Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
I still have moments of looking at the LGBT bookshelves in bookstores feeling sheepish – sometimes because I feel like I’m not “queer enough” to be doing so, or because people are clocking me as queer, that you must be queer if you’re browsing the LGBT section of a bookstore.
What’s funny to me is that I’ve stood in front of 200 people & talked about strapping it on, yet strangers in bookstores looking at me looking at books can still make me shy.
Congratulations to Tristan Taormino on her 200th “Pucker Up” column for The Village Voice. She’s been writing that column since 1999, and even mentions the column about The Queer Heterosexual that I cited in My Husband Betty. (She also wrote a column about My Husband Betty, which did the book a world of good).
So congrats Tristan, and keep on putting your nose (or whichever parts you choose) into other people’s sex lives – with their consent, of course.
Seal Press rocks so hard it’s ridiculous. Not only has word come that the first reprint of My Husband Betty has come out with Seal’s imprint, but they’ve apologized for the situation that lead to me being left off the Transgender category nominees’ list for the Lambda Literary Awards.
Buy Seal’s books, people. They are a great press, & do good work.
I just found out that my publishers missed the deadline to nominate my book She’s Not the Man I Married for a Lambda Literary Award. Considering that it’s probably the only award that has a Transgender category at all, I’m – well, beyond words about how shitty this is.
It’s like the last kick in the ass from 2007 arriving a little late.
But congrats to all my friends & fellow writers on the list: Reid Vanderburgh, Eli Clare, Julia Serano, Mattilda, Virginia Ramey Mollenkott. May the best person win.
I’ll be at Gender Crash! in Boston tomorrow night, doing what I do at one of the coolest events the trans community has to offer.
It seemed like a good way to end my semester up in Andover.
(courtesy of www.unitedhollywood.blogspot.com)
& If you haven’t seen The Front, now’s the time to do it. & There are more speechless shorts, featuring the likes of Tim Robbins, Alan Cumming.
& Go here to sign a petition to tell the FCC we don’t want more media consolidation. You only have until Tuesday, 12/11, to sign it, so go do it now.
Tonight, do come to a crossdressing event at the LGBT Center in NYC. Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Crossdressing: Erotic Stories book is the reason for the gathering. I’ll be reading, as will Miss Vera, amongst others.
Do come! It should be a fun night!
When I spoke at Columbia a while back, students were utterly convinced that we are making progress. They were specifically talking about gender issues and fashion, and I had to disagree with them, at least about clothes, since there were more ways to play with sartorial gender in the ’70s and especially the ’80s than there are now.
But it cracked me up to see William Gibson, of all people, talking about exactly how much progress we haven’t made:
In the past ten years, we’ve seen incredible advances in nanotechnology and synthetic biology. Does any of it amaze you?
My assumption has always been that at some point we would lock on to a literally exponential increase in human knowledge. That was my best guess, somewhere back in the Seventies. There hasn’t been anything that made me sit back and say, “Golly, I would never have imagined that.” The aspects of recent history that have caused me to do that have been, in every case, manifestations of retrograde human stupidity.
How do you mean?
It’s been an extraordinarily painful decade or so. I just never in my wildest dreams could have imagined that it could get as fucked up as this guy [George Bush]. It still amazes me how dumb so much of our species can manage to be. But that’s kind of like being amazed at life.
There you have it, folks: manifestations of retrograde human stupidity, indeed.
So I read The First Man-Made Man
But that’s not what bothered me so much: the tone of the book was remarkably condescending. The interview with the monk at the end just felt like a dick joke. & A lot of the time, the narration made me so uncomfortable I really just wanted to read the actual manuscript the first trans man wrote, instead. (Although from what I hear, no one seems to know if a copy exists at all anymore, or not.)
Don’t get me wrong: this is a valuable & interesting book & really gets at how remarkably new the tech was; I especially enjoyed the section on the early practitioners of plastic surgery. But it just felt to me that the author never really believed he was a guy at all, which strikes me as a remarkably unsympathetic way to write about not just transness, but about a trans man who was so inexorably alone as a trans person. Michael Dillon strikes me as a remarkable soul who had a tremendous amount of integrity and bravery, and frankly, this book gives you just enough about him to know that the book didn’t do him justice.
There’s an article in this month’s Writer’s Digest about “Alternative Fare” and specifically the LGBT markets in publishing, and I was interviewed for the T section.
Boyd points out that people of variant sexuality have always appeared in literature. “There is a long line of novel characters who are gender variant, from The Well of Loneliness to Orlando to Middlesex. I like to think of my work as having inherited a great deal from writers like Gertrude Stein or [Virginia] Woolf.”
The bit that was clipped was my clarification that people have always written books about being in love with someone who is gender variant, as in Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Woolf’s Orlando.