Tiaras are not just for birthdays and weddings and silly princess games anymore. They are for taking over the world!

1. High school elects boy as prom queen

From today’s Los Angeles Times:

Sergio Garcia, 18, spent most of his years at Fairfax High openly gay and wanted to be part of the Los Angeles school’s prom court — but not as prom king. He felt that vying for prom queen would better suit his personality, so he decided to seek that crown, running against a handful of female classmates…. Read full story. 

2. (Beauty) Queen calls for gay rights in India

Former Miss Universe Celina Jaitley launched a campaign this month for gay rights in India.  I couldn’t find a picture of her wearing a tiara, but this is some amazing headgear:

When I openly stood up for the human rights of sexual minorities, I got a whole lot of support from people all over the world; at the same time I have been accused of being a lesbian (which is all right) and, more importantly, scorned and abused for standing up for the sexual minorities’ rights. Before I begin I would like to explain my sexuality: I am a straight woman with a whole lotta balls!  Read full blog post and sign Celina’s petition for the repeal of India’s anti-sodomy law.

3. Cop dresses in drag for a cause …
and ’cause he likes it?

From the Orlando Sentinel earlier this week:

Former police officer Harry Doremus, 50, walked into his veterans post wearing an evening gown slit up the side, makeup, a red wig, high heels and pantyhose [AND a tiara]. The stunt helped Doremus collect $1,000 for the fight against breast cancer, an amount he donated a week later to the Lake County division of the Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure… Read full story.

4. O.T.A.

From the tiara archives (ok, YouTube), this video clip is from “The Last of the Two-Dollar Bills” and shows Wonder Woman, who is the Original Tiara Activist, using her tiara as a boomerang in order to catch Nazi war criminals.

You read it here first: It’s about changing the world, one tiara at a time.

Some things that have been inspiring me lately:

♥ An interview w/hip hop artist Maya Azucena on the LatinoUSA radio show. Her music has its own unique sound and when the interviewer asked her about that, she said, “The thing about imitating is, if you’re an imitator, you can always only be second best… Stick to being yourself. If you’re the greatest you you can be, there’s no competition.”

♥ Re-reading the novel They Who Do Not Grieve by Sia Figiel, the first woman from Samoa to publish novels in English. I’m not yet up to full reading strength yet (I hear this is common for writers who’ve just finished a book), so I am finding it comforting to re-read books I already know. This one surprised me by being even more amazing than I remembered. So powerful and compelling: sexuality, secrets, taboos, silences & how to break them, cycles of oppression & how to break them, colonialism, home, migration… all told by really powerful, heartbreaking narrators.

♥ My dreams—always a rich well of images and life juice.

The other night I dreamed that someone was coming over to clean my house, and I was embarrassed because it was so messy: There were flower petals everywhere. I told the woman that I had intended to vacuum before she got there, and she looked at me and said, “You don’t have to vacuum, honey, that’s why we’re here.” 

So I’m trying to remember that (1) help is available, and (2) even when things seem like a mess and I’m not as organized or together as I feel like I should be, it’s because there have been and continue to be an abundance of “flowers” in my life. The fifth person in a week asking me to send my bio URGENTLY, even though it’s right up there on my website?  A flower.  Being tired cuz I stayed up too late watching tv on hulu.com?  A flower.  Having a hundred emails in my inbox that I feel overwhelmed about handling and am therefore procrastinating?  Flowers, flowers, flowers.  

♥ My Facebook friends! OK, weird, but it feels very good to be reminded on a regular basis of the awesome community/communities that I am part of and the emotional, political, and logistical resources available to me through people I know.  I’m hooked up with amazing artists and activists and people doing good work in a lot of different ways, struggling, loving their families, creating, sharing what they’re passionate about, organizing, resting, reflecting, celebrating, hurting, making change in the world… and doing it together.

♥ Bay Area poet Kim Addonizio’s book on creativity, Ordinary Genius. I first became a fan of Kim Addonizio’s writing when I reviewed her book of poems Jimmy & Rita for my Bay Area Books column in the San Jose Mercury News, way back in the olden days when newspapers actually had book review sections. Recently I went to her reading for Ordinary Genius at the Booksmith, and thought it would be just the creative spark I need to start getting interested in writing again. I like it because I can open it to a random page and find an exercise and do it quickly in a few minutes … just to feel the juices flowing.

Here’s a video of Kim talking about the book:

And here’s a little “poem” I dashed off this afternoon based on one of her suggestions (I’m calling it a “poem” in quotes because for me it’s not really a poem until I’ve had a chance to sit with it, consider the form & each word carefully, revise, decide whether it’s worthwhile. So right now it’s sort of a pre-poem, to me, like a doodle might be to a visual artist…):

I wanted to touch you, your three-
dimensional world.  Against
the sphere of you    I am flat,
so flat, like the earth
before Copernicus
in the days when everyone we knew
knew the same truth,
when the books were illumined
in gold.   I have thousands of books within me
while you are all air,
that emptiness that spins
at the core of me, too,
& all of us
in between every molecule,
if you want to know.  
You don’t. So whole alone
you don’t need me,
no slot for me in your life,
nor for anyone.  I want to place my mouth on you
& breathe.

Instead I spin, going nowhere,
absorbing & repeating
the undiminished memory of your
one perfect curve. 

The exercise was to look around the room, list several objects, choose two of the objects, then write about one of them being in love with the other. I chose a stack of computer CDs being in love with the yoga ball. Hmm!  After I wrote it, I read, “This is an excellent exercise to do if you are in love, or have just lost a love, or are obsessed with someone who does not love you, or are lonely for someone to love.” 

Yes, this IS what writers do for fun.

I was incredibly moved to watch the live stream of today’s poetry jam/slam at the White House. For 45 minutes solid I was amazed and stunned to see poets, mostly poets of color, telling their truths, naming their ancestors & deities, speaking their languages … IN THE WHITE HOUSE!

[Edited to add video links: HBO “Buzz” story (3 minutes), or official White House videos (9 segments approx 7 minutes each)]

President Obama started by introducing his wife as “someone who brings a lot of poetry to my life.” Aww, how sweet is that? Then the First Lady spoke passionately of the importance of poetry and spoken word in helping to “turn the White House into the People’s House.” People telling their own stories is, she said, essential to democracy. She said she had been wanting to do this event “since Day One.” What a difference from our last presidency, when Laura Bush cancelled a poetry symposium at the White House because some of the poets were going to read pacifist poems; she said it would be “inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum.” Did anyone in the White House five months ago even know what “spoken word” is?

But enough of the bad ol’ days.  The poets I admired today were unabashedly political, as was the act of placing these poets—voices of their People—in the seat of power itself.

◆ Mayda del Valle gave us a gorgeous and moving poem about her abuela and about faith:

I need it to reassemble myself whole from these shards of Chicago ice and island breezes
so I can rewrite the songs of your silence and pain. 

◆ James Earl Jones threw a monologue from Othello into the mix, and wow, what a great use of his talent.  As my friend Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (an amazing performer/poet herself) commented, “this is some deep statement shit about Black masculinity in the White House right now, damn.”

◆ Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, who mixes smoothies at a juice chain store while attending my alma mater, came out strong with the opening lines:

what happens to the ones forgotten
the ones who shaped my heart from their rib cages
i want to taste the tears in their names

and built it up from there, crescendoing with phrases in Hawai’ian that made their meaning oh-so-clear. (She came up through Youth Speaks and did them proud today.)  

◆ And in between there was gorgeous music by bassist/composer Esperanza Spalding as well as other musicians and spoken word artists. 

 How beautiful it was to hear the diversity of cadences and languages, to watch the faces and take in the voices that—finally—made sense. When June Jordan created Poetry for the People, this is what she meant;  today was evidence of her legacy as much as anyone else’s.  And to watch it all streaming out of www.whitehouse.gov … well, that was just magic. 

Here’s hoping this is a sign of things to come from the new presidency when it comes to funding for the arts, diversity/equal opportunity policy, economic justice, and other topics of importance to the People.

June Jordan

Day 57 after the release of Leaving India … Time to reflect on what’s happened and what’s yet to come!  I’ve toured in DC, NY, LA, and the SF Bay Area, as well as a few other spots. I’ve been thrilled with the media coverage and great reviews, learned all about Facebook and Twitter, and reached the San Francisco Chronicle review‘s Top 10 weekly bestseller list twice. More exciting events are coming up this weekend and beyond in San Francisco, as well as broadcasts in Portland and New York. Hope to see some of you!

May/June events

5/1/09 Radio: KBOO Portland, “Angry APA Minute”

APA Compass is the Pacific Northwest’s only Asian Pacific American public affairs program. They kindly invited me to do their “Angry APA Minute” segment! It’s a brief radio essay/rant reflecting, with some humor I hope, on the recent Amazon.com debacle.
When: Friday, May 1, 9:00-10:00am PST (my piece will air in the last 10 minutes, approx. 9:50am).
Where: Portland radio, or online
Contact: Listen in the Portland area at 90.7 FM, live stream at www.kboo.fm or on Facebook, or listen later at www.kboo.fm/apacompass.

5/2/09 Berkeley: Queer & Asian conference

I’ll be the featured reader at the closing event of UC-Berkeley’s Queer & Asian storytelling conference, “Articulation: Animating Our Collective Autobiography.” Check out the website for an exciting day of workshops and stories.
When: Saturday, May 2, 2009, 4:45pm-5:30pm
Where: MLK Student Union, UC Berkeley Campus, 2100 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA
Contact: qacon09.wordpress.com
Free and open to all.

5/3/09 San Francisco: K’Vetsh reading

I’ll be a featured reader, along with Courtney Trouble, at the K’Vetsh Queer Open Mic, one of the longest running queer open mics in SF, located at the fabulous, scandalous, and intimate EROS Lounge.
When: Sunday, May 3, 2009, 7:30pm – 10:30pm
Where: K’Vetsh at EROS Lounge, 2051 Market at Church, San Francisco, CA
Contact: 415-255-4921
Free. All genders ages 18+ welcome.

5/3/09 New York: “Shabd Star” tv show

If you’re in NY check out my interview with Ashok Vyas of ITV in “Shabd Star,” a literary program (20 minutes).
When: Sunday, May 3, 2009, 3:30pm, AND rebroadcast Friday, May 8, 2009, 2:00pm
Where: In Manhattan/Queens, Time Warner cable channels 77 and 501. In the Bronx, Cablevision.

5/28/09 San Francisco: Modern Times Bookstore

I’m very excited to be invited to San Francisco’s independent collective-owned bookstore. Reading, q&a, and book signing. Please come by!
When: Thursday, May 28, 2009, 7:00pm – 8:30pm
Where: Modern Times Bookstore, 888 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA 94110
Contact: 415-282-9246, events@moderntimesbookstore.com

6/10-6/14/09 Chicago: Kriti Festival

When: June 10-14, 2009
Register now and save:  Only $40 if you sign up before May 1 for an entire weekend of readings, workshops, and panels with Amitava Kumar, Bapsi Sidhwa, Romesh Gunesekera, and many other amazing writers of South Asian origin.

I always post the latest details on my Events page, or you can view as Google calendar or as Facebook events. Thanks for reading!

… for three very different books, all released in March/April 2009.  

Maybe we can all schedule a reading together. 🙂

Vegas boots with hat-scarf knitted by mum.

Guy: Wow! Awesome boots! I would totally wear those— I mean, er, I wouldn’t, but… I mean, nice boots!

Me: Thanks.

Guy (to his female friend): Look at her boots!

Woman: Wow, those are great! I have some shoes, some shoes that are that color—

Me: It’s a good color…

Woman: Yea, but those boots are great.

Me: … goes with everything. 

Woman (looking at crazy combo of what I’m wearing: short navy-blue yoga pants, sweater with grey-purple-green stripes, silver puffy down vest, and orange-yellow hat-scarf my mother knitted): You are, like, so adorable!  Oh my gosh!

Haha.  Have I finally learned (in my late 30s!) how to dress myself in a way that doesn’t require wearing all black?? Or maybe we were all stoned on post-yoga bliss…  Mainly I was just trying to stay warm, especially because San Francisco has been impersonating the Windy City this week.  

I do adore this hat-scarf creation, with its retro colors, because it keeps my little ears cozy.  My mother designed it herself; she’s a talented knitter, crocheter, and macrame-er. I love the hat-scarf so much that I wear it all the time, except of course when I need to wear a tiara.

Quick take

Coupon for 20% off at Powells.com, where “all books are created equal.” (Use by Thursday.)

Link to IndieBound to order online from a network of independent bookstores, or find the one nearest you.

In case you missed it all, read my previous post and this good, smart wrap-up blog entry that has most of the relevant links and says why this matters.

Slower take

I’m relieved that Amazon has restored rankings and full citizenship to all of the books affected by what the company is now calling a “ham-fisted” error. (What does that even mean? Do hams have fists? Is it bad when they do?)  That statement was an upgrade from the first press release, which called the de-ranking of tens of thousands of books a “glitch.”  Still, the latest official words fall far short of apology or explanation.

In the void of any real information, various theories have been floating around, some quite creative:  confused French programmer, Internet troll, right-wing conspiracy, etc.  A storm on Twitter and Facebook on Sunday led the mainstream media (L.A. Times, N.Y. Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, etc.) to pick up the story on Monday, and NPR’s Laura Sydell interviewed me on “All Things Considered.”  In the end, Amazon said 57,310 books had been affected.  

At my own publishing house, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Stacey D’Erasmo’s The Sky Below, Cris Beam’s Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers, and Anais Nin’s Little Birds were among those that, along with mine, were stripped of sales rankings and categories, which made the books invisible on lists and some searches.

A whole lot of people are still mad at Amazon for either causing or allowing this mess to happen, and as one of the owners of my local independent bookstore said, “This is why it’s not a good idea to have one company dominate book distribution.”  

We might never know what happened inside Amazon, but check out the links at the top of this note for other ways to get your books online:  just as quick, just as convenient, and a lot less prone to ham-fistedness.

Action

Sign the protest petition: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/in-protest-at-amazons-new-adult-policy.

Call Amazon customer service: 1-866-216-1072.
Call Amazon executive customer service: 1-800-201-7575.

Complain via an email form: http://bit.ly/amazoncomplain.
Complain via email to Amazon’s “executive customer service”: ecr@amazon.com .

Twitter using the #amazonfail hashtag.

If you belong to a group that cares about books or rights, encourage your organization to make a public statement.

Background

Or, How Amazon Disappeared Me (Us)

As a new author, I try to keep tabs on how my book is doing. I’m not obsessive about it (really! I swear!), but I did notice the other day that my Amazon sales ranking — that little number that says my book is the 15,000th bestselling book of the moment, or whatever — had disappeared. I thought maybe I hadn’t logged in properly, or it was a temporary glitch, and figured I’d try again later.

Now, thanks to blogger and publisher Mark Probst, I know why:

Amazon had stripped all books labeled “Gay & Lesbian” of their rankings, categories, and searchability. That meant the main entry for my book — which was listed under “Gay & Lesbian” as well as “Nonfiction,” “Biographies & Memoirs,” “History,” etc. — no longer showed up under an Amazon search for either “Leaving India” or my name.

Outrageous.

Probst broke the story early Sunday morning in his livejournal blog after receiving a response from customer service saying that Amazon was instituting a policy to prevent “adult” content from showing up in searches. He figured out that Amazon was excluding all titles labeled “Gay & Lesbian” from searches, when one of his young adult titles was de-ranked.

Suddenly, anything gay was rated X.  

As a means of protecting customers who might not want to see explicit material, the policy was wildly inconsistent:

Straight romances were ranked, gay romances were de-ranked. Among the classics, D.H. Lawrence’s scandalously heterosexual novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” was visible, while James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” wasn’t. The DVD “Tristan’s Taormino’s Expert Guide to Anal Sex” showed up  in a search for her name, but the current edition of her book “The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women” didn’t; if you looked for the book, you would only see an out-of-print listing.

And my book, which has zero explicit sexual content and approximately one kiss (no tongue), wasn’t showing up on a search, while a similar (straight) book that’s packaged with mine was.  Gayness trumped all other categories.  A little bit of gay was enough to disappear a book.

It’s unclear what criteria Amazon was using besides the “Gay & Lesbian” label, but an awful lot of titles were suddenly rendered invisible.

I called customer service and politely asked the nice representative to please register that I object to the new policy that makes it impossible to find gay, lesbian, and adult titles through a search. (Phone: 1-866-216-1072. Email form: http://bit.ly/amazoncomplain)

Then I started digging.

Until now, “Gay & Lesbian” on Amazon.com was a content label similar to “Home & Garden,” “Mysteries & Thrillers,” etc. It was a marketing label designed to make it easier for customers to find books that were of interest to them. Amazon was now using the label as a way to exclude rather than include books. But its menu still listed “Gay & Lesbian” books — 22,381 of them — so I clicked on a random selection.

I found that, without exception, all of the titles were de-ranked — meaning that the main entries for these books would not show up in searches.

This included titles that have a long and valiant history of being censored, as well as others that make you go “hmmm”:

• Orlando by Virginia Woolf
• Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity by Chandra Mohanty
• A Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
• A History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault
• The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk by Randy Shilts
• Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation by Cokie Roberts (note to self: gotta check that one out for racy content!)
• Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg
• Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
• Prayers for Bobby: A Mother’s Coming to Terms with the Suicide of Her Gay Son by Leroy Aarons (a late friend, founder of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association)
• Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
• Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
• Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg
• Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
• Reconstructing Gender: A Multicultural Anthology by Estelle Disch
• The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Families and Professionals by Stephanie A. Brill and Rachel Pepper
• The Laramie Project by Moises Kaufman
• The Other Side of Paradise: A Memoir by Staceyann Chin
• Michael Tolliver Lives by Armistead Maupin

As I pulled out titles I recognized from the thousands on the Amazon gay=bad list, I first felt proud to be in such good company.

But scrolling through page after page of de-ranked titles, I felt profoundly sad that all of this amazing work — the genius of our community, heartfelt stories of true experience, our deepest intellectual and emotional grapplings — had been deemed, not to mince words, obscene.  Inappropriate. Wrong. Bad. Needing to be zapped out of existence.

And then, as I kept going, I noticed that the policy had… changed!

Suddenly, the books started showing up in searches again.  Including mine.

But as of right now, the sales rankings are still missing.  This means that titles tarred with the “Gay & Lesbian” brush can never show up in, for example, bestseller lists on Amazon — since bestsellers are defined by rankings. On a personal level it also means that a week ago, for example, I could see that my book was #22 of Biographies & Memoirs –> Ethnic, and #18 of Gay & Lesbian –> Biographies & Memoirs, and so on. Now, that information is simply gone.  To me this was a narcissistic exercise; to a prospective book-buyer, the sales rankings might range from totally uninteresting to mildly influential.

In addition, the loss of categories means that you can’t get to my book from another book. If you’re looking at Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, and you click on > History > Asia > India to find similar books, you won’t find mine.  Gayness, it seems, trumps all other categories; if you do manage to get to the page for my book, you won’t see any categories describing its content.

Bottom line: Gay books now have second-class citizen status on Amazon.  

I’m grateful for the grassroots power of the Internet that caused Amazon to rescind the most punitive aspect of its new policy, less than twelve hours after Probst posted his blog entry.

I’m shocked by the fact that, in 2009, the mere presence of “Gay & Lesbian” content can deem a book inappropriate — not by some hick rightwing school board in Texas, but by the largest bookseller in the United States.

I’m saddened and angered by the continuing differential treatment. 

And I’m firmer than ever in my support of independent bookstores, where books aren’t sold by algorithm but out of love and an unwavering commitment to authors, stories, and freedom of speech.

I’ll be doing a ‘virtual reading’ and conversation with live callers today, 10am-11am California time, 1pm-2pm Eastern Standard Time (see your local time here: http://bit.ly/minaltime ).  I’d love to hear your questions and comments, as well as your own diaspora stories.  A few of my relatives who appear in the book may also join the conversation.  We’re expecting callers and commenters from around the world so please join us if you like!

Here’s how to listen or participate:

ONLINE:

listen live or later at

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/saja/2009/03/26/Minal-Hajratwala-author

hit “click to talk” to talk

or join the live text chat

BY PHONE:

listen live by calling +1-347-324-5991 

press 1 to talk

For further information please check out the hosting organization, the New York-based South Asian Journalists Association:  http://www.sajaforum.org/2009/03/books-minal-hajratwalas-leaving-india.html