockeys at gay clubs, who, everyone seems to complain, never play music that gay guys like? Though gay bar music is recognizable and predictable and categorizable, all gay guys I speak to claim not to really like what is played at the gay clubs (and by clubs I mean bars also) and yet this unwanted music continues to get played, and almost always at the expense of rock and roll.  This could be filed under the topic of  how a false gay culture is fabricated by media and upheld by non-critical and unvigilant (i.e. unaware and uneducated) gay guys. 

In any case, despite the lack of prevalence of the taste for rock and roll, there ARE plenty of gay rockers out there.  And in some ways the gay rock culture has flourished even as coolness, its progenitor and concomitance, was dying. 

The gay presence in the rock and roll world itself received a boost when my friend Bill, in the late 1990's wrote a letter to Metal Maniacs magazine sizing up and cutting down the heterosexism and homophobia in the rock world, especially in the worlds of metal and death rock. Bill pointed out how pathetic and weak the rockers who relied on the disparagement of LGBT persons to make themselves seem right, strong, or cool, were.   The letter was valuable, but the flood of positive responses it received from across the world was even more valuable, and also uplifting.  The responses were overwhelmingly positive, and many of them were from males who identified as heterosexual. This letter was a watershed in the history of rock and roll queerness.

Another huge boost to the gay rock and roll world, and perhaps its biggest ever, came when Rob Halford, the singer and front man for the godband of metal, Judas Priest, came out as gay. Judas Priest had been, by widespread agreement, the most liked and most emblematic and iconic band of metal music, and thus a focus and spiritual center of rock and roll machismo. Overnight, rock and roll sensibility and spirituality had proved itself to have a queer core.

I think that the hard rock scene has always been homoerotic, and has always been more equalizing than most non-rockers think.  It has also been an early bearer of transgenderism.  My own experiences in the rock scene bear this out.  While there was definitely some alienation as gay man, there was also a greater feeling of equality than in many other scenes. 

In the pit at a Motorhead show in Philadelphia, I was cared for by lots of guys each time I would get banged to the floor by the wild strength being exercised there. Guys who all seemed bigger than I somehow would swoop me up from the floor and hold me for a second from behind, asking if I was alright. They would sometimes protect me from a coming blow in the form of the freight train like forward movement of a group of wayward pit monsters.  The same in the pit at Napalm Death. The same at a Dark Funeral concert.  Once at a Gwar show, I entered the pit dressed as a blue fairy, wearing blue panty hose and wings made of nylon and metal. That show was rough, with one of the members of the band even stopping the show at one point to tell people in the audience to calm down, but I still felt less alienated there than I did later at a gay club frequented by victims of the fashion industry.  And when I went out to a very straight rock and roll bar in Manhattan dressed in trashy hardrock drag[1], the biggest problem I had was dealing with the jealousy of all of the rough-and-tumble "straight" guys trying to compete to pick up on me and buy me a drink.

Now, to take this examination of rock and roll back up to the theme of the blog, I often ask myself the  question whether rock and roll is revolutionary or reactionary.  The question has been asked of punk too, as a sub-genre of rock and roll.  I think that 'culture' for lack of a better term, overall, cannot be pegged as revolutionary or reactionary, but that this may be changing since some theorists are critiquing the use of the concept of culture in a way that sees the very concept as reactionary, or as used to support reactionary ideas. 

Whether or not we can specify how much a part of a culture or a subculture is revolutionary, I know that rock and roll has at least one element of revolution and that is its anger.  Rock and roll expresses anger in rebellion in general, and not just a happy complacence or rah rahism.   What were the jocks and rah rahs supporting anyway, and what was it that rock and roll was against when it stood against the jocks and rah rahs?    Rock and roll was against the establishment, and the establishment was against the revolution. 

 And, I remember rock and roll from a time when it was ok and good to be angry and loud and defiant and to dress in black, but more importantly, I remember when one's look and attitude and even what one listened to helped to define one politically, and being against the establishment is, in the end, a political position.

Within our own rainbow community (I hate the rainbow flag by the way), we have our own establishment.

According to this rainbow establishment, there are many things that characterize the community of queers - of gays, bisexuals, lesbians, and trans persons, but one of them is not anger. Even though Stonewall was an angry revolutionary uprising, and not respectable or of the establishment, establishment queers rest on its anger to advocate non-angry approaches and non-violence and a whole litany of ineffective and community-perverting approaches to justice. 

Rock and roll reminds me, or, it is for me, the music of the reminder that this is a struggle, and that the goal of queerness is to overthrow the heterosexual political regime and to radically change society, and not to assimilate into it and be accepted. 

I think that we need to queer up the rock scene and subculture even more, but also that rock and roll's historical character and sound and tempo and culture should queer up the gay community itself, or at least, those of us with ears to hear its musical and lyrical message of rebellion.

For me the interpretation of rock and roll was always queer.  I'm not very interested in heterosexism in rock and roll or outside of it.  When I hear the crescendo of a rock and roll riff, I thank its creators for getting me hyped ready for queer revolutionary action.  All of the Christian-residual establishmentarianism and rah rahism are what I know is not real when I hear good rock music.  Rock and rollers make, as Judas Priest wrote about, a 'deal with the devil'.   And the devil is not on the side of the establishment. 

I'm here I'm queer; I have the love and anger that revolution requires.

Work me, Miss Halford!

---

[1]   Note:   I was not 'passable'.