“It is the lesbian in us who drives us to feel imaginatively, render in language, grasp, the full connection between woman and woman. it is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.”
–Adrienne Rich
Not Your Whipping Girl
My erotic story in Taormino’s Take Me There
First, reviewer Stephen Ira mentions, upfront, that there is an expectation that Taormino, as a cis woman, won’t get it right — which tells me at least a little something about the reviewer. Ira does redeem Taormino for pulling off an erotica anthology that is “for cis readers . . . not just a lesson in sexual allyship, but a heaping spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down”. Still, it’s worth noting his surprise that she has.
RIP Barney Gosset
He published Ginsberg, Beckett, DH Lawrence, and Henry Miller – whose Tropic of Cancer which attracted 60 legal cases and attempted bans in 21 states. Naked Lunch. The Story of O. Waiting for Godot. He made Beckett’s film Film – starring Buster Keaton – possible. His offices at Grove were bombed after he published Che Guevara.
Mr. Rosset liked to tell the story of how he had responded to a Chicago prosecutor who suggested that he had published “Tropic of Cancer” only for the money. He whipped out a paper he had written on Miller while at Swarthmore (the grade was a B-) to demonstrate his long interest in that author. He won the case.“I remember leaving the courtroom and somehow getting lost going home,” he told The Times in 2008. “It was snowing. But I was so happy that I thought, ‘If I fall down and die right here, it will be fine.’ ”
Au revoir, Mr. Gosset. Thanks for blowing the lid off the thing for the rest of us and giving the US some kind of chance at being culturally literate.
Formerly Poppy Z.
I think maybe I was the last to know, but horror novelist Poppy Z. Brite has transitioned, and is now Billy Martin.
Namecheck Dublin
What a groovy thing: My Husband Betty is mentioned in a cool online Dublin magazine called Totally Dublin, page 6:
“Helen Boyd’s study of the relationships between crossdressers and their partners is a gender equality must-read, as well as a startling insight into the psychology of a variety of different draggies.”
I don’t know about the term “draggies” but I’m not hip to Dubliner slang, either.
Love.
This is one of the most beautiful short films I have ever seen.
it’s like a love letter to every writer, reader, and librarian that’s ever lived. & To all the Damfinos of course, too.
Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone.
Phoenix
I’d like to offer my apologies to those in the Genderific Book Group of Phoenix. Michael Brown & I crossed wires over logistics. I’d be happy to re-schedule.
Obscenity Trial
On this day in 1928 police seized 800 copies of Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. It would be put on trial as obscenity later in 1928 under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857; Virginia Woolf came to the trial but wasn’t allowed to provide testimony — nobody was.
Interestingly, 1928 was the same year women got the right to vote in the UK.
Coincidence?
(h/t to The Progressive’s “Hidden History” calendar, via FW)
Be Who You Are
Alas, another children’s book about a trans child, this one called Be Who You Are, about a young girl who is born male-bodied.
The only thing that bugs me about this is the idea of using the term “gender non-conforming” for a child like this. On the surface of it, sure. But it’s exactly the gender typical femininity of such kids that often convinces people they are trans in the first place; if she were more of a tomboy, her trans status wouldn’t be as obvious to people, right?
RIP Christopher Hitchens
We needed him whether we knew it or not. He was a huge influence on me; I started reading him when he wrote for The Nation and loved his deep passion for politics and for – well, thinking. He was so intense a writer, but always seemed to have such deeply-held beliefs and convictions. He was one of the few men I ever met where you could not escape how goddamned sexy he was – because he was brilliant. His intellect and his passion radiated off him.
He was an inspiration to me, and I’m glad I had a lovely conversation with him many years ago at one of his readings.
His turn toward conservative in these years since 9/11 echoed a similar turn of one of my other favorite writer-heros, John Dos Passos. They weren’t such poor company, really: both of them so in love with the US in some ways, and so deeply critical of it in others.
I’ll miss you, Hitch. I’d say Godspeed but he was the most ardent of atheists, for which I loved him too.
