Category Archives: Queer

Parenting, Queer

Queer Parenting

I guess I’m at the age where my biological clock starts ticking. So far I’ve gotten away with pretending not to hear it. Shows like Nanny 911 and being around squalling babies on public transport turn me off from the idea just enough to breathe a sigh of relief. But then it kind of comes back.

Truthfully, I already have been a parent. My sister is severely developmentally delayed (I don’t know why they use the delayed word, my sister’s never going to catch up okay?) and my mum was a single parent. So there were lots of times I had to look after my sister. Maybe that’s why I don’t want to raise a tiny kid, I know how much work is really involved.

But I still do like the idea of parenting.

And then there’s this firm belief I have that more queer teenagers need a safe home if they get kicked out or have to run away or whatever. I don’t want to start a whole shelter, but I’m thinking it would be nice to parent a queer teenager, or two, or three. I mean, god, I lived through that, I’m sure I’d make a great parent for someone in that situation. I’d even home school them if they were having a hard time at school with bullies or whatever.

So now I’m looking around at how to become a long term foster parent. It’s kind of an interesting process. They’re especially looking for people willing to parent teenagers, and Aboriginal families. I’d rather devote my parenting skills to someone who could otherwise fall through the cracks.

Anyway, it’s piqued my curiousity.

Parenting, Queer

Lesbians And Gay Men Fucking: The Queer Community Secret

Well, an open secret really. Other queers know but we don’t tell straight people because it’s too confusing for them. It drives bisexuals crazy because they think we’re closeted bi’s. I’m sure that’s true some of the time. But I also think it’s just a common past time between opposite sex homos. Being butch I’ve had a bunch of cute gay boys have crushes on me over the years and try to get it on. Sometimes we do. Sometimes we just flirt. If you want to have sex with gay men, become a lesbian. I’m serious. It’s never going to be so serious that someone falls in love with someone who can’t reciprocate, but it’s still going to be a lot of fun. Sometimes ongoing relationships develop that baffle everyone. Sometimes we do it just because we’re both into leather and there isn’t anyone handy at the moment, or a hot Daddy Boy thing springs up. Sometimes we do it because we feel like having a heterosexual experiment. And sometimes it happens just because our genders are somehow complimentary in a very queer way.

Plus homos are much more inventive about sex. It’s not all about sticking it in, there’s different stuff going on. Gay men are just infinitely sexier than straight men, look at how many straight women fall for their gay friends. And lesbians make pretty good opposite sex partners for gay men because we know how to work having a dick and aren’t going to try and “change him”. I have a friend I used to romp with a little bit, never all the way but he made several suggestive come on lines about being butt fucked by me and he let me watch him piss. Ironically whenever femmes would try to get down and dirty with him he would get shocked and run away. I think he just had a hard on for butch women.

It’s definitely an interesting and curious phenomenon. Currently I have two huge crushes on some gay friends of mine, both of whom flame out in this totally adorable way. I know one of them I’m going to be getting down with, which should be entertaining. If I had a kid I would want one of them to be the sperm donor and have a father role if he wanted it.

On a side note I hate it when lesbians are unscrupulous towards their sperm donors. I’ve seen dykes either date a boy and dump him as soon as she’s knocked up (Sperm hunters I call them). I’ve also seen dykes have kids and cut out the donor from engaging in parenting even when the man’s all excited about being a dad, especially if he’s gay. That’s just mean and cruel. I think the cutest queer families are when a lesbian and a gay couple jointly care for a child. It’s sometimes funny to see a little girl or boy toddling around with four, five, or even six parents. The whole thing about children of same sex couples being deprived of having both a male and a female role model is rubbish.

Art practice, Censorship, Criminal System, Politics, Queer, Sexuality

Child Sexuality (or: Thirza’s Vagina Shot)

This is something I’ve thought about for a long time, especially when I was making teenage lesbian videos and the fucking Alberta government outed me in high school because I was supposedly making a child porn recruiting video. Whatever. Then I was still thinking about it when I was nineteen only with the additional issue of chasing older lesbians who were running away for fear of the pedophile label attaching itself to them. But mostly I wanted to talk about teenagers wanting to fuck and why the hell is that wrong? Thus came “Untouchable.”

So I went as far as I could for someone with no sexual partner at the time and flashed my pierced vulva for the camera in what has become the one defining image people remember when they think of my work.

Why? It’s just a vag. Honestly, I think compositionally I’ve come up with more lush lyrical imagery. It’s practically at the point where it’s Thirza’s Vagina Shot, like you could write a queer videos of the 90’s essay on it. In fact someone did.

Then I tried to stick the final nail in the “queer youth” coffin with “Helpless Maiden Makes An ‘I’ Statement” where I juxtaposed a break up monologue with Disney Witch footage. On one angle it was a commentary on BDSM relationships, on another it was about sexualized images in children’s entertainment.

I got into shit for my early work, mostly because I was young and talking about the homosex. I was considered an anomaly in the queer community for coming out at fourteen. Shit, now we have queers coming out when they’re nine. The queer community has to do outreach to these folks, even at risk of being called pedophiles. I don’t mean slippery dick outreach, I mean having safehouses for youth who are running away from homophobic homes, and alternative schools for queers (there are some but not enough).

But child sexuality of all types is criminalized in our society, ironically under the guise of protecting children. I will get to why I think that is a fallacy in a moment.

Currently an issue of Blackflash is coming out where yours truly did a small artwork for (it’s a postcard, send it to your friends!) and it was the Sex/Love issue. One of the articles was about Child Sexuality and featured artwork from luminary folks such as Robert Mapplethorpe. Work which could be found in various galleries around the world. I was going to post a link to it here but probably because of child porn laws on the internet no one can publish it online anymore. It was of a little girl where you could see up her skirt. Nothing ultra provocative, nothing more scandalous than any pics most people have of themselves as children (yes, remember all your bathtub pictures you hide from your friends!). In fact, Diva magazine caught up with the little girl now all grown up (and a lesbian btw) who says it’s her favorite photo of herself as a child.

ANYWAY, Blackflash was set to publish when all the publishers got snippy and refused to reprint the images. Everyone was upset, including myself when I heard. I have in fact had the vice squad run off with my videos to inspect them for child porn (yes, police have seen the vag shot image which has defined my career). There was some rabble rousing, but I think in the end everyone felt pretty powerless to put up a fight. I mean, how long did the Eli Langer case drag on?

Child Porn laws always sound like a good idea on paper, but when new parents are being dragged away from the local one hour photo store for taking pictures of the twins having a bath, you start to notice how the lines are blurry.

I knew it was going to happen, but it didn’t make me less sad. A thirteen year old girl had sex with a twelve year old boy, and currently they are trying to decide how to try her since by law she is both a perpetrator and a victim. Her boyfriend is also considered guilty of being a sex crime perpetrator. People would say “Dear lord, she was thirteen! That’s too young these kids nowadays blah blah blah.” Actually, if you get people drunk/stoned and ask them when they lost their virginity, you’d be surprised how many will say a number between seven and thirteen. And not just people in my age group either, I know people much older than me who lost it at a really young age.

I’m not going to debate when the “proper” age to lose one’s virginity is, truth be told I felt a bit long in the tooth when I lost mine. But the fact is kids are doing sexual things and then turning pink and saying “nothing” when you ask them what they’re doing. I mean, under the law this girl’s being prosecuted, a kid can be charged for MASTURBATING! I’m serious. That means I was a criminal for 11 years of my life!!!

“Protecting” children, doesn’t. It criminalizes natural child behaviour. It criminalizes art work. It criminalizes child sexuality at a time when children are just naturally going about their sexual development. It keeps kids from being able to learn about safe and healthy sexuality, or even engaging with communities they belong to, namely the Queer community. Sexual predators hunting children still get around it. They don’t have to go ogle the local exhibition of Mapplethorpe or Langer, they can just hop on Myspace and write up a bogus profile. They can just wander back and forth along a playground. They can just offer to babysit to help out a frazzled single mother.

People always support laws “protecting” children, until they get caught in a loophole.

Now I really must go and have a shower and wash this famous vulva of mine.


(This is me at nineteen in Untouchable, my vulva is lower down, as is the fashion.)

BDSM, Ex Girlfriends, Filmmaking, Popular Culture, Queer, Transphobia

That’s not love! That’s Stockholm Syndrome!

I wanted a really cool blog to go along with this title, but then I started writing a tired ex girlfriend tirade again and felt dumb so I laid it to rest. But I still like the title. It can stand really well on it’s own. And I think everyone can understand the experience of confusing the Stockholm Syndrome with love.

I felt like a dork today. I’ve been searching for a song from the Shortbus soundtrack for the last two days on Gnutella only to find out I’ve had the damn song this whole time. It’s not like I have THAT many songs, only 1455. And I used to have 80 cds but I have no idea what happened to them.

A deadline I missed in October is coming up again already this January, so I’m hoping to have my shit together. At least the screenplay looks sort of normal now. It has more of a flow and dramatic tension and character development. Actually that’s not true, one character is still pathetically 2 dimensional. He’s practically a prop. I’m considering killing him off. I don’t know what to do with him. I think I fucked myself over by trying to put an ensemble of queer identities all together in an intimate drama. And then I further fucked myself over by pressuring myself to do something stupid like present only “positive representations.”

Positive representations. It’s what organizations like GLAAD are all about. It’s some LA femme getting snarky and bashing bulldaggers as negative stereotypes. It’s what gave us a medley of L Word characters who look the same. It’s what makes queers whisper to each other “Actually I really liked Cruising.”

Pacino and Poppers – Good Times Combination

It’s what leads to obnoxious lesbians in Michigan chasing away girls in leather and transgendered women. Fuck positive representation. I know we have a miniscule number of queer characters/movies and out actors, but god, sometimes you just need a queer villain. I’m not talking Put the Lotion in the Fucking Basket villain, but someone nasty and yet complex. That being said, I really love Silence of the Lambs.

Do you still hear the lambs screaming Clarice?

Some queer filmmakers are breathing a sigh of relief already though because we’re not tied to the positive representations shit anymore. God, isn’t Oprah enough of a positive representation for us all to get by on? Now the rest of us can be dramatic fuck ups while she and Ellen improve the daytime living of bored housewives everywhere.

Queer, Saskatoon

Convoluted Connections

Saskatoon is a weird fuckin’ city to be queer in. I have always thought so. Even weirder is the fact that anytime a queer issue, excuse me, “gay and lesbian” issue is brought up in the newspaper, there is always the stock quote from Gens Helquist.

He’s been providing the stock quotes for years and leading this backwater community towards really weird decisions. Back when a friend of mine tried to organize the first Pride parade, Gens said we couldn’t do that because it would be rude. Back when the same friend held Saskatoon’s first (and only) gay and lesbian film festival, Gens and his cronies advised most of the queer community to avoid it.

If Gens was at Stonewall he would be telling everyone “Now now, let’s not be hasty, these nice policemen are just doing their job.”

Another teenage friend of mine got a long lecture from Gens about being a pedophile because my teenage friend *gasp* liked other teenage boys. The end result being my friend got so convinced by this pedo label that he did go on to be a pedophile.

Anyway, enough about that, I just don’t see why he always gets to speak for Saskatoon’s “gay and lesbian” community.

I also don’t like when people say “gay and lesbian” as a community, because it cuts out at least three other identities that form our community. Namely bisexuals, transgendered folks, and intersexed people. I don’t like the idea that gays and lesbians will get rights and then tell other people in our community they can fuck off. And there are some monosexual queers who will tell trans/bi/intersex people to fuck off. Besides that, if I remember my queer history correctly it was a bunch of trannies who threw the bricks at stonewall.

God, this morning in my sleepy state I was convinced Ellen Degeneres wrote Stone Butch Blues, and I was trying to figure out how someone with such a sad story went on to be a comedian with a talk show. Oh my god, what would life be like if Leslie Feinberg went on to be a comedian?? I love hir, no disrespect, but imagine it. Wow.

My copy of Stone Butch Blues got water damage, I think because my shower wasn’t constrained by the curtain and spewed onto a pile of books. It also soaked my only copy of an ex lover’s porn spread in On Our Backs. Ironically that is the same spread which has my other ex lover’s ex lover in it. Yes, it is just, a teeny community, even for big city queers.

Here’s another weird story about how small this community is. My friend Robin met my first ex girlfriend through her friend in Toronto. I met Robin’s first ex girlfriend at a film festival in San Francisco. Robin and I met in Montreal when we were working in the same weird call centre. I think Vancouver was mixed in there somehow too. Oh yeah, and I was in a porno where Robin’s ex was the camera person. It’s a weird weird weird community.

God, I could think of other convoluted connections, but now I’m tired of that game. It’s only mildly interesting as an L Word narrative device.

Okay, one more. My best friend/neighbor from down the hall used to bake bread for the L Word.

It’s weird but true.