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Editorial Note: SERVICE

Yes, another one.  My job is going to require extensive stays overseas in the near future.  I won't be able to contribute what I've been contributing to AO these past years.  Rather than see this as a problem, I see it as an opportunity for other people to get involved.  I'd like to mention something that I haven't seen mentioned in a while- SERVICE.

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TGDOR 2008

Transgender Day of Remembrance was observed again this year on Sunday, November 23^rd.   As usual it was organized by Transfamily of Cleveland. 

We gathered by the Gazebo in Lincoln Park on the West Side of Cleveland in the cold, and tried to keep our candles lit as we carried placards with the pictures and names of the dead around the square in into Pilgrim UCC (where we arranged for Helen Boyd to speak 18 months ago).

There was a moving performance by local drag king/transman Adam Apple. Adam has been beaten, stabbed and raped and survived to witness for us with yet another artistic and moving performance that made his case for his being just another human being. (as is someone so gifted could be just another human being).

We lit candles for each of the dead. I was by chance given Lawrence King. The brief write-up merely said that he was killed because he liked to wear women's clothes. I couldn’t just read that: I pointed out he was killed in school, supposedly a safe place. That it wasn't just that he wore women's clothes because lots of boys try that out. He was killed for being himself, whoever that was at age 15...and we'll never know who he might have become. 

That little impromptu speech brought me to the attention of a reporter for a monthly, west-side neighborhood paper, and he interviewed me by phone the day after when I got home from work.  When I attend these things I have my "director of Outreach and Communication" Hat on so of course I couldn't say no.

During the candle lighting someone got up and mentioned Jayla who was murdered in Cleveland two years ago (or so). That prompted me to make a suggestion that I repeat here- that in addition to remembering our dead for this year from around the world, we should also remember our local family dead in someway, regardless of the year. I hope this will be incorporated next year, and I hope this idea might spread to other groups as well.

Later, awards were given, including one to Councilman Joe Santiago (who Helen and Betty also met 18 months ago), who is sponsoring a local ordinance for the City of Cleveland for equal protection of gender expression.

And I said good bye for a time to people who I know who I now won't see for months at a time when we disappear into Europe .

It will be a busy week, phone interview, another benefit for my sick friend from temple at a local cafe on Tuesday, Thanksgiving for family of choice from temple in our home, on Saturday the first holiday party of the season at a friend from book circles house on the west side....(I'm a little nervous about this one, very mixed crowd mostly not book circle, and I'm remembering Lacey Leigh's going to Holiday Parties and it being all about her crossdressing...and hoping that my luck of NOT having those conversations doesn't change). And on Sunday next, I leave for Europe for another two weeks.

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Well, I feel a little bit foolish and embarrassed about my wanting to get out so much now.  I feel like a kid in a candy store.  I am sure I am probably the textbook case of what happens when someone “comes out of the closet” after 53 years of hiding.  I am experiencing “gender euphoria”, as I have read on the internet.   All of this excitement will pass in the months and years to come, but right now it feels so right. 

Also, some of my current enthusiasm for “getting out” in the public is a residual effect of the gala last week.  I met a lot of nice trans-people and non- trans people.  All week, the gala attendees kept me how nice I looked.  I thought that was great, but knowing that it was coming from someone like me …. I just blew it off.   It just didn't mean much.  They were just trying to be nice to me, and I thought the comments were not really genuine.   

Anyhow, after the “Ball” on Saturday night, Misses L, T and S  and I went to the nightclub in the hotel.  Somehow, I got in a conversation with this really beautiful woman (gg) at the bar.  This woman was so beautiful that I would have been intimidated to approach her as a guy.  The next thing I know, I ask her to dance, and she says “yes” of all things.  So there I am dancing on the nightclub floor as “Marnie” with one of the beautiful women I have ever seen.  It was surreal.   I thought the night could not get any better.

Soon many ladies (gg's) joined us on the dance floor.   One of the ladies  who joined us on the dance floor was sitting at the table next to me.   About 15 minutes after the dance, she came over to my table (where I was sitting with the other crossdressers), and whispered in my ear how “beautiful” I looked.  I was quite taken by that comment.  She went on for a minute or so, praising my appearance and selection of clothing.  Again , I thought the  night could not possibly get any better.  After she came over, I told Miss L  and the other trans-ladies sitting at the table that if I had known I was going to get this type of attention from females I would have been “dressing” at the age of 15.

 Well, the night got better.  About an hour later, this same women comes over to me again as she is leaving the nightclub.  She suddenly embraces me and gives me this big hug, and she whispers in my ear that I am the most radiant women in the club.  I almost burst out in tears.  I distinctly remember telling her to stop saying that or I am going to cry.  With that reaction, she held me more tightly and whispered “you should have been born a girl”.  As she walks out of club, I am thinking that this is unbelievable.  A total stranger walks into my life and reads my “soul”.    She sees what my wife could not see, and what my family does not know.  

Unbelievable.  I am still shaken to my core over the series of events that night... I heard words that I didn't  think I would ever hear.  

Anyhow, thanks to that strangers kindness, I feel much better about my female appearance.  And my confidence has been given a huge boost.  I am continuing to have a hard time accepting this behavior in myself.  Internally, I still feel like a freak.   But at least in this one other persons eyes …..I am a pretty freak….  

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On Freaks and other Holiday Treats (from December 2006)-Diane Frank

Marnie was a bit c0ncerned about the use of the word "freak".  But it's not the first time that word has been used here.  I shared an article from a few years back about Diane Arbus  with her.  Marnie liked it, so I reprint it here, minus the typos that always show up to haunt me a few years later.  Besides it's another Holiday article, and that means it's also good for recycling this month- from December 2006.

Holiday Season is frenetic for everyone, but add trying to put on a face and fix your hair before you go out the door in 30 minutes less than normal time and it becomes truly an obstacle course. That eyeliner and mascara you thought you had put down right here, migrated to over there, and you are running out of your favorite eye shadow, and wait where did that blemish come from? Oh my, the matching hose has a run in it and I’m down to my last pair… oh fudge! And, this doesn’t include having the right thing to wear. It’s a hard life.

Just before the Thanksgiving weekend, I went with a friend from my book circle to see Fur: the Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus. The late Ms. Arbus was played by Nicole Kidman with wonderful intensity. Now why is Diane Arbus of interest here? You don’t know her? I’m not going to put in the Wikipedia link here, but Arbus was an internationally known photographer whose oeuvre was pictures of the oddballs and weirdoes in society. Us, among others. She was not attracted to the pretty, but to the fringe. The movie suggests that her own discomfort with her compulsions (according to her unauthorized biography as a teen she… oh, read it yourself) lead her to feel more comfortable with the outcasts of society than with her privileged NY family.

Which gets me to my editorial point for the evening: To what extent do we stay in the closet or only hang out with other CDs for the same reason that Diane Arbus did - that our sense of being an outsider makes us uncomfortable being with “normal” people?

The usual story we tell is that we stay in the closet or go only to CD friendly bars and/or support groups because we are rightfully afraid of being out in public - of coming out and so on. But, maybe there is another component - that of finding people with whom you don’t feel like a freak, because they are freaks too. I think I went through a bit of this thinking eight years ago, when I first started dealing with who I was. I thought that maybe the demimonde of dark sleazy bars, where people stopped wrestling with their illicit desires, was where I could be comfortable. It turned out that didn’t work for me, so I had to find my way back into mainstream society, via Temple and my book circle. But I wonder how many stay because they feel most at home there, feeling themselves to be freaks at home among other freaks.

This Holiday Season continued with a bang, or maybe a shriek. Our own Chloe Prince led an expedition to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show – the live stage version - at Cleveland Public Theatre. I guess there were nearly 20 people who were lured out of their closets, their bars and perhaps their isolation by this venture. I couldn’t get a good count because as usual, we got there late and grabbed the first seats we could find. We stayed put because we had a good view. I was surprised that people tended to hang around their seats at intermission rather than meeting in the lobby, so we only got to say hello to Laura and Chloe, who of course go everywhere. I’m guessing also that we were the only people who recognized elsewhere in the audience, a certain former AO member, “CH” and her writing partner for a certain genre musical (in drab) and said hello. Where has our sense of history gone? And of course, someone wanted to get home, so we didn’t hang around afterwards. Still the accounts are that all had a wonderful time.

However, I wasn’t all that pleased with the production itself. Besides the glitches in the sound system, some of the actors were simply hard to understand even with the microphones working. And at this point, Rocky has lost the power to shock. The almost complete cross casting of parts was amusing but bland. And, missing was the audience participation. Yes, some people knew the lines to shout back, and the timing of the narration and some of the dialogue was clearly aimed at providing space for the ritual audience remarks that have grown with the cult status of the movie. But without an audience well grounded in all the interactive bits, the pace seemed off. Maybe another night with a better-prepared audience would have been a more engaging experience. This is however, the second production in a row where I think CPT has overreached its grasp.

The following day I was at Temple again. The senior group was having a cultural afternoon, and the program attracted me. I did get some ribbing from all these little old ladies and men about how tall I am. But nothing else. I really need to learn some more graceful comebacks for that sort of thing.

Tonight I’m just back from Book Circle, and besides getting a not-half-bad picture of myself with my good friend at her birthday party this summer… (there was a lesson there I was going to mention, but I’ve now forgotten.) That will have to wait until some other time. I’ll remember it eventually… and no! of course not. I’m not going to post that picture on the internet. But that’s also another story, as will be the rest of the Holiday Season. May all you and yours find joy and contentment in the season and the New Year to come.

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Points made to a reporter - by Diane

I realized when I talked to the reporter that I have a lot of talking points about this whole business, and I thought that sharing a few of them might be useful.  Some of them may be a bit controversial but I hope it’s a good kind of controversy.  

1-     It’s hard NOT to throw people to the wolves.

There’s an old Russian story about a sled (troika) being pursued by wolves, and people being tossed off the sled to the wolves so that the rest can get away.  This happens a lot in the LGBT world.  In order to buy acceptance for ourselves, we throw out other people.  It’s a very natural, human thing to do.  And it’s the hardest thing not to do. 

AO inherited some of that from TriEss. The homophobia and transphobia of TriEss is pretty notorious.  We’ve worked and evolved away from that, but you can find remnants buried in our old newsletters, parts of our website.  We’ve an insistence on a strict gender binary (either show up as male or female, but don’t show up with a beard in a dress) that is probably no longer appropriate or needed.

Alpha Omega isn’t the only group to wrestle with this.  The recent story about Thomas Beattie, “The pregnant man”, created a flame fest on a local BBS recently.  Many would have gladly thrown him to the wolves, distancing themselves from his particular choices.  Others embraced him.  The controversy was so intense that I suspect that a number of local people didn’t attend TGDOR in order to avoid seeing or being seen.

It’s all too easy to dismiss a person with a fetish, forgetting that that doesn’t define the whole person.   But if you look at this from the perspective of the wolf…we’re all a nice snack.  Throwing out the people who aren’t like us is not only wrong, it’s not effective.

But it is hard not to.  When I do outreach, it would be all to easy to say “we’re the real crossdressers”, and we’re not like those other people.   But I struggle with this and I don’t.  I talk about ranges of behavior and identity.  I talk about freedom of expression, and not defining a whole person by one thing.  When confronted with stories of bizarre behavior, selfishness and even cruelty, I point out that these can be found anywhere in human experience.  Characterizing variations in gender and sexual identity and expression by these negative events is no more fair than doing the same for mainstream society.

2-     About TGDOR

Statistics suggest one or two people a month worldwide are murdered for being in some way transgendered.  I haven’t seen the claims recently that this was an extraordinarily high rate, and given the numbers of us there are I suspect on a statistical basis we’re doing pretty well.  What one tends to notice about the victims is the high proportion of ethnic and racial minorities, the involvement of prostitution and risky neighborhoods.  I need to be clear that none of these things lessens one bit the inherent worth and dignity of each individual whose death we mourn each year.  But I think that we are missing the opportunity to recognize the real problem.  

Yes, it’s bad that people are killed. But it’s also bad that transpeople are rejected by the societies they grow up in and are pushed to these dangerous margins in the first place. Throwaway kids, trans and otherwise end up at the dangerous margins of society, rather than being cherished and protected.

So if it were up to me, I’d be less concerned about hate crime legislation (not that that is a bad thing) and more concerned about having institutions that can help people avoid living on the margins, regardless of their gender identity or sexual preference.

3-     The Story as Target

The last time I was successfully involved with a newspaper article was the FreeTimes article written back in 2006.   (http://www.freetimes.com/story/537).
I met the author, Erin, for lunch, and escorted her to a transfamily meeting and an “Girl’s Night Out” She managed to get to other venues on her own.  She chose the material and wrote the story.  The story was sympathetic, if not comprehensive.  Yet at the next transfamily meeting and on the boards, what did I hear but a litany of complaints that the story didn’t represent the complainant well.  

For many people the experience of being trans is wrapped up in telling their story to other people and getting them to buy into it.  The reality is that a lot of people aren’t good story tellers, and that the story can be hard to get people to understand or accept.  Any public story about transness then carries with it the hope that this latest story will be the one to win the day and persuade all the deniers and skeptics the truth of ones life.

That is, of course, an unrealistic expectation.  There is too much to cover for one thing.  It’s a newspaper story not a thesis or a book that is written.  I also think it is asking too much for any story to do our own jobs for us.  While people may need to tell their story and to be heard, I question how important the story is versus how we live and present ourselves to other people on a daily basis.  It’s not that stories are unimportant, it’s that they don’t always serve the function that we want them to.

Regardless, this need for the good story isn’t going away, it’s probably more intense for transpeople, and I predict that this next story will get the same “but it’s not about me, so it isn’t a good story” reaction.

4-  The Transhierarchy

Transfolk despite their similarities to people on the outside are not homogeneous or unified.  There is a tendency for people in one category to put people in another category down.  It’s a bad thing, but it does exist.

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I confess...I've misplaced my early years of New Yorker Cartoons.  But just the other day I received an invitation to my 40th High School Reunion.  I wondered what the cartoons looked like back in 1969.   Back then mini-skirts were common, hair was long on young men, and we were also at war.  Remembering all the comments about long hair from my youth, I expected to find cartoons full of references to gender issues.  To my surprise 1969 was pretty barren.  What is interesting is the extent to which meanings of these more recent examples of cultural perspective have changed vs the older cartoons I've studied in previous columns.

I liked this one with its somewhat veiled reference to dandyism....but the black hat/ white hat trope is probably what drives the humor.
  

[Ed Fisher 1/4/1969]

We were just past the Carnaby Street fashion era, but as the cartoon below shows, those go-go boots had a practical use.  No Sir Walter Raleigh here.

[Carl Rose 1/11/1969]

This is one of the few references to the war between the sexes during 1969.  For our non-American readers the image is of the floor of the US house of Representatives.   Given our remarkable political year, and Nancy Pelosi being Speaker of the House, this cartoon now has a quaint quality to it.

[Mascha Richter 5/17/1969]

The following cartoon does redeem by itself the dearth of material in 1969.  That year marked the first years of a number of Ivy League Schools going Co-Ed.  One of my classmates was among the first or second year that women attended Yale.  These days the cartoon takes on a whole different meaning.

[Carl Rose 10/4/1969]

And finally, the passing of the microskirt is mourned...although probably prematurely:

[Barney Tobey 11/1/1969]

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Publication Information
This newsletter is copyright 2008 by The Alpha Omega Society. All rights reserved. Articles and information contained in this newsletter may be reprinted by other non-profit crossdresser organizations with advance permission of the author and provided that proper credit is given to author and source. The opinions or statements contained in this newsletter are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Alpha Omega.

Contributions of articles are welcomed, but may be altered in the editing process, with the author’s intent retained, or may be rejected, whether solicited or not. We will exchange newsletters with any other similar group.

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