'White Collar Comes Clean' at the Paley Centre, NY (7 June 2010) - Report

[redjeweled]

Hwæt. So.

I attended the White Collar panel at the Paley Centre in NYC on Monday, 7 June 2010. And it was wonderful!

(There are a small number of comprehensive event reports already posted in various locations, so I'm going to focus on my personal highlights.)

It's going to get prolix in here, guys.

Comments

[asimaiyat]

This is the part where I miss the point entirely and say YOU MET JUNOT DIAZ?!?!?! I would have fainted.

And OMG GAYSPLOSION. I have had that moment in class a bunch of times, unfortunately more often because I'm mad and I'm like "but what about us queer folks?" and then I'm kind of like "... well, I guess that cat's out of the bag." :D Good for you for saying that in front of like tons of strangers! That was really brave of you, and the response sounds fantastic. MARSHA. :D

I'm excited about seeing Christie on the show, oh my goodness!

Other stuff I'd heard about this event had made me less excited about the new season, but reading your report sort of fills me with joy all over again. <3

[sethdickinson]

baaaaaaaah you are so awesome. Lovely read.

I assume Gillian has talked to you about her experiences having Junot Diaz as a thesis advisor?

Also, I am doing a story for a not-very-gender-aware community (it is in a game, actually) with two queer lead characters and may ask for input on making sure I have them written correctly. If that is appropriate.

[redjeweled]

Seth, my lovely, I think that you may have responded to the wrong person! But no matter.

You're awesome, too. I miss you!

And OMFG SHE WHAT? (Man, I am so out of touch with you all. Bad, bad me.) I need to e-mail her about this. Exciting!

You're welcome to ask me any questions you have, of course, but please keep in mind that I can only speak for my own experience--not for any queer community as a whole. That said, I'd love to hear about what you're writing now! My e-mail is the same as it's ever been; just let me know.

[sethdickinson]

My Livejournal comment-fu is weak, it seems.

[redjeweled]

Junot Díaz! I know, right? I'm pretty amazed at myself that I didn't fall over. As it was, though, my voice went ridiculously shaky. Oh, self.

I told him that I was thrilled that he'd written Oscar Wao as a SF/F and comics nerd, especially considering that American pop culture generally codes nerdiness/geekiness as implicitly white, and asked him to speak about his decision to do so. I also went all yay! over all of the copious and untranslated codeswitching, as that was my experience growing up (though not in Spanish). The audience at the reading/Q&A was majority-white; I could feel the bzuh? coming off most of them after I'd spoken up. Díaz was so great, though. (And we talked a bit more on the subject while he signed my copy of The Brief Wondrous Life! zomg.)

Apparently this is my Unintentional Thing That I Do in Q&As: Guys, guys! Let's talk about race/gender/sexuality! Okay? Okay! Heh.

MARSHA. <3 <3 <3

[asimaiyat]

Oh hey you would probably be interested to know this: I actually wrote a paper about queer themes/gender nonconformity in Oscar Wao. It was totally fun. My study partner for the class, who was getting her MA in sociolinguistics, wrote about Creolization and script-flipping, and it was awesome.

I wish I a) got to go to more QAs, and b) chickened out less when it came to asking questions!

[redjeweled]

Both of those papers sound fantastic. Gender nonconformity! Creolisation! The part of me that academia warped forever just flailed a little. No, scratch that. Flailed a lot. Whee!

My trick to asking questions at Q&As is to either bring a friend along or make friends with the person sitting next to me, then to tell that person that I intend to ask a question, and to get that person to nudge me into asking if it looks as though I'm going to duck out. Ah, the joys of peer pressure. I'm not keen on it, in the general case, but it does occasionally come in handy.

Good luck with getting to more Q&A events!