Another Queer Jewish Buddhist

Barilla Pasta, Oral Sex and Federico Fellini!

GIven the PR mess created by Guido Barilla, the CEO of Barilla Pasta with the broadcasting of his bigoted opinions about Lesbian and Gay couples it would be understandable if you thought he was a prude. You might be right. But remember, this is Italy, and looking back at the history of advertising for Barilla Pasta you'll be surprised to discover they made a TV commercial directed by Federico Fellini — centered around a joke about oral sex. Heterosexual oral sex, but still....

Obviously, since Fellini died in 1993, it must have been Guido Barilla's father (or grandfather) who had a more casual attitude about sexuality. But I think it would be good for Guido Barilla to learn from his elders and be more playful and relaxed.

Made in 1984, the spot is hardly an example of Fellini's best work as either a filmmaker or writer/director of TV commercials (yes, he wrote the spot as well as directed it). The spot opens on a couple in a very expensive restaurant. They are being sexually flirtatious with each other as the head waiter explains the menu to them. The woman requests rigatoni, which is used in Itlalian slang to refer to oral sex. And the response from the wait staff is that it will certainly stay al dente, or, uh, hard.

My suggestion to Mr. Barilla is that he remake this commercial — with a gay male couple. And then find the right pasta metaphor for a lesbian couple and make that too.

And yes, here's the spot:

 

Related articles

Barilla Chairman Comes Out As A Raging Homophobe, Urges Gays To Eat Another Pasta

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.

Choc Tease: Women with (malt) balls make this TV commercial one of the U.K.'s faves and a queer hit.

<p>It's always nice to see two men cuddling together on the couch with a gay kiss (even if it is unconscious smooching). Even if, from my point of view it's not naughty or new. But as a TV spot for candy? Sweet. My thank yous to Johnny in Rhode Island for catching this on the list of top 10 best-liked TV ads in Britain:

Men who know how to play with it.

The men behind Butch Bakery have a post-gay sense of humor. With products described as" Masculine styled cupcakes for the guys (and the guys/girls who love em!)" and a website that makes fun of frilly pink frosted cupcakes in a way that doesn't feel like coded queer bashing but in fact is laughing at homophobia and misogyny while at the same time introducing a whole new kind of cupcake experience that clearly can be said to have a masculine aesthetic. Kudos to founder David Arrick and to ad agency readybreak in New York for creating a print campaign that truly made me laugh out loud. 

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.

 

Bullying: a low human instinct institutionalized, examined on screen.

Why Lindsay Anderson's "If..." couldn't be made today, and why it's needed more than ever.

 
Tomorrow night in New York there will be a rare screening of the 1968 British film If... as part of the Queer/Art/Film series so ably put together by Ira Sachs and Adam Baran. This film helped me get through my hellish high school experience — because even though I did not go to a British boy's boarding school and was never caned (or had my nipples twisted by a priest) I felt a complete identification with the students suffering in the stultifying atmosphere of the school in the film. And as a teen struggling with coming out one year pre-Stonewall the sub-plot in the film of a homosexual romance between two of the boys, presented without judgement — in fact presented romantically, I found the film transgressively thrilling.

Of course, the heroes of the film fight back against the school in a climax of bloody violence that makes Columbine look like a picnic — it was made at a time when revolt was in the air and student protests were taking place across the U.S. and Europe. But in the U.S. it was the students who were dying at the hands of the National Guard. In this film, Malcolm McDowell as Mick and his buddies take up arms and open fire on graduation ceremonies. For me, this was divine sublimation. I was that angry, but I certainly wasn't going to act out any of my fantasies of revenge. Today however, in a country where it's easy to get a gun, we actually have scenes like that in If... And they are not dramatically satisfying. They are tragic.

And everyone weeps for the fallen. But in the last few months, looking at the young suicides - those who killed themselves because they were tormented for their sexuality, real or percieved - I know that a suicide is rage turned inward, rage turned at a target where it will be effective since rage against bullies, schools, adults seems hopeless to these young people we have lost.

If... gave me courage to survive my high school years. And showed me an image of gay love that was casual, no big deal, just something that was simply right. More revolutionary that shooting prefects from a rooftop.

I haven't seen If... since the late 60s. In the last few years issues like Columbine and other acts like it have made me wonder if it were even more relevant today. Not because it made heroes of the boys who fought back, but it made it clear why they felt  the need to do so. And with the recent increased coverage of lgbt youth suicide (I won't say increased suicide, because it's always been there, quiet and not covered by media with the serious it has always deserved) I find If... even more important to see and talk about in the lgbt community even here in the U.S.

Consider the case of Andrew Shrivell — a cyber-bully in a position of power. He might have been able to continue his insane attacks had not the recent events helped shine an light on his ugly little mind. But this is the tip of the iceberg, and like most icebergs, the vast majority of nastiness is below the radar screen and not covered by media. It is the living hell kids go through every day.

"It Gets Better" videos are a good thing. They give hope to those who have resources enough to find them. But it doesn't change day to day reality. And when you can members of Congress, and institutionalized religion on the side of bullies, it's no wonder teachers look the other way and our schools become our local version of Lord of the Flies.

The truth is that children are not comfortable with ambiguity at certain ages. They like certainty, categories, clarity, definition. And lgbt people upset those categories. Hell, there are adults who never grew out of the this childish need to see the world in black and white. Those of us who've been over the rainbow know there are all different shades in between and a whole universe of colors to play with. And that's nothing to be scared of — rather it is to be celebrated.

The problem with If... is that Columbine happened. And while I had revenge fantasies, I have no desire at all to shoot down the student body of Pat Robertson's Liberty University. I just want to shatter their color blinders.

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.

 

Substituting Homoeroticism For Health Claims: The New POM Wonderful Advertising

Actor Erik Fellows wanders through the desert without a care how the sun will damage his skin. Why? Because he has the anti oxidant power of POM Wonderful. Ahem.

Okay, let me say I have been a customer. I actually seed pomegranates every week and put them on my cereal (along with blueberries). I drink pomegranate juice. I do this because there is anecdotal evidence for prostate health. However, last week the FTC finally woke up to its responsibilities and came down on POM for what they said were unsubstantiated claims. And heaven knows, POM does do its best to have people believe that their product will help protect men from prostate cancer. That it's 40% as effective as Viagra. Well, I think Erik Fellows on my TV screen (or anywhere in my home) would obviate the need for Viagra.

Now that POM is having trouble with their health claims, they've created some videos that get to the sexual potency claims without saying anything directly. Though in one ad they allude to the fruit's mythical status as an aphrodisiac. They also allude to the claims they can't make by saying "backed by modern science," but they don't say what claim is being backed up. This is classic weasel wording.

When I first started as a copywriter, I remember working on Cascade dish detergent. You know, it gets dishes VIRTUALLY spotless. Not spotless, virtually spotless. Almost. Because they can't make the full claim legally. UNSURPASSED is another weasel work: it means that the product being sold is equal to the competition — it's a parity product. The POM videos are beautiful examples of weasel wording.

These videos are beautifully shot. They use mythic imagery and eroticism to make the emotional association to the claims they can no longer say legally. And I suspect if POM had introduced their product with these video spots they would have become award winners, and given POM a classy image. They may yet do so. The spots certainly have what it takes to win some awards. 

But nowadays, I get Marco Polo brand pomegranate juice. It costs a lot less, and isn't as sweet. And I know that unlike Persephone, even though I consume hundreds of pomegranate seeds in a week, I'm no prisoner of Hades.

You can see the full POM ad below, and you can read about the FTC complaint against POM here.

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.