Out bowling tonight, I was charged. The big thuggish bouncer, the guy bowling next to us who was either threatening me or seducing me, cuties abounding, the couple fondling each other in the elevator as J, S, and I walked back to the car, the night was filled with erotic energy and it felt good.

How do we deal with desire? Where does it go when it’s fuzzy and confused? What do we do when we can’t decide if somebody is threatening us or seducing us? Big questions for my queer little pea-brain.

On the one hand, I say live with it, enjoy it, feel it, and when the mood strikes, run with it. On the other hand, there is a certain danger in the desires of strangers—a fear of the unknown, the repressed, the violent, and the grotesque.

I love love.

I love life.

For me, I’m running with it.  The risk is worth it. The structural violence of the world, the state, society, ideology, all that pain, deserves creative acts of pleasure, love, and open-minded adoration—even when the threat of violence exists.

Bold acts of love, desire and sex are the building blocks of liberation.

Food, water, shelter too.

“The plenitude of history is only possible in the space, both empty and peopled at the same time, of all the words without language that appear to anyone who lends an ear, as a dull sound from beneath history, the obstinate murmur of a language talking to itself – without any speaking subject and without an interlocutor, wrapped up in itself, with a lump in its throat, collapsing before it ever reaches any formulation and returning without a fuss to the silence that it never shook off. The charred root of meaning.” –Michele Foucault, History of Madness

…I’m weary of ideologues. Tonight I pray for a bit of peace and quiet. I need a break from rants and manifestos. I know I’m guilty of delivering them myself, but Jesus Fairy Christ, I need just a few minutes of peace from the loud-mouth post-Left LEFT, the anti-activist ACTIVISTS, and the anti-intellectuals who’ve spent their lives reading theory and have come to the conclusion that it was a waste of time.

Oh, Fuckbuddy in the Sky, how I long to see people heal from the wounds of war, death, destruction, disease, and depression. I know some people rant that this makes me a liberal. But how I long for joyous orgies of love and possibility in a world without human-caused suffering.

Yes dear non-deity, sweet something other than this, I wish so badly, that when we queers tried to manifest explosions of joy and liberation, we didn’t act like such fucking assholes.

Speaking of assholes…

Oh Daddy (the one with the leather cap and boots), I pray to thee, give us peace, pleasure, and prosperity.

And when the motherfuckers responsible for this global catastrophe walk down the street, let them tremble in fear and surrender their power to everybody else just trying to get along in life.

But in the meantime, can we please just enjoy the dance?

Love from your humble servant in queer politique,

QR

The Democracy Now reports coming in this morning from Haiti broke my heart. Hearing that people are having their limbs amputated without anesthetics, that surgeons are going to hardware stores to get hacksaws to perform said amputations, that so many are dead and so many are suffering and dying without care horrifies me to no end. Furthermore, the fact that resources for a 10,000 soldier, U.S. military occupation of a country with virtually no unrest is occuring while people are suffering from crushed bones and infections without adequate medicine outrages me. There is nothing like a dose of U.S. military intervention and arms while people are dying. After decades of U.S. intervention and occupation destroying democratic process in Haiti, no wonder the country has been deprived not only of the resources it needs to survive this catastrophe but more so the resources to rebuild.

I’ve been noticing some funny contradictions in our delightfully queer social movements–those of anarchist stripes and those of progressive stripes. What are they you might ask? Well, I’ll tell you–I’m getting mighty grumpy with the eternal return of fetishizing tactics over strategy. I don’t give a damn what the tactics are–letter writing, sign holding, window smashing, straight-baiting, and protest after protest after protest. What’s the fucking strategy?

So, as queer radicals hellbent on liberation, desire, pleasure, and a multiplicity of identities flourishing without asshole thugs beating, harassing, or otherwise annoying us (fuck “us,” let’s talk about people the world over being screwed by capitalism (eco-destructive or eco-friendly to boot),, I think we need to reflect on the successful queer orgy as a model for social change, liberation, and coordination.

You might wonder who this universal “we ” is that I’m describing? I can’t really tell you. We’re plural. Some of us identify as pacifists who can’t help but smile when bulldozers eating up forests are torched and fascist C.E.O.s are shot, others identify as militants who rarely leave our desks or armchairs. Some of us work within the system, engaged daily in the drudgery of consensus building with power-mongering politicians. Others spend most of our time dishing out bowls of soup to hungry people. I happen to make movies, tell stories, and fetishize the lovely contradictions within our possible collaborations.

What makes a queer orgy hot, you ask? Not to sound like a liberal human resources worker, but DIVERSITY! Yes, that irritating word that neoliberals borrowed to eradicate cultural specificity and create a blob of so-called racially, ethnically, and socially diverse consumers lapping up what remains of natural resources under the unifying banners of gluttony, entertainment, and McCulture. Someone hand me a tissue, I’m tearing up.

Back to the point.

A queer orgy is hot because people who like fisting can fist. People who like cuddling can cuddle. Pretty much anything goes. That doesn’t mean everybody has to engage in everything. Nobody whose into buttplugs is sitting their whining about the people across the room in furry gear. The furries don’t judge the frotters across the way. Why? Everbody knows they have the same goal. What’s the unifying principle of the queer orgy? Getting off. Pleasure. Community. Love.

Sound familiar?

Hell, these are the things I want everybody in the world to have. What’s that? A common, unifying, ethical principle geared towards consensual pleasure, community, collaboration, and satisfaction. Fuck the government. Fuck the corporations. Fuck the exploitation. I want people to get off and get satisfied when they want to, how they want to, without a bunch of greedy fucks imposing their values the world over, without violence, and without exploitation.

Everybody feels good. Nobody whose into buttplugs is sitting their whining about the people across the room in furry gear. The furries don’t judge the frotters across the way. Why? Everbody knows they have the same goal.

So before we worry too much about tactics–particularly judging each others, we’d do well, as queer radicals (diverse, complicated, and often curmudgeonly horney), to figure out what the fuck we want and pick the appropriate targets. For example. Do we want gay green capitalism? I don’t. Do we want ecological sustainability and resilience, a diversity of homes in various geographies from the rural South to the Urban West, gift economies, community self-determination, food for all, health for all, no more cops bugging us, and no more politicians determining our fate based on political expediency and big business lobbyists, et, al? Yippee. Do we want to see corporations such as Lockhead Martin, Blackwater, Newmont Mining, and others eat it? Yes.

How do we get there? Pick our targets and hit them in a variety of ways. Build some cool shit.

Some people like nipple play. Others like fireplay. Nice. Let the nip-fetishists tittytwist the C.E.O. before the friends of fire torch the bulldozers knocking the forests down. But if you like fireplay, don’t keep those who like nipple play from getting what they want (assuming they play into a larger strategy of creating a culture of beauty, desire, satisfaction, and resillience). If you like nipple play, have respect for the furries. AKA, let everybody get to our big queer goals using a diversity of tactics.

Yum. I can taste liberation now.

My fetish for hot, hairy men started in preschool. I had a dream. In it, I was running around at Children’s Palace, an oversized 1980s toy store, presumably bought out by Toys R’ Us.  A tall, middle-aged man with a gut, a thick, brown beard, and short hair wrapped me up in mummy gauze and gave me a cigarette to smoke. I felt frantically fascinated by this scenario of strangulation and nicotine and frightened by the older man’s rough actions. Moments before suffocating in hallucinatory mummy garb, I woke up. Ever since, the idea of being bound by a hairy, older man has had considerable appeal.

In elementary school, one of my fellow Boy Scouts’ dads was an older, cocky guy who wore a Waylon Jennings t-shirt tight against his lanky figure. He sported a cowboy hat and sat around like a real man, legs casually crossed, cock pressed against the crotch of his form-fitting black jeans. His moustache and goatee accented his dark, chiseled features. He smelled like sweat and Old Spice and if I saw him now, I’d give him a dashing, long gaze, take him behind a bar, and get my hand into those tight black jeans.

My friend Wu Tsang has a badass blog, Class. “Class speaks about creativity clublife and capitalism, by a queer and trans person of color living in Los Angeles.” Wu covers everything from critiquing hate crimes legislation and the irritating 501C3 structure to high, queer fashion. It’s hot, smart, and totally badass. Yeah, Wu.

I just had a conversation with two students who spoke about a deep discontent within society, a sense that something’s wrong, but unnameable. They feared it, uncertain about what it was.

Such discontent is often present when society erupts into revolution—be it libratory or fascist. It’s the subconscious awareness that the world is fucked, that violence permeates the mundane, that our reality is structured in oppression.

As liberation-loving-queers looking for a better world, we should cautiously embrace this discontent as a point of rupture, a space where possibility can emerge. We should also brace ourselves for the rising tides of fascism swelling in the country and prepare ourselves for the fights to come.

Like all futures, ours is uncertain. We need to learn to be autonomous from dominant capitalist economies, learn how to produce and create our own livelihood, and overthrow this horrific culture of violence, privatization, and hate.

As queers, we know how to love, big and bold, through thick and thin. It’s time we smash the machinery of destruction and wallow in lust, autonomy, survival. Our bodies are contested territory between our inalienable desire to love, share, and grow as people and the machinery of authoritarianism, oppression, death, and privatization vying for our souls. I sure hope love wins.

Imagine you’re hanging out at a party. You’re one of us queers who thinks sexuality transcends boundaries of sex and gender. You see a hot person at the end of the bar and you get frisky.

Your friend cautions you, “They’re a gender essentialist…a purist…you know…” But they’re sexy and you wanna sack ‘em.

Spike Lee pops into your head, “Do the right thing,” But you ask him, “Spike, I don’t know what the right thing is?”

Neither does he.

So, like the yuppie you are, you pop out your fancy-ass phone and type in, “How to hit on gender essentialists when you’re gender/sex doesn’t match their desires,” and you find this petite-treatise.

The answer’s obvious. Tread lightly greenhorn.

Should you hit on the essentialist? Sure. Don’t expect him or her to like you. There are no guarantees they’ll take you home, but desire is precarious, and borders are flimsy.

When Joshua fought the Battle of Jericho, do you think he sat around whining that the walls around the city were impossible to penetrate? No. He knocked those fuckers down.

Now greenhorn, if you were to wage a battle to “knock down” the walls of gender-essentialism that hurt your ability to bag your crush, you, my friend, would be a first-rate asshole.

Instead dismiss what your friend said. How do they know your new-found crush is an essentialist? Even if they heard right, how do they know that person hasn’t changed their mind? Even if that person is an essentialist rock, nobody says essentialists can’t change?

So instead of acting like an asshole, insulting the essentialist’s right to have arbitrary boundaries of gender and sex determine desire, go up to the fox and say “Hello.” Start a conversation. See where it goes. Flirt.

If, after sufficient flirting, they don’t seem to mind you’re around, take it up a notch. If they start backing up, looking at a clock, or out-and-out screaming, “get away you creepy fuck,” in that case, take a hint, take a hike.

But if they flirt back, heavens, if they start to kiss you, you know what? You’ve proven something critical. Even a puritanical, homo or hetero essentialist can slide down the slippery slope of queerness and fluidity towards our utopian wonderland of seahorses, where  binary gender and sex melt into euphoria.

I just finished watching Where the Wild Things Are with J and Hill. Glory of glories, I got exactly what I wanted out of it—some brilliant fodder for my nightmares and pervy wet-dreams.

The Wild Things are queer as fuck. Hairy, bearded ladies, piles of wild thing upon wild thing, sleeping, wrestling, and flirting, everybody half-faggy-half-brutal stud, the land of the wild things is hotter than the grizzliest bear bar and the crustiest punk show combined.

“Kings aren’t real!” The motherfucking anarchist wild things declare. “Right on,” I say!

One day, I hope to run out into the woods and get picked up by a bunch of hairy, community-oriented, emotionally complex beasts—oh wait, such is life, and I love it.

On a side note, one of my students accused me of being a hippy. My love of hairy beasts frolicking in the woods does little to disprove this wild accusation. Furthermore, brain-dead after a day of teaching and grant writing, a facebook quiz accused me of being an armpit fetishist (which, no doubt, I am…). So am I a hippy? Fuck no. But I sure act like one most of the time.

After the show, we all went to the Paramount for a beer. It was so good having time to chill and relax with friends. Life has been so wildly busy lately that a late night laughing over beers with two of my favorite people did me good.

Tomorrow, I will run off to the woods for some hairy monster armpit. Grrrrrrrr.

On another side note, James Gandolfini has to be one of the hottest actors around—from temperamental mobster to moody monster, he’s a fat, crude, rude, and butch sexpot. !

I wish I were a little boy curled up in James Gandolfini’s hairy, butch, Muppet arms. James, if you’re reading this, thank you for being a fox.