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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (Sept. 16, 2011)
voices The Culture of Home Ec OREGON'S LGBTO NEWSMAGAZINE ------------------------------------------------------------------------ • Portland is a city o f domesticity. Recently, I met one of my favorite new people— an elegant dyke by the name of Julie— at a well-catered barbeque hosted by some Southeast creative types. “This city is all about Home Econom ics,” she observed with the fresh eyes of a re cent transplant. “It’s all about food, interior design, crafts. Say ‘Portland’ and immediately you think of farmers markets and home brewed beer, potlucks, cute little condos, put ting a fucking bird on it.” I was so stunned by her insight that I knocked over my drink with out noticing. “At the very least,” she continued, smiling and reaching for a napkin, “Portland would get an ‘A’ in it.” Unlike my fair city, I’d get a C+ in domesticity. Example: Years ago, I succumbed to the tempta tions of Adam4Adam and invited a guy over to my house with the intention of, well, getting to know each other. He walked into my apartment and looked anxiously around at the bare walls, as if some sort of camera crew were going to jump out from behind the piles of books next to my couch, To Catch A Predator-style. “Is everything okay?” I asked, assuming he was understandably nervous about being in a stranger’s house to “hang out.” “Um, no,” he stated, a sneer forming on his face. “The lighting in here is just terrible. I can’t deal with overhead bulbs of this wattage. Do you have a lamp or something you can bring IV --------------------------------------------------------------------------- SEPTEMBER 16. 2011 39 provide more flattering light upon the furniture I had acquired from the sides of various roads. However, no matter how cute my kitchen, the BY NICK MATTOS cupboards are still bare far more often than I’d Here in Portland, 2011, the cultural milieu is like them to be these days. Checking the mail different, yet for many the anxiety remains at is still an exercise in anxiety, the key in my hand 1950s levels. In lieu of the bomb, we are con shaking in the lock as I wonder whether the cerned by terrorism, war, environmental col mailbox holds payment for a freelance job or a * lapse, economic recession and a frightening notice from my student loan creditor. I can political climate. We are forced to stay at home, make a meal, artfully arrange it on my G ood not because o f social gender roles, but because will plates, take a picture on my phone and post we’re unemployed or underemployed and sim it directly to Facebook so my friends can click ply have no place to go. We arrange and rear “like”—but they’re online “liking” things on range our spaces, assemble ingredients from the Facebook because they’re underemployed. farmers market into artisanal meals, carefully I have to agree with Julie: We are a city all pair vintage T-shirts with worn-in skinny jeans about Home Ec, and there’s nothing intrinsi because we need to feel like at the very mini cally wrong with this. However, just as the ‘50s mum we give off the appearance that every exploded into the ‘60s, the fear that the culture thing is under control and we’re doing fine. We o f house and garden seeks to assuage doesn’t garden and can and homebrew and knit be disappear— it simmers until it boils over to cause they’re all hip things to do, yes— but be scorch everything. We can’t know at this point neath this hipness is genuine fear that, when what Portland will be like after that scorching. shit gets real, when we get sick and don’t have At the very minimum, though, the tension will health insurance, when the unemployment be out in the open, not hidden beneath a veneer benefits get cut off, we will need to eat these o f hip domesticity— so we can share it honestly, pickles and drink this beer and wear these and sigh together, until the sighing gives forth scarves because they could be the only things to smiling. M we have left. I’m certainly a participant in Home Ec cul N i c k M a t t o s may ju st he excusing his tendency ture. Years ago, after the Adam4Adam guy left, to keep a messy apartment. Send helpful house I sheepishly arranged lamps in my house to hold hints to nickmattos@justout.com. remember to breathe No matter how cute my kitchen, the cupboards are still bare far more often than I’d like them to be these days. into this room? Also,” he said, his hands com ing to rest on his hips, “you have a good start in here— I like the pieces you’ve assembled— but your interior design definitely needs some work.” (Needless to say, no “hanging out” o f any kind was done that evening.) It was only much later I realized that it was acute anxiety that moved that overly critical trick to analyze my décor, and fuels much of the culture of Home Ec. I think o f the Atomic Age of the 1950s, when the pressure toward a life of domesticity was a natural outcome of many different tensions coming together at once— the rise of the automobile, a post-war economy, the changing role o f women in soci ety and nascent Cold War concerns, to touch only a few. Of course, like a soup pot, angst can only be tightly covered for so long before it boils over— in this case, the unease exploding into the upheaval of the 1960s, setting cultural bonfires that scorched everything Americans knew about society. re opens at 12 noon Tuesday through Sunday NE Fremont St Portland, OR 97220 8232 503 251-7283 - www.Aparaphilia.com THE K ID S A R E B A C K IN S C H O O L , S O TIM E TO PARTY! C o m e in fo r sp e cia l d e a ls on lin ge rie a n d toys, a n d if y o u h a v e time, en jo y o u r a rc a d e for p riv a te (or not) in-store D V D v ie w in g . 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