THE CRINGE FACTOR

Now that I’ve read James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, I can talk about one particular criticism I have about the book… involving criticism. It’s about how the main character, David, has disdain for particular groups of gay men, basically the groups he is not a part of. Is this the character’s internal homophobia? Is it also the opinion of Baldwin himself? 

 

I mentioned in last week’s post that David considers two older gay men who are central to the plot with disgust. At the beginning of Chapter 2 in Part 1, a more reflective David does confess after the fact, “I understand now that the contempt I felt for [Jacques, one of the older gays] involved my self-contempt.” Somehow I’d forgotten this line. It’s easy to do when the disgust David expresses as the narrator seems so relentless. 

 

Another group gets dissed in a few of David’s asides. The more feminine gay men seem to be despised. The reader is clobbered by David’s hate the moment he walks into a gay bar in Paris:

There were, of course, les folles, always dressed in

the most improbable combinations, screaming like

parrots…Occasionally one would swoop in, quite

late in the evening, to convey the news that he—but

they always called each other “she”—had just

spent time with a celebrated movie star, or boxer.

Then all of the others closed in on this newcomer

and they looked like a peacock garden and 

sounded like a barnyard. I always found it difficult

to believe that they ever went to bed with anybody,

for a man who wanted a woman would certainly

not want one of them. Perhaps, indeed, that was

why they screamed so loud.

 

I would like to think attitudes have changed since the book’s publication seventy years ago. Sadly, I think as long as there have been gay bars, the more effeminate have been savagely mocked by those who have some need to distinguish themselves as not one of them. Not having spent much time in gay bars—or queer spaces—in the last decade, I’d like to think the community is less divisive and, indeed, less inclined to criticize more effeminate gays. I’ve said it before in this blog and it should be obvious but it’s worth repeating. The gays who did not have the luxury of “passing” as straight have often been outed earlier because they never had an opportunity to linger in the closet while trying to figure things out about their identity. Without any choice in the matter, the more effeminate are often the first among us to be fully out. They have been the trailblazers who made things easier for the rest of us. (Personally, I believe that most of my peers suspected I was gay when I was a teen on account of my higher voice and the way I talked with my hands but only a few of them called me a gay or a faggot. There was just the slightest doubt about my gayness that offered me some extra time to figure out my identity.)

 

Immediately after David bashes more effeminate gays, he casts even harsher criticism toward a person in drag:

There was the boy who…came out at night wearing

makeup and earrings and with his heavy blond 

hair piled high. Sometimes he actually wore a

skirt and high heels. He usually stood alone

unless Guillaume walked over to tease him.

People said that he was very nice, but I confess

that his utter grotesqueness made me uneasy;

perhaps in the same way that the sight of 

monkeys eating their own excrement turns

some people’s stomachs. They might not mind

so much if monkeys did not—so grotesquely— 

resemble human beings. 

 

Okay, beyond harsh. Disturbing. 1956, I remind myself. With RuPaul, drag brunches and such, I have to think we’ve changed in this regard. Especially gay men’s attitudes regarding drag.

 

David—and Baldwin—aren’t any kinder to women. Again, 1956. The woman is subservient to the man. At one point, David thinks he’d like to get married someday and have his wife put the kids to bed. [Sorry, Daddy’s busy smoking his pipe and reading the newspaper.] There is only one significant female character in Giovanni’s Room, Hella, David’s girlfriend. Yes, David tries to have it both ways. His elder, Jacques, tells him that a gay connection can be more than sex—love, even—but it cannot endure. “And how long, at best, can it last? Since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that…in the dark.”

 

Okay, sad…

 

Back to Hella. It is noteworthy that she is absent for most of the story. She is an American who is traveling by herself in Spain for an extended period. She comes across as a strong woman and yet she still buys into the times. “[I]f women are supposed to be led by men and there aren’t any men to lead them, what happens then? What happens then?” Immediately thereafter, Hella reaches for her purse, pulls out her compact and applies lipstick. So much for strength and that European independence.

 

Giovanni’s Room. A classic, they say. A reflection of the times, I suppose. But so much disparagement. To be fair, Baldwin isn’t so kind to one—perhaps both—of his main characters, as well. A readable book, but a gloomy, severe outlook nonetheless. 

A MOMENT FOR MATTHEW

It would have been easy to drive straight from Moran, Wyoming, a stopping point between Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, to Denver in a day. Evan and I took turns driving so the nine-hour day wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch, especially with extended hours of summer light. But our journey along Beartooth Highway and through Yellowstone had gotten us in the habit of making frequent stops, to snap pics for social media or, more importantly, to actually savour a moment just for the sake of it being one to share. 

 

Let it take two more days to reach Evan’s home. I wanted more leisurely stops in Grand Teton and we both enjoyed taking in the bougie cowboy vibe in Jackson. More importantly, I knew we’d be passing through Laramie, Wyoming and that was a required stop.

 

In truth, I only knew one thing about Laramie. Prior to our road trip, it was one of only four towns in the state I could name. Laramie will forever be familiar to me as the place where Matthew Shepard was attending university and where he was beaten outside of town on October 6, 1998. He died in hospital on October 12. A stop in Laramie was a must. I wanted to go to his memorial even though I didn’t know for certain that one existed or what it looked like. I just expected one.

 

Thankfully, Google and Google Maps filled in the gaps. On a quiet Sunday morning, Evan and I wound up wandering the impressive campus of the University of Wyoming, first trying a divide-and-conquer strategy for reading plaques on park benches and statues. 

 

Not Matthew. Not Matthew. Not Matthew. 

 

I felt silly and awkward. So focused was I on finding Matthew Shepard’s memorial that I didn’t care in the least about these other people who’d had a bench dedicated to them. No wink, no nod, no calculation for how long they’d lived. 

 

Sorry about that.

 

Evan used his Maps app to get us warm and then warmer. The blue dot on his phone screen took us to a treed lawn on the other side of the building we’d parked in front of. We went from “warmer” to spotting the likeliest spot, a park bench adorned with all sorts of items. As we neared, rainbow stripes came into view. 

 

Once in full view before us, Evan and I marvelled at the collection of items left as part of a makeshift tribute. Multiple paper flags representing different versions of Pride. An oil painting of the rural Wyoming landscape. Bundles of flowers, now dying. A rubber duckie (just because?). A “Say Gay” sticker. A pink unicorn. Candles. Miscellaneous items to represent et cetera.

 

Our visit was on June 22, well into Pride Month so I don’t know if all the decorations were part of marking the larger occasion or if the memorial bench is decorated with items year-round. I choose to believe the latter. I’d like to think there are others who make a point of coming here when life takes them somewhere near Laramie.   

 

While we visited Stonewall Inn in May, the Matthew Shepard memorial may have been more moving, more personally relevant. I was four at the time of the Stonewall uprising. I would have been preoccupied with spying on my sister and her friends playing with dolls (all they had to do was ask me to join) and settling for playing with a collection of animal figurines. I did not hear any news about Stonewall until well over a decade later. But I was thirty-four when Shepard was beaten and left to die. I remember the news. I recall the sadness, the anger, the revulsion. I know his death in Wyoming had a chilling effect on me 2,100 kilometres away in Vancouver. Was I being alarmist and melodramatic thinking something heinous in a small town could happen in progressive Vancouver? Not at all. Two years later, Aaron Webster was beaten to death in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. That only added to fears for my safety. Could I be openly gay anywhere?

 

1998 was a vulnerable year for me. I was becoming more and more open about being gay. For the first and ONLY time in my educational career, I was out to staff. It was not on account of bravery on my part. There were three other gay teachers at the school. Being closeted wasn’t even possible. Oh, how the freedom made for so many laughs during lunch in the staffroom! When I transferred to another school after six years, I went back to being closeted. I told myself I wasn’t hiding anything; rather, I was tired of coming out declarations. I can see now that was bullshit.

 

I can’t adequately explain the fear. It’s an accumulation of life’s experiences: of elementary and high school taunts about being a fag; of my best friend outing me in twelfth grade when I still hadn’t come to terms with sexual identity myself; of fears I’d lose my job teaching in Catholic schools if parents or the nuns found out; of more taunts from carloads of dudes cruising down gay villages because The Gays needed to feel insecure even in their own ghettos; of a total lack of bravado. What happened to Matthew Shepard stoked the fears already within me. 

 

Being gay was unsafe, be it in the form of a certain voice inflection, a limp wrist (both of which were natural mannerisms for me) or when expressed through holding the hand of a boyfriend. Aside from a six-year career blip, being fully out has only been a relatively recent thing. I knew not to dare express myself freely. Twenty-seven years after Matthew Shepard was murdered, I’m letting down my guard, most of that thanks to Evan who has long refused to suppress or edit himself. 

 

I am thankful my visit to the Matthew Shepard memorial was with Evan by my side. We held hands. We hugged. I liked that. I think Matthew would have, too. He’d brought us to the University of Wyoming in a state that, due to lack of familiarity, probably has a lower tolerance for queer identities than the national average. But I’d like to think that, over time, Matthew has come to empower and embolden us. 

 

Like Stonewall. We will not be silenced. To remain more fearful would only be a nod to the people who killed Matthew, instead of a tribute to him.

 

 

 

  

INSTA-GAIN & INSTA-SHAME

A quick plug:

FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM!

rxtraveler

 

As a writer still clinging to big dreams, I am aware that the writing itself is not always enough. I must somehow stand out from all the other writers who dream big. 

 

I can bemoan a lot of things that make making it seem unfair. How much of Madonna’s picture book did she actually write? Why doesn’t a New York editor stumble on this blog and declare, “We must publish this! All of it! And more!”? Why can’t I be seated next to an agent on a flight, have her volunteer this fact and then say, “We’ve got three hours. Tell me all about your manuscripts”? 

 

I’m flying again next week. When I check in, I’ll ask to trade my window seat for one beside a literary agent. “Pardon me, sir?” Worth a try.

 

At writers’ conferences and in articles in writing magazines, both of which thrive based on us (desperate) dreamers, it’s often said writers need a platform. We need to be known. Five appearances on CNN panels last month, a cute shout-out to the number 5 on Sesame Street (with Grover, pretty please!) and a Live chat with Kelly Ripa that goes viral for all the right reasons. 

 

If not all that, well, maybe a lot of followers on social media. That’s something, isn’t it?

 

The hope is that, if an agent and publisher take a chance on me, I’ll earn them money, not just from positive word of mouth and a Pulitzer Prize, but from me tweeting to my 7,000 followers on Twitter: “Hey! Me again. Buy my book. Pulitzer stickers on the cover mean something. It makes a great Christmas present too…for EVERYONE on your list! Even a great read-aloud for your toddler!” My 7,000 tweeps love me. Only three of them may like my latest selfie but they’ll surely pounce on my buy-my-book pleas. (Please!)

 

The trouble is I can’t make sense of Twitter anymore. I scroll, I try to connect, I feel I’m in a black hole. I didn’t even bother tweeting a pic of my latest haircut. 

 

But there’s still that big dream about being a famous, acclaimed, published author. I’ve taken to Instagram. I don’t know what the magic number is for an agent or editor to glance at my account and think, “There it is. Platform. Ka-ching!” I’m pretty sure 281 million would do it (Easy to forget about the haters, Taylor) or even 4.1M (Anderson Cooper!) or 3.4M (Kelly Ripa). I’m hoping 10,000 makes an impression, too.

 

Not that I’m there. I started posting on Instagram 318 days ago, sticking to the respectful one post per day, and I’ve gained 2,000 followers. A good start. 

 

Perusing other Insta accounts, I see many with thousands of followers despite only a handful of posts. Bots, I suspect. Plus, every day Instagram reminds me I can boost my account for a fee. I suppose I too can have a bevy of fake followers. I don’t want to go there. I’m saving my money for my next trip, my next writing conference and the next issue of a writing magazine with LANDING YOUR BOOK DEAL IN 2024 emblazoned on the cover. I’m a sucker but a selective one.

 

Every single person I follow on Twitter or Instagram has an account I’ve spent a few moments scrutinizing. Is it active? Are there signs the person is real and not just a re-poster on Twitter or someone who copies Google Images onto Insta? On the latter site, I refrain from following people whose entire account consists of selfies. (How about just one where the Taj Mahal or Van Gogh’s “Irises” isn’t relegated to background fodder?) I skip the ones where there’s always a woman with long hair and a big hat, her back always turned to the camera, no face reveal. These, I suspect are AI-generated. I also pass when one or more of the three latest photos includes dead game, a closeup of lip fillers or a man who misplaced his shirt. Sorry, but these are previews of what will fill my feed and I choose not to volunteer to be traumatized on a daily basis. (We all have different triggers.)

 

I do follow normal people, even interesting ones. My Instagram account may have a goal of building a platform to shuck my book—er, books—but, unlike Twitter, I’m also genuinely enjoying the site. I have a new appreciation for productive knitters. There’s a guy in Miami whose macramé reminds me of origami. (I mean that in a good way.) There’s a woman in Vancouver who posts pics of graffiti and I feel an odd (misplaced?) sense of triumph each time I can say, “Been there!” 

 

Since my Instagram is specifically connected to an in-progress collection of essays about mental health, I have a big following of people who, like me, have been diagnosed as bipolar. Their posts sometimes strive to uplift, other times address challenges and often avoid mental health altogether. (A bowl of blackberries with a mint leaf gets a “like” from me.) 

 

I tell myself Instagram will make me better at snapping pictures with my phone. I follow many photographers and, maybe by osmosis, I’m learning how to better frame a shot and how to make the mundane photo-worthy. One day, I too will get more than a thousand likes for a hiking shot or an artful image of a half-eaten piece of dry toast. 

 

There is one aspect of my search for followers that troubles me. I hesitate every single time I come across a man’s account. My little bio blurb includes a rainbow flag. I’m gay or perhaps something more vaguely queer. (The menu has so much more to choose from these days.) 

 

Despite all the hype about Pride, I’m still on shaky ground. I’m happy to be who I am, but I continue to feel there are many people who feel otherwise. I have always been guarded around straight men. There is a level of Trumped-up testosterone that I imagine to be present. With that, intolerance. 

 

I can hear queer advocates labeling me as having internalized homophobia, shaming me in the process. I’m not Proud enough. 

 

True. I have an aversion to having my identity dismissed, mocked or packaged into an overblown cry of intolerance.

 

If this were 2015, when Obama was president and the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the right to equal marriage, I’d be less wary. I’d presume instead that a man I followed on social media who did not identify as gay or queer would be open and accepting. He’d follow me because of my photos or my writing blurbs or just as a polite formality. (Maybe he’s building a platform, too.)    

 

I know there’s more acceptance now, but I also know there is a hate that’s more entrenched—bolder and emboldened by politicians who emphasize differences and feed off fear, scoring political points and accruing larger financial donations by eschewing tough issues like climate change, healthcare and the economy for cheap shots at minorities who don’t align with their party in the first place. 

 

There is no Hippocratic oath for politicians. While I believe there are some who enter politics with good intentions, trying to navigate the gamesmanship while maintaining integrity, I also know there are many who are Machiavellian. Do harm if it means gain. 

 

I hate my hesitation in deciding whether to follow a man on Instagram. I scan the photos and the teeny bio to see if there’s anything that hints at intolerance. Despite great content, I have talked myself out of following a guy from Montana, someone with a bushy beard and a dude with a propensity for baseball caps. I’m making assumptions. 

 

I’ve never had someone on Instagram spew hate as a comment to my photo of a mountain or even my pic of rainbow-painted stairs, but I brace for that day. I’ve been blindsided by hateful rhetoric in real life many times. I know the most likely response for a person uncomfortable about any aspect of my Instagram account is to not follow me back, his reasoning never known.

 

My Insta hesitance is a reminder I am not as settled in my skin as I wish I could be. I am still more vulnerable than I should be. I may never shake self-hate and presumed hate. So often, I decide not to follow that man and the man after that. I feel shame, but I also feel safe.

 

Getting to 10,000 followers will take longer. In the meantime, I have manuscripts to finish, revisions to make and agents to accost in airports. 

 

Another shameless plug…

My Instagram account:

rxtraveler

 

 

 

  

OH, FARRELL (Part 1 - Two Gays in the Closet)

 

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. 

 

This one is worth so much more. I could say there are no words, which would also be true. I could quantify it higher—ten thousand words, one hundred thousand words. Whatever. That would make a point, but it would only assign value in a competitive sense. I’m not competing with anyone.

 

This is a photo of Farrell Cahn.

 

If I’m being honest, it’s a terrible shot. He’s bent over. It’s black and white. The hairline at the neck appears to blend with something in the background so it looks like he’s got a mullet. Farrell would never have a mullet.

 

This is the only photo I have of Farrell Cahn. I discovered it when I Google-searched his name. Easy, right?

 

No. Over the years, I’d Googled his name so many times. Nothing ever came up. Google was established as a search engine in 1998. Farrell Cahn died three years before that. 

 

I have no personal photos of Farrell. We didn’t snap pictures then the way we do now. The first cell phone with a camera came out in 2000. During the time I knew Farrell, most people who weren’t professional photographers didn’t carry cameras. Taking pictures required buying film. It also meant paying for the shots to be developed. Few of us would have thought of snapping a pic of the soft tacos at Chili’s or the person across the table from you at Chili’s or, god forbid, turning the lens on yourself at Chili’s. During the time I knew Farrell in Texas, Chili’s was a thing, at least for me and “selfie” wasn’t even a word. Sometimes the good old days were truly that. 

 

Back then, a camera came out for special occasions. It was for a trip to Puerto Vallarta though I have no pics from my one vacation there because I got so sick I only learned after the fact that a maid was giving me sponge baths in lieu of changing the sheets. No parasailing, no snorkeling, but I lost ten pounds in a week. A camera was for Halloween parties like the massive gay one I went to in 1995, my first in Vancouver when friends and I dressed as a pack of crayons because none of us could carry off the typical gay Halloween dress code as shirtless firemen, gold-painted Adonises or Greg Louganis’s body double. (No partygoer stated that divers don’t have body doubles; that was not the point.) A camera was for my grandfather’s last Christmas when he gamely participated in a photoshoot, posing in each baseball cap I bought for him to cover his familiar bald head, suddenly ravaged by melanoma.  

 

Farrell and I didn’t travel anywhere. We didn’t go to parties. We didn’t spend Christmas together. Ordinary events weren’t photo-worthy. And all my interactions with Farrell were ordinary. 

 

We met in the spring of 1987 as part of a group of strangers who’d signed up for an evening tennis class, a course listed in the continuing education catalog for a community college in Irving, Texas. I’ve always loved tennis, but I’ve never been very good at it. Eight consecutive Wednesday nights of “lite” instruction and tedious drills didn’t make me Stefan Edberg, but Farrell’s skill level seemed to suck on a par with mine so we’d stick around to hit a few balls after class. We agreed to meet outside of class to get more tennis time without those time-wasting drills. 

 

We managed to get the ball over the net enough times to get in a workout. Retrieving balls that soared over the fence helped, too. We found enough to talk about during the water breaks necessitated by the Texas heat. Soon we started lingering after play, chatting on a bench or while standing by our cars. 

 

Farrell was a quiet, contemplative soul, as was I, although he didn’t always see that side of me. Tennis made me hyper. Someone once described me as the Energizer bunny, racing to track down every ball, regardless of whether it was in or out. I’d found a handful of regulars to hit with and I could fit in five hours of tennis in a day, even on hundred-degree summer days in Dallas. I was never the one to say, “Let’s stop.” Even when my opponent was worn out or tired of my errant forehand, I struggled to wind down. During off-court conversations with Farrell, I was less guarded, openly self-deprecating and plain silly. This amused Farrell, snapping him out of the disappointment he often felt about his play. On court, he was always saying, “Oh, Farrell” after a volley into the net or a mistimed overhead. Not exactly a John McEnroe meltdown but no one would aspire to that anyway. 

 

One Friday evening, I showed up on court after going to happy hour with nuns. Friday happy hours were huge in the late ’80s in Texas or, at the very least, among my circle of nuns. I taught at a special education school operated by the Catholic Diocese of Dallas so half of my colleagues resided at the convent on campus. Those nuns longed for time away. Happy hour evolved into hours, not all of them “happy,” but it was a must-see reality before reality TV became a thing. They bitched about the other nuns whom they were with 24/7. Booze and cigarettes made the bitching escalate. 

 

On that particular Friday, I suppose I’d had a drink or two too many. Maybe I shouldn’t have driven to the tennis courts, but there I was, returning every ball Farrell didn’t hit into the net. (“Oh, Farrell.”) Spinach may have given Popeye extra strength but, for me, it seemed to come from frozen lime margaritas. I hit everything out, more balls than usual soaring over the fence, Babe Ruth-calibre home runs. As I raced off the court to do my springer spaniel impression, retrieving another handful of balls, Farrell met me at the gate and said, “How ’bout let’s stop?” Turns out you had to have been at happy hour for the happiness to linger. We sat on the grass and chatted, his annoyance quickly going away. Eventually we grabbed dinner. Chili’s, of course; iced tea to drink. 

 

Tennis outings—never again following my rollicking times with nuns—became tennis and dinners. Sometimes it was just dinner. We grew from court mates to friends. 

 

Farrell was reserved about his past. He’d been the result of an unwanted pregnancy, a Black baby placed in an orphanage in Louisiana. He was adopted by a woman and raised with a sister. From what I recall, his adopted mother had died and his sister, well, Farrell would just shake his head. It wasn’t an active relationship. He had no other family. 

 

He worked as an accountant, spoke vaguely of a few friends and regularly attended the Dallas Symphony. The convent and school where I worked as a teacher were adjacent to the University of Dallas where he earned his degree. He happily talked about the present but often turned the conversation to me. I talked passionately about my job and self-deprecatingly about my daily bumblings. I was 21, he was 28. I was still too egocentric, everything about post-university life new and exciting, every experience told as if lived for the first time…by anyone. As insufferable as I must have been, Farrell always seemed amused. 

 

In August 1989, I left Texas to attend law school at Pepperdine in California. Malibu! We kept in touch in those old-fashioned ways that were the norm of the time: phone calls and letters. Too few of both, I suppose. There’s something about academic environments where students feed off one another in portraying classes, homework and papers as heavy burdens, teetering on impossible. Yes, law school was intense, but I found time for the beach, my casebooks usually in tow, grains of sand spilling from them on my desk when I’d reopen them in the lecture hall during Civil Procedure. On weekend evenings, I’d grab dinner with classmates before dashing off, secretly, to the gay bars in West Hollywood, dancing to “Vogue” and tracks by Bananarama, making friends with a struggling drag queen and desperately hoping some cute guy in the crowd might look my way. He rarely did and, if it happened, I took the moment to suddenly check my shoelaces, a highly ineffectual stab at flirting. All this is to say I was consumed by my new, if temporary, life in L.A. 

 

Farrell came to visit at some point while I was still in law school. In the letter he sent me to say he was coming, there’s a phrase that now seems so inapplicable to me. He’d sent me a Calvin & Hobbes book and said, “I hope it gets you through those long Sundays when the sun isn’t shining, your body isn’t tanning and the women are not pawing off your clothes.” 

 

Um…clearly this pasty dude doesn’t tan. 

 

He stayed with some other friends who lived somewhere in Greater Los Angeles and we spent an afternoon in Santa Monica. It was wonderful to see him and I felt honored he’d made time for me, but shortly after the visit, I received a card. His normally light, cheeky tone was absent. He’d sensed coldness from me during the visit and concluded I’d figured out he was gay and I was “repulsed.”

 

Thirty years ago, self-hate was well-fed by a pervasive homophobic environment in the Bible Belt of the southern United States, including both Louisiana where he’d been raised and Texas where he lived. Despite having known one another for four years and having formed a close friendship, neither of us had ever talked about our sexual orientation. Neither of us had ever mentioned dating. Neither of us had a military background but we ascribed to our own don’t ask, don’t tell policy. Had I been so convincing he could envision women pawing off my clothes? And what women, pray tell?  

 

I wrote back—STAT!—because I couldn’t let a perceived rejection fester. I didn’t phone because I still wasn’t used to talking about being gay, even to a friend who had outed himself. Internalized homophobia can be a savage, illogical beast.

 

I remember smiling as I wrote him, assuring him that, “There is no possible way I’m repulsed by you. I’m gay, too.” And yet, we still didn’t talk about being gay beyond that card exchange. I always assumed it would wait for our next in-person conversation, a cherished heart-to-heart. We’d do a lot of nodding, even more laughing, a bit of head shaking and wrap with a warm hug, maybe a new component of our friendship. 

 

Curses to lost time, gaydar malfunctions and stupid Texas. Yes, Farrell. That’s why I fled the state.

Click here to read Part 2.