"Go West - This is Our Destiny":
Arcadia, Gay Flight, and the Idea(l) of California
by Connell O'Donovan
(June 1999)
California is described, prescribed, and proscribed as the Promised
Land for Queer people (especially Gay white men) in American
literature of the Victorian era, underground homosexual films of the 1940s-60s,
Gay pornography of the 1970s, and popular music of the 1970s-90s.
Yet these media also warn that this paradisiacal locus ironically
carries with it the seeds of its own destruction. California has also long been the focus of the homosexual imagination
- "this other Eden" as it were, a locus where the ideal
of Arcadia could perhaps be finally and fully realized. Gay theorist,
Byrne R.S. Fone has found a long and ancient literary and artistic
tradition amongst homosexually-inclined men from Virgil to the
present who have sought out "that secret Eden", most
often referred to as Arcadia (a rural, bucolic, and mountainous
region of ancient Greece often idealized and romanticized in
opposition to the complexities and artifice of the urban polis).[1]
Fone believes that the homosexual imagination employs this Arcadian
landscape as a place "where it is safe to be gay" and
openly portray the presence of "gay love and sensibility
in a text that otherwise makes no explicit statement about homosexuality".
Arcadia then is a metaphor for "certain spiritual values
and myths prevalent in homosexual literature and life" such
as "the search for the Ideal Friend [that] is one of the
major undertakings of the homosexual life."[2]
Two American writers who describe this edenic Arcadia in homosocial
terms and envision California as the fulfillment of that idea(l)
are Bayard Taylor and Walt Whitman.[3] Taylor's 1869 novel, Joseph
and His Friend, described Arcadia as "a great valley,
bounded by hundreds of miles of snowy peaks; lakes in its bed;
enormous hillsides, dotted with groves of ilex [holly oak] and
pine, orchards of orange and olive; a perfect climate, where
it is bliss enough to breathe, and freedom from the distorted
laws of men". It is this sense of classical Cynicism which
permeates so much of the Anglo-centric dialogue on California:
ignoring the presence of Native American tribes, white male sexual
outlaws are told, "here is a tabula rasa, free from
the taint of nomos; what will you do away from social
restrictions and laws?" While California is not specifically
named in Taylor's text, it is a fine description of California's
Central Valley, the Sierras, and the "perfect climate"
of central and southern California.
Of even greater import, the "solitary singer", Walt
Whitman, offers California to his erotic democracy as a place
where the Arcadian metaphor might become a reality. Fone points
out that in Whitman's Arcadian poems (most notably "In Paths
Untrodden" and "These I Singing in Spring") two
important elements are present: "the world of the real life,
which demands a certain conformity of appearance, and the world
of the spirit, which is ill fed by the standards of that world."
The physical and spiritual yearnings of Whitman call him to explore
this other Eden, the "typical Arcadian paradigm" again
firmly established as "the lonely retreat" to the Arcadian
forest completed by homoerotic bathing or baptismal rituals at
the side of the "miraculous pool" of water, (loosely
patterned after the Ladon River, which flows through Arcadia
in Greece).[4]
Several of Whitman's poems envision California as this ideal
site, especially the 1874 poem, "The Song of the Redwood-Tree",
first published in Leaves of Grass in 1881.[5] The first
line of this poem declares it "A California song" sung
by "a chorus of dryads", whose voice is "of a
mighty dying tree in the redwood forest dense" (reminiscent
of the Arcadian "greenwood", that "far, far forest"),
which is heard only by Whitman; the lumberjacks and other people
associated with the lumber industry "heard not" this
song of the dryads, "But in my soul I plainly heard [it]".
These dryads from the redwood forest sing a song of dedication
of "these virgin lands, lands of the Western shore,/to the
culminating man, to you, the empire new". It is a dedicatory
prayer that "beneath all creeds, arts, statutes, literatures,/
Here build your homes for good, establish here, these areas entire".
And like the "stalwart trunk and limbs" with its "foot-thick
bark" and "lofty top rising two hundred feet high",
the dryads pray that
"Here may he hardy, sweet, gigantic grow, here tower proportionate to Nature,
Here climb the vast pure spaces unconfined, uncheck'd, by wall or roof,
...Here heed himself, unfold himself, (not others' formulas heed,) here fill his time,
To duly fall, to aid, unreck'd at last,
To disappear, to serve.[6]
And what inspires these people to come to "the flashing
and golden pageant of California,/ the sudden and gorgeous drama,
the sunny and ample lands", where "Asia's fetiches
[sic]" meet "Europe's old dynastic slaughter-house"?
Whitman sees "the genius of the modern, child of the real
and ideal,/ Clearing the ground for broad humanity, the true
America, heir of/ the past so grand, to build a grander future."
Whitman seems painfully aware that the destruction of his metaphor,
the redwood forest, must take place in order to fulfill the dream
of Arcadia - "the century-lasting, unseen dryads, singing,
withdrawing" from California to find refuge in "the
Wasatch, or Idaho far, or Utah" - all ironically now within
the theocratic domain of the Mormon Church.[7]
While Whitman was writing about the potential of California from
the safety of New York, later Gay men who actually lived in the
"Golden State" had an even closer view of the state's
potential for both utopia and dystopia. Like the Gay literary
tradition, most of the California-made Gay underground films
of the late 1940s through the 1960s were informed by the Arcadian
ideal of California as Queer Paradise, while maintaining a profound
if subtle acknowledgement that California (and in particular
Los Angeles) is a double-edged sword of "sunshine and noir";
anonymity and isolation, freedom and powerlessness; as Mike Davis
put it, Los Angeles is a "city of seduction and defeat",
ultimately the incarnation of insanity.[8] Gay filmmaker Kenneth
Anger (who studied film at University of Southern California
with two other Gay underground filmmakers: Curtis Harrington
and Gregory Markopoulos), was a precocious child of Hollywood,
obsessed with its seamier, more scandalous side of the California
dream. His movies also show an obsession with the occult and
"Magick" or more specifically what the Radical Faerie
historian Randy Connor calls "the left-hand path" of
"powers sometimes unfortunately referred to as 'dark'",
a term he rejects because of its racist undertones.[9] Theorist
of Queer pornography Richard Dyer defines this as an "esoteric
system of pagan belief and ritual" based on the beliefs
and practices of the "ambisexual" Satanist, Aleister
Crowley.[10] Much of Anger's work dwells on "chaos and disruption,
joyously celebrated".[11] Although Anger moved to Europe
in 1950, he often returned and filmed while in California or
other places in the US. Some of these homoesoteric films were
Fireworks (Los Angeles, 1947), Inauguration of the
Pleasure Dome (Los Angeles, 1954), and his most famous, Scorpio
Rising (New York, 1962). While only the first of these works
specifically refers to California, they do represent Anger's
experience of California as a dream and nightmare, a place of
great power.
The central image of Fireworks is one of a sailor holding
a young man prostrate in his arms: the image appears throughout
the film in various media - especially multiple photographic
copies of it being burned in a fireplace grating. The magical
element being invoked by the film is fire, as a metaphor for
desire. Dyer believes that this photo is a Queer version of the
Pietá of Mary and Jesus, whose prostrate corpse
represents "the supreme instance of a ritually significant
sad young man in Western tradition".[12] In Anger's film,
the source of the sadness (and prostration) of the young man
in the arms of the sailor is that he has gone out cruising in
a Los Angeles park and been fag-bashed by a group of sailors,
one of whom soon returns to the scene of the wounded young man
and they make love, in a renewal or resurrection of life for
the young man. The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome is
a magical invocation of an Arcadian forest; the film is "of
jewel-like richness", and features a decadent and "queeny"
Magus (title of a ritual, pagan magician), and a blond Pan, described as "gorgeous beyond words"
by one reviewer.[13] The effeminate Magus "signals the beginning
of a bacchanalian rite by swallowing, jewel by jewel, a necklace".[14]
Erotic diarist Anaïs Nin appears during the bacchanal in
the role of the goddess Astarte, wearing a gilded birdcage as
a headdress. At the culmination of Pleasure Dome, the
Magus is transformed into Shiva, the Hindu god of reproduction
and destruction, perhaps another of Anger's metaphors for California.
Scorpio Rising is a disturbing yet meticulous film; while
it details a magical approach to desire for the hyper-masculine
(found by fetishizing "biker boys" and the erotic undercurrents
of male bonding in the motorcycle world, set to a soundtrack
of 60s hits, popularized by the surfing/beach craze of Southern
California[15]), it also contains disturbing Nazi imagery as
a fulfillment of that desire.[16] Anger has edited in segments
of an older Hollywood film about Christ called The Road to
Jerusalem, but Anger edits this film in such a way that it
"draws Christ into the gay erotic circle"; for example,
a man falls at the knees of Christ, and Anger cuts-in a close-up
of an erect penis, suggesting that the man has fellated the Christ.[17]
The forces that are invoked by Anger in this film are enumerated
by Dyer as "sadism, male sexuality, immaturity, [and] Nazism"
- all which Dyer believes are "disapprovable" and therefore
a "sign for their fitness for Magick invocation" as
"wild, transcendent forces that convention represses".[18]
Mike Davis more critically refers to the "dominant vision"
of Kenneth Anger as the "car-sex-death-fascism continuum"
which lead Anger to explore the "Nietzschean porno-mythology
of motorcycle gangs and hotrodders", the epitome of the
hypermasculine (and hypermasculinist) in California at the time.[19]
Following in both Whitman's and Anger's attempts to portray the
idea of California as a Queer Arcadian dystopic utopia, in 1969,
Gay pornographer Fred Halsted moved back to his native Los Angeles
from San José, California, perhaps as part of Mike Davis's
"migration of intellectuals, in constructing and deconstructing
the mythography of Los Angeles".[20] Halsted later related
that upon arrival, he "just bought a camera and pieced together
a Sunday cruise by a sadist", which turned out to be the
first "hardcore" film ever screened at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York, with funding from the National Endowment
for the Arts.[21] This film, narcissistically entitled LA
Plays Itself, was finished and distributed in 1972 and was
a favorite of viewers at the time. One San Francisco reviewer
wrote that "there's a certain ingenuousness about Halsted
that seems genuine rather than affected", and in viewing
this film (especially as political criticism rather than pornography),
I completely agree.
This film is actually divided into two seemingly unlinked stories
(although their "moral" is basically the same: the
Gay flight to Los Angeles is simultaneously building and destroying
its own community). Both halves are narrated by Halsted and only
feature two actors in each half (with Halsted himself appearing
in the second story line). Throughout both segments, there is
actually very little graphic sex shown - and the sex which is
shown graphically is often purposely edited to be choppy, or
it's shown in such extreme close-ups that details are lost and
there is merely a suggestion of what the actors are doing, and
the accompanying music is usually extremely discordant. Thus
I find the film to be practically useless as pornography per
se, yet extremely valuable as socio-political commentary
on the California Dream.[22]
The film seems to be set up to image what Whitman called "the
child of the real and ideal" (expressed perfectly by Mike
Davis's "sunshine and noir"). The first segment
(which I believe was actually filmed last) seems to represent
the Ideal of California: the action all takes place out in an
idyllic nature; the two men are of the same race, the same age,
and the same class (or perhaps classless); while one man is generally
the top and the other the bottom, there are moments of role exchange;
the subject and the object of desire are fluid, reconcile, merge,
and part. The second segment is the real California that Halsted
actually found in Los Angeles: a dark (in hair coloring and outlook)
thirty-something sadist (played by the "butch-god" Halsted himself) picks up a teenage blond "SUPER
TWINK" off the streets, who has a heavy southern drawl (and
thus despite having the look of the quintessential California
Golden Boy, is in fact a recent émigré from Houston,
Texas, according to the film). The swarthy man is in complete
control of the ensuing sex, bondage, and sadistic scenarios to
follow (all filmed in murky, shadowy, and eerie interior spaces),
and the young, tan blond is the categorical object. It is in
this example of the valuing of the Aryan ideal in both segments
of LA Plays Itself that I find disturbing ramifications.
The first half of LA Plays Itself appears to be an explicitly
sexual retelling of the initial meeting of the "urbanite"
Gilgamesh and the "wildman" of the forest, Enkidu,
as found in the 4,000 year old Gilgamesh Epic.[23] The
film opens with about ten minutes of "nature footage"
of the then undeveloped mountains above Los Angeles: fog rolling
over the hills, rock outcroppings covered in lichen, fields of
wild flowers, beetles, bees, hawks. And over this is a dialogue
of two unseen men; the first man, whom I refer to as Gary, apparently
lives in the city of Los Angeles; the other being the filmmaker
Fred Halsted, who (at least in this scenario) apparently lives
out in the "country", a rural area of Los Angeles County.
Gary: This, this is where it's happenin': Los Angeles - nowhere else.
Fred: Los Angeles STINKS. You know, parts of Los Angeles - if ya get out into Los Angeles County, out...out into the country, it's nice....There's a lot a things going on!
Gary: It's you and those animals and those flowers.
Fred: What's wrong with sniffin' flowers?
Gary: At least I ball humans.
Fred: Well, I do too...occasionally....You'd be surprised what happens out there....I found somethin' AWFUL nice out there...
At this point, the dialog stops, Japanese-style music plays quietly
in the background, and we only see more nature shots for a few
moments, but then a dark-haired man appears (apparently actor
Jim Frost if the credits at the end are in the order of appearance),
fully-clothed and vaguely butch-hippyish although his hair isn't
very long, walking through a meadow of sage-brush where he begins
climbing trees, quietly exploring nature. The Japanese-style
music slowly changes into tribal drumming accompanied by a haunting
flute melody. In the next scene, we see bare legs and feet walking
on a boulder, and then we see this other nude man but only as
a reflection in a shallow pool of water: a Blond Narcissus (like
the Blond Pan of Anger's Pleasure Dome).
Narcissus is revealed finally as a "naturally beautiful"
blond and tan man in his early 20s (apparently an actor named
Rick Coates), and we see him first as he sprinkles water onto
a group of ferns in a small grotto, carefully caressing their
delicate leaves with his wet hands. Throughout the film the blond
represents several things: a Child of Nature (a post-modern wood
nymph perhaps); the quintessential California Golden Boy; an
Aryan poster boy. For Halsted, the blond is the lure and the catalyst
for the Gay flight to California, as the fulfillment of his own (and our?) desire.
The blond is a Child of Nature because he appears already nude
and we never see any clothing belonging to him, his hair is long
(and although he is clean shaven, he is quite naturally hairless
on his upper-body and perhaps he is naturally beardless as well),
he gives a baptismal benediction to the ferns in the grotto,
and he is first spotted by the brunet sitting in a semi-lotus
position on the edge of a pool (echoes of the Arcadian "miraculous
pool").
The blond is the "ideal" Golden Boy (also exemplified
by in that same era by Jan Michael Vincent and Vince Van Patten)
with his natural tan (sans tan-line), naturally blond
and straight hair, extremely white teeth, tall and lanky but
muscular.
The blond man can also be read as a representation of the Aryan
ideal of maleness and masculinity. As Thomas Waugh, a Queer historian
of Gay eroticism, documents, beginning in 1902, the German "Community
of the Self-Owned" began pushing "traditional models
of masculinity and gender politics (if not male supremacy)"
onto the German public through publishing manuals and magazines
which featured values of homosociality and "love of friends".
This movement coalesced with physique magazines in the 1920s
which disseminated the (explicitly photographic) view of the
blond, athletic free spirit, or the "Weimar erotic sensibility
of the man-next-door". Waugh too notes that this Aryan brotherhood
was closely associated with "the aura of bathing and water,
the pantheistic Nature symbology of leaves and grass, forests
and meadow, clouds and sunlight" (so reminiscent of the
Arcadian paradigm).[24] This "cult of the Aryan male hero"
culminated when one of the main German physique photographers,
the apparently Gay Gerhard Riebicke, became the official photographer
for the German Army School for Physical Exercise, under the command
of Major Hans Surén. Surén promoted nude athletics
amongst German soldiers during at least five years of the Nazi
regime. When he was finally dismissed from the Army by a homophobic
Hitler, Surén wrote a hugely popular book called Der
Mensch und die Sonne (Man and Sun), generously illustrated
with Riebicke's photographs of "huge groups of nude soldiers
running...across fields and streams, frolicking in rivers and
lolling in mud", virtually everyone of them an athletic,
tanned blond.[25] This book, which in its 1936 reprinting gained
the subtitle of "The Aryan Olympic Spirit", sold some
200,000 copies by 1940.
While Anger blatantly drew upon images of masculinist Nazis for
his films, Halsted, in LA Plays Itself, is far more subtle
and complex in his portrayal of Aryan masculinism. The nude blond
man of Halsted's film seemingly belongs to this natural setting,
while the brunet man is a "newer stranger" (in the
words of fellow Los Angeleno and Halsted look-alike, Jim Morrison)
who has recently arrived in California and this particular rural
setting; we discover when he is finally unclothed by the blond,
that he has a US Navy tattoo on his left arm and the implication
is that he first came to California via the US Naval base in
San Diego, and after his term of service (his hair is now slightly
too long to be regulation) he has returned to "the flashing
and golden pageant of California". Interestingly, throughout
the film, we never clearly see the face of the brunet; the blond's
alluring face is shown repeatedly while the brunet remains faceless
and thus we (viewers outside of California) are more easily able
to identify with him in his interaction with the blond "Other".
When the two men first meet there is only a brief, four line
exchange of dialogue (during which the Japanese music fades out
and Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony begins - music appropriate
to the Arcadian landscape); otherwise, there is no dialogue throughout
the rest of the film. Thereafter follows a lengthy montage of
them making love quite intimately and lovingly (lots of touching,
kissing, holding, and laughter, and only a few moments of really
graphic sex) in various places and positions (the blond generally
but not exclusively being the bottom, both orally and anally),
their "innocence" even more starkly pronounced nowadays
because their anal sex is condomless (reminding us of those "nostalgic
days" prior to AIDS) with the sex scenes interspersed with
more nature footage of ferns, brooks, and pollinating bees, as
well as animals sexually reproducing (or in pursuit of reproduction),
like three salamanders, butterflies, fish, and water-skeeters,
emphasizing that (all) sexuality is completely natural (for anything
truly "unnatural" would, by definition, require no
proscription against it). During one of the longer, uninterrupted scenarios of the film,
the two naked men climb higher into the hills, to a large rock
pool with a small water-fall, where they splash each other, innocently,
child-like, joyfully, and true to the Arcadian paradigm, they
ritually bathe each other, a Queer baptism under the waterfall.[26]
After the brunet ejaculates (the blond does not), another extremely
significant montage occurs: a bulldozer is shown plowing through
a meadow, destroying the pristine landscape, as lizards, rabbits,
and other animals flee, and others are destroyed. The montage
ends, with a long view of a massive earthworks site, large equipment
covering the hillsides, and above all on the highest hill, an
American flag flying over the California State flag as if to
say: America is California, and California is Los Angeles, and
Los Angeles is this ripped up countryside. Here Halsted seems
to be issuing the caveat that the result of the Gay flight
and our attempts to find the Ideal Friend merely end in increased
population on a fragile ecosystem, and its subsequent destruction
in order to build more housing, more offices for the more jobs
required, more bathhouses, more gyms, more discos, more coffee-shops,
more Gap stores, and most ironically, more cruise parks, in a
dizzying and vicious cycle.
The second segment is in fact a short film noir shot in
grainy, murky, choppy style, which I find rather coy, chilling,
and intense. It opens with a Los Angeles City Limits sign indicating
that the population was then at 2,535,700 people. Then the viewer
begins a disjointed tour of the daytime urban landscape, concentrating
on billboards and other street signs that have sexual innuendo
for Halsted, and almost spying on sites of male bonding and subtle
homoerotics, all interspersed with footage of the sado-masochistic
and bondage-discipline scenarios of Fred Halsted and Joseph Yale,
whom Fred Halsted found one day in 1969 playing the part of the
Jungle Boy in "Disney on Parade". Halsted apparently
asked Yale if he'd like to be in an "'experimental film'
about the birds and the bees and the flowers", which sounded
"almost as wholesome as Disneyland itself".[27] Yale
agreed to act in the film, starring as the submissive boy. Yale
then later married Halsted in 1975, as they had ironically found
each other as that "Ideal Friend" of the Arcadian mythography.[28]
Fred Halsted (left) and Joseph Yale
Fascinating and humorous collages of signs and billboards are
used throughout LA Plays Itself as erotic, communal appropriations
for Halsted, in his attempt "to invisibly appropriate elements"
of a "mass-distributed commodity culture" for fantasy
and erotic use. Signs and posters from restaurants like "Jack's
Joint for Breakfast - Lunch", and Kentucky Fried Chicken
("chicken" being gay jargon for an under-aged young
man pursued by an older "chicken hawk"): "So Tender,
So Tasty", "Finger Lickin' Good", and "North
America's Hospitality Dish"; and other food products such
as "106 Chunks of Beef in Every Can of Dennison's Chili".
Finally and quite significantly, these well-produced, commercial-based
signs are juxtaposed with handscrawled graffiti reading "Gay
Power" in huge letters on a cinderblock wall. These signs
are intercut with footage of groups of male hippies drumming,
playing Frisbee, and sunbathing in the local park (where Halsted
is cruising the restrooms). More scenes of predation are edited
in by Halsted, showing a wolf paused with tongue out, and an
extensive insect collection, each insect carefully identified
by a tag stuck to the pin piercing the insect.
Halsted went on to direct at least four other films (including
Sex Tool, which met to poor reviews and negative audience
screenings)[29] and to star in several porn classics, including
all three of the John Gage trilogy, when he was in his mid-30s.[30]
He also provided all the narration for a 1975 history of Gay
male porn called Erotikus (sometimes mistakenly referred
to as Eroticus) but later he panned it publicly.[31] By
1976, Halsted was living a "private, even 'secretive' life
in his jungle-camouflaged 'fort' about Sunset Strip, and he likes
to spend a day totally alone, gardening, writing, reading, working
out, talking to no one". At that time he lived with his
husband, Joey Yale, his dog, his cat, and "Curtis",
a man from Georgia who had produced Halsted's porno-film, Sex
Tool.[32] True to the promise and warning of California, despite their temporary domestic "bliss", Yale contracted AIDS and died on April 19, 1986. Fred Halsted also contracted AIDS and distraught over Joey's death and his deteriorating physical well-being, overdosed on sleeping drugs and Thorazine on May 9, 1989 in Orange County, California.[33]
In 1979, the New York-based disco group, the Village People,
came out with their hit single, "Go West".[34] The
song is a camp version of New Yorker Horace Greeley's famous
admonition to the "young man" of the United States
in the 1840s, as Greeley believed in the "virtues of country
life and the value of the West as a sanctuary for the East's
discontent masses" (who were mainly impoverished, uneducated,
immigrant non-Anglo-Saxons). In 1859, Greeley visited California
and was so impressed with what he called "the Queen of the
Pacific", that he asserted that "no other state could
compare". Just as Greeley's "discontent masses"
flocked westward to "civilize" pristine wilderness,
so too the discontent Gay masses followed the Village People's
kitschy rallying anthem calling Gay people everywhere to "Go
West". As with most of their songs, Gayness is not spoken
but assumed; their songs give a great big, cheesy wink at "those
with ears to hear".[35] The lyrics to "Go West"
are an overly romantic paean to Gay life in California (where
"together we will learn and teach"), written at the
peak of the so-called "Gay flight". Ironically, this
Gay flight described and prescribed by the song brought thousands
and thousands more Queer folks to urban, coastal areas, who then
participated in the intense sexual freedom (particularly in the
men's communities) which completely obscured the liberation movement
that inspired them in the first place and was so conducive to
the spread of HIV beginning in the late 1970s.[36] In September
of 1993, the British pop group the Pet Shop Boys made a cover
of the song with an accompanying video (see Post Script) featuring
thousands of cloned male couples, marching to the beat of the
song up a staircase to heaven, the Emerald City in Oz. It was
initially seen by critics as both a cynical but nostalgic commentary
on the devastation of the Gay community by AIDS after "going
West" in pursuit of Arcadia, as well as being a cynical
but nostalgic commentary on the Eastern European flight to "the
West" after the end of the Cold War (best symbolized by
the fall of the Berlin Wall).
The media's coverage of AIDS in the 1980s merely confirmed all
our (non-Californians) worst fears. It seemed to be a California
disease (although remotely a New York one as well) brought on
by selfish decadence and the abandonment of all social strictures
and mores (at least according to religions, the media, the government,
etc.)
California epitomizes the paradox of paradise; that the human
search for Utopia leads us to destroy it when we find it. Living
in California has taught me to embrace this fundamental paradox
of the dystopic utopia; while the cosmos is ultimately amoral
(viz. quantum physics), still, some decisions are better than
others. There seem to be two challenges laid before the Queer
men's community, (so sublimely, subliminally charted out by our
Queer forefathers): first, how to value the masculine without
being masculinist; and second, how to value similarities and
symmetries of bodies without collapsing into the violent and
flavorless mediocrity of sameness and hegemony, which so often
and so easily congeal into fascism.
