2010 My Year in Queer & Feminist Culture

• Between Two Worlds play by Emily Nepon
• Shuga Shack performances & party hosted by Khane Kutzwell at Littlefield in Brooklyn
• MIX screening Word is Out at Anthology Film Archives
• MEN concert
• QT: Queer book reading at Dixon Place with Sarah Schulman and Charles Rice-Gonzalez
• Barbara Hammer book launch at the Brooklyn Museum
• Speaking of Femme zine reading with Femme Family NYC at Bluestockings
• Catherine Opie Girlfriends photography show at the Gladstone Gallery
• Three Generations of Feminism panel at the Brooklyn Museum
• MIX screening Home at BAAD! in the Bronx
• MIX screening Creepy Dirty Girlie at The Flickering Light in Mt. Airy
• Barbe Bleu (Blue Beard) dir. Catherine Breillat screening at IFC
• Portrait of Jason dir. Shirley Clarke Queer/Art/Film screening at IFC
• Born in Flames dir. Lizzie Borden Queer/Art/Film screening at IFC
• Maya Deren’s Legacy: Women and Experimental Film screenings at MOMA featuring work by Maya Deren, Barbara Hammer, Su Friedrich, Carolee Schneeman (attended 3 screenings)
• Vaginal Davis is Speaking from the Diaphragm performance/chat variety show (attended 3 performances)
• The Owls screening at New Fest
• Warhol exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum
• Antigone is Trans play by Theater Transgression
• Escape to Uranus by IT/EQ at BAAD! Fashion show and performance
• Roadkill Confidential play by Sheila Callaghan
• ACT UP Oral History Project at White Columns Gallery
• Blowhole by J. Delecave performance/feedback session at Circus Amok studio
• Barbara Hammer Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (attended 8 screenings)
• BUTCH Voices conference
• A Proposition: Beyond the Moon is Lesbos and other tales of queer time artist talk at the New Museum with Sharon Hayes and Pauline Boudry
• Community Action Center by AK Burns & AL Steiner art gallery show and film screening
• Click and Drag Rob Roth photography gallery show
• Justin Bond Re: Galli Blond, a Sissy Fix musical/play at the Kitchen
• SKIN gallery show, performance and film screening
• MIX 23 Queer Experimental Film Festival at Theater for the New City. (17 film screenings, plus performances, installations and community space)
• Landscape and the Fall of Icarus by Samuel Topiary, multi-media performance at Abrons Art Center
• CHERYL performance, dance and video art group at the Brooklyn Museum
• ART+ meeting to plan protest against censorship of David Wojnarowicz by the Smithsonian and religious and political right.
• Demonstration against censorship, started at the Metropolitan, marched to Cooper Hewitt
• Untitled Feminist Multimedia Technology Show dance/performance/play by Young Jean Lee at the New Museum

Justin Bond and the House of Whimsy: Re:Galli Blonde (A Sissy Fix)

The historical imagination of a myth of how queer people were cast out, became cursed, for helping a goddess of light escape from the subjugation of her grieving sister. Cursed to be strangers in our own families, etc. We were watching the re-enactment of our downfall without even realizing it... until it happened. Totally fucking brilliant.

Loved the ritual of sugar and spice, and snakes and puppy dog tails. And Barbie’s head.
Loved the ritual of the disco, the invocation of the houses of NYC, the re-imagined vogue.
Loved Pearl Lin’s sword dance.
Loved the skeleton castration scene.
Loved the kiddie pool communion ritual preceded by the sexiest dance ever.
Loved the dancing, set, music and costumes.

At the end of the mythological re-enactment was a healing ceremony where our pains were confessed and we were healed... it made me want to run up to the stage and get healed too! The people being healed were the actors in the play but their confessions of pain freed them from character as they described their personal experiences of discrimination, rejection, shunning and violence. I wanted Justin Bond to heal me. I wanted to confess how the spectre of the predatory lesbian has always kept me from touching and complimenting women, from expressing any form of admiration or from speaking any depth of love. It blocks me from acting on my desires. It chokes down the least impulse of tenderness and it keeps my hands strictly to myself. I fight back every chance I get. Sometimes I even win. It gets larger, it gets smaller, but it never goes away.

The confessional ritual contained a repeated litany of femme-phobia, homophobia, trans-phobia. Why not name misogyny? Or sexism? In the simplest of terms, part of the reason it is so bad to be a feminine man or trans woman or anywhere on the feminine spectrum is because it is bad to be a woman, period, and a person called male at birth who behaves in a way that is associated with women, well, that's demeaning. Patriarchy was named by one of the confessors, and patriarchy is a big daddy of the -isms that were named. A body with many heads. But I am still stumped over the absence of the word "sexism." Hatred of femininity is misogyny, so coining a new word here seems too small and a failure to make an easy connection.

Is it too much to expect queers to connect the dots between the hatred of effeminacy and the hatred of women? And if it is, isn’t that a problem for our movement? Feminism shouldn’t be news to queer people, and actually I imagine that everyone in the show would agree. The show was an awesome, gender-bending, beautiful blessing and really tapped the vein of all the is magical in our community, our movement, our history and our identity. The failure to articulate the link between women’s oppression and gay oppression created a conspicuous absence in an otherwise awesome work of art.

Generations

Generations. 2010. Barbara Hammer & Gina Carducci. Inspired by Shirley Clarke’s film Bridges Go Round (1953), Hammer and Carducci use two Bolex cameras to capture the final days of Coney Island’s Astroland amusement park. Generations is playing at MIX 23 NY Queer Experimental Film Festival on November 12, 7 PM

The first time I met Barbara Hammer was at CUNY’s 2009-2010 Kessler Lecture. Sarah Schulman was delivering a talk as the recipient of the Kessler award for making a substantial contribution to the field of queer studies. I was attending by myself, and apparently so was Barbara. When she came in, I recognized her and smiled, so she came over and sat with me despite the fact we had never met. The lecture was fabulous, a mind-blowing break from conventional thinking about homophobia that was disorienting in its radical reframing of the meaning of queer community.

The first time I met Gina Carducci was a few years earlier on March 21, 2007 at the Nobody Passes book launch event at Bluestockings, a feminist lefty book store/info shop in the Lower East Side. I was reading an excerpt from “The End of Genderqueer,” something I wrote about the tension between social and revolutionary purposes in identity poltics and queer community building. The reading was my big atheist religious moment, to stand and read in the same very same place where so many of my personal heroes have stood and read. Though I’ve been told no one could tell, my knees were shaking so hard I feared I might fall over. I met Kate Bornstein after the Q&A, and got to tell her how profoundly her writing had affected me. Later that night I met Gina through the good graces of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore.

A film maker looks at a film maker looking through a camera at a spectator/subject...

Generations is a film about making a film.  Two queer film makers collaborate to create an experimental film that shows the process of them shooting and working with the film itself.  We see each filmmaker with her Bolex, and we see the equipment used in developing and printing. We see them filming each other on the subway, at Coney Island, and in the film lab; some images are beautifully saturated with color and manipulated into abstraction, some are relatively straightforward and contemplative. But images are only the beginning of the elaborate parallel meanings and connections in Generations.

When Barbara Hammer and Gina Carducci agreed to make a film together, they planned for a highly structured creative process. They decided on Astro Land at Coney Island as their location and shot the footage together, each with her own 16mm camera. Each artist started with the complete footage but edited privately, neither seeing the other’s work until it was complete. The two complete works were joined into a single film, one after the other, and premiered at the MoMA Barbara Hammer retrospective.  Each of these facts about the process has a bearing on the final film and its meaning, as does the fact that Hammer’s retrospective opened with a screening that featured four films made in the spirit of learning and collaborating with other women. Hammer lives her feminism, so clearly that even her retrospective, traditionally a celebration of an individual artist, began by sharing the spotlight with other women.

Coney Island is in a beautiful state of disrepair that recalls its history as one of this country’s original sites of recreation when recreation was a new concept. Coney Island always seems to be in jeopardy of either destruction or renovation, either of which would signify an ending to what the place is and has been. Film itself is a medium that is used less and less. Both the subject matter and the medium speak to mortality, the passage of things we hold dear, their beauty is in jeopardy of being lost.

Barbara Hammer is the creator of over 80 films.  Her work has taught queer audiences about experimental film and experimental film audience about the politics of queer sexuality.  Not only have Hammer’s films captured lesbian feminism and culture from the 1970s to the present, in a very real way her films have contributed to the creation of that culture.  Gina Carducci is a radical queer filmmaker who hadn't made a film for five years when she met Barbara. Carducci works in a film lab but her own camera equipment was idly stored in various places at the time. Clearly this was not to be a collaboration of equals, but a mentor-student relationship. Mentoring is woefully absent in the queer community, perhaps because it is so perilous, perhaps because we have been too busy in the struggle to make its cultivation a priority. Mentoring between queer women needs to be handled carefully, since we sustain some wear and tear from constantly coming up against sexist and homophobic power dynamics. Our experiences with being excluded from power make it difficult for us to make the imbalance of a traditional mentor-student relationship work well. It is hard to receive guidance or worse yet, advice; it is also hard to take up our power and guide others without being stifled by self-doubt and second thoughts.

An innovative idea to undermine this traditional power dynamic was to shoot the film together and edit separately. This idea doesn’t make the teacher and student equal, nor does it seek to.  But it does undermine the possibility of Hammer exercising undue influence while also creating the opportunity for Carducci to get back into film making, get creative, and essentially go to town stylistically while knowing her work would be seen by an experimental film audience at MoMA. The rules of their process freed Carducci from the potential perception that being mentored by Hammer made her work derivative, while simultaneously allowing Hammer to mentor somebody less than half her age without overshadowing and thereby authentically pass along some of her wisdom. This working agreement was still to be a mentor-student relationship, but not fall prey to the inherent inequity in that dynamic. The collaborative process they came up with subverts the traditional mentor-student relationship without denying that it exists, but rather by taking it consciously and deliberately into account.

Carducci edited her film on a flatbed editor, a mechanical process involving literally cutting and splicing film. Hammer opted to scan the film then edit on a computer. Here the elder shows us the potential of the new, and the younger remains loyal to the structures and demands of the old. Each works with the footage alone, on her own terms, in her own style, and with her own priorities present. The individual pieces were joined together to form one continuous whole, with one showing after the other. It is difficult to see where one ends and the other begins. Gina told me up front that her film was first, but I’m pretty sure I would have been able to tell that from the formal structure of Gina’s work and the playful tone of Barbara’s. And with a nod to Bridges Go Round, the soundtrack is very different in each part of the film.

The early portion of the film has a visual pattern of numbers from the carousel and repeated safety instructions in the soundtrack. There is a level of abstraction that seduces the viewer into a fascination with details, with close shots of Barbara’s hands winding the Bolex or repetitive images of the old signs that linger around the changing Coney Island. In her portion of the film, Gina includes Barbara voicing the advice to shoot more from the “emotional body” and less from the “measuring mind,” and she begins and ends with images of Barbara.

The latter portion of the film exhibits some of my favorite elements of lesbian culture with footage of the two filmmakers beneath the boardwalk, each hiding behind columns trying to sneak footage of the other. There is simply no pretense of coolness. There is Barbara Hammer sticking two fingers up behind Gina’s head just to make some careless mischief. I admire her consistent lack of irony and utter refusal to be detached or distant from her subject matter. In fact, I had the pleasure of admiring her joyful presence in her films through out the screenings I attended at the MoMA retrospective. At one of the Q&A sessions Barbara mentioned that the editor pleasures herself in what she chooses to include in her film. In her half of the film, the editor is surely full of pleasure with her love of the beach, the camera, and Gina.

In the pleasure and admiration each film maker shows in her choice of images of the other, Generations touches on the radical potential of queer love.  On screen, the filmmakers present as artists at large in the world, but also in their own smaller world of queer friendship. In my imagination of our community, “queer friends” are the opposite of “just friends.” Queer friends are not necessarily lovers yet they retain all their love and sexuality in relationship to one another. In queer frendship there is a grounding recognition of all that we share. It is moving to see a queer friendship across ages documented here, especially at a time when the only queer relationships that seem to reach the public eye are those that aspire to heteronormativity.  (Generations comes chronologically on the heels of a particularly vile mainstream movie about wealthy white married lesbians and their sperm donor, from a lesbian director who is so deluded about the meaning of representation that she claims this portrayal is apolitical.)

And finally as the title suggests, Generations is about generating culture: how we make a culture for ourselves, how we create a legacy and how we express our values.  How do queer people pass along our culture when it is never along bloodlines? The film literally shows its own creation, the filming, the work in the lab, the friendship. The making of this film is a political action in that it is preserving queer culture, in particular, our fabulously different friendships. I totally enjoyed witnessing this difference, this homo/mentor/student/friend relationship full of creativity and love. It reminded me of how much I appreciate the precious utopian moments of interconnection in my own life, like back at that lecture and at the bookstore. The Hammer retrospective at MoMA was overflowing with such moments, with utopian imaginings and deep connections between art, community and the emotional body. Generations invites us to pause and actually feel the meaning of our relationships and legacies.

“Big Mom sat in her rocking chair, measuring time with her back and forth, back and forth, back and forth there on the Spokane Indian Reservation. She sang a protection song, so none of the Indians, not one, would forget who they are.”
-- Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues

BUTCH Voices

The mission of BUTCH Voices is to enhance and sustain the well-being of all women, female-bodied, and trans-identified individuals who are masculine of center.  We achieve this by providing programs that build community, positive visibility and empower us to advocate for our whole selves inclusive of and beyond our gender identity and sexual orientation.

BUTCH Voices held a one-day regional conference here in NYC on September 25, 2010 and I made it for part of the day and was glad I did. With consideration to the masculine-of-center theme, this was one of the most successfully diverse queer conferences I have ever been to, particularly in terms of age and race. It was totally heartening to see young and old queers of various races coming together to talk about some deep concerns about our own survival, existence, well-being and flourishing. It was set up as a healing space, less about our gender and sexual politics and more about coming forward with the fullness of all we have learned... and acknowledging all of our injuries and really communing with others. Being seen and seeing other butches.

The climate of the conference was one of thoughtfulness, consideration and care. Clearly a lot of planning went into every little thing! From hosting the conference in a physical space that belongs to queer community advocacy groups to taking steps to make it affordable to the idea of a collective keynote. Even the home-made snacks that were on hand all contributed to a sense of welcome. I think it’s safe to say that feeling welcome is one of our community’s heavy trigger issues and has been the demise of other conferences. Not this one. The organizers made sure and the warmth was undeniable.

One of the workshops I attended was entitled Doing Relationships with Emotional Armor: For Stones and our Partners.  We sat in a circle and facilitator Corey Alexander led us through a bunch of increasingly challenging introspective exercises, including a list of common and all-too-familiar ways emotional armor can manifest. Here were people who wanted to walk the complicated and challenging line where we do not pathologize emotional hardness but we simultaneously recognize how this hardness, this armor, gets in the way of the intimacy we need. It was refreshing that the workshop was designed to respect where each of us was at, rather than move us someplace else. It was really about self awareness. Corey took some time to acknowledge how and why we create emotional hardness and distance in the first place. Dismantling my junky old personal armor has been a personal project of mine for a good 7 years or so, back from the time when it started to outlive its usefulness. It was good to remember the usefulness, to remember something cool about this thing I usually consider at best suffocating and more often soul crushing. It got there for a reason, now it's getting taken apart for a reason too.

A spontaneous group discussion was an exciting break with my prior experience of genderqueer spaces: Responsible Masculinity. This was not on the original program but the programmers wisely left space for people to create the conversations that mattered most to them, knowing some topics are always unforeseen. A few folks simply announced they were adding this topic. When the time came, we overflowed the room that had been reserved for spontaneous conversation. We moved to another open area, sat in a circle, and I counted 42 people who were eager to discuss misogyny, sexism and competition among masculine of center queers. I have been waiting a very very very very long time to sit in such a group and it felt so satisfying just to look at peoples’ faces. Some great insights were voiced about the damage caused by rigidity in our gender expectations of ourselves and others, and the perils of trying to enforce our own ideas of what butch is onto other butches.

A few folks in the Responsible Masculinity conversation got in to talking about their mistakes and it seemed very cathartic for them. At times I felt ill at ease with the comfort with which people expressed their previous misconceptions. There is a place for confessions, but I am not sure the conference was it. This was where the therapeutic atmosphere crossed a line for me, I didn’t actually want it to be a safe space for somebody to say they used to hate femmes or note how they used to believe femmes were not legitimately queerly gendered. Putting it in the past tense doesn’t make it less painful for others to hear about, and as cathartic as it might have felt to confess, I don’t want that stinky turd on my floor. Maybe the person who confessed that they used to hate femmes is reading this right now. Maybe they are thinking they were owning up to their mistakes, not just dumping them. Maybe it was a little bit of both. But if it was painful for me to hear I don’t imagine it was a high point of the conference for the femmes in the room. Community building is messy, messy work and you need to make room for mistakes. Sometimes we mirror the sexism we intend to take up. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like we can have a masculinity conversation without awkward and strained references to opening doors and picking up checks, either. Just got to make some more room, make some room for this messy work.

At the end of the discussion there were some deep conclusions about the need for mentoring in our community, the need to respect each other and not assess each other, and the impact that our all-too-frequent failure to love each other has on our own psyches. One of my favorite comments was that we need to recognize and greet each other, even on the street and subway, rather than looking away like we often do. The fact that this conversation happened at all was a breath of fresh air and I am grateful I had the opportunity to be a part of it.

But the best thing about BUTCH Voices was the incredible potential and palpable excitement in the air. The organizers actualized their vision of a safe, inclusive community where masculine types with divergent identities could feel welcome and give voice to the issues that matter to us, and this was hopefully just the first of these conferences to be held in NYC. What was most encouraging was the clarity of the feminist frame surrounding the day. We were there to support, encourage, affirm and heal. We all spend enough time fighting the good fight, it was really powerful to regroup and gather some energy.

Number 19

One evening I started to develop intense pain on the left side of my jaw. I went to bed hoping I could sleep it off and woke up needing to see the dentist immediately. He took some x-rays and could not find anything wrong. He tapped on individual teeth with various instruments but everything hurt. He asked me if anything happened, if I fell or anything hit me in the face. Nothing like that happened. The dentist thought maybe it was just an infection so I got some antibiotics and hoped for the best.

A couple days later, I was back. Still no sign of tooth decay, and nothing wrong on the x-ray. My dentist sent me for a second opinion, to a specialist. I went to the specialist's office by the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge and she took an x-ray and examined my mouth. She said #19 was cracked and asked me if anything happened, if I got hit in the mouth or got into an accident or anything. I said no. She said, "Even a long time ago? Even when you were a little kid?"

Well, yeah, when I was little, my brother punched me in the face. But that must have been something like 25 years ago at this point. Was it on the left side? Fortunately fist fighting was not a regular occurrence, so I remember it clearly. I had my back against the inside of the front door of the house. My brother is left-handed, and I blocked 3 predictable lefts in a row, but he surprised me with a right to the jaw. That would be my left side. He is seven years older than me. I must have been around 10 or 12 years old at the most. I remember not feeling anything. My mom was there. She took me for a walk. She didn't prevent it from happening and she didn't discuss it with me afterward. We left my brother at home and went for a walk.

At some point during that walk I realized my mouth was throbbing. I didn't say anything. There was no doctor or dentist visit. My mom, brother and I acted as if it never happened. The privacy of the patriarchal household allows for an infinite number of atrocious events to go unseen and unregulated. Often I am sincerely grateful that things never got worse than they were, because there was absolutely nothing stopping them from escalating. The possibility was always there.

The second opinion dentist said I needed a root canal and more likely an extraction. She said some other things that didn’t register after the word "extraction," and put an x-ray into an envelope for me to bring back to my dentist. So I wandered out of her office back into Chinatown, thinking about all this personal history.  My own dentist couldn’t see me immediately, so I had some time to spare for walking and thinking. I walked further downtown to my dentist, whose office is near City Hall, and he still felt reluctant to drill because the x-ray didn't actually show anything. He said once we open the tooth, there is no turning back, and he couldn’t live with himself if he opened a live tooth. (Really, Dr. Chen is a great dentist and quite a perfectionist.) But after some consideration, we it was root canal time.

Drilling down, he found that the tooth was completely dead inside and had been for a very long time. When I got punched, #19 cracked down the center from front to back, which is why the crack didn't show on the x-ray. My dentist explained that when we are young, the body is very resilient. "Your tooth was broken, and your body created a seal around it. First the damage was contained and then the tooth died. It was still functional until getting this infection." I am convinced the infection happened now because at age 36 I finally have sufficient strength to allow this injury to see the light of day. The tooth had to be literally opened up and exposed in order to be repaired. So I have to open up too and acknowledge what happened. Christopher punched me in the face hard enough to break a tooth.

I learned that a root canal is a process and not a single procedure, so I was walking around for about a month with this old injury opened wide.  The dentist would check about once a week for whether the infection had cleared, each time putting some antibiotic powder into the drilled out tooth and covering it up with a bitter wax barrier.  Finally when the infection was gone, he sealed up the roots and the top of the tooth with care that the seal hold the two halves together. I’m almost grateful that I had to go around for a while, conscious of this opening, part of a history that needs to see the light of day in order to heal properly.  It’s still in question as to whether this tooth will last long enough to get a crown or whether it will eventually need to be extracted, but knock on wood, it’s doing pretty well right now.

When I told this story to my team at work, somebody asked light-heartedly if I was going to call my brother. I responded that he is in a residential mental institution. This is accurate but not a response to her question. The real response is that I won’t call because I no longer have a relationship with him. If he were out in the world today, I would similarly choose not to have any relationship with him, and in fact take measures to prevent him from getting my contact information. It was only when I was younger and living with my parents that I had no choice in the matter.  When I was in my early teens, him being institutionalized relieved me of the burden of having any relationship with my brother. I could attribute the lack of relationship to being institutionalized. But at this point it is my decision and I know it is the right one. I don’t need the mental institution as an excuse, and I don’t constantly worry about him potentially being released the way I did during his early years there.

My brother was hospitalized a number of times through out my childhood. Each time he was discharged from the mental hospital after a short stay, we didn’t talk about it.  He would be gone for maybe one or two weeks and my mom and dad and I acted as if nothing had happened when he got back.  I didn't get any explanation for why he was there and I didn't know what treatment he was getting and I didn't know what was expected to change as a result of the hospitalization. I heard terms like “brain damage, learning disability, manic depression.” Somehow I knew I wasn’t supposed to ask. There were always some topics that were taboo.

After these periodic hospitalizations, no one asked my brother what it was like and no one said welcome back. Nothing marked the event or encouraged any improvements in his mental health, nothing acknowledged what he experienced or ostensibly got out of the psychiatric care he was getting, nothing changed in anyone’s behavior or relationship to him. So surprise, his mental health did not improve. I only remember a sense of relief when he was gone. Years later, after he was gone and my mother was herself hospitalized for depression it was the same pattern again, no welcome home, nothing discussed.  But this time we met with the doctor and he said we should be “supportive.” I don’t think we knew what that word meant.  I was a teenager and honestly did not know what it looked, felt or smelled like to be supportive. I was literally puzzled over that word.

It’s not that I think talking about my brother or mom’s mental health would have made them better or would have made my life better. But I do believe banning talk of them made things worse. As a kid, I wanted to bring stuff up all the time but was threatened with trips to the psychiatrist myself whenever I tried. So I became very adverse to bringing up problems directly or asking for what I need in relationships, and this aversion kept me out of the psychiatrist’s office and kept me on the self-styled “sane” side of the family with my father.  This so-called sanity was characterized by silence, isolation and rugged individualism, all qualities associated with conventional masculinity. I became the strong/silent type, an unhealthy archetype if there ever was one.

The reluctance to speak came with me when I moved away from my parents.  And it became a strong contributing factor in two subsequent relational train wrecks: First when my ex-girlfriend brought a straight white monogamous male into our queer poly household and I did not take up the fact that his values and behavior were totally out of sync with the vision for our house. Second when she started to demonstrate values and behaviors herself that were in direct conflict with what was once our shared vision of queer utopian kindness, honesty and responsibility. Both times I waited until the situation was a total crisis to clearly and directly set limits and expectations for how I want my life to run, specifically for the way people can and cannot behave towards me. Since I grew up with somebody whose behavior was profoundly unacceptable, and my desire for things to be different was pathologized, it is no surprise that part of me believed I should just tough out other people’s mendacity. This undercurrent of silence is still present, but now a bigger and louder part of me is committed to dealing explicitly, even strategically, with the unacceptable shit in all areas of my life. Mendacity!

My brother was a minor the first time he was arrested.  He and my mom and I were eating at Burger King in the mall. The two of them were fighting and he flung everything off the table on to the floor and stormed out. I can't remember or imagine what I thought of the whole thing, but remembering this incident makes me also think about how the two of them fought constantly.  Something happened with the security guards and the police were called, the mall being outside the privacy of the patriarchal family home.  He spent the night in jail, and I don’t know exactly what happened but I know “resisting arrest” was one of the charges.  Within a few days he was briefly hospitalized and then released.

One event that stands out in my mind was a time he came home with broken glasses and a bloody broken nose. No explanation given. It turned out he had been to see a girl that night. What registered for me immediately was that a girl had prevailed in fight with him. Only on second thought did I consider the reason she resorted to hitting him that hard or more likely with some object. He often talked about what he wanted to do to girls. I cannot think of any other time in my life I have been so happy to see a person physically injured.

When my brother turned 18, my father kicked him out of the house.  My father had been very vocal about counting down the days and when it finally happened, I was so relieved. Shortly after my brother got his own place, he was arrested again.  He had some kind of fight with his landlady, a fight that resulted in her son calling the police on him. This time the court system did not release him and he was hospitalized instead. As far as I know, he has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Eventually he went to the institution where he resides to this day.  I don't know the name of it and I have never visited him and I do not plan to visit him. For years I felt like I couldn't tell anyone about this decision because they would think I was heartless, or maybe because I believed that I was heartless. The broken tooth gave me a reason to look back through adult eyes and really understand for the first time the reasons for my decision to end my sibling relationship entirely.

 

Pleasure and Danger in Mt. Airy

In March of this year, the authors of Manifesta spoke at a Brooklyn Museum panel about feminism across generations.  The panel discussion was framed as a dialogue across feminist generations in celebration of the Sackler Center, the one-of-a-kind feminist art center at the museum which houses the Dinner Party.  I was pretty excited to go see them and pretty disappointed in how the panel actually turned out.  Lots of discussion of second wave this and third wave that. They talked about their second wave feminist mothers and repeatedly brought up the participation of their husbands in childcare.  The discussion failed to examine the family as the foundational site of patriarchy. The panel placed sexism and misogyny in accurate yet contextually remote places like sex trafficking, but not in contextually present places like their own marriages... marriage being the living and breathing building material of patriarchy. They talked a little bit about pornography but not at all about compulsory heterosexuality. 

Fast forward a few weeks to April, when I had the honor of bringing a program from MIX NYC to Philadelphia for our second round as guest curators for The Flickering Light.  After the bus and train, Mt. Airy positively glowed green, lush and luxurious with coffee shops and beautiful old houses and gardens.  Even before the film screening at the Art Garage in Mt Airy, I could sense a bad vibe from the audience, maybe a skepticism or lack of interest... something.  Feeling some coldness during the introduction, I probably should have intervened in the moment.  Made a joke or asked a question. How many of you are familiar with experimental film?  What brought you here tonight?  Curious about what you are about to see? Instead I did my usual introduction about what MIX does, our festival and various projects. I saw no one outwardly presenting as femme, at least not displaying any of the traditional markers...  And I got very little eye contact.  The few people with long hair seemed more on the all-natural side of things.  My rational voice scolded me not to assume anything.  After all, they must have come to the screening for a reason.  After all, the title of the screening instantly conveyed a lot of information about the content: Creepy Dirty Girlie.  After all, The Flickering Light is a warm, welcoming, independent, free-spirited, open minded art space.  And I made a point of making sure everyone got the program notes to contextualize what they were about to see: queer femininity.  And although I don't remember exactly what I said in the intro, I know the words "queer," "femme" and "sexuality" were high on the word count.

We had an audience of about 35, but by the second film people started walking out.  Six people walked about within the first 20 minutes of a screening that totaled less than 60 minutes worth of short films. There were some x-mas lights that remained lit during the screening, by necessity since in an emergency you need people to be able to find the exit.  The lights enabled me to see everyone's faces and literally averted eyes at the somewhat obscured penis in Project B*mbi, an experimental film that shows various strains of male domination over women, animals, and other men. A woman in front of me put her hand over her eyes at a brief moment of cock from Debbie Does Dallas, which Project B*mbi overlays with Bambi and The Deer Hunter. The film brilliantly invokes pornographic sexuality in order to reveal a discourse of domination. I love Project B*mbi, like I love all the films in this program...

More walk-outs followed the S/M images in 120 Secondi, and I am not sure if people even made it to the pussy close-ups in Pop or Hidden.  The walk-outs probably either missed or didn't enjoy the subversive humor in One Useless Prick, or in Sometimes You Fight for the World, Sometimes You Fight for Yourself, or in Golden Diamonds.  And they definitely missed the straight-up feminism in Hey F*ck Face and My Dead Brain.  While I do not take audience discomfort personally, I do wonder what the person sitting one row in front of me thought- I just introduced the films, mentioned I came all the way from NY to bring you this screening- and I am sitting right behind you.  She couldn't stick out a single short film she didn't like in order to see the program as a whole?  I suspect this was not a matter of like or dislike, but a matter of offense. In a queer film screening, femininity and even het porn images seemed like obvious feminist content to me.  But this audience showed me how easy it was to miss!  And reminded me about the lack of consensus among queer women about feminism.  The content offended them and I was offended they walked out.  Offense all around.

Creepy Dirty Girlie is a program of short films dealing in some way or other with queer feminine sexual expression.  Some more subtle than others, some serious, some comical.  The program went over well during its original screening at MIX22-The NY Queer Experimental Film Festival last fall, with an audience of approximately 85. Audience members even dressed up for the occasion.  At MIX, Creepy Dirty Girlie was thrilling.  Many of the film makers were in attendance.  The audience was energetic and sexy, with everyone celebrating visible queer femininity on the screen, in the audience, all around.  

But the Mt. Airy screening showed me a whole different angle, put me into another state of consciousness, shifted my vision and allowed me to see the films through different eyes. See there were no traditional plots in any of the films... and there weren't even any characters speaking dialogue! I hadn't even noticed the absence of these traditional movie elements before this particular screening.  I sat in the audience in Mt. Airy and realized we were showing queer women's sexuality with no narrative.  The work challenges the audience to make meaning.  I mean, it was clear to me when I was viewing these films and assembling the show for MIX that every last minute was critical of heteronormativity and showed the complicated, perilous relationship between women, femininity, sexism and sexual expression. Hence the title... but it was not clear at the time that the films pushed other boundaries too. 

As Abigail Ottoman recently noted, "Being femme is a constant, simultaneous evocation and rejection of heterosexuality."  Maybe our audience in Mt Airy only saw the evocation and missed the rejection part.  I thought these films in total were about being women, about our bodies, about what is expected of us.  But the audience members who left only saw the fucking.  At the end of the screening, a few audience members hung out for discussion but most hustled right out.  One woman stayed to discuss Lilith references with the excellent film makers behind My Dead Brain.  But we mostly missed out on any kind of dialogue, and that was probably the biggest loss of all.  In Barbara Hammer's memoir, Hammer! Making Movies out of Sex and Life, she discusses touring with her films and the heated discussions afterward about the explicit sexual content, and I was really inspired by this vision of an engaged feminist dyke community.  So I guess the lack of argument is what bothers me most, not the fact that people were offended.  I just wish they had stuck around to talk about it or something.  Didn't anyone want to give me a piece of their mind?

There is no excuse for walking out on sexuality explicit content when it was noted on the website and emails. During an impromptu processing session after the screening, the excellent and insightful founder of The Flicking Light discussed the fact that the event had been listed on two lesbian meet-up sites without any description.   And there is history in lesbian culture of sex-negative attitudes and beliefs, rooted in early second wave feminist critiques of the very real sexist foundations of conventional pornography.  A lot of queers I know pretty much shit on this part of our history, but we need to remember that this very criticism of pornography at least in part motivated a lot of the home made porn, radical porn and sex positive porn we enjoy today.  And some of the earliest sex-positive, non-oppressive images of women's sexuality were positive responses to criticism of conventional pornography, when we took on the criticisms not by discounting pornography but by making better porn.  But on the flip side, it is also where feminism got branded as puritanical, and where right-wing patriarchal opportunists jumped into the fray and represented themselves as being on the same side as feminism.  It is where feminism became an easy target for caricature as merely the old fashioned belief that women are somehow morally superior or just more high-minded and pure. The pro-sex/anti-porn conversation was still contemporary, relevant and real when I was coming out in the 1990s.  And it's a fact that all the historic feminist disagreements are present in our queer subculture's drinking water regardless of our acknowledgment or lack thereof. 

Debate is vital to community building. Open disagreement creates bonds while unspoken disagreement creates distance.  Respectfully communicating our disagreements and differences creates stronger connections, while minimizing or silencing them creates exclusion, isolation and alienation. One of the things I really appreciated about the obits for Andrea Dworkin was the suggestion that we need a feminism big enough to include her, regardless of what we think of her perspective, because it is a vital part of this vast, vast, vast thing called feminism.  And of course I believe feminism must always contain disparate and even contradictory points of view, because the deliberate absence of a monolithic, singular perspective is "essential" to feminism.  Feminism must always contain the essential idea of refusing essential ideas. Yet I thought the sex wars were settled and that pro-sex feminism had won.  Pornography didn't go away and neither did sexism, but public discourse opened slightly to include women's desires and pleasures.  Well, at least some women's desires and pleasures.  Well, at least some of those desires and pleasures...  

So here is where the third wave feminism panel comes in.  This version of feminism was still on my mind at the screening, when I was trying to figure out why people left. So here we sit with the so-called third wave which claims to be more inclusive.  I have been working on MIX festivals and community screenings since 2007 and this was my only walk-out experience, so I really needed to root around for all the tools in the toolbox to try and understand.  

The Brooklyn Museum panel was full of references to husbands, children and writing "slut" across your belly in red lipstick.  This particular version of straight feminism seems to have become all about a woman’s right to chose to stay home and to raise her baby exactly how she wants to; as if poor women and women of color ever had any choice about working outside the home and as if we had regressed to a point where it is assumed that all women want children. Their feminism seems unambitious, kind of like the assimilationist gay movement.  And yet I sincerely give them credit for their tireless work on the most egregious forms of the oppression of women. They are feminists, just as gay marriage advocates are activists. The trouble is how they skim the surface of our lives and spend their energy primarily on causes that will not change the fundamental injustices the vast majority of us live with every day. It's another case of the most privileged among us doing work that makes them feel better about the lives they are already leading.

What the panel espoused seems like such a personal and specific form of feminism, as though the third wave is the feminism belongs to the set of women who are daughters of second wave feminists.  But if your parents were older, like mine, or not feminists- feminism was certainly not in your drinking water the way these panelists claimed it was in theirs.  What I remember about feminism from the 80s and 90s was the backlash as described by Susan Faludi.  The message was that women were foolish for wanting to “have it all” and children had suffered from their mothers' ambition. I'm not opposed to the third wave, and certainly I take issue with different elements of every variety of feminism to date... each issue and every argument serves to make me more committed to feminism, not less so.  But enough waves already anyway, that's a metaphor that has seriously fucking outlived its usefulness! 

Yet this sort of watered-down, consumer individualist relatively sex-positive third wave feminist mentality was not what we encountered at the screening.  On the panel, the third wave feminists cited Tina Fey having her own show as a feminist accomplishment.  That means pretty much any woman doing anything could be considered a feminist accomplishment, since the content of 30 Rock is a far cry from liberatory and while at times funny, the show generally reinforces gender stereotypes and all the gay-related jokes have simply being gay as the punchline.  But even Tina Fey would understand, and any feminist should certainly understand in the presentation of sexually explicit images an opportunity to re-interpret what would appear to be traditionally het porn images in the context of feminist discourses of sexuality and pleasure.  Our audience wasn't tuned in to this and I am wondering whether they were turned off to the porn because they believe it exploits women or they were turned off because it was not sufficiently entertaining or accessible.  Or because the femme women in it didn't seem like "real dykes," which is a tired old misogynist trope in the lesbian community. I would gladly argue against any of these perspectives. All I can be sure of is that they did not want to see it, and they did not want to talk about it either.

Which begs the question of whether queer films are something we merely pay to see/consume, or part of queer people's unique culture that we painstakingly build through our full participation and love.  In which case, maybe walking out is a form of participation, but to me, it looks too much like doing nothing.  These questions were at the forefront of feminist dialogue years ago, and this experience made them feel as of yet unresolved.

If pleasure is no longer part of the feminist conversation, even contemporary pop feminism, then maybe the anti-porn feminists really did with the sex wars... I studied the sex wars and all I got was this lousy third wave feminism where wealthy white women train their husbands to change diapers! And queer alternatives that support patriarchy and consumers who walk away from sexuality.

Wankers at the Dyke March

wanker

Abigail Ottoman: It takes a special kind of person to protest the dyke march.

Sloan Lesbowitz: The dyke march isn't nearly as well known as the pride march.

AO: As we saw, it was a small march!  And the people who protested were two grubby men who would never get any attention from the women in the dyke march- the kind of women who would never talk to them under ordinary circumstances, who are uninterested in them.

SL: But on this one special day, they get all kinds of attention and interaction with a large number of women who are scantily clad.  So many women yell at them!

AO: By thinking it is a parade of heathens, they get to watch a march of half-naked women AND feel all religious at the same time.

SL: Just look at this guy.  He must look forward to this all year!  These guys are as much wankers as the eager photographers, but no one yells at the photographers, even that little old dude who cut into the march just to take a picture of somebody in a bikini top.

AO: I didn't think they were the same.  The religious guys are more perverted because they have to be angry, they can't just get turned on by seeing women.  The photographers are there to celebrate us, even if they aren't welcome.

SL: Either way, it is a very important day of the year for them.  I wonder if they mark their calendars in advance and look forward to it.  I wonder if the photographers or the zealots have wives, and if their wives know what they do the last Saturday in June.

Vaginal Davis is Speaking from the Diaphragm

 WINNER OF THE 2009 ETHYL EICHELBERGER AWARD

"A performance artist of underground legend." - Guy Trebay, New York Times

A performance piece that re-examines the heyday of 1970s American daytime television chat and variety programs. Taking the format of legendary talk shows like The Mike Douglas Show and Dinah!, which starred lesbian icon Dinah Shore. Ms Davis isn't interested in assimilating into the mainstream entertainment complex, but instead wishes to dissect a kind of TV staple and reconfigure it by presenting an array of live and Skype guests from the various worlds of literature, dance, theatre, film and art she has intersected in her over 30 year career as a performance and live artist, writer and cultural raconteur. With guest hosts, Downtown treasure Carmelita Tropicana, and Jennifer Miller the famed bearded lady of Circus Amok expect ten days of the unexpected, the unusual and the sublime.

PS 122.  A series of epic performances that will go down in queer history....

The show begins with some deep breathing and a poem read by the guest host.  With Carmelita Tropicana, the poem is in Spanish and with Jennifer Miller the poem is in English.  The poem invokes Supreme Court Justice Sonja Santo-Meyer.  Which ever of the two guest hosts is present, she is the lesbian lover of Vaginal Davis. 

Ten days of performances and I attended 3 shows and enjoyed lots of lesbian affirmation.  Opening discussions invoke lesbian relationship processing, the lesbiana Clintons, and all the multitudes of lesbians in high office.  And the audience was certainly full of dykes.

Jennifer Miller and Dr. Davis sang together, “you are my lady, my bearded lady” to the tune of You are My Sunshine.  Between verses there was some comedic dialog, songs interspersed with jokes like the Smothers Brothers or other classic comedy teams.

On each side of the stage were computers, projectors and the chat roulette kids.  All present to be objectified in nothing but slightly ill-fitting white briefs.  I was surprised people in the audience were actually watching the projected chat roulette at all, even when the occasional wanker cropped up.  On closing night the chat roulette kids got a lot more frisky, made out and groped each other a whole lot more.  Perhaps Dr. Davis was too free with the praise, however, since some of them seemed quite self-satisfied.  It all worked out for the best when she skillfully referenced and simultaneously deflated colonialism by describing one of the chat roulette kid’s penis as “the most beautiful and well-formed in all of Christendom.”

Next come Dr. Davis’s musings on the desire to bring a man into her lesbian relationship.  Chat roulette kids set upon the audience to find a man.  Man is put on pedestal and admired... for his Bubble Butt. Bubble Butt. Bubble. Butt.  Man-worship and a little bonus shrimping!

Musical interlude.  Yes!  Reluctant Dr. Davis will sing one or both of her original, brilliant, subversive and highly dance-able songs: My Pussy is a Cactus and Tom Cruise Loves Women.

Tom Cruise Loves Women is an old favorite.  I first heard it during Vaginal Davis’s visit to NYC in 2006 where I stalked her for the whole week from a boutique reception to NYU to her Brick Tops party.  She performed Tom Cruise Loves Women in an NYU lecture hall.  This time, the music video for this song was projected in triplicate on the giant screen that made up the backdrop of the set.  Fantastic images of Tom Cruise comprise frenzy of homoerotic imagery.  Mesmerizing images multiply across the screens, the one where he is in his briefs from Risky Business really stands out.  But like the song says... Tom Cruise Loves Women.

My Pussy is a Cactus is a new favorite.  “My pussy is dry. And fidgety.”

The show includes gossip, guests, performances and Skype projections loom large on the backdrop/screen of the set.

Saturday night guests and performances included Julie Tolentino with Pigpen.  Julie Tolentino’s head and face wrapped in rope, she is lying on the floor motionless until her part of the performance.  Pigpen is off to the side, holding the rope, unwrapping her, maybe providing a lifeline.  Rope marks are visible on her face afterwards.

Announcement: There is a car with license plate “Sloppy Bottom,” please move your car or it will be towed. (But who drives in New York?  Is this leftover Los Angeles wit?  An old school variety show interlude? Is there a doctor in the house?)

Sunday night guests included MEN, dressed in gray, tied together, perform their amazing, perfectly danceable and uplifting song, Who am I to be so free?

Jose Munoz read a poem.

Casey Spooner unwittingly wandered close to a smack down from MEN's own Emily Roysden, with his blundering remarks about global politics tempting her to read him like a comic strip.  Not sure if anyone else noticed this tension but it was quickly dispersed, partly by Mickey Boardman’s tired shtick about being a faggot with a distaste for women’s bodies.  No one is buying that old line in this audience, please!

Marc Siegel interviewed over Skype from Berlin.  I love how he showed some of Vaginal Davis’s old zines, holding them up to the camera for all to see.  Treasures!

Many, many lesbian references through out the run of shows, including but not limited to references to several dykes as being a “proper butch.” Sooo respectful!  Vaginal Davis is a real Barracuda Femme Top, as she duly noted herself.

Lesbianic hystrionics!

Hill and Billary, Elena Kegel, Janet Reno.

(It all proves the currently well-known fact that dykes and dyke culture are hot.)

Dance break.

Beauty treatment: Sit on my facial.  Butt-tox.  One of the chat roulette boys provides the juices of a teenage butt to reduce wrinkles and restore youth to our host.

End with human dessert, consisting of whip cream on saran wrap on a chat roulette kid.

Third round of SftD and there was a torrential downpour of rain an hour before show time.  I was walking around the East Village and decided just to hang out in the theater since I was early.  PS 122, like the name suggests, is a converted school and there was a ratty couch in the hallway perfect for my wait.  Thinking about how the only thing missing from this chat show is the actual broadcast.  The title projections and theme music are perfect.  Vaginal Davis is here as the recipient of an award, yet she is putting on a show of all these other performers, academics and culture makers... featuring countless others... in receiving her Ethyl Eichelberger award she is highlighting the world of queer and outsider multimedia and performance art, a world where she is a major contributor and connected to all her guests, many with a history of years of collaboration.  She is placing herself in the center of a loosely formed culture of subversive queer art, and by doing so, perpetuating and furthering the existence of that very culture of subversive queer art.

Why of course there is a radical queer community!  Can’t you see how we are all connected at the hub of Speaking from the Diaphragm?

I wish she had Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch as guests.  According to an interview in Butt Magazine, Ryan Trecartin loves lesbians, not that you couldn’t figure that out by watching his films.  But I digress, and in fact there aren’t many other guests I could wish for, other than of course Vag’s long-time friend and collaborator Ron Athey.  LA gave birth to some seriously powerful movers of queer culture!  I don’t even remember when I first heard of Vaginal Davis, I think she has always been part of my world...  Now that can’t be completely true, but I am fairly sure I already knew about her when I first saw Hustler White.

The run of this show was a sub-cultural showcase, panorama and extravaganza.  All the fabulous musicians, artists, academics and outsiders were enriched and put into context through the so-called German Kindergarten Occultist set and through Dr. Davis’s personal reminiscence with them.

Suzanne Sachsse announced The Jewish Polish Renaissance over Skype and the conversation was all about loving new movements.  Let me show you my manifesto!  Vaginal Davis decreed: Every 15 minutes you have to create a new movement.

Like any other guest, Joanna Fateman's tiny daughter Goldie was offered some of the official SftD drink, Anal Wartese, which looked a lot like cheap vodka and cranberry.

Fashion designer Marcus Pontello changed outfits three times for us via Skype.

Miho Hatori, the singer from Cibo Mato was amazing, loud, rambunctious, defiant and fun music!  Everyone danced.

And one final, important piece of gossip to take away from closing night:

Brian Austin Green is a premature ejaculator.

Listen to Mattilda on NPR!

Now here is something to be proud of this June:

Catherine Opie, Girlfriends

Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of never before seen work by photographer Catherine Opie... “Girlfriends” combines brand new color photographs with a selection of black and white photographs from Opie’s archive that have never been printed. In this new series she explores the nature of butch-dyke identity through portraits including those of public figures such as k.d. lang and Eileen Myles as well as friends and partners who have appeared in her work throughout the years.

The photographs positioned directly across from the entrance are of Daniela Sea and Kate Moennig.  These actors are familiar from the L Word, so anyone coming in to the gallery to see lesbian representation is given an easy entry point in faces they recognize from TV.  In her photo, Daniela Sea presents as herself, not her character, maybe to remind the viewer we may be seeing actors but we are not looking at fiction.  My initial experience of this part of the gallery was an urge to hurry through, thinking to myself, I have looked at these faces enough, I don’t need to look at them here.  But I wonder how more straight-leaning art world visitors felt about these two.  I wonder if Daniela Sea and Kate Moennig served as sentinels of the portal into Cathy Opie’s particular variety of queer representation.  Maybe for some visitors, these two faces provided a gentle welcome and permission to stare at the butches in the gallery.  For me, I pretty much hurried past them to get to the good stuff.

Getting stared at/glared at/looked over/given the hairy eyeball is something of a foundational experience of being butch.  And yet, so is invisibility.  Here in the gallery we are allowed the pleasure of staring at butches, evening staring long enough to be considered rude or inappropriate.  Further for some is the pleasure of both looking and being seen.  The contradiction of dirty looks and invisibility is stirred up here.  But there is more at play than technically excellent photography and queer representation. As the gallery grew more and more crowded on opening night, the room with filled butches looking at butches looking at pictures of butches, like a hall of mirrors or an alternate universe.

The combination of new and old photographs show the same people younger and older, showing the viewer something rather personal of the subjects. In our lives, the people we are close to age along side us, and when Cathy Opie shows us the same subjects over the course of years, we feel a connection to the subjects.  Maybe we feel the kind of connection we do to friends and family.  It gives the show a kind of intimacy and familiarity.  I have never met Pig Pen.  I watched Pig Pen in Hallelujah, a documentary about Ron Athey, I had seen Cathy Opie’s pictures of Pig Pen at the Guggenheim.  The stunning photo of Pig Pen at the center of the gallery stopped me in my tracks.  I felt simultaneously like I was seeing this person for the first time and like I was seeing an old friend... whom I’ve never met. Opie’s portraits often show queers as royalty surrounded by bold colors, but this one shows a saint with slightly bowed head and glowing backlight. (Image below, with my snapshot from opening night.  Notice the little bit of space gallery goers give this portrait, maybe a little subconscious reverence, maybe just a gap in the crowd.)

Many of the pictures feature butch people in wide-open spaces, outdoors, with a visible horizon.  A vertical person within a horizontally infinite space.  Butch standing by the ocean, in the woods, or mountains.  The spaciousness is so vast that much of what is pictured is sky reaching back out of site, woods filling the entire frame, a road trailing off into the horizon, the ocean trailing off to meet the sky.  The subject is at home in the frame, and it gives the impression they could move limitlessly in any direction.  There is this sense of freedom to being the only person in the frame, existing only in relationship to oneself, able to go near and far or anywhere in this wide-open space.

There is a room of all black and white pictures where the point of reference is Robert Mapplethorpe.  I can’t really remember exactly how I first heard about Robert Mapplethorpe, but I have loved him since high school.  The idea of revealing such classical beauty in expressions of sexual perversion was as exciting to me then as it is now. No one could deny that his photography was captivating and beautiful, but of course there was always controversy attached to his work.  A friend with a more liberal mom had the book Mapplethorpe, published in 1992, a year before my graduation from high school.  The book is enormous and heavy in more ways than one, and I studied it in a celibate teenage stupor until it became synonymous with queerness in my mind.  So the black and white room added yet another familiar touch point in the gallery for me.  (See the images below, Mapplethorpe's Self Portrait 1978, followed by my snapshot of one of Opie's self portraits from the black and white room.  Love the whips!)

The first time I saw photography by Cathy Opie was at the Whitney Biennial in 1995.  I was visiting the museum with my college aesthetics class, professor included, and had no idea about what we were going to see.  There was the now-classic self-portrait where she is wearing an S/M hood and has the word “pervert” freshly cut into her chest, still bloody.  Her shoulders and arms are crowded with needles piercing her skin.  There was also a picture of Ron Athey in thigh-high boots, and I recognized him immediately from his interview in Details magazine, also in 1995.  I studied that interview and still have the magazine where he talked about sexuality, pain and transcendence.  (It would be another ten years before I was fortunate enough to attend one of his performances, see image below, a treasured digital keepsake of mine!)  This interview and Opie’s photographs provided me with a window into the world I knew I needed to move into and set up my permanent residence.

When I went to see Catherine Opie: American Photographer at the Guggenheim in 2008, there were some self-portraits displayed together: The infamous Pervert picture. Another one where she is nursing, with the word "pervert" visible as a well-healed yet perfectly legible white scar.  (Admittedly difficult to see in the digital image below, but very clear in person.)  In a third photo she has her back to the camera to show a fresh cutting, similar to a child’s drawing of a family with the house and the parents and the sun shining, only both parents are drawn with skirts.  Reviewers seemed to think the proximity of these pictures represented some sort of progression, but I think it does quite the opposite.  The desire for family is present in the bloody cutting, and the perversion is visible in the image of motherhood. Here, I thought, is a vast and expansive observation about being a lesbian.  There is no contradiction, no before-and-after.  Our lives include all this and more.

I have never met Cathy Opie.  I attended a talk she gave at the NYC homo center during her show at the Guggenheim, and I saw her talking with friends at the Girlfriends opening.  It is curious that someone I do not know personally could evoke such a powerful sense of familiarity and inclusion.  I imagine that speaks to the experience of being part of a queer community that at its best shares more than individual relationships.