Month: July 2006

Entropy

I remember, somehow, when my body had energy of its own.  I would feel it move and it would leap up and carry me forward.

Now, though, my body has something different — entropy.  A body in motion tends to stay in motion, but a body at rest tends to stay at rest.

When I am sitting and decide to get up, I send the message to my legs to get up.  The message that comes back, though, is one of creaky knees and tired muscles, a message of resistance, discomfort and entropy.

Now it takes effort to get that leg to move, to force it to extend and bear my weight.  The days when it had a life of its own seem over, worn away by age, abuse and entropy.

I feel it Dave, I feel it. 

Didn’t Have The Heart

Secrets Of The Dead last night was about the Andrea Doria sinking.  The captain of that boat retired after, but in the late 1970s, a professor at the US Merchant Marine Academy re-examined the records and found the Stockholm was at fault.  He sent a note to the captain, ending it telling him that he and others would be proud to serve under him.

The captain never opened the letter, and died a few months after recieving it.  He just “didn’t have the heart,” the show concluded.

“Ya Gotta Have Heart,” they sang in Damn Yankees, though I prefer the mambo version by Peggy Lee. “Corazon!” (I often see myself in a sheath dress and cha-cha heels.) 

But what when we don’t have heart, just don’t have enough heart left to open the note that redeems us? 

This is one tradeoff of the WH.  It’s only when our heart breaks open that we can open with compassion and concern to the world, letting our own healing energy flow, but when our heart is broken too often, with few others who have opened their hearts enough to tend to ours, well, eventually, we just don’t have the heart to open another surprise.

Where do you go to nurture a broken heart?  I have heard some say that being with their grandchildren helps, but they are a scarce resource here.

For me, what I am craving now, is, of course, play.  To be seen, grasped and reflected in a spirit of encouragement, to allow the possibilities to slide out, be explored and encouraged, to try on new, and to feel that energy might come.

But to do that, you don’t just need heart, you need someone you trust to play with you.

And that’s why all I can imagine is to keep slogging.

Avoidance

If you spend your life trying to remember why you have been yelled at before and how to avoid being yelled at again, it seems doubtful that you will ever lift your head high and do anything really innovative or good.

Or, at least that’s the way it seems from where I cower.

Dumb Or Canny?

Is it more rude to assume that someone made a choice that seems off to you because they knew something you don’t or because they didn’t think the choice though before they made it?

My father landcaped this place when he moved in.  Everytime I have to mow, with a corded electric mower, I have to negotiate obstacles scattred around.

For example, on the steps he built up the slope, there is a big, square rock on the edge that is certain to catch a cord or a hose.  It’s frustrating for the person trying to use it, and creates damage to the cord. 

Is it more gracious to assume he thought about the placement of that rock, leaving it there for years, giving him the benefit of the doubt, or is it better to assume that was just stupid and he has been too bullheaded to fix it?

In my place now, I am to the point where I know that if I want people to respect my choices, I have to respect theirs.  I have to start with the assumption that they made their choices for reasons I don’t see, don’t understand, and trust that they were smart and concious.

The problem with that assumption, though, is that it often pisses people off.  If they haven’t thought out their choices, they get angry over the idea that they intentionally did something stupid, preffering to write it off to not thinking things through.  They are more insulted that you respect their choices, assuming they made a concious choice and it came out badly, than if you just dismiss the choice as dumb in the first place and move on.

I assume that’s because they habitually take the other tack, assuming that choices others make that they find baffling were just stupid and inconsidered choices from the beginning, and should be dismissed as dumb.   They are ready to assume they don’t think things though, so why would others?

Of course, this tack means that choices that do have deep thought and considered tradeoffs but that they find off are just choices they find stupid.  They don’t want to understand why you made those choices; you were just dumb.

I want to respect people and their choices, offering people a chance to help me understand the reasons, rationale and best practice. 

“So, when you planted this clump of trees, how did you plan to mow around them?”

People who haven’t though though their choices before making them often find this assumption challenging and dismissive.

“I didn’t plan for mowing!  Just go around them!  Do you want me to do it?”

So what’s the better assumption: that others made good choices and you just need to understand the rationale better, or that people just did it, and assuming they thought it though is priggish, dismissive and rude?

Frog DNA

Oprah hates ambiguity.  She likes things to be clear, love them, hate them, or they are invisible.   I think this is one thing people love about the Oprahland she invites people into — there, ambiguity is resolved, and passion is the play, the passions of excitement & joy or compassion & titilation or loathing & fear, nice and clear.

Oprah has decided that she was born to stop those who have sex with children.  She has contextualized her own experience of abuse as a primer for this crusade.  She’s putting lots of cash and lots of energy into this quest.

This fits the mood in the country today, of course.  We have no communists to fear, so we fear terrorists and “sexual preditors.”  I don’t think you are allowed to do a local newscast without some story about sexual preditors, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a rehash of old news, if it’s from a long way away, or even if it’s just people talking about about how much they fear these people.

I think forcing someone to have sex without their consent is wrong, and I think that kids under puberty don’t have the capacity to offer informed consent to sexual relations.  I think kids over puberty need to be protected from those who would coerce them, especially where there is a big power inequality (like a female teacher getting it on with a student).  I think everyone needs to be protected against preditors who use violence or drugs to make people have sex against their will.

But what I don’t think is that anyone who does initiate this kind of relation is not human, is less than human, is a monster or an alien.  Sexuality is hard stuff, and from what I understand, most sexual abusers have had some kind of abuse in their own lives.  These are broken and ambiguious people who need to be stopped from hurting others, but also need to be helped to negotiate their own desires.

I watch the police try to understand and explain these people.  They need to seem to be on top of the problem, and so they need to fill in the gaps in their understanding, fill them in a way that others can understand.

This is where the Frog DNA comes in.  In Jurassic Park, they had to fill in the gaps to build dinosaurs, so they used frog DNA.  Of course, this was just a construct that allowed the dinos to change sex and breed, but it was where everything came a cropper.

I watched this when law enforcement people talked about Michael Jackson.  They wanted to dismiss him as “just another pedophile” so they attributed the characteristics of the generic model pedophile to him.

Problem was, he isn’t some generic textbook model.  He is Michael Jackson, huge pop star.

Problem is, though, that nobody is some generic textbook model.  We are all indviduals. And when people try to eliminate ambiguity and reduce anyone to a sterotype by filling in the unknown gaps with Frog DNA, things come a cropper.

Does Oprah understand this?  Does she understand how her quest to purge ambiguity is a contradiction to her spiritual principles to value every human, to acknowledge her connection?

Oprah knows what people want.  She knows what people like, knows what people come to her for.  People come for entertainment and certainty, for solutions and salvation.  They want their fears titlated and redeemed.

And if that takes filling in the gaps with Frog DNA in a way that she would loathe if done to her, well, I’m sure she believes that some people have given up their right to be treated as humans by doing something she considers heinous, or one of the many other adjectives she uses to characterize both the behaviour of these humans and the humans themselves.

Sexual abuse of others is wrong. It should be stopped.

But as long as we think it’s evil, and anyone who does it is evil, seeing them only though our stereotypes, we never get to figure out how to release the pressure on these people before they hurt others.  If their desires continue to be beyond the pale, they will have no choice but to submurge them and act out rather than finding ways to engage that desire in ways that don’t hurt, injure and damage others.

All this fear, all this fear.  No “internet preditor” has ever seen someone who didn’t make the choice to reveal themselves and meet their chat buddy.  The engaging and encouraging kids that adults play to lure these internet trollers are kids who don’t know when to shut off the messenger, kids who have desires and issues.

Do people want to engage their children’s desires?  No, much easier to fear the people and things that might fulfill them, the things they can chase freely once they are 18. 

The only way to make the world unambigous is to fill the gaps and twists with something that explains it in a way we understand; in other words, to fill it with Frog DNA.

And, as anyone who ever watched Jurassic Park can tell you, all that does is make your troubles multiply. 

that classic drag queen bullshit.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/15041727.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

My reading:

I’m not trans, I’m just an actor celebrating the underhighlighted (sic) true femininity. 

I only want to be in drag for work, not like the trannys who people don’t like because they have needs. 

Elaine Lancaster has no needs other than to be the star others want her to be and get paid well for her work, and that’s why people can love her for ever.

I’m more of a man than most marys I know, even if I work in $10,00 ballgowns.

http://www.miami.com/multimedia/miami/news/archive/drag/drag.swf

OK, so dragface is a great way to make normies comfortable with gender crossing, because it silences the queerness of it so no one has to talk about it.

But jeeze, do you think anyone who chooses to be a flaming grand diva most nights of their life is really just another gay man?  Or do you think that claiming to be just another gay man is a good way to stay located in the system of desire?

I get why normies like taking the queerness out of queer performance, and saying it’s just a tribute to women.  I get why making normies like it helps get cash and dates.  It seems to work as a narrative, so people use it.

It’s just that whenever I hear this narrative — and I think the first time I heard it was from Jim Bailey — it smells like bullshit to me.

I much prefer Charles Pierce.  Yes, he mouthed the actor words, but she also used the line “Well, someone’s got to be the drag queen, and I guess it’s me!” 

That I get.

(Bunny copied the whole article:
http://ladybunny.net/blog/2006/07/elaine-lancaster-in-miami-herald.html )

Buoyed By Poetry

I love the human voice.  I love the poetry that it can make, those delectable combinations of words and sounds that catch me and tickle me, vibrant outbursts of truth and beauty.

Of course, most of those phrases aren’t written at all.  They are a mother calling her child to dinner, a grandfather teaching a lesson, a waitress asking a patron what he needs today.

I hear these nuggets and they stick in my head.  I may have trouble playing Scrabble because I don’t see words as being made up of letters, but I have no trouble recapping a meeting with accuracy and panache, because I actually listen to other people.

And when it’s quiet & I feel safe, I play back these snippets vocally, speaking them out loud.  This is my joy in my darkest moments, feeling voices move though me, surprising and delighting me.

The hard part, of course, is that I have learned to keep silent around others, so I rarely get the surprise of voice and poetry. 

I was at a Pagan day, and asked about feminine power.  The guy speaking talked about how the passive role was valuable too, and I said that I preferred to think of the role as “receptive.”

The other women enjoyed that correction, as did I, but I was probably the only one wondering where it came from. 

I suspect the delight that would buoy me if I was more visible, more speaking, would be hearing more of the poetry that surprises & delights me.  It’s the only process I can imagine that would lift me enough to keep me going into the grinder of public life.

I am buoyed by poetry.  It’s what I look for in the world, purity of narrative revealing the ambiguity of life, the words that reveal the beautiful twists of living on the line between flesh and divininity.

I love them when I hear them from others, and I love them when they come though me.

Can I believe, though, that they are something that others can love from me?

Leadership

Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

It’s the standard advice to humans.  We trannies, though, in this culture, well, there is no one for us to follow, so we usually get cut down to two choices: lead or get out of the way.

It’s very rare, though, that growing up queer leaves us with anything other than suspicion of those who claim leadership.  We have watched the self-defined leaders attempt to divide and conquer, to use fear of separation to keep others following the pack rather than following our hearts.

Heck, we have even seen those who claim to lead in trans spaces try to separate out the queers so that the nice normal trannies can come together to have an easier time.

“You know, I’m still hurt that my partner puts down Italian food,” one friend told me. “I’m Italian, so it doesn’t feel good.”

“Yeah!” I joked back.  “You have to find a kind of food you both don’t like and rag on that!  That’s the way it’s done.  How do you feel about peirogis?”

So when we can’t follow, and leadership seems impossible, what do we do?  We get out of the way, that’s what.

And what does that mean?  It means there are few leaders who are queer enough to protect and empower the marginalized.

Becoming tranny, at least for people born male, is becoming visible.  And becoming visible comes with obligations, either the obligation to marginalize yourself, the obligation to do the pennance of a convert to normativity, or the obligation to lead. 

(The boundaries are different for trannies born female, and I’ll let others who have lived them speak about those obligations right now.)

The obligation to marginalize yourself seems self-evident, as do the obligations of a convert, becoming the most fevered believer to prove purity.  There is an old story about Claire Booth Luce, who became an avid convert to Roman Catholicism, having a meeting with the Pope.  Evesdroppers were said to have heard the Pope saying “But, my dear Mrs. Luce, I already am Catholic!” 

It’s the obligations of leadership that seem most challenging, because they are the obligations to serve from the front, figuring out the balance between what others need and want, then helping them move towards those new possibilities & make them real.

It’s hard to lead because it’s hard to be who others need you to be.  I just heard a biography of George Washington, and the way he became a public figure is amazing.  He didn’t want to be President, and after being convinced that it was crucial for the success of the nation, wanted to spend a term or less, but he spent two terms.

There may have been a private Washington, but since Martha did as he directed and burned all letters between them after his death, we will never know him.

I have spoken before about the question we all have to answer: For whom are you willing to be the queen?  Your kids, maybe, your bar, possibly, but where else are you willing to be the leader, who gives yourself in service to the stability, empowerment and growth of others?

I’m an introvert, one who looks within for answers & affirmation, and the idea of having to give myself and my public image to others seems utterly terrifying.  The self I have been exploring is a self that is very, very tender, a thin skinned delicate flower who doesn’t know where her power lies beyond the old iconoclast dance.

But I know that my only choices are leading or getting out of the way. 

I need to believe that there are gifts in leadership, that it is ultimately just a different kind of joy and affirmation, a way of rebirth that allows flowering.

Choose again.

Starting Over — And Over, And Over, And Over. . .

It was 1998, and I asked Nancy Nangeroni if she wanted me to write anything for Tapestry

“Yeah,” she replied. “Write an article telling that asshole Dallas Denny to shut the fuck up.”

I thought that might just be a little too much “on the nose.” But I did understand how trannys sabotage each other, how we externalize our own pain, blame others, and take potshots at people trying to do good.

I saw that again this week, when an old tranny hand blamed the leader of one gathering of not welcoming their partner last year, and now their partner shows no interest in connecting with trannys any more. How sad, this person opined, that one leader destroyed the concern of a potential ally, turning her against trannys forever.

Jeeze. Let’s blame one experience where someone was more concerned about the group than one person for hurting someone so bad they can’t be reclaimed. In other words, let’s externalize the problem, so it’s not our fault that we can’t start over, be reborn, find peace.

Transgender is about pure transformation, or it is about nothing at all, as I said in 1995.

And transformation requires starting over and over and over again.

Here’s what I wrote for Nancy in 1998. She didn’t read it, but I got someone else at IFGE to read it and it was eventually published in Tapestry.

And it seems relevant as ever today.

Continue reading Starting Over — And Over, And Over, And Over. . .

Periodicity

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: The world would be much easier if people (including us) healed on our schedule rather than on their own. But they don’t — it takes time to heal, with work to do to get over the resistance, get past the pain, and put things in context. (I laugh: When I had a car crash and sent out a note about it, Kate Bornstein wondered “How did you turn this into art so fast?)

People are on their own schedule. What’s that old woman’s word of wisdom? “You can have it all, just not all at once.”

For trannys, whose phases are often clearly noticable, this means we live in visible cycles. We become visible in one mode, and then seem to become invisible again, though what that usually means is that we are now visible in a new way, to a different audience, with a different face. What else can you expect of people who live liminal, who are in the doorway between worlds that many see as separate and divided?

I understand this periodicity, and I feel it in my life. I remember that what counts is eternal, not ephemeral, and that love lasts, even when it appears to dissappear.

Now that doesn’t mean I don’t get lonely, don’t pull back, and don’t hurt some when people I love need to go do their own work.

But it does mean that I do understand the need.

Memories

Because I love stories, I love memories.

So many rituals are about making something memorable, either though repetition or making something intense & potent. 

June has been wedding month on lots of cable channels, and I watch these women trying to take their ceremonies over the top, thinking that more and more expensive is what makes a wedding memorable.  Sad to say, what usually makes a ceremony memorable is when a human freaks out and breaks down, because it’s that raw emotion that we understand as essentially & potently human.  Still, in a consumer culture it’s easier to assemble a pile of neat stuff than it is to weave a tapestry of stories that will resonate into our shared futures, so most people leave the stories to chance, fueled with alcohol and fear.

Today, when overstimulation is the norm, creating memories is hard.  We don’t have time or skills to convert sensation into story that will endure in memory.  Sensation fades, which is good, or no woman would ever have a second child, but the story continues, which is why when the joy turns to story women have incentive to breed again.

I grew up in a family where narrative was valued, but story was not, where details were always seen, but the meaning and connection behind them was best left invisible.  We din’t learn to shape stories, didn’t learn to honor the stories of others, didn’t learn to treasure stories that could lift us above the mundane.  We learned that the mundane was to be valued above stories as it wore us down and shortened our sight to today’s immediate losses.   No one was there to help us build a context and understand the arc, sweep and possibilities of our lives beyond toil and hurt.

The human mind may or may not be built for story, but the human heart definately is.  We create stories organize our experiences, and now, while most stories we hear are built for the purpose of daily commerce rather than the purpose of long term benefit to the village/tribe/community, it’s very easy to have our memories be tales of how we didn’t get what we wanted rather than stories of how humans flower slowly to become strong.

Today, healer types often try to manipulate memory, searching for stories that don’t exist to generate a point cause for the pain & disconnection we feel — a “recovered” incident of abuse, for example —  or telling us that we need to not remember to begin anew, that there is only now. 

I don’t think either of these are valuable.  Our memories inform our lives, but the context — the stories — we carry them in often make them dead weights rather than valued lessons, maybe learned the hard way, but learned. 

Others want to deny those memories, like my mother says that I am crazy to think my nickname in the family was “Stupid” until it became “Stupid, Oh The Shrink Told Us Not To Call You That” when I was about 13.   But my sister, well, she remembers.

I want to be able to say out loud that I have experienced this life, and that the scars on me, each one holding a story, have helped me grow in a way that makes me more potent.  However asking people to value pain, scars and context isn’t something easy, because it often illuminates choices and experiences they made that they cannot yet face.

My mantra is often “marry me” when I remember these places when I fell down, connect with me and affirm that I am good and valuable and sweet, even if I have screwed up in the past.  But that dream has been lost for decades, so I try to squeeze out “live and learn,” which I believe, but doesn’t help me pass beyond the memories.

Our memories need stories to create healing, and those stories need affirmation, but if the context is about potent indvidual choice and finding shards of divinity in who we are, that affirmation is hard to come by.

So I offer this to you: 

Your memories hold the points where your messy humanity intersects with your transcendant divinity, and in those moments, bits of the power of the wounded healer has been given to you.  You are a child of our shared human mother, and you are beautiful in her eyes, beautiful in her heart.  May those stories illuminate your possibilities and empower you to make the leaps you need to make away from the expections of others and into the magic of your own triumph.

Forever

According to The Telegraph, April Ashley knows that she will be ‘Always a sex-change first, and anything else second.’

That’s not unique to us, of course. When Rob Reiner finally passes, some newspaper will publish the headline “Meathead Dies.”  Newspapers like quick codes.

The problem with the sex-change code, though, is that it feels dehumanizing.  Meathead was a role played by Mr. Reiner, not who he was, not who he is. 

As I have said here before, I don’t know anyone who wants to be a tranny.  We may want to be a man, a woman, a performer, a hottie or whatever, but being trans isn’t what we want, it’s just the path we find we have to take to try and get it.  What we want is to be who we know we are, and more than that, to be seen as who we are rather than being constrained by expectations placed on our biology and our history.

Stacy has been talking about walking in the world as a tranny.  She knows she is a woman, but she also knows that she is seen as a tranny, and that’s not what she wants, not who she sees herself as being.

For me, watching Stacy is watching someone move from the purity of vision to the ambiguity of living that vision, from a babytranny who believes in miracles to a mature tranny who is finding the hard work of making magic happen.

That work, facing stigma, is wearing and draining, and in the end, as April Ashley reminds us, is almost impossible, because people want to hang a short label on us, and turn us from a human searching for authenticity to a professional tranny.  It’s that step that separates us from the people who encourage the laughs by revealing they are “really” what you expect, not someone who transcends those expectations.

May Stacy find her peace, and may Ms. Ashley find the places where she can be something other than a “sex-change.”

Hell, may we all find that.

Correct

On the other side, the extreme liberals keep pushing the envelope of human sexuality further. It is now not just about gays and lesbians, it is also about bisexuals and transgender persons. Are they asking the church to argue that God creates people as bisexuals as well as of the incorrect sex?
   Debate over the soul of the Episcopal Church, Dr. Phillip Linder, Dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Columbia SC.

This is why it is so problematic to agrue transsexuality as a birth defect.  Are we really incorrect, and if so, why isn’t our brain incorrect, not our body?

To me, the only answer is that God made people diverse and valued, and unless the way they are born directly threatens their physical health, it’s not an error to be corrected or denied.  They may choose to co-create their bodies with God as they co-create their lives, but that’s a choice they make for themselves.

But to have people born different, different in visible physical ways, from skincolor to height and any other way, or different in desire, loving different things & people, well, that’s not incorrect. 

As long as people play by the rules, they have their lives.  The key rule for Christians, of course, is the Golden one: Do not do unto others things you would find hateful to you.  The practical embodiment of this rule is consent, the idea that if you do something that directly affects someone’s body or property without their agreement, you violate them. 

Anyone who studies human civilizations will find that if society moves beyond enforcing order, usually though law, and tries to enforce virtue, to punish sin, things quickly go awry.  If you have the power to enforce your moral code on others, someone else will have the power to enforce their moral code on people like you. Even if you both think your contradictory codes are perfect and come down from God, your attempt to enforce them creates human evil, not justice.

It’s God’s job to punish sin, and the family/village’s job to encourage virtue, and I hope both of those things happen.  It’s society’s job to enforce order, so that people are safe & productive in their diversity, not preyed upon by others. 

Teach others, including your children, why holding the beliefs you hold and making the choices you make is right and righteous, but trying to hold power by holding that other beliefs and choices are evil is an attempt to coerce and remove the free will that lets humans grow by making mistakes and choosing again.

Trannys are not incorrectly sexed.  They are correctly liminal, between in a way that reminds us the walls we see as hard and fast are just of the flesh, and we share a continuous common humanity.

After all, wasn’t it St. Paul who said “In Christ there is no male; there is no female; there is no slave nor free man?”

But as long as the church sees themselves as arbiters of gender, from baptism to weddings to denying ordination to women, or homosexuals or anyone else who crosses lines that heteronormativity has drawn and claimed real, that phrase has little meaning.

And to transsexuals who “just have a birth defect they got fixed and are better now,” well, how did your God make you incorrect, and why isn’t it your mind that’s broke, not your body?

Performance Requires Performance

Of course, she was a redhead. 

Dancing just behind Jason Alexander’s left shoulder on “A Capitol Fourth” with huge, intense eyes and a smile that could light up the night by itself.  The other gals were good, but she earned her place because she committed, pumping out a focused beam of joyous energy right into the massive crowd and TV cameras.

She reminded me to watch the performances, not just watch the show.  Vanessa Williams came on, tall and beautiful, and made Elmo real to the whole place by treating him like a cute three-year old, while below the ledge, Kevin Clash made Elmo everyone’s friend.

Meryl Streep was on A Prairie Home Companion, and watching her talk with Garrison Keillor you could see the precision in her performance.  “Steal from the guys,” she told Kelly Ripa this week, “because they will never notice.”

Success always requires the creation of a persona who can succeed, one who can do the work and make the magic.  In other words, increasing your performance always requires performance, be that the performance of one who can shift in the moment, or the performance of one who consistently and confidently knows who they are and how they can make magic.

I was talking with a friend today about a transwoman whose performance is less than her co-workers would like.  She scares clients, growls and defends because she is trying to keep a ghost alive, the ghost of the man she was.  She tries to cling to his power, his ex-wife and his status, and the harder she tries to cling, the more desparate and disconnected she seems to the people she was hired to help.

We can’t keep the dead alive by keeping their rotting flesh animated.  But we can become alive by being absolutely in the moment, trusting that our training & rehearsal will support our comittment and our performance will shine.

The challenge, of course, is to find that system that supports us in the immersion and rehearsal required for that transformative performance.  It’s really easy to be to big for the room, really hard to let loose and pull it back.  Heck, the Washington Post reports that it took Christine Baranski a month of performances to get the mechanics down enough so that she could find her own Mame with wit and heart.

And for we trannys who learn to self-police like hell, doing that final surgery of pulling the stick out of our ass is even harder.  It just feels so risky not to stay pulled back, defended and distant, even if we know it is our intense and present performance that makes everything — even us — real.

I know this.  I suspect that transwoman who holds tight to a past that she knows is dying knows that it’s her committment to the performance, to being in the moment, that makes her real.  It’s just that both of us know how easy it is to reach and fall, to shatter and splatter.

Jillian Todd Weiss reminds us that the most transgressive trannys aren’t the ones who stay on the edges in the typical roles, drag queen & sex worker, rather the most dangerous trannys are those who take more mainstream power while being visibly tranny.  Freaks and fairies are easy to understand because they self-marginalize, but potent, smart, charismatic and visibly queer people, well, they need more marginalization.

I watch that redhead dancer, so focused and so potent, and I feel that same force inside of me.  Then I swallow that energy, pulling it down to the pit of my stomach so no one can see it.  I work hard to just stay hidden, to let others live their life and take care of their messes.

The fireworks over the Charles are ending now, the explosions pounding out of the television and into my chest.  All that energy that I have to just absorb rather than letting it invigorate me, rather than taking the exuberance and living it.

Performance requires performance. And sometimes it takes a redhead in lots of eyeliner and false eylashes to remind me of all I keep inside, the performance and the voice I swallow rather than hanging out there.

And then, well, once more, power and freedom escape me.

Happy Independance Day, eh?

for you

for you
i give you my death
the tender denial
you have asked for in so many ways
so i can please you
so i can tender you
the love you have tried to tender me
a love ass fragile as
your tender human spirit

i die for you
i die for myself
rather than be killed
for being too alive.

it’s just how & where we die
that defines how we live
giving up some spark
for the smaller comfort of home.
trading a full spirit
for filling my heart
with love
that dies
for you.
(after hearing Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese)