Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
& Here are some Ants tracks you probably haven’t heard (unless you’ve known me a long, long while).
It’s really a lot easier to understand how I turned out the way I did, what with listening to songs about BDSM and fetishes when I was 14. I think I was reading Joe Orton’s diaries around the same time.
So happy birthday, Adam Ant, however & wherever you are. Thanks for the education.
Make her viral folks: this image was created by Shepard Fairey, the same person who made that Obama image that became so important in his campaign.
The colors are so beautiful, & appropriately so.
The one thing people forget about Aung San Suu Kyi is how much a child of privilege she could have been. She was from the 1st democratic family of Burma, & could easily be living elsewhere. She could have left Buma, & more than once. Instead she’s under house arrest because she was democratically elected into office even though she has never been allowed to rule.
(via osocio.org, via Andrew Sullivan)
This morning, the House Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education (Labor HHS) eliminated traditional sources of funding for abstinence-only programs by passing the appropriations bill for FY 2010.
The Labor HHS subcommittee and the Obama Administration has recognized what we already knew: abstinence-only sex education programs do not work. The evidence is irrefutable that spending for abstinence-only education is not only wasteful, but also the programs put young women’s health at risk. A 2004 study by the House Committee on Government Reform, conducted at the request of Rep. Henry Waxman (D-30-CA) found that over 80% of the curricula used in the largest federally funded abstinence-only programs contained “false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health.” >In addition to pulling the plug on funding for failed abstinence-only sex education programs, the bill eliminates a ban on syringe exchange programs, which have been proven to be a highly effective strategy for preventing HIV.
(via email from FeministMajority.org)
In today’s Salon, a nice piece about the failure of Thomas Beattie, and another about the romantic failure of Jennifer Finny Boylan.
Mara Keisling, quoted in the first piece:
Mara Keisling, the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, resents the way that the Thomas Beatie flap has overshadowed more important developments. “The media hasn’t gotten a message yet that they ought to get a life,” she snaps. Last week, Congress held its first-ever hearing on discrimination against transgender employees, and on June 17, the American Medical Association passed a resolution stating that it “supports public and private health insurance coverage for treatment of gender identity disorder,” but these items have received nowhere near Beatie’s media attention.
& Boylan, quoted in the second:
The women I knew, for their part, liked the fact that I had a feminine streak, that I seemed to be sensitive and caring, that I didn’t know the names of any NFL teams, that I could make a nice risotto. A lot of straight women love a female sensibility in a man, an enthusiasm that goes right up to, but unfortunately does not quite include, his being an actual woman.
The romances didn’t last, of course. Because, let’s face it: I was keeping the basic fact of myself camouflaged. How are you supposed to fall in love when you’re so frequently lying?
Emma Goldman has always been one of my heroes, and that’s despite the fact that she never quite said that famous quote attributed to her about dancing & revolution. Or rather, she didn’t say the t-shirt version. What she said was:
“At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause. I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.”
Which doesn’t fit on a t-shirt as readily as “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” (If anyone can make a t-shirt out of what she actually said, I want one!)
It’s from her memoir Living My Life, Pt. 1, page 56. Definitely a book worth reading, and you can read it online, for free, at the Anarchist Archives.
She was, as many know, a pro-choice, family planning advocate (for which she was arrested several times) but what a lot of people don’t know is that she disagreed with the majority of leftist contemporaries in her outspoken support for LGBT people way back when. (She was also a free love advocate, which we might call poly these days.)
As far as I can tell, President Obama’s press release starting Pride Month is the first time the T has been mentioned as part of the gig! Back in 2000, Clinton used the “gay & lesbian” terminology.
What’s interesting to me is that this change in terminology IS a sign or progress. It can be hard doing the work, waiting for things to change, & while having the POTUS acknowldged the T may seem like small fry (say, compared to a gender-inclusive ENDA passing), but it is something.
(h/t to Josie!)
Fairfax High School elected a male student Prom Queen.
Tom Ackerman, a gay man, has vowed to call his friends’ wives their girlfriends, because he’s decided his religious views don’t allow him to recognize opposite-sex marriage.
The New Scientist tells you everything you ever wanted to know about female ejaculation (& maybe a few things you didn’t want to know).
A woman named Brenda Lee got dragged bodily off of Air Force One when she tried to give President Obama a letter asking him to stand up for heterosexual marriage.
Publishers Weekly reports from the BEA that US Publishers have vowed to fight digitized piracy.
Republicans are flooding this MSNBC poll and giving Obama straight Fs. Give him the grade you think he really deserves.
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You’ve gotta love the fact that conservatives against Obama’s tax policies have inadvertantly introduced the nation to an obscure sex act. Happy tax day everyone!