I’m a published author!

Posted: March 30, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: coming out | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Hey, I have an essay in this anthology, Nonbinary:  Memoirs of Gender and Identity, which is finally being released by Columbia University Press, officially on April 9th, but you can go ahead and order your copies now!  This has been roughly 5 years in the making, and through that time, I went through lots of different edits and re-writes with Micah Rajunov (genderqueer.me), one of the two editors.  Both he and Scott Duane did tons of behind-the-scenes work to make this happen.  I just sat around, for the most part, and waited to see what was going to become of it!

The time-frame was so long that I pretty much forgot what I wrote.  And I was a little apprehensive to revisit it.  When I first heard news of the release date, I had a mixture of emotions:  excitement and pride, to be sure.  But also a little bit of hesitation, like, would I still identify with whatever the hell I had written?!  Would I be cool with everyone, friends and family, reading it?  I decided not to overthink it; when I got my copy in the mail, I posted this pic to my social media, and just let what was gonna happen, happen.  However, I still hadn’t read it!  I was stalling.  My spouse went ahead for me, and reported back, which helped me get used to the idea.  When I first tried, I couldn’t read it linearly – I just skipped around and tried to get the gist, get a sense before finding out all the details.  Then I went back and started with the anthology from the first contributor, and when I got to mine, I finally did read it all the way through.  Phew.  I’m almost done with the whole book now.  Lots of really amazing, diverse stories.

People started ordering their own copies.  My grandpa and my aunt have already read it and connected with me about it!  I ordered a dozen to give to friends, my therapist, my local Out Alliance’s library, etc.  It’s starting to feel real, and the excitement is growing, now that I can kinda wrap my head around it.

If you wanna order a copy, you can do so through Columbia directly, here:  Columbia University Press
Or, there’s always Amazon:  Amazon

Janitors in pop culture #3 / awesome film about a transwoman

Posted: November 4, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Janitorial work | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

I recently was at an LGBT film festival and specifically planned ahead to catch a film from Finland called Open Up To Me (Kerron Sinulle Kaiken).  If you want to see it, this blog post is going to contain details you might not want to read about in advance, just a heads up!

Super highly recommend this film.  It follows the life of Maarit, a transwoman, for a few months, starting at the point of her last appointment with her gender therapist – the tone of that first scene, the therapist’s farewell message, is:  now spread your wings and fly.  Maarit had been forced through a lot of sacrifices in the process of becoming who she is.  She is separated from her wife and estranged from her teenaged daughter (we get the sense the daughter is open and figuring this out for herself; it is the mother who is standing in the way.)  She has moved away from where she once lived and worked as a school social worker.  She now leads a lonely existence and works as a janitor within a huge office building.

open up to me film still

There are only two or three scenes where she is depicted at her work (and it’s just her coming and going.  Loading a van, pushing a cart full of supplies).  The story is not about that work, other than utilizing it as a plot device for somewhere she has landed and is unhappy about.  She (understandably) yearns to get back into her chosen profession of helping people as soon as possible.  She wants this so badly that she ends up posing as a therapist (through a series of misunderstandings) while on the job.

Which brings me to a reason I loved this film…  It falls back on some unpleasant tropes common to trans characters in the media, but it ends up twisting them and rising above those ideas, to portray Maarit as a very human, very real, complex, well… person.

Transperson as deceitful:  Although Maarit deceives someone about her profession (and she quickly comes clean), she never once is attempting to deceive anyone about her transgender status.  She is proud, self-assured, and upfront with those around her (on an as-needed basis), even in the face of speculation and slander, discrimination, and violence.

Transperson as hypersexual:  Maarit is not portrayed as a hypersexual person.  It is clear that she is looking for intimacy, emotional connections, and a long-term partner.  Instead, some of the characters around her are hypersexualizing her, and that seems more about them and their own issues, rather than who she actually is as a person.  The film makes this very clear.

Transperson as dangerous and/or tragic:  Maarit is in a very difficult place (there are other aspects of her life that have fallen apart.  I won’t give away every detail!) and there are certainly scenes where she is in over her head, where she is compromised, where she seems desperate.  It feels realistic – it very much seems that some choices she makes are due to (and only due to) being pushed so far into a corner, and she’s just trying to find her way back to where she can live her life.  Those choices are not about who she is, inherently.  It’s circumstantial.  Some of these scenes, although hard to watch, feel triumphant at the same time.  For example, at one point, she is attacked by an ex-lover.  She ends up punching him in the face and ending the attack.  Awesome.

I’m so glad LGBT film festivals exist – opportunities to get out there and see films I wouldn’t have heard about otherwise.  This year, I saw this one, and another trans-specific one (52 Tuesdays – sadly, I didn’t enjoy this one all that much.  It felt overly melodramatic, the characters didn’t feel believable.)  My partner and I have gone to other films over the years, and it’s interesting that it always seems like there’s films for men and films for women.  We’ve been to films before where we’re the only ones in the theater who are not cis-men (that’s an assumption, of course, but over and over again, it has been very much divided, and it is so bizarre to me.)  At these two films (which were both well attended), there was a very diverse cross-section.  I liked that.

Also, the film festival puts out an annual literary anthology, and this year’s theme was personal pronouns.  I submitted, and my piece was accepted!  I’m now officially published, in an actual book with an ISBN # and everything!!!
The piece was a re-working of these two blog posts:
While I was “out,” part 2 – partly out of the closet, fully out of the loop
While I was “out,” part 3 – coming back