Yep yep, I am actually going to fire up the ol’ blog and write some emo crap about Xanadu. I cried for a few minutes after reading of the death of Olivia Newton-John, less because she was some figure looming over my life, some obsession, than because I did have this crazy affection for her just for a moment when I was quite young that looked like one thing but was another, and there seemed to be more to the story.

After what looked like a latency-period crush on a blonde babysitter named Rhonda in Oklahoma and some kind of (I assume, rather than remember) effusive feelings about Leather Sandy in Grease and then Kira in Xanadu, I remember my mother joking to someone that I liked blondes. Give or take an “e”, she was correct actually; until relatively recently I had some annoying erotic archetype of the blond–my northern California memoir will be entitled I Was Told There Would be Blonds–but Rhonda and Sandy and Kira were obviously in another category, if I had known what was what.

Anyway I forgot about all of it for plenty of years and then knew later on that Xanadu was epic camp and loved it as that, and saw the state musical that treated it as such, and then at some point realized that as clumsy as it is, I just think it’s a joyful bad thing, which is to say a good thing. Right, yes, the screenwriting is from hunger and some of the acting goes right along with it, but I think I’m prepared in this overheated moment to say that every last musical number in it is a treasure of one kind or another, and I think if there’s anyone around in a hundred years, they’ll see it as a period piece and a happy trifle and really not as trash.

But no, you couldn’t call me an ONJ fan who kept up with what the hell she was doing over the years except once in a while I did wonder, as recently as a month ago. And you couldn’t say that she was one of the main icons of my emergence as a big gay homo, so when I say Xanadu meant a lot to a proto-gay eight-year-old in a movie theater in a town of 30,000 in Kentucky, I don’t really mean that I came out of the theater knowing something new about myself or feeling I would always love Olivia-Newton John.

I did remember certain moments unexpectedly, word for word, thirty years later when I got it on DVD. Proving she is a muse, Kira has Sonny look up “muse” in a dictionary and the end of the definition was “and now do you believe me, Sonny?” because one power muses have is altering print documents. (I have at some point figured out which muse Kira is but it’s tricky, because several of their names and job descriptions seem to match up to the lyrical arts and none of them directly reference roller skating.)

I did respond viscerally to the exuberance of the opening scene set to “I’m Alive” where all of them are like “this 20th century parking lot is wondrously unlike Mount Olympus!”

I did have the soundtrack cassette. I did, sitting through a long drive in the back of the car with my sister, tell her I wanted to start a band that did 40s music and 80s music that smooshed together (I don’t think people said fusion at the time, and certainly eight-year-olds did not) like the admittedly most purely camp number in the movie, the one with ONJ singing I think all three parts to an Andrews-Sisters-style number and, theoretically elsewhere, a band (in real life called The Tubes) playing some deathly distillation of 80s new-wave until it turns out they’re on two stages in the same room that come slowly together, and they all look at each other with shock, and then recognition, and then their songs overlay into one song I just cannot lie and say I don’t find transcendent in its schlocky way. It is good-hearted in a mode that has died in movies, and that’s a lot of what camp is, sincerity curdled by time.

But I didn’t write a sequel in a notebook or even have a roller-skating party. When I say it meant a lot, I’m looking back, and being grateful for a cultural artifact in which I only dimly recognized something about how things were going to go for me. People who loved Judy Garland, even the queerest of them, maybe didn’t always know they loved her because she was a vocal representation of our every sorrow and triumph. They just responded to something that felt true, and later in life found that this truth was an article of faith among their fellows.

I look back and think well: I was right; and I think: how lucky to have had something to grab onto even if fleetingly and unknowingly. There were other queer totems later that were more lasting and more important. But I’m thankful that Olivia Newton-John, dressed as a fucking Greek muse on roller skates in Los Fucking Angeles cast a little light on an extremely ordinary childhood, and that I was, whatever else could be said so early, queer enough to bask in it.

Let’s take our rays of hope where we can get ’em, people. Today, that means BYU. From this Washington Post article:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints considers same-sex marriage to be a “serious transgression” — and, until this spring, treated Mormons involved in these unions as apostates, subject to church disciplinary hearings that could result in their excommunication.

So a commencement ceremony on Friday at Brigham Young University, the flagship academic institution of the Mormon Church, was an unlikely occasion for this pronouncement: “I stand before my family, friends and graduating class today to say that I am proud to be a gay son of God.”

The affirmation came from Matthew Easton, 24, who was being celebrated as the valedictorian in the political science department — and the graduating senior chosen to deliver remarks at the ceremony for the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences.

Take six minutes to watch young Mr. Easton speak his truth. It will make your day.

It must be sometime in the last year I gave in to facebook’s bid for just an extra little bit of narcissism and started reading the “On This Day” feature, the one that tells you what you thought your friends would find clever on this day stretching back only to that dark era before you were on social media, of course. I’m surprised how often I posted about very similar things a year or two apart. Everyone talks about anniversaries being meaningful in an inescapable and often half-conscious way, and being especially tough when it comes to traumatic events. They’re usually referring to the anniversary of someone’s death. (Yiddish has a word for just that: yahrzeit.)

I’ve noticed in the last year that everyone I know is doing a lot of maintaining. We’re going through our days and doing our jobs and seeing friends, of course, but I would venture to say that for everyone I know, not a day goes by without moments or hours of genuine dread. It’s worse than the W era, though I was also conscious then of the constant reality of living with your fate under the broad control of someone shameful and terrifying. I wasn’t as scared then, though. So for the last week, I dreaded waking up today and compulsively grabbing for the phone and seeing what I posted at 9:31 pm a year ago, though I remembered the sentence anyway. “I have no idea what to do or say.”

This is me, in the quiet space of a largely unused blog, doing what everyone did the year after 9/11/01: putting down where I was. If you still sometimes come here, you can do that, too.

I voted early. I made a confident, joking post that day about well, if she doesn’t win, see you in Mexico. (Tomorrow, I will see the “On This Day” where I spliced together a photo of my great grandfather who came here expecting more and my newly printed passport photo. Jews are never supposed to not have a passport but I’m not a traveler. When I put the two photos together, I had a loud, undignified cry.) Then a few days went by during which I did not seriously consider, beyond the lip service that I superstitiously give to any bad thing happening, that this bad thing would happen.

Dave had a fiddle lesson on election night. I have spent election nights alone and with others, and felt some horror of being alone, just in case. Swells and I exchanged texts during the day but she was naturally going to San Francisco, her Tiffany’s (the place where nothing very bad can ever happen) and it’s not my Tiffany’s, so I hesitated. I watched the very early states come in at a mostly empty gay bar a mile from our house in downtown Oakland. I had a gin and tonic, but not an urgent one. Kentucky always comes in first, and always brings me shame insofar as it’s anything to me. Swells and I finally made a plan. I took BART to the Mission, where she picked me up and took me to…actually I don’t know the name of the neighborhood.

We spent what seemed like an hour in a grocery store trying to find a bottle of wine whose name and label art suggested victory and femininity but not enough overconfidence to warrant jinxfear. And then we spent the next few hours at the home of her old friends, among kind people. It was temporarily fine to swear in front of children, I found, and call a motherfucker a motherfucker, as long as you were laughing. And then one person looked worried, and then several people. I saw Swells weeping before I had fully taken in what had happened.

I called a car. Dave was at home, alone, which was a horrible thought. BART was deadly quiet. I remembered 2008 when I had come out of the New York subway after riotous celebration in Midtown Manhattan and a stranger and I had looked at each other in the doorway to the 190th Street station and simultaneously, quietly said “yay!” I wondered if there would be consolation or reassurance among strangers.

Sometimes you have a strange and inappropriate thought and are unable not to act on it, so I stopped at Whole Foods and bought maraschino cherries, but the good kind–not the bright red kind, because I thought: the drinking we are about to do is drinking we will remember for a long while.

I walked up the stairs and Dave and I cried on each other’s shoulders. I was still figuring out how scared to be. I think I texted Swells “I’m not sure if this is 2000 bad or 1933 bad.” Dave had put on Bach as a reminder that some good things will be here forever, and we had Manhattans because small comforts and anaesthetics are important to remember when it looks like you may be well and truly fucked. At some point we went to bed and slept uneasily.

I am rawer insider, having written this, but I wanted to write it. It’s hard to find the right tone that acknowledges the genuine distress I’ve felt in the year since without feeling like a giant drama queen. There have been much harder times than this, but I nonetheless have often thought of Akhmatova, who in 1961, with some distance on things, wrote, in the prelude to her crushing “Requiem”:

Я была тогда с моим народом,
Там, где мой народ, к несчастью, был.

I was with my people then,
Where we, to our misfortune, were.