Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
So I decided to take a flying leap out of the gender world & read a novel, right? & I chose The Alienist, since it was a book Betty had recommended to our reading group years ago for a meeting that I missed. And what does the first grisly murder scene entail? A young boy painted and dressed like a girl who’s been selling himself sexually to survive.
Is that weird or what? It’s like no matter what I do, there’s a tranny somewhere, or more like everywhere. I can’t escape.
I get a lot of emails from people who want to publish a book, which is an entirely different thing from wanting to write, and that’s a distinction hopefuls should be clear on. Writing is something more like a calling – you do it or you don’t do it, you can write your whole life & never publish, you enjoy it or you do it because something in you compels you to.
Being a published writer is a whole other can of worms, since publishing comes with agents and editors and publicity and amazon.com sales ranks. That’s a different game altogether, but I assume that most people who ask me about writing their own book want to know what it’s like publishing their own book. I recently wrote back to one such person and this is what I said:
I wouldn’t write if I could do anything else. It’s just too hard. Your books are your babies, and as soon as you write something, people assume it’s okay to rip you a new one. That is, I don’t mind bad criticism – well I don’t like it either – but you learn how to deal with it in writing workshops. At least I did. You want to write better, and good critics can help you do that, if you listen to them. However, there are a lot of people who are just hyper-critical, & you have to deal with them, too, which is not always as easy.
Then, there’s very little money. One writer I know who had a bestseller won’t quit her day job because as the publishing industry will frequently remind you: you’re only as good as your last book. Richard Russo didn’t quit teaching till he won the Pulitzer! So the reality is, with writing, you always need another job, and it’s very hard to do two jobs well. That is, if you love the 2nd job, it never gets as much attention as you’d like, & neither does your writing. It’s always feeling a little torn in half. So the ‘making a living’ aspect of it pretty much blows.
What else? It’s hard. It takes patience. If you’re ever in NYC I can show you my stack of rejection letters, and there’s no writer alive that doesn’t have a bunch of those. (Ironically, I think it’s Melville who holds the record, & most of them are rejection letters from publishers who didn’t want Moby Dick.) There’s a lot of ways to be cheated – by publishers, agents, etc. – that you have to be on the lookout for, and publicity support from publishers is getting worse & worse.
& Of course you have to keep track of your ego, realize that people think they know you even when they don’t, and you have to be able to speak well on radio, on TV, & anywhere else.
Mostly I’m appreciative that the books I write have helped people. It’s a pleasure to be able to use whatever communication skills I have in order to relieve some people’s suffering. I haven’t had a novel published yet, but even having friends read my fiction is satisfying. Basically, there’s this unnameable thing about writing that is cool and satifying in a deep way for me, and as Betty would tell you, I never radiate more “happy buzz” than when I’m working on something.
But do I like it? No. If I could find something else that would scratch that existential itch the same way, I would do it. But short of creating Tibetan sand mandalas, I can’t really imagine doing anything that feels more time-consuming, detail-oriented, or more tenuous. A long time ago, & without my permission, writing became my way of talking with myself in order to make sense of my world. It doesn’t always work, but it keeps me from gunning down strangers, at least.
Did you see the stunning & empowering Nikki Giovanni delivering a poem at the Virginia Tech service today? Was she remarkable or what? & A snappy dresser, to boot.
When I grow up I wanna be just like her.
It was as if her presence was to prove the point of why we need poets, as a culture. The spontaneous school cheer that went up was heartbreaking and healing, at once.
I’ve been reading the stories in Rachel Kramer Bussel‘s She’s on Top: Erotic Stories of Female Dominance and Male Submission
I suppose I don’t have to point out to my readers that the subtitle makes it clear that we’re dealing with binary gender only. This isn’t Fictionmania. It’s not intended for trans readers per se but what erotica is? There is some genderfuck in it, specifically a story called “Why Can’t I Be You?”. The women on top are all dominating men, most of whom seemed to have heartily throbbing parts.
I don’t say that like it’s a bad thing, because I can’t bring myself to disagree with the notion that A Hard Man is Good to Find. Still, I did get a little tired of all the hard cocks and longed for a story about a guy who was turned on but who couldn’t get it up, or a woman who was so demanding her man lost an erection from performance anxiety – something a little more problematic, or romantic, or embarrassingly funny, even, the way good sex so often is.
But of course erotica can still be sexy even when there are only binary genders involved and even when the strap-ons don’t strap-off. (Imagine!) It was just funny to notice that I’ve become used to more queer, more genderfuck’d, and more extreme kinds of hotness these days. Occasionally even Wile E. Coyote looks back at the cliff he’s just run off, no?
Each of these stories is about a different woman and by a different author, and often it was their brevity that was refreshing, because they did what porn should do: painted the scene & planted the suggestion while letting your own dirty little mind fill in the details. But for those of you who like strong women in heels and hose who know how to give orders – and I know you’re out there! – this book is a long-awaited companion, and highly recommended.
There is one story especially some of you might like – dominance in period clothes, you might call it, but the author called it “Victoria’s Hand,” & it’s intense, playful, sexy, and while historically inaccurate in its terminology, it’s close enough to do the trick. It was hard not to think of Betty having played Algernon in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest while I read it.
Continue reading “Rachel Kramer Bussel’s She’s on Top”
In an interesting review of the book College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-Eds, Then and Now
She arrived (at the University of Wisconsin, 25 years ago) with a butch haircut, a suitcase full of punk clothes mail-ordered from New York, and a ‘tough-chick persona.’ I suspected that she was romanticizing her past, but then she shows us her freshman ID card, and she really was a fright.
Ugh.
But then in the next paragraph:
Underneath, though, she was as timid as any 18-year-old girl plucked from home and set down on the campus of a huge university. Too shy to raise her hand in class, or even to order a pizza over the telephone, she was so rattled by a boy who flirted with her on the first day of French II that she promptly dropped the class.
Which strikes me as about right. The review is overall good but it’s the quoted bits that Peril wrote about herself that have my interest piqued; it’s not often I read something about women in college with shaved heads and punk wardrobes that mirrors my own experience at all.
On Wednesday night, I did the Nobody Passes reading at Bluestockings, the radical/feminist LES bookstore. As the room was filling up I leaned over to Betty and said, “I feel like I’m in a Williamsburg subway station” because of the multiple piercedness in the room. It’s the punk in me, maybe; I have an old punk rocker friend who likes to yell “freak!” at people with multiple piercings and green hair, because he figured – as it was when we were doing it – that was the point. I mean if you weren’t shocking someone’s suburban sense of normality with your non-conformity, then you weren’t doing it right, but in Williamsburg sometimes it’s like having facial piercings IS normality.
& I say all that with a kind of fondness, love, and a little bit of envy, because I don’t have the energy to look like that anymore. I prefer passing as more mainstream these days, because I like the little shock people express when I launch into a diatribe about the exclusion of crossdressers from trans politics 12 minutes later.
The idea we were discussing was passing – as one thing or another: passing as white, or black, when you have parents who are both; passing as female when you aren’t; passing as female when you are. It was very heady, indeed.
But what was most interesting to me was that to some people, I wasn’t passing at all. One person registered something like scorn every time I answered one of the Q&A questions. The conversation tended around issues of queer community, and LGBT politics & media, which I guess was predictable – Mattilda is the editor of the anthology & all – but still, the book does cover many types of passing – passing as middle class when you’re working class, or the other way around – & yet there were no questions – or assumptions – about class while there was an assumption that everyone in the room was LGBT. & I had a moment – I think of it now as social Tourette’s, but it’s basically just my punk rock spirit moving in mysterious ways – of wanting to say the word “heterosexual” as many times as I could. Why? Because when I did, people twitched. It’s a funny feeling to talk about community and “scenes” and queerness in a group of people who you can bet don’t all consider you part of their “us.” I’m used to that, mostly, except when I find someone copping an attitude toward me, that I’m not properly queer because I don’t fuck girls per se, or for whatever reason they’re not telling me. & That’s okay with me, actually — Betty & I exist at the intersection of most identities and often feel excluded from one community or another — except when it highlights the irony of being branded “not queer enough” in a room of people talking about inclusion.
On Thursday afternoon, as a kind of counterpoint, I did an interview with a journalist from an online magazine, and at some point, she stopped, a little flabbergasted after I was talking about sex with Betty, and said, “You are so queer – I mean, you’re talking about sex between bodies that are heterosexual and you can’t see it that way at all, can you?”
& I thought, Well no, I can’t, but if you ask a couple of people who were at Bluestockings Wednesday night, they might tell you otherwise. & That, folks, is the nature of passing: sometimes you do, with some people, & sometimes you don’t, with other people, & we’ve gotten to the point where we never know which it’s going to be.
My thanks to the journalist for her compliment, and also to Mattilda for hosting and Liz Rosenfeld for reading and especially to Rocko Bulldagger for hir essay (which is largely about feeling ‘not genderqueer enough’) and conversation, and to Kate and Barbara and all the other lovely souls in attendance.
I was saying to friends last night that I expected the problem with Garrison Keillor’s piece to have been an inside/outside problem: that Keillor felt “inside” enough to joke about gay stereotypes, but forgot that he’s actually “outside,” since he’s heterosexual, & ended up at “laughing at” instead of “laughing with” as he intended.
Which it turns out is the case, according to his apology.
More important, I think, is that the upset Dan Savage has also reported that John McCain doesn’t know if condoms help prevent the spread of HIV or not.
But at least Clinton & Obama have actually come out & said homosexuality isn’t immoral. Whew. Now there’s a strong stand. And we have to hear this ‘implied but not spoken’ or ‘spoken and to be inferred’ kind of thing for how many more years? Ugh.
Sometimes a book gets inordinate attention, especially books that reaffirm & reify the gender binary. But there’s plenty of interesting books about gender out there. & Some days, when I see a review of the book The Female Brain in a cool magazine, I wonder why they bother. I mean, bad publicity is good publicity, ultimately: it just wins the author, who the reviewer (and many others, including myself) disagrees with, more airtime, while other books, which are more feminist in terms of their take on gender, don’t get covered at all.
& I’ve always wondered why magazines – especially indie, cool magazines that are mostly written by indie journalists & others like me who understand exactly how poor an industry publishing can be – give airtime to stuff they don’t like instead of giving airtime to stuff they do. Readers will buy a book that gets a bad review, just to see if they agree or not, & while I understand editors tend to think it’s Important, in a Fourth Estate kind of way, to rebut publicly some of the ideas coming from certain corners, it seems like it’d make more sense to help an interesting writer whose ideas they do like to sell a few books.
& Yes, in this case, I mean a book like mine, which nearly is a straight-up rebuttal of all the hogwash in The Female Brain.
Read Garrison Keillor’s piece in Salon about marriage & family. Then read Dan Savage’s response to Garrison Keillor’s piece in Salon about marriage & family, which he abruptly titled Fuck Garrison Keillor.
& Then let me say: the next time a show like Will & Grace comes on the air. & the media can’t stop creaming in their pants over what a great leap forward it is, maybe, just maybe, we can think twice about the painful stereotypes such a great leap forward confirms in the American consciousness.
It’s not all Will & Grace’s fault, of course, not at all. Ignorance is a great big beast in this country, and apparently it comes in both red AND blue. Garrison Keillor needs to attend Family Week in P-Town this year, I think.
Virginia Erhardt, Ph.D. is a licensed therapist, a founding member of the American Gender Institute, and the author of Head Over Heels: Wives Who Stay with Crossdressers and Transsexuals.
(1) How long did it take you to compile the stories in Head Over Heels? Where did you find partners who were willing to talk about their experiences?
It was about two and a half years from the point at which I began soliciting participation in 2002 and then sent out questionnaires, until the time when I had created “stories” from the SOs’ responses to my questions. During that time I also worked on my substantive, didactic chapters. It took another two years and a few months from the time when I completed the project and signed a contract with The Haworth Press until Head Over Heels was in print.
I put out a Call for Participants to every online listserve and transgender print publication I could think of. I also requested participation from people at trans conferences at which I presented.
Continue reading “Five Questions With… Virginia Erhardt”
