Alone to be Together, Fear and Snobbery

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Alone to be Together - Fear and Snobbery, August 2012 created and edited by Liza Corsillo

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ALONE to be TOGETHER (Fear & Snobbery) is Farah Atassi (page 28) Dana Bell (page 26) Liza Corsillo (pages 21, 23, 24, 25, 34, 35 & 36 ) Kerry Davis (page 3) Aurora Halal (page 1) Karin Heide (pages 37 & 38) Elizabeth McCaslin (page 16) Susan McCaslin (page 15) Sarah Moon an interview (pages 29 - 33) Danielle Swift (pages 19 & 20) Alexandra Taylor (page 27) Lauren Von Gogh (pages 5, 6, 7, & 8) Jersey Walz (pages 17 & 18) Margot Werner (page 4) Alison Wilder (pages 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 22 & end papers) Consider it several pages of alone time, bringing you and us together.

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Observations from a desert island for some interviews that never happened I live in a 4 bedroom, 3 bathroom house by myself with a big swimming pool and large garden. I’m interning at a non-profit arts organisation and running my own non-profit art institute. I’m not a squatter, I just got a lucky break.

Some family friends recently made a shitload of money and have bought some properties. They moved away from their house in the up-market suburbs of Johannesburg where they raised their child and now live between their house in the mountains and their house at the dam, on opposite sides of the country. I asked them if I could stay here at their Johannesburg home for a

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brief period. That was seven and a half months ago.

Each time someone visits, the first question they ask is if I’m not scared to live here by myself. My answer is always no. Most of the streets around here are boomed off areas where you need to be a resident to enter. (Well, so long as you don’t look suspicious you can probably just drive in, if you exert the right amount of confidence).

There are security cameras at each speed bump that one would imagine were to monitor whether people are driving too fast through the ‘burbs.

However, I’ve discovered that the cameras are in place to keep track of who has been driving in and out of the neighbourhood, to make sure the wrong people stay out and the right people get in. A month after I moved here, the low lying cameras (pointed directly at a car’s license plate) were all covered by small locked cages. I suspect that these cameras were being tampered with, or stolen. There are some that are not so low-lying, the ones pointed at pedestrian head height, as you enter an area that should be a park (but is rather a thoroughfare through the bush and a polluted stream where a woman shouldn’t walk by herself).

When I run on the street adjacent to the not-park entrance, I can’t help but pull a rude sign or stupid face directly at the camera. I’m almost sure that these cameras are not linked to any external technological device, but are rather in place to feed the residents’ paranoia which in turn makes them pay exorbitant amounts of money to a private security company that underpays and under-trains big guys to wear black clothes, carry big guns and drive obnoxious 4x4s around the streets really slowly. You can even press a panic button and these guys will be on your property within 10 seconds to help you out.

I thought that this neighbourhood would be the perfect place to interview some people about their past experiences that have led them to believe that these big guys with their guns are helping them in some way (some of the houses have their own big guy in a one way glass box, protecting their property from the outside). I am yet to meet any of the neighbours though. The most I see of them are their big cars, driving past with tinted windows. On occasion I pass them on foot during a morning or evening run, but we pass without greeting. The most words I’ve shared around here are with their domestic workers, people they’ve hired to raise their children, wash their windows and mow their lawns.

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SNOBBERY There is nothing special in your

eyes

or mouth,

or even your reaching for presence

and giving smiles instead of fears,

with laughter to soothe your future.

Perhaps it’s a learned measure

of indifference,

Perhaps the grading you need for

pleasure.

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FARTING CASUALLY (transcribed) Farting’s become mundane these days.

Barely conjures any reaction.

I remember the first time Alex farted in front of me.

I’m farting casually, You’re farting casually…

D’s farting casually.

P’s farting casually, Ron’s farting casually.

Even Mason’s farting casually.

Yes, Mason definitely farts casually.

Max is working up to farting casually.

Carl’s farting in his room; so is Josh, though he knows his walls are thin.

Rachel’s farting almost casually, but it’s too comfortable.

There’s a signification of intimacy there that’s like, I don’t know, excessively casual. Verging on casualty.

And to her it’s like the funniest thing.

Yeah, it still means too much for it to be entirely casual.

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Across the street from my bedroom window, I watch this place. Thursdays, blue light glows from beneath the freezer flaps that obscure the ramp’s peak.

Tall women, bare-legged and heeled in winter, wait outside as the blue light pours over their feet.

I cannot enter this place, I have decided. And after weeks of watching, when I realize I might be allowed, I might be welcomed even, I am too afraid to kill my fantasy of what goes on inside.

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Things I am afraid of listed in alphabetical order: anxiety attacks being alone forever being kidnapped being made to look a fool depression disappointing myself and my family forgetting getting fat getting mugged getting old getting stuck in the past going to jail heartbreak jealousy love mediocrity money my dog getting killed by a car or a coyote no love no money not trying not turning out as good as my parents rape rats so many people that New York sinks into the ocean the downfall of civilization “The Watcher in the Woods� too many people

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blind eyed apollo tear me limb from limb, the menad cried awaking. frenzy broke the scattered bodies laying in once joyful heaps to collateral carrion. and those who feared the madness raked the walls with bloodied fingers; lost their selves. leaving fragments of memory, splinters of guilt, to be reconstructed by the purpled fingers of survivors, unsure if wine or blood now binds their soles to the earth.

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The Letter Q : Queer Writers’ Notes to Their Younger Selves is a collection of letters from Sixty-four queer authors such as Michael Cunningham, Amy Bloom, Jacqueline Woodson, Gregory Maguire, David Levithan, Eileen Myles and Armistead Maupin. In their letters, the authors tell their younger selves what they would have liked to know then about their lives as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgendered people.

AN INTERVIEW WITH EDITOR SARAH MOON : ATBT - So, why this form? Why letters?

SM - I chose letters for multiple reasons. Here are a two: When I was a kid I got letters from queer friends of my parents asking me how I was and telling me to hang in there. I loved them, saved them, carried them with me to school every day. So I knew that letters were special, in and of themselves.

I think that letters have the ability to knock down that voice in one’s head that says, “This has nothing to do with me, this person knows nothing about me or my experience,” because it’s all second person.

ATBT - Where did you grow up? What kind of place was it and how did you fit in that place?

SM - I grew up in a small town in rural Connecticut. It was a farming town, mostly, and I fit in not at all.

ATBT - You talk in the introduction of the book about receiving letters from adults in your life that you would read when you needed strength.

Can you say something about the first letter you got? Did that experience in any way influence your decision to become a teacher?

SM - My first letter was a fax from my mother’s partner (my stepmother) when I was in 6th grade. She sent it because I was getting my braces off and she wanted me to know she was thinking of me – she was still working in New York at the time. I loved it. I put it on my bulletin board.

It’s still there, in my childhood bedroom in Connecticut.

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In junior high, I wrote many, many, many letters to my camp counselors during the school year (I was a weirdo) and their letters back made me feel like I wasn’t so far away from better times. Once I was in high school, I would get letters from my parents’ friends, mostly the queer ones, asking me how I was, if I was hanging in there, how the gay thing was going. I loved those letters.

I had never considered it, but I think yes, it certainly influenced my decision. I knew I wanted to be a teacher in 1st grade, when I had Ms. Rose (to whom the book is dedicated), because she made me feel seen, and special and also not special at all, like I was right where I was supposed to be. I think the letters made me feel the same way, and I wanted to be able to do that for kids.

ATBT - Your mother is one of the writers featured in the book. How do your professional lives otherwise intersect? How do the two of you relate creatively?

SM - Our writerly lives intersect with joy and with difficulty. I am one of the first people who gets to read her work, which is an amazing gift to me. She is among the last to get to read mine because I value her opinion so terribly highly. We speak to each other like other people probably wouldn’t; we are very, very frank. She is very patient with my torturing myself about not being as good as she is.

ATBT - Can you say a little about what made this project easy for people like Eileen Myles, Michael Cunningham and Armistead Maupin to say yes to? Were you afraid to ask any of the authors to contribute?

SM - I think it is easy for basic reasons – it’s short, for example. But I also think that it’s a feel-good thing. It benefits the Trevor Project, so there’s a mitzvah right there, but it also speaks to us, I think, secretly, that these are things that we really do want to tell our younger selves.

I also think that it was so hard in the queer community to help kids for such a long time, both because we were busy trying to save our own skin and because we were scared that any efforts to reach back to youth would be misconstrued as somehow pernicious, that we really distanced ourselves from our youth.

It’s an exciting time because so much of that stigma is gone and we’re doing okay, and so we can reach our hand out to them without fear and offer them some hope and I think that was pretty appealing to our authors. I wasn’t scared to ask people, really, as the worst thing they could say was no. I was terrified to ask for revisions. James, my contributing editor, Arthur, the publisher, and I would divide up the list of who had to ask whom.

ATBT - Your book, is co-edited by James Lecesne of the Trevor Project.

How did you two begin working together?

SM - James and I met when I was 12 years old, when I was a kid on my bike in Provincetown. He was one of the many queer people that my parents made sure were in my life. We began working on this together because the day my partner and I came up with the idea, we ran into him. I asked him the next day to contribute and he said he wanted to partner with me and make this idea a reality.

ATBT - Alone to be Together is a zine of all women contributors. It was born out of a desire for more close female friends. At the time I didn’t have very many and was scared to call girls up to hang out. I didn’t feel cool enough. So I made up a reason to talk to them. Have you made friends during the process of making the book?

SM - That’s a good idea! I don’t feel cool enough to say that any of these people are my friends, but they are people whom I admire, adore and deeply appreciate. They are people that I hug when I see them. I’m friends with lots of them on facebook, which is not the same as being actual friends, but it’s a nice start.

ATBT - As you’ve aged has your definition of cool changed? How about through your experience collecting letters for “The Letter Q”?

SM - Oh, cool. Cool has almost killed me so many times. I give it a lot less credit than I used to. What I have come to believe is that cool is being utterly yourself. I’m working on it.

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ATBT - You are a teacher, how do you think being a queer teenager has changed since you were in school? (NYC versus CT has an obvious effect. But beyond that... How is it different?)

SM - The locale certainly makes a big difference. The kids that I have taught in NYC tend to struggle inwardly or with their families, rather than dealing with a lot of the violence or bullying in the classroom that I grew up with. Which isn’t to say that it’s gone, it is also possible that kids have learned not to do those things around me because I look way gay and I’m their teacher. I’m very wary of making any kind of statement about how much better things are because I feel like it devalues the struggles that queer kids are going through and because I’m not one anymore, I don’t feel like I can say. I can tell you that I did an interview with my hometown newspaper for the book and while they didn’t know the lingo (like LGBT) they were open to it, they used it in the article and didn’t shy away from what the book is about and that’s some serious kind of progress.

ATBT - What are you afraid of?

SM - The dentist, snakes, other people, never writing another book.

ATBT - Can you describe a time when you were not the great Sarah Moon? When you were a snob?

SM - I’m a snob—or at least a smug, superior asshole -- all the time; it’s how I keep myself safe and far away from people (I’m scared of them).

Yesterday, for example. My best friend is moving away at the end of the month. I’m going to miss her like a limb. She has other friends. They think that they will miss her too. When I am my most snobby self, I am pretty sure that no one will miss her like I will, that no one knows her like I do, and that I will not be associated with these other people who will “miss” her. My missing is superior. That’s how I felt yesterday. Very snobby. I might do it better today.

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notes: