word count: pathetic

Well, at least I’m work­ing on it. Some kind soul poin­ted out that Secret Life of Us has a new char­ac­ter who appears to be an Asian Les­bian. I have no idea of her name or a more spe­cific eth­ni­city. I don’t watch the show reg­u­larly, but I saw one epis­ode in which she was inter­act­ing with one of the blonde, anglo main char­ac­ters who was a staff member of hers. If that’s who she ends up having sexual rela­tions with, that could be inter­est­ing. Of course, now I’m con­demned to watch­ing hours of the show. Anyone have tapes? Or is it a call to Chan­nel 10 pub­li­city to see if they’re feel­ing kindly?
Watched Walk­ing on Water. Hmm. Had high hopes as it was dir­ec­ted by Tony Ayres and stars Vince Colosimo as Charlie, one of the key gay char­ac­ters. No expli­cit dis­cus­sion of eth­ni­city or queer iden­tity. No family to be seen, he does­n’t seem to be part of his ethnic ‘com­munity’ at all. Anna, his flat­mate is also sup­posed to be Greek, I think so at least he’s not com­pletely sur­roun­ded by Anglos as the guy from The Wed­ding Ban­quet is. Also, I think there’s a black guy in the gay club they go to (have to check again) so the gay com­munity isn’t por­trayed as homo­gen­ous. Have to look again at ‘cul­tural mark­ers’. Ayres talks about feel­ing like he has to per­form white­ness in the queer com­munity, that he’s a ‘banana’ (yellow on the out­side, white on the inside). Have to exam­ine this theme of frac­tur­ing I hadn’t expli­citly explored before.
My other themes that I thought I’d be find­ing (based on the US mater­i­als I’ve encountered) were trans­itional iden­tity as infectious/dangerous (white aus­tralian notions of the yellow peril… bisexu­al­ity as vector of HIV…), the idea of ‘coming home’ when coming out… and issues about closets/passing, vis­ib­il­ity and invis­ib­il­ity… I’m find­ing these in the auto­bi­o­graph­ical mater­ial I’m read­ing by vari­ous the­or­ists but less fre­quently in the ficitonal works I wanted to ana­lyse. Does that mean I change my object of ana­lysis or change my ideas? or both?
Or is it that I’m seeing a sharp change from the texts of the early to mid-nineties when iden­tity polit­ics was just emer­ging to a fic­tional rewrit­ing of ‘prob­lem­atic’ iden­tity as integ­rated (and there­fore harm­less)? if so, that’s a pretty swift reter­rit­ori­al­ising, but usable. It shows the accept­able bounds of beha­viour in order to be a ‘proper’ Aus­tralian queer… hmmm… back to work then.