Gina Lance is the former publisher of Girl Talk
Magazine, current producer of TGLife.com, and too fabulous for words.
< Helen with much shorter hair, and Gina in all her nearly 5’11” glory.
1) As a public person, does “being Gina Lance” ever get in the way of your life?
First of all Helen, thank you for asking me to participate in your ‘infamous’ Five Questions! As far as being recognized as Gina Lance, it’s very flattering to be noticed for the work you have done. When I had a local crossdressing television talk show in Los Angeles back in 1997, I realized how many people were watching because they approached me wherever I was. After I launched GIRL TALK Magazine, it just exploded. I’ve had people too numerous to mention tell me everything from I saved their lives, to I was the one responsible for getting them out of the closet. It’s very heartwarming and I do appreciate it.
As far as the downside of being Gina Lance it’s mostly comical. I’ve been cornered by people who wanted to talk to me (very flattering!) for almost an hour on my way into a nightclub in Los Angeles. I love meeting people but one girl had to even pull her blouse up and show me her new breasts. She said I had inspired her and given her the confidence to get them. Somehow, I don’t remember writing/suggesting that. I’ve had people tell me everything from they’re on hormones to they’re getting their sex change because of me. So I’m usually very careful what I write about now; I see myself as a transgendered ambassador of good will, not a physician!
One of the former GIRL TALK covergirls, Jillian Diamond, looks like my younger, shorter daughter, but she is occasionally mistaken for me by people who don’t know us. I think the funniest thing was when some girl called her a ‘bitch’ for not using her as a covergirl, thinking she was me.
All in all though, I love being Gina Lance. But I also love being my male self and I think that’s very important in keeping me balanced. My wife, KC, loves both of me which is fantastic. Although we steal each other’s makeup occasionally. In male mode I just don’t tell everyone who I am and love being anonymous sometimes – it gives me a break to clear my mind. I recently chatted with Cassandra Peterson who people know as Elvira and we both agreed it is great to go unrecognized when you want to. It gives you some time to relax.
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Five Questions With… Vern Bullough
Vern L. Bullough is a SUNY Distinguished
Professor Emeritus, was a past President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, was honored with the Kinsey Award for his research, and is the author of Crossdressing, Sex, and Gender, along with 50+ other books on various subjects, most of them involving sexuality.
< Helen with Vern Bullough at IFGE 2004.
1) In terms of trans and gender subjects, what do you think is the most important piece of your scholarship?
The field of trans research is rapidly changing as it moves more into the mainstream of variant sexual behaviors. I think the best back ground is the book that my late wife Bonnie and I did, entitled Cross Dressing, Sex and Gender. The best survey of the field up to l997 was also one that Bonnie and I edited entitled Gender Blending. The best for female to male transsexuals is that by Holly Devor, entitled FTM. There are more specialized books coming out now but I think these three are the basis for a good understanding.
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Five Questions With… Calpernia Addams
Calpernia Addams is in some ways the
woman that so many transwomen aspire to be because she’s beautiful, talented, outspoken and smart. But her story is also the story of a Soldier’s Girl and came with more than its share of pain. She and Andrea James now run Deep Stealth Productions together, which produces and consults on a variety of video projects related to gender. At her website, Calpernia.com, you can find community forums, her diary about her Hollywood doings, and of course more info about who she is, what she’s up to, and how she became the woman she is today.
1) When you spoke last year at SCC, you mentioned that you’d be keeping an eye on representations of trans people by Hollywood. What did you mean by that, and what are you doing?
As a relatively out transwoman, I have been fortunate to make several friends and acquaintances in Hollywood who hold key positions in the business of television and film. I also regularly attend premieres and showcases for new media, where I’m often specifically sought out for opinions and input. I never want to be seen as an overbearing nag, but I always let the industry leaders in these situations know that I am watching their portrayals of trans people closely, and that I am available for anything from conversation to consultation to referrals if they are interested in learning more about the realities of our world. While there are many factors that go into shaping a piece of entertainment media, I do try to be present, available and vocal when I see something that uses an aspect of our community in it’s storytelling. Some of the results of the work Andrea James and I have done can be seen in the upcoming Felicity Huffman film “Transamerica,†for which we provided in-person and script consultation. I also appear as a Texas fiddle player in the film, and Andrea can be seen in a clip from our popular “Finding Your Female Voice†instructional video. The upcoming LOGO network documentary “Beautiful Daughters†will showcase our 2004 sold-out all-trans-cast production of “The Vagina Monologues†with playwright Eve Ensler and mentor Jane Fonda, which was the first event of it’s kind. We have also consulted on television shows such as CSI and many documentaries in the last two years.
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Five Questions With… Susan Stryker
Susan Stryker is a researcher, writer, queer historian, artist, and a filmmaker. She is the former executive director of the GLBT Historical Society of Northern California, and a former history columnist for Planet Out. She has written and co-authored books like Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area and edited “The Transgender Issue” of The Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol 4, No 2, 1998. She recently discovered and made a film about the Compton’s Riot – riots by transpeople in San Francisco that pre-date Stonewall – and turned that discovery into a documentary film, Screaming Queens.
1) I was really excited to learn that someone else is a fan of Cronenberg’s films. Why do you love them?
I love Cronenberg because he disturbs me, and because he’s such a fierce auteur who’s not afraid to show even the most unsettling aspects of his sensibility. I like that he is such a philosphically smart filmmaker, and a whiz at making things look stylish on a low budget. But I think my favorite thing is that he really, really pays attention to the fact that we are bodies, that bodies are different from one another, and that bodily difference is a source of fascination, pleasure, dread, and horror for everybody.
That said, I don’t always like Cronenberg. I think his take on women is sometimes mysogynistic, that he finds horrific things I find familiar and desirable. I think he sometimes despairs that his mind is inextricably embedded in flesh, rather than reveling in that. But I totally admire the unflinching way he looks at and represents those feelings. I guess that’s the biggest turn-on for me–that he is alive and engaged with the phenomenogical, existential, emobodied situation of human experience. He feels what it means to be made of meat, and helps us see that.
Favorite moments? Hard to top Videodrome, start to finish–the snuff films, growing new orifices, the flesh gun, infections by viral images, the disemebodied Great White Man in a post-death virtual existence on videotape. What a brilliantly twisted film. And Deborah Harry was just plain ol’ hot. I also love the doomed romance between Jeff Goldblum and Gina Davis in The Fly, and those dwarves who burst out of the rage-sacks growing on Samantha Eggar’s body in The Brood, who then beat that kindergarten teacher to death while all the kiddies look on. When I saw that, I though “this is what filmmaking is all about–see it, don’t say it; show it, don’t tell it.” Cronenberg is such an amazing visual storyteller. He lets you see feeling in an unprecedented way. I could go on and on, but I guess I should stop here.
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Five Questions With… Abigail Garner
Abigail Garner is a writer, speaker and educator
who is dedicated to a future of equality for LGBT families and communities. She speaks from her own experience of having a gay dad who came out to her when she was five years old. Bringing voice to a population of children that is often overlooked, Abigail has been featured on CNN, ABC World News Tonight, and National Public Radio. She is the author of Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is (HarperCollins, 2004).
1) As a child of a GLBT parent, you’ve effectively become a ‘lightning rod’ for others children of GLBT parents. What has that been like?
It’s is really a joy to connect with “my people.” It’s really not what I originally set out to do, because I subscribed to many of the same misperceptions as the general public. Namely, that there are very few adult children of LGBT parents. My advocacy initially was to be a resource for younger children and their parents. In the process, however, I have been contacted by so many peers that I hadn’t let myself believe were out there — adult children in their 20s, 30s and older. I even chatted with a woman born in 1938 who had a lesbian mother and gay father. And despite whatever differences there are between us, when the common experience of having queer parents is reflected in another person, it’s exhilarating.
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Five Questions With… Melanie and Dr. Peggy Rudd
Peggy Rudd is the author of My Husband Wears My Clothes as well as other titles about crossdressing. She was the first wife to write about the experience of being married to a crossdresser, and Melanie Rudd is her crossdressing husband.
1) Melanie, it strikes me that you and Betty are rare among trannies. What’s it like to be the subject of such intense – and published – perusal by your wife?
Melanie’s life has not been the same since My Husband Wears My Clothes was published in 1989. Mel/Melanie’s life story was open to the world or at least anyone who read the book. This book, as well as the other three that followed, were affirmation of the support, acceptance and un-conditional love Melanie had sought for so many years. The most joy and fulfillment from Peggy’s books has been the thousands of transgendered individuals and their significant others worldwide who have told Peggy and Melanie in writing, telephone calls and face to face contact how much the books have helped them in their search for answers. We are certain that Helen and Betty have experienced this joy and fulfillment because of Helen’s book, My Husband Betty. Now if we could only clone Peggy and Helen!
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Five Questions With… Raven Kaldera
A female-to-male transgendered activist and shaman, Raven Kaldera is a pagan priest, intersex transgender activist, parent, astrologer, musician and homesteader. Kaldera, who hails from Hubbardston, Mass., is the founder and leader of the Pagan Kingdom of Asphodel and the Asphodel Pagan Choir. Kaldera has been a neo-pagan since the age of 14, when he was converted by a “fam-trad” teen on a date. His website, Cauldron Farm, contains extensive information about Pagan practice as well as his activist writings on transgender and sexuality topics.
Having met Raven and attended workshops he’s given, I’m always surprised that every time I see him I’m newly amazed by how much his presence is both strong and gentle. His answers, too, are of the ‘pulls no punches’ variety, without obfuscation, and he manages to explain complex ideas – about spirituality, sexuality, and identity – in plain language. Okay, I’m a fan! – I admit it!
1) I think the most vital thing I’d love for you to talk about is how most IS people view T issues, and whether or not they identify as T, and why.
Most intersexuals do not consider themselves transgendered, and are very uncomfortable being associated with the trans movement in general. I think a lot of this comes out of lifetimes of being shamed for being physically different; if it was a terrible thing that had to be medically corrected and then desperately hidden from the world, what’s up with these people with “normal” bodies who are seeking out changes? Not to mention that many IS folks view transpeople as freaks, and are desperate to be seen as “normal”.
The problem is with the cross-section. I don’t know how big that cross-section is, but there are more and more of us popping out all the time – IS folks who decide that they’d rather be a gender other than what they were assigned, and get sex reassignment, transsexuals who discover that they have IS conditions in the middle of their changes, and so forth. We make it difficult for either side to separate from each other. Our bodies are spread across that gap between the two movements. It’s important for me as one of those bridgers to be sensitive to the needs of both sides, getting in the way of the IS folks assumption that we’re freaks; getting in the way of the transfolks’ attempts to colonize the IS struggles.
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Five Questions With… Dallas Denny
Dallas Denny, M.A., is founder and was for ten years Executive Director of the American Educational Gender Information Service, Inc. (AEGIS), a national clearinghouse on transsexual and transgender issues. She is currently on the board of Gender Education & Advocacy, Inc., AEGIS’ successor organization, which lives at www.gender.org. She is Director of Fantasia Fair and editor of Transgender Tapestry magazine and was editor and publisher of the late Chrysalis: The Journal of Transgressive Gender Identities. Dallas is a prolific writer with hundreds of articles and three books to her credit. She recently decided to retire her license to practice psychology in Tennessee, since she seems to have found a permanent home in Pine Lake, Georgia, pop. 650, the world’s smallest municipality with a transgender nondiscrimination ordinance.
1) You’ve been a trans educator/activist for a long time now: what do you see as the biggest development in terms of trans politics since you’ve been doing this?
When I began my activism in 1989, the community was almost entirely about education– outreach to the general public and information to other transpeople. There wasn’t much information available, and much of that wasn’t very good or was outdated– and even the bad information could be almost impossible to find. The rapid growth of the community in the 1990s and especially the explosion of the internet made information much easier to find.
Somewhere around 1993, the community had reached a point at which political activism had become possible. Of course, some of us had always been doing that, but it hadn’t been a prime focus of the community, and what had been done had been sporadic and short-lived, often was done by a single individual or a small group, and tended to happen in places like San Francisco and New York City. This activism did give us some political gains– most notably in Minnesota, which adopted state-wide protections as early as, I believe, the early 1970s, but around 1993 there was a growing political consciousness in the community, and things just began to take off.
I can identify some important events of the 1990s– when Nancy Burkholder, a post-op transsexual woman, was kicked out of the Michigan Womyn’s conference, when people began to come together in Texas at Phyllis Randolph Frye’s ICTLEP law conference, when the March on Washington turned out to be non-transinclusive, when a bunch of us got together to form GenderPac (an organization which was promptly hijacked by the Executive Director)– but there were two biggies, in my opinion. The first was the first transgender lobbying, which was done by Phyllis Frye and Jane Fee. They couldn’t believe they had actually done it, then wondered why they hadn’t done it before. When HRCF (as it was then called) promptly went behind their backs and removed the transgender inclusions Phyllis and Jane had convinced lawmakers to put into the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, there was a sense of outrage. The news broke when Sarah DePalma got an e-mail.at the law conference. It happened to be the only ICTLEP I attended. We had a coule of strategy sessions and went back home and the next week did actions at at least six Pride events, including Atlanta, which I coordinated. You should have seen the jaws drop when I handed leaflets to the folks at the HRCF booth. The organization has, of course, done a complete turnaround since then, or so we hope.
The other big event was the muder of Brandon Teena; in the aftermath, we began to get media coverage that concentrated on our political issues and not just our individual psychologies or transition histories.
After that, things just exploded. Today many of us– as many as one in three– have some sort of legal protections– anti-discrimination, hate crimes, or both. My little town of Pine Lake, Georgia, population 650, even has trans protections– and I didn’t even have to ask for them. They were already in place when I moved here in the late 1990s.
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Five Questions With… Brianna Austin
Brianna Austin is a freelance writer for magazines such as Tgforum.com, Lady Like, Girl Talk, Girls Club Reporter, TG Crossroads, Jazz Review, and Music Press. She is about to co-launch a new website with Gina Lance called www.tglife.com. We first met her at the notorious Silver Swan, where she asked if we’d be in a documentary she was filming – but we declined, due to privacy. A couple of years later when I ran into her, I had to admit we were ready to do her documentary, but she’d abandoned the project, and was very amused at how fast we’d gone from terrified newbies to out out out. It was a pleasure to get to chat with her.
1. So what’s Brianna Austin been up to?
That’s a mouth full. I moved to Buenos Aires in the spring of 2004 and it has been an amazing experience. In addition to running my website, Girls Club Reporter, I did some writing for Lady Like, Jazz Review and other mags, and spent the end of last year finishing a book I co-wrote (it is not trans-related) entitled An Unscripted Life, … I’d Do It Again, which will be available in October. Most of 2005 I have been developing a new transgender web portal (www.TGLIFE.com) which will launch shortly. And lastly, I’ve been working on two new books that are both trans related, Candidly Transgender and A Changing Season. I’ll spend August-Oct in NYC and then return home to finish the books in the fall.
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Five Questions With… Mona Rae Mason
Mona Rae Mason is the Transgender Project‘s Field Coordinator and has been out and active in the TG community in NYC and Northeastern PA. for several years. As a former barmaid in a mid-town Manhattan cocktail lounge, she promoted and hosted several successful trans fundraisers – one for The NYC Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, another for City Meals on Wheels. She has been active in arranging, promoting and hosting transgender specific parties and events, and also speaks at various Transgender support groups and organizations.
1) What is the Transgender Project and what is its goal?
The Transgender Project is a longitudinal study of the male to female Transgender community of the greater NY metro area. The goal of The Transgender Project is, quite simply, to learn! ” The more we learn of ourselves, the better we can teach others”–and that’s pretty much what all this is about. When all is said and done, we will be able to present to MD’s, therapists, and clinicians some powerful and important information about our communtiy. After all, we can’t really expect them to be able to help us if we don’t give them proper information. We need to help them to help us.
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