Time Traveling With Richard Bowes

Richard Bowes reading at Strange Loop Gallery, NYC

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Lately, I've been talking to students about the Lesbian Avengers. I stand up there like a figure of authority, and show a video and answer questions about this dyke activist group I was a part of, and it's all so weird because what's my life is their history.

Like a strange kind of time traveler, I'm not just their past, but their future, too. The Avengers may have been most active in the 1990's, but direct action and political organizing are never obsolete. And eventually, some of those kids I'm talking to will realize that the uncomfortable burning sensation in the pit of their stomachs is rage, and they'll also take to the streets.

One of our queer writers aware at just how life loops and intersects is Richard Bowes. The present is mixed up with the past and future. Good blends with evil, and also mediocrity. An Irish American writer who grew up in 1950's Boston, Bowes mostly does sci-fi and fantasy. As a young writer, he wrote literally about time travel. Lately, much of his work is "realistic" with just a slightly paranormal twist though it is still concerned with time.

Minions of the Moon, one of his most autobiographical books, is also one of his best. Originally published in 1999, and just re-issued, the Lambda Award-winning novel plays hard and fast with the details, though its author did grapple with his sexual identity, and ended up a New York rent boy with a bad drug habit. The twist is that Bowes turns his addiction into a doppelganger who also represents that part of himself that emerges whenever he's stressed out, or needs to get out of a jam. The narrator, Kevin Grierson, calls that double his Shadow, and it sticks with him, appearing periodically even when he thinks it's long gone.

Bowes reminds us that Shadow is something we all have, not just as individuals, but as a society. I was reminded again this weekend of how time doesn't move on an endless, upward trajectory with lessons learned, misery redeemed, and progress written in stone. Even as we celebrate small gains, like the right to marry, youngish queers like Mark Carson, who was murdered by a homophobe in the West Village a few days ago, still cannot walk safely even in our gayest neighborhoods. Everything that's good in the past could happen again. But what was horrible is waiting for us, too.

Beyond that, there's also the merely surprising and absurd. Last week, I had a brief conversation with Bowes about his work and life which he writes about more factually in his upcoming book of interconnected stories, Dust Devil On a Quiet Street. He called his survival "pure luck." He should have died during all his years on the street. There were the sexual predators, the drug violence, the drugs themselves, but he somehow escaped. He never even did time because in those days the police were Irish, and he'd get a break because he looked like every cop's youngest brother. In a miserable joke, he even avoided HIV because he got cancer and was out of sexual commission during the worst of the epidemic.

His surprise at lasting when so many around him didn't, keeps his books honest. They never turn into "How I got clean" stories, or "Redemption through art" fables, or some queer mythology of survival. If he rebelled at Stonewall, it was partly because he was hanging out with some druggie friends, and being East Village riot aficionados, they never passed up a chance to screw with the cops. And if the old Italian ladies started screaming at the police from the windows, it was less solidarity with queers, than a neighborhood hatred of the law. The big revelation: even when we have to fight hard to survive, we owe a fair amount to luck and sometimes the intervention of strangers.

In his books, gender also doesn't stay on its assigned track. As a gay man, when he takes on his life, the main figures are naturally men. Still, when he writes about the enforced masculinity of the military system, even the draft board, he has a strangely "female" sensibility when he reveals how he hated the way they owned your body, taking your clothes and shaving your head like convicts. Stripping you down to your underwear and staring and judging. They enforced their will with beatings and sometimes rape. It was worse than selling yourself on the street where you could at least pretend to have some control.

In another recent book, The Queen, the Cambion, and Seven Others, Bowes takes on fairy tales, plunging further into the ambiguities of time and gender. Here, he narrates most of the stories from a female point of view, and seemed a little puzzled telling me about a writer who asked him why, and how, he pulled it off. "There's no trick to it", he told them. "All the characters are still me."

Follow Kelly Cogswell on Twitter @kellyatlarge

Mothers' Day and the Queer Kitchen

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

One of the few times I've been back to Kentucky in the last zillion years, my mother offered to make lunch if I came over. The menu turned out to be frozen pizza and brownies made from a mix, and for which I was truly grateful. The woman's a rotten cook. Mostly because she hates to. And why not? It's a helluva lotta work, and absolutely poisonous in social terms.

You have to wonder why the kitchen was ever women's place at all. It's dangerous and a little brutal. You could even say it's butch. You hack at things with sharpened knives, heave around enormous pots of boiling liquids. I worked as a prep cook one summer during college, and scalded the crap out of myself when the forty pound pot I was lifting spilled over just a little and the hot water landed on my belly. When I tried to pull my pants away, half the skin came, too. That same summer a girl I knew lost her eyebrows lighting a stove and was lucky to keep her eyes.

Still, I got pleasure out of learning the craft. Not to mention getting the paycheck. But I'm puzzled by people that idealize any part of cooking, especially the "traditional" kind. Whenever I read about yuppie chicks starting to make their own jam and pickles, I imagine my grandmother or great-grandmother trapped in a kitchen in the middle of August with mounds of fruits and vegetables all around her, and no air conditioning in sight. It must've been like a stint in hell. But if she didn't do it, her whole family would starve. And if she screwed up, didn't boil those jars long enough, she'd poison them all by spring. If you want to get back to your roots, what you really need is a little heat stroke or botulism.

Women didn't need feminism's encouragement to flee the kitchen. On the contrary, idealized femininity demanded it of them. White women who could afford it already had black and brown women getting their surrogate hands dirty. That's tradition, too. And part of why my mother embraced middle-class magazine food when she finally left her secretarial job and got married.

It was not only quick, but arranged things so she wouldn't have to break a nail, or even a sweat. It was a sign she'd succeeded, lifted herself out of her working class origins, turned her back on parents who had been factory workers once they left failing farms. They spoke with seriously embarrassing twangs. Said warter, instead of water. Warshed their clothes. Yeah, a lot of cans were opened in my house. A lot of tuna and hamburger were helped. Though once a week, when my dad was home from his job on the road, she would roast something. A chicken. A hunk of beef.

On Thanksgiving, too, while she conceded to tradition and made the turkey, the stuffing still came out of a cellophane bag and the piece de resistance was the casserole of green beans slathered in canned cream of mushroom soup, topped with canned French's onions. It was chic and convenient, with French right there in the title. There were also "salads" consisting largely of JELL-O, canned fruit, and frozen whipped "cream." Half the meal needed quotes.

I think about her sometimes when I'm making dinner. What an irony it's her dyke daughter who ended up back in the kitchen, cooking from scratch. Though I'm not the only one. In my East Village neighborhood overpopulated with restaurants, when you see gaggles of people in checked pants and white aprons sneaking a quick smoke, there is usually a tattooed dyke among them. I've never seen any girls as prissy as the ones featured on cooking shows. No buxom motherly types. No sex pots. Just wiry white girls who like the pace and the competition.

I was startled to discover my Cuban girlfriend's mom cooks no better than mine. Before blood pressure issues put her on a low-sodium diet, her favorite meal was pretty much anything from the Chinese take-out down the block. She was a grade school teacher. Her husband an accountant. A teenaged girl fresh from the countryside would do most of the cooking.

When Faustina finally approached the kitchen, it had been transformed, not by revolution or scarcity, but by Nitza Villapol whose cookbook, Cocina Criolla (Creole Kitchen), was aimed at the modern cook in the modern kitchen. It had a few recipes for the traditional dishes like picadillo, arroz con pollo, and beans speeded up in a pressure cooker. But it also had Waldorf Salad, the same disgusting concoction of apples and walnuts and mayonnaise that my mother used to make when she bowed to tradition, and entered the room she hated.

The Boston Attacks: Learning to Regret

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

He looked just like a young Bob Dylan, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, handsome as sin, and a little lost, with the same dark angelic ringlets, same soulful eyes. All the networks kept showing the photo Friday, right next to one of a boat parked in a suburban yard. Then, they'd show the scene around it, at night now, the darkness broken up with flashing lights, a gazillion trucks, and men with body armor and machine guns. And beyond them, an angry nation also prepared, maybe eager, to kill.

They'd tracked him down because the owner of the house and boat had noticed blood somewhere, on the side of the shed, or on the boat which had a ripped tarp. So we also knew he was wounded. And while the thing played out, and the whole sleepless night afterward, I kept wondering what that 19 year old baby was thinking as he lay inside, bleeding and cornered, his brother already dead. Probably just, "What the fuck. What the fuck." Whatever he'd imagined, toting his backpack to the race, it couldn't have been that. "What the fuck. What the fuck."

Maybe none of it had even seemed real until then. Just a game he was playing with his older brother. There are so many reality shows after all, which are all halfway rigged. And how many of us --let's be honest-- when we're older, look back at what we've done in our teens and twenties and wonder ourselves, What the fuck was I thinking? How did I dare? Sometimes what we did was monstrous. Sometimes insanely, dangerously good. And in either case we're lucky we survived because it wasn't our final trajectory.

To understand, and try to imagine justice, we have to remember that almost all of us are capable of evil, without it being particularly pure. We have a strong desire to wound and maim. We exonerate ourselves. When I read the David Remnick piece in the New Yorker identifying, "the toxic combination of high-minded zealotry and the curdled disappointments of young men" I thought you could substitute plenty of other things for "young men."

All those straights in France furiously queer-bashing because they're losing their exclusive right to marriage. Those men in the U.S. and India justifying rape as masculine power erodes. For a while in Cuba, women who had been curdling for ages got their kicks denouncing their nieces and nephews and kids to the cops who were rooting out queers. It's how Reinaldo Arenas ended up in jail on one occasion. Like others I know. But one mother, at least, lived to regret her own role in the jailing and abuse of her daughter.

Even a couple of stalwarts of the Westboro Baptist Church have seen the light. Just a couple of months ago, the smiling Megan Phelps-Roper, 27, and her sister, Grace, very publicly parted ways with their grandfather's church in Topeka, Kansas after spending their whole lives declaring "God hates fags." And even though their efforts probably killed more people than Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, maimed thousands more, though less visibly, encouraging self-loathing and suicides, rampant vitriol, gay-bashings, and the ignorance and stigma that spread HIV, there they are in polite society, getting kudos instead of blows.

And in case you think you're immune yourself, we Americans after September 11th became complicit in a national program of torture, turning our backs on Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and all the black op sites. People died, or were destroyed and maimed and we didn't do a thing. Maybe because we thought we had good reason. Everybody always does.

So far, nobody seems to regret it much. The Obama administration is as pleased as anybody to sweep torture under the rug. Maybe in the future they'll repent. Just recently, years after he added more fuel to the anti-gay fire, Bill Clinton declared signing the Defense of Marriage Act was a big fucking mistake, not going so far as to admit he has blood on his hands, too, like the Phelps spawn.

This is why I was glad we didn't kill that nineteen year old cowering in a boat after his own monstrous act, even if I was glad it was over. At least his scene. He'll have the future to think it over as the drama goes on without him as it surely will. By the time he was caught, that eruption of violence engineered by two brothers had already been transformed by the likes of Fox News and CNN into dreadful fantasies of another Al Qaeda attack, or failing that, a kind of uprising by shadowy dark figures against the white American majority. And after accumulating more arms, and bb's, black powder, and pressure cookers, Tsarnaev's role will be filled by more deluded young men with names as likely to be Timothy or James as Dzhokhar.

Queering Democracy In France

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Seems like whenever you demand LGBT rights in a democracy, some asshole always declares, "It's a free country. You can do whatever you want inside your home. Why do you have to impose it on me?" Then they call you a fascist, and sometimes cap things off with the advice, "Go back where you came from." Which seems nuts at first, but has a certain twisted logic, since all hate's drawn from the same poisoned well, and our sense of freedom is related to physical space.

Democracy's most important battleground is always public, because freedom's not freedom in private, no matter how many stories you read about visionaries and mystics who find liberation behind the iron doors of a cell. For most of us, the outside world doesn't go away when we close our eyes. It's piped directly past our apartment walls and into our brains where we have to resist a constant broadcast of sneers and threats that aren't empty at all.

Even after decades of fighting back, I take up less space than I should because I know too well that whenever we attempt to escape from our personal jails, even with assumed names, and false identities, we still have to face the thought police, the unofficial cops of the existing order. We've all seen their victims. From the dyke who couldn't find a job, to the transwoman grabbed to play a little stop and frisk.

The forces of law and disorder are on high alert now in France where the status quo is threatened by a bill to make marriage legal for same-sex couples. At first they carefully projected the image of the happy traditional family, filling the streets with smiling moms and grinning, freshly scrubbed kids (many carted to the big cities by transportation paid for by Catholic monies, and marching under banners of fake associations), but the mask has started slipping.

Faced with defeat, the hundreds and thousands of people marching against same-sex marriage are doing it increasingly under truly fascist banners. Their demand? That France return to the country of yore when the Church ruled over everything, and everybody knew their place. Though in case you think it's just those damn Catholics, the Grand Rabbi of France, Giles Bernheim, known for plagiarizing some of his right-wing rants, has once again borrowed liberally for his latest antigay work.

More than the rhetoric is getting violent. During a recent march, members of the opposition party decided to engineer their own Arab Spring, a Printemps français, which wouldn't have meant more freedom for people, but less, and instead of signaling a willingness to sacrifice their own lives on the altar of politics, pretty much showed they only wanted to shed ours.

Then, a couple of weeks ago at Saint Etienne, a mob of Young Nationalists prevented the Socialist Deputy Erwann Binet from speaking at a meeting to explain the law about marriage equality to students. They took over the space, climbed on tables and reportedly shouted "France for the French!" threatening to pull the place to pieces. Afterwards, a similar conference scheduled for April 8 at the prestigious School of Political Science at Grenoble was cancelled after more promises of violence, including death threats against the organizer, Benjamin Rosmini.

They move in packs, pick us off like sheep. Last week alone, SOS Homophobia in France received sixty reports of assaults on LGBT people. And in good old Gai Paree just this past weekend, there was a particularly brutal attack in which several men attacked two guys for walking arm in arm. Wilfred de Bruijn doesn't even remember the assault, just leaving a party and waking up in an ambulance, throwing up blood. His boyfriend had to explain how his face turned into a pulpy broken mess. De Bruijn posted it on Facebook. "This is the face of homophobia."

That was in the 19th arrondissement, a tough neighborhood where there's lots of free-floating testosterone and kids of North African descent form gangs divided into Muslims and Jews, more out of convenience than religious conviction. Weekends often see their blood spilt. But apparently now, we're the prey.

Another couple was attacked the same night, this time in the 10th. Sylvain, the guy that got beaten, didn't look as bad as De Bruijn. But still. And Sunday night, in yet another neighborhood, a dozen masked thugs vandalized a cultural center hosting an important LGBT conference. Their banner was ripped down, and the front plastered over with posters for the antigay, "Manif pour tous," Demo for Everyone, being sponsored by the Printemps français. Which lately makes me think of Mel Brooks and his little ditty, Springtime for Hitler, (and Germany). Which seems to be catching on.

Maybe it will die down when the vote is over and done. I hope so. Let's lend our support to French queers who are trying to fight back with demos like the Rally Against Homophobia planned for Wednesday in Paris.