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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A Boyd in the Hand
People ask me why I chose “Helen Boyd” for my pen name, and just tonight on the boards Andrea wondered if there was some connection to it being more “WASPy” than my given name, but no.
I chose it for being queerer, actually.
Helen’s my middle name, and there’s nothing exciting in that except that I was named Helen for my grandmother, and the name “Helen” (and its variants, Eleanor and the like) fill in a lot of my family tree. (My cousin, who did our geneology, likes to joke that there are only two pages in the Polish naming book.) I’m proud to bear it, as my grandmother was one of my role models growing up.
But Boyd is a little more complicated.
I certainly didn’t choose it to sound WASPy, as I’ve always regretted I didn’t get one of the more ethnic names – like Frollo or Topolski – I might have had (if we lived in a matriarchy).
It’s not Brooklynese for “bird,” as Mariette Pathy Allen once mused, either.
The thing is, I’d already been using ‘bettysgrrl’ with “Helen,” so I was turning up in people’s address books as “Helen B.” So I needed a last name that started with B, and it was the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay who loaned it to me.
In 1919, before she became a famous and popular poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote some early magazine pieces under the name Nancy Boyd. She was infamously bisexual, and some of the love poems she wrote were – gasp! – written to women. Thus, the pen name, borrowed from the phrase “nancy boy” which is slang for a sissy, a momma’s boy, an effeminate male. Millay, who signed her name Vincent (never Edna), was “Nancy Boy’d.”
I’ve always thought it was funny, and genderbent, and a nice bit of queer literary history, as in: a woman poet writing lesbian poems to girls straight out of Vassar uses a genderslur about feminine boys as her pen name, and in choosing my pen name in order to write a book about my feminine husband, I thought it was only appropriate to borrow Millay’s pansexual, genderqueer joke, since I admire her both as a woman and as a poet.
Recently it’s become even more lovely that I chose Boyd since Neil Gaiman – who is a favorite writer of mine, and one who coincidentally has written more than one cool, sympathetic story about a tranny – just published his new novel Anansi Boys, which is again another pun on “nancy boy” but this time borrowing from the Jamaican stories of Anansi the Spider.
An ironic coincidence is that after I chose the name, it turned out to be the actual name of one of my Jewish friend’s grandmothers – ie, someone who would have been the last person I’d have asked if he had a relative named “Boyd.” Go figure.
(Well, I think it all makes perfect sense.)
And for those of you who are wondering, and who have asked: please keep calling me Helen. I actually prefer it to my given name.
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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GE
GE is using the protest song “Sixteen Tons” for an ad about coal energy.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen something so disrespectful in my life.
“Sixteen Tons” was made famous by Tennessee Ernie Ford, but it was written by Merle Travis, who was the son of a Kentucky coal miner. It’s not really difficult to work out that it’s about how much it sucked to be a coal miner, specifically in the time before the UMW (United Mine Workers).
CHORUS:
You load sixteen tons and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go,
l owe my soul to the company store.
Now, some people say a man’s made out of mud,
But a poor man’s made out of muscle and blood,
Muscle and blood, skin and bones,
A mind that’s weak and a back that’s strong.
Well, I was born one mornin’ when the sun didn’t shine.
I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mines.
I loaded sixteen tons of Number Nine coal,
And the straw-boss hollered, “Well, bless my soul.”
Well, I was born one mornin’, it was drizzlin’ rain.
Fightin’ and trouble is my middle name.
I was raised in the bottoms by a mama hound.
I’m mean as a dog, but I’m as gentle as a lamb.
WeIl, if you see me a-comin’ you better step aside.
A lotta men didn’t and a lotta men died.
I got a fist of iron, and a fist of steel.
If the right one don’t get you, then the left one will.
I’ve always thought of the last two lines as pretty direct metaphors for the two industries coal mining hugely influenced in the US: the railroads and the steel industry.
You can read a little more about why miners and their families hated the company store if you can’t work it out, and check out other songs about life in the coal mines at this ‘History in Song’ site.
I know I shouldn’t be surprised. I just wonder if there’s anything that can be respected. I wonder if GE has any idea that miners are still killed and injured in coal mines around the world on a regular basis. On Tuesday, a mine flooded in China and 13 of the miners are still missing as I’m writing this.
Here’s an article about the same ad, in Slate.
(And if you’re wondering why on earth I’m blogging about coal mining at all, that’s simple: my grandmother’s family were Anthracite miners in PA at the turn of the century, and the history of the mines, the miners’ unions, and all things coal have been interests of mine for a long time. I was one of the few kids who did actually get coal in my Christmas stocking to remind me I wasn’t always an angel.)
Five Questions With… Mariette Pathy Allen
Mariette Pathy Allen is the award-winning photographer and author of the books Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them and The Gender Frontier. She has been photographing the trans community for 25 years now, and is unofficially referred to as the “official photographer of the transgendered.”
Transformations was personally an important book for me (the only one about CDs that included wives’ words) and The Gender Frontier won this year’s Lambda Lit Award in the Transgender category, and she also took the cover photo of Jamison Green’s Becoming a Visible Man (which was a Lammy finalist as well). We had the great pleasure of being photographed by her last year at Fantasia Fair, and it was lovely to get to “catch up” with her. Her most recent news, which came down the pike after this interview took place, is that she will soon be the proud grandmother of twins!
< I took this photo of Mariette Pathy Allen with her camera at the 2004 IFGE Conference. And yes, that is Virginia Prince in the background.
1. You won the Lambda Literary Award for best TG book this year – how does that feel?
I wasn’t expecting to win-in fact, I thought I had it all figured out: the odds were so unlikely that I didn’t even have a speech ready. When I heard “The Gender Frontier” announced as the winner, I thought I would faint! Getting to the stage seemed to take forever: I was in the middle of the row, near the back of the auditorium. When I finally got to the stage, I realized that I was thrilled, and that this was as close to getting an Academy Award as I am likely to get!
Last year, Bailey’s book, “The Man Who Would Be Queen” was a finalist. It caused a furor among tg activists, and controversy at Lambda, finally leading to its removal from the list. This year, the selection of books in the transgender/genderqueer category was excellent-any one of the five deserved to win, and there was no drama.
I had the feeling that most of the audience had no idea what “The Gender Frontier” was about and that this was the time to tell them. I mentioned that it was a long time in the making because it chronicled events and people over the past decade, that my intention was to represent the range and variety of people who need to live fulltime as the gender in which they identify. and that the book divides into sections on youth, political activism, portraits, and stories. I can’t remember what else I said, but I know my last word was “gender variant”, and I hope the audience understood.
Out of all the LGBT prizes offered, it is odd that there’s only one for the “transgender/genderqueer” category. We have illustrated books, memoires, essay collections, science, and science fiction, enough books to be included in the range of GLB awards, or to add to our own category. I think we need at least three categories next year: “transgender/genderqueer fiction, non-fiction, and illustrated books”.
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More on Katrina, Politics, and Being Rudderless
Molly Ivins has a word to say about why politics matter, and why Katrina has made that clear.
Here’s something that I could have written – straight from a New Yorker who has had enough of this charade of a Presidency.
And finally, the Rude Pundit (not for those who don’t like swear words!) on leadership and the lack of it. Look, I didn’t like Rudy Giuliani, but I’d take all of his bullshit twelve times over for the leadership he showed on 9/11, a leadership that is obviously lacking with Katrina, and in the person of George Bush Jr. If people think that’s leadership, we really aren’t teaching history in school anymore.
Leaders are people like Mother Jones, John L. Lewis, Eugene Debs, Cesar Chavez: the people who brought you Labor Day weekend, the 40-hour work week, and weekends. None of them were perfect, but all of them understood something that Dubya does not: that what people need is power, not promises.
Happy Labor Day, folks.
Sidney on Katrina
This piece was written by Sidney, a friend of a friend. She can be reached at jsoliver@cox.net.
These are random thoughts, feelings.
I’ve been immersed in this because my dearest friend of 40 years, and her family, live in Gulfport and there’s no way of knowing for sure whether they’re alive or not. She’s a life-long resident and a minister. I change my mind every second about whether she left or stayed, lived or died. The emotional roller coaster is text-book, but because it’s me, I’m feeling desperate and crazed.
If I’m feeling crazed, as safe, dry, fed, watered, and well as I am, and with all the support in the world that I need, I can begin to comprehend the desperation they and all the dear souls in New Orleans and on the Coast must be feeling.
I can’t express my shame and rage that this is occurring in my country. Past the grief and shock of the natural disaster is the utter shame at the boggling incompetence in response to, and the chaos in New Orleans. I can’t. I stammer. I find it hard to breathe. Sometimes I feel such rage and frustration that I think my chest will burst.
At last I hear somebody REAL on TV. CNN’s Jack Cafferty said something like “. . . and the elephant in the living room that nobody’s willing to talk about, the race and class factor going on here.” I could weep for relief that the glad-wrapped whiteout is finally beginning to break down. You know and I know that if this were Dallas, we’d be seeing a totally different play. That it took a — what, what do you call this? “Disaster?” I think frankly that we’re past that now — if it took an obliteration of this size to reach the flinty little hearts of the corporate newsfaces absolutely appalls me, but I’ll force myself to find the good news: At least it is happening now. Long may it reign.
I heard our ghoulish new national Director of Homeland Security first thing this morning give a press conference on how September would be “preparedness month.” The mind congeals. I heard the president say that looters should be dealth with ruthlessly. I had to laugh. I didn’t hear him say that about what’s happening in Baghdad. I had to laugh, for the first time in days. It wasn’t a happy laugh.
My questions are without end. I imagine Europe looking on. I imagine a whole world led for decades to believe that the mighty USA could clean up a mess like this in 24 hours, looking on in a wonder of grief and disillusion, slightly disoriented by the disconnect between what we’ve been told and what we are seeing. I imagine that they, like me, see themselves in the stinking, deadly soup that’s suffocating New Orleans. I imagine Osama tapping his bony fingers, thinking “Now would be a good time.” I imagine that all the world, like me, wonders what will happen to us when the big one comes. I fear I’m seeing the future. I think I’m watching the chickens coming home to roost.
This morning I opened one of the survivor link-up sites. I had posted two search messages there, one for each of my friends. The site format limited what I could say to listing the names and locations, and a drop-down menu of “alive,” “dead.” “missing,” and “unknown.” I had chosen “unknown.” I opened the site this morning, dully, numb and despairing, and clicked on my post for Jane Stanley, expecting what I’ve found for two days : no news. But someone has changed “unknown” to “alive.” I feel something shift inside. My heart ca-thunks. Ca-thunks again. I am clinging to this, using every power of faith I can muster to believe it. Believe. Believe. Believe. Don’t let go.
Memories of the Coast. The beach where caskets lie like pill boxes today is the beach I walked on almost every day for two years. I remember the sounds of the surf, the smell at low tide, the lovely pale sunrises. Girls in their whites around a huge bonfire. Happier days. My then best friend could watch the sea like no one else I’ve ever known. She seemed to meld with it, finding in it a consolation for wounds that no one knew but she. I learned something about that from her in that first year there.
My favorite teacher and I crossing 90, heading back to campus, when a dog darted across in front of us. I knew it would be hit. It was, and yet it fled too fast to rescue.
The very first time I ever got drunk was on that beach, the first week of my freshman year. I wasted no time sowing my wild oats. A pack of Keesler men had come to hunt us, bringing inner tubes with holes sewn closed on the bottom, to serve as coolers. They’d tie a rope to the tube and float it out into the water to chill the gin and Southern Comfort, vodka, bourbon, rum, and coke. Who knew not to drink in the hot sun? Who knew not to mix the liquors? Who knew even how much to drink? Certainly not I. There are half a dozen women alive now who may remember dunking me in ice cold water in the tub until I was sober enough to take the carefully meted-out hazing that the upper class dispensed at any act of serious idiocy. This particular act could have cost my parents their tuition and me my education, because drinking there was a shipping offense.
I remember walking west on 90, past the little Catholic church on a Sunday morning, to Little Man’s, the tiny cafe where we hid out from mandatory church attendance. We called it “St. Little Mans.” The damp chill of a wintry Coast morning. The sound and feel of the sand on the pavement under my feet, or in my dorm room. The glint of Biloxi lights on a moonlit night, and the scent of gardenias mixed with orange blossom on a warm Coast night.
I sit in wonder at the wealthy white men who are right this minute making decisions that will seal the fate of thousands of my countrymen and women, and, like every other American, I suppose, I wonder where I’d be if my fate depended on their wisdom and, dare I say it, compassion. I have a better sense where I’d be now than I had last week, that’s for sure.
I see Perry hogging the limelight for Texas, and while I am grateful for the aid, I want to ask him: “Governor Goodhair, do you plan to house queer refugees in your astrodome?”
I just heard that the Speaker of the US House, Dennis Hastert, thinks it’s a waste of good money to rebuild the Big Easy. What does that mean? I mean, What. Can. That. Possibly. Mean.
Somehow the Red Cross was able to pre-position — word of the week — its “assets.” Somehow the Coast Guard was able to get in there and get in gear. Wonder why the US government wasn’t? You know, it’s 5:47 pm, Thursday, September 1, 2005, and I STILL DON’T SEE THE GUARD in New Orleans. I STILL DON’T SEE 500 B-52s offloading troops, cots, blankets, medicines, food, water, toilets, walkie-talkies.
These guys can set up a rally on the Mall for 250,000 in 24 hours, but they can’t fly in a few large speakers and microphones to begin to coordinate communications in New Orleans?
My mind spins one moment and melts to aspic the next.
I called McCain’s office. At the end of my enraged tirade, I said, “I suppose you’ve gotten lots of calls today.” “Yes,” she said. “Callers saying, ‘O I just LOVE George Bush! I think he’s the BEST president in US history!'” She said, “Not exactly.”
Copyright JS Oliver, 2005. All rights reserved.
“In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.”
Five Questions With… Rosalyne Blumenstein
Rosalyne Blumenstein is the former
directer of the Gender Identity Project at the GLBT Center in Manhattan, and is the author of Branded T.
1. You emphasize the non-inclusion of bisexual and transpeople in your book Branded T by writing it “GLbt.” Do you think this still holds true – are bisexuals and Ts still left out of the majority of “gay activism”?
I currently live in LA. In June they have their Pride Weekend. It is called Gay Pride, need I say more? …Well I will anyway.
I think we have gone backwards just like the larger system. I believe there to be a parallel process going on with the way in which government is running things and the way in which our social movements are following. Here’s the deal and my swing on it. (Not that I know anything… opinions are like assholes – everyone has one, well mostly everyone has one).
Again this is only my opinion.
I believe everyone should be able to live they way they want, experience some semblance of freedom, love, be loved, feel fulfilled, dream, and be on a journey. However, within the gay agenda it is all about mimicking a Christian heterosexist mentality. Mind you, take this apart there is nothing wrong with Christian…having a certain belief system and having faith which is grand and extremely helpful in life…
And as far as Heterosexuality is concerned, there is nothing wrong with someone who identifies as male loving someone who identifies as female. I for one would love to be in another relationship with a man. Right now I would love to be in a relationship with someone breathing let alone what damn gender they identify as.
But from my understanding of a sexual minority movement it‘s about many different kinds of loves, not just the sanctity of marriage. It’s about not buying into just the white picket fence and the 2.3 kids.
So the Gay Agenda has become about wanting the same things everybody else wants which is not a bad thing but is not the voice of the whole queer movement. In fact most voices that are silenced within the movement are those
- that are either getting their ass kicked on the streets because they don’t blend
- or those with little power within the political system
- or those that care less about identity politics, they just want to be, live, have great sex, explore, be.
So the gay agenda doesn’t give voice to all concerned. Well maybe these groupings get some quality TV time during Pride since that is what media wants to show and that is what the larger gay movement does want to be viewed as. I think it is all about oppression and many times the oppressed (gay community) become the oppressors (the rest of us that don’t identify as gay).
So in answer to your question my dear I think B and T folk within the gay movement have the opportunity to participate within the movement but in the larger scheme of things and what is portrayed to the Universe is Gay= LGBT.
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Sacco and Vanzetti
Turns out I missed the anniversary of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti this year, a date which I usually mark. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed on August 23rd, 1927, at the end of a notorious trial during which it’s said their own judge referred to them as wops (or dagoes, I forget which right now, but it was one of the two). Fair trial, my ass.
Whether or not they were guilty is still hotly debated by people who care about such things. They were, in a sense, the Rosenbergs long before the Rosenbergs – radicals put to death mostly for being radicals, and without the kind of definitive evidence you’d expect in a death penalty case.
They had the misfortune of not just being anarchists (the political philosophy doesn’t immediately imply violence, by the way) but being Italians in 1920s Boston. Sacco made shoes. Vanzetti sold fish. They were working-class men who some say were Syndicalists, others outright criminals, and still others, idealists and revolutionaries.
It’s still a case I read about, when I find new things to read. For those interested in the death penalty, famous trials, Italian-American culture, anarchism, radical politics, prejudice – or anyone who just wants to read one hell of a story – there are some decent sites on the topic, and plenty of good books (the best of which are, unfortunately) out of print.
U Penn site
Court TV’s site
a Michigan State U site
The Wiki entry
and Court TV’s bibliography. In the out of print books, you’ll see both Frankfurther’s The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti, which is by *that* Frankfurter. Joughin and Morgan’s The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti is, in my opinion, still the seminal work on the case, including cultural references. You can track down either at reasonably old libraries or through rare bookstores. Vanzetti’s letters are stunning and beautiful and highly recommended.
What does this have to do with gender? Not a damn thing.
Sacco and Vanzetti were officially declared innocent of their crimes on the 50th anniversary of their executions by then Governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis.
Five Questions With… Interview with Jamison Green
Jamison Green is the author of Becoming A Visible Man
(Vanderbilt U. Press, 2004), which won the CLAGS’ Sylvia Rivera Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Finalist. He writes a monthly column for PlanetOut, and is a trans-activist of unmatched credibility. He is board chair of Gender Advocacy and Education, a board member for the Transgender Law and Policy Institute and the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, and served as the head of FTM International for most of the 1990s*. He is referred to in many other books about trans issues, including Patrick Califia’s Sex Changes, Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein, and Body Alchemy by Loren Cameron.
1. Betty and I often repeat your “there is no right way to be trans” idea, and I was wondering if any one thing contributed to you believing that.
I guess you could boil it down to the desire not to invalidate other people, but that desire has been informed by exposure to a wide variety of transgender and transsexual individuals of many ages, from many cultures, and many walks of life. Some people take it upon themselves to judge other trans people, to say “You’ll never make it as a man” or “as a woman,” or “you’re not trans enough,” “radical enough,” “queer enough,” whatever the case is. But I’ve known people who were told those things who went on to have successful transitions and generally satisfying lives, though they often felt burned enough by “the community” to stay away from it. I think it’s a shame that people cut themselves and/or others off from the potential for community, and I think that if we all truly believed there was room for everyone and we could learn to truly appreciate other’s differences and each person’s intrinsic value as a human being –and if we worked to make that a reality– then we, as collective trans people, might really make a positive difference in the world.
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