Urbane Libertines and Atrocious Saints

The Betterness

2010-10-06T10:08:00.000-07:00

When I first heard of the "It gets Better" project by Dan Savage, I was intrigued. I have been in education and youth services for over 8 years, and have been active in environmental and social justice organizing for a bit longer, and I was excited about the hopeful potential. Dan Savage was an important resource for me when I was coming out (he deeply believes in self-affirmation and being real with one’s desires), he is someone who has the social capital to re-purpose Senator Santorum’s name into a widely used, vaguely medical sounding synonym for anal sex leftovers, and so could probably help something go viral, and I was glad to see someone talking about youth trauma as a result of society’s homophobia.

I was also excited to see other people participate in something. Apathy and dissonance are all too common responses to social challenges, and the idea of hope is a powerful one. What’s not to love about offering a queer youth hope?

But when I sat down to make a video, I felt disingenuous, and slightly uncomfortable. I wasn’t sure who the audience was. Without knowing who I am addressing or what their motivations for watching could be, I was simply engaging in an oft-repeated pattern of prioritizing one-way communication from adult to youth.

I felt perplexed – I was being asked by a famous journalist and also members of my community to tell queer youth of indeterminate origin that their life will get better because I am proof of that? Because I faced harassment and now I have a big, fabulous gay life? Th problem for me is that there were some steps in between a and b that I wasn’t sure I was ready to talk about in a short video.

I mean, I can tell stories. I can tell awful stories of being hated and bullied. I can tell stories ranging from serious tales of employment discrimination to personal harrowing tales of drug abuse, compulsive sexual behavior or self-hate, to generalized and catty anecdotes about the many ways that queers can police each other’s behavior. I can tell these on camera, but then and I not really following Dan Savage’s directions? Because then the story starts to sound like ...well, it doesn't really get 'better.' For me, yes, my life did get better! Yes, I can see now what I couldn't see then. Yes, I developed a set of tools and strategies for dealing with difficulty. YES, my life is better and more fabulous on a meta level than when I was in high school. Pulling back from the bad scary stories, I am thrilled to share stories about the things I did right: I was able to leave my home and family, go to college, be recognized for talents I didn't know existed, meet queer adults, see a Dyke March, live in San Francisco where people on the regular have more than one gender and sexuality, and be a part of a social justice movement that was fucking kicking ass against patriarchy.

But to me, being queer is and has been a struggle. Period. Full stop. It's a beautiful struggle, and one I would not change or disengage from even if there was some reason for and mechanism by which to change it, but at the very bottom of it, but to me, being queer is a practice, an everyday action against a machine that would have otherwise, as well as a struggle within the community to handle internalized homophobia, alcoholism, drug use, and just the myriad of ways that queers somehow find to rake each other over the coals. Possibly with the same complexity with which we make very horrifying things very beautiful, it's not uncommon for queers to stuff problems away or project them elsewhere. To say to youth that 'it' gets better reassigns the lion's share of work back onto the youth who disproportionately bear the burden of society’s homophobia. I feel that it is my job to work harder to make “it” better as well as to provide a supportive framework for people to struggle within.

I can't guarantee to anybody that "it" will get better, because it's difficult to piece apart which tools helped me get through, and of those which are traceable to privilege, or to the momentum of time or the privilege of place. Aside from my own experience are those of the youth I’ve worked with. I’ve been privileged to hear stories that keep me alert and vigilant to the actual societal moment. It is not just queer youth’s confusion and lack of future-oriented vision that keeps them where they are: it is the fact that our society is profoundly unsafe for youth, queer and straight. We are facing economic disparity of epic proportions, with scores middle-aged adults with degrees and experience unable to secure work, with college faculty and course offerings slashed, and where we face a climate catastrophe and the related health and geographical issues that goes completely ignored by decision-makers and people in charge.

I cannot think of a bigger middle finger to our youth.

On a micro level, I can’t tell someone that it will get better if they do what I did, because the San Francisco of 1995 is a nostalgic memory, unrelated to today. Youth centers in most cities have closed or reduced their services due to lack of funding, and affordable and available housing is a joke in this city if you don’t already have a job. A high percentage of youth on the streets are LGBTQ identified, and they left home primarily because of family conflict (read: they needed to make it better). Talking about LGBTQ youth suicides in broad terms can sometimes obscure the fact that suicide rates among both queer and straight youth are already incredibly high, and the suicide rate for queer homeless youth is even higher (than either straight youth or non-homeless youth). And, as I mentioned before, simply relocating to the big gay paradise is not straightforward. A huge percentage students in San Francisco report hearing derogatory gay remarks in their schools. Last year. So is it really about small, rural, religious communities? Or is it about society and homophobia that is alive and stratified throughout society?

This is not to say that queer youth should, across the board, stay where they are at because they could be at risk in a big city. Where someone is safer and has more options differs from person to person. And above all, I agree with the point of the It Gets Better Project: queer youth need – and deserve – hope. They need and deserve to have access to adults who care about them and who model the kind of life that they themselves may want to have.

Working with queer youth in different cities, in capacities that I would term ‘Helpful Adult,’ it’s hard sometimes to cope with the fact that sometimes youth just don’t want my help. They don’t want another adult telling them what to do and how they should do it. As adults, we do far too much talking, and I’ve gotten more mileage from simply listening than I have from talking and telling my story. I suspect in some small ways, it is the safety of the It Gets Better Project that makes it alluring– we’re “helping” youth without really putting ourselves into their lives and risking rejection or getting ‘too’ involved.

There is another allure to DIY broadcasting of one’s social media message which also holds me back. There is probably a part of all of us that wants to be Harvey Milk, rousing crowds with the message of hope. Everyone wants to go down in the history books, everyone wants to be the voice that saves queer youth from killing themselves. Sometimes, though, we can't save anybody. Sometimes we don't get to people until they're too broken. Sometimes our words don't carry the impact because the words of the other are louder and greater. As much as I hate saying this, and I don’t know if this is true or this is just where people arrive at when things are really bad, but sometimes hope is not enough if there’s not action. I think that starting to be more open about hope, and more intentional about hope as a need, can create the kinds of action we need.

So, yes, on a micro level, my life is better, and I wish fervently that queer youth can also make their life better, in whatever way works for them. I want to be here as a caring, helpful adult, a role model, and a mentor. But, on a meta level, as long as queer youth are killing themselves, my life is not better. So, yes, this is why so many of us are making these videos, not just because we want to be helpful, but because we inherently understand that we aren’t free as queers if our youth are dying. But we have a lot of work to do if we want to make society better for queer youth to grow up into. I do still have hope, but I also have a lot of fire and anger, and that's real. These things combined are what keeps me going and keeps me continuing to put myself out there in hopes that my message will reach the right ears and hearts, with the knowledge that I have, can and will make a difference to someone.

Hitler Wore Pasties

2009-08-17T13:22:00.000-07:00

If you would have told me when I was a little girl, that someday, a girl dressed as Hitler would beckon me from a stage with a riding crop and a crooked finger, I would not have believed you. And when it happened the other night, I still reeled with disbelief!

We were hanging right in front of the stage at San Francisco Drag King Contest, waiting to pelt our Latin lover Delicio Del Toro with tortillas during the Ricky Martin number. FACT: I was secretary/honorary vice-president of my friend’s Menudo fan club in middle school; it was called Mano a Mano con Menudo, but my favorite member was not Ricky Martin.

Earlier in the show, I had caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a stripper with an SS (Nazi) patch, and as she scampered up the stairs, I thought that there was no way that someone was going to come out in Hitler drag. I was immediately boggled because I see Hitler is an off-limits punchline. I believe in pushing boundaries in imaginative ways, but what is there to push when we’re talking about Hitler? Though I am -- perhaps detrimentally -- obsessed with the grayscale of human complexity, there are a few things that I see as black and white with little room for interpretation. Adolf Hitler is one of those things.

Anyway, despite my prediction I was going to be pissed and walk out of the Hitler number, I was surprisingly intrigued. It was all very high-energy, dazzling, and bafflingly compelling. I guess I was intrigued with the shock-value, as I spent most of the number with my hand in front of my face in dandy-esque shock (adjusting my cravat so I wouldn’t choke). This version of Hitler sucked his thumb and had a stretchy dong that was manipulated in a ways I cannot actually describe; I was already preparing what we were going to discuss and drunkenly analyze on the way home.

And then the stripper edged closer to the crowd and pointed at me. I shook my head (oh so demurely), but felt someone pushing me from behind. I heard a disembodied voice saying, “go! go!” and I could only squeal and bury my face in my girlfriend’s shoulders. There was just no way that I could have anything to do with a sexualized Hitler.

FACT: My family is part of an ethnic and religious minority group who are historically persecuted by the Russian government. Our family had nothing to do with the Nazi party or Hitler, but escaped government imprisonment, harassment, violence, and torture.
FUN FACT: They are called Molokan, which is Russian for “milk drinker.” Also, when my great-great grandfather was imprisoned in Russia, he was visited by Leo Tolstoy himself, who was a big fan of the Molokans. Finally, aforementioned great-great grandfather wrote a spiritual book that sort of resembles notes from an LSD-trip.

So, I feel a little conflicted. On the one-hand, I am a little flip about my family history, but the experiences of Molokans feel embedded in me on a sub-atomic level. Though there were about 500,000 Molokans at the end of the 19th- entury, today there are are approximately 20,000 Molokan descendants worldwide and only 2,000 go to church regularly to maintain the religion. For every person going to church, 250 died or didn’t carry the identity or religion forward.

And, their story is inspiring: my great-grandparents walked overland from the Caucasus to Spain and then sailed to Los Angeles and then built an entirely Russian-speaking church so that I could, today, experience the sweet freedom to find salvation wherever I find it, and since I can find personal salvation in drag and queerness in general, then do I need to feel conflicted at a drag show? Even if I am not what my relatives had in mind for Americanized descendants (there is even a word for me: ninosh, or unclean), I embody a type of freedom that was certainly part of Maxim Rudometkin’s spiritual trip, and that freedom includes living in a country obsessed with freedom of speech and living in a community of people who think outside of societal norms in an effort to make life better.

On the other hand, even if I found the Hitler-based stage show dazzling from a boundary-pushing standpoint, I still arrived at a place of wondering: why? It’s not so much that I felt offended at watching the Hitler stripper, but that since I believe in drag’s ability to create new realities and identities through titillation and suggestion, I couldn’t identify a point to watching Hitler shake his booty. Watching a jiggling swastika felt gratuitous. And yet, I couldn’t stop watching, even after I refused contact.

But then, does drag have to have a ‘point’? Or, more accurately, is the line from drag to meaningfulness so clear-cut? I am wildly entertained by drag shows where a bunch of hot queers sing Boys II Men, but am not really sure why girls who look like boys inspire such profound philosophizing in me. It may just be because genderqueer fags, particularly female-bodied people passing as men, are hot to me in a way that everyone else isn’t. Is it possible that if the person posing as Hitler had a body type I was attracted to, that the performance would have tilted firmly towards titillation? Or, maybe if it had been a butch Hitler, I would have been more overtly offended because it would have felt more true to life? This Hitler had wisps of blonde hair intriguingly peeking out from under the SS hat, and in that respect, maybe the image existed– for me -- firmly not in drag, but in costumed-stripper, and so for me, the individual components didn’t add up to anything, leaving the suggestion of Hitler-adoration too compelling to ignore.

I think for me, perhaps more pertinent than my family’s history as a religiously persecuted people, is that I grew up in an Orange County suburb rife with active neo-Nazis. Seeing swastika’s spraypainted on lockers or hand-stenciled on items of clothing in abject seriousness was a regular part of my high-school experience. Sometimes, I still cannot process what I saw or experienced. When I read newspaper articles about the neo-Nazis who named their child “Adolf Hitler” and pushed to have a birthday cake with his name on it, I can’t get behind their civil liberties, because all I can see is selfish and ignorant hate that I experienced in high school. Personally, I can recognize that my reactions to seeing someone stripping as Hitler may be related to my own experiences, but then again, it’s not like I have some unique relation to history that other people don’t. I’d bet a million tortillas that there were more Jews than Molokans in the audience, and neo-Nazis are everywhere. I kept looking around the crowd trying to ascertain other people’s reactions, and I couldn’t quite figure it out. There were plenty of people cheering and clapping, but other people may have been similarly as confused as I was.

Interesting that I started the show thinking that Hitler is "always" off-limits, but once the Hitler-with-pasties was about to touch me, suddenly it became more complicated. Drag pushes the viewer to consider the tenuousness of identity and image, and no matter how in your face (swastika) or subtle (concealed package), I realize the folly of hanging my hat on any sort of truth, whether it's about gender, or about ethnicity and history and political correctness. Once again, drag yanks me -- in all of my awkward shyness - to consider something about myself.

Anyway, so with that all said, since I am obsessed with etiquette, I feel that I must comment on the trend of taking one’s shoes off at a show. Peeps, I can understand if your pointed shoes and/or heels are hurting, but standing barefoot on a club floor looks so disgusting that I can barely stomach it. I guess I can’t really say that there’s anything wrong with it – they’re your feet, what do I care? – but I’ve seen this more than once now and am a little flummoxed.

But, just to be fair, I’ll turn the laser beam of judgment on myself: if you are drinking beer in a show, hold onto it with both hands, and don’t spill it, no matter how badly you want to clap for the performers or rip into a tiny bag of peanuts. It’s always a good idea to make friends with the people standing around you by not dousing them with Sierra Nevada, because you never know when you’ll need to shove them towards the Hitler stripper beckoning to you from the stage.

Dudes! Shut Up and Get your Shit Together!

2009-08-16T23:02:00.000-07:00

I don’t watch a lot of television, but when it’s on, I see the same few commercials enough times that I hit hyper-analysis pretty quickly.

What is up with not one but two commercials currently on the air with men interrupting women to tell them something that the women clearly already know?

The first commercial that drives me nuts for Fiber One. In a cereal aisle (in front of an implausibly overstocked wall of cereal boxes), some dude in a tie (the Fiber One spokesperson? His affect conveys simpering resentment but he appears in more than one commercial) lectures the very-informed consumer woman about fiber. Every sentence she begins is hacked to bits by the monotone guy until she can’t even say a single word. She walks off in a seeming daze. I for one would have been arrested for violence towards a supermarket grocery manager if I were in her position. That’s not the best way to endear me to your cereal. (Not that I was going to eat it anyway).

Then this week, I saw a commercial, for Verizon Netbooks, with a similar theme. A woman is reclining professorially on the couch, talking and likely about to drop some technical information, but dude finishes every one of her sentences for her, and then looks all pleased with himself for the commercial that he wrote, directed, filmed, starred in, and produced.

Dudes! Why are you all stealing the words of women?

Another outdated commercial theme that remains wildly popular: the bumbling husband tries to take on some of the women’s work, but makes a huge mess. Typically, the children laugh at him, but the wife smirks at him, rolls her eyes lovingly, and spends hours cleaning it up so his manhood isn’t damaged by pointing out a simple fact/request combo like, “You fucked it up; please clean it.” If you only watch television commercials, you’d think that men cannot boil water, make a latté, put clothes in the laundry without shrinking them or including a red sock, sweep, dust without breaking something, or dressing children to go play in weather-appropriate clothes (am I imagining a commercial where the dad puts his daughter’s clothes on upside down on the one day mom is allowed to sleep in?).

Why is this trope so compelling? The the end result of men not being able to help because their idiocy is charming is that rather than divorcing them or issuing household ultimatums, they buy products like swiffing mops, individually measured laundry detergent, or pre-cut chicken dinner in a bag. Oh, the poor men. They're so strong and ha ha, they can't work the coffeemaker and it spilled everywhere! Watch the wife clean it up. Ha ha.

Dudes! Just learn how to do shit around the house!

Let me back up a moment. It's not that I want to encourage women issuing household utlimatums or withholding sex because their menfolk won't do the dishes. I don't really have a lot of experience with this type of thing, so I won't judge, but enough with the gender enforcement via household cleaner commercials!!

Quibbling about the Tip...

2009-08-13T12:42:00.000-07:00

Today’s question is about tipping. I had so much to say about this, that I embedded not only the answer but the entire question deep within a historio-philsophical treatise…

If you’ve ever eaten out in a large group, at some point, you’ve probably had some problem figuring out each person’s share of the bill and tip. One person is so often stuck, addled and hunched over their cell-phone calculator, while others helpfully shout out, “I only had an appetizer and 2 Sierra Nevadas, and I put in $12!” If you are successful in accounting for everyone’s share of the food and tax, there is still the issue of the tip. Standard protocol is pretty clear across the county: you should tip between 10% and 20% of the bill, depending on your geography, but the intensity with which people have developed their own personal rating system reflects two things: personal expectations around service, and an understanding of the point of the tipping system at all.

While the lone martyr with the bill is adding numbers and doing some long division (or, if there are non-drinkers staring balefully at the bottles of empty wine on the table, perhaps some robust logarithms to excempt teetotalers from tipping for alcohol), someone else is generally offering amateur analysis on food quality and service to determine how much to tip. You know you’ve heard it: “Well, I didn’t like how she left my napkin on the table.” “I hate when they ask me if I’m still working on my plate – I’m not at work, goddammit!”. If this is allowed to meander for awhile, somebody who wants to appear above such niceties but not contribute to the math will inevitably offer conversational gambits about tipping. “Say, did you know that tips used to be given before the meal?”

The most commonly reference origin of tipping is that in the 19th century, café or saloon owners set out boxes labeled “To Insure Proper Service,” and customers would place money in that box before service was rendered, in order to effect the outcome of their transaction. But, the idea of tipping actually stretches farther back in history, with some reports of tipping-like practices appearing in the Middle Ages, with noted practices such as lords traveling through a particular area tossing beggars coins in order to guarantee safe, hassle-free passage. Whether or not this is classified as ‘tipping’ or ‘bribery’ is up for debate, ,but there is evidence from this time period that feudal lords would give their servants extra money during times of illness or duress.

The first commercially-tied evidence of tipping appears in 16th century England, with brass urns labeled “To Insure Promptitude” were set out in cafes. Cafes of this period were not breezy coffeehouses or sandwich shops near the courthouse, but salons functioning almost as classroom space for gathering intellectuals. As Renaissance brainiacs would philosophize for hours, it became customary to drop coins in these urns to receive continued (ergo, prompt) service. Through the next few centuries, tipping then spread throughout Europe, becoming common in hotels and restaurants, but didn’t catch on in the United States until after the Civil War, mostly because the United States had less of a servant class than did Europe.

Tipping history in the United States dovetails with labor and economic history. By some estimates, 10% of the workforce in the US in 1910 had a tip-receiving occupation, but because tipping was a relatively new phenomenon, social norms around tipping had yet to be engrained. Some servants (notably bellboys) developed signs and signals amongst themselves to identify some customers as bad tippers/no tippers (bellboys would mark suitcases of non-tippers with slight chalk marks, and perhaps drop those suitcases “by accident”). However, as tipping gain popularity, restaurant and hotel owners began to seek ways in to increase their own profit, naturally leading them to seek a portion of the tips collected by their workers.

It is not difficult to see, then, how service-business owners may have a tense relationship to tipping. If a customer knows that she is going to have to tip on top of the bill amount, she may be inclined to spend less (thereby encouraging incentive on the restaurant owner to take some of those tips to “make up” for the depressed income). Or, the restaurant owners may instead lower the worker’s wage, resting on the fact that the worker is also getting tipped as justification for the lower wage. This conflict was seen particularly acutely in the late nineteenth century with railroad porters. New York Railroad encouraged its customers not to tip, and made their workers wear special uniforms without pockets, but the Pullman company took advantage of the propensity to tip, and simply lowered the porter’s wages.

As tipping became more of an engrained norm, restaurant and hotel owners began to see that encouraging tipping could bring in more revenue than raising menu or service prices, because tipping is seen as “optional.” Labor groups at times agitated to abolish tipping, claiming tipping to be a smokescreen by the owning class to keep wages low. Even currently, there is some movement to create a stabilized tip-income flow by instituting 20% service fees on all checks; this is preferable to simply raising menu prices and thus raising wages, because this service fee works out to a lower amount than wages (after all of the taxes and additional costs of wages). This philosophy is reflected in the San Francisco restaurant practice of adding a percentage surcharge on meals to cover employee health insurance. However, this practice seems disingenuous to some diners.
Urbane Libertine spends much of that hazy weekend wait-time in front of Boogaloo’s reading the small, almost-tattered scotch-taped explanation of the meal surcharge (“Rather than raise our menu prices…”) wondering why they don’t just raise menu prices, until we open up the menu and exclaim, “Holy shit! I always forget how cheap breakfast is; I love this place!”

But is a plate or meal surcharge in the same genus as a tip? It’s not optional to pay the surcharge, but technically, one could walk out without paying the tip. However, tipping is so ingrained as a cost of the meal, that one could argue that there would be little difference from stiffing the tip to simply only paying half the bill. For that matter, many of us would be more apt to rip a friend a new one over not tipping than if a friend was, say, shoplifting. We look the other way when people employ nannies and gardeners off the books, but someone who doesn’t tip is a social felon.

So this brings us back to the unique existence of the tip. If we’re no longer tipping beforehand to let the server know that we want good service and we’re willing to pay extra for it (except, I guess, at a café when we drop the change in the bucket before they’ve turned their back to pull our espresso), is tipping just symbolic? If we agree that restaurant workers and other service professionals (cab drivers, hairdressers, the guy who helps you find a parking spot by the Opera House) receive tips because their wages are lower than those in non-service positions, then why do people quibble over whether their server should get 15% versus 20%? If we’re making up for lower wages across the board, why leave 10% if your spareribs came out cold? The essential question, when we really think about tipping is: what does tipping buy us? Does it buy a customer better service? Or does it buy one aversion to being socially outcast by failing to do one’s social duty? Or does it buy customer internal satisfaction by increasing low-paid worker’s income?

According to Michael Lynn of the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University, a study showed that when waitresses wore flowers in their hair they earned 17 percent more than when they didn't. Another study suggested that waitstaff who squatted beside tables to take the order receive a higher tip than waitstaff who merely stand by the tables. (As a related aside, we at Urbane Libertine can kind of understand why anyone would want their waitperson squatting by their table, but sometimes it feels strange. We also don’t really get the waitperson who actually sat down at our table while taking our order, although given that we were in Santa Cruz, that makes a sort of opiated sense.)

Speaking of being opiated, are you still with us, kind reader? Like I said, we think tipping is a big topic with a lot of confusion, so we’re trying to distill broader topics with which we can grapple.

Most empirical research on tipping has focused on restaurants. Some general themes emerge: people who are ‘generous tippers’ will almost always over-tip (20% or more) on a dining tab (many even tip on top of the added gratuity on a large party), and people who under-tip (less than 10%) will continue to do so regardless of service, and frequently apparently in spite of increases to menu or service prices. Returning momentarily to our fictional group haggling over the tip, you can predict that at some point, someone will point out that the restaurant raised their prices and that leaving a lower tip will send some sort of signal to restaurant owners about how shitty this is. We can logically link tips to service 7 ways until Sunday, but when people are displeasured by elements of their restaurant experience – it’s too noisy at Beretta, it’s too windy at Sky Terrace, I stood in line too long at Café Flore and there were not enough menus, my vegetarian entrée tasted like cow, my blueberry crumble was gummy -- the first place it will show up is in the tip, although things could change with the popularity of Yelp! Yelping it out could fast become a replacement for a shitty tip; if we start leaving 20% tip and then fire up the BlackBerrys on our way out to vociferously describe our displeasure, maybe there would be less confusion over the tip in general.

Granted, I don’t personally believe that many San Francisco diners are actually bad tippers. And, granted, most of the confusion about tipping doesn’t come from people going out to eat; even shitty tippers generally know what they’re supposed to tip at a meal out, but get tangled up when say, getting out of a cab or getting a haircut. Well-intentioned customers seem to get tripped up regarding social customs when tipping hairdressers, dog walkers, babysitters, and even bartenders and bellboys.

With all that said, here’s a question from this week’s mailbag:

Dear Ivy,
Let’s say you call in an order for pickup/takeout at a full-service restaurant, and when you get there, your order is not quite ready. The host invites you to have a seat for a moment until it is finished. While you are waiting, they offer you a glass of water, which you happily accept. Question: Are you obligated to tip? And if so, who should you tip?

The issue here is not that they served you water; you don’t need to tip separately for the water or the fact that they had to re-set the table you were sitting at. But you should be tipping for take-away regardless, even if it’s not full-service. Tip what you normally tip and say thank you for the water.

Having said that, I understand that there is some confusion over why people would be tipping on take-out food --- there wasn’t a lot of service. In most restaurants, the servers tip out the busboys, hosts and bar through a percentage of their tips, but in some restaurants, front of the house tips out the back of the house as well. In those cases, the entire restaurant is motivated by the promise of tips to give you great service, so you’re tipping the whole joint. The burden is more on the server to provide good service because, that’s their job (yes, we at Urbane Libertine have been servers) but the whole restaurant is hustling to make sure you like your mixed baby greens. Even if you get your food takeout (“But we didn’t use plates"), the dishwasher is still scrubbing all the prep plates and sautee pans that your food was cooked on, someone had to answer your phone call and run your stupid credit card, and – surprise! – someone actually cooked your food. Some restaurants pool tips so that everyone gets an equal share, some restaurants mandate that servers tip the back of the house a certain percentage and some may just leave it up to the server on the honor system (remember reporting tips to the IRS? Oh, yeah, that honor system), and many don't tip the back of the house at all but pay them a higher wage than the servers.

As to how much: I think that most people would feel that tipping 15% on your takeout bill is okay even if you’d tip 20% were you sitting down to eat in the same restaurant . When all is said and done, people choose their tip from a socially mandated range, depending on how they feel when the bill is handed to them, and poor service or absence of service is a lot more noticeable to one’s mood than someone hustling behind the scenes and having a sparkly personality. In the end, we’re may just kind of fickle and motivated by our own curmudgeonly and nonsensical instances.

From the Mailbag: To Pay or Not to Pay?

2009-06-23T10:37:00.000-07:00

HAPPY PRIDE!
I've been on hiatus here, but since it's Pride, I've been entertaining a lot of conversations about date etiquette and queer perv etiquette in general. Let's start with the simplest question. Who pays for drinks?

"Dear Ivy,

I never have i gone on a real date, well, i just never gave a fuck before.So these days, do i pay for drinks? Only if i think there will be another date, or a chance of me getting laid? Or, do I just pay?

I hate playing a 'guy' role. What are the fucking rules??
Each girl for their own?

Usually I do something lowbaggerish; chicks dug it. But i dont wanna do it this time around.I trust your queer judgements, thats why I ask.”

Firstly, I understand the attraction to lowbaggerish things. The dates we remember the most sometimes include romantical things like a walk along a river at night with a paper bag of cherries and a warm PBR, or a bike ride to a secret picnic spot with a shared baguette, or climbing around train cars on the d-rail in an under-used train yard. Chicks do dig that kind of thing; who doesn’t love something that feels dangerous, nostalgic, and secret? To be taken somewhere interesting with someone makes one feel special and imaginative.

But, I get what you’re saying about this upcoming date. For whatever reason, you’re going on a “real” date, and thus, you’re interfacing with societal rules and expectations. I think it’s interesting that your immediate anxiety is prompted by the expectations around “the guy role.” Why do you think she would be looking for you to fulfill the guy role? Do you think that she may be reading you as the guy because she's reading your presentation as butch, and thus placing herself within an accepted gender framework?

We could unpack the butch stereotype (and I do love to unpack butches), but I think it’s telling that a “real date”-- defined as such by some kind of capitalist transaction in a sanctioned venue -- raises gender questions based on your appearance.

Whether or not we agree with gender stereotypes, some people can be incredibly motivated based on outdated and heldover ideas about who pays for what on a date, and if this girl operates through that gender lens, she indeed could be reading you as guy/butch/masculine -- or anything on that spectrum -- and if she reads herself as a happy participant in those gender roles, then she may be looking for you to buy her a drink.

But let's be absolutely clear: there is nothing inherently about a butch identity that has to lead directly to "the guy role," and there is also nothing about a masculine identity that leads you directly to being butch. Letting someone else dictate our presentation and behaviors based on that perceived presentation can be very tempting when people read us from our presentation, but a lot of the anxiety and questioning we do about what people want from us turns out to be unfounded fear about how society reads us.

Let's also be clear that, for many people, there's nothing wrong with these kinds of gender roles. Some femmes want a butch to buy them a drink, some butches want to hold doors open for femmes, and everyone else for that matter. But let's also be clear that some fags want femmes to buy them a drink, and some people don't want to overanalyze whose paying for what and just want to get in bed. It's easy to get ouselves worked up over the gender presentation issue on a first date when we don't know anything about how the other person sees themselves in the world.

That said, what does it mean to pick up the tab? We are, of course, talking about gallantry. Being gallant is about being confident and gracious. this does not have to be about being a guy, or tapping into an oppressive gender scenario. Paying on a date expresses generosity, confidence, niceness, and – precisely because it is a tradition that has gotten tangled up with these antiquated ideas -- can be as surprisingly romantic as taking someone to a secret, abandoned warehouse to look at the moon. Queers can be so stingy, and after so many dates of burritos in the park or joining a group of friends to go to a queer dance party, a full-service date can be impressive and newsworthy. It doesn’t have to be about being “butch,” it’s about making someone else feel special.

One tactic you can smoothly employ in an effort to be gallant is to offer to buy the first round, or the drinks “this time.” This implies immediately that you’d like to see her for longer than an hour, or again at another time. If you're not sure how much you want to see her again, you can say, “Let me get this” with a smile and see where the evening goes. If you place the cash on the bar, leave your palm there, and make confident eye contact while saying, "Let me get this" with a slight smile on your face, she will probably slide off the barstool with delight. Or, at least, I would.

You’ll know if she wants you to buy all of her drinks if she refuses to buy the second round, if she disappears into the bathroom when the check comes, if she leaves her wallet in the coat check, or if she smiles demurely and suggestively at you as you pull out your wallet for another round. And, this may not have anything to do with you being in a guy role, with you being butch, with you being read as butch, or with what a great date you are. Some girls want someone else to buy their drinks, and there are people in this world who are happy to do so. All you have to decide is whether or not you want to.

She may try to pay her own way, to express her own independence or equality to you, in which case you may want to consider playful fighting or perhaps arm-wrestling in order to settle the score. Whatever the outcome, I think going dutch on a date is tacky. Someone needs to pay for both people, otherwise, what is there to pay back, either on a second date, or in between hot and sweaty sheets?

2008-08-21T00:24:00.001-07:00

"The essay... shows a characteristic liking for Andrew Jackson, for autocrats, almost indeed, for blackguards and libertines. The highwayman, as we remember, is not expressly endorsed, and the canonization of the pirate is left to the inference of more masculine readers. Emerson, in his fireproof world, admires the activity of torchbearers and fire-kindlers. The common man's morals unfortunately are not lined with abestos." -- Oscar Firkins, on Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Though I believe we have a great deal of social causes upon which we should focus our careful, loving, passionate, articulate and empowered attention, I also believe that a great deal of petty annoyances throughout the day could be avoided by careful consideration of etiquette. What is etiquette? Where did these rules come from, who do they benefit, who are they for, and what do we do with them? What are the common man's morals? Am I a common man?

It is not so much that all etiquette rules must be followed, but that without some guidelines, decisions about how to act and what to do would be difficult. Additionally, without a firm grasp on the reasons and mores behind certain etquette rules, it is not as much fun to break them, subvert them, recapture them, or recontextualize them. On a certain level, thinking about etiquette is thinking about ethics. Although I very much beleive in living an insurrectionary life as part of a social justice framework, I tend to lose important etiquette questions when I don't stop and ask "How do I , or should I, fit in?" Thus: the urbane libertine.

With these questions in hand, this group of advice-givers-and-takers (a collective of coffeeklatch hen-house chatterers and some of our moms) make an attempt to sort out some of the more pertinent etiquette questions for a modern, urban set of folks. From queer weddings for straight people, to composing office email, to declining an offer of a threesome, to what to do when you spill wine on someone's wedding dress while tanked on open-bar, to good communication to not make your partner feel like crap, to punctuality, to grammar, to life. To life! We are imperfect human beings, and our world is incessantly in chaos. Tucking a few chestnuts of gems into our pockets, or sewing them into the hem of our coats, can help us get along.

Moving along:

The first question arrives in our mailbag thusly.

Dear Urbane Libertine,
A lot of my friends like to text message while we are at the bar. Most of my friends say that it's okay to look at text messages if you're hanging out, but that you should go to the restroom if you need to text back. I say that you can go ahead and reply if it's short, but that if it's longer, you should go to the bathroom and text. What do you say? Sincerely, S.S.

Answer! next week!

send your questions in, please and thank you!