weird Here's the premise: all of us horned people are descendents of summoned demons or devils, on one side or the other of the family, or maybe both, or else we're summoned demons or devils that are naturalized American citizens. In other words, I want to treat Hell as just another place, just another country that's contributed people, and culture, to America's ethnic diversity. (Are those of us who only wear the horns occasionally "human-skinned" Infernal-Americans taking occasional advantage of the fact that we can "pass"?) And then, for the sheer fun of it, I want to prank the heck out of this idea. Let's incorporate all of the techniques and all of the symbols that are common to all ethnic identity movements and identity politics, and adapt them to Infernal-Americans. I'm talking protest buttons, protest signs, protest T-shirts, pseudo-political "meetings" (more on this in a second), sloganeering, and an aggrieved victim pose. The really fun thing about this is that doing this gives us a perfect collective group answer to the endless repetition of the same two unimaginative jokes about our horns: fake an aggrieved or angry tone, and attack the dim-witted jokester for ethnic insensitivity.
No, I don't really want to have earnest, deadly serious political meetings where we work for Infernal-American solidarity, seek to lobby candidates on Infernal-American issues, and try to raise awareness of oppression of Infernal-Americans in housing, relationships, and employment. I want to throw parties that pretend to do these things, probably starting with a room party at Archon if I can get or borrow a room on the party floor of the hotel. I'm thinking I want to decorate the room with lots of red and yellow and black, and see if I can get or make one of those lights that projects flickering fake flames on the walls. I'll see if I can get someone with a laptop and a projector (I have someone in mind) to put together an "awareness" slide show in PowerPoint and project it onto the wall: slogans like "Don't tell me I'm horny," and "Don't try to sell me your soul, I don't want it," and "If I were trying to tempt you, you'd know it" and "No, I don't listen to heavy metal" and "Infernal-Americans are devils, not devil worshippers. Was Buddha a Buddhist? Was Jesus a Christian?" and "Just Say No to Holy Water." I figure to maybe decorate the room with Coop posters if I can get my hands on some cheap, and to put Thrill Kill Kult and Lords of Acid and Club 69 and other overtly hyper-sexualized music on the MP3 CD player.
I'm thinking bring my portable DVD player and jack it into the hotel TV; play cheesy "demonic horror" movies and have people who're watching them pretend to be offended by the ethnic stereotyping. I want the horned people to dress in stereotypes of demonic clothing. I'll wear my tuxedo, of course, but the demonic yuppie look is good, too, and so is the heavy metal Satanist look, the goth look, sexy club wear, bondage gear, and so on. I'm thinking that only while we're at the party we should engage in every form of stereotypically Satanic, demonic behavior, and then jump all over anybody who accuses of it for stereotyping. I'm thinking we can think of and tell all of the really evil, sick jokes we can about normal humans, and then make insincere apologies about how we really don't mean it.I'm thinking of serving up at least five gallons of Blue Devils, or if my budget stretches that far maybe Red Devils. Oh, and of course get some disposable shot glasses and some time during the night have a round or two of Hot Damn shots. I'm thinking serving red hots, chips with habanero salsa, devil's food cake. I want to label this room party on fliers as the IA! ADL Infernal-American Anti-Defamation League Cocktail Party, and have the fliers specifically say that people who aren't of Infernal-American descent are only welcome if they're vouched for in person by someone who's obviously Infernal-American, and when people without horns or makeup show up and want our booze, if nobody will vouch for them, I want to throw them out, especially if we can make this party so much fun that people will want to compete to get into it.
Maybe the day before, we can put together a public theater piece. Protest signs are cheap and easy to make. Let's gather in front of or near hospitality, or the hotel lobby, or the convention center lobby, at a pre-arranged time. Then we get some volunteer shill, someone who's in on the joke, to loudly make fun of a group of a bunch of us for our horns, and use the standard stupid jokes. Then let's pretend to be pissed off, and retrieve our conveniently pre-placed protest signs and picket the guy or maybe even fake-picket the building, chanting "What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Right now!" or maybe singing "We Shall Overcome."
In summary, what I want to do is put together an ongoing group improv performance piece, a giant bit of silly role-playing. I want to show how all forms of ethnic identity politics use so many of the same symbols and tactics, and I want to lampoon those commonalities right up to the edge of not being funny.
If you want to promote the silly idea of an Infernal-American Anti-Defamation League in your own LiveJournal, I put together seven user icons that are IA!ADL themed, only one of them specifically for myself. If you want to use any of the other four in your LiveJournal, then right click on one of these images and select Copy Image Location to Clipboard (or whatever your browser calls that option). Then click here (or go to your User Info, hover over Manage, and click User Pictures, then click "uploading a new picture," which takes you to the same page). At the bottom, click on "From URL" and paste the URL of the picture in. Unless you want this to be the default user icon, including for journal entries that you didn't manually pick an icon for, then un-check "Make this your default picture." Now click Proceed, and that'll copy it to your User Pictures if you have any room left. (3 for free accounts, 15 for paid accounts, 50 for paid accounts who pay an extra $10 a year.) To give it a text name for the pull-down menu, edit something helpful (without commas) to the Keywords field and click "Save Settings." Here they are:
If you want a user icon with your own horned or vampiric or otherwise demonic face in the middle, just email me a digital photograph or cartoon. I don't add the horns myself, you need to deliver me finished artwork. I'll have to scale it down to 75 pixels square to fit into a 100 pixel square icon, so it should have a high contrast with the background and no matter what you think, you really are going to want it cropped down to just a head shot, or if you absolutely must include cleavage, maybe a bust shot. Email it to me at the address on my user info page, and I'll email you back the finished icon for you to upload to your own LiveJournal (or DeadJournal, or whatever). If you want it to be an animated icon with some IA!ADL-like slogan or other, let me know and include the slogan.
Who knows? Maybe we can take this joke nation-wide, the way that Yang did with the Dorsai Irregulars, the Klingon Diplomatic Corps, and the Dark Horde. I know someone who can get us web hosting space with a phpBB web BBS for next to free, and of course it'd be pretty effortless and free to set up a LiveJournal community and/or a Yahoo Groups email list. Maybe this joke can become a standard part of SF fandom, an excuse for people to come up with and play fantasy personae at conventions. It can't be too hard to talk people into this, because Eris knows that I see enough people in horns at cons these days!
(I keep saying that I need to come up with more forms of fun that cost less money and take less prep time. And then I think of ideas like this. ::rolleyes::)