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!). 

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.

Music, memory, Match boxes and coffee: An appreciation of Tokyo's La Scala-za Café

While rummaging through a drawer recently I came across a box of matches I’d been saving since 1987. It was from La Scala-za, a café in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, and one of the most memorable café’s in Tokyo at a time when these businesses thrived on competition to be the most individual, eccentric and creative (all the more astounding in a culture that denied this urge in the citizenry).

What made La Scala-za an experience was visible even  before you entered: vines clung to walls that looked as though they were built of stone. There was a turret, and the roof along the side street was crenellated.  There was a tall and narrow stained glass window in front that ran from the first through third floors. The effect was of a decrepit castle. 

Inside there were overdone crystal chandeliers, curiosity cabinets filled with odd knick knacks, a suit of armor standing in a stairwell, and antimacassars on the red velvet chairs. Today’s Goths would feel totally at home there, or perhaps today’s vampire fans. However, I think the intention was to capture the 19th Romantic European sense of beauty. And in fact, the decorative metalwork in front of the second floor window looks like the image on their match-box cover.  

When you consider that the place opened in 1954, only two years after the end of Japan’s occupation by the Allied Powers, in an only partially rebuilt Tokyo where, La Scala-za must have stood as a monument to a fantasy escape from the privations of post-war Japan. But that escape was only partially fueled by the architecture (and caffeine). No, what made La Scala-za so special, and what had people going there regularly was that they played Western classical music non-stop at a time when buying records must have also seemed an incredible luxury.

In fact, Scala-za published a schedule of what they would be playing in advance. A program of sorts. So if you wanted to come and hear Verdi, or Chopin (since it was not only opera, despite the name) you knew just when to show up. Though you couldn’t be guaranteed a seat, since regulars seemed to almost live there.

Students would be there hunched over books, smoking furiously and discussing important issues in art at politics. And young lovers made La Scala-za a meeting place for decorously romantic coffee dates.   I know, because my boyfriend Hiroshi took me there for the first time when we had just started going out in 1982. So finding that box of matches was a moment of romantic memories and nostalgia for Tokyo in the go-go 80s, so different a time from La Scala’s beginning.

The image on the match-box cover, a sort of 19^th Century Romeo and Juliet on the  balcony, with a dash of My Fair Lady meets Dracula, captures the recherché spirit of the place.

La Scala-za closed after a 48-year run on December 31^st,  2002, a victim of the real estate boom. People lined up outside to say goodbye. But recently, it has re-appeared in a new incarnation, though in the basement of a modern building and so without the feel of the old place.

This is the story of cities, and life. I remember going up 6th Avenue in Manhattan with my father when I was a boy and listening to him complain about how it had been ruined by all the new glass and steel buildings. Now, I can’t walk through the city without being surrounded by ghosts of people and places past.

Memories and impermanence. The evanescence of existence — the blossom falls. The beautiful sadness of things. So lets keep dancing. In this moment now — because really, that’s all there is Peggy.  

Sunday Morning Cartoon (sort of): Robot, Ninja & Gay Guy

How I have managed to miss this little internet oddity for several months I have no idea. The premise is explained very simply on their Facebook Fan Page:

"What happens when a gay guy needs new roommates and the only ones who respond to the Craigslist ad are a robot and a ninja? This..."

It's so geeky silly I just love it. Yes, I know it's not a cartoon, but it's about as cartoony as live action gets. And episode 5 takes place in a comic book store! The guys behind this have their own youtube channel with other regular video comedy postings, including a series called (and how I missed this is even more bizarre) Two Hot Guys in A Shower. Doesn't work as well for me. But what interests me is the way creativity and content continue to be democratized (though of course, the goal, you can be sure, for these guys is to "discovered" and make it big. So they can get their 8 million dollars a movie.

The fan page says that there are new episodes the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of every month. Since they started in August and we're in October, they aren't keeping to schedule otherwise there would be more than 5 episodes at this point. But I'm not arguing.

On the DL: The Dalai Lama and the Tibetan response to homosexual love.

How many queer folk who follow the Tibetan Buddhist way would still be on that path if they knew that the Dalai Lama said in an interview that he “rejects” the idea of homosexual love and that gay or lesbian sex is sexual misconduct.  Further, in a recent response to questions about this, a representative of the DL essentially compared the acceptance of homosexuals to the toleration of thieves.

Of course, his position from a human rights point of view is that queer folk should not be discriminated against in civil law. But along with masturbation or sex at night for anyone, gay sex is sexual misconduct from the Tibetan Buddhist POV. How does the celibate DL (doesn’t stand for Down Low) come to this understanding? By consulting a Tibetan treatise by another celibate monk from the 15th Century. A monk who also said that it is okay to pay for a prostitute yourself, but not to have sex with a prostitute that someone else has paid for.

Is your head spinning yet? In a recent issue of Buddhadharma, José Cabézon wrote about Western Buddhists (read Tibetan Buddhists in this specific case but it is generally true for all sects) have a simplistic understanding of a tradition they have signed on to, specifically around the issue of sexual expression.

One of the many reasons I walked away from Judaism when I was 13 (the day after the Bar Mitzvah) was that I knew I was gay, and I didn’t care for a religion that called my expression of love an abomination. And like many Jews, I eventually found myself in the Buddhist world.
I didn’t go for Zen practice, since I was living in Japan and the S&M inherent in the way the sensei would strike practitioners with a rod just didn’t sit well with me. And I didn’t go with the Tibetans, because the whole thing just looked to me like a medieval theocratic state without a country. And if I wanted that, I could have become an Orthodox Jew.

Of course, many queer people turn to Buddhism because there is the perception in the West that it’s a religion where anything goes sexually. Or at least where much is tolerated. Nothing could be further from the truth. But then, the word Buddhism is like the word Christianity — it covers a lot of territory, since there are so many sects in Japan alone that it can be dizzying to try and figure out what the reality it. Though certainly, what most varieties of Buddhists can agree on are the four truths taught by the Buddha:

1.    Life means suffering
2.    Attachment is the origin of suffering
3.    The end of suffering is attainable
4.    There is a path to the end of suffering

I ended up in the world of Theravada Buddhism, considered by scholars to be the closest to what the Buddha taught, though of course, like Christianity, over the centuries, and across cultures, lots of stuff happens to the original message. What is certain is that there were very clear injunctions about sex between monks from the very start.

After that, well, depends what tradition you’re talking about. In Japan, the custom was for older monks to have sex with younger acolytes. At least until Admiral Perry showed up. Of course, in Japan, monasteries also had standing armies and often went to war with each other. Not very Buddhist on either account I would say.

But lets stay with the Tibetans. Perhaps people believe the DL is cool with gay sex because Trungpa Rinpoche’s Shambhala organization has pretty much always been okay with it. Of course, the Shambhala organization also has had a history of extraordinary loose sexual boundaries that raise questions of ethics no matter what religion or path you follow (well, unless you’re a follower of Aleister Crowley).

Like the Jews, the Tibetans have a long scholastic tradition of commentaries that they refer to for guidance. Yes, the Tibetans are Talmudic. And one of the scholars whose authority the DL accepts on the subject of sexual misconduct is that of a 15th Century monk named Tsongkhapa. And according to this dead brown man, among the ways of determining sexual misconduct is the use of inappropriate body parts.

What body parts does he mean? What could possibly be inappropriate?

“The mouth, the anus, the calves or thighs pressed together, and the hand in motion,” according the Tsongkhapa’s book The Great Treatise on the Stages of The Path. So if you’re a follower of the Tibetan’s these are the rules you’ve signed on for.

And if you accept Tibetan Buddhism then you also believe that if you’re having this kind of sex you’re going to end up in a hell realm.

Paging Pope Benedict!

Of course, the vast majority of Western Buddhists don’t believe any of this. Like many mainstream Jews and Christians they take a pick and choose attitude to their spirituality. The problem is that many Western Buddhists are unaware of these beliefs on the part of their spiritual teachers.

But unlike the priests of the Catholic church who are (supposedly) divorced from any sexual expression (and reality), the Tibetans are not being repeatedly challenged by activists. Not that questions haven’t arisen. But from the response the DL gave in his recent Canadian interview, not much movement (or enlightenment) has occurred.

But gay activists aren’t protesting outside appearances by the DL, and some of the reason is that you don’t see Tibetan Buddhists lining up politically against gay marriage anywhere, unlike Catholics, Mormons and Haredi Jews. So they aren’t on the radar of political activists who are concerned only with civil rights.

But that doesn’t make the Tibetan position any less problematic. Because telling a gay man or lesbian they are going to hell because of the way they express their love is doing spiritual violence.

And what is interesting about Buddhism among other things, is that an action isn’t judged by the outcome or the form, but by the intentionality. Anyone experiencing lust of any kind is experiencing the suffering of attachment. Gay, straight, whatever.

Anyone having angry sex is both experiencing and creating suffering. For a Buddhist monk, any sex is attachment. For a lay person though, well, getting laid isn’t out of the question. It’s just a question of how sexual misconduct is defined by the tradition. And if the intention in expressing love physically is loving and open hearted, well, this then is the issue….

Like Judaism, the Tibetan tradition can evolve with scholars debating and discussing and coming to some decision. They just don’t. Today even Conservative Jews not only accept gay congregants, they even ordain gay and lesbian rabbis.

A few years ago, the Dalai Lama met with a number of rabbis from across the spectrum to ask the secret of Jewish survival for 2000 years after the loss of the national homeland. With the destruction of ancient Israel, the Temple cult (and animal sacrifice) ended. And Judaism had to change and evolve. It went from being a state religion in a theocracy to a more diffuse and democratic structure that continues to evolve across cultures and time while affirming its connection to tradition. Perhaps it’s time for the Tibetans to ask the Jews for help again. And perhaps the queer Western followers need to be a little more Western in their push to wake up the Vatican. Oh, sorry, I meant the Kuger Yigtsang.

How will Tibetan Buddhism rise to meet the challenge of having lost the Potala and Tibet? This question will be answered in many ways. But perhaps one test will be to see how it responds Western queer Buddhists in the ranks who are challenging a tradition that’s about as relevant as using the ashes of a red heifer for purification rituals.

What was it like to be red headed in Japan?

This video with Rupert Grint was my experience on an almost daily basis. Of course, it doesn't show the opposite reaction, of people staring, pointing and shouting in Japanese "Monster!" which also happened with some regularlty. Usually at about 2am, after the bars closed.

Rhode Island Marriage Equality Demo: Best Photo

Courtesy of Rhode Island's Future site and my friend John in Providence...

Queer Poetry: Damn The Culture Ministry, by the late James Kirkup

Damn the culture ministry

My lover from Asakusa, a blooming boy,
He who adorned his amber body
With a swirling tattoo
Of the goddess Kwannon surrounded
By ferns, wildflowers, flags
And had a capering carp
Illuminating each vigorous buttock —

He whose suit of ink,
Blue and black and dogrose pink,
Was the one garment
I could not divest him of —
When he pulled back
His periwinkled foreskin, he discovered,
Always with a broken smile,
A gay butterfly on the glans penis.

Now the Culture Ministry
Has proclaimed him
Not only a National Treasure, but
An Intangible National Treasure!

Now I no longer
Hold him in my arms like a warm
Sheaf of poppies and wheat, no more
Stroke that golden-amber shoulder
Stained with a lace of sugarbag blue,
No more bedew
With tears and kisses his
Empurpled butterfly...

I can't get my hands on him.
Our love is finished,
Broken by banal politicians.

Now he belongs to the Nation,
Which means he belongs to no one,
And especially not to me.
I always put him on a pedestal,
But not like this!
He might as well be behind glass,
Stuffed and docketed in the National Museum.

Damn the Culture Ministry!

This poem appeared in the seminal anthology of gay male poets edited by Ian Young in 1972: The Male Muse. The photo was taken by Robert Chang of a temporary tattoo and captures my sentiments perfectly.