My Boss Is a Fiasco

I just listened to the Fiasco show from the "favorites" collection in the archives of This American Life, and I have finally reached the point of Zen acceptance that my boss is a fiasco.

I will call her Captain Bligh. Captain Bligh's incompetence is so extreme that it has become funny, all office protocol has been scratched, and we are all {} THIS CLOSE to starting a real office betting pool as to what date she's going to lay us all off.

Today's additions to the fiasco unfolding are her apparent accidental deletion of the record in our database of our organization's most important contact at the United Nations (we're a gay human rights agency, which needs all the friends in high places we can get). I can't prove that she deleted it, but who else, I tell you, when she's been working closely with the dude, and hasn't let anyone train her on ANY of our systems. Then she put a letter in the box of letters to be mailed... sans postage... and the letter looks like it's the contract for our newest and most important (next to Captian Bligh) employee. I saved it, but I have had to put a pointed sign on the mail out box that letters that are intended to be mailed should have postage on them.

In the mean time, another This American Life show from the archives, Music Lessons, features David Sedaris singing the Oscar Mayer Wiener song in the style (done with chilling accuracy) of none other than Billie Holiday. I ask you.

So I naturally was drawn to doing some research on the famous song... from which you will now all benefit.

Here's a page from Kissthisguy.com, with an instance of the wiener song's lyrics misheard.

Ya know, I think sometimes we all wish we were an octopuss' wiener.

Top Signs Your New Lezzie Romance May Be PoMo

I define PoMo here as post-modern/ post-industrial, showing characteristics of a micospecialized lifestyle or society, celebrating performativity and self-consciousness in the fragmented public narrative. I don't know what motivated me to make this list, I just haven't dated in a long time and it's like an anthropological experiment for me. Join me on this jungle ride... watch the strange new lezzie dating practices, but keep your fingers inside the car...

Your new lezzie romance may be PoMo if:

1. You met on Craigslist, or another anonymous mochepit of sex-starved people with 56k dial-up service.

2. You Google to confirm points of fact... while on dates.

3. You shop for your novelties and lingerie on eBay... while on dates.

4. You have a porn star encounter clause in your fidelity agreement. (There are so many of them now. Porn stars, I mean. But there are lots of different fidelity agreements out there too, aren't there?)

5. You have a list of urban straight hotspots where you intend to have sex using remote-controlled vibrators.

6. You share feedback about your preferred sexual practices on your blog.

7. Each date's preparation involves doing your nails, packing a toothbrush and change of underwear, selecting a costume and buying a soundtrack CD.

8. The date's degree of distance from internet connection is directly proportional to the numbers of cameras involved in documenting the date.

9. Friends e-mail you to see if you're having sex at that moment... and you e-mail back that you are.

10. You mark your one month anniversary with an appointment at a tattoo parlor.

Presenting People For the Unethical Treatment of Fireflies

The Pagan comic for Pagans and the people who love them, or used to love them.

PETA in this strip refers to "People for the Eternal Torment of Animals."

Where I grew up the only "out" Pagans were pretty scary folks, and they liked it that way-- their reputation kept the Xtians out of their hair. They had a sign on their porch "We shoot every third Christian who knocks on this door." I even heard that they used some rest stop on Route 177 (a major trucking road) to do a pig sacrifice. Now, that skeezed me out. But lately I've been getting into eating pork again and, in reflection, I'm betting they put on a nice barbeque for those truckers, and some State Trooper had to go blow the whistle... turning it into just another "animal sacrifice."

Ah, The Secret Spells Triad is Complete. Soon I Will Conquer the World.

Meet Secret Spells Kayla's best friend Secret Spells Barbie.

School girls by day, "by night they turn into magical enchantresses." No wonder it is out of stock. That dirty old man market is a surefire sell. Do they really send "edible poisons," do you think? Do you think they meant poissons? That they will send you some dried salmon jerky with every order?

And oh my god you can order their best friend Secret Spells Christie "in African American." This ad's blurb explains that they are sending sugar-based mixtures that you can drink, i.e. mystical Kool-Aid. Getting the little African American girls ready for Jonestown, are we? I know, I know, that was inappropriate. Shame on me.

Lookit What I Found: The Geekcorps

VERY COOL as benificient Developed World send-us-your-tired-masses-and-we'll-send-you-our-grad-students patron projects go, but they have GOT to get a better logo. Or the Happy Computer should be using both hands to hold the world. He looks rather cavalier, like he's playing volleyball. And is that his keyboard or is he just happy to see me?

Well, There Goes My Solution to All My Problems

I should've been tipped off by the web site describing it as a "fictional reality show."

Thanks for everyone who wrote lovely recommendations on my behalf. Just so you know, the application did not in fact ask for your gender identity. I bet a lot of other girls applied. But they only apologize to the men. Like my feelings wouldn't be hurt.

Dear Lapdance Island applicant

I would like to apologise unreservedly to the tens of thousands of men who
recently applied online to take part in E4's new reality show Lapdance Island
at http://www.channel4.com/lapdanceisland

The show promised to take ten hot blooded male contestants to a deserted
tropical island and have forty lapdancers gyrate around them 24 hours a day.

The truth is there are no lapdancers. There is no island. There is no show.

We made it up to promote The Pilot Show, a genuine series starting on September 8 at 10.30pm on E4. The Pilot Show hilariously dupes unsuspecting celebrities and members of the public into appearing in bogus TV shows.

Sorry about the lapdancers but, as compensation, you can laugh as other people get taken for a ride on The Pilot Show by watching the special preview clips at http://www.channel4.com/pilotshow.

Yours faithfully,

K Andrews
Managing Director, E4

Wiccans Finally Break the Mattel-Plastic Ceiling

I actually have a witch friend by this name-- she's a little older, has a career in linguistics and is a bit more professorial than this babe-alicious witchipoo...

Secret Spells Kayla at KBtoys.com

I suppose if they're going to have action figure Jesuses and Moseses on the market, it's time to have a mainstream witch action figure, I mean doll.

Has Anyone Else Noticed...

That the temperature in the mouth is lower after an orgasm?

Really! Feel your tongue afterwards. It is almost cold.

That pretty much sums up the sum total of my revelations from this weekend, except that I don't look as bad as I though I would in pink. Yes, I've reached that stage of femmehood. I have reclaimed pink.

The Stalker Reveals Herself a Little Tonight- Woohoo!

Here's a crumb for my own slacker stalkers:

Here is my fifteen-day-old tattoo! Doesn't it look innocent when it's sleeping? Yes, it matches my Wedgwood china.

And yes, that graphic is posted on Friendster, and yes, this Slacker Stalker has no friendster friends at this time. Will you be my friendster?

In further revelations, I have to post a poem. I'm committed to NOT putting my original poetry up on this blog. But this is a pertinent follow-up to the ex=ex blog entry, so please forgive this indiscretion. I wrote it almost three years ago in the wake of a break-up with someone who was termino-phobic about the word girlfriend.

San Francisco Replacement Terminology for the word ‘Girlfriend’

A thing
A fling
A fuckable friend
A crush
A flirt
A bendable bend
A Frisco disco
  Swingable girl
   A bubble bath elbow kiss
   Titclamp tilt-a-whirl

A pounding mound
A rebound to a rebound
   A tie me up / tie me down

An easy-bake cake
An mm-hm! earthquake morning roll, a low-fat schmear
   A "you know I hate
   to drive home this late / you can stay here"

A futon footsie tongue twister date
A polypolyamorous play-mate
A mental whack-a-mole
A sleepless queer
  Give her a name and
She'll disappear

Thank you for your indulgence. You will now be returned to your regular poetry-free stalkage.

Ya Know, Sometimes the Russians Scare Me a Little

I spent yesterday evening schmoozing with some wonderful civil society organizers working on cultural tolerance trainings in St. Petersburg and Kazan, Russia. One of the organizers is this salt-o-the-earth veteran, who is also Jewish, and who is a grandfather who brings up his grandkids within minutes of starting any conversation about whatever. We bonded and had a great time. There was this other person there, though, who specifically had wanted to meet some LGBT community organizers, and to whom I was specifically introduced as such. He's a polkovnik (a colonel, a high position) in the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs), and apparently not clear on the concept of lesbian. It never fails. I get asked if I'm married, I say no, and then clueless straight man who knows I'm lesbionic for some reason gets very happy. Now since my partner Kris went and got cancer and killed herself I get to use the beautiful Russian word vdova (widow), and change the subject to that of the prevalence of cancer in the US. But really, this guy is a leader in the cultural tolerance movement? Scary!

Meanwhile, I got a posting on my Slavic Pagans mailing list that led me to the Propoganda section of the site of The Union of Slavic Tribes: The Slavic Native Faith -- this makes me a little scared of the new Slavic Pagan movement. It looks like a Soviet Russian cultural imperialist war-god-driven "let's trample the natives" (or trample the Catholics, Jews and Muslims) kind of project.

Check out this item from the Propoganda section:

Caption: We Are Russians! What an Ecstasy! The glyph associated with the Slavic god of skies and thunder, Perun, is photoshopped onto the side of the plane.

Bosnian Muslims and Croat Catholics, run for the hills! The Pagan Russians are in ecstasy! And they've got fighter planes to give you the money shot!

Shudder. It just hasn't been long enough since the latest Yugoslav war for that kind of propoganda. It will never be long enough...

When X = X, or,
When Is An Ex An Ex?

Some people have lately been admiring my system of defining stages of relationships, so I thought I would share it. It is especially pertinent at this point because I had the unique experience on Friday of being called urgently by someone I've referred to as an "ex" telling me that it was an inappropriate term to use. Not that we're dating again-- in fact I think our friendship (which was always the main relationship) just ended. But that is neither here nor there. I would like to make an open book of when and how I am going to claim someone as an "ex."

By the way, I think the reason "girlfriend" and "boyfriend" are so loaded in queer minds is that - without the white wedding option- those terms are the gateway to the courtship's end. Me, I'm part heterosexual (being historically more bi than lezzie, although currently a lesbian bisexual [I like femmes and butches]), and I am an activist who happens to know that you can currently get homosexually married in three different countries (and soon to be more, more, more!) so I know that girlfriend/ boyfriend is not the end of the line, and so I'm not as gf/bf termino-phobic. But most queers are, and that's why at the latter end of my queer relationship trajectory "THING" is used a lot. "EX" is loaded for people for the same reason gf/bf are- it implies to queers a history of having a committed relationship, whereas among the hets it generally just means you have a history, maybe you shared fluids or something. Quibble with me if you will, but that's how I see it.

I have two relationship plans for fuckable people, i.e. non-blood-relatives who are minimally attractive to me. If you are not currently in an open/ known (uh, by both parties) sexual relationship with me, and I'm attracted to you, you are potentially eligible to advance on the Friend/ Fuckwatch or the Fuckbuddy Program.

This is how it has historically worked for me.
WE MEET
A. WE BECOME FRIENDS, or,
B. WE FUCK

---

WE MEET:
A. WE BECOME FRIENDS
A1. WE'RE FRIENDS, WE STAY JUST FRIENDS
A2. WE'RE FRIENDS, BUT I LIKE YOU IN THAT WAY. I PUT YOU ON
FUCKWATCH. You are now on the Friend/ Fuckwatch Program (365 days' observation after meeting, to determine that kind of compatibility).
|
A2a. WE NEVER FUCK. Nothing changes. We stay friends. Yes that means you, I know you know who you are. We will never fuck, and yes you are still my friend.
A2b. WE FUCK.
|
A2b/1. It's not all that. Return to A.
A2b/2. It's all that. Skip to The All Important 3rd Date.

---

WE MEET:
B. WE FUCK
B1. WE HAVE AN ANONYMOUS FLING AND NEVER SPEAK AGAIN.
B2. WE MAKE A DATE. You are now on the Fuckbuddy Program (i.e. we will not be mistaken for "just friends" by anyone, including your exes). (See below for the definition of an ex).
|
The 1st Date (see my old definitions for sensual living to know if it was a date)
- this can be anonymous, or sharing first names and either e-mail or one working phone number.
B2a. There is only one date. No harm done, maybe we'll be taken for "just friends" after this. Maybe we'll even really be friends.
B2b. You make a second date.
    The 2nd Date
    - here you can find out the person's employment status, and/or other nonintrusive bits of information.
    - reveal your terminal illness here, if you have one.
    B2b/1. There are only two dates. No big deal. You can still sometimes skip to the Friend/ Fuckwatch Program here, after a brief cooling-off period.
    B2b/2. You make a THIRD DATE. This is the big one.
    \      
     \      
The All Important 3rd Date
- After advancing to the third date of the Fuckbuddy Program, you can only go back to the Friend/ Fuckwatch Program after a significant period of virtual or total noncontact after the last fuck, say, two calendar years. Don't waste your time trying to "be friends" because it was "not you, it was me" or something like that. Codependents (most of us are these at some point) do not do well with these "still friends" arrangements, with all the emotional responsibility of an intimate friend but none of the physical privileges of being sexual partners. So be on your most honest behavior on the third date (if you haven't been so far).
- on the third date you can reveal your relationship status(es), your safer sex and time/ space requirements, and how you feel about dating other people. My new standby rule is the "three freebies" rule, where you each can see one person three times without disclosure, but if you make a fourth date, you share the details from there on out.
- if you are a superhero, now is the time you should reveal at least one secret super power. No, it's not too soon.
        /
       /
      /
     /
After you make a fourth date, you become a
THING.
  {
   }
- The Post-Fuckbuddy Thing
Somewhere between the fourth and tenth dates is the zone where you can share a second working phone number (making you more than fuckbuddies), and if you break up you become EXES. Yes, it's a wide zone, but just so you know, if you are reading this, Mr. I'm Not Your Ex, we had more than a few dates. It was a Thing. Not a Thing Thing, but a Thing.
       {
        }
- The Thing Thing
Somewhere between one and twelve months the terminology question will arise, because you are calling it a "thing thing" to friends, and they want to know what that means. Although you can acknowledge that you are more than fuckbuddies, it is still appropriate at this time to skirt the topic and just use the words "girlthing" or "boything" or "boygirlthing."
   {
    }
- You are in an Entanglement sort of Thing Thing after two months.
Long-term emotional entanglements are my most special specialty. The Entanglement Zone is where people (ok, I) will sneak in the words "girlfriend" or "boyfriend." Secretly, to other people, but still. It is no longer funny to use the appellation "my special friend" even though your parents always use it. Processing ensues.
{
  }
- After six months you have a Post-Thing Thing: theTerminologically Challenged Zone.
You will not be able to avoid making SOME decision about the words "girlfriend" or "boyfriend." This is where you find yourself making derisive (but subconsciously longing) "husband" and "wife" jokes about eachother. If you have jointly purchased a piece of furniture without ever finishing the "girlfriend" or "boyfriend" discussion, my hat's off to you. You're beating amazing odds and should celebrate it with some kind of anniversary celebration. Like the anniversary of the first time you took off the latex. I think that's more important than the terminology landmarks. My best friend in high school and I had our favorite pick up line all figured out: "I want to catch all your diseases." When you really get there, that's something.

---

Note: Although "ex" isn't appropriate until after AT LEAST the fourth date, some kind of mediated divorce proceedings are a possibility at any time at all, if it is a lesbionic type involvement. Even that dried flower from the first bouquet you picked her on your first date can be negotiated in a notarized document. Not that I've ever gone that far, I'm just speaking from the point of dispassionate observation. (That's the lonely place I always try to pitch my tent on this blog.)

I'm Just Sayin'

It is telling something about me that my book hunting today involved my continued stalking of a discount price on Bondage Fairies Extreme and buying the new Barbara Weiden Boyd edition of Selections from Vergil's Aeneid. And Amazon.com's suggested reading for me was Pookie Believes in Santa Claus, which I'm not buying because I'm not yet done digesting Pookie Puts the World Right, which is currently thumbtacked to the wall above my desk at work (where the world has most definitely NOT been right).

Vote Precious Party!

The Council of Elrond Presents: GOLLUM FOR GOVERNOR. Finally a candidate with transparent motives.

Honestly, I even considered running for governor, just because of the mass peer pressure.

My New Favorite Place to Stalk Stockings

This vendor doesn't have the seamed garter stockings I need, but s/he does seem to be enjoying selling unflattering old nylons more than anyone should.

Deedeebon's Vintage Pantyhose Web Store's Gallery of Goddesses aka their "Ho Museum" (maybe the URL was supposed to be HoseMuseum.html and it's just a lucky abbreviation).

And check out this shop's "Sultry Canadian" hose, with a cover picture the vendor describes as "crime-scene-ish" -- on the $5 hose page.

Greetings from Hell

From:  Collin Korf - co2link@msn.com
Date:  Fri, 8 Aug 2003

All homosexuals (that's what you are) will burn in hell unless you
immediately give up your perverse lifestyle *choice* and repent and
be saved by Jesus Christ. Trust Him now and avoid everlasting
torment.
Collin K.

I work at a queer human rights agency, and we get our fair share of hate mail. I especially liked the ones written by kids using their parents e-mail (Subject: Burn in Hell; From: thebrownfamily). We used to keep copies and pass them around for fun. Then it got old. Well, sometimes something still comes in that is just irresistable. When this relatively articulate piece of vitriol (above) came in, my coworker M. responded:


To:  Collin Korf - co2link@msn.com
Subject: Greetings from Hell
Date:  Fri, 8 Aug 2003

Life sure is great here. We met this guy named Jesus that just
happened to be a fire fighter. He extinguished the flames in the
blink of an eye, and the whole place was rebuilt . He even managed
to add a swimming pool with all the excess water and he walks across
it for fun sometimes as we all clap. The trick gets a little old
after a while, so hopefully he will learn something new next week.
Hope to see you here soon.

Have a nice weekend,

M.

Catnip makes everything better.

The girlcat and I have rekindled our romance with a big bag of catnip. I had forgotten what a difference catnip makes in our relationship.

The girlcat is one of those MyCatHatesYou.com centerfold candidate cats. She is a very intelligent tabby with piercing green eyes that are often narrowed in your general direction. She has drifted away from me, sleeping separately now for months, and lately sleeping on my suitcase in the closet. It has something to do with me getting a social life, and thereby sometimes staying out all day, all evening, and sometimes even overnight. So the distance has grown, gradually, imperceptably.

I finally realized it had been a long time since our last catnip overdose. So I bought a huge bag of it and poured it out into her toybox/ rolling box. We have had morning visits on the bed, complete with adoring lap cuddling, and gentle hand-cleaning. Kisses galore, every time we run into eachother around the house. I tell you, so many sleights are forgiven, so much affection is suddenly available with kitty drugs.

Check out the Catnip Pizza. I'm still not clear if tomato sauce is involved, and if that would then end up on everything the way catnip is now gently sifted over all my worldly possessions.

Some people apparently haven't yet heard of Aphra Behn.

My friend Melisa is inviting us all to get together to go watch Women's Will - an all-girl Shakespeare company- do The Rover by Aphra Behn, and so it bears reminding that Aphra Behn was a kick-ass proto-lesbian.

A 17th century professional playwright, poet, novelist, spy for the king, crossdresser, etc., also she wrote love poetry to women (from To the Fair Clarinda):

In pity to our Sex sure thou wer't sent,
That we might Love, and yet be Innocent:
For sure no Crime with thee we can commit;
Or if we shou'd - thy Form excuses it.
For who, that gathers fairest Flowers believes
A Snake lies hid beneath the Fragrant Leaves.

She was also opposed to the practice of slavery-- her play "Oroonoko : Or, the Royal Slave" served the abolitionist cause for centuries. Check her out, people.

Isle of Lesbos: Poetry of Aphra Behn

Queer Theory: Aphra Behn

A New Reason to Love Oakland: The People's Grocery

A coworker just sent this to me:

One of the founders [of the People's Grocery] used to be a gang member and decided to drop out of the gang and start up his own non-profit. The group now has its own grocery store and truck to distribute organic produce and products through West Oakland, one of the poorest sections of the Bay Area. They also employ 9 high school students from the local high school, which has a drop out rate of 70%.

And doing a tiny wee bit of research I've found out that the other founder is younger than me-- she's only 28! How hard does this rock?

Hallelujah, One Less Criminal Mastermind on the Payroll in the Pentagon

And the ever eloquent Rumsfeld offered CNN this on the cancellation on the futures market that the now-(again)-resigning Poindexter had proposed:

"It was pretty clear to me it ought to have been canceled, so I did so," Rumsfeld told reporters on Wednesday. "Even if it had been a brilliant idea, which I doubt, it would not have been able to function in the environment that it was created."

He's not sure, in other words, it might have been a brilliant idea.

And yet,

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, said Thursday Poindexter's decision to resign "was probably a wise one."

But then again, he implies, maybe not. Maybe he should have stayed and proposed some even more maybe brilliant ideas.

There is a special place in hell for these people, I have to hope.

In Other News: There's Also One Less Transvestite Criminal Mastermind Loose on the Streets of Oslo

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.

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

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!"

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

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!

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

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.

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

Reportback from Femme-Bottomville



I mark today six weeks into being sexually active again, and two weeks into dating again, after a year and a half of heavy grieving from my girlfriend's suicide. I have to say, it's a bad time to run out of antidepressants. But, on the other hand, I'm enjoying rediscovering my femme-bottom identity after being a tentant of Celibate-Misanthropolis.



Some new discoveries about my femme-bottomhood:



Reprising my teenage experiments with makeup and nailpolish -- where the goal was to be punk and different -- are useful for knowing the color-combination DON'Ts. Punk is an aesthetic that is ready to be put on its pension. Especially if you don't like to make the first move (i.e. are trying to look approachable).



Losing my compulsion to locate someone on the socio-political activist spectrum in favor for operating from my gut reactions -- essentially subjugating my intellect to make it bottom to my sexual instinct -- was the best new thing to come out of the complete crash-meltdown that was/is my grief-process. Butch tops often have sordid personal histories leading to interesting political insights that are not positioned in relation to the rest of the progressive movement, but all the same are valid and worthy. Being less judgemental makes me a better, happier bottom.



Asking my date what I should wear, something my ultraliberated mind would never do before, is now fun. Ultimately, I don't care what I look like as long as it doesn't fall under the rubrick of "embarrassing to my date."



And lastly: do your freakin' hair BEFORE your nails. Good god you'd think I would be smart enough to have figured this out by now. But just now with the putting in the bobby pins with the wet nails. FYI, there's no better way to completely and instantly ruin a nail job.



By the way, thank you Shar Rednour for being a beacon of good sense in femme self-caretaking. I keep remembering parts of your book The Femme's Guide to the Universe. Especially the advice about not cheaping out on things that go on your skin.



Some historical discoveries I've been mulling about femme-bottomhood:



I just have to say, the days of the Lesbian Avengers were good days. But the L.Av. are dead and it's because we were the sorts to challenge labels and gender/ sexual identity, so when we looked around and the entire group here in San Francisco was identifying as FTM or MTF or bisexual or a supersized combination order of these, and nobody's first choice of identity was lesbian, we tried to change the name and the group dissolved. Honestly, I bailed before the name change. I just didn't care enough to sit through endless processing about the word "lesbian." But BEFORE we all gave up on identity politics and were happy to be assumed to be lesbians, we had a kissing booth fundraiser at the Folsom Street (leather kink) Fair where all the bisexual femme bottoms (me among them) made a rule. We would not kiss a strange bioman, anyway not as a cheap-ass $5-per-kiss fundraiser. The butch tops, on the other hand, were all gung ho (ahem) to give the boys a taste of a lipsticked shaved-headed manly-woman. They wanted all the money we could get.



So what was that about? You'd think to us femme bottomy types it wouldn't matter whether we kissed another boy. But we had all been in some way or another scarred by consensual bad boy top experiences. I don't think I was able to completely embrace my femme bottom identity with a feeling of empowerment until I extended this Folsom Street Fair Kissing Booth rule into the rest of my life: no kissing of bioboys I don't know. It's a good rule. Especially since I've extended my definition of "know" to require one calendar year of being around the person. It effectively makes me a lesbian. But I can't rule out bioboys, even under these conditions, so I still call myself bisexual. I think I used to think that these rules made me a coward, but now I know it makes me a good bottom. Good bottoms make their own rules and make their rules known, and then abandon control from that seat of power.



Why I think femme bottoms don't have a special community support network like every other damn microdemographic:



We should, but we don't have a lot of spaces to ourselves. We are essentially the most private/ invisible sector of the queer community, partly because we tend to pass as het. Also because - even though most of us are politically or socially very active - we tend to be really very independent and reluctant to go outside our inner circle of friends for support. In other words, you don't find a lot of femme bottoms in support groups. In mountain climbing clubs or circles of artists, yes, but not in a place where we advertise our weaknesses to potential caretakers. We know the power of the caretaker, and we select our caretakers (tops) with extreme care. So, it's not that we wouldn't do well to have some unity among us, but wherever we make ourselves a public demographic, we become the targets of bad tops. So, we are quiet and grateful to find eachother where we do.



And where do we find eachother? In kink-positive space. I was a fan of the famous "Fuck Fests" here at the dear, departed Castlebar in San Francisco, where we separated the room into two sides, top and bottom, and it was your choice to define yourself as you wanted to be for the duration of the party. There were tables on which we could extend ourselves (from neck-down) under a thick black curtain, on which we would pin (on the "top" side) our list of limits and desires. The tops weren't allowed to communicate directly with us, only through dungeon monitors who were standing on guard on both sides of the curtain. I found such amazing sisterhood among the (butch and femme) women/ FTMs on the "bottom" side of the curtain. We took care of eachother, we enjoyed eachother's pleasure, we gave hugs and butt-slaps where they were needed, and we fed eachother complements and food. It was the most powerful, pleasureful, sexually secure space I've ever been with a group of people, and it still strikes me what a rare feeling that is. There won't be any more Fuck Fests (the venues for such things are basically gone from the city), but I will always cherish that memory of bottom-bonding. It was like the hard workers of the non-management part of staff getting together to just see our numbers and temporarily unionize-- viva the struggle of the hard working bottoms!

Stalking a Social Life



Well, my dear readers, I have been slacking on blogging because I have been stalking a social life. I think I have it effectively cornered and I am figuring out how to feed it. Here are some morsels I have thrown at it that were tasty:



The Monterey Bay Aquarium - I went with friends to grovel before the Cthulic cuttlefish, but they did not demand a sacrifice... this time.



The Ruby Room - I've been trying to log hours under the red lights to get my hipster quotient up out of the negative numbers. Some mighty dykey bartenders, who (bonus!) are also usually my neighbors in East Oakland.



Exodus - I was honored to organize a reading/ performance thingy with this incredibly talented, young and powerful lady hiphopster, the author of these words (the poem "My dinner plate/ grandma's back yard"):

Simple greens

Verses frozen beans

Corn meal

Knee- d- ed into corn bread

Light Mango spread

On Banana bread

Eat your spinach like your mother said

And charge your chard

Paint the rainbow with your squash

And cry like the Nile with

Saboas

Lentil jump around in my

Arroz con pollo

Tauro, Tauro, Tauro

Ahora usteds....

Con Orchata

Simple greens

Verses frozen beans

The last of the mo-ji-cama'

Dance the rain dance in my tang

Pina y pina

The ripe co-co-nut on the floor of the cut little hut

Simple greens

Verses frozen beans

Don’t taste like the skillet of my grandma hands

In her southern ways

Too much pork fat in those days

Caused her to sing simple

Songs

'Bout simple green verses

Frozen beans

In California....

Rock on, Exodus!



Another tasty tidbit: the PornOrchestra -- a recent development in the East Bay, they improvise music to bad mainstream porno flicks. I'm afraid I have to say it is an idea that is better on paper: in practice I found the music and the porn both a little tedious. The highlight was a 70's porno with the female figures blotted out, and some particularly thoughtful jazzy instrumental accompaniment. If you want a taste of this sort of thing, improving/ innovating soundtracks to original film is much better done by the Sprocket Ensemble. But hey! I got out of the house, down to that amazing Oakland cultural institution the Parkway Speakeasy Theater with all my fingernails and toenails painted (all the same color purple- I'm such a vamp!) and a nice slutty outfit to go with. I even had a date.



The SF Lesbian & Gay Film Festival -- which I stupidly eschewed for years because they don't have "bi" and "trans" in the title of the festival -- and the National Queer Arts Festival -- hopefully these two festivals will keep my social life fat and happy for the rest of the month. The only drawback is the initial immobilizing shock of sudden immersion in seas of queer people (including exes who I enjoy not seeing) that exhaust one with their combination of unfathomable optimism with unfathomable cattiness. You know, there you are, crying at a touching low-budget movie short about coming out to your family and someone behind you says "that is so GAY." I mean, I'm glad we're reclaiming "gay" as an invective for our own saccharine white-washing tendencies, but really. A little after-school-specialness isn't going to make queers irrelevant to the counterculture.



Or maybe it will. At an event Saturday Kate Bornstein gave a heady lecture about the poisonous nature of assimilation that seemed very old (can I say retro-90's yet?) which was followed, as if to illustrate the point, by a slide show by some ladies who have bought a farm in the country and got married there (and wanted to flaunt a little apolitical propertarian privilege). Going from Kate Bornstein to the married farmers gave me some serious vertigo: one, throwing her speech's pages angrily on the floor, shaking a fist at the violating nature of marriage constructs, and the other waving her spotless (still price-tagged) chrome hay hooks at the audience, boasting about how she had actually figured out how to use them to move hay. *I* never had hay hooks. I got hay burn all over my arms and legs every spring, loading hay with just gloves. God how we hated the dilettante cityfolk who fled NYC to the far reaches of the north to recover their sense of humanity by buying shiny toys and white-washed fences that would be auctioned and abandoned after five years. They never rode their horses enough to warrant owning the purebreds they invariably bought. But yet, at the end of the night, I still had more to talk about with the farmer wives than the communist demagogue. These awkward social mixes are just a necessary hazard of social life husbandry, I guess.

Another Stake in My Innocence



I have been doing personal ads on Craigslist and finally got curious enough to research what "420" meant. Of course I thought it was something much more interesting, involving more people and fewer clothes. The origin of it is pretty funny.



Said former pot-smoker Steve to the LA Times (from this article)...

The group [of friends] agreed to meet that afternoon after school at 4:20 p.m. by a campus statue of Louis Pasteur, he said, and head out to search for the marijuana patch [one of their brothers-in-law had given them]. "But one thing led to another," he laughed, "and suffice it to say we never found it. Every day we'd meet at 4:20 by this statue, and every day we'd just end up getting high and driving around for hours." Over time, the mere phrase "four-twenty"--exchanged in a hallway, or discreetly mentioned in the presence of teachers and parents--became their personal code for "time to get high," he said.

More Reasons Why The US Doesn't Completely Suck



The Banjo - our first indigenous instrument! Here is an article about women in the "banjo craze" of the 19th century.



Edward Gorey - indigenous Victorianesque weirdness! Here is the quiz to find out which Edward Gorey book you are.



Baseball and Softball - strangely relaxing, superstitious, and supremely geeky! Here is a nice and weird list of ways for baseball players to get good luck. Not through practice and hard work, silly.



Immigrant Pride - every Columbus Day! From the home of Gay Pride and Pagan Pride! Here is the lovely "Who's the Illegal Immigrant, Pilgrim" poster by San Francisco's own Yolanda M. Lopez -- this poster is usually widely wheatpasted for Immigrant Pride day, especially since the anti-immigrant legal changes in California in the mid 90's.



NYC Dyke Immigrant Jewish Theater At the Turn of the Century! Who would believe that the first depiction of homosexuality on the US public stage was in the early 1900's in the Jewish emigre theater: "The God of Vengeance" by Sholom Asch, featuring a lesbian relationship between a Jewish woman and a prostitute. Here is an article about "Schtick" by Sara Felder, the San Francisco show that brought this play's existence back to light a few years ago. The censors didn't go apeshit about this play until it hit Broadway in 1923, when I think the playwright was actually thrown in jail for his depiction of explicit lezzie love-- even though it was actually a conservative cautionary tale.



And now, the Slacker Stalker Guide to the Best in US Children's TV Entertainment:



Science Court aka Squigglevision - when I first got my own television in 1999 I was addicted only to Xena and Science Court. It was an instructional kids' television show illustrating complex science concepts in a satirical take-off on Law and Order, Ally McBeal, and other such self-important social commentary/ legal shows. I heart(ed) Science Court. Here you can sing along with some of their rockin' learning songs.



The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse - short-lived in the 80's: it was cancelled after John Kricfalusi (of later Ren & Stimpy Fame) had Mighty sniff some white powder and regain his strength. Wonderful, wonderful camp.




Count Duckula - ok, this one was British, not US-made. But such a goddamn hoot-- a flamboyantly gay vegetarian vampire duck. I love how he redecorates the family castle and has a flair for show tunes.



The Tick (cartoon) - no, I didn't have a TV when The Tick was on, but I was friends with fans with TVs and VHS recordings. I was a frequent houseguest. Maybe the better way to describe it would be "indigent waif." There are so many sites devoted to this cartoon, I'll just give you the adoring Jump the Shark list of gushing comments.




Reboot - ok, this isn't a US show either. It was made in Vancouver. But I include it because I had a crush on Hexidecimal. Here is a well-linked up page about this, the first TV series produced entirely with computer graphics. The characters had slow and wooden movement, but the voice actors were really witty. The main super evil villain was revealed to have a secret ambition to be a rock star at one point.



The Real Ghostbusters (cartoon) - just thinking about this cartoon brings back warm memories of curling up with a mug of cocoa and a honey sandwich after school. It was my evening ritual before going out to feed the horse and check the fence. It was my daily dose of candy-corn parapsychology. Sometimes they even had real little bits of myth and magic lore that would send me into research frenzies. Like on Buffy, much later, the demon hunters were often friends with the demons.



    and of course



Pinky and the Brain - of course, who couldn't love the little mousey take-off on Orson Welles with a mousey goofball sidekick/ lifepartner who is gay, gender dysphoric and telekinetic. Here is a list of those ever-useful Are-you-pondering-what-I'm-ponderings. When Pinky gave the Brain "the world" (a globe keychain) for Christmas one year, I actually cried.

826 Valencia -- Another Reason to Love the US



Granted, Dave Eggers' brainchild 826 Valencia (where I volunteer) and its fundraising store - "the pirate store" - for which these fabulous piratical signs were written - wouldn't have such a booming business if our public schools had smaller classes and kids had more options for extracurricular language skills development. They have something like twenty kids coming in for their free tutoring help after school these days.

A Coupla Reasons to Stay in the YouEssAy



I am not alone in thinking it's time to take my anti-war patriotic ass away from this country for a while, while it recovers from its recent blight of warmongering and regime-changing. So as I'm readjusting to speaking nothing but English all the time (today I spelled the name "Maureen" Marine and didn't notice it until later in the day when I reread my notes) I am finding myself grasping for reasons to stay here. It would be an awfully lot more convenient to stay than go.



Today's reasons to like the United States:



Black Mary - a tough 6-foot tall cowboygirl who was an ex-slave sharp-shooter bar-brawler and enterprising sort of woman. She died in 1914 in her 90's. They don't make role models like this in EVERY country.



the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission - I know, it's self serving, since I work here, but really, I wouldn't get to know how much I dislike the US if this organization - founded in the US - didn't support me galavanting abroad to promote a human rights agenda.



I know I know it's a cliche. But I can't help it. She's one of my role models and she is not only a product of the US but of North-Western New York, not all that far from where I grew up. I'm so glad the RBRmy finally got that freakin' web page going. And look! I didn't know that Ani had signed Bitch-n-Animal! How very cool.



And now a scattershot list of things that occur to me that I put together in a brainstorm session with a few friends.



The Chicago Manual of Style - the exquisite, nervous, extreme fringes of geekiness!



SpongeBob SquarePants - this is a site ONLY for serious fans. SpongeBob is soooo gay. I ate a whole box of SpongeBob SquarePants CheeseNips the day after I got back from Slovenia just to ground myself in the neon orange food group for which the US has become famous.



The Nation - unconventional wisdom for the uppity intellectual.



The Daily Show With John Stewart - oh how John Stewart makes me doubt my lesbianism. In a brainy sort of way.



The Boondocks - the gospel of Huey Freeman, the little black intellectual version of Calvin (from Calvin and Hobbes), from the pen of Aaron McGruder.



The Wild and Massive but Rather Untranslatable Popularity of Buffy the Vampire Slayer That link is to "Buffy the Patriarchy Slayer." One of my (gay) college friends did a thesis on the movie the year it came out-- about how the vampires represented rapists and Buffy represented the new "take back the night" generation. I thought he was so silly to be so obsessed with that movie. And now here I am, obsessed, turning on the TV at 7 am to watch Buffy reruns on FX. Every morning. At 7 am.



Zora Neale Hurston - said Zora I want a busy life, a just mind and a timely death. Well, two out of three ain't bad.

-- I was at an activist meeting about getting California Native American History incorporated into the gold rush centennial celebration studies going on in California public schools, and this cool 5th grade teacher had this poster on her wall. That smile captivated me. I had no idea who Zora Neale Hurston was, but her smile was the smile of a genius, a troublemaker, a confident thinker and mover and shaker. So I wrote down that name and over the years picked up her books and searched out her story. I blogged about her and her connection to Santeria and the creation of zombies here. Zora is now featured on a US stamp, which kind of astonishes. It's like the Vatican producing rainbow flags. Didn't anyone do their research?

Hometown Vertigo



For chrissakes would you all PLEASE go to this website and vote against the war. I know, I know, the war is over, but this pissy ass website, built as a community site for my high school (sigh, a military cow town), has a poll running which gives you the choice of supporting our troops and country (adding to the brave blue column in the poll results) and opposing the war (wussy pink). I'm a goddamn patriot, I just have a HUGE healthy distrust and dislike our government, and sure as hell don't appreciate being given the choice of EITHER supporting our troops or opposing the goddamn war. Now I remember why I grew up angry.



I can't believe spelling bees used to be one of the ways I got award trips to get out of town. I mean, I can't believe I actually used to win trophies for being able to spell in English, I can't believe I used to go to such lengths to get out of town for any period of time, and I can't believe I now, sitting in my San Francisco queer human rights activist office, consider it a long trip out of my way to walk all the way to the Thai lesbian cafe for afternoon espresso instead of just going to the Japanese place on the corner. It's all so dizzying.

Stalking and Killing and Leaving for Dead The Matrix, Reloaded


Well, I liked it, but not ten-dollars' worth of liking it. I would have paid a fiver for that and felt pretty good about it. Ten? Sigh. Luckily we made the extra five dollars worth of fun ourselves by dressing up in black plastic tight clothing and mugging in all the reflective surfaces of the fancy art deco Grand Lake Theater. That was the way to see this super-empty super-sparkly piece of pseudo-zen.



Jesus Figure: of course, Keanu Christ/ Superman Reeves. Uno. Emo. Whatever his name is.



Gay Figure: what a completely compulsively heterosexual movie! I really need some nominations for this one. I just have no idea. OK, I thought that the council member (old white eyebrows-like-wings guy) was going to make a pass at Uno there for a minute, taking him down to the engineering level to show him the whacky machines with all their mechanical thrusting, thrusting, thrusting...



Lesbian Movie Standard (two female characters who have at least one conversation about something other than a man): no chance, kids! This one is pure, pure Hollywood. Although, it was filmed partly in my own backyard, here in Alameda and Oakland! You'd freakin' think they'd have Trinity have some tactical defense conversation with one of the other (many) female warriors, wouldn't you? The tough ladies of Oakland talk to eachother!



So, for your smart science fiction, go rent Starship Troopers. Readhere a Liquidtheater.com review that reflects some of my own thoughts, especially this part (quoting reviewer Mike Shea):

A couple of years ago I was walking through an airport in Stuttgart, Germany. Two 18 year old kids were patrolling the airport armored in flak jackets and armed with sub-machine guns, pistols, and other forms of submission devices. I remember thinking how much nicer our life in America was compared to that. Six months ago I watched a guy in a flack vest and a 9mm pistol poke through my shoes on his steel table while I sat in my socks a few feet away. While wishing I had used more bleach on my grey socks, I thought about how much our life has changed in the last couple of years. Watching Starship Troopers again gave me another dark wake-up call. Watching it again was a far different experience for me today than it was three years ago.

Hear hear. The Matrix Reloaded just didn't chill me. After all, I'm pro-Borg. A totally militarized community freaks me the hell out, on the other hand.



You know, I didn't see any live weapons except for border crossings the whole month I was in the VERY RECENTLY war-torn former Yugoslavia. One day in Oakland and San Francisco and I feel like military helicopters are following me.