Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
I contributed to a book by Mattilda called Nobody Passes, and I will be doing a reading with other contributors here in New York, on March 21st, at the bookstore Bluestockings.
(Other upcoming readings for Nobody Passes below the break.)
Continue reading “Nobody Passes NYC Reading”
Apparently I’ve been tagged for a blog meme, by Debra over at Tragic/Beautiful.
I’m supposed to come up with Five Things You Don’t Know About Me. I’m going to hope that none of my very old friends are reading, since what they know about me may be very different from what a more generic “you” might know.
(1) I have always worried that all of my eccentricity is really driven by a niggling fear that I am painfully mediocre.
(2) I started my undergraduate career as a Theology major at Fordham University. I wanted to be a priest when I was a child and often wonder if I won’t end up some kind of monk/nun by the end of my days.
(3) My first boyfriend’s name was also Jason. (My friend Ming took to calling him “the wrong Jason” when I met the person who you all know as Betty.)
(4) I spent a good chunk of my 20s traveling:
As a result of the books and my lectures, after I turned 30, I have since seen, all stateside: Eureka Springs, AR; Phoenix, AZ; Washington, DC; Atlanta, GA; Chicago, IL; Hammond, IN; Provincetown, MA; Las Vegas, NM; Albany, NY; Philadelphia, PA; Sherman, TX, and Burlington, VT. As a result of being keynote speaker at First Event this year, I’ll finally get to see Boston!
(5) I am allergic to almost everything a person can be allergic to (dogs, cats, mold, dust, etc.) with the bizarre exception of cockroach poop.
& Now I will tag three other bloggers to list five things we don’t know about them: Betty Crow, Caprice Bellefleur, and John.
I’m starting to get emails from people asking about the new book and whether or not I’d be willing to come to one trans conference or another. Likewise, the “call for presenters” emails are also showing up.
This year, for obvious reasons, Betty & I would love to go to all the conferences we’ve attended before – to celebrate the new book, to help more people, to dispel what rumors we can and to share what we’ve learned in the years since we’ve been to them.
But the same old problem stands in my way: we can’t afford it. My publishers don’t pay for conferences, and a physical book tour, per se, isn’t financially feasible. And as per usual, unless I’m to be the keynote speaker – such as at First Event – I’m told over and over again that the conferences do not help presenters get to these conferences or even waive conference fees, much less pay for hotel rooms or travel costs or the like. I say “I’m told” because that’s what conference organizers tell people when they have requested my attendance – and yet that’s not what I hear from other presenters.
Interestingly, I’ve been told that because I’m selling books I’m a “commercial interest,” which amuses me, considering that even if I sold a book to every single person who came to these conferences – which is far from likely – I still wouldn’t make enough money to break even! But of course I don’t actually sell my own books at these conferences: IFGE does.
So my response to everyone just now is that I honestly don’t know if we can come. We can’t afford to put out the $1000-2000 it costs for us to go to a conference, but we certainly can’t do that several times next year. It costs us more of course because there are two of us – and people always want Betty to come, because she’s Betty.
Mind you, I’m not asking to make money going to these things. I just don’t want to have to spend my own money working for a conference that is – from all reports – making money. I’m happy to donate my time and costs to conferences that are non-profit and have done so in the past. It would help if I felt any of these conferences had a clear-cut policy on these issues. But beyond all that, I know I can draw an audience because I’m told I make a decent advocate for partners, and that a lot of what I have to say is very different from what you hear in the rest of the trans community, and that that difference is useful.
Unfortunately, then, I can’t go unless my expenses are covered, and that is up to the organizing committees of the various conferences.
“Just ask whether Lumeric was a man or a woman.”
“And what’s the right answer?” Candy asked.
“Both,” Malingo and Jimothi replied at the same moment.
Candy looked confused.
“Lumeric was a Mutep,” Malingo explained. “Therefore both a he and a she.”-from Clive Barker’s Abarat, where Lumeric the Mutep was also a magician of the highest order.
I’ll admit that I find it incomprehensible to remain part of a Church that didn’t want me as a member or that felt I was “less than.” When I found out at a young age that I wouldn’t be “allowed” to be a priest, I washed my hands of the Church, and while I still consider myself culturally Catholic*, I’m also an agnostic and don’t miss mass. & I was always allergic to the incense, so I don’t miss that either. But I do still go to Saint Patrick’s to light candles in my grandmother’s memory, and I like to think she’d be quite pleased knowing that she – even from the grave – gets me into a church at all. I still read The Lives of the Saints, and I love the peace I can achieve, easily, when I’m sitting in a Church between masses. The quiet, the art, the ritual, the iconography: all these things make me feel at home.
But queer folks often don’t feel at home if they actually believe in their faith and want to be committed members of a faith-based community. One of my fellow Catholics has joined the UU but I think misses something of the aesthetics of Catholicism (one of the few things, imho, the Catholic Church did right. If you don’t feel a sense of awe entering Saint Patrick’s, I’d be very surprised).
One of the things I see Betty struggle with is how the faith she was raised in might condemn her for who she is, and she’s the one who brought this article to my attention.
I applaud the way these folks have stuck to a faith they believe in, that they feel comfortable in, and have not backed down or compromised their beliefs. But at the same time I find it quite baffling: if literal and conservative interpretation of the Bible yields the label of “sinner” for any gay or lesbian, yet you know you didn’t choose to be gay, why stay? Jesus’ advice, that those who are without sin cast the first stone, might be the key. Because we are all sinners, aren’t we? In one way or another, we are. The man who casts homosexuals out of his church or makes them feel uncomfortable has masturbated once in his life, at least. Or maybe he’s gambled, or coveted his neighbor’s wife, or over-eaten, or blasphemed, or doubted, or lied, or eaten shellfish. There are plenty of ways to sin – especially if one’s going to be strict about Old Testament restrictions – other than having sex with someone of your own gender, and I find the current Christian obsession with homosexuality as the sin that inspires Christians to act in decidedly un-Christian ways quite baffling. I still don’t remember anything in the Bible that says human beings should be judging each other’s sinfulness; last I checked, a sinner’s sins are between him and his God.
As someone raised Catholic I can’t help but find it tragic; after all, one of the huge reasons the Protestant religions happened was because the Church on Earth was interfering in the way a sinner might know his God, so for me, this current revival of people thinking they know the mind of God is a little bit of (the worst of) history repeating itself.
Continue reading “Rock & a Hard Place”
Today, as if to reassure my confidence for the show we’ll be taping tomorrow, both of my books are much higher in their amazon.com rankings than usual, with My Husband Betty clocking in at #10,060 and She’s Not the Man I Married at #12,122.
(They usually float around 40,000 or so.)
Mattilda, the editor of That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, has a new anthology called Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity that just came out, and I contributed an essay called “Persephone.” It’s a bit different from my usual, so I thought I’d post a small preview here.
I’ll be doing a Five Questions With… interview with Mattilda about this new book, too.
I used to be something you might call heterosexual – not straight, because straight carries connotations about picket fences and children and normalcy that have never been up my alley. It is awkward being monogamous around the poly set and legally married when I’m in queer crowds, but both of those things are as true as my heterosexuality, even if it’s not easy to see any of them. They are the old tattoos, or the memorabilia that tells me how I ended up in this new place, with this new tattoo, the same way a transwoman might see her penis as a reminder that she came by womanhood in a slightly different way than the expected route. Some women change their names when they get married; I changed my public identity instead: queer though formerly known as heterosexual, queer though married, queer due to binary, queer in context, queer by association, queer due to no fault of my own, queer as a result of cupidity.
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.
In Margaret Atwood’s book about writing, Negotiating with the Dead
I was now faced with real life, in the form of other little girls – their prudery and snobbery, their Byzantine social life based on whispering and vicious gossip, and an inability to pick up earthworms witout wriggling all over and making mewing noises like a kitten. I was more familiar with the forthright mindset of boys: the rope burn on the wrist and the dead-finger trick were familiar to me – but little girls were almost an alien speciaes. I was very curious about them, and remain so.
It’s always nice to read reports on growing up a girl from other tomboys, although I’m not sure she’d call herself that. She was a girl with an older brother who had parents who followed insect migrations.
She also, by the way, does not drive, so I consider myself in excellent company.
Here’s some other things you can do:
#36 Get involved in the political process: Volunteer for a Candidate
#37 Plan and conduct a Day of Remembrance event
#38 Support or create a radio show or podcast
#39 Hold a House Party for NCTE or another trans organization
#40 Make Jails Safer for Trans People
#41 Hold a Job Fair
#42 Support a Drag Community Event
#43 Engage Media Coverage of Transgender Issues
#44 Conduct a Community Needs Assessment
#45 Vote!
#46 Start a discussion group on gender related books
#47 Respond to Alerts from Other Organizations
For all of the 52 things (thus far!), go to NCTE’s website.
& Have a great Thanksgiving (for those of you who celebrate it today).