Common Sense	Common Sense Archive

I was walking in the woods the other day-- a warm spring day brings out the Thoreau in me. After hiking a bit, I came to this odd parking area, which was the terminus of this single lane access road that came from I do not know where. The parking lot was set up for 20 cars or so. Since it was in the middle of nowhere-- I couldn't imagine anyone using it to park, except in the old-fashioned sense, teens in a car parking to have sex late at night, if they still do. And why shouldn't they?

As I walked through the empty parking lot, I came upon a big lettered sign posted on a metal pole. It read: "Two Hour Parking." I had to stop and ponder. Here was this out-of-the-way parking pit, perhaps of use to the horny teens at night-- when the meter (excepting the Peter-Meter) is not on-- and someone in The Controlling Authority had thought to put up a sign instructing prospective users-- as though in Boston's fancy Back Bay or New York's chi-chi Upper West Side-- that they only get two hours. By what process had this come to pass? Why such a useless mandate? Why pay people to orate against the nothing?

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I went walking on past the concrete and painted parking stripes. But I had to wonder, sparked by this incident: how much of what I wade through in this culture is, in fact, like the sign in the parking lot, just shit and shine-o-la? If someone decided that a sign should go up limiting parking access in a place where it was clear no one would go, what else might persons in similar situations offer me? I pass monuments and symbols and events that have nothing for me. I walk past churches, temples, movie theaters, and malls-- the malls, which I must walk through, drive me crazy. These are our culture's salute to the Pyramids, vast, visible, expensive monuments to a culture of Thanatos, the endless cycle of shopping for things not needed by vendors from-- where? It's the oddest culture, the antithesis of a community-based society. And so I bark.

Then there is the biggest Loch Ness Monster of them all I must circumnavigate every day-- the culture of heterosexuality. I grew up a very horny homosexually-active boy and youth, and the cultural apparatus of heterosexuality was a heavy burden to have imposed, and, like the two-hour sign, none of it made any sense. This was back in the 1950s, when the selling of heterosexuality-- and the demonization of homosexuality-- was at its most frenzied. I happen to think that the culture you are shocked at on first impression is the one you struggle against all your life, even after things change. Of course, the rules and signs of heterosexual regulation themselves changed in my youth-- the 60s-- and the intricate role of engagement and enforcement against sexual dissenters also changed. The overt explosion of the gay & lesbian revolution also changed the discourse and, to some extent, the equation of oppression. The implements of heterosexual manipulation reconfigured, never planning to go out of business. I found that the most clarifying development of all for me-- I never understood the cues of heterosexual culture; certainly understood its punishments, a subject worthy of a study and a book-- was the creation of a gay culture: an active press, theater, community groups, political associations, etc., organic manifestations of people which was called, in the Eastern European countries in the late communist empire, "a civic culture." I am pleased that I have helped contribute to the creation of the gay civic culture, as a writer, explainer, storyteller, jokemeister, publisher, bookseller, and activist.

My world view? The creation of a culture in which the kind of useless and wasteful energy and hegemony displayed by that sign ordering us to observe Two Hour Parking would not come to pass. On the other hand, there is that terrible problem: you have to explain all to every all the time, not just the young, but everyone. Assume nothing. Technology changes, yes, every weekend, this we understand. But other things too. I have a friend who, after giving up the drugs and the drink and the compulsive sexual behaviors, found himself in a Group Therapy situation. The very bright, well-educated group- therapist was a Jewish man. They all liked him. But my friend told me that it came up in conversation that this helpful sage had never heard that Barbra Streisand was a gay icon. Not everyone gets that press release, and I myself miss a few news cycles now and again.

Emblems of culture-- that's what's always ragged me. The wrong designation. The dull and obvious being selected over the clever and sublime-- or in our age, the subversive. It's always stunning to me that the appropriate meets the award-giver. I'm not much on prizes, but a year or so back, when the Nobel Prize for Literature was announced, it so happened that somewhere in Italy, a man, trapped in his car in traffic, heard the news on the radio. He looked into the next lane, saw his friend Dario Fo, and screamed out his window: "Dario! You've just won the Nobel Prize!" I see the emblems of the other culture-- the deliberately uncivic one-- and they are the so-called "Dr." Laura (what ever happened to "first do no harm"?), the one-shot TV show from the Murdoch shit-trough, Who Wants To Marry A Multimillionaire? and the very Reverend Fred Phelps, perfect triangulation of an airless and hostile-- though much hyped-- world, a Mars within. I think two hours at such a space would be more than ample to fill the nose and then move on. Perhaps we should be thankful for the wisdom of the sign.

Author Profile:  Mitzel
	Mitzel was a founding member of the Fag Rag collective, and has been a Guide columnist since 1986. He manages Calamus Books near Boston's South Station.
	Email:	mitzel@calamusbooks.com
	Website:	calamusbooks.com