O. B. J. E. K. T. -- FIND OUT WHAT IT MEANS TO ME

dealings w/ the Queer Bureaucracy within

O. B. J. E. K. T. – FIND OUT WHAT IT MEANS TO ME

In high school your straight sexuality was kept from you, in that you had to prove it. The default setting that all boys were chided, mocked and assaulted over was “the gay setting,” and you had to provide clear proofs to be accepted as anything but this. Then it became internalized. A presence in your head critiqued your straightness, wouldn’t let you be straight – since adolescence – but now it’s the reverse, according to some pervasive cultural thought-matrix you can’t help but detect. The “mirrors” are on the gay side, like soldiers watching each other at the North Korea/South Korea border. And you’re stuck between like a defector. Or at the Berlin Wall: imagine the movie that’d make! Which side is more totalitarian. Do the Queer Bureaucrats adopt some trait from their homophobic doubles, some harshness in response to the heterosexual majority’s harshness, a political position absorbed from the straights that then resurfaces in another guise, serves to perpetuate the fear and repression, the animosity? In any case, now you need a license from the bureaucracy within to write about sexuality, as if it is a confusion that doesn’t automatically belong to you, that hasn’t been with you since childhood.

You don’t go to gay bars, you have never cruised (unless that’s what you were doing on a less-than-conscious level at the G_____ Hotel Lounge in Oylesburg when you met Dr Vern Standish the first time and played the arcade game Pheromones! with him). You don’t go to the rooms where the gay physical objekts are, where people actually have sex, where the body has its many intersections. Instead it’s the garden of gay mental objekts that you wander in, where you sit down beneath a monkey-pod tree and read a book by Genet or Mishima. There’s not really anybody there unless you count Tony Larry and Brian toiling in the plot of land on the other side of the stone wall bordering the garden. You can’t see over, you can only hear them happily humming, whistling, no anxiety. Laughing. The gay objekts in question are invisible because they’re still on the other side of the ivy-grown wall. And do you want to climb over? Not really, you think. You don’t know what happens there and then will you come back, will you find out it’s a maze with cleverly hidden speakers among the foliage, fooling you into thinking there is love over there? The challenges of love: you are too proud (too afraid) to explore them. You stay with the mental objekts, the lifeless statuary someone else loved, you can’t love it, it isn’t allowed. There are rules posted somewhere on these grounds, you know it. You’re living always in someone else’s mind, you are in turn one of their objekts, the bureaucracy. No motion, no heartbeat, no change of life.

At the G______ Hotel Lounge, the chorus of gay men observe you like you’re a zoo animal, one wearing mouth-watering jewelry for all to envy. That is, until they clock the grey hair in your temples. The atmosphere is heavy with people’s gazes. You are older and therefore not an objekt of much attraction. You feel tragic in that environment, disempowered until you get your license from the Queer Bureaucrats, which doesn’t look likely now. The unspoken love for Tony Larry and the constant, unrelenting presence of Brian by his side just make you feel old and near death.

Eye messages bearing secret communications were passively received from the wait-staff. You tried to figure out whether the hotel lounge qualified as a gay bar or was just a room with a temporary gathering of gay men in it. Take that Chinese kid in the NY Giants football jersey (somewhat ironic but who are you to judge) and his white art guy sugar daddy who lets him out on weekends. He scans the room nakedly, searchingly. It was a telepathic presence not unlike the hive-swarm detected during your honeymoon in Manhattan with Natasha all those years ago. The bee swarm noise threatening in the distance, ambient, the concentration of homosexuality always out there, lurking: a natural phenomenon of the city to beware of. The gay hive reproduced not naturally but there is a queen and there are hordes of worker bees gathering pollen. Now you’re back in a city with a new swarm, the people looking around the bar that miraculously you are now aware of. Some perceptual ability turned on, your ESP activated. You know nothing about how this works. Consciousness has many tendrils, and some explore regions, and others choke their exploring brothers, tentacles are related by the central source but can work against each other. The metaphysical ether chokes you, slows you as you try to escape the mental factory, you run in slow motion to get away from the creepy animated scientist with the slithering Peter Lorre voice who will get you if you come within arm’s reach. You have feminine body language that was never adequately beaten out of you – shy shoulders that your college buddy Louis took note of in the corridors of Dexby College, a signal that he should try to get with you in the shower. You recline like an aristocrat on an ancient Roman couch surrounded by oils and perfumes and feathers, decadent trinkets, ignorant of your legs tucked under you ladylike, hips, torso. You unconsciously picked up body language from movies, TV, modeled by the Devil MTV/HBO on some screen by the kid’s room in your childhood home, sometimes recreated by the set designers (the night shift, the dream shift) who send you back there when consciousness ceases at the end of the day. The Devil MTV/HBO created all of you according to some personalized twist of damnation in the flesh. This is your body to be inhabited until the grave. The trespassing life here on earth began in the 1970s. Your body gets disassembled every night during your sleep, every objekt replaced with perfect precision by the day shift set designers, but you swear if you look closely enough in the morning you will catch one of them slipping, something will be misplaced one of these days, one of these life intervals. And if your mind is kept sharp enough, made enough of a steel trap through repeated practices, you will see via this careless misplacement through the gnostic veil-barrier to the reality beyond. The ventriloquists and puppets making it all move, the clockwork will have a fatal swerve and you’ll catch it, and know something for sure for a change.

The sense of objektivity is eroded by a mind even temporarily afflicted by delusions. Doubt nagging along behind every thought, like a predator or parasite clinging fast to a desperate animal. And no matter how fast and fleet the thought swims, the lampreys of doubt stick fast to its side. The doubt will kill the thought, naturally, over time. Also it’s the ugly side of nature: the parasitic doubt that plagues consciousness won’t let it alone even in Dr Blurryfingers’ sike-otherapy sessions you attended in Cooperstown years ago when you started on the sike meds. It induces madness. How much Cartesian blood is sucked out of the thought, and who do we blame in the gallery of philosophers informing scientific methods? I think, therefore I am. I sink, therefore I swam, in a vast aquarium of thalassophobia.

You historically have not been afraid of heterosexual expressions, thought by some to incite homosexual behavior through fear and inhibition. And yet currently, you seem to fit the description: a bisexual with a “distaste for consummation.” Don’t look at the woman in the public square, no matter how loose the jeans fit on the hips, or how tinkling the hanging keychains getting male attention, the sonic sparkle, a siren passes. A porcupine’s intimacy. The girl with the Frankenstein zombie gait.

For five celibate years, your only love life has been in your dreams. But the Queer Bureaucrats, when going over your application, don’t want to read through transcripts of your gay dreams about Tony Larry, the bitter emotional goodbyes that haunted you after you awoke (the misplaced objekt that proves there is a beyond dimension?). They want to know about “awake,” they want to know about “real.” They are busy little zoomer professionals with LGBTQ grants, they don’t have time to waste on metaphysics. They treat the applications for bisexual licenses like a gossip rag, they mock the older generations just coming out after decades of repression, who don’t have the flex that they do as young, out people full of actualization. You can’t help but imagine everybody in your head as cruel and beastly. It’s just where you wound up on the ladder of ethical understanding, and where Gen Z has, too. Their ethical development is what matters, not yours. They’re two generations younger than you and they are, in many ways, to the powers that be, the center of gravity and final authority on all matters lavender. Who has the right to lecture others about alternate lifestyles, when the conditions theoretically could exist in anyone, buried, hiding like the alien organism in The Thing or presumably Alien itself? You didn’t get a primer on any of this, so 1980s movies watched on that devilish screen in your house gave the mere wisps of epistemological clues about “how these things work.” Those Queer Bureaucrats say, “NO. Not by any stretch of the imagination. I knew I was queer at age 9. Therefore it works the same for everyone else. It’s cookie-cutter, all the theorists at my college said so. Self-knowledge must proceed for others exactly as it did for me, and I’m 23.”

“I mean, fucking is probably life,” you want to say on your bisexual application, “and thinking is probably death, and if so I’ve entered old man land where all we do is think and bother each other and it’s no kind of love.” You always felt a wave of disgust and terror when you saw those photos or videos of two men finally marrying each other on the news: two old chubby guys in tuxedos, looking as wiped-out as human beings are capable of looking, tired, glasses, identical white goatees. Did life finally run them down at the end? Did it take the photos in the wedding album to convince the Queer Bureaucrats that, OK, they had to let this case go through, after decades of appeals, delays, setbacks, red tape and false starts with the expected sex? Your wedding album with your ex-wife Natasha was no kind of persuasion with her friends from Sacramento, another bureaucracy, and that was more about money, economics, whose name the house was in because, like astrologers reading auguries, they could forecast the blow-up of your marriage to her.

If bisexuality was your delusion, it was just the most recent in a daisy-chain of unhappy, radically explainable misunderstandings of your life, undermedicated as you were with antipsychotics. How were you supposed to ever get a firm apprehension of reality – both outer and inner – with such broken analytical equipment as yours? It might be supposed this is true of everybody, but you weren’t everybody, you were Noah Turbot, with Noah’s mind and body.

And it will hurt worse with Tony Larry, you fear, you sense the end of a new love, with a different chemical make-up, unfamiliar building blocks since it was a man. It promises to tear your heart in new ways, ways you’re unaccustomed to, and kill you. But you don’t know how much worse it could get than how it’s been with women, who, at the end of the day and at your advanced age, still aren’t all that recognizable and familiar. But then, no one is.

///

I ordered some noise tapes from Puke Pink out of Pennsylvania. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I read Gabriel Hart’s novel On High at Red Tide and left a five-star review at Goodreads. I’m setting up to interview him about the book and what’s going on in a bigger picture but for now here’s the review.

Here’s a piece of paper hanging on my wall which is a rare reminder to me to have some discipline. It’s a schedule for working on revising the novel Blood Trip which took place in 2022. I was generous with my pace of work: 3,000 words a week. But I did it.