girls who wear glasses

In one particularly beautiful episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mary Richards (MTM) and Sue Ann Nivens (Betty White) attend a broadcasting conference together in Chicago, where they fall victim to a gang of rowdy morticians who want to party down with them. When Mary says she hasn’t any glasses (for drinks) in her room, the slimiest of the morticians tipsily jingles, “It’s fun to make passes at girls who wear glasses!” This is a thesis I’m going to test out this summer and beyond. So far, considering the three disastrous “dates” I’ve been on, I would have to answer that girls who wear glasses may not have so much fun. (I put “dates” in quotes because these encounters with the male kind were really questionable in terms of a proper mating ritual, but they all did spectacularly and depressingly confirm the emotional meaning of “disaster.”) Still, I have to say that I’ve been feeling pretty sexy walking around in my new glasses.

Conventional wisdom about feminine sexiness would have it that blindness is not terribly sexy. Usually, girls who wear glasses have to lose the glasses in order to bloom. There was one spectacular example of this in my high school class back in Iowa City. DN was a very typical orchestra nerd—mousy shoulder-length brown hair, unobtrusive and unremarkable attire, quiet friends, sweet and friendly demeanor, and glasses. Clear plastic frames that were not too outsized, if I remember correctly. Then, suddenly, I think in the beginning of our freshmen or sophomore year, she showed up to school sans glasses. And instead of clear plastic framed spectacles, there was shiny purple eyeshadow! From then on, DN changed in the ways that you’d expect, but also, not changed in the ways that you’d expect. I had quit orchestra after my freshman year (I was a horrible violin player) so I didn’t see DN all that much, but when I did see her she was both familiar and glossily new. She kept all her quiet, nerdy orchestra girlfriends, still played the violin, was still very sweet and friendly to all. But instead of jeans and sweatshirts that maintained a comfortable and modest pocket of air between flesh and cloth, she wore brassy biker-girl leather jackets, and tight, tight, TIGHT black jeans.

The thing about those jeans was that magically, their back pocket suddenly grew a hairy male hand. Yes, quiet shy DN got a boyfriend. And not just any boyfriend either, but one who was very much a bad boy, Iowa City style: whiteboy, long brown hair (might have been a mullet), muscular, walked with a bow-legged swagger that emulated the lead singer or Poison (or Warrant or Winger or Mr. Big). When DN and her boyfriend would walk down the hallway together, he had his hand shoved deep into HER jeans backpocket. On one such occasion of their sighting, I remember overhearing one uptight girl saying to another, “DN is such a slut now!” I didn’t agree; I mean, isn’t it actually nice that tight black jeans comes with a matching hickey? In fact, I quite admired DN for this transformation, and was probably quite envious—of both jeans and boy.

But this is all very regular; DN’s story is not at all unusual. In fact, having been a physically geeky kid myself, I went through my own DN moment in the summer of 1994, when I tossed out my glasses (round wire frames, VERY The Last Emperor), got fitted for contacts, started wearing tight t-shirts to show off worked-out pecs and just generally started slutting around (hickeys included). That was many summers ago, but the feeling seems to have repossessed me. Well, not the hickey and pec and slutting part, but the general feeling of wanting to feel sexy. So why did I have this sudden urge to re-find the very glasses I had abondoned to be sexy? Why do these glasses make me feel sexy?

Well, in truth, it’s not so much about glasses as it is about hair. I personally am not one of those girls who wear rhinestones in their glasses, as you can see. But I think a chic, simple glasses frame can perfectly frame an otherwise hothouse feminine self-presentation. This is all due to Lee Remick in the 1959 film Anatomy of a Murder. In this film, Remick plays the sexy (read by others: “slutty”) wife of an army lieutenant. When she is raped by a sleazy bar-owner, her hot-tempered husband goes and kills the guy, which is when Jimmy Stewart his hired as the eccentric defense attorney. Anatomy of a Murder is an interesting text for archiving the filmic representation of female sexuality. It’s kind of infamous for being the first mainstream American film to use the word “panties.” But more importantly, it argues, way before The Accused (1987), that a woman’s sexy self-presentation is most definitely NOT an invitation to rape, or even, sex.

This argument of course hinges on Lee Remick’s embodiment of feminine sexiness. Remick is utterly wonderful. In her more overtly sexy scenes, she really is all jazz and jiggle in tight capri pants and braless sweaters. But what is even more intriguing is that Remick’s sexy character wears glasses. Of course, following the cultural script about girls who wear glasses, she doesn’t wear them all the time—and she hints that she prefers not wearing them. But as she explains at one point, “I wear them to read, play pinball.” (It’s a disturbing kismet that Jodie Foster’s character in The Accused is raped on a pinball machine, and Lee Remick’s character plays pinball the night she is raped.) But this is what is so beautifully idiosyncratic about Remick’s femininity in the film. The glasses are not a deterrent to but an accoutrement of her sexiness: she has to play pinball to “jiggle” her tight-panted butt, and in order to play pinball, she has to wear glasses. So, the glasses become necessary to her sexy aura.

This is a point that is underscored in the courtroom scene in which the prosecution attempts to prove that Remick’s “sexy” is actually “slutty.” When the trial starts, Jimmy Stewart anticipates this and orders her to look the part of a “good wife”: tweedy suit and hat, glasses firmly in place. The prosecution calls a witness to describe how Remick looked on the night of the murder, to show that she is indeed a slut who was not raped. When he begins to describe what her hair looked like, Stewart simply asks Remick to take off her hat and show the court her hair:

I find this scene glorious. It’s like a shampoo ad as assault rifle: Remick whips off the hat, and tosses her hair about and then sits there, fully proud and unashamed of her femininity. This gesture says to the court: "Yes I am sexy but you will not make me feel shame about my femininity." But I also love that she doesn’t take off her black, heavy-framed glasses. I love the nonchalance of the gesture, and the new kind of femininity that it creates. Remick’s subtle argument is that the geekiness of black glasses is not discordant with a traditional feminine sexiness. The message here is not “You can be a sexy girl in spite of your glasses,” but “You are a sexy girl because of your glasses.”

So I saw the film again a few weeks ago, and totally became obsessed with replicating Remick’s courtroom look. I hunted around for frames, and finally came upon the perfect pinball-playing pair: Tom Ford TF5040, a.k.a. “Cary.” You know you’re making an investment on your femininity when a pair of prescription glasses cost the same as a good cashmere cardigan or a Lanvin bag on markdown at Barneys. I’ve stored away my contact lenses for now, and been wearing these glasses almost every day. I feel pretty sexy in these glasses (and hopefully it's not totally delusional!); I think that the heavy black 1950s-style frames go well with big hair, and makes my face feel smaller. I’ve been feeling not only like Lee Remick, but also my pop-cult namesake, Jenny Schecter (Mia Kirshner) on this past season of “The L Word”: Jenny also wore heavy black frames to great effect when playing at being a film director.

But unexpectedly, I felt like my own self--more specifically, my adolescent self. My very first pair of glasses were black-framed. I picked them out myself, with no cultural referents—just the budding and questionable personal taste of a 14-year old fag.

I don’t know why I’m holding this blue balloon from the First National Bank of Iowa City in this picture; maybe I’m dreaming of being floated away out of the midwest into some beautiful homosexual heaven. Wearing these glasses today, I’m Lee Remick and Mia Kirshner but also my own babyfaggot self—fresh pimples and all. Wearing my new glasses connects me now—with my banged long hair, my lipstick, my shameless femmeness—with that kid with the black glasses. I’m taking an Bic pen to those beginning days of adolescence, and doing some badgirl vandalistic doodling: drawing a web of curlicues, hearts, rainbows, fairies, princesses, potential boyfriends’ initials, around that babyfaggot who felt so physically and psychically so ugly, and making him an antique desk to be velvet roped in the museum of my heart.

bawbawa warrrtuhs

Child versions of gay boys always mimic famous women. If you were born before 1970, you’re probably mimicking Carol Burnett mimicking Gloria Swanson (like the Canadian illustrator Maurice Vellekoop). If you were born after 1990, you’re probably mimicking Britney Spears. If you’re me, you’re mimicking Barbara Walters.

Huh? Does Barbara Walters sing? Does Barbara Walters dance? Does Barbara Walters have a music video?

Oh, how I wish. As much as I love music, back in the middle of the Reagan-eighties, before I truly discovered American pop music, my reigning sonic diva was none other than Barbara Walters, then the co-anchor of the television news show 20/20. I wrote a bit before about my learning English through television as an immigrant kid; all the soap-opera and sitcom-watching I did was a more or less absorbent process of learning. That is, if my brain was filled with the glorious writing of Esther Shapiro (creator of Dynasty), I couldn’t quite, in my awkward ten-year old tongue, roll off the spew of bitchy dialogue. What I became obsessed with sincerely imitating, however, was a little petit-four of a speech: “... I’m Barbara Walters. And this is...twenty-TWENTY!”

Imagine, if you can, a tiny little Korean boy with a bowl-cut, walking around the house chanting “I’m Barbara Walters and this is TWENTY-TWENTY!!”

Who know what my parents thought, but they never stopped me from my vocal emulation of a sixtysomething blonde Jewish newscaster. What was it about her that I loved so much? Between the ages of ten and probably fourteen, I was obsessed with Barbara Walters. I watched 20/20 every week, as well as every one of her Specials. Like any good diva obsession, a part of it was certainly Walters’s physicality. I found her completely glittering and enchanting. I was not like Geraldo Rivera, who professed to having a huge crush on Walters, but I could certainly understand why a heterosexual boy—especially one who was much younger than her—would. Walters has great cheekbones, a great sharp profile, acquilne--but not too acquline (gift from her Russian-Jewish heritage...those Eastern Europeans!!) and fabulous taste in clothes and hair. In the past few years, the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar has run a feature called “Fabulous At Every Age” featuring images of celebrities of varying ages wearing the same themed looks—bohemian, long tunics, whatever. My sister and I love scanning these junky pages, and we always go to the sections for “40s,” “50s,” and... “60+.” Much more interesting to look at pics of Vera Wang or Kristin Scott Thomas than those of Cameron Diaz and whoever is on MTV's "The Hills" I think Madame Walters has appeared on the “60+” section more than any other woman, and she looks great in each pic.

But for me, in the end, it’s all about the voice. That raspy voice that is pushed out of her throat and skull while her cheeks are sucked in. Every word that she pronounces looks like it should rhyme with “O.” And the wacky, waltzy cadences of her speech rhythm: Barbara Walters veritably swings!

And the accent that is the source of the infamous caricature created by Gilda Radner in the late seventies on Saturday Night Live: Barbara Walters became BABA WAWA.

Walters’s inability to produce “R” sounds—she pronounced it as a “W”—was a great part of the vocal charm of Walters for me. This vocal in/disability was a remnant of her Boston childhood, but when coupled with her smooth newswoman speak, it came off as a weird affected accent, a cross between a 1930s Hollywood starlet, a robot, and a Korean immigrant lady. This is probably what I cathected on to. Koreans have a problem with “R”: our “R” sound is very tough and hard, closer to a Spanish rolling “R,” so when we pronounce the letter R, we say, “AAAH-RRRUH.” To my ten-year old ears, then, Madame Walters’s stylization of her mispronunced R was a glamorizing of a speech pattern that was stigmatic of a Korean-immigrant status. She made something that was embarrassing and shameful into something sleek and showy. But then along comes Gilda Radner, (may she rest in peace) to undo that very vocal feminine veneer, ripping it apart, making fun of it. For the record, Walters never had problems pronouncing “L” sounds. Interestingly enough, when Radner adds this fictional element ("WaLters" becomes "WaWa"), she’d psychically caught onto my identification with Walters: it is another speech-tic of Koreans to mispronounce “L” as “R.” I remember the embarrassment I felt as a child, some twenty years ago, when my mother tried to buy some film for her camera at a drugstore in Iowa City: “Could I get some fee-rum?” The stupid hick clerk replied, over and over, “What? What?” Even though she was working at the film-developing section of the store, standing in front of an entire wall of fucking Kodak. I was, I think, eleven or twelve, and totally embarrassed, unable to stand up for my mother with her broken English. This memory flashed in my brain when I came to the following moment in Walters’s recent memoir, Audition:

Audiences found her [Gilda Radner’s] mimicry of my pronunciation of l and r as w hysterically funny. I found it extremely upsetting. I was feeling so down that I probably wouldn’t have found anything funny. But everyone else loved Gilda’s impersonation.

Every first or second generation Korean kid understands this terror/ shame of being made fun of for your accent. When Radner creates a “Barbara Walters” that confuses “L “and” R” (for “W”), she is creating a Korean Barbara Walters. Barbara Walters, too, had broken English--which she felt was a performance of professional femininity, that others misread as a speech impediment. I understood Barbara Walters’s hurt, because it’s a hurt I felt for my mother. The shame I feel now is for that child self that couldn’t yell at the drugstore clerk.

This retroactive shame-guilt seems to be an appropriate reaction for reading Audition. I know that most people are yakking about her affair with the African-American Republican senator, and yes, that tidbit was very juicy and actually touching, but I was more into the vulnerable, "broken (English)" spots that Walters revealed. As I was finishing the book on the longass flight from Providence to San Francisco a couple weeks ago, I wrote the following capsule book-report on its endpapers: “Barbara Walters: Guilt-ridden!! Indecisive!!” And I meant that affectionately, as gesture of sisterly understanding and empathy. Walters begins the book by saying that she almost titled the book “Sister” because of the great impact that her mentally disabled sister had on her life...contributing a lot to the aforementioned guilt and indecision. While I love the title that Walters eventually chose, I think “Sister” could have worked as well. Barbara Walters has always been my Korean soul sister.

portrait of a lady (house mix)

A couple months ago, I sat (and stood) as a model for one of my students, Chad Houle, a photography major who’s working on a great project about gay men and domesticity. (Check out his work at chadhoule.com) When Chad approached me about sitting for him, I was a bit nervous, for multiple reasons: will I look cute enough? Am I really a "gay man"? But the most visceral nervousness rose from the simple prospect of being the object of a stranger’s photographic eye. The last time someone plopped me down in front of a camera for a formal portrait was (not counting those endless squares of yearbook mugshots) was more than fifteen years ago, when someone in my family had the brilliant idea for a family mugshot. I was in full adolescent awkward glory, with rough black hair that looked like it was cropped with a lawnmower, and sporting a mustard-colored corduroy oxford shirt (yikes). But worse than that was the fiction of our “happy” family—my sister and I, our two (pre-divorce) parents, smiling like zombies for the fuzzy-wuzzy portrait. So psyching myself out for this new portrait of myself as a single divorcee, I was apprehensive about what kind of a fictional remix I was adding to my current state of being.

The above is an outtake from that session. Here I am in my Providence apartment, sandwiched between my wall of books and shelf of fetishistic inspirations: a red wooden Japanese doll, a Jenny (Japanese Barbie) doll, a flyer for my first warehouse dance club in San Francisco (circa 1996), a pen in the shape of a lipstick, a cassette single of Mariah Carey’s “Love Takes Time” (1990), a postcard of Marilyn Monroe in her last film, a nearly-empty container of Gucci Rush perfume (a perfect pinkred rectangle), a 1978 first edition of the poet Ai’s book “The Killing Floor." In the photograph that Chad chose as the final portrait, I very much recognize myself: still the filling of a fetish-and-book sandwich, I'm leaning against the mantle, one leg bent, looking like the perfect combination of mistress of the house and tweedy librarian. But I heart the outtake for a different reason. I look tired. Or perhaps more accurately, I look boneless, like a rag doll flopped on a chair.

Mistress of the house/ librarian is fiction not because it is fake but because it is an idealized goal for and of myself. The boneless ragdoll, on the other hand, is a bit of reality. Because in truth, I’ve since moved out of this bookcase-lined apartment on the West Side of Providence. The “mistress” aspect of my lady persona was factually fictional, since I this apartment was not mortgaged, but rented. Emotionally, too, because in my year of living in this place, I never felt it to be “my own.” Not only because I was renting, but because I had a very intrusive and disruptive neighbor downstairs who loved her television so much that she needed to share her programming choice with me almost every night, all night by turning up the volume to some ungodly level. And when my landlady decided to sell the place, she had her realtor come into my place and perform little acts of violence. After my friend TLS saw images of the place online along with the ad for sale, and she said to me, “I didn’t know that you had got a new print up over your fireplace.” I was like, “But I didn’t?!” Apparently, the realtor had gone in and covered my poster for the seventies softcore film “Emmanuelle: Joys of a Woman” (tagline: “Nothing is wrong if it feels good”) with a cheesy Monet print. And when I got back home from one of the open houses, I’d see that they had hidden my gay magazines under more "innocuous" ones. I understand the need to sell, but hello, it’s not like the perspective homeowners have to buy my poster of French porn flick and the latest issue of “Butt” magazine along with the place. It all made me feel very un-grounded in the very space that was supposed to be “home.”

Now, all of my books have been shoved into wine boxes and along with bins of clothes and what bits of dishes and furniture I have, tucked into a storage space for the year. I'll be a bit nomadic for the next year (I'm teaching in the Fall; on leave to write in the Spring). This coming year will be a bit nervy for me, for a lot of he same reasons I was nervous for the portrait. Given the emotional instability of my “home” life as a kid, I think I’d been searching not so much for a boyfriend as for a husband. That is: someone with whom I could express in the concrete materiality of physical space and objects the emotional bond of love. I thought I had found it in my ex-husband, and to give both of us credit, we had a good long run (nearly 9 years). But once single, I found myself unable to disconnect the emotional synapse between emotionality and living space. I felt that as a thirtysomething, I needed a “HOME”: an adult dwelling space that could speak for the mistress-librarian in me.

But seeing Chad’s portraits of me helped me realize that I have to re-learn my emotionality as a single woman all over again. I once read in an interview with Lindsay Lohan about the joys of living out of a suitcase...and a storage space. She talked about how unstable such a life is, but surprisingly joyful: when she returns to the storage space, she finds all sorts of things she didn’t know she owned!! Like a little Christmas every couple months! So of course I will take inspiration from Miss Lohan, and learn to take cozy comfort in a few suitcases and a storage space that waits for me faithfully like a long-distance lover...all the while looking for a lover who will be independent of me but always boxedpacked and ready for me—a boy like a storage space.