GOLD RUSH

I think it's the Tea Partiers who've been driving the price of gold up -- it's been hitting record highs, because people seem to think it's the only stable currency in a time of economic uncertainty. So after the torrential rains brought heavy roof leaks and the certainty of a big repair bill, the idea that had been slopping around in the back of my head for a while came to the front: gather up the old gold jewelry, and take it to 47th Street. So we did.

First came the culling, which had its own emotional baggage. I had a bunch of 18 carat gold jewelry my father had given me years ago when he lived in the middle east -- it had nothing to do with my taste, and I'd never actually worn it. Also, I have a very problematic relationship with my father. Still, it's strange to give things away that people have given you -- feels very final, like making a decision on a break-up: it's a very definite statement about the impossibility of reconciliation.

Static had rings and chains from family and exes -- a motley assortment, some with small stones. There's always a story attached to jewelry, even when you don't really know what the story is because everyone's dead and gone -- so, more baggage.

Anyway, we excluded anything we felt queasy about, and were pretty clear that since we didn't desperately need to sell things just to pay the rent (interesting, because both of us have been in that position at various times in our lives), we could leave if we weren't happy. The 47th Street website suggests getting three price estimates at various places before deciding, so that's what we planned to do.

The first thing we weren't prepared for the was the shark-like feeding frenzy -- step onto 47th Street and you're instantly mobbed with people begging you to sell them gold -- guys rush up to you and try to pull you into shops and into booths, and they press cards into your hand. "Girls! Girls! over here! we buy!" It's very disconcerting. Apparently, everyone is responding to the gold rush by emptying out their jewelry boxes, and everywhere there were people like us doing the same thing -- tipping out little bags full of rings and chains and lockets. How many people were desperate, and how many were just cashing in? It had the chaotic, scary feel of Weimar Berlin - as if the whole economic structure were about to come crashing down.

We went first to a booth in one of the exchanges, and I chose one with a woman: she looked at the little pile, sorted it, weighed it quickly, and gave an estimate of $1800; she told us she'd have to test it if we chose to sell it. So then we went to a storefront, and went through the routine again -- it was a little calmer, because the store was quiet and protected from the mobs of hawkers outside. This time the storekeeper said he'd test it right away -- and I finally found out what "passing the acid test" means: he scraped each piece on a lead sheet, then dropped acid on it. He had different bottles for 18 carat, 14 carat, etc. If the gold disappeared under the acid, it meant it was a lower carat. He pulled out a clipper and clipped the stones out of the rings -- it seemed painful, like a medical procedure: we both winced and looked away, and he smiled wryly. The stones were of no interest to him -- even the diamonds. Finally he gave us a price, all the while lecturing us about how careful he had to be and how little profit he would make. His price was better than the first dealer, and we decided to settle rather than going on. I had a little fun trying to bargain him up, but not much success -- I got an extra $50.

Then I felt we had to rush to the bank and put the cash in right away -- not that it was so much, but the freaky atmosphere of desperation created by the hawkers really got to me and made me edgy. There was a smell of craziness in the air.

Finally, we sat down on a bench and tried to analyze why we felt so disturbed by the whole thing.

First, there's the emotional element: people give you gold because they find its value to represent something meaningful about their relationship with you. I always thought I was immune to this -- I just don't wear expensive jewelry: it makes me anxious, as if it's just another thing to worry about and take care of, something I'll lose or have stolen and then get upset about. My commitment ring is a tattoo. The only emotional jewelry pieces I have (since my long dead mother's opal ring was stolen soon after she died) are two rings my mother made in a jewelry making class: they're pretty but crude, with cheap stones -- just practice rings, but they mean something to me. Still, when people give gold, they surely intend it to be meaningful, and to sell it feels like a violation of their intent. My family wasn't rich, and god knows it was a family with a very skewed ability to give gifts (when I was about eight, my mother gave me an umbrella for Christmas: by that age, I'd already tried to learn to tamp down expectation, in order to short-circuit the inevitable disappointment that came with her gifts -- she just didn't have the knack, let alone the money, to give emotionally satisfying presents). I'm awkward about gifts myself, and have a hard time accepting them, so to give away gold that's been given to me feels a little ugly.

Then there's another piece: the stupefying frenzy of this gold rush seems to augur very bad things. If gold is booming because so many people mistrust our economic institutions, their very mistrust could trigger the disaster they fear. And if they're right-wing fringe people, they'd probably be happy about that; we have an economic system that isn't based on the actual value of anything -- as has become especially clear in the past three years. Wall Streeters don't make money by buying and selling goods, but by betting on the ups and downs of the market, and they can make just as much by betting when it goes down -- none of it is based in the value of a substance, and to most of us it looks like a shell game. We've already seen how easy it can be to disrupt this, and we know who pays. Gold rush frenzy seems like the sign of a bubble about to burst, with a bunch of people trying to profit from the curve rather than trying to shore up the economy.

Finally, as Static says, gold comes with some of its own baggage, because it's always recycled, never thrown away. That necklace you're wearing could be melted down from a mixture of an 18th-century coin, a few teeth fillings from a concentration camp, and a Roman brooch. That's creepy. Gold is just a thing -- why is it more precious than anything else? Why have we imbued it with special value? But right now you can watch as people are calling it the savior of their own personal finances, and creating a gold rush out of nothing. Diamonds are no longer meaningful; gold is king.

Maybe it's a good thing that Octavia Butler died prematurely. She'd probably be freaked out watching her Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents coming true: gated communities, huge fights over water, company towns that control the entire lives of their workers, people hoarding gold .... I just hope she's more wrong than she seems right now.

Mushrooms

Written with Static

At Destiny, a perfect summer afternoon -- the meadow was empty because most people had gone down to the river to swim. We took a middling dose of mushrooms and lounged around on the yoga platform, looking at the view of the distant hills through the trees.

It was beautiful -- not enough to get nauseous, just a gentle rolling high that turned the left brain off and opened up the right-brain world. Mushrooms make it impossible to talk -- they make it impossible to think in narrative: how fabulous! what a relief! No language, no way to process linguistically, just a total rest from the incessant nattering. Most of my life I've privileged my left brain, protected it, nurtured, it, encouraged it; now I have no way to shut off and make it leave me in peace. Finally, a little hiatus.

Afterwards, we were thinking about that, and what happens. It's as if the organizing energy of the left brain moves over to the right brain: everything around you comes into clear focus -- nature looks incredible, fresh, bright, new. You see things clearly, and then the right brain tries to organize them into visual patterns -- complicated designs like extraordinary rugs: do rug designers do mushrooms or hashish to visualize those patterns they weave?

What you see is the same and different. Your brain sees things as unique, and then puts them in patterns to make them the same. There's a constant push/pull -- your brain wants both things, two opposite desires pulsing in different directions. But they're yoked together and can never be separated. They're in balance, taking turns, in a trembling equilibrium. Unique/universal. It's a new vision of the yin yang.
Our natural urge is to desire the new and then to familiarize it: we want the new, and yet we resist it when we want the comfort of the familiar. We want this in what we see around us, and in our art, and we want it in ourselves: we want to be special, but we want to be the same as everyone else.

Our human energy bursts in those two different directions at once. It explains the artistic avant garde, and the cooptation of new ideas. It explains the dialectic and the dionysian. But in order for it all to work, you have to let the right brain loose sometimes.

Free Pussy

I continue to mull over what gay marriage means to me, and find that so far it means what straight marriage always meant: something I wasn't interested in.  I was there at the Stonewall the night the New York vote went down, and saw how happy lots of people were.  It was peculiar that the crowd was a merging of two very different groups: the drag march had just wound up at the Stonewall, as usual, and by chance pro-marriage people were converging there to wait for the vote -- the crowd of faeries and queers in drag mixed in with the people who wanted to get married.  I was there in one of my better drag costumes, feeling distinctly schizophrenic.  It's always wonderful to be with a crowd of gay people when we get something we want -- recognition, acknowledgment, legitimation.  But like many faeries, I have never felt a need for marriage.  And as a woman, I think that's even more so: since when has marriage ever been good for women?

Marriage commodifies pussy.  Marriage harnesses the free expression of sexuality into a legal structure.  And it's no surprise that the legal structure has always worked in favor of those who made it: for many, many years, adultery was a main reason for divorce, but in practice only the woman's adultery counted.  Have sex outside your marriage, get thrown out -- and lose your children, your property, and any means of support.  So married pussy is never free.

I understand that queers with kids want to get married, but what they want doesn't look very similar to the way I wish to construct my relational landscape.  So I think it's time for a proliferation of terms here: we need to go back in history to an older concept that makes sense out of the different things gay people might want.

Before 1700, in western Europe and America, getting married meant setting up a household: it was a social construction that provided a legal and physical haven for parents, children, relatives, apprentices, and servants.  Living together under one roof, the members of the household worked to make a livable situation: the father was the legitimate head, the wife managed the household, different members made or grew necessary materials (soap, chickens, vegetables, bread, fabric).  Apprentices and servants came to live in a household as children either to work or to learn a trade, and in exchange were supposed to be taken care of.  Unmarried or widowed relatives might join the household and contribute as possible.  It was an economic unit, and it provided social cohesion in the larger world.

Then along came the middle classes, and a new idea that you were supposed to romantically love the person you married.  The self-reliant household gave way to splintered wage labor, the extended household gave way to the nuclear family.  Everything narrowed down: you were supposed to find all your material and emotional sustenance in a tiny nuclear group of parents and children.  The village-like commonality of life shrank behind walls -- in urban London, where it used to be that everyone knew her neighbors' business and much of life was lived in the streets, boundaries arose between "private" and "public": now you were supposed to keep your sexuality in the bedroom.

The one thing that didn't change was gender inequality, so the new form of marriage didn't do much for women.  In fact, you could argue that new rules of respectability made things even harder: women still could not own property or sign a contract, but they were supposed to love their husbands now instead of just tolerate them -- more ideology, more rules of behavior.  And the new system still provided a large sexual arena for men -- prostitutes proliferated, and there were no punishments or opprobrium for men who visited them, while women were no longer supposed to exhibit any sexual desire at all.  Now women were supposed to be "nice," and men got to have sex with prostitutes.

Fast forward to now.

So here's the problem: free pussy.  Many, many people (straight and gay) are falling over themselves to suggest to any gay person in a relationship that it's time to get married -- if you're in that position, count the times you've been asked the question, "So when are YOU guys going to tie the knot?"  This suggests that marriage is assumed to contain sexuality, and that straight people are very anxious for gay people to be as sexually contained as they are.  Marriage is assumed to fix people's sexual behavior like a dead butterfly pinned to a board.

Traditionally, there's one period when people are sexually free: after they become adults, and before they get married (which is supposed to happen after a reasonable amount of playing the field).  It's assumed that women want to get married sooner than men do, and are more willing to give up sexual freedom; and that men are more reluctant to exchange the free bachelor life for the demands of conjugality.  Parent blogs in Park Slope even suggest that women's erotic drive becomes attached to their children after they have them, which means they do seem to be creating the old-style "household" rather than a romantic coupling.  In other words, the sequence of modern life suggests that people might have a short period of sexual freedom, but that it lies outside marriage.  

Dan Savage has tried to address this with his vision of "monogamish" marriage, which attempts to maintain a stable household while allowing both partners to negotiate acceptable external sexual encounters.  Savage's style of marriage probably works better for same-sex couples than it does for straight ones, who have a harder time blocking the world's gender stereotypes.  But what Savage offers is an updated vision of a "household": a stable environment for raising children while acknowledging the real sexual needs of both partners.  None of this does much to challenge the notion that people do best in pairs, as opposed to some other configuration, or that the financial ties that come with marriage may be problematic, or even that health insurance is best conceived of as a perk for married spouses.

Marriage implies that sexuality can be fixed, resolved, channeled, etc.  It implies that this is for the social good.  One of the old arguments about why homosexuality was bad was that gay sexuality threatened marriage and society, that gays couldn't be controlled sexually -- that they would be off having sex in bushes or back rooms, or jumping from lesbian bed to straight woman's bed, etc.  Queers weren't good for the family, and the family was necessary for stable society.

So I'm wondering why so many queers are now jumping on the marriage bandwagon.  Just when it seemed possible to question those old assumptions, we've been derailed by marriage. 

Let's put children aside, because that's a different issue -- maybe it's true that "households" are the best place to raise children, but for those of us who don't have children, the question of sexuality -- free pussy -- is a pressing one.

The right to control our own sexuality keeps slipping away from us: look at the assault on women's reproductive rights in this country (access to abortion and birth control, to non-judgmental sex education and decent health care).  Look at the surveillance on public space, which makes public sex harder.  Look at the gentrification of New York, which means leather bars and clubs are closed and knocked down, leaving little space for those who want to practice any alternative sexuality.

Where's the public discussion that tries to de-couple health care benefits from marriage?  Where is any questioning of the couple as the pre-eminent acceptable relationship?  Why do we want to insist that sex and emotional relationships have to go together -- and that they all have to look the same?

Gay men seem to have an easier time side-stepping the traditional view of sex, so this is a call-out to lesbians: let's talk about free pussy! 

And here's a link to Alexis Pauline Gumb's comments on marriage abolitionism:

http://www.thefeministwire.com/2011/07/27/%e2%80%98keep-your-sorry%e2%80%99-on-slavery-marriage-and-the-possibility-of-love/