... having been breathed out

Mr. Vasya Gabov (born 1951), the youngest fluent speaker of [Siberian language] Ös and our expedition guide, felt particularly pained by the fact that Ös had never been allowed to have an alphabet. Like Sequoyah, the native Cherokee scholar who invented writing for his people in 1809, Vasya was determined to bring the technology of writing to his people in their own language. In the Soviet Union, alphabets were designed and bestowed by Russian scientists, and the political decisions about which minority peoples could have letters were made in Moscow. It would have been a punishable offense to invent your own alphabet, so the Ös did without.

Vasya and his peers told us how they had been made fun of for being dark-skinned native children among blond Russians in elementary school. They had also, he recounted, been made to feel ashamed of their language and forbidden to speak it. Under such pressures, he and his generation made the decision [...] to avoid using Ös and speak exclusively in Russian. Ös children like Vasya made this decision at the very young age of 5 or 6, not realizing it presaged the loss of their ancestral language. They were concerned with how to fit in, be accepted, and avoid ridicule for being different.

Vasya grew up to be a successful worker in Soviet society, married and had children, and worked as a truck driver. A born outdoorsman, he never lost his love of hunting and would spend weeks at a time out hunting bears, moose, and other animals. At night, sitting alone in a small log cabin in the forest, he made an audacious decision—he would keep a hunting journal in his own native Ös language. Of course, he—like all Ös adults—knew how to read and write in Russian. But Ös has four sounds not found in Russian. Since Vasya was not a trained linguist, he decided that he would not invent four new letters for these sounds, but would simply use new combinations of Russian letters he already knew.

After some time Vasya worked out his new writing system and began to make regular entries in his journal. He was motivated in part by something his mother had said to him as a young boy: "My mother told me that it is necessary to speak our Ös language... let the Russians speak Russian and let the Ös speak Ös." This expression of linguistic pride inspired him to keep writing and perhaps even dare to think that Ös might be passed on to his children's generation. But Vasya's journal was ill fated.

One day Vasya got up his courage and showed his journal—containing three years' worth of entries painstakingly written—to a Russian friend. The Russian's reaction was devastating for him. "What are you writing there, in what language?" the friend demanded. "Why would you write in Ös?" When Vasya yeard these disdainful words, he felt as if he had done something wrong. The shame of the schoolyard and stigma of being different came back to him. In a fit of pique, he threw his journal—the first and only book ever written in his native Ös tongue—out into the forest to rot. "I might have wanted to show it to you," he told me in 2003, "but it's not here, it's still there where I threw it away."

Doesn't it feel strange, I heard myself ask, putting your fingers exactly the way someone put hers only she's been dead for a few hundred years? Louise smiled, as if it was fine for me to join in. Not to me, she said, not anymore, anyway, I'm always trying to do what dead people tell me. And especially when I'm making a replica, spending days looking at and feeling and listening to some prehistoric object, I'm kind of trying to think their thoughts too. I mean, it would make sense, wouldn't it, that when I really concentrate on the spaces between decorative dots or the exact tension of a twist, my mind's doing what their minds did while my hands do what their hands did. I sometimes think I can tell when two pieces from the same site were made by the same prehistoric person, because the way my hands move is the same. I shivered. Of course, that was the whole point of the reenactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts, learning to walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago, to tend our fire as they tended theirs and hope that some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone. To do it properly, I thought, we would almost have to absent ourselves from ourselves, leaving our actions, our re-enactions, to those no longer there. Who are the ghosts again, we or our dead? Maybe they imagined us first, maybe we were conjured out of the deep past by other minds. It's a shame I couldn't bring a loom, Louise was saying, it would have been interesting for you to see, perhaps I should ask Jim to arrange a session in my studio next term.

More and more LGBT people seem to be operating on a similar wavelength [to that of the author, a trans lesbian who prefers to live in a small "red state" city rather than a large coastal one]. I asked Gary J. Gates, the most widely cited demographer of the American LGBT community, what evidence he has seen of queer demographic shifts away from coastal big cities over the last decade.

He pointed me to his recent Williams Institute analysis of U.S. Census and Gallup polling data, which compared the concentration of same-sex couples in American cities in 1990 to the percentage of their LGBT population from 2012 to 2014. (It's an imperfect comparison, but given how hard it is to gather data on a small population like the LGBT community, it's one of the best available.) And the results are striking: Salt Lake City leapt up thirty-two spots in the overall rankings between 1990 and the 2012-2014 time period. Louisville, Kentucky, rose thirty slots over the same period. Norfolk, Virginia, and New Orleans, Louisiana both jumped more than twenty places. Meanwhile San Francisco remained static, Los Angeles fell two slots, and New York had a staggering eleven-place slump.

Gates believes that this discrepancy speaks to the social change happening in many red-state cities. As he wrote in the analysis: "Substantial increases in LGBT visibility in more socially conservative places like Salt Lake City, Louisville, and Norfolk likely mean that these areas are not as different from cities like San Francisco, Austin, and Seattle (all with long histories of fostering social climates where LGBT people felt more comfortable) in their acceptance of the LGBT community today than they were twenty years ago."

Indeed, an "important explanatory factor" for that data, as Gates acknowledged in the analysis, is the increased "willingness" [I, breathedout, would argue "ability"] of LGBT people in conservative areas to come out of the closet. In other words, although the analysis probably indicates some degree of population shift, [there is also an element of simply revealing that... ] LGBT people have been building beautiful lives away from the coasts for years. [...] But because the media overwhelmingly focus on the tragic things that happen to queer people in red states, that kind of community building often goes unnoticed by people on the coasts. As Jack Halberstam wrote in In a Queer Time and Place, "Too often minority history hinges on representative examples provided by the lives of extraordinary individuals"—among them LGBT people who have been murdered in conservative parts of America.

"[In] relation to the complicated matrix of rural queer lives, we tend to rely on the story of a Brandon Teena or a Matthew Shepard rather than finding out about the queer people who live quietly, if not comfortably, in isolated areas or small towns all across North America," Halberstam wrote.

After moving to Delhi, [my close friend] Siddhartha had lived in a series of rented apartments in the cheaper sections of Defence Colony, Lajpat Nagar, and Jangpura. Siddhartha's flawless Hindi and his angelic good looks always enchanted his landlords initially. But in just a few weeks they would inevitably turn hostile.

They disapproved of the unending stream of bohemians visiting Siddhartha—men of feminine appearance (some with tweezed eyebrows and a hint of kohl), rough and macho men, obviously single women (based on their arriving and leaving without male companions), and even one flagrant cross-dresser who sometimes arrived decked out int he shiny slips he favored. Singly or in a group, they all disappeared into Siddhartha's apartment.

The curtains were then pulled tight. Whatever the hour, there was music and loud laughter, sometimes broken by suspiciously long silences. Impromptu parties took place at odd times, occasionally even in the afternoon. The sound of ghungroos and male voices seductively singing "In ankhon ki masti ke, mastaane hazaron hain"—"Countless men are intoxicated by my bewitching eyes," a courtesan's siren song from a classic movie—would drift down. Siddhartha's voice, excited and giggling at a peculiarly high, feminine pitch, would float above the din.

Soon enough, the landlords would insist that Siddhartha move out, saying that his lifestyle was unacceptable in a respectable neighborhood. Though they strongly suspected he was gay, it was never brought up. They had no firm proof, and the large number of women visitors must also have confused them. But, Delhi being lawless in such matters, the landlords either refused to return Siddhartha's rental deposit, or, without giving him due notice, insisted that he leave immediately or be thrown out forcibly.

Because I had long taken on the role of being Siddhartha's responsible older brother, I inevitably got involved in the crises. Try as we might, matters would deteriorate. On one occasion, I came to blows with a landlord and his adult sons. Luckily, my years at [Eton-style boarding school] Doon had made me a tough opponent, and they backed off after we traded a few punches.

So absolute was my lack of theoretical knowledge that everything I read came as a revelation. Despite having studied at India's leading school and college, I had never come across any scientific information on homosexuality, not even in biology textbooks. The sum total of my reading had been the mild allusions in Jacqueline Susann's books, a handful of sexual passages in Harold Robbins's potboilers, and Gore Vidal's oddball Myra Breckinridge.

greywash

I was at a loss for words. On the one hand, the idea was definitely attractive. Myron sometimes enjoyed the company of four or five men at the same time but he did not believe in mixing the sexes. I of course do. [...] Although I am not a Lesbian, I do share the normal human response to whatever is attractive physically in either sex.

St Peter met her at the gate,
And took her by the fin
Said He: some sins we all must rue
But you did clubs one winter through,
And that is hell enough for you—
Come in.

Boston's status as one of the key ports in the colonies left the city vulnerable to disease. On April 21, 1721, the HMS Seahorse sailed into Boston Harbor from Barbados. A month later, Cotton Mather logged in his journal, "The grievous calamity of the smallpox has now entered the town." One thousand Bostonians, nearly 10 percent of the town, fled to the countryside to escape the judgment of the Almighty.

Fifteen years prior, Mather had asked Onesimus[, an enslaved West African man Mathers's congregation had bought for him,] one of the standard questions that Boston slaveholders asked new house slaves—Have you had smallpox? "Yes and no," Onesimus answered. He explained how in Africa before his enslavement, a tiny amount of pus from a smallpox victim had been scraped into his skin with a thorn, following a practice hundreds of years old that resulted in building up healthy recipients' immunities to the disease. This form of inoculation—a precursor to modern vaccination—was an innovative practice that prevented untold numbers of deaths in West Africa and on disease-ridden slave ships to ports throughout the Atlantic. Racist European scientists at first refused to recognize that African physicians could have made such advances. Indeed, it would take several decades and many more deaths before British physician Edward Jenner, the so-called father of immunology, validated inoculation.

Cotton Mather, however, became an early believer when he read an essay on inoculation in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions in 1714. He then interviewed Africans around Boston to be sure. Sharing their inoculation stories, they gave him a window into the intellectual culture of West Africa. He had trouble grasping it, instead complaining about how "brokenly and blunderingly and like Idiots they tell the Story."

On June 6, 1721, Mather calmly composed an "Address to the Physicians of Boston," respectfully requesting that they consider inoculation. If anyone had the credibility to suggest something so new in a time of peril it was Cotton Mather, the first American-born fellow in the London's Royal Society, which was still headed by Isaac Newton. Mather had released fifteen to twenty books and pamphlets a year since the 1690s, and he was nearing his mammoth career total of 388—probably more than the rest of his entire generation of New England ministers combined.

The only doctor who responded to Mather was Zabadiel Boylston, President John Adams's great-uncle. When Boylston announced his successful inoculation of his six-year-old son and two enslaved Africans on July 15, 1721, area doctors and councilmen were horrified. It made no sense that people should inject themselves with a disease to save themselves from the disease. Boston's only holder of a medical degree, a physician pressing to maintain his professional legitimacy, fanned the city's flames of fear. Dr. William Douglass concocted a conspiracy theory, saying there was a grand plot afoot among African people, who had agreed to kill their masters by convincing them to be inoculated. "There is not a Race of Men on Earth more False Liars" than Africans, Douglass barked.

[Kipling's 1857 Mutiny] stories are [...] carefully screened for their unspeakable horror, a horror that only the narrators [and not the readers] can wholly see and decipher. [...]

In her work on narrative obsessions and their links to fetishism, Emily Apter connects such narrative structures to a particular kind of pleasurable preoccupation: "The literary psychodynamics of vision: the conceit of seeing... heightens erotic atmosphere by placing the reader-viewer at a distance (the suspense of image-suspension) or situating him or her at some transgressively hidden vantage point. The reader is a lonely voyeur, hunched over a keyhole, and the space that separates him or her from the spectacle correlates to the temporality of lingering on the way to a sexual aim... what Freud called perversion... and what Peter Brooks (glossing Freud) has described as the protracted forepleasure of narrative 'clock-teasing'." A footnote to the above passage further points us to the section "The Sexual Aberrations" in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), in which Sigmund Freud places the burden of perversity on the rather elusive notion of "lingering": "Perversions are sexual activities... which either (a) extend, in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union, of (b) linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim." For Freud, these aberrant activities are problematic beginnings, preliminary stages that lose their "abnormalcy" when placed in a strongly teleological model of sexuality that must have as its endpoint the stabilizing space of heterosexual genitality. The founding split in all of Freud's revisions of these essays is his inability to account for the breakdown in such developmental models.

What happens, however, I want to ask, if this "lingering" or "fore-pleasure" supersedes the value of genitally defined pleasure, or more interestingly, what if "lingering" becomes, because of and not despite its defined incompleteness, the desired object of narrative focus?