Song of a Reformed Headhunter

 The full title of the book is  Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 . Subtle analysis combined with plenty of interesting detail makes this a terrific read. The style is not at all academic, and yet the rigor is so. The research into visual and textual documents held by a wide range of sources, such as purity movements, the police, local newspapers, doctors' reports, is impressive, and the documents themselves are read with sensitivity and insight. My biggest takeaways are (1) when the fairy, the emblem of the period, gives way to the gay, the view of queer men changed from being a gender status to a sexual identity, and (2) the notion of heterosexuality arose together with the notion of homosexuality, when the white middle-class men felt threatened by women's social progress and the fairies' increasing visibility. 

  The flight from CDMX to Puerto Vallarta took one and a half hours. Our Airbnb is on Pilitas, in Zona Romantica, the gay part of town. Had lunch at Cafe de Angel, walked about in the afternoon, and then a dinner of whole red snapper in Joe Jack's Fish Shack, which was not a shack, but a popular restaurant. The server deboned the snapper expertly in front of me. After dinner, went to a bar called La Noche, recommended by Bench. On the rooftop, talked to a young server who came from Venezuela. On the ground floor, a drag performance dragged out for one and a half hours. We were seeing many older gay men with other older gay men. Guy remarked accurately that PV, with its cheaper rents and drinks, seemed to be a haven for retirees from California.

Five of my "Ungovernable Bodies" poems have just appeared in Five Dials, a literary magazine published by Hamish Hamilton, together with work by K. Busatto, Helon Habila, Annie Katchinska, Mattie Lubchansky, Ben Miller, Tommi Parrish, and Binyavanga Wainaina. The issue is themed Unfettered Joy and Freedom. You can download the pdf for free here , and read about my shenanigans with Leroy, Carlos, Brian, Antonio, and Antonio again. Yesterday, flew with Guy into Mexico City. Five-and-a-half hour flight.  Checked into Galleria Plaza Hotel at Reforma. Met Tim for dinner at a Japanese restaurant, Wanwan Sakaba, and then got a drink at NeonSoulRave. Cute boys, but we were too tired to wait for the drag show to start at 10 pm. We are here until Tuesday. 

 Column written for the weekly Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . I dreamt that 377A, Singapore's law against private, consensual sex between men, was repealed. That families of all kinds, LGBTQ+, blended, single-parent, were cherished and supported. Workplace discrimination against one's sexual orientation and gender identity was outlawed. Full housing and medical rights, benefits, and protections were extended to queer people and their loved ones. Schoolchildren were taught to love and respect themselves and others who were different from them. I dreamt that economic benefits were redistributed more evenly and fairly. No one would go hungry, homeless, or without an education. The young learned to look out for those not in their families, those supposed strangers, the poor, and to challenge the winner-take-all, zero-sum-game mentality. Secure and independent in their old age, the elderly did not have to clean tables in the hawker centers or the bathrooms in the gleam...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Message “SINGAPORE, STOP THE KILLINGS” projected by  The Illuminator  onto the building  housing Singapore’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations on November 2, 2022.  The NYC-based Singaporean organizer explained, “The goal is to name and shame on the international arena,  to increase awareness outside of Singapore and show our support for those in Singapore fighting for justice."   The  shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs  last Saturday, killing five people and wounding 17 others, was a tragedy. The repercussions of the shooting will live on, not only for the wounded and the families of the dead, but also for the LGBTQ community everywhere, who are reminded, once again, that they are not safe even in what is supposed to be a "safe space." Tragic in a different manner is the Singapore state's judicial murder of prisoners on death row. State-...

 I venture that to understand the protagonist Colin, and thus the novel, it takes one to know one, or else someone with a large empathy. As Colin explains it: "Well, Ray's charisma was real, and I wasn't the only one to feel it. But I went along with it. It's only exaggerating a little to say that I knew what I as doing when I fell over those long and insolently extended legs. I was ready. I had no real idea of what I was ready for, but still I was ready. "Even sudden things have a history behind them. Maybe it's the sudden things that have the most history. Sooner or later I was going to have to respond to excitement and danger. It was just a question of when and how I was going to do it. Sooner or later I was going to have to answer the call of the live rail." I give four stars instead of five for what James Wood in his LRB review of the book called "a little Nabokovian velvet," the slight over-deliberateness in the description and placement o...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . June is Pride Month in New York, and in Singapore, Pink Dot, an annual picnic-turned-rally for LGBTQ equality. After having come out as a gay man for years, more and more I find June to be a time not just for celebration but also for reflection, on what the LGBTQ movement has achieved and how far it has to go. This June, a Facebook post by a young Malay-Muslim gay man from Singapore made me think harder about the goals of the movement. I share his post with his permission. "Someone asked me this morning whether I tuned in for Pink Dot, and my reply is always the same. I have a complicated relationship with PD and Singapore's LGBT movement in general, because my entry into gay spaces at 18 just made me even more aware of my alterity. It was not a moment of self-acceptance and solidarity commonly imagined in popular coming-of-age narratives. The gay community in Singapore was often a brutal ...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newlstter. Sign up here . On February 2nd, 1963, 57 years ago, the British authorities in Singapore arrested over 110 anti-colonial activists in a security operation codenamed Cold Store. They were suspected of being Communists, but they were never tried in an actual court of law. Evidence from the British archives suggests that Malaysian and Singaporean political leaders, such as Lee Kuan Yew, urged the British to take action in order to eliminate their political opponents, and not because there was a real Communist threat. Singapore Unbound again calls for the Singaporean archives to be opened for the inspection of independent historians to ascertain the truth of the matter. The use of the Internal Security Act for detention without trial comes under public scrutiny again recently. The Ministry of Home Affairs has detained a 16-year-old Protestant Christian under the Act for planning to attack Muslims at two mosques. Si...

I really enjoyed this conversation last Thursday with fellow queer writers Kiran Bhat, Tom Cho, Farzana Doctor, Angela Meyer, and Sarah Sala, moderated by William Johnson. We all hail from different places—Australia, Canada, India, Singapore, US—but find a common basis to discuss our different identities and writings. What is queer about our writing? How has it changed through the years? How has the pandemic changed us? What excites us about queerness now? So inspiring to hear different writers' takes on these topics. Hosted by the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, the event can be viewed on YouTube .

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . On Monday, Singapore's High Court dismissed all three legal challenges to Section 377A, the law that criminalizes the LGBTQ community. After ten years of Pink Dot, the annual mass rally for equality, after the increasing show of support from straight allies and local companies, after influential political leaders such as the former ambassador to the US and the brother to the Prime Minister called for change, after a former Chief Justice and two former Attorney-Generals wrote public critiques of the law, the High Court's judgment has not budged a millimeter from the 2014 judgment of the Apex Court. Most infuriating is the High Court argument, which agrees with the government's, that Section 377A "serves the purpose of safeguarding public morality by showing societal moral disapproval of male homosexual acts." The fight for equality must continue. Already one of the plaintiffs has filed ...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Now that I have your attention with that rather silly subject line... I've been reading some journalism comparing the responses of different political systems to the COVID-19 global crisis, and so adducing the superiority of one system to another. Much of this journalism strikes me as lacking in facts, context, and nuance. It reads much more like instant ideology rather than patient analysis. It caricatures complex ways of life to score cheap points. It is the chattering class's equivalent of street-level xenophobia. We can't tell from this pandemic which political system is better for three reasons: 1. The crisis is not over yet. The results are not in. 2. Even when the crisis is over, the results will be evaluated according to different sets of social values. The raw numbers of infections and deaths, though tragic, are only a part of the picture. What have we gained or lost by m...

Last night, watched Pain and Glory directed and written by Pedro Almodóvar, with GH, WL, and CC. The Spanish title Dolor y gloria sounds so much better and fitting. The film is a rich meditation on love, desire, family, and the creative process. How much do you really love your lover if you won't abandon your Madrid-centered artistic ambition to help him cure his drug addiction? How much do you really love your mother if you won't stay in her village of caves? After the success, will there be time to make it up to lover and mother? Is the failure to make it up to them related to one's creative crisis? Antonio Banderas was superbly subtle as the aging filmmaker Salvador Mallo. Penelope Cruz and Julieta Serrano were wonderful too as the mother at different ages. César Vicente was the dishy young man who was the director's first desire, when as a boy he was first awakening to the world of men. César Vicente with the director Pedro Almodóvar

Weekly column for Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Last Friday, Taiwan's parliament voted to legalize same-sex marriage, a first for Asia. In doing so, it met the deadline imposed by the constitutional court, which struck down the Civil Code's definition of marriage as exclusively between a man and woman in 2017. Singapore Unbound salutes all the Taiwanese LGBTQ activists and allies, and rejoices with all Taiwanese, both LGBTQ and not. The change is not just for a sexual minority but for everyone, because it enhances democratic ideas, freedoms, and rights for all. Over in Singapore, the annual LGBTQ rally called Pink Dot announced its campaign theme for this year, its eleventh. It urges all Singaporeans to take a stand #AgainstDiscrimination. To inform the general public of the real harm inflicted on LGBTQ people in school, at home, and at the workplace, members of the LGBTQ community are asked to take to social media to share their experiences of being discrimi...

Weekly column for Singapore Unbound's newsletter. Sign up here . When I expressed interest in attending a Jewish service, a kind friend brought me to the Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, which he has visited a number of times, not for worship (he is an atheist), but for the beauty of the Hebrew language sung and chanted, the sounds of his childhood. Founded in 1973 by twelve gay Jewish men, CBST describes itself as the world's largest LGBT synagogue. There I was last Friday, wearing my rainbow-colored kippah, tapping my foot to the catchy music, and trying hard to follow the service in English. I must admit that in the midst of the worshipful atmosphere, a fleeting thought went through my mind: what if a gunman should burst in and shoot up the sanctuary? The rising tide of anti-semitism and homophobia in America made such a thought not altogether fanciful. The Poway shooting, which took place less than a week ago, must have been on the minds of the CBST congregation. The at...

I have a poem, "Gaudy Boy," written after Singapore's late poet Arthur Yap, in this anthology commemorating the bicentennial of the birth of Walt Whitman and the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Besides Whitman, many poetic forebears, including Cavafy, Rimbaud, Thom Gunn, Justin Chin, James Baldwin, Garcia Lorca, Tim Dlugos, Allen Ginsberg, and Yukio Mishama, are celebrated by a good range of contemporary gay male poets. Big thanks to editor Raymond Luczak for including my poem and for putting together this celebration of the vitality of the gay male poetic tradition. You can get hold of the anthology here .

7 poems from my new book CONNOR AND SEAL forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press in Spring 2020. The poems in the voice of Seal are pessimistic in outlook (be warned!), whereas the poems spoken by Connor are the opposite. Together they capture something of the vacillations of this politically unsettling time, I hope. Big thanks to Dale Peck, for accepting these poems, the first poetry published in this reincarnation of a pioneering American journal that was launched in 1957 with the work of Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mark Schorer, and James Purdy, and that introduced to American readers the work of Genet, Grass, Ōe, Duras, Paz, Walcott, and Nabokov. * Watched Tom at the Farm (2013), directed by Xavier Dolan, who also co-wrote the script and played the part of the protagonist. Quite a tense film, a psychological struggle between Tom and his deadlover's homophobic older brother, but the film could have been so much better. Pierre-Yves Cardinal plays the older brother Fran...

Like its actors, "Ma vie avec James Dean" (2017), written and directed by Dominique Choisy, is extremely likeable. Johnny Rasse plays the young director Géraud Champreux, who goes to Normandy to present his first feature film "My Life with James Dean." He meets a bunch of oddballs, including Balthazar, played with lovelorn candor by Mickaël Pelissier. Françoise Lebru, who plays Champreux's mom, steals the few short scenes she appears in.   

Friday night, watched "God's Own Country" (2017), about a young Yorkshire farmer (a very credible Josh O'Connor) who numbs his frustrations with binge drinking and casual sex until a Romanian migrant worker (Alec Secareanu), joining his family farm for the lambing season, shows him how to be himself, a gay man capable of love and connection. The film brings to mind "Brokeback Mountain" except that "God's Own Country," directed by Francis Lee, is much better. It actually shows the blood and death of newborn lambs. Some survive, some don't, a visual comment on the dangers and pitfalls of coming out in this day and age still. Not in love with the title, though.

Star Attractions of Singapore: when will Parliament reverse the injustice that makes me a second-class citizen in my own country? Leaving Singapore tonight after giving away 33 out of 50 tank tops. Our biggest challenge is our (self-)imposed invisibility. Putting on an equality singlet is a small but significant way of saying, we're here, we're queer, get used to it. Looking forward to coming back for Pink Dot 2018 to join everyone in claiming and celebrating the right to love. #gaybutnotyetequal #singaporeunbound

Gave out 27 tops altogether, yesterday at Artistry Cafe and today at Intermission Bar - at The Projector. Take a gander at these brave souls who wore their gay pride proudly. Thanks, everyone, for coming and taking a risk. Let’s stand up for gay equality! You make a difference.