I’m one of those, the types who can’t stop moving / thinking / reorganizing until I’m entirely moved in. I might stop to make a list or two, but otherwise I want it to be done so I can get back to my life. We are far more moved in than I expected at this point, and wow do we love this apartment. Next up: getting the management company in to put bolts in the walls for art, because wow do we have a lot of it, & we finally have the space to put it up.
More photos as we manage it.
We are back in our lovely Park Slope neighborhood & apt, briefly: my brother gets married on LI on Sunday, & otherwise I will spend the week packing up a bunch of our stuff in order to move it into our new apartment.
But wow is it nice to be back: to be a minority as a white person again, to spend $12 on a pack of cigarettes. Some things I don’t miss, but some I do. I would like to bring Park Slope back to Appleton with me & show folks what diversity looks like, and goddamn, how to make decent Italian food, and if I can convince one of my salon ladies to return with me, maybe she can teach someone in Appleton how a proper waxing is done.
Still, I miss Wisconsin: the quiet, my friends, bunnies. That’s always the trouble with travel: no matter where you are, & no matter how happy you are, you always miss somewhere else you like.
Just wanted people to know I’ll be taking a short break from blogging as I travel from Appleton to Brooklyn to pack up our Brooklyn apartment (okay, most of it) & arrange to move it all back to Appleton, where we’ll put it in our new & fabulous place. & Yes, I’m going by train (20 hours, pretty much), & returning in the shotgun seat of the U-Haul driven by an old friend (who grew up in Milwaukee, you betcha).
My posts will probably be a little erratic for the next month or so; we are once again living in an apartment littered with boxes. For those who don’t know, I/we’ve been living in university housing while I’ve been teaching here, and we need to move into our own place for this coming year. We found a great, great apartment, & we’re excited about having enough space, & a cool view, stairs, and enough room for us both to have an office/work area and enough closets & storage. It’s like a pipe dream for NYers. (That’s our future living room you’re looking at, if you hadn’t figured that out yet.)
That said, moving also means living with boxes; it means lists and logistics. We’re moving not only the apartment we currently live in here in Appleton into the new place, but we’re going home to Brooklyn to move our tons of stuff from there to here. August in NYC is not when you want to move stuff out of a third floor walk-up, especially when most of that “stuff” will be book boxes. But it will be moved: just don’t expect so much from me for a while.
If you hear of any interesting gender stories or articles, feel free to forward so I can at least put up some links.
Lawrence University, where Rachel & I work, has a Conservatory as well — which for me means tons of free, cool music. I go see a lot of things I never went to see in NYC; as I was explaining, in NYC, classical music often costs a lot, and when it doesn’t, it means sitting with a million people in Central Park to hear/see it. Ditto for opera, and often for jazz, too.
Here, I go a lot, although I’ve never known much about classical music, and along comes this cool series from Atlantic Monthly about how to listen to (& appreciate) classical music. I’ve had people give me CDs (the music medium, not the type of trans person) in the past, but for me – live is the thing. I prefer all of my music live & in person, pretty much, & now feel like I’ve been incredibly spoiled to have so much of it around so much of the time as a NYC resident. I went to see a Chinese classical performer, here, for instance, & couldn’t remember where I’d seen someone play that kind of instrument before, until I remembered: the W 4th Street subway. It’s one of the things I miss most, all the found music in NYC – guys playing plastic buckets, folk singers in Washington Square Park – but the Con makes up for a lot.
Congratulations to all of Lawrence University’s graduating seniors! Today is commencement, my second since I’ve been teaching here, but the first where I’ve known quite a few students, one of whom is graduating summa cum laude with an honors project on drag kings in Amsterdam. He was in the first Trans Lives course I taught here two years ago.
Jessica Who? wrote a nice piece about her experience reading and re-reading My Husband Betty. It’s so satisfying to know that anything I’ve written helped someone else come to terms with their crossdressing or their transness. I was just putting the finishing touches on it seven years ago, around this time of year. I had no idea how my life would change once it was published, but I’m sure I had even less idea that anyone else’s would!
Congrats to Jessica Who? on her year of blogging.
A Lawrence student has been taking photographs of faculty, staff & students who wanted to participate in the NOH8 campaign, and yesterday, 
on our 12th anniversary, we decided to (finally) get ours taken. Here are some of the shots.
I’ll be doing a reading tonight at Harmony Cafe in Appleton as part of the Fox Cities Book Festival. 7:30 PM. Be there or be square.
I’m part of a panel discussion tonight, hosted by Lawrence’s Diversity Center, called “Women: Breaking Boundaries & Reaching Your Goals.” The other women on the panel are:
Professor Rosa Tapia
Amy Uecke, Acting Dean of Students
Yvette Dunlap, Asst. Superintendent AASD
Lyndsay Sund, Assc. Dir. Of Alumni & Constituency Engagement
Kathy Flores, Diversity Coord. for the Appleton Mayor’s Office
Maiyoua Thao, VP of Universal Translation & Staffing Inc.
I’m very much looking forward to hearing how these other women approached their own goals.
Not too long ago I went to what’s called “the Big Gay Conference” which is a conference for LGBTQIA ETC students who are attending colleges in the midwest. On Friday night, after we’d checked in and gotten Miss Bornstein checked in, I went down to register. As it turned out, there was a wedding going on the same weekend as the conference, so I found myself, name tag and schedule in hand, standing on a landing.
To my left, a cocktail party of the heteronormative variety: men in suits, women in cocktail dresses, hose and heels.
To my right, blue haired, pierced kids; boys in cigarette leg jeans; girls in ties, starched button-downs; trans people of many types.
I stood there for a while, hoping I had Moses’ staff, or at least his gumption, to ask for a parting of the waters that would provide a third, middle path. My life has been spent on that landing, really, popping back and forth between groups, hanging out in one because it’s where I feel more comfortable, but hanging out in the other because it’s the way I desire. Like Superman, I had to change clothes pretty often, and often with my clothes, my gender; I still long for a heterosexual space where I could be a het woman in a suit & tie, or for a queer space where I could be a woman who loves sex with men.
Sometimes, in rare moments, that third space appears: in the music scenes of the late 80s in NYC was one. Fetish clubs are sometimes another. But mostly I have had to decide between being with my people as a queer woman or pretending to be more gender normative than I actually am when I’ve had boyfriends.
Thank you to all of the lovely people who came to my reading tonight at the Appleton Public Library. It was a really lovely crowd, but I’m sorry I didn’t get to talk more with the LU folks who came out to support me. I am determined to read fiction at my Fox Cities Book Festival reading @ the Harmony cafe on April 12th.
& I stand by my claim that I have never yet met a librarian who wasn’t extremely cool.
I’m reading Wednesday night at the Appleton Public Library, 6:30 PM — be there or be square.
I had the lovely honor of getting to introduce Kate Bornstein when she spoke at Lawrence, & thought those of you who couldn’t be there might want to know what I said.
Welcome Lawrentians, Appletonians, geeks, freaks & Others with a capital O
Thank you for coming.
What I first started working as an advocate and ally to the transgender community, one of the first authors people recommended was Kate Bornstein. What self professed tomboy could resist a title like Gender Outlaw? I couldn’t stop reading it and I still haven’t. I still re-read sections of it with my classes & on my own. I read My Gender Workbook – and took all the quizzes – and Hello Cruel World, which taught me that superheroes are, after all, outsiders. So it was a real pleasure, and honor, when a website that features interviews with authors by authors asked me to talk to her. We had been introduced long before then, but that was when we really met. & What surprised me and impressed me the most – amongst all the other possibilities – was how many questions she asked. She is, after all, the Grand Dame of transgender activism and has influenced a generation or two of gender activists, artists, & theorists. As our one hour on the phone turned into three, I realized that it might be because she asks such good questions – of others, & of herself – that she is the star she is.
The questions she has asked of herself have not been easy ones, and they tend to be the kinds of questions most of us would rather avoid. They’re sticky, troublesome questions about identity, and desire, and the dark things that go bump in our psyches when we’r ealone. They are questions of survival, first, but of joy and creativity and community too. She asks them with curiosity & a kind of Puckish delight, which is why she is the 21st century role model for the many communities she inspires.
Please join me in welcome the astonishing, rule-breaking, and shame-liberating Kate Bornstein.
She did tell me she very much liked being referred to as a Grand Dame. Rachel & I had the lovely honor and pleasure of getting to hear a reading of one chapter from her upcoming Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger, and let me/us tell you: we are in for a real treat. It will be published in Spring 2011 by Seven Stories Press.
Back in Appleton after the Big Gay Conference and kind of exhausted. More when I’ve fully recovered. But hot damn on getting to spend five days in a row with Kate Bornstein!
I’m doing a reading / Q&A at Appleton Public Library on March 3rd @ 6:30 PM. If you’re on Facebook, you can check out the event page here, & RSVP.
I’ll be on SistersTalk radio tonight, January 6th, at 7PM Central time.
I’ll be on SistersTalk radio this Wednesday, January 6th, at 7PM Central time. & Yes, they’re on Facebook. They recently interviewed Rachel Kramer Bussell, erotica empress.
Other upcoming for me: a reading at Appleton Public Library on March 3rd, and I’m doing a reading for the Fox Cities Book Festival on April 12th. My best calendar is still on the front page of my author site, www.helenboydbooks.com (along with a list of past appearances, etc.)
The Lawrence campus has been mostly closed for a solid month; faculty has been off since Thanksgiving at least. Students were gone and the campus was like a ghost town. Since we live on the edge of campus, that was especially apparent, as we’re used to the regular parade of faculty who live nearby walking past on their way to classes.
Only today, with classes starting tomorrow, has life really returned. At dusk, a frat boy was moving back into a Greek house around the corner; the luggage he was carrying looked like it weighed twice his body weight. Instruments were being carried back into the Con (or dragged, pushed, & pleaded with, as was the case with one very large harp). The events listings are back up on the calendar page of the website, and the academic building offices will be buzzing with syllabi copying tomorrow.
I’ll be teaching Freshman Studies 101, which includes Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment, short stories by Borges, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the writings of Zhuangzi (formerly known as Chuang Tzu), and Reading the Rocks, a book about geology by LU prof Marcia Bjornerud. I’m looking forward to it; I hope they are, at least a little.
So welcome back, Lawrentians!
