Dopp Juice Archive

Walking down to the beach last night after dinner, I noticed there was a young athletic-looking guy lying on his back on a platform, shirtless and in basketball shorts, staring at the sky.  It looked like a nice place to rest and look up. I walked past him.

Before I got to the water, I heard a loud yell.  Like an “AAH!”  Then a pause.  Then another one.  Then I realized it was coming from him.  No one else was close enough to notice it or respond.

For a minute, I rolled my eyes and shot an accusatory glance at the ocean. That’s nice, but I have to work tonight. Get someone else, okay?

Two more yells.

Okay, fine.

I walked up to him.  “Hey! Are you okay?”

He shook his head like he was trying to talk, and nothing came out.  I saw that he was shivering, and took a few steps closer.

“Hey.  Do you need me to call an ambulance?

He found my face and said, “No. No. No. Please.”

“Okay. No problem. What do you need?  Are you cold?  Do you need a blanket?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I’ll see what I can do.  Did you take drugs?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of drugs?  Did you take LSD?”

“No.”

My brain ran out of other drug ideas.  “What did you take?”

No response.  I looked at his scattered stuff.  There was a backpack, a textbook, a book called Kama Sutra for Gay Men, a towel, and a jacket wrapped around his leg.  He couldn’t move.  I climbed onto the platform and wrapped the towel across his chest.  I pulled the jacket off his leg, lifted him up by the shoulders, and placed it underneath his back.

I ended up spending four hours with him.  The first two were just sitting there, in the cold, trying to get him to talk.  He passed out a few times and I shook him back awake.  His name was Joey. He was 31.  His parents were in Arizona.  He hadn’t seen them in a long time and they didn’t accept him. He was gay.  He was a massage therapist.  He wanted to join the military.  He loved to cook.  He was addicted to meth, and was in a harm reduction program. He was homeless.  He wouldn’t say whether this was a suicide attempt or not. Read the rest of this entry »

First of all, thank you for all the kind notes of support you’ve been sending me over the last month. I’m so grateful for your comfort, inspiration, and encouragement.

I just got back to San Francisco after that three-week emotional roller-coaster. In a nutshell: I got to NH just in time (thanks to you). I held my grandmother as she died. I picked out her casket. I spoke at her funeral. I held the hands of two young cousins as they walked through everything they feared about death. I wrote. I worked. I spent two weeks living with my grandfather, helping him sort through details, clothing, trinkets, sympathy cards, visions for the future, and messy smatterings of sadness. I missed two Queer Open Mics. I left my car parked illegally. I forgot to pay my rent. I attended my cousin’s wedding. I fixed issues on four family computers. I found people. I held space for grief. I invented a new card game. I flew to Colorado and hiked beside the Continental Divide.  I threw a snowball in August.

And the lesson I’m taking home from all this is actually about dancing in China six years ago. It may seem completely unrelated, but it’s not.  Here’s what happened:

The “Dancing in China” Story

In 2002, I spent four months living in China. More than half of that trip was unplanned — I attended a 5-week study abroad program, and then just didn’t get on my plane home. Instead I set up shop in Qingdao, connected with other ex-pats, taught English under the table, and rented an apartment illegally. I spent many nights at a local bar called the Jazz Bar, which was the central hub for foreigners (and Chinese people who wanted to meet foreigners).

The bar was large and had great floor space. A local band named Angel Hair Tobacco played covers of American rock songs three times a week. It was a neighborhood pub set up for drinking, chatting, and playing darts. No one there danced.

My friends and I spent most nights playing cards, where the winner of each game always dared the loser to do something small and silly. After one particular card game, where I came out as the loser, the winner dared me to get up and dance to the next song at the front of bar.  This was a hugely bold dare and my pals laughed at the idea, figuring I would refuse to break the no-dancing taboo.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last few weeks, I’ve found myself in a series of (mostly unrelated) events that all drilled into this same themes from different angles:  Women. Technology. Sexism. Sexual tension. Sexuality. Sexual privilege. Sexualization. Sexual harassment. Feminism. Power. Reaction. Anger.

The tech industry is a male-dominated field, and it doesn’t have a lot of social infrastructure in place for dealing with its sexual transgressions.  To add insult to injury, we’re stuck with woefully inadequate language to describe what’s happening in general terms.  The phrase “women in the tech industry” doesn’t refer to a unified group of people with common opinions and experiences.  Instead it describes a scattering of individuals who are, far too often, trying to get a job done as the only woman in a room.  They face sex-related challenges in professional situations on their own, and they’ve found their own ways of walking through them.

As a young woman in the tech industry who’s still just trying to figure out the rules to the game, I have to admit I’m a little pissed off about how much in-fighting, criticism, and judgment I see women dishing out to each other on the subject of sexism, sexual harassment, and other concepts that start with sex.  Forgive me for sounding naive and idealistic here, but it seems like our energy would be better spent respecting the differences of our individual paths over such a rocky terrain, and throwing each other a rope when needed.

As a gender-bending queer, I’ve always felt like mainstream representations of “women’s issues” included a lot of things I didn’t identify with, relate to, or experience in my daily life.  On the same token, I fight my own unique list of social battles that many “mainstream women” (which is a bullshit notion in itself) don’t have to deal with.  Our paths are different.

Except when they’re not.

Every single person on this planet can look at any large group of people and say, with plenty of evidence, “I’m one of them.”  That same person, looking at the same group of people, can also say with just as much truth and proof, “They’re not like me.”

And when we’re talking about sex -ism/-uality/-ualization/-ual harassment, what we’re talking about is a big fat knot that has no right answers, and we all have to find our own paths through it.

I’d like to walk through it with the support, thoughts, ideas, respect, and understanding of the women around me.

(p.s. Just dawned on me: stuff about sexual harassment in the tech industry is usually about office politics.  I’d just like to say that I work with the best, most respectful team on earth, and that area in my life is just fine.)