main: May 2008 Archives

...Yesterday's court-tossed wedding bouquet was caught by me and thousands of others who will visit City Halls all over California in a state of "finally" and make it legal. Of course, the decision to allow queer marriage can be reversed by referendumb as soon as November. In the meantime, here's a quasi-update to my very last, coincidental post, "Gay Rice":

So, ladies and gents and everyone in between, why has it taken so long to have a pissy little gay wedding on network television? Yes, we're in California, not Massachusetts, so no wedding, just wedding simulacrum. Maybe, soon, they'll wake me in the nursing home: "Hey, Jeff, they're about to have a real gay wedding, and each and every parent is actually in the mosque."  No idea, but I'm relieved the justice system finally caught up with ABC-TV. I've always depended upon what William Blake once wrote: "What is now proved was once only imagin'd" -- even if imagin'd on Brothers and Sisters.

When that happens, I'll take Guess it's time to take a piece of my piece of chocolate donut out of the freezer.

Down the Aisle, Slowly

It took the supposedly liberal New York City mayor David Dinkins ages to come to his political and humanistic senses and order City Hall to issue domestic partnership certificates. That was January, 1993, more than 15 years ago, and it seemed late in coming even then. No money for city employee health benefits, previously promised, came with the mingy declaration; Dinkins was and will forever be an accountant. (Sample certificate is above. I don't know who the fine gents on this particular document are, although one is named Jeffrey.)

So, on March 1, the moment we were allowed, my eternally patient partner and I registered. In spite of my constitutional inclination to be first, we let two ladies in Teamster jackets precede us, so our certificate says number 2. We used off-brand chocolate donuts from a cart for our wedding cake.

I wrote about this before it happened for the Village Voice, where I worked, but for the life of me I can't find a copy of the piece anywhere to post and show you. It did include a stock wedding-shot with my very own face pasted over those of both the lacy bride and tuxedoed groom -- nutty, but it attracted attention. I was a restaurant critic at the time and genuinely anonymous, but I couldn't imagine a maitre d' who would rip out that queer item and tape it to his station: a restaurant critic could never be anything but a restaurant critic.

My article mildly scorned the idea of gay marriage. Why duplicate the broken-down, female-as-chattel cornerstone of bourgeois stability? Let my (sorry, our) registration be remonstrance to ...

Well, the piece advertised the political festivities of March 1, and that was that.

Why TV Counts

It's Sunday, Mother's Day, 11 p.m., and I have just watched the season finale of Brothers and Sisters, an ABC series I don't usually sample because my no longer eternally patient partner can't stomach the maudlin Sally Fields (me, I will always see her on a table screaming to organize a downtrodden shop) and wonders how the tremulous Ally McVeal can still make a living.

The episode was constructed around a gay-male wedding. Yes, it's a wedding; no, it's a ceremony; the sympathetic script goes blah blah blah. The main family is all wry and gooey with acceptance and love, while the other dad and mom, in an Arizona tract home, won't be bothered to come. "Try to understand we're not bad people," the distant father says to his son's groom-to-be, before secretly passing to him the Family Wedding Cuff-Links to give to his errant boy. It's a sniffle-evoking gesture, an absent parent's love in the form of two cold pieces of metal.

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So, ladies and gents and everyone in between, why has it taken so long to have a pissy little gay wedding on network television? Yes, we're in California, not Massachusetts, so no wedding, just wedding simulacrum. Maybe, soon, they'll wake me in the nursing home: "Hey, Jeff, they're about to have a real gay wedding, and each and every parent is actually in the mosque."

When that happens, I'll take my piece of chocolate donut out of the freezer.

Oh, don't think I didn't pump out real tears when the brothers and sisters toasted and hugged the two gray-suited fellows in love. Those tears aren't frivolous, not at all. They run down my cheeks to mark and anoint every scenario of hope that popular culture offers to my potential sons and grandsons, daughters and granddaughters. The minor generosity of this workaday script may have earth-shaking results when taken in by just that boy or girl. It will award brave and curious children with the pride of permission.

Even in its twilight, television has spectacular power to free our younger selves. What our parents do or don't do shouldn't concern us at all.

A Gay Marriage Reprint

Although I can't find my 1993 Voice piece, here's something I wrote (published May 23, 2004) for the Op-Ed page of the Philadelphia Inquirer the day after gay weddings began in Massachusetts. Again, TV is central:

Justices of the peace across Massachusetts opened for unusual business Monday at 12:01 a.m., and as is his wont, The Tonight Show's Jay Leno found a joke in it. A government office actually working when you need one, he wondered. Maybe we should all say we're gay.

The startling photos filled the covers of most newspapers the next day: the very first female couples and male couples being married, officially wed, in these United States.

Yes, civil marriages of gay citizens have taken place recently in San Francisco and elsewhere, but these are in legal limbo. There were even the reported half-dozen marriage licenses issued to same-sex couples by Boulder County, Colo., in 1975. But Monday (which also marked the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education) made history. Now, under law, these Bay State knots are truly tied.

I happen to be a gay man in my 50s. I came out just after Stonewall -- that's June 1969, in case you've forgotten, when furious gay men, drag queens and lesbians told abusive and corrupt police that they wouldn't take it anymore and stormed Greenwich Village streets. For many years I wrote, spoke and marched for what was then called gay liberation and is now called, more quietly, gay rights. My partner and I have been together for 27 years; we were, in fact, the second couple to register in New York's city hall as domestic partners, a concept I may claim some credit for originating.

Yet, when I saw these love-besotted folks and their friends and families grinning, hugging and crying on the network news, I was wonderstruck. The next day, at the newsstand, I was still incredulous. It may sound odd, but in spite of decades of wearing my gay heart and mind on my sleeve, the achievement of legal marriage for the likes of me is something that, until Monday, was literally unimaginable. It was as if I had been jogging along on some interminable gay-rights road and suddenly a bus with thousands of shoes tied to the bumper sped by. Just married. Just amazing.

It seems I am not alone among my gay-pride contemporaries in feeling this way about the reality of same-sex marriage. "It's beyond anything we saw as possible," Peg, from New York, told me. "We were just barely becoming legitimate, and then this... . It's like instead of renting your house, you own it."

My old friend and marching buddy Melvyn, in San Diego, agrees completely: Marriage was never in the cards. That domestic-partnership registration, so long-sought and hard-fought, is now the fallback position for those who previously wouldn't give gay rights the time of day is miraculous. We each recall the many times one or the other of us addressed hostile or queasy groups of students, librarians, police officers, trying to explain the ultimately ordinary facts of gay life, but actually serving as initial real-world exposures to a species our audiences knew only as artistic, pathetic, deviant, criminal.

Yes, weddings aside, much has changed. AIDS decimated the gay body politic and continues to ravage us as well as so many more. (Did the potent cocktail of ACT-UP activism and unavoidable compassion somehow make this marriage moment possible?) Gelded but successful Wills and Graces have opened the mass market to ever-queerer exemplars, finally normalizing - even if into burnished cliches - those previously demonized.

Opinions, apparently, have followed suit. If polls are true, most Americans 25 and under think gay marriage is cool, leading to the astounding conclusion that optioning this most basic family value to all is inevitable.

But a few of those benign teens will, in the next year or two or four, be tossed from their homes for declaring that they can't ignore the same-sex guy or girl next door. Some of them will be beaten or even slain; some will kill themselves. Schools will continue to isolate them, places of worship will exclude them, the military will use them and lose them.

Mr. Leno's writers, as usual, got it backward. Monday was the first time city hall opened to me. When, Sir, does saying I'm gay keep it from closing?

For an automatic alert when there is a new Out There post, email jiweinste@aol.com.

Ankimo, a silken Japanese small-dish prepared from the scarce monkfish's hefty liver, gives up a rich, accordioned delight that we usually associate with love or art and rarely with death. First, there's the elegance of its miniature presentation. Then, with the slightest pressure between mouth and tongue, the steamed morsel becomes something neither liquid nor solid and takes hold in two places at once: your fragrance-poised inner nose, and your texture- and temperature-sensitive mouth, which is beginning to be fretful about when the luscious visitor will vanish.

As you fear, without warning, it melts and is gone ... to be replaced by a quiet, ghostly version of itself (a pedestrian term, aftertaste), which, if you don't nullify the process with a bite of something else, joins with the brand-new brawny memory of your first, swooning impression. Those two sensory partners will circle and circle, moving ever farther away, until in a day or two they leave behind nothing but words such as these.

I can only imagine that the potentially fatal liver of the blimpy blowfish, fugu, makes ankimo seem like tinned sardine. (Actually, I love certain brands of sardines and believe the modest fellows possess a formidable pleasure-soul.) Fugu liver has been described in gastronomical terms so hyperbolic that it leads anyone to question my constant assertion that serious pleasures are found in frivolous places. There's nothing frivolous here.

Japanese Roulette

You know fugu: it's Japanese roulette. When caught wild and not properly butchered (can you butcher fish?), the toxin in blowfish, especially in the reportedly delectable liver, will paralyze you and, with all your senses still active and screaming, retard and then halt your breathing and heartbeat. Imagine yourself as a pallid star in some Poe-pretending Hammer film, with a queeny Vincent Price gloating over your motionless demise.

Not all fugu has the same amount of toxin, and licensed chefs in Japan gain reputation through their skill in purifying the beast, especially the toxin-riddled liver, occasionally leaving just enough poison to create the sought-after tingling of the lips. But accidents will happen. In 1975, a fugu treat killed kabuki actor and gourmand Bando Mitsugoro VIII, who until that moment had been a "living national treasure." What a ruckus, national art murdered by national novelty. Sale of fugu liver was henceforth forbidden, which made its macho charm all the more potent.

You may have had your fugu memory refreshed by the news that it can be farmed in a manner that results in a toxin-free product, the poison being bred by what the fish eats. Because of this, old-time fugu masters have hit the ceiling, fearing that if risk is diluted, even the wild stuff will lose its social potency, and they their jobs.


Death by Theater

Restaurant critics are supposed to eat everything, even foods we may not like, but I have never eaten fugu liver, or the safer fugu sashimi -- and both have been listed on menus in my hands. Does that make me a culinary coward?

Hard to say: I was once almost done in by a Santa Monica curried oyster, and never forgot. There's risk in anything that goes into one's mouth, just as there's risk in whatever goes into one's mind. I had always thought that arts critics, especially theater critics, were cultural "king's tasters" or, even better, lifeguards (with a footlight tan) who would warn me of Broadway undertow. Really bad theater -- bad art of any kind -- can paralyze one's heart just as effectively as will an errant piece of fish. Yet Grease et alia do their damage slowly, without the thrill of personal jeopardy or any exceptional commensurate pleasure .

Relativists of the "I know what I like" breed may object to the bossy finality of critical judgment. But I have seen the harm done to those who have exposed themselves again and again to poorly trimmed theater and film scripts numbed by clichés, moldering musical warhorses, and cutesy, whatever's-available "thematic exhibitions" of art.

Should we critics continue to eat our fugu so that others may be safe? Yes, of course, but reviewing opportunities are fewer and fewer, just like wild fugu itself and its brave, though diminished, clientele. Most art, and criticism, fail not by taking risks, but by avoiding them. If we're not prepared to put ourselves on the line, we critics, and what we criticize, may just as well be farmed and neutered, too.

For an automatic alert when there is a new Out There post, email jiweinste@aol.com.