Womanspreading

There's all this talk about 'manspreading' ... It would be hypocritical of me to pretend I don't occasionally witness it, but I'm positive I encounter what I call 'womanspreading' much more often. You know what I mean: a female occupies one seat with her buttocks, one to her side with her handbag, often the one to her other side with another bag, crosses her legs so that the upper one almost touches the opposite seat, and when you want to pass through the aisle, effectively blocked in this way, she gives you a hateful look saying 'How dare you inconvenience me?'

And don't even start me on 'womansplaining' about how lacking all men are in the emotional department ...

Chaochail Desmond Tutu

Tha fhios gum b' aithne dhomh dè cho cudromach agus a bha an t-easbaig Afraganach seo anns an t-strì an aghaidh apartheid. Ach mus do thug mi sùil ghoirid air an aiste Uicipeid Bheurla mu dheidhinn an-diugh, cha b' aithne dhomh gun robh e cuideachd a' bruidhinn gu làidir às leth co-ionnannachd gèidh ann an Afraga a Deas agus anns an Eaglais Anglican. Hmm, chan eil aiste Uicipeid Ghàidhlig mu dheidhinn ann; 's dòcha gum bu chòir dhomh ga sgrìobhadh latha de na làithean.

Le wokisme

Je suis britannique, mais dans cette matière, je suis d'accord avec les français. La voie, c'est le daltonisme, pas le wokisme. On n'atteindra jamais l'égalité si l'on souligne des différences entre des races (des sexes, des sexualité et ainsi de suite). On juste fortifie la méfiance mutuelle.

Gay lib in the arts

Yesterday I read an article in The Guardian in which film-makers and writers recalled 'gay' film scenes that had a profound effect on them; I also read quite a few of the comments of the article's readers remembering theirs; and it occurred to me that I could hardly recollect my own 'firsts'.

Maybe this is because I had to do without any while still struggling with who I was. As far as I can remember, the first film I saw that had homosexuality as one of the main topics was the 1994 Fresa y chocolate; and unless I'm much mistaken the first gay kiss I saw on the silver screen happened in 1997's The Full Monty (provided it was actually a kiss and not just an embrace) or in Wilde of the same year. But I had come out in 1989, and experienced my own first loving kiss - and more - in 1991.

Not that literature was any better. The first 'gay book' I came across was the 1993 anthology The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction. Up till then there were just hints (which I often even failed to decipher as such at that time), at best a minor character who was gay but not allowed to do more about it than say so.

In short, I had no 'revelatory' experiences of this kind. For all that, each time I watched or read somebody daring to go further in breaking the taboos surrounding us, it was a source of immesurable pleasure to me.

Rangers v Slavia

I wasn't there, so I can't know what really happened. Still, there are questions ...

Slavia's Kúdela claims he swore at Rangers' Kamara at the heat of the moment, but nothing racist. Sure, and he covered his mouth like a wee kid behind a teacher's back just out of force of habit. A very mature and trustworthy guy, apparently?

While Kamara was so shocked by the insult that those reports about the pervasiveness of racism in Britain must be exaggerated. Or maybe it's convenient to be shocked when your team is losing a home match while playing so gentlemanly they get two red cards?

And then there's the attack in the tunnel, according to Slavia 'brutal', despite having no obvious effect upon Kúdela's ability to go on training and playing; nevertheless showing that Kamara must have grotesquely misheard the old adage about sticks and stones.

Grotesquely? Well, after all it's just showbiz, innit?

Fawlty Towers

Frankly, I'm not impressed. There are some good jokes now and then, but there's too much shouting and slapstick humour for my liking. I prefer sitcoms in which people say funny things, as opposed to yelling them or playing at stuntmen.

But I wonder who actually does like the series. Can those on the political right really enjoy this parody of a small-time Tory Basil Fawlty? Can those on the political left get over the portrayal of Manuel from Barcelona?

Hmm. Maybe they can. Maybe the former see Basil primarily as a henpecked husband, and maybe the latter, for once, see no racism in a humoristic picture of a foreigner - after all, Manuel is European and white.

Yoshirō Mori

Alors, le président du comité d'organisation des Jeux olympiques a dû démissioner. Peut-être adéquatement. Il a dit que des femmes en gestion sont plus compétitives et plus loquace que des hommes. Bien sûr, c'est absolument vrai, mais est-ce poli de le dire tout haut ?

SM as a substitute

In a sort of afterword to the 2016 edition of his Lanark: A Life in Four Books, Alasdair Gray mentions: "I was terribly stimulated by the highly coloured American comics which first came to Britain in the late 1940s when I was in my early teens. They showed [...] females with figures and faces like glamorous film-stars of that time, but wearing much less clothing, and since the representation of normal sexual practice was forbidden by the USA moral code their adventures involved them in capture and bondage instead." I have a different yet similar experience: coming into my teens at a time when homosexuality was more or less a taboo topic, it simply didn't occur to me to have 'bona fide' sexual fantasies; mine instead involved the other form of male-to-male touch: fights, captures and so on.

Mark Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

ALL THE OTHER children at my school are stupid. Except I’m not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are. I’m meant to say that they have learning difficulties or that they have special needs. But this is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties because learning to speak French or understanding Relativity is difficult, and also everyone has special needs, like Father who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put in his coffee to stop him getting fat, or Mrs Peters who wears a beige-coloured hearing aid, or Siobhan who has glasses so thick that they give you a headache if you borrow them, and none of these people are Special Needs, even if they have special needs.

But Siobhan said we have to use those words because people used to call children like the children at school spaz and crip and mong which were nasty words. But that is stupid too because sometimes the children from the school down the road see us in the street when we’re getting off the bus and they shout, ‘Special Needs! Special Needs!’ But I don’t take any notice because I don’t listen to what other people say and only sticks and stones can break my bones.

(Christopher John Francis Boone (narrator), p 43)

 

This is exactly why I tend to mentally wince when I hear people (who often don't even belong to the particular targeted minority) claim that such-and-such word should never be said, because it's offensive, as it were, by definition. I have friends who use words like faggot or poofter and it's all right because they don't mean it nastily; there are many more people who would never dream of using these expressions, yet are latent homophobes for all that. (Some of them are not even latent, except perhaps to themselves.)

I remember a real-life example similar to the one in the quote: years ago, where I lived the word 'Gipsy' was a perfectly neutral expression; if one wanted to be offensive, there were many other words to choose from. But as the majority population on the whole hated the Gipsies and only talked about them disparagingly, some activists (many of them 'white') decided that 'Gipsy' was an offensive word in itself and decent folk must use 'Roma' instead. The result? Ten years later most people said 'Roma' ... and most said it with a sneer and as much, if not more, hate.

 

 

Patrick Gale: The Aerodynamics of Pork

[....], never treating children as children. He laughed at, not with.

(about Huw Peake)

Obviously, I'm prejudiced about this one. It wasn't the first gay prose I've ever read, but it was the first gay 'full novel' I did, and after having read dozens of novels which in the vast majority pretended homosexuality didn't exist at all, or at best showed it as a minor character's 'quirk', it was beyond refreshing to read a novel in which most of the main characters were gays and lesbians, despite its being set in 'ordinary' surroundings (there are just a few pages happening at something you could call 'gay scene').

And yet the book reflects the fact that even as a young gay you don't spend all your time thinking about gay-related issues, however important these are for you, you have myriads of other things to think about, myriads of other aspects forming your personality and your life. The book is full of observations which could work as well in a 'straight' novel.

An example is the quotation above about one of the main character's father. This is so like my own parents, and one of the reasons why since about mid-adolescence I never again thought of them as of my 'nearest and dearest'. They were like my favourite high school teachers: people you like, but people  who seem unable to treat you without condescension, and with whom you can therefore be on polite, but not on really friendly terms.

Tactile deprivation

In Paul Greer's novel Less the main character sadly ponders that while two gays can't walk hand in hand on a street in Morocco, two straights can't do it in Chicago. I suspect that he's right: that in general, the easier it is somewhere for two gays to openly show their love, the harder it is for two straights to show their friendship and not be perceived as latently gay. Homophobia, instead of vanishing, simply taking on a different form.

And between gays and straights ... Even my best friends, who are in every other way perfectly relaxed about my sexuality, would be wary of touching me as freely as they would another straight. For my part, the more attractive I find somebody, the more studiously I avoid touching him. And the less you can touch people you love, the more unpleasant are touches of those you don't, so you avoid that as well.

Consequently, reading about all those people who are so distressed at suddenly being unable, because of the lockdown, to hug their nearest and dearest, it's actually hard to be compassionate and not just grin and think "for fuck's sake, you only have to endure for a few weeks or months something I've been suffering from almost all my life, and in all probability will go on suffering from until I die".

'It's okay to be white'

John Swinney has reportedly said that stickers with this slogan, which appeared in Perth, were "atrocious" and had "no place in Perth or any other part of our country".

The way I see it, this is an atrocious and racist approach. Unless of course he would say the same thing if they read "It's okay to be black" or the like.

Oh, it's quite possible that the slogan has been appropriated by neo-Nazis. And? Would you say that praising socialism is "atrocious" because the term was appropriated by both the КПСС and the NSDAP?


(originally posted on WordPress)

William McIlvanney: Laidlaw

 

His life had been spent acquiring compensatory qualities that weren’t natural to him but which enabled him to survive.

(about Harry Rayburn) 

When you’re a misfit you can do nothing else. Except maybe kill yourself.

--------

They weren’t talking, they were broadcasting.

(about three young men in a pub) 

Given that I can’t find this sense of the verb mentioned in any dictionary, it’s probably this book I’d picked it up from when reading it for the first time a few years ago.

--------

Tommy was where so many people wanted homosexuals to be, trapped in a ghetto of self-loathing.

(about Tommy Bryson)

When I was growing up it was this, rather than gay-bashing, that was the greatest danger: the possibility that you’d end up perceiving yourself as a morally inferior being simply on account of who you liked.

--------

He could think of nowhere to go but away.

(about Lennie Wilson) 

Many’s the time I moved flat, even town. With only a few exceptions I didn’t have much of an idea about the place I was going to (sometimes didn’t even look forward to getting there), but I couldn’t wait to get out of where I was.

(originally posted on WordPress)

 

 

Paul Flynn: Good As You

Frankly, a disappointment. The author does warn the reader in the Prologue that he can only tell the story of gay liberation in Britain as he subjectively saw it unfold and I don’t blame him, but his likes and experiences are too different from mine. His is the world of clubbing, pop, big dreams, soap opera and so on; mine is the one of loneliness, depression, defiance, books and so forth. Suffice it to say that Peter Tatchell is mentioned nine times, while one of the ten chapters is basically all about Kylie Minogue.

Still, I did learn a lot: for instance the importance of Manchester in British GLBT history, and the fact that characters in soap operas can be as influential for the mindset of a TV-watchers as those in books for the mindset of a book-reader. And of course, it would be strange if there were no passages I could absolutely relate to, like:


Part of coming to terms with being gay is accepting that all your previous belief systems collapse.

(Greek Pete) 

Absolutely. Some say that a man’s mentality is basically completely formed by the beginning of adolescence, but I’m sure my frames of reference have changed almost beyond recognition during the years I was coming to terms with my sexuality.

[….] that subtle new ways of recalibrating the phrase ‘I am gay’ would have to be found in the perpetual motion of identification that accompanies coming out. Nobody tells you that you’ll have to do it over and over again, boring yourself with answers to a carousel of the same questions asked over and over for the first five years, before you’ve worked out subtler ways of short-circuiting this ritualistic moment in which your sexual fancy becomes other people’s property.

Quite so. You think you’ll tell a friend and the next day everybody’ll know, but no, you have to come out again and again … and again … and only gradually you learn how to do it right.

[….] the terror that sits at the heart of some homophobia – that we are only here to steal your brothers, husbands, cousins, sons [….].

I wouldn’t know about blood relatives, but I was always well liked by women who knew I was gay, probably because they felt they could be relaxed and open with me – with the exception of wifes and girlfriends of my (straight) male friends, the majority of whom were quite obviously jealous of every minute these friends might have spent with me without being ‘watched’ by them.

Programmed in my subconscious from very early on was the idea that I’m not safe.

(David Furnish)

But then this goes almost without saying for us gays of a certain generation.



(originally posted probably on WordPress)