doubting thom

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I just finished watching the third episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy on TiVo, and just as in the second episode last week, Jai Rodriguez received the opening credit as the culture queer, yet there was a hunky black guy, identified only as Blair, actually playing that role instead. Who is he? Why was he replaced? Why does Jai get the episode credits for these two episodes? Inqueering minds want to know.

I’m guessing from this and other clues that the first episode aired, with Jai, was actually filmed after these other two. Perhaps Blair was originally the culture queer but was dumped for some reason, and they decided to air an episode with Jai first to establish his presence. But I’d still like to know what happened.

For those of you who maintain blogs, I’m curious about your practices vis a vis comments. When an entry of yours has received a comment to which you want to reply, do you do so: 1) directly to the commenter by email only, 2) directly within the comments section of the blog entry itself solely, or 3) both by email and within the blog entry’s comments?

The second option would seem to allow the comments section to function as a forum of sorts, and also continue to allow others potentially to participate rather than turning the conversation into a private one, but I seem to rarely see back-and-forth communication between the blog author and the commenters in this fashion. If you do choose the second option, though, do you worry then that the original commenter might not see your reply at all?

I often use the third option, but in practice since the original commenter is much more likely to reply directly to your email rather than coming back to the comments page if they have something further to add, this ends up functioning pretty much just like the first option.

For those of you in or near the DC metro area, the DC Lambda Squares glbt square dance club is having the second of their three summer open houses tonight, an opportunity to explore lesbian and gay square dancing before new classes begin this fall.

The open house is from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. at Christ United Methodist Church, 4th and I Street, SW, a block from the Waterside Mall/SEU Metro station on the Green line.

From the information about the open house:

Men, women, singles, and couples are welcome. You don’t need a partner, and you don’t need any previous dance experience. We’ll teach you everything you need to know.

Admission is free, and we’ll provide refreshments in a smoke-free, alcohol-free environment. Dress is casual. You don’t need to wear crinolines, unless you really want to. We recommend comfortable clothes.

If you’re interested, but can’t make tonight, the third and final open house of the summer will be at the same place and time on August 22. The next beginners’ class starts soon thereafter, on September 9, and continues weekly until spring.

I‘ve been writing so much about my family and my trip home, and I did say I would post some more photos, so here is a glimpse into my childhood home.

My parents’ house in the woods. The portion on the right is the original three-bedroom, one-bath my parents built in 1964 when my sister was born, and where the four of us lived until I left for college and my sister was married; the middle and left portions are additions just from the past few years.

My sister’s house, in the field behind my grandparents’ house, which is a few hundred yards through the woods from my parents’. The house is a beautiful old building from the 1800s; standing on land in the next county that was to be flooded when a local man-made lake was complete, my grandfather bought it and he, my grandmother, my brother-in-law and my dad rebuilt it. It has a wonderful high-ceilinged great room, and a huge fireplace in the kitchen.

My aunt’s house and her horse barn, a short distance up the road from my parents, grandparents and sister, and on the river near the camp where my birthday party was held.

Called the “camp,” it’s basically a small house on the river just up the road from where I grew up. It’s jointly owned by my grandfather and a family friend; when I was a child, we spent many summer days here and, until recently, my mother’s family celebrated Independence Day here each year.

My family can be so cool. Here I am, ten days away from turning 41, and my birthday present from Mom and Dad included a copy of a vinyl record of J.R.R. Tolkien reading poems from Middle Earth (purchased from a library sale when my elementary school–the same that she also had attended, and that her father had attended all the way through high school–recently was torn down in preparation for construction of a new one; I’d checked out that very album more than once back in 6th and 7th grades) and the Warriors Fortress set from the MegaBloks Dragon series (similar to the dozens of Lego castle sets I already owned).

My youngest nephew always asks me to play with him and his army and wrestling men, or on the Playstation; my family expressed amazement that he–a nine-year-old–and I were able to discuss comic books and cartoons non-stop for a couple of hours when I arrived there last Friday. He’d also been playing an old Sega Shadowrun game of mine that I’d given them years ago; when I described to him the pen-and-pencil Shadowrun RPG I used to play, he started creating character concepts and asked me to bring in the books and my dice the next time I come home. He’s a cool kid.

It’s amusing: when I was a teenager, I used to bemoan that my birthday and Christmas gifts were mostly practical rather than “fun,” consisting almost entirely of clothing and money by then (not that I didn’t appreciate either). Now that I’ve reached middle age, though, gifts from the family more and more include the impractical and unserious. Who knew getting older could be so much more fun?

The power just came back on after having been off for an hour and a half. No one in the building or on the block that I saw while walking around seems to know why it went out, though I’ve heard that there are severe almost tornado-like winds in northwest DC a few miles from here; here on the Pike, though, it’s neither rainy nor particularly windy.

It’s amazing how dependent we are on electricity. I couldn’t fix a proper dinner, as both the range and microwave are electric; I ended up settling for hummus and pita, cheese and grapes. As the sun continued to set, I finally gave up even on trying to read by dim candlelight and just went out for a walk. The UPS did at least allow me to gracefully shut down the PC, but I’d forgotten to recharge the laptop’s battery recently, so I had no computer access; in any event, the DSL modem also is AC-powered so I wouldn’t have been able to get online. I could have posted via telephone and audblog. I only just now thought about that; I still haven’t gotten used to that service.

Yesterday, I made my usual mistake of agreeing to attend church services with my family, an agreement that usually ends up with my blood pressure spiking from holding in my outrage at what gets said from the pulpit. This was no exception. My family sometimes describes me as “selfish” and “free from guilt” in the sense that they believe that I live my life in a way that ignores their desires for how I should live and behave in favor of my own happiness; leaving aside for now the issue of whether there’s even anything wrong with that, they don’t realize the ways in which activities that seem commonplace and trivial to them–like attending a southern Methodist church service because they want me there–might feel to me like a compromise of my own integrity and even my sense of comfort and well-being (given that past ministers there have railed against homosexuality, for example), and therefore probably not acts of selfishness.

The church’s usual minister is away for the month, pursuing some additional theological education, so yesterday’s speaker was a lay leader–a contemporary of mine whom I knew well in my youth as we grew up together in that church and in that community. He’s a nice guy, sincere and compassionate, but the topic of both the children’s discussion and general sermon were about the lack of God, overt Christianity and prayer in public education: “Isn’t it ironic that we are educated from preschool to college in order to find a good job [already a premise I reject, at least as a sole justification for acquiring education] so that we can pursue the evil of money, on which we find ‘In God We Trust,’ but just a few people have made them take God out of our schools? Since just a few people got God removed from school, maybe just a few of us can get Him back in.”

Every time he said “just a few people made them take God out of our schools”–and he said it many times–it was all I could do not to shout out “Yeah, like the authors of the Bill of Rights.” I wanted to point out that “In God We Trust” was not an original motto of our nation and hadn’t been printed on our currency before the 1950s, just as “under God” hadn’t previously been part of the Pledge of Allegiance. And I was curious as to whether his belief that religion should be put back in the classroom would extend to encouraging daily prayers to Shiva or Diana, or if the assumption of Christianity was, as I suspect, so fundamental (if you’ll pardon the pun) to his argument as to be unquestionable. More humorously, I wanted to suggest that despite the alleged absence of God from school, I probably heard more prayers being offered up during final exams than anywhere else in my life.

But I kept my mouth shut, sat on my hands, and tried to tune out the service as much as possible, for the sake of my parents’ feelings–I was there for them, after all, and clearly not for my own spiritual or intellectual edification–and the implicit inappropriateness of speaking back in church. And it turns out that my family all thought it was a great sermon, so I guess it was just as well that I–no longer a member of that church, nor indeed of that community–didn’t rock the boat. I’d already used up most of the family’s tolerance for political discussion with my comments throughout the weekend about the war, the economy and the environment.

Friday’s edition of The Washington Post carried a great, very positive article in the Style section about DC Lambda Squares, the gay squaredance club with which I used to dance regularly. The first few paragraphs of the article are included below:

The gay square dancers are group-hugging again.

This time, it’s to the last notes of a honky-tonkified version of Bruce Springsteen’s “Pink Cadillac” blaring on the borrowed stereo system, and they’re sweaty and happy and filled to the brim with Chips Ahoys and diet soda. But the truth is, they’ve been hugging all night, and when the music stops in the blue-green basement rec room, they go on hugging and clapping and promenading in the silence.

Which makes you think this is about therapy or unity or something more profound than the shared love of square dancing.

But it’s not.

It really is just about the love of square dancing.

They come to Christ United Methodist Church in Southwest Washington every Wednesday night, and usually the crowd is much bigger than this one, they say. Having finally broken out of formation, the dozen or so middle-age men and women are sitting in kid-size plastic chairs arranged for tomorrow’s Bible study and talking about square dance steps. And square dance picnics. And last weekend’s International Association of Gay Square Dance Clubs convention in San Diego.

These are the DC Lambda Squares, by their account the world’s oldest gay square dance club, and this is a rare moment of youth and vigor for a centuries-old pastime feeling the strains of age. Over the past 20 years, straight square dancing has been in steady decline, and the new square dance–the Lambda Squares dance–was born in Washington and has been growing up gay.

That last paragraph does include an obvious mistake: I don’t believe that DC Lambda Squares is self-described as the “world’s oldest gay squaredance clubs,” though it’s certainly one of the oldest; what the club members may have told the reporter, rather, is that it’s the only squaredance club of any kind, gay or straight, within the District (just as the Times Squares, a sister gay squaredance club, is the only squaredance club within Manhattan).

The article does a very nice job, however, of describing some of the differences between squaredancing in the straight community–where the number of dancers is steadily dropping as the population ages and they do a poor job of attracting new dancers–and in the gay and lesbian community, where the activity seems to be at least holding its own. One explanation, as my friend Karl Jaeckel from the International Association of Gay Square Dance Clubs is quoted: “For the gay square dance community, in addition to just enjoying square dancing, we come together to celebrate who we are as a community,” Jaeckel says. “That aspect isn’t present for the straight square dancers.”

Having noted earlier that “[Squaredancing] is not hip. It is the opposite of hip. It is anti-hip,” the article concludes, “‘See, it’s not easy being a square dancer,’ [Lambda Squares co-founder Samuel] Johnson says. And it’s not. But it’s novel. It’s goofy and homey, uncomplicated, awkward and surprisingly jumpy for its age and reputation. It’s a favorite tin lunchbox, a new pair of gym shoes, something happy and frilly and fun to do on a Wednesday afternoon.”

It is. And it’s also a great way to meet really wonderful, truly friendly people from around the world (I even met several boyfriends through the activity). What the article omits, especially as it specifically says squaredancing is an “uncomplicated” activity, is the mental challenge that squaredancing provides at the higher levels of the activity, when you’ve learned not only several hundred calls, but dozens of additional formations and call-modifying “concepts.” At the highest levels of Challenge squaredancing (squaredancing starts at the Basic and Mainstream levels, then proceeds through Plus, two levels of Advanced, and four levels of Challenge), the activity is less a physical or even purely social one, but more of an intellectual one; in fact, many of the other Challenge-level dancers I know come from a mathematics or computer background.

Now, don’t I feel chagrinned? Here I was talking about my family and the weirdness about today’s cookout, and then it turned out to be a surprise belated (by 353 days) 40th birthday party; apparently my mom had wanted to throw me a 40th birthday party last year, but with my dad hospitalized in Richmond that month, she and I celebrated alone with dinner near the hospital.

When I arrived at the camp, my dad was blowing up black balloons, which I then ended up hanging from the black crepe paper already strung from the ceiling (I’ve got pictures on the digital camera, but no easy way to upload them to my dad’s computer or edit them, so I’ll append them once I’m back home); Mom was paying me back for the same theme my sister and I used for her own 40th birthday. They had hoped I’d not come over until the rest of the family already were there, but I had thought when they left earlier that the subtext was that they wanted me to come over sooner; so much for clear nonverbal communication.

It was a great day, and I was truly surprised; I don’t usually mark birthdays or holidays, so I didn’t expect this at all, particularly just about two weeks’ shy of my 41st birthday. We had lots of cookout food, some of my sister’s great homemade desserts, and cake. The kids went fishing, and the rest of us engaged in my family’s signature n! conversations, where n is the number of people present at a given gathering, and where the winning argument or opinion that holds sway is likely to be merely the one that is loudest or otherwise commands the most attention. My sister said at one point that she wishes we were Greek, having seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding, or Italian: I noted that I didn’t really see any difference between our English/Irish/Scot/Welsh/German/Dutch/French melange and the stereotypes of large Mediterranean families.

But given the couple dozen other voices talking at the same time, I’m not sure she heard me.