I’ll be speaking at the University of West Virginia’s Morgantown campus on Thursday, October 16th, at 8PM.
Place: Greenbrier Room in the Mountainlair at West Virginia University
When: 8 pm 16 Oct
Open to everyone - the more the merrier!
Sponsor: Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Mountaineers (BiGLTM)
Today I’m taking the GRE, or Graduate Record Exam, and let me tell you, I’m not excited about it. I don’t mind taking a test for four hours - my time spent writing often runs longer than that - but the idea of this exam just pisses me off. I don’t do well with standardized anything, but the idea of standardized intelligence is so unbelievably counter-intuitive, especially for us humanities types.
I’ve always been good at math; I just didn’t like it. My sister, who always scored higher on verbal than math, went into banking. I always scored higher on math than verbal and I’m the writer. Maybe it’s just inborn perversity, or maybe this whole idea of a “right” answer offends me. Math encouraged the wrong bits of me entirely.
I’ve spent most of my intellectual career teaching myself not to look for a right answer, but to look instead at things in a way they’re not usually seen, to ask questions that expose more of the riddle of the thing in question. I love the idea of imbuing the subjective narrative with authority; of defining the universe in a kind of Buddhist solipsism. You know, in a healthy sort of way, that maximizes the importance of our humanity and decreases our judgment of what’s right or wrong.
Call me a recovering Catholic, but I had a literature professor in my first year at Fordham - I started out a theology major, no kidding - who called me The Church Lady because I found Kate Chopin’s “The Storm” a moral outrage. I was The Church Lady with a mohawk, but judgmental nonetheless. I think that tendency is sometimes referred to as liberal fascism, or for you D&D types, Lawful Evil. I recognized the streak and since then have learned to tame it.
And then this test comes along, a test I avoided taking the first time around by getting my MA in Writing, of all things, but now, considering doing a Ph.D., I can’t avoid any longer. And they want to know the best opposite of restive is, and I have to spend the first seconds while reading the question turning off the part of my brain that wants to know the context, and whether restive is being used sarcastically, who’s using it and what they’re describing. The next seconds I convince myself to just answer the damn question the way I expect they want it answered, and the next seconds after that I have to convince myself to stop thinking about it because my first “this is the answer they want” impulse is usually the one that gets me the check mark of correctness. It’s exhausting.
I don’t believe in check marks of correctness, and the idea - at this age! - of having to take a test to give someone a numerical way of understanding how smart I am, or am not, is pretty damned frustrating.
Either way, I’m taking the GRE today.
Please wish me luck in not sticking the pencil in my own eye out of frustration.
The Yale harassers were found not guilty.
The charge of intimidation and harassment does not include sexual harassment, a separate charge not brought against Zeta Psi.
Well that certainly made it easier for the Committee to let them off.
(via Feministing, via Lindsay at Female Impersonator)
I heard Jasmyne Cannick speak at the Bodies of Knowledge conference at USC Upstate, and the focus of her talk was race and the LGBT community. She made a couple of important points about the failures of the white LGBT set in dealing with black LGBT people. I use “black” because she did; she mentioned that she dislikes the phrase “people of color” but didn’t explain why exactly.
One of her main issues was that minorities are often used to trump up “diversity” numbers for primarily white LGBT organizations but aren’t then given any real power to choose issues within those organizations. Gay marriage in particular was way down on her list of priorities, after things like universal healthcare, jobs, access to education, immigration, access to power/politicians, and other issues of poverty. Her point was that in LA, it’s the white LGBT who live in West Hollywood, but that black LGBT people tend to live in their neighborhoods of birth: Compton, East LA, etc., exactly because of the issues of dicrimination and access.
As she put it: “Just because someone doesn’t agree with you that gay marriage is the most important issue doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be at the table.”
After dinner, Jasmyne Cannick spoke about race + homophobia. I’m going to summarize some of her comments in another post so that they might be available for trans groups doing outreach into racial minority communities. But she was good, funny, and yet she didn’t turn down the heat when it came to asking white LGBT people to pay attention to the ways they exclude black LGBT people.
The evening ended with drinks at our hotel, conversation, food, goofing around, gossip updates, flirting – and of course with me packing to catch an 11:56 PM train. I got hugs from some pretty lovely people, exchanged info with a bunch of others, and got on the train feeling renewed and re-invigorated. I want to thank Lisa Johnson again for having me at this conference, and I hope it can become a tradition for the college.
& So I waited for a cab to take me the short distance to the station, & at the station I got to fill a bunch of novice train travelers in on Amtrak. We boarded, and I slept, and then I wrote most of what you’ve been reading.
On the trip back, I met another man and his son over breakfast, except the son was only four and was learning everything with big blue eyes; after he saw me peel my banana, he kept half a finger on his own until his pop wasn’t paying attention, and then, lickety-split, he had his peeled too and broken in half.
“Are you going to eat that?” his father asked.
“No.” he said, still examining the banana peel in tres partes.
Love kids who aren’t my own.
Now it’s raining out; the raindrops coating windows on one side of the train and not the other. A woman across the aisle from me sleeps with her mouth slack, glasses askew. Penn Station in an hour, and home, and kittoi, and Betty.
Now to the people I met who came to the conference: the woman who wanted to know how Betty and I had sex (and not for prurient reasons, but to ask me how I felt about missing cock). The woman who’d been married three times before she realized she had rotten taste in men and much better taste in women. Her partner, butch identified, who said she can only think of herself as a woman if she says “lesbian woman” but not without the clarifying adjective. The mom whose lesbian daughter told her about a young gay man who had been kicked out of his home and who she, in turn, took in, and in the process left off being a homophobe to become an LGBT ally. And a woman who volunteers at the local PFLAG, whose daughter or son isn’t gay, and who isn’t LGBT herself, but who was invited to a wedding years ago where the younger daughter of two was getting married, and the older daughter was coming to the wedding with her girlfriend. The mother of these young women sent out a note to “warn” friends and family coming to the wedding about the older daughter coming… and something struck this friend of their family as just wrong. We talked about what it means to be an ally, especially when LGBT people are “born that way” but we who are not choose to ally with them, & how hard that is for other people to understand sometimes, and how much it makes you queer – that long fall off the short cliff of heterosexual privilege.
As I said before, I met and talked to most of the students.
The last people I met were the couple whose own life was the reason for the conference: they lost their son last year when he was gay-bashed. They gave me a t-shirt, and we exchanged information, and they have become powerhouses for PFLAG much like Judy Shepard did after the murder of Matthew. They were beautiful, mourning, and determined to get justice for their son.
I was once again impressed with how intense the sense of community is in smaller places; here we have enough LGBT people that there are splinters of gay men who wear leather vs. gay men who don’t. But in this community, there was a much greater sense of everyone hanging together or ending up hanging separately which has been, in my experience, typical of smaller places where there are fewer LGBT people. The murder of that beautiful kid, Sean Kennedy, was the reason for the conference, and the conference had a remarkable energy to it: sad but tenacious, tired but optimistic. There was no room for cynicism, and I found that incredibly refreshing and inspiring.
I’ve found myself back in Brooklyn after teaching a term at Lawrence and a semester at Merrimack, needing work.
I’d prefer teaching work in the NYC area, or lectures at colleges or the like, but really I’ll consider anything that pays okay. Lecture gigs are always good fun.
I am, of course, for hire as a coach, to help find transition resources, and for other trans-related stuff. I’m happy to provide an ear or a shoulder to cry on for trans people & partners alike.
I’m also a decent editor, writer, and admin. I’m a good lecturer and teacher. I can bookkeep if necessary. If you want to see more about what I do and what I’ve done, my author website is the place to check: www.helenboydbooks.com.
But if any of you know academics, especially in English or Gender Studies, please mention me to them.
& While I’m at it, I need a new literary agent who represents fiction, too. & A grant to finish writing my novel.
Okay, I think that’s it for now.
Today Betty and I are doing our encore performance at Lawrence University - back by popular demand! - since last time around, the room was more than 50% over its seating limit and many people couldn’t get in.
We’ll start at 3:30 today. I’ll read from She’s Not the Man I Married, we’ll talk, we’ll answer questions. Come if you’re near Appleton, since it’s open to the public.
It looks like Betty & I will be doing an encore performance here at Lawrence University before I/we leave at the end of term. It’ll be on Sunday, 3/16, at 3:30 PM, probably again in Science 102. Hope you can make it if you missed us last time.
Betty and I will be speaking tonight at Lawrence University in Appleton, WI. There’s a reception at 6:30PM, with the talk starting at 7PM. The event is open to the public.
(Since it’s required that Lawrence students live on campus — due, no doubt, to the insane weather here — it is unlikely that the event will be canceled due to the dastardly amount of snow that’s just been dumped on WI.)
& Yes, they did belong to a frat! How did you guess? I was so surprised by that. Can the Yale administrators kick them out of school for being a redundant parody of themselves? I hope so. I’m more offended by how lame an idea this was than by the sentiment, even.
I’ve spoken at the Women’s Center at Yale, for Trans Awareness Week, four times in fact, and it’s an understated little office with a few old couches, the kind of place where if a male student had wanted to have a discussion about the use of the word “slut” as a positive term for a sexually-liberated women, they probably would have let him.
IvyGate has provided a higher-res version of the photo, presumably so women know which assholes not to date, though I’m sure there’s a third-waver out there who will end up dating one of these morons while taking issue with the Women’s Center suing Zeta Psi for sexual harassment.
(via Feministing.)
I’ll be speaking at Lawrence University on Monday, February 18th, at 7PM, in 102 Science. Mark your calendars. Betty will be with me.
I’m speaking at Merrimack College in North Andover, MA today at 4PM. Here are the rest of the details.
Next year in April, I’ll be part of the Bodies of Knowledge symposium at the University of South Carolina. As per their website:
The Bodies of Knowledge Symposium is designed to raise awareness on campus about sexual diversity, to cultivate anti-homophobic attitudes among Upstate students, faculty, staff and administration, and to provide LGBTQ students with opportunities to deepen their ties to each other, to the LGBTQ community, and to their straight allies on campus, as well as in the region of the U.S. Southeast.
I’m very much looking forward to the event, to meeting the organizer and other speakers, and especially, of course, to meeting the students.
I’ll be speaking from 2:30-3:30 PM on Friday, April 11th, 2008.
Helen Boyd @ Merrimack College in North Andover, MA
Not Jerry Springer: Gender Expression and Transgender Identities
Touching on her own experience as the partner of a trans person and on her experiences with the mainstream media, Boyd will speak from a feminist perspective about transgender identities and their relative place in the spectrum of gender expression.
Tuesday, November 13
4-5:30 pm in Murray Lounge
Cosponsored by the Women’s and Gender Studies Department
For more information contact Gordene MacKenzie at Sullivan 308, X4278
Directions to Merrimack College
If you’re in the Boston area, I’m going to be delivering a lecture at Merrimack College (where I’ve been teaching this semester) on Tuesday, November 13th, 4-5:30 PM. More info as I get it.
& Betty will be with me.
At least here at Merrimack, they’ve got it good, even though they probably don’t know what’s right under their noses.
They get free films, for instance. I’ve been going to see them, which is kind of funny considering I don’t like most movies most of the time & don’t go see them - not American movies, anyway, or anything contemporary. They’re rarely worth the $10.
But Tuesday night I saw Deepa Mehta’s Earth, which is about the Partition of India in 1947, into India & Pakistan, and which came with Independence. It’s a stunning movie, & I’ve been thinking about the plot and themes and scenes and characters since I saw it. It’s a terrifying film, but deeply moving as well.
Last night I saw one of the earliest Theda Bara films, A Fool There Was, in which she plays her legendary vampire character, and afterwards they’re screening a documentary about her. A Fool There Was made so much money that it helped launch Fox Studios. It’s such a lovely rare treat to get to see a silent film on the big screen.
& In a couple of weeks, they’re screening a film about Dorothy Day, though it’s not the one that I missed when it played at the Brecht Forum in NYC.
This is the text of the talk I gave in Denver on Tuesday. It probably won’t surprise anyone that I’ve been busting at the seams wanting to have a say in all of the dialogue going on about ENDA. At least I don’t think it should surprise anyone, not by now.
**
First, let me thank Ed and Jordan and all the students who asked them to bring me here. It’s a pleasure to be here in celebration of National Coming Out Day, a pleasure to see all of you gathered, celebrating who you are. Thanks to all the crossdressers, the gays, the lesbians, the genderqueers, the trans men & women, MTF and FTM, & to their partners. Thanks to all of you who are family, or friends, or allies, for being here.
Betty and I have been on tour a lot this year because I had a book published in March, and we’ve gotten a chance, once again, to meet a lot of people and to talk to a lot of trans people and partners, and this year, we’ve met more gay and lesbian people who aren’t trans than we did before. And it’s been a pleasure all around in hearing people’s stories of their own gender variance, or the stories of how they came out to loved ones, or of their first big crush or the moment when they realized they were trans or gay or lesbian or how they came to understand the first identity they understood themselves to be was not quite accurate in the long run. What I love to hear the most is about how queer people find one identity fits for a while and then not at all; like Oliver Wendell Holmes’ chambered nautilus, queer people build themselves bigger chambers, bigger categories, labels that are not so confining, over time.
That’s how it’s been for us, certainly. By the time people get used to what we’re calling ourselves our identities have shifted a little, changed usually by experiences we never expected and wouldn’t trade for anything.
Today we’ll be part of the TRANSforming Gender 2007 Conference at the University of Colorado @ Boulder. More details about other speakers - including Matt Kailey (author of Just Add Hormones) & Julia Serano (author of Whipping Girl) - can be found on the conference’s website.
Where: Dennis Small Cultural Center, University Memorial Center Rm 457
When: I’ll be doing a workshop on Queer Heterosexuals/Emerging Identities from 3:30-4:45
and then will be part of a panel with the other speakers from 5:15-6:30.
The full schedule is as follows:
Today I’ll be speaking at the Metropolitan State College of Denver.
Where: MSCD Campus, Denver
When: Tuesday, October 9th, 1-3PM
Details: The building is St. Cajetan’s. On the map link below or on the attachment it is number 16. http://www.ahec.edu/campusmaps/ahec3d.pdf
Park in the parking and transportation center which is number 10.
If you have any other questions, contact the office at 303-556-6333 or by email at info@glbtss.org.
