Cocky

 Ok.  I have to stop crying.  

Maybe it will help to tell a story about the last time in my life when I felt close to being this alone -- my first quarter at the University of Utah.  I moved down there on my own in 1984, separated from both my spouse and my young lover, driving the 160 miles north on alternating weekends to visit each; living in an awful, cockroach-infested apartment with no phone so I needed to make calls from the phone box on the corner of Third and Third downtown.  It was a terrible, hard quarter and I survived.  So I'm sure I'll get through this current agony.  To do so, it might help to tell the story of "Kake," pronounced "Cocky."  Maybe telling this story will remind me that I am strong as a 1979 Castro Clone.

My very first graduate paper in the doctoral program at the University of Utah (1984) was an analysis of three pamphlets about "Kake".

Who is Kake (Cocky)?  Kake is a leatherman created by famous cartoon pornographer/eroticist Tom of Finland.  He exists in little pamphlet sized booklets as well as in the collected Tom of Finland.  Back around '83 my friend Lee sent me three of these booklets, with my name on the front and wordless, visual stories of hot men with big dicks inside.

My first graduate class was "Introduction to Graduate Studies." It introduced us new Utes to the department's professors and provided an overview of what an academic life was like.  We wrote papers and then got a chance to present one as part of a classroom panel.  Because the one contemporary critic/theorist I knew at that time was Michele Foucault and I had devoured his "History of Sexuality," I decided to write a Foucauldian analysis of the Kake comics as my paper to present.  I argued that the gay porn pretended to be freeing but instead created a very rule-governed universe of sexual expression.  My paper included the word "fisting" without any explanation so I wound up defining it in class.

Because I'd felt strongly linked to the gay male community since high school, and had already written and published two pieces of gay erotica, I was completely comfortable with the topic.  Not so some members of the class, I much later learned, when a friend told me that everyone in the department had heard about my paper by the next day.  Just as when Will and I married, I was a scandal without realizing it.

This paper became my very first conference performance in 1986 in Atlanta.  As a beginner, that was a wonderful experience because the room was packed for the sex papers.  I was strong in those days.  I was also almost 34 years younger.  Nevertheless, maybe it's time to go back to my queer roots.

Maybe what I need now is more cockiness -- to be more Kake.