Posted on

Trans Partners: Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are

Hey, lovers of trans people! Come out about your desires today for National Coming Out Day! Celebrate the beauty of trans bodies and souls, no matter their shape or size or color.

There’s not enough of us out.

Here’s an exercise I ask trans partners to do when they’re feeling isolated: imagine you are Professor Charles Xavier and you’ve got that fabulous helmet — except instead of finding mutants, it helps you find other partners of trans people.

Posted on

Gay Man Tortured in the Bronx

This is sickening:

He was told there was a party at a brick house on Osborne Place, a quiet block set on a steep hill in the Bronx. He showed up last Sunday night as instructed, with plenty of cans of malt liquor. What he walked into was not a party at all, but a night of torture — he was sodomized, burned and whipped.

All punishment, the police said Friday, for being gay.

What the fuck is wrong with people?

Posted on

He Isn’t Superman

Ashley Love of TFM has a post up about Arianna Huffington’s talk about the “demonizing and scapegoating” of the president. She was inspired to comment:


When Arianna started talking about the “demonizing and scapegoating” of the president by “irrational” people, it really struck a chord with me. Like many LGBTTQI Americans, I have become very upset with many queer activists making all these personal attacks on the president, as if he is a dictator that can wave a magic wand and grant us all our wishes at once. Reality check: President Obama has to work with the courts, Congress and the people to create change (and those anti-LGBT equality Republicans are holding up equality, not the president!). To put all the blame on him when things are not moving fast enough is infantile, and suspect. It’s bad enough the racist Tea Party is slandering him, but for LGBT direct action groups to act just as crazy is dangerous. If the Democratic vote gets split, do we really want another 8 years of Bush and Ken Melhman types ruining this country again? The scary thing is there are lot of classist gay folks who only care about marriage equality, they don’t care about ENDA or many other issues that affect the less privileged part of the LGBT community, and they most certainly don’t care about rights for trans and intersex Americans. Many of them would not mind if a classist Republicans got into office, because many gay people believe in a hierarchy in the LGBT community, with rich white gay men at the top, and transsexual, transgender and intersex people at the bottom. These Animal Farm types don’t care about the epidemic of homeless LGBT youth, or hate crimes that happen to trans women of color every week, or trans health care rights, or many queer communities of color, or LGBT people who have low income, etc. We need President Obama to stay in office, or things will get worse for the majority of the LGBT community.

I can’t agree more.

Her reasons are exactly why we all need to be out & voting for Democrats for other public office, too: to say, out loud & clear that we do NOT want these wingnuts who barely consider us human.

And yes, I understand the “I’m tired of voting for people who only like me marginally better” and I agree. I’m tired of it too. We need to keep the pressure on, but that means keeping the pressure on the whole political system, not just on President Obama.

Posted on

For the Record

I don’t do this often, but I wanted to be sure people know that I only use the terms “wife” and “partner” for the person you all know as Betty these days. “Husband” was from back in the day when her primary identity was still male, and for when we were trying to figure out a “middle path,” dually gendered, genderqueer sort of thing, which has long since been abandoned.

Posted on

Genderswap Tempest

Helen Mirren is playing Prospero (Prospera, in this case) in the new film version of The Tempest:


Alan Cumming, too!

(via io9) (whose editors are, btw, Charlie Jane Anders, author of The Lazy Crossdresser, and Annalee Newitz)

Posted on

Two Tune Tuesday: Flipsides

I’ve always thought of these songs as teenage lust flip-sides: hormone-charged, sloppy, full of angst but perfectly direct, too. (Must’ve been on my headphones when I was watching skater boys in high school.)