Of Verbs and Versas

Aggghhhhh I didn’t want to become it, but I did. I’m the guy who blogs about gay dating. And I hate myself for it. BUT IT HAPPENED!

Anyway, I’ve been on a lot of dates that have been a great times to giant ?, and while driving the 3 hours to my family’s home, the nerd in me couldn’t help but compare all my dates to verb tenses.

Yes.

Verb tenses.

Past

I only recently encountered the past tense date. Everyone mentions an ex or something at some point, it happens. But this guy was just taking me through Ex City.

Me: Why’d you get into running?

Him: Oh, my ex. He’s really into it and got me into it.

Me: Oh, the one you just broke up with?

Him: No that was another one.

Me: Oh.

Him: I mean the one I just broke up with, there was therapy. It’s hard leaving a Latino, you know. Like we’re in it 100%. I just want to call him sometimes. I’m finally getting over it. I was in NY for like 8 weeks last fall trying to get over it. But I am now. I’m over it. I barely think about it.

Me: Ahhhhhhhhh…

This guy also spent the week telling me he wanted to “cuddle.” At the end of the date when I tried to kiss him he said, “No. What are you doing?” Which, I would have taken as a rejection and been fine with, had he not texted immediately after the date and said, “So…when is a good time to cuddle?”

Maybe his ex was into that.

Present

Present tense dates are only interested in… You know.

GRRRRR.

Hubba-hubba.

Future Perfect

Of all the dates I’ve been on, this has been the most prevalent. I’ve dated guys for quite a while and not realized that this is what was happening.  Basically, on these dates, the guy is looking beyond you. Hiding behind your head in the restaurant is their Mercedes, boat, 500K Gold Coast Condo and you and him taking topless beach photos in Cabo. Your existence is just a blurry haze between him and his gay fantasy. He needs some kind of boyfriend doll to take with him on this adventure and if you’re pleasant enough, this could be you! You could be the bauble that accompanies him on vacations, fills the other side of the bed and is the person he tells other people about when relationships come up in casual conversation. Oh, you have opinions and want to talk about social problems and concerns? That’s great! You can share those at dinner parties where you will be serving as an accessory.

Example:

One guy I dated had face crème in his bathroom. I was like, “Oh! You’re fancy!” He picked it up and looked at me. “Yeah, it’s good. I have another one, do you want to take it?”

“Oh, no that’s fine.”

“No – you should take it.”

“Oh…okay.”

Forced laugh – “I don’t want you to look old next to me. Ha.” His forced laugh uncomfortably shifts to a glare of warning.

Awkward silence ensues.

Present Progressive

These are the most fun. And by fun I man humiliating. This is when you’re on a date and the date is continually looking past you and trying to find another guy to hook up with. I was recently out with a guy. To be fair the date was ambiguous… We went on a date and then didn’t talk that much. We had tried to meet up a couple times and then ended up meeting on a Sunday Funday via text. So…were we there for each other? My answer came when the guy brought another tall blond guy back to our group of friends, I was like, “Oh… I’ve been replaced.”

Present Perfect

This is similar to the Future Perfect just a little more intense. This is the guy who after the first date has planned your future together. Sometimes it doesn’t even have to be the second date, they have already projected all of their fantasies on you and decided what order your genetically engineered babies will be born in before you even meet. This is usually the easiest to avoid as attachment problems and craziness emerge promptly.

Future Progressive

I’m making this the ideal because I ran out of tenses without getting into like pluperfect and… let’s not go there. But, if I may shoehorn this, I think it kind of fits. Because a Future Progressive is someone who looks into the future, but not a boat-6-figure-salary future, so much as a tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next day kind of future, a waking-up-next-to-you kind of future. 

And because it’s a sappy context, I’ll just say that the most romantic thing I’ve read in a long time was in the “Elegance of the Hedgehog” a few weeks ago. To paraphrase: The old concierge of an apartment building dresses up and is taken out to dinner by her date. As they are leaving the apartment some of the tenants look at the concierge and greet her as if they have never met her. She remarks on this and her date replies, “They didn’t recognize you. But I’d know you anywhere.”

Thanks for Nothing, Steve Jobs

I come off as an easygoing person, but at certain points I become as type-A and obnoxious as they come. This is most noticeable when I travel and have to be at an airport. I will be there super early – because I paid for a ticket and will not miss that plane.

Last weekend I was at a wedding in Tampa. I had rented a car and the last day of the trip went out to brunch with friends. Brunch drug on and on (as they tend to do) and pretty soon I had two hours to get to the airport before my flight left. I hop in the car, drive toward the airport, and find out that the airport exit is closed.

No worries.

I have plenty of time and will figure this out. It doesn’t take long for me to circle around to another exit, turn around on the interstate and head back the other way. The exit in the other direction is open so I’m flying high again.

If you are traveling to Tampa, it is worthwhile knowing that the lights last an EXTREMELY LONG TIME. Empires rise and fall in the period between a green turn arrow and the light actually turning green.

Well, I was low on gas, so I decided to turn around and fill up. In most places this would take about 5 minutes.

Not Tampa! In Tampa you age like that guy at the end of Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade as you wait for the lights to change. Then you turn around.

Then you get stuck at the light again.

Then you cross the intersection and have to turn around.

If, at this point, you’re concerned you haven’t waited at lights long enough, never fear, because you will get caught behind a mall exit lane and have to wait for 2 more light cycles before you can even get into the gas station.

It’s okay if you were feeling dry too, because suddenly the heavens will open up and it will be a flash flood downpour as you fill up the gas and then hop in the car.

You’ll freak out that the 5 minute gas junket turned into a 30 minute gas adventure.

Bu you’re close! So you wait for 2 more lights (yay!) before getting to turn back onto the main road.

Your Apple Map will tell you you have 1 mile before the turn, but there will be a huge green sign that suggests the airport is to the left after only ½ mile.

For some reason you trust Steve Jobs more than the Tampa city council who placed the sign, so you keep going straight and turn at the next light.

After turning, almost dying in a roundabout, then seeing a sign that says, “Cargo Road” you start to freak out as the Apple Witch says, “Dest-e-nation is on. Your. Right.”

Which is fine, because you actually mean “Abandoned Storage Shack” when you typed in “Tampa International Airport” into your phone GPS.

Well, it’s still raining and you’re driving a Nissan Versa, which wouldn’t survive a turtle shell toss in MarioKart.

But that doesn’t stop you from slamming on the gas and flying down the abandoned storage road at 60 mph as you curse Steve Jobs. When you come careening around the roundabout and a good citizen is driving the speed limit and you also begin to curse them and their stupid Altima.

After more breakneck speeds, turns, and panic as you see no airports around you, you finally see the rental car drop off sign ahead in the distance.

You did it!

And the rental guy is fast!

And the check-in is easy.

But…oh…. You got behind a family of 15 non-native English speakers who have to get through security.

You give them dirty looks, shove them forward, then come sprinting out of security to finally arrive at the gate.

WIN!!

Good thing that didn’t happen. Not one of those things happened because I left on time and followed the speed limit and love Steve Jobs and Nissan Versas.

But Tampa stoplights do suck. A lot.

Iggy by the Shore

I don't write stuff like this too often, but sometimes Iggy Azalea wears a Scarface leotard/tanktop and it inspires one. 

A - Operational Definition 

Queer is a word I learned early on. "queerbait" was a favorite (not so) term of endearment used by my brother when we would play games when I was little. Growing up the term was mostly closely associated with homosexuality. "Queer" people in my adolescent years just meant someone gay. It was an especially fun day at recess when the boys would gather and decide it was a fun idea to play "Smear the Queer," a game that involves tackling/pummeling/disemboweling a boy who had a ball. If you caught the ball, then you became the Queer and everyone's job was to attack you until you gave it up.  

This in itself is a fascinating object lesson. The desire to both destroy and be the object of difference is a tension that most people live in their whole lives. This, however, wasn't a game to dwell on this philosophical tension, so much as an excuse for boys to get together and give control to their most primal instincts of smashing into each other. 

The glory of a college education is that understandings become larger and worlds open up. Queer Theory, the definition of queer came to mean a lot more in my college years when, outside of being tackled for carrying a ball, "Queer" came to mean aberrational and not just homosexual. The Golden Girls is a queer show, not because it is about gay people but because it is about alternative families and lifestyles. It is oppositional to the television programs centered on nuclear families that espouse traditional sexual mores and exhort the joys of suburban life. Homosexuality and Queerness are tied closely together because being gay is deviance; options of a nuclear family, traditional Christian values, Sundays at the ballpark, etc. are outside of that realm. By sheer value of existing and experiencing same-sex desires, homosexuals are deviant and cut off from mainstream cultural operations.  As our society grows more open, this diminishes, but in many ways queerness is only normalized in larger urban centers. Take your same-sex partner and Asian baby to a baseball game in rural America and you will be stared at. 

Being gay, despite our striving forward, is still weird, deviant, different, odd - queer. 

But queerness isn't limited to that. I'm a double queer because yes, I like boys, but I also go to church, I would rather read Joyce than watch Andy Cohen, and I generally despise and mistrust any force that is able to exert power over me: governments, gravity, etc.  

B - Islands 

An interesting spin on the classic queer saga, is the push-pull of different subsets that strive toward or away from queerness.  

For instance, in Boystown there are groups of guys who have somehow created their own islands of gayness. They operate under the assumption that while they are gay, they aren't queer. They're gay but not THAT gay. I tell people about this concept and it doesn't make sense to someone not in the bubble, but these people very much exists. These guys are generally very masculine, attractive, and in positions of social power through work or general social connections. In many ways it reminds me of Orwell's Animal Farm, how the pigs take over leadership but are then subsumed into the world of men and betray all the other animals in the farm. Four legs good, two legs bad inverts itself into two legs good, four legs bad as the pigs learn to walk on two legs and start to subjugate the other animals on the farm. Likewise, these gay men have turned their back on larger issues in the gay community and see themselves as above and removed. They have successfully merged into larger society ("People see me and don't even know I'm gay!"). There is no concern for the LGBTQ youth who have to walk the streets of Boystown because they have no homes to go to. When a chubby guy comes into a bar, they don't see a fellow gay person, but a guy who should work out so he's more attractive.  

This isn't limited to gay men, but I find it the most upsetting and uncomfortable in my own community, because we have been ostracized and we should know better. This practice, however, is in every sect and slice of society. It's in the gifted artist who majors in accountancy so he can merge into the universal rat race; it is in the heterosexual couple who is afraid to break up because they have been together 3 years and it is "time to get married."  

It is a human impulse is to drive toward this great beacon of sameness and uniformity. There is something terrifying and also awesome about thousands of soldiers moving in unison, perfect goosesteps rising in time with the sharp tap of boots. It is the desire to find the boy, queer, with the ball and crush him. 

And yet oppositional to this are the other kind of islands; these are the ones who consciously seek a boat and a captain to drive them to a place of isolation and difference. This movement has a number of symbols, from Lady Gaga, to John Lennon. But these are sects of people who strive to drift off from the mainstream, the great continent of grey and white uniformity, that society represents.  

Every high school and college student goes through this. Even the most cookie cutter of conservative Catholics discovers Objectivism at some point and decides that there is another reality, another plane of existence that they have not yet experienced. These feelings of elation drive them to pockets of likeminded individuals in which the merits of libertarianism are discussed and their true difference is realized.  

Alternatively, it can happen to a group of vegans who decide that they will taken the mantle of diet difference. This I find most fascinating in that it also cloaks the wearer in a sort of martyrdom. "Oh, you don't have a vegan menu... I supposed I'll just eat after the party."  

Either way, this tenacious desire for otherness tends to die off in the mid-twenties. People who you thought were hippie/rock alternative are suddenly married with two kids. The leftist who chained herself to a flagpole in college is suddenly voting Republican and reading C.S. Lewis for her Bible Study.  

The movement, the masses fade off and most drift back to the continent of grey. They don't often make the trip across the sea to the island in its totality. A few waves experienced and a shark spotted in the deeper waters are enough to bring them back to shore. They drift back with the gays who have created their own inner-model of sameness. 

But no one would get out in this water if it weren't for the captains on the shore who really ARE trying to break off the island. These people are rabid, crazy, and completely different. They aren't just queer, they are Queer. Their very being exudes separateness, divergence. 

They are people like James Joyce, John Lennon; thinkers like Einstein, Copernicus, and Steve Jobs. And maybe like 

C - Queen Iggy 

Last summer a song was released called "Work." My boss played it and it was funny and catchy. Then she showed us the video. 

What I had assumed was an African-American woman trying to be like Nicki Minaj was actually a 5'10" blond Australian woman. In the video she rides a bicycle in Louboutin heels around a trailer park. Further diving into her background showed she was Australian but came to the US at 16 to make her way in hip-hop by cleaning hotel rooms. Her first big hit was called Pu$$y. In one video called, "Murda Bizness" she forces her fictional daughter into a beauty pageant. Her follow up single to "Work" was called "Bounce" and featured her in full Indian garb dancing Bollywood style as midi, videogamish music throbs in the chorus.  

I had liked "Work" - I loved Iggy Azalea. There were two things very clear from these videos.  

a - She gave zero f@#ks 

b - Gurl was queer 

Of course, not queer in the homosexual way, but in the I am different and I fit into no particular mold whatsoever kind of way.  

Even looking at other so-called symbols of difference like Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj, she stands out as actually different. Lady Gaga is a white girl with a good voice who sings pop songs. She wears meat suits for attention. It's fun and different and there's a reason that people who don’t fit in identify with her. Likewise, Nicki is an African-American who raps and performs hip-hop music. She makes some weird music videos and wears colorful wigs - it's kind of different and fun. 

But Iggy... What is this glorious mess? 

D - Case Study: "New Bitch" 

A lot of female pop artists make songs about female empowerment. "Roar" and "Brave" come to mind over the past year. Lady Gaga's "Do What You Want" is an interesting play on the loss of female/individual autonomy within different contexts. These all speak to the plight of women, the desire to be stronger in spirit and carve out a special and unique place within a dominantly masculine culture. This concept is something that resonates with a plurality of different social groups, from women, to gays, to chubby boys in grade school who would rather take dance lessons than go to football practice. 

One of Iggy's ballad's on her new album is called "New Bitch." The song is about finding a man who's rich then talking trash to the other women who you have replaced in his affections. Within the song Iggy sets herself up to be successful and powerful in the first verse, however, the song is structured around her relationship to a man. The song isn't about female empowerment, but it's about power. Iggy has chosen a subordinate position because she wants a man. She defends her position and she doesn't compromise. One gets the idea that a conversation between Miss Azalea and her man in this song would go like this: 

Her "Daddy": "Baby, you want a Lexus or a Ferrari for your birthday?" 

Iggy: "Or? Boy, you better buy me one of each." 

The song isn't an anthem for women but it's not about cowing to a man. It's a weird convergence of feminism, traditional gender construction, and empowerment. The phrase, "I'm his new bitch" isn't about her relationship to her man, it's about her telling everyone else who she is. She appropriates the vulgar term our society uses for women and claims it as her own.  

Iggy: "Call me a bitch? Yeah, I am and I'm the one running this show." 

Is this song a positive influence on young women?  

I have no idea, but it's catchy and it makes me want a new boyfriend so I can be his New Bitch.  

E - Oh Captain, My Captain 

In the crowd at Iggy Azalea's Chicago show last week, I looked around and saw a pretty odd cross-section of the Chicago population. There were Hip Hop fans, hipsters, and copious homosexuals. For some reason Iggy has spoken to all of us. How can a female vegan hipster converse with an uptight, well-quaffed homosexual? I guess you put on Iggy's The New Classic and see. 

The group I went with was in and of itself bizarre. I was the Midwestern Homo, a graduate advisor friend from rural Michigan was our leader, and my engineering friend from Houston rounded out the group. 

Something about Iggy's queerness, the difference conveyed in her weird, gravely vocals and throbbing club and hip hop beats draws us together. The manifestation of a tall, blond Australian singing American hip hop is a nucleus that pulls a number of us in. Something about the hit, the crunch of bone and skin and being the queer that is smeared is tied to her difference, her willingness to stand out, be the target and represent something unique, different, queer. 

To paraphrase an interview I read on Iggy, someone asked her what it was like growing up. She said it was awkward - people made fun of her for rapping. They made fun of her rhymes and her love of hip hop music. She basically ran away at 16 to pursue a life that dreamed of in America in the epicenter of the hip hop scene.  

It is a variation of the American Dream, the longing for a place that will offer our difference opportunity. America has symbolized this to people of different religions, ethnicities, creeds, and colors. But even when we arrive it is our tendency to forget our longing, our desire for our difference to be upheld. The masses subsume us and our colorful Scarface leotards turn to gray. It is the struggle to keep our head high and recognize our differences and remember that dream that disconnected us from the masses in the first place. 

It is difficult to be different. In college and high school we push away, we dance to Lady Gaga in her meat costume and celebrate being a New Bitch. But the party starts to die down. Our friends through marriage, career, and children pull toward the mainland and it is our impulse, the natural flow to join them. There are only a few with boats along the shore, calling us to remember difference, isolation. They are the queers who keep holding the ball when the world strives to smear them. 

Iggy seems to be one of those with her boat ready. Gurl doesn't paddle herself, but she is on her way to new and exciting lands. She represents that difference that we all strive toward but have beaten back. She is queer and strong and has cut out a place in a subculture that is usually not receptive to people of her color, gender, or nationality. But she stands tall and raps for all of us who have forgotten what that striving, what that dream is like. 

This whole exercise is probably putting too much creative emphasis on the songwriter of a song called "Pu$$y", but I think what Iggy Azalea represents is something that is more universal than one hip hop artist in the early 21st century. Artists like her will continue to arise, lead, and remind us of the pulse and bang  of queerness. They hold the boats and remind us that there is a shimmering world out there that we may just be too afraid to explore.