Turns out lee lynch and s. Renee Bess threw this book together after the pulse shooting because they felt so rattled by the resurgence of gay bars being unsafe when they thought they’d left that kind of thing behind decades ago

["Lee Lynch Freedom Clothes

So here I am, donning men's dress pants for the Golden Crown Literary Society Awards ceremony, and I keep thinking of the photos of our people in Orlando. They dressed up too in their best freedom clothes, also anticipating an evening of togetherness. I'm grateful to be alive and able to gather with other gay women, while I can barely take in how many of us were killed, wounded, traumatized and experienced losses because of our gender preferences.

I've been reading about NYC Gay Pride. When I attended the early NYC marches, there was some security— mostly to control us, I believe. In 2016 security is for our protection. Blocks and blocks are closed to parking. There will be thousands of officers on the streets, on rooftops, in the air and in boats. My biggest fear in the early 1970s was that my mother would see me on T.V. and find out for certain I was going to burn in hell.

Yet ever since the 1980s, when the right wing decided it would be politically expedient to build their power base by turning us into a featureless symbol against whom multitudes of non-gays could unit, I have expected mass killings. We're natural targets for people taught by their religions that their deities find us an abomination.

The horror of that Central Florida night brought back the general horror of gay bars for me. Like whole neighborhoods that house other minorities, the bars pen us in one place where we are queer ducks— queer sitting ducks. Orlando was a pogrom, "the organized killing of many helpless people,"* in this case organized by a stealth enemy that turns people like the deeply conflicted, unstable shooter into murderers. I think affectionately of some gay bars— I got to wear freedom clothes there too— but I also remember the horror of them. They were a nightmare then, they're a nightmare again. Yet I thought of them as fun. Didn't we all? I loved being with other gays, but drank to tolerate the demeaning conditions of our loud, cold, dirty, dangerous pens.

Truth be told, I'm a wallflower by nature with seldom enough self-confidence to ask a woman to dance. Even with the drink in me and a cigarette going, the bars bored me silly. Any excitement came from dancing with my partner and being surrounded by our kind.

The gawking het couples on dates who come to laugh and stare at what to them was a grotesque sideshow, the ones who always managed to get tables because they knew the owners of the joints while we stood around without a place to set our drinks, degraded, intimidated, and antagonized us, their very presence a warning that we danced to their fiddle. My rage at them continues to this day and fuels some of what I write. It's due to the gentle nature of our people we are the victims of violence and our tormentors get off scot-free.

I expected such an attack on LGBTQ people at least since the night, in the mid-1970s, when my friend and co-worker Dino was shot outside Partners Café in New Haven, Connecticut. Dino was walking to his car when out of nowhere, someone started shooting from a moving vehicle. Young, handsome Dino got a bullet in the arm. Now I'm only surprised at the infrequency of the attacks.

I am surprised that a gay bar has been designated a National Monument. This is one of many such dichotomies. We're central to the frightening divide between U.S. voters, which only confirms how powerful we really are.

It's fitting that our monument should be a bar. Human communities form where they can, spontaneously, and eventually develop traditions. Hellish as they can be, at times they were glorious, glorious! The music may have been loud past bearing, but we danced all night. Under the glitter balls we saw ourselves reflected in our peers like nowhere else. I was not the only shy one and eventually a few strangers would become friends, friends grew to circles. With a gay bar nearby we never needed to be totally alone.

A night at the bar was always a celebration. Angry, estranged, alcoholic, festive— companionship was there for the taking. Danger united us, as it does still.

There will be increased security at venues and events like the one I'm headed to. I'll be wearing my dress up pants, shirt, vest, pocket square and tie. Others will be in alluring frocks and a number in their full-dress U.S. military uniforms. Day after day, more and more people condemn atrocities against LGBTQ people and other minorities and we are stronger for every changed mind.

I will remember the beautiful, proud and daring men and women who were attacked that nightmare night in Orlando, every time I don my glorious freedom clothes."]

from our happy hours: lgbt voices from the gay bars, story collectors s. renee bess and lee lynch, 2017

if i ask very nicely, will you people stop trying to bring the mullet back. like if i'm really fucking nice, will you stop

and I mean. the effect of horror on the body is dissociation, which is inherently chaotic. when you’re dissociated, you’re not acting from a place of thinking, it’s all instinct and murky survival scripts and motives and pressures that don’t make sense because they’re coming from however many pieces you split into when you dissociated. a horror story takes control of the splits that occur and pressures the story into ever more splits and fractures to the point of apostheosis: where the last fragment that remains is compelled to inhabit concrete reality for however long it can stand it. and at that point, that fragment either burns out like Toni collette at the end of hereditary or leo at the end of shutter island, or it mutates, becomes an even greater horror. it queers.

I think where my horror story shifted into something that felt like life’s work territory was when I began to decide exactly how we were going to dissociate and which directions we were going to split into from there. because you never just dissociate, or at least I never did, I hyper-associated with something else, even when I was inhabiting deadness. I zombiefied. I was dead but I still interacted with reality and often in very deliberate ways that showed both agency and courage, I had hobbies and interests, both of which led me deeper into the horror story.

Susan Stryker - My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix

— Susan Stryker, My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage (1994)

[“Because I now live in the world as a woman who loves women, and because there are times (more common in the past than now) when I’ve been perceived as an effeminate gay man, I also have a direct experience of homophobia. My transgender experience is thus also part of why I feel a strong commitment to lesbian, gay, and bi rights. Although I have a stable sense of being a woman rather than a man, and have taken a lot of steps to get my body, my state-issued IDs, and other paperwork aligned with my sense of self, I know that I can never align everything the way cisgender people do and that there will always be some discordance and incongruence. For me, that means that, even though I identify as a transsexual woman, I am also, in practice, unavoidably gender nonconforming, genderqueer, and nonbinary. Being perceived or “passed” as a gender-normative cisgender person grants you a kind of access to the world that is often blocked by being perceived as trans or labeled as such. This lack of access, created by the way the world is organized to benefit people whose embodiments are different from my own, limits the scope of my life activities and can therefore be understood as producing a disability. And just as my transness creates an overlap for me with disability politics whether or not I am otherwise disabled, it intersects as well with other movements, communities, and identities that also contest the negative effects of living in a society that governs us all by norming our bodies.”]

susan stryker, transgender history

[“White feminism often (and often unconsciously) claimed its moral strength based on some concept of “purity”—notably (especially in the first wave) some notion of female sexual purity, but also, more abstractly, in the second wave, on the idea of an essential womanhood to be recovered or restored from the taint of patriarchal pollution. In contrast, Anzaldúa’s brand of feminism valued the power to be found in being mixed, in crossing borders, of having no one clear category to fit into—of being essentially impure. Haraway drew on this evolving frame of reference in her famous “Cyborg Manifesto,” which described a “post-gender” world of “technocultural” bodies, and added machine/human and animal/human to the kinds of boundary and mixing questions with which feminism should be concerned. Stone’s “posttranssexual manifesto,” attentive as it was to technologically altered transgender bodies, was deeply influenced by Haraway’s approach to the intersectionality of gender, embodiment, and technology. However, it also drew from another new way of thinking about gender then being explored by another feminist faculty member at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Teresa de Lauretis, who coined the term “queer studies” for a conference she organized under that name in Santa Cruz in 1991.

The new “queer” version of gender espoused by de Lauretis and other like-minded feminist scholars, which de Lauretis laid out most succinctly in her essay “Technologies of Gender,” discarded the older feminist idea that gender was merely repressive—that it was only a system for holding women down, turning them into second-class citizens, exploiting their labor, and controlling their reproductive capacities. Without denying that gender systems indeed produced systematic inequalities for women, the new queer take on gender also talked about gender’s productive power—how “woman” was also a cultural or linguistic “site” or “location” that its occupants identified themselves with, understood themselves through, and acted from. The new queer feminism drew heavily from French philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of social power as decentralized and distributed rather than flowing from a single source; that is, that each of us has a power particular to our situation, and that power is not just something vested “up there” somewhere in the law or the military or capital or the “patriarchy.” Queer feminism reimagined the status “woman” as not simply a condition of victimization to be escaped from, and it reconceptualized gender as a network of “relations of power” that, like language, we don’t ever get outside of but always express ourselves through and work within—a situation that gives feminist women a “dual vision” and “split subjectivity.” Sometimes womanhood is a binding-in-place that needs to be resisted and worked against, and sometimes, de Lauretis said, women want womanhood to stick to them “like a wet silk dress.”]

susan stryker, transgender history

love those stories where the conflict isn’t centered around a person or an institution so much as it’s. the breaking down of a lie. the conflict is between the layers of the lie and reality, the arc comes from the journey through the lie and out the other side, the characters show you who they are in relation to the lie while under enormous pressure and so on. marvelous.

F. Douglas Brown

[ID: Make Out Sonnet

The first time I saw two men kissing, I was six,

Living in 1970s L.A. My mom took care

Of an elderly woman who found herself in a fix

And moved into a complex of all men, bare

Chested men, with cutoff jeans and tinted glasses.

My mother's friend gave me chocolate that matched

Her skin - this must be heaven. These sons' asses

Peeked out beneath their shorts, but watched

Over her better than mom. Took donations for heat,

A sofa and a new wig - all changed her mood.

They even did her laundry. They did sweet

Better than honey. Did family better than blood.

And between duties, two men always off alone

So desire, like the dishes, could also get done.

end ID]

THE BEAR Season 2 Teaser

Listening to 'From First Draft to Plot with Alexander Chee' and he talks about how one of the problems with his student's drafts is unmade decisions, that story is about making decisions, and he also says" the other big problem I find with student drafts besides unmade decisions is that implications in the initial scenes have not been dealt with and sometimes the draft, as a result will be a pile of inventions with implications that are still unmet and because the implications are unmet the writer keeps inventing things thinking the writer has nothing to write about when in fact the writer is ignoring what the writer has already written."

why is “get ___ed idiot” one of the funniest sentences in the english language

get verbed idiot, the sequel to “ok nounboy”

get verbed nounboy

Someone: transmascs can’t say tranny because [insert some random shit about how transmascs are immune from transphobia etc etc] so basically transphobia and slurs are never directed at them blah blah

some transphobe upon hearing someone on t speak: nice tranny voice faggot

on “transmascs can’t say tranny” via Kate Bornstein, 2009

Transmascs have always been and will always be included when someone says tranny. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. They’re doing historical revisionism and our ancestors are ashamed of them.

[“Living in a FTM transsexual body is, of course, living in, with, and through corporeal incoherence. Very few FTMs can afford successful lower surgery as most phalloplasties remain simply cost prohibitive. Enough Man, and Casey in particular, both take those private masculine anxieties about living with indeterminate bodies (that is, bodies that might pass as male in public but could not pass visual inspection) and refuse the social shaming by allowing the camera to film the physical site that is quietly and euphemistically identified among FTM men as “the tranny bonus hole.”

In his interviews with FTMs as well as with intersexed folks, Colin Thomas teases out the way that transitive folks rearticulate gender possibilities based on a decoding of the binary gender system even as that system attempts to limit its subjects. “Hanging out with gender-variant people,” Thomas writes, “can quickly dislodge one’s concepts of what it means to be male or female, gay or straight.”

In fact, one of his interview subjects notes how these limits of language mirror the limits of bodies when “he” says: “If there was a tranny pronoun, I’d use it . . . I’m male, but I’m not suddenly this biodude either [ . . . ] I do plan on keeping my tranny bonus hole [though]. That’s staying.” This is not the same site of physicality that equally defines heteronormative femininity and some radical-fundamentalist feminisms (the vagina-as-sheath-for-penis) and by implication lesbianism (the for-women-only vagina); this is the paradoxical space that defies existing gender and sexual taxonomies but which uses their imperatives as foreplay.

As a way to pay homage to the early feminist porn workers, and to Annie Sprinkle in particular, as a queer trans son of this post-porn movement, Casey does a performance piece in the film that he calls his “Andy Sprinkle.” With partner Natalie holding a flashlight, Casey puts his feet into stirrups and invites the viewer, assisted by Natalie and through the camera’s gaze, to quite literally look at his genitals and into his vagina or what he calls his boy hole. Narrated through a voice-over by Natalie—a voice-over narration directly evocative of Sprinkle’s in Linda/Les and Annie—“Andy’s” scene puts that productive space of nothingness and impossibility fully on display, situating his body within a public representation while challenging its essentialisms at the same time. There’s something vertiginously incoherent about Andy’s body literally in motion between sexes, reducible to neither, bearing traces of both, and owned, and narrated, in queer representational circuits of desire, by his femme top. Gendered discourses of shame might compel the composition of the sexual scene but their work is rendered mute.”]

bobby noble, from Knowing Dick: Penetration and the Pleasures of Feminist Porn’s Trans Men, from the feminist porn book: the politics of producing pleasure, edited by tristan taormino, constance henley, and celine perreñas shimizu, 2013

don't let my tits distract u from the fact that i'm not ok in the head

don't let the fact that i'm not ok in the head distract u from my tits