Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan

Julie Andrews, Babs Streisand, Linda Hunt, Hilary Swank have all been nominated for (or have won) Academy Awards for playing men or women pretending to be men. Cate Blanchett, I'm sure, will be another one.

We all perform gender. Some of us 'do gender' better than others.

Just another gay Sunday morning

This morning, while avoiding delving into the tedious task of writing a looooong overdue seminar paper, I got introduced to two important figures in gender bending through the wonders of television.

First, a profile on tennis champion and specialized surgeon Renee Richards on Sunday Morning.

Second, a documentary about Charles Busch, drag performer and playwright extraordinaire.

I'm ashamed to admit neither of them had been on my radar screen until this morning.

I also watched John Waters on Henry Rollins's IFC (or is it Sundance?) show last night. Love them both.

Cable is ruining my life.

But back to the gender benders. BFF asked me why I have such a fascination with transgenderism and transexualism. I think she might suspect I'm a closet case. But I actually do think of myself as a drag queen. I find men who perform as women with reverence to be playfully liberationist for all of us who identify, or perhaps struggle to identify with our feminine natures. Male dipshits on sitcoms who dress as women to make fun of women have the opposite effect. What drag does better than anything else, is show that gender is indeed a performance. Language doesn't help us with this. In French there is only one word for woman, female, feminine--at least in English we have the three words. There is a difference between sex, gender and sexuality. There can, and often is, overlap. All of us deserve to think through the complexities of who we are in these terms, especially within a culture that denigrates the feminine.

And as much as I love drag queens, I'm concerned that the gender bender figures who are gaining positive attention and getting accepted by a mainstream audience are/were born into male bodies. Where are the women transitioning into male forms? Where are the beloved butch dykes? They're out there, but they're not getting press. Why are drag kings harder for us to swallow, so to speak, than drag queens, especially if my cultural-hatred-of-the-feminine argument stands? Is it fundamentally biological (and believe me, I hate to bring the argument into this territory, but bear with me) . . . is it the 'how-dare-you-subvert-your-procreative-nature'? Or is it the harder to pull off performance of it all? It's perhaps easier to worship a glamorous figure who is indeed performing on a literal stage, a la Charles Busch or Ru Paul, and harder to be drawn to someone we expect to perform a glamorous role in life who is choosing to fade into the background. Or, do we believe in a kind of essentialism for men that we don't for women? That somehow, you cannot perform masculinity the way you can femininity, so butch dykes are ultimately frauds? Aha, perhaps I'm winding my way back to the hatred of the feminine here. . . .

Help me out, ya'll. What says you?

One of Kiki's characters comes out:

Dina McGreevey talks to Oprah. Airs Tuesday. Can't wait to hear what you've got to say about this one. . . .

By the way, I hate Gawker.

Hooray for tranny journalists!

From Mike to Christine.

So this LA Times sports reporter has begun her public transition in a very public way. God, I love California.

I hate, however, that journalism doesn't quite provide the forum necessary to really address these issues with as much complexity as they deserve. Or perhaps I'm just not giving readers enough credit.

I appreciate that Mike hints at the relationship between identity and writing--that since he's begun his transition he's brought more energy to his writing and suffered less from writer's block. But I want more depth in that area. I want a discussion about how even when he's writing about sports, he's creating himself on the page, and for all these years he's created a made up character. Now, or soon, when his byline changes to Christine Daniels, she'll be creating a more truthful character and reinforcing a self she doesn't have to do battle for the sake of cultural normality.

What do you think?

*thanks to Sid for the link! and I strongly encourage you to visit her most recent, brilliant rant on Russell Simmons.

A new blog begins

I woke up this morning, read the front page of the Times and slipped into a panic attack. I don't tend to be prone to such a thing, but today's news was more than I could passively take.

Kiki and I got together over brunch this morning, as we're wont to do, and we quickly got to the depths of things: fear and self-identity. Our conversation ran the gamut from growing up in the age of AIDS and Lyme Disease, being creative writing professors in the age of Seung-Hui Cho and Virginia Tech, why passing as straight is hated in the gay community, how we hate being defined by others, how we hate that our institutions fail us, how we hate that we're feeling powerless in a world full of hate that we, at moments, see with great clarity. We're writers, and I daresay truth tellers, each in our own way, but we question the depth and reach of our impact (I should quit with the "we" here and just start speaking for myself).

Growing up in the '80s and '90s, I expected to contract AIDS and/or Lyme disease and die from it. I did not expect to get cancer and survive it. Right now I'm expecting one of my students to attack me physically, because he sees me as a vulnerable woman and I confronted him publicly about his agression. Am I concerned about the right things? Maybe I should fear diabetes. Maybe I should fear the karma splash from my government's illegal foreign policy. Perhaps I should fear the local community theater board of directors that wants my head on a platter. Maybe I should worry about head injuries incurred in my shower or fatal car accidents on a spring day. But what horror (or perhaps delight) might actually befall me I do not know. Whatever it may be, I feel duty bound to a moral imperative to resist the radical wrongs I witness in whatever ways I can. I do not want to live or die complicit in things I despise.

I am now a part of the media, that nebulous machine that helped create the pervasive fears that are so often red herrings. Who's asking the right questions? I think Kiki and I are, but we tend to do it over brunch. I think it's high time we open up the discussion to the rest of y'all inquisitive, thoughful beasts out there.

Be forewarned: I take many a cue from Michel Foucault and my life's greatest teachers and mentors have been queer and feminist theorists. This blog has been inspired by Kiki's and my work in linguistics and narratology--we're questioning and writing for our lives. To paraphrase Kierkegaard, the ethical person is editor of his life: to write one’s life is to assume responsibility for that life. But to know and write one's life, one must come to grips with her self, and honorably face the truth of that self despite the forces at work to berate and denigrate that self for not conforming to cultural norms.

So, it's an experiment. We tried to recreate our brunch conversation that birthed this crazy thing but then I inadvertently erased the damn thing before we made it into a podcast. Oh well. Now it's a blog.