Gay Men

Gay boys drive me crazy, because they get so paranoid about gender. SO paranoid. And I think I know why.

I didn’t really think about butch and femme until I started meeting other two spirited people in female bodies who were FEMME! That was so shocking for me. I didn’t notice it unless I dated someone with the same gender as me, but they could do the girl thing SO well. I was like, fuck, you are such a boy, but you can be a really good girl! You do that really well, how do you do that? I can’t do that! It was such a puzzle. I mean, I had never seen a two spirited person when they were in a gender presentation they could actually work with. And that was always why I ran away, because I couldn’t understand how that kind of femininity worked. That always blew my mind, my brains would end up on the floor. A girl who knew how to play like the boys AND still keep her make up on, fucking hell! Fucking hell! That’s insane! And there was always this frustrated moment between us where I’d be like, fuck, you be the top, I don’t know how to beat that! You look like a girl! How do you make such an excellent girl?

But I don’t know if they ever felt like such excellent girls, because no one ever wanted to see their boy side. And they totally have one and it makes everyone crazy. I mean, they make really good girls! But they can be so dangerous, because really no one acknowledges that they have a boy gender that’s happy being femme. And I’ve watched them do insane things to try to prove that they are girls, and they don’t have to prove anything. They’re just too intense for most people. And they are girls, in this so super intense way. But I know one of them, if not more, would bitchslap me if I didn’t mention upfront that they also have some intense boy stuff going on.

I remember when I got my psychic reading, she kept using a gender neutral term for someone I liked. And I was like “girl” and she kept saying “person.” Fuck that was a good psychic. But it’s true, I’ve watched all kinds of people show up. To be perfectly frank, most people nowadays are trans in some way or another. Just because if you want to use your whole brain, you have to access the other gender too. That’s the way a whole brain works together. But I think butch and femme is still relevant, because that’s how people have fun with gender. And it doesn’t always look like butch-femme, sometimes it’s butch-butch and femme-femme, because then you get fun variations. And I have seen boy girl couples that are femme femme, totally, that so exists.

See, now it’s getting confusing again, which is good, because gender and sexuality are confusing.

The Social Position of Tomboys

I don’t know that every tomboy ends up deciding to be a guy, I think it always varies. Some do get all girly, but not all of them. I think there’s an idea that if you feminize a tomboy you can neutralize what that person learned when playing with the boys, but it’s not true, because then they just go on and teach the girls how to play like the boys. It is so tricky, you can’t ever contain that. And some tomboys I grew up with are women now, so you never know. I think the key is tomboys will choose a position of power based on what they learn from their lives. Not always though, some totally choose a non-powerful role, but even then it has a reason.

The two boys I grew up with treated me like two spirited children would have been treated in the old days. As in, they told stories to me about their lives. And we did rituals. And they basically played charades waiting to see if I could guess what happened to them, because they could not say it. I played all kinds of weird boy games trying to figure out what the hell they were on about. I walked around and around in a circle with a broom and a tea towel for four hours repeatedly trying to learn Luke’s story. And it was an interesting story, in the symbolic form. I totally got it. And the funny thing is they were sure I was a girl, because no one ever taught them about two spirited kids. So I was unfortunately their model for ALL women. And I was bad! If they punched me I punched them right back, I didn’t take their shit. But it was so hard for them to clue in to the fact that they were just playing with another boy. I think if they were playing with another boy they wouldn’t have tried to explain so much in so many bizarre ways. On the other hand, if they knew I was a boy maybe they wouldn’t have been such bad boyfriends! But you know, a lot of men base their future relationships on the tomboys they played with as kids, which is why they are so weird. Because women get two spirited friends too and they abandon them later on in life, which means they miss out on part of what they are supposed to know. It’s a bad tactical error, because transwomen know some intense stuff!

But the fail safe device is ALWAYS tomboys, because tomboys can insinuate themselves in male society from day one, practically. And tomboys with other tomboys confuse the heck out of each other because that’s when the other genders start showing up that don’t equate. That’s when gender starts falling apart. I mean, crap, Heather takes 911 calls for a living! That takes balls man, I just sold leftist memberships on the phone.

I like talking to guys actually, the ones who don’t have that gender barrier up, because they can talk intelligently to women too, if they learn how.

Anyway, when Luke went to the bin I finally found out what they were trying to tell me. And that was intense. Basically there was no more gender differences as soon as they showed up, but that kind of gender indifference was so horrifying that they didn’t know how to relate to the girly feelings guys usually have. They had split brains, one side to deal with this horrible thing that happened to them and the other side that was all nice happy things. And I’m finally realizing that a lot of those guys I grew up with, they don’t remember ANY of the happy things we did. Some of the things we did weren’t happy, if you look at it in a girl way, but in a boy way they did have the total guy childhood in a decent way. They just don’t remember the good boyhood they had because they don’t know where to place me in it. Because I would put on lipstick to freak them out! I went all contrary, because I had to, I had to figure out if girls were having just as much horrible shit happen. And they were! And girls didn’t know how to talk to guys either because suddenly they got all the hate and angry feelings, and they didn’t know that guys were putting their girl feelings in stasis until someone could mediate.

I can’t believe I’m mediating, I feel kind of silly. But I watched Luke go crazy and Steven turn into an alcoholic and I was like “Fuck, what happens to guys when they grow up? How come they turn into instant asshole? I don’t want to do that!” And I didn’t, so I became the tranny Peter Pan and put off transitioning until I could figure out what happens to these girls that guys are mean too.

Boy Story

Sometimes Steven and Luke used to MAKE me watch boy movies because they were trying to explain something they couldn’t otherwise. And all these movies were highly bizarre, but entertaining so I could kind of see the point. And the good ones had love stories in them.

The last good boy story that they ever showed me was Red Dwarf. I remember it was just before Steven got hardcore into drinking, and just after Luke ended up a chronic mental patient.

It was Red Dwarf. Steven knew how it began and he kind of knew how it ended but he made me watch the pilot episode with him because he knew he finally picked a boy story that could explain his life properly. And it did. Red Dwarf is a sci-fi series about a man of colour who spends his mining ship tour of duty in stasis, on purpose. Because he’s bored, so he gets a cat which breaks regulations and stasis is the punishment. And meanwhile a nuclear accident happens on the ship which kills the crew and allows a super race of cat people to exist. And the cat people worship Lister, because he went into stasis, and told them all about a vending cart he was going to have on Fiji. It becomes Cat lore, and a schism happens over the colour of the outfits. It’s been running for ages now, years and years.

Everybody’s Dead Dave

Desk Graffiti

I used to be a graffiti artist in school, but only on school desks. And I would have conversations with people, and usually I knew who it was but I’d have all kinds of people notice this weird little writings. And some of them were injokes, and people started catching on to that, which was weird. And sometimes I just drew symbols and other completely unrelated things. Just because I wanted to see what would show up. And some other weird graffiti showed up, you can tell who people are by their graffiti really. Which is why I hate bathrooms, because it’s gender specific graffiti and really mean. But desk graffiti, that was fun. And Britta did catch me at it one day, when she was in my desk at a different class. That was really embarrassing because she wrote “Thirza? Is this you?” And I was like, nope, that was not me.

But desk graffiti is an interesting way to teach subversively. That was before the internet. Because it has no position of authority, you have to question it. But you might agree sometimes.

I remember in school we all had to constantly thank Joni Mitchell, because she had no band, no theatre, no art class, barely anything when she went to Bowman, and she still did all this stuff. So ever since then Aden Bowman has been a weird school that has tried to rectify the fact that they didn’t have enough resources when someone like Joni Mitchell attended. It made it an interesting school, because there’d be a little photo of Joni Mitchell, surrounded by all these jock trophies. And that was all, one mega star and a bunch of high school football players. It was such a weird dichotomy. They’ve always been trying to make up for that.

Last I heard a bunch of neo nazis were there.

Life

I think for four years I had trouble accessing both memories of my life, one life that was doing the girl thing, and the other that was doing a boy thing. But even though I am a guy there is still the whole girl thing going on, which is nice. I like being kind of a marshmallow. Sometimes. But then other times I wish people wouldn’t try to tell me I can’t do stuff, because that drives me crazy. Because usually I just want to do nice things, really, because I know when stuff gets mean. But sometimes your gender gets used against you! Because people don’t honestly believe anymore that someone could understand what it means to be masculine and feminine and still choose the place they like best. Or even what gifted people are like, which is intense, because their brains just spin these amazing things. You so can’t tell what they are up to unless you know they’re being cared for properly. And gifted people are still so unknown.

I mean, raising a gifted child is a bizarre job, because they want to know the meaning of life as soon as they show up. And they have such intense emotions, it’s bizarre, to see so much passion in someone who can move on later. And it makes everything really intense, so high school politics between gifted individuals gets equally intense. But since high school is a model for society, everyone could kind of figure out from their own standpoint where things went wrong. It was chaos theory at it’s finest. And it was brutal, high school was so brutal, just because everyone kept raising the bar to see how high it could go. And I think that was hard on the regular students, who also went to school with us, because we were doing weird shit! And they never knew what.

My Generation

When I think about my generation of gifted friends, we had this ongoing in joke. “I’m going to get world domination.” “No, I am, because it’s my plan.” We totally jockeyed for position and went off and did what we could to find some piece of it. So I think I just went off to find the opposite plan, which is this. If you read it properly no bad things happen. But you have to be compassionate, or you can take really bad directions. And it’s not really in any order, and some of it is just fiction but I thought the stories were interesting. It’s a boy story, which is why it is so awful, but girls are in it too. And they’re pretty interesting. But I don’t want the boy story to overwhelm everyone else’s story. Anyway, I hope the friggin girls start talking on this thing, because they are so amazing. I love women. And everyone else.

Aden Bowman

Aden Bowman Collegiate, besides having been the high school of Joni Mitchell, had one other unique feature to it’s courses. If you were an enriched student, you probably took the psychology class. And that was the best class, because it was so weird! And Ms. Beatty could always find some way to relate the subject matter to her own life, which was so awesome because then you wanted to know more about her, she was trippy! She put a quarter to her head one day for like, fifteen minutes, just to prove she could, and then she talked about how.

I remember she started teaching us about cults and MPD and all kinds of weird mind control shit, and how to get people out of cults, and how brainwashing worked. It was a weird month, she’d show us a movie, she’d be like “And now class, part one, of Sybil!” And we’d be like WTF? And then she’d come back next class “Part two, of Sybil!” And we’re like what the hell is with Sybil? Poor Sally Field, man, was a weird movie. But we got it, it was such a rare sounding phenomenon though. And then when we learned about cults, it was another movie with some girl getting involved in some goofy cult. And there was one part in the movie where they were just jumping up and chanting over and over, and it didn’t make any sense, the chant, not for us anyway. And Renee was like “Are they chanting “Juicyfruit Juicyfruit?” And that was such an awesome idea, because if you wanted a cult of free thinkers you would make them chant about something that made no sense what so ever.

“Juicy fruit, juicy fruit, ra ra ra!”

Anyway, I remember some friends of mine and I were bored and had nothing to do and Heather just got a new crappy car and someone, probably Chris, said “Let’s go bother that cult outside of town!” And we were like, yeah, that is like such a good idea! And we drove out there and were snoopy little assholes and they chased us down the road in a truck. And we were all “OMG! Like, you guys, they were so mad! What do you think they’re doing? They’re freaks!” Anyway, I think since then that whole generation has been trying to figure out if Sybil really exists.

Madame Rosa

by Mirha-Soleil Ross

Madame Rosa is a 1977 French film adaption of the novel La Vie devant soi, written by Romain Gary under the pseudonym of Émile Ajar. Through his double identity, Gary, who had already received the Prix Goncourt in 1956 for Les Racines du ciel, received it again, in 1975 for La Vie devant soi, becoming the first writer to be twice attributed the highly coveted award. The film adaptation was directed by Moshé Mizrahi and produced by Daniel Pomerantz. It stars Simone Signoret as Madame Rosa, a frail, aging, retired Jewish prostitute and Auschwitz survivor who earns a meager living by caring for the children of younger sex working women, as well as Sami Ben Youb as Momo (short for Mohammed), a young Arab boy on the verge of adolescence. Momo hasn’t seen his parents in years. Him and Madame Rosa struggle to make ends meet, and as her body and mind start to fail, it becomes clear that Momo is the only person she has left in the world. Despite his young age, he has to help Madame Rosa who refuses to be hospitalized. He will stay with her as she faces her ultimate fears, prepares for her last and most difficult voyage. The story of Madame Rosa and Momo unfolds in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural community. The profound emotional bond between the two main characters, one an old Jewish woman and the other a young Arab boy, is what drives the film emotionally from the beginning to the end. The film also emphasizes the compassion and empathy that can be found in such a disadvantaged community context through the helping gestures of the secondary characters. Madame Lola, for example, while being bluntly described by Momo as “a transvestite” who had been “a boxing champion in Senegal”, is depicted in both the book and the film without any sensationalism. To the contrary, she is presented as a compassionate human being who is concerned by the poverty of Madame Rosa and Momo, giving them food and money without expecting anything in return. Momo says of her that “she’s really somebody”, that he “likes her”; Madame Rosa declares, “She’s a Saint, I don’t know where we’d be without her”. The dynamic represented between Madame Rosa, Momo and their transsexual prostitute neighbor, Madame Lola, stands as a good example of the type of deeply humanistic values and respect for human difference, whether that difference is of a sexual, religious, or racial nature, that is embedded in Romain Gary’s written text and further successfully emphasized through Moshé Mizrahi’s cinematographic representation of the story. The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film of 1977. The book has been translated in English, but the same translation has been published under two different titles: The Life Before Us and Momo.

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www.lagalipote.wordpress.com

Trans Liberation

I would get the hardest assignment, wouldn’t I?

Kate had already drafted a battle plan by outlining the forces at work keeping in a police state and the binaries. And I knew even though I was the most boy of boys, I was still trans, and that meant my natural enemy was the police state. And like anyone, I wanted to be free. But I knew if I transitioned soon, I could get co-opted into upholding the police state through my own arrogance and ignorance of the true meaning of women’s lives. And I watched trans guys get co-opted by that force, not all, but enough to decide to avoid it until I could work out the puzzle. But this was a tricky puzzle, because now to liberate my friends I had to take on fascism in any form. And that was fucking scary because I knew I would be alone for most of the time. And I had no idea what torture I was courting, although I knew I was courting it. I made the assumption that I would be tortured in psychiatric care, so I started asking people about that just so I would know what to expect. But the mundane details still don’t adequately convey the horror, ever, and the pills were something different all together. I had not thought of myself before as someone who had an advantage because both sides of my brain could work at once.

The psychiatric care I recieved WAS torture, because it imposed an identity that wasn’t mine and I knew wasn’t mine. But it was so vast, that branch of power, and then I had to find out where it came from and how it operated and how to trump the mental health act, which was enormous.

I think by the end of my struggle to get out of it, I had forgotten I was on my trans liberation mission. Because when I started switching back into guy I was still on anticonvulsants, which meant I went through Asshole territory, something I’d been hoping to avoid. And my natural 2 sided brain wasn’t able to give me my morals yet, because I didn’t have my own female empathy to keep it even keeled. It was horrible, and I was like, fuck, guys really are jerks.

A number of trans men are on anticonvulsants by the way.

Men aren’t jerks if they know how to use both sides of their brains at the same time, but so few do, because that one sided brain makes it seem like you actually have power, even when a bunch of women are talking about trying to take you down because you’re being a dickhead. And they will take you down. I mean, I grew up with women, I know how intensely fierce they are, especially the generation I grew up with, because I helped them take insane risks and land safely on the ground. And they taught me to look for hidden messages, because that’s how girls talk since they can’t talk openly about a lot of things.

And believe me, sometimes when I was studying shit I would be like “Fuck, I could just be having sex right now, I SHOULD just be having sex right now.” But then I would see all my friends being terrorized and it let me put my own needs aside for years and years. And I would go back to researching something I didn’t even know existed for sure, but I operated on the leap of faith that something that crazy WAS possible. Because if someone as wild as me could exist on the planet, then obviously this shit had to as well. And I knew it did because every time I tried to make friends they would all start saying “Triggers, triggers.” And I’d be like, what the hell? I was just being silly. Why do I keep hurting you? What the hell happened to you guys?

I mean, a global Stonewall is pretty intense. But I think we have help now because lots of people hate that system, not just the trans folks. I mean, EVERYONE knows it sucks, and most of them forgot what fun people do live on the planet all over the place.

Anyway, I am a guy. And I think now that we know what guys can do when not properly supervised, maybe we can go back to fighting for equality across the board instead of just drips and drabs. I mean, you DO know who the enemy is now don’t you? They’ve been so obvious.

OMG!

I can throw a couple eggs in a freezer in case I want kids later with my DNA. Aaaah! What the hell, that would creep me out, like something out of a Ridley Scott film. Sarain eggs. Oh man, I dunno. And apparently they can grow penises in petri dishes now! At least they’re not growing penises on the backs of mice or something. I don’t think I could handle that. That would be too weird!

I’m stoned almost all the time while these drugs finish getting out of my system, as per the psych nurse instructions. It’s pretty nice, it makes things very silly and not so scary. Boys are silly! Really.