Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
I’ll be on SistersTalk radio this Wednesday, January 6th, at 7PM Central time. & Yes, they’re on Facebook. They recently interviewed Rachel Kramer Bussell, erotica empress.
Other upcoming for me: a reading at Appleton Public Library on March 3rd, and I’m doing a reading for the Fox Cities Book Festival on April 12th. My best calendar is still on the front page of my author site, www.helenboydbooks.com (along with a list of past appearances, etc.)
If you haven’t checked out the Awkward Family Photos site yet, do it the next time your life seems fucked up.
Because if this family photo doesn’t help you feel better by seeing someone else’s misery, nothing will.
At some point in the last month, this blog had its 1 millionth visitor.
Cool.
My RSS feed apparently changed with the last WordPress update.
Just FYI, because of the recent spamming of the RSS feed and other technical errors, we’ll be doing a lot of tech overhaul of the blog in the next couple of days. It it acts funny, that’s why.
One of the things I’ve always liked about Vanessa Edwards Foster is that she doesn’t lose sight of the goal: actual equality. I agree with her that our standards are low when it comes to justice for the trans people, and their families and friends, who are murdered. I agree that “manslaughter” is not murder, and that shooting at someone who is basically a sitting duck in a car can’t possibly have been an accidental killing.
But what I don’t agree with is the vitriol directed at the LGB leadership of the organizations that called the ruling on Teisha Green’s murder a victory.
Our standards are low because we are too used to seeing no justice at all when it comes to people who intentionally hurt and kill trans people for being trans. There are too many cases that break your heart. There are too many families who have had to hear the most hateful bullshit about their trans loved one. There are too many cases that are simply not solved, nor investigated.
But that the jury came back to rule her death a hate crime is a good thing.
What bothers me about the politics between the LGB & T is that there are plenty of other gay bashings and hate crimes experienced by the LGB that the trans community pays little attention to, such as Sean Kennedy’s. If you want an example of an absolute failure when it came to our legal system, that’s it. It’s horrific. Every time I see that young man’s beautiful face, and think about his parents’ loss, I wonder where exactly the trans community has been in raising awareness of that horrible injustice. No, he wasn’t gender variant. He was a young adult who was out and proud about being gay. But he’s dead just the same as Teisha Green is, & for the same reason: someone hated him for what he was.
Do we know Michael Scott Goucher? Richard Hernandez? Satendar Singh? Ryan Keith Skipper? Jeremy Waggoner? Daniel Yakovleff? These are the names of gay men who have been murdered for being gay in the last couple of years. I didn’t know most of their names.
Community goes both ways. We all have more than enough mourning to do.
I saw this clip about Singaporean import Dr. Thio Li-ann on Queerty, and it reminded me that a PM who recently stood up to get the homosexuality laws off the books in Singapore was not reappointed. Some in Singapore feel his not being reappointed had everything to do with his support for LGBT rights, although his support for women’s rights – AWARE is a feminist group – certainly contributed.
Interestingly, he’s also currently involved in a petition to get the residual marriage rape laws taken off the books in Singapore.
Please read this update from NCTE on the status of the Hate Crimes Act that was voted on in the US Senate yesterday.
They certainly don’t get enough credit, in general, but here are MiApogeo.com’s “7 GLBT Bloggers to Watch” – including Charlie Vázquez (who I read with for the Queer + Catholic readings last year).
How can you not read someone who calls herself a Post Pomo Nuyorican Homo?
(via Audacia Ray)
My friend Willow directed me to this narrative written by a woman on Father’s Day. I’ve heard too many similar stories for one lifetime.
It made me think of that line uttered by Dmitri Karamazov: “There are fathers and there are beasts who only sire you.” That’s probably a paraphrase from the novel, but it’s a direct quote from the film version (in which Dmitri is played by Yul Brynner. Really.)