A Dahl’s House

By now you’ve undoubtedly heard that for the first time, a survey shows that California voters favor marriage equality by a 51-42 percentage margin. The more significant thing is the demographic change that’s driving. Back in 1977, when the Field poll first posed the question, only 28 percent of Californians agreed. What’s changed in three decades? Several generations that have gone up seeing gays and lesbians in the media, and knowing them personally. Both youth and knowing someone who’s homosexual are both the strongest predictors of acceptance — and acceptance directly corolates with age: 68 percent of those 18 to 29 supported marriage equality, compared to only 36 percent of those 65 and older.

That said, if the initiative to change the state Constitution to ban same-sex marriage gets on November’s ballot it’s going to be a tough, nasty fight. (A different poll last week, found that 54 percent of registered support the initiative.) Already the fundies have taken out full-page ads in the local papers urging support for “traditional marriage.”

But the phrase itself — the fact that they need to distinguish it from plain old “marriage” — shows how they’re fighting what ultimately will be a losing battle.

My take-away from it all: visibility matters. Kids today see gays and lesbians in the media and in person. I’m not quite as optimistic as Jenny Boylan that you can’t hate someone who’s story you know, but the fundies are right to be freaking out over the increased public visibility of gays and lesbians. It has normalized what was once the unspeakable.

I realize that not every trans person — whether you’re transsexual, crossdresser, whatever — wants to be out or feels that they can be.  But think at least give it some thought. Even just being out in public helps people know we exist.

It’s 2:30 in the morning after a show. I’m wiped out and would love to head home, but my drag mother wants to get something to eat so we stop by an all-night sandwich joint on a seedy stretch of Market Street near City Hall. As we’re waiting for our food, I notice an sitting by the window, her long silver hair cascading over her shoulders.

“You ladies are so beautiful,” she says, and I go over to talk to her. She’s a bit spacey, but very sweet — and homeless, though you’d never guess it by looking at her; she’s obviously taken pains to keep herself well-groomed. I tell her that her hair is gorgeous.

We chat for a bit, she mentions that she won’t stay at the shelters. It’s obvious that she’s spending the night here because it’s one of the few safe places for her. She wants to know how she can break into show business like Nikki and I—she thinks that might be a good way to make a living; maybe she can do stand-up; maybe she can save up enough to find a place. I don’t have the heart to tell her that there’s no money in either drag or comedy. Let her dream a little.

Our take-out is ready. Nikki, who I know is broke herself at the moment, walks over and gives the woman some money and tells her to get a nice breakfast. I do the same. Then we walk out in the night, my mascara running.

Glad someone called him on it to his face. As I’ve said before, it’s time to retire “hot tranny mess.”

Siriano had another fun run-in with the evening’s host, Dirty Sexy Money’s transgendered star Candis Cayne.

Siriano was onstage and uttered his catchphrase “hot tranny mess.” Cayne came from backstage, my source says, and hissed, “I hope you aren’t talking about me.”

Siriano insisted he wasn’t, cooing, “You’re a hot tranny success!”

Contrast this with Dominique from “America’s Top Model.”

TVGuide.com: C’mon, you’re not at least a little sore about all the transvestite remarks you kept getting from the judges?

Dominique: Honestly, I took being called a transvestite as a compliment. I mean, transvestites are some of the most beautiful women in the world. They carry themselves sometimes better than most women. There’s so much grace, poise, and the makeup and hair are perfect.

Dominique, you are so hot tranny fabuliciousness.

I’ve always loved John Cusack, both as an actor and as someone not afraid to speak his mind, but this quote (in response to the question “Who are your heroes in real life?”) made my day:

Let’s go with Jesus. Not the gay-hating, war-making political tool of the right, but the outcast, subversive, supreme adept who preferred the freaks and lepers and despised and doomed to the rich and powerful. The man Garry Wills describes “with the future in his eyes … paradoxically calming and provoking,” and whom Flannery O’Connor saw as “the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of [one’s] mind.

During one of my first forays out in public while crossdressed, I was walking down the street in San Francisco when an extremely flamboyant gay man flounced up to me and shouted out, “Hey Mary, you’re looking fierce! Work it girlfriend, work it!” (Yes I still remember the exact words.) Now he probably thought I was extremely drab drag queen, since I was dressed the way an ordinary woman of my age would’ve been, and undoubtedly he meant well and was trying to be friendly. But I was absolutely mortified. It had taken close to three decades to work up the courage to go out of the house while crossdressed, and consequently up to that moment I’d been ecstatic that not only had I not been beaten to death by sticks, but that — although I was getting the occasional stare — for the most part people seemed not to notice the guy in the dress in their midst. That confidence was crushed in an instant. I fought back the tears and just tried to get the hell away from him as fast as possible.

Ironically, I’ve since discovered that it’s LGBT spaces, ones that usually thought of as “safe spaces,” where I’m most likely to get “read.” In part it’s because LGB are simply more aware of trans people, but I think a big part of it has to do with the fact that when it comes to how people think about “being out,” the LGB and T communities are like two nations divided by a common language (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde).

In the gay and lesbian communities it’s usually presumed that being out is a Good Thing, and anyone who isn’t is someone who’s quivering in the closet. At the extreme, anti-assimilationists condemn those who are “straight-acting” for not being visibly queer, and milder forms of this thinking are behind the disrepect bisexuals often get for supposedly being “unwilling to commit” and “closeted when convenient.” But in the T communities being “visibly out” has far different connotations. Over at the My Husband Betty forum, we’ve had a serious discussion about what we’ve half-jokingly called the “rules of engagement” — i.e. if someone sets off your transdar, do you greet them as one of the tribe? In other words, do you overtly or subtly try to see if they’re trans too. It’s an issue gays and lesbians faced during the long years of needing to be discrete, and they evolved numerous subtle ways to identify each other without the straight population knowing what was going on: whether it was wearing red ties, asking if someone was a friend of Dorothy or mentioning you’d read “The Well of Loneliness.” (Sometimes it wasn’t subtle. Crossdressing (in part or in full) to signal one’s homosexuality goes back at least as far as the “Molly houses” in the early 1700s.) All these were ways of trying to (safely) communicate to others who one really was.

Trans people have the same desire — but the difference is that we usually want to be seen as the gender we’re presenting ourselves. So for transsexuals being “visibly trans” means being seen as a trans woman or trans man, and for crossdressers it means being seen as a “guy in a dress,” rather than being simply being seen as women and men. “Passing” (or as I prefer to think of it: “blending in”) is something that most trans people — at least those who aren’t gender queer — have usually thought about a lot during some point in their life. In fact, some people obsess over it. (Ironically it’s often those who are most likely to blend in — those of us with bodies that fall far outside the statistical norms for the height and build of our desired genders end up just having to make our peace with that.)

Now there’s some very logical reasons for wanting to blend in. The first is one that LGB people are familiar with: safety. Being visibly gender variant means being a potential target, and not just from transphobes — homophobes don’t bother to inquire about my sexual orientation (If they would they’ve find out I prefer women.) The few times I’ve been harassed, people didn’t yell “tranny,” they yelled “faggot.” Plus, higher percentages of trans people are victims of hate crimes than the LGB people — at rates as high as 16 times the national average (a figure all the more striking because many jurisdictions still don’t report hate crimes against trans people) — so it is it any wonder we seek to avoid attention? Even if there’s not a safety issue, constantly being an object of curiosity can just be wearying. Sometimes I just want to have an ordinary, boring day.

Another big reason — one that lesbian and gays don’t experience — is how your identity is too often disrepected when you’re “visibly trans.” Transsexuals often are treated with double-standards when they’re perceived as as trans men and women. As Julia Serano talks about in her excellent book “Whipping Girl,” trans woman who act “too masculine” are accused of really being men (or at least of having “male energy”), and those who act “too feminine” are accused of aping women — “unenlightened” women at that. Likewise, it seems like the current fetishization of trans men (most famously by Margaret Cho, who’s bi) in some lesbian circles stems in part from trans men being perceived as deliciously masculine without the icky side-effects of being, well.. you know… actually men. (I can only imagine how these same folks doing the fetishizing would react if a similar disrepect was shown towards their own sexual identity as is shown in the implicit assumptions about trans men’s gender identity.) As a crossdresser, I can tell you that the reception I get in some lesbian circles can be downright chilly, while gay men just assume I’m one of the boys.

Finally, there’s a serious emotional component as well. I’d venture the most staight-acting “virtually normal” LGB people still would like to be do things such as be able to mention their partner when people ask about their weekend, or to be able to put their partners’ picture on the their desks. In other words, to be seen as the person they see themselves as. Trans people want that too. I see it close-hand with one of my best friends, who transitioned a few months ago and who’s thrilled that she’s met new friends who see her simply as another women. But when we’re “read,” we’re seen as not who we want others to see ourselves as — just as I was on the street corner — and that can be emotional devastating.

Now don’t get me wrong. These days I’m both regularly out in public, and fairly publicly out — most of my company knows I perform as drag queen. (Yes I went from fleeing attention to seeking to be the center of it — after those long years in the closet there’s something extremely liberating about that.) Some of my co-workers also know that I also crossdress off-stage to express a part of myself that society deems “feminine.” I’m on various online forums for trans people and I see how being closeted eats away at people — particularly the vast numbers of crossdressers (probably ten for every transsexual) who make up the “dark matter” of the trans spectrum. I dearly wish my peers could step free of that closet.

But it’s still tricky at times. For the reasons mentioned, the consensus over at My Husband Betty was that one not let on that you think someone might be trans, and even dropping hints that you might be trans (like gays and lesbians of yesteryear) could be problematic — since the only people who would get the hints would know that they set off your transdar, that they didn’t blend in. It’s also a widely-held belief in the trans communities that two trans people together are far more likely to get “read,” (and three trans people together even more so), so there’s an additional factor that the other person may react badly because of their fears about that. All of which is tragic in a way, because it leaves people isolated. It’s not for nothing that people who disappear from the trans scene after transition call it going “deep stealth” — and some of these folks who do quietly dip their toe back into the trans-world feel a fair amount of anxiety about their past being discovered, in part because they may not be out to their partners. These are problematic issues, and that’s something the trans communities need to deal with.

However, these “rules of engagement” are, for better or worse, the rules most of us intuitively play by, and they can be hard for LGB people to grasp — particularly since their own gender-bending (whether it’s being a full-time nelly or butch, or whether it’s just for play on Halloween or at a Pride parade) is often done in part as a statement about their being gay, lesbian or bisexual. Likewise, these rules are often misunderstood as being somehow ashamed of who we are, instead of recognized for what it is: just wanting to be seen as the person you see yourself as, and simply being able to live your life in peace. The difference for trans people is that not being “out” doesn’t inherently mean one is “closeted.”

Probably the best advice that came out of the discussion also was the simplest — if someone sets off your transdar, just approach them and get to know them the way you would with any other person. If they’re comfortable acknowledging to you that they’re trans and they feel it’s relevant, they’ll do so. If the guy on the street corner had complimented me on my outfit and asked me about my day in the way he would’ve done with someone who was born female, would I have guessed that he probably had read me too. Yeah, probably. But I would’ve gone on my way with a smile on my face instead of tears on my cheeks.

Someone once aptly described privilege as the luxury not to have to think about things. Like the way most men are blissfully unaware of the safety concerns that are reflexive for most women venturing out at night. In a far more minor way, I had a reminder last Friday about how being gender variant means not being able to take things for granted.

It was insanely hot for May here in the Bay Area, with record-breaking heat near 100 degrees. So it would’ve been nice to wear sandals to work because they would’ve been cooler than shoes and socks. One nice thing about working for a tech company is that the dress code is extremely casual and although a guy in sandals is a bit casual even in that environment, a lot of people were wearing shorts or sundresses that they wouldn’t normally have worn because it was so damn hot.

There was just one issue: I’ve got painted toenails.

Unlike a lot crossdressers who “underdress” I don’t wear nail polish because of the feminine symbolism, I wear because I like how it looks. To paraphrase (our patron saint) Eddie Izzard, it’s not women’s nail polish, it’s my nail polish. I guess in that regard I’m just a metrosexual gone too far.

Now most of the company knows I perform as a drag queen, and a smaller number number know that my presenting myself as a woman is more than just for stage, it’s also to express a part of myself that society deems “feminine.” So it wasn’t likely that my co-workers would freak out. Besides, my toes were an almost-sort-of-manly shade of bronze, and outside of work I’ve got no problem with walking around in sandals and shorts exposing my shaved legs and painted toenails.

But still…

There’s always the not knowing how people will react, and if nothing else, I had a lot to do that day and just didn’t feel like dealing with the conversations that might result. So I put on my shoes and went to work. It’s trivial in the scheme of things I know. But it’s another one of those subtle remainders about how I’ve forfeited my “straight” card now that I’m embraced being a gender variant guy.

I’d meant to get caught up on a number things I’d been meaning to post about… but it was close to 100 degrees today — and like a lot of folks in the Bay Area, I don’t have A/C. Now usually there’s only a 2-3 weeks out of the year where it’s uncomfortable… but those days can really suck.

The good news is that the installing soffit and roof vents, plus replacing the skylights so that they open now does seem to be making a big difference: the house is about 10-15 degrees cooler than the outside temperature and cools down much faster at night, when things cool down rapidly. But it still would be nice to install central air (although not A/C) since having a fan to move air around inside the house would make a big difference, plus the air filter would be better for my allergies compared to throwing open the windows.

My good friend Erica was supposed to be in town on Wednesday — and was finally got to see me perform, which she’s wanted to for ages. But the airlines had other ideas, leaving her stranded one day, in turn forced her to rejigger the rest of her business trip.

It seems like whenever LGBT people try to get anti-discrimination laws passed, the religious bigots invariably trot out the argument that we’re somehow seeking “special rights.” So my hypocrisy alarm went off when I heard that a conservative legal-advocacy group is looking for a church willing to be a test case to challenge IRS tax laws against using the pulpit to endorse political candidates. Now the thing is, churches are perfectly free to engage in pulpit partisanship — as long as they’re willing to give up the exemptions from taxes that the rest of us pay. (A principle even Reagan-appointee courts have upheld.) So who exactly is seeking “special rights”?

While we’re on the subject… It’s not uncommon for religious bigots posing as “reasonable people” to argue that protections for LGBT people are “different” (i.e. less legitimate) than those against racial protections because LGBT people supposedly chose their “lifestyle,” as the bigots usually put it. Sadly it’s too-often an argument put forth by bigoted people of color.

Sadly too, the “it’s not choice” argument we in the LGBT communities too often buy into ourselves, sometimes invoking contorted personal histories to reassure ourselves and others that “it’s not my fault” that I’m [insert descriptor here].” Now before everyone starts firing up the flamethrowers, I do think both sex/gender identity and sexual orientation can — and usually do have — a biological component; and I recognize that the “born that way” argument is in part driven by the way U.S. civil rights law is written — since it generally (and I’ll come back to that point in a minute) holds that innate characteristics are protected and personal choices aren’t. But the thing is, both sex/gender identity and sexual orientation are spectrums — even though our society generally views them as binaries — and while there’s a hard-wired aspect about where one falls on that spectrum, biology isn’t destiny. Which is why the “it’s not a choice” argument always has an Achilles Heel: there’s just too many examples of people choosing to act in ways contrary to their “nature” — from “political lesbians” (some of whom weren’t necessarily sexually attracted to women) to men who engage is same-sex act when they aren’t women available (in prison, among immigrant populations, etc.) to people who choose to remain closeted about their sex/gender identity and/or sexual orientation (even if they pay a heavy emotional cost for doing so).

So we’d be a lot more honest if we acknowledge that choice can play a role in how one’s sex/gender identity and sexual orientation gets expressed. But religion is a choice too and we still see fit to protect people from religious discrimination. Now the religious bigots in the United States would point out that’s because those protections are written into the Constitution. And they’re right. In fact protections against religious discrimination predate by decades (if not centuries) protections against discrimination based on race, sex, pregnancy, national origins, disability or age. But the common thread among all of these is that they involve aspects that are so central to who someone is that we consider them worthy of protection.

If the Framers were willing to protect a “chosen” part of one’s core identity, why shouldn’t we?

Those darn kids… They make me want to cry (in a good way).

It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision that drove Brewster High School student Michael Loscalzo to go to school dressed as a girl.

“Years of taking judgment made me decide to stick up for myself,” said Loscalzo, 17. “All my life, people either said I was weird or that I was gay.”

The Brewster High School sophomore recently revealed his secret about his desire to become a woman by going to class wearing makeup and feminine attire. His choice has reverberated through the halls.

Loscalzo said school officials warned him Friday that he could be suspended if he continued to cross-dress, a claim that administrators denied yesterday.

In a show of support, several students have organized an “Equality Protest” this week, by showing up to school dressed in garments of the opposite sex.

Yesterday, about a dozen teens gathered at a local deli with boys wearing skirts, wigs and dresses and girls donning caps, cargo pants and T-shirts. They said about 60 students cross-dressed yesterday, though school officials said the number was far less.

“We want Mike to feel more comfortable in his surroundings,” said senior Shannon Dodd, 18, one of the organizers. “We’re letting the student body know that it’s OK to dress this way.”…