Okay — I’m coming out.  As a prankster.  I co-conspired with several upstanding straight and LGBT folks on a little hoax at the Capital.  The local queer blogosphere went bonkers when Patriots for a Moral Utah announced their “Fair Solutions” initiative.

“Nora Young”, portrayed by the fantastic Tamara Howell, is a composite of all those who fight against the LGBT community.  Her words were crafted together by the outrageous statements of Chris Buttars, Gayle Ruzika, Sutherland Institute and of course the Mormon Church.  She was a parody of all these right wing, state’s rights ideologues.  Her words exposed the never-ending parade of inane message bills from the Utah Legislature.

The fact that so many believed this could happen speaks volumes to the climate of ignorance and fear in the state.  I’m sorry that my friend Jesse Fruhwirth from the City Weekly got so riled up.  I think he’s a great journalist and an asset to our community. But I’m also glad that others in the alternative media, like Brandon Burt, saw what we were going for.

And just for the record, the good folks at Peaceful Uprising, who work on direct action for climate change, did not orchestrate the prank.  The names of the organizers, as well as the mission statement are all available here.

Have a watch and enjoy!

In the dawn of the 21^st Century the human civilization faces a crisis of limits.  Life ways that sustain our species are strained beyond capacity. In the dark of uncertain futures we ask: could collapse actually save humanity?

Check out this space for details about the forthcoming premiere of eco•gnosis.  I am collaborating with several artists to create a memorable art installation that explores the themes of “collapse and renewal”.  Film artists include Ryan Gass, Matt Mateus and Mary Catrow.  Art exhibits by Sandy Parsons, photography by David Newkirk, sculpture and desire by Nolan Reddick.  Hair and fashion by Matthew Landis.  And many more.  Watch this space!

I was lamenting on Facebook yesterday how frustrated I am that the Left can’t pull together their own populist response to the Tea Baggers and the corporate ownership of the Democrats. The Tea Bag phenom is fascinating to me.  How can a group of disadvantaged Americans be so engaged to work against their own self-interest?  Sure, I have many problems with Obama — but a socialist he is not!  In fact, he’s proven himself to be quite adept at making big corporations happy at the expense of our national well-being.  And yet this new populist right wing that is comprised of Birthers, Oathkeepers and wingnuts are willing to spend hours watching FOX News, denying climate change and denouncing health reform as a Nazi style plot.  And where is the Left?  We have conceded to centrist “corporatist” Democrats.  As Bill Maher keeps saying, we have no progressive left in this country.

That is until now!  Behold, my friend Lisa Duggan from NYU has already stirred up the grassroots by forming the Cocktail Party! Their emerging platform includes:

*Nationalize the banks
*Soak the Rich with High Taxes
*Free public education through college for all
*Free day care for elders and children
*National health care
*Universal accessibility
*Abolish all student loan, credit card and mortgage debt
*Withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, shift resources to the Arts, and to an independent Haiti
*Abolish marriage

Check out Bullybloggers for the developing platform RIGHT HERE!

Cocktails anyone?

Podcast the entire interview HERE.

In her latest book, Kathryn Bond Stockton argues that “children are thoroughly, shockingly queer.”  Through the pages of The Queer Child: Growing Sideways Through the Twentieth Century, Stockton takes us on a literary and cinematic journey into the fictional worlds of queer children – the very children that our official histories and childhood studies deny even exist. “As we explore the history of childhood books written in the twentieth century, there is no mention of non-normative sexuality” Stockton argues, “History has no way to really talking about the sexual motives or desires of children.”  Fiction on the other hand does.  In fact, it is through the novels and films of the twentieth century where we are first introduced to the very queer child that the public culture has no language for understanding.   Laying our fictions next to (and on the side of) our official histories provide us a fascinating view of the ghostly gay specter haunting all of our childhoods.  Ultimately, as Stockton contends, the gay child helps us to perceive the queer temporalities haunting all children. I sat down with Kathryn recently on KRCL’s RadioActive.

Troy Williams: You teach queer theory at the University of Utah.  If I enroll in your class am I going to learn all the theories about why people are gay?

Kathryn Bond Stockton: One of the major points of queer theory is that sex itself is queer.  So it’s not so much a course in gay and lesbian folks (though there are a lot about gay and lesbians in the course), as much as it’s about the queerness of sexuality and sexual orientation in general.  So many straight people taking the course, surprisingly, come out learning that they are queer.  There is no way to think about sexuality without stumbling across its endless strangeness.

TW: Queer theorists use “queer” in a very different way than popularly understood.

KBS:  Maybe, although if you look it up in the dictionary, there are two different definitions that are important to queer theory.  One is slang, usually derisive for “homosexuals” (though obviously less derisive now, as gay folks have embraced it) and the other definition is simply, “strange”. The way in which the notion of homosexuality haunts the word is important, but at its most fundamental level, “queer” means “strange.”  Queer theory likes both of those parts of the definition to be active.

TW:  So this is a theory of strangeness.

KBS:  Yes.  So in other words, instead of trying to prove that gay people are “normal” or as good as anyone else (which certainly could be perfectly true), this is coming at it from the other end of the spectrum, which is to say that everyone is queer.

TW: Queer theorists from the academy are often out of sync with the contemporary Gay and Lesbian political movement – which is essentialist to its core – and by that I mean, the LGBT political movements argues that “gay” is a fixed state of being that is in-born.

KBS:  Yes, that you either are or you are not.  You can’t be “a little bit” gay.  And obviously we don’t really know what causes this thing that the culture calls “gayness” but I think what queer theory is trying to do is to show that inside sexuality things are rarely that clear for anyone.  And there are all kinds of people who get called gay by the culture. I’m thinking of many women that I know, who grew up imaging that they would have straight lives and straight lovers, and at some point just said, wow, women are cool why don’t I consider them?   And all of a sudden they discover they were attracted to specific women.  Nobody is attracted all women.  Nobody is attracted to all men.  So in that sense the very notion of sexual orientation is itself is a very strange one, and possibly a very forced one. So once you really start looking at sexual orientation and opening it up conceptually, the more difficult it becomes to sign on to a notion that seems incredibly clear, fixed, essential and inborn.

TW:  In The Queer Child, you explore how children are made strange by a variety of things – money, candy, skin color and even innocence. Throughout you discuss the “gay ghost” – describe this.

KBS: Part of what I’m arguing is this: if we really took seriously the notion of a gay child in the present tense (which we haven’t yet come to terms with as a culture in a public sense), then it seems to me this gay child and it’s current ghostliness, dramatizes the problem of “childhood” as a category.  So in some ways it looks like the book is focused from the opposite end of the telescope by taking the gay child as the lens by which to focus all the other versions of childhood before us.  Here’s the point about the ghostly gay child: growing up, I began to think I was attracted to other girls. And having a tremendous sense of “oh no, this can’t be good!”  And hearing kids talk about other kids who were “homos” or “lessies” and feeling that those words probably did apply to me.  Now, as a child I said this to no one, I came out no one.  This did not seem safe or wise. All through my childhood I am this ghostly gay figure to myself.  Only much later in life, (at the age of 23) do I come out to anyone.  And at that point, I actually birth myself retrospectively as gay child.  Now I can start talking to people about my gay childhood when I am no longer a child.

TW:  And adults don’t believe that a gay child can exist.

KBS:  Generally not, at least in terms of standard public American discourse.  Though this is changing. Folks may have seen the really interesting New York Times article that discussed kids coming out in middle school.  I am talking about that and also kids who are maybe five, six, or eight who maybe don’t even know the word, but they sense this about themselves, and later will have a word applied to the attraction that they feel.  This is the kind of figure that we really haven’t talked about in the present tense.  Grammatically it’s always in the past tense, “I was a gay child” or the idea that a child will “grow up” to be gay.  But the idea of a present tense gay child is what we have not publicly come to terms with.

TW:  And yet kids very much do believe in the gay child.

KBS:  Yes. Nobody believes in gay children more than other kids. Now of course a good bit of the time they are actually wrong about who they apply the word to.  For a lot of kids it’s a way of saying, “I hate you”.  But kids do speculate about other kids and use that word all the time.  They have no problem imaging that kids are gay in the present tense.

TW: Another idea that leapt out from your book was the notion that the silences surrounding queer children are broken only through fictional forms.

KBS:  One of the first moments of a public discourse surrounding the possibility of gay children in a present tense is a 2005 segment of the Oprah Winfrey show that was titled “When I Knew I Was a Gay”.  Oprah was trying to demonstrate that often children are gay to themselves before they come out to anyone else.  So Oprah could be an interesting marker for the point where we began to have a public discourse of when kids are gay children in the present tense.    Up to that point I feel fairly confidant saying that gay people have often talked and written about gay childhood, but aside from that, public legal discourse has not recognized that category. Interestingly enough, fiction, and highly canonical literary fictions have.  And I go back to Henry James as one of the first instances – a novella that James published in 1892 called The Pupil, that might be the first instance of a ghostly gay child.  By the time you get to 1928 with the Well of Loneliness, undeniably there you have the ghostly gay child of Stephen – a child who senses there is something “wrong” with her.

TW: Stephen is a girl.

KBS:  Yes, as a seven-year old girl she has a crush on a twenty something housemaid.  Literature and film have been thinking about childhood in wonderfully complicated ways for quite a long time.  This figure that I call the ghostly gay child we will look back and historically say was a figure alive in the twentieth century.  But not in the twenty-first century.  We are starting to show signs of a movement believing that children may be gay to themselves.

TW: Take us through what you call a sideways growth.

KBS:  Why is it that we always talk in terms of growing up? If you think about the metaphor of growth that has been most powerful in our culture, it’s one that has a vertical sense and linear sequence.  So literally you are growing up to full stature: to marriage, work, reproduction and having a family of your own.  All of those things are taken as the most central signs of growing up.  But it seemed to me that this verticality was problematic in any number of ways.  First of all, what does it mean for the lives of many people, gays, lesbians, and other straight folk who don’t reproduce? Does it mean then that they haven’t grown up if they haven’t reproduced themselves generationally?  It was that upward trajectory that seemed problematic to me because it didn’t seem able to speak to all the other kinds of growth that many of us obviously know from our lives.  It also seems to suggest that once you reach full stature, or have reproduced yourself, that growth has stopped for you.  Which is clearly not the case.  And it seems to me that cognitive science is very much aware of a lateral metaphor.  Neural-networks are about extension and lateral connections between and among ideas.  This is one way that brain science thinks about growth.  We need to come back to ideas of growth that are about vigor, volume and lateral connection and extension.  Other ways of thinking about growing that are not just tied to hetero-normative notion of a growing up in a vertical, linear fashion.

TW: Or as you say, growing toward a question mark.

KBS: I could not imagine the pain and suffering of Jr. High or High School.  I really didn’t know what would become of me.  I could not imagine a future unfolding for the form of attraction that I desired. In that sense, I really did feel myself growing sideways.  I had no idea of what I could grow “up” to since I saw no version of growing up to that I could participate in.   Very different now for kids growing up now maybe, who think they might be gay.  They may actually see possibilities for themselves that I did not.

TW: And this is relatively new.

KBS:  It’s really why I had to decide the parameters of the book would to be the twentieth century. The 90’s saw tremendous change.  Queer theory wasn’t really born until 1990.  When you think of all the people that were still in the closet before the 90’s, Elton John and KD Lang – Ellen doesn’t even come out on TV until 1997.  So kids growing up with many gay figures on TV and in the movies is a very recent phenomenon.  And this is changing the phenomenon of whatever it is kids think they are when they find themselves attracted to the so-called “same-sex”. I want to come right back at this from a queer theorist’s perspective. Part of what I’m saying is that what this seemingly gay child is having is a relationship with a word, often more than anything else.  This is not necessarily a good or bad thing for children to take the word “gay” to themselves and solidify themselves under the term.   This is not a book that in a sentimental way wants to embrace the idea of the gay child and argue for a series of rights (though I’m not against that). The book really looks at the force of that ghostliness throughout the twentieth century and the effects that may have.  This is a complicated idea of a child having a relationship with an idea of gayness that they are putting together from the culture around them, and to then layer on top of that whatever they perceive their queer attractions to be – cross-dressing, transgender or whatever.  It could be any number of things for children.

Sister Dottie has done it again — delivered another brilliant dramatic reading of one of today’s most revered civil right’s leaders, Lady Gaga! Sister D has recently been revealed as one of the of the mysterious “Gang of Five” that has been meeting with the LDS Church leaders. They kept her identity secret so as to not allow her celebrity status to distract from the sacred (not secret) on-going talks.

We are just glad Sister D is back in action — and helping the Mormons and the Gays overcome their “Bad Romance”.

And if you are interested in hearing more of “The Best of Dottie” episodes as heard on KRCL — her new cd, THIS I KNOW is available as an inspiring Christmas gift to give to all of your Mormon family and friends indulging in their same-sex attractions!

And thank you Mayor Becker and the City Council for this brave step. It will serve as a template for other municipalities, and possible statewide legislation.

I’d also like to recognize the incredible efforts of Equality Utah and The Pride Center. They have done phenomenal work over the past year – both publicly and privately.  This victory belongs to all of us working on the frontlines. It takes many voices to create change. The protests, The Common Grounds Initiative, the letters to the editor, the petitions, the kiss-ins, The Passion of Sister Dottie S. Dixon, Lance Black’s Oscar speech, Cleve Jones at Utah Pride, our gay legislators, PFLAG, LDS Apology, Affirmation, and all of the fantastic media coverage from the AP, The Salt Lake Tribune, The Deseret News, The Nation, Huffington Post and so many more – all of these factors put the Church under tremendous pressure.

And make no mistake – despite the words of Councilmember J.T. Martin, the Church most definitely “blinked”.

This is how activism works. Pressure is applied from all sides. The angry crowd marching around the temple is just as essential as the moderate, measured gay leader in private meetings with legislators and the Church. Some people are already calling this a “PR tactic” on the Church’s part. You bet it was! The Church is absolutely trying to side-step the onslaught of horrible press they have received. Others bemoan the fact that a religious institution should ever have power over our civil liberties. And they too are absolutely correct. The Church has perpetrated great abuses against the LGBT community that they need to be held accountable for. We need truth and reconciliation and the Church needs to come clean. Their bigotry has injured thousands, torn families and cost lives. Michael Otterman talks about the potential “violence” against marriage – well, they need to acknowledge the violence they have perpetrated against the gay community.

But, let’s put aside our angry eye for a second and see the possibilities that their endorsement provides future activism in Utah.

We are now in a position to approach the Utah Legislature and advocate for statewide protections WITH the endorsement of the state’s most powerful political juggernaut. I can’t overstate how significant this is. Other municipalities will feel emboldened and will step forward to create similar protections. New doors are opening that we all had thought were forever closed. We have new opportunities to engage in progressive politics. Amy Ray called it, “I feel a crack in the skin of the majority”.

And maybe real change is possible. Maybe Mormons are starting to awaken to their own queerness.

We in the LGBT Community recognize and remember the historical persecution experienced by members of the Mormon faith. We know the stories of fear and intolerance that drove members of the Church west. Prophets were mobbed and murdered, homes and property were burned and stolen, lives were uprooted and lost. Many members of the LGBT Community are intimate with these stories because so many of us were also born into the Mormon faith.

The Church’s history is our history.

The LGBT and Mormon communities have so much in common. We understand bigotry and resentment that comes from being a queer and peculiar people. We too have experienced the violence of intolerance. We both share a deep understanding of the pain that comes from being socially and politically ostracized.

There are still many hurt feelings that have ensued since the passage of Proposition 8. Rhetoric on both sides has escalated to the point where we have often lost sight of our shared humanity.

When we look around the world we see that the human family faces tremendous challenges. Poverty, war, climate change, racial and class divisions impact all of our lives. Imagine the positive work that we could do in our community if we worked together. I can now see a day when The Latter-day Saints work in friendship with the LGBT community to address the greatest challenges facing our state, our nation and our world.

We recognize that we have many differences and disagreements. We understand that in many areas we may never see eye to eye. But if you will permit me to go all Obama on your ass, our similarities are greater than our differences, our hopes are greater than our fears and that forgiveness and friendship can replace the anger and distrust that has thus far divided us.

I’m optimistic. Last night was a fantastic first step. So now let’s keep the pressure on. Let’s continue to march, write letters, write plays, make documentaries, lobby the Legislature, support Equality Utah and the Pride Center – continue to be angry, impatient, and intolerant of the status quo. Let’s keep working on the Federal level to ensure full civil equality exists for LGBT Americans in all 50 states.

I’m ready to roll!

The Salt Lake Tribune
Utah’s Temple Square kissing incident sparked news headlines around the world. Now, comedy writers are taking over, as the event inspired a comedy sketch aired Tuesday night on TV’s “Colbert Report.”

The July 9 arrest of Derek Jones and Matt Aune, who were detained by security guards after kissing on the Mormon Temple grounds, inspired the episode. The incident sparked national attention and led to “kiss-in” protests around the country.

In September, Utah gay actor Charles Lynn Frost and his partner — dressed as members of the Village People — were filmed passionately making out on the same grounds for a comedy sketch filmed for the Comedy Central show, which aired during Tuesday night’s episode.

“We ran to our car before we could get arrested,” Frost said about that day of shooting, which occurred in broad daylight in the middle of a work week. “But there was no sign of church security anywhere.”

Jones and Aune are interviewed in the sketch, as is BYU property law professor John Fee who explains why the church was within its legal rights when its security guards tussled with the pair. The professor emphasizes that Jones and Aune were trespassing on private property. Frost, dressed as a construction worker from the 1970s disco group, and his partner, dressed as the group’s cowboy, then walk onto the plaza and kiss, portraying what the sketch characterizes as the “Mormonization” of what happened on July 9.

“What’s funny is, here I am dressed as a construction worker and there was a whole group of real construction workers behind me,” said Frost, who was hired by Comedy Central for the sketch. “I’m sure people were looking out their windows watching. We saw temple workers, we saw construction workers all over.”

Sources involved with the filming said producers of the “Colbert” segment got permission from LDS officials to shoot on the temple grounds, but filmmakers didn’t say they were shooting a parody of the incident.

Church officials declined to comment Tuesday, or to confirm they approved the filming.

Later in the Comedy Central segment, Jones and Aune were interviewed in their apartment and asked how they would feel if Mormons burst into their apartment and kissed.

Just then, two more male actors dressed as Mormon missionaries burst into the living room and begin making out on the couch. “We just start going at it — mad, passionate kissing,” said Troy Williams, a KRCL radio producer who played one of the missionaries. “It should be very funny.”

Frost and Williams created the locally popular radio and stage character of Sister Dottie S. Dixon, a Mormon housewife with a gay son.

Not even H1N1 can keep a strong woman down, says Fran Pruyn, director of “The Passion of Sister Dottie S. Dixon — Second Helpings.” She’s referring to lead actor Charles Lynn Frost, who helped create the iconic character and was performing a successful reprisal last month, only to have been taken ill with pneumonia and complications from an infection with the H1N1 virus.

JANUARY 17th, 18th and 19th

at the Jeanne Wagner Theatre in Salt Lake City.

Charles Lynn Frost, who plays Sister Dottie in The Passion of Dottie S. Dixon: Second Helpings, has been released from the hospital following his illness with pneumonia caused by complications from two forms of flu (including that pesky H1N1!). He is recuperating, and expects to be fully recovered long before he appears on stage for the January performances.

Sister Dottie S. Dixon is a middle-aged Mormon’s mother from Spanish Fork. The play recounts her mission to reunite the Mormons and the Gays — one casserole at a time. The Passion of Sister Dottie S. Dixon was completing a very successful second run when Frost was hospitalized.

Patrons can contact ARTTIX – 801-355-ARTS to reschedule or make reservations.