queer discomfort

last night i saw a film at the red rattler about an intersex teenager living in uruguay.
then i went to the sly fox hotel.
a drag queen was performing on stage, but later revealed her breasts. and spoke about her 'plastic' vagina. a post-op trans woman performing drag, as a woman, to a crowd of mostly lesbians. it was a queer moment.
then she made a racist joke about young lebanese men stealing cars.
then a person from the audience took to the stage, and to the microphone, to highlight that this was a racist joke.
people cheered. a non-lebanese queer yells out "it's not only lebanese who steal cars", suggesting their own potential civil disobedience.
the drag performer gets defensive and slags off the rebuttal. she says that because she's greek she's not being 'racialist'. she makes a quip about it being like hey hey it's saturday.
a bunch of anarcho-queers line the front of the stage with their backs to her.
it's a bit hostile. and strange. and still very queer.
there are murmurings of a walk-out, hints of 'an action' being planned. someone tells someone who tells us about the walk-out. the queers leave, discretely, undefiantly. they probably had to finish their drinks.

today we're talking about nationalism in class and one student gets worked up about what 'we' give to aboriginal people - free education, housing, and everything. she suggests that black issues are still a problem in the US, but they're not here. it seems she's making a comparison between african-americans and aboriginal-australians. other students are looking uncomfortable. they're looking at me. i cut her off. another student starts asking her to justify her arguments. i cut him off too. i make a short statement about their being current and ongoing discrepancies in aboriginal health and... something, i can't remember exactly. a summation, in order to move back to where we were. i try and take the 'us/them' example to relate back to nationalism, and how this divide might be utilised in terms of race/gender and other difference. but she gets defensive. i assure her that i'm not referring to her, but to the ways in which we all speak (and indeed had been throughout the entire class) in terms of 'us' and 'them'.

she doesn't get it. it's uncomfortable. i'm losing my way. nobody has done the readings. i'm writing words on the whiteboard, but they may not make sense. a student jumps in and saves me, saying what i'm trying to, but with more clarity. but she still doesn't get it. she wants to talk about hey hey it's saturday.

i'm going now, to drink beer and play music trivia. if anyone mentions hey hey it's saturday, i might be compelled to slap them.