Category: comings & goings

when we’re up to.

Posted on

Upcoming Moving Day

My posts will probably be a little erratic for the next month or so; we are once again living in an apartment littered with boxes. For those who don’t know, I/we’ve been living in university housing while I’ve been teaching here, and we need to move into our own place for this coming year. We found a great, great apartment, & we’re excited about having enough space, & a cool view, stairs, and enough room for us both to have an office/work area and enough closets & storage. It’s like a pipe dream for NYers. (That’s our future living room you’re looking at, if you hadn’t figured that out yet.)

That said, moving also means living with boxes; it means lists and logistics. We’re moving not only the apartment we currently live in here in Appleton into the new place, but we’re going home to Brooklyn to move our tons of stuff from there to here. August in NYC is not when you want to move stuff out of a third floor walk-up, especially when most of that “stuff” will be book boxes. But it will be moved: just don’t expect so much from me for a while.

If you hear of any interesting gender stories or articles, feel free to forward so I can at least put up some links.

Posted on

Classical Music (& Class)

Lawrence University, where Rachel & I work, has a Conservatory as well — which for me means tons of free, cool music. I go see a lot of things I never went to see in NYC; as I was explaining, in NYC, classical music often costs a lot, and when it doesn’t, it means sitting with a million people in Central Park to hear/see it. Ditto for opera, and often for jazz, too.

Here, I go a lot, although I’ve never known much about classical music, and along comes this cool series from Atlantic Monthly about how to listen to (& appreciate) classical music. I’ve had people give me CDs (the music medium, not the type of trans person) in the past, but for me – live is the thing. I prefer all of my music live & in person, pretty much, & now feel like I’ve been incredibly spoiled to have so much of it around so much of the time as a NYC resident. I went to see a Chinese classical performer, here, for instance, & couldn’t remember where I’d seen someone play that kind of instrument before, until I remembered: the W 4th Street subway. It’s one of the things I miss most, all the found music in NYC – guys playing plastic buckets, folk singers in Washington Square Park – but the Con makes up for a lot.

Posted on

Graduation

Congratulations to all of Lawrence University’s graduating seniors! Today is commencement, my second since I’ve been teaching here, but the first where I’ve known quite a few students, one of whom is graduating summa cum laude with an honors project on drag kings in Amsterdam. He was in the first Trans Lives course I taught here two years ago.

Posted on

Impact: MHB

Jessica Who? wrote a nice piece about her experience reading and re-reading My Husband Betty. It’s so satisfying to know that anything I’ve written helped someone else come to terms with their crossdressing or their transness. I was just putting the finishing touches on it seven years ago, around this time of year. I had no idea how my life would change once it was published, but I’m sure I had even less idea that anyone else’s would!

Congrats to Jessica Who? on her year of blogging.

Posted on

Women’s Career Event Tonight

I’m part of a panel discussion tonight, hosted by Lawrence’s Diversity Center, called “Women: Breaking Boundaries & Reaching Your Goals.” The other women on the panel are:

Professor Rosa Tapia
Amy Uecke, Acting Dean of Students
Yvette Dunlap, Asst. Superintendent AASD
Lyndsay Sund, Assc. Dir. Of Alumni & Constituency Engagement
Kathy Flores, Diversity Coord. for the Appleton Mayor’s Office
Maiyoua Thao, VP of Universal Translation & Staffing Inc.

I’m very much looking forward to hearing how these other women approached their own goals.

Posted on

On a Landing

Not too long ago I went to what’s called “the Big Gay Conference” which is a conference for LGBTQIA ETC students who are attending colleges in the midwest. On Friday night, after we’d checked in and gotten Miss Bornstein checked in, I went down to register. As it turned out, there was a wedding going on the same weekend as the conference, so I found myself, name tag and schedule in hand, standing on a landing.

To my left, a cocktail party of the heteronormative variety: men in suits, women in cocktail dresses, hose and heels.
To my right, blue haired, pierced kids; boys in cigarette leg jeans; girls in ties, starched button-downs; trans people of many types.

I stood there for a while, hoping I had Moses’ staff, or at least his gumption, to ask for a parting of the waters that would provide a third, middle path. My life has been spent on that landing, really, popping back and forth between groups, hanging out in one because it’s where I feel more comfortable, but hanging out in the other because it’s the way I desire. Like Superman, I had to change clothes pretty often, and often with my clothes, my gender; I still long for a heterosexual space where I could be a het woman in a suit & tie, or for a queer space where I could be a woman who loves sex with men.

Sometimes, in rare moments, that third space appears: in the music scenes of the late 80s in NYC was one. Fetish clubs are sometimes another. But mostly I have had to decide between being with my people as a queer woman or pretending to be more gender normative than I actually am when I’ve had boyfriends.

Posted on

Thank You APL

Thank you to all of the lovely people who came to my reading tonight at the Appleton Public Library. It was a really lovely crowd, but I’m sorry I didn’t get to talk more with the LU folks who came out to support me. I am determined to read fiction at my Fox Cities Book Festival reading @ the Harmony cafe on April 12th.

& I stand by my claim that I have never yet met a librarian who wasn’t extremely cool.