It Will Follow The Rain

These politics will be recognizable to many lesbians who lived during these years. We had an ideological unity then that did not survive the 1980s, for better or for worse. Class and race divisions did not dissolve so easily in the solvent of our sisterhood. "Sex radicals" raised questions about the nature of lesbian and female sexuality that many feminists, straight and lesbian, had no tolerance to hear, and the "sex wars" tore through the community. AIDS soon began to impact all of our lives. There were deeper schisms among women, and new alliances with gay men. A younger lesbian generation began to shape a different politics in the space that we had worked to open for them.

(...) Lesbian-Feminism in the 1970s taught that you should not work with straight women because they "gave all their [and therefore your] energy to men." After Feminary imploded, I figured, Shit, nothing could be worse than this. That's when I went to a meeting in Durham of the National Anti-Klan Network to hear from Leah Wise, Lauren Martin, and Reverend Wilson Lee that North Carolina had the worst Klan/Nazi movement in the country and they were looking for local people to organize. It was 1983 and I was ready to take the plunge. In this border crossing between the lesbian and feminist and the anti-racist movement, I began to realize how such movements separate people as much as bring them together. I found a compelling and complicated reality that neither race theory and organizing, nor class theory and organizing, nor feminist theory and organizing is capable of handling.

Lesbian-feminism had given me a clear analysis of how power operates among people and in a culture's institutions. But it gave me few of the specific skills I needed: how to put on a press conference, build up a computer database, interact with community agencies, organize white and Black people in small towns and cities, or monitor and call to accountability the criminal justice system. With Feminary, our battle had been largely interior, a psychic confrontation with the lethal forces of the culture as we had internalized them. It was an intense, revealing, but sometimes insular process. The "politics of identity" could easily slip into a politics of victimhood and guilt, its focus more purity of consciousness than effectiveness of social change. By 1983, I had hit the limits of this internal work. (I was not the only dyke to think that lesbian-feminism was dangerously over-literate and under-strategic.) Guided by the people who eventually incorporated North Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence, I set to work to learn to organize.

(...) The shit hit the fan about a year after NCARRV had begun our work in Statesville. A woman involved in the national work suddenly brought up gay issues across Flora's kitchen table. Flora and I were friends by that time. I had come out to her the evening she had asked me whether my interest in the Statesville work came because I also had a Black lover. She was on the right track, I had explained, telling her of my different outcast status. "We still love you," she had said, and reached across the table to take my hand.

Okay, I thought when the woman confronted me. You want this discussion, you'll get it.

Soon everybody had fled the room except my opponent, Flora, and me, as I heard how being gay was like being on heroin, and how this particular woman was raising her daughter to be heterosexual, and how she wouldn't want her organization to take a stand on homophobia because it might promote heterosexuality.

"If I ever have a child," I countered, "the main thing I will teach her about relationships is that she deserves love and intimacy and should never let herself be abused. What this is all about— gay rights and these cross burnings to which Flora and Joe have been subjected— is the right of human beings to love."

Flora stayed beside me, nodding agreement.

When I got back Durham, I called Leah Wise to report. Whenever an emergency arise, I could count on her to let me sit down near her desk for five or ten minutes to think it through. It was natural that I take the incident at Flora's back to her. She responded immediately, "This homophobia is like racism; it's got to be opposed." We arranged a further discussion with the woman in question, and Leah came with me for support. On the way back, Leah took the time to share with me all the things she saw me doing right.

I was intensely grateful. "Shit, Leah," I replied, wedged in the seat adjacent to hers on the plane. "I feel like I do not know what I am doing most of the time. All you folks have all this political history, and here I am flying by the seat of my pants."

"Actually, it's better that way," she said. "A lot of times, that other sectarian stuff just gets in the way."

Her ready support in challenging homophobia and her affirmation of my work marked a major turning point for me. If I knew my enemies, I also knew my friends. Perhaps I could stop looking over my shoulder.

Leah affirmed my instincts to build not just coalitions, but movements grounded in relationships. I figured I was doing work on racism and anti-Semitism because it was the right thing to do, and once I laid out the case about homophobia, the people I was working with would do the same for me and mine. I was not disappointed. The result was friendships that come among people who catalyze changes in each other. Our work carried a lot of risk, but the risk gave us occasions to develop substantial trust. I was scared shitless a lot of the time, but I never regretted what I was doing.

After thirty-five years, my life was no longer segregated.

Somewhere in my metamorphosis, I realized that I could not longer settle for "lesbian space" as just one room, or camp, or building, although I was, and am, still grateful for those gathering places. The Reagan era made it clear: there is no separate safety. "Lesbian space" had better be a world where everyone belongs."]

goma-ramen　"After the rain"

Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.

But... Stochastic Parrots.

Phil Davies

2tbsp of peanut butter. a splash of rice vinegar, soy sauce, sesame oil, maple syrup. some chili flakes, some sesame seeds. a splash of water to thin it out. now you put in your noodles (cooled!!!! boiled and rinsed so they’re cold!!) and then some chopped up cucumber or carrot or avocado or cabbage or any crunchy vegetable. i just used cucumber

No, we will not pick a new book for next month. We will not pick another book until Susan has been held accountable. Yes, we were about books, but it's important that books take a backseat to accountability sometimes. And that time is now.

Susan, I'm not sure you understand how difficult this is for us. Bearing the psychic violence you've inflicted on us is enough, but do you know how many hours we've spent on the dossier of your misdeeds? Do you know the emotional labor we've endured holding these criticism sessions? You're effectively gaslighting us when you continue to deny our accusations despite the clearly stated evidence in Cynthia's lovely dossier.

Susan, please don't defend yourself. Now is the time for you to listen. In fact - no, we will - in fact, let us declare that we will no longer be reading books in the Cozy Retreat Book Club. The time is not right for reading books. We will be reading justice. We will be reading hearts.

Now, you may say there are larger concerns in the world. This is true, but we cannot address the material harms of reality until we have addressed the material harms of Susan.

fuck twitter

fuck reddit

fuck tumblr

and fuck you

The audacity of this conceit is hard to convey. All of the forewords and afterwords that talk about the "history of the author (fictional Aoyama Chizuko)" and whether (fictional) Taiwanese O Chizuru/Wang Tshian-hoh was a real figure and the multiple (fictional) translators talking about the considerations they had while translating and their relations to the subjects of the (fictional) "original" Japanese manuscript--all of it is part of the conceit!

Everything but the English edition afterword is part of the fiction:

This is fiction:

This is the only nonfiction but see how even with the English version the team considered continuing to play into the fiction that an original Japanese manuscript exists:

These are some of the wildest footnotes you'll see:

Yang, the real-life author of all of it, writing the novel in such a way as to have to provide "corrections" and "translation" and "context" clarifications for the "modern" audience of 2020. (No Japanese manuscript exists so Yang had to plant this false layer and further disguised it as a second attempt at a Mandarin translation.)

Aoyama, in-universe fictional author, "providing" footnotes that need to have a 1938 context.

King, doing the English translation, having to consider anything a non-Taiwanese audience would need clarified and talk about the "layers" of translation happening.

The audacity.

By the end of the novel, the layers of translation and the conceit (and these aspects' commentary on colonization) were all I could think about--which is impressive considering that the chronicling of food feels like 90% of the novel. So much food. Much of the cuisine might not exist today so it was a labor of Yang's niche interests fed to us through the pill of meta madness.

Is the novel gay? If the flavor of gay you prefer is the type that lives in the subtext, then, yes, this novel will scratch that itch. If you want your gay to be gay smooches, then no.