Language matters. Language matters way more than we as a whole give it credit. I’d like to talk about the language that surrounds us, and specifically that excludes us. Be it gendered language or plainly heterosexist, the message we receive is clear: Our very existence as queers inhabiting by choice or otherwise the space outside societal norms is contrary to nature. There are no words for us. Language is so deeply rooted in our psyche, our translation of the world around us, we forget that language is a cultural construct, and not a part of nature at all. The exciting realization of this leaves us at a precipice over the unknown, fresh with the potential for change and conscious culture.

I feel in my mother tongue, English, a cavity where the words for my people should be. I can’t imagine what it must be like for friends of mine whose first languages have no words for queer or even gender at all. How does one begin to explain, without being forced out of the spoken altogether? We can’t live our lives in dance, or wordless birdsong, hoping to be interpreted. If there’s one thing I’ve always loved about English (and I do love it dearly), it’s practicality. While it arguably lacks some of the spirit or lyric of other languages, there is a clarity available- a clarity quickly forgotten when it comes to us. Instead, we are, as I said, either neutered (spouse, parent, sibling), assigned a masculine or feminine gendered word despite ourselves (husband/wife, mother/father, brother/sister) or denied the recognizance of our interpersonal roles altogether, leaving a genuine expression of our lives to the realm of art and metaphor solely.

As beautiful as these fluid and creative expressions are, they are not enough for me. I like the stability and strength of language, the roots of parent tongues and branches of generational lingo. There is a beautiful thing that Harvey Fierstein says in one of my favourite films, “The Celluloid Closet” that has stayed close to my heart. In it he explains that “all the reading he was given to do in school was always heterosexual. I had to do this translation into my life rather than seeing it in my life. Which is why when people say to me it’s not really gay work, it’s universal. And I say, ‘up yours!’ It’s gay. That you can take it, and translate it for your own life is very nice, but at last, I don’t have to do the translating.” Mr. Fierstein is saying something quite important (as does the entire film) as he describes the ‘translation’ from ‘straight’ to ‘gay’, something that I’m trying to find the words to address more fully in my own life and society. Anyone who is queer understands this statement too deeply. The ‘translation’ is literal as well as experiential. The truth is, we’re translating from English, a heterosexist and (relatively) strictly gendered language into a language which doesn’t exist yet. The only way that language which is not oppressive because of how it is gendered, or focused on a sexuality or normative lifestyle (be it born of English or Italian or entirely new) exclusively is if we make it. We are the poets of our future and our children’s future.

Which brings me back to being a queer parent (hypothetically). The reason it is so exciting to realize that we need to make new language is simply that it means we have all the creative freedom. When my ex-fiance and I were talking longingly about parenthood, we started thinking of ungendered names for parental units. In my own life, I know I want something that wouldn’t sound like other words, something without connotations, something it’s own. Well our nicknames for each other are Bear and Deer, so we thought ‘Bur’ and ‘Der’ would be cute diminutives in places of Mommy and Daddy. Gender free and personal! The ideal is for words created in our own personal lives to be so excellent that they really catch on and effect the culture around us, but even in one’s own life, the effect queer language has on comfort, self-esteem and confidence is amazing. It really makes a difference, and like Harvey Fierstein says, at last it is normative society who must do the translating.

This applies to heterosexuals also. I had a conversation with a friend recently who is quite fascinating, though on the superficial fits into the white heterosexual male category. Well living in a Liberal community, he was finding himself disappointed with the neutering of everything. He missed the intimacy of the word wife, but the history of marriage and the word ‘husband’ itself were not cool with him. When heterosexual people are over the oppressive nature of language molded to empower only part of humanity, they too are faced with this creative challenge.

We are not the first generation of queers to get creative with their words.  For a truly impressive example of queer creative language, one only need look to the history books.   From the priests of Cybele, “said to converse with the palms of their hands turned upward, a gesture depicted on figurines portraying female deities, …to lisp, to giggle and whisper, to use obscene language, to employ women’s oaths, and to address each other in the feminine gender,” (Conner 1997) to the language Polari, which was very popular in Britain during the 1950s, we have found had a tongue itching to be explored.  Polari was made predominantly of English slang inverted and modified slang of foreign languages coming in with new immigrants.  Peter Burton wrote in Polari, only partly understood by the non-speaker,

“As feely homies, when we launched ourselves onto the gay scene, polari was all the rage. We would zhoosh our riahs, powder our eeks, climb into our bona new drag, don our batts and troll off to some bona bijou bar. In the bar we could stand around polarying with our sisters, varda the bona carts on the butch hom[m]e ajax who, if we fluttered our ogle riahs at him sweetly, might just troll over to offer a light for the unlit vogue clenched between our teeth. If we had enough bona measures, we might buy a handful of dubes to hoosh down our screechs – enabling us to get blocked out of our minds.” (1997)

One of my favourite examples of queer language in my own life came up between myself and a partner quite by accident. He is Italian and a wonderful cook (wonderful in many, many ways, actually). While talking about how we’d like to make lasagna for each other, and ‘taste each others lasagna’, being human/fancy apes, we couldn’t help but note the sexual subtexts of the sentence. ‘Let’s make lasagna together’ made a rather good code for sex if I do say so myself, better than ‘Studying’. (By the way, to people who say ‘we were studying’- you don’t have to wait until backed into a lingual corner before getting playful with language. Just sayin’.) Swiftly the phrase broke down into ‘lasagna’ as this beautifully multipurpose noun which could be placed in conversation to refer to just about anything sexual.

While I still wish for more specific language, the ambiguity of some created queer language excites me. Why not have a word which refers to sexual organs or sex? Why can’t my outtie be described by the same word as your innie? Language, though it shapes us, is something that we have conscious control over, despite normative society’s wishes that we would all forget that we have any conscious control over anything but our credit cards at all. After all, at the end of the day, we are human: creative, sexual, and designers and users of tools. Fancy apes.

But Romance? I had another thing coming. Brokeback Mountain, for all it’s hype as a ‘ground-breaking gay romance’ was no such thing! What the fuck? It wasn’t a romance at all! Instead, few minutes of painful backwoods monotony, sexual tension, and then a quick non-consentual fuck on a cold night before a summer of man on man sex and intimacy followed by an entire movie depicting the desparity of two men who were unable to follow their desires.

Not a movie about romance- not even a movie about love.  To be clear- it’s not the movie I’m upset with or even TALKING about here, as some seemed confused.  It’s the reaction the movie gendered from the various communities that viewed it.  Brokeback Mountain was a beautifully directed and executed film (that frankly should have been about 30 minutes long) about an important topic I wish didn’t exist- OPPRESSION.

It really grinds my gears, having now seen this movie, to think of all the straight people I knew and didn’t know who were congratulating themselves upon moving ‘past their homophobia’ even though the movie made them uncomfortable and enjoying that beautiful ‘romance’. It speaks to the queerphobia and ignorance of our nations that such a desperate and painful story could be read as romance at all- rather than an honest chronicle of the life-leeching oppression of heteronormativity. It doesn’t fucking matter whether these blokes were gay, bi, just lonely, in love or just became obsessed with the one place in time where their repressed desires were fulfilled momentarily, so each faction can stop whining about their sexuality being misrepresented. A romance? By the last time they met, they had practically no chemistry or connection. The picture painted here is not a windswept romance, but a drawn out and taboo desire in a society where that desire was punished by being pulled naked through the desert by a rope tied to your cock until it ripped off of your body.

Regardless of why or how they wanted it, these two men wanted each other in one way or another. Both knew that it was not acceptable at all in society for them to have each other, worse to want each other. Both knew that their lives were at risk, both engaged in fights of fear, both insisting “I ain’t no queer” the morning after their first romp and entering fist fights whenever they felt their masculinity or heteronormativity in question. This movie shows eloquently the lies, the loneliness, and the desperate lives we who deviate from the norms of heteronormativity and heterosexuality live when forced to live within them for fear of death/rejection. This movie gives an idea to those who would never have lived experience what life in the closet might be like. The pain these men suffer over each other, over this unapproved desire is a lesson in the suffering caused by normativism of all kinds, specifically heteronormativism.

Said Alec Scott of the CBC, “ It’s a little jarring that neither of the characters seems the slightest bit nelly; it’s as if this is a vision of gay life brought to you by the Log Cabin Republicans (the U.S. group of gay conservatives). It’s equally implausible that despite having been taught to hate queers — as a lesson, Ennis’s dad once showed him the corpse of a gay man who had been beaten to death — that both boys’ innards didn’t somehow get completely twisted. They are still innocent enough to sustain a loving, long-term affair and be, in their own ways, true to each other.”

Ignoring the presumptions towards the main characters’ sexuality (that they are gay), I want to shake my head at the CBC. A loving, long-term affair? Ditching your wives to have the sex you crave and can never bring the courage together to move forward with is not innocent, and neither is their disturbing, sometimes violent sexual relationship, it’s sad. It is not a loving, long-term affair- it is a vision of what happens when we (queers, faggots) are taught to hate queers.

Worst of all, I have seen on many blogs and reviews (through my search to find a single review that didn’t extole the virtues of this ‘progressive romance’) that state something to the effect of “This isn’t a gay romance, it’s a story of two men- two people in love.” To which I have to wonder… does the fact the I have sex with my boyfriend more than once a year, recognize our relationship with a title other than ‘fishing buddy’, don’t punch him and draw blood when I get scared of intimacy with someone of the same sex, don’t look like a tough straight cowhand from Texas and have a shitty marriage with a woman for show mean I am less like “two people in love”?

I would like to give, via the internet, a public “fuck-you” to everyone who would look at this movie, a movie about the suffering people experience when they are not allowed to experience the people they’d be if they were free from oppressive societal codes of conduct like heteronormativity, and say “Finally, a movie that’s not just a gay love story (because, of course, gay men are less than real men /sarcasm) but a love story about two men, two people in love.”

Fuck that. I don’t have to go to Mexico to hire a prostitute or wait all year and take it up the ass bare in order to get what I want- want to meet? I’m a fucking person, trust me. This is the kind of bullshit I want down with- let’s please stop allowing people to tell us when we’re less than people when we are gay or queer. Let’s please stop allowing these self-congratulators to spout conforming words like that minutes after watching a heartbreaking movie… about the perils of conformity and normalcy. Let’s start these conversations with our so called ‘allies’. All the would be queer teen suicide victims will thank you when adults start criticizing the gendering and norming behaviours and words of other adults. I sure wish I could have heard one adult, one teacher contradict another’s norming of my behaviour, my speech, my dress. How many Jack Twists have to ‘accidentally’ die while changing tires or Tyler Clementis have to take their own lives before we stop accepting this kind of language?

And that is what is concerning me.

No, It Does Not Get Better for all of us, if It Gets Better only means that when you are older, you will be Dan Savage.  And for all the babyqueers of disability, colour, transexuality, size, immigrant families, non-normative gender or sexualities of any kind, we cannot necessarily depend on moving to a large city and inheriting a liberal Canadian or American white gay male privilege.

Some of us look forward to not just being another black male suspect when they move to the city, but now a queer black male suspect. And I quote, “Yippee…”

I am glad that the It Gets Better Project is happening.  But its not enough.  In a world where the suicide rate for trans and queer youth is as high as it is, where native and immigrant populations teens have as high suicide rates as they do, what we need is NOT yet another normative telling us we will be okay when we are them.

We do not need a gay mainstream, a homonormative that we cannot achieve whether by body or creed or gender, to replace the straight mainstream oppression, the heteronormative which has historically beaten us down.  This is not a critique of those in the gay mainstream reaching to the future members of the same privilege- I commend what the have done, what we have not.

No, what this is is an appeal, to those who are that queer non-normative, who are the beautiful rule-breakers, iconoclasts, the brilliant freaks and outsiders of our society, to do what our gay counterparts have already done.  Don’t leave the twelve-year-old version of yourself, marginalised as sie is, with only normative gays existing in the machine to try to relate to, all the while unsure how to reconcile the genderbending clothes, the glitter, the buds of queer critical discourse beginning in their questioning minds with the binary gendered masculinity and normative privilege of those who have put their voices on video already.  How indeed, can we allow one normative to be replaced by yet another normative, this one claiming to be for the ‘others’ in society?  How indeed can we allow our own to be marginalised so further into obscurity, that they are isolated by the very project that seeks to help?

I think that many of us can relate to what I’m trying to say here.  Or perhaps even have already been there, feeling their way through normative gay culture and finding no place in the fold that felt right for them or perhaps even wanted them.  The queer, trannies, the ‘others’, our contemporaries, NEED to know that we are alive, NEED to know that they are not alone, and NEED to know that it DOES GET BETTER FOR THEM TOO.  That community waits for them, and that in community, is strength…

So here’s where I’m at.  I have been considering doing a video of my own, on this blog, and thought, why not go further.  Why be just one voice, the voice of a queer twenty-year-old life-long other/weirdo, when we could be many?  Why not a video blog?  It might take an hour of your time to write and film your contribution… but it might save a life.

Please, please, PLEASE contact me if you are at all interested in participating in this project.  I am dead serious and want this to happen.  Let there be no complaining without constructive action.

Lets inundate the oversaturated world of free media with our voices.  Let the voices of the people, queers of all classes, creed, bodies, genders and minds be heard, like a great wave.  Let’s make a repository of hope, from our vast and diverse experiences let’s make something one could spend hours on, watching real, potent video after video!  And don’t think your experience is not worthy of this- we all are.  Doesn’t matter whether you have ‘made it’ or not.  I’m not a newspaper columnist with a fancy condo either- I’m a twenty year old, trying to make it through college.  But I am real, and It Got Better for me… Because I found all of you.  I know you have a story to tell as much as I do.

Please, please, please, for me, for you, and all the children growing up in a time like this one who are as we were, please draw that story out of you.  It’s a fishing line that might help someone else up out of a very dark place.

Solidarity forever,

Isaac e Perseid

External links and further reading:

TO CONTRIBUTE -

The steps are: 1. Ruminate over what your message of encouragement is. Think about what got better in your life. (ex: my video will be about how finding community, learning I was part of a family rather than alone made all the difference and made things Get Better.) 2. Write it before hand if that’s your style, don’t if it’s not. 3. Find a webcam, video camera, or cell phone camera is that all you can (although it’s not preferable, of course) and film your part. 4. Send the video to me either at siouxdonym@gmail.com.  The facebook event for the call for videos is linked below.

EVENT PAGE http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=172158972803954&num_event_invites=26

Article by Jasbir Puar – http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/nov/16/wake-it-gets-better-campaign

I’ve begun to think in dualisms, which historically I hate, since returning to a normative world. A queer person may either stop being queer, live as a warrior, or leave mainstream society altogether, live in a place like Short Mountain or Mount Zuni. I live in Windsor now, though, not Short Mountain. My bark must be worse than my bite so I don’t have to bite, but my bite must be worse than it was so I can keep on barking. Every day is a reminder of an unequal society, made all the more strikingly obvious to me by my forays into better communities.

You may ask, if you’re unfamiliar with my blog, why I would leave a place I obviously see as paradisiacal and come to Windsor, Ontario, a town best known for automobile production, failed economy, and it’s bootlegging reputation during American prohibition. The long and the short of it is, I’m in school. One of the classes I’m in is Society and Warrior Cultures, an interesting class with a good teacher that I chose mainly out of concern for the language I find activism and justice adopts most often (fight, battle, defendant, war, warrior), and a hope that the relation between these ideas and warriorship would be illuminated for me through semantic.

I envision a cavern with much rock formation. The kind where no matter where you shed the light, no one part of the cave is ever fully lit- that is how I see my feelings towards my own emotional and psychological experience with activism and particularly queer thought- is a warrior what I am? Do I want to be a warrior at all?

I’ve opened this article with the sentence “A queer has two options available to hir: stop being queer, or live as a warrior.” More and more I begin to believe that within mainstream society this is true. For one, if queer is a practice, or a relationship between sex, sexuality, gender and society, then one can certainly choose their relationship. Can choose to be straight or gay. The second option, to live as a warrior, rings particularly true when the wording is considered.

Read it, it's good!

To live as a warrior. Through this class we have discussed what it means to be a warrior, versus a fighter or soldier. The word warrior carries with it, for most that hear it, an association to some code of honour. It holds more to this concept than it does to physical combat. We refer to warriors every day. For example, within the queer context, “Gender Warriors” by Leslie Feinberg, a book intersecting gender identity and warriorship throughout history. We don’t mean queerdos that fought. We mean something… more.

And we relate to that something more. We relate to that sense of something greater, we sense without being told what it would be like to live as a warrior. To live as a warrior tells of a way of living that is the way of the warrior, more than any act.

And there is no question to a queer whether there will be a reason to act or not. Queer is a struggle for most, getting there and defending it once we are ‘there’. We feel a sense of internal struggle when we see images of Joan D’Arc donning men’s armour. We feel, every day, the struggle. The struggle to survive, be hired, make enough money, be accepted, be allowed so many things given to dominant social groups as though they were nothing. The freedoms some would take for granted when we wouldn’t dare enter for fear of how the law, as queerphobic as most of it’s subjects, wouldn’t treat us. If you are someone perceived as queer, you will face struggle- or stop being queer.

Instead, those who remain queer learn to fight. Even if not fight for, to fight because. Before we are ready to flagship our politics and our rights to dignity and humanity, we find ourselves fighting, on fist or word or paper, because we are queer. Because we are under attack, and the option of non-resistance, the option of ‘not stop being queer, or become a warrior’ is fail. Because without a code of ethic, without a sense of righteousness, even defending yourself begins to feel hollow and infinitely tiring. How much attack can a person take without lifting a shield before they either repent their queerness and subvert to a less confrontation, less conflict bound politic, or die?

Our days are met with violence. Physical violence, emotional, religious, spiritual, intellectual, and legal violence, in ways that are subtle, and in ways that are not. The nature of social hierarchies is to make ‘others’ out of the oppressed. Oppression is intersectional, and Queer as it manifests in the West, as Queer critical theory, represents an aggressively oppositional response. Be that response a knife, a lawsuit, or a journalistic tenacity, it is an art of war we eventually adopt.

And is that what we want? I say I resent the skin I have had to grow back coming back to the mainstream, that I resent the kinds of tough that children have to be when they are told that they can’t wear something because they are ‘the wrong gender’. Is this connection to violent words like war and fight really something we want so close to our hearts when we ‘fight’ for change?

This discussion isn't limited to queer fight. The same can be said of feminism and other anti-oppression movements.

I am learning to see warriorship as a thing of grace, of art, and sacrifice- discipline. But all the while I am still seeing that through all these graces and arts, whether glamorized or not at all, there comes to be a lust. A warrior begins to enjoy his martial art. It becomes a way of balance when applied properly. I can accept that the practice of these powers are healthy for the mind, the body, and most importantly, the spirit. It is not ability to fight that I have difficulty with- it is better to have fought and survived than to have decided pacifism and died. Perhaps it is not the distaste for the method that holds me back… But rather, how close I feel that the fight brings me to the heart of what I fight against. Because the heart of my opponent is the same as mine. If I as a queer warrior begin to enjoy the struggle as a martial artist might enjoy his discipline, what prevents my heart from becoming a mere reflection of the desire in the heart of my enemy?

I am grappling with this and unsure of anything. I am a patient person, willing to wait for an answer. This blog is not a manifesto. It’s a conversation, and no content will ever be removed when it no longer represents my opinion or standpoint. I believe it is always useful that way, and that the conversation is more useful than the dogma that can result like sediment. But I still want to get closer to clarity, or to a properly lit cavern or whatever. I think if we combine our floor lamps and headlights and candles we can get a lot closer to it together. And then maybe we can clean the cave the fuck up!

This week I want to give you an example of a day in the life of someone who presents themself the way I do.  This is how genderfuckery is met in our ‘progressive’ Canadian society… Americans take note: if you live in an American city, the social climate may be far more progressive than here in Canada.  I’m not in the countryside, I’m in a Canadian, Ontarian city (Montreal, alone, stands accepting of divergent people to a noteworthy degree) and I am not the most transgressive dresser by any means.

“Dear Diary”, Bunny Boy would write at the beginning of his day, sipping carrot juice and eating veggielox on sprouted grain toast, “Today is going to be a really wonderful happy-go-lucky day”. Bunny would promptly put his coat on, give his cheap (read adorable) pink headpiece a final adjustment and go outside to wait for the bus that would take him to school. He would probably expect everyone he met that day to see his floral lipstick-red and white pants and ears and grin, say something nice to him, and go about their day amused. That is, if Bunny Boy didn’t live in a world that hated himself and people like him.

In real life, Bunny’s day looks more like this. Bunny Boy walks out the door and across the street to the bus stop alert like a hare out of the tall grasses- it is not to early for locals to try to hit him or crack addicts to attack his faggoty ass for what money they assume he has (being a poof and all).

When the autobus arrives, Bunny swipes his card (which the driver gives a good long look, perhaps for a gendered name or some clue to divine the reason for the extremity of his otherness {Why can’t Bunny just be a normal gay man?}) and steps on the bus. He walks past all the stares just waiting for a lewd comment or a look of disgust. Experience has given him acid.

Bunny sits at the back of the bus where more seats are free. A girl (henceforth to be known as Hyper) who seemed initally to have bi-polar and turned out to perhaps merely by drunk and high on coke on her way to school decides he’s fucking adorable. Hyper befriends Bunny loudly and repetitively for the next thirty minutes of the bus ride.

At school, Bunny makes his way through the sea of bulky heteronormous straight men, chatches, jocks, guidos, guidettes, and flaxen-haired hotties (complete with vacant blue eyes) with the all confidence and posture of an out-and-proud faggot queer who went through Catholic grade and high school and came out alive. He is secure knowing that even though the security probably hates him too, they will likely protect him too if it comes to that. He has of course taken more precautions for himself than merely noting the officers in uniform.

Through the halls and the staircases, our bodacious ear-wearer distributes many middle fingers, fuck-yous and fuck-you-and-your-ugly-Abercrombie-and-Fitch-gender-binaries. He is openly laughed and pointed at. Grace, poise, fag-in-a-Catholic-school calm. And roll camera.

In classes, Bunny is considerate enough to remove his ears, even though the women don’t remove their attention-drawing sexualized articles of clothing for class, out of respect for the teacher. Luckily in his program the students want to be there for that program specifically, so weeding out the unruly group of ‘”My parents told me to go to college and just take SOMETHING” students (opinion of these privileged yuppie offspring available later over alcohol).

On the bus after school, Bunny is delighted by children not yet properly trained to see him as a monster who in turn delight in the fact that he is a pink-eared bunny boy. Our protaganist wants to play with these five unruly sprites but knowing that anything he does near children will be perceived as pervert by the straights around him, especially the five girls’ moustachioed, Budweiser shirt-wearing begetter. Bunny Boy chose to be an other today when he woke up and wore his ears.

Windsor wasn’t exactly like being in school as a young thing, though. Between the bus stop and his apartment, Bunny was accosted by two seperate groups of three elderly men, loudly exclaiming their confusion as to his gender/sex. While they thought Bunny was a girl they called out lewd and dehumanizing things and made lewd gestures.

When they said, “What is it? I thought it was a girl! I can’t tell in the light,” Bunny replied “I don’t have tits,” pulling his shirt down to show his flat chest. “Doesn’t that mean I’m a dude?” Not seriously, of course, because he/I didn’t believe that at all.

With my new perceived otherness, though, the taunting normalized mention of rape came, too, as per usual. As usual the tone of having to be taught a lesson, that to be a queer was something requiring punishment, the old men offered to show me what real men were, or some such sick shit. “I couldn’t see in the light, faggot! Whatever, the tranny is still sexy, ooooh. Want me to slip you this dick?”

Bunny/I responded, “What if I am a woman with breast cancer? Am I still a tranny or a woman at all?” Bunny kept walking and ignored the words of minds that wouldn’t change in a three minute converation shouted across a street. Frustrated he/I shouted “Fuck off, pigs.”

Down the street, almost at his house, Bunny was called out to from above. “Hey, cute ears!”

It sounded sincere. So he looked up to a muslim wife sticking her face out from a screen door as far as she seemed to think appropriate. “Thanks,” the tired bunny replied, smiling.

“But pink is a girl’s colour!” said she.

You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.

“Yeah, Those ears were made for a woman, not a boy! They’re pink! Haha!”

Unwilling to deal with it, not caring for a conversation and not sure of the young locals near him (there were too many to risk confrontation), Bunny simply said “Your idea of gender is constrictive and fucking boring.” and walked on, too numb and caught off gaurd to think of anything more helpful to the woman.

Of course he/I went over in our head what could have been said afterwards, while sitting at our/my table. I just didn’t have the energy by the end of the day. It can be so, so tiring to deal with people’s perceptions of you. For some it can suck all the energy right out of them. For some it can end up killing them.

I’ve visited paradise, but I came back to mainstream Western society to learn medical sciences. I know I won’t be killed by all this, but honestly, I really don’t like the kind of tough, the kind of skin I have to grow to take it. I want to meet everyone with love, not caution. Not letting yourself get killed hurts.

I’ll leave you with a pleasant and amusing side from Bunny Boy:

Yesterday (Sunday, August 15^th) was Divers/Cité, a.k.a. Gay Pride in Montreal. To queers, what I’m going to say will sound like beating a dead horse, but to some I know this is worth publishing. I know that most fags enjoy the clubbing events (be they foamy or topless) without thinking about where the money comes from. Where the fags come from. Where Pride, as a march, comes from.

Divers/Cité’s website claims their “mission is to present an arts and music festival that illustrates and celebrates the value of diversity in a spirit of sharing, solidarity and openness with the world.” … And yet, in practice, this is not so.

In reality, what they offer is a commercialized version of homos’ sexuality, by large by a body of white cisgendered able gay men and women for the very same group. Nary an accessible event planned, nary an event with an atmosphere that might interest or make feel considered/comfortable/included our elders… Nothing but tanned bottoms sporting beer commercials on tight underwear.

I am not attacking ‘white gay men’, as we have all who speak out against the eploitative capitolism are accused. I am demanding a defence as to why the gay community allows it’s so called leaders to pander to corporate giants like Rockstar or beer companies whose interests are far from our own. Why, at a pride parade, do I see the advertisements of the same straight corporations who would fund the American Family Association, start anti-immigration groups, and fund our queer people’s continued oppression world-wide?

Why is an event based on a queer riot, the Stonewall Riots, meant to commemorate the gritty fuckers who fought back against the establishment that keep them down, beaten, raped and bruised, why is that event one which includes the police as anything more than an escort? The police, who were the enemy in the very battle Pride parade was started to remind us, and more importantly, remind our oppressors of?

Why is Pride a commercial endeavour, and why does it generate so much mulah? Why do groups have to pay to march? Why do groups have to be approved of? Do I really have to have money in order to legitimately have pride?

Apparently so. Or at least, their version of pride. Their version of pride does not celebrate the underpriveleged and penniless youth and trannies that fought for all of us. It does not celebrate the poor queers of colour of Greenwich village or anywhere else. Disabled people, differently-bodied people, fatties, and old people not invited. Be cute, be almost naked, and spend money.

I suppose this is an appeal to look closer. I’m hoping that next year when we see those trashy flyers floating around advertising a de-politicized, commercialized week of clubbing and drinking the logos will be noticed. The brands will be noticed, and the sheer numbers that they will be making off our misled understanding of ‘pride’.

There is hope, though- while Divers/Cite thinks itself a vibrant other from Gay Pride (don’t make the mistake of thinking they are one and the same, oh no, the tokenizing liberals behind Divers/Cité don’t like that), there is a queer rumbling in the belly of Montreal touting itself as the underside of Pride. Pervers/Cité (how witty), brings a queer, politically charges voice and community to the week with film festivals, safe spaces, panel discussions, craft groups, and yes, indeed there are parties as well (badass queer fatherfuckin’ parties at that).

While issues of accessibility are still painfully noticeable (Montreal is not an accessible city but that is not really an excuse), the queers behind Pervers/Cité are trying and they are movin and shakin from the grassroots. Each year the goings-on have been bigger and better.

And there is good news around. This year in Toronto, dykes of honour named this year and for years passed all rejected their award upon learning that Pride Toronto was not allowing the Queers Against Israeli Apartheid to march. In Berlin, Judith Butler publicly denied her award for Courage as a means to take the stage to talk about the racism and commercialism that had impregnated St. Christopher’s Day Parade (similar to Gay Pride).

Maybe one day we will have a diversity celebration were true diversity, perversity, and non-conformity are truly celebrated, where the beer is all home-made, the spaces are all accessible and equal, and the queers with the politics don’t have to be angry. Until then, I’m pissed that my fine piece of ass can make a straight man who hates me without ever needing to know me more rich than I will ever be. I’m a queer, not a billboard, and I am insulted that whoever assembles these dog and pony shows think they represent my people.

For more information on Pervers/Cité: http://www.perverscite.org/

For more information on the origins of Pride Parade: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots

For more ranting about Pride Parade: http://queertothepowerof.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/stonewall-remembered-stonewall-inspired/

I believe strongly that supporting pornography is important, for so many reasons. I explained two on camera. One of these reasons is the simple truth that in the ‘developed world’, a queer’s first experience with queer sex is likely to be online- through porn or camming. I know my understanding of queer sex came from a long engagement with internet porn before I ever came close to the physical reality. If this content, made for adults, invariably reaches adolescents and preadolescents as their first experiences with queer sexuality, I feel it to be of utmost importance to represent a healthful sexual norm.

Not of morals, mind you- subjective morality has nothing to do with my arguements, and never will. No, I mean real, life or death, tangibly healthful sexual practices. For example, while bareback (anal sex without condoms) sex may feel great, and may be healthful in a completely closed monogamous relationship, this is not what should be shown as the norm if we want a preventative and safe understanding of sexuality for our youth.

It may seem at-odds to talk about what kind of porn we want our kids to watch- but let’s be real, no matter what moral ground we are individually coming from, people watch porn. More importantly, our kids are going to watch porn as they seek to feel out and understand their sexuality. For me, participating in porn that makes use and shows the putting on of condoms, participating in porn that show the use of lube (I don’t want to hear another story of an adolescent that tore their rectum to shreds while experimenting with anal masturbation so long as I live)… These things make me feel proud to bed a part of the continual creation of a healthier and more supportive pornographic content and sexual culture.

The second note I hit on in the interview, though, is where I fear I may have been slightly (or perhaps more than slightly) less eloquent. I said something to the effect of “As people of queer sexualities we have some obligation to be as openly and publicly radical/perverse as we can. If we don’t push, we will be pushed back. If we don’t shout, the conservative right will bury our rights with our voices in the sand.” While I do feel this way, I wonder if perverse was the right word. I do think that visibility is important, I do think that representing a radical queer sexuality (often read as ‘perverse’, a word that we reappropriate in our radical communities all to often, which the conservative right will never understand) is important, I do feel that pornography, in that sense, is a radical act.

I wish I could find a serious image about porn being political. You'll have to settle for Sarah Palin wearing an American Flag.

When I see new laws cropping up throughout the states (In many states, same sex couples can be denied the right to visit a sick or injured partner in the hospital, make medical decisions for one another. Having medical power of attorney documents may help, but there’s no guarantee and hospital will recognize those documents.), from the privileges of the heterosexual population denied to the ambush of abortion rights and accessibility, our bodies and our sexualities are constantly under attack by the far right.

And the far right would love nothing more than to have our bodies, our lives, our children and our finances under their control. Under their superior judgment. The reality is, if we want to have rights at all, if we want to choose anything at all in our lives or be anything at all, we have to make ourselves known and we have to defend our lives to the teeth. Our hetero allies often fail to understand, when they ask, ‘Why are you always talking about it?” or, “Why does it seem like there’s always a fight?” that if we don’t shout, we are liable to be washed out by the voices with power, invariably conservative. We are liable to be stripped of our personhood, again.

There is so much I want to do in my life, and whether it brings me to medicine or law, or even cobbling, I live with the conviction that what I have done was right. I thought about it before I entered into the porn industry; Hell, I called my mother before I entered into the industry. I have never been addicted to any drug, and I am not trying to pay off any debts, as I have none. I am a person of hir own agency, trying to actualize in hir own life the ideals and beliefs sie holds so close to the heart. Hopefully one day, when I am applying myself to a licencing board of professionals, whatever they may be, that they recognize this truth. I am not a person of ‘poor moral standing’. I am a person of great integrity, living the politics and the ethics that myself and my community hold true.

So long may the queers talk, long may they fuck on camera, long may they voice their indignation when they are politely told that they are not fit to be a licenced professional, or stay with their partners in a hospital, or have insurance (thank goodness that marriage is a reality here in Canada now for our community). In a society where nothing is won, because our privileges, our rights are never a sure thing, we must fight in this way, that one day, maybe, queer rights will be a ‘given’, too.

Love, Isaac and Perseid

   When I read a book I tend to google it to find out what others have gotten from it.  Before I read a book, I like to have an idea of what others thought about it.  Yes, it’s true; I am a googleing whore.  Steve Jobs has me putty in his nutty hands.  When I troll the google scene, though, it is rare that I find what I’m looking for if anything for the books which lie on the fringe of readership.  Especially for our queer liteature, I want to see more content.  If the internet is the information repository of the future, let it catalog that we were here too.

   Lockpick Pornography usually reads as a happy-ending adventure story for the pissed off queer, in which the protaganist has several exciting escapades with little if any consequences.  The unnamed protaganist is a white, cisgendered, queer homosexual man who enjoys a series of outings arranged based more upon chronology than a central plotline.  Nonetheless, if your politics are in the same camp as the character’s, these outings are entertaining if not giddy-making.  Lockpick Pornography boils down to a children’s book for the angry adult queer- either a fun adventure, or a moral warning story.

   There is grave danger, in queer politics, in coming at queerdom from a place of anger, rather than love.  Joey Comeau writes on his own website for the web comic A Softer World that he is “a firm believer in the idea that if you can’t be a good example, you have an obligation to be a horrible warning,”  His first published novella, though, reads as a warning only if you choose to read it as such, in a way that those whose politics are similar will not recognize, in the same way that most fail to recognize the warning in Herman Hesse’s Demien.[i]  Except that unlike in Demien, Comeau’s protaganist meets the end of the novella not the shock of Hell, but the shock, for the readers of Comeau’s much more honest novella, that he gets off with a warning.

   This is my major criticism of the book (which I largely enjoyed, by the way), that the warning, the promise of consequence, is left floating, unfulfilled, and thusly the warning is never substantiated.   There is no impression that the unnamed protaganist has grown or changed as a result of his (mis)adventures.  The only motion (plotwise) to the book being a warning is at the very end when he relies on the goodnatured mother role of a housewife he has been aggressively prank calling since the beginning of the book, implying a recognization (if not an acknowledgement) that he has gone down a path of wrong.  The issue I take with this is that it reinforces the symbol of the heteronormative, this (good) woman, as the right and no queer character as anything but the wrong.

   I‘m not asking for a book where we are all ‘good little gays’; On the contrary, I would be loathe to read about ‘nice people’.  I merely expected, from a book so far from subtle, something more tangible than the loose symbolism at the end, where it wasn’t before (it’s perfectly possible that I missed it).

   The minimal warning that the protaganist is on a self-destructive path in the plot is well made up for by the fullness of the character created.  He is, from beginning to end, a frustrated and confused individual experiencing his rejection of heteronormativity through violence and miscreance.  We are offered richly described accounts of his attempts to break down boundaries of gender and sexuality in his own life.  We are invited to visceral accounts of his suffering as he tries and fails, continually.  In my personal opinion, because his approach to deconstructing these boundaries is one of anger rather than love.

   The characters are well written, and engaging, but at the end of the day, this is a first person narrative and it is the unnamed protaganist that we really get to know.  The fervour with which these characters are cast, especially the narrator, is infectious, and like in Demien it is easy to find oneself rooting for the protaganists in their antics.  A scan of the reviews online will show that none have interpreted this story as a warning against coming at queerdom, politics, life, what have you, from a place of anger and hate, if that is indeed what it was meant as, but rather it has been unanimously interpreted as a superficial queer punk adventure story.  

    Perhaps it is just that.  Regardless, the characters are alive enough and truly charming enough that you should be with them until the narrator punches a stranger in the stomach because she’s blonde and skinny.  While discontented and disturbed, the protaganists do have valuable discourses on gender and sexuality throughout the book, but chances are if you read the book, they’re preaching to the choir.  Furthermore the protaganist fails to overcome his own difficulties with gender and sexuality, making the book bitter in a way that makes me think of a new-age version of Pre-Stonewall literature.

On the inside cover of LOCKPICK PORNOGRAPHY, Joey Comeau quotes artist 2pac, "Don't wanna make excuses, cause this is how it is. What's the use? Unless we're shooting no one notices the youth" and aptly sets the stage for his characters.

   To pick on the plot one more time (forgive me- I swear I enjoyed the book) I found that it was clear that the writing process had stopped and started after a time- the story did not seem connected so much as a collection of smaller adventures leading up to a final slightly bigger adventure of kidnapping a preacher’s son.

   Honestly it was a fun read while reading it as a punk queer adventure story, but reading it critically left my disappointed.  I was excited by the description and the idea of characters making queer positive children’s literature to subvert the children, but found that this procreative escapade was vastly outnumbered by the destructive ones. 

   The one thing that I really need to emphasis before finishing is that Comeau’s writing style is delightful- there are some sentences that tickled me pink.  I have enjoyed his penpersonship in Lockpick Pornography and have been moved by his cover letters in Overqualified.  I am thankful that there are queer writers like him in this country writing to a wide audience, sharing their voice, our voices.  Strengthening our community in the world of literature.  I honestly look forward to reading Joey Comeau’s newer work and am excited for what he churns out in years to come.

Love, Isaac and Perseid 

If gender is purely performative as Butler argues, then these guys didn’t get the memo. Apparently even though Jade had, performatively, ‘men’s haircuts’, hir hair was indelibly gendered to match what these men believed matched hir breasts. Of course, meaning, instead of the twelve dollar haircut (or whatever it costs) that I would have enjoyed, Jade, and every female bodied person like hir, is expected to pay anywhere between twice and several times as much for the same haircut.

If we think salons, compare the two. A higher class barbershop will charge you twenty bucks, maybe thirty if you have a nice shave. The equivelant for female bodied people (having worked at a middle-range salon, I’ve seen this first hand) will run anywhere from fifty dollars for a short haircut to a few hundred.

Outrageous! I think we fags can agree we know plenty of male bodied people with more complicated hair than our female-read counterparts. But the disparity doesn’t end there… Hair products, clothes, why, everything is more expensive if you are a ‘woman’.

I overheard a stylist the other day say “Girls are expensive!”, jokingly, to a client who was saying how she had tried repeatedly to conceive a female-bodied child and was now feeling the pinch. Forget that this suburban woman could have/should have adopted one of the very valid, very family-less children trapped in the Children’s Aid Society and the wardship of the Crown, and think about that sentence. “Girls are expensive.”

Why? I don’t know many expensive girls at all! It was a ‘girl’ who gave me a place to live when I first moved out at fifteen. She spent her time working and volunteering at three different places, because she intended to make a difference. She helped me and fed me when I was in need. Her hair care products were a ten dollar bar of natural soap from the neighbourhood health food store. The bar of soap was good for hair and body.

Clothes weren’t expensive for her either, and she always looked fabulous. A ‘girl’ from Brasil taught me how to live on cans of beans and bananas. From apartment to apartment, squat to commune, I have always known ‘girls’, ‘women’, who are strong, intelligent, beautiful and fabulous on less than a hundred dollars American or Canadian a month.

The above photograph is a sign outside a restaurant in Thailand. At this restaurant, women actually cost less, apparently, to feed, than men. Kathoey, or ladyboys, float somewhere in the middle of the two prices… Based on gender? Based on sex? I would have said sex, but the kathoey being less expensive makes me think gender. I think about experiences friends of mine from East Africa, from South America, from Mexico have told me, and although I know it’s not isolated to North America and Europe, I definitely end up thinking this: “Girls aren’t expensive. Our girls are expensive.”

But why are things gendered for girls more expensive than things gendered for boys? I’m going to say it- economic gender oppression. I believe that the creation and reinforcement of a gender code where female-bodied people were and are expected to buy into such expensive trends has served to create a society in which to be read as a woman and valid one must dish out a large part of one’s income. It helps, if you’re spending this much, not to be the primary breadwinner. It helps if you can depend on another. I am no (his)storian, so I am willing to concede to the possibility that the creation of this gendered cost was not intentional, but I am not so optimistic for such and unlikely anomaly.

But let’s face it- if one is properly preoccupied with the tasks of looking pretty and clean, how could one possibly have time do all the things that we can expect of an intelligent, talented and upcoming man? We can’t! The form of the feminine gender in the binary (world of two, dual genders and two only) as it exists IS expensive. The clothes, the makeup, the toys, the unneccesary and oftentimes dangerous ‘feminine’ products (regarding menstruation and procreation)- one thing after another, we begin to see a picture wherein following the statistical reality (while still under-reported) of lower wages for women, women are expected to pay more for every little thing than a man is.  And it simply won’t do.

Hope you like waiting tables- because it looks as though the closest we’re getting to law school is waiting on a lawyer man.

The group I’ve been working with while I’m in Ottawa, Qeer fAction, is rabble-rousing a little action in response to the instance of gender oppression at Imperial (what a name, right?) Barbershop. We’ll be going in asking for gender-innapropriate haircuts in and out of drag all day, drawing attention to the queerphobia in this establishment’s choices.

Because then we’re on the other side of the expensive gender dilemma- what if you choose ‘fuck no’? What if you choose to bend, blend, fuck gender? What if you decide that gender is a game, or that you want your body to match yours? Well then you’re stuck with this: limitation after limitation based on perceived gender. We all experience it, wherever you identify in the gender diverse community. We don’t even expect people to take responsibility for asking what pronouns to use.

What I’m getting at, though, is that if gender is performative (which I think is an oversimplification) then the performance we’re expected to give is a limitation first and foremost, and, secondly, that the rules around that performance are limiting as well. It is limiting to be expected to be this thing designated as ‘pretty’, and it is limiting to make pretty damn more expensive than ‘handsome’. And it is treason to put on a different show altogether.

Girls aren’t expensive- their expected performance is. I have finally accepted that my body is not my performance; I do not have to cut and scrape and scalpel to be my queer gender. I can wear it on the outside, which indeed, reinforces the inside, but I know more than anything I exist inside my body. And inside this body I am polygendered and queer as the day is long- no fabrics, binders, glitter or glamour changes that. Gender is more than what is outside- how then are some disabled people of their gender, if they are not able to move, or sometimes choose their clothes?

Is our gender whatever our parents (or caretakers) put on us? Is it then, to another degree, what our peers put on us? What our viewers put on us?

I try to put on a good queer show, but at the end of the day, I’m a person, not a show, and they can take their pennies back. So I believe that you can be a girl and not buy into a really costly gender code (in more ways than one), just as I can be who I am and still wear a suit. So, no. Girls aren’t expensive. Mine won’t be- and the ones that helped me through the journey of adolescence never have been. So I promise to fight beside anyone who challenges what they are told their gender entails. Let’s do what we can and let’s do it with heart.

Love, Isaac and Perseid

A link to the facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/siouxdonym#!/event.php?eid=132490823435831&ref=ts