Post #100!!! On L. Frank Baum and Gentrification

This weekend, while doing research for my revisions to the essay I wrote for the Spicer panel at the Poetry Project May 15, I was reading about Wizard of Oz creator L. Frank Baum's love affair with California. In 1910 Baum moved to Hollywood, which was then a quaint sleepy burg, and built a two-story home he named Ozcot.

Despite failing health and scary financial woes, Baum lead an idyllic life at Ozcot, gardening, writing, playing with his dog, which he named Toto. It's like he wasn't content to leave Toto and Oz in the realm of fantasy; he was compelled to materialize them into flesh and wood. This impulse to bring the fictive into the real is intriguing. I'm reminded of when, in the heat of writing The Letters of Mina Harker, I moved with Kevin to Minna Street. This was purely accidental. I didn't stop, jaw dropping, when I saw the Minna street sign and marvel at the similarity of the name with my character Mina, and say I was destined to move in. Far from it. When Kevin and I saw the ratty building and apartment, we said no way. The landlord actually called us up and begged us to move in. "But the kitchen is painted black," we said. "I'll paint it white," he said. "But the refrigerator is too small," we said. "I'll get you a bigger refrigerator," he said. Due to an ongoing nightmare with some junkies on the first floor (who thankfully moved out just as we were moving in), he was determined to convert the building from a drugged-out makeshift dorm of the SF Art Institute into a more respectable residence. Kevin and I were the best thing he'd ever seen looking at an apartment. We'd heard about the building from Cecilia Dougherty—Kevin was acting in one of her videos, and another "actor," Amanda, lived in the apartment next door. When we were looking at the place, the first thing Amanda said to us was, "People in this building do drugs." Meaning, don't move in if you can't handle that. The rent was dirt cheap, and our Boho romanticism kicked in, so we took the place. The cheapness of life on Minna allowed me the flexibility to finish Mina—that's what the magical resonance of the names means to me.

Even more startlingly—for Kevin, the Spicer scholar—we were later to find out that in the 70s, after Spicer's death, members of the Spicer circle lived in our building—in our apartment, in fact. We have a water color by Bill McNeill of the view from the apartment next door—Amanda's old apartment. McNeill, who co-directed Helen Adam's 1963 film Daydream of Darkness, was one of the first people to die of AIDS.


But, looking back, I now see Kevin and I as an early mini-wave in the ongoing gentrification of Minna Street. On the site where I found the above pic of Ozcot, it was reported that Ozcot was razed in the 50s and replaced with an apartment building.

The elegant complexity of the original Ozcot wiped out by this boxy nightmare is deeply disturbing. I think back to a comment Jacob Evans posted on my Facebook page about "assholes transforming American cities into mini malls." Saturday, when Kevin and I went to see the Star Trek movie (which we both enjoyed enormously, what a surprise), we drove down an alley near the theater, an alley so narrow there was no parking on either side of the street. The alley was lined on both sides by boxy condos several stories high, only a few feet from one another. The main condo complex on the right side of the street extended for most of the length of the block. The street was absolutely clean, no trash, the concrete of the newly poured sidewalks an unblemished white, no people in sight, a totally sterile environment—and I realized this is the vision of my neighborhood that the more vigilant members of the local neighborhood association have in mind.

I keep using the word "boxy," as if it were the most terrifying thing to happen to architecture. And it is terrifying, these huge institutionally-shaped living structures that look more like office buildings than homes. You see a similar aesthetic in upscale restaurants, all the metal and sharp edges, stark walls with noise bouncing madly around. It's like the character of the City is being wiped out by Lego blocks. I feel like an ancient turtle, an aging Colette courtesan, a hold-over from the previous century, clinging to cozy and ornate, sentimentalizing my neighborhood in 1990—the gay bath houses that populated the area had all been shut down, but when I'd look out the window I'd sometimes still see people leaning against dumpsters, fucking—ah, the old days—longing, as Cher sang, to turn back time.

if I could turn back time @ Yahoo! Video

Colin Herd

Reuben Sutton, Cedar Sigo, Colin Herd

On Friday we held a salon to welcome Scottish poet Colin Herd to the US. On the eve of the new moon, and a summer hopefully of productive writing, we opened our home to some of our favorite people in San Francisco, just to see what would happen.

Rob Halpern and Colin Herd

Poet Colin Herd was born in Stirling, Scotland, and he is studying at the university at Edinburgh for his Ph.D. He’s writing on Charles Bernstein, and has his own blog called The Devil Reads Poetry. Recently he flew to California to work in the Archive for New Poetry at UCSD, where Charles’ papers are stored, and during his side trip to San Francisco I was excited to have the chance to meet him in person. He comments occasionally on this blog, and on the blog that Dennis Cooper runs over in Paris, and this month he has five poems in the newest issue of our zine, Mirage #4/Period[ical].

Colin and Alli Warren

Reuben and Suzanne Stein

Colin, and his friend Reuben Sutton, came to SF on a week weirdly lacking in any good poetry events. (Usually there are 2 or 3 things every day, or so it seems.) He scanned through Del Ray Cross’ invaluable guide to what’s happening in town and saw nothing exciting. We were really letting him down. Kevin offered to have lunch with the two boys, but that was just a drop in the bucket compared to the oasis of cultural nothingness that yawned before them like the Deadly Desert in The Wizard of Oz.

Matt Gordon and Colin

So it was a matter of civic pride as much as curiosity, that we offered to have a party for Colin, a place where he could read his own poetry in our apartment. It was very spur of the moment and quite small. The first 15 people who said they could come, we stopped at. Kevin asked Colin if there was anyone he would like to meet in SF, so we tried first to do the make-a-wish thing, then we asked a bunch who might be interested in the work.

Colin particularly wanted to meet George Albon. Here they are together.

It didn’t hurt that Colin turned out to be so personable, and the same with Reuben. And when Colin got up to read, you could have heard a pin drop. He must have been terribly nervous, but his delivery was persuasive and he acted out his poems to bring out qualities in them you might never have guessed at by reading them on the page. In his writing the voice of the self, or narrator, seems to weave through, and thrive on, disasters both social and political.

Reuben, Bruce Boone, Colin

He has a great talent for conveying the infinite resources purveyed by embarrassment and shame—the furies and the solace of Pandora’s box. The agonies and ecstasies of the subject position—sort of the quintessential New Narrative stance. And also that of Frank O’Hara’s poetry, of which several of us were reminded. While remaining true to psychology, Colin Herd seems even more interested in, perhaps a slave to, the action of the sentence and the propulsion of the line break. So his reading was dynamic and we all caught our breath.

Sara Larsen and David Brazil leaning on Reuben

Colin and Reuben are launching their own Edinburgh based magazine Anything, Anymore, Anywhere, so you’ll be hearing more from them. The next morning Kevin drove them off to do some work with Kota Ezawa, and then they went off to San Diego. I wonder if I’ll see either of them again? Oh yes, I will, I’ve just remembered that we told Reuben to come back next year and we would have a reading for him in our apartment, so here’s to auld lang syne.

Kevin, Jason Morris, Colin

Nature's Laws

Yesterday Bruce Boone and I took a walk through the Botanical Garden in Golden Gate Park. When we came upon the above sign, with its brightly-colored column of NOs, we stopped in our tracks and stared at it. The meaning of some of them were mysterious, inviting discussion and interpretation. Bruce pointed to the 5th one down and said, "It's telling parents not to beat their children in the park." I was doubtful of this, so I put my glasses on to get a better look:


I said to Bruce I didn't think that's what it meant. Bruce then said it was the parent shaking a crucifix at the bad children. By then I figured out it meant no picking the plants, and the NO beneath it meant no stomping on the plants.

We were so taken by the totem pole of NOs I asked Bruce to pose with it:


When I asked Bruce if his weird contorted pose was that of a horrible person who breaks the park rules, he said no. He was impersonating someone who needed a crucifix shaken at him. I like how the plants are covering the NO above Bruce's head, as if Nature Herself were rebelling against the juridical vulgarity of the sign. And then we wandered off, in search of a bathroom.

R.I.P. Robin Blaser

I knew it was going to happen, but it still came as a shock when I received an email from Peter Quartermain on Thursday, reporting that Robin had died at 9:30 that morning. I met Robin, I don't know, 25 years ago here in San Francisco, and first went to visit him in Vancouver in 1990, where they were staging the Gay Games, a sort of queer Olympics. I remember assuming the Gay Games would be beneath Robin, but instead he spoke of how moved he was by this massive public gathering of gay people. He said, "I don't mind being Pindar for this Olympics." As everyone, I'm sure, is saying, he was a wonderful, generous person and a great poet. It feels eerie, fated even, that Robin will be buried on May 15th, the same day as the Jack Spicer celebration in New York City. In life he and Spicer were entangled, and so in death.

Here's a photo Kevin took of Robin with Brian DeBeck at the huge party Karen and Brian DeBeck hosted for Robin's 80th birthday in Vancouver. Even though I didn't see him very often, I'll miss him.

My Cinco

Last night I hung out in the Mission with Stephen Boyer (reading book in pic at left) for a nice leisurely dinner. I hadn't spent alone time with Stephen for quite a while, so our 3 hours of rambling conversation was a treat. The atmosphere in the Mission was very odd. The weather was that heavy mugginess where you're simultaneously too warm and chilled, an uncomfortable cold stickiness. Like the air is just dying to rain, but no matter what it does it just can't come. The streets were oddly empty, except in front of any Mexican restaurant—even the the crummy taqueria on the corner of Valencia and 18th—there were mobs of people. The emptiness broken by the intense clusters of humanity along with the bizarre atmospheric pressure made the night feel unreal, like we were walking through a sound stage—like we were Irena and Oliver in Jacques Tourneur's Cat People,
looking back over our shoulders for lurching shadows. Stephen pointed out that it was Cinco de Mayo, and he made some wisecrack about "hipsters." We chose the Sunflower, a Vietnamese restaurant, proud of our authenticity and difference. We split one of those beansprout-filled crepes where you cut off pieces which you wrap in lettuce leaves and drizzle with this sweet runny sauce. Or at least that's how I think you eat them. I made a mess of myself, like an infant, sweet sticky sauce smeared over my cheeks and fingers, as I chatted away. Then some French people sat at the next table, a couple in their 30s and a very proper middle aged woman wearing a brimmed hat, who ate with an awesome delicacy. I nodded to them and told Stephen I felt like a pig at a trough.

Forgetting seems to be a theme right now. It's a focal point of the micro paper I'm trying to write about Jack Spicer for the Jack Spicer symposium at the Poetry Project on the 15th. Yesterday when I woke up and realized it was May 5th, I didn't think of Cinco de Mayo, I thought that the day before was May 4, my mother's birthday, and I'd forgotten it. My mother died about a year and a half ago, so this forgetting pained me.

A photo of my mother taken a few years ago while she was undergoing chemo and wearing a bad wig.

But I wonder if on some subconscious level I did remember. I felt frustratingly weird on May 4th, pangs of social phobia—and this frustrated longing to live in a dream world, part of which I attribute to gorging on the poetry of Jack Spicer, with its incessant call to the oceanic. "Incessant call to the oceanic"—that's not too bad, maybe I should slip it into my paper? When I returned to San Francisco after my mother's death, it was very hard to return to the world of the living, and that's what I felt like on her birthday, not depressed really, just craving to be otherworldly. I had to teach that day, which I managed just fine (I think). Having done so much teaching, I've learned to squelch whatever's going on with me and perform as a sort of engaged automaton. Of course, I'm not perfect and sometimes I see them noticing me glitch and twitch. Teaching and writing are conflicting drives for me. Writing is fanning myself into a frenzy where the crazy, interesting stuff can come through. Teaching is all about control, trying to appear that one doesn't have a raging id, that one wouldn't even consider having a raging id.

As Kevin has written about so masterfully on the SFMOMA blog, Friday night we saw Stephen performing in Marc Arthur's experimental theater extravaganza, "The Key." Here's Marc Arthur trying to steal Stephen's soul and put it in a box, and Stephen on the floor quivering and whimpering, "No, no!"

























I can so relate, can't you? What I liked most about the play, performed in a gallery space with the audience standing wherever, is that you couldn't tell for sure where the "stage" ended, could never be sure if you were standing on it or outside it. And the actors toyed with that blurriness. At one point Stephen went up to a group of costumed people (who weren't in the play, they were merely audience members wearing costumes) and yelled, "You're standing in front of the door, I need the door! You have to move!" There was no (physical) door there, but Stephen herded them away from it. Taking photos with my cellphone, which doesn't have a zoom, I found myself moving closer and closer to the action, until I realized I was standing in the middle of it. The costumed audience-people, which Stephen later learned were on mushrooms, moved over to some drums across the room and spontaneously played some lovely percussion. Stephen told me the performance the previous night was much longer, slower, so that at the beginning he stood and stared at a wall for ages, like 20 minutes. He said David Buuck, who came in after the "play" was underway, approached him and tried to engage him in conversation. "Hey, what's up with you," David said, but Stephen, not wanting to break character, didn't respond. Eventually David said, "Whatever, weirdo," and walked away.

Mercy Housing

This is a random/accidental pic of my desk—I don't know if I took it or if Kevin did—but I enjoy the confusing readability of it. The desktop is glass over a dark wooden drawer with dividers in it for pens, etc. The round mouse pad and mouse are actually beneath the glass, with the tiles sitting on the glass, maybe three inches above. The Pepsi makes me favor Kevin as the artiste, plus the pair of glasses in front of the Pepsi, which I'd most likely be wearing if I took the photo—there's three pairs of glasses because I keep a couple of old scratched up glasses in the desk drawer for quick reach when my current glasses aren't at hand. I bought the Op Art-inspired round mouse pad from the Chicago Art Institute the winter I went to the MLA there. When you look at it in real life it has a 3-D holographic effect, which some people find disturbing. Yes, I've brought people into my office and showed off my mouse pad to them. The turquoise tile is from a set of four rather primitively handmade tiles I got at the Goodwill. One of them had lots of "T"s embossed on it, so I gave it to Taylor Brady and Tanya Hollis. The round tiled coaster is from a vintage store on Valencia Street that has long since closed. The small yellow coaster is Tupperware bought on eBay. The wireless mouse is from the downtown Apple store, our second wireless mouse. One of the advantages of a wired mouse, we discovered, is that the wire makes it hard to knock the mouse on the floor and break it. I guess the question here is why do I have the urge to tell the history of my consumer items. I have one student who turns everything she writes into a rant against U.S. capitalism, and I have to admit she's right, our rampant consumerism feels so ugly, and frighteningly unavoidable.

Been thinking a lot about entitlement and capitalist greed due to recent run-ins with the neighborhood association that formed a couple of years ago for the three little alleys that make up my micro-neighborhood. We didn't have a neighborhood association until condos started taking over the neighborhood. The first thing to go was my view of Potrero Hill, but that was just the beginning. Eventually a condo was built on my block, directly across the street—it's barely a street, too narrow for cars to park on both sides. Thus only a few feet from my bedroom, people hang out on a balcony talking, people walk around half naked with the curtains to their 2-story front window open. No place to rest my eyes except on these lives I'm not really interested in. I can still see fireworks from my kitchen window, but I know some day that too will end.

The new owners of the condo across the street have put up some kind of screen in front of the bed, but when the curtains were open the second floor loft bed used to be visible. The original owner of the condo was this really vile woman whose creepy boyfriend would lean on the balcony railing and stare openly into my bedroom. One night we looked out and saw them having sex. She was on the bottom and her legs stuck straight up in the air, and Kevin and I went on the outdoor landing of our building to get a better look at her V-splayed legs bobbing up and down. That same autumn she turned her stereo full blast late one evening—programmed to alternate between two then current pop hits, "Hung Up" by Madonna, and that song by Kelly Rowland "My Boo." Then she passed out. She had a really good sound system, it was like having a disco across the street, the walls were rattling, she woke up everybody. We called the cops, and she wouldn't answer the buzzer, and when they got in the building and banged on her door, she couldn't answer the door, so the cops called the fire department and the firemen put up a ladder to the side of the condo and crawled up to her balcony and through an open window and surrounded her bed. We invited people from the street up to our landing so they could get a better view, and we took pictures of the firemen on the ladder. It was 4 in the morning, almost worth being up just to see the expression on her face when she awoke and men in uniform were surrounding her.

The neighborhood association is obsessed with property values and thus are waging war on taggers. One of them caught a tagger in the act, and grabbed a can of spraypaint and sprayed the tagger. He was seen as a sort of hero on the neighborhood listserve. Another called the cops on two 17-year-old taggers and four patrol cars came out and arrested them, and there followed many "way to go!" messages on the listserve, and I unsubscribed.

Another thing they complain about on the listserve is the eyesore apartment building being constructed on Mission and 10th. The other day when I was on the Mission bus going downtown, I noticed a sign in front of the eyesore and it said Mercy Housing. I looked up Mercy Housing and here's what I found:

Mercy Housing California is developing a former parking lot into two affordable rental housing developments that together will form an intergenerational community in the mid Market neighborhood of San Francisco. Both developments are high rise buildings with significant amount of secure open space, a 5,400 square foot youth and family center, a 400 square foot primary health clinic, and ground floor neighborhood serving retail space. Residents are within the heart of the Civic Center community, close to services and employment centers, 23 MUNI lines and BART.

10th and Mission Family Housing: 136 apartments for lower income families in a new 12-story building. Units will be affordable to households ranging from 15% AMI to 50% AMI. Forty-four of the units will be targeted for occupancy by chronically homeless families referred by the City.

I looked up AMI = Area Median Income. 2009 Median Income for San Francisco is $67, 750 for a single person and $96,800 for a family of four. No one ever mentioned on the list that it was low-income housing that they were complaining about. The complaints were about how the scale of the building was inappropriate to the neighborhood. I'm saddened my funky, arty neighborhood has been invaded by such right-wing attitudes.

Does gentrification always feel heartless? Last Sunday I went to Cafe Flore with Bruce Boone. Bruce is rather frail these days due to the recent death of Jaime, his partner of 18 years. Bruce brought along Sadie, his teeny Yorkie, as we've taken her to the Flore before. She was a companion dog for Jaime, but in all the chaos surrounding his death, her tags have been lost. The Flore, which in the 80s was ultra-hip, punk, outrageous, is now really popular again, but with a more conservative crowd. Bruce and Sadie sat at a table beside this guy in his 30s with a shaved head, while I went to order our food. I saw the guy talking to Bruce, figuring they were chitchatting. After a while Bruce came up to me in line and said we had to move, as the guy was asking for Sadie's tags and papers, and said he wasn't sitting next to any dog. So we moved our stuff to another table across the room, and I got at the end of the line again, and a few minutes later, Bruce came up and said we had to leave, that the manager came up to him and told him no dogs. The asshole guy had complained. This really disturbed me, it was so unkind, for no reason. Who could be so rude to a frail man in his 70s? I wish I'd taken a picture of the guy, but I didn't. Here's a 2007 picture of Bruce I stole from X Poetics:

So we took Sadie back to Bruce's apartment and then went for brunch at the Cove, a diner on Castro Street. The Cove is oldtime Castro, unpretentious hearty food, and it's as nerdy as the Cafe Flore is trendy, like Revenge of the Nerds part 20 could be filmed there. And, of course, everybody was very friendly at the Cove.

I visited Jaime a few weeks before he died. It was before the pain of his cancer became unbearable, just before. Jaime was half lying, half sitting up in bed, eating oatmeal and cinnamon toast. He said that he was calling up all the people who meant a lot to him and telling them how much they meant, telling him that he loved them. He said he was lucky to be able to do this, that knowing he was dying was a blessing in a way.

So, I'd like to end this post with some sweetness, some Barf photos I've had for ages but forgot to post. Here's two majorly cute pix from Erica Kaufman of her dog Isabel (that looks like Stacy Szymaszek's forehead behind the book in the top pic):



And here's two of sweet, generous, gorgeous Colter Jacobsen, who did the lettering and cover design of Barf Manifesto. (These photos are by Andrew McKinley.)

Colter helped me apply a clear privacy film to my bedroom window in order to block my view of the condo, but still allow light to enter. To burnish the film he used a copy of Deepak Chopra's Seven Spiritual Laws of Success.

Lambda Nominee Reading

I went to a star-studded reading this evening at the San Francisco Public Library of some of the local writers nominated for this year's Lambda Book Award. For the two or three readers of mine who aren't gay, the Lambda Book Award is for the "best" gay and lesbian books of the year. The prizes will be awarded in a New York ceremony on May 28. We on the more experimental side of things, of course, complain about the choices every year—although 2 years ago by some fluke Dennis Cooper won for best gay male novel. This fabulous reading tonight was enough to shut up my complaints for this year.

Before the reading the nominees lined up against the mural in the library basement:

Here's the readers, their books and categories they were nominated in; from left to right we have:

JL Meyer, Hotel Liaison, Lesbian Romance
Elizabeth Bradfield, Interpretive Work, Lesbian Poetry
Judy Grahn, love belongs to those who do the feeling, Lesbian Poetry
Kevin Killian, Collected Poems of Jack Spicer, Gay Poetry
Daphne Gottlieb, Kissing Dead Girls, Lesbian Poetry
Marcus Ewert, 10,000 Dresses, Transgender
Thea Hillman, Intersex (for lack of a better word), Transgender
Annie Sprinkle, Live Through This, LGBT Anthology
Christopher Rice, M.C., president of the Lambda board

Missing is Rex Ray, illustrator for 10,000 Dresses. Handsome and popular Rex showed up after the photo op.

The evening's host, novelist Christopher Rice, son of Anne Rice, is so suave he's uncanny. This photo doesn't do him justice. He was so poised, so comfortable with being in the spotlight and so handsome, it was like meeting Prince William or Harry. He gave a moving speech about how the recent Amazon "glitch" in deleting thousands of gay and lesbian books from their search engine had inspired Lambda to become more of an activist organization, like the GLAAD of the art world, monitoring the machinations of those who would suppress queer voices. We all clapped and cheered.

I went to the reading to support Kevin and Marcus, "my boys," and I hadn't really paid attention to who else was reading, so what a pleasant surprise to sit through an amazing group of writers. Elizabeth Bradfield, from Alaska, whose book was published by Eloise Klein Healy in her Red Hen series, took the stage in a very reserved manner and then shocked us all with her hilarious and biting bawdiness. She and Kevin swapped stories about their respective poetry anthology projects and promised to brainstorm with each other in the future.

Annie Sprinkle then presented a slide show to accompany her reading. Veteran artist and activist and former porn star, Sprinkle has been around a long time, and she told the story of her bout with breast cancer and how it affected her ongoing relationship with the academic Elizabeth Stephens. The couple made a series of art projects centering on the cancer. In one series they dressed in extravagant costumes each time Annie went in for chemo therapy and had the doctor, nurses, or other patients photograph them. The photos were hilarious, almost denying the gravity of the experience, yet hurling it at you at the same time. I loved them.

A photo of Annie Sprinkle Kevin snapped with my iPhone. Master photographer Rink in the background. On the screen, the image is of Beth Stephens.

Next came Marcus and Rex. Rex said he was the hand model for the evening, and he held up 10,000 Dresses as Marcus read the entire text. Oddly, even though the book is a brightly colored children's book, it's not nominated in the children's category, but in the transgendered category. I reminded Marcus that Anna Paquin won the Oscar for best supporting actress for The Piano when she was still in grade school, so he shouldn't discount the power of childness to win awards. 10,000 Dresses is already a classic. I tried to imagine I was a child hearing it for the first time. What would I make out of it? A dress!!!

Daphne Gottlieb, exotic and beautiful in black bangs and knee-length black cotton dress, moved away from a squeaky microphone and just tore up the room with poems from her Kissing Dead Girls book. With her extensive background in the spoken word scene, she knows just what to do to present what is actually very sophisticated and nuanced work and grab you by the gut with it. I will never forget her final piece where she spoke from the voice of a young lesbian girl brutally murdered by other girls in her school (based on a true story), incorporating lines from the girl's real letters to the girl who betrayed her. "Can you give me something to remember you by." Watching Daphne act this all out was riveting, scary.

Next a legend took the stage, also abjuring the microphone. I read Judy Grahn in the 1970s, in Indiana, which to me is a indication of a very influential and powerful voice. I kept wanting to yell out, like a fan at a rock concert, "Read Edward the Dyke!" Grahn's new collection spans decades of her career, and she started with a poem written in 1975. She is still a force to be conjured with, and as she spoke I remembered interviewing her in the early 80s, with the late Steve Abbott, like we were Diane Sawyer and Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes—interviewing her at her house, when she was still living in San Francisco with the late Paula Gunn Allen. I'm going to have to dig out the old gay literary journal it was printed in and take a look at it again. Steve acted like he was good buddies with her, whereas I felt like a babbling groupie.

Like Marcus Ewert, Thea Hillman is also nominated in the transgender category, and she pointed out how perfect it is that her Intersex book is in a category in which it doesn't really belong. Thea, astonishingly and beamingly eight months pregnant, read two essays from her book, brief and impressionistic pieces that capture as no other kind of testimony can, the ways in which "intersex" is dismissed and pathologized. As she read, I kept wishing that my friend Christopher Breu was there—a scholar who put aside his academic rigors last summer to write a guide for high school teachers on how to teach and handle intersex issues in the classroom. Top on Chris' list was Jeffrey Eugenides' novel Middlesex, and it's a shame Thea's book appeared too late to make it into this article.

Kevin read next—perfectly, of course, but how are you going to top a brief reading that begins with the opening of "Thing Language"—the famous poem about "This ocean, humiliating in its disguises"? Then he read the early "Homosexuality" and the late 1950s "Dignity." Halfway through, he confessed that some have asked him what "Dignity" was about, and he said he didn't know. After the reading, Annie Sprinkle told us that she didn't understand anything about experimental poetry, but she enjoyed the Spicer. "You said you didn't know what it was all about," she reminded Kevin. "Well, that's how I feel all the time."

Lastly we heard a lesbian romance novelist, Joanne Meyer, reading from the kind of story I never actually read, about a hotel for women going up in San Francisco and our heroine, Stephanie, annoyed beyond endurance, by her sexy new female hard-hat, "Jock Reynolds" (you got to love the names)... Kevin said they were meeting cute, but in any case the whole audience gasped when defiant Jock swings her sledgehammer into a wall in the decaying hotel, again and again, while Stephanie huffs, and lo and behold, inside the wall someone sees—what is it? I can't make it out—oh my God, it's a coffin! At that dramatic point in her novel, Meyer stopped reading and shut the book knowing many of us would rush out to buy a copy to find out what happened. "Coffin?" I glanced at Christopher Rice, who must have grown up in a home filled with coffins, where coffins were used as coffee tables. But Rice only leapt to his feet and thanked us all for coming.