MAKE ADVENTURING GAY AGAIN (sorry)
Hi, you. It's been a minute. I hope you've been spectacular. It's been interesting on my end, ever since I quit. I've been at the same long-term gig since then, which has been a blessing, money-wise (suggestion: don't quit your job to go freelance with very little savings and an impending 3-week trip!), since this job pays twice as much as what I was making at my salaried job, which should build up a little bit of savings. But as it finally comes to an end next week, I find myself full of anxiety about finding the next gig. I bit the bullet and applied to a job at Facebook, who promptly rejected me. Even though I wasn't sure I wanted a full-time job again! In short, I'm a mess, but I'm also happier than I was? I think? Or maybe not? Mostly, I keep waiting for someone to show up and tell me what I'm supposed to do with my life, until I realize that there never was or will be that person, a fact that's only become more apparent now that I don't have a boss.
Anyway I'm doing great, mentally.
Whatever happens with my work life, in just 11 days (oh god only 11 days left?) I'm heading to Morocco, to participate in the Monkey Run, a stupid race in which a bunch of idiots drive tiny motorcycles designed for children or possibly circus chimpanzees across the Atlas Mountains. My upcoming departure has led to a lot of ~thoughts~ and ~feelings~ and ~reflections~ so let's get into it.
In 2013, I did a similar event in India, called the Rickshaw Run. Not to sound like a DAD, but it was character-building in all the best and worst ways. We laughed, we cried, we nearly drove off several cliffs, a guy climbed through my friend's window at 4am trying to rape her, etc. etc. etc.
As you may not be surprised to learn, the majority of Rickshaw Run participants were overwhelmingly white, cis-male, and Australian or British (with a few exceptions, most notably Queen Zaya, who should have three television series of her own by now). And, of course, finding another Gay was a challenge of its own. Out of nearly 300 participants in the run, I only met two out LGBTQ people, and zero gay men.
Almost instinctually, surrounded by such an onslaught of heterosexual masculinity, I half-retreated back into the closet. Not that I ever denied being gay, exactly, but I wasn't nearly as forthright as I am in my real life. Our closest friends out there — a team of three Americans including my now-good-friend Henry who I went to North Korea with — didn't learn I was gay until halfway through the race, on a much-needed lazy morning in a small town on the shore of the Indian Ocean. "I'm gay," I found myself saying in the midst of some story, something I had done thousands of times in my life by then. And yet it felt like high school, all nerves and self-doubt and shame. Throughout the whole race, I only ever told them and Zaya that I was gay, in fact. And I only told Zaya after an intense night in which she zapped me with the taser she keeps next to the Bowie knife in her purse, put a henna tattoo on my upper lip, and then kissed me. (Again: Zaya needs several TV shows.)
The other friends I made out there, while great people who are probably very open-minded, were not the kinds that made me comfortable enough to come out. There was the Sri Lankan-British guy, who was one of our closer friends but laughed at me when I helped a sleeping puppy out of the middle of the road and called it "sweetie." Or there were the two Australian miners — "miners" as in removing ore from the crust of the Earth, not "minors" as in underaged people — one of whom had the stunningly beautiful face of a model, which happened to be covered in a web of scars from various bar fights. We got drunk one night and ended up in breaking into a hotel pool in our underwear, wrestling in the water. How would they have felt about that if they knew I was gay, I worried? Would I have been included?
Not to mention, of course, the setting for all of this T E E N A N G S T. India isn't exactly known as a bastion of gay rights, although recent events (including the freedom to register as a third gender!) have begun to change things. I still remember one striking moment, as we drove through the outskirts of a large-ish city in the northeast of the country, when a cute man on a moped steered his bike next to our bright purple rickshaw as we motored through traffic. "Your eyes are beautiful!" he shouted at me, before driving away. I rejoiced in the back of our rickshaw, screaming, "I FOUND A GAY!"
As this new adventure nears, I wonder if I'll be the only gay on the road, and I realized that, not only have I not encountered many members of the LGBTQ community on any adventures, but I haven't really heard of any famous gay adventurers in the first place. Which, after three cups of coffee, led me to open about 400 tabs and go insane on the internet.
What I found was a murky, half-recorded history of tragedy, confusion, secrecy, and oppression (a not-unfamiliar mix when looking at any aspects of gay history, of course). Most adventurers now classified as "gay" were questionable at best, seemingly just claimed because, well, we need to get our numbers up, you know? Almost every person's story, as I dove into it, revolved around some recently unearthed letter to someone of the same sex that used the word "love" or "friendship" in a suspicious way. If they were actually confirmed as gay while living, their story usually didn't end well. Like Sir Hector MacDonald, a key figure in the expansion of the British Empire (also btw the history of "adventurers" is 99% one of colonialism and racism, but that's a topic for another time), who killed himself when he was found out, an extremely typical fate. Others, like Lawrence of Arabia, went to great lengths to keep it hidden, usually through the time-tested methods of denouncing homosexuality louder than anyone else.
I know, trying to jerry-rig modern concepts like "homosexuality" onto historical figures is always a tricky business, and usually leads to fighting. But I'm of two minds about it: it's messy and historically inaccurate and can paper over all the wonderful complications and contradictions that make people what they are; on the other hand, it could do a lot of people good in today's hateful world to learn that figures like Lawrence of Arabia may have had sex with men, and if it takes re-labeling them as "queer," then, fuck it, let's call him Lawrence of Gayrabia and have ourselves some goddamned pride.
But the more I looked, the more gay adventurers I found waiting in the shadows. I'm not sure I ever knew that Margaret Mead was gay! (Figures, though.) I once knew astronaut Sally Ride was, but somehow forgot! Mountaineers Wilfrid Noyce, George Mallory, and the hilariously named John Menlove Edwards? Sure, why not, they were all gay! Great job, chaps!
My searching eventually led me to the fabulously named Captain Moonlite, an Australian bushranger. Bushrangers were escaped convicts in the early 1800s who used their manly rugged skills to survive in the bush and escape capture. Eventually, the term came to include criminals, highway-robbers, and any other outlaws who existed beyond society. Naturally, in a society that hated and feared men loving men, a few of these bushrangers appear to have been queer. If society won't take us, we'll take to the bushes! Or something. Captain Moonlite, most notably, wrote "love" letters about another captured convict after he was imprisoned, wore a lock of the man's hair around his toe, and requested that he be buried next to him after they were both executed.
Then there were Charles Marks and Edward Feeney, two bushrangers who were involved in a strange case. For whatever unknown reason they made a suicide pact, which ultimately didn't work due to Feeney's gun failing, leaving poor Feeney alive, alone, and on trial for the murder of Marks. Before the pact, the men had been frequent guests at local pubs, where they were often seen cuddling and lying with their heads in each other's laps, according to a fascinating article in Australia's The Monthly. Before Marks and Feeney tried to follow through on their suicide pact, they posed for two photos: one, in which they can be seen holding hands and locking eyes, and a second, with their pistols pointed at each other's heart.
As for living gay adventurers, the list is still shockingly small. Maybe not that shocking, considering we just somehow had our first-ever out male gay Olympic medalist. In 2018! But still, I expected to google "gay adventurers" or some-such term and be provided a plethora of LGBTQ explorers, daredevils, and endurance athletes to choose from. Instead, after nearly a week of searching, I've found less than 10, half of whom only popped up buried in one or two sentences in an article about someone else's achievements.
Probably the only one you could name off the top of your head would be Diana Nyad, who finally defeated the stereotype that lesbians can't swim (not a real stereotype). Others include Irish extreme adventurer Gavan Hennigan, who is outrageously handsome but has disappointingly said, "I don't consider myself a gay role model;" Cason Crane, the first openly gay mountaineer to climb the Seven Summits; Sylvia Vasquez-Lavado, a Peruvian lesbian who did the same; and Ann Bancroft, the first woman to cross both poles on foot and to ski across Greenland.
That's about it. That's all I could find in regards to still-living gay adventurers. Three women, two men. Notably, only one person of color. The lack of LGBTQ representation in this space made me sad, and changed how I feel about my upcoming trip to Morocco. Sure, it's not nearly anything as hard as walking across the fucking North Pole like that showoff Ann Bancroft, but it's going to be a major accomplishment in my life, and now I'll be even more proud to be a gay man doing it.
As it's an adventure on a motorcycle (albeit a tiny, ridiculous one), we're obviously donning our most affordable Indiana Jones looks (fun fact: one of the "original" inspirations for Indiana Jones was an openly gay Nazi!), including patches on our jackets. I've bought a few — a Wisconsin flag, one that says "Hello, my name is DADDY" — but the one I'm most conflicted about is my rainbow flag patch. I want to wear it somewhere, but I'm also aware I'll be riding a not-very-reliable motorbike through the most rural parts of a super-conservative country, where I'll only be able to eat, sleep, and repair my vehicle through the kindness of the people I meet there. It does not feel like the time or the place to wave a rainbow flag, you know? That said, I don't like the idea of ever going back in the closet — this time, any and all Australian miners I meet will know from the get-go that I'm gay, but that I'm also still ready to jump into a pool with them in my underwear if the occasion arises — so I feel weird about, say, hiding the rainbow patch on the inside of my jacket. It feels like a cop-out, and a betrayal of how hard I've worked to be proud of my queerness (or to even comfortably call myself "queer," for that matter). But I'll probably end up not sporting the flag publicly, and feeling weird and bad about it the whole time. A wonderful compromise!
As I fell further and further down my desperate internet search, I started compiling my own list of any gay adventurers in history — to do what with I'm not sure yet — and I began to understand why so many of these lists were willing to accept anyone who maybe even tried it once. There's simply not enough, so a "list" feels silly when there are, like, 6 names on it. Most famous pirates or sailers were tossed onto these lists, seemingly for the simple reason that, well, when you're out at sea for years with only a bunch of men, a lot of gay shit probably goes down. A lot of lists included women who weren't known to have had sexual or romantic relationships with women, but did like to wear pants so, you know, were probably ravenous lesbos. One list, my personal favorite, included Flipper, classified simply as "gay dolphin." (This is now canon.) Blinking and bleary-eyed from my caffeine/internet binge, I finally had to go outside and take a walk, upon discovering this glorious image of Dora the Explorer all grown up into a queer fat femme:
We're making the past more gay, reclaiming and reclassifying historical figures at an insatiable rate, which is exciting and important. Even if we shouldn't be prescribing the label of "homosexual" to, say, every mountain climber from the 1800s who once wrote a letter to a buddy with the word "love" in it, it's also a little bit like, fuck you, why can't we claim him? History is messy and incomplete, gay history infinitely moreso thanks to "gay" not really being a concept 100 years ago. There won't be any answers or easy ways to classify these people who, by nature of society's prejudices, usually didn't want to be found out. But beyond that, I hope that we keep pushing forward into the worlds of adventure and exploration, and expanding these lists with living people who do incredible things. Mrs. President, give us a trans woman on the moon by 2022, STAT.
Someday soon, I hope, the globe (and the stars) will be teeming with gay, queer, and trans men, women, and everything between, prancing and exploring and adventuring to their gay hearts' content, in every corner. We're here, we're queer — actually, wait, now we're over here, on top of this mountain! Now we're at the bottom of the ocean! Now we're skiing across the north pole of Mars! Sorry, try and keep up!
DANNY RECOMMENDS!
Have you watched Ugly Delicious, David Chang's new food series on Netflix, yet? I hate to belie my well-established counter-culture REP by admitting I'm a David Chang stan, but the man makes good content. I devoured (ugh sorry) every page of every issue of his now-defunct food magazine Lucky Peach (well, not exactly: I've actually been saving the last few issues for some unknowable future date, because I can't bear to not have any more Lucky Peach to read). Each issue focused on a specific topic, from tacos to breakfast to the controversial gender issue, and dove into every aspect of that topic they could find.
Ugly Delicious feels like a continuation of this mission, with episodes devoted to tacos, dumplings, and pizza. It's great and fun and stupid and makes me really hungry. He also tears into the tricky concepts of "authenticity" and "fusion" and who gets to own which cuisine in general. He pushes against the son of a Vietnamese refugee in New Orleans, who expresses discomfort with Muslim refugees. He shows how Japanese pizza could be considered "more authentic" than many kinds of Italian pizza. It's great! My only real issue with it is the lack of female voices — the conversations on the show are fascinating, but far too often they happen with a bunch of men (albeit largely non-white men) sitting around a table, nary a woman in sight. Occasionally, we focus on a female chef, but so far the most female-centric episode was the episode about cooking for your family, which.... is not ideal.
The best example of what I wish he would do more of comes in the second episode, the taco episode, where he documents the opening of the insanely famous Nordic restaurant Noma's pop-up in Tulum, Mexico. However, instead of focusing on Noma's celebrity chef Rene Redzepi's experience, the show follows his former pastry chef Rosio Sanchez, as she travels back to Mexico from her Danish taco restaurant, to learn about traditional Mexican techniques and to bring those to Noma's Tulum restaurant. After the insanely male-heavy first episode, it's a breath of fresh air to get to experience this slice of the culinary world through Rosio, a chef just as fascinating, charismatic, and talented as Rene Redzepi. I hope David does more of this as the show continues.
If you're going to watch just one episode, though, I'd make it the family episode, because David Chang's mom is just ridiculously charming.
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As always, feel free to reply with thoughts/arguments/dick pics.
Bye.