If the news is anything to go by, there are only two kinds of Egyptians: There are Islamist fanatics who want to reshape Egyptian society and position it as hostile toward America, and hostile toward multiplicity, and there are the young, hip, activists, who only want democracy.  The former are no good because they look nothing like us. The latter are only good because they look just like us.  The wide swath of Egyptians in between, the rural and politically active, the moderately religious but mostly tolerant, all the apolitical bystanders, are utterly absent from the conversation, and lost from our imaginations.

When we lose them, the middle, we lose our ability to picture a full and complex society, and as Americans we lose the ability to see ourselves in them.  This is more important than ever considering the growing influence of Occupy Wall Street.  Pundits and protestors alike have pointed to Tahrir Square as a source of inspiration for OWS, and Egyptian activists are giving teach-ins and workshops and motivational speeches to Occupy Wall Street protestors.  We owe it to Egypt and to ourselves to take a closer look at the world and the people that produced Tahrir Square.

Chris Abani, a novelist and poet, said, “What we know about how to be who we are comes from stories.  It comes from the novels, the movies, the fashion magazines, it comes from popular culture.  It’s the agents of our imaginations who really shape who we are.”  It follows, to better know Egyptians, to know better what is inspiring a movement impacting the foundations of our country, we should turn to Egyptian literature.

Naguib Mahfouz

Naguib Mahfouz is nothing less than an Egyptian cultural hero.  A Nobel Prize winner, by the time of his death in 2006, he published more than fifty novels and hundreds of short stories in Arabic.  But The Cairo Trilogy – three discrete novels revolving around the same Cairo family – is unanimously regarded as his magnum opus.

The first part of the trilogy, Palace Walk, begins in 1917, and culminates with the end of British occupation in 1919.  The parents of the Abd-al Jawad family are living relics from a gone era, trying to reconcile their dichotomous identities as both parents and role models, and as individuals with their own dreams and desires: The father is a moral tyrant at home, but a libertine with his friends; while his wife – restricted to the home – yearns to go out and participate in public street life, yet fears it intensely.  The next generation, their five children, are struggling their own personal crises, dealing with unrequited love, negotiating marriages, and trying to make an impression on figures of authority, while coming into themselves as political beings who also want to fight those figures of power and thus improve their society.

Palace Walk is a portrait of a family in transition; through them we see the nation in transition as well.  Using very short chapters, and alternating narrators, Mahfouz allows the reader to check in with the inner narrative of each character, as he weaves the bigger and bigger picture: First there is the home and the family in it; then the street, the neighbors, the neighborhood.  Eventually the daughters marry, and we see all of Cairo, and British-Occupied Egypt, until each family member’s personal struggle eventually climaxes as their private lives converge with the public and political apex of that is the 1919 revolution.

Mahfouz paints a literary tableau that gives us insight into the way an average Egyptian experienced Egypt at that point in its history.  Incidentally, the work is abstractly autobiographical; the author would have experienced 1919 at the same age as the youngest boy of the family.  His imaginative accounts of that time, as a state of great tension and flux, are invaluable for today’s generation of Egyptians and Americans, as we reflect on how we experience the same state of change.

Alaa al-Aswany

Another Cairo-born and based author, Alaa al-Aswany provides a more contemporary voice.  Educated in the United States, in Chicago, Al-Aswaany is to this day a practicing dentist in Cairo.  He is also known for his regular political columns advocating for democracy in Egypt and a freer society in general, and leading a historically oppressed community of Egyptian intellectuals.  Al-Aswaany is the author of four novels to date.  His first, The Yacoubian Building, was internationally the best-selling Arabic-language novel for two years, and was later made into the biggest budgeted film in Egypt’s long and successful film industry history.

In The Yacoubian Building, Al-Aswany takes a similar approach to the novel as Mahfouz, attempting to portray the whole of modern Egyptian society by encapsulating it into a small subset of characters, building a Rubik’s Cube out of their lives. As each character’s narrative builds, a new square on the cube is colored in, until finally we can see the color of every square on every side.  We can imagine life in Cairo from so many angles.  If the family unit was Mahfouz’s cube, Al-Aswany’s is the Yacoubian building itself, a real Art Deco style building in downtown Cairo, just a few blocks away from Tahrir Square.  Once an impressive façade, housing only luxury apartments in the 1930’s and 40’s, the building is crumbling now, and its elite residents have long moved out.  Now it contains some middle class apartments, many professional offices, and on the roof, a number of huts have been fashioned, where some of Cairo’s poorest residents live on top of their wealthy employers.

The characters, in their turn, face all manner of challenges: A professionally successful resident struggles with his sexuality, while the young poor kid who opens doors for wealthy people, finds doors of opportunity are closed to him.  A bird’s nest of intersecting narratives interact in clever and poignant ways that give us a sense of the challenges modern Egyptians face, how they feel, what they struggle with, and why they’ve made the personal and political choices they have.

Both Mahfouz and Al-Aswany bravely tackle themes of corruption, religious fundamentalism, homosexuality, promiscuity, love, death, and violence.  In light of OWS (not to mention the ongoing race to find a Republican Presidential candidate), these are themes we as Americans have to take on in a big way. Through reading Egyptian literature we have an opportunity to learn about a culture that has impacted us, a chance to better understand ourselves through embracing the other, and are given examples of how fiction can help shape a culture.

In a recent interview in Cairo, where pro-democracy protests are renewed, and more violent than ever, Al-Aswaany said: “Being a novelist means defending human values… defending freedom, equality, and justice.  If you defend the human values, and when people are in the streets facing death for their freedom, you cannot stay home… I am a novelist, I am a writer, and I know exactly where I should be… I am always with the people.”

The Cairo Trilogy and the Yacoubian Building were written by Egyptians, for the Egyptian people.  Yet, while the work may seem very specific to Egypt, we as Americans can read these books and see ourselves as well.  As Al-Aswaany says, these are stories to defend human values, to portray human truths: Sometimes we pedal and don’t get anywhere.  Sometimes heartbreak breaks a person.  Sometimes revolutions happen, but things still stay the same. Things true in 1919 Cairo remain true in 2011 New York.  Egyptian literature shows that fiction can help pave the way for a revolution, guide a country through the change, and be there as the people begin to find themselves in the new world they/we have created.

Don’t go if you’re not white, that is. On June 9, 2011, the State of Alabama passed the HB56 Immigration Bill. This bill allows for the state to profile, harass, and destroy the lives of those who don’t look like they were born in the United States.

The law forces schools to determine their students’ legal status and it encourages police officers to profile by giving them the power to file criminal charges against anyone who doesn’t look white. That’s right. The law states that the police can do this if the person has no documentation or if “they appear to be in the country illegally.”  Law enforcement officers are never going to stop anyone who is white and if they happen to be here illegally, they will never be questioned simply because of their color. The same can’t be said for the Latino immigrant. The moment the person looks like they “do not belong” it gives the state the right to mess with them.

It also prohibits anyone to transport any undocumented immigrants in a vehicle. So you can’t give your undocumented cousin a ride in your own car in the state of Alabama. This new statue has caused many immigrants (both documented and undocumented) to leave the state.

Undocumented immigrants are a huge part of the U.S economy. These people work the demeaning jobs for meager wages that we as citizens do not want to do.  They scrub the latte cups and toilet bowls, they cook your breakfast and pick the cotton that the table napkins were made from.  In Alabama, crops are dying because there’s no one tending the fields and restaurants are losing most of their staff.

In a state where the Hispanic population is merely 4% and the foreign-born people make up a measly 3%, this law seems to be targeting a certain group of people: Latino Americans and immigrant workers. That’s why on October 14, 2011, a Federal Appeals Court temporarily blocked elements of this law.

The arrogance and sense of entitlement of some of the citizens in this country possess is the reason why racism persists.  Until these prejudices die we will never move forward as a united nation. This entitlement stems from the color of their skins and from the fact they were born here. Clearly, these people have forgotten their history. They have forgotten that their ancestors came in the Mayflower, or through other venues, migrating from Europe. No one was asking for proof back then. It was come one, come all.  They have chosen to forget that the real AMERICANS were the Native Americans. Aside from the Indian tribes, we are all descendants of immigrants.

I’m not saying that some type of immigration reform is not needed, but treating the ones already here like they were hardened criminals is excessive. What’s next? Undocumented immigrants can’t procreate in this country? I don’t like the hypocrisy. Some of the politicians who supported this bill have hired illegal workers. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney in 2006 came under fire for hiring a company that hired illegal aliens. Romney knew it all along but denied it in public. And former Governor of Nevada, Jim Gibbons, was also in trouble in 1993 for hiring an illegal alien to be his nanny. They tried to deny these allegations but failed. I’m sure one or two politicians in Alabama have in the past or now on the low down hired illegal aliens. The guy mowing the lawn, the guy helping the electrician or plumber, are quite possibly not legal. People in office, like many of the rest of us, scream about stricter immigration laws to serve their personal agendas and then quietly look away when these immigrants serve them food.

The inscription on the Statue of Liberty says: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed, I lift my lamp beside the golden door. It did not say this door will be slammed in your face unless you show papers.

The girl with scratched pink ballet flats sat carefully counting her change. Piled on her lap: nickel, quarter, penny, dollar at a time, disappeared into the pocket of a black jacket. Leather, maybe. Her lips moved at only the far corners, white fingers stayed busy. I watched the blue and fading home inked tattoos, one letter across each fingers front. They spoke to her past. R.I.O.T. G.R.R.R.L. I believed her. Wholly.

2.

I wanted to follow her short-cropped head home. Eat creamsicle and kick at the prolific walls. The rats would have names and we would always have plenty of friends, for the house was broken into rooms like above ground wells. Fifteen, twenty or so, we would never take the time or the care to count. Everything leaked. But we were real. And could feel the velvet of the air that came from our open mouths as noise like a hammered trumpet projected. The pennies collected from lost corners and a cup held out filled our belly’s aching with cans of chili and too small amounts of wonderland. We cooked with our same spoons, over flame, a piece of cotton, a needle, and away we fell, fingers licking at the crisped ends of bandages from last weeks decisions.

3.

At the top of the stairwell I lost sight of the girl with the scratched pink ballet shoes. I wanted to follow her home. To cradle her head and whisper: Riot Grrrl.

Blue ink poked into the bone, one letter for each finger, and one for a thumb. R.I.O.T. G.R.R.R.L. I believed her.

Christine Sneed’s stories seduce us. Hot-as-sex and tragic, they illuminate the nature of attraction and the superficial yet character-defining scenes that follow acts of lust. Her characters open and wither and dry-up like flower-petals in an intricate garden; they desire and love and fuck like you would–do–given an attractive or intriguing partner. And such peepholes into the romantic lives of the beautiful and the famous—and the damned—somehow show us ourselves.

I see myself.

And I feel guilty.

I will be better, Christine Sneed.

*   *   *

In five three-word sentences, tell me about the past five years of your literary career.

Doubt, then Defiance

Waiting = Hardest Part

Thanks, Mr. Rushdie!

Thanks, Ms. Pitlor!

I Heart AWP.

In this past decade, you’ve been published in The Best American Short Stories, won the Grace Paley Prize, written and published a beautiful and acclaimed story collection, and had a story accepted into the 2012 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories anthology. Ten years ago, where did you see yourself in ten years?

I don’t know if I have ever actually tried to imagine myself ten years into the future. I think I am firmly wedded to a belief in the unexpected, and also, the belief that if you work hard enough and really love what you do, and are honest with yourself about your writerly weaknesses and do everything you can to improve them through obsessive, exuberant reading and writing, you will start to achieve the things that most writers hope for – a) that someone smart will like your work, b) that someone smart will publish your work, and c) that someone (smart or not) will pay to publish your work, and as a result, based on the checks the publisher has so kindly (but sometimes with great delay) sent to you, you will be able to buy your favorite ice cream when the whim strikes you and pay your rent on time, and buy presents for the people whom you like to see naked on a regular basis.

Your stories are not overtly political. As a fiction writer, what, if anything, do you see as your responsibility to the “real world?” What is the writer’s role –art’s role–in a socially progressing and regressing world? Do you view fiction writing a democratic act–an act essential or central to our American democracy?

Recently I was at a reading in Chicago and someone asked the writer who was up on the stage, “Who do you write for?” and the writer replied, “That one desperate person who needs me to speak to them through my work.” I think that’s such an astute and almost romantic way to look at our work as writers. Interestingly, I worry about the opposite of what you express, i.e. that my politics are so transparent in my stories. In them, I frequently (but maybe obliquely) rant about conservatives and even have one character saying to another in the title story in Portraits that she’d better watch out, or the next thing she knew, she’d be voting Republican. I also think of “Walled City” as a political allegory. I’m so down on the pettymindedness that infects a lot of people, myself included, when it comes to living in a big city or in any city, for that matter, where we are told, so often, by our media (ads in particular) that we should fight for what we want – the biggest car, the most expensive handbag, the best haircuts, three palatial houses, and the consequences be damned!

I do think of writing as a democratic act, in that I hope to give voice to a lot of the very personal fears that plague people – if we all felt better inside our heads and hearts, it’s likely that the world would reflect this, but because there is so much unexpressed and sometimes violent private malaise in so many of us, our aggressive, imperial-minded policies reflect that anger and resentment and fear.

I’ve read your poem “Fifteen Hundred Clowns in One Room”—so sad—and your short story “Clown Testimonies.” And, on your website, this little joke:

Q. What did the cannibal say after he ate the clown?

A. That tasted funny.

Tell me about an interaction you’ve had with a clown.

I have interactions with clowns all of the time. On the highway, in line at the grocery store or at the post office. Isn’t this an inevitable part of human experience? Many clowns, however, leave their big red noses and floppy shoes at home; they like to disguise their clownishness. Which sometimes makes it difficult to recognize them, but I know that their essential clownishness is there, just below the plain, ungreasepainted surface. Sometimes they ask themselves questions such as, “If you had to choose between a VW Bug and a Mini-Cooper, what would you do?” Their answers are dead giveaways – they always choose the VW Bug.

In your interview with TriQuarterly Online, you mention a character you once wrote who “interviews himself, and I got that idea originally from Glenn Gould, the pianist. He’s been dead for thirty years, but he used to interview himself and had elaborate transcripts.” If you interviewed yourself, what would be your first question?

Actually, I did interview myself once for a Nervous Breakdown piece after my story collection was published (you might know that site). The question I asked there was: Are you sure that your stories aren’t based on yourself or on people you know? But here’s a better one, maybe: Just who do you think you are? The gall you have! Expecting people to pay you to publish your work, let alone read it!

And what’s the answer?

Well, writing (at least for me) is the best therapy out there, so that’s one of the reasons why I do it. I guess I expect people to pay to publish my work because I see a lot of other people getting away with it, so why shouldn’t I? (Hmmm…that sounds like a copycat criminal’s excuse; “Everyone else was looting the convenience store for Pop Rocks and Slim Jims. I thought, why shouldn’t I do it too?”)

Which of your characters would you most like to ask some questions? Have a drink with? A one-night stand? A relationship?!

Well, Lyndsey in “Quality of Life” – she’s someone I’d like to ask some questions, e.g. don’t you know that you can simply stop picking up Mr. Fulger’s calls? That you can stop going out to meet him? But at the same time, I feel this deep sympathy for her – I know that she feels like she owes him something. I think a lot of people are in relationships like theirs – one of the two principals is miserable but doesn’t know what to do about it. Mr. Fulger’s power, his authority, his money – these things are eventually like straitjackets for her.

I’d like to have a drink with Thea in “A Million Dollars.” There are a few things I think I could tell her that might make her feel better about her situation.

As for a one-night stand – won’t my boyfriend get jealous if I air my fantasies here? I honestly don’t know – a lot of the male characters that I write are kind of scoundrel-y. I do think Brynne’s boyfriend in “Twelve + Twelve,” Griggs, is a nice guy though. And maybe he’d be hot in the sack. Who knows…wait a minute, I created him, so I can make him a 5-star lover too.

Griggs might also be the guy I’d want to have a relationship with. Or Luis, Alex Rice’s bodyguard. He’s a nice person. I bet he would also be able to get us a lot of free movie tickets.

A lot of your male characters are scoundrel-y. It sounds like you’ve got a kind boyfriend and it’s a happy relationship and, as you’ve said in other interviews, fiction is fiction. So I don’t want to ask you if male scoundrel-ism is a theme in your life. But then I want to ask you: is it? Or do un-loveable men just create better stories—say and do things that drive intriguing plots? Or both, maybe?

I do seem to write about scoundrels a lot of the time, but you can’t really have a good story if you don’t have flawed characters. The women who tangle with these scoundrel types are also flawed, but often it’s in their case, bad judgment. Or else, I guess to be more kind, I could call it misguided hope. The men aren’t necessarily intentionally cruel, but they are not always as nice as they could be.

So what’s next, now? Any new characters for us to lust after and learn from? You know my rendezvous with my favorites are always too short. You need to write a novel!

Your wish is my…well, guess what, I have written a novel and it was just picked up by Bloomsbury USA. I am so damn thrilled. It’s called Little Known Facts, and it’s about a big-time actor named Renn Ivins and the effect his fame has on his two grown children (especially his son) and his two ex-wives, along with a couple of other people he is close to.

So is Renn Ivins a scoundrel?

Renn Ivins isn’t exactly a scoundrel – at least not all of the time. He does do some things that people will raise their eyebrows over, but I am about 95% certain that most readers (provided I have some readers…) will expect him to do the naughty things he does, because, well, he’s a movie star.

Little Known Facts. Tell me one.

Just learned this from reading one of my student papers: “karaoke” means “empty orchestra.”

You turned forty last weekend. Happy birthday! What’s the best present you got? Any wishes for the year ahead?

An end to the partisan bickering in this fraught, absofuckinglutely irritating year before the next presidential election (along with a big, mysterious hole opening up in the ground in the middle of Tea Partyland, one that sucks up the entire constituency).

The best present: a pair of woolly pink UGG slippers, from my beau. So cute!

On Friday, November 4, New School Riggio Writing and Democracy students along with friends gathered to find out during an event entitled Reading + OWS Discussion.  While the reading is a regular event, the discussion about Occupy Wall Street was added as an acknowledgement that the movement is impacting  lives.

Something that emerged early in the night was the way writing created years ago, read now, echoes the activism sweeping the country. Student Rochelle Melton, currently working on a memoir, dug deep in her vault of poems to share life before her northern migration. Her deeply considered work vividly expressed a bleakness many of us have come to realize you can’t escape by moving. The systems of sadness we live under are bigger than state lines.

Other work was so fresh it was ripe with relevance. Riggio student Charlotte Slivka read a work in progress about taking her daughter to the October 7^th Brooklyn Bridge protest and how she was unable to explain why upon getting there people were being arrested. By sharing, Charlotte made the audience complicit in the job of explaining the complex world to her daughter. If we as adults are tying to make sense of what is happening, shouldn’t we include our children in our unknowing?

In between were stories of everyday lives, visiting loved ones in prison first person accounts about the US healthcare system, contemplations on violent instincts, and epic journeys of young love. Never far from anyone’s tongue, yet hardly ever explicit, was Occupy. It seemed to hover over the podium, there to supply extra meaning when needed.

Bringing the reading came to a close, poet and student Enrique Sebastian Rivas performed a soliloquy from Hamlet, reminding us angst in the world is nothing new, there is value in sharing what haunts as, and nothing is ever just one thing. Kicking off the Discussion was a hip-hop/spoken word tribute to the laboring bodies that keep New York City running written and performed by 12^th Street Online Editor Tim Prolific Jones and collaborator SoSoon. Written years earlier, the piece, like Melton’s work read fresh.

New York City nights, bright lights, pretty sights/somebody’s gotta keep it lookin’ all pretty
when the city’s at a standstill, they keep it movin’/it’s a fucked up job, but somebody’s gotta do it

In talking about how it fit with OWS, Jones explained, “as young, working class, black men, being disillusioned with the American Dream is nothing new”. Opening the door to talk about race, class and the occupation, the crowd never picked up the opportunities thrown out from Jones and SoSoon, instead the OWS discussion came into it’s own around the politics of tipping. Mentioned as an example of how neo-liberalism creates conditions for owners to shift employee compensation on to consumers, tipping surprisingly became the evening’s lightening rod. Faces went flush, voices were raised, and lines were drawn. Some felt that tipping is a harmless, culturally ingrained form of financial incentive. Others suggested this way of thinking was what Occupy Wall Street was hoping to change. As one woman offered, we are always participating in systems that contribute to the bigger picture; sometimes connections are clear, and sometimes – as with tipping – it can be less obvious. While we don’t always have opportunities to choose how systems engage with us, we sometimes have a choice on how we engage with systems.

Two weeks after Reading + OWS Discussion, there was an early morning raid at Liberty Park, the home of the OWS movement. What becomes clear that in the face of things that can be taken away – tents, rights, and privileges, writing can often be something that remains. In response to the question, why he joined the Occupy Writer’s statement Hari Kunzru wrote, “Writers do many kinds of cultural work, but one of our roles (or duties, if you prefer) is to make visible what is hard to see, to use words to tell the truth about the world.”

What do raps about the working class, Shakespeare monologues and stories about the south have in common? Everything, they are our stories. They make visible what OWS is working to address; they represent ways writers engage with systems, and right now they are adding to the coalescing of issues that make up the OWS movement. Without stories, OWS is just dogma against dogma.

In the end Occupy Wall Street, no matter its outcomes will run it course. What Shakespeare, rappers and the readers who shared their work during Reading + OWS Discussion teach us is, our stories matter. Whether they are as fresh as a new laptop, or as old as a fading page, stories endure. Our responsibility as writers within the OWS movement is simple. Write.

The book is filled with mementos that date back to New Year’s weekend in 1966, when Didion and John Gregory Dunne (Didion’s husband and Quintana’s father) went to Cat Harbor to attend a party. Diana Lynn was there, and after she discovered that John and Joan were trying to have a baby (to adopt) she suggested Blake Watson, an obstetrician. On March 3 of the same year, as Joan was in the shower, Dr. Watson called and said, “I have a beautiful baby girl at St. John’s Hospital.” From that moment onwards memories are traced, and with Didion’s self-inquiry—the way in which she imagines her future as a mother, and how, after she has been granted her wish she hesitates—she includes Dr. Watson’s second statement: “I need to know if you want her.”

What if I fail to take care of this baby?

She writes: The tone needs to be direct.

Herein lies my respect for the way Didion is capable of taking sentiment and controlling it so precisely it’s as if she uses a steel instrument to cut out the images of her past; it becomes a style and voice all her own. To put it bleakly, unsentimentally, she’s facing the threat of death and coping with the loss of her daughter; yet still, she’s able to balance personal sentiment and literary architecture in a way that makes both seem as though they are destined for symbiotic partnering. Didion reveals how, inevitably, we get the privilege (and torture) of scanning over the memories of our past selves, and as readers, we don’t ask, Why should I care? With her particular grace and nuance, she directs our attention to the subject:

How does the mind work; how is memory contained; how do we endure it?

In the way astrology fascinates the scientist, this memoir is an experiment in which Didion is both doctor and patient, muse and artist, and the structure deftly reveals a control parallel to the quality of its language. Apart from the research—discernment, evaluation, comparisons between the way things are and the way things were, understanding them, coping with them—there’s music on the page. The sentences are like lyrics that continue to play in your head long after the song is done. By its ebb and flow there’s a tension of poetic sustenance. On one end the mind is frayed, on the other, precise. When we come to a repeated line (a technique used in The Year of Magical Thinking), a punctuation of an alternate meaning or perception of the same order of words, we begin to come close to understanding her point of view. And in this moment—Let me again try to talk to you directly—we spot the essayist. Puncture the yolk not with a declarative but with a question: Did I lose it? Did it frighten me?

Of course it’s musical. Do you wanna dance? I wanna dance, Quintana says to her mother as a child in their beach house off the coast of California. The way a sestina rearranges its words, the way a sonnet finishes.

Like when someone dies, don’t dwell on it.

(How could one not dwell on it?)

It’s a line spoken by Quintana to her mother after she hears a poem Didion considers for John Dunne’s memorial service, W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues.” The idea is repeated in the book, like one of those lyrics that continues to return.

“She said she liked nothing about the poem,” writes Didion. “She said it was ‘wrong.’”  The tone of the poem is harsh and rejects the world: Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun/Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;/For nothing now can ever come to any good. She writes, “I now think of her vehemence differently. I now think she saw “Funeral Blues” as dwelling on it.”

Until recently, I have remained relatively unaffected by the recession. I know one person whose house was foreclosed and a few who have lost their jobs. I hadn’t been fired once, until recently. Is there some connection between the trillions of dollars national debt and my lost bartending wages?

The Occupy Wall Street movement has sprouted sister protests in over 100 cities around the world. They seem to be holding the international spotlight as well as Liberty Plaza. The protesters have been criticized for a lack of specific demands.

Admittedly, the heart of their official statement is indignantly vague: “We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice and oppression over equality, run our governments.”

- John Emrys Eller

[Show as slideshow]

I documented the Occupy Wall Street crowd a day before nearly 700 of them were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. The only consensual cause I saw was an overwhelming need to be heard. My photos serve as an exploration of what those voices are saying and who they’re coming from.

- John Emrys Eller

[Show as slideshow]

In response sex columnist Dan Savage, with partner Terry Miller, started the It Gets Better Project (IGB), a viral video intervention reaching out to bullied lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender kids through computer screens. Using their own lives as examples, Savage and Miller aimed to convince young queers that regardless of their current situations, their lives could improve – that one day they too could be successful. The project caught on. Everyone from small town hairdressers to Hilary Clinton posted a message. People breathed a sigh of relief – the kids would be alright.

Not everyone was a fan. For queer theorist Jasbir Puar, the best part of the campaign was “the many [who] have chimed in to explain how and why it doesn’t just get better”. Writing for the UK’s Guardian newspaper last November, Puar pointed out the narrow ways in which the project defines ‘better’  – monied, upwardly mobile, white, able-bodied, gender conforming, wrapped up in capitalism, and maintaining the status quo. Critics of the campaign asked – does it get better for those who can’t or don’t want to fit in? What about those who want better than better?

I thought about these questions while reading the new memoir Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels, the literary debut of New York performing sensation Mx. Justin Vivian Bond. In the book published by Feminist Press, Bond recounts what it was to be a queer kid with a fluid sense of gender, coming of age in the suburbs of America between Vietnam and AIDS. Like any good memoir, it’s not just the story of the Bond but also those around v (“V” is Bond’s preferred, gender-free pronoun).

Early on in the book we learn that a man named Michael Hunter, a boy Bond grew up with and had an ongoing sexual relationship with, gets arrested for impersonating a police officer. Without hitting the reader over the head, Bond sets the stage; here are two babies raised as boys. One would go on to become a legendary gender bending Tony nominated performance artist (Bond). The other would end up arrested for a failed attempt to embody our culture’s idea of the masculine (Hunter).

Born a few decades later, Hunter and Bond would have been the prime target audience for IGB. Instead they had each other, a few close girlfriends (in Bond’s case), and a cast of adults that didn’t know what to do with children that were different. When Bond’s Mom discovers the grade-school Justin wearing her lipstick she shouts “Boys don’t wear lipstick” raising the ire of young Justin who understands already such simple labeling does not apply.

A few years later, feeling conflicted after fooling around with boys at camp (including Michael Hunter’s brother) Justin confides in v’s Mom. Mistake. She called the other boys’ parents, and insisted they come over to talk about it. The parental tête-à-tête was not for the sake of the boys but, as Bond realizes later, was for Bond’s mom to assert “she was, in fact, a good mother.” When Justin’s Dad learned about the camp adventures he shared with Justin that, “curiosity was normal, and that even though I should never do it again, it was over and I shouldn’t feel bad.”  Feeling relieved Justin left the house thinking, “I wasn’t going to hell after all. I was just a normal boy who had done something that lots of kids do.”

“But then I turned the corner…” One of the named boys was there and promised Justin that from here on in life was going to be hell. It wasn’t over,  Justin was soon to be known as the local “cocksucker” – gossip spread by parents and kids alike.

A few years later living up to the reputation, Justin was caught giving head to a broken legged Michael by his mother Ms. Hunter. Not wanting to get summoned by Mrs. Bond again, she demanded Justin go home and tell her what happened, “and you tell her that this time it was your fault, you sick freak!” By then, Bond knew better, aware to stay safe secrets needed to be kept from adults who could not handle the truth.

But what about Michael sitting there with his busted leg and his aching teenage penis unable to escape his mother’s glare? As the book draws to an end we learn Hunter has had many problems, spending much of his adulthood trying to win over the approval of others. Bond on the other hand, rebelled from suburbia, took Justin’s life and has been giving the world Mx Bond ever since.

The take away from Hunter and Bond’s stories is not, as one might assume, how hard it is to grow up queer in America. Or even what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Rather Bond’s memoir illustrates how much harder adults can make life for queer children, often while trying to make life better.

Tango gets to the heart of what It Gets Better fails to understand – you cannot have well-adjusted children if you have fucked up adults. From Justin’s parents, to Michael’s mother we encounter adults who are unwilling to see their kids for who they are. Confronted by their children, the parents abuse their power. Instead of taking on the tension, they work to instill the culture’s heterosexist and uncritical idea of normal into their kid’s minds. It’s not that the Bond’s or the Hunter’s are bad parents – it’s that they didn’t know better.

It Gets Better functions the same way. Each video can be seen as a how-to-guide for young queers coming up, or as a catalog of all the ways adults have learned to struggle to survive. The question is not just for whom does it get better – but how, why and at what cost?

While it might seem unfair to criticize IGB for all the good it has engendered, those it fails deserve more. As adults getting out of the way and working on our shit, while trying to create support for generations to come seems like the best we can do. Along the way we can share our visions, and help each other make them come true. Bond ends Tango with a future I think many of us are be happy to be working towards,

“I do hope that a time will come when queer children can be themselves without any questions, able to experience the same dramas, heartaches and joys that any other kids would have to go through, no more and no less.”