sardine -- post 10/31 -- turkey huntin'

“Two basic strategies have been evolved for dealing the threat. First, the Other can be trivialized, naturalized, domesticated. Here, the difference is simply denied (‘Otherness is reduced to sameness’). Alternatively, the Other can be transformed into meaningless exotica, ‘a pure object, a spectacle, a clown’” (Hebdige quoting Barthes, 157).

I like this quote within a quote. It clarifies why high school was horrifying and my need to reduce my turkey huntin’, Fox news watching neighbors to freaks.

I have to confess something. I am not a soccer mom. Six years ago, my older son came home and asked me “When can we go turkey huntin’?” I promptly found him a ballet class. Six years later he’s still doing it, and now his younger brother. However, it has escalated into something more than the Saturday morning ballet class. It takes up the week.

In public we use code words to avoid the word ballet like “football practice”. Everyone knows ballet is Gay. And recently the turkey huntin’ family next door discovered the ballet. Now I’m getting the pitying looks. I have gay sons. What am I going to do?

Bullying always happens. My older son’s best friend just last week was bullied by two or three boys at his private school. A girl from the ballet school told the class about the ballet. These boys called him Gay, of course. They wanted him to do a less Gay sport like football and tried intimidating him with violence. Fortunately, a teacher overheard and one kid was suspended. This is a rarity. Often the teachers feel threatened by the gay student or the tutu wearing ballet boy, and they orchestrate the bullying. Anti-gay is politically correct these days.

I try to inoculate my sons from the anti-gay neo con virus out there. I was considering doing my praxis on the documentary of The Yes Men. And when I was watching the credits, I recognized one of the names. It felt weird, so I chose another subject. However, I had my kids watch the movie, and they were proud of knowing the name in the credits. It’s kind of lonely being the Other, and they will need to seek out Others like themselves. Yet the ballet world is rather pretentiously part of high culture and is very exclusive. Where to fit in? The eternal question.