Stories from Mykonos, Part Two

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A continuation of my impressions from Mykonos, Greece…

The Waiter Dmitri

Everyone loves the hotel’s head waiter Dmitri.   Dmitri is tall and handsome and very reassuring.   He rubs our backs while he’s talking to us, and he speaks in a soft and gentle voice.   He tells us that he works six months in Mykonos, and the other six months he’s a ski instructor in Austria.

We ask Dmitri many questions about Mykonos’ nightclubs.   He takes great pains to be as thorough as possible with his answers, and if we ever appear confused, he draws us maps on little scraps of hotel stationery.   He can’t say the word lesbian without lowering his voice to a whisper.   This is Dmitri’s only fault as far as I can tell.   I think his mother must be very proud of him.

Lost

When we travel as a group, we rely on the Germans.   They have an innate sense of direction, like carrier pigeons, and it takes German efficiency to navigate the island’s unmarked streets and the labyrinth of pedestrian walks in town.   Only once did they lead us in the wrong direction, but we ended up at a beautiful amphitheater surrounded by flowering trees.

The city plan was designed to confuse pirates.   All we want is ice cream and a taxi cab.   We find a transgender gypsy wearing a medieval crown, sitting on a stoop, reading fortunes.   We see stray cats everywhere.   We want to take them home and give them a better life.   At restaurants, the cats beg at tables like street urchins.   They will eat the fish, the lamb, and the bechamel on the moussaka, but they won’t eat the squid or the octopus.

There is a famous pelican in town.   A man drives him around in the carriage of his scooter.   One morning we saw the pelican sitting on the terrace of a restaurant, and the owner came out and cursed and shooed the bird away.   We thought it was extreme and impolite until we realized that he didn’t want the pelican shitting all over the place.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stories from Mykonos, Part One

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My partner and I celebrated our 10th anniversary in Mykonos with seven of our friends.   I’ve been writing some short essays about the trip and decided to share them here over the next few weeks.  Names have been changed as a courtesy to the involved parties.

Here’s Round One…

Arrival

We are seven arriving at Athens airport on staggered international flights.   Four of us have a six hour layover until boarding time for the little jet to Mykonos.   Anxious for adventure, we check-in our luggage and get a cab into the city.

The heat is oppressive, and the sun is scalding.  There is no air conditioning in the cab.

Such things would be outrageous in New York City, but we are in Greece, and jetlag-drunk.   We want to See, See, See.   Athens is hosting an Olympics.   The Special Olympics.   Our friendly, patriarchal driver tells us so.   He drops us in the Plaka district with advice to take the Metro back to avoid the traffic.

We wander up a staired lane in search of a taverna with a view of the Acropolis.   There are dozens of places with outdoor seating, each with a Maitre D’ foisting a menu on us and promising free beer.   We are shielded by urban skepticism.   At the top of the lane, looking up, up, up, we see it—a corner of the Acropolis wall.   It’s a good enough view considering how far we’ve come, and there’s a shaded taverna nearby.   Foods that we could order at any New York diner taste fresher and more ethnic:  Greek salad, tzatzichi, chicken souvlaki.  We learn how to say thank you in Greek.

“Efharisto!”

We find an air conditioned cab for the trip back to the airport.   The cool air is luxurious and our young driver with thick black hair is a sight more favorable than the man who took us into town.   But he swears a lot, annoyed with the redirected traffic pattern around the Olympic events (even though he steers through roped off streets like most of the other drivers).   Our older driver would have told us anything we wanted to know about the ancient city.   This one wants to be somewhere else, with his girlfriend maybe, or watching a soccer game with his friends.   Someone overtips him anyway.

First night out

At the hotel, we are greeted by the Germans, our eighth and ninth companions, a couple.   They have reserved a table at the restaurant.

After bread and wine and shared appetizers, most of us feel renewed.   At eleven, a proposal to go into town for nightclubbing is seconded, thirded, fourthed and fifthed.   We have made shopping trips for this occasion–designer jeans, patterned shirts, graphic tee’s, and for the women, espadrilles—and we have worked out, dieted, and tried new skin products for the past six months.

The walk into town is a steep downward slope with speeding mopeds, ATVs and buses, and no sidewalk.   We wind along the waterline to find the club the hotel waiter recommended.   At midnight, we are early arrivees, but the music is exhilarating, and we dance like teenagers.   Later, the club is mobbed and we take to tables and the tops of booths.

Exiting the club is a sensuous experience.  We squeeze through walls of men with well-built, overheated bodies.   Around the corner, there is an alley behind a church which is the designated cruising spot.   A Dutch tourist asks one of our single friends if he wants to go back there because his “balls need to be drained.”  Our friend declines.

We are arm-and-arm and joyful walking to the taxi stand in the early morning.   People are out on the streets like the scattering of a big parade.   Groups of young women teeter on the cobblestones in high heels and mini-mini skirts.   From a cafe, a lesbian couple watches us with Cheshire cat smiles.

The taxi line is ten parties deep, but there is a drunken British couple to talk to.   They started drinking when they arrived yesterday afternoon.   We crowd into a cab in two human layers.   A flirtatious friend asks the driver: “Where are you from?”   Everyone laughs riotously.  Someone blurts out:   “We’re on an island.  You think he commutes in from Bulgaria?”   The point is:   we’re not in NYC anymore.

 

What does it mean to be post-gay?

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I’m missing the Pride festivities this year.   I’ll be in Mykonos, Greece, having a more private Pride celebration—my 10th anniversary with my partner—along with close friends and family.

Last year’s Pride month had me thinking about growing older in the Gay community. This year, I’m stuck on the concept of “the post-gay generation,” which has gotten some chatter lately.

It’s come up through reactions to the Broadway revival of Larry Kramer’s 1980s AIDS saga The Normal Heart, or—more to the point—the revival of Kramer calling out the younger generation as “tragic” and “apathetic.” Then, there was the responding, angry “Open Letter to Larry Kramer” by J. Ricky Price from the youngish queer media site TheNewGay.net.

To be precise, Kramer and Price don’t use the term post-gay generation per se in their interviews or letters, but the issues and questions surrounding this new identity are evident through their exchange.

Are Gen Y-gays unappreciative of the extraordinary work their forebears accomplished to make life better for them?

Do Baby Boomer-gays place too much emphasis on sexual identity and politics, to the exclusion of the many interesting facets of being an individual?

Is it necessary to identify as gay, at all times, first and foremost, to push the civil rights movement along?

Are young gay men who prefer to stay outside of gay politics and the gay community feeble assimilationists, and likely self-hating?

As a Gen Xer, my views on all these debates are, predictably, somewhere in the middle.

But first, what does post-gay mean?  According to the Urban dictionary:

The notion that homosexuals should be able to define their identities by something other than sexual preference.

OK.   Doesn’t sound so new, or terrible for that matter.   This is the Urban Dictionary, after all, so I’ll even forgive the specious, antiquated terminology like “homosexual” and “sexual preference.”   I believe people should be able to identify however they want, and if a young man sees his gayness as secondary or tertiary to say…being an artist…or being Black…or having an eclectic mix on his iPod…that seems perfectly reasonable.

The problem I see with the term post-gay—-which is the same problem I see with “post-racial” or “post-feminist”—-is it seems to imply putting something in the past, as though certain experiences, histories, or I guess identities are no longer important or relevant.

I could but won’t argue the relevancy issue, since I think it’s pretty obvious.   Instead, I’ll frame the post-gay debate in the context of our broader post-identity culture (which is not the sole creation of Gen Y).

We live in a world where becoming skin color “blind” is considered to be a state of enlightenment.   Our most visible female politicians may invoke sexism when their qualifications are questioned, but their platforms say nothing about promoting the status of women.   It makes sense that many gay men are gravitating toward “neutral” identities that make navigating the decreasingly identity-conscious, decreasingly community-conscious world easier.   It’s not precisely assimilation, I don’t think, or social conformity.   It’s more about individualism trumping group identity.

There’s something sad in that, but every generation has demanded the right to identify on its own terms, not just to spite their older detractors, but because that’s how we find ourselves in the world.

At 18, I was a retro Dead Head.   Five years later I was a gay-liberationist graduate student in Doc Martens.   At 41, I’m a gay writer slash social worker cum humanist-atheist cum social justice enthusiast.   Maybe our identities get longer the older we get.   I’d never use the label post-gay.   Maybe gay-plus.

andrewjpeterswrites.com goes dark next week due to vacation!!

 

Gregory Maguire’s The Next Queen of Heaven

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Showing how far behind I’ve gotten in my reading, I just finished Gregory Maguire’s late 2009 release The Next Queen of Heaven.

If you’ve poked around my site, you know Maguire is a literary hero of mine (maybe you noticed a particular sidebar icon).   My appreciation for Maguire is manifold:   his intricately re-imagined fairytale worlds, and the sly twists therein; his sense of humor—a winning combination of absurdity and crotchitiness; and his expert rendering of hapless anti-heroes.

The Next Queen of Heaven has all of these peculiarities to recommend it.   Even as a departure from Maguire’s retold fairytale stock, there’s still a backdrop of magic and myth, vis-a-vis the Virgin Mary and the simmering possibility of another Christmas “miracle” in the works.

A little synopsis:   40-something, thrice divorced Leontina Scales is desperately concerned about her 18-year-old daughter Tabitha, a foul-mouthed, intractable, near drop-out high school senior with a knack for sleeping around with small town losers.   So Leontina stages a paradoxical intervention.   She’ll show Tabitha the error of her ways by shaming her with a strong dose of bad behavior.   But the plan is thwarted when Leontina gets accidentally hit over the head by a falling Virgin Mary statuette, rendering her aphasic and unable to care for herself (or, maybe it was all part of her plan).

Not a bad premise, and combined with the setting—the marginal upstate New York town of “Thebes,” that’s inching toward Y2K with angsty superstition—things start off with plenty of quirky narrative drive.

I laughed out loud quite a bit while reading, particularly during Tabitha’s wry, fatalistic observations, and a hilarious Christmas pageant scene that is some of Maguire’s best literary humor ever.

In a sense, he’s freer to take things to extremes with an original story.   And, at the same time, there’s an added relatability to his contemporary characters.   Passages about Tabitha’s discovery of sexual pleasure, with the local bad news-heartthrob Caleb, are haltingly vivid (not graphic).   Brought in later to the story is co-protagonist Jeremy Carr, who can’t break free of a shattered love affair, or the small town Catholic community where his gayness is a dirty secret.  He’s the kind of guy most of us know, or have known.   The denizens of tNQoH’s Thebes are each uniquely handicapped by personal hang-ups, but not meanly so.   Even the homophobes, like Tabitha’s brother Hogan, manage to achieve a measure of redemption in their earnest, if misguided pursuits.

They’re doing the best they can with what life dealt them.

Maguire’s break into contemporary, realistic fiction (realistic applied loosely:::things approach send-up on occasion) is not without its uneven moments, however.   Things start out quick, drag in the middle a bit, then pick up nicely.

It’s an issue of the narrative drive not quite meeting the demands of the subject.   A degree of character floundering by Elphaba in Wicked, or Liir in Son of a Witch, worked well for Maguire’s epically lost heroes, where the scale of personal, even philosophical, discovery was vast.   But in a modern context, where the characters’ problems are “smaller” and more familiar, the meandering character journeys get a little sluggish.

For a good part of the story, Tabitha is on a search for Caleb, who has clearly moved on from their sexually-charged relationship, and I was anxious for her to move on too.   Same thing with Jeremy, who is shown in repeated scenes of passive snits with the guy who dumped him.

A plot diversion in which Jeremy’s gay men’s chorus (actually, a trio) has to negotiate rehearsal space at a neglected convent—the Sisters of Sorrowful Mysteries—provides a clever observation about what gays and nuns have in common in a heteronormative society.   But it doesn’t quite hit the wacky heights of life with the Maunts of the Cloister of Saint Glinda from the Wicked trilogy, of which it is a rather plain derivative; nor does it serve such a critical purpose.

As Maguire’s first work that explicitly deals with modern gay and bisexual men and their troubles, tNQoH treads familiar themes—AIDS, loneliness, estrangement from family—but the delivery is matter-of-fact and ultimately heart-warming.

Tabitha’s younger brother Kirk, the beleaguered “good son” of the family, is immensely charming, and a spot-on portrait of queer coming of age.   The bisexuality of Willem, Jeremy’s old flame, is handled equitably and effectively, forgoing a typical “is he or isn’t he?” debate (or at least, that’s up to the reader to decide).

Everyone, gay or non-gay, is looking to escape something, in most cases the social confines of Thebes itself.   Like much of Maguire’s work, the future of these embattled characters is unclear; but there is hope.   For Jeremy, it comes in an opportunity to get discovered while performing at an AIDS charity concert in New York City.

So, my bottom line:   the journeys here are worth following.  Will sexually-loose, ungoverned Tabitha make something of herself?   Will Jeremy transcend heartbreak and musical mediocrity?   And there’s worthwhile wisdom along the way, i.e. if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get, what you’ve always got.

tNQoH gets my full-on recommendation, even if it doesn’t sustain the engrossing quality of Maguire’s re-imagined subjects, my favorites—Wicked, Son of a Witch, and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister.

Is Dumb the New Smart?

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A little social commentary, a little writerly update this week…

Is Dumb the New Smart?

It’s actually a political/pop culture trend that started under the George W. Bush administration, and the concomitant rise of celebrities like Paris Hilton.

But it reached its zenith with Sarah Palin and her recent commentary on Paul Revere. He made his famous ride, gun in hand, to warn the British:   we Americans have the right to bear arms.   Remember from history class?

Education is passe, intellectual inquiry is for assholes, and everything you needed to know, you learned at Sunday family suppers, between Church and rifle practice.

For a recent pop culture counterpart, see Charlie Sheen.

Writing Brief

In writing news, my manuscript wends its way to a climax and denouement (isn’t that a great word?).   I just finished up a murder scene (mwah, ha, ha, ha).

Excitement is building for Lambda’s 2011 Writers’ Retreat.   I’ve made my flight arrangements and sent in my photo/bio.

Lambda started a listserv for Fellows so we can share transportation and get to know each other.   I’m already amazed (and a bit intimidated) by the list of authors.   Lots of writers to learn from.