I am delighted for my husband's friend--Gabriel Arana--who has a wonderful personal essay in "The American Prospect." The essay isn't new--it's around ten years old--but Marc just made me aware of it. Perfect title, perfect opening, perfect conclusion. It's a demonstration of the power of "voice." From the first sentence onward, Arana is blunt and charming. It's easy to follow him anywhere he wants to go.
I haven’t been home for Christmas in ten years. The excuse I always gave was that the holidays stress me out, which isn’t untrue. I can’t stand to watch once the local news station starts its seasonal coverage. You know the hard-hitting journalism I’m talking about: brave reporters staked out at Wal-Mart before it opens at 6 a.m. on Black Friday; with a frumpy Jane Doe browsing Amazon.com on Cyber Monday; and, around now, live on the scene at the airport giving updates about the bad weather, long lines, and flight delays. Just thinking about standing in a security line for two hours makes me want to punch Santa.
There’s buying and wrapping gifts, writing and sending cards. If your family is anything like mine,
Christmas is also when everyone comes together, gets drunk, and airs the grievances they’ve been holding onto all year.
After that come the teary expressions of love and forgiveness. I’m one of five kids, my dad is one of eight, and my mom is one of four. All that pathos can be overwhelming.
The sassy gay allusion to "a frumpy Jane Doe" lets you know--almost immediately--that you're in good hands.
Arana goes on to describe his own Christmas tradition, which is to visit a gay bar. It's important for an artist to be "interested, not interesting"--Arana is intensely interested in the world around him, and that particular commitment to watching and listening pays off. There are dividends.
Instead of going home on Christmas, I went to a gay bar, the first place I found other people like me. On the 25th, the hotspots in Washington, D.C. and New York have an aura I usually associate with smaller-town establishments. They’re more sparsely populated, the patrons friendlier, the age range wider. As more and more of us feel comfortable coming out, the increasing number of gay bars in major cities means more self-sorting. In D.C., for instance, young professionals go to Number Nine while thirty-somethings who are too old to wear Abercrombie & Fitch go to Nellie’s. But on Christmas, it seems gay bars go through a time warp. Whether it’s in New York or D.C. and whichever bar it is, each feels like the only one in town. While the night before they may have played Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” to the wild screams of the dancing queens, on the actual holiday gay bars don’t play Christmas music. Instead, they play the anthems of gay and female empowerment-“Born this Way,” “Firework,” “Defying Gravity,” “Strong Enough.” There is an air of loneliness about them I always found comforting on Christmas. Comforting because I recognize it: Here are other people who fled to the cities and, like exiles trapped together in a foreign land, feel they can’t return. That’s of course why they also play “We Are Family.” For a long time, I indeed felt that way.
This paragraph could fuel a mini-dissertation. A heterosexual reader might not know that the D.C. gay bars are organized in the way that Arana describes. (A gay reader *will* know this, and will appreciate Arana's droll reference to "Abercrombie and Fitch.") The real goldmine in this paragraph is the movement from Mariah Carey to Idina Menzel. A gay playlist changes on Dec. 25th. No one before Arana has made this observation in print. Additionally, the description of "democratization" on the 25th (at Therapy or at The Boiler Room) deserves a prize.
It's not easy to write this way--and Arana makes it look easy. A virtuosic essay.
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