This has been an interesting fortnight, and the last few days have been strange, hopeful, and also quite misery-inducing.
The good news is that summer, my least favourite season, has finally ended. Summer in Chicago is particularly vile, with blankets of humidity swaddling the city and making it hard to breathe outside, even in the early morning or late evening (this skin does not see sunlight during summer, oh, no, no, no: there’s a reason it has aged relatively well). Masks make it all harder, of course, and no one can really afford to crank up the air-conditioning so every place is either hot or unpleasantly warm. And people, uff, the people everywhere! Chicagoans are so desperate for the four or so weeks of heat that they cram a hundred events into every week, making crowds unavoidable everywhere you go. I miss the regular sociality of city life, but not so much that I want to be in sweaty, hot crowds (Chicago attracts a LOT of tourists in the summer). At some point, now that the weather is better, I may even get on my first bus trip since March of 2020 and make it downtown, at least. I’ve been on car trips with friends through the city, but I do miss taking the #6 and just sauntering around the buildings. I miss going to museums, and the quiet hum of autumnal crowds.
This month will be taken up with getting some things in order so that I can have an extended period of not worrying about rent and being able to just write for a bit. Some things are slowly coming into being and I’m excited about the four key projects in the works, as well as all the pieces plotted out (the ones on race just got more complicated, as I’ll explain below). I’d forgotten what it feels like to have your own space and, again, really: if you’re wondering about how to support your writer friends (the ones who are struggling to write AND pay bills, not the ones who hopped into cushy writing gigs via unpaid internships they could afford to take), ask them if you can help with housing/rent in any way. Virginia Woolf was right, about the necessity of a room of one’s own.
I wrote a couple of pieces, both unexpectedly. When the news about R. Kelly came down, I was about to post my Daily Post from the archive (if you follow me on social media, you know I refer to these as DPs, and some friends tell me they always think of “double penetration” when I pop up). It was about 8:30 a.m and I sat down and wrote “We Created R. Kelly.” In all honesty, I wanted to title it “We Failed R. Kelly,” for reasons you’ll see in the piece. As you know, I’ve got a longer article on him in the works and there I’ll go further into why everything about the R. Kelly case is just a sad, sordid failure and reflects our inability to repair the systems that allowed for so many to be pulled into exploitative conditions. And I include Kelly in the “so many” though I know it’s hard to see him as disempowered in any way. The case is an indictment of Chicago, which operates like a plantation town in its deeply embedded and structural racism and Kelly has become a convenient and easy way to pretend that we’re doing something to create change. We’re not, and everything that happened around Kelly will continue and perhaps be even worse because, hey, we caught a big ringleader—or so the fictional story goes.
I also wrote “My Accent.” I wasn’t planning on this at all. Barely a couple of hours after my podcast with Nathan J. Robinson was released, Lyta Gold posted a deeply nasty and racist subtweet about the two of us. Talking to a friend that afternoon, I kept saying, “I’m fine, really, I’m fine,” as she kept looking at me over Facetime and repeating, “I’m sorry this happened.” I really did try to convince myself I was “fine” — I taught myself to discern and avoid White People Shit a couple of decades ago when my experience with Queer to the Left warned me never to get too comfortable around a certain kind of white person, but I’d foolishly imagined that Lyta was not that sort. That night, I realised I couldn’t just let this go and that the experience and shock of it all was all the more jarring because it reminded me of the million problems with race in so-called radical/lefty circles and that in turn reminded me of the million ways in which white organisers and activists in Chicago have consistently sought to marginalise and silence me for not being the right kind of Other. Friends have pointed out that “My Accent” is my most personal piece to date, and they’re right. I didn’t enjoy being this raw, but I’m also fed up. I’m not going to mine traumas or personal experiences, moving forward and, arguably, that’s one of the many reasons why so many have an easy time being openly and publicly contemptuous of me (without ever actually critiquing my work, mind you—it’s all very personal and malicious, on the level of mocking my accent or just making shit up, as Chicago activists have been doing for a while): I appear untethered to the kind of sad, diasporic life story that they’re much more comfortable with and am therefore considered unworthy of even some basic respect.
This isn’t just a personal problem: this is something that happens to radical lefty/queer people of colour everywhere, in a million different ways: we’re fetishised and brought into certain spaces for being so adorably outspoken and all the rest, and then we get silenced and cast out when our actual views don’t affirm the status quo. The status quo in this case is not conservative politics, which is easy to spot and criticise but the world of supposedly progressive/radical/alternative organising. For the longest time, I thought I must be the only one but I’ve now realised that this is a shared experience for many of us: we don’t fit white lefty ideas of acceptable POC lefties and they really don’t like it when we speak up and/or back. The subaltern must not speak.
I don’t make this next statement to be conciliatory: I do want to make it clear that this is not endemic among all white people. A lot of white organisers find themselves in peculiar positions, often among other white people with far more money and influence, and they try to make sure that voices of POCs aren’t shut down and out—but there are subterranean economies of race that make it difficult or impossible for them to speak up or take action when they see things happening.
Anyway, I’ll have more on all this, in “The Subterranean Economy of Race,” a follow up to “My Accent.”
I’m going to finish the work of getting my literal house in order. I’m very tired a lot of the time but I am researching and drafting several pieces as I also try to make sure that I have some measure of stability. In the meantime, I’ll keep posting pieces that expand on current issues (expect more this next fortnight on the Obama Presidential Center, for instance).
WRITING
Here’s “My Accent.”
And here’s “We Created R. Kelly.”
PODCASTS
Nathan J. Robinson and I did a podcast about my article for Current Affairs, “Where the Gay Things Are.” We also talked about the changes at the magazine. You can read Nathan’s announcement here. I’m working on an explanatory piece of my own as well. Please do support CA with a subscription (the print magazine is gorgeous) or a donation.
FROM THE ARCHIVE
My Nostalgia Trap podcast conversation with David Parsons, about Tom Cruise: “Seduce and Destroy.” One of my fave podcasts: do support and subscribe!
“The Politics of Storytelling.”
“AOC and the Weaponisation of Trauma.”
“What Does Your Politician Mean to You?”
“My Radio Free Galistea podcast about gay Marriage and Wokism. A new podcast: please listen and support!
RANDOM LINKS FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER
Here are two baby bears frolicking.
Margret Grebowicz wrote this, about why Cesar Milan is awful.
Everyone’s talking about this New York Times piece about…writers, “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?” We are weird. There are no good people in this story.
Finally: Which fighter are you? I’m a 7.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
Image: Claude Monet Painting by the Edge of a Wood, John Singer Sargent, 1885.