alix olson

Once upon a time, we mistook straight for a kind of people, a boring breed of breeders, diamond ring and picket fences, you were everything we’d rejected, all the normal we resented, relentless in convention, you were in our queer way. We were confronting gendered bathrooms, we were training to be multiple, if you were straight then you were culpable; straight was your assumptions “do you have a boyfriend, honey, what’s your boyfriend’s name? the presumptions and the shame: was it something I said to you, maybe something I read to you; the judgment and forgetting, no plus one to the wedding.

Straight was the people who asked which one of us wore the pants and then when we laughed- neither if we’re doing it right- they didn’t get it, straight was the people who didn’t get it. And we didn’t really want them to. We carried comebacks like tazers tucked inside our cheeks, we policed straight in defense of our lives.

 But we mistook straight for people instead of vision:  you’re not thinking straight, get your head on straight, bracketed vision straight-jackets vision can only see what is straight ahead, It sees justice in a courtroom, possibility in statistics, get your facts straight, let’s get one thing straight panicked by division, deviation interruption, imprecision, straight vision doesn’t dream of other worlds, of other ways

 We mistook straight for people not order: the ordinary order of things, proper order plots the dots, here to there, straight-shot, it doesn’t make pit stops to let you pee or ask directions, with the speed of logic and reason it promises away your billion brilliant possibilities, point birth to point death, sacrifice for success, no breath, no time for saying wait up no time for saying hold up when you are all one way velocity, straight time is cruel and usual. It’s about time, isn’t it about time?

 We mistook straight for people instead of sequence:  straight sequence disfigures and dis-orders, moves history forward by clear-cutting all that could stumble us, might humble us: read how we’ve progressed, repeat that we’re the best, straight sequence cheerleads and organizes, postures and prosthletizes.

 We mistook straight for people instead of business: Straight means business, it stakes its claim in white, makes a wager on white, sustains its share of white, straight business is deadly, takes hold of whose lives matter, who needs to claim to matter, to cling to the matter, to name the color of the matter, straight business is deadly, #straight doesn’t see color, #has best friends who are black, #cop was a bad seed but this lawlessness is straight out of Compton

We mistook straight for people not production of truth: straight rebukes what coils and twists, insists that Trump will give it to you straight, look you straight in the eye, shoot straight from the hip, straight to the heart of the matter, no qualms, no reservations, no suspicious hesitations, no fancy information or history lessons, no tricky verbs or elitist big words, only clear-cut demands and straight-forward stands, only straight talkers talking straight talk

We mistook straight for a kind of person as if any one being could be any one thing, what a disservice to magic, how tragic to call any being straight: “straight as an arrow,” “straight but not narrow,” we mistook straight for people not power. Straight is the HRC, brutal equality, power lines that strangle with their intimate parallel force, see straight was never narrow, it widens and accommodates, it despises what it tolerates, in order to stay tidy, it cleans up and legitimates

Straight is the stick figure family on the back of that car, the kids play lacrosse, the moms play guitar, life is good, we’re so glad life is so fucking good for you.  But refusing straight might mean not settling for that good life, might mean unsettling some forms of good life, might mean refusing to be organized like that, might mean letting down the team, stepping out of party line, disrupting progress, bankrupting the prophets of white.

Refusing straight might mean refusing to un-complicate your vision, might mean your mission statement is a question, might mean insisting that no order is a given. Refusing straight might commit to crooked as a practice, to not knowing what will come next, might make you ache for the days when kissing was a protest, was the scene of moral panic, when our slogans made us horny, when our fucking made them frantic, when a rainbow sticker was still a secret wink or a middle finger, when our tribe was comprised of avengers not brides, might make you ache for the days when straight meant them versus us, when “us” was obvious, when “us” felt dangerous. When straight meant straight people, confounding straight men, converting straight girls.

“once upon a time, straight was a kind of people...” (from “Refusing Straight”)

come hear the rest. it’s new and i wrote it to share with you. 

tomorrow night w/ Pamela Means @ The Iron Horse Music Hall, Northampton, MA. 7pm. 

http://bit.ly/AlixOlsonPamelaMeansTickets 

me and ms. pamela means have been close friends for a very, very, very long time. one time, we were on the cover of Curve Magazine together and it was really, really, really not enjoyable. there’s a funny story about that…  want hear it? we’re comin’ at you live, Northampton, Ma. Thursday, November 19th, 2015. Iron Horse. TIX here: http://bit.ly/AlixOlsonPamelaMeansTickets 

Intro Poem (Kindness and Rage): 

“Kindness grew up with number two pencils poised, all sharpened and ready for the standardized test. Rage from the beginning had her paint box employed, prepared to answer with a beautiful mess. She’d pile up her tongue like a slingshot, pull it back and watch the colors fly. And the stultified world became her canvas, she was the vibrant tool of the angry artist. And she never relaxed and she never cried. And she said: “your kindness and rage, they’ll meet in a seedy bar one day in old age, with grey comb-overs and faded jazz, striped in wrinkles, hunched over streaked glasses. To talk about their years as bad asses, in that one stubborn body intent on keeping them together. She had this great love story and I’m a closet romantic so I leaned back and I let her transport me. She said your Rage will stroll in dressed down in her best brand of self-righteous, attached to her ego like it might just float away. She’ll wear her laundry dirty, she’ll air it in public. It smells better that way. Kindness will already be seated, nursing a French martini, always so lovely in her cheerful label, always well groomed out of principle. Rage’ll mumble: I recognized that stupid grin from a mile away, you. Yeah, Kindness will smile, it’s good to see you too. And after another round or three, Rage will slur, you just wanted to showcase your beauty. You were a commodity, you had to be on hand. You never knew when her supply of you would be bereft of her demand. And tempted, dared, and inebriated, Kindness will pull off her heels and she’ll pull on Rage’s boots. And she’ll start to stomp around in the dimming East Village lights with unprecedented cloudy callous and for once not all balanced.  And she’ll stop to shift her smile to adjust for her spine and as she stands up she’ll stand tall instead of just standing by. And watching her stack up, Rage will get all choked up. And sniffle back pride for her posturing opponent past. And with a little tipsy convincing she’ll pull on Kindness’s heeds and she won’t look half bad. Prancing, indignation flouncing, til she trips on the base of her stool and bangs her shins. She’ll mumble to Kindness, I guess you gotta walk a little more careful in these things. And when the check comes, she’ll throw some cash on the table. But Kindness will pull out her plastic and for once Rage will concede. And the Bartender will say hey, I’ve never overheard the circumstances of a love story so inconceivable but your chemistry is unbelievable and this one’s on me. And they’ll reach for the bar nuts, bump hands and laugh and toss back the seeds of their disagreeable past. And Kindness will leave the bar a nice girl with rebel rising. And Rage will remain a rebel- but with a soft spot for Kindness.” 

Good afternoon. President McCartney. Provost Rowe. Deans. Distinguished guests. Faculty. Families. Parents. Pals. And you. Oh you. You newly minted world-changers, you determined little do-gooders, you pesky resilient gadflies. With apologies to your partners, I should confess up front I have such a total crush on you: Taking on impossibility. Battling limitations. Confronting. Comforting. Counseling. Championing. Advocating. Encountering resistance. And coming back for more.  I just find that so–  attractive. But you know it’s hot. That’s why you picked this career. That. And the salary. 

In preparation for these comments, I was lucky to sit down with a bunch of you to think through the meaning of this commencement. In accordance with your obvious sense of entitlement, it seems you needy, greedy creatures are eager about two things. One, to date someone other than a “swister” or a “swartner.” And two, to be paid for what you already do. In that brief two hours, I also learned you are empathic and funny and really, really, good at what you do. There was actual earnest listening while talking earnestly about listening. There were many, many jokes about transitional objects. I was assured I would be a “good enough” speaker.  I heard you called your dance the bio-psycho Social- a geeky depth of discursive clever that made me swoon even more for you people. You told me about heal and rupture, trauma and nurture, about the rage and the kindness of your internal compass and how they had pointed you equally and jointly to this place.

Your College of Social Work website says students in your program should “prepare to be stretched.”  I will tell you that euphemisms like “prepare to be stretched” make me curious. Apparently, three years ago you were not as curious. Because if you had been, you would have discovered- as did I- that social work “seeks to improve the lives of individuals. And couples. And families. And groups. And communities. And the larger world.” That it was developed to (and I quote) “deal with the entire range of social problems.” You would have learned that the social work field incorporates theories from anthropology and education and ecology and law and philosophy and psychology and medicine and economics and sociology.  And you would not be here today. Representing total interdisciplinary masochism.  You beautiful brilliant over-zealous creatures, I stand here in utter awe of you and your stretch.

Also there’s this: Social workers saved my life. As a professional globe-trotting queer passion-spewing anti-racist critically pissed-off feminist I had (as you can imagine) countless ideas about how to transform the political landscape. As a professional alcoholic, on the other hand, I had not a clue how to transform my own. Change happened “out there,” the problem was “out there,” the system was “out there.”  And while I spent my life battling that system, I had no idea how to navigate it. So when my diminishing infrastructure finally crumbled, when I stood there holding its bare bones in my bare hands, when I finally hit my own disastrous tedious bottom, when I finally said ‘please help me’ it was one of you who did. It was one of you who picked up a phone, one of you who found me a bed, held me with space, who told me that yes I could still be a bad-ass. But I had to stay alive first. Me and my liver and my (what I think you people call adaptive coping), yeah we owe you one.

Back then, care of the self was something I did not have time for, openly mocked: Downward dog, organic lavender tea, knitting scratchy scrawny scarves, zumba, I found these intolerable. White patriarchy wasn’t gonna stop for zumba. Ms. Magazine called me a “road poet on a mission.” Concerned Women for America said I was “dangerous.” I lived like my body was inconvenient, like every minute rested was a minute wasted. There’s no time for gassing up, no time for a tune-up, no time for saying “hold-up” when you are all velocity.

But as poet Audre Lorde tells us- as I was forced to understand- attending to one’s wholeness of being is not self-indulgence but self-preservation, an act of political warfare. It is in fact a bad ass move to take your love for yourself seriously. It is by taking care of, care for, care full of ourselves, through turning and returning to ourselves, uniting and reuniting with ourselves, by looking in upon and after ourselves, unbecoming and then re-becoming with ourselves- it is only through these radical acts (as far as I can tell) that—we have any chance at practicing freedom in this mess.

And it is- as you know- a bit of a mess. I teach political theory to undergraduates and I am often amazed at the fairy tales upon which their self-protective worldview depends. Like once upon a time there was some bootstraps dangling so my granddaddy climbed the beanstalk, it’s too bad yours was lazy. Or like once upon a time, there were a bunch of bad guy bullies. Then came Three Founding Fathers Charming. And so everything got better, it always gets Better. Like how we had slavery, can you believe we had slavery? And it’s good there was protest, I guess we needed protest. But people figured it out, people passed laws, (didn’t women burn bras), people made a plan, people made it better and so mostly it’s all better. And like our democracy isn’t perfect but it’s like literally the best: because Freedom of Speech, Balance of Power, Black Commander in Chief, the Freedom Tower. Because happily ever after, married gays, liberty for all, together we stand. In this post-gender, class-fluid, race-invisible land.

So part of my job is to up-end these sanguine endings. To demonstrate how these mirthful myths obscure so many forms of systematic violence. To convince them there is work to be done, no more, no less than ever before. That progress is not battery operated, that it is not a byproduct of evolution or generation or time. That to question the American Dream, to probe freedom as usual, to ask how it works, if it works  is dangerous and disobedient and their duty.  At first they resist. Some always resist. Of course they resist.  As writer Sarah Ahmed tells us: “power works by increasing the costs of fighting against power.”

It is costly to see pain. It is costly to be implicated. 

And to choose to stay with it. 

But you- I know you are not fairy tale tellers. I know you could tell me what the world is really like out there. And that once upon a time cannot repair it or wake it up. I know you know that some days injustice will be so threaded through your eyeballs you will beg for a pair of rose-colored glasses just so you can find your way home. That some days you will be so sick of your expertise in receiving sad stories and still so start-from-scratch at tackling tragedy, I know some days you will look at the front lines and say I’m sorry, I cannot serve today. And some days you can’t or just won’t. Some days you will be so sacrificed, so pissed off, so broken, so broke.  Some days you will ache for once upon a time. So achingly certain one life at a time will not cannot do it.   But you of course are doing it. Your work claims that lives matter. Not ALL lives. But these lives. These Black lives. These young lives. These queer lives. These lives without refuge. That life. And this life too. You go to the margins. You sit with what is wounded. You make precarity legible. You get specific. You do not permit the be-ing of the human erased.   And so some days your reasons for this work will bloom before you like daisies.   Some days your Smith years will sit back on their heels and Cheshire grin at you.   Some days, solidarity will spin cartwheels through your chest.   Some days, there will be one person less lonely, one person less angry, less panicked, one person more whole and your thousand daily practices of love will glitter in sync like a meteor shower.   Some days your commitment will grow so fast you’ll need a bigger heart to house it.   Some days you’ll be so proud you’ll want to halo your damn self.     Some days your fear and doubt will just shoot blanks.   And unless we are fairy tale seekers, unless we depend upon promises and saviors, it is those days we live for. It is because of those days we are gathered here on this one.   I wish you laughter among all of the facts of this world. I hope you can consider that insurrection. I wish you being-in-the-moment-ness. I hope you can consider that enough.   I wish you lovers who long for every detail of your mundane and monstrous day. 

And someone who will pack your lunch for you sometimes you just need your lunch packed for you.   I hope you can ask for what you want. Insist on what you need.  I hope you make someone make you hike. I hope you let someone let you lose it. And on the days you’re just going through the motions I hope you know that staying in motion is so much of being brave.   I wish you as much resilience as you can muster and as much give as you can spare. I hope you risk being seen in some ways that make you scared. And that you stock sharpies in your brain to scrawl on all the scripts there saying you are not sufficient. I hope you hold onto these bonds you’ve knitted here like blankies in your guts. I hope you meet up over strong coffee and good bagels and bad jokes about your hard gorgeous jobs- At conferences and at marches. At community meetings and national rallies. In Atlanta and Albuquerque, in Manhattan and Minneapolis, in Oakland and Omaha, in Birmingham, New Orleans. And all of the places you are busy holding up, holding together our shared world.   I hope you give ‘em hell. But then release yourself. I hope when you’ve screwed up, you see it well. And then forgive yourself.    I wish you enough rage to keep you useful, enough kindness to keep you safe.  I wish you parachutes in your pockets, for the landings and the take offs to come.  

smith college of social work graduates, my big crushes, thanks for letting me be a part of you yesterday:  

and here's rebecca solnit's take about the flag and unpredictable effects: