Another Queer Jewish Buddhist

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.

Queer Midrash: Retelling and Reclaiming Our Stories

Andrew Ramer has just published his collection of Queer Midrash, Queering the Text, in which he writes our stories back into the history — and the sacred texts — of the Jewish people.

Midrash is an ancient custom of creating stories the fill in the blank spaces, or explain the seeming contradictions in the Torah. The best example is the story almost all Jews know — that of Abraham smashing the statues of idols in his father's shop. Many Jews believe this story is in the Torah. It isn't. It was a midrach created by a rabbi centuries after the Torah was redacted into the form we have it today.

Midrash is kind of a sacred literary jazz riff on the story, giving it new meaning and relevance to later generations.

In the story Andrew reads in the video, he takes a text from Genesis and uses it as a window into the Biblical landscape to create a story of the first gay male lovers — and how their love was recognized as sacred.

You can read an interview with Andrew in Zeek. You'll find other posts about him and his work elsewhere on this blog. And you can order Queering The Text online.

Apologies for the poor quality of the image, but you can hear him read clearly, and if this kind of story is meaningful to you, you can be sure it will be a heart-opening experience. By rewriting the story, we can set ourselves free from the tyranny of the story. By recognizing it is a story created by others, we don't have to live out the old scripts — we can write new ones and truly live happily, in the moment, ever after.

 

William "Wolf" Agress, who would have been 54 today...

Bill was my first serious relationship, when I was in college. We met at a meeting of Gay Youth — he started coming as a regular when I was president in 1971. He was aggressively snobbish about language and intelligence and used it as a defense since he was hit on by lots of guys of all ages. It made him hard to get to know. In fact, I didn't even like him when we first met. And he was never easy. But he was an original — and he was always an activist. I loved him a lot. And I miss him to this day.

When we first began our relationship, he was still smooth and free of chest hair. And he knew it was a look I preferred, this being the androgynous '70s. He asked me once, "Will you still love me when I'm hairy?" I told him yes, and I did. Even when he grew a wild beard. His wild heart took him to traveling the country — he lit out for the territories. We were each other's first — and the memories I share of him to this day with my friend Marion, who was there, leaves us both laughing and crying at the same time.

At his memorial service I was weeping uncontrollably — and then the rabbi came out to speak of him. The rabbi was cute, and I turned to Bill's brother and said, with a moment of lightness in the grief, "Bill would have said this rabbi was cute." His brother said, "He did, he me the rabbi before he died, and that's just the first thing he said to the rabbi — 'you're really cute.'" And then we laughed and cried at the same time.

Bill was one of the first to be diagnosed with HIV, and he was a founding member of the PWA coalition. He wrote for their magazine — articles like "THE CONDOM CONNOISSEUR"  — and he hosted their cable TV show. 

If you're a regular reader, you will know I've written about the Tupelo tree in the Ramble's Tupelo Meadow in Central Park. Bill and I used to climb that tree together. And when I took this photo out to scan it, underneath it I found a poem written for Wolf (he was always Bill to me even though he changed his name to Wolf, which was in fact the English translation of his Hebrew name, Z'ev) by Eric Thorndale, one of the original members of GAA who we were friends with and worked with as part of GAA's AgitProp committee. Eric, like me, was interested in medieval and renaissance English literature. The difference is that he regularly wrote poems in the style of the period. The poem below, that he wrote for Bill, mentions the Tupelo tree in the first line.

For Sweet William:

Thou comely Swain    by Trysting Tree,
I sought in Words    a looking Glass
That long undimm'd    might shine of thee
But as I laid me    on the Grass
And watch'd the lighted Morning shine,
I thought how Words    might wane and pass,
Which Thought    the while was woeful Tine.

What Words need I    when all's behight?
I'd bed in Burrs    could I but cleave
To thee    in blazing Bliss unstight —
How would that Joy     me speechless leave

How would my leaping Heart be blithe
When wordless    in thine Arms I writhe!

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.

Gay Poet, James Kirkup, dies at 91

I'd read James Kirkup's memoir of Japan, These Horned Isles, years back when I first moved to Japan. I was introduced to his poetry by the gay Canadian poet, bibliographer, archivist and activist, Ian Young, back in the 1970s.

His work stirred up a lot of trouble in Britain when one of his poems, about the love of a Roman Centurion for Christ on the cross, led to the last successful prosecution for blasphemy in that country. The Japanese of course, honored Kirkup, and he received prizes for his writing from the Heisei Emperor.

I will dig thru my books later to post something of his.

Twenty Days: Two weeks, Six days of the Omer. Yesod of Tiferet

Yesod, once again, is the sefira that corresponds to the second chakra — of sexual energy, generativity, and most importantly in Kabbalah, connectivity or bonding. This is an energy that is clearly physical in nature. And today the energy that we meditate on is that connection in beauty, as well as the bond forged in compassion. These may seem to be somewhat opposite at first. However, anyone who has been in a deep, long-term committed relationship knows the compassion partners have for each other — they see the true beauty in the fully vulnerable humanity in the lover, and have compassion for the ways the lover is broken.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote "There is a crack in everything God has made." This is in alignment with the Kabbalistic view, and that it is our job to help repair the world. Part of the work of this repair is seeing the beauty in the brokenness and loving it. After all, the Divine love flows through all things. How can we love it any less? How can we feel anything less than compassion for all Creation, including ourselves? And how can we see it as anything less than beautiful?

One note about the image of the Nine of Pentacles, which captures some important information about the energy of Yesod. In this garden, the mistress holds a falcon that is hooded. It is a recognition of the animal nature of sexuality, and the fruits that come from understanding how to control this energy and channel it in ways that create connection and celebrate beauty and compassion. So may we all walk this path.

Today is 15 days, which is two weeks and one day of the Omer

Into the week of Tiferet. Where John Keats would feel right at home:

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

Of course, the Jews of the Kingdom of Israel during the time of the Maccabees would be horrified at the quote, given that it is inspired by a Grecian Urn. Well, I suppose given the nature of this blog that would be the least thing they'd be horrified by.

But Tiferet is the intersection of Truth and Beauty. It is also known as Compassion, which connects it to the Boddhisatva Kuan Yin, who is female in China and Japan, and known as the beautiful male youth Avalokiteshvara in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Kuan Yin is the expression of today's sefirotic energy, Chesed in Tiferet: Lovingkindnes in Compassion. So I found it rather amusing that at both Andrew Sullivan's blog, as well as on Joe.My.God there was a link to a video of Chinese dancers in an homage to Kuan Yin. And not one to run from the energy of the day, here it is for your pleasure — it's quite amazing:

Todays is the 10th day, which is one week and three days, counting the Omer: Tiferet of Gevurah

Yesterday, I wrote about ikebana and discipline in my discussion of Gevurah in Gevurah. Today is Tiferet in Gevurah, and one way of looking at this sefirotic relationship is the Beauty of Form. Or Beauty expressed through Discipline. So once again, the example of ikebana seems appropriate. Or indeed truly any art form, with the accent on form. After all, a sonnet is as highly formalized as a haiku. So today is a good day to meditate on the demands of a discipline and how it channels our creativity and enables us to bring beauty into the light.

Alternatively, the energy of this day can also be considered as a time for expressing the compassion of discipline. I think of the advice given in the 12-step world: Easy does it. This is a recognition that someone in recovery needs to be easy on him or herself. After all, there is much internalized shame and judgement when one is in recovery. And there is no perfection in recovery. Simply recognizing that we are all human, that we all fall, is to experience compassion for ourselves, and for all those who fall once, or again and again. (This is not excuse making or abrogating responsibility, it is the simple recognition of that there is no perfect form)

Visual Headlines: Plucking the Chrysanthemum and the Black Tulip

There are many headline writing techniques to get attention. The visual headline uses either a graphic or  visual element to be both words and visual. For example, in this ad for Ikea below:

We see a floor plan that spells out the word "play," which is hopefully the attitude customers will bring to shopping at Ikea to decorate their flat. The Black Tulip Hotel in Amsterdam, which advertises specifically to the gay community used a similar technique -- the visual headline -- and in fact, a floor plan, to suggest another kind of play available for guests at the hotel:

An odd tangent is my question about the name The Black Tulip. In classical Japanese literature, the phrase, "plucking the chrysanthemum" was used to denote the taking of a young man's anal virginity. Apart from a reference to the tulipmania of the Netherlands' economic history, I wonder if the phrase "black tulip," has a similar connotation as the Japanese phrase mentioned above. Any Dutch speakers out there have any info?

W.H.Auden, Cute Butts and Bicycle Seats

This TV Spot from the ever amazing team at Euro RSCG Paris brings to mind the couplet by W. H. Auden:

I've often thought that I should like
to be the saddle of a bike.

Exactly.