Gay Sex, Anyone?

Last night I finally saw Milk, and although I could not find any sign of my friends or myself in the crowd scenes, it was a really good movie. I feel grateful to Gus Van Sant for making an educational mainstream film with political content. Way to rep us proud, homo.

Participating as an extra was anti-climaxtic and made me dubious about the final product. I just wasn't that jazzed standing in the cold watching Sean Penn call the gay to action with his silly little haircut. But the weasel was mistaken dear friends, because Sean is freaking amazing as Harvey Milk. Seriously. Does anyone remember when he dated Madonna and beat up reporters? I totally thought he was a major meat head. Then came his intense performance in Dead Man Walking, but I was willing to chalk that up to luck until he directed Into the Wild. When I heard his little buddy, Emil Hersh, had been cast in Milk I knew they had a special connection, and thought that perhaps Sean and I could too. It's official as of last night, Sean Penn is my boy. And he and Emil Hersh are in man love (I am in bisexual love with James Franco, but that's another story).

Milk made me grateful to all the rad activists who went before me, and showed so much bravery and grace in the face of violent ignorance. It also made me proud of my human rights work continuing the legacy. I'm still happy that Obama won: let's end the f*ing war in Iraq, save the economy and the environment by creating green jobs, and then we can get back to advancing the homosexual agenda. I would prefer to achieve this aim through feminist means rather than marriage (they don't jive for me so much), but Prop 8 totally means fight back. I look forward to seeing you all in the streets, or the bedroom.

Force of Nature

To celebrate the first snow storm of the season I crashed my mom's car into a railing yesterday taking the dog to the park for a walk. We are both fine, and I got out some frustration by doing a lot of shoveling last night. My mom has a really long driveway so she bought a snow blower. Today I broke the door frame of the garage trying to put the blower back in. Has anyone tried to use one of those before? They weight like 60lbs, it's a good workout, but I feel like a crazy force of destruction. Good-bye xmas $$.

Hurrah

I did it. I made it through finals without going totally bonkers and my reading last night went really well. I wouldn't have made it through without the comedic relief provided by Andy Samberg. So to celebrate, I offer you this:

Chingedy Ching (Hee Haw, Hee Haw)

I just took a break from finals to make risotto primavera and though it was my first time, it came out amazing. If you try to make risotto, I recommend dancing around the kitchen to the Dominick The Italian Christmas Donkey song while doing it. I think the joy of the simple folk music infused the food with extra deliciousness.



Also, doesn't the mustachio guy look like a cute Italian tranny from Brook-a-lyn?

Dreidel I Will Play

We always do it the kosher cowboy way in Brookline!



For those of you who don't know, though I love to talk about it incessantly, every year the Kort family throws the most bitchin Chanukkah party. This YouTube link was part of the 2008 invite, so I know it's going to be a gay olde Jewish time!

A Long Winters Nap

Today is the first snow of the year--hurray! It's just a light powdering which my mom informed me wasn't nothing but it feels all nice and cozy inside. I have instituted a no TV policy until finals are over so both my mom and cousin are upstairs. Everyone has been sick and drinking off a large vat of wellness tea I made. I have been sleeping 12 hours a night which seems to be keeping me well. I can't wait until this week is over and I'm finally free. Look for me on Friday doing cartwheels in the Commons after my reading.

11 in 5

For my short fiction final, I have 11 papers due on Monday. I've written most of them but need to revise all and I think I'm getting carpal tunnel. Perhaps I should ask for a massage for x-mas.

Brokeback Backlash?

Last week during a class discussion of Annie Proulx, I took the opportunity to read the following response paper on Brokeback Mountain (see below). Last night, when a student who was absent asked what she had missed people told her gay stuff, lots of gay stuff. Then they went on to say how being gay is cool and hip and everyone is doing it. It was all for my benefit and maybe funny for a second (maybe?), and then I finally told them to stop being ignorant. For those of you at home dying to know how I spend my time, here is the gay manifesto (not) that took over the entire four hour class and started a week ling riot in the brains of my classmates:


November 23, 2008
Laura Campagna
Reading Experience
Brokeback Mountain
I Wish I Could Quit You, Annie Proulx

Gay and transgender characters of the page or silver screen have a tendency to be murdered. When Brokeback Mountain came out, some of the queer community critiqued the wholesale embrace and public lauding of a story in which the gay protagonists end up lonely and miserable or dead. “This is progress?” people asked. 'No,' I thought, 'This is America.' When I told my friends I was reading Brokeback Mountain for class, several people asked me how Jack really dies. There was ambiguity in the film, was it a hate crime or an accident? I had read the story before, but honestly couldn't remember. I was in the accident camp; Ennis needed to believe it was murder because that was the only way he could live with the choice he had made. The choice to live without love. “I hear it's really clear in the book,” my friend said. But I've just finished the story for the second time, and it's still not clear to me. Is it my own stubbornness? Maybe I've had enough of real and fictionalized queer people dying in the Mid-West stories. I'll take the unlucky accident, thank you very much.

What is really going on? Is it just another slight of hand by Anne Proulx whose abstruse and precise writing I love to hate? The story is told in the third person and the tire iron theory is exclusively Ennis' nightmare. According to the information provided by Jack's wife, Lureen, he was killed while changing a tire on a back road. That situation does sound a little fishy, but how would the murders fake a tire explosion? The narrator gives us no reason to suspect she's lying about that detail. Ennis feels her voice is cold, but that could have been his own projected guilt. When Lureen tells Ennis that Jack drowned in his own blood he thinks to himself that they got him with the tire iron. He goes to visit Jack's family and his dad tells him that Jack was always promising to bring Ennis up to the ranch, but after their fight he started talking about a new fella. The information about someone else in Texas confirms to Ennis that it was the tire iron. However, that sentence read as free indirect discourse to me, more like the narrator reporting on Ennis' thoughts rather than a fact of the story. In the final section, we are told that Jack appears to Ennis in dreams; young as they were on Brokeback Mountain and sometimes eating a can of beans with a spoon. That the spoon handle morphs into a tire iron could be seen as further proof of the murder or just a haunting part of the dream.

I think Proulx leaves it deliberately vague because in the last sentence we are told that: “there was an open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe...” What Ennis knows is that Jack is dead and that men get killed for living with other men. He believes in the tire iron, but whether this is PTSD paranoia or what he tells says to be able to sleep at night, we'll never know. It's like trying to fetter out the happening truth of a fictionalized story when I think its clear that Proulx is much more interested in story truth. By refusing to confirm for the reader, she leaves space for Ennis' emotional truth to live which I think O'Brien would approve of. In the end, it doesn't matter how Jack actually died because the threat was real for Ennis, so Proulx makes sure we know how it feels to live with those consequences.

Racism Is Over!

If you want it.


http://racismisover.blogspot.com/

silence, please

It's hard sharing the library with undergraduates, they test my patience. It's like being in the middle of 8000 conversations at once, none of which I feel comfortable responding to directly.

Overheard

Gay Boy: I haven't eaten any solid food today, so I bought myself a muffin. Sometimes I go a week and then realize all I've eaten the whole week is a bagel.

Straight Girl: I know, like half a bagel. Ha, ha, ha.

Dear youngsters, please don't discuss your eating disorders so loudly when your sitting next to me. I'm trying to write a paper and find your problems distracting and depressing. Please go to the counseling center and talk to one of the therapists. Also, a muffin from Dunkin Donuts is not a good dinner, it's just not.