Housekeeping, 4.13.08

+ news +
Queer woman in NYC?,
feminist porn,
and gender inequity in Whoville for the week.

Ubergratz to tokenstr8dude for his post; please welcome him to BTB!

Sincerely,
ts

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Askfannie: UnDyked!

Dear Fannie,

I’m a lesbian in my mid-twenties. I’ve been in a relationship with my partner for two years now. We’re what you would call a stereotypical U-Haul Lesbian couple. We fell in love fast, and moved in fast. Recently, my partner has been struggling with her identity, and dropped the bomb last week. She considers herself a trans man and wants to transition to male. I’m a lesbian, and I fell in love with a woman, not a man. I love my partner, but I’m not interested in being straight!

Losing Lesbianism

LL,

So, your lesbian life-mate’s announcement of his trans-identity has rocked your relationship and your own identity. The realization that a partner is trans can greatly alter the dynamics of a relationship. Not only in between invested parties, but also how that relationship is made legible to society at large. Coming out as a lesbian, while often difficult for many people, also grants those new inductees access to a culture, community, and identity previously unavailable. An identity few are ready to give up idly. But this is one of those instances when queers can be astoundingly unqueer.

Gay people have a tendency to be infatuated with the idea that once you go gay, there ain’t no other way. We are so ready to claim sexuality as fluid to entice our hetero counterparts to the way of the fey, but the moment that we lose one of our queer sistahs (I use the word in the most gender-neutral drag queen way possible) to the straight and narrow, we’re right back to claiming a fixed queer identity. As queer people we have to acknowledge, that in the same way that it’s possible for a person to steer queer, it’s equally possible for someone to make straight. Now your situation is a little more complicated, LL because your partner’s sexual orientation isn’t changing, it’s his gender. However… in some ways, you are being asked to expand your own sexual horizons.

I understand that you may feel betrayed by your partner for not disclosing this information when you first entered into a relationship. But it’s important to remember that your partner didn’t do this maliciously to harm you in any way. In fact, this realization has very little to do with you. It certainly effects you, but your partner would have discovered that he is trans one way or the other; with or without you.

So the question boils down to love. It’s not about identities that one previously subscribed to. Do you love your partner? Is your love for you partner greater than the mean looks you may get from your lesbian friends when you bring your new husband to the Estrogen Folk Music Festival. Because if it isn’t, then you may have Uhauled too fast, even for lesbians. You mention in your question that you're "a lesbian. I fell in love with a woman, not a man." Well, this just in, LL. You did fall in love with a man, you just didn't realize it.

A side note: If you’re concerned about your sexual relationship and how that may be effected by your partner’s transition, you may want to try and branch out and experiment with strap-ons and other similar sex toys. That way your sex life can transition as your partner does. Also note that not all trans men get bottom surgery. So it all depends on what your partner feels is necessary, it’s very possible that you may end up in a “heterosexual”-double-vagina relationship.

And don’t worry, even if you and your husband are read as “straight,” a trans man partnered with his lesbian wife is still pretty queer in my book.

++
fiercely,
fannie


send your questions to askfannie@belowthebelt.org

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Baby Sacrificing Lesbian Vampires: Halloween for Queens Part 1

This is my obligatory Halloween article. I'm writing it a bit early because, to be honest, I want to remind people to start getting ready. Halloween is the best night of the year and half arsed costumes make me want to immolate people.

There's probably a few people out there wondering how I'm intending to link Halloween to Religion. There's more than likely a lot of you wondering what this has got to do with Queer. Well, to start off I'm going to talk a bit about what Halloween actually is. Do not worry, the ever elusive point will eventually turn up.

Halloween is a, nominally, Christian festival that marks the evening before "All Hallows Day". All Hallows Day is a Catholic celebration of all the saints, known or unknown, who've achieved union with God in heaven. The day afterwards, All Souls Day, is for those dead people who are in purgatory and still working their way up to Sainthood. These three dates mark the beginning of November, a month that is dedicated to those Catholics who have left the body on a permanent basis.

However, this is almost certainly not what the majority of celebrants are thinking of. Halloween for the majority is about dressing up, telling ghost stories and waging anonymous war on those old people who don't distribute candy. "Mischief" is enacted and we all dress like monsters, saints or celebrities. It's a time where people can be safely perverse, on the condition that they put that perverseness away at the end of the night. It's a similar type of thing to the Medieval Feast of Fools, Ancient Roman Saturnalia and Ancient Greek Dionysia. All of these festivals involved the poor mocking the rich, women mocking men and individual bucking at state. But, unlike these other festivals, Halloween isn't just an outlet for the oppressed. It's also an outlet for fear and the fear inducing.

I'm sure you can all see the link I'm trying to make here. Halloween is about the oppressed and the feared and queer people are sort of oppressed and feared. Big whoop. I'm sure neither of these things are particularly revelatory. But, I want to explore a bit further the way that queer action can be seen as monstrous and, god help you all, then go on to suggest what I think we should do with that knowledge.

If we want to talk about fear, a good place to start it Freud's concept of "the uncanny". Uncanniness is a quality belonging to an item that it both familiar and unfamiliar. Dolls, those staples of childhood horror stories and adult phobia, are uncanny because they seem both human and inhuman at the same time. Masks, a personal fear of my daddy, are uncanny for the same reason. They are not alive, but they can seems alive. And, for a lot of straight people, queer living is frightening for the same reason. We are males who are not men, women who are not wives. We wear the faces of human beings, but behind them we keep alien thoughts. To prove my point I want to show a brief selection of quotes that link gender deviance to the occult, death and *thunder rolls* the dark.

"Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."

-Pat Robertson, vocal right wing "Christian".

"Homosexuals are not monogamous. They want to destroy the institution of
marriage... It will destroy the Earth."

-James Dobson,

"You ask anybody that's investigated homosexual murders and without
question they are the most violent...even the sex act itself is violent
in homosexuals."

-Tony Perkins, President of Family Research Council

"The perversion that follows homosexuality is bestiality and then human
sacrifice and cannibalism."

-Barbara Blewster, a member of the Church of Latter-Day Saints and the Arizona State Legislature

"I have learned that the radical, perverted homosexuals and lesbians are
already promoting their '2000 Disney Gay Day'...they are timing it to occur in June -- right when children out of school will be flocking to Disney-owned parks! This proves the true intent of these homosexuals: they are after our children!!"

-Bonnie Mawyer, wife of Christian Action Network founder

"Homosexuality is Satan's diabolical attack upon the family that will.
not only have a corrupting influence upon our next generation, but it will also bring down the wrath of God upon America."

-Jerry Falwell

Well, I'm approaching the end of the article and I haven't actually got to my point yet. I'll continue my train of thought later in the month. For now, all I've really proved is that gay people are a bit like monsters, sortof. Next time I'll be discussing how to use that knowledge to undermine western thought, disrupt the family and spread HIV.

Or, if they want monsters, we can give them monsters.

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Housekeeping, 8.3.07

+ news +
Sandy case,
the homosexual panic no more?,
and not queer enough for the week.

Sincerely,
ts

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AskFannie: Labelmaker

Dear Fannie,

I am a 23 year old lesbian who occasionally sleeps with men. While the queer world usually understands and accepts this, I find it difficult around my heterosexual friends. They like to label me as "bisexual" or "bicurious" when that is not the case at all. Why does everyone in the free world feel the need to put me under some sort of label?

Queer and Proud

As talkingtranny addressed in her earlier post, labels make us feel safe. They offer us a little bit of space that we can call our own. They help us form connections with people like ourselves. They help us create communities and safe spaces. They allow us to form identities to rally around. Labels do a lot of good things, but there are also downsides to this culture of rigid identities.

When one defines identities it often becomes imperative to define what doest not fit in this identity. This process of de-identification is what leads to a lot of needless squabbling over who deserves entry into the assorted identities out there. I find it interesting that there seems to be an over enthusiastic interest on the part of straight people in the sex lives of queer people. The ever so politically correct terminology of LGBT seems so clinical. It seems quite odd that we feel a need to develop specific labels and completely seperate identities to describe a man-who-sleeps-with-men, and a woman-who-sleeps-with-women, and a man-or-woman-who-sleeps-with-men-or-women, and a woman-who-used-to-be-a-man or a man-who-used-to-be-a-woman… *whew* that’s exhausting! I personally prefer queer to the acronym, which I think speaks to how society requires non-straight sexualities to be categorized, classified, and studied because we’re oh so strange and dangerous. Hide your children!

And in your case Q&P, despite self-identifying as a lesbian, the fact that so much attention has been directed at the few men in your sexual history speaks to a deeper issue. Queer people, for some reason, have to “prove” their sexuality through empirical evidence. We are asked to divulge our entire sexual histories, fantasies, dreams, aspirations, experiences in order to be correctly cataloged into our proper label. But, we don’t seem to have the same kind of interest in straight sexuality. This kind of discourse implies that straight sexuality is somehow ordinary, uniform, and the status quo. Now, I’ve read enough of Savage Love to know that there are PLENTY of kinky straight folk out there. And that’s the thing… sexuality isn’t limited to what gender or sex your partner is. There are so many axes on which sexuality is influenced: age, race, ethnicity, language, body shape, height, personality, socio-economic class, etc.

It’s not enough to think of sexuality as a spectrum, with a b-line from straight to gay. There are an infinite number of variable axes that run through sexuality it offers an infinite selection of sexualities. So, Q&P, I hope that answers your question about why people keep trying to peg you down like a butterfly pinned in a museum display. But I also don’t think you should be afraid of labels. They can be very powerful, invigorating, and empowering. It’s important to embody the mindset that labels of course help define us, but aren’t the be-all end-all. So saying you’re a lesbian that occasionally sleeps with men isn’t so much of an oxymoron anymore.

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Don't feed the queers.

Remember criticism that shows like Friends and Seinfeld received in terms of their homogeneity (“How can a show based in New York City never have any people of color?!”)? While any given show might have good writing and directing and what have you, it can be pretty important to present a convincing portrayal of what’s being performed through the look and feel of the performers themselves.

Because Work Out has depressingly failed me as it finished its season, I’m moving on. It’s time to talk about what’s really important; the staple of my everyday television diet: The Food Network.

The Food Network boasts a number of incredible winners and a handful of terrible losers. Despite the fact that the Network is about food, the channel is entirely founded upon culture and old, new, and transformed representations of culture as demonstrated through the process of culinary preparation and how it is ultimately enjoyed. And by the way, it’s really queer. But I’ll get to that later. First, a quick snapshot:

I used to come home from work and watch Giada De Laurentiis as I settled down from a hard day. With her carefully applied makeup and low cut dresses, Giada prepares her food and invites the camera to zoom onto her hands as she chops; the camera lens dwells on her lips as she consumes high-fashion meals and sugary desserts. Though I admit that I mostly hate her for the implicit classism which her recipe choices exude across the television set; she’s filmed like a porn star – delicately masked with a sheeshy, “proper” demeanor – and it’s fun. Playboy Bunny Delaurentis.

After changing into something more comfortable and preparing some food myself, I’d eat my dinner with the queen bee of cuisine, Rachael Ray. All hail -- seriously. Rachael’s brought back the talkative Italian housewife to the mainstream, this time adding some serious tom girl action. What a tom girl. She’s cheap (or at least tries to convince us she’s on a budget), eager to roll back her sleeves and get dirty, and she can probably hold her liquor better than most.

After Rachael, I’d catch a little of Emeril. The biggest loser award, hands-down, goes to Emeril. What a tool. Every time he chops, stirs, sautés, or seasons I want to projectile vomit on the screen. Not one moment, not one motion of his show is uncalculated – for Emeril, it’s all about masculinity. When he cooks his food he struts around the kitchen; he flaunts his dominance over the raw meat and vegetables; moans “Oh, baby!” when pleasured by his own work; and occasionally even drops an awkward sexual innuendo about him actually getting laid. The kicker is that he’s threatened by Rachael’s success. During his show after he cut something cleverly, I actually heard him say: “How’s that, Rachael?" Awkward. Emeril, it’s not a competition if she isn’t trying.

But I guess my overarching point here is that to the naked eye, the Food Network seems pretty whitewashed. And according to the content of the shows, it is. But the irony, here, is that the Food Network has a huge queer following. Almost every homo I know watches the channel, has a favorite chef or show, and creamed themselves when Rachael and Giada faced off on Celebrity Iron Chef (Giada was SO bitter). The gays that love Giada are usually bitchy, classist queens; the mo’s that are into Rachael are typically dykes or butch-bent trannies and other queers; the followers of Sandra Lee are often the diva-loving, cher-worshipping, bleached-hair Marys.

But the question then, I guess, is how did this happen? How does the Food Network, of all things, become queered? Do we as queer viewers just automatically queer everything we see, regardless of the intention behind the viewed performance? Perhaps. But I can hardly believe that we did this all by ourselves. My theory? There’s something a little queer over at the Food Network headquarters. Every time the Barefoot Contessa invites her male floral arranger over for dinner with his “good friend”, I smile a little bit. As the Food Network wrestles to manage its viewership over time, from the truly closed-minded in middle America to the flaming queers across the country, my guess is that we’re going to start seeing a little more gayness each day. So keep tuning in, dear queers. As long as we’re cooking together, we’ll stay together. Until we have an openly queer cast member on the Food Network, feel free to relish in AskFannie’s version of Rachael. And what a beautiful vision it is.

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For a queer Mexico

So it seems to me that, so far, I am the most (for lack of a better term) straight-edge on this blog. And separately, perhaps not quite queer enough. It's something that a lot of us men-lovin', queer-supportin' ladies deal with. It's the struggle with knowing how to identify personally (generally as the majority), how to support those who identify differently (generally as marginalized identities), how to fight against those who don't support those who identify differently (the punks), and then how to meet a decent person these days (not easy).

Then I think of an increasingly favorable way to cope – just not identifying. What's the point? We all know that we've had urges to bat for both teams. And let's hope it stays that way. So, I'll be the first one on the page to lay it out – I'm in a straight relationship. And yes, you guessed it, with one of those Mexican men I mentioned in the last post. I'm laying it all on the table now because it occurred to me this is an important factor in the way that I digest my experience living in Zacatecas. Transitioning from being a single American to a non-single American woman in Mexico has provided me with very different experiences. But that will probably be addressed more in-depth later.

So what the hell does any of this have to do with gender and queer issues in Mexico? In terms of dialogue? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. That's because the majority of the people here just aren't thinkin' about it. I say the “majority” because it is a rare thing that I come across a little dialogue in my daily, weekly, or even monthly life. If I was living in a bigger city it would be different, but for now I become frustrated when I try to personally or socially address gender (and especially queer) issues. I think I was (surprisingly) spoiled by a certain pocket in U.S. culture and a more personal social circle that was more aware of these topics; I slammed a bit too hard into a metaphoric wall when I moved here.

I met this guy at a carne asada last week and he was describing one of the few gay clubs that exist here and it hit me – I've lived here for almost a year and I have yet to go out to a gay or lesbian bar. Why? Well, like I said, being in a relationship (for the good and the bad) allows you to not feel guilty for having a more relaxed social life. If I actually went out to bars and clubs on a regular basis maybe this detail would be different but I'm still trying to figure out this separation that exists in my social life that I never experienced before. But in the end, it shouldn't be so easy to exclude this part of the Zacatecas night life from one's social scene.

As one queer-identified friend responded when I asked him to come visit me, "Don't Mexicans hate gays?" Then the answer occurred to me: “Don't a lot of people hate gays?” Yes, you will probably find that a large percentage of Mexicans are uncomfortable or in disagreement with a gay lifestyle…but no, Mexicans don't "hate gays". They're not used to it. They have no experience with the idea. They live in a VERY different society than the one that the majority of our readers live in. They're vehemently taught by their political leaders, the church, and their elderly relatives that it's different, weird, and – yes— morally wrong. It's just that here, there is a lack of support, a lack of a place for gay culture in this society. You have to be REALLY out, or REALLY not out at all. There isn't much of an in between for identity growth because the culture just ain't havin' it. I've heard more than once that "gay" actually means having a penthouse and BMW in New York City…it's the idea of being gay that exists here rather than the actual thing.

In a city that is 98% Catholic, you have to give a little credit to the fact that this country just doesn't have the foundation in its politics, culture, or social values to keep in step with the good ol' U. S. of A. One of my co-workers once asked if I thought there were a lot more "gays" (as they are commonly referred to) on campus these days. And I said no, I think there are just more that finally feel comfortable in their own skin. The thing is, folks, a lot of times people think of "queer culture" but what they are really thinking about is "American queer culture". There's no room to talk about things like semantics, adoption rights, or anti-discrimination policies- we gotta get people used to the general idea before we can ask for their support on what we consider to be inherent expectations.

But hey, civil unions were legalized in Mexico City last November. And the truth of the matter is, you gotta start somewhere.

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