From: dblakele@acpub.duke.edu (Dean Blakeley MD)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Re: redefining masculinity
Keywords: drag
Date: 16 Aug 92 22:27:23 GMT
Organization: Duke University; Durham, N.C.

Well, folks it looks like I have to put on my best and sincerest
expression here.  Not knowing what I was possibly getting myself
into (or at least not discussing this on the phone with Arnold)
I produced a few rather offensive lines of drivel (soundly planted
my foot in my mouth).

>>I marched as a leatherman when I should have been there in my lab coat
>>and stethoscope.  We have to show ourselves to the world as ourselves.
>>Marching in drag, leather or G-strings doesn't help us out a bit.

Ever the dear one to offer pieces of advice to me as I try to figure out
who in the heaven's name I am and as he is "ever one to disagree with my friends, i respond to article <4576@news.duke.edu> " with

>let me be try to be the first to remind dean that pride parades are
>not intended as educational events for the populace in general; the
>spectators are mostly family and friends, plus a sprinkling of the
>inalterably hostile, and the marchers are mostly there to celebrate.
>for some, this is the only time when they feel safe and comfortable in
>exhibiting their versions of gay drag (leather, cross-dressing,
>wearing in-your-face stickers and buttons, whatever) *in public*.
>(and i don't know about you, dean, but when i was halfway down the
>incline on high street and there were marchers as far as i could see
>in front of me and looked back over my shoulder and there were
>marchers as far as i could see in back of me, i was filled with
>shivery *delight*.)  for my taste, there weren't *enough* dykes on
>bikes, barely clothed hunks, people in full leathers, drag queens, and
>so on.  why have a parade to celebrate *ordinariness*?

It was an actual pity for me to learn this fact.  It was my first parade
and maybe I missed some of the small points of what was going on.  True,
being in the midst of a crowd of about 10,000 well-behaved people enjoying
a lovely stroll down High Street past the capital was rather interesting.
My initial comment at the top were more of a reflection of comments made
by my friends that I was with than of my own.  Clearly, I believe, the
experience was unique because I was probably out in the public with my
friends and able to acknowledge them in the open.  There were other 
feelings that were rather distant and removed and I'm still ruminating
on those. 

In any case, I guess I'll have to agree that for some a pride parade
means being able to express oneself out in the open any way they feel.
Sometimes that means doing "in your face" kinds of things which is 
probably in no way different than for the trappings of ethnic pride
presentations such as what the African-Americans are doing.  For others,
being prideful just means identifying with a group in large numbers
(I'm speaking at this point for my immediate circle that I marched 
with last month) and showing that there are those of us who are 
concerned not so much with costumes but with jobs, health care and
dependent benefits, and housing.  

I also enjoyed what Arne Adolphson had to say:

>At first I was offended by that.  Now I'm charmed by Dean's naivete.
>What are our real selves that we can show ourselves as ourselves?
>I'd much rather show myself as the silent movie queen manque (a Pola
>Negri-Gloria Swanson type) I sometimes am, or as the retiring, bookish
>type I more often am, than as what I do for a living.  How would
>I show myself to the world as a low-level university administrator?
>And why would I want to?  That's less the real me than are any number
>of other personae.

Thanks for the reality test, that was in retrospect a very naive comment.
At this point I would probably have to say that maybe the lab coat
and stethoscope are as much of a costume as anything else.  In fact
I usually chafe quite a bit at having to wear the damn things because
I feel they get in the way of being able to communicate with my patients.

I loved what William Tsun-Yuk Hsu had to say:

>No, no, you should be marching in your lab coat and stethoscope, with
>nothing underneath except a leather G-string.

Folks, I'm not too serious that if I had had the foresight of this one,
I probably would have done it.  Flamboyance is a trademark of mine. But,
since some doctors can be power hungry little demi-gods, a whip would
have to be included in that get-up.  ;-)  ;-)

Acknowledging all of those points together, the true power of pride is
the power of both numbers and diversity.  So, my argument for specific
uniforms and conformity will have to be retracted. 

Now onto the more touchy piece of blithering that somehow escaped my
keyboard.  Good lord, what was I thinking!  I started with:

>>...Drag, in my opinion, is a means to cover up perceived deficiencies in
>>one's own character by portrying a fantasy.  I want to emphasize 
>>perceived here because with a little help there is probably a good
>>person down there that has been taught to act the way he does by
>>forces he can't understand at times.

Arnold, ever the quick one, comes charging to the fore:

>now, about drag, dean.  i see two problems with what you say.  the
>first is that you're looking to reduce some complex bit of behavior to
>a single explanatory factor - drag IS a cover-up for perceived
>deficiencies, period, every time, for everybody - which, moreover, you
>judge to be "bad".  the second is that you're projecting your own
>experiences and feelings onto everybody else; from your postings, and
>even more from our talks together, i know that anxieties about your
>own worth were connected, in your mind anyway, with some of your gay
>sexual behavior (you felt you were punishing yourself by doing
>unspeakably "dirty" things) and with your self-presentation as a
>faggot in gay contexts.

This is a true point with which I agonized for many years.  Thanks to
a good shrink and some very good friends, we've gotten over that part.
This from Arnold was an interesting brush with reality though:

[Clipped for brevity]

>as for projecting your experience onto other people's, dean, you
>should know just from reading this newsgroup that different
>people mentally configure the same behavior in very different
>ways.  i, at least, keep saying that over and over again in 
>different words: you can't tell from looking at what they're
>doing what it means to the participants.  you might understand
>the springs of your own behavior quite well, but that doesn't
>make you an authority on the minds of other people.  

This one set me mulling for a few days, but Arnold agreed off the net
that there was probably something I missed and it was a matter of 
interpretation of personal experiences.  One problem with the medical
mindset is that one is force-fed through medical school the idea that
you draw your proper conclusions from your own experiences.  How many
times I saw some attending physicians go on at great length about a
particular topic as if it was God's gospel, but those of us cowering
on the ward in front of them knew that they were way off base and
couldn't do a damn thing about it.  

In actuality, I flunked God class in medical school.  But, that still
means I will sometimes take some simple self-truth I learned in therapy
and wash it over the rest of the world.  Ah, what a smug son-of-a-bitch
I can be sometime until dear friends pleasantly knock some sense into my head.
That's probably a good reason to get out of the hospital for a while and
see what the real world is doing.

The real shocker about my glossing of drag, though, came from Arne:

>I'm still offended by the homophobia in that paragraph.

Yow!  That smarted, but once again illustrated how far off base my 
assessment of others has been.  What I spent three months in therapy
for was to fix my own sense of self-esteem and redefine what I was
taught about masculinity.  It pointed me into some very good directions
for growth and I've been very relaxed about it.  Anybody who knew me
before would agree how much of a mess I was even though I glossed it
over with a sugar coating so that nobody (even myself) noticed.

But here, oh my god, I've apparently got some learning to do!  Arne, you
hit that nail squarely on the head and I didn't even realize it.  I guess
I thought that if I thought I was in support of the club, I was immune to
phobic behaviors.  OUCH!  Take an attitude and give it a good shaking.
I'm still reeling from that one.  And it probably gets down to the core
of what I was saying about myself before.  My focus has been way too
limited and parochial.  Looks like I'll have to shut up and follow the
group a little more closely before I jump back into the fray again.
Not so much from fear about getting burned, but being sure about what
I'm saying and from what spring I used as the source.  

William Tsun-Yuk Hsu said it the best:

>I dunno, I've hung out with some pretty well-adjusted people who do drag.
>Perceived deficiencies? Some of them are almost arrogant :-). And not only
>are some of them good persons *down there* (ahem, and fun in bed too), but
>good people in general. Some even have email access :-).

>Dean, some time you need to go talk to Mona Foot in NY, or Vaginal Creme
>Davis in LA, or Joan Jett Blakk in Chicago, or DeAundra Peek in Atlanta...

My humblest apologies and words of thanks to all!

(The delay in the reply was tempered due to the sadness I felt in
reading all of those wonderful things about Rob Bernardo.  I'm
sorry I never got to meet him on the net or in person)

Peace (and hoping that Jacques' arrival home will help Arnold)


-- 
| Dean D Blakeley, MD            |  This ain't no party.  This ain't no disco |
| Ambulatory Care Service (11C)  |  This ain't no fooling around.             |
| Durham VA Medical Center       |  - David Byrne                             |
| Durham NC 27705                |  NeXTMail accepted                         |