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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.”

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Confirmed Events

I will have the extreme pleasure and honor of introducing Leslie Feinberg at the State Museum of New York in Albany, this coming February 3rd.

Betty and I will also be attending IFGE 2007, in Philly, where I’ll be presenting both my Trans Sex & Identity workshop (on Friday) and doing an additional workshop on She’s Not the Man I Married (on Saturday).

& That is in addition to my being the keynote speaker for First Event this year and doing an erotic memoir reading for Rachel Kramer Bussel here in NYC.
More to come, no doubt!

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Rockergrrls

As I promised Gracie a while back, the whole issue of women & music has been chafing my ass a lot lately.

I’ve been a musichead all my life. I love music, I love bands, I love seeing live shows. I’ve been to more concerts than I can count; the list I kept when I was a teenager blows even my mind, these days, as I rarely get out to see a show anymore (since Betty isn’t big on concerts, sadly).

Moreso, I love aggro rock, & always have. I’m a punk at heart, and while I have my love of New Wave and Caberet, there’s nothing like a good garage band as far as I’m concerned. Loud, out of tune, I don’t care. Just bring it on, and with major cock attitude, too.

So I watched when Betty found a “100 Best Hard Rock Bands” show in VH-1 the other day, because I was curious about how they’d mix metal and grunge and punk and glam. I’ve never been a metalhead but I’ve had friends who are, but grunge and punk and glam – well, HELL YES.

What puzzled me not at all was that Carmen Electra was the host, even though that doesn’t make any sense at all, since she’s famous, of course, for being one of Prince’s finds, and has otherwise become a professional Pretty Face. What was weirder is that all the voiceovers – you know, the smart bits about the bands – were done by a guy. I’m sure she has talent, I just don’t know what in. Anyway, she was wearing a leather minidress and reading blandly from the teleprompter – there’s nothing quite as ridiculous as someone delivering the phrase “Rock On!” with no passion whatsoever – and I got more and more aggravated by her presence.

Because they were interviewing people like Lita Ford and Penelope Spheeris (director of the Decline of Western Civilization movies, amongst other things; in other words, a woman with real rock n roll bona fides). I couldn’t understand why Carmen as host, when there’s all these cool rock women around, and then it hit me: oh, Carmen is there for the audience. You know, the guys who like rock. You know, cause it’s only guys who like rock. You know, cause women like me don’t exist. Neither does the woman I met in St. Louis who told me every cigarette she couldn’t have caused her to turn up her Black Sabbath that much louder on her headphones.

Women in music are scantily-clad Rolling Stone covers (please notice the paucity of women on the covers, & the paucity of their clothes when they are), pretty girls in leather minidresses that can’t deliver a “Rock on!” with any conviction whatsoever. They’re the ones who sleep with the bands, with the roadies. They don’t actually know anything about music; they’re only in it for the boys.

Anyway, Carmen Electra tires me. It’s not her fault. It’s a million years of rock & roll history. No matter how many Jordans, or Poly Styrenes, or Chrissie Hyndes or Wendy O. Williamses or Joan Jetts, aggro rock will always be the domain of the boys. And you know, FUCK THAT.

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A Queer Sunday

Reading John Waters’ article about Tennesee Williams – and in The New York Times Book Review, no less! – was a treat. I love them both, for being queer, for their art, for their humor and sarcasm and truth.

These are my people, and always have been.

But it made me think about the books I had to “steal” as a kid, or read secretly. For me, it was Joe Orton’s biography, Prick Up Your Ears, first and foremost. I heard about him reading interviews with Adam Ant, who simultaneously introduced me to Marc Bolan, the erotic art of Allen Jones, Derek Jarman, and Tom of Finland. Around the same time I discovered Soft Cell and Marc Almond, who in turn turned my head toward the likes of Jacques Brel and Jean Genet. (And I wonder why I turned out the way I am, reading about rough trade and anonymous bathroom sex when I was 15.)

They were all great “bad” influences, their books and art I hid from my mother. They told me there was another world out there, just as Tennesee Williams told John Waters there was.

So who were yours?

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Paris Review?!

Oh, the sobbing and wailing and gnashing of teeth! Literary hoaxsters awash on The Strand… except that that’s not the way it goes, is it? Instead, James Frey gets more time on Oprah and wait, is that Laura Albert on the cover of Paris Review? Oh, it is! It is!

You want queer memoirists, real ones? Here’s a short list, literary world. I can pretty much guarandamntee that none of these books got the publicity they should have while you were frothing about JT LeRoy (the person Laura Albert pretended to be).
There’s Max Wolf Valerio’s memoir of transition, The Testosterone Files, and Jamison Green’s Becoming a Visible Man, and Matt Kailey’s Just Add Hormones. S. Bear Bergman’s Butch is a Noun is a great memoir of life in the butch lane.
There’s life as a queer girl from Michelle Tea in Rent Girl, Alison Smith’s Name All the Animals, and Fun Home by Alison Bechdel.
Then there’s just about anything by Patrick Califia.
Shoot, you want MTF memoirs? Take She’s Not There, or, for the more sexual side of things, Richard Novic’s tale of his part-time life as a woman, Alice in Genderland.
(Oh, right. There’s me, too.)