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My dear friend Ruth only has one week left in Los Angeles before she must return to Holland. Her work visa application has been denied. She was given just three weeks to leave behind her girlfriend of five years, with whom she shares a home and a life.
If Ruth had been with an American man for the past five years, there would be no problem. She would have been married and have a green card in her wallet by now, but because she has been in a monogamous relationship with a woman, the United States government denies her right to live and work in this country, and before you ask, even a legally recognized state marriage in any state that allows such, is not federally recognized. Her marriage to a woman would not give her the right to live and work in the US with the person she loves.
That state federal legislation deny queer people the right to marry affects us all. These are the civil rights we need to protect our children and families. The right of gay partners to share joint custody of children, share property, health insurance and tax returns and visit our sick partners in the hospital are all withheld without a marriage license. Even those in state recognized same-sex marriages are denied 1,138 federal benefits awarded to opposite sex-couples. The ability to marry a foreign national and give them a green card just as is awarded heterosexual couples is unavailable to queer American’s like Ruth’s partner and I. My girlfriend of two years and I will be moving back to the UK to marry when her work visa expires.The effect ripples out beyond us as queer individuals. Our families bear the brunt of our compromises as well. At very best, I will get to see my younger sister once a year over the course of her young adult life. The choices will be between a family Christmas or her college graduation, my father’s 60th birthday or her wedding.
Anti-queer marriage legislation asserts that the love we express as LGBTIQ people is less relevant than that of heterosexual people. The laws differ state by state but the punch line is always the same: “Your love is invalid so you don’t deserve to live with the same civil rights extended to heterosexual couples.” The Mandukya Upanishad simply states, “All here is God; the soul is God.” Indeed yogic philosophy would have it that there is no room for conditionality in the matter.
Traditional marriage beliefs uphold dichotomous gender norms stating that being born with one of two sets of genitalia entitles you to a certain gender role. A person is assigned a sex and gender role that is then mandated for them to fall in love with someone of a conceived opposite sex and gender role. This thought paradigm insists that sex and gender are static, fixed points of identity. That one comes into this world as a man, and is socialized to play with toy trucks, wear blue, later blue business ties, and fall in love with a woman who wears pink skirts, plays with dolls and now wants nothing more than to be a wife and mother.
My yoga practice has taught me that nothing is fixed, that everything is fluid. I have learned that nothing separates me from the person on the mat next to me, in the car next to me, in the relationship next to me. We are all sharing the same energy, the same Purusha (Absolute Truth), the same lifetime of working through Karma on our way to stillness and later Moksha (liberation). To say that social constructs of “gender” and “sexuality” can simply define who we are is as irrelevant as fighting over which religion has defined God correctly. The reality is that we are all so many things, so many gender traits, so many sexualities, so many expressions of love to so many understandings of God. Gender roles and sexual identities are social constructs we learn and recreate. They speak nothing of the true nature of our beings.
How can we stand by when some are denied rights based on something so irrelevant to love as gender and sexuality? To accept state and federal legislation against gay marriage, even though you think it might not affect you, is to say that a pure shared consciousness does not permeate us all. It is to say that at base, we are different, that we are not all entitled to true love, to our true nature and to peace. The Chandogya Upanishad states, “Tat Tvam Asi”, meaning, “God dwells within me, as me”. If it is important to you that your community honors the Absolute Truth in all of us, as all of us, speak up. Write your representatives, donate your time, and share your devotion to love with others.

Directed by Jamie Babbit.

If this film was a person it would be in need of some therapy to sort out its cognitive dissonance. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a film that so determinedly undermines the very narrative it’s supposed to be celebrating.

Ostensibly, this is the story of Anna, a young, depressed, lesbian high school graduate who works as a receptionist in a plastic surgery clinic. She falls in with a group of wannabe radical anarchist feminists: C (I) A (Clits in Action) and in love with the group’s leader, Sadie.  The narrative follows Anna as she finds herself through an exploration of feminist and riot grrrl culture.  At least, that’s one way of looking at it.

It’s a lively film with some excellent performances, especially from Melonie Diaz as Anna.  But there’s no point in beating about the bush (*cough*), I found Itty Bitty Titty Committee hugely problematic on all kinds of levels.   For me, this young woman’s journey into feminism quickly became a journey into feminist movie hell.

Warning: lots of spoilers!

While the film supposedly celebrates anarchistic, riot grrrl feminism, it also represents it as superficial, preachy and attention-seeking, based more on casual vandalism than anything else.  It also feels very dated already.  IBTC is a satire, but not an affectionate one and there is a bitterly critical undercurrent running throughout the film.

The first half hour is pretty uncomfortable in its representation of a young woman of colour being bullied and leered at by a couple of arrogant young white women.   The two main feminist characters, Sadie and “Shulamith” are both represented as horrible people.   “Shuly” is just an arrogant bully, but Sadie seems to be bordering on sociopathic – a compulsive liar and user who apparently has no conscience. She’s in a relationship with an older feminist, Courtney, who she cheats on with every young woman she can lure into her group.

The young femme characters, Anna, Shuly and Sadie, are privileged in the film’s narrative, while the butch, trans and older characters are marginalised, objectified and not given any room for development, (although they appear far more interesting than either Shuly or Sadie).   It’s worth noting that the butch artist is appropriately called “Meat”.   Then there’s Calvin, a butch soldier, who appears just for Shuly to express a particularly offensive point.  As Shuly lusts after Calvin, Anna and Sadie observe that they thought she liked men, to which she replies “God, you dykes are such closed-minded bitches” or something along those lines.  One of the worst moments comes when the f-m trans character, Aggie, is used and abused just to advance the romance between Anna and Sadie.  And of course Aggie is saintly and forgiving about this because trans folk are not allowed to be angry about being pissed on.

One of the basic tenets of this film seems to be that feminism makes women behave like total dicks, especially to other women.  Anna starts the film as a depressed, but perfectly decent human being, but as soon as she starts spending time with C (I) A, she loses respect for and empathy with other women.  She treats her bewildered mother and sister like shit, pursue Sadie even though she knows she’s in a relationship with Courtney, and uses and dumps Aggie to get at Sadie.  In one telling scene, Anna subjects a distressed woman who has come into the plastic surgery clinic for breast augmentation to a feminist harangue without any care for the woman’s feelings or any interest in finding out why she might be there.

The scene in which Sadie and Shuly take Anna to a bookshop and buy her a huge pile of old feminist books is also telling because these young women don’t seem to have a single original thought in their heads.  Everything they say and do is derivative, calling themselves things like “Shulamith” and making models of Angela Davis.  Also, there’s the implication here that being a feminist is about having enough money to buy feminist stuff.

They have no staying power either.  The scene in which everyone “quits” the group because their pranks are not getting enough media attention and the website hasn’t had any hits is quite painful, especially if you’ve actually lived through these kinds of dramas in feminist groups. It did make me squirm at bit.

The ending is nonsensical and returns us to a celebration of the kind of activism that the rest of the film has represented as a failure.  Sadie’s (now ex) girlfriend, Courtney, goes on a TV show to argue that the celebration of the Washington Memorial is a distraction from real issues.  Meanwhile C (I) A break into the TV station and somehow get the image of penis transposed onto the image being broadcast of the Washington Memorial.  Hilarious.  Afterwards, Anna tells Sadie that it wasn’t meant as an attack on the older woman’s feminism, but of course it was.  How could it not be? It makes a mockery of what Courtney was trying to do and dismisses her approach in favour of yet another prank.

At the end, Anna seems to find some level of compromise between being a decent human being and being a feminist, but the film insists on pursuing her romance with the terrible Sadie.  Andygrrrl and I were really hoping all along that she might get together with one of the butch characters or perhaps Aggie, but no (I think it’s possible that the character Sadie wasn’t meant to be as appalling as she comes across, but the part was badly written or the actress was incapable of conveying depth or vulnerability).

We are also informed at the end that Anna will be going to Sarah Lawrence College, which is a highly elite women’s college, like that’s the epitome of feminist awakening, the highest goal a young woman exploring feminism can achieve, not organising her co-workers, or doing community activism, or any other possible forms of feminist activism.

There is actually much potential in the film for an exploration of uncomfortable issues in relation to feminist activism.  Does the concentration on the political ideology sometimes cause feminism to lose touch with the concerns of women outside of feminism?   What about the treatment of trans people within feminist groups?  Is this ranty, derivative prank-based feminism the best way forward? Does it have any staying power? Is there any way it can be redeemed and made useful?  Or, are there other approaches that might work better?   What about the relationship between older feminists and younger feminists?  But none of these issues are explored in any depth and, to be honest, I think the presence of these questions is fairly unconscious on the part of the filmmakers.

It’s completely exhausted my critical faculties at this point and my girlfriend is suggesting that I might be dehydrated, so I’ll leave it at that.

so in a general sense, my feelings on marriage – and the same-sex marriage campaign in particular – can be summed up by these two articles.

however, sometimes one does things for other reasons, so this week’s project is the making of a Wedding Cake of Fantastical Proportions for a same-sex marriage rally that’s happening here.

hence much of my downloading this past few days has been centred around pictures of wedding cakes.  if anybody knows of any particularly fanciful examples i would very much enjoy some links.

(i also no longer remember the provenance of these images, so if you know where they’re from, do tell me so i can credit accordingly?)

Just because you rallied in WeHo for Prop 8 don’t mean you’re work is done. The campaign for marriage equality is a national issue, and we need to support each individual state’s battle. Call your friends in Washington, Maine, and Michigan, TODAY.

Washington:

Who we are: Approve Referendum 71 is the campaign to preserve domestic partnerships in Washington State. By voting to approve, voters retain the domestic partnership laws that were passed during this year’s legislative session, including using sick leave to care for a partner, adoption rights, insurance rights, and more.

What we need: We need phone bankers to get our supporters out to vote. Washington is an all mail-in ballot state, and we need to ensure our supporters put their ballots in the mail. Also, youth turnout is a critical component of our campaign, and youth turnout historically drops in off-year elections. So we need a lot of help to turn them out.

How you do it: Sign up here to make remote calls for Approve 71. We’ll then contact you for a training, and you can make GOTV calls.

Maine:

Who we are: The No On 1/Protect Maine Equality campaign is working to protect Maine’s recently-passed law legalizing marriage equality for same-sex couples. Our opponents have put the issue on the ballot for Nov 3, 2009. Because of Maine’s early voting election laws, people are already voting at the polls, so we need help immediately to turn out our side at the polls.

What we need: We need you to devote a few hours to Call for Equality. Call for Equality is a virtual phonebank set up so that you can call Maine voters wherever you are. Much of Maine is rural, where canvassing isn’t effective, so we need to reach these voters- along with other supporters- by phone. All you need is a phone and internet connection. No experience required! We’ll provide the training, and all you need is a a few hours to help get a win in Maine.

How you do it: Click here to sign up for a training and your shift. There are lots of times available for your convenience.

Kalamazoo, MI:

Who We Are: The Yes on Ordinance 1856 / One Kalamazoo campaign is working in Michigan to support the City Commission of Kalamazoo’s twice approved ordinance for housing, employment, and public accommodation protections for gay and transgender residents. Opponents forced a public referendum on the ordinance so dedicated local volunteers, led by former Stonewall Democrats Executive Director Jon Hoadley, are working to ensure voters say YES to fairness and equality and keep Ordinance 1856.

Why The Urgency: In the final weeks, the opposition has gone all out with aggressive disinformation and misleading red herrings to try to defeat the ordinance. This includes signs that say “No to Discrimination” (even though voting No actually supports continued discrimination of GLBT residents), transphobic door hangers and fliers, and now radio ads that falsely suggest that criminal behavior will become legal when this simply isn’t true. The Yes on Ordinance 1856 supporters are better organized but many voters who want to vote for gay and transgender people are getting confused by the opposition.

How To Help:

1) Help the One Kalamazoo campaign raise a final $10,000 specifically dedicated to fight back against the lies on the local TV and radio airwaves and fully fund the campaign’s final field and GOTV efforts.

Give here: http://www.actblue.com/page/3-2-1-countdown

2) If you live nearby and can physically volunteer in Kalamazoo sign up here. If you know anyone that lives in Kalamazoo, use the One Kalamazoo campaign’s online canvass tool to remind those voters that they need to vote on November 3rd and vote YES on Ordinance 1856 to support equality for gay and transgender people.

Contact voters: http://www.onekalamazoo.com/tellfriends2

I’m going to start my lesbian movie marathon series with Canadian Director Anne Wheeler’s 1999 comedy, Better than Chocolate.  This is the story of Maggie, a college drop-out who meets and falls in love with itinerant artist, Kim.  Everything goes very well (and very erotically) for them until Maggie’s mother and brother (to whom she is not out) descend for an unexpected visit.  Not wanting her mother to know that she’s practically homeless, and a lesbian, Maggie borrows an apartment from a lesbian sex educator friend, pretends it’s her own and that Kim is just her roommate.  The film also features a sweet love story between Frances, the uptight owner of the local lesbian bookstore and Judy, who is a trans woman.  When Maggie’s mother arrives, all kinds of fun ensues and ultimately everyone is able to make genuinely heart warming progress in their lives.

Warning spoilers!

Better than Chocolate features a narrative convention common to lesbian movies.  I’m going to call this convention ‘The Lesbian Fantasy Ending’.  Right at the end of the movie, there is a break with realism (I use the term loosely here) and suddenly the film veers into fantasy territory.  The family accepts the lesbian characters and their relationship, the lesbians get everything they want and everyone lives happily ever after.  This is not a criticism; I just think this convention says a lot of about lesbian life. Lesbian viewers desire this kind of wish fulfilment because in reality, it doesn’t happen very often and family approval usually remains more or less qualified.  At the end of Better than Chocolate, our heroines live happily ever after, becoming an artist and a writer respectively, Maggie’s mother becomes so accepting that she actually gets involved with the community and starts performing in the local gay bar, Judy and Frances also get married and live happily ever after.  It’s all just wonderful.

Overall, I enjoyed Better than Chocolate, but I do have a few reservations.  For a start, this movie centralises white, middle-class experience.  No one else seems to exist within the terms of the narrative.  Also, the bisexual character is a one-dimensional stereotype — sexually insatiable and kinky! I think this would be pretty offensive to a lot of bisexual woman.

It was great to see a trans woman represented as a multi-faceted person who is allowed to be legitimately angry in the narrative, and the film pulls no punches when it comes to representing the prejudice of others, including feminists (there’s a truly horrible scene in the toilets). However, I can’t help but wish an indie film like this had cast a trans woman actress in the role rather than a male actor.  My anxiety about the casting of cisgendered actors as trans people is that it quickly becomes all about the actor’s performance – oh, wasn’t so and so amazing as a trans woman —  rather than about the issues being addressed.

So, a couple of reservations, but overall a good lesbian date movie

Sure the National Equality March on Washington was an epic media failure and an untimely distraction from the localized battles for queer rights waged in Maine and Washington, but as Lydia DePillis at Campus Progress reported, the march brought an unexpectedly high turnout from young activists. De Phillis said ; “Young people came from colleges all over the country—some call them the Prop. 8 generation or Stonewall 2.0.” and as you’d expect the youth of today to be called to arms, David Valk, the march’s Student Outreach Coordinator, later explained he organized their attendance almost entirely through facebook.

As a Californian, I received condolences from many a straight ally when Prop 8 passed in a blaze of Orange County Evangelical glory. My response though often further confused my only slightly interested straight friends. I told them that I had expected it to pass and while that was a shame, I was excited to see the response from young Californians that the election had engendered. After all this is a generation of first-time voters who spent high school watching Will & Grace in prime time and Britney kiss Madona on MTV. These are straight kids who respect their LGBT counterparts and don’t support their elders instincts to suppress and closet them and LGBT kids who might now have a slightly easier time coming out now than someone did 20 or even 10 years ago. I know that I’m making a giant oversimplification of current pop culture. Will & Grace gives visibility only to the white wealthy buttoned up male while painting his queeny sidekick in the same zany piss take Hollywood’s used since the 1920’s and Britney and Madonna’s kiss subscribed to every stereotype that satisfies the male exploitation of lesbian sexuality but these images help make today’s youth much more comfortable with sexuality than the cast of Happy Days ever did.

This is a generation who don’t think it’s such a big deal to be gay because their world was just that bit more welcoming than ours was. But as gay culture became a bit more homo-normative, lgbt youth seemed less inclined toward a politicized identity. So when Prop. 8 passed and students and young professionals poured out of UCLA, out of West Hollywood and onto Wilshire Blvd night after night, I mused aloud to my uninterested straight coworkers how it was a good thing that this new generation of queers and their allies finally had something general and communal enough to get angry about. So they marched and tweeted and facebooked up a storm and they learned that we still have so much work to do despite the attention focused on us in the 90’s as consumers from television networks and vodka advertisers.

Prop. 8 made youth take notice in California and nationwide. They are angry now, they are active now, and they have new tools. How do older activists engage these passionate youth and their new-fangled technological devices?

“Lesbian Attack” is a relatively new action group with the mission,”to infiltrate Los Angeles’ best straight bars and gay ‘em up with the hottest women we know. We don’t make deals with the bars; we don’t warn them we’re coming and we don’t advertise. This is a grass roots effort. Just OUR favorite women and THEIR favorite women.”

Next week ’s event has been announced with plans to attend an irrelevant sports bar on Melrose. In her most recent announcement Jones explains, “Though we don’t take money or warn the bars, we do want to take care of you. So we’ve booked the VIP room upstairs for a “private social mixer” to ensure everyone entry to El Guapo. Downstairs, there will be plenty of brews and confused boys. Upstairs, you can take a break from freaking out the straights with our private bar tender and DJ.”

What I have tried to do in my own life is refuse the language and categories that would reduce me to less than my whole complicated experience (213)

This is a compelling collection of essays.  Dorothy Allison shares with Joan Nestle an ability to make complex ideas and arguments accessible.  It’s interesting that both these writers come from poor working-class backgrounds and I suspect they brought their “no bullshit” attitudes with them into their feminism.  Allison is particularly good at getting to the heart of difficult issues.

She grew up in South Carolina, a member of what she calls “the bad poor”, the American underclass. She experienced horrific physical and sexual abuse from her stepfather. She came out as a lesbian in her adolescence and and got to university where she became involved in feminism.  Since then she has become notorious for being on the “sex positive” or “pro-sex” side of the feminist “sex wars” (she was a founder of the Lesbian Sex Mafia and has been open about her femme identity and interest in BDSM). She also writes fiction and poetry.

As you would expect, there are essays about dildos, pornography and BDSM in this collection, but I think it’s important that Allison is not simplistically reduced to the role she has been ascribed in the feminist “sex wars”.  The here essays show her interest in a wide range of issues, such as class, lesbian experience, abuse, violence, creative writing and science fiction.

My favourite essays:

‘A Question of Class’

This is about how her experience of coming from “the bad poor” has shaped her politics. It explains a great deal about Allison’s uncompromising attitude and insistence on speaking out about the complexities of identity.  Where she comes from, not speaking out is fatal:

I grew up poor, hated, the victim of physical, emotional, and sexual violence, and I know that suffering does not ennoble. It destroys. To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off the conditioning of being despised, the fear of becoming the they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed, and extraordinary. All of us – extraordinary (p. 36).

I can see why this essay is the first in book – it is the basis for everything that follows.

‘Public Silence, Private Terror’

Here she talks about her experiences of the feminist “sex wars” and the impact they had on her. It is unapologetic, but makes it apparent that she honestly didn’t foresee that speaking openly about her views on sex would get her into so much trouble with other feminists. She took the radical feminist incitement to women to talk about their experiences very literally and then got burned in the process of doing just that. You might disagree with her views on sex, but I think this is an important essay to read:

The hardest lesson I have learned in the last few years is how powerful is my own desire to hang onto a shared sense of feminist community where it is safe to talk about dangerous subjects like sex, and how hopeless is the desire.  Even within what I have thought of as my own community [...] I have never felt safe. I have never been safe, and this is only partly because everyone else is just as fearful as I am. None of us is safe because we have not tried to make each other safe. We have never even recognised the fearfulness of the territory. We have addressed violence and exploitation and heterosexual assumptions without first establishing the understanding that for each of us, desire is unique and necessary and simply terrifying [...]

As feminists, many of us have committed our whole lives to struggling to change what most people in this society don’t even question, and sometimes the intensity of our struggle has persuaded us that the only way to accomplish change is to make hard bargains, to give up some points and compromise on others. What this has always meant in the end, unfortunately, is trading some people for others.

I do not want to do that.

I do not want to require any woman to do that.

I do not want to claim a safe and comfortable life for myself that is purchased at the cost of some other woman’s needs or desires. But over and over again I see us being pushed to do just that. (113 – 114)

‘Survival Is the Least of my Desires’

This is about writing as catharsis, something Allison seems to believe in very passionately. Some quotes:

I believe the secret in writing is that fiction never exceeds the reach of the writer’s courage. The best fiction comes from the place where the terror hides, the edge of our worst stuff. I believe, absolutely, that if you do not break out in that sweat of fear when you write, then you have not gone far enough’ (217).

It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and re-examining it, recreating it in the story, and making is something different, making if meaningful – even if the meaning is only in the act of telling (p. 218).

That’s what I believe to be the important of telling the truth, each of us writing out of the unique vision our lives have given us (219).

Her essay ‘Believing in Literature’ is also very good.

‘Skin, Where She Touches Me’

I found this the most disturbing essay in the collection. It left me feeling shattered and emptied out and it took me a little while to figure out why. It’s about her relationships with two of the most important women in her life: her mother and her first lover.  Both of these women betrayed her in extremely painful ways, her mother though her inability to leave Allison’s abusive stepfather, and her lover by not caring enough to give up the heroin that eventually killed her, so both chose other things over Dorothy. But I think that what’s so disturbing about this piece of writing is the truth it expresses about the way women can have such complex and painful relationships in which we commit terrible betrayals and yet at the same time carry on loving each other because we do understand why it happened.  This is not something we like to talk about.

All in all, I found it by turns a difficult, challenging and inspirational read.

This is pure Southern Gothic, so the question of whether or not you enjoy it will probably depend on your feelings about that particular genre.  Personally, I love it.  You can usually expect an intense, overripe, lyrical style of writing, a cast of eccentric characters and a lush, but sinister landscape, of all which are present here.  Capote never allows himself to topple over the edge into overwriting, but hovers around it, as if to let you know that he’s in control of his craft which he took extremely seriously. This is his first novel.

After the death of his mother, thirteen year-old Joel is sent to live in a dilapidated mansion with his mysterious father, stepmother, Miss Amy, her decadent cousin Randolph and their black servants, 100 year-old Jesus Fever and his granddaughter Zoo.  As the story progresses it becomes apparent that more than one inhabitant of the landing is mad and Joel is also haunted by the strange appearance of a ‘lady’ at one of the upper windows.  All of the characters are memorable and the children are particularly well-written. This is very much a post-Freudian tale of queer childhood.  In Joel and his friend, Idabel, I thought Capote really conveyed the painful confusion of children on the cusp of adolescence confronted with the secrets of an adult world they can’t quite understand, both resenting and desiring the inevitable loss of innocence that will come with that understanding.  Idabel is the most resistant, but as a (transgendered?) tomboy who utterly rejects the requirements of adult femininity, she has the most to lose.   At the end, Joel seems to find some place for himself in his love for and identification with the effeminate Randolph, but Idabel, who has no such model, can only run away and disappear from the text.  In the openly homosexual and oddly nurturing figure of Randolph, Capote provides Joel with a kind of mentor, which is not to say Randoph is perfect.  We don’t know how much of his story to believe and he seems to desire to control Joel and separate him from other people, but at the end there is also a feeling that Joel will gain the upper-hand in the relationship.

An important work in in the history of LGBT literature.

After the amorality of Poppy Z Brite’s Lost Souls (1988) (which I also read recently but can’t be bothered to post about here), I was much refreshed by the profoundly moral concerns of Cabal.  Like a lot of queer writers, Clive Barker is interested in identifying and exploring the distinctions between morality and moralism.   Cabal is a wonderful story about otherness and Barker locates the source of evil, not in the monstrous Nightbreed, but in the institutions of law, psychiatry and the church.  The hero, Boone, is a “mad” man accused of committing terrible crimes.  Persuaded that he is indeed guilty, he sets out to join the Nightbreed a mythical race of undead beings with magical powers of transformation.  The Breed may be monsters, but it turns out that they have a sense of integrity and community which Barker envisions the “normal” world as lacking.  There is clearly an allegory here about the position of queer people in the ultra-homophobic 1980s.  But Cabal is also a story about unconditional love. Boone is aided by his lover, Lori, and the absence of misogyny in his depiction of this character was also a relief after the misogyny of Lost Souls.  Lori’s story is not that of a woman mindlessly pursuing some silly notion of “true love”, it is about someone discovering inner resources she couldn’t imagine and having the capacity to take risks and love beyond boundaries.  My only complaint about this book is its brevity.  At times the action feels rushed and I really think this story could have supported a longer novel.

The movie adaptation is terrible though. I watched it when I was incredibly drunk and it was still awful.

oh heeeeell no.

i thought we were done with The L Word?

Ilene Chaikin also thought her pilot for The Farm was gonna get picked up by Showtime… Turns out she was wrong.

Since they’ve passed, Chakin has found new inspiration from The L Word series she managed to run into the ground on the first go. The Real L Word: Los Angeles will feature “real” LA lesbians doing, you know, la lesbian stuff: drinking, partying, being incredibly femme, doing pilates, fame whoring and crying. Because as Chaiken said, “I believe we are not nearly finished telling our L Word stories.”

The thing is, the LAST thing anyone in the lgbtiq communities need is to tell more of these stories. Perhaps, at one point, it was important to establish ourselves as consumers, as a viable source of commerce, and now every major city has a row of gay bars and absolute vodka effin loves us now that we’ve shown we can party. And sure, the world as a whole loves consuming shows about vapid star fuckers vying for a piece of the la lifestyle via reality programming fame. But I fail to see how a reality show about lesbians who are fame hungry, sexy drinkers is going to improve the image of lesbians in the common consiousness of viewers.

We have better stories to tell. I’d much rather make and/or watch a show that followed women who are doing work that is for the betterment of lgbtiq people everywhere. Rather, we will watch The Real L Word which insists that real lesbians are heterosexual in appearance, over sexed and incapable of monogamy. If you want to make the point that lesbians are just like everyone else, why not follow a woman or couple who is living in everyday society, working, loving, etc and then explore how she encounters homophobia or oppression in her life. Then viewers might find commonalities to identify with, influencing their concept of gaynes as “otherness”. Rather, The Real L Word will support the concept that the lesbian woman is here for the fantasy of hetero men.

We have the blessing of having a voice in this country that  so many elsewhere don’t. I think it’s unfortunate that this type of program is often how we choose to use it.

By Lisa Duggan

The battle royal has now been engaged over the question of whether health care reform will include a public option, with insurance industry flacks and free market ideologues drumming up hysteria and hauling out the loonies to denounce any public option as “socialist” (I wish) and “Nazi” (say what?), while mild mannered liberals defend it for bringing “choice and competition” to the health insurance markets.  It’s a hard war to watch, given that the so-called public option is a pale shadow of single payer–the approach that might provide universal quality care without siphoning buckets of money into executive salaries and profits for the health care robber barons.

But here’s my question for today: Where are the homosexuals?  While all the mainstream gay groups and lgbt media and bloggers are rehashing Prop 8 and planning a march for equality in October, honey, Rome is burning right here right now.  Much of the furor over marriage rights in the United States is fueled by the desire for access to health care–employment and marriage being the primary routes for insurance coverage.  In countries with universal health care, the battle over same sex marriage rights has been much less intense and consequential.  Gaining universal access to health care in the U.S. now would meet the widespread need that is now largely expressed in campaigns for partnership recognition.  In addition, it could address the crying need for adequate health care for masses of queers who have no wish to marry.  In the large balancing scale of benefits–free universal health care, or single payer, would do more for The Gays than marriage equality.  So where are the gay groups and activists?  Where have they been for the past decade when organizing for single payer might have helped push it onto the national political agenda, before it was so unceremoniously replaced by the “public option”? And where are they now that the public option may be replaced by the even paler, more impotent health co-op plan?

Are gay groups and activists serious about gaining concrete benefits for queer constituencies–homeless kids, transgender sex workers, lgbt populations that are unemployed, elderly, migrant or immigrant, disabled and sick?  If so, then it would make a lot more sense to spend $50 million in donor funds pushing for free universal health care, than even thinking about spending that sum to redo the Prop 8 referendum next year.  Should we rename the current organizations to peg them as the Gay Couples Rights Movement?

Access to health care is a national emergency, for queers folks more than most. 

It’s past time for us all to mobilize on the front lines of this political battle–it matters more to more queers than marriage ever will.

Two recent snippets support the main argument of my recent book on lesbian and gay rights in the U.S. and Canada. My argument in a nutshell is that the political cultures of the U.S. and Canada are not so different and that political institutional differences between these two North American neighbours have shaped political mobilization in ways that block policy change in the U.S., while facilitating it in Canada.

In other words, Christian evangelicals are not single-handedly responsible for the slow progress of basic civil rights protections for lesbians, gay men, bisexual and transgender people in the U.S.

Snippet #1:  Lisa Duggan, whose work I have long admired, has written a fascinating article about queer politics in Utah in The Nation.

According to her account of LGBT activism in Utah, there is a lively movement in Salt Lake City that is cleverly strategizing around the political institutional roadblocks to re-frame the marriage issue. The queer movement has grabbed onto the arguments of marriage equality opponents who claim that they have nothing against “basic protections” for LGBT citizens.  Basic protections here include such things as the right not to be fired from your job because of your sexual orientation.

Queer activists in Salt Lake City have formulated a list of such “basic protections” and asked conservative marriage equality opponents in Utah to sign on. This Common Ground Initiative may build support for policy change in Utah on issues such as employment discrimination, hospital and inheritance rights, and benefits for same sex couples. As Duggan points out, the beauty of this strategy is that it reframes the discussion away from same sex marriage and towards civil rights protections.

So, yes, evangelicals can be countered through political mobilization. Knowing the level of church attendance in the U.S. does not tell us about this dynamic process of political contestation. Culture does not equal law or policy.

Snippet #2: The NYT recently wondered why shifts on gay rights lag behind culture. Americans actually support LGBT rights in many areas but their political institutional set-up makes it difficult for this support to translate into legal and policy change.

I’ve spent the past…oh…6 hours of my weekly writing date (it’s not usually that long, but work was canceled today due to lack of work) chatting with my friends, eating two meals, discussing linguistics and how stupid men who believe women aren’t really funny are, reading comics, joining Twitter, and generally doing everything but writing. Maybe I should try to actually get some work done before I give up and go home? No, never mind, it sounds like my friend’s new gentleman friend is coming by and I’ll get to meet him. You all don’t care if I never post again because I have the attention span of a gnat, do you?

Right. Um. Trying again on Thursday. I’m on a train to Philadelphia (Yay Trans Health Conference!) so there’s no internet and really very little to distract me. [Aaaand now the PTHC is in the past, and I failed to give you all a heads up that I'd be there so anyone else who would be could say hello. Oops. Next year.]

I spent Saturday May 30th at the Bi Writers’ Association and NYC’s LGBT Community Center’s Putting the “B” in LGBT Summit. It was an interesting day. The organizers clearly tried to pack a weekend conference into one day, and the experience suffered for it — everything ran over and got increasingly behind schedule, and all of the panels had too many people in too short a time slot to effectively have a conversation. Nevertheless, there was lots of good networking, and some very interesting things were said. And while the opening plenary was made up entirely of people of the same race and within the same age range, that did change somewhat as the day went on — not as much as I’d have liked, but some. It was clear someone was trying.

Robyn Ochs gave the keynote. I’d never seen her speak before, and I was very impressed. She’s smart and engaging and funny and seems to have good queer, gender, etc. politics. I’m happy to have her representing my movement — which is good, because, um, she does. There are very few bigger names in bi activism out there. So I’m delighted she’s so on the ball.

For example, she made me very happy by acknowledging that the LGBT movement has lots of inclusion problems, and that we’d be focusing on the way bisexuals are often marginalized because it was the topic of this particular summit, not because it was the only or most important marginalization happening within the community. Yay.

She talked about how the ways to be visible (to most people) as bisexual at all mirror the most common stereotypes about bisexuals, thus reinforcing them, and how that and the way the existing language supports binaries leads to a lack of positive images of bi folk. She talked about the importance of choosing a wide range of messages and spokespeople, rather than only “easily digestible” ones. And I got a moment of being quite pleased with myself when she suggested that we think about the kind of resources we want to see out there and then go out and make them.

The first panel was “Bisexuality: Exploding the Myths,” and the only thing I really remember about it at this point is that Ignacio Rivera was on it and as brilliant as always. My notes remind me that I’m always amused when people say things like “You can’t have it both ways” in contexts like this. On the “Bi Community Panel: Telling Our Stories,” people talked about the ways DADT, job discrimination, immigration, etc. impacted their lives. We’ve all heard these stories before, and they’re touching and enraging every time.

During “Crafting the Message: Putting the ‘B’ in LGBT,” people talked about news stories about queer issues, and how important it us to quote bisexuals as well as just teh gays about how they’re affected. Particularly of note was Joshua Lynsen of the Washington Blade saying that he makes a point of contacting bisexuals for comments. He gave out his card so anyone present who wanted to could add hirself to his contact list. (Although now that I actually look up what’s he’s written for the Blade, I’m not so sure I want to plug him…”Black Opposition to Gay Marriage Remains Strong?” I’m so over that meme. And what ever happened to not calling it “gay” marriage, anyway?)

The closing plenary discussion was less a panel and more a whole bunch of people each getting to speak once — that’s what you get when you put something like two dozen people on a panel. Someone made the irritating assertion that the trans community is pulling ahead of the bi community in the race to our rights, which is problematic on any number of levels. (Can we just agree never to ever say again that anything is the last acceptable prejudice? Please? And “bi inclusion is the unnoticed stepchild of trans inclusion?” For fuck’s sake. I wish I’d written down who actually said that.) I don’t remember most of what was said but bisexual and New York State Assembly Member Micah Kellner was there, and seemed pretty decent for a politician. And you know, he was open about his bisexuality during the campaign, and that’s pretty awesome.

Things I was less thrilled with: It always strikes me as unfortunate when people say things like “In this movement, bisexual men and woman fall through the cracks.” So many people fall through the cracks of that statement. And a surprising number of people who did talk about gender in non-binary terms and even spoke explicitly about bisexuals and trans folks as allies to each other then turned around and used phrases like “opposite sex.” But all in all, I’m very glad I went. If they have it again next year I’ll go again.

Next up: That night’s Bi Lines II performance! (Or at least my favorite segment of it.) Tomorrow’s writing date day again…

]]> http://swishisin.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/one/ Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:09:16 +0000 a james http://swishisin.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/one/

I could sit and write manifestos, and I puttered around with one last night, but it is more succinct to simply state my presence and then move on. There’s been a noted effort to homogenize the queer Rights Movement, half-apologetic hand waves to the WASPy straight yuppies of the world that no, really, we’re not trying to undermine sex and gender roles in society! And while, no, as a general collection of people, we are not, this line of “defence” has engendered contempt and dissonance from those of us who are, or simply do.

Feminine and campy men, cast aside as callous stereotypes but never reflections of actual gay men have thus been vilified by our less-ostentatious peers. It rattled my swishy aplomb to see fellow queers cursing and bemoaning those “flaming faggot screaming queens”, with accusations of homophobic, transphobic, and all-together sexist language…which as a gay, trans, feminist-raised anti-sexist made my cupcake pink mohawk curl.

Somewhere in my raising I had not caught the memo that swish was out, but I’d been unfashionable before; it was the harsh words that made my brows stitch together and my blood beat. So like anything that made me angry, I raised my fist and let out a private cry…but such seclusion is never very effective.
To me, gender subversion is at once a political and a natural motion. In my quick glance around the blogging block, there are many who agree, but very few who say a word about it.

So greetings and welcome darlinks, I must do much thinking about directions and futures; but for the time being, I’m seated behind the little lemonade stand, dying my tongue blue and testing eyeshadow. Please refer to the sign that The Swish is In.

nmccoy1

This week the California Supreme Court upheld the ban on same-sex marriage (see article below).  This ruling has reignited political, ideological, and religious disputes over the meaning of marriage.  Much less discussed in the media is the tension between movements based on achieving same-sex marriage (typically lesbian and gay politics) and movements of queer politics.  While there are certainly overlaps between these identity-driven positions, queer politics tends to emphasize the need to challenge heteronormative norms and institutions as well as to de-essentialize sexuality claims.  Within this frame, queer politics would seek to disrupt or (re)define what a committed relationship could look like.  

In accordance with Chantal Mouffe’s concept of a radical democratic citizenship, the emphasis is not on a particular identity but rather on working against an essentialization of an identity.  This combination of the rights of the individual with the pluralistic public asserts that the individual and the collective need not be articulated as dichotomous and that the crucial aspect of political community is the nature of the relationship, the form of the identification between and among individuals.  To this end, the primary relations must be centered on the very democratic principles of citizenship upon which the community is built and from which it draws its own legitimacy.  There is in some sense a relation or a common purpose among individuals that acknowledges a set of  norms or conditions that led to the collective action.  Using the notion of a radical democratic citizenship directed towards the California ruling may help to garner support across gay and lesbian and queer movements.

 NY Times

 Blackwell Reference to Political Sociology

This is not about Gordon as a person or as a performer. I may be sceptical but I applaud his decision to stand up for a good cause. This is about the weird things my mother says because of what she heard on the news.

—

My mother pointed out to me yesterday that what Gordon has done is create media attention. I didn’t come up with that myself. But what pains me is that she doesn’t understand why I don’t care about that that much.

Maybe what pains me is that she doesn’t realize I have a lot of media she doesn’t have. I read so many gay news sites that I feel safe to say that I’m a lot more up-to-date about this than her.

The struggle in Russia is not new. The same thing happened last year, they announced pride, they asked for permission, they got rejected. The organisation of the announced pride is currently in multiple law suits. They are fighting there constantly.

I told my mother walking away from the competition would not help for the struggle in Russia. The broadcasting team at the final will work around it and will simply move on to the next act. The public at large watching Eurovision will not notice, or notice but not think about it that much.

And yes, I’m already talking about how the final is going to look like without The Toppers, because one person will not make a difference. And please, Gordon is not the only gay performing there. I’ve heard rumours about the German contestants, and what about Dima Bilan? He is the only one to stand up for this, which, by the way, international gay rights organisations have called for. So in that respect, I appreciate his efforts.

“He’s created so much media attention for this,” she kept repeating.

“In Holland, yeah,” I retorted.

“You don’t know what it’s like abroad because you don’t read foreign news.”

“I read American news.”

“And in the US they think as much of homophilia as in Russia.” Homophilia is a word that should be erased from human memory. Forever.

I didn’t have the energy to remind her of the fact that legislature is being changed in two states right now, that the US is the only country from which I can adopt if I marry a woman, that there is talk of appointing an openly gay man to the Supreme Court, that Gene Robinson was invited to speak during inauguration. I know there are many bad things in the US, but you cannot compare it to a country like Russia. You just can’t.

The American news I read is a-plenty. I used to pick up the International Herald Tribune when I went to the library every afternoon to avoid her a few weeks ago. I read Unite The Fight, Queers United, 365gay.com. I follow @cnnbrk on Twitter. I know those gay sites present gay news, but really, that is what this is about. It’s gay news. So in this case, I read more than enough American news.

—

My mother at one point used “nicht”, which is like faggot, but not quite, to make a point about the gay fan base when it comes to Eurovision. Just a week ago she snapped when Susan Smit, author and contestant on Ranking The Stars, said she had “nichten” (plural) friends. “Why does she use nicht if they are her friends?”

I have stopped thinking about bringing up the fact that she called me dyke, twice. I know, water under the bridge, and everything, but her constant moving between being for me and being against me aggravates me.

I told her a member of the House of Representatives was going to ask questions to the Ministers about it, to which she replied no one would’ve asked questions if Gordon hadn’t brought this up. Well they would have. The member in question is gay, and since I knew about Pride in Russia somewhere halfway through last week, before Gordon said he would boycott, he probably did, too. And according to a recent study by the COC (which is like Dutch GLAAD), he is part of one of the two best parties when it comes to gay rights. Of course he would’ve asked those questions.

—

So I sighed and told her not everything would change now Gordon fussed about it.

“You are acting like the whole world already knew about this. Well they didn’t!”

“Most of the Dutch viewers couldn’t care less!”

“That is your opinion!”

No, mum, it’s not. Just spend one day with me and sit there, silently, listening, in class. Sit there in the bus when suddenly one of the boys in the back seat drops his voice and says, “that girl is a lesbian!”. And then think again.

I’m not sure why she’d think that the majority of the Dutch viewers could care less. Maybe she felt offended. Well I didn’t say all Dutch viewers. Yesterday when the “that girl is a lesbian”-thing happened, I was merely amused. Also I think it’s pretty cool if straight boys who have conversations about things like telephone numbers for half of the ride can see something like that. And I’m not offended by it. It’s just that the fact that it’s a topic of conversation, and a topic of muffled conversation, means there’s a lot more to be done in terms of acceptance. Might mean that they don’t care if I would be beat up if I protested in Russia. I’m a hundred procent positive that the majority of the Dutch don’t care at all about this entire thing.

But still, I don’t care that much about media attention. Seeing this on tv won’t change minds.

I care about what happens when we will get this issue to the Council of Europe, of which Russia is a member. I care about what happens when that member of the House of Representatives with the grey jacket I just saw of whom I didn’t catch the name goes to Pride in Riga (Latvia) this weekend. I care about the petition I signed for IDAHO (International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia), the Appeal to the United Nations, the WHO and “the states of the world”.

Media attention is just a small facet of all that we have left to achieve. I can’t say it’s unimportant, and I can’t say what Gordon does is nothing at all, but it is not enough.

And yes, this is my opinion. I know. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a point.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has died

It would take me a long post to articulate the influence this woman has had on my life and work.

RIP Eve.