dissipation ball

The House of Schecter is a new house. In fact, right now, it’s less a house than an igloo. Still, a gal has to start somewhere. I’m usually inspired by Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning, the 1990 documentary about the Harlem drag ball circuit in the late 1980s, as I teach it each year for a course on conceptualizing race as a transsexualism process. But this year, I’ve been particularly obsessed with the scene in which the beautiful Octavia Saint Laurent shows off her own obsession: with the Czech supermodel Paulina Porizkova. In the scene, Octavia is wrapped in a housecoat and radiant, face makeup-less and hair in soft un-dressed fluff. She’s wearing a thin black wrist watch. She stoops on a chair and glides her hand over images of Paulina, explaining what she loves about her (“The red hot fire of hair...”). Though she expresses her idolizing of the supermodel, hearing Octavia’s gently lilting voice and watching delicately cadenced wrist, I can’t help but idolize this Mother of the House of Saint Laurent.

In my replication of this scene, I am stooped over inelegantly on a chair, my hair in post-run-shower lank, gliding my splintery wrist (note thin black watch) over my idol: Butterfly McQueen. I have a huge pantheon of female idols, but I’m not a big believer in walls so their images recline in magazine pages and clipping boxes. The images I’m gesturing towards in this photo are three paintings I made of Butterfly McQueen back in 2002 or 2003. Butterfly McQueen was the film actress best known for playing the slave Prissy in the 1939 film Gone With the Wind. With that voice pitched into Mount Everest, she uttered the classic line that became a pivot for many critical examinations of race, racism, and cinema, theses that were often critical not only of the film and the Afro-American stereotypes it espoused, but critical and perhaps even hostile to the woman who uttered those words for a salary: “I don’t know nothing about birthin’ babies.”

I saw Gone With the Wind as a teenager, and I became instantly obsessed with Butterfly McQueen. Or perhaps, it began as fascination that volupted into an obsession. Perhaps it was because as a feminine boy and Virgo at that, I actually felt as if I were “Prissy.” My fascination with McQueen indicated an idiosyncratic response to her performance. I didn’t see what everyone else saw, I didn’t hear what everyone else heard. Of course I understood her to be enacting a racist caricature, but I was struck by the deep force of that body wiggling beneath the role, as if she were a human cosmonaut trapped in the slimy spew of a monstrous alien creature. The wiggle felt like a struggle, supreme. The voice didn’t sound funny to me: it was mystical, androidal. She didn’t look like a buffoon to me: her eyes were like black cut-glass beads mistakenly jabbed into a child’s soft toy. Her body didn’t seem bojangly; it seemed slender as a switch, jointed not like a puppet but like a ballet dancer. When I researched her life, I learned that the woman who iconized the dim-witted slave on screen had indeed begun her career as a classical dancer. She got her stage name “Butterfly” from a dance she performed in a production of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. She didn’t lead a dancer’s life, but then, neither did she lead the life of a desperate Hollywood hanger-on. She grew up. As an adult, she mundanely managed her own life along its line, which she had drawn. She owned property in both New York and Georgia. She earned a B.A. in political science from the CUNY. She became an atheist. And in that last incarnation, she uttered the contents of her own true brain that furiously ripped through the slime of words stuffed into the mouth of Prissy:

They say the streets are going to be beautiful in heaven. I’m trying to make the streets beautiful here. At least, in Georgia and in New York, I live on beautiful streets …When it’s clean and beautiful, I think America is heaven. And some people are hell.

I painted three pictures to try to embody that Butterfly McQueen. In the big green painting is a simple act of glamorization: Butterfly McQueen is a fashion model. My Paulina. The two tiny ones re-imagine one of her “maid” roles, in Duel in the Sun, in which she keeps refraining the words which the screenwriter obviously took to be the buffoonery of a flighty maid: “I have so much to remember.” But voiced through McQueen’s trembling, fairy-whistle timbre, the line sounded to me like a lament, and spoke to the heaviness of memory, the burden of remembering. It spoke to me of wanting to float off, to be snipped away from the balloon-man of your history. So in one image, I painted her as she appears in the film: hoop skirt, tears. In the match of the pair, I painted her as a frilly French maid: servitude is only a role, a fetish costume. She leans back and closes her eyes, relaxing from the demands to keep remembering. As an academic and an apprentice of language, “I have so much to remember” is a complaint, an excuse, a badge of honor, a motivation to work. As a girl embodied in a male body, “I have so much to remember” is a necessary formula for living. I’ve been working it all these years through that utterance. Even though we had radically different physical lives, I think Butterfly McQueen understood that feeling.

Last month, I wrote about wanting to collect children for my house; now I will start. Traditionally, one becomes a child of a house—is given the new family name—when one walks at a ball and snags a trophy in a category. But the kind of ballwalking I need for my house doesn’t call for sashaying or stilettos or even military realness. Not literally, anyway. Part of why I chose “Schecter” as my house name is to honor not only the feminine feminism of Jenny Schecter, but to honor her hyperbolic, performative embodiment of the art of writing. The shade of my pancake foundation is the English language. I vogue to the rhythm of syntax. I tuck my tool into the crevices of my sentences. So my ball has to take place in the digital field. The bodies-in-realness are fleshed out at a level both deeper and shallower than the epithelial: at the molecular level, at the level of emotions that comprise those molecules. I want to dissipate into fabulosity.

The ball:
DISSIPATION BALL/ PROVIDENCE IS BURNING.

Location:
“The Imperial Elks Lodge” of the internet, which is right here, now, where your eyes are bearing down, where your fingertips are transforming and moving your digitalized flesh.

Time:
Whenever you want.

Entry:
I will post the categories as individual comments in the “Comments” section of this blog, and all you have to do is write one thought and crafted sentence (or two) that is the embodiment of your walking in that category.

Categories:
REALNESS IN THE DAYTIME
UPCOMING PRETTY GIRL
BUTCH QUEEN FIRST TIME IN DRAGS AT A BALL
LUSCIOUS BODY
VOGUING

One rule:
Post with your name or email address. Posting anonymously is like walking without the body.

Another rule:
The sentence should cover over the body that people and see and understand through the seeing, “you.” The sentence will look like fiction but will really be a truth that’s deeply embedded in your cells.

those bones are that child

The last time I ate bunny was also the first time I ate bunny: December, 1997. It was at Rose Pistola, a fancy-dancy restaurant in North Beach, San Francisco. It was the first official date with the man who was shortly to become my husband and eventually my ex-husband. I don’t remember what the bunny flesh tasted like. I wish I remember what that bunny tasted like. Instead, I just remember only the butter that soaked it and my share of the bottle of red wine my ex-husband extravagantly ordered (We killed the whole bottle), then stumbling giddily and fatly down to my old raspberry-colored dented 1989 Nissan Sentra in my thrift-store finery—a teddy-bear plush fake fur coat—and suddenly being picked up my date and swung around in the mud and cheesy fog surrounding us.

That kid wearing a fake fur coat eating bunny on a first date pretty much sums up the kind of vegetarian I am to become. I’ve been transitioning as a vegetarian for the past couple years, slowly weaning myself off of meat, which is difficult. Being Korean, grilled meat has transcended the status of cultural marker and become chromosomal component. Still, I’ve not touched red meat now for 5 months, and not touched poultry for two months. But I don’t think I can’t give up fish, so I guess I am what you would call a pescatarian. Having written that sentence featuring the word “pescatarian,” I feel like a straight girl who had one lesbian affair in college and still wants to hold onto a bisexual identity. Oh well.

Actually, the reasons for my becoming a fisheating vegetarian is pretty much like those of a straight girl who tries lesbianism and becomes bisexual: it felt simultaneously shiny and right. I stopped eating cow-pig-lamb, because when I started doing it, I began to feel much lighter in brain and body, like my own flesh stuck to my bones better. Then I realized that I’ve never felt fully comfortable eating flesh, not because it had been a result of killing (I don’t think foraging is inherently more ethical to hunting; tigers and cheetahs and wolves and foxes are still ethical) but because of the cruelty that goes into their particular killing. As I hate zoos because I hate seeing animals cooped up for human amusement, I hate the idea of penning up and fattening animals for the purpose of producing steak and bacon. Farming livestock for me amounts to sadism. So while I began transitioning to vegetarianism to feel bodied in a certain way, it’s also inspired me to eliminate the affect of sadism from my life.

But here is the big exception: bunny. After 13 years, I just ate bunny again. Why did I do this in the middle of my transition? I don’t really know. Partly because the chance to eat bunny comes rarely. Partly because I wanted to see if I’d immediately puke it back up (I didn’t). Last weekend, I took my Aries gal pal Trace out for a birthday dinner to another fancy-dancy restaurant, this time in Providence. She ordered a gorgeous gourmet hamburger, medium rare, stuck pink between briochy sponges and I, though ostensibly not the birthday girl, ordered a more expensive dinner, a “duo of rabbit.” On a fluorescent white plate: black triangle of wine-dyed scant flesh hanging barely onto the tiny bones of something very hungry; two little beige cylinders made to look like the bone-and-marrows of a much bigger animal. When I asked about the dish, the server told me that the black stuff was “the arm” and the cylinders were “the saddle” that was made into a pâté.

“Saddle?” I said. “You mean like the butt?”

He looked a bit stricken or disgusted when he replied in the affirmative. I wasn’t trying to be crude or be facetious; his restaurant-language struck me, too. Cows and pigs and sheep don’t have “arms” and “saddle”; they just have “legs”—four of them. The asymmetrical conceptualization of limbs is applied to birds—who have “wings” and “legs”—and of course, humans, with their “arms” and “legs.” So bunnies, in evoking that asymmetry, are made more akin to humans. It’s as if it is this proximity, created solely through language, is an expression of the general discomfort in eating an animal that is so cuddly and cute, associated with Easter and the arms of children that reach out for something plushy.

“Saddle” seemed to me a ridiculous euphemism (but then, maybe all euphemisms are ridiculous). Like calling a living part of a body the name of an inanimate object can distance you from the feeling and reality that you are munching on a tiny thing that was once tender, soft, and obviously throbbing. No amount of wine, butter, and spices can cover up that memory.

I sucked the sauce off the fairy arm bones and brought them home. You see them above. They are so tiny...and curved! The curvature makes the bones look extra weak, and extra beautiful. One of the bones is like the arm of a doll’s violin. Handling those bones, I can almost feel the flesh and fur that used to protect it, before it was yanked off. It feels horrible to imagine the terror of the bunny before it is killed. I imagine its fright, its desperation, those tiny arms flailing, the strong butt muscles about to be turned into “saddle.” To imagine this is so painful it almost makes me want to puke.

But I’m glad, too, that the bunny bones make me feel this way. Because when you eat a hamburger, or even a slab of steak, the piece of meat before you no longer has any emotional connection to the body that it used to be. This is how most humans eat: abstraction frees them from empathy and sympathy, allowing gluttony for flesh without fear, guilt, or disgust. When I eat flesh, I want to know it, feel that I’m eating flesh. But not to gloat in its fleshiness. I don’t want to enjoy it by sadistically enjoying the pain of its former self but nor do I want to enjoy it by repressing that dark emotion either. I want to be reminded that I’m eating something that used to have feelings. That the flesh I’m eating used to be connected to joy and terror. And so even if I’m enjoying eating, I want to feel that bit of terror, not as an aspect of the enjoyment, but as penance, to give silent respect the complete being that this taken-for-granted food used to be.

Eating bunny is like eating myself. When I was a little child, the bunny was my favorite animal. In fact, as you can also see above, I wanted to be a bunny. I don’t think I’m unique in this. But eating bunny now, I feel like I’m eating my former self. I still love bunnies as creatures, and eating them connects me to being six years old again, making bunny-ears out of my hands and thinking of hopping as a mode of transportation. It makes me feel more primal to eat a tiny thing: I’m a tiny thing that can only eat other tiny things. My diet is more about respecting intimacy than animacy. I don’t want to not eat cows or pigs because they are more “alive” than plants. If I eat rabbit once every thirteen years, it’s because eating them makes me feel closer to them: I love bunnies so much that I want them to be a part of my body, on a cellular level. In real life, we can’t show love through actual cannibalism, which is a good thing!Eating bunny lets me remember the terror it causes in loving too much, and not let loving become a desire for totalizing incorporation.

So that’s why I’ll be a vegetarian of intimacy. I will only eat those animals that fit into the cradle of my arms, so that I never delude myself into thinking that edible flesh fall out of some abstract space without terror and hurt. And while I won’t be eating bunny very often at all, when I do, I won’t eat it without feeling it, remembering its history of living, knowing that somewhere, sometime, my butt, too, is saddle. I won’t eat bunny without feeling that I am chewing on my own bones. This isn’t very vegetarian of me at all, but my dietary edict might go something like this: I SHALL ONLY EAT ANIMALS THAT I CAN HOLD TIGHTLY WITH MY HANDS TO MY HEART.