Category: LGBTQ

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Brother Outsider NYC Screening

The Brecht Forum & the War Resisters League here in NYC are screening Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin this Friday, 1/19, 8PM.

I’ll be in Boston or I’d be there. I cannot recommend this film highly enough. Bayard Rustin was one of the organizers of the March on Washington, but was asked to take a public backseat as he was a known homosexual (& a communist, but that’s a whole other story). He was a really remarkable individual & the film is an excellent chronicle of his life.

There’s a bunch of other cool political films (though i’m sad to have missed the one about Dorothy Day, who is a hero of mine).

http://www.warresisters.org/filmfestival.htm for all the info.

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Upsetting

The Task Force recently issued a report about homeless youth: up to 42% of homeless youth are LGBT (even though only 3-5% of the population is).

While I’m glad to hear NYC has stepped up funding to help serve these kids, I wonder if a public education campaign isn’t also in order. That job, however, might need Federal support, which we certainly aren’t going to get just yet. Still, you’d think we could maybe let people know that throwing their LGBT kids out on the street is not a solution to anyone’s problem.

These throwaway kids are one of the ‘side effects’ of all the anti-gay rhetoric being thrown around, & that includes the anti-gay marriage rhetoric, in my opinion. Define a group of people as second-class citizens and this is what you get.

You can read the full report at The Task Force’s website.

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Preview of Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity

Mattilda, the editor of That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, has a new anthology called Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity that just came out, and I contributed an essay called “Persephone.” It’s a bit different from my usual, so I thought I’d post a small preview here.

I’ll be doing a Five Questions With… interview with Mattilda about this new book, too.

I used to be something you might call heterosexual – not straight, because straight carries connotations about picket fences and children and normalcy that have never been up my alley. It is awkward being monogamous around the poly set and legally married when I’m in queer crowds, but both of those things are as true as my heterosexuality, even if it’s not easy to see any of them. They are the old tattoos, or the memorabilia that tells me how I ended up in this new place, with this new tattoo, the same way a transwoman might see her penis as a reminder that she came by womanhood in a slightly different way than the expected route. Some women change their names when they get married; I changed my public identity instead: queer though formerly known as heterosexual, queer though married, queer due to binary, queer in context, queer by association, queer due to no fault of my own, queer as a result of cupidity.

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Five Questions With… Max Wolf Valerio

max wolf valerio

It’s been a while since a Five Questions With… Interview, but I can’t imagine a better re-entry interview than one with Max Wolf Valerio, the author of The Testosterone Files. Max and I “met” as a result of us both being published by Seal Press, and because we were both friends with the late, great Gianna Israel. His Testosterone Files are a fascinating account of his move from his life as a radical dyke and poet to being a ‘straight guy.’

1) I often joke that I only ever “passed” as a straight woman, and there were parts of The Testosterone Files that made me feel like you “passed” as as lesbian. Is that even close to right? How do you feel about your former identity now?

Yes, I definitely did “pass” for a lesbian, a dyke, whatever you wish to call it. I was dyke-identified for at 14 years, and more, if you count my adolescence. Early on, I realized I was attracted to women, and so, a lesbian identity made the most sense to me. It was all I knew to name myself. The idea of transitioning in 1975 and before, when I was a teen, was completely off the map.

I am proud of the person I was as a dyke, and I learned a lot in my years as a lesbian. I understand many of the finer points of feminism, in all its permutations. Through lesbian feminism, I also came to an understanding and empathy for other types of radical politics. It was quite an education, and an amazing immersion in female life. Ultimately, dyke life is about immersion in female life I think, and it provided an axis for me as well as a point of departure.

However, as I show dramatically in The Testosterone Files, I was much more than simply a lesbian feminist or dyke. I was, actually, just as involved in the punk rock scene, as well as in being a poet who crossed all lines of identity and just “wrote” and read for an audience that appreciated poetry as an art form period. So, this involvement gave me an “out” from dyke life and provided a portal to the fact that there is so much more out there in the world than simply lesbians or feminism. This portal would prove to be invaluable as I came into male life.

On the other hand, I think my perspective was a bit constrained anyway from being a lesbian all those years. I have had to re-examine many of my feminist beliefs and attitudes anyway, even if I was not entirely cloistered within the dyke perspective. Some of these attitudes no longer fit my male life, and I find them to be restricting. More importantly, I also have come to see that certain of these ideas were just wrong-headed, even if they served a purpose for me then. I mean, some of the anti-male attitudes, and anti-het attitudes that I absorbed. These attitudes and ideas not only do not serve my present life, they are not rooted in truth. I think I was often coming from a place of defensiveness, and I have learned, and am learning, to drop that.

Even so, I have many fond feelings about my past dyke life, and about lesbians in general, and will always feel related.

Continue reading “Five Questions With… Max Wolf Valerio”

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A Queer Sunday

Reading John Waters’ article about Tennesee Williams – and in The New York Times Book Review, no less! – was a treat. I love them both, for being queer, for their art, for their humor and sarcasm and truth.

These are my people, and always have been.

But it made me think about the books I had to “steal” as a kid, or read secretly. For me, it was Joe Orton’s biography, Prick Up Your Ears, first and foremost. I heard about him reading interviews with Adam Ant, who simultaneously introduced me to Marc Bolan, the erotic art of Allen Jones, Derek Jarman, and Tom of Finland. Around the same time I discovered Soft Cell and Marc Almond, who in turn turned my head toward the likes of Jacques Brel and Jean Genet. (And I wonder why I turned out the way I am, reading about rough trade and anonymous bathroom sex when I was 15.)

They were all great “bad” influences, their books and art I hid from my mother. They told me there was another world out there, just as Tennesee Williams told John Waters there was.

So who were yours?

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Details about Columbia

Just a reminder that I’ll be speaking at Columbia U. on Monday, October 9, 7:00pm – 8:30pm, in the Sulzberger Parlor Room, Barnard College. It’s open to the public.
Here are directions to Barnard’s campus (which is right across the street from Columbia):
http://www.barnard.edu/visitors/directions.html
Here is a map of campus that shows where the Sulzberger building is located:
http://www.barnard.edu/visitors/map2006.pdf
Click the 9th on QUAM’s October calendar for the full description.

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Queer Carnival

Last month I discovered something called The Carnival of Bent Attractions, which was hosted this past month at A Delicate Boy’s blog, and I’m a part of it.
Do check out some of the other posts that were highlighted as part of this month’s Carnival, because there’s a lot of interesting stuff there, like Jay Sennett’s stuff on MWMF, the woman who reports on why her gay friends thinks it would suck to be straight, Nina Smith on the economics of lesbian motherhood, and those lovely feminists in Wales on the intersection of queer & feminist politics.