The Parent Thing

The local GLBT center showed the film “Southern Comfort” for movie night, and as it was dull and rainy, I thought I would go.   Lola and I were chatting through those days, and I know Maxwell and met Robert, so it’s a very personal film for me.

Southern Comfort is also the best film I have seen to date on the realities of a trans life, because it lets the story and people evolve rather than trying to fit a framework.  Kate Davis could afford to do that with her DV camera over time, and it shows.   The film feels like home movies put together by an auteur, and that makes it very intimate — the theme of Robert and Lola’s relationship — and very honest.   It’s impossible to make an intimate portrait of someone who doesn’t yet know how to be intimate with themselves and others, no matter how much they want attention.

Real intimacy is incredibly potent, but as I watched the film, I saw that the root of intimacy for Robert was clear.  The foundation of his intimacy was the role of the parent.  Robert had been a mother to his children and continued that to embrace his grandson, great-grandparent, grandparent, parent and child altogether.

When you do it right, there is no intimacy greater than the parent, because as a parent you have the entire life of a vulnerable person placed into your care.  You wipe their bum and check their sores and listen to their stories and help them find language and watch them grow and all those simple and complicated things that make up the sweep of humanity.

And when you know how to hold someone’s beating heart in your hands and feel that trust and responsibility, you have the chance to grow and blossom as a person.  Parenting, when done right, is both extremely selfless and incredibly fulfilling, a gift of service that nourishes you.   And as Robert’s relationship with Max showed, it’s also almost impossible to explain to someone who doesn’t understand the power of being a parent.

Lola found her caretaking integrated with her trans expression through her experience with Robert, as Robert treated Lola like a tender living creature who just needed encouragement and support to blossom.    Everyone has something to offer, as TBB and Kristine would tell us, and parents know that, know that bringing out those special gifts are the blessing of a lifetime.   It’s wonderful to know that all the people in this film blossomed in the fertile garden of Southern Comfort Conference, first imagined by TBB when she visited IFGE 1998 and knew she could bring this kind of cross-pollination to the great Southland.

Robert’s legacy continues today, from free respectful clinic visits for transmen every year at SCC, to 150 medical providers gathering at Empire Conference a few weeks ago to better understand how to support transpeople.

But the possibility of transpeople knowing the role of the parent, understanding how to care for and nurture the best that can come from the others in their life, well, that legacy is a bit more difficult to pin down.  To be trans is often to be out of the communal exercise of parenting, of helping people grow and blossom.

So much of my writing over the past two decades has been about these themes, the four types of intimacy and the power of parenting, because they really do seem to be the heartbeat of the relationships that make us human.

And it was good to have a few new people exposed to that power again last night.

Thanks, all.

(Aside: Southern Comfort and Hedwig were on the film festival circuit in the same year, so at Berlin, John Cameron Mitchell pulled Lola Cola up on stage to honor a real-life Hedwig.  Ah, the connections.)

Your Inner Merman

There is no business like show business.

Not even for The Drama Queens.

TBB called tonight.  She had the privilege of having her family around her as her son graduated from her alma mater, and took up his commission in the Navy.  It was a great time, but it put her out of synch with her ship’s sailing schedule, so she is doing two weeks on another ship as a fill-in, meeting her ship next week.

It’s been a tough week there.  The old chief is leaving the boat, the new chief is a fill in, the juniors want to show off, and the ship was in port, with most of the crew going home every night.

Usually, TBB just has to prove four things to get over the scuttlebutt that a transsexual is coming aboard.  She just has to prove that she is competent, excellent, human and charming.  That’s usually not hard for her.  What’s the old Bella Abzug mashup?

“To get ahead, a woman has to prove she is twice as good as a man.   Luckily, that’s rarely a problem.  The feminist revolution isn’t about making sure that a female Einstein is recognized as easily a male Einstein, it’s about making sure that a female schlemiel has the same opportunities as a male schlemiel.”

But when there is lots of other drama going around, it’s tough for TBB to get standing to show her stuff.   The girls see her as old, the boys are trying to show who has the biggest member, and everyone is apprehensive about change.  Things change this week when they are on a cruise, and everyone is locked in the same big floating tin can.   As an extrovert, TBB really needs company, not like me locked in this basement, and so an audience will be life blood to her.

TBB is being seen as other, not one of us, without standing to perform at her best.  Why is she other?  Because she is new, because she is short-time, because she is a woman, because she is a transsexual, because she is older, or some other reason?  The answer is, of course, that all those reasons are in play.    But I got to talk about all the stuff I wrote  this week about the experience of otherness, and it all resonated with her.

Just understanding otherness isn’t enough.  The challenge is how to get past it.  Regular readers of this blog (both of you) will know the answer I was working with this week.

Performance is performance.  When you’re hot, you’re hot, as Jerry Reed sang.  And part of the job when talking to TBB is to bring back that heat, get her laughing and performing, so she feels the energy surge through her, the energy that is so easy to be buried.

“If they offered to have you do a one person show at SCC,” I asked her, “what songs would you have in your act?”

She had to think about this.  On Karaoke nights, TBB often does Sinatra, but he’s not really a perfect fit.  Ol’ Blue Eyes is a very cool performer, but TBB is a very warm performer, wanting to touch the audience.  She’s much happier with some Jerry Herman, like her performance of Hello Dolly!, a performance I had to channel in my mother’s last week to get her into the shower.

We thought about Sophie Tucker, maybe, The Last Of The Red-Hot Mamas, but she wasn’t it.

No, the answer to unlocking the energy was simpler than that.  It’s unlocking your inner Merman. Ethel, that is.

In a story on Theatre Talk, a friend of hers talks about seeing her at curtain call for Gypsy when she was going through her third divorce.  She looked down, with maybe the saddest face ever, until she stepped out into that spotlight, and then she blazed with the light of a thousand suns, filling the theatre with her energy.

Ethel Merman was not always Ethel Merman.  But when she was hot, well, she was blazing.

Bert Lahr used to tell the story of when he and Ray Bolger and Jack Haley used to goof around between shots for The Wizard Of Oz, and director Victor Fleming would get upset that they lost focus.  But Fleming was used to Hollywood stars, not vaudeville troupers, so when he called action, the energy level soared instantly.  Bang.

The experience of being the other, and the experience of being in the deep freeze where nobody supports your inner Merman.

There is a little bit of Merman in every one of us.  That may not actually be true, but if there is one thing The Drama Queens believe, it’s when you say something potentially stupid, you gotta commit, dammnit.  Go big or go home.

Stay hot, babe.  The world needs your Merman.

9/10/11

September 10, 2011 is one of the worst days in my memory.

Sure, the next day, 9/11/2011 was pretty bad too, especially after Bush gave the terrorists just what they wanted and went to war with them, but that wasn’t nearly as personal to me.

My birthday is on the tenth of September, and on that day, my sister decided she wanted to take me to see Hedwig And The Angry Inch.

I didn’t want to go.  I had already seen the film, and while I enjoyed the comedy and music, the ending left me cold.  It was the standard ending for a drag show, where the performer pulls off their wig, showing you “who they really are beneath the illusion.”   In the film, Hedwig walked naked into the street, maybe an interesting symbol, but not the basis for any kind of life.  I mean, where would you keep your keys?

It’s not really a trans-positive ending, though since John Cameron Mitchell identifies as a gay man and not a transperson, it’s not surprising he would choose that old drag trope.

But saying that I didn’t want to go wasn’t enough.  It had been decided.  So I trudged down to an empty theatre with my sister, her then husband and a woman who would later try to beat me into compliance with her idea of how I should behave.

The good part about Hedwig is the rock opera bits.  I can still put on “Wig In A Box” and get both teary and invigorated.

I was there, the only one dressed up, watching and waiting for the energy to flow.  But my three companions who hauled me to this event against my wishes for my own good, well, they were sitting like stones.  Not rocking out, but stone cold rock hard.

No playing, no laughing, no swaying, no nothing.

It felt like I had been ordered to expose my heart, and then they had chosen to immerse it in liquid nitrogen, freezing the beat and making it so cold it could shatter with a touch.

It was a bad, bad night.  And the worst part may have been that they thought that they were doing something nice for me.   I hated it.

I need to follow my bliss, need to have others affirm and reflect that bliss, letting the heat rise.  Instead, I just felt naked and chilled, much like Hedwig walking into the street at the end of the film.

It sucked, big time.

Then, of course, I woke up to the World Trade Center bombings and called Rachel Pollack so she could watch the second plane go in live on TV.  A chill ran through the entire country that morning, and while I prayed for peace in the world, others prayed that their God would Bless America.  Hard decade.

Very few people understand what a tender and bruised soul we reveal when we show our naked trans heart.  Very few people share the experience enough to take that beating and battered heart and hold it safely, so it can beat a little stronger, so we can feel a little more vital and free in a world that has tried to quash us.

And that night, 9/10/2011, was just a night when I felt a bit more unsafe, a bit more scarred, a bit more scared.

It was a bad night for me, followed by a bad day for the world.

And yet, my mother in the sky asks me to try again, asks me to trust again.

Bliss, don’t fail me now.

Throaty Laugh

I saw Gillian Anderson in The Fall, the new BBC/RTE co-production where she plays a stylish London cop on assignment in Belfast, a kind of more glamorous Helen Mirren from Prime Suspect, and suddenly I wanted one great pair of outrageously expensive sunglasses.

Or, more precisely, I wanted to be the kind of woman who wears classic style, like those amazing sunglasses.

I have lived in austerity consciousness for so long, a life of self denial, where there was never, ever room for style.

I live in an area where style is devalued.  On one hand, that’s good, because there are few poseurs and shops only succeed with reasonable prices, but on the other hand, it means that what we have a chain stores, and the plebeian ones at that.

My family traditions are for cheap and serviceable.  My mother would rather buy three pieces of crap than one good piece.  Her shopping goal was never to look for the perfect or even the exceptional, but rather to look for the discounted, whatever the quality.

My style is changing.  I think more about the investment pieces, the signature accessory, and the notion of a uniform than I ever have before.  I want to be sure of my look, sure enough that I can focus on the content of my presentation rather than on my appearance.

Sadly, though, my family traditions are not changing, which makes for a gap between possibility and practice.  My sister hasn’t even found time to help measure my pupilary distance (PD) so I can order great sunglasses online.

But aspiration is the heart of growth, and the aspiration to be the kind of woman who has fabulous sunglasses and a confident, throaty laugh, well, a girl can dream, can’t she?  Even if she hasn’t dreamed in a decade. . .

 

Spiritual Bypassing

Thanks to the lovely Erin for sharing a concept I had never heard of before: Spiritual Bypassing.

http://www.realitysandwich.com/spiritual_bypassing

I never heard of it because it isn’t really my problem.  I don’t use spiritual practice to bypass the hard stuff, to get around the difficult feelings and heavy lifting in my life.  I tend to plunge right in, knowing that “there must be a pony in here somewhere!“

But I do know people who have run from me just because I am too prone to shovel the manure, which offends their delicate spiritual sensibility.   Personally, I can’t figure out how to find the jewels without shovelling the shit, but that just seems not pretty and not spiritual to them.   That’s why I often feel unsafe in overtly spiritual settings, where beauty and tranquility is valued over sweating and grunting and bleeding, all of which are vital to my spiritual process.

I’m not sure I need one more reason for people to find me too challenging, even people who think that they are spiritual, but I know it was happening anyway.

Now I have a name for it!

Thanks, Erin!

Have A Good Day!

Went to the mall, just to get out of here.  Took my time, breathed, sat a little.  It’s a little too late for black tights and uggs, but I made sure to include some bright summer colours.

I was feeling pretty good as I was leaving, feeling my hips roll as I walked.  That little femme wiggle.

And then I heard someone say, “Have a Good Day!”

I took a moment to figure out what was going on, realizing it was one of those half-good looking Sears salesmen saying it to me.

A nice man chose to wish me a good day.  Sure, he does it to dozens of gals everyday, but today I was one of them.

I smiled.

Why not smile?  After all, the universe decided to wish me to have a good day.

Who Brings The Joy?

Les Feinberg had a great line.

“I see the world of men and women as ice floes.  And when they get pushed apart, it’s painful for me, because I have a foot on both shores.”

S/he was saying what I say in my mission statement, that my gender crossing is a reminder of our continuous common humanity.

The two ice floes that are pulling me apart right now are the world of my own thoughts & experience and the world of my family.

While my parents were alive, there was no question.  I stayed with them, no matter how hard it was on me.

But now that they are gone, the choices are harder.  Do my siblings come with me a bit, into a brave new world?  Do I stay with them, keeping my head down?  Or am I torn apart by being on two ice floes that are pulling apart?

I need my family.  I especially need them until the estate is cleared, but I need them even beyond that.

And my family has been clear that they need me, but often in the caretaker role that I did so well for so long.

The world of my family is still a world of loss and struggle.  The decades with my parents, especially the last eighteen months, were abusingly hard on all of us.  I know about my still open wounds, but I also see how my sister has been impacted.

The question for me in all of this challenge is hard.  If we are all floating apart, all being torn with separation, all suffering and all hurting, then who brings the joy?

It’s bliss that separates my intentions from my family.  My family is a bliss burster, unable to support transcendence, magic and possibility.  This makes them unsafe for my dreams.

Rather than finding affirmation for my dreams, I find demands for caretaking and the ballast of a history of my mother’s family, a family that needs to look at the dark side.

I can bring the joy, but it when I know it is going to be steamrolled, well, I know I need to be prepared for something else.

No matter how hard I work to follow my bliss, being pulled back into the bliss is bad zone always screws me up.  And I cannot stop engaging with my family, for practical and for very personal reasons.

Follow your bliss.   Bury your bliss.  Two ice floes that pull me apart.