Here’s the latest from my travel writing site. Check it out here.
Fifteen years.
It was that long ago, in June of 2010, that I nervously stepped into a taxi from my little place in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill, headed to the event at a Castro Street bookstore to herald the release of the first-ever book-length anything I’d ever written.
Platitudes about timespan notwithstanding, what strikes me most about those days, when the book and the trip it was about were happening, was the youthful notion that after, say, one’s thirties, all the big life transitions were done. After all, most of us are settled at that age: married, owning first homes (well, once upon a time), having first kids, all set in careers. Life’s future tragedies — the passing of a parent; the failure of a marriage; a massive socio-economic shock — often seem distant, or abstract.
Or as Elastigirl from The Incredibles put it, “we’re superheroes… what could happen?”
Of course, as the years roll on, many of us discover that’s a blend of hubris and horseshit.
Maybe it’s a by-product of these fractured times, but it seems for many the years that follow the freewheeling thirties are anything but placid these days. Future tragedies move into the present. World events move in unpredictable directions. All those best-laid plans go up in smoke.
Perhaps most surprising, then, is what emerged for me out of all that tumult: after decades of both figurative and literal wandering, I finally did settle down, just in time for my adopted homeland to legalize same-sex marriage. Together with my husband and associated creatures, we set about doing two things I never would have imagined for myself that evening when I got into that taxi — or that earlier evening almost two years before, where I boarded my first flight across the Atlantic in two decades: become owners of a single-family home, and welcome a child into our family.
Perhaps least surprising to those who’ve been through it: these supposedly banal journeys of domestication were no less of a whirlwind than the times that came before. The home purchase turned into a multi-year adventure, as we got caught in the winds of San Francisco’s housing, construction, and affordability crisis. We made it out OK, and the house turned out gorgeous, though in pandemic times we were forced to make some big changes once more.
The little one’s arrival was on a whole other level: on top of the usual life-changing clichés about the arrival of kids in one’s life, the whole thing came amid other professional and personal stuff that frankly could merit an entire blog and book of its own (maybe someday). Oh, yeah, and then that little thing called the pandemic happened in the middle of it all.
Yet, through it all, we made a pledge to Leon: as descendants of families of nomads, one thing would always remain a focus in our lives.
Travel!
And so, this project evolves in a fresh, new direction: the continuing voyages, in Star Trek-speak, of a whole family of travelers. Maybe a bit like The Incredibles after all. The cast: me, onetime queer backpacker and child of overseas immigrants; and Mathew, son of two military kids, accomplished global explorer, and master logistician.
Join us as we bring Leon, now five, and help show him — one more Disney reference incoming — a whole new world.
The 1980 film The Blue Lagoon holds a peculiar place in popular culture, particularly for those of us old enough to remember when it came out (hello again, fellow Gen-Xers).
Disclaimer: I was only ten at the time, not quite old enough to see it in theaters. But I had older cousins, and they all talked about it a lot. Heck, I may have even caught part of it on the Sony Trinitron TV in their basement, sitting on that purple shag carpet surrounded by faux-wood paneling that was ubiquitous in those days.
Based on a 1908 novel, it’s a classic of the shipwreck/desert island genre. Two kids, boy and girl cousins aged seven and nine, are stranded on an island sometime in the late Victorian era after their sailing vessel goes down somewhere in the South Pacific. Clearly privileged for the time—one of their dads is traveling with them from Boston to San Francisco—they’re likewise a little sheltered and naïve. Marooned on the island with a crew-member and fellow survivor (who’s definitely not in the same social class) he soon dies of what looks to be an overdose of binge drinking. They’re left to fend for themselves—with only their childlike sensibilities, and what he taught them, to go on.
Spoiler alert for the uninitiated: they grow into adolescence, discover they have feelings for one another, and somehow, through a combination of old photographs and watching nature around them, figure out how to have sex. They have a baby, and—through a misadventure—are finally rescued…but may or may not have lived long enough to see it. The ending is ambiguous.
Paradise‘s controversies
The movie was both groundbreaking and controversial. Coming near the end of filmdom’s movie brat era—when a then-new crop of film school-trained directors took on Hollywood, and reinvented it for the modern age—it features startlingly frank depictions of teenage sexuality and exploration. But what made it particularly hot-button was the ages of the actors themselves: Christopher Atkins was a barely-legal eighteen, and Brooke Shields was—yikes—fifteen. They used body doubles for some racier scenes, and even glued her long hair to her chest so as not to reveal too much. This is years before Oprah, decades before #MeToo (and Shields’ own coming forward about a later sexual assault). With all we’ve learned about exploitation of kid actors, the mistreatment of women in Hollywood and other industries, and the rise of child porn and human trafficking, it seems almost more shocking to us nowadays. Perhaps we, as an audience, have had our own fall from innocence in the intervening decades.
Then again, what it’s depicting, at least romantically, isn’t totally out there. Plenty of fifteen-year-olds have sex for the first time, often with kids slightly older than they—and if stats are to be believed, in greater numbers during the liberated Seventies than today. Teen parentage isn’t all that unknown either—particularly for the time period the movie depicts.
If anything, the movie’s greatest unrealism is far more workaday: how did these two youngsters keep hair and teeth perfectly groomed across a decade of life in the wild? How did the cannibalistic natives—itself a politically problematic depiction—remain unaware of the kids’ existence on a tiny island over all those years? How did they miraculously discover all the mechanics of sex—then, subsequently, deliver a healthy baby just like that? Then again, lots of stories demand suspension of disbelief, so maybe we just go with it as something of a fantasy.
The production values help: it’s gorgeously shot, mostly on an island in Fiji, by renowned cinematographer Néstor Almendros (Days of Heaven, Sophie’s Choice); stirring music accompanies the visuals, composed by Basil Poledouris (The Hunt for Red October). Watching it in sharp 4K streaming on Max, you wouldn’t be off-base for thinking it was made last month. Randal Kleiser, its director, went to USC, and was housemates with George Lucas.
It’s not all perfect, though: the beautiful production is undercut by so-so acting; I’m not sure if Kleiser was deliberately going for his leads mimicking childlike behavior, but whatever the reason, they come across like performers in a junior high play. A respectable box-office success at the time, it was largely panned by critics; while it was a star-maker for its leads, Brooke Shields doesn’t exactly count it as a high point in her career.
All that by way of saying: in an era before streaming, it would have been largely forgotten, a relic of the sex-and-drugs 1970s, available on late-night television, and maybe as a worn-out VHS tape at Blockbuster.
Paradise (and mythology) re-found
For me, though, the movie’s long held an odd emotional tug. Maybe some of it was the tropical island setting—magic for a kid growing up in snowy Eastern Canada. More likely, it’s because I was only starting to understand sexuality back then, and the scandal of it all shocked me; like so many deeply-closeted kids, then and now, I was simultaneously openly uptight about, yet secretly fascinated by, sex and sexuality. It‘s been on my endlessly-long streaming watchlist for awhile—and one recent night, in the middle of folding some laundry, I screened the whole thing from beginning to end.
And…Holy. Effing. Moly.
I think everyone has a small subset of themes, images, sounds and motifs that trigger strong emotional associations. Like really strong, shake-you-to-your-core strong. As an alienated, nerdy kid, I gravitated toward movies like Star Wars and Superman. When, in my adolescence, director Steven Spielberg brought his sensibility to a sobering wartime epic set in the same place and time where my Dad had grown up, I felt those feelings again. That time it even influenced my career direction. Years later, having come out but still never having found real, abiding romance, I had that emotional reaction once more, to—of all things—James Cameron’s Titanic. I doubtless wasn’t the only young-ish gay man at the time swept up in Leomania.
In later years, with my (straight) siblings and peers starting to have kids—and with my now-husband and I aiming to do the same—movies about coming of age, of childlike wonder under threat, ring my emotional bells. Some standouts from the past decade: Arrival, Room, and Interstellar. I find the second of those so hard to watch that I haven’t seen it since it first came out. With a kid of my own now, I wonder if I could sit through any of it.
Paradise different
Here’s where The Blue Lagoon ties in on a level I think many have missed. In the tradition of those film theorists formerly-closeted me spurned, I’m going to offer up a theory I haven’t encountered on the interwebs.
The Blue Lagoon is a metaphor for fantasized queer experience. What it almost never was at the time, what many thought would never come to pass, and what it has (sort of) become today.
First off, the obvious: its director, Randal Kleiser, is openly gay. In fact, he made a quasi-autobiographical movie some fifteen years later about a gay man dying of AIDS who throws one final goodbye party. It was one of the first LGBTQ movies I saw, part of the crop of mid-nineties films that slowly, tentatively, introduced queer life to those of us still struggling with it.
Second, and also obvious: those flirtations with taboo. Underage actors, childlike sensibilities about adult experiences, the fact that the two main characters are cousins (though this was also something not entirely unknown in the 19th century).
I think Kleiser wasn’t that innocent, and was totally aware of the taboos and their significance. The novel it’s based on was said to be an old favorite of his. The scandal, the unrealism, the mystical, fantastical nature of it all…it reads to me like something of a queer fantasy.
I don’t know Kleiser’s coming-out story, but given his times and generation, I have little doubt that he didn’t dream of living an open gay life like that of his straight contemporaries: feeling first flush of love as a teen; discovering the pleasures and connections of sexual awakening; birthing a child, and starting a family. These are fundamental, primal things that for so long were utterly unthinkable to LGBTQ folks unless they wanted to live their lives as a lie (aside: that story is the subject of an outstanding recent mini-series).
Predictably, scenes of young parenthood got me the most. There I was, sitting on my bed with a snoozing cat, piles of folded laundry, watching the two main characters onscreen nursing and raising their baby, teaching it to walk and swim…and I was losing it. Like, totally bawling. The story sat with me for a long time until it hit me what it was really about. If these clearly naïve, isolated survivors could build a beautiful, loving life for themselves in an oft-harsh but beautiful world…then maybe we queers can, too. The ending—where it’s unclear if this nascent nuclear family survives discovery by the so-called civilized world—is doubly poignant as a result.
While the controversies about the film’s production are significant, and should not be ignored or overlooked, I hope the movie also gets credit for what shines through in subtext: a paean to the purity of unconventional love, of family forged under unlikely circumstances, and all the possibilities that may bring.
The cliché is accurate, that one about all-those-years-ago-slash-feels-like-just-yesterday. I think that’s always the case with momentous time periods that reshape who you are.
For this one, I was eighteen, headed up to northern Quebec, enrolled in a six-week French immersion program sponsored by the provincial government. In an era when Franco-Quebec nationalism seemed to be slowing down, it was a moderating bid: get more people all across Canada familiar with la francophonie. Brings my native country’s historical Two Solitudes together.
OK, that was the official spiel.
Unofficially, my part of Canada’s long been known as a place that loves a good party. Unlike their Anglo-Scottish Protestant neighbors, the French part of Canada had its own variety of joie de vivre. Once a conservative, Catholic place, it shrugged off religion in the sixties, and never looked back. The drinking age was (and still is) a very loosely enforced eighteen; it wasn’t uncommon to see high schoolers out at college pubs in my hometown, Montreal. Every Quebec town of any size boasts bars and strip joints alongside spots to eat poutine (pro tip: greasy indulgence is handy after a night of carousing).
Given that, it was an open secret among young Canadians that Jonquière, the town whose local college hosted this summer language immersion program, had more bars and clubs than some big cities. With the higher, and more rigidly enforced, drinking age in the rest of Canada, this subsidized summer adventure became for many a sort of extended summer camp, a last hurrah before the tribulations of college came calling.
It must’ve seemed baffling to many why I would’ve signed up. Languages were never my thing, and, truth be told, neither was any form of carousing. To say nothing of the fact that I was utterly petrified to get on that bus.
Let’s unpack all that, shall we?
It seems hard for me now, looking back through all the years, to put myself back in the body of the eighteen-year-old I once was. The events may feel vivid, but the headspace feels like another world. I think that’s true in the broader sense, looked at through the prism of today, when being a young, gay nerd is typically a thing to be celebrated. But it sure as heck didn’t feel that way in the summer of 1988. It was a different world, and I was a different me. Socially, I had a microscopic circle of friends, each about as nerdy as I was (though in different ways). Sometimes it felt like we barely tolerated each other, wishing we were in some other universe where we’d all be more welcomed. The letters my friends and family wrote me that summer (how they’ve made it through all these decades and relocations, I don’t know) reveal my peers to be as lost as I was. In an era before the widespread Internet, we’d grown up in a clannish, close-knit, homogeneous community. One that always seemed so different from who I was, or would ever be.
That explains the fear. It was a defense mechanism. After all, if we were misfits in our little community, imagine how little hope we had of making it in the bigger world. I think that’s the message that plays on repeat inside the brain of every bullied nerd or incipient closet case. Closed off, cautious, unwilling to boldly go. What was the point? We were all too weird to be accepted in this universe.
Still, as high school drew to a close, I had a countervailing panic: what if we were being too cautious? Maybe answers did in fact lie outside, beyond the familiar. Ned Stark’s son in Game of Thrones, asks how you can be brave when you’re afraid. I love the answer: it is only, replies Stark père, when one is afraid that one is truly brave.
And so, there I was, on a six-hour bus ride north, fretting. What was I doing here? I tried to console myself with the official stuff: knowing more languages helps in life, people said—so if nothing else, it’s a summer to build a potentially marketable skill while maybe, just maybe, I don’t know…try to be more social?
The ride up confirmed it was going to be an uphill mission: in addition to a motley crew of mostly college-bound kids from all over Canada, the Jonquière program had gotten on the radar of folks from my little community for many of the same party-time considerations. I don’t think there were many, if any, kids from my actual high school on that bus…but I inhabited such an incestuous scene that people knew people, and no doubt word had gotten out about me, and the words were stay away. Or, maybe I was just obsessing. Whatever it was, nobody spoke or paid attention to me over those six hours. Maybe I was even a bit relieved: I’d long since learned that if you don’t engage, you can’t get in trouble.
Fabulous 1970s architecture
I was even more relieved to learn that the dorms we were staying in — a pair of mid-rise buildings overlooking a forest and an aluminum smelter (how Canadian is that?) — were single-occupancy. No roommate I’d have to fight with all summer. There was even a sink in the room, though toilets and showers were communal. I unpacked, settled in, and felt my anxiety rise.
As it began to get dark, I felt nature calling. I’d heard through my door the sounds of other kids in the hall: arriving, unpacking, chatting and laughing. That, too, was part and parcel: I was accustomed to an existence where all kids seemed to know each other, and got on in a convivial way, while I, well, didn’t. Still, I figured, no harm in popping out to the loo. Right?
I walked out my door, aiming myself at the bathrooms around the corner. A group of kids stood nearby—those voices through my door—and I did my usual, giving them a wide berth. Then I heard it behind me.
“Hey, what’s your name?”
Ugh. Busted. Well, no worry. Don’t engage, remember? No need to start this trip off on a bad note. So I ignored them, and kept on walking.
“Hey, no, come back! We’re just doing introductions.”
I remember pausing, confused. Like, what now? I had no playbook for this. All those platitudes about bravery seem to go out the window when you’re actually in the thick of it. Might as well rip off the Band-Aid now. So I turned around, walked over to them (probably mumbling an “I’m sorry” to boot).
And then, the craziest thing happened.
They actually wanted to know me, and what I was all about. Like, for real. Not as a joke, a prank, some way to cut me down later.
They’d also only just met. Not a one of them were from my hometown, much less my little community within it. As anticipated, they were from all over my vast but very spread out homeland: one guy, a buff redhead, from one of the scores of midsize towns surrounding Toronto; another kid from the Toronto burbs, headed to college to study aerospace engineering; a chatty, studious blonde gal from Windsor, Ontario, who shared my love of politics and America (I had some weird ideas about both back then); three kids from around Edmonton, Alberta, two of whom were a longtime couple—they told me how, for their high school Prom, they were gifted handcuffs; and one ski gal from Cranbrook, British Columbia.
We walked out into the unseasonably warm dusk — 1988 was the first year climate change got headlines — to experience what the town had to offer. We glided our way effortlessly into one of the many bars on the main drag. We ordered drinks, chatted, compared notes on our lives, and our life directions.
The (much younger) author, and one of his new friends
No big deal, right?
Actually, it was a big deal.
Huge.
It was nothing short of a miracle, really. A revelation. I was on a high that no substance could equal. They all seemed like popular, fun (dare I say, rather good-looking) kids, the sort my friend circle could only dream of hanging out with back home. All of them smart, funny, interesting, and ready to have a good time.
And they wanted to hang out with me. Me.
I know how all this reads. It all seems so trifling in hindsight. But those fears and insecurities we chuckle over when watching John Hughes or American Pie movies are the most significant events in creation at that age. That goes double for us real-life Freaks and Geeks, and triple in a less forgiving and understanding age.
Fun times
I spent the whole rest of the summer with that gang; they even gifted me with a cute nickname that, for once, didn’t feel derogatory. The kids from my hometown community, meanwhile, save one or two, continued the silent treatment for the duration. Though, to be fair, it wasn’t all rosy with the gang I’d fallen in with: there were predictable romantic dramas; one or two of the guys proved not quite so nice as I got to know them better; my infantile political attitudes of the period no doubt grated on them (how could they not; I cringe at some of my opinions from back then).
And, yes, even with these newfound mates and adventures, I knew something was still missing. “One day,” said one of the Alberta gals to me during a heart-to-heart, “you’ll meet somebody who’ll knock you off your feet.”
How right she was—but not in the way any of us thought. Even though I clearly recall plenty of mysterious fascinations with guys both in and out of my circle — things I’d later identify as crushes — back then, in the Reagan-era 1980s, it was unthinkable that a guy like me could ever, in a million years, be like that. To my knowledge, not a single kid that summer was openly LGBTQ+, which was no different from the high school I’d attended. Love and romance were things for other people, with me in the dark as to why I was so clueless.
Still, in spite of the boring immersion classes, and the you-must-speak-French-all-the-time rules obeyed more in the breach than the observance, it was a summer for the ages—the first one I can remember. We went to rock concerts—also a bigger deal than it sounds, since I’d been too uptight to go to any before; songs from the local band we saw back then still get me misty (heck, don’t even get me started on Rick Astley). We went on day trips to old Quebec City, and on boat trips through the fjords of the Saguenay River; I still recall some of the more opinionated kids from Out West whining about how geographically uninteresting Eastern Canada was. In retrospect, having lived on the West Coast for more than half my adulthood now, I can say they kinda had a point. We went out dancing. We drank too much — me for the first time—which, yes, culminated in that all-important rite of passage one friend dubbed praying to the porcelain god.
But above all else, that summer was about feeling included, a feat my gang of misfits back home seemed to struggle to achieve. Alienation is a feeling that unites many of us nerdy and queer kids, then and even, to a degree, now.
First time Out West. Winter 1988.
I remember we all wept as we got on the bus home. I stayed in touch with some of them for a spell, even visiting the Albertans that winter for a ski trip to the Canadian Rockies. Ultimately, we drifted apart, as young people and young friend groups so often do. And no, I never came out, or found love, or really learned who I was that summer. That would only come years later.
But those people, that place, that season, lit the spark of who I would one day become.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust
I still remember that late-summer evening when I boarded British Airways flight 94. My first flight across the Atlantic in over two decades.
I had seven months planned out. Every continent on Earth save Antarctica. Though I was always big into travel, I hadn’t set foot outside North America since adolescence. I’d lived and visited all over my home continent. But even as the son of two first(ish)-generation immigrants, I had no adult exposure to what it was like Over There.
When asked, I had the usual American-style excuses ready: not enough time, not enough money. They’re powerful reasons when they’re true, and they’re true for many. Fewer than a fifth of the human race has any kind of regular access to air travel. While I’ve been grateful enough to be a part of that fifth, I used the opportunity to stay in my home continent for many years.
Why? Like so many in this country, I fell a bit for the notion that my home continent was kind-of enough, at least for the time being. I never wanted to be a struggling newbie in foreign lands, some awkward guidebook-toting tourist trying to figure out how to ask for the bathroom.
Kyoto, Japan. January, 2009
But then, things shifted. My 1990s-era optimism about America was starting to fade — after 9/11, two wars, a misbegotten Presidency, and, ultimately, a real-estate crash. I wasn’t sure if travel would answer life’s big questions, I wrote in my journal, but at least it forces us to look at them from someplace else. In 2008, many someplace elses were needed.
The global rainbow
First off, yes, it happened: I had my mind blown. But not in the ways you’d expect.
Machu Picchu. March, 2009
First big surprise: all those places cynics had written off as touristy or tired or predictable. OK, some of them were… but many, many, many more were just plain awesome. Not just places, but people. I met a kaleidoscope of them, and all those clichés about fellow travelers and citizens of the world made sense on a truly visceral level. It’s cliché for a reason, I mused, but we all really do have a lot more in common than we realize.
Also: traveling the world was so much easier than expected, or feared. Granted, I was pretty organized, planning some things out while leaving a lot of other things to chance. As for those horror stories about lost luggage and food poisoning and getting robbed? Both happened to me back home—before the trip—but not on the trip itself. Trains and planes (mostly) left and arrived on time. I never got anything worse than a throat infection—and that in a country where I happen to have a doctor relative; a buck-fifty’s worth of antibiotics and I was on my way. Heck, even the weather was great most everywhere I went… except for that minus-twenty week in Beijing. Silver lining: I had the Great Wall almost to myself.
Great Wall, Badaling, People’s Republic of China. January, 2009
Timing played a role. 2008 marked something of a sweet spot in world navigability: just enough Internet out there to make connecting easier, but not so much as when filter bubbles closed us off. Even with the financial crash hitting big back home, overseas—at least where I went—the party was still going on.
Meanwhile, I rid myself of many preconceptions. I used to think of the Old World as, well, old. Dirty. Used up. Fractured by ancient hatreds. Instead, I saw a gleaming new Europe, one continent like never before, stitched together by amazing high-speed trains. Berlin had just finished putting itself back together. London looked nothing like the fusty old place I remembered from when I visited as a teen. This world was slick, modern, and—in the right places—party central.
Brandenburg Gate, Berlin. November, 2008
That was true for me on another level: I found thriving LGBTQ life in Tokyo, Cape Town, Singapore, Lima, and (yes) Moscow—on top of well-known standbys like Amsterdam, Bangkok, and Buenos Aires. I encountered friendly locals in Jordan, Cambodia, and Peru. Bathed in 2008 Olympics afterglow, I marveled at China’s recent rise—that remarkable stadium complex in Beijing; the elegantly restored historic neighborhoods of Shanghai; those incredible airports; those young professionals sipping lattes at Starbucks whose parents, I mused, might have endured life in labor camps.
The Bund. Shanghai, China. January, 2009
I also encountered fellow Americans, and while some impressed me, others, well… let’s just say that, with the Yankee laser-focus on career ambition, few Americans with wherewithal to travel were doing it “just be” style like young (or not-so-young) Europeans, Australians, or South Africans on their Gap Years. Heck, that was practically the point of the bestseller of the time, Eat, Pray, Love.
with American college students. Macchu Pichu. March, 2009
Maybe that’s what made me celebrate the world I encountered, and contributed to my attitude that, while we in America were relapsing into partisan bickering and economic mismanagement, the rest of the globe was figuring it out. Waking up from history.
An Atlanticist’s Kool-Aid sugar crash
Coming home in mid-2009, I held on, wanting to believe the great stuff I’d experienced could translate into lessons learned back home. Our new leadership had to get it, understand the lessons of the world and move America into the leadership role it always professed to hold. Especially then, since that leadership was headed by a man who embodied the connected world: a Middle American Mom, an East African Dad, and a birthplace smack in the middle of Earth’s biggest ocean. I watched his election late into the night from a sports bar in Prague, audaciously hoping that this would put us back on track, back to the hopeful 1990s and those dreams of a New World Order.
You can guess how I’ve been feeling over the past weeks, or for that matter, the last half-decade.
I used to repeat the mantra “war in Europe is no longer possible” so many times that it must by now be etched into my skull. I bought Thomas Friedman’s Golden Arches theorem in a big way, enjoying that company’s offerings in once-unthinkable places, though more for the symbolism than for the Big Macs.
McDonald’s. Moscow, November, 2008.
I think there’s a kind of perverse naïveté among Gen Xers like me— a generation who otherwise rank as history’s greatest group of cynics. We learned in school about the scary first two-thirds of the Twentieth century: two World Wars, the Bomb, the Iron Curtain, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire speech.
But it’s what came after school that marked us: watching that same Wall come down, peacefully no less; the Evil Empire disintegrating not long after; South Africa freeing, then electing, Nelson Mandela; Northern Ireland forming a lasting peace; the Middle East coming within sight of doing the same. And all that before Y2K ended up a giant party. Apocalypse? Pshaw. I mean, what other generation became adults just as a book literally named The End of History came out?
Zen and the art of being wrong
Predicting the future is dicey business, but you get a pass for failing as a fortune-teller. What’s more embarrassing is to realize you got it wrong about the present. What was right before my eyes. Being out there, in the moment, in the world, and not really taking in what’s before you. Granted, I was hardly the first person to get out there and see what I wanted to see; I doubt I’ll be the last.
What did I miss? My intellectuals and party friends (sometimes the same people) in London were grand… but didn’t help me understand, or even uncover, the side of Britain that voted the way they did six years later. Leave that marvel of post-World War II unity? Insanity. Looking over the lights of Cairo, I dreamed of a city ready for a glorious revolution… sure, it came, a scant three years later, but didn’t change much of anything in the end. Nowadays it’s hard to say Egypt’s any better off than it was fourteen years ago. I met up with gays in Moscow, oblivious not only to Putin’s recent war in Georgia, but also his incipient homophobia at home. I didn’t make it to Ukraine, but in years since worked with offshore tech teams from there. I always thought of their country as a part of the connected world I experienced, those talking heads on Zoom calls an echo of places I did visit, like Czechia or Germany. I wonder how those former colleagues are holding up these days.
We may feel far from it, here in North America, but it’s no less heartbreaking, reading headlines that seem torn out of history books. Clearly, some of us held on to the heady optimism of the 1990s too long, felt we’d transcended the ancient cruelties we as a species have visited upon each other for eons. We reached the brink of Armageddon, went the notion, sometime around the Cuban Missile Crisis, and have since been on a decades-long process of climbing out of it.
Except, history isn’t always a smooth climb upward. For many of us, coming to terms with that is a feature—a limitation, perhaps—of a whole life philosophy. I’ve long been critical of pessimists who believe in an intractable “human nature,” the inalienable human feature conservatives so often cite as the reason things will never really get better. Maybe I thought otherwise, that human nature’s push for self-preservation finally saw the light after the nuclear age, realized there was no way out of the stalemate but to become better to each other.
Hope and (more) travel
Utopian? Maybe. Or maybe just too soon. H.G. Wells—and Star Trek, Wells’ biggest modern-day standard bearer—posited that we can grow up as a species, sure, but only after enduring great cataclysm and existential shift from the outside (I’m looking at you, Vulcans). Simply proclaiming the Cold War over and nuclear war unthinkable wasn’t enough. And no matter how much of the world one sees when traveling, the picture you bring back is always going to be incomplete.
Over California. June, 2021
Don’t get me wrong: I still very much believe in going Over There, believe it’s a key lynchpin for breaking barriers, widening horizons, and trying to build a more complete picture for us and for generations to come. It’s something I aim to pass on to our young son, now taking his first steps in new places.
Maybe it’s partly for his sake I haven’t fully let go of big-picture hope. With everything going on these days, it seems improbable to imagine that we collectively will figure things out one day without great cataclysm and destruction. But then, everything’s improbable—which is maybe both the lessons of one’s younger travels, and a reminder to all idealistic liberal internationalists. The future is always murky, and even given the darkness and pessimism of the past years and weeks, nothing in history is ever over. Or guaranteed.
You might say I came of age at the dawn of political correctness.
It was a generation ago. I was in college, back when Baby Boomer academics, those folks who opposed Vietnam and the draft, hit their career stride. They began questioning all that Dead White Male canon of Western thought. Back then, I was actually on board with conservative PC critics, the ones who called it illiberal and closed-minded. You can probably guess why.
For one thing, I counted myself in their political camp. And even though I wasn’t really all that conservative, part of what I bought about conservatism, in the Reagan-Bush days, was that gains made in past ages—those battles fought for rights and justice—were over and done for. Won and assumed. In the post-civil rights era, went the thinking, there’s absolutely no need to make a big hoo-ha about linguistic trifles. Women can work and vote, so no need to spell womyn with a y or call it herstory. All that’s just performative b.s. In fact, sayeth the conservative, then as now, the real thing to be worried about is the latter-day leftist Thought Police, those Feminazis enforcing codes of speech, keenly attuned to trigger warnings. Plus, what are we supposed to call our heroes? Superperson? Wonder Individual? Puh-lease.
But then, like Elpheba in Wicked, something changed within me. Actually, more like, I realized what was always there: my membership in LGBTQ nation. But, believe it or not, that didn’t change my stance on PC-ness just yet. I’d been so convinced of the illiberalism of the PC police that at first I thought they were the problem, the reason I didn’t figure myself out sooner.
What’s behind all that PC bashing?
These days, decades later, it’s not just conservatives who scoff at political correctness. This past summer a bunch of writers and artists, many on the progressive side of things, published a letter on Justice and Open Debate. In it, they warned against dogma and coercion, the inevitable by-products of PC thinking.
One area that’s always been a PC target is humor. By its very nature, comedy is supposed to poke fun at the absurd—and what better way to do so than to veer hard into things that ought not be said? What, say they, we can’t make jokes about gay hairdressers or lesbian truck drivers anymore? We’re not being bigoted or homophobic, say the comics. We’re making fun of those dolts who don’t get that it’s wrong.
That’s the big accusation from the anti-PC crowd: that there are no allowances for irony, parody, and satire, that PC thinking is too dense and dogmatic to comprehend motivation. Actually, here’s another place my past experience helps, as I think about my changing feelings on adult animated TV shows like The Simpsons, South Park, and Family Guy.
In my early, anti-PC days, I wasn’t a fan of these shows. They seemed like snarky liberal fare that simplistically pilloried complex ideas and institutions. The non-PC nature of them wasn’t an issue—in fact, it appeared like they were in fact defending the PC worldview by making parodies so obnoxious as to make political correctness seem, well, correct.
But there’s another way of looking at these shows, as well as some earlier TV comedy—All in the Family for example. The show looked like it had a super-progressive outlook, with Meathead giving it to Archie Bunker and his wacky-doodle conservatism. I’d heard it said that was part of the boomerang effect that explained the show’s huge success: lots of conservatives tuned in as well, because they liked Archie and his way of thinking. This is not unlike wannabe criminals watching gangster movies, or wannabe workplace bullies watching The Devil Wears Prada or Swimming With Sharks. Parodies often attract the unintentional approbation of those who are its targets.
The case for politically correct humor
I think about these shows now, years later, and my prior feelings about them now seem to make the case for political correctness rather than against it. If a show initially intended to appeal to critics of something ends up attracting people in favor of that something, has the message really gotten through? Sure, the show got (or gets) good ratings, but somehow that doesn’t seem like a great thing if it emboldens the wrong people.
There’s a way out of this. Decidedly non-PC comedians such as Sarah Silverman have acknowledged that their earlier work may have been insensitive, and have adapted and changed with the times. All culture operates within norms, and I think some of PC culture is simply nudging us to adjust our norms a little.
That’s where conservatives lost me a long time ago: they don’t seem to get that. They also fail to understand the PC agenda, which is that the very subtlety of those cultural norms is what makes them so powerful. In my own life, it took me years to stop dismissing the existence of stuff like heteronormativity, and to realize how real and pernicious it can be.
We tend to think of prejudice as something awful and overt, those scenes in somber Jim Crow-era period pieces where the white Southern sheriff liberally uses the n-word. Or reports of two straight guys from Laramie leaving a gay kid to die hanging on a fence. Sure, those things happened, and were indescribably awful. But it’s all too easy to be appalled by such events, and tut-tut that it’s nothing like who we are. By Star Wars-ifying reality, we feel good that we aren’t Darth Vader.
Except even Star Wars isn’t that simple. Neither is bigotry. Over the years, I‘ve begun to see subtle patterns of behavior, in myself and others: the way we might be a bit more short with a customer service agent of a visible minority. The way we talk about sketchy parts of town. And—yes—the way so many movies of the last century ended with the guy getting the girl, but never, never two girls or two guys getting each other.
Fragility and Cancel Culture
Clearly, then, prejudice and intolerance exists on a spectrum. It’s rarely as straightforward as bigoted/not bigoted. Attitudes and assumptions sometimes need to be questioned and rethought, to understand where things came from, and why they are the way they are. At its most thoughtful, political correctness is an evaluation, a means of recognizing why so many assumed ideas and words were built on foundations of injustice.
The pushback against this, as the book White Fragility suggests, primarily comes from privileged folks who previously never had to look this stuff squarely in the face. Most often, the defensive refrain goes: If I’m not offended, and I didn’t mean to offend, the offense doesn’t exist.
Ultimately, that’s what I think political correctness boils down to: do we hold people accountable for unintended consequences of what they said or did? Where do we draw the line at “free speech?” Maybe it’s hailing from a land with stronger anti-hate speech laws, but I’ve always felt there’s a place for decorum, for nuance, for placing a few—albeit not many—limits on the right to offend. If the offense carries forward odious traditions with deep-rooted significance…well, maybe that joke about gay hairdressers needs to be dropped.
That brings us to Cancel Culture, and the oft-stated notion that shunning or deplatforming someone violates our free speech principles. Actually, I’d rebut, it doesn’t. Even if somebody loses their Op-Ed column or Twitter account or TV show, they aren’t being silenced…they’re just being shown the door by a private corporation responding to market pressure. They’re still free to express their opinion elsewhere. This is where all the claims of illiberalism fall apart: I can’t think of anybody in the PC sphere who’s suggesting gulags or permanent exile for violators of norms. Everyone has the right to speak their mind—but if you perpetuate hate speech by belittling or mocking historically marginalized groups, your speech may find a more limited audience.
By that token, political correctness is something we’ve always practiced. And it’s certainly been misused—comedian Bill Maher’s 1990s-era show, itself called Politically Incorrect, was canceled after he made one offhand (and I happen to think, accurate) comment about the 9/11 hijackers. Maybe that’s instructive as well: the goal of PC thinking isn’t to be a blunt axe. Instead, it’s to be more nuanced and thoughtful—not less. It’s to keep the conversation going—not shut it down—about what it means to be both a free and a considerate society.
Exactly ten years ago today, I boarded a JetBlue flight from Boston, bound for a relatively new destination on their roster: SFO.
I wasn’t exactly Mary-Ann Singleton, at least not anymore. For one thing, I was a good bit older. For another, I’d lived in San Francisco before, in the heat of the dot-com era. Back then, almost as quickly as I’d been granted admission to Baghdad-By-The-Bay in 1999, I was ejected in 2001. I was in the middle of a Green Card application that could only stay alive, in those post-9/11-economic times, care of a new job deep in the Midwest (more on that saga here).
But even without that, I’d soured on San Francisco. The intolerable cost of housing. The angry backlash it engendered. The can’t-seem-to-get-it-right public transit. And, for me, some personal stuff, too: a friend who fell prey to drug addiction. A messy breakup for one of my earliest relationships. I thought it all spelled the end of a lifelong dream to live in California.
So why come back?
Turns out some other bits of America were even less of a fit for me. Oh, sure, I found cities that seemed better run, that had friendlier people, and more affordable real estate. But something about SF called to me in those years, across the miles and time zones. For one thing, as a software developer and progressive-minded science nerd, I found Thomas Friedman’s thesis about the world being flat to be a bit of optimistic overreach. Heck, Tom, America isn’t even flat. And, for me, there was no better way to experience that than by working at a San Francisco startup one year… and then working in Middle America with ex-military software guys at an investment bank in the heart of the Dubya Bush years. You can guess how those lunchtime conversations went.
And so, after years of cobbling together contracting gigs in America’s Number Two tech center, I decided, for the first time in my life, that an earlier decision I’d made about a place I’d left wasn’t the right one, and that, yes, it was the right place, after all.
Oh, it was no small change of heart: it led to the end of a four-year relationship, the fortuitous sale of a Chicago condo right before the big housing crash, and the niggling suspicion that, for all its attraction, SF would still present many of the same issues in 2007 that it did in 2001.
I wasn’t wrong: MUNI still sucked, leading me to get a motorcycle license and a scooter (I still own one a decade hence). There was more melodrama with friends and more-than-friends as I found the city less welcoming, at least socially, than those Middle America spots I’d previously called home.
And I watched the tech industry transform. Ten years ago it had recovered from its dot-bomb hangover, and had reached a sort of equilibrium where work was widely available, the Bay Area was still an international software center…but enough of the old guard was around to make an offbeat fellow like me feel right at home. One of the senior guys I worked with at two of my first jobs was a gay hippie type who was as great to work with as he was brilliant.
But then, along came Facebook. And Twitter. And an ever-expanding Google. And the iPhone, released within days of my return here. On the one hand, it was reason for techies like me to cheer: more work opportunities and new technologies. But it felt a bit different this time, as I found myself contending with new challenges in the business (once they assailed me for being too young; now it’s the opposite); and an even greater conflict between the burgeoning business (now populated by more than a few of those typesI thought I’d left behind in the Midwest) and a metro area that wasn’t entirely sure what to do with this major world industry exploding on its doorstep.
And yet, I somehow managed to make it all work, and can now count San Francisco as the second-longest place I’ve lived in after the city of my birth. I became a U.S. citizen here. I springboarded into a trip around the world from here, which led me to write a book about those experiences. It sucked me into the vortex of an ever-buoyant real-estate market, where I bought and sold one home and am now in the midst of fixing up another. With all its foibles, faults, and transformations, San Francisco’s still got an ineffable uniqueness, a heart-stopping beauty and force among the great metropolises of our age.
But the biggest thing San Francisco granted me was a long-delayed adulthood: I met the man I’d eventually marry here. I dealt with the loss of a parent here. I adopted two pets and am planning an even bigger adoption with my husband here in the years to come. For better or worse, this lifelong nomad can finally say he put down roots in this most rootless of cities.
American Immigration officials had me all figured out. I triggered what’s known as a pattern of preconceived intent: all that luggage, a desktop Mac from those pre-smartphone days, plus some correspondence I’d packed with me from movie producers, short-term apartment rentals, and family relations—noob mistake. Oh, I wasn’t actually trying to settle in L.A., at least not yet. Unlike many would-be immigrants, I could reasonably go home, albeit tail between my legs, Joe Gillis-in-Sunset-Boulevard style. I was giving myself four months to see how things would work out, much like any other Hollywood-bound dreamer from podunks near and far. Only difference was, my not-so-podunk happened to be north of an important imaginary line.
“You can’t just go and move to the United States,” growled one of those officials as he made some entries into his computer, handing me back my passport after a seeming eternity of police-style intimidation questions. I didn’t realize what was going on at first: I was being refused entry to America. I was in the INS’s system, the Mark of Cain upon me for all time, for all I knew.
Americans have this weird relationship with their neighbor to the north. Too many of them don’t even realize Canada actually is a separate country (to our constant exasperation, and no doubt to Ted Cruz’s benefit.) For the most part, Canadians are subject to the same immigration laws as our European, and Asian, and Latino counterparts—though our proximity to the U.S. and our near-identical culture and speech patterns obviously gives us a leg up.
Unlike our southern neighbors, however, for whom el norte can be an enigmatic, tantalizing prize (or so politicians want you to think), for Canucks, America’s mostly just a convenient place to visit for cheap gas and factory outlet shops, and—for the better-heeled—sun-dappled vacations with the kids at Disney resorts in the wintertime. When those well-off children grow up, their parents do the same thing their American counterparts do: send them to elite colleges with the aim of getting them hired by top-flight U.S. legal or consulting or investment banking firms. Those lucky Canadians then often have their immigration paperwork handled as part of their employment package. Heck, if they’re high up enough on the totem pole, a Green Card usually follows not too long after. And don’t even get me started on Justin Bieber.
For those not quite so well placed, things can get dicier. Canadian-ness mitigates some, but not all, of the obstacles we face as would-be migrants. In my case, a bit more initiative was all it took: a week after my initial refusal, with rearranged plane tickets and a few letters of explanation, Immigration officials did let me in. On arrival in L.A. I enrolled in a night school screenwriting class at UCLA, went to some LGBTQ coming out groups, and worked to kindle a life in a new land.
In case you’re wondering why they did they let me in: Well, you’re technically allowed to decide to try setting up shop in America once you’re in the country, as long as you go home once your legal time as a visitor in the country is up if things don’t work out (a very loosely enforced six months for Canadians pre-9/11). You’re just not allowed to intend to do that at the instant you cross the border. Capiche? Me neither.
Lost in all the rhetoric about immigrants and open borders these days is the big question: why come here? Why uproot ourselves—or, sometimes, flee in fear and desperation—from homelands, crossing deserts hidden in false bottoms of trucks, or boarding planes to California with three month’s savings and only the vaguest of invitations to pitch stories to off-Hollywood kids’ TV shows… all to live in a land it’s now claimed needs to be made Great Again?
Let’s start with the “why leave” question, and my answer to it.
I was no refugee or victim of global poverty. I was, rather, a closeted gay nerd of moderate means growing up in a quasi-traditional, cosmopolitan, eastern-Canadian community in an age before Canada surged ahead of its southern neighbor on same-sex legislation. America, particularly California with its movies and technology and LBGT meccas, beckoned from an early age. “Go West,” sang the Village People, and I heeded the call, the strains of that seventies disco tune playing as I packed up my life of temp jobs and spec scripts and nascent gay identity. The fact that many of my cohorts viewed America with disdain, even suspicion, only whetted my appetite further.
“The asshole of America in Gucci loafers,” sneered one colleague as he characterized Los Angeles. Hollow rhetoric, I thought, as I beheld the grandeur of the city at night from the Hollywood Bowl Overlook off Mulholland Drive, or took in sunset vistas of the Pacific from grassy clifftops above Santa Monica beach. Oh, it wasn’t easy at first; I ended my first year in L.A. twenty grand in debt and survivor of more than a few clumsy first dates. But those early, painful months as a new arrival gave way to a gig as a technical writer and my first work visa, a product of NAFTA, turns out. Politicos, please note: I was indeed paid the prevailing wage for that position, and for every other I held during my time as a non-American. While I have no illusions about the shenanigans many companies pull on this front, I’m happy to report my citizenship status was never used to deny me or any native-born American or citizen of any nation any employment right or benefit or means of advancement.
A job may bring you somewhere, but a life is what’ll keep you there. For me, two fantastic bosses at that first job saw potential (and needed a new database) and sent me back to night school at UCLA—this time for a vocation I’d long neglected, computer programming. With the dot-com boom raging, I again packed up my life and headed north, to San Francisco. I watched the millennium turn, filed an application for a Green Card, and met my first American boyfriend in those Red Bull and (for some) MDMA-fueled late nights of the early Internet age.
But the story didn’t end there.
As boom turned to bust and airplanes exploded into the Pentagon and the Twin Towers, I got laid off with my immigration petition still pending. Some new laws allowed me to keep the application alive, but only if I uprooted my life yet again. So I did some soft time, in Lansing, Michigan, working a tech job for an insurance provider while nervously awaiting final approval. When that finally happened, a year later (and almost six after that initial arrival in L.A.), I wanted to put down roots. Good thing about a big, diverse country like America: it gives you options. In my case, a friendly, welcoming, urbane yet surprisingly affordable spot lay right across the lake: Chicago. I bought a condo in East Lake View and entered a four-year relationship with a native-born Wisconsinite and (yes, really) became his living liver donor after a congenital childhood illness threatened his life. I did it all proudly and willingly, of course, but score one for immigrants giving back.
Oh, but the story didn’t end there either.
The relationship, in spite of all that, didn’t quite work out. So I packed up my life yet again and returned to the West Coast. Not long after, I took the oath of U.S. citizenship, renouncing allegiances to other princes and potentates. Some years later, with America joining a growing chorus of nations (including that of my birth) in making same-sex marriage the law of the land, I met and married my love and life partner here in San Francisco, where we are now in the process of remodeling a home amid the city’s hurly-burly property market.
It seems every group, every religion, every nation in its most fevered imaginings thinks it’s got things figured out. America sure does: I mean, part of the country’s origin story’s got city upon a hill on the marquee. My native homeland professes a greater modesty, but don’t let that fool you either: Canadians sometimes think they’re America done right, Yankeedom with the rough edges smoothed out. In truth, my becoming a Twencennial American has taught me that both places, indeed all places, have so much to learn from one another—which is the best argument for a more open world I can possibly imagine. For me, the true essence of globalization is found not in the market-driven calculus of corporations but in the wanderings and discoveries of inveterately curious people.
And so, too, the American Dream, or whatever you want to call it. Just as the world is shaped by its wanderers, its misfits, its personalities unsatisfied with the status quo; so, too, America, a nation of nomads going back to the Pleistocene. It is this very melding of peoples and cultures that has made the nation a place grand, creative, and wondrous. Politicians and polity alike would be wise to remember that this election season.
Because that’s what one scared, closeted twenty-six year-old stepped up to an Immigration podium, twenty years and half a lifetime ago, to come to America to find.
