Tipping my invisible Fedora in the direction of the New Yorker tower...

From the Department of Junior High Chemistry

Printed in last Thursday's SF Chronicle's CORRECTIONS column –which I read religiously, which is to say occasionally:

Clarification:

A story Tuesday about a congressional hearing inaccurately stated that adding sodium bicarbonate and citric acid to water causes an explosion. Sodium dropped into water is extremely explosive, whereas sodium bicarbonate and citric acid in water is merely effervescent.

–and refreshing!

I imagine all the disappointed young mad scientists' faces, peering squinty-eyed through the sites of their emptied super soakers, baking soda boxes and piles of lemon rinds at their feet, waiting for the varsity football team's equipment storage shed to erupt.

I know, I know, exploding school buildings aren't as funny as they used to be. But in my day they were pretty funny, and that's speaking as someone whose own elementary school exploded to bits one day over winter break because of a gas leak. That was a LONG winter break.

"Bring Me That Horizon, Really Bad Eggs, and Johnny Depp in a Corset"* -- or --
The Slacker Stalker Review of Pirates of the Caribbean

First of all, apologies to the stalkers of this site for my blogless week. I am experiencing a certain amount of brain damage from lack of sleep caused by the evils of Cyberskin. Now for your review.

Somebody once told me that Johnny Depp is the rare male actor who is a lesbian icon: his role in Pirates seals this fact for me. His strong androgyny, his heavily mannered/ put-on swish/swashbuckling, the eye makeup and hippy hair with a twisty moustache (that I know is the envy of so many butches)... Basically, even for the most man-hating of dykes, Johnny Depp is a good argument for not doing away with the Y chromosome.

But most of all I liked Pirates because it has pirates. I liked pirates before I started volunteering at the amazing pirate-tastic 826 Valencia / pirate store/ tutoring and learning lab in San Francisco, which inspired a pirate-themed bellydance performance I did last Halloween, and where I encountered the book about girl pirates, Booty, which inspired the pirate-themed spoken-word queer cabaret-style show of the same name that I produced earlier this year. Pirates have a lurking, growing presence in my inner and outer worlds. I'm always happy to hear lines like the one in this movie:

Piracy itself can be the right course.

...on a big screen aimed at small impressionable young US Americans. I think my inner pirate used to be nurtured by things like the now-defunct Lesbian Avengers, whose icon/logo is a bomb, and the original open mic. incarnation of Sister Spit, whose icon/ logo was a pirate. But I digress.

The LMS Rating: This movie meets the lesbian movie standard. There are three female characters (our lovely heroine, her maid, and the woman pirate) with speaking parts beyond the strumpet-slap "take that"-s. Our heroine has two different tactical non-boy-related exchanges, one each with the other women. Mind you, there's not much to the conversations, but for an action movie for children, it's a stunning contribution to the world of female-to-female dialogue on mainstream screens.

The Gay Character: This movie has a pair of gay characters (the pirates who are clearly life-partners, with parasol fetishes), and several explicit homoerotic moments (an old drunk sees Johnny Depp's character and says "ah, my first love!" -- my friend I was seeing this with both thought we could've done without knowing that detail, ew-- and some flirty threatening between male kidnappers and male captives), and substantial amounts of crossdressing, with at least two each of very emphasized instances of male-to-female and female-to-male. All the research I've done on pirates supports the idea that pirates attracted genderqueers to their ranks, and reputedly enjoyed breaking all kinds of gender and sex taboos. I'm so, SO glad this movie didn't make pirates just big mean drunk rapacious criminals. They were that too I am sure, but also lusty rebels relishing life amidst danger, and playing hooky around the edges of all kinds of laws, not just criminal laws.

The Jesus Figure: of course, Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp's character. Did ANYONE think he was going to really hang, though? At least they didn't have his rescuer cut the damn hanging rope so he could scamper away and sword fight his way through the throng. They did something more creative, bless their hearts. The makers of Xena would be proud.

Other notable moments: the cgi moonlight-illuminated-skeletons intermixing with the shaded live actors-- amazing. Really, I thought it would be hokey, and it was beautiful, creepy, and used without a lot of underlining, which made it all the more stupendous. Lastly, whether you are into S&M or not, EVERYONE can enjoy the heroine's line:

If you like pain, try wearing a corset.

(*the Slackerstalker paraphrase of the movie's ultimate line, which you can imagine being delivered by the captain's first mate [the one with the "you were my first love" line], sneaking up on the slurring, swaying Johnny Depp.)

Please Join Me in Mourning

King Karl the Pufferfish of the Pirate Store at 826 Valencia (a writing lab for kids where I volunteer). Karl was cantankerous, jumpy, and defensive, but a very, very good listener. As long as you brought food.

Read here the Pirate Store blog where Karl's death announcement is currently posted.

Gollum as Advice Columnist

"I have had a crush on one of my friends for a very long time. I really want to date her."

For all you other bi-curious women out there, Gollum has some advice for you:

Ask Gollum!

NASA Conspires to Halt Gay Rights Movement with Weapons of Cyberskin:
Or, They Know an Army of Lovers Will Never Get Out of the Barracks

The defense department has to be involved. There is no way this product has innocently found its way into the bedrooms of activist queers all over the world, stopping their militant advance toward freedom as they become stupid and subservient to the pleasures of Cyberskin. It is the footsoldier of an eldritch evil, not unlike the Ring that nearly seduced poor Frodo. I had my first experience with it last night, and it has completely wrecked my focus for work, all day. I’m an activist queer rendered passive and content by its high-tech magicks.

What is this new, real (or realistic) evil? Cyberskin ([tm] or Futurotic [tm], AKA Ultraskin, EroSkin, truskin, soft touch, softskin, thermal plastic, or just the palsy-sounding cyber) is a silicone-and-PVC-mix NASA-made insulator that has a distressingly flesh-like texture. Cyberskin’s main diabolical properties are that its atom bonds are hyper-resilient: it warms with body heat, stretching and then “remembering” its original shape; and it has both the softness of skin and the rigidity of erectile tissue. You see, Cyberskin is made using “the Aerospace 601,” a computerized injection molding machine, which makes varying densities of CyberSkin, creating anatomically perfect replicants of various body parts (you can feel the “bone” within the boner).

According to my research, Cyberskin products are nefariously expensive. They are moody, and high-maintenance. They can become moldy if not kept in an airtight, antiseptic, dry container. They can become very sticky-- sticks-to-walls-sticky-- if you handle them for a long time without washing them. They cause erratic, possessive behavior. OK, in me at least. Putting me in touch with my inner Gollum.

I know Cyberskin must be destroyed, but yet I have an unfathomable, ferocious protective urge towards it… Soon NASA will be producing counterrevolutionary hypnotic robotic pleasure-queers out of the stuff. I am distressingly intrigued by the vision of a post-cyberskindroidal world.

Good Vibes’ evil selection of Cyberskin products must be destroyed. Do it now, before another activist becomes compromised.

For My Thirtieth Birthday I Will Treat You To

Pretty Pictures of Hedgehogs, Wedgwood, and the wily Vrsic Pass.



Because I have so many substantial things I want to write about I just can't choose.



Hedgehog to cure depression.

Immodest hedgehog.

Modest hedgehog.

I love this Wedgwood pattern enough to tattoo it on my behind. Which in fact might be happening soon. Ok, not my behind, but somewhere.

Ooooh. Lookit the salad bowl. I'll never be able to afford it, but it makes me happy to dream.

Yes I drove the Vrsic pass this May, and yes it makes 51 curves like these on a sharp elevation. In the alps. Built by WWI Russian POWs, who left many of their own buried in the snow up there.

Here's a cool aerial view of the tiptoppimost summit point.

Here's some views of the mountain peaks neighboring the pass.

And here's the view of the mountains the pass traverses from a distant point due south.

In case you were planning to attempt to pronounce the name of the pass, it's one of those special Slovenian words with the accent on the consonant cluster. "VRR-sheech."

You can't escape it by going south, they keep accenting the consonant clusters all the way down the Balkans to Greece, near as I can figure. The only way out of the clusters is over the Vrsic and into boring, plainmouthed Austria.

Again With the Punk Credibility Problems



So it's been repeatedly pointed out to me that I have lost all punk cred for my fancypants misspelling of moshpit (though I swear I picked up "mochepit" being pen pals with Francophone punks at a formative age). Then in the ensuing debate about the difference between moshing (a group dance) and slamming (more of a solo thing) I had to start talking about the slamdance move "doing the pogo stick." Well, my research shows that people DO talk about "doing the pogo stick" but it truly is more punkily-correct to say "pogoing."



From the History of Punk Rock in the UK at www.punk77.co.uk:

It's all very well doing this moshpit type of street violence or pushing each other around like kids in a playground. But it just don't look so good and is only for the uninspired or faint hearted. So come on you Punks lets see a bit more pogoing at the gigs!

Another Dispatch From Femme-bottomville
     On Bad Top and Happy Bottom Barometers

You know when you're with a good top (because you are trying to pant out your phone number between squeals of delight), you know when you've got an unhappy bottom (she's packing her toys and going home), but how do you discern when a top becomes abusive or inept, or a bottom becomes a total lump of orgasmic joy? We gals aren't taught a lot about spotting hot girl-on-girl live abuse coming at us, or expressing satisfaction from within a rollicking sex scene. I came up with some barometers based on my own experience, and discussions with friends.

• Effective and Ineffective Bad Top Barometers
  
  1. Effective barometer: Hostile personal criticism about your or her other lovers' physical attributes (especially if you later see her preening and pointing out her own physical gifts). A good top ultimately is compassionate about a body's frailties.
  Ineffective barometer: Dirty talk or use of cuss words / degrading talk in general. Listen for tone: if it's coy, playful, affectionate, targeting your behavior, and suggestive without being really threatening, it's one thing. If it's *hostile,* targeting things you have no control over, and threatening, be sure to check yourself for safety boundaries.
  
  2. Effective barometer:  Expressing doubts about whether you are worth her time. This isn't topping, it's adolescent manipulation. She should keep that question in her Inside Head Voice.
  Ineffective barometer:  Giving you a run-down of her schedule of planned social and sexual activity. Some tops are just really overscheduled and use the iteration of their time management choices to create personal space. It might be a little self-aggrandizing, but it's not a manipulation or a rejection.
  
  3. Effective barometer:  Feigned dramatic revulsion when you reveal a wound or vulnerability.
  Ineffective barometer:  Actual reactions of distaste, usually followed by clarifying questions about what you've just revealed. Hey, everyone has their squick zones.
  
  4. Effective barometer:  Real expressions of hostility about something remote to the occasion at hand but directed toward the bottom (like, spanking harder and harder while getting verbally angrier and angier about last month's PG&E bill-- or last month's girlfriend).
  Ineffective barometer: Real expressions of sadness about personal loss or misfortune. Don't be a dick to your dick-- tops need to cry too.
  
  5. Effective barometer: Childish ploys for attention about the top's areas of insecurity. I include financial insecurity here. Tops can be so fragile-- especially butch tops who are given the responsibilities of masculinity with only a fraction of the privileges. There are those who are completely broken by their circumstances, and they shouldn't be working on their wounds by creating them on you. They should just get professional help-- from a therapist, a paid domme, whatever. You don't need to try to heal them.
  Ineffective barometer:  Urgency about knowing your health and/ or relationship status. Don't be suspicious if your top needs to know these safety parameters in order to play. If you don't feel like talking about it, just say so, but try to respect her safety concerns if you want her to respect yours.
  
  6. Effective barometer: Excessive control issues-- good tops actually *have* most of the control they want. They are *in* their power and confident, know their boundaries, and are *not* seeking to prove something, to you or themselves or anyone else, by establishing control over you.
  Ineffective barometer:  Checking in with you incessantly. She might be recovering from a bad experience with an incommunicative bottom. Tell her if it's turning you off.
  
  7. Effective barometer:  Not owning anything resembling a date planner.
  Ineffective barometer:  Not having e-mail. Also, not sharing all her contact digits and coordinates. Bottoms can be stalkers too. Or so I've heard.
  
  8. Effective barometer:  Consciously or unconsciously violating an express boundary established with or by the bottom. Safer sex, disclosure or privacy, pain or intensity preferences, safeword use-- anything.
  Ineffective barometer: Expressing concern about a boundary that has been set. Concern doesn't mean the top intends to violate it, so don't take a question about boundaries as a violation of boundaries. Unless you've set boundaries about asking questions about sets of boundaries (ya freak!). 
  
  

• Effective and Ineffective Happy Bottom Barometers
  
  1. Effective barometer: Reduction to lizard brain activities (grabbing random things to chew on, ripping fabric, falling onto the floor -and maybe not noticing she's fallen, biting, scratching, etc.).
  Ineffective barometer: Departures from bed to see if there's anything to eat in the kitchen. She might just be hypoglycemic, you never know.
  
  2. Effective barometer: Very inarticulate loudness.
  Ineffective barometer: Very articulate loudness ("holy cow does that vibrator remind me of the last time I was in Prague!"). She might not have good bringins-up about what is good pillow talk. She might just be nervous.   
  
  3. Effective barometer: Preternatural silence and stillness while sweating with a racing pulse, especially if uncontrollable twitching is involved (and the person doesn't have a history of epilepsy or high blood pressure, and isn't experimenting with dangerous mind-altering substances).
  Ineffective barometer: Actual brain death. 
  
  4. Effective barometer: Marriage proposals, or, stalking proposals. (Just don't take her up on anything. ANYTHING. said in flagrante.)
  Ineffective barometer: Prior marriage (or commitment) confessions. Really, don't take this as a complement or an insult. She's just got too much on her plate already and this is how she's telling you.
  
  5. Effective barometer: Offers of specific sexual services.
  Ineffective barometer: Offers of specific housekeeping services. Even if she is a service bottom, it's not a good sign if she's thinking about *your* hygiene at this point. Then again, with some clarification, it might be some kind of personal kink for her.
  
  6. Effective barometer: Nonsensical profanity (unless of course your safeword is a piece of profanity, which means you have a stupid safeword).
  Ineffective barometer: Profane personal criticisms. (See note on number 2. Bad bringins-up is sometimes just all there is to explain it.)
  
  7.  Effective barometer: Stopping you to tell you explicit instructions or ask questions about what you like: yes this is a good thing. This means she's enthusiastic and comfortable with you and doesn't fear top-down reprisals for helping you help her get off (or helping you help her get you off)-- if you want, you can quickly reassert yourself by making a thrilling counter-proposal/ counter-inquiry (the Socratic method can be a turn on for those brainy types)-- but absolutely do take competence-promoting feedback as a good happy bottom barometer. Only bad bottoms fail to give any guidelines for their own pleasure (giving or receiving) preferences.
  Ineffective barometer:  Stopping you to tell you about her abuse history. Abuse survivors getting triggered in sex play is par for the course in this community where one in five is supposed to have survived rape. Stopping doesn't mean she's happy or unhappy with you as a person or as a sex partner, but it does mean you should (without you grumbling- AT ALL) take time to talk. Negotiations about boundaries can start there, from scratch: that's when you'll find out if she's happy or not.
  
  8.  Effective barometer: Wetness in combination with any one or more of the above.
  Ineffective barometer:  Wetness or dryness alone. Sometimes a gal is just plain dehydrated-- from sun, or alcohol consumption, preferring 24 ounces of espresso to water as her daily liquid intake, etc.-- or she's just not genetically descended from the fountain-people as some are. Think of it in terms of normative male anatomy where a guy can ejaculate but not orgasm: while always (always) honoring requests for "more lube!", and monitoring the slickness of the roads, don't *just* go for the juice-- go for the radiant smile and twitchy fingers. 

So You Think You Can Outsmart Tokelau



Tokelau is one of the few (83) countries of the world with a federal law against same-sex consensual private sex between adults. They also have a free web domain referral service. So you might think of taking advantage of their islander good naturedness and get www.slackerstalker.tk for your blog, ha ha, associating their little suffix with practices they officially punish with ten years in jail. But you would not have outsmarted little Tokelau, no ma'am! Because when someone enters a ".tk" address, a phone rings. A modem picks up somewhere in a dusty store room on one of the 127 islands that compose Tokelau, and prints out an order for a certain computer to be connected to another site. The next morning a nice lady collates the orders and photocopies it twice, filing one copy, faxing another to her boss, and mailing the original to the office of web page referrals on one of the other atolls. All of the letters are date stamped and one by one child laborers trained in Javascript enter the order for the user contacting the website at ".tk" to finally be granted access to its assigned site. Then I'm sure they beat the children for taking too long to enter the code. Well, you want to go to Tokelau to prove me wrong?



Lonely Planet on Tokelau:

Want to get away from it all? Head off to Tokelau, where there's no capital city, no airport, no harbour, no cars, no banks, no guns and no tourism.

Ah, 1987



So, Merriam-Webster's dates "mosh" back to 1987, and says it is a variant of "mash." I find this unsatisfying, but look at the definitions for yourself-- they don't vary much. The only question is if moshing is a synonym for slamdancing, or if slamdancing is more violent than moshing. I think in 1987 I would have cared.

It Has Been Called to My Attention



By a concerned reader that I have egregiously misspelled "mosh pit," less commonly spelled "moshpit," but never by anyone but me spelled "mochepit." I have now been given my new obsession for the week, stalking the origin of the word "mosh," in the hopes of finding out why I internalized a French spelling of it. I vaguely remember hanging out with some French Canadian punks at orchestra camp in 1990. I think I thought I was a real punk for a while around that same year. The origin of my misspelling may prove more interesting than the origin of the word.



What moshpit move are you?

Aunt Stalker's Advice to Adventurous Butch Tops



Yes it is appropriate to give your date remote-controlled vibrating panties for your second date. Just remember, having the control device, it's your responsibility to not turn it on when your date is walking down stairs or steep hills.

Report Back from San Francisco's Sodomy - I mean - Pride Week

Dear readers: this has been a week of being in full body contact with the queer community of San Francisco during our sodomite celebrations. If you are my mom, dad, or grandma, please stop reading here.

Also, I'm sorry I'm having to post everything in tiny chunks, since I last blogged Blogger has started to super-suck for its unpaid members. You can't post more than a few paragraphs at a time.

=====================================

Thursday, June 26th, 2003:
The Day the US Supreme Court Fell On Its Knees Before the Country's Sodomites

I spent part of that celebrated day at my (FTM top) lover's pot dealer's house, where she (a butch top) asked me:

Q. “What’s so great about being a femme bottom?”

I couldn't answer very well at that moment, for marijuana-related reasons, but I thought and wrote about it in the ensuing days of encounters with other femme bottoms whose opinions I respect.

A. Becoming transcendental shimmering egoless light under the touch of a good, understanding top, who takes pleasure in your pleasure.

A. Getting to choose to be vulnerable on your own safe/ sane/ consensual terms, a relief when every day on the streets you are forced to act strong on the terms of a misogynist, hostile, aggressive bio-male-centered world.

A. Being admired for qualities like tolerance and femininity that make you a second-class citizen in the patriarchy.

A. If/ when you are a service bottom: the challenge/ delight of succeeding in pleasing someone, maybe healing the absent/ disapproving/ detached father (and mother!) wounds so many of us carry.

A. If/ when you are a stone bottom: the challenge/ delight of taking whatever is dished out to you: releasing a negotiated amount of control of your circumstances that you are forced to try to completely control all day, maybe healing the exhaustion and burnout that comes with being perceived as a public target all the time.

A. Submitting to someone else’s will under controlled circumstances exposes you to certain health risks, but it is mentally therapeutic. Even tops seem to have to bottom to something for mental health—usually god, liquor, or some other controlled substance. Oh, and for all you tops reading this: that “we do all the work” crap doesn’t sound so valiant when you look at our parallel complaint-- “we get all the infections.”
So why play with power and boundaries in sex at all? Because it leads to good processing (and transcendance?) of the world's underlying invisible structures that disempower dykes. Plus, it's just fun.

=====================================

Saturday late, after the dyke march, notes from a great conversation with M. about transsensuality versus transfetishism:

On transsensuality:

We bonded over being bi-femme-bottoms who like living around/ discussing trans identity, grey-area complexities of masculine and feminine mixtures, women’s issues and lives and histories in male-shaped life/bodies. We are both afraid of being seen as FTM-fetishizers, but are constantly getting involved with FTMs, and so we are starting to come out as transsensual. This is a quality/quantifier of our attractions, not a requirement for admittance to our bedrooms. We decided we'd probably be in straight relationships if we hadn;t come to the SF Bay Area. But in the SF Bay Area, when not with FTMs, we tend to get involved with other dykes, femme and butch, not bio-men. We are distrustful of the het privilege temporarily conferred on the streets to a femme dyke with an FTM partner, because we know it can backfire violently in a heartbeat. We seek friendships in and act in solidarity with the FTM transgender community. But in the privacy of our own company we examine our own motives.

On the problem with the FTM fetish:

There is an FTM fetish that is the attraction to (or shallow obsession with) the ideal of the formerly-female having a physical male shape and attitude. That fetishism can be alienating and unsupportive to the realities of FTMs (who don’t attain or retain the ideal body/ attitude 24-7), and frightening to butches (who see femmes with FTM fetishes and have body issues triggered by it).

On femmes who leave their butch lovers for not being butch enough, or for having aromatherapy candles instead of beer bottles on their coffee table:

Femmes with the FTM fetish aren’t usually prepared to stick around for the hard real issues of having a woman-shaped history (or current woman-shaped life) with a male-shaped body. They can be drawn to the joys of girlsex in private with the benefit of straight privilege on the streets, and then flee when all
the complicated mixtures and imperfections within the glamour come to the surface. These femmes mostly haven’t yet had intimate, nonsexual, supportive, friendship-based relationships with people who have transitioned FTM. But they probably will, and then the fetish will turn into understanding and a more
finely-honed taste in partnership material (i.e. not just based on appearance, or interior decorating choices).

On FTM sexuality surprises:

Confession: I once was involved with an older FTM who had a heinously old-school lesbian separatist music collection. It was almost enough to end the fling when he put some boring 70’s sisterhood-is-powerful folk on the tape deck. Not to impress me. These were his people. He was singing along. And let me tell you, those 70’s sexphobic lesbian separatist types can unearth some pretty weird sexual pleasure paths when they start dropping T (testosterone). You femmie FTM-fetishizers better put on your seatbelts before you get on that wagon. Hello, strangulation fantasies! And another thing: T can give (very) high blood pressure, which makes sex impossible. It’s like watching a dog chase its tail: they take the
T, get horny, and then feel like a balloon about to pop and are too nauseated to stand up, let alone mouth-kiss. All these issues and more can be yours along with your FTM fetish! In my opinion it’s worth it if you can love the person beyond their physical appearance and health negotiations.

On hot FTM-on-FTM action / FTMs rejecting femmes because “Girls are too complicated”:

It’s true, someone experiencing a testosterone high isn’t really good at verbal processing. Sometimes girls (or girl-like-creatures) are too complicated for people buzzing around on a testosterone cloud, feeling like fucking or fighting all the time. This state of affairs can look like a good time to some butches, like being FTM-identified gives you a license to act like a 14-year-old boy, a most prized license to people who often spent their 14th year terrified someone would beat them up for acting like a boy. Like their 14-year-old boy counterparts, having a “girls not allowed space” is powerful good fun. For some it’s even a long-term preference-- the faggy-boy FTM identity we’re seeing so often now. Sexual pleasure paths are a personal matter: I can’t say I want to waste my time trying to turn out someone who prefers boys (or boy-energy). I try to filter my jealousy over certain hot FTMs who only like other boys into a healthy admiration for their stigmatized and hence brave choices. Anyway, lust is ultimately an urge that is only concerned with itself, so jealous arguing over someone else's body as though it were property to be negotiated is a selfish act independent of the urge to make an individual (you or anyone else) truly happy.

=====================================

Friday night at the Sexcapades -- a carnival of perversion for dykes and FTMs (and the stray well-behaved bio-boy):

My femme bottom friend M. and I working at the masturbation booth to our voyeurs:
“We’re sodomizing ourselves in honor of the supreme court ruling yesterday.”
We provided details of the ruling as we bounced away on the air mattress, surrounded by purple x-mas lights.

One lanky butch from out of town:
“I’ve never come standing up before, thank you.”

At the coat check line, the tired old running joke:
"Mine's the black leather jacket."

=====================================

Saturday night marching with the sex worker contingent in the dyke march:

I'm not a sex worker, but people paid to see me Friday night, so M. invited me to join her in the sexiest
contingent at the march. It felt so great to run into ex-girlfriends with my contingent of femme dykes proudly displaying our dominion over our explicit sexual dyke bodies.

Our Chants:

Sodomy, sodomy, rah rah rah!

Yaaay- hos!

Whose streets? Whores’ streets!

1-2-3-4- I’m a dyke and I’m a whore
5-6-7-8- not all working girls are straight
(or: “working girls are never straight,” as one woman commented to herself)

2-4-6-8 I get paid to masturbate

Our Signs:

A graphic of a stiletto heel wreathed by the words “San Francisco Sex Workin' Dykes Got Pride" (text in attractive big black scratchy-font print on white), with purple feathers glued to the sides of the white foamcore which was glued to a flat short wood stake. Since I work at a queer rights organization, I felt completely honest carrying this sign, because the back read:

"We’re here, we’re queer, we get paid for it."

This may have been one of the best ever protest signs, and I am a discriminating customer in the
activist signage department. Read my blog on signage here - written during the anti-war protests in the spring.

Some of Our Stickers:

(We gave these out freely. Black text on bright neon sticker paper.)

Boobs not Bombs (--the most popular)

US Out of My Underwear! Support Sex Workers' Rights! (--and)

SFPD Out of My Underwear!

Feminists Fuck Better (--and)

Dyke Feminist Sex Workers Fuck Better

I’m not a whore but my girlfriend is (--the most popular for straight couples-- the boy would take one and then the girl would read it and say "Hey, I need one too.")

Sex worker rights = women’s rights = human rights

Dykes and sex workers UNITE: our bodies, our rights!

Support Your Local Lesbian Sex Worker: Ask me how! (--I think I gave this one to a grinning Jewelle Gomez.)

Some of Our Pins:

(These were also free to all takers.)

Dyke Whore

A cute little pin-up girl image

A cute little dominatrix image

M’s sign from the bombshells-not-bombs contingent in various peace marches:

Easy on your eyes- hard on your empire.

=====================================

Saturday night: continuing the notes from my conversation with M. on transfetishism versus transsensuality

On “Butch Flight”:

Susie Bright coined this phrase for butches running away from their female bodies into the decision to transition F to M. Of course, it trivializes the real and painstaking decisionmaking process people go through. But there are dilettente FTMs, people who aren't transitioning in any direction, and who ten years ago would have been happy identifying as butch.

These same butches sometimes choose to start identifying as FTM without actually a) passing as men, b) trying to pass as men, c) wanting to pass as men, d) taking hormones, or e) even considering hormones (never mind surgery).

These butches may or may not be FTM in a long-term transitional sense, they may be 3rd gender, intersexed, and/or simply lacking a better term than FTM for what they are. They may not be transitioning in any direction whatsoever but see that calling themselves FTM will help get them play (with girls and/or boys). Other motives for taking on the FTM moniker in the absence of transitioning gender can include trendiness, wanting to act in solidarity with an oppressed minority (being a political FTM but living a butch dyke life, the way so many women are political lesbians while living a straight woman’s life), actually liking being in FTM spaces (in the tradition of femme fag-hags, there are butch FTM-hags), and liking the way femmes flock to FTM spaces like so many grandmothers picking over the tomatoes at a market.

Probably the two main motives for identifying FTM without being in transition from F to M come down to sex and friendship. If we are going to be a sex-positive community, we need to be happy that people are exploring their sexual boundaries, and (if we prefer butches to FTMs) contain our anxiety about the scarcity of butches. OK, I have found myself needing to contain my anxiety about the scarcity of butches. Specifically good butch tops. It’s hard to watch a good butch top dematerialize into the faggy orgies going on in the back rooms of the FTM community, sometimes never to return, but I can always just pocket those thoughts and turn them into positive sexual fantasy fodder. And as for friendship— in general this community needs to be more supportive and friendship-based. Building a movement through extended families of ex-lovers is not exactly a sustainable long-term plan for revolution that we want to pass on to our replacements. They are filtering even now into the queer bars out of the pre-teen gender mochepit and they are looking to their elders for values systems to follow. Do we really want to teach sex first, friendship second?

I’m not saying don’t have sex with these juicy youngsters, I’m just saying that we have to model respectful behavior towards eachother’s ever-changing identities that we impose on the 3-dimensional sexual animal we each carry in our core. Let whoever call her/him/hirself whatever, and ask respectful questions about what you don’t understand about her/his/hir choices.

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The Slackerstalker Shimmy Down Market Street in the Pride March Sunday:

Yes I marched, without expecting to. I was hanging out among the contingents about to depart, where a wonderful (Lebanese) femme friend was playing finger cymbals, so I was shimmying along, when the (Egyptian) contingent leader (also a friend) needed someone to hold the "Strong Middle Eastern Queer Women" sign, and I was the only female nearby without something to carry.

Which is how I ended up marching with the South West Asia North Afican Bay Area Queers (SWANABAQ)--- still wearing my sex worker rights stickers and little slutty black leather outfit from the night before. So, I was a middle eastern sex worker for a day… I told a friend this in the neighboring South East Asian contingent, and he made the "rock on" hand gesture and said "the more the merrier!"

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Sunday night at the girl rock-n-roll movie “Prey for Rock and Roll” at the Castro:

Gina Gershon, the star of the movie, was there answering questions and fending off brazen offers from the local dykes.

On picking out the hottie for the movie's lezzie sex scene: “I saw her picture and said- please god let her be able to act.”

Gina was very sassy, even talking back to Linda Perry (of 4 Non Blondes, former band also of Cheri Lovedog, the writer/ protagonist of the movie) who was asking about the research she had to do for the sex scene: "Shut the fuck up Linda."

Cheri's only instruction to Gina for the sex scene, apparently, was, "this isn't making love. There's no candles, flowers, soft music. You are fucking her." And then when the scene rolled around, Cheri was nowhere to be found, so Gina just had to figure it out for herself. I'm not saying this movie is perfect, but that sex scene is completely realistic. Rock on, Gina! Oh, and she does her own singing in the movie. And the band that came together for the movie is going on tour in support of the movie, so watch out for Gina Gershon on your local punk dive stages, America!

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More notes from Femmebottomville after this last week’s festivities:

I know Shar wrote the book on this stuff, but remedial femmes like me might need some even more basic pointers:

-- Use two different tissues to correct your mascara and to blot your lipstick.

-- Remember how last time I wrote about doing your nails and then fixing your hair? Don't do your nails right before flossing either. Ew.

-- Never run on yellow. If you are a femme bottom, you are either barefoot or ridiculously shod and shouldn’t be playing deer-in-the-headlights at crosswalks. If you are late to an appointment, you should still strike a relaxed pose and wait for the green. Your date may be somewhere down the street watching, and s/he doesn’t need to see you falling ass over teakettle.

-- I’ve (re)discovered that a lot of femme-chasers like a little something to hold on to. Don’t diet for attention— diet to look good to yourself. Looking at yourself should turn you on. It’s the surest way to attract people turned on by who you are. I thought I’d gotten over those issues, but I have been watching a lot of Buffy this past year and one starts to wish one could fit into those little
gauzey slip-thin numbers she wears to such great effect…

-- Bring an oven mitt if you ever anticipate marathon use of your Hitachi Magic Wand. That little motor gets pretty hot.

-- I highly recommend wearing lace-up leather arm cuffs with slippery nylon laces that are always coming undone as a way to test-drive potential personal knot-tiers.

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