Category: GLBT

I was reading the comments in a contentious diary last Friday, when I encountered the following.  It took my breath away.

Just stop it. You aren’t convincing anyone or winning anybody over. I believe sexuality is an immutable characteristic like skin color, but if you can hide in a closet to keep from suffering it’s consequences, than the discrimination you suffer is nowhere near Jim Crow if for no other reason than you can’t hide from it.  

—Link

Hide in the closet?  Really?  For a transsexual person, hiding in the closet is tantamount to dying, because what you are counseling is to not transition.  If that were possible, there wouldn’t have been the crisis point which leads to the transitioning.

I was scouting for something to write about/discuss a couple of nights ago and I ran across a few reviews of a new movie that is making the rounds in less than usual venues.  Funded in part by The E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, That All May Freely Serve (TAMFS), The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, The Arlington Cultural Arts Council, The Open Meadows Foundation the movie was produced and directed by Alice Dungan Bouvrie of Mineral King Productions and is entitled Thy Will Be Done, which we of course recognize as a phrase from The Lord’s Prayer.

Personally I might have preferred a quote from Shakespeare.

This above all: to thine own self be true.

–Polonius to his son Laertes, Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3, line 82

That is, after all, what the story seems to be about for me.

Last week, you all recall there was a “moneybomb” for Jack Conway.  Hey, I get calls for money from democrats three or four times a day.  I usually write them back asking some questions.  They are generally not answered.

I asked, in the moneybomb diary, why there was nothing at the Conway website describing the candidate’s stance on GLBT issues.  I was told by someone who was apparently a supporter…and someone who thought he was much smarter than I…that it was Kentucky, as if that meant those issues didn’t matter there.

Excuse me?  I thought Kentucky was one of the United States of America…and that as Americans, and especially as Democrats, we were generally opposed to second-class…even third- or fourth-class citizenship.

I recently had to empty one office and move all my shit into another one in a different building.  As often has happened when I have done this sort of thing, I uncovered an old scrap of paper.  On it were three poems.  Searching my data banks has revealed that two of them were micro-planed into poems which I have published before, in slightly different form.

Because of the start of the new semester, that’s about all I’ve got to share this evening.

Originally I was going to write a piece entitled In the good old days, they just called us perverts, but I didn’t find the time to flesh it out.  If anyone wants to discuss the topic, I’m game to do so in the comments.

Sacramento, CA:  The California State Senate passed the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Prisoner Safety Act (AB 633) by a 26-9 vote and sent it on to Governor Scharzennegger.  The bill is designed to protect LGBT people who are incarcerated.  Arnold vetoed a similar bill last year.

A recent study from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) found that 67 percent of LGBT inmates report being sexually assaulted by another inmate, a rate 15 times higher than the overall prison population. Another study by UC Irvine and commissioned by CDCR found that 69 percent of transgender inmates reported sexual victimization while incarcerated.

Gottlieb and Diane G. are live and in color (or is that off color?) on WWL radio Friday night at 6pm Eastern Time to guide you through Current Events taken from a Wildly Left Prospective.

Hear the Unreported & Under Reported Headlines stories you should be paying attention to, from US Politics, to the farthest reaches of the Earth by the WWL coalition of subversion: undermining the PTB by speaking Truth to Power!!!!

Come join in on our interview with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. Check out her blog “NOBODY PASSES, darling”!

Mattilda was recently interviewed on NPR and Pacifica where she talked about the malevolence of the mainstream gay marriage/military/ordination-to-the-priesthood movement, resisting the violence of assimilation, gender fascism, gay hyperconsumerism, sex work, myopic liberals, defiant ways of loving, the failure of the “gay liberation movement”, US imperialism, creating oppositional culture, challenging all hierarchies (including anarchist hierarchies), incest, and more!

This will be one fascinating, insightful, transgressive and fabulously provocative show you don’t want to miss.  She makes the case against the gay marriage movement.

WWL is delighted to have Mattilda with us this Friday. She challenges EVERYTHING, even the narrative of Gentrified Mainstream *Gaydia, (yes that is a Dianism, inspired by her book) who she feels has co-opted the larger movement against the realistic needs of the larger GLBT community.

In reading her latest book, “So Many Ways to Sleep Badly” you are transported directly to the place of no words, to the direct soul of her being. And that being is amazing. This is not observational reading, this is rolling around in the direct-essence of Mattilda until you are Mattilda. Buy this book! It will change your EVERYTHING.

From the boxes we all put one another in, to the issues people “decide” are important, to the description of “acceptable” behaviors… the only way to bend the spoon is to realize there is no spoon. When you read or listen to Mattilda, you are invited directly to a place where there is no you, and no her, there is only surviving a world of shattered glass pasts, the hugs that put the Earth back on her axis, the sweet relief of an orgasm, and always, always the air we all breathe.

We will be discussing her book, gentrification, gay marriage, anarchy, sex workers, tricks, gross consumerism, or anything the fuck else she feels like talking about.

Come let your mind be bent… or blown!

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is a writer, editor, activist, critic and troublemaker.  Most recently, she is the author of the novel So Many Ways to Sleep Badly (City Lights 2008). She is also the editor of Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity (Seal 2007), and an expanded second edition of That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Soft Skull 2008).

Mattilda’s first novel was Pulling Taffy (Suspect Thoughts 2003), and she also edited Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving (Haworth 2004) and Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write about Their Clients (Haworth 2000), which now also appears in Italian (Effepi Libri 2007).

Mattilda is currently working on a new anthology, Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform. She is immersed in Lostmissing: a public art project – about the friend who will always be there, and what happens when you lose that relationship. She is also working on a memoir called The End of San Francisco.

Mattilda’s articles, essays, interviews, reviews, and stories appear regularly in a variety of publications, including the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Bitch, Utne Reader, AlterNet, Bookslut, The Stranger, and The Gay & Lesbian Review, and she writes a monthly column in Maximumrocknroll.

Mattilda is the reviews editor at the feminist magazine Make/shift, where she also writes a column.

In 2010, Mattilda made a short film, All That Sheltering Emptiness, in collaboration with Gina Carducci.  Mattilda and Gina are currently working on a second film.

Mattilda’s activism has included ACT UP in the early ’90s, Fed Up Queers in the late ’90s, Gay Shame, and numerous lesser-known (or even unnamed) groups.

Mattilda lives in San Francisco, but tours regularly, and is available for bookings. In the past, she has appeared in independent bookstores, community centers, performance venues and universities including Yale, Harvard, Brown, McGill, University of Chicago, Wesleyan, Macalester, NYU, UCLA, University of Massachusetts, Evergreen, DePauw, DePaul, Mills, Antioch, University of Michigan, Wagner, University of Oregon, UC Santa Cruz, Georgetown, and others.

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Helena Bushong was diagnosed with AIDS in 2002.  She probably had been HIV+ since 1985.  She also has Hepatitis C and is a survivor of spinal cancer.

But she has one hell of a strong backbone.

This past week she was interviewed about being transgender, black and poz.  Do yourself a favor and go see what she has to say for herself.  The video is not embeddable.

I felt comfortable in my own skin for the first time in my 56 years.

–Helena Bushong, about going on homone therapy

But y’all come back, y’hear!

And there is more…

It was about a week ago that we saw the ruling throwing out California’s Prop 8; that decision has now been appealed, and we will see, at some point in the future, how the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals handles the matter.

A couple of days later, I had a story up that walked through the ruling, describing the tactics used by the Prop 8 proponents, which, in the opinion of the Judge who looked at the evidence, were basically to try to scare Californians into thinking that gay people, once they’re able to get gay married, will somehow now be free to evangelize your kids and make them gay, too.

In the course of answering comments on the several sites where the story is up, I noticed that there were those who felt the Bible should be guiding our thinking here…that if it did, we would be better off than where we are today, with all those immoral gay people running around free to do all those immoral gay things.

This led me to an obvious question: are those who have been using the Bible as a sort of “divining rod” to figure out who is immoral and who is not…actually any good at it?

In her essay earlier today, Allison’s Story told us about her “friend” who told her he thought she was psychotic because she chose to treat her gender dysphoria.

That’s too much of a constant in our lives.  Because we don’t believe that chromosomes, or even genitalia, are destiny, people tell us they think we are insane…and then use that conclusion in attempts to drive us from our professions.

To some people, the options we have are being thought to be insane or having a moral defect.  The truth is, in my opinion, that we are some of the more sane people around.  On the other hand, what is moral is in the mind of the beholder.

I’ve met hundreds of transfolk since I began my transition in 1992.  I actually came out on September 30, 1992, which would have been my father’s birthday if he had still been alive.  From my years of knowing him, I can assure you that informing him of my plans for the future would not have gone down well.

The airwaves (and the print and blog waves, for that matter) are filled with the news that a Federal Judge in California has declared that State’s Proposition 8 to be unconstitutional, which could clear the way for the resumption of same-sex weddings in the State.

Ordinarily, this would be the point where I would present to you a walkthrough of the ruling, and we’d have a fine conversation about the legal implications of what has happened.

I’m not doing that today, frankly, because the ground is already well-covered; instead, we’re going to take a look at some of the tactics that were used to pass Prop 8, as they were presented in Judge Vaughan’s opinion.

It’s an ugly story-and even more than that, it’s a reminder of why it’s tough to advance civil rights through the political process, and what you have to deal with when you’re trying to make such a thing happen.

The Dog wrote this morning about the people who want their nation back.  I added the following comment, about what I saw in that sort of thinking:

The lady wants to go back to a time when she feels that things were better for her…and presumably people like her….as in identical.  She doesn’t care a whit about people whose lives have improved since that time.  Indeed, she thinks such people should be stomped on and put in their place…because they are undoubtedly the cause of her distress.

Meanwhile, I’m one of those people for whom life has gotten much better…and the lady the dog wrote about it…and people like her…just can’t stand that.

That’s not to say that life has gotten totally better for me…or that the improvements I’ve seen in our world have been totally sufficient or have been happening fast enough.  It will be quite a journey to get the world to where I think it should be.  And those people trying to tug it in the opposite direction certainly don’t help.

As you look at today’s Prop 8 ruling, I want you to think back a few weeks to the Massachusetts Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) rulings for a bit of legal logic that will make a huge difference as this case moves through any appeals process.

What I want you to think about are two moderately obscure concepts: “strict scrutiny” and “rational basis”. The difference between the two will tell us how hard Prop 8 will be to defend, and we’ll quickly walk through what you need to know, right here, right now.