In 5th grade, I learned the phrase “Crimes Against Nature” from the Alabama penal code and/or the state Constitution (I don’t remember exactly), which we were reading through as a class. My teacher, Mrs. Goss, wouldn’t tell me what this phrase meant.
“What do you think it means?” she said, finally — I think she thought I was just messing with her to get her to say something dirty.
I took her seriously, though. I pondered long and hard. Eventually I decided it must mean stuff like clearcutting, polluting, littering, and strip mining. Turns out it was actually a reference to homosexuality!
I was sitting in standstill traffic on Oak, the street I live on, a narrow two-lane near downtown that has been around for hundreds of years. Traffic coming toward me was flowing smoothly, but my side was the one headed in the direction of the Interstate onramp, and a lot of people needed to get to the Interstate after the Derby Festival parade, I guess. I wasn’t in a hurry. Had my windows down, my radio up.
Out of the corner of my right eye I saw a young woman running toward the street. She was a fat girl. I say this not to make fun of her or shame her but to impress you even more with what happened next. She maybe stood 5 feet tall, and probably weighed about 300 pounds. She was heading directly toward the gap between me and the car in front of me at a full tilt.
Out of the corner of my left eye I saw a car coming toward us in the other lane doing about 60 miles an hour, which is crazy for that area, a combination of low-income residential and retail.
All of this happened way too fast for me to do or say anything.
The girl didn’t stop. The car didn’t stop.
She did manage to make it almost across the street, though. The hood of the car (it was a low-slung Mazda sportscar type dealie) caught her in the right thigh as she was almost out of its range. She did a complete head-over-heels flip in the air and landed on her hands and knees, right outside my open window. I looked at her. Then, like a Hong Kong movie protagonist, she said, “Son. Of. A. Bitch.” Stood up. And walked into the liquor store which had been her original destination, without even so much as a limp.
She was gone before I could think to say anything. It was the weirdest thing to see her flip over in the air like that.
The car, of course, didn’t stop.
Everybody else in traffic started getting out of their cars at this point and yelling, “Hey, is she all right?” to each other. Turned out there was a Sheriff’s deputy in one of the cars, so he turned his lights on and did a U-turn and pulled into the liquor store parking lot, presumably to check on her.
I’ve seen this photograph, framed on walls, in various spots in Louisville — barber shops, gastropubs, frame shops, the kind of places that truck in grubby Old Louisville nostalgia. Invariably, the caption beneath the photo, if there is one, states that the photographer was standing on Logan Street, looking south. But that can’t be. Turns out this was an old insurance adjuster’s photo (according to the digital archive of the University of Louisville), and apparently he got it wrong when he labelled it way back in 1935. I know because I live here. The photographer is clearly standing on Oak Street, looking west through the Logan Street junction. The big cathedral building in the background, left-hand side, one block down, is on the corner of Oak and Shelby. You cannot see it from Logan Street looking south.
The photographer was actually standing on the 900 block of east Oak Street, looking west. See:
I know you don’t really care. But it bothers me. Have I become a tiny, cranky, old crank of a tiny man? I guess so.
Almost nobody made fun of mullets until almost nobody had one. In the eighties, shaving the sides of your head was just one way to look different from your older, 70s-styled semi-hippie siblings and cousins. Today we would say that if you shaved the sides of your head but cut the hair in the back, you had some form of a mohawk, and if you didn’t, if you left the back long, you had a mullet. But back then, mullet and mohawk sat on the same continuum, with a lot of give and play between them, a thousand variations of mohawk-like mullet and mullet-like mohawk. We didn’t have a name for “mullet,” either. My hairdresser called it a “ska-fish” when he shaved the sides of my head. (He pronounced “ska” to rhyme with “play.”) My mom called it a “shag,” after David Bowie’s famous haircut. Bowie, because he has remained cool over the decades, somehow avoided being blamed for the mullet, though I think he has a lot to answer for, frankly.
The ancestral ur-mullet, 1973
Lately my redneck relatives have started making fun of hipsters. Note: I do not use the word “redneck” disparagingly. My redneck relatives are reasonably proud to be rednecks, as they should be. If you think that that word is an insult, then it probably doesn’t mean to them — or to me — what it means to you. We’ll talk about rednecks another day. Today the subject is hipsters.
So yeah. Redneck relatives. Talking about hipsters.
“How did the hipster burn his tongue?” asked my Uncle _______, a tractor/trailer operator, the last time I visited Alabama.
I was surprised that my uncle had ever even heard of hipsters. I’d been dealing with hipsters for a number of years, myself, mainly because of my work in the webcomics field, which is crawling with scrawny kids of both genders wearing granny glasses and fedoras, smoking pipes smugly above ironic t-shirt slogans. They can be adorable and they can be annoying. They’re easy to make fun of; they always have been. They kind of set themselves up for making fun. It’s kind of the thing they do. So it’s understandable that my redneck relatives, for whom these kids must look like space aliens, would make fun of them. My redneck relatives will make fun of anybody who isn’t a redneck. That’s the thing they do. That part I get. But as far as I know, hipsters have always been a phenomenon of the trendy, privileged, “alternative” parts of the country — Park Slope, Portland, Seattle, Boulder, Austin. I’ve never seen one in north Alabama, where Uncle ______ lives.
“He sipped his coffee — before it was cool!” said Uncle ______.
I’m going to talk about the word “hipster” for a moment. Pardon the new digression. First I’m going to talk about the word “Punk.” In the 17th century, “punk” meant “rotten wood.” In the early 20th century, it meant “young hoodlum,” “criminal’s apprentice,” and “butt-boy.” It’s easy to see how the word got from there to here:
“Hipster,” likewise, as a word, predates its own most specific definition. Ginsberg spoke of “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,” for example, in Howl. It’s pretty easy to assume that the late-fifties Greenwich Village cats and kitties Ginsberg knew were the cultural and spiritual (and maybe even actual) ancestors of today’s hipsters, but it’s also safe to assume that they were as different from their contemporary offspring as an Edwardian prison butt-boy would have been from John Lydon, whose Edwardian butt-boyishness was metaphoric rather than actual. Was a pose, let us say. Can we say that? 50s hipsters read novels and epic poetry instead of webcomics, for example. That’s one big difference. If they drank Pabst Blue Ribbon, it was because they honestly couldn’t afford a better beer, and they didn’t pretend to be happy about it.
But back to my Uncle _____.
Generally, when a lot of people who aren’t part of a pop subculture start making fun of that subculture, it’s a good sign that the subculture they’re making fun of is no longer viable. I’ll take that a step further. Generally, when a lot of people who aren’t part of a pop subculture acknowledge the very existence of that subculture, then that subculture effectively ceases to exist as a subculture. It becomes a part of the larger culture. It’s safe to make fun of because there is no longer any real reason to make fun of it. The threat is gone. See mullets, above. Hipsterism — in the contemporary definition, not the larger Ginsbergian definition — entered the mainstream the day the first Keystone Beer ad featuring “Keith Stone” appeared on the television set of my Uncle ______.
When Madison Avenue co-opts a subculture, that subculture dies, at the same time that it appears to explode. People start to dress and talk and act like members of the subculture because they picked it up from (for example) a beer commercial. See punk, above. “Punks” who don’t understand the punk ethos – who think that “punk” is a sound and a style, and don’t see how, for example, Patti Smith or Talking Heads fit into that sound and style, because they don’t sound like Blink 182 — are the norm rather than the exception. Right?
Hipsters are a little more slippery than that. They were never much more than a pose, so one wonders if it matters how the pose memeticized its way into a new hipster’s head. Is a hipster who caught hipsterism via Questionable Content in 2008 more or less of a hipster than one who caught it from Adventuretime or Portlandia in 2012? Can a subculture be co-opted if it was always commercially-driven and ironic at its heart? Or is faux mass-media-generated hipsterism, ironically (or, I guess, “ironically”), the most sincere expression of the style?
I guess we’re about to find out.
Turns out, by the way, that Portlandia is where my Uncle ______ first learned about hipsters. He loves that show, the same way that Joe and I love watching nature documentaries.
And, yes, my uncle proudly sports a mullet.
I told him to pretend it’s ironic.
He says, “But it is.”
And who am I to argue? We can all be hipsters now.
We didn’t have a comic book shop in Russellville, Alabama when I was growing up. The nearest one was “The Great Escape” in Nashville, two hours away. But no matter. New comics were purchasable at Cole’s Big Star, as well as several convenience stores around town.
There was a used paperback store in Florence, Alabama that had a pile of three-to-five year-old comics in one corner: Red House Books. That’s where I bought this:
I also bought my copy of Giant-Size X-Men # 1 there, for fifty cents, after it was already worth about fifty dollars. They wised up eventually and got themselves an Overstreet Price Guide and priced everything exactly according to it.
I hear there’s another character active in the Marvel universe these days named Warlock, a member of the New Mutants, so they always have to refer to the real Warlock as “Adam Warlock” now. That is so stupid that it’s extra-stupid. They stepped on their own trademark! What were they thinking?
I’ve just realized that Warlock’s tagline, “The Man Who Stalked the Stars” makes him sound like one of those fans that Hollywood celebrities occasionally have to file restraining orders against. Be assured: his stories are nothing like that. His stories are awesome.
I think it was one of the preachers. I forget which. You’ve all seen the preachers by now, I guess. There was the one who wanted to punch the gay away, most prominently, but there were others. Or maybe it was the kid singing his “no homos in heaven” song in church, with the enthusiastic backing of his congregation. I forget. Anyway, after one of these incidents, a gay friend of mine asked why everybody was sharing this hate speech, promoting it on their Facebooks and Tumblrs and Twitters and blogs. Why not ignore it? Wasn’t rebroadcasting it giving it power? Weren’t we just playing into their hands?
I grew up in a community where anti-gay attitudes were so unremarkable that you could almost say they didn’t exist for the people who held them. Homophobia was not a thing you could even talk about, because homophobia was consensus reality. That’s really the only kind of environment where the worst kind of loony homophobia can thrive: an environment where nobody even notices it exists. Once it has been noticed it immediately apologizes and shuts itself up.
So that’s the reason to share this shit: to drag it out of the murky madness where it thrives, into the light of everybody else’s consensus reality — the one that is actually, you know, real — not so that people who already disagree with homophobic idiots can point and laugh, or not just so that we can, but so that people who assume that homophobic idiocy is the only way to think about these issues can see and hear and think about us pointing and laughing.
Most homophobes in the South don’t really hold their homophobia quite so closely to heart as you might imagine. It’s just another thing they’ve picked up from everybody around them. They think it’s the way normal people think. When they realize that it’s not, that their local community has been infected by a bizarre shared hallucination, they sometimes leave their homophobia behind as quickly and as easily as they might abandon any socially embarrassing practice. Not all of them, no, and not always. But sometimes. And that’s useful.
On the one hand, a local chef opening up an ambitious but overpriced taqueria in a former junk shop is hardly a fair example of the depredations of global capitalism. That’s just silly. Throw some self-righteous collegiate ire at Qdoba’s ongoing occupation of the historic Uptown Cinema building at the corner of Bardstown Road and Eastern Parkway, if you actually feel strongly about these matters. Or not. If you don’t. But don’t pose. It’s boring.
On the other hand, if a chef is willing to serve me a taco with delicious pulled pork as the filling (and, yes, the filling was delicious), he shouldn’t then turn around and say that the reason the tortilla was bland and crappy is because it’s Vegan. Save the difficult-to-make, crappy Vegan tortillas for the Vegans, and please assume that a fat guy ordering pulled pork doesn’t mind a little lard in his flatbreads! Thank you very much!
I see that Taco Punk is hosting a fundraiser for the homeless next Wednesday. Whether that was motivated by the silly review in the Cardinal, or their own conscience, or both — good on them!
When you write something down in a notebook, then turn to the next page, you can sometimes see an imprint of what you wrote on the prior page, especially if you were bearing down pretty hard when you wrote what you wrote. Even if you throw away the written-on page, an attentive investigator can still read what you wrote, by looking for this imprint, or (as they say in the business) the palimpsest, on the underlying page. Palimpsest is one of my favorite words. It comes originally from scholars of ancient literature, who use this trick to, among other things, recover lost works, by looking for them in palimpsest form on the hand-illuminated pages of unlost works. In the modern era, a murder investigation can sometimes turn on a sticky-note palimpsest.
Palimpsests provide a handy metaphor for thinking about the way time works, especially the way that individual moments from the past can remain attached to a place. For example, there is a hill in Cherokee Park, here in Louisville, Kentucky, where I sometimes walk my dogs. The first time I came to this hill, there was a scary Public Works Administration era restroom at the top of it, an airless graffitied cinderblock square with broken-down, rusted toilet stalls and a leaky zinc urinal along one wall. The kind of place that is so gray that any sunlight that comes through any cracks in it looks pink, weirdly, against the gray. You’ve been in those kinds of places. You know what I’m talking about. That was the early nineties.
My boyfriend Joe told me that a gay guy had been killed in there once, when he was a kid, in the seventies. Other friends of Joe’s claim that that’s an urban myth. No matter. That murder, even if it never occurred, is a palimpsest for me. Every time I walk by that hill, I think of that murder in that restroom.
It happens, by the way, that that restroom is no longer there. In the early 00s, the city put up a beautiful, airy pavilion. That old, scary restroom still stands there in my mind, though, like an indentation in the air: it has become, along with the murder that may or may not have occurred within it, a palimpsest, too.
Hunter S. Thompson grew up near Cherokee Park, on Ransdell Street. I read somewhere that he used to go to Cherokee Park and have “hill parties” where he and his friends would burn tires in a bonfire. This hill, the one with the nice new veranda on it, the one with the palimpsests of the old restroom and the tentatively-historical murder, is the most likely candidate for such an activity. The hill I’m talking about is the centerpiece of Cherokee Park, a masterpiece of design, crafted by Frederick Law Olmstead, the same dude who designed Central Park in New York City. It’s also within easy walking distance of Hunter S. Thompson’s childhood home. That has to be the place. So Hunter S. Thompson and his tires and his fires and his childhood friends (and no doubt his drugs and his crazy-ass shenanigans) are another palimpsest that overlays the current reality of this hill.
I think of this stuff every time I walk my dogs there.
You collect these kinds of palimpsests when you stay in a place for a long time. They enrich your experience. I’m not just walking my dog on a hill. I’m thinking of a murder, and a scary old restroom, and a favorite writer, too. I’ve got a lot of palimpsests in Louisville, because I’ve stayed here a while. That’s a rare thing for me. Most of my life, I’ve moved around. I’m sure I’ve left behind many palimpsests in Denver, San Francisco, San Rafael, Portland (Maine, not Oregon), and everywhere else that I have lived. Russellville, Alabama, where I lived when I was a kid, is probably full of them (as are the nameless trailer parks we lived in when my dad was on a pipeline job — trailer parks, motels, campgrounds, etc., that I wouldn’t be able to find even if I looked for the rest of my life). I’m betting that these memories, in palimpsest form, would enrich my life if I ever reconnected with them. But I can’t, and they don’t, because I am never in those places, and to detect a palimpsest of place, you actually have to be there — otherwise there’s no way to feel the indentations in the aether. Many of those places probably don’t even exist anymore.
Is it better to stay in one place, and collect a bunch of palimpsests, a web of memories and connections and associations? Or is it better to throw yourself at random at the world, like a pinball in a pinball machine, like I did, forgetting half of the places you’ve ever lived, and the things you did when you were there — but making a lot of noise and having a lot of adventure?
In Genesis, a very old book of middle-eastern supernatural adventure and romance, we find an intriguing glimpse of the way that homosexuality may have functioned in that part of the world, way back when. The story goes like so: this one upstanding gentleman, our hero, finds some visitors to his city standing alone near the city gates — they are messengers from God, in fact, but that’s not the point at this moment — and seeing that they have nowhere to sleep, he invites them into his house so that they will be safe. The point at the moment is that these men are pretty. Overnight, a gang of drunken men gathers outside the gentleman’s house, and demands permission to gang-fuck the gentleman’s visitors. He refuses to release the visitors, but he does offer his daughters instead. The men insist that it’s male tail they want. The story gets silly and supernatural after that. It doesn’t have a happy ending.
'The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah' by John Martin, 1852
When I was a kid growing up in northwest Alabama, I often heard preachers compare the city of San Francisco to Sodom (which is where that gentleman lived, and where those visitors were in danger of being raped), but I never saw anything like that happen when I actually lived in San Francisco.
“That’s because things like that don’t happen anywhere anymore,” you may say to yourself. “It’s because things like that never actually happened.”
Consider then, this excerpt from “A Boy to be Sacrificed,” a brief memoir by Moroccan gay writer Abdellah Taïa, from yesterday’s New York Times:
It all came to a head one summer night in 1985. It was too hot. Everyone was trying in vain to fall asleep. I, too, lay awake, on the floor beside my sisters, my mother close by. Suddenly, the familiar voices of drunken men reached us. We all heard them. The whole family. The whole neighborhood. The whole world. These men, whom we all knew quite well, cried out: “Abdellah, little girl, come down. Come down. Wake up and come down. We all want you. Come down, Abdellah. Don’t be afraid. We won’t hurt you. We just want to have sex with you.”
Taïa was not actually a “little girl,” though that’s what the drunk men were calling him. That was his nickname because he was an effeminate boy.
The thing to bear in mind is that those men gathered outside the house — in either case, ancient Sodom or modern-day Rabat — were not “gay men.” In Taïa’s wording, they were “frustrated men” seeking “easy sexual objects.” They would have been outraged if you called them gay, or whatever word meant “gay” to them — and rightly so. The “gay” would be the one they desired to poke their penises into. It’s not a good position to be in, if you don’t like penises poked into you.
We have a much milder version of those kinds of guys here in American culture, too. They are social conservatives who have sex with men and boys in dirty bookstores, truck stop restrooms, or via internet hook-ups, but do not live as gay men, and specifically do their best to try to make life difficult for gay people, either by being anti-gay politicians or by voting for anti-gay politicians. You’ve seen the scandals. You know they exist. Such men tend to be found in societies were homosexuality is considered shameful, and where other forms of sexual expression are also limited and painfully fraught with social stigma, too — conservative societies, in other words. No liberal, pro-gay congressman has ever been nabbed with a wide stance in an airport restroom.
In terms of its attitudes toward sexuality, Sodom probably looked much more like contemporary Morocco, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and even Mississippi than it did contemporary San Francisco.
The common wisdom is to say that anti-gay conservatives who practice gay sex are “in the closet,” and just need to “deal with their sexuality,” but no. We are talking about two very different social practices, both of which happen to have homosexuality as a defining characteristic of a larger social ritual. Think of the way that ballet dancing and the Haka of the Maori kind of seem to be the same thing (dancing), but did not develop for the same reasons, and have few common fans and practitioners, if any. Just as there are many different forms of dance, there are also many different forms of homosexuality. Gayness is only one of them. The homosexuality of “sexual relief” bears about the same resemblance to gayness as a Las Vegas “massage” does to heterosexual marriage.
It’s unlikely for a bunch of drunk men to show up on the doorstep of an unwilling male object of desire and demand to be allowed to gang-fuck him in San Francisco because the kind of homosexuality practiced by gay people there is different, and has different social meanings, than the kind of homosexuality practiced by people who do not identify with the gay movement, in places where homosexuality is shameful.
I was never threatened with gang-rape in Alabama growing up — we didn’t go to that extreme there, I guess — but I did meet plenty of otherwise-straight, verbally abusive guys who considered young gay men to be easy marks for “sexual relief.” Those guys weren’t gay. They were fundamentalist Christians, as a matter of fact, every single damned one of them. Some of them were preachers. Bringing them “out of the closet” would serve no purpose, because they are not in it. They are up to something else altogether. At best, they might make good leathermen. But that’s another subject for another day.
In 5th grade, I learned the phrase “Crimes Against Nature” from the Alabama penal code and/or the state Constitution (I don’t remember exactly), which we were reading through as a class. My teacher, Mrs. Goss, wouldn’t tell me what this phrase meant.
