lady sings the hill street blues

A few days ago, I came out to the RISD community as Mariah Carey. OK, technically, I “came out” as “queer RISD faculty,” participating in a panel of other queer faculty who presented their “work and inspirations” as a part of RISD Queer Week...but please, my coming out as “queer RISD faculty” is like coming out of a walk-in closet the size of an auditorium, since everyone knows that I am gay, flaming. So the more important coming out was revealing to a roomful of students and some colleagues that I consider myself Mariah’s spiritual twin. So in honor of all things queer—and by this I mean the entirety of that word: homosexual, non-normative, and probably most appropriate to this post, “strange"—I thought I would write about and perform my favorite track on Mariah’s new album, E = MC². The song is “I’ll Be Loving U Long Time,” and I’ve been listening to it, at least three times, every day since the album came out last Tuesday. Here’s why...

the blues:

First there is the melody: the music-librarian in me knows that it is technically a sample of DeBarge’s “Stay With Me,” but to me, it is the theme to the 80s television drama “Hill Street Blues.”

When I first heard the opening bars of Mariah’s song, I immediately saw the opening credits: a garage door opens, and police cars stroll out, the ominousness of their sirens supplanted by the melancholy of the catatonic piano chords. Mariah’s song actually interpolates not the opening bars of “Hill Street Blues,” but its transitional moment into its actual theme. The show was one of the textbooks—along with “Diff’rent Strokes,” “Dynasty,” and “Dallas,”—by which I learned English when my family moved to the U.S. in 1983. But “Hill Street Blues” had a different pedagogical effect than the other shows. The big 3-“D” shows hooked me in easily and immediately into the English language with their glittering feminine icons (listen to the names!): Charlene, the sublimely beautiful bourgeoise black girl(Janet Jackson), Alexis Colby Carrington, the bitchy Brit (Joan Collins); Krystal (note krazy spelling) Carrington, the saintly silver fox (Linda Evans); Miss Ellie, the warm-eyed matriarch (Barbara Bel Geddes); Jenna Wade, who was unremarkable except she was played by a soap-opera character named Priscilla Beaulieu (“beautiful place” in French) Presley, a.k.a. Madame Elvis Presley. As a prepubescent femme kid, I was always seeking out women crystalline enough to emulate and imitate. “Hill Street Blues,” however, had no krystalline women. It did feature a brittle D.A. played by Veronica Hamill, and her severe ponytail would have been attractive to a 28-year old version of myself, but the tweed and turtlenecks and the character’s name—JOYCE DAVENPORT—was not...sparkly. The other woman on the show was also another I’d have loved as a grown lesbian in a fag’s body: Betty Thomas as Sgt. Lucy Bates (Thomas went on to direct, notably “The Brady Bunch Movie”). But the point is: the women of "Hill Street Blues" were documentary-dykey in a way that a wide-eyed girly 9-year old boy has no pull towards. But I remember staying up to watch the show, understanding none of it (because there were no gowns, no femme gesticulating) and often falling asleep in the middle of it, only because I wanted to hear the theme song. The music touched some deep pit in my stomach: it sounded incredibly sad to me, and even though I didn’t understand or particularly care what happened what happened after the credits finished, I stayed loyal nonetheless. So to me, the fact that Mariah, knowingly or not, interpolated the music into her song feels like a femme vindication: she realized its feminine potential, and in doing so, she vindicated my baby-aesthetics.

And then there is the title. “I’ll Be Lovin’ U Long Time” is a multi-layered citation: first, there is the 2 Live Crew Song, “Me So Horny,” which links Mariah to her hip-hop love. But hyperlinking from 2 Live Crew, we come to the film “Full Metal Jacket,” the 1987 Stanley Kubrick film about the Vietnam War. Both song titles refer to a scene in which a couple of American G.I.’s are propositioned by a Vietnamese hooker, who basically says: “suckee fuckee ten dollar...me so horny...me love you long time.” Within the film, it is a disturbing representation of American influence in Vietnam; outside its textual realm, it becomes a racist caricature that foreclosed the ways in which Asian women could be represented in American cinema. (Margaret Cho does a great, critical imitation of this.) So what does it mean that Mariah uses this line, uttered in an Asian hooker’s broken English, as a chorus to a love song? I think something pretty gorgeous: sampling at its best. By remaining faithful to the broken syntax of the line (Mariah doesn’t say, “I’ll be loving you FOR a long time”), Mariah embraces broken language as the only syntax by which a woman can express an addictive, possibly self-annihilating, crazy love. She retains the shattered grammar but fastens back together the hooker’s desperate social position with the superglue that is her voice, the voice. Mariah’s whispery belting beefs up the skeletal broken English of “loving you long time” into a complex rhythm that is simultaneously sad and swinging.

...and at the same time, her use of broken English gets me back to “Hill Street Blues,” and my 9-year old self, with my own broken English, learning through TV and the lure of mysteriously sad drama-themes, to perfect my use of the new language. Which gets us to...

the lady:

I recently bought a nice shiny new camera—my first digital! (ooh I’m so low-fi!) And I wanted to play with its video component and also figure out a low-fi way to clip the song into this blog, so I thought, why not put my body on the line and give a little quarter-pounder of flesh to this lovely song. I thought it’d be cute to do something casual, so I thought I’d film myself in the morning, when (when I’m not teaching) I’m rolling around in my dressing gown singing along to various tunes with my four cups of coffee. So Monday, I put on some Shu lipstick (RD 190 this time...a smidgen of blue in it), waited till my hair was dry, put the camera on a stack of CD’s, and bopped the song out. Another reason for filming it in the morning was that my dressing gown is in fact a kimono, and I wanted that specific costume as a tribute to the misunderstood Asian prostitute who inspired all of this in the first place. Let me tell you about my kimono:

I bought it a couple years ago when my old red plaid kimono fell apart. I went back to the store where I bought the other one: Genji, on Geary Street in San Francisco, which specializes in Japanese antiques. I paid $60 for it and what a bargain! It’s vintage, threadbare and yellowed in spots, but a soured-milk white silk, with a blue butterfly insignia...

...which is so appropriate for a femme Asian fag: M. Butterfly and all that. And besides, “Butterfly” was the title of Mariah’s post-divorce album, which has a lot of meaning for me: it was released in 1997, my first year of graduate school, my first year living in the Bay Area, the year I met my ex-husband. I loved that album so much, that for years, my best friends from grad school who knew my Mariah-identification, simply called me “B”—for “Butterfly” (but also for “Bitchy-poo” when I was not...agreeable).

When I watch my Butterfly performance of “I’ll Be Loving U Long Time,” I have to laugh, and get a bit embarrassed because I’M SUCH A BAD LIP-SYNCHER!!! I mean, I get a lot of the chorus, but mess up most of the verse. It's clear that I haven't yet learned all the words, and Lord, the psychotic eye and head-rolling...am I trying to be a soul diva or a thrasher or a suicidal poetess? You decide. What’s certain is that I’m a terrible lip-syncher, but that’s OK with me. To me, lip-synching should NOT be a performance of mastery. I’m always kind of creeped out when drag queens lip-synch perfectly because it feels kind of like colonization: like femininity can be “captured” or “perfected” through a set of learned gestures. To me, femininity, like any language, is much too messy to perfect and it’s wonderful because of its difficult-to-master expansiveness: it makes one find joy in the process rather than the end result. I like seeing myself fudge up Mariah’s song: Mariah cannot be colonized, by anyone, ever!! The voice of my ideal doesn’t fit perfectly into my skin, and it shouldn't: it’s one I still, always, have to grow into.

knit a sweater (,) girl!

I started knitting for the same reason I started smoking at age 16: I wanted to look like a chic bad girl. To this day, I still love the way my wrist moves around the cig dangling off extended fingers. I decided to teach myself how to knit a few years ago, not because there was a plethora of what I find to be kind of inane trendy knitting books (I won’t names or titles, but they seemed to be basically self-help books disguised as hipster guides) but because I learned that Joan Crawford used to knit compulsively on the sets of her movies. Crawford claimed that knitting calmed her nerves, but her friends suggested that she used the click-clacking of the needles as a strategy of bitchery: to annoy and distract co-stars she hated. I love this idea of conceptualizing a craft traditionally associated with grandmothers or grandmother-aged bachelorettes, as an aggro-femme act. Yarn reminds me of the slyness of clawing cats; the needles themselves are blatantly weapon-like. In Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” Madame Defarge knits up a hitlist of aristocrats headed for the guillotine. In her story “Devil Finds Work,” the British mystery writer Ruth Rendell creates a character who kills her annoying husband (who is annoyed by her obsessive knitting habit) with a sharpened steel knitting needle—driven straight into his skull. Knitting is a dangerous craft that creates dangerous girls.

When I knit for myself, I imagine that I am creating myself as a sweater girl. This doesn’t just refer to the fact that I am a girl who makes sweaters, but it refers to the specific feminine skin I am knitting for my body. “Sweater Girl” is an American sexual persona of the 1940s and 50s. It named saucy girls who wore tight sweaters that emphasized their breasts. The filmmaker Ed Wood famously fetishized the angora sweater as a major medium of his transvestite identification. The original sweater girl was most likely Lana Turner, who cemented her fame as a Hollywood sexpot and bad girl (Turner developed a penchant for fast and dangerous boys, one of whom was eventually murdered by her lesbian daughter). As a teenager, Turner appeared for a few minutes in the 1937 film, “They Won’t Forget," bouncing across the screen in stiletto heels and a tight sweater, her breasts bouncing up and down. Interestingly enough, “They Won’t Forget” was not a sex-comedy but a serious film about lynching: a girl (Turner’s character) is raped and killed and the suspects and potential lynching victims are...a Jewish teacher and an African-American janitor. The sexuality of the sweater girl originates from a crossroad of race and power.

Then there is my favorite sweater girl of all time: Kim Novak in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.”



Novak famously plays a double role in the film—as the icy blonde Madeleine, and then, the earthy, raw Judy. Judy is a sweater girl: in contrast to the high-toned Madeleine, she’s a working-class girl who admits to a clueless Jimmy Stewart that she’s been “picked up” before (by guys). But the costume: Novak wears a tight sweater but clearly, no brassiere. It’s kind of amazing to see a film from 1958 in which the nipples of a major Hollywood star is on brave and reckless display—thanks to some blue-green wool. The feminine sexuality enabled by the sweater is a weird one, despite its obvious exploitive effects. Even though it allows male oglers to cop a peek at a woman’s nipples, the sweater itself is always totally opaque. Not only that, it is often opaque and prickly. If the knit is supposed to simulate a second skin for its feminine wearer, and if the sweater is made of angora or mohair (as it often is) then the vulnerability of the nipples have been given a kind of thorny, burry life. The sweater girl sweater is the unsupplicant cousin of the wet t-shirt. If ogling boys want to eroticize the nipples of a sweater girl beyond pure voyeurism, then they must brave a tongueful of itchy wool. The nipples of a sweater girl are simultaneously revealed and armored by the angora-mohair sweater.

So when I knit, I feel like a bad girl in the tradition of Madame Defarge and Kim Novak. Right now, I’m working on a cardigan that I spotted back in January: a Rodarte cardigan that is hand-knit out of multi-colored and tinsel-flanked mohair yarn. To achieve that huge, functionless weave I’ll use very thin yarn with a fat-ass needle (US 17).



This cardigan is actually not a traditional sweater girl sweater: it’s not tight, it’s not a pull-over. But I like that it is made out of mohair, and looks super-itchy: it’s a cross between a cobweb and a porcupine. And its designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy admit that they've been inspired by Japanese kawaii ("cute") culture and horror films. I find Asian cuteness and horror to be appropriate inspiration for a nouvelle-sweater girl. I went through a whole knitting phase of working only with milky cashmere blends, but I think I’m over it now. I’m totally loving the itchy bitchiness of angora and mohair. I imagine that rashy discomfort of the braless 50s sweater girls and would like to replicate it on my body—or at least cite it a bit. I would of course wear the cardigan with my standby t-shirts, but my arms at least would feel the prickly femininity of the yarn. But I’m so lazy: I haven’t actually begun knitting the thing yet. (I’ve made the swatches...) I’m still writing the pattern, which is my favorite activity of knitting: converting measurements of the garments into stitches. It’s rather like lo-fi pixilation. I’ve measured my favorite cardigan, and multiplied them by the stich/inch ratio of the yarn I’ll be using. To figure out the final size of the shoulder seam, I have to recall geometry--how do you figure out the hypontenuse of a triangle? And it’s kind of like reading: breaking down the thing I love, and then converting it into another language, and then building it up again, to be wrapped around my body. I’m going to try to finish the damn pattern this weekend, and hopefully I’ll be done with this sweater and be able to upload some pictures of your Joony Schecter actually wearing the thing...maybe by July? Oh, angora in the summertime...how masochistic is that? Feminine masochism can be romantic—provided that the girl in question is talented in brain, imagination, or handiwork. But because I am not Billie Holiday, Lauryn Hill, Judy Garland, Sylvia Plath, or even Amy Winehouse, my level of feminine masochism stays in a very small level: knitting in the summertime. (OK, so it’s not officially summer yet; but the temperature today is as if it wanted to be summer—warm and sunny and threatening balminess.) There is something self-flagellating about constructing a garment out of wooly stuff during a season of show-offy near-nudity. While others are scheming ways to strip off layers, I’ll be scheming ways to add layers on—layers that will give me sweater girl-nipples made out of itchy-witchy angora and mohair.

jenny doll seeks transformer

I’m thinking about dating a transguy—an FTM transsexual. Not anyone in particular, but I’m considering in abstract the joys of its possibility. I am a girl’s girl after all and stuff in magazines influence (way too much, perhaps) how I think about my wardrobe, my body, my psyche (in that order, by the way). The new issue of “Out” magazine is a “Transgender Issue,” featuring an article about “gay” transguys. This started the wheels clicking in the old soup bowl, then, my friend H, a dashing boyish dyke, suggested that maybe I ought to try dating a transguy. Now just a few years earlier, I would have said, “Never, I need a dick!” or something equally stupid. But I must indeed be evolving in my femme faggotry and womanishness (to borrow a word from Alice Walker) because I’m starting to imagine-fantasize about what dickless sex must be like...

...could there be such a thing as “Stone Femme”? A “Stone Butch” defines her dyke butchness by physically pleasuring her femme partner, but refusing reciprocation that would contour the femaleness of her body with the touch of an active femme. I would need to have the kind of sex that would produce pleasure without emphasizing the maleness of my body. Thinking about the possibility of dating a transguy, I wonder about what kind of FTM would desire me, what kind of FTM I would desire, and how I would arrange my femme but still male body around him. If he were pre-op, I suppose conventional sexual wisdom would have me (the one with the bio-penis) fuck him, but that idea is yucky to me. The scene in a recent episode of “The L Word,” in which the pre-op FTM Max gets fucked—vaginally or otherwise—by a fag made me, involuntarily nauseous. It seemed such a violation of dyke butch bodily cohesion to me. So, with either a post or pre-op transguy, I’d feel weird using my penis. Which made me realize: I feel kinda weird using my penis anyway. The penis is a secondary sex organ to me. The penis is an organ of orgasm, and even though the orgasm it brings is a nice thing, what I consider “real” pleasure—that which takes place during foreplay—has never really originated from its skin. Receiving fellatio never turned me on, and fucking did even less for me. So you can imagine how I feel about vaginal sex: the thought that my sperm could produce something—let alone a child!!—fills me with a dread like no other.

So as a femme—and more to the point, a very lazy pillow princess—I want to receive pleasure. But a lickety-split pleasure. And more specifically, a licking and sucking of my titties, not my penis. In the film “Flashdance,” a cheesy and losery comedian makes a joke: sticking his tongue out and up, he says, “What is this?...a lesbian with a hard-on!” The joke is crude, but I have to say, funny because it is true and sexy for me. The comedian tries to make fun of lesbian sexuality by trying to bond with the heterosexual audience about what a bad facsimile it is of “real” male sexuality. But a nice, forceful, skillfull, heat-seeking missile of a tongue is always better than any thumpy dick.

All of this sexual speculation about myself made me wonder exactly what it is that I have—and continue to seek out—in a boy. And I realized: even in the boys I’ve liked and loved, more than the penis, I’ve always been much more interested in the face, and in particular, face sprouting a lot of hair. This is why I opened this post with a picture of one of my favorite t-shirts. T-shirt, meet world; world, meet a favorite t-shirt:

-Original “Love & Rockets” tee-shirt, circa 1984. “Love & Rockets” is the famous underground comic begun in the early eighties by Los Bros. Hernandez (Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario). This piece depicts an early cover, with the original ’80s logo, and depicts the famous Mexicana character Maggie Chascarillo (a.k.a. Maggie the Mechanic), drawn by Jaime. I purchased this piece at the San Francisco vintage emporium Wasteland in 1998, for around $16 (Oh the halcyon days of before vintage became “Vintage”!!). When I first bought it, it was already basically a dishrag, a conditional path on which it has steadfastly continued, as you can see in the picture. It now hangs on me like a lovely jersey Stephen Burrows evening gown. But a major secondary selling point of this t-shirt when I first bought it was that it had a completely split collar.

The collar is so worn that it has completely come apart at the circumferential point. I love such destroyed collars because it indicates that the boy’s neck-stubble was so profuse that it tore apart the t-shirt while he lived in it. And now I can slip my slippery body into it. I know this because my ex-husband had such a heavy beard and neck-stubble that many of his t-shirts had similarly split collars. Even now, I love looking for and finding t-shirts with such destroyed collars, because it floods me with such heady memories of those old hairbrush kisses on my lips and parts more tender.

The feel of rough hair or stubble on my lips and body are more sexy than being blown or fucked. If that is the case for me, then certainly I could date or fall in love with an FTM...provided that his body has responded to the hormones in a way that produces lots of facial hair. And of course, that he was a butch dyke—and treats me like he did his femme girlfriend. Actually, psycho-socially, a butch dyke who becomes a transguy is kind of my ideal boyfriend: he has a history as a woman—and it may be as fraught and frayed as the torn-up t-shirt collar—but he understands what it is to be a woman, and is now working to shape that history into the present-life narrative of his maleness. That is what I am doing inversely as a femme fag: to accomplish my girlhood not through surgery, but a physical presentation of femininity that works to create a lived sense of “femme” that integrates my own split-collar history as a “boy.” So: this Jenny doll now is open to, and perhaps seeks, an FTM Transformer who has hairy reactions to his bottled testosterone. Talking of her transguy friends, H said that transguys “have a more active and conscious relationship with testosterone.” Come to think of it, that’s what I long for in a guy, that’s what I try to cultivate in every guy I meet and try to love.