The Invention of Sanity, Bauer, October 2014

The Invention of Sanity 

Robin Williams’s passing has affected everyone within our ‘sane’ society. As a result, maybe those Victorian definitions of sanity really need to be re-questioned - after all the Victorians invented ‘sanity’. I consider myself to be bonkers, but I know that’s only measured by what the rest of the world sees as sane. And let’s face it Homosexuality was still considered a mental illness until the 1970’s – after that date, I have no excuse.

“Williams had everything and he was just so… funny... but I suppose depression is an unknown disease….” 

Roll on the great morality debate as the world continues to pathologize Williams’s mental state. This misunderstanding tells us more about the ignorance surrounding issues of ‘other’ mental states than a failure to recognize them within ourselves. Hence my refusal to personally cite “mental”, illness, disease or health.

Cocaine rots the brain and destroys the nervous system. Not the best way to die, but who cares when you’re approaching hypernormality? Let’s collectively condemn the evil users right now for screwing up the world. Phew, doesn’t that make you feel saner already?

But apparently this isn’t a legal or moral issue, so we’re still left with the questions of what ‘mental illness’ actually is.

Here’s the easiest scenario; Robin Williams had fallen off the wagon after 30 years sober. He didn’t want to go through that withdrawal again so he made the choice to die instead. A personal choice that he couldn’t disclose. And to fail is a felony.

Thirty years earlier he would have also been arrested for having a toot backstage to get him beyond the curtain where, after the first laugh, he would have been flying on adrenalin.

Brain frying drugs and criminality aside - lets go back even further. The chances are that Robin Williams was something of a show-off at school - making everyone laugh as a mini version of the buffoon he eventually became.

Today they call it ADHD or something or other but either way we were (and still are) forced to change. The biggest change happened when it became illegal for teachers to beat the crap out of kids, thus permitting the drug companies to step in and dish out amphetamines to hyperactive children like M&M’s.

My generation never had that that amount of Pharma intervention, so many self-medicated themselves into the world of sanity with rapid cyclicals – speed rather than weed. Of course it would have been easier to let everyone just be, (suggesting that we were sane to begin with) and to let us live our lives creatively while supporting the lows and the highs - the only real De facto currency of the creative. 

A raft of media personalities have spoken publically about their ‘mental health’ and bipolarity - Stephen Fry and his university mate Tony Slattery to name but a few. And I’m not throwing in all things gay here but we also have to include the ‘close to genius’ Alexander (Lee) McQueen into the same mix.

Stephen Fry has made television programmes about his bipolarity, interviewing the likes of Robbie Williams – someone else on the hit list – and someone else who has taken grandiose quantities of that evil cocaine stuff. But it’s not fair to say that they were merely ‘addicts’, or that they ‘repented’ via recovery - that’s just another Victorian package. And some say they deserve such a crash for being rich, successful and having more money than sense. But contrition aside, nobody still admits to ‘using’ as a product of their own self-regulated boyhood.

...nobody still admits to ‘using’ as a product of their own self-regulated boyhood...

Lee McQueen’s passing would not have been a knee jerk decision. Perhaps, like Robin Williams, he had been planning that departure for most of his adult life – perhaps also to be delivered from the isolation and pain of the imposter genius. A wandering child waiting in order to avoid the consequences of his actions on the one person he loved most, the protector who understood him as a child and even more so as an adult. It’s no coincidence that within a week of his mother’s passing Lee McQueen was also dead - the genius voided.

Let’s take Robin Williams, McQueen and everyone else I’ve mentioned back to kindergarten and watch them through the window unobserved. Do they look like normal kids? You bet your sweet ass they don’t. They look and act like kids that knew there were no barriers. Kids who believed they could do anything.

But not long afterwards, these naughty kids began to have their sanity questioned. As usual, because they knew them best, the parents fail to see anything wrong with their child and so defensively lock horns with the authorities - while maintaining a private discourse of support with their child.   
Nevertheless, in the big world the child begins to interpret their own creative behavior as disruptive and so begins a process of self-regulation to fit in with the ‘normal.’  Their lost identities now appearing before them as a self-neglect – as a lie to the self. It’s easy to jump forward to 2014 and observe the hugely wealthy, much loved comic genius Robin Williams feeling as if he’s been dying from the same neglect.

The ‘loony bin’, as a system of ordering the sane, creative or disruptive into boxes is no more. Maybe we should also abolish the Victorian labels and judgments surrounding ‘addicts’ while we're at it.  Or, for that matter, Pharmaceutical decisions by interventionists whose only real motor is a big payday.

A dressing down. Gscene Magazine August 2014

The ongoing end of privacy

The bastard brother of the ‘end of privacy’ (August 2013 article) seems to have become the new age of the 15-second celebrity. Everyone will be now be famous for as long as it takes to create a vine or write a response comment in a ‘Comments are free’ section of a national blather-reel. I mean, this is the breeding ground of dissent is it not? But while everyone purges their rhetoric away online, White Papers regarding privacy and corporate surveillance and tracking are slipping through parliament unnoticed. Not the first time. Thatcher did it with the Falklands war, just as Reagan followed with Grenada. Then they started their reelection campaigns to tally in with the assured victories. But as we post, while we all think that the readership are taking note of our well-crafted often hilarious comments and, while thinking that we’re contributing to a greater debate; ‘meta laws’ keep rolling on in the background.

Do you feel better now that you’ve vented in your favorite paper? Good. Well, you might as well treat it as therapy because unfortunately nobody is listening. Perhaps what your outpouring is actually doing, is keeping you away from any real engagement in the issues you care so deeply about. For example, across the spectrum of the main US recent news, and although the imagery of the occurrences in Gaza were exploited endlessly, they somehow failed to show the extent of the protests taking place around the world. This could mean that you are more likely to post a comment on a quasi-liberal digi-broadsheet than participate in any physical show of unity. Ah, well. Looks like another day I can stay at home on my own and view it all through the telescreen -yet still have my say. And be hilarious.

It’s amazing the catharsis we feel by just pressing the return key and heading for a celebratory cup of Horlicks.

Here’s an example of a permitted comment:

In a study of 397 gay, lesbian and bisexual men and women they discovered that problematic alcohol and substance use were positively related to shame and internalised heterosexism. There are probably other determinants of harmful use of alcohol and other drugs, but I'm guessing shame, poor self-esteem and lack of confidence play a significant part.

This is linked to an academic journal, which you will never read to check the data. This was probably written by the postee under a pseudonym and seen as a way to disseminate their own research. This example no doubt relies on cross sections of a banging gay bar culture in a major city, a random sample of which does not equate to gay culture unless all of ‘gay culture’ lives in the same gay bar.

But perhaps the worst crime from a government to its people is when they piggy-back terrorist acts in order to set an extreme agenda on the over-compensation of surveillance.  It is here that they cite that, all of us – yes, even that old lady in the care home - could be potential terrorists. Then as happens, every liberty is stripped and we are humiliated into these new ‘protective’ laws. 

Then, as happens, every liberty is stripped and we are ‘humiliated’ into these new ‘protective’ laws.

Only last month, at an international airport, I stood behind a woman accompanied by her twelve-year-old daughter. The girl was in tears as we waited in line at the newly installed full-body scanner. When it was her turn, the girl held up the line and the security guards grew restless, the mother lost her cool and dragged the now wailing girl up the steps to the scanner. The scene was quite odd. As the girl stood cruciform behind the Perspex shield she dropped her head in shame. Not only the ‘secret’ room who scanned her digitally naked body but the airport staff and customers did the same to the clothed version on the pedestal before them. After a few seconds she crept down from the booth, sobbing, to collect her iPod and the too-old for her holiday shoes from the plastic tray - with the weight of a hundred eyes upon her.  

But we have to concede, since there have apparently been jihadi much younger than this girl, I’m sure everybody felt a little more secure on the flight.

Here’s another post that proves my point:

…Any anti Surveillance law will be upheld by royal prerogative (as the dispossession of the Chagos islanders was). The stakeholders in the status quo need a Stasi to mitigate the risks of networked democracy; in the age when protests can go viral, it's vital that the security services are able to disperse protest movements and detect potential troublemakers before they can cause trouble and have the means to bring very precise amounts of force to bear against them as soon as they start doing something; hence mass surveillance.

Right track, wrong argument. The real issue here is that of Chagossian diaspora and their apparent treatment by the Queen. Nevertheless, since this person is only online packaging his real gripe into a collective dolly mixture of vent and anger, people still are still agreeing - tick the like box, they just forget it as a confirmation of their own views. And the postee has his 15 second fix of acceptance. 

As the world heats up, so do the unleashing of newer surveillance laws. France, home of Foucauldian Panopticism is objecting strongly as are many European countries - but not Britain and the US. They are passing legislation by stealth while we’re all Wikipedi-ing, WTF the Chagos Islanders actually were.

There, it's already midnight and we’ve all missed the protest.

A goodnight story for humanity. Gscene Magazine, August 2014. Charlie Bauer Phd

A Goodnight Story for Humanity

Long ago, in a land far away there was a young prince (James Murdoch) who was soon to be given his old fathers kingdom. But first there was a task he needed to do to prove himself worthy. He had to take a journey to a far away land and bring back the world’s biggest diamond (BBC) for the kings treasure chest. This huge diamond had been protected fiercely by the people of the land. They all knew - because of an old spell - that if it were ever taken away, they would all lose their voices and never be able to speak to one another again. 

So, the prince decided that he would go to the country peacefully and try to convince the people (MacTaggart lecture, 2009) that the diamond was too big and that they’d all be better off without it. The people, who believed anything a prince would ever tell them, thought long and hard. Maybe he had a point. They were, after all, paying taxes to keep the diamond in its glass case on a hill by the ocean. And even if they wanted to see it, it would cost them more than 2 shillings (License fee). But the prince deceived the people because he knew that once the king had the diamond he then owned all of the diamonds in the world. 

However, in the woods lived a bunch of merry men (The Guardian) who could see the prince’s cunning plan. They decided to let the people know that the prince was evil and that his father’s court did very bad things to poor people’s children (Milly Dowler’s voice mail). If there was anything the people didn’t like, it was if someone stole their secrets or if children were harmed in any way. Even local gossip could drive the people to seek revenge on innocent people (NOTW name and shame campaign: 2000). 

The merry men told the people that the king had a wizard (Andy Coulson) who could magically capture the people’s secrets (phone hacking) and when they were told this they turned their backs on the King and wouldn’t let him near their diamond. They captured the king’s princess (Rebekah Brooks) and threatened to banish all of his friends from the land. 

Defeated, the prince returned to his father’s kingdom. The king was very angry because the prince had not only failed in all his efforts to capture the diamond but he also had the princess thrown into jail. The prince was shamed and went to the dungeon to seek solace with his dukes. He would never get his fathers crown and felt he was a bad prince.
Later, around the campfire, one of the dukes said he remembered that there was someone who guarded the diamond who hated children (Jimmy Saville). Maybe if they could tell the people, they wouldn’t like the diamond anymore. 

The prince laughed heartily, for he knew that this news would greatly please the king. So, from his castle far away, (Australia) the prince began to gather all of the dukes information together and let all the people know about the evil guard. As he did this, other people told him there were even more guards who hated children. And because the prince was very rich (because he was, after all, a prince) he bought up all the secrets in the land. Eventually, the prince convinced the king that the princess would never be free unless he himself went to save her. The King agreed, finally glad that his son was in command of his own fortitude. 

Eventually, one by one, all of the guards of the diamond were unveiled as children haters - the thing that the people would never forgive. So, as the prince had prophesized, the people began to hate their diamond and even though it was not the diamonds fault because diamonds cannot talk - they turned their backs on it. 

On the day that the princess was going to be put to death by a poisonous snake, the prince rode into town with his dukes. He gave the judge a beautiful new robe and told both him and the poor people who would decide the princess’s fate, that the real enemy was the diamond. Then he gave them all the parchments that his dukes had given him and they were finally convinced.

When the princess’s life was spared, the prince sent word to his father that he had conquered the diamond, saved the princess and killed the guards all in one day.
And the people rejoiced because all the evil guards had gone and all of the children could finally live in peace again.
And the merry men, defeated, went back into the woods in shame because they’d been let down by the people they’d only wanted to help. They knew that if only they could afford to buy the judge a new robe they would never have been beaten by the prince. 

And, for the first time in a hundred and one years, the diamond grew dim and the king let it roll into the ocean.
‘But father, I thought the diamond was everything you’ve ever wanted?’ The Prince said.
‘No. That diamond was worthless to me all along,’ the king replied, ‘I can die happy now that you have learnt the value of things, my son - for that was your quest’. And the prince knelt and the king placed his crown (News International) onto his head. 

It came to pass that the king never wanted the diamond for his treasure chest after all; he just wanted all the people to follow him. And even though the people lost their voices and were unable to speak to one another again, they all lived happily ever after. 

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KPFK. Hollywood. 2014

Homonormativity is a virus. Bauer. Gscene Magazine. July 2014

Homonormativity is a virus     July 2014       GScene Magazine

 Hang on, what’s all this about using wet wipes on homos? Agh. According to research somewhere in Eastern England last month (or the month before, sometime), the heterosexually defined needed to cleanse themselves when they were in any contact with a homosexual. Why didn’t I think of that? Because, maybe we are of the same filth.

Let me explain, firstly, I’m not at all knowledgeable in any of this. I lied myself though one degree and bought my PhD online from the University of Throckmorton, Texas (best $300 I’ve ever spent). What I can gather in between bumps of K, is that a few spotty straight identifying teenagers were asked for their reactions if they had to borrow a phone from a gay man and they said they’d rather wipe their arse with it. And? Then some Spanish students were asked would they rather accept a pencil or a Wetwipe in the same circumstances. They chose to wipe.

I still have a problem with, for example, Latin cultures and the proliferation of anti-gay sentiment through the Christian scriptures handed down by closeted priests to underpaid and overworked parents. My parents were almost the same but northern white-trash Catholics. I’m sure, like my parents, they thanked god daily that both school and the church (which were comingled) existed so that they could get the kids off their hands and earn some money to feed the little sods. They had no thoughts about social complexities and homophobia, they assumed that their kids were straight because they themselves had never met anyone gay.

Then some Polish students were offered the same test and, front to back, wiped away. Ditto the above but now with the political ataxia of communism thrown in. Yet another ‘Homophobic’ doctrine tossed at parents who have missed the modernist boat of social reform. Probably this is why their children are choosing a British education in the first place.

"Metastasizing through the rhetoric of their leaders into the ears of children"

It seems pretty inconclusive on a conscious level; the parent cultures embedded identities in political doctrine and the church - despite any heteronormatvity or homophobia thrown in - have influenced their own children’s fear of the queer. Nothing else. Metastasizing through the rhetoric of their leaders into the ears of children.

As a sometimes fellator, sometimes drug-fuelled top, sometimes prizewinner in local Macramé contests, I will not take any of this seriously. After all, I’m sure most of these badly-formed students who are rich enough to leave their motherland for a cheap English education, are in for a rude awakening. Losing that deep entrenched primitivism is bloody hard work. I know it; I come from a good, solid British working-class culture whose parents never read a book and a place where a hippie told me not to say the ‘N’ word when I was fifteen.

When it comes to issues of contracting HIV from phones and toilet seats, actions speak louder than words. I’ve snogged all of my positive friends, even when HIV didn’t have a name. And let’s face it Diana kissing the AIDS patient did more for the love and care of the ‘soon to be dead’ than any of Thatcher and Saatchi’s AIDS campaigns ever did. Any studies around this are moot. In the so-called, most 'primitive' societies of central Africa with all the western strangulation of expensive medication, they have no choice but to use the same equipment as the dying. These messages are still sent through idiot parents, cultures, religions and political doctrines, where the homophobic slurry still seeps.

I think the most fascinating theory, the reference for which I’ve got written on a Post-it near the cat tray and can’t be arsed to get at this point, is that gay men collectively think we’re all a bit 'ikky'. Gay men will always think that, we love it. The one remaining right we have is that we can be judgmental and laugh it off. I know groups of gay men who pay handsomely for some of the ’filth’ that we are supposed to do to each other. No social meaning involved. And some of them don’t even wash their hands afterwards before calling for pizza.

As Bifuria D’sconza recently said, “When everyone realised it’s white, straight men that have screwed up the planet; everyone else - faggots and clown faces too - grouped together to knock those assholes down. Sista - Homosexuals ain’t the problem. White, male, bankers are. And the governments that feed them too. I thought everyone knew that. Where you been livin?”

Some friends of mine just love waking up in their own vomit after being dragged, face down out of Legends at 3 AM.  They go back again and again and who can deny, what is to them, such an important part of their identity. How many times have I ended up in a piss club and sobered up with the texts from friends the next day calling me all the dirty scrubbers under the sun? How many times have I just laughed at such filth and got on with my daily, unconscious homo existence. We don’t scorn ‘filth’, we accept it. Because, as Lola once said, ‘that’s just how we are’.

Filth, like homosexuality, is not a mutable platform for the degenerates and there is no way we can bend – whether the Nazis are pounding at the door or not. To suggest that we can change decries the fact that all those queers killed in the Holocaust had some form of choice in the matter to 'man up.'

Here we have spelled out what homophobia isn’t. It’s not about gender policing or anything else. It’s about getting rid of essentialism within political doctrines and religions spewed from the primitive masses and the conservative men (hang on, they’re the bankers aren’t they?) and replacing it with homonormativity, its’ sworn sister.

Twitter: @charliebauerphd

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The Tranny Pack. Gscene Magazine. June 2014

The Tranny Pack. Charlie Bauer PhD. Gscene Magazine. June 2014 

Fever rages in the US about Trans terminology on RuPaul's TV show, 'Drag Race.' Again, and I bleat on about this ad infinitum - it all comes down to the language. I mean to say - even the title is a direct association with macho culture. Now there's subversion at work.  

I say again, I can chose to say that I’m a dirty, stinkin,’ rotten, filthy homo (because I am). Jaysus - even my friends call me this. But if someone else called me it in the street? Hmmm. Well, I’ve realised by now that they only want a reaction from me, so I just shove my pudenda high and head off along my way. But sometimes it’s different. In that scream across the street, there’s usually a morsel of hatred. If you respond, then you open up the (usually violent) conversation that ensues. If you’re alone, vulnerable and/or off your face, it can get very nasty, very quickly.

Before the big homogenization of the LGBTQI… culture that happened as result of HIV and AIDS - in my hometown, at least, it was common for women to be referred to by gay men as ‘Fish’. I’m not getting into any prosaic reasons why this could be, other than to say it was yet another barrier in the breaking down the terminology of the closet.

And we’ve always reclaimed words, the fact that RuPaul chooses to do that in mainstream media is a debate within itself. The fact that a Black Trans person is up there and accepted within mainstream cultural media, surely goes somewhere to answering the visibility question. Misogyny towards Trans women exists and is still very real, but this is not that, so put down that claw-hammer for lord’s sake.

As you know, again old-fashioned of me, but I’m a big fan of contextualization. And Vaudeville. And RuPaul is modern Vaudeville. She’s that wonderful intertext between the mainstream and the street. That humor that surrounds us and is aimed back at ourselves, is only received from a point of privileged power. As a matter of note, take a look at the way Jewish humor works - the most sophisticated humor on the planet, yet never taken literally. Even an old goy like myself is in on those jokes. Whoops – I’ve mentioned it – humor – that dirty word, again.

RuPaul has only ever exploited RuPaul. RuPaul has not changed gender as she has become famous to gain a wider audience. RuPaul still isn’t compromising. The battles for Trans people to be here are hard fought and hard won and RuPaul had that same fight. A fight that was started when the, then lowest common denominators, - the drag queens and the whores - pushed back on June 29^th 1969 at The Stonewall Inn.

Granted, nothing has been helped by the freak show/drag show of daytime television but the community has not been put back by the mention of the word Tranny and She-male on American Telly, sorry, television. Granted, this terminology was generated within the heterosphere, but it has also been used as an internal tool by the ideological separatists in the name of everyone else within the acronym. No-doubt the same separatists that won’t consider self-identifications such as ‘Drag Queen’ or ‘Cross Dresser’ to be included within the Trans umbrella. But this rigidity about who is Trans and who is not fails everyone - Trans being a point of movement and not necessarily a final destination.

So, just to get this straight, lots of people are included within the capital T of the acronym. Gender bender/drag/occasional cross dresser. Straight boys who dress as women, aren’t ridiculing, subverting or kidding anyone, neither are they being disrespectful to the Trans (or female) community. And I’m sure what begins as fun soon changes into something altogether more liberating for some of these men. Anyone who expresses gender differences and fluidity are surely welcome here. Anyone, for whatever reasons and for whatever period of time. Sorry to all concerned but the closet is open for business.

In May 2012 I wrote an article about my meeting with Trans man in Invercargill on the southernmost tip of New Zealand. His partner was in the northern Island but he chose to stay in the frozen south. He told me about the Whakawahine (3^rd gender) within the Māori and Samoan cultures. Cultures who both respect and honor the Trans people within their communities where they stand alongside warriors.  In the west, the war paint is somewhat different.

I also remember an episode that took place in South Wales in the early hours of October 3^rd, 2009. Drunken Dean Gardener and Jason Fender taunted a pair of cross-dressed men who were walking along the street in wigs, short skirts and high heels. When bare-chested Gardener threw a punch, one of the men landed two lightning quick blows, rendering Gardener and Fender unconscious in under 30 seconds. The cross-dressers regained their composure, linked arms and wandered off again into the night.

The police were eventually called and all concerned were, of course, arrested including the cross-dressing cage fighters the straight boys chose to pick on that night.

The verdict? Gardner and Fender were tagged and given community orders as a result of their Trans-phobic aggression, while the cage fighters walked free. And nobody mentioned the fact they were dressed as, or identified themselves as women.

www.soundcloud.com/thewholeworld

Interview with Don Bachardy. Charlie Bauer PhD talks about love, Isherwood, praise of older men and love letters