GK’s Apology

I was saying to friends last night that I expected the problem with Garrison Keillor’s piece to have been an inside/outside problem: that Keillor felt “inside” enough to joke about gay stereotypes, but forgot that he’s actually “outside,” since he’s heterosexual, & ended up at “laughing at” instead of “laughing with” as he intended.

Which it turns out is the case, according to his apology.

More important, I think, is that the upset Dan Savage has also reported that John McCain doesn’t know if condoms help prevent the spread of HIV or not.

But at least Clinton & Obama have actually come out & said homosexuality isn’t immoral. Whew. Now there’s a strong stand. And we have to hear this ‘implied but not spoken’ or ‘spoken and to be inferred’ kind of thing for how many more years? Ugh.

A Little Rant

Sometimes a book gets inordinate attention, especially books that reaffirm & reify the gender binary. But there’s plenty of interesting books about gender out there. & Some days, when I see a review of the book The Female Brain in a cool magazine, I wonder why they bother. I mean, bad publicity is good publicity, ultimately: it just wins the author, who the reviewer (and many others, including myself) disagrees with, more airtime, while other books, which are more feminist in terms of their take on gender, don’t get covered at all.

& I’ve always wondered why magazines – especially indie, cool magazines that are mostly written by indie journalists & others like me who understand exactly how poor an industry publishing can be – give airtime to stuff they don’t like instead of giving airtime to stuff they do. Readers will buy a book that gets a bad review, just to see if they agree or not, & while I understand editors tend to think it’s Important, in a Fourth Estate kind of way, to rebut publicly some of the ideas coming from certain corners, it seems like it’d make more sense to help an interesting writer whose ideas they do like to sell a few books.

& Yes, in this case, I mean a book like mine, which nearly is a straight-up rebuttal of all the hogwash in The Female Brain.

St. Patrick’s Day

Until the AOH figure out they should let gay folks march in the St. Patrick’s Day parade, I decided I’d post the biography of an Irish person who happens to be gay on St. Patrick’s Day, instead, because it’s so embarrassing to be both (a little) Irish & Catholic with these numbnuts behaving like it’s the Middle Ages.

So who better to start with than Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, the Irish writer who was the bon vivant & society wit and who was eventually imprisoned for being homosexual. His most famous works are The Ballad of Reading Gaol, The Importance of Being Earnest, and The Picture of Dorian Gray Despite his decline after jail, however, he maintained his sense of humor: just a month before his death he is quoted as saying, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go.”

Savaged by Dan

Read Garrison Keillor’s piece in Salon about marriage & family. Then read Dan Savage’s response to Garrison Keillor’s piece in Salon about marriage & family, which he abruptly titled Fuck Garrison Keillor.

& Then let me say: the next time a show like Will & Grace comes on the air. & the media can’t stop creaming in their pants over what a great leap forward it is, maybe, just maybe, we can think twice about the painful stereotypes such a great leap forward confirms in the American consciousness.

It’s not all Will & Grace’s fault, of course, not at all. Ignorance is a great big beast in this country, and apparently it comes in both red AND blue. Garrison Keillor needs to attend Family Week in P-Town this year, I think.

Giving It Back

Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle told the Feds to keep their money if the only education it can fund is abstinence-only.

Wisconsin has received the federal funding since 1997, but new guidelines tying the money to abstinence-only education programs were implemented this year. These guidelines include that students be taught that sexual activity outside of marriage could have harmful physical and psychological effects and that students receive no information about contraception or sexually transmitted diseases and infections.

How much does he rock?!

Four other states have already rejected this strings-attached financing: California, Maine, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Nightmares

I’ve always expected I would die in my sleep of a heart attack, sweating bullets, outrunning some cauchemare of a beast.

Tonight, in the dream, Betty & I went to see a Shakespeare play, in a park. Maybe in England, maybe at Jones Beach. & My dream came up with a kind of Shakespearean joke, dreamt lines that were in the play we were seeing, in which one character asks another, “Where are you going?” and the other responds “To and fro, here & there, somewhere & elsewhere.” (There were seven words to the answer, but I don’t know which seven, because those six could have been “north and south, whence & hence” etc.) By the time we were leaving it was dark out, & we were being followed by a man, except Betty couldn’t see him, even though I could hear him asking me, “Where are you going?” just like in the play, except terribly ominously.

& I felt like a cat or a dog that’s gotten wrapped up in something that makes a terrible noise and that it can’t get off of its body no matter how fast it runs like the devil away from this thing that’s always just right behind it.

I did learn how to dream lucidly as a result of my nightmares, at least, and so in the dream we ran to the house I grew up in, & kept shutting numerous garden gates after us, into the back door (which we always left open, though we locked the front one) & finally into a house that was nothing like the house I grew up in on the inside, but inside, there was my niece watching television & my sister, her mother, chatting on the phone amiably. & We were fine.

But of course all that running woke me up.

Five Questions With… Virginia Erhardt

Virginia Erhardt, Ph.D. is a licensed therapist, a founding member of the American Gender Institute, and the author of Head Over Heels: Wives Who Stay with Crossdressers and Transsexuals. She published her first article concerning the partners of trans people back in 1999 after publishing a workbook for lesbian couples called Journey Toward Intimacy. She is a regular at trans conferences like the upcoming IFGE Conference.

(1) How long did it take you to compile the stories in Head Over Heels? Where did you find partners who were willing to talk about their experiences?

It was about two and a half years from the point at which I began soliciting participation in 2002 and then sent out questionnaires, until the time when I had created “stories” from the SOs’ responses to my questions. During that time I also worked on my substantive, didactic chapters. It took another two years and a few months from the time when I completed the project and signed a contract with The Haworth Press until Head Over Heels was in print.

I put out a Call for Participants to every online listserve and transgender print publication I could think of. I also requested participation from people at trans conferences at which I presented. Continue reading “Five Questions With… Virginia Erhardt”