Category: media

tv shows, magazine articles, movies

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The Fringe

Tonight I’m being interviewed for a radio show called The Fringe for KDVS out of Davis, California. It’s a show for queers and feminists and the gender variant. If you’re in that neck of the woods, I should be on near the show’s beginning, which is at 8PM.

Eventually the interview should be archived on the show’s website, and it should be listed as something like ‘DJ Cariad – The Fringe (Mon, Apr 02).’ I don’t know how soon the archived show goes up, but last week’s show is up already, which means – no more than six days.

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Further Thoughts on the Stanton Hearings

The first thing: it’s obvious the commissioners went in with their minds made up ahead of time, & all of the people who waited hours to testify were wasting their time & their breath. & To hell with those commissioners for being so cynical, close-minded, & pig-headed about it: those are bureaucrats, pure & simple, who don’t have a conscience to examine.

Props of course to the Mayor Pat Gerard and Commissioner Rodney Woods for making the right decision. Mayor Gerard’s wish that there would be a day when LGBT employees felt safe working in Largo was heartfelt, and her point that that is not the case now was chilling.

That said: I found this round pretty damned encouraging, to be honest. In all the time I’ve been paying attention to trans politics (something like 5 years now), this has been the most unified response to an unfair, discriminatory firing. Hearing the various lesbians and gays and trans people of Florida speak at the hearings was absolutely inspiring and heart-breaking; hearing so many ministers of various religions – the Friends, of course, but also Unitarians & others – speak so plainly against discrimination against LGBT people actually made my night. A labor organizer, a minister that wasn’t one, and ordinary citizens all came & said “don’t do this.” And that was damned cool. The testimony of the objectors was far greater than the testimony of those who wanted him fired, and they were – by far – more articulate, more heartfelt, and came off as far more rational than the bitter people who spoke about wanting him fired.

Honestly, it’s good to see “my team” in such good shape, willing to wait in line for six hours to speak, and doing so in defense of trans people – even though, as more than one speaker pointed out, they don’t necessarily understand transness.

That, my friends, is progress.

Our thoughts are otherwise with Stanton, his wife, and family. & Mine, of course, are especially with his wife. You can find a bunch of video, photos, & news articles about the hearings & initial firing at The St. Petersburg Times site.

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What a Real Woman Needs

Okay, for whatever reason, the recent set of Quiznos ads plays while a lot of my Law & Order (my stories!) is on TV, & I cringe every time the Prime Rib on Garlic Bread one comes on.

That woman, at the end, is like nails on a chalkboard to me. No lack of meat, just what a real woman needs. Ugh.

What this real woman needs is for them to stop running that damn commercial.

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Killer Shoes

On tonight’s Law & Order:Criminal Intent

“Is crossdressing something people kill for these days?”

and later

“This is a straight guy who can only get excited by wearing women’s clothes. Tranvestism usually goes hand in hand with masochism.”

& Now Goren is interviewing the two prositutes who are explaining forced feminization.

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GK’s Apology

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.

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A Little Rant

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.

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Savaged by Dan

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.

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Female Bonding

Wow.

Donna sent me a link to an episode of “Real Housewives of Orange County” which is one of those shows that’s supposed to convince us that rich people have real problems, too. I’m really kind of astounded by it; as much as I wrote Chapter 2 of She’s Not the Man I Married with more of a theoretical shoe-buying bonding moment between women in mind, I didn’t expect to actually see something like this on TV, much less that the store these women go to happens to be a Jimmy Choos, since that’s one of the types of shoes I mentioned. (The other was Kenneth Cole.)

But, yeah. This kind of scene is enough to give me hives all over again, from all those years just trying to buy a pair of summer sandals that I didn’t hate. If this is “women” then I’m not of them.