Holy Week 09

When I was eight I had a dream that I would die at 16.

At 16 someone did die...my straight cover, a claim to gender/sexual "normativity." I came out as gay. But something much truer and beautiful grew out of that death.

Going undercover to survive my first and most unwanted adolescence I came out again at 19 inside UC Davis's campus ministry. I also made a vow to never surgically alter my body and accept my femaleness.

Then Berkeley called and I read God In the Balance by Carter Heyward. I packed up my Aggie clothes and moved to the East Bay, leaving behind my ambitions to be a Music Historian or Composer.

Didn't know who this "Judith Butler" person was when she sub'd for Gayle Salamon at the end of my Junior year Queer Visual Cultures Class...why no one would speak to the laid back Professor in jeans and a t-shift in class that day. Looking at MDiv programs became my obsession...along with trying to avoid my gender questions.

CJ Pascoe's masculinities class reopened everything in a completely non-threatening, intellectual way. I think if it wasn't for her class and the Vagina Monologues, I'd still be struggling with pronouns and breasts. In a similar way Trinh Minh-ha's Identity Across Difference. Suddenly hiding my Cantonese background behind my Scottish/Irish/Welsh heritage seemed ludicruous. I am everything and nothing at once. It always seems that way. Hybrid that I am.

Tonight feet are washed, vigils begin for those who follow Christian traditions. I no longer count myself as a Christian, but there is still something very powerful to me about aspects of Holy Week. I think about Christ in the garden, very human pleading for his life, terrified about the known unknown and I can't help but find myself in the Passion Story. Asleep from exhaustion perhaps. Or sweating drops of blood from crying so many tears. It was one very long night of pain for him.

Gethsemane is very similar to the Jacob story from the Hebrew Bible. A man alone in the middle of the night, feeling very much at the end of his rope fighting for his life with a superior (masculine) divine figure. Neither leave the encounter completely intact. Perhaps with more resolve to do what they must. To face the responsibilities that they have been dreading. Jacob limps away with a wounded left hip. Jesus is exhausted from what is characterized as a futile prayer. Jacob must face his angry brother Esau. Jesus...well a lot of angry people out for blood.

Three years ago I was struggling with choosing between HDS and PSR. (ah seminary acronyms) This year I'm in a pickle around three doctoral programs: my desire to return to California and a school with strong ethnic studies but also to work with one of the greatest Trans Theorist/Historians ever. My clone and I always fast on Good Friday (I broke this tradition the day I started T two years ago). Something interesting always comes from this practice. I'm hoping that will be the case again.

After all, there always is something life transforming at the end of the story.