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Tom and I have stolen steal this blog! from the Manatee of Love for a weekend, and honey, it ain't nothin' but a socio-cultural house-party. Names dropped in our practically unedited online tête-à-tête include Belle & Sebastian, Tom Frank, Jonathan Richman, Snopes from alt.folklore.urban, John Grey, Ph.D., the ever-lovable Mahir, Oprah Winfrey, and this guy, eww... This is what we know from this article: Rufus Wainwright doesn't write pandering songs about love like the Backstreet Boys: "[his] approach speaks more authentically to the hearts of listeners than today's typical pop offerings." Rufus Wainwright's music never gets morose or depressing, unlike (presumably) Stephen Merritt. Rufus Wainwright doesn't act macho or arrogant, unlike the scores of sports metal bands out there. And Rufus Wainwright will probably never win the kind of success of a Ricky Martin. In other words, again and again, this article goes out of its way to define Wainwright by what he is not. Which makes me wonder exactly how interested the writer is in what Wainwright is. Thanks, Planet Soma, for the link to this quiz which scientifically measures how "straight-acting" you are. On a scale from zero to ten, zero being "THE ULTIMATE IN STRAIGHT ACTING" and ten being "QUEEN STATUS," I score a three. So does this guy. But you're on the SAME SIDE as Britney! What decade produced the most romantic music? Why, we know the answer as just as assuredly as we know what decade is supposed to have the "most political" songs. (No, not the '30's, you communist.) This nostalgia for the past, of course, is based on a very willful denial of certain things. Note that as time lurches backward, each decade's music is seen to be progressively more romantic until we reach the 1930's, not only the point when America's living memory peters out, but a decidedly wretched and unlikeable decade as well. Likewise, the sixties are, well, the sixties. Fun maybe, but definitely not romantic, too selfish for the kind of "real" romance which will invariably be defined, now and forever, by a bunch of old movies, TV shows, books. It's like this restaurant in Times Square -- "comfort food" served in a "diner" decked out with Raymond Loewy's "Boomerang" formica pattern on the tables, Bye-Bye Birdie on the TV, and quasi-GI outfits on the waiters. The whole variety of post-Depression/pre-Beatle American experience gets clumped together and greyed-out like the separate colors of Play-doh in a messy child's hands. How boring. I curse the whole fucking godamned nu-swing movement for this, too. After what's happened this weekend, I can't even say this with a straight face: my dog is dying. I heard a loud thump upstairs, right about midnight last night. I figured it was Gypsy, because she has tendency to...I don't know. She gets up noisily sometimes. Only this sounded worse than usual. But it wasn't noisy enough for me to go upstairs and check her out. About an hour later, as I was finishing up some herbal tea (for stress, you know) and getting ready for bed, my mom asked if I could carry Gypsy to the car. My parents found her downstairs, whimpering and physically unable to pick herself up. So I carried her over, in a typically ungraceful fashion, almost surely causing her pain. They went to some emergency vet out in Commack, who told her that it was Gypsy's arthritis. When they got back, they woke me up to carry her out again. Which means I got maybe four hours of sleep last night, which is better than mom, who got no sleep at all. I don't hear Gypsy upstairs, so she may be at the vet, or she may be dead. Sad to say, I haven't even gone upstairs to ask my parents -- I'm not sure I want to know. And so you're back. Apparently my birthmother wished to see my adoption records, and needed my consent to do this. With my father, at work, and me, at home, we set up a three-way conference call with the civil servant who originally called him. (My dad, considerably more well-trained in dealing with government officials than I am, warned me not to say anything about how "I wasn't ready" or "wasn't mature enough to meet her yet".) I told her that I would deny my birthmother's request. As I was saying this, I had some vague recollection of my life. It was memory of me at Jones Beach, with my parents. To think of me, back then. And me now. In this room, on this phone, a cypher-child giving his cypher-mom a firm legalistic rejection of her existence. I got emotional in a way I hadn't all weekend; in fact, I pretty much put little thought into it until I woke up this morning in a fit of dream-induced paranoia. It didn't take long -- there wasn't even enough time for the song on the radio in the civil servant's office to end. When we were done, I shared some awkward, relieved comments with my dad about how I was glad this was over with, for now anyway, and then we said our goodbyes. I didn't tell my dad what I should've told him, which was that while neither of us have had a particularly close relationship, that didn't matter here, because he was still my "real" dad, because he was the one who provided for me, and this was a fact far too set in stone to change. But it is as hard for me to confide with him as it is hard for him to confide with me, so I let it pass. This doesn't necessarily end this. First off, I have to send the Tennessee Department of Child Services a letter making it all official, which I will do once I'm near a computer with a printer. But my birthmother could also fill in another request. (As could my birthfather. Wherever he is.) She could try to find me by other means, something which would be hellishly awkward for me. I want to be the one initiating this. Then again, what I did today may sufficiently have crushed her enough for her to never even think of contacting me again. It's strange to think of her in these terms. All I know is that she exists -- that, yes, she is still alive, which is more I can say about my birthfather with any certainty -- and that she has done this one action. Everything else is a void. I wonder if she thinks I'm bitter. I'm not, I swear. I'm just not ready. I have to add that there was a horrible pop irony in this, the kind that permanently ruins songs: the radio in the civil servant's office was playing Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive." "'Don't know what I want but I know how to get it / I wanna destroy the passerby'. Have you ever wanted to destory the passerby, dear reader? I have frequently wanted to fuck the passerby, but never to destroy him or her." Oh god, how I love him. And I've never heard a single one of his records. From the precocious.org essay Tom was talking about: In a very analogous way then, isn't it also possible that most women's studies students don't act pushy and obnoxious, that most Irishmen don't have a mean temper, or that most black men run around "wilding" -- perhaps only a highly visible/vocal yet unutterably tiny minority do so, and that all the contradicting examples out there don't stand out enough to be noticed? In fact, it's obvious that Ms. Boyer understands this when she says "The comments about Women's Studies students merely represented what I (and others) have seen of them." First she says that stereotypes are rooted in an obvious truth about the actions of a majority within a group; *then* she says the women's studies stereotypes she was invoking were only based on her experiences with Women's Studies students. Now unless she can say she's had experiences with the majority of Women's Studies students out there, she's contradicting herself. But some stereotypes can have an extremely tenuous relationship to how *anyone* in the stereotyped group behaves. Example? Nearly every image of Native Americans I witnessed as I grew up came from cartoons set in the post-Civil War West. So until I understood what the hell Buffy on *Sesame Street* was talking about, I thought Indians were venal motherfuckers who fought Cowboys, went half-naked, were practically subverbal -- and pretty much did not exist anymore. (Iron Eyes Cody? I thought he was supposed to be a ghostly eminence from the past.) Now, how could the Native Americans of the 1970's be thought to create these stereotypes for themselves? In other words, exactly how could contemporary Native Americans be held responsible for stereotypes which had not only had little bearing on their ancestors lived, but also utterly no bearing to the way they lived now? There are also stereotypes with *no* bearing to reality. At all. You don't believe me? Well, exactly how many jews have horns? Stereotyping stems from what is actually a fairly admirable human function, the ability to take the myriad of particulars found in human experience and efficiently simplify them. These simplifications can have a wide range of truthfulness -- there is "A=F/M"; there is also "the gods are responsible for the well-being of the polis, and require a human sacrifice." But when we lose sight of the particulars, we ask for trouble, especially when we simplify the behaviors of human beings -- not merely because we will be wrong and all that entails, but because such simplifications have the potential to cause others pain, and *that* is the worst thing we human beings do. "We got a call from Tennessee today." It's not as if they hate each other, because they don't, but after the divorce, dad would only call mom up only to talk about things like taxes or inheritences or what not. It's just the way he is. So the fact that my dad was even calling my mom was enough to concern her. And all he had to say was that he got a call from Tennessee to really shake my mom up. Because nobody -- not my dad or my stepmom, not my mom or my stepfather, none of the kids or their wives or whatever -- knows anybody from Tennessee. But I was born there, and that's also where I was put up for adoption back in 1971. Adopting a third child had become extremely difficult. My mother typed letters to adoption agencies in nearly every state of the union, as well as Canada and Costa Rica, and I keep the sizable pile of rejection letters in a Lord & Taylor box in my little closet. I take them out every once and while thanks to base curiousity. They tell an increasingly dire tale. The Nevada Catholic Welfare Bureau Inc.: "Like most agencies, we are experiencing a decided drop in the number of infants available for adoption." The Wyoming Children's Home Society: "I suppose the low supply here can also be explaned in terms of the low supply in your state as being due to the 'pill', the increased ease in obtaining an abortion and the growing acceptance of unmarried mothers keeping their babies." The Chatham County Department of Family and Children Services in Savannah, Georgia: "We feel sure that you are aware of the many older children, the physically and mentally handicapped children, as well as the mixed racial who are not as fortunate as the more normal, younger children who are in need of homes." The phrase "more normal" dries my throat, but I can easily imagine my mother, whose heart bleeds so easily, considering such a choice. I can also imagine my grandparents shrieking, stamping their feet, crumpling into a ball on Three weeks after the first affirmative call, she had me in her arms. I had the most beautiful blue eyes and blond hair, she recalled. (The colors of both would turn more ambiguous later on.) She also remembered that I seemed afraid of the wind, and that I liked curling her long, black hair with my fingers, to the point where she had to walk with her head lopsided when she got off the plane. I always grew up knowing I was adopted. I could never understand why people expected me to bitter about the situation -- to me, the salient point wasn't that I had parents who "didn't want me" (even back then, I realized the reasons of my biological parents would have to remain strictly unknowable), but that I had parents who went well out of her and beat some pretty sizable odds to find me. There has always been some mild curiosity about who my birthparents are, which is really a fairly selfish curiosity about why I am the way I am, but regardless, the mother who brought me up was always my "real" mother, and even the father I was never particularly close to was my "real" dad. Even with the amazing resources that I knew had to be out there on the internet, I don't think I spent more than ten minutes of my time ever looking up stuff about adoption -- except, oddly enough, about two weeks ago when a co-worker queried about it, after this queasy story appeared on Salon. So while I'm still a bit unclear about what exactly has happened (remember, my mom was telling me what my dad told me), it appears that my biological mother may be making overtures to contact me.This troubles me. My personal life is hardly the tidiest thing at the moment, and, obviously complicating the matter, I'm *gay*. I mean, it was hard (at first) for my adoptive mother to find this out; how on earth would this cipher-mom react? So, I have opted not to press the matter any further, at least for now. I do this knowing that this woman (and where's my biological father in all this?) might very well die before I choose to meet her. I think I'd better stop for now. I'm making CAOTM into a weblog, hooray. And just in time for some vaugely harrowing personal news... |
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