I spent most of last week in Portland and it was a wonderful chance to re-connect with Oregon's largest city as well as with friends of mine who live there and with whom I stayed.

So what's so special about Portland? Actually, quite a lot. Portland has the largest and most authentic Japanese gardens outside of Japan. And the International Test Rose Garden and the annual Rose Festival has given Portland its sobriquet, the City of Roses.

While I missed the Rose Festival, I did get to the Rose Garden at just the right moment, when the roses were in bloom — all too briefly. I was overwhelmed by the beauty and the variety of the flowers there — over 550 different types of roses. Some roses were named for famous people (Diana, Princess of Wales; Madame Caroline Testout), while had evocative names (Moondance, Fragrant Memory), and others appeared to be named for the effect their creators hoped they would exert (Liebeszauber (Magic of Love), Strike It Rich), while others had highly theatrical names (Broadway, Opening Night). Even with the overcast sky above, the Rose Garden was a veritable garden of earthly delights.

Talking about oneself is the easiest and the hardest thing one could possibly do; the easiest, because one knows one's own story better than anyone else; but the hardest, because it is difficult to summarize a half century of experience in a matter of 15 minutes or less. Talking about oneself in front of an audience of three hundred or more people can be a particularly daunting experience, and I must admit that my heart was pounding when the six of us went on stage for the premiere of "Undesirable Elements" on April 21 at the Queens Theatre in the Park. But after the first ten minutes, it was clear that the audience was 'with us,' and I was able to relax and even enjoy the performance.

Richard Dawkins is delusional. That might be a strange thing to say about an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, but his new book, "The God Delusion" (406 pages of turgid polemics published in late 2006 by Houghton Mifflin), amply documents his delusion. And what is that delusion? That Dawkins is debunking religion -- all religion, for all time and eternity. The bigger delusion, really, is that Dawkins thinks he's talking about religion at all.

Dawkins' 'analysis' is no analysis at all; it's simply a polemic that takes only one very narrow & particular kind of religious ideology -- that of the contemporary religious right (whether of the Jerry Falwell Christian variety or the Muslim Ayatollah Khomeini sort) and generalizes to all religions & spiritualities across all cultures and all epochs; clearly, that's simply bad science -- if one could call it science at all.

Ironically enough, for someone who is so obsesses with fundamentalist religion, Dawkins seems completely unaware of significant developments within even this limited sphere of religious experience. For example, the National Association of Evangelicals -- the largest and most influential such organization in the United States -- right now is being convulsed by arguments and debates over what constitutes the proper scope of their work, with traditionalists insisting on sticking with the narrow political agenda of opposition to abortion and LGBT rights and the like and 'modernizers' (as some observers have called them) arguing for an expansion of the agenda to include action to combat global warming. Lest one think that the latter is a 'fringe' element within NAE, this new movement-within-a-movement includes figures of the prominence of Richard Cizik, NAE's vice-president for governmental affairs. Many evangelical Christians are now beginning to ask "What Would Jesus Drive?" and some are ditching their gas-guzzling SUVs in response.

So it's Hillary vs. Rudy. Well, at least, the French versions of Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani.

Segolene Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy will face off in the general election in May after having won the run-off in April. Unlike our party primaries, in France, all presidential candidates compete in one gigantic presidential primary and the top two candidates go onto the general election, a process that has some real advantages over ours but some disadvantages as well.

In any case, now that it's clear who will be carrying the banners of the Left and the Right, it's also clear to me what the next president of France will be: in a word, bad. 'Sego' vs. 'Sarko,' as the French call them: she who would be the first woman president of the French Republic and he who would remake France in his own image.

Question: does queer theory produce liberatory discourse that can and should inform LGBT activism or is queer theory nothing but pretentious crap? I feel compelled to ask this question in the bluntest possible vernacular following an extended exchange with a queer theorist on the Q-Study listserve.

Because she is on tenure track, I will refrain from naming my interlocutor and simply refer to her as 'H.' Having once been on tenure track myself, I am sensitive to the particular power dynamics in which an assistant professor is caught up. But I will not disguise my dismay with the quality and character of the ideas that H littered her messages to the list with, nor the manner in which she did so, because to me, they raise serious questions about the current state of queer theory. Let me begin with a quote from one of H's messages to the list:

"I'm always surprised when queer folks in particular start taking the moral high ground. This is exactly the tool of oppression that has so often been wielded against us. And my understanding of what i take to be the best, most exciting, and most radical queer theory is that which celebrates the shameful, the animal, the embodied, and declares that to be what is most human about us. admittedly, this is still ensconced in a moral framework (since "shameful" depends on a moral framework for intelligibility), but if the shameful becomes what is most dignified, then it also seems that the distinction between the two is so muddied that insisting upon it becomes a retrogressive act of moral policing. this withering away of morality is what i see as the task of queer theory/politics, not (as someone suggested) an
upholding of a binary in which queer theory wins out over morality..."

Here's my response to H:

I'm not an actor of any kind, but I will be making my theatrical debut of sorts on April 21 at the Queens Theatre in the Park. I can tell you what "Undesirable Elements" isn't, but it's hard to describe exactly what it is. "UE" isn't a play and it's not fully staged, so don't come expecting "The Importance of Being Earnest," "A Raisin in the Sun," or "La Cage aux Folles." I could tell you that six Asian/Pacific Americans sit on stage, reading from scripts set on music stands and tell the stories of their lives, which would make it sound rather static. It's actually much livelier than that description would suggest.

There's Joseph O. Legaspi, a Filipino American poet who talks about his childhood growing up in the Philippines and in Los Angeles. There's Moana Niumeitolu, a Tongan American who was raised Mormon in Utah. There's me (Pauline Park), the only Korean adoptee in the cast and the only openly transgendered person. There's Zohra Saed, an Afghan American scholar who speaks lyrically of her memories of Afghanistan. There's Raj Thakkar, an Indian American whose life has been greatly influenced by his childhood as the son of a Gujarati shopkeeper in Queens. And there's Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai, a young Chinese American poet and spoken word artist who lives in Brooklyn but who still has many family members back in Taiwan.

You just have to come and see it for yourself. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll want to meet the entire cast. And if you can't make it to QTIP on April 21, there will be performances in the Bronx and Manhattan on June 14 and 15.

Consider this item from the GLAAD Media Reference Guide:

PROBLEMATIC: "transgendered"
PREFERRED: "transgender"

The word transgender never needs the extraneous "ed" at the end of the word. In fact, such a construction is grammatically incorrect. Only verbs can be transformed into participles by adding "-ed" to the end of the word, and transgender is an adjective, not a verb.

I hesitate to criticize what is in general a very useful guide, but on this issue, the guide is simply incorrect: 'transgendered' is clearly grammatically correct and 'transgender' is the term whose grammatical status is in question. It is certainly true that some transgendered people use 'transgender' as an adjective to describe themselves or others, but a review of the above will show that this is, strictly speaking, grammatically incorrect.

There are adjectives that we use to describe people that do not end in 'ed,' including 'Norwegian' or 'Chinese,' 'masculine' or 'feminine,' and 'gay' or 'lesbian,' not to mention 'bisexual.' But to point this out is simply to point out the diversity of adjectival constructions in the English language; in itself, it does not constitute an objection to the use of 'transgendered' as an adjective.

What happens when a popular and well-regarded city manager of a small city in Florida comes out as a transgendered person? All hell breaks loose, of course.

Steve Stanton is Largo's universally respected city manager. None of the members of the city commission had mooted the slightest hint of criticism of his performance in running the small city, near St. Petersburg and Tampa Bay. But when he took the courageous step to acknowledge publicly his own internally felt sense of gender identity and announced that he intended to transition from male to female, he was summarily terminated by the city commission.

To compound the injustice, the Largo city police arrested Nadine Smith, an African American lesbian who is executive director of Equality Florida (the statewide LGBT organization in Florida), when she went to Largo to protest this clear act of discrimination based on gender identity. That violent arrest was really more a physical assault on her by a police officer who was trying to prevent her from distributing flyers in support of Steve Stanton at a meeting of the Largo City Commission.

I've never been much for autobiographical writing. I'd much rather talk about my activism and advocacy work than myself. Most of writing to date has been focused on my advocacy work through the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) and other transgender-specific and LGBT organizations. And most my speaking engagements have focused on my work on behalf of the transgender community and LGBT/queer people of color (especially Asians/Pacific Islanders).

So I hesitated a bit when my friends Patty and Jinky asked me to submit an autobiographical essay for an anthology they were putting together. I met them for lunch when I was out in California for Creating Change (the annual conference of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force), which held its 2005 meeting in Oakland in November of that year. Somewhat reluctantly, I agreed, and the result was "Homeward Bound: The Journey of a Transgendered Korean Adoptee," my first extended foray into the world of autobiographical writing. The essay was one of 60 contributions selected from over 600 submissions to Homelands: Women's Journeys Across Race, Place, and Time, an anthology edited by Patricia Justine Tumang and Jenesha de Rivera, published by Seal Press earlier this year.

'Zie' and 'hir' have come into vogue in certain corners of the transgender community. The equivalent of 's/he' and 'him/her,' these gender-neutral pronouns are meant to free transgendered and gender-variant people from the tyranny of the sex/gender binary. The expectation, I suppose, is that once American society has overthrown the oppression of 'he' vs. 'she,' the Utopia of gender liberation will be achieved. I don't mean to burst anyone's genderqueer bubble, but it seems to me that the argument for the use of gender-neutral pronouns is a profoundly ahistorical one that is not informed by a close examination of how languages actually work.

I would point out that Chinese has a gender-neutral pronoun and has had one for thousands of years, and yet China has traditionally been among the most patriarchal societies on earth. A great civilization -- arguably the greatest continuous civilization in human history, China nonetheless has been and unfortunately remains a profoundly misogynist Confucian culture even after half a century of ostensibly gender-egalitarian Communist rule.