Category Archives: GLBT

Poetry, Music, and a Queer Doll Wedding by Nhojj

I connected with singer-songwriter and poet Nhojj through my friend John Ollom, the movement artist. Raised in Guyana and Trinidad, Nhojj has recorded 7 studio albums and published 3 books. Winner of 4 Outmusic awards, Nhojj has shared stages with Norah Jones, Regina Belle and Estelle. Nhojj views his art as multidimensional healing spaces where audiences can experience themselves through the eyes of acceptance and love.

He filmed this adorable gay wedding with two Ken dolls, set to his original song “Faithful”:

Nhojj has kindly allowed me to reprint two of his poems below.

Ritual of Dance…

I
Dance at
Night on a basement floor
Music
Pounding
Tribal vibrations
Sounding
Sweet on my taste buds
Soca
Beats provoke my waist
Flood of
Sweat
Drips down
Body strips down towels wait
Behind the door cause
I aim to leave it all on this homemade
Dance floor

This house hypnotizes
This afro symphony baptizes
Me by the silk cotton tree
Spirits arise & walk in
Moonlight… fireflies
Reggae lullabies
Djembe drum sanctifies
Our dun dun purifies

Eyes closed
Chest exposed
Arms flailing…remake me
Voices wailing…remix me
Feet stomping…rewind me
Speakers thumping…replay me
Over & over & over again…
Gods of Jouvet
Voices
Chanting rhythms
Visions speaking in tongues
Lyrical phenomenons
Spirit of Shango
Magic
Lightning & thunder
Beneath my feet

Turn the dial left…
Left for…
Higher bandwidths
Higher frequencies
Higher planes

Villages of ancestral domains
Calling forth the rains
Come forth
Come now
Fall down &
Water this parched earth
With…

P
E
A
C
E

****

Cherish Yourself

She didn’t notice me at first, but then I turned, and the light bounced off my being, getting stuck in her vision like a speck of dust. Her eyes narrowed, recognizing something familiar… something distasteful.

Of course this wasn’t the first time. There had been many before her, mostly boys in men’s clothing, with that look of recognition in their eyes, trying desperately to erase this thing inside me. They’d used every trick in their books, teaching lessons they’d been taught about what was right and who was wrong.

This time it only took me 3 years… 3 years to feel my fingers and toes again… 3 years below ground to feel my heart beating… wildly at first, then more evenly, with each new breath. 3 years for me to remember my light, always recognized, would not always be cherished.

So now, every day as sun rises, bending light and shadow round table and chair, I write in my journal, read books from the shelf, and recite the words “cherish yourself”.

Poetry by Perry Brass: “The Death of the Peonies”

Author, journalist, and activist Perry Brass explores the intersection of gay male sexuality and spirituality. His books include The Manly Art of Seduction and the novel King of Angels. This poem, which he has kindly allowed me to reprint, was staged as a musical performance at Dixon Place in 2000 with support from the NYC Gay Men’s Chorus.

The Death of the Peonies

At first they are nothing.
A stubble on the earth
and then their stems shoot up
and tangle and gossip with one another,
and twist their leaves about each other
rancorously, grabbing towards the light
thrusting their fingers out in fisted buds
and penis heads, tight, furled, foreskinned out,
and you wait,
anxiously, hesitantly
for a soaking rain to please them, but not
beat them down. And you dream
about their flesh, their baby whiteness
and rich Latin reds and extravagant nights of them—
drifting out to the garden to smell—
then they burst, and you’re shell-
shocked from them: their dazzling, belly-
filling, ruthless gaudiness. Your heart triple
beats around them, a bolero entangled in
cockatiel plumage, a bed
washed with petals and you’re diving in them,
dripping; swimming; sinking obscenely,

licking them—with that scent of apple
and mango and citrus breeze
and the clean creases of babies and a ripened banana
and rain pounding your throat.
And at night you can’t sleep from the thought
that this exalted gallop,
hard, rushing, punching the air—
its moments are numbered. You must go
out and kneel in it, as you once made love
to whale sounds on a boat—insane,
but who could control it?
They go off. Your beloved will forget you
and take new partners, while you
can only watch—but this does not stop you
from rolling in the agony—how unseemly, dreamlike,
yet revolting. They have just taken your heart
and popped it and are eating it,
these awkward, hushed flowers turbaned
in the mating call of earth and testicles;
and you blame them. They made you ashamed.
Stripped you. Reached inside and ripped
some vital piece from you, while you
only wanted to lie face down, drenched in their odor,
in the crotch of their enduring artlessness

as that scent, intimate, fleeting
suddenly clears through you
and you draw up to your knees
and roll into yourself to at last
dissolve what figures between you.
And in a burst, it reaches you:
your own waking nightmare has taken you out
as its victim and pushed its jagged knife
into your chest as the sun beat down,
while you screamed with a gag in your mouth—
God-take-me-now, God-take-me-now,
now, now—owwww—till your blood rushed up
and was met by a heaven of simple lips,
as the Holy Child, knowing, floating
on a cloud of petals blessed you
and kissed that place in your heart
that bled.

Then all folded into One
rolled into its own thrilling head,
presented on its stem, perfect
through infinity, where its blossom
holds and tempts you
with an aroma of such intensity
that it made you stay alone
in the garden all night.

And in a week or so,
there before you
is that final retreat
when the air takes their petals and drops them
to your feet. And you watch them, exhausted,
mute, stunned, left . . . left in the waiting room
of a choking, single breath.

June Links Roundup: Books Versus Groomers

Happy Pride Month! Are we excited about the upcoming Barbie movie, or are we straight?

Some friends I brought home from P-Town last summer.

This 2022 article from BookRiot remains relevant amid widespread attempts to censor schools and libraries in conservative states. “Sex Ed Books Don’t ‘Groom’ Kids and Teens. They Protect Them,” writes Danika Ellis, recounting situations where Robie Harris and Michael Emberley’s puberty guide It’s Perfectly Normal had life-changing effects on young people. First released in the 1990s and available in a trans-inclusive updated edition from Candlewick, this book has been repeatedly challenged by right-wingers, who call it “grooming” to give kids information on their sexuality. The facts tell a different story:

[A] 10-year-girl in Delaware…picked up [It’s Perfectly Normal] when at the library with her mother. Her mother let her check the book out, and when they came home, she showed her mom the chapter on sexual abuse and said, “This is me.” She was being abused by her father, and it was the first time she’d spoken about it.

Fashion gets a bad reputation as frivolous (hello, femme-phobia) but here are two stories about how it can make a positive difference. “Turning Debris into Haute Couture” by Harvard Gazette staffer Eileen O’Grady describes a student design festival with an environmental message. In a materials challenge worthy of Project Runway, the participants in the Marine Debris Fashion Show had to craft stylish garments from ocean trash. The attractive and innovative runway show educated people about the role of fast fashion in creating pollution from microplastics.

At New York Fashion Week last September, queer style magazine dapperQ hosted a fashion show at the Brooklyn Museum that spotlighted LGBTQ designers and expressions of queer joy. The organizers also made an effort to include trans, disabled, and plus-sized models, affirming a diversity of beauty standards. Check out the top looks in this NBC News article.

Sophia Giovannitti’s essay “In Defense of Men” in the lit mag Majuscule pushes back against “an accepted truism among left-leaning women online: cis straight manhood is bad, interpersonally and politically; therefore, any other gender or sexual orientation is interpersonally and politically better.” This attitude, dubbed heteropessimism or heterofatalism by various commentators, seems like a familiar feminist complaint from women attracted to men under patriarchy. Giovannitti, however, argues that it’s also a problematic way for cis women to hang onto a moral high ground as “the globally oppressed, the phallus-less, the righteous” at a time when feminism is (or should be) moving on to “a nuanced analysis of gender that accounts for race, class, and transition.”

While the decrying of men by Political Heterosexuals is less overtly bio-essentialist—tending to focus on men’s emotional immaturity, commitment-phobia, poor sexual skills, lack of hygiene, or failure to own a real, off-the-ground bed—it still relies on an implicit or explicit comparison with women, and thus, a binary. What makes these men men is that they are not women; what makes these women, then, women is that they are not men. In my view, professing hatred of men online is not exclusively or even often reflective of individual disappointment or in service of individual absolution; it is in service of the desire to continue to define the political category of “women” by a clean-cut opposite, in a time when it is no longer politically correct to do so…

…The performative online displays of man-hating stem from a longstanding in-person sociality: the age-old tradition of straight women bitching about their boyfriends to one another, which they do precisely to feel a sense of community with other women. It’s a grasping for a pseudo-political solidarity that isn’t as performative as online displays are, but that often feels like the easiest way to make meaning of the confusing, ever-present affective experience of women in straight relationships who feel failed emotionally by their partners. This is not unique to straight women, though. I’d argue it’s the universal experience of romantic love: feeling fundamentally misunderstood or unmet by one’s beloved—a betrayal felt so deeply only because of how known the beloved can otherwise make one feel—and whenever I find myself falling back on a “men are trash” refrain to explain my alienation from male romantic partners away, it’s out of laziness or a desire for connection to those who might feel the same. This is a way to make suffering feel more communal and less punishing—to imagine that failed communication or bad sex are beyond our control, and also, to imagine that something better is out there. In other words, I don’t think heterosexuality is a curse, as is so popular to profess, but desire certainly is.

Finally some good news out of Florida: a federal judge in the Northern District of Florida just blocked the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth. Erin Reed’s Substack newsletter summarizes Judge Hinkle’s opinion, which said in no uncertain terms that the law was bigoted and unconstitutional. Erin says:

The judge pulled no punches when he resurrected lawmakers own statements to prove their discriminatory intent with passing this bill. Earlier in the year, a Florida GOP lawmaker, Representative Webster Barnaby, referred to transgender people as “demons, mutants, and imps.” Numerous references to transgender people in a derogatory and discriminatory were made in the hearings, as they have been made in statehouses across the country. It turns out that getting the anti-trans Republicans on the record with their statements helped block the bill in court.

Judge Hinkle not only referenced the comments, but called them out openly as an exercise in overt bigotry. He contrasted the statements of lawmakers opposing the care with doctors, who are acting in a professional manner to alleviate the suffering of gender dysphoria…

…One of the most profound statements in the court documents was also one of the simplest: “gender identity is real.” This statement, obvious to anybody who knows a trans person or is trans themselves, has nonetheless been challenged and disputed by anti-trans organizations. Transgender people are often painted as a “fad,” a “choice,” or a “social contagion.” Judge Hinkle firmly establishes on the record that this is not the case, proclaiming and using as the basis for the rest of his decision that gender identity is real.

This is a profound and impactful statement. If gender identity is real and if trans people are indeed telling the truth about this being an integral part of who they are, then discriminating against transgender people is firmly unconstitutional.

Amazon.com: Respect Pronouns Transgender Devil Gift Funny Transgender Satan Devil Goth Throw Pillow, 18x18, Multicolor : Home & Kitchen

I’m the real thing, baby.

May Links Roundup: The Conscience of the King

Starting off with some more Richard III content to make this blog even more niche. Don’t worry, though, you can still count on Reiter’s Block for plenty of trans and autistic links and flat-chested selfies. Someone once said that Yakko from Animaniacs is that guy who’s had top surgery and takes his shirt off whenever possible. Relatable!

My partner has adjusted very well, as you see.

Armchair diagnosis of public figures, living or dead, is more of an entertaining pastime than a science. Still, I found some clues to my adolescent affinity for the last Plantagenet king in “Richard III – A Psychological Portrait” by University of Leicester psychology professors Mark Lansdale and Julian Boon, on the Richard III Society website. Due to his disability (thought to be scoliosis), a childhood disrupted by exile and political instability during the Wars of the Roses, and the death of his beloved wife and son, “A number of reasonably reliable indicators suggest Richard was more than usually intolerant of uncertainty in a way that will have had a marked impact upon his personality and his dealings with others.” The authors go on to describe me as a teenager:

Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) is a common syndrome that varies between individuals in degree and is associated with their general levels of anxiety. It probably has its origins in childhood as a need to seek safety by being able to control one’s environment. Thus, if a child’s perception of their caregivers is as being weak or vulnerable, one (but by no means the only) response to the social anxiety associated with that is to develop a degree of self-reliance. This can take many forms associated with an IU syndrome. Without suggesting pathological degrees of this, those evident in Richard include: the tendency to show excessive trust, attachment and loyalty in his positive attachments; piety and rigid moral values, possibly to the point of priggishness and inflexibility; a strong emphasis upon justice and the law; a high sense of personal responsibility; and a strong sensitivity to potential threats.

Indeed, in V.B. Lamb’s spirited mini-biography, The Betrayal of Richard III, the king comes across as an Al Gore type in contrast to his elder brother Edward IV’s Bill Clinton: dutiful and reliable, to the point of being mocked for his sincerity, and unprepared for the deviousness of his milieu.

Now, you might ask, who gives a toss about the ethics of a guy from 500 years ago, or the monarchy in general? Lamb’s book is distressingly relevant to our “fake news” era, in that she documents how the next king, Henry VII, systematically doctored the historical record to make Richard look like a dictator who deserved to be overthrown. The medieval English populace had too little access to information, whereas we have too much. But either way, the average person can’t do independent research on every subject, so we may be seduced into believing the story with the best production values, whether that’s a hatchet job by Shakespeare or a Russian deepfake on Facebook.

I told you we’d get around to the trans content. Emotionally charged misinformation about our community is one of the biggest problems we face, too, because it peels away potential allies on the center-left when conservatives pass laws against our existence. I highly recommend subscribing to Erin in the Morning, Erin Reed’s Substack newsletter that tracks state-by-state efforts to attack or protect trans civil rights. Fun fact, Erin just got engaged to Montana State Rep. Zooey Zephyr, who was silenced by her own House Speaker after she opposed the bill banning gender-affirming care. Tell me again how conservatives support free speech?

I do not have the time or attention span for podcasts longer than 15 minutes, so I am grateful when there’s a transcript for any lengthy and information-heavy audio presentation. Death Panel, a podcast about the political economy of health, hosted this great discussion in 2022 in the wake of yet another New York Times concern-trolling article on trans healthcare: “Panic! At the Gender Clinic with Jules Gill-Peterson and Charlie Markbreiter”:

Jules Gill-Peterson and Charlie Markbreiter join us to discuss Emily Bazelon’s recent controversial New York Times Magazine cover story “The Battle Over Gender Therapy,” its harmful and historically inaccurate portrayal of medical transition, and why liberals are so ready to embrace gatekeeping in trans healthcare. Jules Gill-Peterson is an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and the author of the award winning book, Histories of the Transgender Child… Charlie Markbreiter is the managing editor of The New Inquiry.

Gill-Peterson expresses frustration that cis journalists in mainstream papers ignore the politicized history of medicine, no matter how often trans historians educate them about it. The issue gets framed as though neutral well-meaning medical experts are trying to navigate a middle path between angry queer activists and concerned parents. “WPATH” is the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which sets the guidelines for our medical care, similar to the DSM-V for mental health. Its original standards were crafted by German endocrinologist Harry Benjamin, of whom Gill-Peterson says:

That’s the model where trans healthcare is a special kind of health care that tries to not make itself available to as many people as possible, right. So the whole purpose of transgender health care is to stop as many trans people as possible from transitioning. And Harry Benjamin created the sort of standards by which we would try to do that, in the 1960s. And so those standards included heterosexuality, they included wanting to disappear into society, they included being a well behaved middle class person, they included trying to pass at all costs, right.

They included basically a kind of extreme respectability politics. And you know, as the 1960s wore into the 70s, and Benjamin was sort of a key player, this Harry Benjamin society, right, sort of was formed and became the kind of rudimentary sort of organization for clinicians. Now, it wasn’t formed in the interests of trans people. It was formed because clinicians who provided hormones and surgery were generally regarded as quacks by other medical professionals. And so they just wanted to band together basically, to help lend prestige to what they were doing and to further their own institutional goals.

Framing themselves as a disinterested higher authority arbitrating between political factions, mainstream outlets like the Times or the Atlantic basically launder Christian Right anti-trans talking points as equivalent to trans people’s accounts of our own lives. Gill-Peterson quips:

This is the sort of emotional attachment to liberalism as process, right, as deliberation, “as I, Emily Bazelon, who is not trans, who is not in the trans struggle, who doesn’t have anything on the line, really went through, you know, an emotionless reflection period, and then bravely wrote this article. So actually, what I have to say is more important than, say, multiple trans people with PhDs who have been doing research for a long time, including decades, at some point,” right.

Markbreiter concurs:

it’s funny because again, this piece thinks of itself as being very neutral and unemotional, but actually, one function of it is an extremely emotional one, which is okay, liberals are increasingly eugenicist, have been increasingly so, you know, since COVID, how do they reconcile the fact that in this case, as in many other cases, they have the same position on childhood transition as literal fascists, right? ‘Cause that might make you think, right, like you’re doing something wrong, like if you’re like, damn, I think like all the same things as like the Nazis, like that’s kind of weird, right? Because I’m not a Nazi. So you’re like, hmm, how do I make sense of that to myself?

And I feel like one function of this piece isn’t to make sense, but just to be a kind of like soothing ASMR, spiritual glow for liberals, to be like, “listen,” like “you’re doing eugenics, but in just like a different way, like the vibes are just different with you. So like, don’t feel bad about it. Like if your kid wants to transition, and you’re going to actively block them from doing that and like make them suicidal, like you’re not a bad person. You’re just a concerned parent, and you are different than those bad Republicans.”

This is where Gill-Peterson’s expertise as a historian of childhood really sets things on fire:

And I actually think it’s a really significant problem that we’re facing in this moment, where I just see this kind of doubling down on sentimental politics, where children are perfect for this, right? This is what children, “child,” the concept was invented for. It was invented for letting your fantasy of how you think the world could work, because you’re a good person, override what is actually happening. And it actually is the way that you ideologically justify violence as humanizing, as caring, as loving kids, right? This article records so much mistreatment, harassment and violence against children, it records and openly discusses the abuse of children by institutionally embedded people who are given responsibility over them, whether it’s parents, educators, politicians, or doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers, and they celebrate the harm that they have done as properly caring for those young people, right? That is chilly. Right?

But of course that’s not how the article presents it. But we have to really think about this is the ideological function that we come together around in American culture, right? Loving children means harming them. That is just completely normal business as usual. And it really, really disturbs me, again, to just see how intensely trans children are available to reinforce that structure.

Radical lesbian-feminist playwright Carolyn Gage got a fresh perspective on her childhood when she received an autism diagnosis…around age 70. In this blog post about her inner life with her dolls, I see myself re-enacting the English wars of succession with Lettie Lane and the Ginghams. (I went through a lot of Scotch tape with all those beheadings and resurrections.)

Gage writes:

I would play with the dolls for six to eight hours at a stretch. When most little girls played with dolls, they would change up the outfits or hold miniature tea parties. When Barbie came along about five years later, little girls could put her in her car and drive her to the beach. My idea of playing with the dolls was very, very different. My dolls were engaged in complex plots involving abductions, and magic, and murder, and illicit romance… There were always four or five subplots going on, and the lives of the servants were as intensely dramatic as those of the court. In fact, the heroine of the castle was a rescue doll whose hair had been pulled out and whose body had been vandalized with ink.  She was a doll of mystery, greatly favored by Ginny and the Powers that Be. Her name was Pat, and it was only later, as an adult, I realized that the avatar of my youth had been a survivor and a gender-non-conforming lesbian. ,

There was something else I was doing in the dollhouse. I was plotting an escape from reality. My family was not well. My mother was a practicing alcoholic, as was my brother–who, like me, was on the spectrum. My father was a sex/pornography addict with scary and confusing dissociative disorders. I was terrified of him. He was a tyrant, and, from what I experienced as a child, he was never called into account for his malevolence.  None of us could ever mount a successful revolution, and any signs of resistance were met with cruelty and sometimes violence.  BUT… in the dollhouse, amid all the epic dramas, goodness and innocence would eventually prevail. To that point, the females always won, and matriarchy would always carry the day. Unlike my father, the perpetrators in my stories would be killed, banished, or won over by good. My dollhouse kept my belief in justice alive. It was an alternative world, and, quite frankly, one that I preferred to inhabit… which I manage to do, as much as possible. The dolls were my true family and my dearest friends.

the ginghams paper dolls | sydandgoose | Flickr

Lesbian commune edition: Carrie is the therapist, Katie practices witchcraft, Sarah grows organic marijuana, and Becky fixes the farm machinery.

April Links Roundup: A Recipe for Transformation

Tonight being the first night of Passover, let’s start off with Rachel Meirs’ graphic memoir “Ruth’s Kitchen,” published in Jewish Currents in 2021. It reminded me of a 1960s cookbook that my husband’s paternal grandma passed on to me, shortly before she died. (This was when I still had time to cook.) The recipes leaned heavily on frozen and canned ingredients, still considered a gee-whiz novelty rather than a target of hipster disdain. Pre-packaged ingredients must have felt like a promise that our moms and grandmas could have it all–a modern woman’s freedom from drudgery as well as the tradition of nurturing our families in the kitchen. Tonight, my mom-of-choice, who taught me to cook, will host a small seder with supermarket rotisserie chicken and non-alcoholic fancy grape juice for our friend in 12-step. Togetherness is what counts.

Liberation is on the menu for us pandemic transitioners. At LitHub, Rafael Frumkin’s essay “The Beauty of the Trans Body” pays tribute to the transmasculine elders who showed him the way forward when his chest dysphoria became comprehensible to him during 2020 lockdown.

Breasts always seem to belong to everyone but the wearer. Freud tells us that infants’ polymorphous sexuality is first expressed through their oral attachment to the breast, leading them to identify their mother as their first external “love object.” Media tells us that breasts are among the most important thing any woman can have, and that they should be full and perky and grabbable. Breasts nurture infants, feed sexual desires: nipples are sucked for both milk and pleasure. One can start to feel like a Christmas tree, branches sagging with ornaments for others to ogle and touch and break.

(All the love to my husband, who sent me this article shortly after my surgery–because even though we live in the same house, we communicate through screens like a pair of nerds.)

Hat tip to poet friend Lauren Singer, on whose Facebook page I discovered the artist Shona McAndrew. This Vulture article, “An Artist Reckons with the Fat Body,” profiles McAndrew’s sensual, dreamy series of nude self-portraits.

“As a fat woman,” Shona McAndrew explains in the catalogue for her new show, “I came to believe that I didn’t deserve intimacy, shouldn’t express happiness in the presence of others, and certainly shouldn’t be proudly showing my large naked body to anyone.”…

In Too Deep depicts McAndrew guiding the finger of her lover into her belly button as she fondles one of her breasts. Flesh abounds, falls, forms a landscape. She peers down the visage of her own body while withdrawing into her psyche. The penetration echoes Jesus guiding the finger of Thomas into his open wound.

Hold You Tight features a seated McAndrew as she embraces Stuart, her partner, who is standing. Her eyes are closed; she seems to be partaking of a world of sensual and spiritual sustenance — like she’s savoring the first taste of something she’s denied herself until now.

In Harvard Magazine, Lydialyle Gibson profiles the formerly incarcerated artist Jesse Krimes. In 2017, Krimes and Russell Craig co-founded Right of Return USA, which offers artist fellowships to other ex-prisoners. The article showcases the resourcefulness and determination of people who desperately need tools of self-expression, but are denied these materials by the carceral system:

Behind bars, art became his escape. Krimes studied philosophical texts—Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth—and developed new artistic techniques, foraging for whatever creative supplies he could find. He made a series of small portraits using newspaper mug shot images, playing cards, and thin slices of soap. His monumental opus, which took three years to produce, was a 40-foot mural made from prison-issue bedsheets, plastic spoons, New York Times clippings, and hair gel from the commissary. Because the artwork itself was contraband, Krimes had to smuggle it out by mail, piece by piece. “It was almost like sending out pieces of myself out of the prison walls,” he says in the film. After his release, he was able to assemble the bedsheets into a whole for the first time: a colorful meditation on heaven, hell, sin, redemption, and purgatory.

I just loved this flash fiction by Christopher Hyun, “A Taxonomy of Gay Animals,” in Electric Lit. It’s one of those clever pieces that uses humor and surrealism to capture an experience more accurately than literal explanation ever could.

In my world, we have an animal code. It goes way beyond the generic gay bears and gay otters. There are gay fish, gay hippos, and gay raccoons…

Like raccoons, owls are more active at night than during the day. Owls are always asking who. Who’s going to be there? Who’s paying? Who’s lost weight? Who’s more popular? And when you answer them, they act like they don’t care. They can turn their necks almost all the way around. They also eat mice.

You know that guy.

Since April is Autism Awareness Month, whatever the heck that means, I recommend poet Cyrée Jarelle Johnson’s 8-minute TED Talk about “autism neutrality”. Let’s stop scaremongering about autism and treat it as an equally valid cognitive style, with its own strengths and challenges.

After 500 years, the Catholic Church has disavowed the “doctrine of discovery,” which had encouraged European Christians to colonize and convert Indigenous people in Africa and the Americas. (Hat tip to Lakota People’s Law Project for the link.) In the UK newspaper The Globe and Mail, Kent McNeil calls out the “err, that was other people” tone of the Vatican’s course-correction. FYI, papal bulls are like official position papers from the Pope.

Though the Church claims that the bulls were “manipulated for political purposes by competing colonial powers in order to justify immoral acts against indigenous peoples that were carried out, at times, without opposition from ecclesiastical authorities,” the Vatican is wrong to depict itself as being so passive. The bulls empowered Portugal and Spain to further the Church’s Christianizing policy by forcibly acquiring the lands of Indigenous peoples and subjecting them to the control of the Catholic monarchs of these countries.

The 1455 bull Romanus Pontifex, which relates to West Africa, is one document mentioned in the statement. In that bull, Pope Nicholas V asserted that, as successor of St. Peter and vicar of Christ, he had a responsibility to Christianize the world. Toward this end, he authorized King Alphonso V of Portugal “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed,” seize their property, and “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”

The 1493 bull Inter Caetera, authorizing Spain’s colonization of the Americas, starts by asserting that the highest-ranking work of the pope is that “the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.” After praising King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella for recovering “Granada from the yoke of the Saracens” and for discovering lands previously unknown to Europeans, Pope Alexander VI’s decree purports to grant the Catholic monarchs “all rights, jurisdictions, and appurtenances, all islands and mainlands found and to be found, discovered and to be discovered,” west of a line in the Atlantic Ocean from pole to pole 100 leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands. The stated purpose of this grant is religious – namely, to spread the Christian faith and convert the inhabitants of these distant lands.

Colonization was not an accidental distortion of Church doctrine but an official policy. But I guess when you pretend to be infallible, it’s hard to repent.

March Links Roundup: Klaus Nomi Transition Goals

Serving 110% of that futuristic homosexual decadence, baby:

I discovered the late great Nomi via Kristine Langley Mahler’s March Fadness essay on Taco’s cover of “Puttin’ on the Ritz”. Nomi was a gay German countertenor who fused electronica and opera with space-age vaudeville effects. Sadly, he was one of the first known figures from the arts community to die of AIDS, in 1983. Here he is again in one of my favorite Bowie songs, “The Man Who Sold the World”.

This new Gucci ad starring Elliot Page, actress Julia Garner, and rapper ASAP Rocky as a happy throuple dispelled my last doubts about my upcoming top surgery.

LitHub reports on a recent open letter sent to the New York Times by 200+ contributors protesting the newspaper’s anti-transgender bias.

The letter, which presents a damning and deeply disquieting case against the Times‘ coverage, alleges that there has been “over 15,000 words of front⁠-⁠page Times coverage debating the propriety of medical care for trans children published in the last eight months alone.”

It goes on to reference several prominent Times op-eds and investigative features which have “treated gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources,” and which have actually been cited by Republican lawmakers in their efforts to pass anti-trans legislation.

Signees of the letter include dozens of prominent journalists and regular Times contributors, including Ed Yong, Lucy Sante, Roxane Gay, Rebecca Solnit, Carmen Maria Machado, Alexander Chee, and Jia Tolentino.

Read and sign the letter here, especially if you are a NYT subscriber. The Hill reports that the NYT responded that they “will not tolerate” criticism from their own reporters. Free speech, amirite?

Parapraxis is a high-quality new online journal of essays about psychoanalysis from a leftist social justice perspective. In their first issue, I especially liked McKenzie Wark’s “Dear Cis Analysts: A call for reparations”, which describes the anti-trans assumptions in the field’s foundational theories, and Nathan Rochelle Duford’s “What Can Men Want?” Ever seen those tweets making fun of right-wing masculinity posts: “Fellas, is it gay to eat pussy?” Well, Junior Soprano would say yes, and Duford explains why. In hyper-macho ideology, the need for intimacy is feminizing in itself, regardless of the object’s gender.

When authoritarians admit of desire at all (including the presumably traditional desire for a genital sexual relationship between a man and a woman), they open up the radical possibility of a sexuality that includes potentially anyone and everyone, any and every bodily or psychic satisfaction from pleasure to pain and whatever lies between or outside them. This also breaks open the possibility of new forms of relationality, of intimacy, of friendship—it presents us with potentialities for social relations that are different or other than the regressive traditionalist fantasy that authoritarians hold of a normal family in which all desire can be fulfilled. As a result, fascism requires a set of seemingly confused norms surrounding gendered sexualities that begin to expand to include all elements of life, not just genital sexuality…

…As Lacan puts it, “man’s desire is the desire of the Other.” It isn’t only desire for the other, but desire of what the other desires—when one desires, one desires recognition in and through the other’s desire. From this provocation, we arrive at a doubling of lack and insufficiency. Admitting of desire, to want at all, is also admitting to insufficiency and an insufficiency we will never be capable of fulfilling for ourselves. We can see here the organic connection between the idea that having sex with women is gay and the idea that men should not masturbate. In each case, sexual desire, especially in its fulfillment, demonstrates the absence of completeness and the presence of need. This need for the other (even in fantasy) is a fundamental form of weakness because it’s possible that it won’t be fulfilled, showing the insufficiency of the person in need. In both cases, sleeping with women and masturbating (what you may think of as typical straight-guy activities) are demonstrations of a failure of self-control. This is a true failure for the authoritarian because if we have to desire, at the very least we should be in control of it, rather than guided by it. Each of these seemingly normal activities is actually an admission of failure…

…[F]for the fascist (or protofascist) man, sexuality is experienced more as an attack on sexuality itself rather than an expression of desire. The erotics of authoritarian desire are thus short-circuited, routed instead toward hatred for what is outside, destruction of the body of the other, and brutality toward difference. The rejection of a desire for difference, as a rejection of desire, full stop, can be read through all kinds of authoritarian urges to expel, exclude, or annihilate.

In Columbia’s alumni magazine, meanwhile, journalist Heather Radke explains why Nature likes big butts and cannot lie:

 I hadn’t realized that we are the only animals that have butts—that this particular set of muscles is a uniquely human feature. I had always thought of humans as inferior runners and was taught that standing upright and using tools were the keys to human evolution. But Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard and the go-to guy on butts, believes that the unique way that humans run was actually an important factor in our survival. Humans are slower runners than four-legged animals, but thanks to the butt, we have something they do not—endurance. The gluteal muscles are the largest muscle group in the human body, and their strength and positioning are what allowed humans to keep running and chasing prey when other animals had to stop. That endurance gave humans a competitive advantage that became crucial to how we were able to survive and acquire the calories necessary to maintain and develop our brains.

Radke’s cultural history of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s favorite body part, Butts: A Backstory, is available from Simon & Schuster.

 

 

February Links Roundup: Sims and Saints

Happy February! Tomorrow is Imbolc, the midpoint between winter and summer. Of Celtic origin, the name means “in the belly of the Mother” because the seeds of spring are germinating in Mother Earth.

At Reiter’s Block, every day is trans awareness day. EA Games came out with an update to The Sims 4 yesterday to make my favorite game even queerer:

Top Surgery Scar

Under the same Body category, all players can find a Body Scars category with an option for Teen and older male Sims (masculine or feminine frame) to add a Top Surgery Scar to their Sims.

Binders and Shapewear

With this update, players can find two new assets in Create a Sim. Under the Tanks, in the Tops category, you will find a Binder top asset for your Teen and older Sims. In the Underwear category for Bottoms, there is a new shapewear asset for your Sims as well!

They’ve also added hearing aids and glucose monitors so you can create realistic characters with disabilities.

At Medium, Jude Doyle surveys transmasculine “Patron Saints”, from medieval monks assigned female at birth, to Pauli Murray, “the first Black person assigned female to be ordained to the Episcopalian priesthood.” Doyle notes that the cloistered life was far from a perfect refuge for gender outlaws. It’s good to know that people like us existed, and were considered holy, but we shouldn’t romanticize the compromises they had to make.

Escaping into the church was a privilege, and a gendered privilege at that; we know of dozens of transmasculine monks, but there are no transfeminine nuns on record. Trans girls who ran away from home, fleeing “bandits” or marriage or parents, did not have this option…

At Salon, feminist writer Amanda Marcotte is following the unfolding story of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s book bans.

[T]eachers in Manatee County, Florida were told that every book on their shelves was banned until otherwise notified. Failure to lock up all their books until they could be “vetted” by censors, teachers were warned, put them at risk of being prosecuted as felons.

The facts of this situation are straightforward: A Florida law signed by DeSantis requires that every book available to students “must be selected by a school district employee who holds a valid educational media specialist certificate,” in most cases, the school librarian. This may sound reasonable on its surface, but as the situation in Manatee County shows, in reality, it’s about creating a bottleneck preventing books from getting into the hands of students. Even more importantly, it’s about establishing the idea that books are inherently dangerous objects, to the degree that no student can be allowed to handle one without heavy-handed surveillance…

…In Duval [County], a principal warned teachers that allowing students to read books could result in felony prosecution.

Marcotte perfectly sums up the philosophy behind censorship:

Authoritarians hate reading for the same reason they hate sex, or any private behavior that allows people to experience thoughts and feelings outside of the authoritarian’s control. Learning to sit quietly and read by yourself is, for most people, the first step towards being able to sit with your own thoughts.

Go make Ron DeSantis mad! Read Electric Literature, a smart online journal edited by (gasp!) a Black trans woman, the fantastic Denne Michele Norris. Some pieces I’ve enjoyed recently include Benjamin Schaefer’s essay “We Need to Talk About Professional Jealousy” and [sarah] Cavar’s poem “My Autism Has a Mighty Appetite”.

In the December 2022 issue of The Baffler, Kristin Martin offers an unsettling exposé of Christian foster care influencers. “Wards of God” describes the latest iteration of the colonialist project to “rescue” children from marginalized communities and use them as props for white evangelism. Two-thirds of kids in foster care are there because social workers found parental “neglect,” a broad term that includes the effects of poverty on families with no abuse history. Instead of helping the whole family achieve stability, the foster care system is geared toward child removal. Foster parents receive payments while birth families have to meet draconian requirements to see their children again, let alone reclaim them. Most children characterized as “orphans” by Christians with a savior complex have living parents who were either struggling to meet their material needs, or deceived about the permanent nature of international adoption. “Scrolling through evangelical foster momfluencer accounts, with their testimonials about how God gets them through the hard seasons of care, and how they get too attached to the children in their homes, you can almost forget about the families on the other side: families that didn’t need to be policed and broken apart in the first place,” Martin concludes.

Hilarious gay advice columnist John Paul Brammer a/k/a Hola Papi! has excellent counsel for a queer writer stuck in a pearl-clutching peer group. Read his latest Substack post, “I Hate My Writing Group”. (Sorry Papi, I don’t know how to add the upside-down exclamation point in this blogging platform.)

Incuriosity is thriving at the moment. People seem incredibly proud of publicly renouncing critical thinking in favor of asserting a frustratingly simplistic “thing good or thing bad” mindset…

Worse yet, we’ve come to think of art—all art—as commercial goods that warrant this calculation of the “Moral Nutrition Facts” to ensure we’re not feeding anything “bad” to our brains. So we arrive at a place where art is constantly screaming its own virtues at us. All the rough edges get sanded away, and the lines between “good person” and “bad person” are boldly drawn with one of those ridiculously large Sharpies in mass-produced, infantilizing literature that reassures us that we are good people for putting it on our shelves.

Archives can be subversive. As DeSantis and his fellow authoritarians know, erasing a people’s history makes them isolated and vulnerable to political elimination. I recently had the privilege of touring the David Ruggles Center, an abolitionist history museum in Florence, MA. Their Black history library is available for on-site use only, since their all-volunteer staff can’t keep up with running a lending library. I was sad that all this knowledge never reaches the average middle school or high school classroom. Heck, I went to expensive private schools and colleges in liberal cities and didn’t learn most of the stuff I’m discovering from The 1619 Project on Hulu.

At Nursing Clio, a blog about social justice issues in gender and medicine, Amanda E. Strauss writes about being the director of a new archive about childhood sexual abuse at Brown University’s John Hay Library. The project was barely underway when COVID lockdown hit, Strauss’s father died, and she recovered her incest memories.

I disclosed my truth – “I am a childhood sexual abuse survivor” – one by one to the colleagues and students working most closely on the collections. I led discussions on ethics and spoke with the voice of a well-trained archivist, a confident leader, and that of a survivor. It was the practice of years that kept me going during these conversations as my vision tunneled and the room began to tilt. As during the early months of COVID, the careful boundaries and personas I created to partition my past from the present and my personal from the professional evaporated, and the ground shifted under my feet. I would later learn the clinical word for this phenomena – integration. I like to think of it as healing.

January Links Roundup: God’s Second Draft

Happy 2023, folks. My resolutions this year are to organize, downsize, and appreciate my resources.

Because even when I was a woman, I didn’t need this many handbags.

Caps for Sale!

R.L. Maizes’ satire piece at Electric Literature, “On the Eighth Day God Attended a Writing Workshop,” imagines giving feedback on Genesis:

Levi, flipping through pages: The beginning was a quite a slog. Does anyone honestly care about the firmament? (Workshop participants shake their heads no.) Maybe just start with the apple incident and give us information about the rest of creation when we need it.

Selena, looking up from her laptop: Is the book supposed to be nonfiction? Because I don’t get how a couple like Adam and Eve who are just starting out can afford to live in Eden when I can’t even make the rent on my Jackson Heights studio.

God: Can I just—

Jason: Sorry, Ya. The Author doesn’t get to talk during the discussion. You’ll have a chance later.

This fantastic erasure-poem from J I Kleinberg in the latest issue of DIAGRAM, “Joining the Academy: A Job-Match Game,” discovers gems in found text. Would you like to attend the “College of better odds” or visit “The Museum of jam”? Perhaps you are qualified to become a “professor of sweaty foot smell” or the “Prefect of Lips”.

Also in DIAGRAM 22.6, this set of illustrations from a 1975 ornithology textbook shows birds multi-tasking by eating a lizard during sex. Their facial expressions suggest they know you’re watching and they enjoy it.

In the Jan/Feb 2023 Harvard Magazine, Nancy Kathryn Walecki profiles happiness researcher Arthur Brooks.

The way Brooks sees it, happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. The “four pillars” that support that trifecta are family, faith, friends, and work.

“Faith is anything transcendent that helps you escape the boring sitcom that is your life,” he says. It could be a meditation practice, time in nature, religious faith, or even playing music (he recommends fugues by his favorite composer, Bach). Work, on the other hand, is anything that helps a person sustain herself and her family. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a passion, but it should be something that makes a person feel useful in the world…

…Americans have an inalienable right to pursue happiness, Brooks says, but are not always good at the pursuit. Instead of putting their energy toward building their four pillars, they chase the four idols: money, power, pleasure, and the admiration of others. “Mother Nature doesn’t care if you’re happy,” Brooks likes to say. “She cares if you reproduce. So, the things we crave are not always the things that are going to make us happy.”

…Most of Brooks’s [Harvard Business School] students have an incorrect definition of happiness when they start his “Leadership and Happiness” class, he says. They tell him happiness is a feeling. “That’s like saying that Thanksgiving dinner is the smell of your turkey. Happy feelings are evidence of happiness, not the whole thing,” he likes to say.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this December article from PsyPost reports that “People with unhappy childhoods are more likely to exhibit a fear of happiness, study finds”.

Aversion to happiness beliefs were stronger among people who were younger, more lonely, and more perfectionist. They were also more common among people who believed in collective happiness, believed in black magic or karma, and recalled an unhappy childhood.

“The results show that people from collectivistic cultures are more likely to show an aversion to happiness than people from individualistic cultures,” Joshanloo told PsyPost. “At the individual level, perfectionistic tendencies, loneliness, a childhood perceived as unhappy, belief in paranormal phenomena, and holding a collectivistic understanding of happiness are positively associated with aversion to happiness.”

Importantly, reporting an unhappy childhood predicted aversion to happiness even after controlling for current loneliness. As Joshanloo explains, “This suggests that traumatic experiences as a child may have a long-lasting impact on the person’s perception of happiness, independently of the individual’s satisfaction with current relationships in adulthood.”..

…“It is worth noting that happiness can be defined in different ways,” the researcher added. “People are far more likely to be averse to emotional definitions of happiness (based on pleasure, fun, and positive feelings) than virtue-based definitions (based on finding meaning in life and fulfillment).”

For myself, I am noticing a connection between my vast amounts of disorganized possessions and my trauma-habit of believing that fulfillment is exclusively located in the future. When you live in a constant state of emergency, pleasure can seem like an unaffordable luxury in the present. The affirmation “I have enough” risks reconciling you to an untenable situation. The line between equanimity and despair is hard to perceive.

Transgender historian Jules Gill-Peterson’s feature “Doctors Who?” in The Baffler (October 2022) finds present-day political lessons in the hidden history of transitioners who bypassed the medical gatekeepers.

Fifty years ago, a small group of women of color boarded a bus in Southern California bound for Tijuana, Mexico. They may or may not have stuck out in the crowd of Americans who crossed the border daily for the cheaper rates on goods and services. Once in Mexico, these women, who had journeyed all the way from San Francisco, walked into a pharmacy, bought out its entire stock of estrogen, and then carefully hid it inside their luggage. Back home, they made straight for the Tenderloin.

These women were trans—poor, many unhoused, and most sex workers who faced unending street harassment from the police, clients, and other Tenderloin residents. They were also the self-appointed doctors of their community. In hotel rooms, shared apartments, and sometimes the back bathrooms of quiet bars, they resold and administered the estrogen to their friends—other trans women who could pay in cash for injections. At the turn of the 1970s, this group of ad hoc smugglers and lay doctors were part of a vast and informal market in hormones that stretched along most of the West Coast…

…As the liberal principles of bodily autonomy and the right to privacy are eviscerated, the history of DIY transition offers one path out of the quagmire of zero-sum legal arguments and toward what might come after, or in the place of, state-sanctioned care.

Gill-Peterson describes how institutional trans health care “was explicitly designed to limit access to transition” to those patients who would pass as cisgender heterosexuals after treatment.

As feminists and trans activists struggle against the liquidation of the right to privacy, digging into the connections between DIY transition and DIY abortion is instructive. Both reject how medicalization and the state collude to restrict people’s autonomy. And DIY history suggests that one of the core lessons of trans feminism is that you can steal your body back from the state—not to hold it as private property, but because the state power that polices and punishes your body, just like the doctors who execute its arbitrary policies, is fundamentally illegitimate. DIY treats legitimacy as arising from the people whose lives are most affected by resources and care, not from the abstract power of the state or medical gatekeepers.

The trans liberation activists of the 1970s who dreamed of free clinics were part of a political movement that wanted to depathologize transition, so it was no longer treated as a mental illness or a medical condition that required diagnosis and supervision from clinicians with no vested interest in trans people’s happiness…

…DIY has envisioned freedom in starkly different terms. Instead of pathologizing people to grant them access to medical resources, or relying on the state’s flimsy blessing, activists imagined community-run clinics where people to whom transition matters most would support one another and distribute the care they needed. In that framework, both abortion and gender transition would be something like resources for personal and collective autonomy—means to a life characterized by abundance, not dramatized medical procedures contingent on bizarre criteria of deservingness.

 

Reiter’s Block Year in Review: 2022

A highly eventful year on the Block!

Made My Bones: My third full-length poetry collection, Made Man, was published in March by Little Red Tree, with cover and interior artwork by friend-of-the-Block Tom W. Taylor a/k/a The Poet Spiel. Solstice Lit Mag calls it “a comitragic, day-glo accented, culture-hopping, snort-inducing, gender-interrogating rollercoaster of a ride.” The American Library Association’s Rainbow Round Table says, “A mix of somber moments and charming wit, Reiter’s collection makes space for humor in the maelstrom of navigating gendered experiences.” Made Man was included in Q Spirit’s list of Top LGBTQ Christian Books for 2022 and was the subject of an essay on later-in-life transition by J Brooke at Electric Literature.

Persia Marie says, “The cover feels nice to rub my whiskers against.”

Reading from Made Man at the Brattleboro Literary Festival. Shirt by RSVLTS; suit by Hart Schaffner & Marx; body by Valley Medical Group Endocrinology.

Big Pussy: I turned my home office into a cat AirBnB for my friends’ fur babies when they go on vacation. The shy and regal Persia Marie is the child of artist and writer Jane Morrison. Check out her website for sublime Greek landscapes, caricatures, portraits and more. Ginger rascals Lorca and Rilke belong to author Michael Bondhus and poet/photographer Kevin Hinkle. If you have a reasonably well-behaved cat that you are willing to deliver and pick up in Northampton, get in touch with Uncle Jendi!

Ginny Sack Is Having a 90-Pound Mole Taken Off Her Ass: The impossible has become possible. In March I had a consultation for top surgery. My surgery date is March 23, 2023. As soon as I can lift my arms again, expect this blog to show way too many pictures of my pepperoni nipples.

My Crew: I celebrated my 50th birthday this July by meeting a dear friend in person for the first time. Friend-of-the-Block Richard Jackson, a/k/a the poet “Conway” from my Prison Letters series, visited us with his loving partner Vanity. We were devastated to learn that Van passed away in a motorcycle accident over Thanksgiving weekend.

Nostradamus and Notre Dame: I graduated from Year One of the Temple of Witchcraft Mystery School. Year Two began this past September. My spellcraft is going a lot better, now that I figured out that I was trying to light the incense holder disk instead of the cone.

Waste Management: Why throw anything out when you can glue it together? I made a lot of collage greeting cards this year.

John Ollom and I will be teaching a multimedia workshop at TransHealth Northampton on May 7. We’ll use collage, bodywork, improvised movement, and journaling to guide participants on a journey of gender self-discovery.

You Know Who Had an Arc? Noah: An embarrassment of riches for best books of the year, as I read three novels that would have been #1 on my list, not just for the year, but in general.

Tara Isabella Burton’s sapphic boarding-school novel The World Cannot Give shows idealistic teens getting their crushes all mixed up with their yearnings for transcendence. The author understands, and eventually the protagonist does too, that sincere passions with life-and-death stakes can coexist with a highly performative, aestheticized selfhood. In other words, you might say it’s a Catholic (or Anglican) book, as well as a very queer one, in that ritual and artifice are the container for authenticity rather than its opposite.

Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea is a hard-science thriller set in a reshaped geopolitical environment, where humankind’s aggressive harvesting of the oceans for protein may have put evolutionary pressure on octopuses to develop a civilization of comparable intelligence as ours. On a deeper level, it’s a dramatization of different philosophies of consciousness, in which the impossibility of truly seeing through another’s eyes becomes an invitation to rekindle empathy and wonder.

GennaRose Nethercott’s Thistlefoot imagines what would happen if Baba Yaga, the witch of Eastern European folklore (and patron saint of this blog), had American Jewish descendants who inherited her chicken-legged hut. The Yaga siblings–a puppeteer with the power to bring objects to life, and a street performer and thief who can uncannily imitate anyone he meets–find themselves charged with the task of laying the ghosts of the pogroms to rest. Don’t miss the chance to see Nethercott perform a puppet show dramatizing sections from her book. Join her mailing list to find out tour dates.

Bro time with Shane at the Big E!