Tuesday, May 30, 2006

what's wrong with me? seriously

How come I can enter into near empty pub and within minutes have a woman introduce her good self, interrupt whatever I was doing and sit down at my table but I struggle to even get a guy to speak to me at a gay bar? And when a guy does come up to me he turns out to be straight... but... what goddamn kinda wrong signals am i sending out? What strange pheromone is seeping out my sweet glands? I mean how the fuck in the stretch of one evening at q&a (local gay night-standing for queer & alternative) of the two guys who approach me one is so clueless (and straight) that he didn't realise he was in a gay bar-wanted to talk to me about some chick he'd scored- and the second wanted to pick a fight with me for being a screaming poof .... ?

What am I trying to tell myself? Would I have made a better hetero? Christ!!! Yes god, maybe you were right.

Postscript: Admittedly the young lady did then tell me that if her boyfriend saw us together he ... well it's not like he'd beat me up or anything, not if he only saw us together... but that's not the point... seriously I am not happy!

Monday, May 29, 2006

oh my gay lord its vodou!

In Haiti the lwa or loa, the spirits of vodou, leave their home beneath the ocean, bas de l’eau to walk the earth and commune oh-so personally with us through the act of possessing. During a service, held often in a hougan or mambo’s (priests and priestesses of vodou) house in a room called the peristyle (vodou chapel) where music, dance and sacrifice swirl around a central post that represents the universe the lwa chooses and then rides a person like one rides a horse, taking the reigns and guiding them this way and that way to the beat of the drums; there they demand, promise and prophesise, dance and cavort, there they swear and say dirty crude things to offend and titillate. Joan Dayan wrote that from a Western vantage these gods of vodou might appear to lack a certain grandeur or transcendence, surrendering themselves to the “spectacle of ceremony with a kind of rough immediacy,” as the lwa of the dead particularly, not tied to a mortal coil nor suffer its tiresome consequences engage in animated exaggerated sexual behaviour, that is much comic as it is erotic, as the Gede (the dead) dance the banda, thrusting their hips to a staccato beat.

Sidestep:

Thus travelling throughout the transcendental realms of the multiverse in my search for a true gay lord I journey to the Caribbean and find an island deep in as much the violence of the past as it is the present. Haiti, a land shrouded in the myths of hollywood zombie movies and technicolour CNN television coverage of its violence and political unrest. Vodou has gotten itself a bad name, whether through the media and church attempts to discredit it, colonial and neo-colonial slander perhaps or maybe it’s sometimes close relationship with the island’s nastier side of sorcery for sale, I don’t know. Regardless vodou is a religion that traces its roots back to Western Africa and was brought to the Caribbean with slavery and thrived despite it or even because of it and is practiced often alongside the christian faiths, primarily catholic who consitutute about eighty percent of the population with little (if any) perceived contradiction with gods from Africa often portrayed using the same christian portraits they do the saints.

Well… it is not exactly the place you’d expect to find some homo-friendly god or religion; where priests and priestesses practice their faith and their sexuality with little moral prohibity. Mambo Racine Sans Bout, an initiated and ordained priestess of Haitian vodou writes that gay men and women though “rigorously excluded from Protestant congregations, and frowned upon in Catholic services” find in vodou an outlet for spiritual expression. Saying that there are a higher percentage gay people at vodou ceremonies and in the priesthood than represented in the general population, knowing of a few peristyles in Port-au-Prince that have congregations where being gay is an entry requirement. While not unknown the priestess continues, homophobic attacks in Haiti are not on the level that they are in other parts of the Caribbean, like Jamaica that have seen mob attacks and killings. Although male machismo is as high in Haiti as it is elsewhere in the region a high level of bisexual activity may point to why it doesn’t easily translate into violence against gay men (lesbians are another story).

Sidestep:

Erzulie Freda, a powerful and important lwa of the Rada nation who was born in Dahomey and brought with the boats that carried the slaves to the new world; Freda is portrayed as the epitome of grace and has the airs of virginal mercy that can be seen in the eyes of Mother Mary. She is fair skinned and very beautiful and is often seen wearing fine jewellery and is the lwa of ideas, hopes and aspirations and is often said to hold a special place in Her heart for gay men who inturn place Her as their met tet (ruling lwa). Yet She is also a woman says Bob Corbett on his Haiti page, who walks with “a saucy sway to her hips”, a lwa who is pleasure loving, taking delight dancing kissing and caressing men. Mambo Racine Sans Bout says that the gay men in Her sway dance wearing the fine colourful dresses that She loves. Thus like nowhere else in Haiti or in the Caribbean for that matter they may openly flirt with other men. Indeed it is in vodou ceremonies she says that gay men are above all prized as dancers combining their athletic prowess with the “voluptuousness of women.”

Contrasting the feminine Freda is that of Her Petwo sister Erzulie Dantor, a strong black woman who was born in the brutality of slavery in colonial Haiti. An enemy of Freda, it is said that the scars that adorn her black face were obtained battling Her pale and delicate sibling. With her Dantor carries knives that she willing to draw in the defence of the vulnerable, deploring violence against women and children and will seek vengeance upon the men who abuse them. While married with children she is said to lie with both men and women in her bed and is seen as something of a patron to lesbians.

Vodou is a religion born out of and in reaction to poverty, slavery and life times of suffering and as Joan Dayan argues, the lwa of vodou do not sit high, detached up in heaven but live, love, hate and suffer with their people. They do not stand above us in some glow of moral puritanism, nor is there a priest to stand in the way of communion simply because of the partner you sleep with... gasp.

Disclaimer
*I have not been to Haiti nor have a witnessed a vodou ceremony so my apologies if I have anyway misrepresented vodou, its believers or the lwa themselves. I promise you it has not been my intention.

References:

Websites:
- Richard Ammon, Gay Haiti 2003, Global Gays

- Mambo Racine Sans Bout, The Vodou Page:
Sex In Vodou
Homosexuality In Vodou

- Bob Corbett, Bob Corbett’s Haiti Page
NOTES ON CENTRAL LOA

- Kevin Filan, Ezili Danto: Single Mother with a Knife, Widdershins, vol 9 issue 5, 2006

- Wikipedia, Haiti

Essays:

- Joan Dayan, “Vodoun, or the Voice of the Gods”, Sacred Possessions: Vodou, SanterĂ­a, Obeah and the Carribean, 1997, pp. 13-36.

Sunday, May 21, 2006

quote of the day

Walking down the steps into missinglink today, searching for Wheat album I couldn't find at JB I stumbled on an instore performance by grind band Fuck... I'm dead. Surrounded by a sea of black metal t-shirts and long unkept hair I stuck around and listened to a few songs, when lead singer Jay Jones said to the crowd "if you don't like someone, set them on fucking fire." Take of this what you will... but I shook my head and left the store, suffice to say I didn't get my CD.

halley's comet and a luminous trail of sentimentality

I remember my dad waking me in the early hours of the morning, and with stern prodding and despite my several determined attempts to fall back asleep he suceeded in getting me out of bed. It was 1986 and we were driving down an unsealed road in our '76 Holden Torana, binoculars on the passenger seat and my siblings and I in the back. I was six years old. We were to witness the comet that Edmond Halley had named and had last visited this bright blue globe in 1910 and wouldn't be back for another 76 years or so for its fifth flyby since Halley had spied it through his telescope. By all projections I'd be lucky to see it again.

My father has been dead now for about 15 years and like many father-son relationships it was a distant one. My father was an academic who spent most of his time in his room slash study and many of my memories about him involve a kiss to a face covered in stubble, as I had quietly interrupted him and his work to say 'night'. Someone recently told me that the love of a father is different to that of a mother but that it could nonetheless be found beneath all the anger, derision and disappointment aimed at his fat sad son. And then sometimes I think maybe Freud was right.

You know I even thought about telling him? It was less than a year before heart failure threw him to the ground. I was eleven and my grandmother was staying with us and in need to accommodate the Empress Dowager in our modest homestead my father and I were sleeping in a caravan we'd hired and parked in our driveway. I think it was really my brother who was supposed to sleep there instead but there had been an argument and a fight, with my father and brother falling into each other so clumsily and my mother screaming for them to stop... well perhaps this is why my father was sleeping out in the caravan and not in the house.

I was in bed and reading when my father came in. The book was about some ecologists fighting poachers in deep dark Africa, sort of a dumbed down 'Gorillas in the Mist' for children where justice and universal good sense prevail. Instead of the murdered researchers bodies being found their heads split by Hutu extremists who would go onto pile the land and rivers of Rwanda high with the bodies of their Tutsi neighbours.

I lay there nervously with the words sitting on my tongue but I said nothing, either because I was scared of how he would react or simply incapable of fully articulating my feelings at that age, I don't remember. But the lights went out in silence and I fell into sleep.

We left the car in a gravelled car park and made our way to the oval. The air was that kind of frigid that sets your skin taught so as to remind you of the boundaries of your self and the outside atmosphere and we stood still and looked up into the universe above and to be honest, even with the assistance of the binoculars I don't remember seeing very much at all; unable to tell the comet from the stars. Maybe there were too many clouds or too much light pollution but I was tired and unimpressed. So we headed back to the car with my father in silent irritation and whether he was angry at the comet or me I don't know.

I could of course try and recall this a little differently, construct an alternative memory to exist alongside this one where I was really awestruck by the sight through the binoculars of this streaking sliver of light. With my father crouched next to me helping me hold the binoculars, speaking in a soft warm tone explaining how this comet travels through cold dark space being warmed by the light and love of the sun that gave birth to it, causing it to stream and sparkle like the magnesium fire on top of your birthday cake. Crossing these skies striking fear, awe and joy into the hearts of many men, reminding us of our place in the world and those things that are really important.

I understood not a word of it yet given how much I saw of him I enjoyed just being near him and in hindsight am grateful to have had moments like this however fleeting before he too disappeared into the night.

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

a giant wombat & me


For the last week and a half maybe I've had nightmare after nightmare. Almost every night a new one. It is getting to a point where I am beginning to wonder about my own mental state.

On sunday night I dreamt that I had angered a giant wombat. Perhaps it was a Diprotodon australis or a some great and terrible animal spirit of the land. Maybe it was both, I don't know but what I do know is that he took a particular disliking to me and for whatever reason he wanted me dead or at least severly crippled.

I ran from him as fast as I could to my house, the one that I grew up in. There an assortment of friends and family waited for me and as I told them of my plight one by one they made there excuses: shopping to be done, rock concerts to be seen, new countries to visit and they left me, abandoned me.

Meanwhile the great Diprotodont recruited many other animals to his cause, to aid him in my destruction. And they gathered around my house; a keen labrador stood by his side: his able lieutenant.

I rang every number I had on my phone in desperation: no answer, can't talk, too busy. I thought of places to hide, doors I could lock but a sense of finality gripped me and my stomach dropped. A wombat the size of a truck could easily smash any door, any lock, any wall that I might put between us.

I was grade A fucked.

  • the last I dreamt