readingqueer - Tumblr blog

[readingqueer]

my boyfriend is making a webcomic and it’s pretty freaking awesome. you should check it out!

realized after coloring it all in that I forgot to put that last word bubble in (which is, of course, the only word bubble in the comic so far). Go me.

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you know the story, girl is crying in her car in brooklyn watching stray cats eat bread on the sidewalk; so, she turns on her friend’s tape and listen. she watches the cats weave back and forth behind the cars, back to the bread again, away into found shelter, back into the bread. they keep returning, so we worry.

I think I know a lot of people who have written off greg kckillop: as an overexcitable community organizer, as an overly prolific songwriter, as somehow too much of something that they don’t know how to name but don’t want to be around. while recognizing his effect on the diy scene in worcester, he increasingly keeps to himself, and has abandoned the big unsustainable projects that he has devoted his life to. as people look away, his music is getting stranger and stranger.

I would urge you to pay attention. little demon on the back seat is a pretty incredible journey that is setting the stage for some of his newest work. I watched him last night in brooklyn play maybe his last touring show of his life, ending an extremely successful set with a slow, long, complicated dirge whose chorus listed off six or so major arcana of choice (whose choice, no one knows).

it was strange. it made me realize that his work has always been strange, has always wrestled with some nightmare quantity, some looming wildness, some awful noise. and though he’s done so much work to write humble and loving and frustrated punk songs, he’s now diving more and more into experimental forms, into mystical objects, into visual art training, into new worlds. it’s an incredibly exciting time to be a fan of his work, so I worry when it goes unnoticed.

we value strangeness when it appears to us immediately as a useful tool: as a strangeness with which we can terraform our outlooks, with which we can uproot the dirt of our own selves and throw it around into new pleasing unnatural forms. we like cyborgs, we like gardens, we like bad stuff; we don’t like rust, we don’t like blight, we don’t like real evil. we don’t, in short, pay enough attention to the strangenesses that don’t serve us immediately. instead, we set them aside for the sake of our wholeness and cultivation as people.

pay attention. pay attention now. greg has a patreon and still books in amherst and is always up to something new. in all that he does, his mighty wrestling with nightmare quantity, looming wildness, awful noise, becomes extremely apparent. it’s a strangeness that you have to listen carefully for. it’s not a loud performative queer shout; there is a delicate queer whisper as long as the longest poem that weaves itself through his work. please, please, we need to pay more attention.

…at least that’s how it feels to me.

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go read it

“Self-Portrait Of The Artist As Ungrateful Black Writer” by Saeed Jones over on BuzzFeed is the most powerful essay I’ve read this year, and it hasn’t gotten nearly enough play. You should go read it now if you haven’t.

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I don’t like to repost things here that make me angry, because I don’t want other people to feel how I felt when I read them byreading this blog. But what kind of stupid fucking questions do they tell these NYT reporters to ask?

“In ‘Fun Home,’ you wrote about becoming a connoisseur of masculinity at a young age. Today a young person like you would be more likely to identify as transgender than gay. Is the butch lesbian endangered?”

Where do they get off saying what a “young person” would be more likely to identify as? How do you know there weren’t a lot of endangered trans kids who never got to transition and instead had to grow up in bodies they didn’t feel connected to?? RAAAAAGE.

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Pretty good article in The New York Times today advocating for broader social and institutional acceptance of transgender people. However, the article closes with a strong call for the US military to allow transgender service members to serve openly, to be able to transition on the job and continue serving after transitioning. Obviously I’m not against this as a policy, and I think that soldiers who are transgender shouldn’t be made to wait or change the course of their lives because of a discriminating employer. But as a trans person who believes that a career in the military should not be this country’s economic answer to lifting people out of poverty, I’ve got some problems with the article.

I don’t want to go on a tirade. Especially because I’ve come to understand over the last couple of years that state-sanctioned validation of LGBTQI people is important in some ways, even if I don’t agree with the overall strategy. But the NYT article is a fascinating example of the obstacles to real, intersectional change. Instead of focusing on broader, class-based reforms to our social programs, such as shoring up national support for social security and working with low-income urban communities of color to reach for real change, national LGBT lobbying groups have instead opted to go piece by piece. These pieces on their own, from marriage to serving in the military, aren’t inherently bad; but with each piece of legislation passed is a chance wasted to form connections between marginalized communities and identities. Everyone benefits from social and economic reforms that strengthen public education, access to free healthcare and wealth redistribution. Who benefits, aside from a very few, from transgender service members in the military? And, given our country’s love of neverending war, why aren’t we asking how many will it hurt?

(For a more nuanced treatment of this issue, from someone who speaks more eloquently than me on the subject, check out this Kenyon Farrow interview, of the sadly now defunct Queers for Economic Justice.)

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Tomorrow I am going to attempt to teach the controversy over Radiolab's "Yellow Rain" podcast. This will either go incredibly well or totally tank. If you haven't listened and want to, these are two good places to start in a super vital conversation.

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Wheat

If you research wheat varieties for a story you're working on, you will run across Aegilops, the genus of wild goatgrasses to which domesticated wheat is genetically linked. 

And then you will learn that "Aegilops" is the longest word in use in the English language with letters in alphabetical order.

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“Every novelist should possess a hermaphroditic imagination.”

Fuck you Jeffrey Eugenides.

(This thoughtpost may not be in keeping with previous mentioned resolution.)

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One of my New Year's resolutions is to make all of my correspondence (email, letters etc.) more eloquent so they can be justifiably collected after I die.

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Catherine Murphy, "Swept Up," graphite on paper, 1999

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I just wanted to put this here.

Over the last 4 days I made: an Apple Bacon Cheddar Frittata; Chicken Enchiladas; Orange Cranberry Scones with Almond Flour; and another batch of Butternut Squash & Goat Cheese Soup. And the fun's not over yet. Tomorrow is for cinnamon raisin bread. I love fall.

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When a Woman Bests a Man

I've been raging lately at all the stupid stuff being spewed about strong women in sports. Dutee Chand, the Indian sprinter with high levels of naturally occurring testosterone, can't compete against women anymore because the International Association of Athletics Federation says she's too much like a man (i.e. not not “deficient” enough to qualify as a woman). The director of the Russian Tennis Federation recently called Serena and Venus Williams the “Williams brothers,” claiming “it's scary when you really look at them”--a sexist and incredibly racist remark coming from an influential personality of the sport.

It's notable that these two instances happened in track and field and tennis—two sports where this inane breakdown between men and women athletes is enough to make you take up golf. In the four annual grand slam tournaments of tennis, the men play a championship match of the best of 5 sets, while the women play best of 3. (Ostensibly this is because women can't endure the long, grinding matches that men can. But really it's because TV networks don't think enough people want to watch women's tennis to waste the sponsor time.) In running, both professionally and at the high school and college level, this mentality is especially pervasive. I remember running as part of my high school's track team as a female distance runner. For some reason, the boys ran the mile and the 2-mile, while girls ran the 1500 meters and the 3000. In college, men ran the 10k or 6k while we ran the 5k. WTF, I remember asking myself every time we toed the line. Do they really not think we can't run the spare meters? Today, however, I realize it's just that man-boys don't want women to be able to compare their times to their own—they don't want to know when a girl has out-paced them.

There are some sports where women outcompete the men consistently, and on the same playing field, most notably ultrarunning where men and women race 100+ miles over the Rocky Mountains or the Himalayas. But there's still some block on acknowledging that women are better at these sports because they're just plain better. Instead, people give the excuse that women have the advantage because they are smaller than men, and thus have less body mass to drag up those steep climbs. This is like saying “oh, well, she won, but there's less of her to move through the course, therefore her small body detracts from the validity of her win.” Is there any more explicit way in the English language to call someone “less of a person?”

In The Frailty Myth, Colette Dowling argues that it's a complete fallacy that women are “naturally” not as strong, fast, etc etc as men. She says that if women hadn't been hindered athletically and physically for centuries—and thus not allowed to develop the same muscular prowess and physical stature as male counterparts—they'd be competing on the same level as men today. Furthermore, says Dowling, the stunting of girls' physical growth is still happening. Young girls, even toddlers, are coddled, she says, often inadvertently by well-meaning feminist parents who carry in them the bias against strong capable women, and so prevent their daughter from jumping off that picnic table or doing anything where she might fall and scrape a knee. Dowling cites scads of research that shows how building muscle, athleticism and even bone density are a lifelong process that begins when we're as young as 2 or 3. It's this unwillingness to allow girls to run around, exercise and enjoy strenuous physical activity as much as their brothers that limits women athletes today, she says—not their “natural” feminine bodies and weakness.

I wish I could live another 100 years so I could witness the moment when women start catching up to the men in things like the 100 yard dash and the Tour de France (where this year women only got a token day of racing). Because it's going to happen. People sometimes wonder where the excitement will come from as events like track and field get narrower and narrower margins for world records. Human beings have limits that do not approach Mach 4 or 0:00 on the time clock down the straightaway of a track. But I think there will be lots of excitement when men reach that plateau first, and the women are hot on their heels, and soon right there with them and then surpassing them. Oh, how I wish I could see that. 

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Miles Huston "Watering Can," 2014

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Starting the day with a handful of microaggressions. Woo.

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This Gay Stuff's Coming Out of My Ears

It's National Coming Out Day for at least a couple more hours. I’m out to pretty much everyone already as a big ol’ gay transman, so I figured I’d use the chance to write about something a little different, and Patrick Swayze.

But first, Barthes: in class the other day, someone brought up the idea of the “reality effect,” Roland Barthes’ notion of all the little details of a narrative that give it the feeling of realism. The dishes left in the sink don’t propel the story forward, but they make the scene more real, more relatable, and they helps us see ourselves inside the story’s world. Or, to put it another way, Patrick Swayze’s rippling triceps and chiseled abs certainly don’t advance the plot of Dirty Dancing, but they made 13 year-old me see myself inside Patrick Swayze. Wait, what?

This all got away from me way too quickly. I meant to say that this is a post about the pieces of media/stories that ended up being a lens for me to catch glimpses of my queer self growing up, before I knew such a self existed. Have you ever had one of those moments? You’re going along, watching a movie, a TV show, listening to a song, and then all of a sudden it just hits you: omg i could be gay; omg i could be trans; omg i could be gay again. I dunno, maybe for you it was a moment more meaningful than a piece of pop culture that got you to wake up and smell your own faggotry. But I’d bet it’s more common than people think. After all, we live in an age of Netflix binges, and if that creates more of these special moments of self-recognition, then that’s probably not a bad thing. 

Now that I’ve given you a reason to watch all seven seasons of Buffy in a row, I can give a rundown of the three epiphanic pieces of media that helped me come out to my own self: Dirty Dancing, Brokeback Mountain, and, embarrassingly, Merlin (the BBC family drama).

Nobody Puts Jane Brucker In The Corner

Moody Mount Holyoke student on the left, little ray of sunshine on the right.

I know I said above that it was Swayze’s raw masculinity that made the movie transformative for me, but strictly speaking that’s not exactly true. Yes, I obsessively watched the film over and over when I was 13, drooling over him in adoration and emulation, but it wasn’t until I bought the soundtrack and listened to this song for the umpteenth time that it hit me: this whole gay thing might be applicable here.

"Yes," by Merry Clayton is, of course, the song that plays when Lisa, Baby’s older sister, is walking down the block of staff cabins, all spruced up and looking forward to losing her virginity. I’m not sure how much of that scene stayed with me as I listened to the song on my stereo, but I loved Lisa’s tropical prints and extreme camp. And even though she was Baby’s superficial foil, she exuded a sexual confidence from a feminine perspective that was exciting to me back then. 

And sometimes it’s just really hard to tell if your “gay” epiphany means you’re a 13 year-old lesbian, or a 13 year-old faggy transman.

Only Time and Gay Cowboys Can Tell

Immediately after graduating from a very liberal East coast women’s college, I packed up everything I owned and drove to Driggs, Idaho, where an internship with a newspaper awaited me. I was incredibly lonely and out of my element among the Mormons, ski bums and grizzly bears. I rented a lot of DVDs from the public library in Alta, Wyoming, just a bike ride away across state lines under the shadow of the Tetons. Eventually I got Brokeback Mountain, and even though I’d already watched it a few times, it soon became the impetus for my second Big Gay Epiphany.

This time things got much more specific. Now I realized that I could be a man who loved other men if I wanted to. In college I’d identified as a lesbian, hoping it would make some sense, but I rarely dated and continued to feel uncomfortable in my own skin. In Idaho over the summer I’d started binding without understanding why. So when I watched Brokeback Mountain with all this weighing on my mind, it was suddenly like looking in a mirror. That was the kind of relationship I wanted—minus the fisticuffs and sheep herding.

Up until this point, I think I’d considered what it might feel like to be a man, but it’s important to note that I didn’t really crave it until I realized I could be a gay man. It’s in this way that gender identity and sexuality are actually intrinsically linked for me, and I guess that’s a coming out of sorts. The queer community makes a big deal of how separate these two things are, and I agree that it’s important that they be understood as separate. But in practice, for me anyways, I’ve identified as a gay man from the moment I started using male pronouns. It’s a crucial part of how I understand my own masculinity, and for better or worse, Brokeback Mountain helped me realize that.

And Now For Something Really Embarrassing

I love Merlin. And not the old bearded Merlin of T.H. White or Mallory; not even Mary Stewart’s badass version of Merlin in The Crystal Cave (though those books are amazing). No, for me the only Merlin is this Merlin:

I know. I know. The BBC’s Merlin has played a larger part in my coming out as a transman than I care to admit, but what can you do? The plain truth of the matter is that I named myself after the actor who plays Merlin. (OK, more specifically, I chose the name Callum after a role played by the actor seen here, Colin Morgan, in a film called “Island,” but it’s pretty close.)

It’s just that you cannot find a more feminine male character starring in his own television drama. Seriously, that’s a challenge to anyone out there. Mainlining this show on Netflix I became totally obsessed. With the stack of epiphanies I was working with, I could now not only be a gay transman, I could be as feminine as I wanted and still be a man. Merlin never uses force or violence, relying instead on his magic, wit and intelligence to get out of trouble. Plus, the overt homoeroticism of this “family” show is just … wow.

All in a day’s work for the needlessly naked Knights of Camelot.

I don’t necessarily always like the fact that so many of my really defining moments of self recognition came about because of movies and television. I prefer to think it’s in the stories and the characters that I found some sort of reflection of the person I wanted to be. And maybe that sort of visceral reaction can’t be had in books. When reading you can only picture in your head what you’ve pictured before, and it’s rare that they won’t already resemble you in some way, even more difficult to imagine a person you’ve never even conceived of before. 

I’d venture that there’s even something different in the way we watch these shows today. For two out of these three “moments” above, I have a vivid image of watching the show/movie on my laptop under the covers, curled up in my own bed. It’s a much more intimate way to experience a story than in the theater or just in a room with other people. It feels like the characters are just for you, and the message is just for you, and that can lead to some interesting personal discoveries. At least, that’s what I think.

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Last night I was out camping in the cold and damp and in the middle of nowhere. I was with a group of people that I'm really enjoying getting to know better. There was this moment when I had stepped away from the camp fire (probably to go to the bathroom behind some bushes), and I was standing off from the group in the dark. It was just me in this open clearing under the really exceptionally bright moon. And this intense happiness crept up on me, that was like 'hey, I'm a man today, and I'm here.' Because I made all these choices and decisions and changes to myself, and sometimes it's hard to think back and remember the uncertainty surrounding it all, or the doubts so many people voiced. But more specifically, it's hard for me to remember where I found the courage to do so, to so thoroughly alter the way I'm perceived. Sometimes I think I wouldn't be able to do it again if I had to -- that the amount of energy and will power and fortitude it took to do that was a once in a lifetime thing, and I've used it for good, as it were. 

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i now know that real fermented fish soup smells like manure and tastes absolutely delicious