top row, left to right: Brigitte, Jenny Boylan, Andy Marra, Eden “Bianca” Riegel, & Betty.
Bottom row, left to right: Tommy, Jeffrey “Zarf/Zoe” Carlson, June, & David Harrison.
& Here’s the GLAAD newsclip about it.
Category: photos
Five Questions With… S. Bear Bergman
Posted by – February 28, 2007
S. Bear Bergman is the author of Butch is a Noun, a writer, theatre artist, and educator who tours regularly. Zie’s book, Butch is a Noun, is one of my favorites of the past year because it’s funny, self-ironic, but full of a kind of combination of sadness and love that I found meditative and energizing.
1) I have to say that it was the title of your book, Butch is a Noun, that first caught my attention. Tell me how you came up with it, and why you chose it.
It’s both one of my talents and one of my, er, little problems that I’m a huge language geek. I love words, I love language, and I am always deeply satisfied when I can talk about something well, with good words. But I had a hard time, talking about butch. I would say I’m a butch, and people would hear I’m a butch woman or I’m a butch lesbian. Neither of which is comfortable, or accurate. I kept saying No, listen, I mean that I am a butch, as a noun, all by itself – not a modifier but a thing to them be further described.
For a while, I referred to it as The Butch Book, but I never really liked that as a title, it was just sort of a characterization – an internal shorthand. Then one day, I was applying for some time at a writers’ residency to finish it and when it asked for the project title I somehow just knew: Butch Is a Noun. 
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Five Questions With… Mattilda
Posted by – February 7, 2007
Mattilda a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore is an insomniac with dreams. She is the editor, most recently of Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity and an expanded second edition of That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation. She’s also the author of a novel, Pulling Taffy. Mattilda lives for feedback, so contact her or check up on her various projects via her website or her blog.
1) I love the way you use the word “assimilation” – it always reminds me of the Borg episodes of Star Trek – but I wonder how that term plays in different audiences – say a gay male audience as compared to a trans one. How do people respond to your use of that term, and its sinister connotations?
Generally I’m talking about the way an assimilated gay elite has hijacked queer struggle, and positioned their desires as everyone’s needs. In this way, we see the dominant signs of straight conformity reimagined as the ultimate goals of gay (or that fake acronym “LGBT”) success, i.e. marriage, monogamy, adoption, gentrification, military service, etc. We can see this fundamental absurdity where housing and healthcare and fighting police brutality and challenging US imperialism are no longer seen as “LGBT” issues, but access to Tiffany wedding bands and participatory patriarchy is seen as the bedrock.
So when I articulate these politics, it’s generally the people I’m holding accountable — gay men and lesbians with power and privilege — who are the most scared. Most gay men wouldn’t know Feminism 101 if it hit them over the head, so it’s not surprising that they see getting rid of homeless people and people of color and sex workers from the neighborhoods they’ve gentrified as a wonderful service to the “community.”
Generally it’s more marginalized queers, and especially trans, genderqueer and gender defiant freaks and outlaws and misfits — as well as feminists of various formations — who are ready to challenge the cultural erasure that assimilation represents.
Five Questions With… Richard M. Juang
Posted by – January 24, 2007
Although Richard M. Juang is an otherwise studious English professor, I came to know him through my participation with the NCTE Board of Advisors, and increasingly found him to be gentle and smart as a whip. We got to sit down and talk recently at First Event, where he agreed to answer my Five Questions.
(1) Tell me about the impetus that lead to writing Transgender Rights. Why now? Why you, Paisley Currah, and Shannon Price Minter?
Transgender Rights helps create a discussion of the concrete issues faced by transgender people and communities. Our contributors have all written in an accessible way, while also respecting the need for complex in-depth thought, whether the topic is employment, family law, health care, poverty, or hate crimes. We also provide two important primary documents and commentaries on them: the International Bill of Gender Rights and an important decision from the Colombian Constitutional Court concerning an intersex child. Both have important implications for thinking about how one articulates the right of gender self-determination in law. We wanted to create a single volume that would let students, activists, attorneys, and policy-makers think about transgender civil rights issues, history, and political activism well beyond Transgender 101.
One of the things the book doesn’t do is get bogged down in a lot of debate about how to define “transgender” or about what transgender identity “means”; we wanted to break sharply away from that tendency in scholarly writing. Instead, we wanted to make available a well-informed overview about the legal and political reality that transgender people live in.
Oddly enough, Shannon, Paisley and I each did graduate work in a different field at Cornell University in Ithaca NY. (Apparently, a small town in upstate New York is a good place to create transgender activists!) The book represents a cross-disciplinary collaboration where, although we had common goals for the book, we also had different perspectives. The result was that, as editors, we were able to stay alert to the fact that the transgender movement is diverse and has many different priorities and types of activism.
Five Questions With… Max Wolf Valerio
Posted by – November 29, 2006
It’s been a while since a Five Questions With… Interview, but I can’t imagine a better re-entry interview than one with Max Wolf Valerio, the author of The Testosterone Files. Max and I “met” as a result of us both being published by Seal Press, and because we were both friends with the late, great Gianna Israel. His Testosterone Files are a fascinating account of his move from his life as a radical dyke and poet to being a ‘straight guy.’
1) I often joke that I only ever “passed” as a straight woman, and there were parts of The Testosterone Files that made me feel like you “passed” as as lesbian. Is that even close to right? How do you feel about your former identity now?
Yes, I definitely did “pass†for a lesbian, a dyke, whatever you wish to call it. I was dyke-identified for at 14 years, and more, if you count my adolescence. Early on, I realized I was attracted to women, and so, a lesbian identity made the most sense to me. It was all I knew to name myself. The idea of transitioning in 1975 and before, when I was a teen, was completely off the map.
I am proud of the person I was as a dyke, and I learned a lot in my years as a lesbian. I understand many of the finer points of feminism, in all its permutations. Through lesbian feminism, I also came to an understanding and empathy for other types of radical politics. It was quite an education, and an amazing immersion in female life. Ultimately, dyke life is about immersion in female life I think, and it provided an axis for me as well as a point of departure.
However, as I show dramatically in The Testosterone Files, I was much more than simply a lesbian feminist or dyke. I was, actually, just as involved in the punk rock scene, as well as in being a poet who crossed all lines of identity and just “wrote†and read for an audience that appreciated poetry as an art form period. So, this involvement gave me an “out†from dyke life and provided a portal to the fact that there is so much more out there in the world than simply lesbians or feminism. This portal would prove to be invaluable as I came into male life.
On the other hand, I think my perspective was a bit constrained anyway from being a lesbian all those years. I have had to re-examine many of my feminist beliefs and attitudes anyway, even if I was not entirely cloistered within the dyke perspective. Some of these attitudes no longer fit my male life, and I find them to be restricting. More importantly, I also have come to see that certain of these ideas were just wrong-headed, even if they served a purpose for me then. I mean, some of the anti-male attitudes, and anti-het attitudes that I absorbed. These attitudes and ideas not only do not serve my present life, they are not rooted in truth. I think I was often coming from a place of defensiveness, and I have learned, and am learning, to drop that.
Even so, I have many fond feelings about my past dyke life, and about lesbians in general, and will always feel related.
Countess’ Court?
Posted by – November 12, 2006
A very long time ago, a friend sent me this postcard from the UK. The text on the back says:
Julian Howes resigned from London Underground when his employers refused to allow him to wear a female uniform, London 1979.
and on the bottom is says, in caps:
BETTER BLATANT THAN LATENT
Kinda cool, no?
Purdue
Posted by – November 6, 2006
The good folks at Purdue (mainly Tom Mihail, who did all the legwork for my talk there) have put up some photos from my talk and a description of it as well.
I had a wonderful time there and am still planning on culling my journal some to describe the whole experience in more detail.
Five Questions With… Eli Green
Posted by – September 6, 2006
Eli Green is a self-described ‘genderwarrior’ and ‘social-justice & gender-junkie.’ Also an academic, activist, educator, author and researcher who focuses largely on addressing gender based systems of oppressio, Eli Green resides in New York City, working with trans and queer youth, and traveling around the country speaking at conferences and leading educational trainings. Current projects include working towards a doctorate in Human Sexuality, running Trans-Academics.org and working on the publication of the Community Needs Assessment Survey results.
1) www.Trans-Academics.org was one of the first sites I found that gathered resources for academics on trans issues. Do you find most academics interested in trans issues are trans themselves? If they are, is that necessarily a positive or negative thing?
I think that the majority of people who are doing positive trans research and academia right now are personally involved in the trans community – be it because they are personally trans identified, or that their partners, friends or family are trans-identified. This is not necessarily a good or bad thing – but it does have its pros and cons. For instance, if only transpeople are the ones doing trans research, it may be considered by some to be of lesser quality, (however inaccurate), or the research may be particularly slanted towards validating one type of trans experience. On the pro-side, gender diverse people are hopefully more invested in doing research that is respectful of all trans experiences, have access to a greater diversity of respondents, and have greater buy-in from research participants.
There does also seem to be a growing interest in trans related themes by cisgendered people. Gender diversity appears to be the next up and coming thing in academic and media circles. It seems like overnight there are about 15 new documentaries in the works, lots more books being published, and just more general recognition of gender diversity. I am not sure if it is because people are looking for the next best thing to make money off of, or if it is because educational efforts are paying off and people are truly interested in gender diversity. Either way, I think that as long as the end results are sensitive and trans-positive, it can be an important human rights stepping stone.
Five Questions With… Kate Bornstein
Posted by – August 16, 2006
Kate Bornstein is an author, playwright and performance artist. Her latest book, Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws, came out last month. Kate’s published works include the books Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us; My Gender Workbook; and the cyber-romance-action novel, Nearly Roadkill, written with co-author Caitlin Sullivan. Kate’s plays and performance pieces include Strangers in Paradox, Hidden: A Gender, The Opposite Sex Is Neither, Virtually Yours, and y2kate: gender virus 2000. It was both a pleasure and an honor to get to speak with her.
1. I love that you mention in Hello, Cruel World how trans folk are separating themselves into “male” and “female” by using terms like MTF and the like, because I’ve noticed that those of us who are hot for trans folk seem to like the transness, not the ‘target gender’ (or really even the ‘birth gender’) alone. It’s the chaser’s dirty secret. Do you think trans people will start to enjoy being trans, sexually or otherwise?
There are lots of un-named, unclaimed desires that are free from the male/female gender system. Desire for sex with oneself is a sexual orientation in itself, and you can be any gender or no gender in order to have that desire. My former partner felt the most important component for his desire was that his partner be the same gender as him. When he was a woman, he was with women; when he was gender-exploring he was with someone who was also gender-exploring; now that he’s a man he’s with men. I think what you’ve got is an as-yet-un-named sexual orientation: the desire for sex and romance with someone who’s neither male nor female.
Give your desire for transness a name. Then, speak your desire loudly, and proudly and seductively. I think if people hear that, that you’d like them the way they are, they’d be more encouraged to live that place of neither/nor.
As to using terms like MTF/FTM – yeah, I’ve been complaining about that for years. In this new book, I’m just a little less patient about it. It’s amusing and humiliating to admit it, but I still work hard to pass in public. I’m an old fart, and that’s still important to me. Out in the world, I pass to avoid the shame and the danger. But intimately with friends, community, or our lovers? The not-passing is the dance of love. No need for male or female, what luxury!
1b. But I seem to upset some transsexual people when I recognize that Betty’s masculinity turns me on – even if it’s in addition to my being turned on by her femininity.
Upset them! When you go beyond either/or, people think you’re a radical, that you’re less safe because you’re less predictable. Speaking or writing down the truth of your desire unlocks the political and moral shackles of desire.
The Photo Shoot
Posted by – July 26, 2006
I’m not putting up any of the possible book cover photos – that would be cheating! – but there are some other shots that we took that I thought I’d share. Last time around media folks seemed to want photos of us together, so for publicity’s sake I had our photographer take some of us together.
It was a pretty nutty experience all around, and almost nothing like the shoot for the MHB cover. For starters, we already knew the photographer (she was our wedding photographer, actually) and she took my author headshots not long ago. It was all around less tense, with fewer wardrobe changes, and with no art director on hand. It seems important to point out that these are not the best of the lot; I’m saving those.
So there you go. Our next job is to pick our favorites that were shot for the cover & send them on to the design team at Seal. As soon as there’s a cover, I’ll be putting it up here so you can all get a look-see.
Photo Betty
Posted by – July 25, 2006
Today we went to our favorite photographer’s studio and took a bunch of photos – one of which will become the cover of She’s Not the Man I Married. I don’t have any previews just now – we’ll get some of the photos tomorrow – but it was a very interesting experience. Our favorite salon here in Brooklyn did hair and makeup, and quite wonderfully: even my flat, straight hair seemed like it had body. Betty looked truly beautiful.
At one point when we were nearly done, and Betty was still in the make-up chair, and a few other women were waiting around, the makeup artist said something (accidentally) about “Jason,” clearly indicating she was talking about the woman in her makeup chair, and I watched the double and triple takes on the parts of the awaiting ladies.
But I do want to confirm that Betty does not enjoy having her picture taken. The photographer and I had our work cut out for her us trying to get her to relax. Afterwards, when we were going to dinner, I laughed at how obviously physical her tension had been, because her jaw was in a different place than it has been for days.
Betty tried three outfits; I tried two. We’ll see: fingers crossed.
Five Questions With… Jan B.
Posted by – July 19, 2006
Jan B. is one of the people who started a trans group in Poughkeepsie called MHVTA. She’s been helping run the group since 2001, and I’ve known her for about that long. I used to call her “perpetual lurker Jan” on my very first yahoo support group, CDOD.
1) MHVTA is a nice group – how did you decide to start it? Do you have rules or guidelines, or are you making it up as you go?
Helen, thanks for the opportunity to answer these 5 questions. This is also a nice way to publicize our group so I want to start with a Shameless Plug:The Mid-Hudson Valley Transgender Association (MHVTA), a chapter of Renaissance, is a fairly new group. It was founded in May 2001 by Nikki and I. MHVTA serves the mid-Hudson Valley area of New York (the area north of New York City and south of Albany, from the Pennsylvania border on the west to Connecticut on the east). It’s an active group with regular monthly meetings near Poughkeepsie.
We were so frustrated that nothing was local. We had to travel forty to seventy miles to find a group, so someone said. “Well, just start it yourself (and they will come).” I had never been to a TG support group before but was pretty used to other types of support groups. We met in homes for four meetings and eventually found [an affordable] place to meet, with discreet off street parking.
It varies but there are around 20 dues-paying members who attend meetings. We have more than 100 members on our list server who are interested but don’t necessarily attend meetings. The membership requirements are that you are a TG interested to know more and we are open to the TG spectrum including family if they want to attend. We currently don’t invite admirers in but they sometimes sneak in when someone brings a friend. The members seem to appreciate the level of confidentiality and the one on one interviews pre visiting the group.
MHVTA’s principal mission is to provide outreach and support for our members, their families, their friends, and to be active in the Transgender Community and the greater community of the Mid-Hudson Valley, New York. MHVTA is a non-discriminatory group which is structured to allow participation by all those who support the transgender community. We respect and support the right of free and open expression and the right to be treated as equals by society. We focus on providing an understanding peer support network for anyone who would like to be a part of it and to assist others who wish to learn more about the Transgender community, acting as a Transgender advocate to other groups and institutions in the Mid-Hudson Valley area. We welcome new people with sensitivity towards their fears and concerns that accompany revealing themselves to others. MHVTA aims to accomplish this through: Regularly scheduled meetings, social events, and frequent and open communication. For more information, you can check MHVTA’s website.
You can also find an interview with some members of MHVTA at www.tgforum.com (but you can go directly to the article if you’re a subscriber).
Book Covers
Posted by – July 8, 2006
Betty took this photo of me not too long ago, and the funny thing about it was that we accidentally got some nifty stuff in the background: the beige thing, far left is (1) a galley copy of Virginia Erhardt’s upcoming book Head Over Heels: Wives Who Stay with Crossdressers and Transsexuals (Haworth, Winter 2007); the reddish thing, taped to the wall is (2) mock-up of a groovy cover by our own Lucy & Mary, which unfortunately got rejected for being “too abstract” but which I really loved, and right behind my head, with white text, is (3) the current mock-up of the intended cover, but with a model who is not Betty.
Five Questions With… Cynthia Majors
Posted by – June 21, 2006
Cynthia Majors was born and raised in Teaneck New Jersey. She graduated from Teaneck High School in 1970 and Bergen Community College with a BA in 1972. She and her wife Sharla were married in Sept of 1983 and still live in Teaneck. Cynthia has been a member of Chi Delta Mu Chapter of Tri-Ess for about 10 years and is now serving as President for the second time. Besides being an active amateur drag performer Cynthia is also a member of a Drag Performance group called Flavah which has been a regular in the NYC Pride Parade for the last several years . Their photos have appeared in the NY Daily News and the front page of AM New York. In addition Cynthia has been interviewed on both WPLJ and WINS Radio on several TG issues.
1) You were President of CDM and then you weren’t and now you are again: did you take a break or are you feeling reluctant about leading CDM?
To put it frankly, I took a break. I felt that I was getting in over my head because I was trying to do everything myself and it just wasn’t working. I had gone into being President with what I had thought were some very good ideas but when things didn’t work out the way I had hoped I became frustrated and I think it had a very adverse effect on how I handled myself and the group. When election time came around again I had no interest in continuing as President. Now. a little older and a lot wiser, I’ve opted to try it again for several reasons. First I now have a great team working with me. My wife Sharla is the Treasurer and Linda Mills is my VP. I’ve finally learned that things need to be delegated or you burn out-not an easy lesson for a Type A personality to take in.
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Writer’s Desk
Posted by – June 19, 2006
I took this photo in order to figure out my desk ergonomics, & it surprised me to see exactly how much of my life it reveals.
Starting at the upper right corner and going around clockwise, you can see: backup ream of HP paper on top of paper sorter stack; vintage lamp; large candle; my father’s old mahogany inbox; iPod (20 gig with black earbuds for subway safety); “Trans in the City” mug (a gift from the Hetrick-Martin Institute) of tea; scissors.
Center bottom: new underdesk keyboard drawer & old trackball mouse precipitously perched.
Starting at the bottom left corner: copy of Sims2 Nightlife on top of my computer tower & external hard drive; ashtray, cigarettes & matches; another inbox with articles I’m reading/using for the new book.
On the hutch, my bottles of painkillers, muscle relaxants, anti-depressants & allergy meds (so I remember to take them), a green page holder, Merriam-Webster’s Page-A-Day calendar, & the upper right corner of my new HP all in one printer.
On the top plane, above my monitor, the bottom edge of my Sandman “Still Life with Cats” poster with four postcards tucked into the frame: (1) Buster Keaton dining with an elephant; (2) postcard from the first Rufus Wainwright show I saw; (3) Our Mother of Sorrows 9/11 prayer card, and (4) Greta Garbo photo (the one the US postage stamp was drawn from).
If you look really close, you can also see that the monitor view is of the message boards, and in particular Lynne’s post about how to prevent CP and RSI, which is what caused me to take the photo in the first place.
(You can see a much larger version of the photo here.)
Just Because
Posted by – June 15, 2006
I took this the other night, and I’m quite pleased with myself for having taken a photo of Betty that Betty likes. It’s a rare deed. That and dang she’s cute.
Five Questions With… Richard Docter
Posted by – June 7, 2006
Dr. Richard Docter is a clinical psychologist and gender researcher from Los Angeles with 20 years of experience in the transgender community. Together with Virginia Prince, he is co-author of the largest survey of cross dressers ever published. In 1988 he published the book Transvestites and Transsexuals. He continues to be a frequent contributor to transgender conventions throughout the nation.
1) Your Transvestites & Transsexuals was one of the only books (other than Mariette Pathy Allen’s Transformations) that actually mentioned spouses when I was looking for information nearly a decade ago. What encouraged you to include spouses?
< Dr. Richard Docter with Christine Jorgensen, 1987. (Photo by Mariette Pathy Allen.)
There were a number of published articles about the concerns of wives published prior to 1988. I was interested in the views of wives because important family dynamics are almost always affected by cross dressing. Few wives were totally rejecting, but few had worked out an accomodation that felt good for both. The wives who seem most interesting to me are people like you, Helen, who defy the societal view that all of this is sick, sick, sick. Instead, some wives, as you point out, not only put shame on the back burner, but find ways to enjoy the joy of cross dressing that means so much to their husband. I hope you will keep collecting their stories so they can be shared with both husbands and wives.
Five Questions With… Ariadne Kane
Posted by – May 24, 2006
Ariadne Kane has been doing transgender outreach longer than many of us have been walking – since 1972. She was on The Phil Donahue Show in 1980 and probably gave some of the people reading this a glimpse that they weren’t alone in being trans. Somewhere in there she came up with the idea of Fantasia Fair, as well.
< Ariadne Kane
1. Since you were the person who ‘invented’ Fantasia Fair, how did it come about? What did it take to put on the first couple of them? How has it changed in the ensuing years?
Fan/Fair (the abbreviated version) was conceived of in 1974. It struck me that we could create a dynamic program of activities that were educational, social and practical for all CDs & TSs who were willing to come out from the ‘closets’ of shame, guilt and shyness. I believed that, in a tolerant and open community, they could learn some things about being femme or masculine; get much needed help about comportment and presentation and, have truly educational experience out of the ‘closet’. It was with this guiding premise that Fan/Fair was created. It was with the help and financial backing of 3 members of the Boston Cherrystone ‘T’ Club and myself that Fan/Fair 1 became a reality in 1975.
Needless to say, we learned a lot about the needs and aspirations of the ‘T’ community, including what program elements worked in favor of our Goals for the program. Over the next 3 decades, the Fan/ Fair Steering Committee adopted a template for programming and administration, These included a balanced mix of educational, social and practical modules for the ‘T’ person who wanted to emerge from the ‘closet’ and learn the dynamics leading to personal growth and adaptability in either the feminine or the masculine gender role of choice. This template is still the guiding instrument in the design of every Fair, even today.
Five Questions With… Lisa Jackson
Posted by – April 26, 2006
Lisa Jackson was born in Fayetteville, Georgia, and her first
venture into rock n roll was as a Christian rocker. But at the age of 21 she followed her star to New York, where she formed the Steve Friday band. In 2000, she did her first gig in drag, and eventually began to transition in a very public kind of way. With the support of several downtown notables, like Jayne County,
Lisa has gone on to not only become a fantastic role model for the trans community but a fantastic rock n roller in her own right. Her band, Lisa Jackson + Girl Friday, regularly play gigs in New York and beyond, and her CDs rock. Her “Fabulously Done is also the endpage of My Husband Betty. If you’re in New York City during May, you can catch them on Monday nights at Arlene’s Grocery.
1) As a fellow 80s kid, which were your bands? Which band did you love that might surprise people the most? Were you Punk or New Wave?
Well the band that tops my list from that era would be Van Halen and that would be the David Lee Roth era only! But I was also a big fan of Men at Work, Till Tuesday, and even Journey.
