CockTales

I know what you are thinking. Cocktales? WTF is Cocktales? Please let me explain. Cocktales is not some new gay club opening in the Castro that centers on men’s cocks with hella cheap happy hour specials. There will be no Black Supermen or Asian Hotties being served at the bar—if you never had one, please speak with your bartender IMMEDIATELY cause you missing out. Cocktales, my friends is something completely not alcohol related. KEEP READING! Cocktales is really apart of a new men’s social campaign, The Men’s Story Project, that provides a forum for men to share their personal stories about social ideas of masculinity, gender socialization, and how they navigate their journey to manhood. In a society where men are constantly inundated with ideas and values that suggest the only way to be a man is to fuck bitches and get money, the Men’s Story Project says NO. For all my academics out there let me spit it to you like this- Cocktales is a social project that provides a forum for all men to share stories that highlight the intersections between race, gender, sexuality, religion, and class. It questions hegemonic notions of masculinity while simultaneously agitating normative and hetero-normative beliefs and ideologies that have been strategically created and deployed to police bodies and minds. This forum acts as a site of resistance for men who have been silenced, marginalized, and victimized by social ideas of masculinity.    

            Okay, I’m done with all that theoretical framing. The event was OFF DA CHAIN! I’m not just saying that because I worked on it since October of 2008, nor because everything I touch turns into gold—which is clearly not the case since i’m still a broke grad student, but because of the transformative power of sharing one’s own personal story. Cocktales took place at SF State’s Studio theatre on April 10th and we had a packed house! There were students, staff, faculty, and community members all gathered to hear the stories of 15 men who identified as different races, ages, sexual identities, and religious/non-religious creeds. Through poetry, spoken word, monologues, and rap, the men unapologetically shared stories about being sexually assaulted by the “cool” jock in high-school who was too afraid to deal with the possibility of having a non-hetero-normative sexual identity. They spoke of the trauma that they experienced because of perceived or actual non-heteronormative sexual identity. They sang original songs about wanting to find a man and of the sexualization and eroticization of women they love so much. They rapped in response to being questioned about what it means to be an American--in a particular moment in U.S. history where the subject of immigration is a hot-button topic.

            If you just got a whiff of politics, your nose is serving you correctly. This project is inherently political. It is about reclaiming our own bodies in an effort to live on our own terms and to define for our selves what it means to Be. The men who participated in the event did exactly that! They critically reflected on their lives and articulated school, work, media, and religion as areas in which they experienced pressure to conform, but also provided a space to transgress.

For more information about this new social campaign, please check out the links below.

http://www.mensstoryproject.org/

For clips of some previous performances, please check out the link below.

http://www.youtube.com/user/MensStoryProject