“No Christian can quote those passages [about homosexuality in the Old Testament] with any credibility. For if they do suddenly start getting pious about verses in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, then they can only do so if they adhere to other verses in it such as circumcising all your male children, as it also commands; abstaining from pork or prawns, as it also commands; not wearing garments in which wool and linen is mixed, as it also commands. If you don’t keep up these, but do object to homosexuality, then you are just doing a pick and mix job, and are driven not by religious beliefs but by gay prejudice. If you take this approach to scripture you should also not object to stoning rebellious children or nailing your slave’s ear to the door post.”
— Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Romain gets real with Christians who use Judaic scripture to justify antigay discrimination and pretty much wins the argument.
I love you Internet, but at the end of the day, I still live to get published on paper — to feel a book in my hands and trace the letters with my finger. If that makes me outdated, a Beta Norm as opposed to a Norm 2.0, then so be it. I’ve seen my name online and I’ve seen my name in books, and there is very little that gets me more excited than the printed word.
So here’s what my contribution to The Official Book of Sex, Drugs & Rock ‘N’ Roll Lists looks like. (It goes on another page.) The book appears to be available now via Amazon, but hard copies will be in stores on June 5 through the venerable Soft Skull Press. In addition to myself, the book also features contributions from Keith Richards, Willie Nelson, Michael Musto, Steven Blush, Andrew WK, Rich Juzwiak, and Kurt B. Reighley, among others. No, seriously. Willie Nelson and I are in the same book.
At any rate, here’s an excerpt from the essay I wrote — which, truthfully, is one of the best things I’ve ever written — called “Five Reasons Hardcore is More Homoerotic Than Emo.” Reason #1:
Hardcore bands sing almost exclusively for and about men.
You can say what you want about a band called Cute Is What We Aim For, but there is very little doubt that “The Curse of Curves” refers to a woman’s body. And when it comes to asserting your sexuality, there is probably nothing more brazen than naming your band Boys Like Girls. Which makes it all the more glaring to note the total omission of similar sentiments from the male-obsessed hardcore scene. I mean, there doesn’t seem to be a single girl in the DYS “Wolfpack” (where “every kid is my brother here”), and Judge’s “New York Crew” — which repeatedly invokes the nostalgia of a “New York brotherhood” — almost makes 1982 sound like a fraternal S&M club. At the very least, I can’t imagine wearing “chains around our waists” anywhere else.
A big thanks goes out to Judy McGuire for putting this all together and for giving me another notch on my Publishing CV. There will be more to come, I hope.
There are 25 minutes remaining on the clock. The room is packed, save for two students: one had a health scare, and I hope he’s feeling better, while the other may have just been scared. I did everything I could to prepare my students for this afternoon, but as is always the case, some of them will need another semester in this class to get it right. It’s not punitive, really.
Writing is an activity, a skill, but that skill is independent of the actual ability to form a sentence or to know your grammatical morphemes. To teach writing, in this sense, is to teach thinking — not what to think, but how to process ideas, to discern what’s credible, to evaluate opposing concepts in the dialogical sense. That’s what I tried to do this semester, but as is always the case, some of them will need a little more time with developing the kind of critical acumen we need to exist — and participate — in this world. The world is words. It’s not an insult, really. Most of us are trained from birth to accept and summarize and just shrug our shoulders at the things we could change if we just said “Fuck that” more often.
There’s only 10 minutes left on the clock now, and students are still scribbling. One of them wrote her first word less than 15 minutes ago, and — considering they were given two hours to write — that scares me. Obviously, I want everyone in my class to succeed, to have a eureka moment, to walk out of this exam somehow transformed. I poured my heart out to these students not as a teacher, much less a “professor,” but as a fellow writer who knows how frustrating this is and who has faced his fair share of blank pages and blank headspace. But as is always the case, there’s no way for me to accurately share with them the rush that makes it all worth something — the feeling you get when you read something you’ve written and it feels so true that you’re not even sure it belongs to you anymore. It takes time to get to that place.
As is always the case, we don’t always get the time we need.
“It’s funny, the Toto IV [cassette] — the one with ‘Rosanna’ and ‘Africa’ on it — they made the mistake of putting ‘Rosanna’ on the first side of the record and the last song on the second side was ‘Africa.’ So you’d play ‘Rosanna,’ flip it and play ‘Africa.’ I bet you no one has heard the rest of the record, to this day. Maybe until it came out on CD.”
— Dashboard Confessional’s John Lefler talks tapes. I’m pretty obsessed with figuring out how the ways in which we listen to music changes along with the mediums we use to listen, but this super true observation of cassette-listening quirks escaped me until now. There’s a reason the two songs I remember most from The Cure’s Disintegration are “Plainsong” and “Untitled.”
