ghosts are good company

“Someone like that, who does those kind of things, and goes out in public, knows full well that this might happen to him.”

a nineteen-year-old from puerto rico was horribly murdered last week. the above statement was from the local police investigator assigned to the case.

nobody deserves that treatment, that bias. but the sentiment happens world-wide.

it’s the trans day of remembrance.

this is the eleventh year of transfolks worldwide making a conscious effort to get together on the same day and remember their dead.

too many people are killed, (unsurprisingly) skewed largely toward transwomen of color.

there are vigils today, yeah, you can vigil at home, but to me this is a day to be with your people and love them,

and then think about who aren’t your people.

who’s not with you? how can you expand your world to include everybody? how can we work together to stop folks from slipping through the cracks?

i’m caught between an idealistic “don’t ever let your posse be alone” with a feminist “i should be able to be alone if i fucking want to.” how can we unite those concepts by making the streets safe for everyone?

gender jam is this weekend, but that kind of space needs to be available to folks always. how can we create immediate support while still maintaining hope and building toward long-term change?

three things for you to work on tonight: light a candle. change the world. keep breathing.

of course now that we’ve got the computers figured out at home and the internet all set up, i’m writing this from the deliciously free wireless at sacramento airport.

which makes sense – i got in early and my flight to san diego is late, so what else should i be doing than catching up on the last two months with you Strangers From The Internets?

since i have that penchant for reverse chronology (and the bad memory, i’m sure that has a lot to do with it), i’ll start with last night’s double-stuf’d amazingness. the evening started with a free choir practice/performance at what i’ve been calling the stretch pants summer jam. it’s always fun to get out of our rut (as we’re doing next week at the shelton library, as well), especially in stretch pants. mine were purple lame and quite glam.

the glam continued with tragic magic at northern, where i promptly fell in love with all of the performers. i had a theater mentor tell me once that he thought i’d make a great performance artist – after seeing these kids, it’s firmly in the compliment column (again).

golly, if there was stuff that happened in the past two months that wasn’t choir and/or awesome queers, i don’t remember it. also it doesn’t seem likely to have been my life.

i have a new job, starting on tuesday – thus the trip to san diego now. i went to san francisco for the national conference on volunteering and service (huge! overwhelming!) over pride weekend and was elated by trans march. while i was there i was able to catch Chagall and the Russian Jewish Theater, which was spectacular. so much of his work was done so quickly, i learned, that it could only be almost a stream-of-consciousness.

the first piece i saw of his, like most people i’m sure, is america’s windows. i actually have a tote bag of it, which was one of my favorite bags to carry around when i was high school. he’s done a lot of work, i’m not sure if that was his only stained glass (research finds that no, there are lots of amazing glass pieces of his around!), but the most stunning part of the russian jewish theater exhibit was a set that he had created for a show… i could have stood there for hours staring at the details, and apparently i should have. one of the museum guards yelled at me for trying to take a picture of my favorite bit, and of course i can’t find it online. i wish my memory was better; i’m tired of things i love being so ephemeral. anyhow, the beauty that i can’t find is part of “chagall’s box,” and you can read more about it here.

last night i had a long and complicated dream, which isn’t so surprising… the surprising part is that i then remembered this dream when i woke up. this isn’t so much the “look at what a wacky dream i had” narrative as it is a “what does this mean about waking life?”

because in this dream i was having an argument with someone who was in to me, liked me a lot, wanted to be my friend, but flatly refused to accept that i was part of the trans community.

… and this is something that i’ve been worrying about a lot lately, as i explore what it means to be largely femme-identified in a female body. in my burlesque class i’ve been trying to choose between two pieces – one that’s pretty much just high femme, and one that’s obviously a genderqueer commentary. my analysis of these two pieces is that the genderqueer one would be easier and probably more interesting, and that the femme one would be more challenging, but also potentially boring.

i’m in burlesque 101 to challenge myself (i’m in this world to challenge myself?), but also to increase my strength as a performer. i was thinking seriously about starting hormones a few months ago, when i realized that the only thing holding me back was fear of societal repercussion (the alternate word that i was going to put there was “asshattery”)… i think that somehow i’ve come to believe that if i’m not challenged, if i’m comfortable, things aren’t worth my time.

this is everywhere in my life – work, relationships, gender – and it has such an amazing contradiction with my agoraphobia, i can’t even begin to fathom. i wonder if it comes from judging myself harshly for letting the agoraphobia win and not facing the challenges? and i wonder how the hell i might try to beat it.

this isn’t at all where i thought this entry was going to go. it was initially just going to be a reassertion of my place in the trans/gender/queer community, my role as a “militant genderqueer” … but then i wonder, if i feel the need to constantly remind everybody that i belong… am i feeling like i belong? obviously not. i have no way of knowing what everybody else is feeling, but i keep distancing myself from transmasculine spaces in particular because of my femme presentation – but other than being the most femme gay guy you might ever meet, i’m also pretty darn gay and man.

i don’t know, sweethearts. i have no idea.

hi blog!

things are fine, the world has been proceeding normally without you. i’m heading up to evergreen on fool’s day – although it sounds all like a hoax, since i don’t actually have a place to live, i’m hoping to find some sort of stability once i’m there. i’m registered for eighteen credits at the moment, waiting to get through a wait list to bump it back down to sixteen – i’m taking enough credits to graduate just in case amsterdam doesn’t work out, as it has a tendency… not to, and considering the state of the dollar.

the trans leadership summit was a fantastic experience, and i’m lucky to have been able to go. i made the acquaintance of some great people, and got back in touch with folks i’d lost touch with. i was able to find genderqueers again (it’s lonely down here in san diego) and learned a lot, much of which was a reminder of the binaries and biases within the trans community. i had to walk out of a workshop which began with discussion of how badly the hrc had done with enda – and ended with the conclusion that perhaps the trans community would do better if we had the “normal” trans folks step up in the media, and let the “militant genderqueers” be out of the spotlight. so that “the mainstream” doesn’t think that the whole trans community is made up of “freaks” [like me*]?

i was enraged, and wrote an impassioned piece about it while i was on the plane, and then my computer deleted it. that’s what i get for writing in a program that doesn’t auto save.

i’m going to be updating wordpress sometime in the next few days, so if things get bumpy over in greendinoville, that’s why.

tonight i’m making buttons for the rubber rose (they made my button-helpers volunteers of the month for february, and that makes me happy) and tomorrow i’m going to the getty with my family! yay for things!

the birds are twittering outside. happy spring. i’m looking for the perfect daffodil header for my blog – which i recall doing last year as well…

* don’t you wish your partner was a. i was lucky that this rage was mostly productive, it’s the kind where i got pissed off and motivated, rather than pissed off and depressed.

i decided to backpedal – um, skate backward – with my skating practice. i’ve been going to boot camp with the san diego derby dolls off and on, but having trouble there because i’m Just Not Good Enough. so i decided (on the recommendation of a skater who used to live in s.d. but has recently moved down from san francisco…) to try out the Adult Skating Lessons at skateworld. they’re shorter, cheaper, and more geared to people my level – and also a totally different kind of workout! we were doing a “scissor” thing around the rink, where you use your legs to move your feet out and in without lifting them up? and ow, my thighs. i don’t get this much of a thigh workout just striding.

so that hurts. but also, i managed to fall down and kick myself pretty hard in the inner-thigh. no wonder derby’s hardcore, if i can injure myself this much just on my own. i haven’t worn my skatetown shirt to the rink yet (it was a “paulie bleeker is totally boss” day, so orange – but different orange), but i hope to soon.

and i did actually skate backward today! woo!

there’s been discussion lately about “yo” as an organically developing gender neutral pronoun, but none of the discussion that i’ve seen really addresses race or class issues, which i find… fascinating… especially considering the demographics of the communities contriving other gender neutral pronouns so far.

(note my not addressing it either? i’m just bringing it up for people to think about what connotations “yo” has in their minds.)

i’m still an epicene “they,” myself, and damn anyone who tries to tell me that it’s grammatically incorrect. they seem like probably the people who would make sad faces at me if i took “it” instead, and if they want to find something 1) grammatically correct 2) not dehumanizing 3) that flows well in language, i welcome them to go ahead – and tell me when they’ve found it.

my friend erin just posted in her blog about a class at uc berkeley that’s happening next semester – it’s called “Sex Change City: Theorizing History in Genderqueer San Francisco,” and is taught by susan stryker. this course makes me giddy.

i’ve been trying to figure out how to make things work out so that i can take the class. i found this bit on the ccsf website:

This program with CCSF and the University of California, Berkeley, provides qualified students the opportunity to enroll in one free UCB course.

… but then i came across this bit, finishing it up:

Students who have attended four-year colleges or universities are not eligible.

humbug.

all of this came up as i was in the middle of looking into some things that i’ve been wanting for christmas, and i was like “yes! this is the best christmas present ever!” … but it turned out to be a lie.

any ideas on how i can fenangle this, anyone?

in other news, i was a fantastic eleanor roosevelt! i’m thinking about wearing the costume again and making cubbie take pictures of me wearing it, because it’s pretty darn cute. i got a lot of compliments on the outfit, and it sounds like my fairly unrehearsed presentation was amusing and educational. woo! one course down.

i mentioned a bit ago having taken diversity: transphobia. the course was a saturday course, taught by lydia sausa.

i’ve had some trouble with the “diversity:” courses in the past, so i was feeling fairly trepid, but it went well – really well. sausa offered a class that catered to people with all ranges of experience around trans issues – managing to both engage people who were new to trans experiences and also to offer relevant information for people with pasts in trans organizing and education. yay.

i’ve gained more resources to use in my education, and (hopefully) folks newer to these issues will have found an impetus to their working with them further.

perhaps my favorite part of the class was when sausa brought up different theories of gender. one of them was dylan vade’s concept of a gender galaxy… and the other, my favorite, comes from my favorite genderqueer rockstar, lynn(ee) breedlove. this is the “nesting doll” theory of gender, which i was immediately attracted to – if just because the czech parts of my family inundated me with matryoshka dolls as a child. so, this theory revolves around there being many layers of gender. in a sketch, breedlove suggests that hir tiniest inner gender is “peter pan – a young boy, always played by a woman” and that on the outside they’re unka lynnee, who is made up of all of those inner parts. of course, there are seven or eight other gender identites in between those – and for everybody, there is a different set of dolls. this concept makes me want to do art, to do paintings or molds or mini-statues (um, figurines?) of my own gender makeup. apparently breedlove was in class last semester to do their comedy routine about this. it’s probably the best thing that i wasn’t there for that one, as breedlove makes me fairly weak at the knees.

umm, where was i going here? oh! one of the folks in the class was touched by a lot of the exercises, to the point where they realized that they really did need to come out to their family. the wistful “i wish my parents could have been here!” made me realize that – hey! maybe their parents could be there… the course is going to be repeated on january sixth, from 10:00am to 6:00 pm. you should take it! it’d be something like $15 for california residents, $80 (i thiiink) for non-residents. thoughts?

City College of San Francisco:
IDST 80G Diversity: Transphobia 0.5 37954 W01 Lec SAT 10:00-06:00PM 01/06 BNGL Accessible: The classroom is fully ADA code compliant. Sausa, L

come visit us! come learn things. yes folks, that was an ad for my school.