Another Queer Jewish Buddhist

Those Crazy Japanese TV Commercials...

This time it's Toyota, with a TV spot for a new car featuring an alluring 18 year old Israeli model:

The car is a hatchback — and the slogan in Japanese speaks to using your butt smartly, sort off. Or maybe they used this strategy because the car is a, uh, hybrid. Well, in any case, it has gotten the young model lots of attention. And more power to him. He has the kind of androgynous looks I've always loved. But then, I am a child of the 60s after all.

Genre Transgression: Between Yü and me, how many queer Buddhist reincarnation revenge mystery historical romance stories can there be?

It’s no secret to (the admittedly few) regular readers of this blog that I have interests in gay fiction, Asia in general and Japan in particular, as well as Buddhism and mysticism.  Earlier this year I was surprised to discover there is, like yayoi, a whole subgenre of gay fiction that could be described as Queer Supernatural Asian Mystery Erotic Historical Romance Novels. I came across these books through Librarything.com — a kind of social network for book lovers that matches similar book collections by members and then makes recommendations based on these shared affinities — and started reading some of them.

Shortly after I’d finished reading a couple of Sedonia Guillone’s “Beautiful Samurai” novels in this subgenre I received an email from Joy Shayne Laughter, the author of a book that fits most of the categories in this subgenre — but let me be clear immediately that her book, Yü: A Ross Lamos Mystery,” does not tick off the “erotic” check box in this subgenre. Yü is more of an intellectual and spiritual effort (this is not to suggest it’s not fun — the many pleasures of this book will keep your hands above the table and turning pages relentlessly).

The appearance of Yü in my mailbox got me to thinking about the history of this subgenre. After all, in 2006 I had a short story, called Musuko Dojoji, published in an anthology of gay fantasy fiction called Charmed Lives: Gay Spirit in Storytelling. Musuko Dojoji was a retelling of a thousand year old Japanese folktale (Musume Dojoji) framed by a contemporary gay love story. The folktale is connected to the contemporary story by a reincarnation motif. I wrote this story out of love for my late boyfriend, Hiroshi Aoki, as a way of keeping his memory alive through our shared love of folktales and mysticism. It was one way of honoring our connection — a connection I always felt was something that went beyond my limited understanding of reality.

As I thought about reincarnation as a plot device in queer love stories, I realized this motif is hardly new. One of the things Hiroshi and I shared was a love of kabuki — and we were both great fans of the classic kabuki play, Sakura Hime Azuma Bunshô: The Scarlet Princess of Edo.

This play’s prologue is the story of two lovers fleeing an angry mob of monks. Indeed, the two who are running away are the monk Seigen, and his young chigo ( temple acolyte), Shiragiku.

The chorus sings of same-sex love as they climb the cliff at Enoshima, a site famous for love suicides named Chigo ga Fuchi (Chigo Falls) in memory of this particularly notorious plunge:

Not only woman can be in this mortal world
closet companion to man, his dearest lover.

Seigen and the boy pledge to die together rather than be kept apart by the world  —supposedly not because this is a same-sex or intergenerational relationship but because Seigen is a monk and thus has broken his vows of celibacy. Of course, the audience knew that these relationships were nothing out of the ordinary.

Before jumping, Shiragiku prayed for a rebirth as a woman so he could marry Seigen. And then he threw himself to the rocks below. You can see the two in the moment before Shiragiku jumped in the photo below — the boy is the young Tamasaburo Bando in his very first role on the kabuki stage before becoming world famous as an onnagata, a man who traditionally plays female roles. One of Tamasaburo’s most acclaimed roles is that of Sakurahime.

Back to the story: after the boy jumped, the monk Seigen, seeing the body of his lover broken on the rocks below, reveals himself as a faithless coward:

I would die for you without a thought, but…

Seigen has second thoughts, and runs away. The prologue ends and then the real action of the play begins, 17 years later, when the boy acolyte, now reincarnated as the Scarlet Princess, and meets the cowardly and duplicitous Seigen once more.

Written by Tsuruya Namboku and first performed in 1817, this is the earliest example of a romance/revenge/reincarnation/ghost story centered around a male/male relationship that I am aware of. If you know of anything earlier, I’d love to hear about it. Oh, and if the whole story sounds over the top operatic, you’ll be pleased to know David Henry Hwang, author of M. Butterfly, wrote the libretto for an English language opera based on the story, composed by Alexina Louie, called The Scarlet Princess.

But enough about me and my interest in this genre — let’s talk about Yü. Promoted as the first in a series of books about Ross Lamos “karmic detective,” Yü is the story of a gay antique art appraiser who has psychic touch — simply by holding an object, he will not only know its provenance, he’ll go into a trance, reliving the experiences of everyone else who touched it.

When a woman walks into the gallery where Lamos is employed (and where he keeps this supernatural gift secret from his employer) and presents him with three exquisite Han Dynasty jades he is plunged into a 2,000-year-old murder mystery. His touch reveals that all the players in that long forgotten drama have reincarnated around this woman today.

Lamos also discovers that his employer is planning to replace the jades with fakes because he’s running an art forgery operation. And while Lamos is busy trying to solve an ancient mystery and save the jades from being stolen, he’s doing his best to reconcile himself to the fact that his philandering ex-boyfriend has become a celibate Buddhist monk at the temple where he began his own spiritual practice.

There’s a lot of movement between past and present in this story — though really the crux of the action takes place in the Han Dynasty, a little more than 2,000 years ago. It’s a tale of passion and philosophy — desire and Taoist thought in the imperial  court. And the confusions of physical and spiritual love in this story of palace intrigue are reflected in the story of Lamos, his clients and friends today.

Each section of the book begins with a translated text from a famous Chinese Taoist philosopher or historian that gives further depth to the action. The parts of the story that take place in ancient China captured all the beauty and tension that is heightened by the restrained expression of Chinese imperial court life.

If there were anything I would have wished for in Yü it would be more of Ross Lamos today rather than in his previous incarnation. The Chinese story is really a story of heterosexual love. And Ross is so caught up in his work, and this old mystery, that his personal life, and love life, today suffers. I don’t need to read about someone with a problem like that — I can just look at my own life (cue the violins).

Ross is a character I want to get to know better — not only in his previous incarnations, and I assume that if there are going to be more in this series, in each volume we’ll not only follow his current life, but his previous lives as well. I just want more of a balance between the two. Or more of an intersection between the two next time.

A Ross Lamos series holds the promise of both past and present, sexuality and spirituality, coming together in a way that heals and reveals reality at its deepest, while giving the reader the pleasure of a page-turning mystery. So I look forward to more books in this promised series.

Another series of books that fits the romance/reincarnation/revenge motif (and given that it appears enough times in stories at this point I think it has to be recognized as a motif) are the “Beautiful Samurai” books by Sedonia Guillone.

In contrast to the more spiritually entertaining goals of Yü, the Guillone’s Beautiful Samurai books are described as m/m erotic fiction (with all the other subgenre categories appended). However I found the long passages describing sexual acts in overblown (ahem) prose so graphic as to cross the line from erotic to pornographic.

 

This is all a question of taste. I didn’t want to like the Guillone books. However, I did like the stories if not the writing or the lengthy erotic digressions. The characters she has created are interesting, if not fully drawn in depth. There is so much more possible here that the graphic sex scenes actually seem to get in the way — even though passionate sex is what draws a demonic force to manifest and recreate an Edo period murder in the first book.

Here we are introduced to John Holmes — an American Gulf War veteran, who also has psychic touch and other psychic abilities. He is brought to Tokyo to help solve some weird crimes, and there he meets a young Japanese detective, Toshi. They fall in love and have lots of sex. And in the process they solve the murder mystery that is several centuries old, while solving the current crimes of passion taking place in Tokyo.

As I say, I didn’t want to like the Guillone books. There were spelling errors. Mistakes about Japanese culture that bothered me. And more sex than was really necessary unless you wanted to read the books with one hand below the waist. But as I say, I thought the stories were interesting — better than the prose they were written in.  And the characters were interesting too, if one-dimensionally drawn. These books had potential the author gave up by putting more energy into the sexual escapades and to me they suffer for it.

As for the physical book itself, I can forgive the fact that the typesetting is amateurish — this is clearly a publishing house that exists because computers make printing easier and cheaper than ever. But spell checking and professional editing, often invisible to readers in the final product, as they should be, are glaringly absent here. This publisher, Torquere Books, is one of the centers of the new m/m pulp fiction (oddly written by straight women) and some of their writers have been recognized with awards for writing queer science fiction.

So how many more books can we expect that mash up all these genres to create a subgenre that even Marion Zimmer Bradley (whose queer pulp science fiction Darkover series was groundbreaking back in 1975 with The Heritage of Hastur) would never have imagined? Well, given the mainstream appetite for vampires, werewolves and wizards in film and print I doubt we’ll see the end of this almost Jacobean fascination any time soon. And when a good book like Yü: A Ross Lamos Mystery comes along, I’m not complaining.

The Best, Most Strategic Viral Web Copywriting You'll Ever Read...Today

Brian Barrett over at Gizmodo waxed rhapsodic over the "rant" in this online ad for an inkjet cartrtidge. And he wasn't the only one. As if it really were a Howard Beale moment in the world of copywriting. Really?

There's a process that we copywriters go through. Nothing is unmediated. Forget that things go past supervisors, account people. Let's just stop and notice all the spelling errors in this piece. It wouldn't get through proofreading.

I suspect this was an extremely clever viral strategy that everyone fell for. Because this has turned up all over the web today.

I can be certain this was a plant because way before the Internet became a public wall instead of a Defense Department tool I was living in Tokyo, where I worked as an English language copywriter at Japan's largest ad agency, Dentsu. And I created an ad for a very rare daring Japanese client who ran it knowing it would become a subject written about with humorous condescension in Tokyo's many English language newspapers.

If you follow sites like BoingBoing and Gizmodo, you will on occasion find hilarious examples of Janglish — that weird combination of Japanese and English that comes from either a misunderstanding or spelling errors. My client, the New Otani Hotel, had a steak restaurant on the premises called The Rib Room. In Japanese, the R and L sounds are very close, and the B and V sounds are very close. So a Japanese person, in trying to pronounce the English work Live might say, and for that matter, spell this word, in a way that a native English speaker might hear as Rib.

Taking out the copywriter tool box, which includes using familiar phrases and playing with them to make a headline more memorable, I wrote the ad you see below for the restaurant. I told the client that some in the local press and letter writers would make merciless fun of them for running the ad. And that others would recognize that the restaurant was in on the joke. But that it would be reprinted and talked about. It was.

I make no claims to this being award winning or wildly creative. When I was a 30 year old writer in Tokyo, I was proud to have found an opportunity to do something fun, and happy to find a client brave enough to play.

Today, the internet makes such opportunities both harder and easier to recognize. But when done well, and when picked up, the rewards can be a worldwide business bump, instead of simply a few more seats filled at The New Otani.

Mind you, the only reason there was an open position in Tokyo so that I got the job was that a writer before me had mischeviously written a headline for a now defunct Japanese bank that took advantage of the fact that the Japanese client didn't recognize the semi-salacious word-play.

The logo of the Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank was a heart. So this writer's headline, which ran in the Japan Times and the other local English language papers was: Dai Ichi Kangyo Has A Heart On For You.

I don't get opportunities like this much anymore. My work does in fact go through account people, proofreaders, lawyers lawyers and more lawyers. So you might understand why I don't believe the ink cartridge ad was a real "rant." A great copywriter sees opportunities on match book covers if that's the media to work in (and that tells you how old I am!). 

Fashion, Phallocentrism and Nationalism: Singapore's Swimming Trunks Gets Their Hot Team In Hot Water

The Flag of the city state of Singapore was designed by committee. It had to satisfy the Muslim population, so there's a crescent moon in it. It also had to satisfy the Chinese population, so it is both red and has stars. As flags, and compromises go, it's not bad. But recently the swim team from Singapore, competing in the Asia Games unconsciouly made clear the connection between nationalism and phallocentrism when they used the design of the flag for their swim trunks.

The always conservative and rather Victorian government has expressed outrage at the design, calling it inappropriate and lacking dignity. Some have called it obscene. Of course, I can only recall the motto of the Order of the Garter: Honi soit qui mal y pense, which means "the evil belongs to him who thinks it is evil." Sort of a medieval understanding of the psychological law of projection.

Certainly these swim suits say something about projection, but just what is projecting, well, I leave that up to you. I think the crescent moon looks like a horn, among other things, which also has phallic implications.

As a fashion statement, if the government of Singapore were smarter, they'd recognize they have a hot new export on their hands, and instead of calling out the team, they should be thanking them — and gearing up to sell these swim suits in stores worldwide. Or at least in Chelsea and Hells Kitchen.

 

Homoerotic Ritual As An Essential Part of Societal and Spiritual Health

An Essay on the Takashi Miike film: Big Bang Love Juvenile A

The film Big Bang Love, Juvenile A starts with a monologue that is consciously filmic – it opens with a clap board and a man reading from what might be a script, yet sounds like a treatise on the physics of time, a philosophical meditation on the past and the future as waves of light seen from space at different points thus allowing the viewer to see back almost all the way to the Big Bang as well as into the future.

 

The opening “narrator” explains that this point in time/space where the past and future can be seen is also an experience of synesthesia, when the senses merge so that you can taste colors and smell shapes. And it is ultimately the experience of the Divine beyond time, the at-one-ment where/when all time is simultaneous. The “narrator” explains that it is in this place, where the veil of time has been ripped from our narrow view of reality that the story we are about to witness in this film of  “sad young men from a time that has lost something” occurs.

 

From here, Big Bang Love, Juvenile A, the deliciously homoerotic film by Takashi Miike, shifts the scene not directly to the story just described, but to another kind of prologue. We go from the opening film set to a place out of time and space — the world of men and divine masculine energy. We see only an old man and a young boy. The old man is a sage, who instructs the boy on how to encounter this divine masculine energy, take it in, make it his and become one with it, thus becoming a man himself in the process.

 

The ritual is simple, and if you have read Men, Homosexuality and the Gods by Ronald Long, you will recognize this ritual as one practice by the Sambians of Papua, New Guinea: sacred fellatio. In that culture, a pre-pubescent boy, in order to become a man, fellates post-pubescent boys until he himself is able to ejaculate. At which point then he becomes the inseminator of masculinity to those younger than himself. Among the Sambians, this practice stops for the young men once they marry a woman. Presumably they no longer have any same-gender sexual relations. In this culture, it is truly ritualized as “a stage they are going through,” and an essential ritual at that.

 

A variant of this ritual is described in the 2^nd prologue of Big Bang Love Juvenile A to a young boy who must choose a man from his village whose masculine energy he wishes to take in and emulate. You can see the man he chooses at the top of this post — and in the opening sequence the dance of this tattooed avatar (and I use this word in its truly original Hindu meaning of a deity that takes human incarnation) of masculinity you have an approximation of the power of such an act when connected to living ritual. And in his dance you may recognize the atavistic influences of this ritual on the dance floor in a gay club, where dancing men stripped of their shirts and covered in tattoos that have been stripped of true ritual meaning act out their unconscious need for homoerotic spiritual transcendence. This is in fact the dilemma of the circuit party dance floor ritual: it is a celebratory rite of manhood that has been split off from the container of true religious ritual in its finest sense. And without a ritual container, it is not wonder many in the world of the circuit party seek divine connection through the Dionysian world of drugs and sex that ultimately consumes them.

 

The ritual of sacred oral sex in this film stops just short of the sexual act itself. Though the old man described to the young boy exactly what will happen:

 

“He will teach you what to do…and finally he will aim for your throat, releasing his manhood. For ages we have become men in this manner. Handing down manly vigor to our descendants.”

 

From this scene we are rocketed into yet another timeless place that is simultaneously recognizable as a classic B movie situation: the prison drama. And the young boy and young man from the previous ritual scene now seem to be re-incarnated as two young men entering prison together, both for separate crimes of murder. Tattoos appear and reappear. Walls and bars that demarcate the prison are both solid and merely indicated by chalk on the floor from scene to scene to indicate the existential nature of the subject matter at hand.

 

The film is also takes the film conventions of the “police procedural” mystery as two detectives try to solve a murder that takes place in the prison. Like most of Takashi Miike’s films, Big Bang Love Juvenile A is filled with disturbing violence. While in the story, ultimately the true murderer is exposed, the film does not answer the many philosophical questions it raises — because to answer those questions would be to do violence to the quest each young man must face in his rite of passage as he confronts the divine masculine and assimilates its energy into his life.

 

As a gay man, experiencing the divine masculine through the sacred and shamanic traditions of same-gender love is an important subject for me. Because love — emotional and spiritual love when experienced together in physical expression with the beloved — is one gateway to heaven. When these three are split off from each other, and their connection is denied by society — when there is no social and ritual container that recognizes the (w)holiness of this expression — those who step into this space without a guide may find instead a gate to the hell of compulsive sex. (Of course, both heaven and hell are expressions of divine energy, just as Brahma and Shiva are twin poles of creation and destruction. And both are ultimately expressions of Brahman, the infinite and eternal oneness. Or the Ayn Sof as the Kabbalists would call it.)

 

In the act of love — the “small bang” — we seek to experience that oneness of the moment before the Big Bang.

 

(Italo Calvino, in “All At One Point” his Cosmicomics short story of the moment just before the Big Bang there is still separateness, a universe full of diverse characters described as “packed like sardines.”)

 

I seem to digress. But those who read this blog with any irregular regularity (given my irregular postings) are used to this.

 

Big Bang Love Juvenile A brings together all these strands of meaning for me — wrapped up in my love of Japanese culture (and Japanese men). And to be certain, it also raises questions about the divine feminine and how men relate to it. It looks at the penetrative spirit of warrior culture and its relationship to men who enjoy the receptive role. I highly recommend this film for any gay man who thinks about the questions raised here. As I also recommend reading Men, Homosexuality and the Gods by Ronald Long.

 

Below you can see the entire 9 minute opening sequence — from the clap board monologue through the ritual and dance to the prison murder —or you can follow it as a link to youtube where you can see it full screen.

Queering the Icon: Marilyn Monroe, Dean's Scotch and Yasumasa Morimura

The image of Marilyn Monroe standing above the subway grate as a gust a air blows her dress up high is an American cultural icon of the 20th Century. Nicholas Roeg's film, Insignificance, opens with the the filming of this famous scene in The Seven Year Itch re-imagined from the POV of the film crew — and the man under the grating who turned on the fan. Roeg's film, far from camp, is among other things a meditation on the prison of sexism: my favorite scene in that film is when Monroe, with the aid of toys bought at F.A.O Schwarz, explains the theory of relativity to its author, Albert Einstein.

In the ad below, this image is appropriated once again, in the service of selling Dean's Scotch:

Created by a team at Scholz & Friends NRW in Germany, their explanation, at Adsoftheworld.com notes that:

"Dean’s Whisky is especially mild. Which is why it appeals not only to rugged guys. The advertisement’s unusually humorous, feminine look and feel are designed to arouse the interest of a new target group and raise awareness of Dean’s Whisky above and beyond its loyal customer base."

Arouse the interest? Who is this new target base? Is this ad running at gay magazines in Germany? In women's fashion magazines? Inquiring minds want to know.

Scotch is one of the few hard liquors that retains an aura of masculine privilege. This might have the effect of undermining their image with the base customer. This isn't to say that I don't like the ad. I think it's hilarious and playful. The image of a man in a regimental kilt uniform is hardly fey. There is every possibility that the core consumer for this product is secure enough so that if they saw this ad they'd laugh. Then again, because this is a "mild" Scotch, it might not have very much of a base with the traditional Scotch drinker, so that an effort like this won't hurt.

I wonder what Marilyn would make of it though. Or what she'd make of the photographs of Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura. I first saw an exhibit of his self portraits at the Saatchi Gallery in London: images of the artist in drag as Marilyn, Audrey Hepburn, Garbo, Liza Minelli. You can see the photos on the gallery site, where the question is asked:

"Morimura is more than just art's most famous drag queen. Dealing with issues of cultural and sexual appropriation he is constantly exploring ideas of image consumption, identity and desire: Can Brigitte Bardot be as innocently flirtatious with angular Japanese features? Would Marilyn Monroe be as sexy if she was Japanese - and a man?"

Having lived in Japan where I both enjoyed and endured drag acts where these Western film icons were portrayed by Japanese men, I was less interested in the questions posed above than the questions around Japanese identity and the effect of Hollywood and American cultural dominance on the traditional Japanese sense of beauty. I am curious about what the reaction to images is in the debate/discussion about the feminization of Asian men in the West within the Asian and gay Asian communities.

Within the discussion of constructed femininity, Morimura throws a light on the minstrelsy of Marilyn; how her image was just as much a creation out of the fantasies of men as Thomas D. Rice's blackface Jumpin' Jim Crow was a creation out of the fantasies of white men in the 19th Century of black men. 

Good grief, I hope to God I am not turning into a queer theorist. Ewww.

China, Sex & Censorship: Celebrating Gay Men in Beijing, Dealing with Discrimination in Ulaanbaatar

The big China story this week is Google blowing the whistle on cyberspying and censorship. This is of personal interest to me because I chat online with a gay Chinese man in Chengdu every week, and there are subjects he doesn’t know about, and things he doesn’t have access to.

Once I found myself cutting and pasting the sentences from a censored story into the chat window so he would know what I was writing about. But of course, this was risky business and he made it clear he didn’t want me to do that in the future — our conversation is simply about gay life in the US, since in Chengdu it isn’t anywhere near as open as it seems to be in Beijing, where this week, what is billed as an officially sanctioned male beauty pageant (you can see a video of these shirtless young men here). I suspect my friend in Chengdu can't get to this video link however.

Late Breaking Development That Should Be No Surprise: Police Shut Down The Pageant — Full Story Here.

That's a sea change from just a few years back when homosexuality was a criminal offense. Bu then, in a country where a one child policy and the preference for male children has led to a male/female ratio that makes it hard for a straight guy to find a wife, taking the pressure off gay men from marrying as cover just might help a little. In fact, it also helps take some pressure off the regime, since a country with several million frustrated young men has got to feel like a powder keg no matter who is in power.

I have no idea what's behind the ruling Communist Party easing up on things in Beijing, but it's still not easy if you're in the provinces. And I’m not just talking Chengdu.

Mongolia for example. If you're in NYC this month, stop by the LGBT Center on 13th Street — in the lobby there is an amazing exhibit documenting the lives of LGBT Mongolians living in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar.

Beyond the Blue Sky, created and produced by Brandt Miller, includes amazing portrait photography by Miller and Mareike Günsche and a film by Miller and Sean Devaney.

The photographs are intense and dramatic. While some of the men in these photos are shirtless, each of the subjects’ faces covered by a khadag — a ceremonial scarf made of a sacred blue cloth representing the eternal sky and used at funerals to wrap the head of the deceased.

Each photo is accompanied with an oral history — a life story of each subject, transcribed by Miller — that captures the universal longing all lgbt people feel, that all people feel: the need for love and intimacy that is not merely recognized, but celebrated.

Miller, who was in Mongolia on a Fulbright Fellowship, was a co-founder of the first LGBT Center in Ulaanbaatar.

The exhibit will be on view at the NYC LGBT Center on 13^th Street through April. If you go there regularly as I do, take some time to stop and see it all. If you don’t go to the Center, consider stopping in. There are so many groups that meet there, and social services provided, it can be easy to overlook the fact that the Center is indeed a central arts resource for the community too.

Here is a video interview with Miller, followed by the video documentary made with Sean Devaney:

 

'Behind the Blue Sky' - Short film from Ual Da on Vimeo.

'Beyond the Blue Sky' Interview with Brandt Miller from Ual Da on Vimeo.

Sunday Morning Cartoon & Music Vid: Boy Meets Boy

This little gem from Korea in two parts features a little mystery of the relationship presented in part one that is resolved in part two. But I'll bet you've never seen a film with a singing fairy (live action) in a cartoon sequence gives street cruising advise to teen aged boys. Between this and Antique Bakery, I'd have to say South Korea is starting to give Taiwan a run for its money on good gay film!