Up Front by Emma Hart

”If you're girly I'll make you braid my hair and listen to me talk about boys, which believe me I can do for a really long time.”

I wrote that at Bardic Web this week, and it annoyed the hell out of me. Don’t worry: even with context it’d be pretty much impossible to work out why. Basically it comes down to this: language is usually my bitch, so when I can’t make it roll over and do what I want it to, I get cranky. I get especially cranky when the problem is that colloquial English doesn’t work well for bisexuals.

Let me take you on a journey of WTF-scovery. The quote above comes from my favourite character, my best girl Ghet. She’s talking to a friend of hers, Shadow, who is written by another writer. The way we work, as a cross between writing and role-playing, means that we have to be more precise than we might otherwise be in what our characters do and say, so that the other writers don’t get confused. So I have to convey Ghet’s meaning to Shadow’s writer, as well as to other readers.

The problem with the sentence is that, if there was any other option, Ghet wouldn’t say it. She’s bisexual: there’s no reason she’d only want to talk about boys. She’s actually come to Shadow to tell her that she’s starting boffing one of the other women in their party.

Now, if Ghet’s talking about just one gender:

Tall, lean, fit, young, and obviously bright, it was no wonder he’d got into trouble teaching at the Academy. Back in her day, Ghet would have eaten him alive, or at least given him a serious licking.

or the other:

"Mira does not look like you. She's much hotter. Sometimes I regret there's not enough of me to go around; I'd have done your daughter like a dinner. And I eat with my hands."

that’s fine. I’ve never had trouble expressing that when Ghet is talking about a girl, it might be rude. But when it comes to generalisations… you can talk about boys in general, or girls in general, and clearly convey sexual connotation, but as soon as you use the word ‘people’ the implied meaning of the sentence changes completely.

Going back to our original sentence, “talk about boys” clearly means “talk about males that I fancy in a sexual context”. But if I change it to a more accurate “talk about people”, suddenly the implication is gossip: the sexual connotation vanishes completely. I could say ‘lovers’ but that’s not what I mean either: many of the people under discussion wouldn’t be people she’d slept with. (Yet.)

Writing Ghet, I fall over this problem often enough that it really bothers me. I can’t seem to find any smooth, natural way to convey a bisexual interest so that my fellow writers clearly understand what I mean. Compare the connotation of “I’ve known a lot of men in my time” and “I’ve known a lot of people”.

Usually when I have a writing problem like this I try to find out what other writers do in this situation. Alright, I ask myself, What Would Joss Do? Trouble is, there are no bisexuals. (Please note: this is a link to TV Tropes. If you haven't been there before, you're at work, or short on time, please finish the column before following the link. You won't be back for hours.)

Well, there’s one. One writer, one show, one stand-out ‘shag anything if it’s gorgeous enough’ character. Now, I don’t want anyone thinking I’m a big girl’s blouse who gets all hysterically over-emotional, but when I first saw Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor Who, I cried. Thanks to the blog age, I can actually go back and see what I thought at the time. (Yes, a large portion of this column is recycled quotations, but at least I’m only plagiarising myself.)

But the most important thing about Captain Jack for me is that he's bi. There is no way I can convey to a straight white able-bodied Christian what's it's like to never see yourself depicted on television. To not exist. It's like the way right-handed people never notice all the little things about the way the world is set up that make life difficult for left-handed people. It's not prejudice, it's just a blind spot.

The step after not being depicted at all is stereotyping. Gays are stereotyped as camp, we've all seen that. Bis are stereotyped as promiscuous on the very rare occasions that you do see them. Yeah, I'd like to see a day when a character just happens to be bi and it's present but not a big deal. The closest I can come to that is, say, the Jewish characters in the West Wing. You know they're Jewish, but it's not constantly right there in your face, they're not wearing a 'hello I'm Jewish' badge, and they're all different people, different characters.

However, in the meantime, I have to say I rush on seeing Captain Jack.

All of which seems to mean I should be stalking Russell T. Davies.

Except it’s not really his problem. Davies is gay. John Barrowman is gay. Between them they’ve already given us a fabulous role model. I’m the one who’s bisexual. I’m the one whose People language is failing. There must be a way around this. I’m open to suggestions. (Of course I am, you know what those bloody bisexuals are like.)

First, a brief note. This column contains no spoilers for last night’s episode of Outrageous Fortune. I’m not going to promise, or even ask, that the comment thread be that way. What you read from this point on is your own responsibility.

There are lots of reasons I love Outrageous Fortune. It’d be rude not to, really, after people went to so much trouble to make a dramatisation of a couple of years of my life. Alright, the names have been changed, but like I’m not going to recognise ‘Pascalle’ and ‘Munter’ and ‘Van’. I’m just relieved that it wasn’t me who slept with ‘Aaron Spiller’, it was ‘Pascalle’. Alright, ‘Munter’ and ‘Van’ I’ll cop to, but Aaron’s name in Real Life was Rhys and the resemblance is fucking uncanny.

Primarily, though, I’d like to give Outrageous Fortune the first ever Up Front Award for Services to Sex (Television).

The way sex is portrayed on television in general drives me to drink, and I suppose I should be grateful for the ride but I’m not. The consistency of presentation is remarkable given the level of bullshit, which is nearly total.

A couple of U.S. cable-only shows and British gay-specific dramas aside, you’ll only see one kind of sex on television. It will involve one attractive woman and one attractive man, aged between twenty and forty. There will be kissing, but no foreplay. Foreplay is rude. Actual intercourse will take place in the missionary position, unless the woman in question is a bit, y’know, ‘forthright’, in which case there may be reverse missionary. There will be a little bit of gasping and almost certainly some hands clutching at sheets, because sex is a hands-free activity. Sex on television is like actual sex, but with all the fun and interesting stuff removed.

After sex, people lie in bed wearing a minimum of two pieces of clothing each, and both genders keep their chests covered. Children might be watching and we wouldn’t want them to get corrupted by nipples.

Nobody has rude sex, or gay sex. You can have gay characters, and even gay couples, but you can’t have gay lovers.

Outrageous Fortune took what I sometimes suspect is an actual written-down manifesto on the televisual presentation of sex and gleefully set fire to it like you would a wanker’s townhouse. People of all ages and body types and predilections have sex. They do it standing up, sitting down, kneeling, against walls, gleefully, playfully, viciously, and as an expression of their characters. The infamous ‘finger licking good’ scene showed just how shockingly rare actual foreplay is on television. Bless them, they were even doing ‘porn for women’ before it got trendy.

There are lots of other reasons to love it, of course. The name of every road and school is going to make me giggle. ‘Gleaning’ has re-entered people’s vocabularies. And even when they tell you they have a big really shocking surprise up their sleeves, it still turns out to be a really shocking surprise. Now that takes real talent.

In a haze of weary convalescence, it nearly escaped my attention that this is one of my favourite Weeks: Banned Books Week. It’s a celebration of stupidity and small-mindedness and a great excuse to laugh at book burners.

When the children were smaller, I used to make a point of reading to them from something on the U.S. Most Frequently Challenged list. It wasn’t difficult, just a matter of skimming the list until I hit something that was already on our shelves: Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen perhaps. I assume it’s there because of the penis.

As they got older, this was no longer necessary. I could guarantee that, left to their own devices, they’d be reading from that list anyway. Both kids loved Captain Underpants and Harry Potter. Now they’re in their early teens, and if there was a book you found profoundly influential at that age, it’s probably on that list.

Which is about where it might start to get a bit more tricky. The reason To Kill a Mockingbird is there is because it’s been challenged, often successfully, because of its racism. This is the same problem Huckleberry Finn and Tintin in the Congo have: the pressure to ban is not coming from religious conservatives, but from people who find the books’ dated racial attitudes offensive. As adults, we can allow for the attitudes of the time when we read, but can children? We understand that there are limits for what goes into a school library, right, even liberals? It’s not a free for all, but a discussion about where the limits are.

And I’m sure some of the many people who objected to And Tango Makes Three, a book about two male penguins hatching and raising a baby penguin, genuinely did it because they felt the book was ‘anti-ethnic’ rather than for any seemingly more obvious reason.

Sometimes it’s all a bit more <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joan-e-bertin/banned-books-week-still-n_b_302248.html
" target="_blank">overt and depressing:

This February in West Bend, Wisconsin, a local couple filed a petition calling for the Library Advisory Board to remove or label several Young Adult titles, including Francesca Lia Block's Baby Be Bop and Stephen Chobsky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower, because they felt that all the books in the young-adult section that dealt with homosexuality were "gay-affirming." The couple also requested that the library build a collection of books by "ex-gays" in order to achieve an ideological balance.

As this debate raged on, four members of the library board were not reappointed because of accusations that they were "promoting the indoctrination of the gay agenda." Then the Christian Civil Liberties Union Milwaukee branch filed a lawsuit against the city of West Bend, complaining that the mere presence of some of the young adult books in the library caused "mental and emotional harm" to the elderly plaintiffs. The CCLU seeks $30,000 in damages per plaintiff, the mayor's resignation, and the removal of the books for a public burning

But that’s America, and we all know Americans are crazy, right? Things are better here, we can point and laugh in perfect security. My daughter is head librarian at a school with a large number of conservative Christian families, and nobody has tried to get any Harry Potter or Philip Pullman removed. Christian organisations here don’t seem to push book challenging like they do in the States.

We still ban books though. Here’s a list (warning: Excel spreadsheet) from the Office of Film and Literature Classification of books that have been either banned or restricted since 1965. Have fun with it. Right at the top, you’ll find one of my all-time favourite New Zealand censorship decisions: the restriction of Justine to “psychologists or psychiatrists or any adult bone fide student of literature or philosophy”. Fitting that qualification obviously made me immune to whatever damage would otherwise have been done to me by reading both that and The Story of O, which received the same classification two years later.

If, however, anyone knows anything about Why Was He Born So Beautiful and Other Rugby Songs, banned in 1968, I’ve love to hear it. Also, in 1992, The Limericks of Aleister Crowley was ‘restricted to Tony Hutchins’. Tony? WTF is with that?

Later restrictions seem to break down into three neat categories: scary scary guns (Expedient Homemade Firearms: the 9mm Submachine Gun), drugs (The Construction and Operation of Clandestine Drug Laboratories) and ‘deviant’ sex (at least, I’m kind of hoping that’s what A Librarian Enslaved is).

And once a book is banned, that’s it, right? There’s no way to get hold of it after that. It’s not like anyone’s compiling pages of links to ebooks of banned and challenged texts. Imagine the lengths you’d have to go to to get hold of

Justine.

Every now and then, I need to reassure someone that I’m comfortable in my skin – I’m happy to take my shirt off for treatment or tattooing if that makes things easier, and no I don’t need the curtain drawn or a female practitioner or any kind of inconvenient awkwardness to preserve my modesty.

Telling relative strangers that I don’t have any modesty sometimes disconcerts them, so over the years I’ve come up with what seems to be a sound tactic. It might even be the actual reason I feel this way. I just tell them I was Raised By Actors.

My earliest memory of my mother’s involvement with the theatre is of being utterly outraged that I wasn’t allowed to go and see her in The Crucible. I think I was about six or seven at the time. I can’t have been much older, however, before I was spending hours hanging out at rehearsals. I could be counted on to read quietly in a corner, and sometimes I was even allowed to prompt. There was always somebody around who had a scene off where they could entertain me for a bit, and theatre people are great with kids.

I was eight, I think, when I appeared on stage for the first time – a tiny cameo in The Visit. I don’t remember much about the play, except an air of grim creepiness and a sound effect of a panther which I might be imagining. I had long braids and a pretty Tyrolean dress, and I had to present Claire with a bunch of flowers. I was taught to curtsey properly for this play, something I can still do.

So I spent about two minutes of every night on stage, and the rest of the time out the back in the dressing room, which was full of Asterix books, and people of both sexes undressing with total matter-of-factness. This made much more sense to me than the segregation of changing for school, which I’d never understood.

By the time Mum was one of the mad murdering sisters in Arsenic and Old Lace, I was a full-fledged member of the greater theatre family. I understood the plays now, I loved the language and the sets and costumes, and the smell of the theatre. Set-wrecking parties were enormous fun. I loved ushering: there’s no greater filing thrill than getting to file people. When I ushered for Richard III, we divided the audience with a central aisle and gave one side white roses and the other red. Some people got fascinatingly upset by this and insisted on wearing the rose of the other side.

At eleven I was Peaseblossom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, setting myself up for a lifetime of being completely unable to understand why people were completely unable to understand Shakespeare. (I was possibly also the least convincing light gymnastic fairy ever to clomp across a stage.) The South Canterbury Drama League did a Shakespeare play every second year all through my teens, and either I was in it, or my mother was in it, or both, and there’d be an ex-boyfriend and a couple of my teachers as well.

The Theatre was a family, and while there were no patches, there was certainly a sense that you looked out for each other. So when I ran into a fellow cast member in The Old Mill nightclub one night we were both on the pull and I knew he was married and he knew I was sixteen, we got by on a nod and a wink and an absolute unspoken expectation that nobody was going to tell anybody anything. The only exception to this I can remember was the time my mother made a point of taking aside me and a Young Man I was striking up a Friendship with, and pointing out to each of us how old the other was. The ‘28’ was a little scary, but I’m pretty sure it was the ‘15’ that put the kibosh on the whole thing.

It was when I played Nerissa in The Merchant of Venice when I was sixteen that I realised something quite important: I wasn’t a very good actor. My mother is so talented she made it all look completely effortless, and I’d been running lines with her since I could read, but I hadn’t inherited her ability and I had no idea how to work at it. I loved it, but I could never excel at it.

In the school production of The Tempest the next year, I was Juno – or, according to one audience member the day Timaru Boys High came to watch, ‘the fairy with the big tits’. The make-up girls had, at the insistence of the director’s husband who was playing Prospero, painted a helpful arrow-shaped leaf above my cleavage. I waitressed a dinner-theatre production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in what was basically a French maid’s outfit.

Then I left for uni, and left Theatre behind me. I resisted an actor-friend’s attempts to get me to audition for a part in The Forsyte Saga - the love-interest, co-incidentally, of the part he was auditioning for. My knowledge of theatre-craft got me some sterling marks in a couple of English essays, but that was about it.

I thought I hardly missed it. But when my mother told me that one of the English teachers I talked about in my last column was in their latest play, and perhaps I should drop in on a rehearsal when I was down next week, it all came flooding back to me. I could smell it again: paint and putty, cold cream and musty fabric, wine and cigarettes. (When I was a child, you could still smoke in the foyer at half-time. I believe that’s why plays have act breaks.) I miss the building itself, from the flies to the uni-sex dressing room. I find myself ridiculously excited about going back.

Also, everything you’ve ever heard about actors is true.

Some people will go to great lengths to avoid a high school reunion

Had I not been laid up in hospital last weekend, I might have been at my high school reunion. Alright, that’s not true. I didn’t schedule my brain surgery in order to avoid the school reunion, because I didn’t need to. There was no way I was going. I’d forgotten it was on until I got that message from an old school friend on Facebook.

What I found oddest about the whole thing was that I actually did consider going at one point. It almost seemed compulsory. On reflection, I realised two things. One, if I went there was absolutely no way I could avoid people I could never stand who were crashing wastes of oxygen twenty years ago and still would be. And two, if there were people I would like to see again, I could actually do that any time I wanted, without any chance of encountering people from Group A. In that sense, it was a useful wake-up call.

Even during my teenage years, a lot of my attention was focused on things outside of school – politics, partners, acting. It was hard to peel all of that away and realise that actually the school itself wasn’t all that bad.

I chose my own high school, though there wasn’t really any choice. There was no way I was going to Girls’ High. It wasn’t even that I had a desperate need to have boys around, it was just that I couldn’t understand single-sex schools at all. It made about as much sense to me as having a school just for people with blue eyes or brown hair. Also, Mountainview was going to teach me Latin. They didn’t: my arrival coincided with Latin’s departure. My first year options included horticulture and agriculture. The school had its very own flock of sheep. I had to settle for teaching myself French in a cupboard.

Mountainview was great, really. It was a brand new school: it took the kids who got expelled from the ‘good’ schools, and yet it was clean and cared for. There wasn’t a staircase in the place. The only vertical things were the forms, and that was a system that worked. When I was a 7th former, I was a peer support leader, and there was a real sense of looking after ‘our’ thirds. Adults were scared of kids from our school, the uniform was practically a gang patch.

I was unpopular, and bullied. A lot of the time I was hugely unhappy. There were people, both staff and students, who seemed to take real pleasure in making other people miserable. I thought I was hideous, and this is the only surviving photo of me from those years where I’m not in costume. It was taken just before the prom in 5th form.

Anyway, in the spirit of not-reunion, the Good Things. I had some sterling teachers. Paul Rosanowski had an invisible dog he used to send troublesome students out to walk. It was tragically run over and replaced with an invisible giraffe. He drove the senior staff crazy, but the kids loved him. We also had huge respect for John Fitzsimons, the only teacher who ever got called ‘sir’. Any kid giving him grief would be taken aside and ‘sorted out’ by some of Fitz’s larger and scarier fans. He taught English and took the Drama club, and there was a tweedy Englishness about him that should have got him ridiculed, but we loved him.

My personal difference-maker was John Brown, the biology teacher. He loved his subject, actually liked teaching, would go off on huge tangents, extend us, indulge our curiosity, and we’d end up hugely behind on the curriculum, but people would stay half an hour or an hour after school to finish stuff. I adored him. I also adored his eldest son, who was in my year, and the other top bio student. Competition and naked lust are both healthy things, but it’s probably healthier when everyone’s sure which member of a family you fancy the most.

What distinguished those three, I think, was the sense that they cared about us as people. We weren’t just ‘students’ to them. They would have conversations with us, and they could communicate a passion for their subjects. I actually got better marks under the English teacher I hated, but the marks just weren’t the point. (Also, she cast me as Helen in A Taste of Honey. Ahahahahaha fuck you.)

Mountainview was a small school, and by the time our year reached 7th form, there were only forty-five of us left. All the previous little cliques broke down to some extent. It was quite surreal to realise that the ‘popular’ kids weren’t happy and none of their friends actually liked them, and a valuable lesson

So thanks, high school, for not sucking as much as you could have. But given the choice between a school reunion and brain surgery, Sharon was completely right. I will go to great lengths.