Pi Love, Preface (Do You Still Believe in Fairies?)

2011-06-27-Gay_Pride_Parade_NYC_2011_H   Another Pride Season came and went this summer as it does every summer.  What does that mean anymore?  Did you go?  Were you inspired?  The Homocorporate Jamboree is part of Americana now.  Should we still bother to believe in the Gay Holiday Spirit?  Should we yet look upon the trails of rainbow glitter, dusting the urine-soaked sidewalks with wide-eyed wonder imagining the glorious, radical fairy that may have left us a shimmery trail of hope for profound subversion and true transgressive potential?  Do Towanda and the goddess still swell within your vagina as big dykes on big bikes rumble past, engines rattling your diaphragm?  Are you truly Proud?  Or has the HRC and Absolut Vodka stolen our magic beans forever?

When was the last time you truly felt that gushy, choked-up, heart-pride at the beauty of the solidarity of a bunch of freaky misfits engaging in the simple, profound bravery of resistance?  I’m not talking about that feeling that you get when you’re at some awesome, completely self-aware activist fundraiser, watching yet another performance by that local queer artist that seems to land every activist fundraiser gig, that you’re secretly not into, but you can’t wait to tweet about it anyway.  I’m not talking about facebook proud. I am talking about that rare moment when you suddenly realize that you are in that spontaneous, organic location of choice… providential, morality-forming choice.  And you choose correctly, courageously, with your whole heart.  This can happen when you simply chose to be utterly possessed and cosmically aligned to the unexpectedly compelling queer performance art. In that moment, when you watched that aging trans-woman, whose voice was cracking while you were sobbing, sing Christina Aguilera’s “I Am Beautiful”,  you understood, completely, you might kill or die for her because nothing else is as important to vanquishing evil in the world as her bravery.  You let that experience change you.  Good and evil may again reveal themselves when you choose to stay on the front line of a riot because you watched the cops, in full riot gear mace the people standing next to you, who (not surprisingly) happened to be transwomen, and your initial impulse to provide care or help them escape, transformed into fanatical awe, watching five of them simultaneously draw mace from their own purses to return the gesture.  The fire-hoses did not move you.  And maybe, at some point, you saw, in an instant, an unlikely opportunity to actualize a fantasy of a physical sanctuary and community venue for the purpose of fomenting that exact feeling of pride and that rare potential solidarity you feared was fading with each passing Pride Season?  You knew you could actually do something real for the community you have most admired and loved, but it was a huge risk.  Would you take it?  Even if it meant there would be nothing else in your life?  And you could lose everything?  Is that swelling in your heart real or are you just having an mid-life identity crisis?  Does it matter?  Because if you truly believe in the Spirit of Queer Past and you let it fill you with gooey psuedo-nationalistic, epic We Are The Champions Pride, is it any less of a miracle when what you envisioned actually manifests in the world? Is there anything else that you are doing with your life that might end up being as important to you as creating something that touches others and changes things, just a little?  What are you willing to give up to see what your heart desperately wants in the world?  To overthrow cynicism, even for a tiny fraction of your life?  images-4

Queers aren’t what they used to be.  It’s probably time to refresh the taxonomy of queer.  To me, it feels like a purely emotional and moral classification.  Anyone who is not an asshole, but must also be some some sort of awesome.  This is important because queer still has potential.  Queer still antagonizes the foundational assumptions of the dominant, Western, cultural paradigm – sex and gender.  The regulatory norms of the dominant culture still fuck everybody up.  They also undergird the principles of colonial capitalism which are, at heart, paternalistic and cause unimaginable destruction and suffering globally. This is not friendly paternalism, dad is an evil dick.  Perhaps you’re wondering what this has to do with Gay Pride.  The only thing that has ever kept the zombie apocalypse at bay throughout human history is the magnetism of the outcast, the gumption of the underdog, pirate mojo, and the “Pride” of moral certitude in acts of solidarity and resistance to a common evil.  Being gay has become kind of boring…and worse than that, lots and lots of the younger generation of queers seem to be pretty ok with that. The rich, old Republican dykes and fags are a lost cause, but it’s the kids I’m worried about.  My worst fear is that they never get to experience that cool feeling that is sort of like when a group of improbable heroes in a cheesy action movie are strutting together in slow motion to face impossible odds.  That feeling actually happens in real life and it is the only thing that has ever organized people and started movements.  Did anybody remember to pass the torch?

I will be the first to admit that I am one of those disparaging, crotchety, aging Gen-X’er that too often and too vocally laments the loss of the nineties.  I bark and bark about the demise of the music and the politics, the fashion and the spirit of that decade.  I growl about “kids today” and I confess to having called them whiny, overly sensitive, boring, and mostly big pussies. (Don’t talk to me about my use of the word pussy.)  And I am not alone in freaky, wrinkly-tattoo, used-to-be-angry-now-I’m-just-grumpy geezertown.  Courtney Love wrote a cute little song a couple years ago about (in my reading) an aging nineties rock star’s annoyance toward Millennial’s insipid pop, called Skinny Little Bitch.  A lyrical sampling…

And you would be oh so dumb to fuck with me
Cause baby you’re much too young to end up with me…

In my vile sex horror and my cheap drug hell
I am all the things you’ll never live to tell
And you will never see the light
I’ll just obscure it out of spite…

Skinny Little Bitch, Skinny Little Bitch… tumblr_lgocat5ryr1qdhwt8

God I love that woman.  I have also listened to human interest stories on NPR that suggest that the lack of unstructured playtime and over-protective or indulgent parenting might be contributing to a generation of young adults with stunted social coping skills and underdeveloped life strategies.  NPR is always so polite.  But then I read Jack Halberstam’s recent blog, “You Are Triggering Me: the Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger, and Trauma” which largely echoes many of my own complaints. As I was reading it, I found it wholly entertaining.  Yeah! Put a trigger warning on my fat, dyke, tranny, hairy tits and ass!  Yeah!  I was completely ready to roll my eyes at any critiques.  But, I read about four or five responses to his article and found, at least, a handful of compelling counterpoints, most significantly that this esteemed, published, queer theorist in academia leveled critiques at the proliferation of rhetorical constraints on academic queer theory ironically created largely by the work of established queer theorists.  This started an internal critique of my own belligerence.  I realized that I have friends in their twenties, many of whom have heard my rants, who I like and respect very much.  I have experienced a great deal of intelligence and wit from some young people recently.  It is not entirely helpful for me to bully youth into adversity or even make them do pushups every time they whine.  I don’t want to be an old hater.  But, something is nagging at me.  Something is missing that I don’t think has ever been missing in a young generation.  What is it?  Am I just out of touch?

Also, let us not forget to place this whole polemic squarely in the unavoidable poo-pile of privilege into which all mostly white, largely academic, socially urbanized and queerified mo’s are sure to step and then act like everybody’s got shit on their shoes.   Young, educated privileged queers, are you sure you have sufficient training and experience to create a fluffy cloud of verbal prophylactics that speaks to and for everyone in the community?  And hey, grumpy old gender studies professor, have you done your due diligence and qualified your curmudgeonry with deconstructive, anti-colonial critique?  I will point out that nobody in this debate is calling young transwomen, especially poor transwomen, or transwomen of color overly sensitive.  And I’d wager that they are probably not present at many backyard safety summits that alter queer custom and speech for their benefit.  And that is because transwomen of color do not now, nor did they forty-five years ago, have the luxury of expecting a world free from potential harm.  They are still fighting for that.  While all the gays are getting married and adopting babies or riding their fixed-gears in a polyamorous peloton, transwomen are still fighting for basic human consideration.  In case you missed the first day of Queer History 101, it was transwomen who fought back at Stonewall in 1969.  A couple years earlier, it was transwomen who rioted at Compton Cafeteria in San Francisco.  It was these events that precipitated the great, slogging, back-biting circus that has been the GLBT Movement for the past forty-five years.  Transwomen were fighting against police harassment and brutality.  They were fighting against housing and employment discrimination.  They were fighting for their personal safety and individual freedom.  And we find out from Time Magazine this year, that transgender issues are “America’s next civil rights frontier”.  The concerns discussed in the article are exactly the same as they were half a century ago.  “It Gets Better”, but not for everyone.

The Time article begins with, “Nearly a year after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, another social movement is poised to challenge deeply held cultural beliefs.”  There are so many things wrong with that sentence, that I’ve been unable to move my head for a half-hour trying to figure out where to begin.  I’m not going to bitch about Time or the journalist.  They both get the ‘way-to-go mainstream publication’ pat on the head.  You have exceeded my expectations of you which are zero.  However, queers, I have higher expectations of you.  It is your fault this sentence was published.  First of all, it would appear that the gay and lesbian agenda of legalized marriage is being juxtaposed to simply being transgendered as similar challenges to dominant culture.  This might imply that the movements have something to do with each other, but wait, “another social movement is poised”.  This mainstream, and traditionally conservative publication has casually named something that should cause shame in the hearts of every Wells Fargo banking, Chipoltle eating, rainbow bracelet wearing, Pride Parade enjoying mother fucker.  There was never a T in GLBT.  Transpeople and gender deviants have always born the brunt of societal discrimination, violence, and exclusion, not to mention all of these things from within their own supposed movement as well.  They started a movement that has been so shitty to them, that it is not surprising at all to find that mainstream America thinks it’s a brand new “frontier”.

To those of you that believe in the efficacy of an incremental civil rights strategy…well, yes, certain things do change, but it appears to be at the cost of reinforcing by renegotiating a timelessly brutal matrix of oppressive power dynamics.  By simply expanding the obligatory guest list of those vying for a seat at the table of dominant class entitlements, you just make the bouncers bigger assholes.  The categories of exclusions become ever more specialized and aggressively policed (often most enthusiastically by the newly entitled).  Racism and classism, you are like gravity, nothing on earth escapes your force.  Gender, however it is perceived internally and externally has everything to do with everything you do every day everywhere.  These mega-categories influence the power dynamic of every single human interaction we have.  And no matter how much you think has changed in the last fifty years, the dominant model of power in the Western World has really not changed at all.  That’s why getting married became so much more important to gays than any other queer issue that had anything to do with poverty, race, or gender presentation.  But I know why those gays fought for that.  They were willing to leave the dominant regulatory norms in place and assimilate as much as possible to the dominant model, to gain access to not only legal entitlements, but a certain gain in social cachet. That happens in all social justice movements.  But, something sincerely troubles me about the queers that seem so aware of all of these easily identifiable problems with mainstream G&L politics.  Something diabolical has seized the great tentacles of traditional, American, clumsy, shit-kickin oppression, against which it was so satisfying to mobilize, and trained them into millions of tiny, wiggly, tickly tadpoles of easily consumable, oppression-friendly, magic chicken fingers that make complacency delicious.

The real reason that some of us old nineties activists get so grumpy about the younger generation of activists is because it actually seems to us that oppression in the fringe is getting more severe, and the global situation is becoming more dangerous.  When we look for signs of clever and functional resistance, we often only find facebook links to Jon Stewart or Beyonce.  I honestly don’t have any answers.  It’s my fault, too.  The main reason I started this blog is that I’ve been having a very difficult time finding my shine.  I don’t know how to begin to fight the situation we are in.  I have been transitioning for almost four years.  I look like a middle-aged white man.  Perhaps the absence of daily micro-aggresions has dried up my access to outsider magic.  At least I know what I’m missing.  Nothing can take away my personal history and my memories.  Or my stories.  That’s what this personal project is for.  Right now, it is all that I have to give.  I am hoping, by the end of telling my story, I will have more.  However, to those adults who were born after I graduated high school, you killed rock ‘n’ roll, so I have to think that you don’t know what you’re missing.  Perhaps you think my emphasis on the emotive power of the Spirit of Queer Past is corny.  It is.  But, I got to live a real life Fairy tale.  I know a story seems anticlimactic after all of my proselytizing , but a good story is a much more efficient way to pass on what you think is important and it is the best reason to risk it all.

 

So clap for Tinkerbell.  joker-clapping-hollywoods-best-unscripted-moments  And I will tell you a story of fairy dust and pirates, real heroes and real villains, and destiny made.  And just like a creepy, animated Tom Hanks movie that makes you cry when the kid hears the jingle bell or a creepy Tom Hanks prison movie that makes you cry when you realize that a death row prisoner is kinda like Jesus or something, you will get that cheesy, childlike gut rush of endorphins and believe again in queer miracles.

This will be the story of Pi.  It was a queer nightclub in Minneapolis that I began to envision in early 2006.  It closed in late 2008. Though short-lived, the enormity of the experience has delayed it’s telling until now.  I will try to be more diligent about posting the chapters of the story in a more timely manner.  I honestly have just felt intimidated about writing it.  I don’t want to fuck it up.

Butch syndrome – DSM XIII, Lord of the Rings Edition

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Make a peace sign with both hands, facing yourself.

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Turn both sets of fingers toward each other, turning the right hand counterclockwise a quarter turn and smash the crotch of each finger scissor together as if mimicking two women smashing vulvas in mid-air as a viable sex act.Photo on 2014-05-16 at 12.35 #2

 

Now, affect a look of condescending befuddlement and repeat this motion over and over while asking your hot, femme girlfriend, in the presence of her hot, femme ex-girlfriend, “What did you two used to do together?”

Two things: A, number one, this actually happened.  A butch dyke I know, in her thirties, who does not otherwise seem mentally deficient actually said and did this in front two beautiful, intelligent, queer, femme women…relatively recently.

B, number two, if you didn’t notice that the tip of my left index finger is amputated (caught in the lift-gate of a truck) and that my right middle finger is permanently crooked and gnarled (played too much softball and basketball), go back and check out how butch I am.

Is there anything hotter than a butch?  Our insecurities, neediness, jealousy, infidelity, mood swings, and digestive problems are irresistible in the right black t-shirt. Don’t forget our giant dyke ass trying to get into some boy jeans.   Seriously, how do we ever get laid?  Chicks fucking dig us, that’s how.

See what I did there…talking about ‘chicks’ as if I wasn’t one.  Butches do that.  We get to do a lot of shit that cisboys wish they could.  When my current girlfriend has dated men, she dated tall, thin, good-looking, well-behaved, sensitive men who respected her boundaries and were good in bed.  On the other hand, the butches she’s dated have been a variety of short, fat, awkward, crass, demanding, ill-behaved, or bad in bed, and she’s totally hooked.  Mostly on me, cuz I’m the king.

I’m what you might consider to be a “classic butch”.  All other butch types are derivative of this model.  Younger butches nowadays often opt out of this category, I imagine because of its highly demanding skill set requirements and the fact that you can’t smoke in bars anymore.  As a paradigm, we of the “classic” tribe are proud, epic caricatures unto ourselves.  We invented the nod, the swagger, and the smirk. As the most ridiculous of all lesbian stereotypes, we also suffer and display, most acutely, the common and highly annoying symptoms of what I commonly refer to as the Butch Syndrome.  Though I’m positive I did not coin this term, I am confident of my expert insight into butch dumbassery.  Let us speak now in sweeping generalizations for comic effect.

The following list of symptoms and anti-social behaviors is not meant to be exhaustive nor all-encompassing.  It is intended to be a helpful diagnostic tool for exasperated femmes and egomaniacal, self-centered douchebags who consider themselves butch.

then I am yours, my lady

then I am yours, my lady

  1.   Obsession with straight girls.  (Can lead to stalking, bad poetry, lifting objects that are far too heavy for you, and many failed gay marriages.)  This is just a sad, sad story.  Butches embody, perform, and present masculinity every day.  We have striven to perfect that masculinity despite parental objection, relentless ritual public emasculation, and a lifetime of tiny little heartbreaks every time we think about that pretty girl we will never have (which is roughly 5000 times a day if you have a crush.)  Classic butches are usually really good at being boys by an early age.  We are often better at being boys than the boys.  Then boys hit puberty and gain height and strength, while we get tits and ass, and then a dark, mocking hate moves in and takes up half of our intestines for the rest of our life.  Despite all of this, butches cannot help getting crushes on inaccessible cute little girls.  My first was Deborah Hansen in kindergarten.  She was the prettiest and smallest girl in school.  I would protect her from the boys, and carry her stuff, and be her confidant.  She was the first in a very long line of pretty straight girls to utter these six soul-crushing words to me, “I wish you were a boy.”  Sad face.  Here’s the thing.  I think there are a variety of modes of attraction in life.  There’s the kind when somebody smells like you want to shove your ovaries in their vagina, the kind no one talks about that makes you feel like a dirty, dirty whore, and the most common kind for butches and probably for everyone, the one that makes you feel like the person you want to be. This one starts before puberty when we are all newly cultivating our little gender identities.  We are learning our cultural paradigms of gender, power, and relationships just like our ABC’s and we are exposed to a staggering array of gender acquisition stimuli.  By four or five, we know about marriage and courtship and romance and that it is supposed to happen for a boy and a girl.  The girls love us butches, especially, though.  Our fresh, earnest, awkward masculinity is completely endearing to an overly objectified pretty straight girl.  It actually seems more authentic.  We are often the alphas in our pack and not nearly as tedious as boys with penises.  (This continues into adulthood.)  But they also understand that we are not appropriate public mates.  So they love to play house with us and make us their secret, fake boyfriends (also as adults).  In private, we are the fairy tale, the star-crossed archetypes.  Both parties are happy to contribute to this mutually delusional made-for-TV dramatic mini-series.  Come on boys, you know you’ve done some cheesy-ass shit for some pretty, pretty straight girl.  We are the boyfriends with no flaws, except for that one tiny void between our legs.  Even at an early age all the way to an embarrassing maturity, you know how this is going to end.  While you are wooing her, you feel like the hero, the epitome of masculinity.  It is an identity suspended in time and space, and a great way to avoid anything that would be healthy for your self-esteem.  This is a diagnostically common way to cope with the cosmic injustice that is our gender nightmare.  I think, even as a kid, we realize that we aren’t going to get the same human perks as the dominant paradigm, no matter how adept we are at the assimilation of it.  I think our identity fractures into the person we have to be for our parents, the person we have to be so we won’t get beat up, and sometimes for a few blissful weeks, months, even years, we are the person who fights the good fight, often in the name of our beautiful princess.  Kids pretend that they are superheroes all the time.  Butches just get to do it our whole life.  With a straight girl, we get to beat the boy for the affections of the girl that still wishes we were a boy.  It’s a sick, self-hating, delicious fetish that we cannot resist.  We nurture our martyr complexes, secretly learn how to fix things, do tricks, and bake their favorite cupcakes.  We study their dream men and perfect our affectation of just that.  How many of you live for that moment when she looks at you like you’re a fucking wizard because you included her favorite, obscure song on a mixed tape?  Duh, you overheard her telling her friends that when you were skulking around the corner like a crazy person.  You are hers to use, to torture, to disappoint.  You will crawl through dog shit to bring her a latte (soy, most likely).  If she doesn’t leave you in a couple weeks for some hairy, smelly vegan cisboy that sometimes feels guilty about getting a blow job, your identity will eventually start to feel flat, the magic bubble pops.  You even may start to feel quite resentful that she has come to expect you to do all the chores, pay for everything, and be ok that she never wants to have sex with you anymore, even though that’s the way you set it up with all your martyr bullshit, dumbass…and then… what’s that?  Is that another damsel in distress?  This brings me to…
  2. Serial Monogamy.  (Can lead to extensive and complicated community shunning, sustaining physical injuries or property damage, loss of cars, great apartments, beloved pets, and favorite sex toys, also fantasies of sudden death or living alone in the woods forever just to avoid breaking up with yet another person.)  You can prattle on to me all you want about some new-fangled polyamorous genderqueer disturbance in the normative gender binary within the queer universe, but I have yet to see any significant decline in cliches and impulsive commitment decisions.  Serial monogamy is an embarrassing lesbian punch-line on par with softball and mullets.  Though the appearance of mullets is largely ironic nowadays, (except for that exotic older subset of butches who own Honda Viragos and all kinda look like Steven Tyler from Aerosmith) we will never completely rid ourselves of dykes who wear their white visors upside-down or our proverbial U-hauls.  I did four minutes of google research on the topic and it was mostly articles on how this is becoming the norm for straight couples, too, and perhaps it’s logical to think we are evolving past traditional monogamy enough to see that there’s more than just one soulmate for everyone, and we’re reconciling our animal instincts to have multiple sexual partners with the societal courtesy of monogamy, and blahblah more poopywords.  Serial monogamy  happens, especially for butches, because we, more than cismen, strive to perfect an ideal of masculinity.  Stay with me.  When we are developing our young gender identities, we do not merely emulate, we absorb and begin to embody an amalgam of a wide array of masculine archetypes, characteristics, body language, and eccentricities.  I think, because we learn early that we are not going to get to be normal boys, we commonly respond by stoically accepting the challenge to outdo boys in all conceivable categories.  It’s why we’re so good at shit.  Impressing girls and humiliating boys is what we do.  We are also not tethered to normal boy rules.  We just get to go ahead and be a character from middle earth. As such, honor is very important to us…as an ideal.  And that is because, that is what makes us a knight.  Along with this honor thing is that whole marriage obsession that is really one of the cornerstones of Western ideology.  We do not have a choice in the models that inform our formation.  Plus (see symptom #1) we are instantly devoted to the person that makes us feel like the manly superhero we aspire to be.  Often, it is a pretty feminine girl, the rights to whom we would like possess as soon as possible, who is working out her own gender perfection issues with us.  Then…omg can’t stop touching your vagina…camping…meeting family…cats…furniture building…new clothes…new dietary restrictions that you pretend you always had…more cats…you’ve built your hobbit hole in the shire.  You all know what that feels like, the high of summer camp sorcery, the utopia of gender perfection.  Obviously, this is not sustainable.  But the “it’s not you, it’s me” breakup is exceptionally valid for the butch.  The torture of realizing that you cannot keep up the completely magical combination of your dad, Danny Zucco, Gimli the Dwarf, and your dad, that the love of your life made you feel like at the beginning, is almost as intense as your obsession with the new chick that makes you feel like a better version of your dad, Bo Duke, Angus Young, and maybe, your dad’s dad.
    me and my dad

    me and my dad

    It is a fragile psychological barrier you have erected against any understanding of your own human needs that were never met by any culturally ordained model of entitlement.  You end up not knowing what you want or who you are, except that you are really good at being cocky and awesome and making promises that you can’t keep.

  3. Saying and doing inexplicably misogynistic, racist, classist, and generally stupid things.  (Can lead to lesbian Republicans…should lead to its own reality TV channel.)  mary cheneyWhat do you call two butches making out?  Fags.  What do you call two femmes making out?  Sweet.  This might be a more benign, drunken encounter with a butch.  Might have been me.  Our masculinity is assembled and internalized from the available dominant models of masculinity.  Dominant American culture provides an endless variety of templates for dumass dude.  Neither one’s life experience as a vagina owner, nor membership in a queer subculture will automatically cleanse your gender performances of stupidity.  Humorous, horrifying, or just confusing, the irony is always thick and deep like an imaginary penis humping the disbelief in our masculinity into submission.  There’s the common dumb frat boy butch feigning ignorance of lesbian sex, “but who puts it in?”  There’s the double, secret irony of the butch softball dyke who has a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker on her truck and shaves her legs.  There’s the high-powered, creepiness of a rich butch on the national board of the HRC who once bragged to me, “I used to sell land mines for a living.  Mother Theresa used to be my competition.”  There’s the butch who owns one of the only gay clubs in the Twin Cities where lesbians go in large numbers who said that she’d rather just have gay men there and has actually placed security outside the men’s room door to check the gender on ID’s before allowing/denying access.  There’s the terrifying former owner of another lesbian bar in the area, one whose customer base was largely people of color.  She once gave me the advice as a new queer bar owner, when I was developing a night to attract more people of color, “You don’t want those jungle bunnies in here.”  It’s enough to make me want to hang out with straight people.  When a cisdude says something offensive, you immediately know you can just punch him.  When dykes do it, it takes too long to pick the slimy layer of assumed solidarity off of your face and most often you just bumble off wondering if you heard them right.  You did.  Tell them they throw like a girl and punch them in the vagina.
  4. Affinity for creating fashion after the style of boy bands, mythical warriors, muppets, or science fiction characters.  (Can lead to fuck yeah, I fuckin’ rocked that shit.)  We all know about dyke fashion.  It’s amazing and ridiculous and so terrible that it’s hot, to someone we hope.  We aren’t fabulous like gay boys.  We are scary and mythical.  We must intimidate through bewilderment and woo with total dedication to our fantastic facade.  Our ability to completely replicate a current, popular men’s fashion is often limited by less than masculine, unavoidable curves.  Besides the fact, as has been mentioned, we are actually superheroes, denied the conventional choices of normativity.  It’s your fault world, that we look the way we do.  I found so many examples of epic butchness on the internet.  I couldn’t use them, because it felt ishy.  So these are of me.  I don’t have any of me in an abercrombie and fitch t-shirt with a faux hawk made out of bad highlights, but it still might happen.  You can always send me one of you.
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those are bolo ties

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I don’t know if I can go on being this hot.

dork

Ewoks are charming.

 

I picked you this tiny flower.

 

5.  Intestinal difficulties or stomach problems.  This is merely anecdotal, but have you ever noticed how most butches have some sort of digestive issues?  Just saying.  Could be that being butch causes anxiety.

I’ve been pretty harsh on butches today.  These are my faults.  I’ve spent most of my days wondering how I can continue to make the same mistakes, be such an idiot.  I’ve also spent most days trying not fantasize about dying.  My self-destructive behavior patterns are comfortable companions.  I have lost friends, communities, support, and hurt people I truly care about.  Coping with a non-normative gender manifestation is hard.  When such an integral part of your identity disappoints your parents, alienates peers, confuses and terrifies potential love interests, and causes you to hate your own body, it’s hard to not just want to disappear.  Butches find way inspiring ways around that.  Our overcompensation does often lead us to be renaissance men.  We can fix things and build things.  We can often cook, bake, and sew.  We are often artistic, sensitive, and intuitive from a lifetime of having to read people so carefully to know where we stand.  We have developed real courage.  We are often funny.  We can be fiercely loyal and loving.  We are capable of deep intimacy if you can convince us we deserve it.  Sometimes, our piggy banter is charming.  We can have successful relationships, I think, if we find a place of safety even when our facade crumbles, even when we’re naked.  We are incredible at spacial organization and helping people move.  And most of us are happy looking like handsome gas station attendants, unless we’re being fancy.  We are better at being boys.  We always have been.  To straight girls that I’ve dated, who are now married to men, I’m sorry I was too awesome.  To queer femmes, that are amazing in every way, that I might have been real, real stupid around, sorry fam, my bad.  To young butches, who don’t want to call yourself butch, your music sucks and I don’t understand your hair.  Download entire Lunachick library immediately.  Also, please smoke a cigarette and buy a motorcycle.  I think I’m ready to ride a horse.

MI0001784636

She can dance
She can sing
She can do most anything
She is the jerk the jerk of all trades
She can build
She can fight
She can bust out your light
She is the jerk the jerk of all trades

Never ever ever ever underestimate
She will kill you kill you with her hate
She is the jerk the jerk of all trades
She can write
She can pose
She can punch you in your nose!
– Lunachicks

 

 

 

gender string theory

socrates_knuckles  “Nay, even in the life of the same individual there is succession and not absolute unity: a man is called the same, and yet in the short interval between youth and age, and in which every animal is said to have life and identity, he is undergoing a perpetual process of loss and reparation.”  Plato, Symposium (207d-208d)

The self is always coming into being.  That is the actual verb.  (Yes, I did study ancient Greek.)   In this quote, Plato (in the voice of Socrates) points out our common perception that identity and sense of self is commonly considered consistent or that there is some abiding authenticity that is as real as our physical being, that we are the same living being throughout our life. (The translation of “identity” is literally “to be oneself”).  He is also identifying a “perpetual process of loss and reparation” – that it is the nature of our mortal existence that we experience continual damage that we (by our own physical and psychic abilities) resist in our inclination to repair and survive.  Thusly, we are always in a process of coming into being, including our own identity as self-perception and an actor in the world.  It seems illogical at times, how fiercely we struggle for consistency of identity considering the social disadvantage that occasionally that defiance can produce.  Self-destructive impulses, fetishes, obsessions, and secret dark personalities co-exist and co-manage with our highest aspirations, heartfelt intimacies, and loves to consolidate and approximate a person.  We begin to depend upon who we think we are at a very early age.  A lifetime of submission or resistance to our experience constantly recreates our dependent attachment to our identity which gives the effect of a consistent identity while actually always changing.

What are the possibilities and restrictions on who we can be?  How is it that we can look back to our earliest remembered experiences and see ourselves, already working with a set of skills, perceptions, and behaviors that we still utilize in adulthood when so much of our plot has yet to unfold?  It is logical, if we are products of adaptive evolution, that we as individuals are creatures of an adaptive nature.  It’s what we do.  It also seems reasonable that the process of evolution has equipped us, at birth, with certain mental and physical capacities that allow our own unique interaction with our own singular environment.  How much of our “identity” as an individual is cultivated as we adapt, even as infants and how much is who we were meant to be or born to be?  Babies, while they are learning their language of origin are also learning the social and cultural relationships of power and gender that are simply another aspect of social communication.  They become fluent in both by an early age. Have you ever experienced a two-year old lying?  No one teaches a child how to lie, which makes this spontaneous competence in the manipulation of  language and power seem a little eerie even if they’re not good at it.  I think the potential for success as a human organism must have a biological component that we all come with.   Little kids do all kinds of things that no one teaches them.  We have the ability to create utilizing the rules we’ve been given.  We have all inherited an evolutionarily engineered, bio-neurological glob of ability to ascertain and utilize an astonishingly complex matrix of flexible and restrictive rules of language and human relationships that are completely unique to one’s environment of infancy and early childhood.  There are rules of gender just like grammar that we must master if we are to be a participant in our world.  Our infant genitals determine our starting point on the local game board, but we all pick up on the rules for the other players, too.  If the genitals are so important to the game, how does anyone get it wrong?  The only difference, I think, between a little human, born with a penis who acts like a boy by the time he’s five and a little human, born with a vagina who acts like a boy by the time she’s five is that the latter has advanced mutant, unicorn genes that allow her more interpretive creativity.  They both have learned correctly how a little boy is supposed to act.

I was a pretty big kid.  I was 9 pounds at birth.  By the time I was 2, I was 45 pounds.  I entered kindergarten at 75 and was at least a foot taller than any of my classmates.  I have theories about my size, mostly having to do with my body actually physically responding to an inner adaptive urgency to expedite self-sufficiency.  Regardless of the cause, my size was part of my inner narrative by the time I got to school.  I felt both alien and special, self-conscious and powerful.  I knew I was different and that I was certainly not like other little girls, nor was I invited to play in the reindeer games of boys (unless my size and strength was required to vanquish an enemy).  I was Ferdinand the Bull instead of a bully, but had a sense of responsibility associated with my superior strength and intellect.  Little kids would come to me for protection.  In this way, my size augmented my unusual gender expression.  If I was invited to a slumber party with girls, I was the one who slept by the door to protect the rest of the girls.  The boys, at recess, actually invented a unique game which was basically to see how many boys it would take to tackle me.  My physicality made me masculine and it had its own genre of positive feedback in the form of a specialized outsider  power in my social group.  I think I was an alpha before I was a boy.  But, power and masculinity are associated at an early stage in development.  Kids know your gender and relative social position better than you do usually, especially apart from the gaze of grown-ups, who have an additional set of expectations.  Children understand the language of gender and power long before they learn irregular semantic structure and socially established contradictions in values of gender and power.

In first grade, it was my turn for ‘show and tell’ which was terrifying for me.  I had gone to some carnival with my parents and won a doll, I think for throwing a ball at something.  I was more proud about winning than of the doll, but my mother suggested that I take the doll for show and tell.  She also put me in a dress with ribbons in my hair.  I remember being apprehensive, but even at that age, one has an understanding that it should be alright to have and display gender appropriate clothes and possessions, even though it is uncomfortable and you don’t know why.  And of course, there’s mom’s face while she is trying to make her big scary unicorn into a pretty girl.  She thinks I’m pretty, but I could see her discomfort at wondering why it feels peculiar to dress me this way.  But we proceed through the apprehension, which evolves into our interminable collaborative routine of awkwardness and conflict, and I go to school.  The teacher calls me up with my doll.  She looks nervous, too.  Even before I get out my story about how I knocked down the thing with the thing, all of the boys are shitting themselves laughing at me.  The girls are giggling, too, but with a look of “oooh, I thought we were clear about you not doing things that we do.”  Of course I run out of the room crying.  I remember a sadness that was like mourning a loss associated with not being able to be like other girls. Even though I really never tried, it was an expectation that I could not meet and there was nothing more debilitating to me than disappointing my parents.  There was definitely a felt deficiency related to the possibility of being like other girls that was also externally enforced.  I don’t like being bad at things, even things I don’t want to do.  I also remember a deep and clear anger after my first profound experience of public emasculation.  I would never get to be a boy either.  I was big and strong and good at sports.  Other kids looked to me for protection and I was always among the first to be chosen for teams in P.E.  That was my source of control and power in my social environment and even though it could be isolating, it enabled a sense of status in its eccentricity.  It also made me good at being a boy.  All at once, I knew others would always have inexplicable expectations on my masculinity, but I would never enjoy any of the entitlements of maleness.  So mad, so, so mad.

How does this happen?  How does a person, born with a vagina excel at acting like a boy by the time they even encounter an institutionalized peer group like day care or kindergarten?  Why does a little gender queer continue to refine their non-normative gender expression even after they figure out that it pisses everyone off and it’s not going to help you get laid anytime soon?  Some say we are born this way.  There seems to be a common belief that one’s soul is gendered and one may be born into the wrong body.  What this belief does is attempt to shift agency and thereby, a judgement of culpability away from the individual, allowing a possibility for social empathy and access to mental health care.  If an individual’s gender expression is somehow innate, commonly contrasted with behavioral, it is somehow more understandable and forgivable, for the individual as well as everyone else.  But, do we really want to make the argument that naturalized gender exists?  Do we really want to go back in time and tell Simone de Beauvoir that yes, actually one is born a woman.  Within the discourses of resistance to hegemonic social paradigms, the assertion that gender roles are socially constructed, is effective precisely because dominant heteronormative gender roles are fucked up, but seem timeless and pre-ordained.  To proclaim them artificially made and imposed is to disempower them and reveal their artifice. This opens the possibility of social change in the relative power relationship and acceptable characteristics associated with prescribed gender roles.  Though this only really happens at a glacial pace, it is an important rhetorical weapon for ongoing feminist deconstruction.  However, for the gender defiant, like this transman, the idea that gender is merely a mutable social construct is initially unsettling on a personal level and leaves the transgender community politically vulnerable to a host of philosophical attacks on our authenticity – from liberal gays to conservative straights.  Are we ridiculous children playing dress-up?  Can we be “rehabilitated”?  Are transmen assimilating an oppressive norm that harms the rest of the queer community?  Gender is such a dangerous thing to fuck with because it is so foundational to all of our identities.  There must be a way to reconcile these two divergent, yet philosophically important assertions.  Gender is constructed, yet it is somehow real and important.  It is essential to the way we move, and feel, and fuck, and love…but we shouldn’t take it so seriously.

Judith Butler is a classic rock star in this effort.

“Bound to seek recognition of its own existence in categories, terms, and names that are not of its own making, the subject seeks the sign of its own existence outside itself, in a discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent. Social categories signify subordination and existence at once. In other words, within subjection the price of existence is subordination.” ― Judith ButlerThe Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjectiongosling-butler

Judy is so smart.  Damn, I really wish I could sound that smart.  An individual is “bound”, meaning obligated, to look for itself in the relational structures and language it has learned.  These structures are “dominant” and “indifferent”.  They were here before you and they’ll be here after you.  Our identity is relational.  We are social animals.  Our identity, our “existence”, is continually reaffirmed or denied by our social environment.  Our subordination is inescapable.  We “seek” recognition as a boy or a girl, which is just a category, but our existence hinges on one or the other.  Genderqueer is of course a category, but essentially an unintelligible category in most cultural paradigms.  This is why I’ve spent most of my life in tiny, insular urban queer communities.  We don’t like to think of ourselves as subordinate.  We like to think we are originals, but we are merely a unique amalgam of pre-established social categories.  Even our eccentricity is dependent on norms for its charm to be possible.  It is important to realize also that this “subordination”, though inflammatory as a word choice, suggests the obligatory nature of gender that we commonly appeal to in the “born this way” argument.

Gender is “a stylized repetition of acts . . . which are internally discontinuous . . .[so that] the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief” – Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

Judy makes so much sense she makes me nervous.  I think she intentionally uses language that belittles and mocks human experience.  As she should, humans are ridiculous.  The ones with the most power are often additionally assholes.  She is making the point that not only is gender a social construction, but we are all also brainwashed to believe in it.  That’s a great point.  That’s an extremely uncomfortable point.  Is she adding enough subconscious obligation to one’s gender role for a transman to feel like he’s not just playing house?  Is she allowing enough agency for social transgression?  I think Judith Butler is certainly smart enough to understand her project.  I have often thought, though, as an academic, that she may be a little inexperienced when it comes to the weirdos.  What does Judith Butler know about punk rock?  This is what I want to know.

Noam Chomsky is a linguist, among other things.  I once took a beginning linguistics class.  They discussed his theory of deep structure or deep grammar.  It is about a child’s acquisition of language.  He theorized that a child is born with a hard-wired language template in place that merely plugs in the idiosyncratic features of the particular language they are exposed to.  Evidence for this comes from children making mistakes like “I swimmed yesterday” instead of “I swam yesterday.”  They understand the grammar rule that tells them to put an “-ed” on the end of a verb to indicate past-tense, but they have not mastered the irregular verb forms yet.  When I heard this theory for the first time, it was a moment of epiphany for me concerning gender, even though nobody else seems to share my enthusiasm. Language acquisition cannot be detached from the rest of the communication skills we acquire.  Social power dynamics and gender relationships must be included in total cultural proficiency.  I am not the first to point this out.  Judith Butler draws on linguistics, and indeed, Noam Chomsky’s language acquisition theory sounds eerily like Butler’s performativity thirty years earlier…at least in my head. Though Chomsky seems to have a sense of delight and wonder at human possibility,noam where I think Butler seems deeply disappointed in the human condition.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied…We thus make a fundamental distinction between the competence (the speaker-hearer’s knowledge of his language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations)…The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the ‘creativity of language,’ that is, the speaker’s ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are ‘familiar.'”  -Noam Chomsky

So language, like normative gender roles, have rules which are fixed when we learn them.  He makes a distinction between competence and performance.  I think we more consciously choose our words than go to the closet and choose our gender, but trying to come up with an entirely original gender would be like me trying to spontaneously speak Martian.  Once you are past puberty, it’s becomes increasingly difficult for a human to learn a new language.  Actually, it starts becoming incrementally harder past the age of around four.  So, my only reason for bringing this up is to say that maybe we don’t start out as a particular gender, just like we don’t speak a particular language when we’re born.  We learn the rules of our native language and social dynamics and we don’t learn them wrong.  In our mind, we correctly place ourselves within the matrix of social power and by the time we get to kindergarten, it’s too late to change it even after we figured out that everybody else thinks we’re wrong, or when we “produce new sentences…that are immediately understood…although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are familiar.”  We are constrained to our own native grammatical laws and the gender dynamics we were taught, but our process of “free creation” can lead to unique performances, like poetry, especially as we further our mastery of the rules.

Often, the whole transgender discourse revolves around a very strict, non-feminist gender binary.  The rigid pronoun insistence is exactly in opposition to the feminist effort to make pronouns inclusive or neutral thirty years ago.  There is an actual experience as transgender that seems richer than the experience of cispeople.  It is a gift of dysphoria.  This word is also Greek.  It means difficult to bear.  It is often commonly used to indicate profound confusion or hallucination, but it is deep adversity.  It has a passive sense which is to be born (carried) violently as if by a storm.  Those are powered gendered norms that we are subordinate to which toss us about and are painful to bear.  But, I am grateful to have been in the storm.

I occasionally experience a little melancholy or longing nostalgia when I think about my transition.  I look like a man.  For forty years of my life, I looked like a freak.  That was my performance.  Being a dude is less exhausting, but less fabulous in a way.  It’s nuances like this that I don’t think academics understand fully.  They only know about the non-normative narratives they’ve read about and happened ten years ago.  They don’t know what it feels like to be a gangster.  (Damn, it feels good, btw.)  Academia is a locus of dominant power arbitration.  There are many a treatise about what it means to write post-colonial theory in a squarely colonial institution.  I don’t know if I can go back.  Harvard almost killed me with its smiley-faced normativity.  But now I’m a balding white dude, so I think gangster’s out too.  I’m blogging.

By far, the most brilliant philosopher on the subject of the way I feel about gender is John Cameron Mitchell, who wrote the most amazing movie in the history of the universe, Hedwig and the Angry Inch.  My first semester at Harvard, I watched Hedwig almost every single night.  I had been ok being an unbalanced, cocky butch pirate around a bunch of queers in San Francisco and Minneapolis, but not even a childhood in the suburbs prepared me for that kind of elite, east coast, beautiful people, old money kind of soul-crushing polite exclusion.  I don’t know what it was, but I completely unravelled.  Hedwig was like going to an AA meeting.  I was working the program and taking it one day at a time.  Hedwig was my sponsor and my higher power.  Every syllable of dialogue is brilliant and I’d like to share with you, ‘Wig in a Box’.  In this one song, Mitchell conveys a complex theory of gender, including performativity, the feeling of being duped by social constructions of gender, envy and longing, the triumphal feeling of exquisite failure but doing gender better than any cis-counterparts, and of course the fact that no matter how much it sucks, unicorns have the wisdom and the shine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=740TB17Dsn0   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=740TB17Dsn0

Me and Caroll and Chaz and Cher

chastity then gettyScanned Image 140800017When I was two years old, my favorite TV show was The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.  It was 1972. Perhaps this is my first memory or perhaps my mother has told the story so many times that I think I can remember it.  I believe I do remember watching one of the many times when Sonny and Cher used to close the show by bringing out Chastity for their final number.  I would insert myself into the TV with them.  I might have made my first petty comparisons between my cuteness and Chastity’s cuteness, preferring my own.  Perhaps I might have thought that I would make a more suitable famous TV child.  Apparently, I used to carry around a picture of Cher with me wherever I went.  I also told my day-care providers that was, in fact, Sonny and Cher’s child and that I was just on loan to my parents.  They must have told my folks, because my parents started calling me Tara Bono, which was eventually shortened to just Bo.  This is the name my parents have called me my entire life.  Fortunately, it has  enduring gender neutrality.

Thus began the paranormal resemblance of my life to Chastity Bono’s.  We are almost exactly the same age.  We both came out as lesbians at around sixteen.  We both transitioned later in life.  I didn’t think about it much over the years.  It was a cute story my mom liked to tell about my childhood.  My mom.  She is not like Cher in so many ways.  Who is?  But, she is pretty and thin.  There is also something relatively uncommon about her femininity and presence that is quite Cherlike. My mother has a larger than normal life aura surrounding her, like Cher.  Not in a theatrical sense (although she has that side), more associated with her superhuman competency.  Think Annette Bening in American Beauty or Robin Wright in House of Cards.  I just realized that Kevin Spacey is the husband in both of those shows – weird.  She is super capable and really pretty and she is kind of a big deal in her own community.  She also has a sense of entitlement that borders on the masculine.  Many pretty women know that they can manipulate because of their beauty.  Caroll and Cher seem to bend cumulative human folly to their will, using their beauty merely as a jedi mind trick that disguises their true alien forms.  Their looks are not the most significant thing about either of them.  They are significant people.  As to their femininity, there is something additionally performative about it for both of them, almost as if it is not a naturally occurring gender role.  There is a similarity to the way Cher wears a Bob Mackie spider web dress and the way my mother dons a St. John’s knit pant suit.  They are intimidating, not titillating.  I think what I am saying is that my mother and Cher actually are drag queens.  What choice did Chaz and I have but to become men?

There is a huge difference between a drag queen and a masculine woman.  One is entertaining and powerful.  The awkwardness of the other is just uncomfortable for everyone.

Occasionally, we would do our best to make our mothers happy.

Scanned Image 140800009chastity:cher
Scanned Image 140800012CHER & DAUGHTER, CHASTITY BONO. PIC.GREGG DE GUIRE/LFI

But the transitional lesbian mullets happened…

Scanned Image 140800013mullet

which is actually the fault of…

rosie mullet

And this, of course, happened…

Scanned Image 140810000 Exclusive- Chastity Bono & Girlfriend Out in LA

but then this…

DSC_0040  hot chaz
Unlike my mother, Cher has another child, a son. I think his name is Who Gives a Shit.  I believe Cher rolled her eyes upon hearing he was getting married.  Cisboys with drug problems are boring.  I think Chaz and I have mothers who actually ended up really liking us as people.  And I’m pretty sure we are the only ones who understand our mothers.

While I was at grad school in Boston, about a year after I had started transitioning, my mother called one night.  Her voice was a bit frantic.  “I need you to send me a current picture of yourself.  A good one.  I can pay for you to have one taken if you don’t have one.”  I say, “I think I have one, ma.  What do you need it for?”  She explained, “I got tickets to Dancing with the Stars…and it’s for the night that Cher is going to be there.”

Because my mother is magic, she just assumed that she was going to be able to meet Cher and tell her the whole story.  She also told me I was more handsome and a better dancer than Chaz, but she is my mother.  I sent her a picture I had actually taken for my girlfriend back in Minneapolis, so I was trying to look hot, which of course, my mom loved, because she’s just so happy that I’m good-looking now.  “You always did suck at being a girl,” is what she said when I told her I was transitioning.

My mother took the picture with her to Dancing with the Stars, but she didn’t meet Cher.  They stuck her way up on the third tier in the back.  I’m sure Cher would have taken care of that shit had she known my mother was there.  I’m not sure if Chaz and I are evidence for some obscure psychological template.  This is what happens when magic drag queens raise butch dykes.  I’m sure we are very different people, simultaneous hairdos aside.  I wonder if Chaz dresses in drag every Halloween like I do.  I bet I walk better in heels.

Wet Dream Messenger

I’ll measure time
I’ll measure height
I’ll calculate
My birthrite
Good Lord I’m big
I’m heading on
Man-size 
Got my leather boots on – PJ Harvey, Man-size

Are wet dreams common?  For whom?  I haven’t heard much talk about them lately.  I have had one.  It visited me when I was around sixteen.  It was a ‘point-of-view’ production.  I was driving an old muscle car with black leather bucket seats and a long-handled gear shift.  I was alone, driving fast.  I especially remember the sky as a hi-def, David Lynch dream sequence kind of hot orange.  There were mountains on both sides and I was approaching a narrow, flat bridge across an impossibly wide and deep gorge.  I felt rising pleasure and excitement.  I looked down and noticed my big, hard cock in my own left hand.  The mountains receded from around me as I drove faster onto the bridge.  I watched myself stroke myself faster as I drove faster, not looking up at the road.  As I was about to cum, the car/I veered sharply to the left, quickly breaking through the low guard rail and into mid-air.  I never saw the bottom and I didn’t fall for long.  I woke up sweating and panting with throbbing clit.

I am not someone who remembers my dreams often, nor even many singular waking events in my life, but this was an omen with no intention of being forgotten.  The uncanny physicality of the actual dream and of me and of the darkness of my bedroom continues to stick to me, though it’s been almost thirty years (or more, my age is the most arbitrary part of this narrative).  I immediately thought I had just witnessed how I died in a past life.  This is hilarious, if true, that there may be some part of my eternal soul that is so fascinated with my own penis and touching it and admiring it that it not only caused my death at least once, but that this self-destructive compulsion follows me into every incarnation.  I am still a little cockcentric, though I do not possess one in this lifetime.

Occasionally, I pull out this wet dream to help me think critically about gender.  I think it is a versatile metaphor for gender experience.  Had I been born with a penis, I imagine that I would have been experienced this dream as fairly unremarkable.  Having a penis and dreaming about touching it probably doesn’t stimulate much analysis of the link between masculinity and a cock in cis-men.  I have had sex in other dreams with my own body, but never resulting in spontaneous orgasm.  I don’t recall ever having another dream where I so viscerally embodied an alternate flesh.  It felt real.  This sensation of ‘realness’ and its fickle presence is a bit of what I believe gender performance desires.  It was probably the most experiential moment of maleness in my life, but much of the time, I don’t even know if ‘male’ is what I have wanted to achieve.

This vivid dream, an altered state of consciousness is not completely unlike the daily involuntary masculinity I perform.  My masculinity perpetually defies the fact of my body.  When I am alone, I must touch my female genitals to masturbate, though I may be fantasizing about having an erect penis and putting it where I imagine it would feel good to my phantom limb.  When I am not alone, my gender performance, to the extent that it is successful and fulfilling for myself and others, must necessarily be collaborative.  When I put my silicon penis on and have sex with my girlfriend, we must both suspend disbelief to achieve the desired intimacy.  It is infinitely hotter to tell someone to suck your cock, than to suck your strapon.  I cannot feel my penis inside her, but the illusion helps me orgasm nonetheless.  Practically speaking, it might seem more desirable to have her go down on the anatomy I do have, but the reaffirmation of my masculine identity is just as important, if not more, than an orgasm.  This is why stone butches exist.  At least they used to.

When surrounded by other urban queers, being a masculine woman is an intelligible identity, easily integrated into social discourse, verbal and non-verbal.  When in normative surroundings, the dominant paradigm polices and excludes and mocks the masculine woman.  Cis-gendered, heteronormative people sometimes don’t like to play dress up with you and your arduously crafted gender identity.  Suddenly, the recollection that your masculinity is a dirty adolescent dream you once had hits you like shame pie in your girl face.  In the life of a young butch, those moments of cognitive dissonance assemble to form a relentless clown parade of humiliation.  Oh, young butches, I just want to send you all to Pippi Longstocking Island with horses, and femmes, and proud moms who never want you to wear a dress, and dads you can beat at basketball.

At forty-one, I made the decision to transition.  Into what, is unclear to me, possibly because I am one of those people who uncritically link maleness with penises.  But, I love taking testosterone.  Adult puberty is so much more fun than menopause.  One of the multitude of benefits that I perceive for my life is simply the public plausibility of my act.  It is exhausting to be a constant subject of internal conflict for others.

Once I had a dream that I was a man.  I came all over myself, then I died.  The body that bares the life that I have had deserves the entitlements it has earned and the pleasures it can experience.

Silence my lady head
Get girl out of my head
Douse hair with gasoline
Set it light and set it free, PJ Harvey, Man-size

Suspension of disbelief or willing suspension of disbelief is a term coined in 1817 by the poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who suggested that if a writer could infuse a “human interest and a semblance of truth” into a fantastic tale, the reader would suspend judgment concerning the implausibility of the narrative.

I’m too old to do this.

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I tell stories all the time.  I think I am a good storyteller.  I think I have good stories to tell.  That is what I have instead of a fake job at Target Corporate that doesn’t even make sense.  That’s me in the picture.  I was taking that for my new girlfriend.  I don’t remember if I sent that one to her or not.  That’s my little apartment in Brookline, MA.  I stayed there while I was getting my master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School.  I went to Harvard because the dyke bar in Minneapolis that I opened, closed and I was emotionally broken and forty and I didn’t know what else to do.  My new girlfriend stayed in Minneapolis.  Long-distance relationships are horrible and I was crazy jealous and had just started taking testosterone.  You can see the hint of a new goatee as well as a little cleavage under my creepy bathrobe, which I think is hot.  I’ve been home for a couple years now, and things are great.  I just have some stories to tell.  I have more facial hair now, but I still have my tits.  I wanted to call this blog ‘hairy tits’, but people keep cringing every time I say that.  I do actually want people to cringe a little at this blog, though.  I want commentary and resistance and conversation.  I want to talk about sex and gender and body parts (silicon or flesh) in a more uncomfortable way.  The blogs I’ve read about queers, transmen, and butches (and that’s not really that many) have been pretty tame and have narratives we have become comfortable with.  They talk about bowties, and binding, and bathrooms, which are fun and fuzzy subjects that warm the queer cockles like a drag queen doing Whitney Houston, and these stories create community and are important.  I think my transition is one of my least interesting stories, but it will be fun to read, nonetheless.  I am a lazy, lazy transman, if you insist upon calling me that.  I do like muscles and wanting to fuck all the time.  I miss San Francisco in the 90’s.  I miss punk rock.  I miss sex-positive, bald, dyke whores… most of the time.  I am also getting to old for that shit all the time.  I do not miss being a baby butch disco queen in LA in the 80’s, but that happened.  I really like being happy and well-rested.  I have a lot of great stories though.  I wanted to write a book, but Katrina told me that people blog now.  After much initial resistance, I found the rambling serial format might actually work better.  My best stories are about opening a dyke bar, but that requires background.  I want to talk about sex and gender deeply.  I want to know about your dark sides and tell you about mine, because I tend to think our common narratives, as valuable as they are to our community, are mostly incomplete, and largely horseshit.  My dream would be a community of weirdo truth-tellers. Let’s fix modern psychology together and even teach Judith Butler a thing or two about gender.  Mostly, I’m going to tell stories though, really good ones.