Hello?

Hey, son! About time we talked, don’t you think?

About what, dad?

You, my dear son, you. It’s been a while.

Yeah, sure has.

We missed you.

Dad, you know how much I hated that small town where we lived. The feelings were pretty mutual back then.

Come on, son. You know it wasn’t for no reason you and your friends couldn’t get along.

Oh, so it’s my fault then? Great, dad, calling to tell me that I’m a jerk. What else is new?

You haven’t exactly been a … well, friendly kid back then. Can’t blame others for what you did to yourself.

Why don’t you try being friendly to a group of kids who kick your butt into the dirt every day?

I’m sure it wasn’t that bad. After all, the teachers wouldn’t have allowed anything to happen.

Dad, the teachers hate me too, remember? All that crap about me ‘straying from the path of the righteous’ and ‘mixing with a bad crowd’ pissed the hell out of me.

Well, you were a bit of a troubled kid, disobeying orders and never finishing your homework.

I was busy surviving high school, dad. That place was a freaking nightmare. One wrong move, and you’re screwed.

I went to the same school when I was your age, and it was pretty fun.

You were the jock, dad. I was the kid everyone pisses on.

Maybe if you weren’t so… flamboyant, people might have left you alone.

That’s who I am, dad. I can’t change who I am. But nobody understands that. Even you and mum think I’m twisted or something.

Son, guys your age spend time playing football and hanging out with girlfriends. They don’t….

What, dad? Dance and sing? Play the piano? Watch musicals? Don’t be ridiculous, dad.

You spent entire days singing along to songs from Grease and Cats. What was I supposed to think?

That I liked musicals? Why don’t you try that for a change, huh, dad?

It’s not just that. It’s…. well, the way you behaved, and all. People were freaking out. Your mum and I were freaking out.

Oh my God, I can’t believe you’re telling me this crap. There’s nothing wrong with the way I behaved.

Son, of course there’s something wrong. You’re a guy, and guys don’t act like that.

How the hell do you know how guys are supposed to act? It’s not like it’s written in stone or something.

It’s in the Bible, son. Maybe if you’re not so busy you could try reading it.

Read something that tells me I deserve to burn in hell? No, thanks.

But if you repent, and accept God’s love, you can be in heaven with us! Think about how sad we’ll be if you weren’t there.

Technically, if you’re in heaven, you should be happy. If you’re sad, it defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?

…

Dad, you still there?

Yeah, just thinking about what you said.

Oh, screw that. How’s mum doing these days?

Well, about that… she isn’t exactly hale and hearty, but she’s hanging in there.

Hanging in there? What the hell are you talking about?

She had a stroke last year, and I tried to call you, but you never picked up….

Oh.

Son.

…

Son.

…

You OK?

My nose is runny. Wait a minute.

…

Dad?

Yes, son?

What happened after that?

Well, she was hospitalised for a couple of months, and during that time, she kept asking for you, but no one knew where you were.

Oh.

She got better after a while, but we’re keeping her health in check. Can’t be too safe nowadays.

You know, even after all those fights back then, I still cared about her. But she didn’t give a damn about me.

She did, son. She just didn’t want to show it. When you left, it pretty much broke her heart. She cried for days, and when she wasn’t crying, she was walking around the house like a zombie. She kept saying that she failed as a mother.

Well, she sort of did. Mothers were supposed to love their children no matter what, and she pretty much failed on that part.

Don’t put the blame on her. She has strong values, and you can’t expect that to change overnight.

I waited seventeen freaking years for her to change. That’s not overnight.

I think what tipped her over the brink was the night you left. Remember that?

Yeah. It wasn’t pretty, was it?

No, son, it sure as hell wasn’t. We were all screaming at each other, and after a while, you announced that you were leaving. I swore that when you walked out that front door, I felt sure as hell you were going to come back. You always did before. But that time, you didn’t.

I slept in the park that night, dad. I knew I couldn’t possibly go back again, so I hitchhiked, got a job, moved around for a while. Then I met someone. We were cool for a while, but then he broke it off. So I bunked around at friends’ for a while until I got enough money for an apartment. It wasn’t much, but at least I had someplace I could call home.

Well, you could’ve come back here.

And what? Start another row? No dad, I’ve had enough with that place. At least out there, I had some peace of mind.

So you’re still staying in that apartment?

What, now? Hell no. Left that place ages ago. Moved in with someone.

Oh. So you’re…

Still that way. Yes dad, I am, and I can never change.

But how do you know that?

If you were me, dad, you’ll know.

But I don’t understand.

I don’t wanna talk about this. The last time we did, it ended in a fight, and I doubt you called me for that. How’d you get my number anyway?

A friend of yours passed it along. Took me a while to convince him, but I finally did. The thing is, son, your sister is getting married. And she’s hoping that you could come to the ceremony.

Oh my God, Ella’s getting married? Who is it?

Some guy she met at her workplace. Name’s Rich. Nice guy, treats her well and all that. But most importantly, mum likes him. She thinks he’s a ‘true gentleman’.

Unlike me, I suppose.

Oh, don’t go into that. So, are you coming?

Hell yes I am! I love Ella, and I’m definitely going to be there on her big day.

There’s one more thing. Can you… not bring anyone?

What? I can’t even bring my boyfriend to my own sister’s wedding? Who the hell said that?

Son, let’s try to work things out here. Our relatives would freak if you walked in arm-in-arm with another guy.

Who cares? Definitely not me.

But it’s your sister’s wedding, son. Don’t ruin it for her. She’s been planning it for months, and she really wants to see you again. Please, work with me.

Hmm… all right. But remember, I’m doing this for Ella, not for any of those snotty, stuck-up bastards we have for relatives.

And I’d appreciate it if you don’t take off immediately after. We’d all like to spend some time with you. It’s been a long time, son.

We’ll see how it goes on that day. When’s the wedding, anyway?

Saturday.

What? That’s like three days from now!

I know. This is a pretty short notice, but I really hope you can make it.

Well, it shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll have to cancel a few plans, but Ella trumps anyone else in my life. She’s the only one who remained supportive throughout all those years. Damn, I miss that girl.

You’re going to be seeing her pretty soon, son. And the rest of us old folks as well.

…

…

Hey, dad. I got to go. There’s some work I have to finish. See you Saturday.

Bye son.

The moral of the story permeates not only in the dialog but also in the explicit scenes of affection between Shireen and Atafeh and the displays of skinship. One must take a stance and be willing to take risks to change one’s circumstance. Given that homosexuality is a crime punishable by death in Iran, the movie bears a lot of risk for the people involved in the production of this film including the actors. Never mind that the film was shot in Beirut, Lebanon, the courage of the film’s crew is commendable for affording us the pleasure of peeking into an entirely plausible tribulations of a lesbian couple’s life in Tehran.

Apart from the occasional vagueness and abruptness in plot shifts of some scenes, this is a great movie to watch.

If you enjoyed the movie as much as I did or even if you haven’t, please show your support at http://www.takepart.com/circumstance

Circumstance Trailer. Link obtained from IMDB

A crisis is what it takes to re-inscribe gender onto ourselves (cf Butler). Whether it is the one fine morning I look into the mirror and realize that my hair, when left untied, fucks with my tried masculine presentation, or the time when I decide to take off the black dress I was wearing just to go to the dining hall for a bagel, it takes that moment of risque uncertainty, that gender can partake in surrealism (over and on the real) as re-inscription. But at both these times, I decided that a normative gender should re-inscribe itself unto me. I tie up my hair. I take off the dress. But a crisis can not only fuck gender, it fucks with your methodology – your way of thought. It leaves it dangling precariously and in danger of crashing to the floor. And when it shatters onto the ground, you kneel to pick up the broken pieces.

I want to examine the moment between its precarious dangling and the moment of shattering on the ground. The moment where height is translated into speed towards the inevitability of a disorder. Coming off a praxis where the body takes central stage in the studies of gender and sexuality, I am always left confronting my own naked body, in all its erotic and insecure dimensions. Whose bodies can we talk about? Through whose bodies can we talk about other bodies? How far out should I distend my body and embodiment to look at the multiplicities of Other bodies, bodies that stand on the crossroads of multiple variables? In other words, can I embody Other bodies without consent? And what does consent mean and how do I get it?

Bringing it back to the bodily, my crisis begins where people in groups share a sexual act. Speaking of the particularity of the bodies, where can we place these bodies to set the scene? Friends, each with partners who are not present. In a profuse overflow of spontaneous lust, they begin groping and exchanging saliva, beating the mixture of saliva and dinner’s grease with the tongue. Smells. Limbs here, there. And then they stop. It was all play. A play in desire, a play of pleasure. And through this sharing of an intimate experience, the boundaries between the bodies are blurred, rendered ambiguous, liminal and full of potential for queering. And as this project takes form, a relieved sigh, shared secrets and skins, they go home. The project is for now stalled, and the partners and their bodies were not told of their shared project within that liminality. Partners on the margins, the liminal becomes the conspired center of shared sensuality.

This is where methodology gives in and falls into the threshold of gravity’s pull. The thin thread breaks and it falls to the ground. What was once praxis for a theory of the body from the margins, a theory of the embodied in all its crummy sexual and gendered nakedness, is about to shatter onto the ground. Without consent, gender and sexuality theory becomes another branch of the hegemonic heteropatriarchy it seeks to disable. Bodies are snatched, abandoned without consent. There are now bodies that kiss and caress in a room and bodies that are exlcuded beyond.

Nakedness. This is my crisis of queer methodology at stake: in a body of knowledge and practice that puts the sensual, the sexual, and the sensuous as its departing point for activism and critique, I worry that we leave behind non-consenting bodies. Sex is all good and merry as an act of inclusion, a spiritual and bodily exchange across boundaries. Notwithstanding that desires are specific to particular bodies, the fucking that excludes without consent endangers praxis. Not only are bodies not given the space to be informed and included, but that these bodies are silenced and not allowed to signify. Fucking can be a source of political activism only if it is without the enforced boundaries of exclusion and with the reciprocity of enthusiastic consent.

Or it will only shatter on the floor so that we can begin blaming conservative values, morality, and judgementalism for it all. But it has yet to fall. We are in a crisis. What should we re-inscribe? And how?

Join PT Foundation and the Annexe Gallery for this film screening as a few human rights lawyers and film critic Benjamin McKay talk to us about blackmails on homosexuals, our legal rights and the decriminalisation of laws that target homosexuals.

Please remember to register your attendance: queerasfilms@ptfmalaysia.org

Include your name, age, and who you are bringing along, if any.

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Detective: Someone once called this law against homosexuality the blackmailer’s charter.

Melville Farr: Is that how you feel about it?

Detective: I’m a policeman, sir. I don’t have feelings.

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Queer As Films Session 7

VICTIM
(1961)

In 1961, closeted gay actor and British heartthrob Dirk Bogarde put his career at risk when he played a married lawyer being blackmailed for his homosexuality. Being the first English movie to use the word “homosexual” and shocked the public, this movie gave dignity to the lives of homosexual men living with the threat of blackmail.

Instead of killing his career, Victim gave Dirk a new career as a serious actor. It is also believed to have contributed to the large public sentiments that gave way to the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in UK in 1967.

A few human rights lawyers will join us to talk about blackmails, our legal rights and decriminalisation. Friendly neighbourhood film critic Benjamin McKay will also talk to us about the film and the LGBT movement in the UK.

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Date: Sun 7 June, 2008
Time: 3pm
Venue: The Annexe Gallery, 2nd Flr, Central Market Annexe, KL
Admission: FREE!

Enquiries: 03 4044 4611 (PT Foundation), 03 2070 1137 (The Annexe Gallery)

Note: This is a private event - by invitation only – which will be checked against a register at the door.

Please email to register for this event: queerasfilms@ptfmalaysia.org

Include your name, age, and who you are bringing along, if any.

Please refrain from posting this event on blogs, or anywhere else without permission from the organisers. Thanks!
(This announcement is published on Tilted World with permission of the organiser.)

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Wanna be part of something irresistible and fabulous?
Wanna watch amazing films about being queer in a safe, inclusive environment with friends?
Wanna see if the queer rights movement can have relevance for us in Malaysia?

Now you can… At Queer As Films, brought to you by PT Foundation and The Annexe Gallery. Once a month (First Sundays at 3pm) at The Annexe Gallery, you’re invited to watch some movies with us and join frank discussions with film critics, well known personalities and other minor celebrities we love.

We are trying to organise a meeting next week to discuss the upcoming Seksualiti Merdeka (12-16 Aug). This year, we are using all three galleries and the whole week for this sexuality rights festival. Last year, it was held over 2 days of the weekend and drew about 500 members. If you wanna find out about last year’s event, please check this site: http://seksualitimerdeka.blogspot.com/

For this year, we are already planning a book launch (Body 2 Body), film screenings, a gay anthem gig and also a pot luck for family and friends of LGBT, together with a story-sharing session. If you have other specific ideas of what you would like to see at the fest, please reply this message. Or if you would like to help out with the above, do reply.

Please help suggest topics for:
1. Talks/forums/discussions
2. Workshops
3. Exhibition
4. Performances
5. Gatherings
6. Anything you want to launch related to Sexuality rights

Better still, if you like to organise that component yourself, then give me your number and I will send you details of the meeting so you can come and present the idea yourself.

If you would like to volunteer in any way for this year’s Seksualiti Merdeka, please let me know too. You can help by writing letters, be a contact person, coordinating, carrying things, providing massages, etc.

Let us know!

pang
012 305 1135

I try
to be
but
I am

only objectified
by the fat middle-aged
buggers who talk
about my role as a voter
my place as a citizen
my duties as a Malaysian

when you fuckers
in your suits and shiny
baju melayu
fuck around with democracy
and leave us
with pandemonium
without parliament

stop imprisoning us!

“majority is a maxim”
only when we vote them in
you little fucker

Malaysians are intelligent,
thank you, Najib

but I wouldn’t measure
our intelligence
by your limpid yardstick
of hegemonicracy.

I am to be free
and full -

where are my constitutional rights?

Arrest me
defile me
demonize me
as you will,
Barisan Nasional -
and you shall find
pounding fists
of revolution
breaking down
ISA prison bars
and your door.

This is not metaphor.
This is sedition
if we play by your rules.

But the rule by which
all other Malaysians play,
dear darling Najib,
is the constitution.

“One is born Malaysian, ze does not become one.”

screencap of “I’m F**king Matt Damon”

I don’t know if you people caught a particular episode of Jimmy Kimmel’s talkshow, in conjunction with his 5-year anniversary with girlfriend Sarah Silverman. They screen a duet Silverman performs with Matt Damon, called “I’m F**king Matt Damon“. The title sums it up, really.

So what does Jimmy Kimmel do? Why, get even.

screencap of “I’m F**king Ben Affleck”

With multitude gay references, this is Jimmy Kimmel and Friends with “I’m F*$king Ben Affleck”. Everyone, this is a list of Hollywood stars winking at you (with a clip of Silverman’s “I’m F**king Matt Damon” in the beginning):

Spot the celebrity cameos singing! Stop reading and just watch the video if you like to identify your own celebs!

There’s Brad Pitt as the Fedex guy, Perry Ferrell (of Jane’s Addiction!), the Madden brothers, Josh Groban, Macy Gray, Robin Williams, Cameron Diaz, Joan Jett(!), Harrison Ford, Christina Applegate, Lance Bass, Huey Lewis and of course, Ben Affleck. Identify the rest of them yourself, it’s quite fun.

Also, words cannot describe how surreal it is to have Josh Groban bellow that Jimmy Kimmel is …er, shtupping…Ben Affleck.

It is no secret that we in LAGAI – Queer Insurrection, like many other grassroots queer activists, are not big advocates of gay marriage. As with queers in the military, we think the overall political institution is wrong, and therefore we should not be struggling to have an equal place in it. Through legal marriage, the state coerces people into nuclear families, statistically the most dangerous place in the country, through a system of rewards and punishments. People’s rights in society, whether to health care or immigration should not be affected by the type of relationship they are or are not in. We wish the energy that goes into gay marriage could instead go into the other issues that affect us all, like making queer youth safe in schools and on the streets, providing economic support for queers and all people, and building a society where people’s needs are met, and we are free to live and love as we choose.

However, we opposed proposition 8. Proposition 8 wasn’t about the de-establishment of marriage, it was plain and simple about homophobia, or the maintenance of heterosexual privilege, however you want to call it. It was about religion controlling access to benefits of what is supposed to be a secular state. So we were appalled to see the No on 8 ads put on by the “Human Rights Campaign” (HRC) and other mainstream gay groups, that at best missed the point and were ineffective, and at worst were racist. No On 8 never showed the diversity of gay people who wanted to be married and they never talked about the impact of denying these rights on how queers perceive themselves and their place in society.

The last ads were, instead, appropriative of the history of people of color in the u.s. They equated the history of slavery and the fight for civil rights for African Americans, the internment of Japanese residents and citizens, and the struggle for justice for Latino workers with the struggle for legal recognition of gay marriage. White Europeans exterminated millions of Native Americans, and killed at least two million Africans who were abducted and thrown in the holds of ships to be sold as slaves. Slavery was legally maintained for over 200 years. White supremacy was maintained through terrorism (including lynching), as well as law. Legally enforced segregation persisted until the 1960′s. Although nominally able to vote after the Civil War, African Americans were effectively disenfranchised everywhere in the u.s., and legally disenfrancised in much of the south. The Civil Rights movement was about overturning this systematic legal oppression of African Americans, and thousands of people were injured and hundreds of people lost their lives in that struggle.

It is absurd to casually equate this experience with the experience of not getting state recognition for a marriage.

Racism is Not Over

Starting in the 1960′s pollsters have been asking white and Black americans about their views on racism in America. For example, in December 2006, a CNN poll found that 49 percent of Black respondents said that racism is a serious problem, and an additional 35 percent said it was “somewhat serious.” Compare that to 18 percent of whites who thought it was a serious problem, (while 48 percent at least thought it was “somewhat serious”). This only a year after the federal government abandoned tens of thousands of Black people in Louisiana and Mississippi to die in flood waters, or to beg for help by the side of the road or in a filthy and and overcrowded sports arena.

It is beyond the ability of this statement to address all of the forms and examples of racism against people of color in this country. We just want to say that racism is not over. It is still the very root and core of u.s. society, as is the heterosexual nuclear family.

Perhaps one of the most offensive manifestations of racism in the Prop 8 aftermath is the statement, seen on signs, and now as the front page of the Advocate, “Gay is the New Black.” It is amazing how much wrong can be put into five words. It seems to imply that either Black people are gone, or possibly that Black people are no longer oppressed, because otherwise how could anyone be the “new” Black? It clearly negates the existence, and certainly the oppression of Black gay people. As we said above, it appropriates African American history.

Let’s get it clear, it wasn’t Black people who created Prop 8, it wasn’t Black people who funded Prop 8, and it wasn’t Black people who made Prop 8 win. The vast majority of people who voted for Prop 8 were white. Black people make up only 6 to 10 percent of the California electorate. The CNN exit poll on which the media built the idea that African Americans were responsible for Prop 8 winning was based on 154 Black voters.

The media, including the left media, is titillated by the “conflict” between Black people and gays just as they have been by the “conflict” between Jewish and Black people for decades. Democracy Now has had more gay content since Prop 8 than perhaps in its entire history. We hear on KPFA and Public Radio that white gay people have never done anything to support struggles against racism, and we know that isn’t true. We hear that no queer people of color support gay marriage, and we know that isn’t true either. The impression is given that the people of color who voted for Prop 8 weren’t doing it because they were homophobic, but because they were angry at the racism of the No on 8 ads or because they are generally anti-marriage, and we think that’s not true either. Because there are better ways of handling this contradiction than by participating in a vote that brings out the homophobia in all communities, and particularly places queer people of color at risk.

The mainstream gay organizations, particularly the HRC, waged this campaign as they have waged all others, completely divorced from the community they claim to represent, hiring ad agencies and conducting focus groups, putting out single message bullet points (“It’s unfair. It’s wrong”). We have heard that ads were made and not used with diverse gay couples explaining why they wanted to be married. Probably some of those ads would have been more persuasive, but we will never know.

We still oppose Prop 8, and we are glad that the mainstream civil rights organizations, Asian Pacific American Legal Center, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Equal Justice Society, California NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. filed a petition on November 14 seeking to overturn Prop 8 on the basis that permitting a majority vote to eliminate rights for any group of people threatens the rights of every minority. “We would be making a grave mistake to view Proposition 8 as just affecting the LGBT community,” said Eva Paterson, president of the Equal Justice Society. “If the Supreme Court allows Proposition 8 to take effect, it would represent a threat to the rights of people of color and all minorities.”

Unfortunately, queer liberationists, and other progressive queers have a very low profile in both the straight and left media. On most issues, on any day, KPFA would rather put on the HRC than LAGAI or Gay Shame. Even though the HRC supports sweatshops, and sold out trannies on ENDA. But it is not fair to impute the history of the HRC to the many queers — queers of color and white queers — who fought in the civil rights movement, and continue to fight racism in our communities and elsewhere.

The campaign against 8 will move forward into the courts, and we can only hope the courts overturn it, because frankly we were sick of the gay marriage issue 10 years ago. But no matter how the court case goes, it is important that queer communities address the racism that has boiled to the surface in the Prop 8 aftermath.

We will never achieve equality as LGBT people until we join all the struggles for justice and liberation and against racism and class oppression. We need to honor and name the unique histories of queer people of color, not write them out of history, and out of the present for that matter.

But as we’ve recently come to find in Malaysia, not everything’s that simple. Slick lawyers can be mistaken for something else entirely. So can rampant homosexuals for that matter.

X : I fantasize about men. I have crushes on men. But I’m not gay.
Paul : Huh?
X : Well I don’t have sex with men.
Paul : Huh? So that hand on my crotch bit was purely an accident then?

But let us not jump to conclusions yet.

So how would you define a gay man? Is it by the thought or purely defined by the act? By definition, homosexuality refers to sexual behavior with or attraction to people of the same sex, or to a homosexual orientation. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to having sexual and romantic attraction primarily or exclusively to members of one’s own sex.

You think I’m gay?

But if it occurs on a regular basis without abating, I think that would be just cause for suspicion. The thought counts. Since otherwise if the homo definition only extends to those who have indulged in backyard schoolboy buggery, I’m afraid quite a number would have lost their pink passports a long while ago.

And that includes the closeted virgins out there. Not to mention those not receiving their anal dose regularly.

Makes sense actually. No wonder after a certain age, you’d find gay men nearly extinct in the country! Since most -if they’re not put out to pasture without their weekly buttfucks – either repent, revile or revise their tactics! Repent by getting married to the nearest willing bridezilla. Revile by taking an aggressively homophobic stand instead – perhaps even opening a reformation camp for despairing fags. Or otherwise revise their tactics by making haste to leave the country for pinker pastures.

But that’s all me. Some people equate homosexuality with the act of sodomy by itself. So rampant in our papers these days that it’s a matter of time before they have a raunchy show-and-tell article on sodomy.

For those curious about visiting the other side of the matter just take a look at what Afiq has to say about gay muslims. Not that I’m commending him for his point of view but I’m glad that he has put forth his ideas in an articulate, non-judgemental way while somewhat tolerating ( sort of! ) the mores of the unrepentant sinners. Quite a refreshing take – out of the mouths of babes – far from the usual rabid militant curses I get from the right-wing conservatives!