Tag: money

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Carnival of Bent Attractions

This month, I get the pleasure of hosting the ongoing Carnival of Bent Attractions, and there’s a nice sampling of interesting LGBT Bentness to be had:

First, an interview with no other than sex-positive educator Susie Bright from the financially-minded set at Queercents, where we find out Ms. Bright worked in a cathouse but wasn’t getting paid for sex amonst other things;

Then, a review of a Thursday night Transvestite party in Buenos Aires, written by Oliver Hartman and posted on the Argentina’s Travel Blog site. Mr. Hartman didn’t know what to expect, and didn’t seem to know what was what (or who was whom):

I’m not entirely sure when the show ended, but there was some sort of conga line and crazy swan costume involved.

I wonder if it wasn’t a chicken.

Further still, a commentary on Craig’s wide stance on The Agonist, which tries to understand the likes of Craig and how they can claim not to be gay:

Perhaps it’s because many or most of them, like Craig, genuinely think they aren’t gay, despite enjoying gay sex?

& Finally, to wrap things up, SF Brawny Bear answers the question, “What does Bear Pride Mean to You?” on the blog Bear Bones. (But who does Bear bone, exactly?)

Nice roundup. Next month, our various Bent Attractions move on to a new ride at the Carnival.

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Five Questions With… Julia Serano

Julia Serano is a Bay Area slam-winning poet, author, performer, activist, & biologist. She organized the GenderEnders event from 2003 until last year; plays guitar, sings & writes lyrics for her band Bitesize, and oh – has a Ph.D. in biochemistry. We got to meet her when she was in town promoting her book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, recently published by Seal Press.

(1) I loved Whipping Girl, for starters. I think it’s a pivotal work for trans communities, especially in building trans pride. But you know I kept waiting for you to actually define “feminine” – maybe if not for all time, but in some way that I could understand what you meant by it specifically. Your “barrette Manifesto” came close, except that I see barrettes as childish, not feminine per se. So can you help the genderblind like myself? What is femininity? Can you be feminine without being girly?

In the next to last chapter of the book, “Putting the Feminine Back into Feminism,” I talk about that a bit, but I’ll try to define it here a little more clearly. I would say that femininity is a heterogeneous set of traits (some of which are cultural in origin, some biological, some psychological, and many are a combination thereof). The only thing that all feminine traits have in common is that they are typically associated with women in our culture. But they certainly aren’t exclusive to women, as many men and MTF spectrum transgender folks also express feminine traits (similarly, many women express masculine rather than feminine traits). I think most of us tend to express some combination of both feminine and masculine traits.

Continue reading “Five Questions With… Julia Serano”

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Don’t Get Married

Had I known this before, I might have told Betty we had to wait until she learned to do more chores:

Within marriages, the study finds that women do about twice as much housework as men, even after adjusting for employment status and other factors. While men living with their partners do more housework than married men, women still shoulder the burden of household chores. (bolded for emphasis by yours truly)

What’s interesting, however, is that in cohabitating couples, the chores are split more evenly.

Every study I’ve read backs this up, and that women do more chores than their husbands seems to be true despite childcare breakdowns and employment status. One woman I know worked fulltime and made most of the family’s money and still came home to do most of the chores.

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Five Questions With… Eli Clare

Eli Clare is the author of Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (South End Press, 1999) and has been widely published. He has walked across the United States for peace, coordinated a rape prevention program and co-organized the first-ever Queerness and Disability Conference. He works for the University of Vermont ‘s LGBTQA Services. We were lucky enough to meet him at a Translating Identity Conference at UVM, and I was happy to get the chance to talk to him about his new book, The Marrow’s Telling, which was recently published by HomoFactus Press.

(1) Why poetry?

As a writer, my first love is poetry. I think of it as a thug who grabbed me by the collar many years ago and whispered in my ear, “You’re coming with me.” I went willingly, not having any idea where poetry would take me or what it would demand. Twenty-five years later I find myself writing a mix of poetry and creative nonfiction; my first book, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, is a collection of essays, and my second book, The Marrow’s Telling: Words in Motion, which ought to be rolling off the press at any moment now, is a mix of poems and short prose pieces, not quite essays but more than prose poems.

Audre Lorde in her essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” writes of poetry as a “revelatory distillation of experience.” Poems demand both wildness/revelation–moments where language, sound, and rhythm, rather than thought or idea or analysis, take the lead–and discipline/distillation–the paring down to heart and bone. As a writer, a reader, an activist trying to make sense of the world, I need revelatory distillation.

I also know that in the United States too many of us have been taught to fear or avoid poetry, to feel bored or stupid in its presence. As an activist-poet, I always hope that my poems will be doors held wide open, roller coasters, parachutes opening above you, slow meandering rivers.

Continue reading “Five Questions With… Eli Clare”

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Turn Up that AC

Just a tip: put your air conditioner on 80 degrees to save money on your electric bill. You don’t have to be cool, just not hot.

Check out a bunch of other smart, green tips on how to use air conditioning best (& most cost-effectively), and otherwise check out ways to save energy in the summer (& prevent those local brownouts).

& Unplug your chargers! That’s a new one I just learned. When you’re not actually charging your iPod / cellphone / PDA, you’re using energy just by leaving the charger plugged in.

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Perseus Reorganizes Avalon

As some of you may remember, Avalon Publishing Group – my publisher – were bought by Perseus Books a few months back, and today they announced the news that my first imprint, Thunder’s Mouth Press, is being disbanded. It’s part of the re-organization, as imprint Carroll & Graf is also going, as are 24 employees of the former Avalon.

My Husband Betty will hopefully stay in print, as the book is now in its sixth printing and continues to make money, but still: it’s kind of sad to see my first home as a writer cease to exist.

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What is it about upcoming birthdays that makes you reconsider every decision you’ve ever made? Betty & I, despite our protestations, are getting a little too close to the big 4-0 these days for our own comfort. I can’t speak for her, but for me the past couple of weeks I’ve felt torn about everything in my life: the writing, my sense of home & family, work, money, you name it. The only things I feel sure of are Betty and the kittoi, all of whom bring me joy every single day. They all make me laugh in ways that do my serious soul some good.

Whenever people complained about getting older, my father has always said, “well, you only have one other choice.” Some days that’s not so funny, but other days it reminds me of the deep & abiding pragmatism I was raised with: either you bellyache about it & bore yourself & everyone else, or you just get older & get on with things. But then, peace is easy for a man who is happiest eating hot dogs & watching baseball. Some of us don’t find joy as easily as that.

There are days I wish I could, & other days when I am convinced I could be that way – if, if only, if only something. But that’s not what the Buddhists tell me: they tell me it’s mine if I want it. Because I could moan & whine about the nerve.com interview that was supposed to happen but didn’t; I could complain about the marathon bookkeeping sessions I’ve done in past months; I could curse whoever’s in charge of this universe for their bad administration.

& I do, oh, surely I do. But eventually I get bored of that & find something to do, even if that something simple is cleaning out the litterbox for the umpteenth time.

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Letter to a Hopeful Writer

I get a lot of emails from people who want to publish a book, which is an entirely different thing from wanting to write, and that’s a distinction hopefuls should be clear on. Writing is something more like a calling – you do it or you don’t do it, you can write your whole life & never publish, you enjoy it or you do it because something in you compels you to.

Being a published writer is a whole other can of worms, since publishing comes with agents and editors and publicity and amazon.com sales ranks. That’s a different game altogether, but I assume that most people who ask me about writing their own book want to know what it’s like publishing their own book. I recently wrote back to one such person and this is what I said:

I wouldn’t write if I could do anything else. It’s just too hard. Your books are your babies, and as soon as you write something, people assume it’s okay to rip you a new one. That is, I don’t mind bad criticism – well I don’t like it either – but you learn how to deal with it in writing workshops. At least I did. You want to write better, and good critics can help you do that, if you listen to them. However, there are a lot of people who are just hyper-critical, & you have to deal with them, too, which is not always as easy.

Then, there’s very little money. One writer I know who had a bestseller won’t quit her day job because as the publishing industry will frequently remind you: you’re only as good as your last book. Richard Russo didn’t quit teaching till he won the Pulitzer! So the reality is, with writing, you always need another job, and it’s very hard to do two jobs well. That is, if you love the 2nd job, it never gets as much attention as you’d like, & neither does your writing. It’s always feeling a little torn in half. So the ‘making a living’ aspect of it pretty much blows.

What else? It’s hard. It takes patience. If you’re ever in NYC I can show you my stack of rejection letters, and there’s no writer alive that doesn’t have a bunch of those. (Ironically, I think it’s Melville who holds the record, & most of them are rejection letters from publishers who didn’t want Moby Dick.) There’s a lot of ways to be cheated – by publishers, agents, etc. – that you have to be on the lookout for, and publicity support from publishers is getting worse & worse.

& Of course you have to keep track of your ego, realize that people think they know you even when they don’t, and you have to be able to speak well on radio, on TV, & anywhere else.

Mostly I’m appreciative that the books I write have helped people. It’s a pleasure to be able to use whatever communication skills I have in order to relieve some people’s suffering. I haven’t had a novel published yet, but even having friends read my fiction is satisfying. Basically, there’s this unnameable thing about writing that is cool and satifying in a deep way for me, and as Betty would tell you, I never radiate more “happy buzz” than when I’m working on something.

But do I like it? No. If I could find something else that would scratch that existential itch the same way, I would do it. But short of creating Tibetan sand mandalas, I can’t really imagine doing anything that feels more time-consuming, detail-oriented, or more tenuous. A long time ago, & without my permission, writing became my way of talking with myself in order to make sense of my world. It doesn’t always work, but it keeps me from gunning down strangers, at least.

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Next Time No Strings, Please

Another governor – this time Governor Strickland of Ohio – has given the Feds back the abstinence-only strings-attached sex education money.

That’s six states now, & the fifth (Wisconsin) only refused the impractical funding a few weeks ago.

So now there’s the other 44 to work on. Write your governor and tell him to return funding that denies a state the right to teach sex education in the way that we decide is most appropriate for our kids.