Four Seawolves on a Zoom

(Erika, for the Ivory Tower Boiler Room team)

It’s the weekend again and we’ve got a great episode for you to listen to. Three of this week’s four podcast participants are Stony Brook alumni, and the fourth is still there. This week, from the Boiler Room, we bring you a little something new–a new questionnaire to help you get to know our guests a little better. Adam and Erika wrote it with inspiration from Proust, Warhol and James Lipton, but we haven’t named it yet; we’d love your input for a clever name though. Leave us a comment below with your suggestions.

Take some time to get to know our guests this weekend, Ula Klein and Kathryn Klein.

Ula Klein is the author of Sapphic Crossings Cross Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature.

Meet Ula Klein:

1.What are you listening to, reading, watching?
Listening to 80s pop music–the sound of summer in my opinion! Reading mystery The Guest List by Lucy Foley. Watching Modern Family.

2.Do you like to cook? What is your favorite thing to make?
I love to cook international cuisine. I love to make tacos and stir frys because they are easy, but I love homemade pierogi. They are a bit more work intensive but homemade tastes best!

3.What is something you have read and loved, and wish more people would read?
Anything from the eighteenth century! It’s so over-looked as a time period these days, but there are so many great books. If you love Austen, then I strongly recommend her predecessors and contemporaries like Maria Edgeworth, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald.

4.Did you grow up with video- or computer-games? What were/are some of your favorites?
I did. I played Bubble Bobble, Super Mario 3, and Wheel of Fortune on Nintendo, and Tetris, Alley Cat, and Block out (a 3D version of Tetris) on the computer.

 5.You’re taking a sick-day from work. What movie are you putting on?
Clueless, 10 Things I Hate About You, When Harry Met Sally….

6.What’s your favorite excuse for why you have writer’s block?
I have too many ideas all at once and I don’t know which one to start with!

7.What’s a book everyone says you should read, but you either read it and hated it, or haven’t read it?
Robinson Crusoe. It’s SO BORING. But people love it. I think it’s more interesting to analyze than to read, but I also have a weird relationship with that book, because my dad made me read it as a kid in Polish to practice my language skills. It was a chore to read back then–but when I reread it in grad school in English, I still found it a chore to read! I’m just not a fan of survivalist storytelling I guess!

8. Also, do you have any websites/writing/or anything else you want to share with us (especially when promoting your books)?
I did a blog post for Pride Month about my book for the UVA Press blog page.

Kathryn Klein’s most recent book (as Charlotte Greene) is From the Woods.

Meet Kathryn Klein:

Kathryn’s Responses:

1.What are you listening to, reading, watching?
I just finished Mare of Easttown which I adored. I’ve been listening to the podcast The White Vault (thriller/horror docudrama) and the audiobook of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. It’s summer, so I’m mostly reading “beach reads.” I tend to read a lot of genre fiction for beach reads, specifically horror, thrillers, and scifi/fantasy. I just finished the very excellent The Guest List, by Lucy Foley and Hail Mary, by Andy Weir.

2.Do you like to cook? What is your favorite thing to make?
I’m only a so-so cook, but I can make decent Tex-mex and a really good fried steak. I do, however, love to bake, especially pies. My specialties are coconut cream and key lime.

3.What is something you have read and loved, and wish more people would read?
Gosh, that’s a Pandora’s box of a question. Most of the literature I work with has been totally forgotten. Some of it, however, was pulped in the 1950s, and, as David Earle has so neatly coined it “Re-Cover[ed]”. One of my favorites is a 1930s classic lesbian gem by Lilyan Brock called Queer Patterns, which you can find most easily as a 1950s pulp novel.

4.Did you grow up with video- or computer-games? What were/are some of your favorites?
Yes and yes. My dad worked with computers, so there’s been one in my house since my early childhood in the early 80s. I played most of the original Sierra games as well as some other lost classic PC games like Dragon Wars. Now I still play PC games, most RPGs like Fallout and Dragon Age. My recent obsession is a Canadian indie called The Long Dark.

5.You’re taking a sick-day from work. What movie are you putting on?
I like to watch pretty vapid and/or funny stuff when I’m sick, so I would say something like Airplane! or Twister.

6.What’s your favorite excuse for why you have writer’s block?
I’m going to end up cursing myself by saying this, but I don’t really get writer’s block. I’ve had life and work circumstances prevent writing, but when I make time for it, it comes pretty smoothly. That said, when I’m, let’s say, more reluctant to start than usual, I aim for a version of the Pomodoro Technique, with little rewards and breaks after so many minutes/words.

7.What’s a book everyone says you should read, but you either read it and hated it, or haven’t read it?
As a modernist, I’ve never tried Finnegan’s Wake. The summer with Ulysses during my comps was more than enough Joyce ramblings for me, thank you. I came to appreciate the latter, but I simply can’t abide another dip in that pool with the former.

I have a website that includes links to all of my books at charlottegreeneauthor.com


We all hope you’ve enjoyed getting to know Ula and Kathryn a bit, and that you enjoy Adam and Andrew’s interview with them. When you’re done with that, here’s what the Ivory Tower team is planning to enjoy next:

On Saturday, Andrew is meeting up with his parents in Woodbury, right around the corner from the Whitman Birthplace. We know he’ll bring along plenty of work to do, even while he’s planning to relax and have a good time. After our usual Friday night planning meeting (you can hear a little of what those often sound like if you listen to our “Real Housewives of Academia” bonus-episode) he is still planning work on his dissertation and some more blog content. He also launched the donation section on our website this week, so if you can, keep the writers in coffee and the cats fed so they don’t nibble away at Erika’s writing fingers. It means so much that everyone Andrew talks to about our community has been so supportive and interested in how so many Humanities communities have come together (and will continue to do so). It means a lot to all of us. Andrew is promising us photos by the pool while he’s reading, and we promise to share generously, but if you’re into the books, you can expect to see his bag from Words Matter Bookstore by his side with books from this week’s podcast guests Ula and Kathryn Klein, (Sapphic Crossings and Gnarled Hollow) in it. He’s also packed Bridgerton, the series that serves as the inspiration for the Netflix show, into the bag. He and his mom are doing a Bridgerton book club. Andrew and Erika are both reading Raphael’s “Dancing on Tisha B’Av” (they are both excited for the upcoming Lev Raphael interview). Andrew is also currently finishing the BBC’s dramatized performance of Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (which satisfies his Gilded Age gossipy nature), and there’s also time to listen to Todrick Hall’s new album FEMULINE!!

Mary plans to start reading the Vanishing Half this weekend. She also just finished up Mare of Easttown and says, “If you know, you know how intense that shit was to watch! (And I loved every second of it!) Kate Winslet and the rest of the cast are absolutely brilliant and nailed their Del Co accents. Most people found the ending shocking, but I had an idea at the end of the second to last episode who the killer might be. Stream for yourself on HBO if you want to find out!” Even though it’s summer and the weather is getting warmer, she’s still running, too.
During her runs, she has started listening to Bailey Sarian’s (YouTube’s Murder, Mystery, Makeup, Monday creator and star) new podcast Dark History. Each week Bailey sits down and talks about a really fucked up event that occurred in the US that our history teachers never told us about. There are only two episodes out: The DuPont Chemical Scandal (the true story behind the movie Dark Waters) and Zoot Suit Riot (yes, like the song and yes, there were actual riots) so it’s easy to catch up!

Erika is grateful not to have a really deep, heavy piece of writing for this Saturday; two in a row was plenty. There’s still plenty of writing and editing to do, but in addition to Lev Raphael’s Dancing on Tisha B’Av, Adam very thoughtfully sent some of Kyle Lukoff’s books as a birthday gift and she is finally hoping to squeeze out enough time to read Too Bright to See. She’s read the first two chapters and just cannot wait to get through the rest. After Dancing on the Tisha B’Av, she’s also very excited to read Secret Anniversaries of the Heart and revisit some beloved characters. While working on a blog post the other day Erika dusted off Jill Sobule’s eponymous album from the 1990s, and so there will be a little retro listening there, too, while she works on those blog posts and on her Big Think for this month. She’s also going to try and convince Adam to listen to Dan Tepfer’s “Bach Upside Down” with her, too, now that he’s conceded that The Brandenburg Concerti are pretty good (especially the epic harpsichord in #5.) There’s also going to be some time considering Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and probably the Decameron as well (probably with Adam, too), as there are plans taking shape for something for our readers who are feeling like doing some creative writing that may draw inspiration from those works. Erika is also very excited because this year’s “Broadway Bares” show premiers soon, and so this weekend will almost certainly include a viewing of last year’s show (Broadway, dancing and a little nudity or near nudity…absolutely, thank you very much.) There’s also a new video coming from Matt Baume this weekend about queer Disney villians, and so Erika will probably check that out, and if she’s in the mood, might even join in on the livestream before the video.

Adam just finished The Color Purple (here are some of his thoughts) and has launched into reading a second hand copy of Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, found serendipitously at the local library. Andrew is having a corrupting effect on his reading list, to be sure.

We’d love to hear what you’re listening to, reading or watching (other than reading our blog and listening to our podcast, of course.) Feel free to leave us a comment or find us on social media. Enjoy your weekend!


Fine. More “Big Cat, Little Cat”

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On the left, a large, orange cat with an apparently benevolent expression takes up almost half of the frame. On the right, a small grey with a squinty, grumpy look takes up less than a quarter. Big Cat appears to be looking down at Little Cat with love.

Big cat says to little cat: “Little Cat, do you believe in original sin?”
Little cat responds: “Ok Fine I ate from your bowl. Stop it with the third degree.”

Some Thoughts on The Color Purple: A Postscript to Adam’s Big Think #2

By Adam Katz

First of all, what an awesome book. I find it interesting when an author goes all in on accents and dialects, as if to demonstrate that it can be done without compromising the respect the reader owes the characters. As if to say: it’s not how a person speaks that should determine what you think of them. No. It’s what they say. Or maybe as if to say: this is standard English. Just not for you.

It’s also a textbook of intersectionality in the ways that it shows hierarchical structures within a minority group that make life difficult women and queer people. There is also the way in which sexism its black women and white women differently throughout the–

Sorry that’s not really what I came here to say… I just… I really need someone to talk about that book with. If you are such a person, hit me up in the comments section.

Time is a factor.

No, what I came here to talk about is that I finished writing my Big Think on Sunday night (June 13) or thereabouts, I posted it Monday, then I finished reading The Color Purple. And Albert’s character-arc is almost exactly what I was talking about in my Big Think. There is this line that particularly struck me:

“…look like he trying to make something out of himself. I don’t mean just that he work and he clean up after himself and he appreciate some of the things God was playful enough to make. I mean when you talk to him now he really listen, and one time, out of nowhere in the conversation us was having, he said Celie, I’m satisfied this the first time I ever lived on Earth as a natural man. It feel like a new experience” (122).

I was tickled that the first thing he does as a natural man is learn to make textiles. Same, bro. Same.

A textbook example of why I should follow patterns. It’s gorgeous, if I do say so myself, and the color palette is definitely appropriate for this article, but the hat is too loose, and doesn’t actually keep the cold out. Bother.

“That’s all I want. To live as a natural man.* I want to enjoy the things God was playful enough to make, and I want to really listen to people.” Walker, or rather Celie, doesn’t talk about ‘natural’ living with the char of prophetic fire at the edges of her voice. She isn’t talking about Albert becoming a warrior for righteousness; just about his no longer being an asshole. The Utopic retreat her characters find themselves in as the novel progresses is a different sort of path. It may be idealistic even to reach for as little as the characters lay claim to. But part of me reads that and say: yeah. That would be enough.

*Hey look at that: I don’t have to change, or feel uncomfortable about, the noun! Thanks, cis-male privilege!

New Weekly(ish) Piece

Happy Pride from Big Cat, Little Cat

By Adam Katz. Photo Courtesy of Erika Grumet. Facial expressions courtesy of Frob (left) and Widget (right).

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For the visually impaired: Two cats, orange and grey. The orange cat takes up almost all of the left half of the frame, and is looking downward at the grey cat with what appears to be a benevolent facial expression. The grey cat is smaller, crouched, has a sour expression on his face, and does not even take takes up a quarter of the frame.

Big Cat says: “Little Cat, it’s pride month! Put on your cheerful expression!”

Little Cat replies: “Damn it, I thought I was.”

“Literally” has Legit been Replaced

By Adam Katz

Barbara J. Fields; photo courtesy of Columbia.edu

One of my two or three favorite professors in college was Barbara Jeanne Fields. I want to spend all of my time saying everything I know about her, because she amazing and has an amazing life-story, but suffice the subject of today’s musing is professor’s Fields’s conservative feelings about the written word in English. She once bemoaned to me that the word ‘literally’ no longer means ‘literally;’ that people say ‘quotation’ when they mean ‘citation.’

Two examples. That’s all you get.

She was—and is—a writer of several decades’ standing; so long that the craft she had been at such pains to hone had changed beneath her feet. Words no longer meant, towards the end of her career, what they had meant at the beginning.

So what do you do when you have a mentor figure, and you learn so much from them, but there’s something you have a basic disagreement with them on? I would not know how to write, period, without her guidance, but I have since come to disagree with her frustrations regarding the changing meanings of words. I had a realization about ‘literally’ some time after our talk on that subject. The realization came up, I think, because almost our exact conversation, plus some corporate haggling, made its way into an Aaron Sorkin script.

Around the time we lost the word literally (though some friends and I tried to make ‘liguratively’ catch on) we started hearing people say ‘legit.’ It’s almost a 1:1 replacement. You can say ‘he legit can’t do the job’ where a more tradition-bound person might say ‘he is literally incapable of doing the job.’ So that’s that. In academic papers one still has to say ‘literally,’ but in conversation, when I wouldn’t be clear whether the word ‘literally’ means ‘literally’ or ‘figuratively,’ we can clarify by instead saying ‘legit.’

So here’s my question. At what point will ‘legit’ replace ‘literally’ in academic writing? You might scoff and say “never!” But remember that there was probably some Londoner in the year 1100 saying: “Beef? But I eat cow! Damn these Normans!” And we all know how well that turned out.

https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/ektjr2/french_cow_oc/

(Podcast Episode) A Postscript to our Writers’ Round Table on Queerness and Allyship

Andrew and Erika’s Endnote

As Andrew and I listened to the playback for parts I and II of this month’s Writers’ Round Table about queerness and allyship we both found ourselves exhausted from the emotional labor that we’ve been doing this month. We were both unprepared for the things we felt-trauma, disappointment, frustration, and for the homophobia we would have to deal with. After a long conversation, and a great deal of emotion from both of us, we recorded this end note. We recognize that we are only two voices of many in the very diverse queer community, and are definitely feeling tremendous responsibility to be aware of our place while we find the balance between speaking with our authentic voices and amplifying other voices and acting as allies where we’re needed.

We know that we are very lucky to have the kind of allies we do on our Ivory Tower Boiler Room team. Our team works very hard to allow us to manage minority stress and that goes a long way to allowing us to do our best work and to be at our most present. We have the good fortune to work with people who truly understand allyship. Our team members know that the role of an ally is to support and amplify and uplift. They know that they cannot speak for us but they do speak on our behalf and in doing so relieve both some of the stress from us and provide some of the education that is needed. At the same time, they are also wise and astute enough to recognize that there are things they do not know and are willing and open to learning more about them and doing the kind of self-reflection that helps them grow as allies. They also are aware of not asking us to take on tremendous amounts of additional emotional labor when they do have things to learn, often pursuing knowledge on their own and confirming or checking in with us when they have checked things out.

These conversations about allyship and dismantling patriarchy and essentially rebuilding a world into our ideal vision are not easy. They also are not single conversations, there are ongoing conversations with work and reflection in between. I often think of the story about the old man planting the fig trees and how he is ridiculed for planting trees that he will never enjoy the fruit from only to remind his tormentor that someone planted trees for him to eat from and now he does the same for the people who come next. Plant trees, grow strong roots, flourish, and provide support and shade.

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Allyship is needed in support of all unheard communities. While we’re speaking specifically to LGBTQ+ allyship, some of these links address allyship in other communities and the general principles are universal.

Trans Allyship Information from PFLAG

Syracuse University’s Guide to being an Ally

Ways to be an ally in the workplace

Skills for Allyship

The Do Something Guide to Being an Ally

Adam’s Big Think #2: Performing at the Cringe Festival: Becoming an Ally

By Adam Katz

The fact that I knit this apparently means that I am a gay man. Which makes me wonder if that’s what gay men do behind closed doors: get erections, and then use them as knitting needles.

Early on in my relationship with my very first girlfriend, she told me about how she broke the exciting news to her friends that she was dating someone new: this guy who has all these interests: he likes to knit and listen to opera and draw and play piano, and… To which her friends responded: “Wait—are you sure he’s not… you know… you know?” This conversation didn’t take place at a Baptist potluck in South Carolina; it took place in Barnard College, and, because of that, if told that their line of questioning was homophobic, the women in question might have used a phrase like ‘statistical likelihood’ in place of the expected ‘just telling it like it is.’ Or they might have said: “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. I was just looking out for my friend.” But at the time it was just some funny anecdote to me. When I heard the story, I laughed. And if you had told me at the time that their comments were homophobic, I would likely have shrugged, and perhaps laughed again.

It took me a while to make the connection—as a grown-up no less— that the kind of thinking represented in that conversation–the same kind represented in numerous episodes of bullying for which I was both aggressor and object–had its roots in the same homophobia and misogyny that I now choose to ally myself against. The toxicity of those cultural norms affects all of us. No, the enormities that women and LGBTQ+ people are forced to confront were not visited on me directly, which is perhaps why I was slower to notice. Does a fish notice they are in water? If misogyny and homophobia can result in serious injuries, both physical and psychological, then it must be said the way they affected me is more like lead-poisoning, in that it was slow, easy to overlook, and, if left unchecked, would have rendered me stupid and unfeeling. I wish I had been exposed earlier to the doctors and educators who make exactly these points. Homophobia and misogyny might focus their trauma on the select few, but they have what video-gamers would call an area-of-effect that includes bystanders, both innocent and guilty, not excepting the homophobes themselves. My goal in writing this is not to elicit pity for my story; it’s to use what I have seen to discuss how homophobia reproduces itself. This is an important conversation to be having just now. I see and hear people talking about how we just have to wait until all the old folks die out and then racism, homophobia, et al., will be no more. I find this attitude disturbingly naive. 

So about these “gay” hobbies I was into. Playing piano was something I did at home, so that wasn’t a big issue, and yet in my mind I would always compare it to other members of the rhythm section: guitar, drums, bass. The piano was clearly the geekiest of the lot. The other side of that coin was that my heart lifted every time I listend to someone playing my instrument, making the kind of music I wanted to make; and yet in my stomach there was always this pit: I’m not good enough, I’m not cool enough, I’ll never fit in. I could set my watch by it, so to speak.

The instrument I played in the school band was trumpet, which should be a manly instrument, because it’s associated with soldiers murdering each other with muskets on 18th century battlefields. But for some reason, it always felt dorky to me. I envied saxophone players. To my ears I always sounded piercing; they always sounded mellow. Anyone with half a musical ear would say: Duh! That’s the point! I think that no matter how much Miles Davis I listened to, I always felt dorky with my trumpet, whereas playing the saxophone just seemed so… cool. Why would that be? Was Hans Saxe, when he invented the saxophone, any cooler than the first shepherd to cut the tip off of a ram’s horn all those millennia ago? Is there a list of instruments that are cool and not cool, and more importantly, is this list not embarrassingly simpleminded? And yet. I recall that, all through middle school and high school, I wished I played saxophone or drums or guitar or bass, and my saving grace was that at least I did not play a girly instrument like flute. Even back then, I listened to Miles Davis or John Coltrane or Pink Floyd or Beethoven, not because of whether they were cool or not; I listened to them because they made me feel that joyful electricity; they attuned me to the cosmic dance in a way I would not have had the words to describe at age twelve or so. So I could listen to trumpet music or even flute music just fine without thinking: Is this man manly?, which, by the way, he may or may not be, and who cares. But for some reason I couldn’t make the leap from listening to playing without getting cold feet.

I don’t know if this is as frustrating to read as it is to write. Every sentence that appears on the page, I type it because it’s what happened, and then I read it over, and it makes me want to go back in time and slap some sense into my younger self. If I were actually able to go back in time, my experience as a teacher, an older brother, an uncle, etc., would take over and I would give the lil monster a much-needed hug. Then let him cry on my shoulder. I don’t think he cried much; at first he was afraid to, and eventually, he forgot how.

So the question that I still don’t have a particularly good answer for is: if I was so hung up on how dorky I secretly thought it was to play trumpet, why in the fuck did I switch to tuba? Don’t get me wrong. I grew to love the deep, mellow, occasionally romantic sound of the tuba. But I still remember the way my cheeks burned when I had to carry my instrument from the band-room to the auditorium for pre-concert-rehearsals. A grand total of about 50 feet, and I could barely manage it for fear someone would see me with my brazen albatross.

“Tubas are for fat kids with pimples.”

I don’t remember where I read or heard that, but to my delicate psyche, I might as well have seen it on as many billboards as Frozen III: the Frozening inevitably will have. It didn’t help that I was sensitive about my weight, and was pimpled like a plucked goose.

I remember being unwilling to sing out loud in music class as an eight-year-old—an eight year old!—because I was afraid of being thought of as a sissy. You know, like this guy or this guy or this guy. Sissies all, right? Right? 

I remember being afraid to stand up to bullies in my school who tossed around homophobic epithets, lest I become tarred with the same brush. If I close my eyes, I can still see one such scene. I was walking through the door of the middle school that led to the athletic fields, which means it was either gym or recess. A few people were walking near me, one of whom was my friend. I’ll call him ‘Corey,’ since he may not want a guest spot in this particular vignette. Anyway, apropos of nothing, one person says: “Hey, Adam. Name someone who’s gay.” By a sense deeper than thought, I knew that I had to put someone in the way of his making fun of me. I had to name someone else. I said: “I don’t know. Corey probably.” I believe I thought that if I passed the buck to someone who was near me, then one of three things could happen: everyone would know I was joking, or we could handle this together, or, if worse came to worst, I did in fact think Corey was more of a geek than me, so he would make an effective scapegoat. The response was a hoot of laughter and “Oh my god! Is that true? Are you gay?” And Corey, bless him, just shrugged and said: “probably.”

The lesson I want to take from this episode is that little seeds grow big weeds. The shame surrounding that moment is so intense that it has lasted to this day, some 25 years later. But the discomfort I felt as a direct result of hurting someone else would be of little relevancy to this or any conversation, had I not mended my behavior. For I can readily see how Corey’s response to that bully was a lesson I took with me. I don’t have a linear memory of this sequence, but it was around this same age that I decided I was never again going to use a homophobic slur. That’s not an easy decision to make on Long Island, where we drink racism and homophobia with our carcinogenic groundwater. I am proud of lil Adam for making that decision, and I can attest that Corey’s micro-heroism was one of the seeds for that change–one of many. Good going, lil Corey.

So what happened then? I will say there was progress towards being an ally; but there were times when I lagged behind, or went backwards. In high school, working for the school newspaper, we regularly wrote and solicited articles on the topic of queer inclusion. I myself wrote one such article, dated about 2003, criticizing then-president George Bush for making gay marriage the center of his reelection campaign as a cynical ploy to distract from his disastrous economic and foreign policies. I mean. My article did not go on to prevent his reelection, but I am proud of that moment in my development as an ally and as an author. I hope someone read that article and thought that I would be a person they could talk to if they needed to. I was still loath to join the groups that made a direct impact on other people’s lives: the charitable clubs, the politically active clubs, and so on, at my high school. Again: those were clubs girls were involved in, and so I was unwilling or unable to take an interest. Sigh.

I’m not sure how give a more realistic, nor a more urgent, picture of the stakes, than to quote Freddie and Bowie: “love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the knife.” We who grow up in a culture of homophobia (and, not incidentally, of xenophobia, racism, et al., but that’s a whole other pile of stuff for a whole other pile of articles), cannot help but imbibe the ambient toxicity. Even if these fears and hatreds are motivated by seemingly positive values like decorum and tradition and not wanting to get bullied yourself, or by not wanting your child to get singled out for ridicule. Even if the person in question would never knowingly hurt or even exclude an LGBTQ+ person.  Nor was the environment I am describing uniquely toxic. The solution; the way to purify the toxicity is to value love above other considerations, and to put that value into practice. That means that if a boy loves to play the flute, he gets to play the flute; and if a boy loves another boy, he gets to have those feelings. I credit my parents who encouraged my interests, however outlandish, and I credit my mother, who made it clear, despite so many messages to the contrary in pop culture and among my peers, that love is love. 

We ask about the balance between free will and societal pressure, because of course both are involved. I can be an ally in a toxic environment. But every act of allyship one of us performs makes it easier for the next person to join us on that ever-widening platform. Andrew is right when he says “I don’t need to wait for you to give me the key.” I can take my rightful place as an ally without anyone’s permission. All I need to start is to feel that sinking feeling in my gut when I see an LGBTQ+ person getting bullied, or when I hear someone throw around a homophobic slur; next, I need to realize that experiencing that feeling and doing nothing is worse than having the homophobic slurs turned on me. And the rush of satisfaction from helping someone in need, from attending a Pride parade (Covid willing), from affirming in speech or print the idea that love is love, is greater than the pleasure of fitting in with people whose views are not even particularly worthy of respect. 

“Love is love” doesn’t only mean that the love between or among queer people is as valid as the love between two straight (or straight-presenting) people. It also means that you cannot deny one type of love and yet still hope to nourish another as fully as it deserves.

I made the conscious decision to love people, and to embrace as fully valid the love other people feel for each other, and I have felt my heart and imagination grow to accommodate that decision. I am now able to cry while listening to my favorite songs without feeling ashamed. I am able to hug my male friends without having to thump them on the back like a frantic parent trying to dislodge a grape from a child’s windpipe. And I am able to give and receive help on matters ranging from the trivial to the catastrophic. And it turns out life is more pleasant for me and for the people around me if I do the work of actively rooting out negativity from your psyche. 

A last word on the cloying positivity of these last few paragraphs: I have had a sarcastic, pessimistic outlook for as long as I can remember. I lack faith in most groups larger than 20, and particularly in politicians and corporations of all shapes and stripes. The difference between now and a few years ago, and all the more so between now and when I was an adolescent, is that back then, I was quite negative in my personal relationships as well. I was much quicker to make jokes at others’ expense and much slower to reach out for help, to offer praise, to express my affection for friend and family alike. My embrace of allyship is part of a larger desire/attempt to conquer, or at least rein in, my depression and anxiety and relentless negativity. My steps in this direction were tentative at first. I worried that if my mood changed, I would not know myself anymore. Well I’m happy (or at least not totally miserable) to report that I am just as dour and pessimistic as ever; the difference is that there is an island of positivity in the middle, and the people I care about are welcome to join me there. Well. It’s more like the weather on that island is cloudy with a chance of positivity. 

But dammit, I’m trying.

Your Love is better than Ice Cream

By Erika Grumet

Photo courtesy of Getty Images

(A note about the term “bisexuality”: some people find the term ‘bisexuality’ restrictive or uncomfortable because of its focus on the idea of “binary” or an either/or dichotomy. My personal interpretation, the way I use it, describes the idea of “a gender identity similar to mine” and “a gender identity unlike mine” but not necessarily incorporating or encompassing a specific or singular gender identity label. Yes, the idea is “either/or” but it’s an inclusive sort of either/or rather than exclusive. It’s also why, unless I need a more narrowly focused label for a specific reason, I generally default to the word “queer” in my own self-description, and have since the 90s.)

I have a special affinity for Carvel ice cream; my grandfather was involved in the design of Tom Carvel’s very first ice cream freezers. And, like many kids, birthdays were associated with Carvel ice cream cakes. 

If you’ve never had a Carvel ice cream cake, let me explain. It’s a layer of chocolate ice cream, a layer of chocolate crunchies, and a layer of vanilla ice cream, all covered with a kind of whipped cream topping, and decorated.

I also have a younger sister; she’s a year and a half younger than I am, and as children, she was a very, very picky eater. Among the things she wouldn’t eat…vanilla ice cream. Because we were close in age, this meant we were very often at the same birthday parties for many years. Being older and more flexible, this meant that whenever Carvel cakes were served, my slice was cut in half, the chocolate half deposited on my sister’s plate, and I was presented with the vanilla half of her slice. 

Don’t get me wrong, I like vanilla ice cream. I did then and I do now. But there was definitely an appeal in at least trying the chocolate side sometimes. I just kept getting told: “No. She only eats the chocolate, so you have to take the vanilla.” 

And in that same sort of way, I was taught: “You can only like boys. You’re a girl, and that’s what girls do. Girls like boys. Boys like girls. It’s just the way things are.” I suppose it was the same way for most kids… if you were lucky maybe you also got told, “Sometimes boys like boys or girls like girls, but it’s kind of weird, like having pistachio ice cream as your favorite. No one ever orders the pistachio.” And when I started looking at people and getting those kinds of feelings (you know the ones I mean…the ones that make your heart beat a little faster, and your tongue feel funny, and other parts of you kind of tingly), but before I could name them for what they were, I knew I got those feelings looking at boys, and that was okay. But I also knew I got those feelings looking at girls. And that wasn’t, as far as I knew, okay. I wasn’t craving pistachio ice cream, but it was more like “why can’t I have the cake with the chocolate part and the vanilla part? Why do I have to always give one part away? Why do I have to choose between wanting chocolate or wanting vanilla? 

You don’t. Obviously not. You can have vanilla, you can have chocolate, you can have swirls. You can’t necessarily have swirls all the time, everywhere. Some people are allergic to chocolate. Some people have a stronger preference for vanilla and others for chocolate, but most people like both to some degree or another. And there are people who can’t have any dairy products at all, too. This is sort of like what we usually call “the Kinsey Scale”, which most of us are at least a little familiar with: a linear way of plotting sexual orientation on a scale from zero (exclusively heterosexual) to six (exclusively homosexual)…you fall at a point, somewhere on a line, between the point at the left side and the point at the right side, and sure, you might move around a little throughout your life, but it’s a line; you can only move forward and backwards along the line.

But we’re more complicated than tab A, slot B, right? So then Michael Storms comes along and proposes the idea of this Storms Sexuality Axis. It allowed us to look along both an X and Y axis, where heterosexuality was on the Y axis and homosexuality was on the X axis, and you could plot a point somewhere in the quadrant where you matched up. Still very binary, obviously, plus, what about people who are asexual? Where do they belong? They kind of ended up in the negative quadrant; if you remember way back when you were graphing equations, bisexual people would end up in quadrant I, with a positive number for X and a positive number for Y when they plotted their location, but asexual people? Nope, Negative X and negative Y, down in Quadrant III. And we all know there’s nothing negative about asexuality unless an individual person is unhappy with it for themselves. So obviously, this doesn’t work either.

Along comes Fritz Klein, who would publish a book called The Bisexual Option, and he would also found the American Institute of Bisexuality. Dr Klein understood that labeling your sexual orientation is far more complicated than just sliding points on lines, whether that’s one line that goes from left to right, or whether you’ve got two ways to move that point. Naming your identity is multifaceted; it means thinking about what you’ve liked in the past, what you’re doing now, and what your ideal vision of the future looks like, and not just the physical parts and behavior, but also your fantasies, your desires, and more. It takes into account so much more than who you might want to be k-i-s-s-i-n-g (or something else). Dr Klein developed the Klein Grid (here’s an interactive option, where you can click choices based on your own experiences, desires and fantasies to discover or examine your own labels-past, present and perhaps future). Being able to look over time, at past, present and future and about what your ideal is, will probably tell you a lot more about your own orientation than a simple left or right line or even an X and Y access.

I still like ice cream. Vanilla, chocolate, swirls. But I also like cherry vanilla, pralines and cream, peanut butter-and-chocolate, or butter brickle. And there are even more flavors than that to sample. All of Ani DiFranco’s 32 Flavors and then some. I’m glad to get to taste so many different flavors–it works for me. “Life is a banquet and most poor sons of bitches are starving to death,” right? Maybe you want to stick with your vanilla, or chocolate. It’s ice cream. It’s all good. So are the sherbet and the sorbet.

We Dance to the Rhythm of 49 Heartbeats: The Pulse Massacre 5 Years Later

By Erika Grumet

Pictured: A mural in Orlando, depicting 49 birds in 7 irregular rows, painted in rainbow colors over a “P” logo, with the words “you mattered” painted at in the top left corner. Painted by Andrew Spear, photographed by Arlene Laboy.

In December of 2012, the day after my youngest child turned 3, on what had begun as a typical Friday (with a little extra crankiness because there had been an extended evening of celebrations the night before) the Facebook News Network broke a story about a shooting at an elementary school in Connecticut. It was Friday, which meant we ate chicken nuggets for lunch (our weekly “special lunch” day,) and we cleaned up and played and read stories, and then the kids went to their beds with books for “quiet time.” I made sure to give extra hugs that day, even though the children had no idea why,

I had the bedroom TV on, quietly. I’d spent the time between preschool pick up and quiet time ducking in and out of the bedroom, checking the breaking news from Connecticut… from a suburb not entirely unlike the one I’d grown up in. I kept needing a few minutes alone to weep and worry and slowly process. An elementary school. Rooms full of first graders, not much older than my four-and-a-half year old who would be starting elementary school the following year, and if that wasn’t already enough to make a parent worry (because just about every decision I’ve ever had to make as a parent comes with worry,) to think that a school, a community with security measures in place already, could be devastated like that, meant I was gripped by fear, even while trying to maintain the moorings that would allow the gradual letting go that parents have to do. The thing about Sandy Hook is that I did everything I could to shield the kids from it, to keep my worries away from them and to grieve the loss of precious children, while they remained as innocent and unaware as possible.

But children grow. They learn new things. And there are some things as parents you just choose not to shield your own kids from, but to share in more depth with them in honest, age-appropriate ways. My kids have always been more protected from images and information about violence (not that we never talk about it but that it’s talked about differently) than about the Alphabet Mafia and the rainbow of people along the gender and sexuality spectrum(s). For example, my kids came home from a park trip one weekend afternoon to find me catching up on an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Phrases like “colors are for everyone” and “clothes are for everyone” were always a part of our vernacular. So sparkly dresses, high heels, wigs and make up and beards weren’t entirely puzzling for my children (who would have been 5 and 4, or thereabouts). So when the kids came in, they asked what I was watching, and I set about explaining it to them. I happened to have a very lovely book about drag queens, and although the text (much like the dialogue in RuPaul’s show) isn’t really something I wanted to expose my young children to, the photographs of various people as they transformed are wonderful to look at. And this began an obsession with drag performers (something I endorsed wholeheartedly). There were drawings, “Mom, this is a drag queen, this is a regular girl, and they are friends.” There were multiple requests to go see drag shows. And excited, but slightly confused things like “Mom! Did you know in Japan, in the theater all the parts were played by men? That means they were drag queens!” That idea was quickly corrected, although there is some Shakespeare I look forward to reading with them when they’re a little older.

We finally found a kid-friendly opportunity for them to see real drag performers though, at Broadway Brunch, and became frequent attendees. Broadway Brunch became our default celebration for birthdays and the end of school and almost anything else we could think of. To my kids, “drag queen” was a regular job someone might have, like teacher or doctor or astronaut. Another time, when we learned that some of my kids’ friends have two moms, the only question my children raised was: when the kid says ‘mom,’ how do they know which mom they are talking to, or about. One of my favorite moments, though, is when we were listening to a story about marriage equality on the radio one day, and, after a brief explanation that the law right now was that boys could only marry girls and vice versa, but that the Supreme Court was trying to decide if it would be okay for boys to marry boys or girls to marry girls, the very wise voice of a six year old spoke up from the back seat of the car and said, “But Mommy, that’s not fair. That’s segregation.” And I said to the child, “You’re only six years old, and you understand that. Isn’t it silly that so many grown ups don’t get it?” 

As you might guess, raising kids who are kind, compassionate, aware allies (and not just to the queer community) has been a long-term goal for me, and it was clearly working. And then, suddenly, the events of what had started out as a normal Saturday night shattered everything.

I’d recently returned from New York; my father had passed away about a year before, and, in accordance with Jewish custom, we’d waited to put up the headstone. The school year had just ended, we were taking a little break before summer activities started, which meant late nights, lots of playing, and all of the other things that can make a summer great. I’d fallen asleep with the television on the night before, probably hate-watching a Saturday Night Live rerun. I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and was greeted by flashing lights and reports of a shooting on TV. I assumed it was an officer-involved shooting until I got back to my bed and suddenly I felt like one of those cartoon characters whose mouth gapes open as they’re being strangled. The shooting wasn’t an “officer involved shooting”–it was a massacre at Pulse, a gay club, on Latin night, too. Two thoughts flashed through my head. First: “Is everyone we know okay?” I went quickly through a mental list of people we knew who might be performing that night and then thought of friends and acquaintances who might have been having a night out. The second was: how do I talk to my children about this? They were sleeping. Innocent. I knew there was no way they could imagine why someone would hate someone so much for being in love; no matter how cliche it might sound to us as adults, to them love really is love. I slipped away to peek into their rooms, to soak in their innocence, to mourn what I had no choice but to destroy. And then I crept back to my own room, and sat in the dark, holding back tears as much as I could, watching the story unfolding slowly over hours as the body count went up, waiting for news, holding my breath mourning not just the lives lost, the destruction of a sense of safety and community, but the innocence and hope and the belief in good that I was going to have to shatter. 

When it was time, I gathered my children in my bed, wrapped them in my arms, and explained the actions of a very angry, evil person. We hugged. We cried. We hugged some more. I did the best I could to reassure them that everyone we knew was okay. We talked about being brave, and not letting people try to scare us by being violent and angry, and about being stronger and more powerful than them. We talked about what to do that day to help out, and decided that, because The Center was being used as an all-purpose station for people in need of help, that we would go to the store and get some things like snacks and water to make sure they were available to people. The kids each added a drawing to the package, and we made sure it was delivered without fanfare. We all needed to feel like we were doing something. There really wasn’t anything we could do though, and feeling helpless is one of the hardest feelings to cope with.

The story developed over the next few days. Body counts rose, more horror stories came out. I broke down as the stories aired about ringing cell phones that would never be answered. It was like walking through thick clouds. The world felt dim. It still felt like there was nothing I could do. And as I watched, things happened. One thing I noticed was how disconnected I felt from the queer community. There was a time when my Saturday night would have been spent at Pulse or a similar place. I would have been laughing and dancing and perhaps drinking a little bit, and just living. Time, age and young children had taken me away from that world and put me into a place where my grief felt very isolating. There was grief for the life I used to live, for the community I used to have, for the lives lost, for the future and for hope and for the joy that I always felt when I was able to be in place like Pulse–joy that came from being authentic, and being surrounded by people who understood the fight to love, which is why the fact that the Pulse massacre happened on Loving Day has always felt especially poignant.

But this isn’t just a story about grief and fear. It’s also a story about how a community and a country came together to give Orlando the support we needed. From outside the city, support poured in. Lin-Manuel Miranda told us “Love is love is love,” #keepdancingorlando popped up and people all over the country shared their videos. We found our hearts and danced again. Five years later and I still sometimes seek out those videos on YouTube. Broadway for Orlando was created by Seth Rudetsky and James Wesley (who featured the story on their series Stars in the House last year). When Las Vegas was the site of its own mass shooting, I heard an interview with someone who talked about how when there’s a mass shooting like that the previous city reaches out to help guide the new city through the crisis. When the Las Vegas massacre happened, Orlando helped. In June of 2016, San Bernadino supported Orlando. Sadly, there have been too many to list since then. 

Locally, communities came together, too. The city of Orlando offered space at Greenwood Cemetery for all of the victims. Transportation and travel was arranged to bring families of victims to Orlando. Funeral homes, churches, florists, limousine companies, all of the things that one might need for a funeral were offered in the community. Pet care for anyone who was injured and hospitalized or who had been killed and whose families needed time to make arrangements was even arranged. “One Pulse,” “Orlando Strong,” and other slogans came into use. 

No matter how much we spoke of love, so many of the faith-based offerings bore an undercurrent of judgement and shame. Even when judgement seeped through, it was clear that people were trying to find ways to come together as a community and gratitude seeped through everywhere. 

And then I read a post in our local Facebook group. An offer from the interim minister at the local Presbyterian church. It was the most honest, most genuine, most judgement-free, most sincere offer of help I’d read in all of the messages I’d seen. And it was accompanied by a photo of a pair of feet wearing Wonder Woman Converse sneakers. I had to reach out and say thank you; I sent a Facebook message that said that I appreciated the genuine nature of the offer. We were Jewish, and not looking for anything, but the lack of judgement, the honest nature of the offer, meant I needed to say thank you. The minister and I talked about all kinds of things, about judgement and shame and faith and community and Doctor Who and Wonder Woman and my children. We made a plan to get a cup of coffee soon after. The tragedy of Pulse introduced me to the person who I have probably learned more about the meaning of faith from than anyone else in my life. There’s just something funny about a Jewish girl from New York learning one of the most important lessons about faith from a Presbyterian minister, but I did: that faith isn’t about a label or a specific belief or ideal, but simply about knowing that you are connected to something so much bigger than yourself, whether you ascribe that connection to a deity, to other people, to love or something else.

Months after the shooting, we were back at Broadway Brunch. It was crowded, and we’d made a kind of last-minute decision to go that weekend. It wasn’t our first time back, but it was Pride weekend here in Orlando (our big Pride celebration happens in October, which has much more tolerable weather than the traditional June celebrations.) Our last minute reservation meant that, instead of our usual table way up front, we ended up squeezed into a different, much more crowded spot, next to a table with two men. It felt good to be there, to be surrounded by people, to be able to celebrate, to honor people and to feel a little joy, and obviously Pride. Broadway Brunch, though family friendly, does still feel a little like “grown up space”–it’s certainly a place where it’s fine to take kids, but where you need to be sure to remind them about being on their best behavior and all that. One of them managed, in all the excitement, to knock over an entire glass of orange juice, though, and as any parent would, I cringed and felt embarrassed at the mess. We all immediately began grabbing napkins, moving plates, and doing our best to mop up. Instead of the kind of frustrated or irritated reaction I anticipated, where people who aren’t always used to having kids in their space are almost offended by their presence, one of these men jumped up with us, and immediately began trying to flag the waitstaff while he helped us clean up. I thanked him, and, as he helped out, and watched me soothe an upset child, he began telling me how glad he was to see children there, and how he had been at Pulse, and about the loss and injury he experienced, and that seeing children there, at Broadway Brunch, during Pride, meant so much to him, that it helped him heal, and gave him hope. I held my tears until I was in the bathroom, alone.

Five years later. Gun violence still plagues our country. Homophobia does, too. We still have a long way to go and a lot to learn about love. I could get stuck on that. But five years later we’re having conversations we weren’t. Orlando, though not perfect, is not the same as it was. Orlando Strong, Orlando United, they may not be felt quite as strongly as in the immediate days or weeks after the shooting at Pulse, but they have made a difference. There is still a sense of connection that feels different from before. The rainbows around the city still shine brightly. For the last four years, June 12 has been observed as “Orlando United for Love and Kindness,” and it does still feel like that spirit exists here. We lost 49 lives at Pulse on June 12, 2016. Those people mattered. The nation and the world watched as we responded, with compassion, with pride and with love. I saved the image of the front page of the Orlando Sentinel the next day, June 13. “Our Community Will Heal” it says. Healing often means change, and often leaves scars. Orlando will never be the city it was on June 11, 2016. Orlando is still The City Beautiful. Pulse was an opportunity for us to learn about our strength and compassion, but there’s something even more important, and I thought about it a lot throughout the last year, while so much of the world was out of sorts and chaotic and confusing and quarantined. In such dark times, we learn so much about love. 

Keep dancing Orlando. And keep putting love and kindness out there. It hurts no one and we all need it. 

An image of the cover of the Orlando Sentinel from June 13, 2016, showing a picture of two people holding memorial candles and embracing, with the headline “Our Community Will Heal,” followed by a long block of text, and the hashtag #OrlandoUnited at the bottom of the page.

(Podcast Episode)Pride 2021: Queerness and Allyship- An Ivory Tower Boiler Room Round Table Part II


You couldn’t wait, right?  We left you wondering more about our interaction with LGBTQ+ literature, and you like listening to us in the Ivory Tower Boiler Room so much that you couldn’t wait to come back and listen to the rest of what we had to say about queer literature, Pride, allyship, coming out and queer mentors.  Well here’s part II of our Pride Month Writers’ Round Table where we keep trying not to talk over each other while we share about some of our personal stories.   

Pride 2021:Queerness and Allyship
An Ivory Tower Boiler Room Round Table
Part II

If you haven’t already listened to it, you can also find part I online. In Part I you’ll hear us talk pronouns, identity, positionality, and what Pride means to us.

Pride 2021: Queerness and Allyship
An Ivory Tower Boiler Room Round Table
Part I

After we recorded this episode, as we were preparing to release it, Andrew and Erika found themselves feeling deeply weighed down by some of the emotional labor.  After some back and forth chatter on the phone, they recorded a brief postscript of sorts, which we’ll bring you tomorrow, along with some resources about allyship.  Meanwhile, here are some links Andrew has shared for you to explore relating to the content we bring you in Part II-Erika will bring you some links with our post-script:

Disclosure-a documentary exploring tropes, stereotypes, media images, and what else shapes the narrative about transgender people. We are asked to confront our unexamined assumptions about what we know about transgender people as we hear from people like Chaz Bono, Laverne Cox, Lilly Wachowski and others.

Paris is Burning-A 1990 documentary about the 1980s ball culture in New York City, and the queer BIPOC communities of color involved in it. There is some controversy over the making of Paris is Burning, and so we also suggest reading this article as well.

The City and the Pillar-the 1948 Gore Vidal novel about a young man coming of age and discovering his sexuality, notable for being one of the first novels to portray gay men in a more masculine way and actually portraying the main character in a sympathetic way.

Call Me by Your Name-A love story set in 1980s Italy between a young American-Italian Jewish boy (Elio) and a visiting American graduate student (Oliver.)

Two films about Marsha P Johnson, the iconic transgender artist and activitist who is said to have thrown the first brick at the Stonewall Riots (“the first Pride was a riot,”) to check out: “Happy Birthday Marsha” about her life before the riots, and “The Death and Life of Marsha P Johnson” about her suspicious death in 1992.

We’re going to share a bunch of allyship and support related links with the episode end note, but for now we hope you will check out PFLAG and the Centers for Disease Control’s list of LGBTQ+ Youth Resources.