8/05/02

The Toilet and The Baptism

- Leroi Jones: expansive and heady, Jones wrote poems and plays (produced in 1964)… included Frank O’Hara … Important black in the 60’s who’s negotiating homosexuality… his identity was not specifically homosexual… imagines experiences with men… pre-Stonewall sexuality… negotiation of blackness via whiteness and not-quite formatted gender identities…

- Taylor Mead… all downtown… part of the Warhol group… Diane Deprima (literary journal with her called The Floating Bear) TFB published Ray Johnson and Frank O’Hara…

- interested in Jones because he was one of the most prominent people of color… TFB was targeted by the FBI because of pornography charges… Jones did go to jail… was an obscenity trial circulating around the movement…

- 1964: The Toilet was predictable by out standards in 2002… written before the proper birth of the gay movement… Foot probably has feelings and emotions for Carlos…

- In relationship to queer theory

- Between Men… Eve Sedrick… work pioneered by Gale Rubin and Adrienne Rich… homo-social theory of culture that calls attention to the shared commonality and stigma between women and gay men… The male trafficking of women… women are bartered and exchanged in contemporary culture… women are used to mediate homo-social relationships between men… everyday eroticism shared by straight men in the culture (football butt-pats)… Straight men have energized limbidinal relations to eachother…

- Homosexual panic (the crossing over between homo-social and homo-sexual)—creates violent policing of that explicit desire… homosocial: erotics between the men in that bathroom… It’s a predictable cultural narrative… what does it say about the culture…

- It’s a polemic that is hard to articulate today… The church says its problem is homo-sexual priests, not child molesters… The homosexual is not the secret agent of abuse…

- Delaney: Red Square, Blue Square… historical, auto-ethnographic notion of Times Square… important methodological move… that historical moment is juxtaposed for our conditions of possibility for the present… What does it mean to touch the past… a tactility about emotionality, to feel it (texture, blah blah blah, forming an affective affection to a previous structure)

- poems are stupid

- I want to go to sleep

- I want to go to sleep

- The guy over there is totally annoying. I hate the way he folds his arms in this lap. And I hate the way he lifts his eyebrow. Why did he have to be so mean, just because he was wrong. Global warming doesn’t happen that fast, you fucking dumbass. Why did you have to make me feel bad about knowing more than you do. He’s so mean. I hate him. In fact, I’m thinking about hating all gay men because I hate him. Does that make me a gay-basher? I don’t care. I hate queer theory. I think its dumb to talk about desire and cultural moments. I want to go to sleep because I don’t want to be in bad mood on my birthday. I can’t wait until 6:15. That’s when class ends. I’m going to buy a book, a book that I’ve already bought once and lost, and now I’m buying it again. That sucks. Damn it. Then I’m going to write James a fat fucking check for a bill that he should have paid. He’s a bastard. Everyone is a bastard. I want to hit the next person that lifts their sleazy eyebrow at me. I want to tell gay people to shut the fuck up. We’re all sad. Can’t you see me? Typing on the keyboard like a raging lunatic. Yes, I’m fucking priviledged. But I’m still sad. I don’t feel guilty about being able to afford the laptop that’s making me so miserable right now. Fuck the poor. Fuck the rich. Fuck every stinking person on the streets of New York. I’m leaving.