On KinnPorsche, Gay Mafias, and the Trauma of Toxic Masculinity

There was definitely a moment where I thought the Thai mafia show KinnPorsche was never going to exist.

To be fair, the show took an extremely long time to come out. They dropped their first trailer in early 2021, before they had even shot the show. It was 9 minutes long and absolutely insane. Mafias! Who are gay! Violence! Sex! Exquisite shots! Intrigue! People were down.

Then there was silence. More trailers. More trailers? A release date that was pushed back, first because of COVID, then because the show producers broke ranks with their original network and re-shot the entire show for a new network. When it premiered in April 2022, I was convinced it was going to be a total trash fire.

What it is, in fact, is one of the best shows I have ever seen in my life. And I have seen a lot of shows.

Maybe it's because they shot it twice. We are getting a more-than-second draft, which is rarely true for any show, let alone a queer one made by queer creators. They also had a real budget for it, so it is beautifully shot on movie film with an incredibly talented ensemble cast.

It is also a gay mafia show that is really not about being gay or being mafia.

Instead, it is a show about male trauma, specifically the kind of trauma that is enacted by the prison of masculinity over generations. It is about sexual violence, and physical violence, and verbal abuse, and psychological abuse: all the types of violence that a culture does to men who do not conform to its expectations.

This all sounds very heavy. It is, in some moments, extremely heavy. (It is also, surprisingly, often laugh-out-loud funny. But I digress.) The plot centers initially around the enemies-to-lovers romance between a mafia don and the bodyguard he coerces into his service. The power dynamics are unhealthy from the get-go, and they only get worse. And that is even before the secondary romance kicks in around episode 9, which…whew.

Without spoilers - because this is a show that benefits from being seen spoiler-free - I think what I can say about KinnPorsche is that it gets some very essential aspects of what it means to be traumatized extremely right: that it is a thing you are taught to hide at all costs; that you will never find a way out of it unless you seek it yourself; that avoidance will not heal you; that you can heal; that it is forever. 

This show enacts trauma on the male body, and this is significant. I do not think I could watch it otherwise, because I have seen trauma enacted on female and queer bodies already, far too often. What KinnPorsche does is show predominantly what happens when men inflict their wounds on each other rather than the female-identified people in their lives, and in the sausage fest that is mafia culture, this seems fairly believable. The fact that that some of them are also fucking is fairly incidental. Despite the previews, which leaned hard into the idea that the show was NC-rated, the sex scenes are few and far between. Though they are technically explicit, they are also quite tasteful. This is not a show that seeks to fetishize anyone, no matter what their sexuality is.

So what you have, instead of the hilariously campy mafia fuckfest I imagined from the previews, is a show that seeks answers to the problem of how men treat each other: What they expect from each other, what they hide, what they are capable of giving each other, and how the culture of toxic masculinity limits them from truly taking care of each other.

Credit is due to the show's cast, many of whom have never been in a series before but who give their entire selves over to roles that are demanding and punishing. Credit is also due to the show's writers and producers, who wrote and re-wrote the original source material (a webnovel) in order to solve problems related to issues of consent and kink and to give characters more agency in their own healing. 

The final product is not flawless but it is close. The plot is intricate and ridiculous, but the emotional trajectory of the characters feels absolutely on point. No scene is wasted. It is rare to see any show spend this much time on how men feel about anything, especially in the context of a world defined by guns and bravado.

It goes without saying that most of the people watching this show are women, because the ultimate kink for women is men expressing their feelings. Also, everyone in the cast is hot. Women are allowed to be superficial too. It is also undeniable that the show will be silo'd specifically because its audience is primarily women and queer people. Unlike The Sopranos, which had substantial male backing, a show like KinnPorsche will be diminished the same way we diminish boybands and romance novels. If women like things, they must be lesser than.

I don't always like the things that women are "supposed to" like. In fact I often don't. I also don't identify entirely as a woman. But I do know that KinnPorsche has made me think deeply about the way we put men in boxes, and I thought I was done caring about any of that. The reason I can watch it on KinnPorsche is that it is not a show that lets men off the hook just because they have been traumatized or mistreated. Instead it brings them to heel, shows them the ways they are broken, and forces them to confront their wrongs. 

Perhaps I spoke too soon - there may be no greater fantasy than that.

Despite its darkness and cynicism, however, KinnPorsche also embraces a kind of cheesy sentimentality that rivals something you might see on Lifetime. That means that it wants happy endings for its characters, even the ones who are perhaps difficult to want happy endings for. If the show only wanted to punish and victimize, it would be no different than the many shows that offer basically torture porn, usually aimed at women. Instead it poses the question: What would happen if men truly allowed themselves to love each other without fearing judgment? How would the world change? And what parts of toxic masculinity can be deconstructed when its poison is pushed out?

On Stray Kids: Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light

Credit: Stray Kids

As I am writing this, it is 5 am. I do not sleep much these days. If you do – well. 

About 4 hours ago, I returned from the first concert I have attended in more than two and a half years. The last concert I went to was Against Me! in 2019 in Los Angeles. Though I had no idea what was to come in a few months time, it is hard to ask for a better concert to precede a long hiatus from live music. They are furious, frantic, political, and filled with rage.

I have come to realize that I love music that lives in the rage place. This has always been true to a certain extent, raised as I was on the blues and hip-hop and indoctrinated in high school into the benevolent cult of artists such as Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails. Later I would discover so-called emo bands like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, though in times of great strife, I always fall back on the classic soul greats like Nina Simone and Etta James - definitely ladies who lived in the rage place, always.

Credit: New York Times

The kpop band Stray Kids may not seem at first like they live in the rage place. After all, as is required for kpop bands, they are adorable. Their eight members range in age from 20 to 26, and are varying degrees of impossibly beautiful. But do not let their elvish exteriors fool you. They are chaos demons poised to set the world on fire.

Never was that more evident than at their three hour-long show at Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey, a good place to rage. Like many musicians, Stray Kids’ last North American tour was postponed by the pandemic for two and a half years. Fortunately for them, this allowed them time to produce more music. Stray Kids has written nearly all its own music for their entire tenure as a band – they are five years in, having debuted in 2018. As is fairly typical for a band that formed when the members were teenagers, their earlier music is less polished. But its one universal theme is this: RAGE AND REVOLUTION.

As a long-time BTS fan, I have dabbled in other kpop bands for years, and first heard Stray Kids when, in 2020, they produced the incredibly catchy single “Back Door,” a song that exhorts its listeners to join them in their clubhouse of chaos where they will plan how to take over and re-form the world as a place of joy and dance. No, seriously. This is what the song is about. When I heard it, I liked it but did not quite register it. Not until 2021, when I heard their newer single “Thunderous” (and was heavily pushed by my friend Puja, an angel for waiting for me to get to where they already had) did I take notice. 

It was a perfect storm: BTS had mostly gone on hiatus, the world was on actual fire, and Stray Kids had produced their best album yet. In NOEASY, they paint a picture of a dystopian world they are seeking to bring back from the brink. Every song on the album is laced with their typical defiance, especially “Thunderous,” which, in the chorus, states, in English, so they will not be misunderstood: I’m not sorry I’m dirty.

Has there ever been a time where a message of celebrating your unapologetic dirtiness resonated more? A mere four days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in a puritanical and vicious rebuttal of a human right granted 50 years ago, it is hard to think of a more appropriate tagline.

This is key to Stray Kids’ message. We are all living in filth, but we are looking at the stars. As much as they celebrate many different angles on defiance and revolution, they never lose faith in the idea that the world will get better if we try hard enough. In fact, during the concert itself, one of the members said some version of: “We are the new generation, and we are coming.” This is both a promise and a threat.

If all of this sounds kind of metal for a band that frequently sports bead-embedded crop tops, that’s intentional. Like many kpop bands, Stray Kids has embraced a gender-fluid aesthetic that leans into the idea that you can both spit savage rhymes (which they do, perhaps better than almost any other kpop band) and look like you are ready for a night at the gay club. Pride flags abounded at the incredibly diverse show, which showcased fans of all ages, genders, and races. Stray Kids’ members have carried on conversations with fans online (because pandemic) where they have congratulated them on coming out and finding their new queer girlfriends or boyfriends. They openly love each other and are a mixed-up, goofy and triumphant little found family. They preach self-acceptance and celebrate weirdness. In their recent single “Maniac,” they encourage everyone to embrace their crazy, their uniqueness, their desire to blow things up (metaphorically but also maybe not?). If I could reduce Stray Kids’ message to one sentence, it would be: The world is fucked up, but you don’t have to be.

Credit: The Honey POP

Nothing about this message is new, but nothing is new under the sun. What may be new is the way they sound. It is heavily hip-hop influenced, and they gladly give props and credit to the many African-American artists whose music raised them. But they mix in their own cultural influences too – Korean folk elements and fairytales, of course the cadence and eloquence of the Korean language, and a fierce devotion to what are now three previous generations of kpop artists who paved the way for their success.

To be honest, as much as I knew that Stray Kids could rage, I was not expecting them to be quite so metal. But in a live setting in a large venue with a band backing them up, they were a force to be reckoned with. Even when the stadium’s less-than-ideal acoustics swallowed some of their musical nuances, the hooks, beats and message came through. 

We are the new generation, and we are coming.

Thank God.

Here’s a Stray Kids sampler.

Thunderous MV

Back Door MV

Stray Kids - Kingdom: Legendary War - To the World

On BTS, KPop, and the Self-Love Revolution

Originally posted on 10/7/2018

Note: because this post was written in 2018, and some information in it has changed. For example, BTS now does get American radio play for their songs (though only the ones they recorded in English), their fanbase is much, much larger, and many of their music videos now average 1 billion views. I keep the information unaltered here because it is about a specific moment in their trajectory as a group and pop music phenomenon. Please enjoy!

Here is a moment I think I will remember for the rest of my life: as we were driving to NYC to see the most famous boyband in the world, K-pop group BTS, one of my best friends got a text alert that Brett Kavanaugh had been confirmed to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court.

The timing was, if anything, surreal. I have had these tickets for almost two months, but never would have imagined this show would coincide with this particularly hellish development in the news. But truthfully, many things about this trip were unexpected. When, a little over four months ago, I chanced upon a BTS video on YouTube after seeing a short Netflix documentary on K-pop, I had no idea it would lead to making a trip like this to a sold-out show at Citi Field, the 40,000 person capacity Mets stadium. The concert is historic: no Asian band has ever played a stadium show in the US. The BTS show sold out in under ten minutes.

I remember the fateful moment I watched that music video. I was at the tail end of a writing retreat that had not gone particularly well, sequestered in a strange Air Bnb in western PA where it’s really West Virginia – full-on Trump country. The video was for their song “Blood, Sweat and Tears,” and came out several years ago. It’s gorgeous and cinematic, as are many K-pop videos, but also more than vaguely sinister. The song is an innocuous dance bop about unhealthy relationships, maybe a little minor-sounding, but the aesthetic is Interview with a Vampire meets Alice in Wonderland meets Phantom of the Opera. There’s some light bondage. There’s an interlude in which they quote Herman Hesse and show one member kissing a winged statue while another reveals the scars on his back from where he’s lost his wings. To quote my friend Lisa, who bravely agreed to go with me to this show, “I don’t understand it, but I love it.”

Watching that video in that part of Pennsylvania felt fairly deviant. Despite being the product of an intensely patriarchal and fairly conservative South Korean society, K-pop is undeniably influenced by two types of cultural rebellion: hip-hop and queerness. These are also the most important cultural influences in my life, and so I think, though it took me awhile to get here, that in some ways K-pop and I were destined to meet.

Though I did not know it until I got to the concert itself, BTS’s fanbase is not only worldwide (estimated at somewhere around 15 million strong) it is also incredibly diverse. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a more diverse concert, in fact. So many races and hair colors and aesthetics and ages. It makes sense to me, because BTS’s music is not only engaging on that extremely accessible pop level, their message is one of complete inclusivity. Their last three albums have been part of a series entitled “Love Yourself,” and their unequivocal message can be summed up in this way: before we know how to love others, we must give that same love and acceptance to ourselves. This is an interesting message for a pop group to put forth, especially considering that their fans are predominantly young women and queer people. In the age of Trump and Kavanaugh, this is not the message we are sending to young people, or frankly – to anyone who is not a cisgender wealthy white straight male.

Being in a crowd of 40,000 people dancing and yelling and singing along to lyrics about loving who you are no matter what people say about you felt like a rebellion in the same way watching that music video did, except multiply that feeling by one million. BTS may be adorable and fun to dance to, but they are not apolitical. At various points, BTS’s songs call out parents and other adults for putting young people in a pressure cooker that doesn’t yield the opportunities they’ve been told to strive for. They call out their haters for saying they aren’t real musicians because they make dance music. They call out people who shit on you because you struggle with mental illness. They call out their government for being misleading and corrupt. They wear costumes that call to mind queer pop icons like Prince and David Bowie and Elton John. There is so much leather and sheer fabrics and flowers and sparkle. They are androgynous but also represent a soft sort of masculinity, and are visibly affectionate with each other with absolutely no self-conscious no-homo vibes. Their dancing is both remarkably precise and incredibly joyous. And they thank their fans. Over. And Over. And Over again.

Interestingly enough, the story of BTS in America is one of subversion of the American music industry itself. Though they don’t get radio play and rarely appear on American TV, many of their music videos have over 300 million views, with America being the third largest source of watchers. All of their North American shows sold out in minutes with no on-the-ground promotion. They debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts despite the fact that their music is almost entirely in Korean. They are in themselves a fuck-you to an industry that has always insisted that Americans won’t consume entertainment from around the world.

From a purely cynical point of view, BTS playing Citi Field is an enormous victory for the Kpop industry, which has always had its eye on the xenophobic US market as its ultimate goal. But it is also an enormous personal victory for the seven young men who have spent the last eight years of their lives getting here. This was clear in the final moments of the show, when each member gave carefully prepared remarks – some in English, some in Korean with an interpreter – saying how grateful they were to be there. “You are the brightest stars in my universe,” one said, while another dissolved into tears and could not keep going. Their leader RM, the only member fluent in English, gave a small speech which ended with: “What is loving myself? What is loving yourself? I don’t know. Who can define their own method and the way of loving myself? It’s our mission to define our way to love ourselves. So, it’s never intended, but it feels like I’m using you guys to love myself. I want to say one thing: please, please use me. Please use BTS to love yourself. Because you guys taught me how to love myself.”

This is some heavy stuff for a pop concert, but hearing it felt like – for that one moment – a weight had been lifted. While I despair about the news cycle, I am not afraid for our future. Most of the work I do is with or for young people, and I see a generation that is so much more accepting and embracing of difference, so much less afraid to be who they are. As much as it may seem like a leap, BTS is part of that. In a speech they gave at the UN’s General Assembly a few weeks ago, they encouraged all people to speak their stories, to feel validated, and to believe they can do good in the world. Such rhetoric would not be out of place at an Obama rally. The difference is that they have the ears of the young people who will shape this world. And for those hundreds of thousands that have seen them at sold-out shows in the last few months, they are unlikely to forget the experience.

I know I won’t.

On Michael B Jordan, Warrior Prince, Brother in Arms

Originally posted 12/19/2018

It is 2003. I’m home from college in DC, taking a semester off after having a slight nervous breakdown and leaving my private liberal arts school in Minnesota.

We’re watching The Wire. The show is about Baltimore, a city 45 minutes away from where I live, but one trillion miles removed from my life. At the center of the first season is a kid named Wallace. I remember little about that season but I remember Wallace’s face. Wallace is young, and black, and trapped. He is played by an extraordinary child actor named Michael B Jordan. By the end of the season, Wallace will be dead.

I didn’t cry much about TV until I watched The Wire. There is a helplessness that show induces that is hard to bear. The bearing of it is the point. We must feel helpless so we can understand. We are all Wallace. We are all to blame for his fate.

The creator of The Wire, David Simon, is an alumni of University of Maryland, College Park, the college I will transfer to a few months later. I meet him and DC-based mystery author George Pelecanos at a reading on campus. Simon explains that he is an American Jewish writer from Baltimore, struggling with how to understand and engage with the black experience in America. Pelecanos, whose ear for the DC black vernacular is uncanny, says it’s natural for him to write black characters because these are the people he knows and he loves. He knows every block in DC, every store and bar and school. He knows what people eat and what music they listen to and how they take their coffee and how they talk. He writes what he knows.

After the reading I go up to Pelecanos and tell him how much I love his books and also The Wire, as he’s recently joined the writing staff. Pelecanos asks me where I grew up, and I tell him. Oh, that’s Coolidge territory, he says. Those are good kids. I don’t tell him that my mom got up every year on lottery day to get me into school out-of-boundary, and that in junior high I melted down and my parents gave in and sent me to private school. I tell him I want to write about DC but I don’t know if I want to stay here. He tells me: You can write anywhere.

Fast forward a few years and I am watching a show called Friday Night Lights. Michael B Jordan doesn’t show up until Season 4, and by the time he does, Coach Taylor has been through the ringer. He is defeated and angry and feels like a failure. As Vince, Michael B Jordan is cocky, charming, furious, flawed. His story is one of terrible and wonderful striving. He saves Coach Taylor’s career, but that is almost incidental. Coach Taylor becomes Vince’s greatest admirer, his surrogate father, his strongest advocate. I cry almost every episode. I love him so much it hurts.

On New Years Day in 2009, I am living in Oakland. Oscar Grant is shot at Fruitvale Station, maybe two miles from where I live. Oscar is young, and black, and trapped. Riots break out in Oakland, mostly douchey white anarchist kids who crossed bridges to be there. We watch the news as helicopters circle above us.

I love Oakland. I walk every part of it, including downtown where the riots were. There are boarded up storefronts and burned out buildings where there used to be restaurants, corner stores, homes. People put up Oscar Grant posters to keep rioters from breaking their windows. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

They make a movie about Oscar Grant in 2013 called Fruitvale Station. I keep saying that I will see it. Everyone says, over and over, that it is extraordinary. It stars Michael B Jordan as Oscar Grant. I am living in Philly by then and it has been four years but I can not bring myself to go see it. I still haven’t seen it. I am afraid of what it will make me feel.

Several years later, I finally sit down with my friend Shannon to watch Creed. Shannon has recently been diagnosed with cancer and is recovering from a complete hysterectomy. We watch the movie in the living room of her father’s apartment, which is filthy. We manage to make jokes about how everything on TV has cancer in it, because that is how we roll. Creed seems like a safe bet. We’ve been told that it will make us cry, but we know it has Michael B Jordan in it and if he is in anything, we will cry.

Creed is about Philly, and Rocky, and boxing. It’s so good. Michael B Jordan is perfect. He is at times young and black and trapped, but he is also a champion. His relationship with the aging Rocky is like a father/son relationship, but it also isn’t. The movie is so Philly and so smart and so great.

We get halfway through before the cancer plotline happens. It is comical and terrible and I am on Wikipedia in seconds to find out if Rocky survives. He does. He is Rocky.

Shannon does not.

When the news breaks that they are making a Black Panther movie and that Ryan Coogler - director of Fruitvale Station and Creed - will direct, I nearly faint. I know nothing about Black Panther because it is a relatively obscure comic and I am not a true comics nerd, merely a selective reader. I read everything I can find about the production. I watch as they add cast members. Michael B Jordan. Lupita Nyong’o. Chadwick Boseman. Forrest Whitaker. Angela Bassett. When the preview drops, I come close to crying. “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” plays over the footage, and I am transported to my living room, where, as a small child, I would sit on the floor while my dad played Gil Scott-Heron on his record player.

Michael B Jordan looks, in the preview, like a warrior prince. That is in fact what he is.

February 2018 finally arrives and I refuse to read anything about the movie before I see it. I’m glad I do this. It means that I know nothing and that I experience it all for myself with no critical filters. From the moment that Michael B Jordan comes on screen, he is magnetic as hell. I want this movie so much but I also want a movie about his character in which he is at the center. He is young, and black, and trapped. He is Oakland and he is Wakanda. He is trauma and he is resilience. He is beautiful and he is terrible. In some scenes he is Creed, punching his way out of his darkness. In some scenes he is Vince, cocky and yet afraid to look at himself in the mirror. In some scenes he is Oscar Grant, killed unjustly years ago on the streets of Oakland. And in some scenes he is Wallace, and Wallace is everything, and Wallace is broken, and Wallace misses his father, and then Wallace is gone.

Rewind: it is 2012. I am in my first year social work internship at a non-profit in North Philly that works with juvenile drug offenders. In my mind I keep thinking about The Wire. I think about Wallace. Stupid white girl, I think. I am well-meaning but totally unqualified and untrained. Every morning I wake up nauseous.

One day I arrive early at the room where we hold group therapy. A few of the boys are there, and they’ve found an old DVD set of The Wire. Shit is real, one of them says. So real, says another. Where’s Wallace? says a third. Where’s Wallace? echoes the second. Where’s Wallace?

On Sensitivity, Least Valued of Superpowers

Originally posted on 7/26/2015

I grew up in a house where people did not cry.

This is a lie. I cried a lot. I mostly cried alone, and I grew up believing that crying was something you did alone, because you should not cry. Crying was not okay. Crying was weakness, it was vulnerability, it was wrong. When I cried my mother would tell me not to cry. She didn’t do this out of meanness, she did this because she was also raised not to cry. We are a society that raises children not to cry, that tells people to be ashamed of their feelings, that pathologizes and overmedicates sadness and grief. It fucks us up.

It is amazing how many years and many hours of therapy later, I still feel guilty when I cry. It is hard-wired into me, this guilt. It is that voice I always hear: Don’t cry. Don’t be so sensitive. Why do you have to be so sensitive?

In the always-changing field of neuroscience, there is a good amount of energy currently being devoted to studying why some people are so sensitive. In her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain cites evidence that children may just be born sensitive, meaning they have less of a tolerance for stimulation of all kinds, whether it’s audiovisual or emotional. But she also takes this a step further, to illuminate the ways in which sensitivity can be a strength. Those who are naturally more sensitive may experience more pain - especially in a world that is overstimulating even for the less aware - and be more avoidant and solitary as a result. But they are also more empathetic, more caring, more altruistic, more artistic, more reflective, more intuitive, better listeners.

I wish when I was younger that I’d had more access to discourse like Cain’s. I spent a lot of my adolescence and young adulthood battling pretty severe depression, and that depression was complicated by feelings of shame around being so affected by the world around me. Why do I care so much? Why do I hurt so badly? I used to imagine I was literally empathic, and my powers included my ability to feel the pain of others. No wonder high school was so hard for me. Teenagers are walking emotional Molotov cocktails. You try being sensitive around that much simmering emotion all the time and not falling apart.

My most recent struggle around my sensitivity has taken the form of battling chronic and debilitating migraines. Migraines are a very obvious physical way that the body reacts to overstimulation, stress and trauma. Over the last four or five years, I spent a lot of time telling myself that I could “handle” what was being thrown at me, whether that was the non-stop stress of social work school or the vicarious PTSD derived from doing trauma work, the loss of a number of my relatives, a displacing cross-country move, a broken ankle, numerous familial illnesses. I worked a job that depleted all my physical and psychological resources up until the day I literally could not get out of bed. I was surrounded by other social workers and mental health professionals who seemed to be doing fine in their jobs, and all I could hear was that voice: Why do you have to be so sensitive? Don’t cry.

It has been a little over 4 months since I left my job. I have recently begun working part-time as a therapist again, and it is absolutely all I can handle to see 5-6 clients a week. I am still getting migraines 2-3 times a week. I feel immense guilt for not doing more, because I have spent so much of my time fighting my own sensitivity by doing as much as I possibly can that I don’t know how to do anything else. It’s like learning to walk all over again. It’s terrifying. The doctor who I go to for biofeedback tells me repeatedly: Be as good to yourself as you are to other people. I don’t even know what that means. You’re a sensitive, she told me a few weeks ago. It’s hard.

Watching the incredible Netflix series Daredevil, I had a revelatory moment when I realized: Daredevil is a sensitive. He is this literally - the tragic accident that left him blind when he was a kid also gave him enhanced senses - but he is also emotionally raw, constantly vulnerable. When he first got his enhanced senses, he had to learn to block out much of the world in order to survive the everyday. He compensates in exactly the way most sensitives do in a society that doesn’t value his sensitivity - he goes out every night and gets beat up, his emotional pain manifested physically in blood. If you punish yourself for it, sensitivity is okay. This is the lesson we teach the Daredevils of the world: if you must be sensitive, you also damn well better be useful.

It is hard to feel useful when I can’t work full-time, when I can’t achieve in the ways that I’ve always used as barometers of my self-worth. But I’m trying. I’m trying to see my sensitivity as a superpower and not a handicap, my capacity for empathy and my listening abilities as valuable, my time spent resting as healing and not laziness. When I cry I try to see it for the release it is, not some sign of my inability to cope. I try every day to accept where I am in this moment, quieting the loud and self-critical voice that constantly harangues me for not having a plan or a purpose. 

If you’ve got this particular superpower too, just know: no matter how this world seeks to isolate you, you are not alone.

On Sense8, Inside Out, and the New Pop Culture Psychology of the Touchy-Feely

Originally posted on 6/30/2015

I am in the business of feelings. When I’m working as a therapist, that is a big part of what I do - try to understand how and why and what people feel, all in service of helping them to feel better.

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard all the therapist jokes in one form or another. After all, therapists manage to be both incredibly in demand and also widely mocked. Never more so than in pop culture, where therapists stand in as convenient narrative devices on TV shows and in movies: But how do you feel about that? How does that make you feel? Pop culture representations of therapists are overwhelmingly terrible, inaccurate and insulting, both to therapists and to the people who seek them out, but they are also ubiquitous enough to highlight the strange fascination we have with those who do this for a living.

This summer has brought two wildly different - and yet strangely similar - pop culture products of our fear of and fascination with feelings. Sense8, available via Netflix streaming, is a lush, confusing and breath-taking show about eight people from all over the globe who have the ability to feel each other’s feelings and share thoughts. It is maybe the most ambitious TV show ever made. Inside Out, perhaps Pixar’s most perfect movie, takes the viewer inside the mind of an 11-year-old, where her core emotions are visually represented by adorable avatars: sadness, joy, anger, fear and disgust. Both of these intra-psychic fantasies invite the viewer to do the work of a therapist: to try to understand the way people relate to each other while also trying to understand what it’s like to live inside someone else’s head.

Though Sense8 is undoubtedly the more adult of the two - how about that orgy scene?? - Inside Out demonstrates a more sophisticated understanding of the way the brain actually works. Admittedly the “science” of Sense8, whenever they bother to try to explain it, is more fantastical than reality-based, but even so, Inside Out is superior in the way it imagines emotional cause-and-effect. While the sensates are often forced into feeling certain things by their clustermates and their weird soul bonds, Inside Out looks at the intricate relationship between what is inside of us and the world we inhabit, a complex interplay of triggers and instincts. This is so well-articulated in Inside Out that I left the theater wondering what my little Disgust mind-person might look like.

On the one hand, there’s a logical aspect to why we feel certain things. Does it smell weird? Is it unfamiliar? Is it dangerous? Is it unfair? Is something being taken away from us? Or is it beautiful? But sometimes, there is no logic at all - instead there is just feeling, and all the ways we learn to protect ourselves from those feelings we don’t understand.

The sensates - tethered to each other, fearful, raw, open, out-of-control - are basically all 11-year-olds in adult bodies, trying to navigate the circuitous planes of their psychic adolescence. They careen from one location to the next, learning the ways they can protect and fight for each other. The fascinating thing about Sense8, though, is that the characters rarely fight each other. They fight the attraction between them, they fight their own abilities - but they don’t try to harm each other. As invasive and terrifying as it would be to find yourself inhabiting the mind of someone else, it is also an instant way of connecting people who have little else in common. The second that the sensates understand how each other feel, they don’t want to hurt each other, because that hurt is shared and they must bear it together.

This, too, is the lesson of Inside Out, in a way – that part of the necessity of emotions is that even when circumstances differ (like, say, the way a parent and a child experience moving), they can connect over shared feelings of loss and fear and maybe eventually joy. Circumstantial differences are rendered relatively unimportant because we all feel the same things.

The last few weeks have contained an emotional roller coaster of events in this country, from the unforgivable horrors of Charleston to the Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality. These events were almost iconic representations of the power of love and hate. In a time of such political polarities, maybe we all need reminders of the ways in which we are alike and the necessity of interpersonal understanding. From those of us in the feelings business, this might sound like an “I told you so.” But if I’ve taken anything away from Sense8 and Inside Out, both of which have been very popular, it’s this: Don’t be afraid of feelings, and don’t be afraid to feel them together.

On the Perversity of Diversity

Originally posted 4/4/2014

When I got the phone call about how I had lost my book deal, I told my agent - somewhat desperately - that I was working on my second novel. “Is it realistic fiction with a diverse set of characters?” she asked, to which I replied,“Yes,” though I had never thought of it that way. It is - among other things - a queer romance, a coming-of-age story, grounded in questions about what it means to be young in a society that believes you to be selfish and apolitical. The main characters are two boys growing up in the suburbs who eventually make their way to New York City. One of the boys is wealthy and white; one is middle-class and mixed race. They have friends who span the spectrum of identities - gay, straight, wealthy, not wealthy, Asian, black, Latino, Jewish. I didn’t do this to create some kind of United Colors of Benetton but because this is who the characters are to me, and this is the story I want to tell.

There is a lot of stuff out there in the children’s and YA book publishing world about diversity right now. Everyone has an opinion. Most people think we need more diverse books, which is a sentiment I completely agree with. Literature should reflect the mixed up reality of our world, and the current generation of young people is both the most diverse and the most integrated generation ever. By all means, tell the stories of all kinds of kids from all kinds of backgrounds. Tell different stories, tell exciting stories, new stories, real stories. Let’s do this. I’m stoked.

The things is, though, I’m not so sure that this emphasis on diversity in theory is translating to diversity in practice. When I go to Barnes & Noble or browse on Amazon or frequent my local independent bookstore, often all I think is: S.O.S. Same old shit. In Barnes & Noble, for example, they devote significant shelf space to "If you like this, you’ll like this” displays, not unlike how Amazon recommends books to you based on a complex algorithm that finds similar books to ones you’ve read. If you like John Green, you’ll like this book about kids with cancer. You like this book about dystopian teens in a maze? How about this book about dystopian teens on a planet where everyone can hear each other’s thoughts? Even the covers are designed to trick you into thinking you’re reading something you’ve already read. Such marketing by its definition discourages readers from reading diversely, from going outside their comfort zones. How do we expect different stories to flourish in a marketplace that is trying so hard to keep everyone in their own lane?

Also: is this what diversity truly looks like? Because it’s still hella white and super-straight. Furthermore, these are not - for the most part - different stories. So you’ve added an Asian best friend and the love interest is Hispanic. Maybe even the protagonist is a minority. But most of these books still fit into the narrow categories we’ve created - oh, look, it’s the Hispanic Rainbow & Park. It’s like The Fault in Our Stars, but Haitian! What if we re-wrote The Hunger Games, except Katniss was Asian? Why are we so locked into these boxes? I mean, I know why. It’s because these are stories that sell, and publishing is perhaps as risk-adverse as it has ever been. Truly embracing diversity would be mean allowing for stories that include frank discussions of race, of inequality, of prejudice, of hatred. Publishing wants the rainbow, but it doesn’t want the rain.

When I wrote my first novel, there was never a point where my male protagonist was anything but black. That’s because Damon Lewis was born that way, because his identity as a black kid who had gone to a mostly white prep school in a racially diverse city was intrinsic to the story I wanted to tell. It was a story of two boys drawn together by their difference, strangers in a strange land, and a boy and a girl who come to understand their differences are less important than the charged and heavy past they share. Race is not the subject of my novel but it’s everywhere in my novel. I didn’t write my book because I was interested in representing a particular community or even experience. I wanted to tell this story of these kids, of who they are to each other and to the world.

The flip side of diversity is tokenism, and I fear that some of what is going on in publishing right now is exactly that superficial. My “diverse set of characters” is not just a selling point, it’s the story I’m telling. It’s the world we live in. Stop trying to sell me the same old shit. Embracing diversity is a risk. Let people tell the stories you’re afraid to hear, not the stories you’ve heard a thousand times over. Then we’ll know something is actually changing.

On Jewish Food, Jewish Geography and (Not) being a Jew Amongst Jews

Originally posted on 3/16/2012

As you can probably tell, this is going to get a little Jewish.

So I’ve been reading Ruth Reichl’s terrific memoir Tender At the Bone: Growing Up at the Table. It’s dangerous when I read food books – I either end up jealous, hungry, or wanting to write one of my own.

Reichl writes beautifully and about a million different incredible food-type things, but mostly she’s made me want to cook Jewish food. Tonight, in fact, I made matzoh brie, inspired by her description of making it for her high school friends late at night while her parents were out of town. She talks about making it with sticks and sticks of butter. I almost never cook with butter, but I used some tonight. Not a lot! But enough to really brown the onions and matzoh, to crisp them the way oil doesn’t.

But it still didn’t turn out right. I’ve never been able to make Jewish food in California. It could just be because I don’t really know how – though my grandmothers make some great classic Jewish food like matzoh ball soup and pot roast, I never learned how to make it myself. Why make what your grandmother makes for you, even if she only does it once a year?

All my friends have heard me whine about bagels in California. It’s my West Coast Holy Grail, and I’m still on a quest to find it. Why is that? Why can’t people make really good bagels out here? I’ve heard all the dumb arguments about the water and the whatever, but I don’t buy it. Californians can make anything taste good. Everyone in the world seems to come here to cook and to eat. And yet I have tried a lot of kinds of bagels, even the ones people say are “authentic,” and…no dice. Their texture isn’t right, and they’re bland. Bagels have a taste, you guys! Bagels are supposed to have a taste without adding cream cheese or raisins or seeds of various kinds.

It’s like – there’s this place in Berkeley, Saul’s, that’s supposed to be this sustainable, organic, ethical blahblahblah Jewish deli. Like many restaurants in the so-called Gourmet Ghetto (see: Chez Panisse), Saul’s is truly great. I had one of the best corned beef sandwiches I’ve ever had in my life there, and their potato pancakes are ah-mahzing. But it’s weird being an East Coast Jew in a place like Saul’s, because places like that feel kind of…judgy. We love Jewish delis! But we want to take the Jewish deli and “improve” it, make it more “moral,” less gross. I never thought I’d be this person, but I like the Jewish deli the way it is! I’ve never found a good Jewish deli out here either, and it makes me sad.

Of course missing food is often not really about the food. It’s about the people. I miss my family. My family are the kind of East Coast Jews that Hollywood loves, dropping Yiddish and making jokes. My grandparents on my mom’s side grew up in Long Beach, Long Island. My grandfather was the son of a butcher; my grandmother was one of five children of a self-made millionaire. My dad grew up in New York – mostly Queens – and his mother lived there until she was 60.

My grandparents were classic model minorities, back when Jews were the immigrant group to emulate – they pushed education as the most important thing a person could acquire, they networked and stuck together, they tried to pass. They’re successful and unashamed of it because they worked damn hard for it.

I wasn’t raised religious, but I was raised 100% culturally Jewish. I miss it.

The Bay Area is a weird place to be a Jew. I speak of course only from my own experience, and won’t attempt to generalize. But I’ve often felt strange here, exotic – which makes no sense, because there are Jews in the Bay Area. I’ve been told there are quite a few. Somehow, though, I don’t know any of them, or if I do, we don’t talk about it. Jews seem very quiet here about their Jewishness. Every year I’ve been here for Hannukah (which has been almost every year for five years – though I’ve gone East for Christmas, I often didn’t leave until just before) I’ve struggled to find Hannukah candles to light my menorah. I’ll never forget the year my well-meaning roommate asked a clerk at Target where they kept their Hannukah candles. What’s that? the clerk asked. I thought: Really?

Recently I’ve been re-watching episodes of Season One of The O.C., a show I’ll still stick by in terms of its dialogue (at least early on) and it suddenly struck me how Jewish that show is. Like – Sandy Cohen, as ridiculous as he is, reminds me of so many of my family members. Well-meaning, a little too self-righteous, self-deprecating, always joking. Not that Jews have a monopoly on any of these characteristics, mind you. All I’m saying is Sandy feels familiar, and if I’m honest with myself, I’ve always fancied myself a bit of a Seth Cohen – awkward, funny, maybe a bit tied up in my own head, never quite fitting in. Kind of in love with the blue-eyed Anglo kid who’s tougher and sexier and says less stupid things because he just says less? There is no story more Jewish than that.

At the moment I’m in the process of making some serious life decisions that may very well mean leaving the Bay Area and moving back East. Yesterday I spoke with my grandmother on the phone about it, and mentioned how I miss being near family, and by extension, other Jews. She told me the story of the first time she went to Florida, and how it was amazing to her partly because it was the first time in her life she’d been “a Jew among Jews.” Even in New York, she said, that had never been true.

I realized, in that moment, that this is true for me too. I’ve almost never been a Jew among Jews. In elementary school in D.C., I was always the only Jew in my class, the kid who got called on to tell the story of Hannukah like my big nose meant I was born knowing it by heart. In private high school I knew more Jewish kids but not many, and all of us were too politically correct and brainwashed by our funky alternative curriculum to talk about it anyway. In college in Minnesota, I went to a seder held by the Jewish student group and felt like a failure when I realized the whole thing was done in Hebrew.

Now in California, I’m too “New York” for Berkeley—even though I’m not New York at all.

Let me just say – I am not advocating the re-ghettoization of the Jews, like my life would have been better if I’d been raised with less diversity or something. I love that I’ve been fortunate enough to know so many people from so many different places and backgrounds, and California has exposed me to more new and wonderful things than I can even name. But there is part of me that wishes I could have it all – the comfort of my Barry Levinson/Woody Allen/Aaron Sorkin-esque Jewish family, and the excitement of everyone else too.

As my grandmother might say, would that we could all have these problems.

And hey, if anyone knows where to find a great bagel in the Bay Area, they should hook me up.

On Gun "Control"

Originally posted on 12/14/2012

This morning in a seminar I attended on Suicidal Assessment, the facilitator told us that people who express strong feelings of anger and hostility are more likely to kill themselves. “Like in those school shootings,” he said. “We look at those as acts of violence against others, but most of the time that’s just a way to commit suicide. These are people who just want to take a lot of other people with them.”

It’s true: it’s a refrain that we hear, time and time again. Columbine. Virginia Tech. The Sikh Temple in Wisconsin. Jiverly Wong in Binghamton, NY. George Hennard in Killeen, TX. James Edward Pough in Jacksonville, FL. Pat Sherrill in Edmond, OK. Now Newtown, Connecticut. Then the shooter turned the gun on himself.

Gun control, people always cry out after such tragedies. And rightfully so. We are armed to the teeth and we pay the price. But these mass shootings – though tragic and terrible and inexcusable – are not the reason we need gun control. They are the outliers, the abberations. Saying we need gun control because of crazed mass murderers who kill kindergartners in their classrooms is a cop-out. We need gun control for all the thousands and thousands of people who are killed in this country by guns every year. For the man who argues with his wife and accidentally shoots his child. For the drug dealers who turn menial fights over turf into bloodbaths. For the teenager who breaks up with his girlfriend, drinks a bottle of his parent’s whiskey and shoots himself. We need gun control not because of the extreme examples but because guns make everything an extreme example. We make impulsive, angry, sad, frightened choices, and guns make those choices instantly destructive and often fatal. We need gun control because we, as a country, as people, often do not know how to control ourselves.

I’m not going to preach at you, because I know people have heard it all before. I know the other side’s arguments, too, and honestly: I don’t give a shit. I don’t care about the 2nd Ammendment, “a well-regulated militia,” the NRA. I think Americans largely agree with me. For every loud, well-funded gun rights advocate there are thousands of silent victims of gang warfare, domestic violence and suicide, millions and millions of witnesses.

Get loud, America. Stand up for what you believe in. Don’t just shake your head and accept it. Don’t just do it when kindergartners get killed. Do it every day, because people die in this country from guns every single day. Do it every day. Do it until someone listens.

On Fan Fiction, Open Secrets and Shades of Gray

Originally posted on 4/6/2012

Hello, my name is Sonia, and I’ve written fan fiction on the internet.

Oh, yeah, I said it.

Have you all heard of Fifty Shades of Gray? I bet you have. It’s been quite the topic of water cooler conversation lately, according to magazines like Entertainment Weekly, who last week featured a salacious cover of a naked, faceless woman with the headline Fifty Shades of Gray EXPOSED! Always subtle, that Entertainment Weekly. About as subtle as this book sounds like it is.

If you don’t know what Fifty Shades of Gray is, I’ll enlighten you. It’s a novel that began as a piece of Twilight fan fiction and became a best-selling phenomenon. It’s a romance, I guess, about a mysterious man and a woman who falls for him. As far as I can tell, without having read any of it, it’s mostly about sex. They have a lot of kinky sex, tie-me-up and hit me sort of sex? And people like to read it, especially – according to the media – women.

Do you ever have what I like to call a hipster moment? Like, when you realize you’ve known about something forever and the rest of the world has just discovered it? This is how I felt reading Entertainment Weekly’s article about Fifty Shades of Gray. There seems to be a lot of tittering and blushing going on in the media about this book, with the undercurrent of oh my, women like to read about kinky sex? What is this madness? I know, right? It’s insanity. The next thing you know women will be enjoying sex too, and then what will we do? THE WORLD WILL END.

The slightly quieter but ever-present element of this debate is also: Fan fiction! What is this fan fiction?! As if author E L James was the first person on earth to think: Hey, I like that story and those characters, I think I’ll write one of my own where things go a little differently! In this case I guess the Bella and Edward-inspired characters have more sex of the BDSM variety, though from my impressions of the actual Twilight saga, that’s not that far off from what those of us in fandom call “canon,” or the original source material.

Yes, I am a member of fandom. I am counting myself among the hundreds of thousands of us who have either read or written fan fiction. If you’d like a more detailed breakdown of the extent of fandom and fan fiction, please read this remarkably well-balanced article by best-selling author Lev Grossman (The Magicians) in Time Magazine. Yes, Time Magazine ran an article awhile ago on fan fiction! So ground-breaking, this stuff is. You’d think Shakespeare hadn’t been writing fan fiction five hundred years ago when he borrowed his plots and characters from all over creation and became what is debatedly the most famous writer in all of Western literary canon.

But hey, let’s stop talking generalities and get personal. I’ve written fan fiction since I was roughly 16 years old. I’ve been posting it online since I was 19. At last count, I’d written in 12 fandoms. I’ve written a lot of fan fiction, okay? No, I am not proud of all of it. No, I will not link you to it. But I have a lot of love for fan fiction and fandom, and I’m so tired of people acting like it’s some sort of scandalous land where crazy people share their twisted fantasies. Yes, it is that for some people, but you know what? The world is that for some people. Don’t knock it ‘til you try it, assholes.

I can tell you this: like E L James, I might have never written a novel if I hadn’t written fan fiction first. More than my expensive writing degree (sorry, academia!), fan fiction has taught me how to craft a good hook, how to develop voice, how to move a story along. When I was 16, using the characters of others gave me a jumping off point, a way to find my own voice, an audience, a community and a wide open space to try out new things stylistically and plot-wise.

I’ve heard critics scoff at fan fiction sometimes for being “easy,” a crutch, as if imitating the voices of others is somehow simpler than creating your own. I’m not sure this is true. Yes, writing fan fiction gives you somewhere to start, but it doesn’t determine where you go, and in a world where thousands of people are writing about the same characters you are? You better work damn hard to distinguish yourself. And in case you think fan fiction only exists in chat rooms or message boards (oh my God, is this 1999?), how about that book Wide Sargasso Sea, where Jean Rhys wrote a sort-of prequel to Jane Eyre? Or March by Geraldine Brooks, the story of Little Women told from the viewpoint of Mr. March? Those books won major awards. Please don’t assume that because something is fan fiction, it’s also trash.

There’s a lot of bad fan fiction out there, it’s true. Sadly, there’s a lot of bad writing in the world in general. I don’t know if Fifty Shades of Gray is good or bad, because I haven’t read it, and I wouldn’t venture to judge it until I have. (I probably won’t read it. I don’t think it’s my cup of tea.) Every time I see somebody make some crack about it being Twilight-inspired, though, I want to smack them in the face, and lord knows I am no Twihard. In fact, I hate that entire franchise and what it teaches teenage girls, but that’s a subject for another rant. My point is this: please stop treating fan fiction writers, and fans in general, like they are animals at the zoo. We are all around you. We are your friends, we are your co-workers, we are your family, we are (possibly) your children.

I get it, you’re too cool to like things. You never get super-passionate about stuff like, say, sports, right? Never watch a game or a show or read a book and wish it’d gone another way? Never got to the end of some movie you loved and wished there was more of it?

Congratulations! You’re no tweaked out fan, no Trekkie, no Twihard. I’m sure you’ve never read or seen or encountered anything in your life inspired by anything else.

Do you know what the only difference is between a person who wishes there was more of some piece of entertainment they loved and a person who writes fan fiction? The fan fiction writer actually did something about it. So, yeah, I write fan fiction. You might call it crazy. I call it pro-active.