New York LGBT Pride Season 2011

June is Pride Month, in honor of the Stonewall Uprising, a truly fabulous event back in 1969. You may have heard of it.

I live in New York City, and Staten Island Pride was yesterday. It's the youngest borough Pride event, dating only to 2005. I didn't make it this year, but you can see some photos I took of SI Pride in 2009 here.



The event is surprisingly low on guidos...and high on penis cookies.

Queens Pride was today, offering ample opportunity for puns. I'll restrain myself.

Some upcoming NYC Pride events:

• Brooklyn Pride: June 11
• Trans Day of Action: June 24
• Dyke March: June 25 <3
• Harlem Pride: June 25
• Manhattan Pride: June 26
• Bronx Pride: July 9

Queer Nerd Safari + Homeless Youth Rally Vids

TOMORROW!

The dudes over at FAQNP are presenting their third zine, "A Queer Nerd Travel Guide". As always, it will be at the 13th Street Center in Manhattan, corner of 7th Avenue. The event starts at 6:30.

Woohoo! Zine party!

Also...in April, there was a homeless queer youth rally and panel in Chelsea. You see, Albany recently cut founding to youth shelters in half, effectively fucking over all the kids who flock to NYC as a "gay mecca", upon being tossed out by homophobic and transphobic parents. You can check out the goods here:

Unpacking Blur

Hey guys. Remember the '90s?

• Simpsons characters still had souls!


• Biggie and Tupac weren't pretending to be dead!


• Sonic the Hedgehog was so awesome he starred in two cartoon shows simultaneously!

...and, for a brief moment, somewhere between the New Kids On The Block era of boy bands, and the Backstreet Boys era of boy bands, mainstream pop music wasn't abysmal.

There was Nirvana! There was Pavement! There was Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day totally not looking like a weird mash up of Gary Numan and Liza Minnelli!

And there was Blur! If we're being generous!

What am I saying? Blur was great. Maybe not as great as Nirvana, but certainly better than that other British band. You know...those guys.

Blur was the band that brought us "Song 2" (woohoo), and a music video starring a carton of milk (see below).



Blur also brought us "Girls & Boys", a song which contains the fitting lyric: "Love in the 90s is paranoid". There is also, in the same song, a lyric for our own decade: "Avoiding all work, because there's none available." Truly timeless.

However, for this post, I shall concentrate on the chorus of "Girls & Boys". It goes as follows:

Girls who are boys
Who like boys to be girls
Who do boys like they're girls
Who do girls like they're boys
Always should be someone you really love

Come again?

At first glance, the only intelligible part is that last line. That's clearly sarcasm. The lead singer of Blur is sneering at you for being such a pervert. The bastard.

Lucky for you, I couldn't sleep last night, so I worked out the rest.

Girls who are boys

Hm...that's pretty easy. That's a boi (thanks, urbandictionary!). As in "Brooklyn Boihood". As in "what I could be comfortably defined as if I weren't so standoffish and socially awkward".

Let us continue.

Who like boys to be girls

Huh. Well, that's a feminine male-type person, possibly in drag.

Who do boys like they're girls

Pegging!

Who do girls like they're boys

That one's a little harder. Maybe it's like giving a blowjob to a strap-on? Not that I have ever contemplated such a thing, or sought out books and online fiction on the subject.

Let's pause at this moment for a sing-along.



That was fun, wasn't it? So...anyway...now that we have worked out who is involved, and what is going on, let us examine who is doing what to whom.

Girls who are boys
Who like boys to be girls
Who do boys like they're girls
Who do girls like they're boys
Always should be someone you really love

There is definitely a lot of pronoun confusion going on here, and not of the usual kind!

One way of looking at it is, that the aforementioned boi, who is into feminine males, likes to engage in pegging, while the feminine male partner (we'll call him "the femme" from now on) enjoys giving blowjobs to strap-ons.

HOWEVER...because of the pronoun confusion, it may also be the case that it is the femme who likes to "do boys like they're girls" (which would be the usual gay anal sex), and it is the femme's gay male partner who likes to suck off dildos.

ON THE OTHER HAND...there is the distinct possibility that it is the boi who is the subject of the last two lines; that it is the boi who likes to BOTH "do boys like they're girls" and "girls like they're boys". In other words, a switch hitter.

FINALLY...perhaps it is the case that it is the femme partner who is switch hitting, engaging with boys like they're girls, and with girls like they're boys, variously.

All of which makes it quite clear why, in the twenty years since this song was released, there has been a proliferation of queer terminology. Some people say that "labels are for cans of soup", but they also make it a lot easier to figure out what the hell is going on during a Grecian orgy.

Pants!

I am currently reading a biography of Luisa Capetillo, a late 19th, early 20th century Puerto Rican feminist and anarcho-syndicalist. She organized strikes, wrote books, and traveled to Mexico, Cuba and the U.S. mainland...but what do people remember most about her?

According to Luisa Capetillo, Pioneer Puerto Rican Feminist:

Historian Angel Quintero Rivera comments, "When we asked the old labor leaders about her, all of them -- without exception -- began by mentioning that she was the first woman in Puerto Rico to wear pants or pant-skirts."

Capetillo was even arrested in Havana for wearing pants and "Causing a Scandal"! Times have changed a lot: now they arrest you if you're NOT wearing pants. Can't people make up their minds?



In addition, Capetillo was also an outspoken advocate of free love.

So you'd figure this pants-wearin', free-lovin' anarchist would have been an early voice for queer rights, right?

WRONG!

Capetillo, in Mi Opinión, a book of essays on feminism, explicitly takes on lesbianism...as a social ill. If human beings practiced free love, Capetillo believed lesbianism -- and masturbation -- would disappear! Women would have a "natural" outlet for their passions, instead of needing to turn to other women or to the 19th century Puerto Rican equivalent of a vibrator (I imagine that would be a woodpecker). Lesbianism and jacking off were unnatural acts in her mind; sex was for reproduction, and was most naturally between a man and a woman.

Capetillo hated the hypocritical priests of the Catholic Church, but clearly her concept of love and sex was heavily influenced by religion. Capetillo's version of free love was serial monogamy.

Free love as defined as "straight people should be able to love who they like, one at a time, within marriage, with certainly no jacking off" seems...quite different from the definition I've acquired from watching PBS documentaries on Woodstock. But Capetillo's Puerto Rico was so prudish that her ideas were as shocking as a bare ankle.

I find it interesting that Capetillo was able to be such a nonconformist, but was still bound by her culture and early upbringing, to such an extent that her ideas on love would seem right-wing today. I think it illustrates how political discussions can be shifted so far off center that any opinion in the opposite direction looks extreme. Perhaps we should not hedge our opinions for fear of being ridiculed as wackos. Go out, wear our pants (or dresses), and not moderate ourselves to the point that we are actually supporting those who would oppose us.

"Transamerica": A Buddy Film for Lifetime Television

"Transamerica" is a very strange film. It is, on the one hand, a completely ordinary road trip/buddy film, starring a television actress and a young actor who kind of reminds me of Shawn from "Boy Meets World". On this particular hand (I think it's my left hand), "Transamerica" is about a very ordinary woman who just happens to be transgender. The movie details her journey of self-discovery as she travels across the United States with her long-lost son, Toby.

Toby is a very ordinary name, by the way. Or at least, hella white (maybe not?).

For an example of this hand, here is the synopsis from Rotten Tomatoes:

Bree is a perfectly adjusted conservative transsexual woman. Born Stanley, a genetic male, she's about to take the final step to becoming the woman Stanley always wanted to be -- until she finds out that she is the parent of a long-lost 17-year-old

Ok. Second hand.

Bree is transexual, and a woman, and conservative, but she is sure as hell NOT well-adjusted. Her every movement screams anxiety and repression. Felicity Huffman does a great job of playing Bree as a nervous wreck, rendered clumsy by fear of not passing.

Even worse off is her son, Toby. He's addicted to presciption painkillers, he was raped by his step-father, and he was picked up by the police for selling his body. His big dream is to be porn star. His biological mom is dead and his biological dad is a transwoman who lies to him and tries to abandon him after bailing him out of jail.



On the first hand, my left hand, Bree is perfectly adjusted and Toby is a Huck Finn-like teenage rebel. On my second hand, these two folks have huge, glaring personal problems. In fact, the more I think about this movie, the more Toby's numerous, long term, gay-for-pay issues overshadow Bree's.

I mean, Bree is doing pretty much ok by the end of the movie. She's had her surgery, and she's out of the back room of the restaurant, waitressing.

Toby meanwhile, is starring in "Cowabunghole", using the same breathy, seductive voice he used on his rapist step-father when he was forced to reunite with him. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: it's ALSO the same voice he uses on Bree, when he unknowingly hits on his biological dad.

Oedipus went through less!

"Transamerica" features a week of Lifetime movies' worth of horrible interpersonal issues...but somehow the tone remains light. It's not because the movie is funny, because it isn't really funny, except for maybe Bree's psychotic, eye-shadow overdosed mother. Who actually isn't funny either, because I know women like that, and they've traumatized me.

I guess how "Transamerica" manages to remain on that first hand is mostly via bright, feminine colors and jaunty country music. I don't even LIKE country music, and I still enjoyed those lively banjo tunes.



What else disturbed me about this movie? Well, there's this weird, freak show scene involving a party full of transfolks. It's really awkwardly inserted into the middle of the road trip, and it seems like it was put there because somebody told the director, "Hey! A lot of folks think transpeople are outlandish! Let's address this with an embarrassing party that totally freaks out Bree!" It wouldn't offend me, except that it's just soooo out of place, and the party-goers come off as jerks in comparison to the "stealth" Bree.

"Transamerica" is, overall, a very ordinary and generic film that just happens to be about a really screwed up teenage boy...and oh yeah, one of his parents is a transwoman. Who is also kind of screwed up, but not as badly.

I give it 2 stars.

1 star for "Felicity Huffman isn't a transwoman?!"
And 1 star for "Toby isn't that bad, either"

Skeletor Supports Homeless Queer Youth; Albany Does Not

My first post for the month of April allows me to introduce a new tag that I will, without a doubt, be using often: he-man!

Coming up this week is "Skeletor Saves", an auction of art based on "He-man and the Masters of the Universe"...and if that isn't awesome enough, it's for a good cause.



You see, for the first time in, let us say, forever, the lazy bastards in New York's state capital passed a budget on time. Of course, no good could come of this. I mean, it's the New York equivalent of hell freezing over. Surely the end times are upon us. All joking aside, Satan's minions in Albany all agreed that cutting half of all state funding for homeless youth was a GREAT idea.

Because you can't raise taxes for millionaires -- that would just be wrong!

The "Skeletor Saves" show's proceeds will go to the Ali Forney Center, a homeless queer youth shelter in Manhattan. Submissions include art by Helmut Lang, Phuc Van Dang, Marc Jacobs, aaaaand Buck Angel, who is more well known for his creative skills in other areas, such as your mom.

The show will be Thursday 4/7/11 from 6-10PM at Headquarters Studios at 385 Broadway, in Manhattan.

The inevitable video:



By the power of GraySkull!

Hollywood Crazy

Out of the five movies I've reviewed so far, 3 have featured crazy ladies in starring roles (of course, in "Sucker Punch", the film is in fact playing with the tropes that I mock here by making the "crazy" retreat into fantasy justifiable, sympathetic, tragic, and even heroic).

As for the other 2...one was about drag queens and the other was an extended Freudian metaphor for the devouring mother...so while ladies were prominently featured, it's not really the same thing. You don't have to be crazy to wear drag OR to be a gigantic cave system.

Right? Right!

Now, while "A Streetcar Named Desire" is in another galaxy entirely from "Sucker Punch", and "Black Swan" is within the "Streetcar" planetary system though perhaps many orbits away, they do show certain commonalities in their treatment of insane women.

1. Crazy ladies are hypersexual
Whether they're makin' moves on the paperboy, having elaborate lesbian fantasies, or having elaborate lesbian fantasies with guns and robots and steampunk Nazis...crazy ladies in movies certainly like to get it on. Clearly the corollary is that normal, sane women do not hit on the paperboy. But I have relatives in the suburbs, and, well, sometimes the paperboy is super hot. You'd be insane NOT to hit on him. There is also the insulting corollary that normal, sane women do not have elaborate lesbian fantasies. Sometimes I have my doubts about myself, but I'm pretty sure that this is not the case.

2. Crazy ladies are violent
Crazy ladies in movies hit people, but more often they just stab them. Sometimes they like stabbing folks so much, they get confused and stab themselves. And then they get blood all over their tutus.

This neatly ignores the fact that most people with mental illness are very passive. Depression is one of the most common mental illnesses, and is characterized by social withdrawal. If you are depressed, sometimes you can't even get out of bed in the morning, never mind killing people.

Schizophrenia, which is portrayed by Hollywood as very exciting and entertaining, is also characterized by social withdrawal. In fact, "withdrawal" is one of the main symptoms of schizophrenia listed in the DSM-IV, the diagnostic manual used by American psychologists.

Then there are the anxiety disorders: Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Panic Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, and the phobias. A person with such a disorder is much more likely to weep in fear than stab the anxiety-provoking stimuli. PTSD, which is portrayed as very exciting indeed, is also an anxiety disorder. While folks with PTSD might be very angry, the diagnostic criteria include a whole list of avoidance behaviour.

Finally, Bipolar. Bipolar people often enough show all the signs of depression, with the same social withdrawal. In a manic phase, a person with bipolar might engage in risky behaviour, but that risky behaviour generally IS NOT axe murder. Maybe they just write a lot...WITHOUT necessarily murdering their families. I'm not going to say people with mental disorders are never violent, but certainly most of the violence in our society comes without a diagnosis.

3. Crazy ladies are incurable
Once a lady goes crazy in a movie, there's no turning back. She's going to spend the rest of her miserable life in a mental institution, and will most likely die in a tragic manner. In real life, most mentally ill people go to a general practitioner and get a prescription for Xanax or an SSRI. They might go to talk therapy, or a support group, too. These options simply aren't available in the movies. If there are any shrinks around, they are invariably clueless and/or evil.

In real life, you can't be admitted to a mental hospital unless you are regarded as a threat to yourself or others, and most people are let out within a matter of days or weeks. In the movies, you don't get admitted until you've already killed someone.

And of course, you never, ever get out in the movies, unless of course you're a Batman villain and the security at your hospital is highly flawed for keeping supervillains. In real life, the "lifers" might be stuck there because they have no family to take them in afterward, or because they have other cognitive problems that would make it impossible for them to survive on the outside: an old woman with severe depression AND dementia, for example. These folks can barely function. They're not supervillains. That's right -- I'm telling you supervillains ARE NOT REAL.

As you can see, "Hollywood crazy" and actual mental disorders are two very different things. "Hollywood crazy" is characterized by a "twisted childhood" or maybe a single, highly disturbing event, that turns a person into an uninhibited monster. "Hollywood crazy"'s symptoms include serial killing, interest in "minority" sexualities, a great sense of humor, and flamboyance. "Hollywood crazy" makes for much more interesting side characters/villains than the bland lead characters you were meant to relate to. But "Hollywood crazy" mostly makes for villains...because disabled people are scary.

On another note...I could probably rewrite this entire post using links exclusively pertaining to the Batman franchise.



Batman is such a dick to patients.

Game Company gives the "Straight Male Gamer" what-for

Bioware recently responded to a rather screwed up forum post regarding Dragon Age II allowing same-sex and (arguably) polyamorous romances between characters.

Apparently...that's a bad thing.

But really, they let you romance elves, so it only seems fair!



The second fucked up thing about this is, the guy who made the post positioned himself as the Straight Male Gamer, which was just asking for trouble. Because all straight male gamers are homophobes? Because all straight male gamers are bigots? Sometimes it can seem that way, but then again my games of Risk on Facebook can get a little heated...

Here's a gem from the response -- David Gaider, a Dragon Age senior writer:

"And if there is any doubt why such an opinion might be met with hostility, it has to do with privilege. You can write it off as “political correctness” if you wish, but the truth is that privilege always lies with the majority. They’re so used to being catered to that they see the lack of catering as an imbalance. They don’t see anything wrong with having things set up to suit them, what’s everyone’s fuss all about? That’s the way it should be, any everyone else should be used to not getting what they want."

You can read more here: Straight Male Gamer told to 'get over it'

It almost goes without saying that online gaming culture can be extremely homophobic, but that's another post.

"Sucker Punch": Muppet Babies Hit Puberty!

March 29th: Updated with some observations on the levels of reality in this movie

You may have already heard the premise behind "Sucker Punch": a really smokin' hot femme is locked away in a 1950s mental institute, and she has n days until her lobotomy. Soooo...like anyone else would do in her situation...she has elaborate fantasies involving robots and dragons and machine guns that somehow enable her escape.

This seems almost stupidly straightforward. "Stupidly", because, quite honestly, what the hell do robots have to do with mid-20th century psychiatric medicine?

Well, ok, but that's just barely pertinent.

"Sucker Punch", is, in fact, not that straightforward or even that stupid. I mean, it's kind of stupid...it is often a showcase for explosions and cleavage. But everyone going to see this film wants explosions and cleavage. And it manages to present these showcases for cleavage explosions/explosive cleavage in a way that isn't completely stupid or...Lord help me...antifeminist.

Yes, I am about to tell you that the movie about hot femmes shooting guns in skimpy outfits isn't sexist.

As hard as it may be to believe, judging from the film posters, the overall message of this film is not sexist. It can be summed up as, "Girls are awesome". Girls in this film sacrifice themselves for their sisters, their "sisters" (as in fellow exotic dancers), and for their vaguely lesbian best friends. Girls kick ass and look great while doing so. Girls stab oily rapists in scenes that gave me bad flashbacks to "Black Swan". And they pilot steam-powered mechs in scenes that gave me good flashbacks to "Tank Girl".

Yes, I am about to tell you that "Tank Girl" is a better movie than "Black Swan". Suck it!

The way the movie gets around the inherent stupidity of steam-powered clockwork Nazi zombies is by presenting these scenes as fantasy vignettes triggered by disassociation. It's kind of like "Muppet Babies", except it's as if Kermit and the rest of them are all attractive young women and are trying to escape from a brothel.



The movie treats the dissociative moments in a sympathetic manner, (no matter who is having them). The bad guys might characterize the protagonist, Baby Doll as violently insane, but to the audience she is presented as a brave, self-sacrificing hero, fighting against authoritarian villains and indeed, the patriarchy. Her trips into la-la land grant her the power to do great things. Thus the movie avoids the trap of certain other movies reviewed here, where potentially sympathetic women who are traumatized by violence and sexual assault wind up turning into unsympathetic monsters. Sometimes literally. Ahem.

I guess you can argue that Hollywood crazy somewhat resembles PTSD, which CAN make people very angry as a result of a specific event...but Hollywood crazy really is a special disorder, all its own. Most "crazy" people are not violent, and often are singled out for violence because of their odd behavior. Meanwhile, in real life, often the bad guys are perfectly sane and the ones in charge.

Enough of my harangue. Well, maybe a little more...in "Sucker Punch", the bad guys are indeed the ones in charge. They are rapists and corrupt doctors. And the good guys wind up losing a lot. The ending is not feel-good, because of all of the suffering that leads up to it, although I would call it life-affirming.

And the plot? Well, there's a plot. It can be a little cheap at times.

I really liked the overall message of women working as a team to help one another. It warmed my frosty heart.



Or maybe I've just been taken in by how pretty the damn movie is, and all the explosions and swords.

I don't think so, though. I think, indeed, that anybody who calls this a bad movie, or boring, or unimaginative, probably doesn't have a soul.

I give "Sucker Punch" 4 stars, and if you don't like that, you can go watch Natalie Portman yank her cuticles off.

3 stars for "Is that a biplane? No, it's a triplane! No, seriously, 3 wings!"
And 1 star for "Not being completely stupid", which is all I really asked for anyway.

****
Update: On another level, perhaps nothing in the film actually happens except for the very beginning and the lobotomy scene toward the end. All the rest is disassociation in reaction to extreme abuse. Or maybe it's the other way around, and the brothel is real, the disassociation still occurs, though for other reasons, and the protagonist isn't who you think at all. The movie mostly follows the character named "Baby Doll", who is champion of these fantasy vignettes. She is the one who appears to be spacing out during the fantasy sequences. But does she exist at all?

"Where Is My Mind" is featured prominently throughout the film. The same song ended "Fight Club", in a very plot-appropriate way. Certainly the song is thematically related to "Sucker Punch", but maybe it's also a hint? The film is open to multiple interpretations.

The very same twists that seem to come out of nowhere on first viewing really do enrich the film. Underneath the action is a tragic and serious story! No really. Shocker number 3. Yet I do not think that ruins the enjoyment of the action sequences.

Updates!

First: More info on the black sci-fi event coming up!

The event will be hosted by M. Asli Dukan, director of a documentary called Invisible Universe, about the way blacks are portrayed in speculative fiction. "Speculative fiction" is a term that covers not just science fiction, but also horror, fantasy, and the latest Philip K. Dick adaptation whose marketing pretends that it isn't sci-fi at all but just an action thriller.



Also!

Friday, March 18th is quite a busy day. Not only is the black lesbian sci-fi event Friday, but later on, at everybody's favorite feminist bookstore, there's Trans Bodies, Trans Selves. Trans Bodies, Trans Selves is a resource guide for transgender folks, and they're currently doing a book tour. The event will run from 7 to 9pm Friday, March 18th, with discussion and a Q&A.

The place that will be hosting Transbodies, Bluestockings Bookstore, is located in Manhattan, near the corner of Allen & Stanton Streets. That's one block down from Houston Street, and one block east of 2nd Avenue. Yes, "one block east of 2nd" should be 1st Avenue, but it's the Village: 4th Street zig-zags all over the damn place, so what were you expecting? If you happen upon a grocery store with awesome cartoon characters all over it, you're heading the right way -- the bookstore will be the next building over. That's how I figure it out, and I could get lost in a paper bag.

Black. Lesbian. Sci-fi.

Now there's a combination I'd like to see more of.

I can't even think of any films that fit that criteria off-hand. Am I just completely clueless and ignorant...or is the presumed market for sci-fi still little white boys who want to see triple-nippled space boobies?



That's from Total Recall, if you were wondering.

The LGBT Center in Manhattan will be having an event on black lesbian sci-fi this Friday, March 18th, at 6:30pm. Unfortunately, since the event is from an outside group and not organized by the Center itself, there's no info posted on the Center website (www.gaycenter.org). However, it will undoubtedly be amazing. The Center is located at the corner of 7th Avenue and 13th Street, in Manhattan.

On a semi-related note, check out Brooklyn Boihood. They're all about increasing visibility for masculine-identified lesbians of color...and their calendar is pretty rad. I have a copy in my bedroom, so I can remember to forget all sorts of upcoming events. Autostraddle recently wrote up an article on how great Brooklyn Boihood is: Where the Bois Are.

In the meantime, I'll be seeing if the Performing Arts Library has Total Recall available for borrowing.

More Queer Nerds at the Center

Hey guys!

Coming up next Tuesday (ahem), the guys over at FAQNP are having another event at the Manhattan LGBT Center. They're the same folks who brought you "Yaoi for Beginners" (like you needed help with that). This time they're trawling the Center archives for queer nerd "print material"...which probably means filthy, filthy fan zines, Tijuana bibles and slash fiction.

Speaking of queer comics...I bet you didn't know this about Popeye...



So here ya go -- Queer Nerd Print Culture, March 8 @ 6 PM!

"Hannah Henri": Lesbian Woody Allen Rom-Com

Last night, I went to Queer Memoir, which is a series of readings about queer lives (next week they're in Philly!) There was a performance that night of some scenes from Hannah Henri, an upcoming indie movie that pitches itself as "the lesbian Manhattan, the butch-femme Annie Hall".

I thought Annie Hall was butch-femme already?



This project really disappoints me: I wanted to be the lesbian Woody Allen! I guess I'll have to settle for being the lesbian Daniel Radcliffe instead...

On the other hand, it sounds really exciting! It would be great to see "a neurotic metro-sexual butch" up on the big screen...hell, it was great seeing it at Queer Memoir! You can see some pictures at their Facebook page: Queer Memoir Hello/Goodbye. We were treated to a make-out scene, and lots of talk about hand sanitizer and tacos. Sounds pretty damn promising in my book.

Hannah Henri is still in production. To help it along, you can donate at IndieGoGo.

Geeks Out!

NEXT magazine (a weekly guide to all things gay in New York City) ran a piece on GeeksOUT, an organization that's raising queer visibility in geek culture. Lord knows we need it. Who do you think invented Star Trek fanfiction in the first place?! It's all about Kirk/Spock! You can read the article here: Out Geeks.

Besides the web presence, GeeksOUT also holds meatspace (hello 1995!) parties and mixers. The next one will be February 24th, at Vig 27.

You can help GeeksOUT by donating so they can reserve a spot at Comic Con: show them love.

"The Queen": What More Can I Say?

This week, I almost despaired of getting a review out. I had been hanging on to Barbarella for the past 2 weeks, but I never got around to seeing it. I always had more important things to do, such schoolwork, awkwardly ignoring girls I like, and dumpster diving bagels.

Well, what luck! The LGBT Center, headquarters of the homosexual mafia, was having a free screening of The Queen last night! With complimentary wine! That's even better than the advanced screening of Sanctum! Do you know how much they charge for popcorn in Manhattan?!

The Queen is a 1968 documentary, by queers and about queers. It is narrated by drag queen Jack Doroshow, AKA Flawless Sabrina. It's a behind-the-scenes look at a 1967 national drag pageant, held in a Manhattan theater called The Town Hall. Jack/Sabrina was at the screening, and apparently the pageant was originally meant to be a benefit for muscular dystrophy...and the advertizing had Lady Bird Johnson's name on it. The President's wife was horrified and had them remove her name and any connection to her charity!

In fact, the progressive 60s were so prejudiced, that the movie itself was rated X, despite containing no nudity, violence, sex...fuck, I don't even think any of the queens cursed! The only "objectionable material" was men wearing dresses, talking frankly and seriously about their lives.

Lord knows Hollywood has no inherent objection to men wearing dresses...may the censor board save us from another drag comedy...



Interviewing gay and trans people about their lives was the obscenity, not the crossdressing...you weren't supposed to talk openly about such things! This was 2 years before Stonewall. Gay bars were regularly raided. "Free love" was so straight guys could plow hippie chicks and not have to marry 'em afterward.

As a historical document, The Queen is absolutely fascinating. The mod sixties styles and the dancing are a real treat to see. The movie also addresses issues of the time. The contestants are asked about the draft board; all of them were refused for being gay, at a time when you had men fleeing the country to avoid having to serve.

One of the contestants actually WANTED to serve, and wrote the draft board insisting upon it. To no avail. Think that's all over with the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"? I've got news for you: to this day, you can't join the American armed services if you're transgender. You are automatically disqualified.

The contestants are also asked about what is crudely called "sex change" surgery, a new procedure at the time that had been mocked and sensationalized starting with Christine Jorgensen's transition in 1952. Of the 3 asked, none want it. One says he doesn't want to be a "real girl", because he's gay, and likes gay men; his partners wouldn't want to be with a "real girl". Also, he said, the doctors in charge of the surgery don't want to work on gay men. The other two don't have much to say about it.

Although I don't want to dismiss their opinions, I wonder how much of it was built out of fear and shame. Being openly gay and a drag queen was considered lowlife back then, but transitioning in the 1960s meant being treated as a total freak. It was beyond the pale. At least you could take the dress off if you were a drag queen...

As a movie, The Queen is thoroughly entertaining. Even though it treats the pageant fairly seriously, there's still a lot of music and humor. The highlight, for me, was hearing a contestant sing "Honey Bun" from South Pacific, in a beautiful, almost unearthly, voice. It is a touching performance, his voice full of sincere affection, and his vocals both high pitched and powerful. It's enchanting. Watching Elliot, the show's host, yell at contestants and panic over wigs and spirit gum was also a real laugh. Queen Mum Sabrina told us the movie played for 9 months at Kips Bay, despite the X rating.

Or maybe because of it.



The pageant actually had some big names behind it. They had Andy Warhol as a judge, along with pop artist Larry Rivers. Diane Arbus and Jill Krementz were at the afterparty!

Overall, I give this movie 4 stars.

1 star for "being loud & proud"
1 star for "more bouffants than John Water's Hairspray"
1 star for "best performance of 'Honey Bun' from South Pacific I've heard so far"
And 1 star for "best use of spirit gum"

Yaoi for Beginners

This one is for the New York Metro area!

On February 16th, these guys are having a discussion on yaoi at the Manhattan LGBT Center.

The LGBT Center is the super-secret headquarters of the homosexual mafia that is running this country into the ground.

Oh, wait...that's Congress. And a handful of 'em are even straight!

No, the LGBT Center is just a community center on 13th Street in Manhattan, on the corner of 7th Avenue.

Anyway -- ho yay! Go queer nerds!


FAQNP sponsored yaoi event @ February 16th, reception at 6 pm & presentation at 7 pm

"Sanctum": Freudian's Delight

Hey! Back from a free screening of the new James Cameron film, Sanctum. The way I got a pass to see it was completely random.

I just happened to be at Bluestockings, and they just happened to have a stack of free passes on the counter, next to flyers for queer dances and maybe a menstrual cup or two.

Maybe it makes sense. I mean..."wet cave"..."feminist bookstore"...ok, ok, I'll shut up about the vaginas already.

Well, disregarding the wet, tight cave for the moment...there isn't much of a plot, but it seems to be vaguely about mothers and fathers. First things first: we have a blonde kid and an obnoxious yuppie competing over a hot babe who wears simply amazing, water-proof makeup. Meanwhile, down in the snatch, is a weary woman who doesn't wear makeup. Guess who dies first? I'm not going to tell you, because that would be spoilers! I'll give you a hint: not the blonde kid.

So, the blonde kid's Dad is down there too, and they bond, but first people die a lot. The yuppie and the blonde kid also whine a lot. The emotional peak of the film involves bat shit.

Yeah.



This movie is not particularly bright, in any sense of the word. It is marginally smarter than Avatar, in that it doesn't utilize retina-scorching Lisa Frank colors. Yeah, I know you loved Avatar, but the constant neon blues and purples made me want to puke. Here, we have a palette of browns, blues, and blacks. And sometimes reds.

Very nasty, effective reds.

I would have liked to see more of Judes (when a character names a part of the cave "St.Judes' Cathedral", you know they're all in some deep shit), and less of the whiny folks. I mean, I realize that I'm supposed to identify with the whiny people, particularly the blonde emo surfer guy, but I mostly wanted Daddy Carl (I mean, Frank...boy these characters are forgettable...) to yell at them more. As somebody who also doesn't wear makeup, I felt in solidarity with Judes. She was the only REAL woman...spelunker...in the movie, and she seemed totally bad ass. Not like the other woman with the water-proof makeup, who apparently climbed mountains but needed tips on how to rappel?

What the fuck, you have to climb down mountains too, right?

Overall, Sanctum is an effectively entertaining movie that gets the job done, but is nothing special. Most of the characters are morons, but I enjoyed being angry at them, because they eventually got their comeuppance.

I give it 2 stars.

1 star for "killing stupid people"
1 star for "floating underwater all-pretty like"

Red Tide

Another interesting link: A Softer World's Joey Comeau is doing a blog on women and horror movies, called I'm Into Survival. Check out the post on Nightmare on Elm Street.

Video below is a homage to my teenage goth sister, who made me watch 80s slasher flicks waaaaaay too many times:

"Alien" She

Yesterday I found a very interesting feminist critique of the Alien franchise. You can check it out here: Demeter, Peresephone in space.

This also gives me an excuse to post a Bikini Kill song...

"Deflowered": A Bunch of Punk-Ass Pansies!

Deflowered: My Life in Pansy Division is an autobiography by Jon Ginoli, the lead singer of punk band, Pansy Division.

Who are Pansy Division?





And personal favorite:



These guys are a totally gay punk rock band. They are a tight operation, they rock out, they're funny...they even toured with Green Day right when Dookie was making it big!

So why haven't you heard more about them? Because America is run by assholes who hate you. How else to explain Top 40?

Deflowered briefly discusses Jon's childhood and adolescence, which was very normal and boring: no heroin abuse, no being locked in the attic until the age of 13, or any of that usual memoir crap. Jon was raised in the Midwest, and the wildest thing he did as a teen was dress like Patti Smith. I can totally get behind that, and have been tempted to do so myself.

The story continues in the gay bars of the 1980s, which played the same shitty dance music they do today. In fact, while reading Jon's complaints about the San Francisco scene, I was very much reminded of walking into The Stonewall Inn on New Year's, and leaving 15 minutes later, because I can not stand that disco bull shit. Seriously. Jon and his friends in Tribe 8 worked very, very hard to give queers RAWK; why can't we give them some props at the bars instead of waiting for Riot Grrl theme night (if we even get that)?

Because Jon, 20 years ago, was frustrated by the lack of queer punk rock, he did the punk rock thing, and formed a band himself. He notes that there were queer punk zines before the music had arrived yet, which I found quite interesting. There were also some dyke bands forming, such as Tribe 8. The riot grrl scene eventually brought a lot more of them, but by the late 1990s the status quo had its revenge and we were subjected to Gay Pride favorites, The Spice Girls. Girl Power!



Most of the book consists of tour diaries. They got picked to tour with Green Day in 1994 because the drummer of that band, Tre Cool, wanted to rile up the frat boys that began to come to their shows as they got MTV airplay. The boys in GD genuinely liked the band, though, and they toured with them twice. Pansy Division even got some MTV airplay themselves in the form of an interview on 120 Minutes.

Some audiences, like the ones at Squeezebox in New York, or the venues (squats) in Italy, were very positive. Others, like some of the Green Day audiences as the band got huge, were absolute assholes. The band gossip Jon relates, concerning certain of the pop-punk scene, I really relished, since I grew up in the late 90s and had to go to class with the same alternateens that worshipped those pricks.

The tour diaries are fascinating at first, but they can get repetitive. I wish Jon had talked more about the transformation of the punk scene, though hearing about Tre Cool smearing mustard on electrical outlets was kind of great. They toured so much maybe it was hard for him to make a clear observation of what was going on. He was also in his 30s at the time and not really part of the punk "lifestyle" even as a teen, so he was kind of on the fringes despite being in a band.

However, the problem with the diary entries is that they don't have a lot of meat on them, so it all kind of blurs together and I wound up skipping parts. Discussions of band promotions, like making a video parody of Bill & Ted are a lot more fun to read, but fewer and far between.

Deflowered gets 2 and a half stars.

1 star for "attempting to make music at Pride less horrible"
1 star for "Beavis humping Butthead, Bill humping Ted, et al"
And 1 half star for "mocking Blink 182 and Bon Jovi" (it's only half because it's too easy)

"Fun Home": Dads to Watch Out For

Fun Home is a graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, the cartoonist behind Dykes to Watch Out For, a long-running comic strip about dykes and dykey things. It came out in 2006, so if you care very much about dykes, graphic novels, funeral homes, etc., you are probably aware of it. Entertainment Weekly even put it on their list of best books of the freakin' decade.

Even though Entertainment Weekly loves it, you shouldn't hold that against Fun Home. It really is a good book! It's also a great graphic novel. A memoir where the images explicate the words, it is exquisitely detailed but never stiff and dull. The drawing style keeps things lighter than they might otherwise be...considering the heavy subjects touched upon, such as mortality and even suicide. It is both funny and deep, engaging and analytical: everything the best comics are.

And it is a very gay work. Alison, of course, is thoroughly lesbian, having come out in college and drawn a comic strip about dykes for 25 G-d damn years.

But her dad was also queer. He was a high school English teacher and had relationships with some of his older students, which really did a number on his marriage. He was even arrested and prosecuted for giving a beer to an underage boy. He also had relationships with fellow soldiers in the service, during his time in the Army during the 1950s.

Even though he had strong feelings for males his entire life, he got married and had children, as many people did back then and still do. This was to the detriment of everyone involved. When his wife, exhausted by his affairs and verbal abuse, finally asked him for a divorce (Alison was 20 by then), he was hit by a truck soon afterward. Fun Home speculates that it was suicide, but nobody knows for certain.




On the lighter side, Alison's father was also obsessed with fashion, flowers, and period restoration. He seems to have taken out his more femme proclivities on poor Alison. Some of the strongest parts of the book focus on their power struggle. He was a tyrant for velvet and precise flower arrangement. There is a certain poetic justice in the man's only daughter growing up to be butch dyke.

The plot of the book is elliptical, driven forward more by ideas than by actions. The central event of the book is Alison's father's death, so soon after the threat of divorce, and only 2 weeks after she came out. To add to the memetic swirl, her father was also the town funeral director. The funeral home is introduced early in the book; it is the titular "Fun Home". Its presence hangs over everything as a shadow of death.

Another theme in the book is literature. Alison's father was very fond of F. Scott Fitzgerald as a young man; later in the book, it's James Joyce; and the Greek myth of Daedalus is alluded to early on. There are also references to Proust. However, the book is still accessible even if your idea of high literature is High Times.

This is truly the sort of book you read again and again, picking up more with each reading. It's not just about living with a frustrated, closeted dad as a young lesbian...it's about death, it's about family, it's about how literature informs and affects one's life.

I give the book 4 stars.

1 star for "being a cartoon that's less cartoonish than the last two movies I've seen"
1 star for "taking on Dad touching boys in a calm, collected manner"
1 star for "still being entertaining despite all of the above"
And 1 star for "1950s truck stop butches"

New "Sucker Punch" Poster

"Sucker Punch" is a movie meant to appeal to the 13 year old boy within us all (ahem). It has girls, guns, dragons, biplanes, giant mechs, and probably a nuclear-powered kitchen sink (although it isn't in the film poster). Slated for a March 25, 2011 release after some delay, it will hopefully be more than just a collection of boobs and explosions...it's by the guy who did "300" and that owl movie, so...yeah. I mean "hopefully" in the most hopeful way possible.

Also: more crazy women! -- the protagonist is in a mental institution. The more things change, Hollywood, the more things change...

Here's the new poster, covering all the key 13 year old bases:



This movie is like meeting a cute girl in a Ramones T-shirt. You get all excited, and then you remember it's not 1979 anymore, and people look at YOUR blue hair and think you're into The Killers or some shit.

Check out the trailer below.



Can "Sucker Punch" deliver? I'm praying it does. The angsty voice-over at the beginning is awful, but the explosions sure are pretty...

And here's to something old school that always delivered: Tank Girl!

"Black Swan": Oral Sex Can Kill You!

I went into this movie (oops) fully expecting to hate it. I mean, it's a movie about ballet (cooties!), and the reviews I've read seemed to suggest it was homophobic.

I did not, in fact, hate "Black Swan". Sometimes it was gross, and sometimes it made me angry, but mostly I thought it was funny. This is a movie that hates the fact that human beings have bodies. I can not imagine anything more ridiculous...

I also didn't expect to find so many similarities to "A Streetcar Named Desire", but, even leaving aside the fact that "Streetcar" is still fresh in my mind, the parallels are plentiful.

1. Both movies hate, hate, HATE sex. "Streetcar" offers sex appeal and then cruelly yanks it away, leaving you with incest, pedophilia, spousal abuse, and rape, while "Black Swan" barely gets as far as holding hands before making you feel like a terrible person. The movie from 1951 is actually more progressive in that regard.

2. Both movies offer us horny females who go absolutely, positively, woo-hoo insane because of their horniness. Granted, Nina (Natalie Portman) is on opposite sides of the fucking planet from Blanche, in regards to acting on her desire. However, it's still desire that gets the two of them into trouble. Woops, I meant "terrifying madness and/or death".

3. Finally, both movies really don't like the fact that men and women exist. And not in a queer, "down with gender" kind of way. It's more like a "you are sinful for existing" thing (see link above). In both movies, men are portrayed as insensitive, sex-crazed brutes and women are portrayed as jealous, sex-crazed lunatics. Hey, maybe it isn't just these two movies...maybe it's Hollywood. However, a "Streetcar"/"Black Swan" double feature would really make a great field trip for an abstinence only sex ed class!



On to our feature presentation...

The movie starts with Natalie Portman (Nina) dancing with a big ugly man in an awful sweater, who eventually turns into Satan, or maybe a Mexican wrestler, or a chicken. And so the tone has been set. Off we go on a sinister subway ride, where a cute chick is spotted in the opposite car -- or is it only Nina's reflection?

Nina is a ballerina, who has a creepy relationship with her mom, and is so femme she makes Barbie look like Vin Deisel. She trains in an underground torture chamber. Oh wait, that's Lincoln Center. You know, I was just by Lincoln Center to visit the Performing Arts Library, and it didn't look particularly grim then. Maybe because it was daylight...

Enter the asshole director, who gives us some exposition on "Swan Lake". The good, pure White Swan is bested by the evil, slutty Black Swan, "and in death finds freedom". That's almost as subtle as Blanche telling a sailor, "They told me to take a streetcar named Desire and transfer to one named Cemetery." Actually, it's even less subtle, since at least that was a metaphor.

And how the hell does a bird kill itself by jumping off a cliff, anyway? Very deliberately?



Ok, so, we already know how the movie ends. Nina dies. Time to go!

Wait. There's that sexy girl from the subway ride!

Sexy girl's name is Lily, and she's "straight off the plane from San Francisco". Straight indeed. Nina's already got a queer eye for her.

There's some bitchiness from the other ballerinas, and there's some bulimia, there's some toe cracklin', and Nina is menaced by graffiti...then we have the wrinkly old asshole director sticking his tongue in her mouth. She bites him. Good for her!

In accordance with Hollywood logic, this is exactly what she needed to do to prove herself. She gets the lead role in "Swan Lake", over Veronica, who is mean and wears too much makeup.

Nina celebrates by calling her mom, and by getting completely freaked out by a slur written on her mirror. Even worse, mom has to get all weird about her cake. If you go by this movie, bulimia is just part of the job, but getting upset when your daughter won't eat cake is crazy and abusive.

The next scene is all ribs and nipples, in case you were feeling ok about Nina not eating cake. Asshole director (his name is Tomas) watches her dance the pure, virginal White Swan. He tells her, "The real work will be your metamorphosis into her evil twin." I agree, I hear that kind of thing is exhausting.

Bloody cuticles scene. You know, I bite my cuticles all the time (I know, it's gross), and it never sounds like that...



More assholery from the asshole director. Nina is called a cocksucker by Winona Ryder. There's an ugly damn bird-man sculpture. Is this at the Museum of the American Indian? You know, I once did a drawing project just like that, it was all about a man sacrificing himself for art and science, and transforming himself into a bird...

Tomas continues to be an asshole by taking a less-than-eager Nina back to his room for sex. When she resists, he suggests she go fuck herself, quite literally. What a charming guy.

Nina returns home. Now, I scribbled down a series of notes at this point. They're just sentence fragments, but I think they get the point across all by themselves:

Exposed spine
Scratching herself
Oozing
Mom strips [Nina] topless & sucks bleeding finger

In other words: ewwww.

Well, after all that, Nina decides to go to her room and take the asshole's advice. Surrounded by pink, fluffy stuffed animals, she lies in bed and rummages under the covers to her crotch. It's not very sexy, since she has the body of a prepubescent, and is even wearing little girl Underoos. It gets even less sexy when we, and Nina, realize that Mom is in the room.

Winona Ryder's character, Beth, meanwhile, decides to throw herself into traffic. We don't actually see this, but the asshole director suggests to Nina that she intentionally got hit by a car. You see, Beth was the former head ballerina at the company, and the asshole fired her for being old. Then she got hit by a car. Does he seem guilty or remorseful about it? Not particularly. He is truly a prince among men.

More scabs. More sexual harassment: "I'll be the prince" indeed. He paws at her little girl body as a sort of tutorial. She needs to be more passionate, and nothing gets a woman's blood flowing like RAPE.

Enter sexy Lily, with bad-girl cigarettes. She is much prettier than Tomas, or hell, even Nina, who has this weird skin rash...she is also genuinely charming and would be the most sympathetic character in the film if the film didn't consider female sexuality completely evil.

"Someone's hot for teacher..," Lily surmises, when Nina defends Asshole Tomas. I think I threw up in my popcorn.

Bloody fingernail clipping. You know, I could have sworn that this sort of thing was a specifically MALE metaphor for fear of sex and the castration complex...but then again, I wouldn't want to see what the movie would come up with for a specifically female version.



Another evil subway ride, on the Hogwarts Express to Hell. Grandpa sits across from Nina and mimes fingering her. Boy howdy, does this movie hate sex.

Nina and mom argue. Nina takes off with Lily to the evilest night club in New York City. Lily gets her drunk, introduces her to frat boys, and gives her E. This can not end well. And it doesn't.

While Nina is half passed out from all the booze and drugs, Lily fingers her. Has nobody in this film ever heard of consent? Next up: Nina arguing with her mom. That's kind of a good thing, since her mom is too attached to her. Then Lily has ambiguously real oral sex with Nina, accompanied by disgusting sound effects, because how dare the audience enjoy it?

It ends with Nina waking up alone and throwing out all her creepy toys. Wow, that wasn't so bad afterall. Maybe sex isn't such a bad --

GAY PANIC!

Nina starts going...well, less sane. She is all sweaty and gristly the day before her starring role. She is hallucinating, complete with ominous music and huge shadows. "Black Swan" temporarily transforms into a slasher flick. And Nina temporarily transforms into...oh come on! That's actually the ankle joint, not the knee! There's absolutely no need for that popping noise either!



Well, I guess female independence means going insane. That's what puberty is for. On to the dance!

Everything is going great until Lily's man-whore "accidentally" drops Nina. For that, Lily (certainly not her man-whore) must die. So she dies. Or maybe she doesn't. Who can tell at this point? Nina kisses Pickle-Puss asshole Tomas, which is this movie's way of saying "Nina has become an independent adult", and my way of saying "That's disgusting!"

It's bad enough that Nina has just killed her lesbian crush in favor of an oily old leather bag of a man...but he's been a little rape-y throughout the movie. The only reason he doesn't, in fact rape her is...um...I'm at a loss for reasons. Because it would give "Black Swan" an X-rating?

Oh G-d, I can already hear the sound effects...

But Lily isn't dead...or evil...and something about pushing shards of glass into a pussy...I mean, a tutu, and then...oh fuck, this is worse than menarche.

If I had to give this film a star rating, it would be 2 and a half out of 5:

1 for "keeping my attention" (how could it not, with all those bleeding sores?)
1 for "making me afraid of ballerinas" (see above)
And 1 half star for "lesbian sex scene which was actually kind of hot if you ignore the amplified slurping sounds"

Despite my first impression, I did not wind up hating this movie. It has such a vile message I almost ENJOY hating it, which makes me like it...but then I remember why I hate it again. So in the end, I like hating it, which is different from simply hating it.

Natalie Portman put in an excellent performance, and I'm going to do an image search for the actress who played Lily right now.