Author: Helen Boyd

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Helen’s Holiday Gift Guide

So. I’ve noticed that two lovely women, Rachel Kramer Bussel and Tristan Taormino, have put up their holiday gift guides, and while they cover our erotic lives, I know every year I’m a loss for what to buy people that won’t stink of consumerism and waste.

That is, I seek to assuage my own guilt about being an overeducated person who lives in a Western country with clean water and half-decent healthcare (unlike most of the world’s population).

As a result, I’ve found a neat list of places who sell cool stuff for good causes:

For you doggie types, Schmitty is a Yorkie whose proceeds to go an organization called Dogs Who Care. The North Shore Animal League, on the other hand, has stuff that makes us cat types happy: Betty and I are getting new PJs courtesy of them! And if you can’t find anything at either of those two places, the Animal Rescue Site also has a store with lots of animal-inspired gifts no matter what types of critters you like.

It’s also easy to go from that site to some others with cool stuff, like the Rainforest Site’s store, where you can get anything from Fair Trade products to Brazilian art works. (Did I mention they have lots of pretty jewelry?)

For lower-impact, good health types of gifts, try gaiam.com for things like yoga videos or light therapy for the depressive in your life. (Just don’t look at their shoes. Only me and a couple of other partners would wear any of them.)

And to round things out, NOW’s store has a bunch of groovy t-shirts and you can buy one that says “Question Gender” to help support the student-run TIC conference.

So go do some good with your money, okay? Just about every organization out there sells cool stuff. If you find anything similarly cool, please post about it in the comments section.

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Dressed to Kill

Or rather, Dressed to Speak.

As an early Christmas present, I bought my outfit for First Event. I will not have the flippery hair, of course, and I’m not sure about the tuxedo shirt. And no silly shoes, either – I’ll be wearing flat shoes, of course. Mine is not a size 0 or 2 like the one shown in the catalog photo, either (and now I’m wondering if I should be posting this photo at all, since I’ve just realized I will look both shorter and fatter than this lady in the picture.)

I gave in and bought it for two reasons: (1) it was made by Ann Taylor Loft, and their clothes fit me well, and aren’t so bad cost-wise, and (2) because the “tux” I wore for the past two years was not even mine – the jacket was my sisters’s – and wasn’t actually a tux, just a tuxedo jacket and a pair of pants that matched well enough.

But otherwise (ha), voila. The tux in which I will speak.

Betty bought a very pretty black cocktail dress to be my stunning date. Now we just have to figure out who leads when we dance; that’s one we still haven’t sorted out.

But we’re clear that I’m the one who’ll be speaking, no matter how many people call me “Betty” via email.

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Floozies v. Clerics

In this month’s Secular Humanist, a report that some Pakistani clerics (belonging to a group called Movement to Cleanse Society) are objecting to the women who work for international relief agencies which arrived in Pakistan in the wake of last year’s earthquakes.

They claim the women are “spreading obscenity in society and trying to weaken our faith by corrupting our women” and charge them, as well, with dressing improperly, socializing with men, and drinking alcohol.

I’m going to take a wild guess that these particular clerics were not made homeless by the earthquakes, and I wonder if anyone has told them to stop worrying about the women and to start building homes for all the people displaced there, instead. Right now, it’s Floozies 1, Clerics 0.

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Act NOW

Health and Human Services is considering appointing Eric Keroack, a doctor who is not just anti-choice but anti-contraception, to be in charge of the US’ birth control funding. Basically, he’s an “abstinence only” type – which is, as most of us know, the worst form of birth control around. You can get more information about him from NOW’s site.

NOW has a petition up that you can (and should) sign, and is also asking people to write directly to their reps to get them to keep him from this appointment.

Lunatics running the asylum. This is like us appointing someone hostile to the UN to represent the US… oh, wait, we did that one already.

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Flexing Her Muscle

An interesting article from tompaine.com discusses the possibility of a woman running France, and about the increase in women voting for women – and men voting for women – that’s going on stateside.

Here’s the bit I found most interesting:

Buried in the Ms. results is a loud warning bell for Republicans. While all voters rated Iraq number 1 in importance, there were differences between the genders on this question. Republican women are more intense about ending the war than any other group, with 73 percent of them rating it as a very high priority. They’re ahead of even their Democratic sisters on this one.

Now think about what would happen if more of those women were actually in power within the Republican party!

Also, not surprising to this working-class feminist, but women overwhelmingly voted for the increases in the minimum wage. It’s not surprising because the majority of adult minimum-wage earners are women.

(Thanks to Melissa for the link!)

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Watch Cat

She really does have a thing for sleeping on manuscripts. The real kicker is that I’m not allowed to pet her (or she tries to bite me) or move her (I lose my hand to her) or try to get my manuscript out from under her (if I even think it, she starts growling).

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Preview of Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity

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.

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Five Questions With… Max Wolf Valerio

max wolf valerio

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.

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