Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
Just a reminder: on this Saturday, July 18th, I’l be doing a talk ouat the Long Island GLBT Community Center on “Gender & Love.” It starts at 7PM & there’s more info (directions, etc.) on their website.
Then, next Sunday July 26th, I’ll be doing a reading with some other contributors to the June issue of Global City Review at The Bowery Poetry Club. The theme for this issue was “Nothing is Simple.” I’ll be one of 4-5 readers, including a couple of poets.
Congrats to all the winners!
21st LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD WINNERS for BOOKS PUBLISHED IN 2008
TRANSGENDER
Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word), Thea Hillman, Manic D Press
Really: it’s my favorite book. This year they’ve added a bunch of new terms
For all 15, check out cracked.com. (via Queerty)
While I was in Milwaukee, I did an interview for a local paper and entirely forgot to mention it. It’s a little more recent then a million others I’ve done, so it might answer some questions about what the hell I’m doing in WI & other mysteries of life. (I especially love the bit about how my “writing exudes a Midwestern no-nonsense practicality.”)
I’m not one & I don’t understand them, somehow like a teenager who doesn’t understand the boys or girls he ogles. They are a mystery: a perfect, empowered, complicated mystery.
I have had, like so many tomboys and masculine spectrum and androgyny-leaning and genderqueer sorts, the kind of frustration with femininity that is about me & about the world & its expectations, but one day while listening to a femme talk about intentionally trying to look like a dyke so that others would know she wanted to date women, I had one of those revelatory moments. I explained why I was smiling to her: that I had experienced the reverse, trying to fem up my naturally dyke-spectrum gender even though i wanted to date men. We both had a moment of why is this shit so absurdly stupid along with a little and why are there always uniforms and prescriptions that go along with desire?
I don’t know the answer but I do know I have mocked femininity like the injured tomboy I can be, but this book – so full of longing and coolness and love and desire and girlness and attitude that I feel once again something like that teenaged boi or grrl utterly confounded but this time, a little in awe.
This book Visible: A Femmethology Parts 1 & 2, edited by Jennifer Clarke Burke and published by Homofactus, is full of the narratives of the people who call themselves femmes, and they ponder such a range of questions: the obvious ones about invisibility and identity – especially relevant to readers here when that (in)visibility relates to having a trans-masculine partner — to the femininity of a self-confessed “stopped pretending to be a male to queer to femme female” trans person. They are full of gender theory, concerned about community, biphobia, butch-femme dynamics and too many other things to mention. It gives me hope that even I, one day, can overcome being a jerk and punching those girls I like in the arm instead of just telling them how awesome & fabulous they are.
Thanks femmes, for making me look again at femininity. You can read more at www.Femmethology.com.
Westboro Baptist Church is going to Boston on an anti-Semitic, homophobic rant. King of astounding, but you know? I can hear Allen Ginsberg laughing:
Song
The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction
the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.
Who can deny?
In dreams
it touches
the body,
in thought
constructs
a miracle,
in imagination
anguishes
till born
in human–
looks out of the heart
burning with purity–
for the burden of life
is love,
but we carry the weight
wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in the arms
of love.
No rest
without love,
no sleep
without dreams
of love–
be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines,
the final wish
is love
–cannot be bitter,
cannot deny,
cannot withhold
if denied:
the weight is too heavy
–must give
for no return
as thought
is given
in solitude
in all the excellence
of its excess.
The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye–
yes, yes,
that’s what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.
I love this idea.
Love and mourning can be such interesting inspirations for art, and in her case, activism.
In a not an unironic juxtaposition, Epistemology of the Closet author Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has died at the age of 59. Without her, there would be no Queer Studies.
Honestly, I’m pretty cheered by the response to #AmazonFail: so many people upset about censorship, and censorship of LGBT, sex-positive, and related topics.
Not a bad thing at all. There’s a reasonably good summation at CNET and at WiredPen (which has the PW report about it being caused by a glitch) (& there’s my post from yesterday about it, with links to a lot of the original sources).
Not books about queer sex per se, although I’m sure those are included, but books about sexuality and/or queer topics, have lost their rankings at amazon.com. Mine included.
As Mark Probst reported, they are removing the rankings of these books exactly so they do not appear in “some searches and best seller lists.”
My Husband Betty was often categorized either in sexuality sections or in LGBT sections, but She’s Not the Man I Married is classified as a Gender Studies book.
This is bullshit. Amazon.com already gets crap ratings on the T with HRC’s Corporate Equality Index. When you see a book you like is missing its sales rank, that’s probably why: they’re filtering LGBT books out of their lists. Aside from being a bad business decision, it’s discriminatory and – well, just stupid for booksellers to be censoring their lists.
WHAT YOU CAN DO: When you find a book that doesn’t have a sales rank, please send Amazon a message using the feedback page provided – scroll down toward the end of the page, & look for a Feedback box shaded light blue.
& GOOGLEBOMB: link to this page that redefines “amazon rank” more accurately.