Wrestling Emily Dickinson

What Would Batman Do?

2012-01-28T14:02:00.000-08:00

I've always liked Jonathan Ross. Even before he became the UK's answer to David Letterman, before he became famous for dressing outrageously, asking David Cameron inappropriate questions about Margaret Thatcher, and pulling off juvenile phone-pranks with Russell Brand. Even before his wife Jane Goldman became famous for writing the scripts for Stardust and Kick-Ass, I liked him.

I've liked him, in fact, since I was twelve, and I read the introduction Ross wrote to Batman: Vow from the Grave, a Titan Books reprint anthology published way back in 1989. What I liked was the fact that Ross had written the introduction. There was a lot of talk in those days about how 'comics were growing up', but here was a famous, successful guy, a bloke who was on the telly and that, unashamedly confessing his love for the antics of a man who fought crime dressed like a flying rodent, and in particular his love for the intelligent take on the concept written by Dennis O'Neil and thrillingly illustrated by the great Neal Adams. Look, I could shout at people who mocked me for sitting in the lunch queue reading Death in the Family or Challenge of the Man-Bat, you lot may think I'm a moron for still reading comics instead of porn I've found in the woods (what we had before the internet, kids: ask your parents), but Jonathan Ross reads them and he's on telly, so kindly drokk off!

And then they would sneer that Ross was a poof with a speech impediment and beat me up. But, still, the fact that a successful grown-up liked Batman was a comfort to me, during those hard teenage years before I was able to invent an army of terror-meks and wreak a bloody vengeance on all those who had mocked me in my youth. The fools!

If you've been following this blog, you pretty much know what's coming at this point. 'AJ's began a post by praising someone,' you're thinking. 'She only ever does that when she's going to put the boot in.' And you're right. Because this morning, courtesy of Paris Lees of Diva and Meta magazine fame, I learned that Ross, who I've admired and followed since I was a gawky, squeaky-voiced teen, turns out to be just another scumbag who thinks transphobic 'humour' is the funniest thing EVAR.

I hate discovering that my heroes are transphobic. Finding out Tony Judt had helped hound a young trans woman out of university made me burn with rage that a supposed 'liberal' thought this kind of shabby treatment of vulnerable women was acceptable. But with Ross, I'm just disappointed. Disappointed that, despite providing the introduction to Vow from the Grave, he seems to have forgotten one of the most important stories in that collection: 'Night of the Reaper'.

'Night of the Reaper', like many of the best Batman stories, is about the morality of vigilantism, and what happens when one goes too far. In it, Batman encounters the Reaper, a Holocaust survivor who has taken to dressing up as death to enact a grisly revenge on the Nazi camp commander who tortured him, and some disgruntled fellow Nazis who seek to punish the same guard for embezzling party funds. In the course of his rampage, the survivor, Dr Gruener, cuts a swathe not just through the fascists, but everyone in his path, including some of Dick 'Robin' Grayson's college friends - including his Jewish friend, Alan. And, then, in one of the most haunting shots in comic-book history, Gruener comes face-to-face with what he's become.

Gruener believes his actions are justifiable, admirable, even: like Batman, he dons a costume to battle evildoers. But when he kills people, when he takes the lives of his prey, when he acts as if endangering the lives of innocents is just a means to an end, he goes too far. And, realising that, he leaps from the dam he stands on and takes his own life.

The message is: you need to have limits. You need to have boundaries. You need to have a line you must not cross. And that applies whether you're a comic-book vigilante or just a comic. Ross may feel his jokes are justifiable: admirable, even - he's giving people a laugh at the end of their working week. But in making trans people an acceptable subject of cheap, mocking, humour, he legitimises the kind of prejudice which sees trans people verbally abused on the streets, attacked in public or even in their own homes, and murdered at a rate much greater than that of the cis population. In doing that, he crosses a line. His comedy ceases to be inclusive and welcoming, as befits the host of a show on one of the main television channels in a diverse, modern country, and instead becomes exclusionary and unwelcoming for some of the most vulnerable people in that country.

Just as Gruener didn't want to become the kind of killer he hunted, I don't think Ross wants to be the kind of comedian who makes that type of joke. But I don't expect him to jump off a dam to redeem himself. All I want, like the thousands of other people Ross has alienated with his thoughtless attempt at humour, is an apology, and an undertaking to try harder as a comic in future, to make jokes that don't exclude members of his audience who've been fans for twenty-three years just to get a cheap laugh. Because, as a comic book fan, Ross really should know that power - even, perhaps especially, the power of an entertainer - comes with responsibility.

That's the main moral of Spider-Man, of course, but the message of pretty much all the great superheroes, the thing that makes them awesome, is the same. Batman may beat up criminals, 'a superstitious and cowardly lot' to be sure, but he always protects those who are truly vulnerable; Spider-Man will crack wise at anyone going, but he never mocks the weak. Real heroes never do. And those of us, trans or cis, who've thrilled to the exploits of the mythic metahumans know that while we can't be the last children of a dying planet, get bitten by a radioactive spider, be born carrying the X-gene or train our bodies and minds to the peak of ninja-detective perfection, we can imitate them morally. The superheroes represent our best qualities: tolerance, openness, physical bravery and moral courage, too. When I get angry at cis people like Ross and burn, for a moment, with the thought that we should go terrorist and exterminate all the brutes, I remember that the X-Men protect the world that fears and hates them; when I wonder if I should go back to the closet and hide for the rest of my life I think of Mystique, in X-Men 2, telling Nightcrawler that she doesn't disguise herself as human all the time to please the humans 'because we shouldn't have to.' Mutant and proud.

All of which is really a long-winded way of saying: Jonathan, we read the same comics. We have that much in common, if nothing else. And what we both know is: Batman wouldn't do this. Spider-Man wouldn't do this. Superman would die before even considering doing something that would alienate a single human being. We're not superheroes, and we'll always fail to live up to their ideals, but we both know that kind of thing is wrong. And when you do something wrong, you apologise. Don't you?

Christmas Special: The Ballad of Private Manning

2011-12-22T14:03:00.001-08:00

This Christmas, while many of us tuck into turkey and get progressively comatose on good red wine and the Dr Who Christmas Special, Private First Class Bradley (or more properly Breonna) Manning will be languishing in a prison cell at the behest of the US military and government, for the crime of exposing their dirty secrets. Therefore, I choose to mark Christmas with the following poem.

The Ballad of Private Manning

Vaclav Havel died today:
you spoke of freedom far away,
but in a courtroom in your land,
the witnesses denied the stand
told the story, gave the lie
to that song you sing, the flag you fly.
You are not brave, and neither are you free,
and though you claim it, you do not love liberty.
While Private Manning sits in jail
your Founding Fathers' dream has failed.

Your soldiers left Iraq this week
in APCs no longer sleek,
but pockmarked, patched-up, battle-scarred,
new shielding on their fuselage
to spread the blast of IEDs:
and elsewhere, naked, on bent knee,
under 'Prevention of Injury',
your High-Value Detainee,
Private Manning, cannot sleep.
At such things Lincoln once would weep,

but we're sophisticated now,
or post-postmodern, anyhow.
We know the Gulf War happened, since
we bulldozed bodies into pits.
We bag-and-tagged, we shock-and-awed,
we turkey-shot and pressed 'record',
shot our own Movies of the Week:
but God forbid the stuff should leak.
Now Private Manning has to pay
for snitching on the USA:

One nation, indivisible,
of free-market individuals
and corporations - which are people
(who are not created equal),
where goods and wealth will trickle down
to your senescent steel town,
and if they don't? If you're still poor,
speak to your friendly neighbourhood recruiter,
like Private Manning! Join the team!
Just don't let on that you're a queen,

or that, inside, you're just a girl -
don't wanna make the jarheads hurl!
And who could blame those good ol' boys
for dissaproving of said lifestyle choice?
When you're in country, killing ragheads,
you don't wanna think you sleep with faggots!
But it's a poor and unAmerican excuse
to blame sustained, malign abuse.
No: Private Manning chose to tell.
We were forced to give her Hell.

Now Christmas comes to one and all
on this side of the prison wall,
while some sweat in judicial fire,
cries for justice echoing higher,
right up to the White House Door,
where Barack says you broke the law
before your case is brought to trial.
He'll pardon turkeys with a smile,
but Private Manning suffers still,
sees no light from the City on the Hill.

America won't last forever:
nothing does this side of Heaven,
but backed-up drives and mirrored sites
will help the future scribes to write
of how a nation's shining dream
was finally broken at the seams
by Haliburton, Rove and Bush,
who made blood gush so oil would rush.
So Private Manning went to war
to buy the Haves a little more,

and found a happy hunting ground
for those who wanted flesh to pound,
faith to torture, bones to snap
and pretty girls and boys to rape.
Saw and told. Did what she must.
In Lamo Manning placed her trust:
Lamo, who claimed to be a man,
then sold his ass to Uncle Sam.
Now Private Manning's in a cell,
since Adrian Lamo chose to squeal,

and they say Manning's 'almost gone',
seventeen months denied the sun,
while Rove goes off on lecture tours
and Lamo's Langley's favoured whore,
and Barack speaks of hope and dreams
while hopeless, disenfranchised teens,
taught by pain not to give a damn,
enlist for battle with Iran,
while Private Manning sits and rots,
naked on an army cot.

Vaclav Havel died today,
but he was once, like Manning, caged,
because he wouldn't bend the knee
to those who steal our liberty.
Once he coped with secret police harrassers,
then skated through the leader's palace,
brought tyrants down, exposed a lie:
the same which bids us 'Occupy!'
Let all free voices now contend,
that Private Manning may see such an end.

* * *

I would like to get this poem on Youtube as a collaborative performance video, with people reading out a line each. If you'd like to add your voice, please comment or contact me via Facebook or Twitter.

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Life and Soul

2011-11-09T04:11:00.000-08:00

Life and soul are you? Everybody's mate?
Top bloke? Everybody's got a good word
for you? Big deal. Nobody looks too close
when the phones ring every second of the day.

No-one has time to look between the lines
you crib from last night's sitcoms;
to ask why you say nothing fresh
yet hunger to be heard.

No-one watches your eyes when you flirt,
sees where your focus lies, the way
that you use womens' eyes as mirrors.
The way you need to know we look at you.

And no-one sees the grubby rooms,
the sweat-damp notes that you hand over,
the way you roll words like 'slut' around your tongue,
pound your way through another hired fuck.

No-one looks close enough:
they're caught up in your blizzard
of bargain bucket bonhomie
and bar-room, blokes-together, bull;

but some of us don't play that game.
Don't do the parties, hang out with the lads,
or read the same naff magazines.
We see you. And we know you.

Life and soul? Top bloke? A mate?
Dead-eyed. Nothing. Fuelled by hate.

For Tomorrow

2011-08-08T17:29:00.000-07:00

London is burning. I don't live by the river. But I see what's happening and I read the rumours on Twitter, the horrible photos and the even more terrifying words of people I previously thought of as well-adjusted calling out for curfews, water cannon and martial law, and I worry. I'm on holiday in London next weekend, on my way to somewhere else, and I am seriously considering donating a couple of hours of that weekend to volunteering to help with any clean-up efforts going on. It's not much, but London has been good to me on the gigs I've done there over the past year. And I feel I ought to do something.

Because the riots will burn themselves out. They always do. This kind of intensity, this kind of lawlessness, is not self-sustaining. Eventually tomorrow will come, and when it does it will be time to rebuild.

The following is a poem I wrote some years ago now, after Hurricane Katrina and the Boxing Day Tsunami. I wrote it and then left it in a file, finding it again only recently. It's not my best work - the influence of Auden is extremely obvious - but it somehow seems appropriate. It's all I can really contribute right now, from where I am:

Rebuild

Pump water from your flooded home,
lay the new foundation stone:
rebuild, rebuild.

Walk again on plastic legs,
unwind the bandage from your head:
rebuild, rebuild.

Pull the landed boat to sea,
dig the living from the scree:
rebuild, rebuild.

Bring order to the troubled city:
on your own or by committee,
rebuild, rebuild.

Take the orphaned hand in yours,
obey the deeper, human laws:
rebuild, rebuild, rebuild.

* * *
Actually there is one more thing I can do. The South Tottenham Customer Service Centre at Apex House, 820 Seven Sisters Road, N15 5PQ, is asking for donations of bedding, clothes and so forth to help those made homeless as a result of the rioting in Tottenham. Please, if you're reading this and in a position to give something, help. Shelter are also worth donating to, ditto Crisis. And I'm sure there are many more charities whose work is germane to what's happening now but it's half-past one and I'm rambling and can't really think too clearly right now. Suggest charities and I'll add them to this list. But the important thing to do now is to think about where we put our resources and what we do to fix our cities, and our polity, and fix them deeply enough that something like this cannot happen again. And that repair will not come from curfews or repressive legislation or squaddies patrolling the streets of London. It will come from all of us deciding, together, to do what we can to put things back together. To rebuild.

Whm Bm Thk U Mrm (a quickie)

2011-08-07T13:57:00.000-07:00

Some time ago on this blog I mused on whether the linguistic experiment of adopting gender-neutral pronouns, such as 'hir', 'ze' and 'Mx' might not be extended by the adoption of a gender neutral equivalent of 'Sir' or 'Ma'am'. Such a word, especially if we worked hard to get it into general use, would fulfil the function of allowing non-binary or genderqueer trans people, as well as binary-identified trans and cis people who prefer to use gender-neutral speech, a polite way of addressing each other; give us a term of address we could request people to use when speaking to us; and also furnish us with a word we could use when interacting with people of whose gender identity we are unaware (in telephone conversations, say).

It occurred to me today that we could designate the neologism 'Mrm' (pronounced 'Mirm') to serve this function. Visually the word echoes the form of the existing binary terms 'Mr' &; 'Mrs', but the ending in 'm' confounds this expectation. Verbally the word begins and ends with the pleasing, bosomy 'm' consonant, but interpolates the sound of the male honorific 'Sir'. This 'ir' sound also rhymes with 'er', the universally recognised expression of uncertainty, symbolising the fact that use of this term brings the certainties of binary gender into question; and also with 'ur', the prefix denoting the primordial form of a text or language, which may perhaps be thought to gesture in the direction of the fact that gender exists in an undifferentiated form prior to social constructs being imposed on it. Though this last reference (to 'ur') might be an example of the author of this piece lapsing into pretension, a fact possibly not unrelated to the fact that ze happens to be watching Peter Greenaway's 'Vertical Features Remake' while typing.

Perhaps most crucially, 'Mrm' sounds fun, and has that silly, hat-doffing, Jimmy Stewart, vintage character which the ostentatious use of polite forms of address in an aggressively, compulsorily informal society like ours tends to accrue. I have always enjoyed addressing people (where I can be sure of their binary identity) as 'Sir' or 'Ma'am' (rather than the ubiquitous 'mate') in much the same way that some people enjoy wearing forties dresses or co-respondent shoes. It's a form of verbal burlesque, a bit of pantomimic play. 'Mrm' extends this field of play by introducing a term for people who don't fit the gender binary, or for the use of people who have no desire to use terms which reinforce said binary.

I therefore submit 'Mrm' for the consideration of all those who wish to make use of language as a tool for undermining binary gender norms. Have fun using it, gentlebeings.

Pornography and its Discontents

2011-07-17T13:18:00.000-07:00

I went on holiday by mistake - or at least on the spur of the moment - this week, hopping up to the Lake District town of Staveley with a friend to spend a night in the unique surroundings of the Eagle and Child Inn, then have a wander around Ambleside. So far, so not exactly Withnail and I, but I hadn't figured on one thing that would cause a problem: tha lack of a decent mobile signal in the wilds of the Lakes, particularly on a stormy night like Friday.

Stranded in the pub, twitterless, I would have been stuck for something to read in the quiet moments while I waited for my friend to return from the toilet or the bar. Fortunately I had just subscribed to the Kindle edition of the Guardian this week and still had an issue backed up on the machine to work through. This would do, I figured, until I got to somewhere I could connect to wi-fi and download the weekend edition. And so it was that I wound up reading and agreeing with - up to a point, anyway - an article by Julie Bindel. (trigger warning: graphic descriptions of sexual abuse in pornography)

There are a lot of things I don't like about Bindel: her transphobia, her islamophobia, and her selective amnesia and special pleading when called out about both; her inability to take criticism, to the extent of siccing her good buddy, disgraced journo Johann Hari, on people as a kind of big fluffy attack dog; or the fact that I know, from personal experience, that she searches Twitter for her own name on a regular basis and chides people if they're not positive about her. But I think what we would both agree on is that the activities of the sleazebag 'Max Hardcore' are an affront to any notion of decent behaviour. Where we differ is on the inferences we draw from this privileged, cosseted little man's antics. Bindel sees this case as an inherent problem with pornography itself, comparing pornography as a medium to great human rights abuses of history:

'Other human rights campaigners rely on disturbing imagery to add strength to their arguments: footage of animals being caged and tortured; images of men being lynched in the American south by the Ku Klux Klan; pictures of mass graves in conflict zones.'

But there's a problem with this analogy. While what Max WankyNickname does to the women in his films is wrong, and while I for one would love to see him punished for it (at length, in a steel cage, by people wearing sap gloves - but then we all have our fetishes, don't we, Max), the fact remains that the porn industry is not the equivalent of the genocide against black people carried out by the KKK in the American south, or the genocide of other groups carried out by the millitias in Bosnia or Rwanda. I find this comparison both ludicrous and offensive. Porn - whatever problems you may have with it - is not the moral equivalent of genocide.

I do think Bindel is on to something with her analogy between the porn industry and the meat and animal research industries. Though I reject the dehumanising comparison between porn industry workers and livestock implicit in this analogy, it holds inasmuch as both industries are guilty of low standards of welfare, both represent the ugliest side of capitalism, both need tighter and better regulation, and both produce a homogenised, low-quality product which is a cheap perversion of the natural and desirable aspect of life - whether husbandry or, ahem, husbandry - which they distort to create factory-produced crap.

Prior to arriving in Staveley, I had been reading my friend another new Kindle acquisition of mine - Caitlin Moran's most excellent new book How to be a Woman. Moran takes a different attitude to porn, arguing that we need 'free range' porn and 'a 100 per cent increase in the variety of pornography available'. What Moran means by this is more than just the shallow 'variety' offered by the sexual Woolworth's pick-n-mix of DVDAs, hot grannies and interracial creampies, but a variety of approaches, of styles, of genres and ideologies underpinning the stuff people fap to.

This is an attitude to porn I can support, because to me the behaviour of someone like Max MyDaddyNeverLovedMeEnough is an industry issue, a workers' rights issue, and a rightness of content issue rather than an issue which suggests the entire genre in which he works should be banned. By way of a more fitting analogy, consider the action film, particularly the martial arts action film as popularised by Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude van Damme et al in the late eighties, early 90s. This genre of film has many similarities to pornography (many heterosexual women and gay men could argue with some justice that in the case of the early van Damme ouevre the distinction between the films' ostensible genre and pornography collapses completely) in that the 'plot', such as it is, exists primarily as a frame on which to hang a number of fight scenes of increasingly graphic character, in much the same way that the 'plot' of a porn film exists as a frame on which to hang a number of fucking scenes of an increasingly graphic character.

So far so good. But now imagine that someone decides to start making 'hardcore' action films, which contain only the fights - and make them real and basic, rather than choreographed and balletic, at that; which show no regard for the health of the participants, and in fact seem to delight in injury or trauma being inflicted upon them; and which dispense with any semblance of a plot, a moral, or an emotional core beyond vapid, dead-eyed ultraviolence. Would we allow someone to continue making such films? Would we accept it? No. We would not.

And this is where, despite my disagreements with Bindel, I part company with the extreme free speech advocates on the pornography issue, because I do not believe all porn is justified under the 1st Amendment or the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Pornography in which workers are abused by pathetic, petty tyrants who style themselves 'stars', in which audiences are abused by being pandered to with substandard content, needs to be regulated out of existence. Like the food industry, pornography is capitalism at its ugliest; and, like the food industry, it needs to be regulated more strongly and more aggressively, because the products of an UNregulated porn industry are bad for us all.

The Appendices Will Be Printed In Heaven

2011-07-12T12:06:00.000-07:00

Yes, I did delete the poem in the last post. That's coz I entered it in a competition and was worried the organisers might consider a poem I'd already blogged 'published' & therefore ineligible. Here's another new poem by way of compensation, based, like the first, on performances at the Newcastle branch of Dr Sketchy's, in this case a tribute to the late Poly Styrene:

Tank Girl Lives!

i.m. Poly Styrene 1957-2011

Doughboy-helmet, mirrored shades,
draped flag, glimpse of fishnet,

wrists bound, head Diana-tilted,
Bambi with a PTSD-stare,

a sneer honed by facing down
the mocking curiosity of bus stops;

upraised middle finger,
jagged ‘X’ taped on each nipple:

the back of the 50p-piece
as redesigned by Jamie Hewlett.

These Dr Sketchy's poems are part of a series I'm doing based on performances at the Newcastle branch, which are being combined with photos from the events and exhibited at Fifth Floor, the home of Spill Culture Club in Newcastle. Do get along to one of their events if you can, they're ace!

Giggage!

2011-06-27T11:55:00.000-07:00

As you might surmise from the relative silence on this blog in recent times, I've been busy. June has been a hectic month, with lots of gigs and, more importantly, a lot of preparations for gigs as well, so most of my downtime has been spent chilling out recently. This entry is mainly just a round-up of the recent gigs for people following this blog who may not also follow on Twitter or Facebook.

The first major gig in June was the Jibba Jabba Showcase at the Leazes Fringe of Newcastle Green Festival, held at the Trent House. This was the first gig for which I was billed as AJ McKenna instead of my non-writing name (on the flyers at least), but initially it was a gig I wasn't keen to do on the day - not for any big reason, just because I was feeling really tired the day I had to do it. I forced myself to go though, and I'm glad I did because in the end I did an absolutely blistering set - no major surprises, just the usual stuff - Tension, Eggshells, A Short Course in Suicide Writing and On Looking Back into the Mosh Pit - but delivered in a really vigorous, exciting way that went down really well with the packed audience - many of them new attendees who'd came because of the Green Festy connection. I left on a massive high. The lesson here is that, unless you're really, really, seriously bad, you should always, always force yourself off your comfy sofa and out to gigs. It's worth it.

Later in the month came Take Ten at the Cumberland Arms, just this past Thursday. This was a really special gig for me because I performed two new poems - Other Peoples' Things, which I'd written for Monkfish Collective's 'Hand Me Down' extravaganza at Stockton Arc, and My Revolution Will Not Be Trivialised, which I wrote just recently. I was really pleased with the reception both these poems got, particularly the latter, which I was very nervous about reading - but again, I'm glad I did. The feedback was uniformly positive, and the room was pretty much blown away. My only criticism was that in the heat of the moment I altered my set after reading it to finish on Mosh Pit again - I had originally planned to finish on The Secrets, Almost Silent, that We Sang, which I think was a better thematic fit, but I was worried that more strident trans activist poetry might be laying it on a bit thick, so decided to go with something more universal. Probably a mistake, but to be frank after reading Revolution whatever else I read that night didn't make much difference.

But the main reason I've been busy was last night's gig at the launch of Spill Culture Club: a half-hour, curated group performance with other members of Apples & Snakes' Tyneside Scratch Club which featured two poems from me, one, Criminally Fragile, done reasonably straight (or as straight as possible given I was wearing what I now call my 'fuck with gender' outfit of white shirt, black tie, trousers and braces teamed with fabulous make-up [AJ McKenna is brought to you by 'Electric Plum' lipstick from Rimmel London - this concludes this brief word from our sponsor]), and then NSFW, done as what I suppose I ought to call a multimedia performance piece with guitarist Matt Harrison and dancer Angeline Lucas. This was a frankly awesome performance, and the reason I, a usually shy person not much given to the blowing of my own trumpet, french horn, or indeed euphonium, can get away with saying that is that Matt and Angeline did such a good job of bringing the piece to life for me, and for the audience who watched with rapt attention as Angeline literally writhed her way around the words, and around Matt's sumptuous, serpentine guitar riffs. An awesome spectacle, and one I feel privileged to have been part of.

So it's been a busy month! July will be a little quieter, with fewer gigs & rehearsals, as the local writing scene goes into its customary summer break. But I'm really pleased with the way these June gigs have gone; and, as all three gigs have been filmed, I hope to be able to provide followers with links to the performances so you can see them too as soon as I can!

Wrestling with Timelords; or, how I learned to start worrying and doubt Steven Moffat

2011-06-16T14:51:00.000-07:00

One of the nice things about blogging is that you don't always have to keep to your beat. So while this blog mainly concerns itself with trans issues, poetry and politics, I can occassionally indulge myself by wittering on about some of the more minor subjects on which I waste cognitive capacity, such as sci-fi, professional wrestling or, in this case, both.

(It ought to be pointed out that from this point on the reader must consider the phrase 'Spoilers, sweetie' to have been uttered in the husky tones of Alex Kingston.)

First, some context. After reading a chance link from a friend, I came across Lawrence Miles' Dr Who Thing, wherein quondam Who-scribe Miles voices, among other things, his concerns about current Who-showrunner Steven Moffat. Now, Miles clearly has a little bit of an axe to grind, but that's understandable: an intellectual property he takes seriously and for which he used to be fortunate enough to write has now moved decisively in the direction of a kind of sci-fi he can't stand. But it did set me pondering what I thought about the reign of Grand Moff Steven, and particularly how it contrasts with the Russell T Davies (RTD) run, which I enjoyed a great deal.

Today, those thoughts crystallised with the news that in 2012, we won't get a full series of Dr Who, but a series of 'specials', rather like the awful 2009 run of the show, in which lazy, overly dramatic foreshadowing replaced the things that had made RTD's run up to that point so much fun: good forward continuity and a drip-feed approach to foreshadowing which was far more effective than 2009's 'have someone say something dramatic at the end of the episode' strategy. What worked really well in the RTD series was the way that mentions of Bad Wolf, Torchwood, or Mr Saxon would be scattered throughout the series in a way that piqued the viewers' interest and kept them guessing. Think about how subtly some of it was drip-fed as well: Bad Wolf in Series 1 was used as the name of a power plant, for heavens' sake. Sure, they lampshaded the fact they'd hidden the clue by the end of the episode; but if you knew Welsh and had been paying attention, you'd have spotted it from the start.

Compare that with Moffat's way of introducing his big unifying plot-point in his first series, and the beginning of his second: to have characters constantly shout 'The Pandorica will OPEN! Silence will FALL!' at the Doctor during dramatic moments. Not exactly subtle, that.

About the only half-interesting thing about Moffat's Motifs was the fact that they both meant the opposite of what we assumed. The Pandorica opening was, we assumed, some kind of container that would unleash ultimate evil. In fact, it was a prison for Matt Smith's Doctor. The dangerous thing wasn't the Pandorica opening, it was when it shut. In fact, when it opened the second time, that was actually a good thing.

How 'Silence will fall' panned out was, if anything, even more ridiculous. Instead of the Doctor being silenced, we were instead treated to a new alien race called THE Silence...which fell. Boneheaded literalism at its worst. But from a certain point of view it might seem cool, because it wasn't what the fans expected. It was a swerve.

And that was when I realised what worries me about Steven Moffat. The thing about Moffat's writing which really worries me, more than budget cuts on the show, more than Lawrence Miles' musings, more than anything else.

What worries me about Steven Moffat is that he is Dr Who's Vince Russo.

Let me explain. Vince Russo was chief booker (a position roughly analogous to Moffat's show-runner position, though dealing with steroid cases drenched in baby oil rather than RADA graduates, so probably a slightly more pleasant working environment on the whole) in the WCW wrestling promotion. And he gradually destroyed said promotion due to his obsession with throwing swerves into storylines. Used sparingly, this can be a good tactic in a wrestling promotion: a large part of your audience has seen how most storylines pan out before and thinks it knows what to expect; so throwing them a curveball once in a while, as long as it adds something to the storyline, keeps things fresh. Russo's problem was he began to use swerves all the time, and he would throw in swerves which made no sense in the context of the storyline, just because they were swerves. Russo became obsessed with booking in such a way that the expectations of smart marks and internet wrestling geeks would be confounded. This pissed off the geeks because they saw through it, and it confused and upset the more mainstream wrestling audience because stuff was happening which made no sense whatsoever and was also kind of ridiculous and what in the crap was David Arquette doing with the Championship Belt, for Hogan's sake? It was a complete mess, but in Russo's view, it was working brilliantly, because, hey you didn't expect that, didja?

And that, to be honest, is what I fear in Moffat's epoch. Let's face it, 'The Silence' should have been a big clue. Moffat, seeking a way to make a swerve out of a phrase with such obvious implications as 'silence will fall', was forced to invent an entirely new alien race, with a convenient amnesia-inducing superpower, purely to service a pun. The existence of the Silence is hard to square with other elements of Who mythology, and the way the Doctor deals with them is out of character on a number of levels - but ha ha, do you see, the Silence fell! You didn't expect that, didja?

And this leads us, inevitably, to the revelation that River Song is Amy Pond's daughter. Does it make sense chronologically? Just about, I guess. Does it make sense emotionally, in terms of Amy's character? Or in terms of River's arc? I'm not so sure about that. How old is River? Does she age at a normal rate? Does she regenerate (and if so, why doesn't she regenerate when she dies at the end of the Silence in the Library two-parter?)? How does a human parent deal with a baby who's part timelord? How will this be dealt with when Karen Gillan finally leaves the show? What about the rather horrid emotional aspect of River's revelation - the exploding Amy, the exploding baby, the whole damn women-in-fridges ickiness of the origin? Has any of this been thought through?

I rather think not. To be honest, River's Revelation doesn't really seem to be something thought-out and planned. But it's a swerve, and I worry that, to Moffat, that's all that matters.

My revolution...

2011-06-07T15:53:00.000-07:00

With Gil Scott-Heron having died recently, I think it's inevitable that most poets will have had their thoughts turning to ~~ripping off one of his poems~~ doing a tribute to his effect on poetry. I considered it for about two minutes or so, then rejected the idea on the grounds that, while I love The Revolution will not be Televised, I Think I'll Call It Morning and Lady Day and John Coltrane, doing a 'tribute poem' would be, well, kind of a wanky, sophomore thing to do. So there I left it.

And then...

Browsing through a dating site (because I am, ah, I may have pointed this out on occassion, available), I came across a woman with one of the most bile-filled dating profiles I've ever seen. A profile which - on a site supposedly known for open-mindedness etc - she waxed at great length about how she would not date, and I quote, 'TGs, TS's, CDs and TV's' because she only dated women and 'no matter what you do to your body you weren't born a woman etc etc'. Because nothing will endear you more to prospective dates than a rant about how you hate a minority group.

Same old same old, really. Trans people are used to this kind of attitude. But what got me was the sheer dehumanising effect of that parade of initials. TS. TV. CD. TG. Not trans people. Trans labels. Trans categories. Externally imposed. The stuff of porn-mag back-page adverts; the brand of the oppressor used to differentiate each particular category of untermenschen from the real people. And it hurt, and it got me angry, and so I found myself ranting away to myself in the shower and started repeating the phrase 'I am not a TV, I am not a TV, I am not a TV...' and some associative faculty was triggered and I began exploring that metaphor of not *being* a TV and so, well...that's how we got here:

My revolution will not be trivialised

I am not a TV:
I am not available in flat-screen
Sony Widescreen hi-definition 3D
I am not something for you to gawp at
from the comfort
of your cisnormative settee
I do not pour forth bile at
people like me nightly
I am not a TV

I am getting ready for a
big
switch
over
but it may not be
in 2012
and it will not be digital
at least not initiall-y:
I am not a TV.

I am not a CD:
I am not exactly
long enough to hold
Beethoven’s 9th Symphony;
I contain so much more.

I am not a CD
though I am allowing a lady
with a laser to unlock me
firing her beams into my pits and grooves
re-editing my data
remixing me
into what I want to be

but I am not a DAT
a Minidisc, an MP3,
a DVD, a PS3 or Nintendo Wii
and I am not a CD.

I am not a TS:
my life is not a waste land
waiting for the touch of fisher kings,
though I have seen death undo so many:
Andrea, Brenda, Mariah, Estrella,
Myra, Faith, Amanda and all those with no ID,
sweet ladies who were never bade goodnight
and had time called in spite of how they hurried;
but who were more, in their time, than Eliot’s tired seer,
more than his reingold borrowings and Sosophistries,
alive, undoing death with every step
across the bridge from one state to another.

I may wind up measuring my life
by each dose of HRT
but TS is not a label
that you’re gonna pin on me.

I am not a TG:
I am not a droid, a replicant, a Nexus-3,
I am not a minor character from ST:TNG,
I am not a space oddity:
there is nothing futuristic about me.

Those who lived like me
are found throughout your history:
Herculine Barbin, the Chevalier D’Eon,
The Priests of Attis, Elogabalus, the Amazons,
Moll Cutpurse, Jan Morris, Lili Elbe, Christine J,
Nong Thoom, Wendy Carlos, Lea T,
Lynn Conway without whom I couldn’t type on this PC,
but there’s nothing futuristic about me.

I am not a label,
I am not a category,
my only initials are AJ
and you will respect that about me,
but if you come for me
with labels intended to dehumanise,
to delegitimize my trajectory,
project your own lack of humanity on me:
I will change your channel,
make your tracks skip,
rewrite your past, and your future
the way you want to edit me:

so, if you please, respectfully,
hear and acknowledge me:
I am not a TV, CD, TS or even TG:
I am me.

Live Word Show

2011-05-31T14:29:00.000-07:00

Hey people - I realise there haven't been a lot of long and detailed posts on here for a while. This will probably continue for a while to be honest, as I'm pretty damn busy at the minute. I'll try to swing by and post the odd thing from time to time even if it's just to pimp gigs I'm doing or alert you to links.

Such as this: me reading some of my recent poems from the Newcastle Dr Sketchy's at Apples & Snakes Tyneside Scratch Club performance session back in April.:

Hat tip (and a heck of a lot more really) to Kirsten Luckins of A&S North East for organising the Scratch Club & posting the video to her Youtube channel!

Other Peoples' Things

2011-04-22T17:29:00.000-07:00

Mum’s boots: brown leather creeping up
my bare calf, heel thrown at an odd angle
forcing my foot to slant, to curve;

John’s Swiss Army Knife, to cut
the nascent hairs, springing
from my big toe, from my arms;

someone else’s lighter,
the first time I used one
to singe them to the root

(at the first laser session,
years later, the smell
of burning hair was Proustian);

other womens’ fingers,
painting the nails
of my left hand;

you, applying the blusher,
the eyeshadow, your make-up
your swimsuit, your bra:

their words: queer.
Tranny. Fag. ‘I’m a
little poof’,

sang down the Metro
by a boy who didn’t like
my velvet jacket.

New poem. Inspired by Monkfish Productions' new 'Hand Me Down' themed project, and also by this horrific fucking story (very severe TRIGGER WARNING, I can't bring myself to watch the footage).

We discover who we are in private. And too many of us are forced to stay who we are in private because we fear this kind of violence, and the indifference - in some cases the amusement - it provokes in the people who should protect us. Fuck that.

Bad News is Not News (where transphobia's involved)

2011-04-16T11:55:00.000-07:00

I mentioned a few posts back that this blog has gradually turned into a kind of Trans Comedy Watch, ever alert for examples of transphobia falling out of the lazy mouths of cissupremacist comedians. This week, however, has witnessed a major episode of 'comic' transphobia about which I have yet to shoot my mouth off, due to me being shagged out from running around like a blue-arsed fly working on the You Didn't Win campaign, your honour.

However, on the grounds that I seem to have made the task of nailing transphobic comedy bastards in this blog a glitter-coated millstone about my neck, it behoves this blog to turn its divinely mascara'd eyes in the direction of one Russell Howard. This 13-year-old comedian and child prodigy, who first came to public attention on Mock the Week, the show which forces Dara O'Briain to slum it with much lazier comedians for half an hour each week in return for a regular paycheck from Auntie Beeb, has this week...hold on, I'm being handed a note...what, really? Have you checked this? He is?

I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but it appears Russell Howard is not in fact a prepubescent, he merely looks like one. He is, however, a transphobic little piece of work, as the following youtube clip - for which a serious trigger warning is in effect - shows.

After being alerted to this blatant piece of bigotry by trans journalist Paris Lees (who blogs at Last of the Clean Bohemians), I, like many others, fired off an email of complaint to the BBC. You can see the text of their reply at my tumblr.

You can also see the reply that trans man Big Daddy Keltik got over at his tumblr. Notice anything familiar?

And we're not the only ones. Pretty much everyone else who's complained to the BBC has got the same stock reply, trying to argue that a sketch about kathoey stewardesses on a Thai airline is somehow 'not a sketch about trans people' and is 'in the tradition of Kenny Everett and Les Dawson'. You can see a detailed dissection of that line of bullshit in the press release from Trans Media Watch.

The BBC have removed the offending episode from the iPlayer, as per their policy of only leaving content up on it for a week, leaving only an inoffensive clip of a different routine from the show. Doubtless they're hoping that this story will go away. That, just like every other time they've made a joke about trans people, the fuss will die down and they'll get away with it.

But it won't. Not this time. Pink News have covered the story, and a general sense has crystallised in the trans community that enough is enough. Why should we stand by and take it when egregious, grinning little scumbags make jokes about how we're so disgusting we make people want to vomit?

This is dehumanisation. This is what Nazis do: make jokes about how the Other is so sickening that the only response decent people can have is horror and revulsion. And this is not what an organisation like the BBC - which has a public service remit to respect all the people of Britain, especially the most vulnerable of us - should be doing. And it is past time they were reminded of that, and started to act on that remit.

This time, we are not going away. This time, we are not giving up. This time, Auntie Beeb and her special little comedy children do not get to get away with it. The BBC and Russell Howard must apologise properly for their disgusting behaviour, and the BBC must start living up to the commitments it should honour as a public service broadcaster in an increasingly diverse society, instead of acting as if, where trans people are concerned, it's still the 1970s.

The naming of poets is a serious matter

2011-04-16T08:38:00.000-07:00

'So why is it called Johns Hopkins?' I asked the poet who was hosting me on a trip to Baltimore as we drove past the town's famed university. 'Was it some kind of historical spelling error?'

My associate then explained that it wasn't: Johns with an s really was the name of the historical figure the university was named after. It's an incident that's always stuck in my mind, because something about Johns rather than John as a name makes it much more memorable. Names have always fascinated me: when your surname is Fish you don't have much choice about that. The inevitable ribbing on the playground will see to that.

When I started writing my concerns about the name became even more acute. It just never looked right at the top of a manuscript or the bottom of a poem. The trouble with Fish as a writer's surname is that it's a bit, well, unintentionally comic. Think of the baggage, the antecedents: Michael, the weatherman who failed to predict the 1987 hurricane? The lead singer of Marillion? These are not figures who are redolent of literary tradition. And the only other famous historical Fish I can think of is the child rapist and cannibal Albert Fish, and the less said about him the better.

So when I began writing I was always somewhat sensitive about this whole name business, what with being surrounded by people with good, strong proper writer's surnames like Cadwallender, Readman and Matthews. But worse was to come, on one of my first forays on the road as a poet, when I went to the Hastings Poetry Festival. I arrived at the venue a little before the event started and was introduced to one of the other readers, a homeless guy who wrote poems for The Big Issue. When I said my name he reacted...unexpectedly, let's say.

'You're not Adam Fish!' he shouted. It took me some time to convince him that, in fact, I was entitled to that name, as he had apparently heard of another poet with exactly the same name working the circuit. We eventually compromised on the idea that there might well be another poet of that name, but there was also me, and the fact that two poets of the same name existed was clearly just one of those coinkydinks.

I never found out who the other poetic Adam Fish was, but a spot of googling led me to discover that there is, in fact, another Adam Fish who's more famous than me and is some kind of film-maker and anthropologist who, as far as I can ascertain, travels the world taking exotic drugs and doing funky yoga maneuvers. Jammy git. Clearly, when there is someone like that wandering about with your name, introducing yourself at parties is going ro be fraught with peril. I could just hear people saying 'Oh wow, that film you made about the tribe in Borneo whose culture is entirely based on eating the pituitary glands of monkeys who themselves eat hallucinogenic centipedes was amazing! Tell, me what insights did tripping for 17-hours on dried monkey-brain give you?' and imagine their crushing disappointment as I sheepishly explained that haha, no, funny story actually, I'm the poetry Adam Fish, not the one with the interesting life, sorry.

Still, it's not all bad. If there's any karmic justice then perhaps one day that guy will find himself in a beautiful house, in another part of the world, at a party with someone telling him he looks much butcher than they imagined, and asking him to 'do 'Eggshells', no, go on, do Eggshells dammit, what the fuck are you talking about that poem meant so much to me, you've changed!' One can but hope.

And none of this, by the way, was helped by the guy who spelled my name 'Adam Fisch' on an early poster for one of my gigs, apparently under the impression that my accent indicated I was some kind of North European dude. Though I have to say I quite liked 'Fisch', it had a sort of Rammstein-y quality to it.

It was pretty clear, then, that when I started writing seriously I was going to have to do something about this name business. But of course, I figured it could wait for a few years because I hadn't started writing seriously yet. Mindful of David Bowie's example, I took the view that switching monikers too early in one's career could be a problem, as it would make it easier for people to trace my embarrassing early output, and so, just as the Ziggy-to-be had stayed plain old David Jones during his time in various terrible mod bands, I decided that I would learn my craft as Mr AF, and swap to a more writerly pen-name when I felt I was good enough. (And I wasn't going to jump the gun like Bowie - if I was going to make the poetic equivalent of an Anthony Newley album, I would make damn sure to release it before I changed my name).

Well, after the past couple of years in which my writing has improved a great deal, both in creation and performance, and with the likelihood of actual book publication drawing ever closer, I decided this week that if I was going to switch to a more writerly name, then now would be the time. The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that the author bio on this blog now contains the moniker AJ McKenna, and it's this name under which I intend to write from now on. When the book is published, that's the name it'll be under; any future pieces in mags or anthologies will be signed thus as well. It's not a massive name-shift - McKenna's my mum's maiden name, and A and J are my initials - but I like the heft of the name, the rhythm, the Celtic resonance, the sense of connection to the lyrical wealth of Irish letters; the paradoxical solidity of the initialised name (think CS Lewis, PD James, H.D., AA Milne, WN Herbert, JRR Tolkien, CJ Cherryh, AJP Taylor, TS Eliot...it's a long and honourable tradition) which is also, of course, gender-neutral and so more in keeping with the spirit of my writing too. It just feels, in an indescribable way, more me, certainly more like the writer me, and if I'm going to get serious about my writing then I think now is the time to adopt it. And so I have.

The Curse of the Drinking Classes

2011-04-02T08:41:00.000-07:00

This weekend I sent off a selection of poems to a publisher which might, just possibly, turn out to be my second pamphlet. If all goes well, said publication may see the light sometime in 2012, which would be exactly ten years after my first pamphlet was published. I like to keep to a tight, frenetic, some might even say punishing, publishing schedule. It's a curse.

The selection I put together - with the working title 'Singing Motorhead in the Voice of Dolores O'Riordan' (there's a story behind that which I'll explain some other day) - concentrates, naturally enough, on trans stuff, but, in the editing, I noticed that there are a lot of poems about work, too. Which had to be left out to preserve the thematic unity of the selection I came up with, and which now have me thinking along the lines of doing another selection taking work culture as a subject. Work and trans stuff tend to be the things I bang on about most on here and in my poetry, so that would make sense. Though I'd need to write a few more work poems to get a full selection together.

Maybe it's just that work culture is much on my mind lately. Only recently I finished reading Madeleine Bunting's Willing Slaves, which I can't recommend enough. And, of course, the BBC have recently done a series, 'The British at Work', telling a story about peoples' experiences of toiling for the man in this septic isle.

You'll notice that I say 'telling a story', and refuse to go quite so far as to call the show a documentary series. That's because documentaries, well, document something. And too often, The British at Work seemed less interested in documenting peoples' working lives than in shoehorning facts and events into a narrative which ends with everybody living fulfilled working lives in the happy-clappy new milennium. A narrative in which unions got in the way of social progress and the Thatcherite desolation of large parts of the UK was a historical inevitability. Watching the eighties episode, they did pay attention to joblessness (by showing a clip of Yosser Hughes) and they covered the Wapping Printers' Strike (though this segued into discussing how lovely the new newspaper offices, and indeed other office buildings, became in the eighties), but you could've blinked and missed one of the defining workplace conflicts of the eighties, the Miners' Strike. Too bad you couldn't say the same for the endless shots of yuppie fun and fawning interviews with post-downshifted yupsters about how much stress they'd been under, the poor dears.

There's a good dissection of what's wrong with the show's narrative about work at The Blog from 20,000 Fathoms, which says pretty much everything I'd've said if I'd found the time. But today, a week after the March for the Alternative, I find the BBC's dismissiveness about workplace organisation not just offensive but completely out of touch.

Last week I marched through the streets of London with 500,000 other people, most of them drawn from the trade unions, in a show of numbers organised by the TUC. The atmosphere, the noise, the numbers were incredible. But what was just as incredible was the fact that, for the first time in what seemed like ages, peoples jobs and livelihoods were the key political issue. The Tory-led government's cuts are having a massive impact on peoples' jobs, and, despite a few highly-publicised new projects, it seems highly unlikely that the private sector can provide enough jobs for highly-qualified people like librarians, teachers, nurses or social workers when their jobs are cut.

There's no economic justification for these cuts. The Tories are making them in furtherance of a mean-minded ideology which, in some respects, chimes all too easily with the dismissive, anti-union, anti-worker, 'we've never had it so good' attitude of The British at Work. The Tory approach is about 'making it easier for businesses' by getting rid of legislation which protects workers' rights. The British at Work bolsters this approach by saying that there's no need to protect workers' rights because we're all 'doing jobs we like' in beautiful, 'hotel-like' offices, feeling fulfilled and creative and self-actualising.

How could people in such utopian working environments begrudge making life easier for our new business overlords? Resistance to managerialism in The British at Work was associated, again and again, with negativity, in the form of closed shops, racism, or, at the top end of things, bowler-hatted bankers straight out of a Monty Python sketch. Whereas the workers who donated time free of charge to the risible 'I'm backing Britain' were presented as heroic, patriotic figures, though even Kirsty Young struggled not to laugh at the campaign's official single by the dodgily-moustached fame-chaser Bruce Forsyth. Y'know, Bruce Forsyth who thinks that people should 'get a sense of humour' about racial slurs. How could you object to a campaign fronted by a class act like that?

(Of course it's unfair to single out Brucie. The 'I'm Backing Britain' campaign was also supported by such moral stalwarts as Jimmy 'I invented zero tolerance' Saville, and Robert Maxwell. With people like that 'backing' the country, one does feel amazed that we actually still exist as a nation at all.)

The reality is that in the 21st century millions of people in Britain still toil at unfulfilling jobs for wages that are a joke. 'Gold-plated pensions' only exist for bankers like Fred Goodwin, and Tory MPs who can roll out of the House of Commons and straight into a do-nothing, fat-salaried executive directorship on a company they've helped out during their time in office. Where people do jobs that are above the McJob level, they constantly face an uphill battle to make their workplaces decent places to work and spend time in, and most of the things that are good about workplaces today were only won by scaring the bejesus out of bosses.

But of course if you think of things that way, then you might find yourself objecting to the Tory agenda. And we can't have that, can we?

Tomorrow, Life

2011-03-25T12:50:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I, like thousands of others, will be joining the March for the Alternative in London. We will march peacefully, we will assemble peacefully, and we will, peacefully, make the case that there is a better way to cut the deficit than George Osborne's misguided, ideologicaly-driven, economically and politically suicidal austerity program. Forget the scaremongering of right-wing demagogues who bleat about anarchists. These are ordinary people - people of all races, all genders, all sexualities and all social classes, abled and disabled, young and old, gathering and making our voices heard. This is democracy in action, and a more democratic coalition than that cobbled together when Nick Clegg threw away his principles for a chance at a stroll in David Cameron's rose garden.

I'm proud to be a part of this movement, and I hope that, if you're reading this, you are, or will be, too. And to be honest I don't really have a lot of time to do a detailed blog about it, because, among other things, I need to get my nails done so I look as fabulous as always for this historic day. So I'll get off now. I just wanted to let anyone reading here who doesn't follow me on Facebook or Twitter know that I'll be there. And if you do follow me on the second of those platforms, watch for a lot of tweeting over the course of the day.

And now...offski! See you on the other side, fight the power, and I leave you with the deep and resonant political analysis of Rage Against the Machine, fuck you, I won't do what you tell me...motherfucker!

Always Outnumbered, Always Betrayed

2011-03-21T14:36:00.000-07:00

It's a truism of politics - and of life, of which politics is merely an extension - that you hate your betrayer more than your enemy. This is why there is a greater reservoir of hatred for Nick Clegg than there is for David Cameron. Cameron is a Tory, and we know we can rely on the Tories to be horrible, hateful, bigoted scum, who'll kick crutches away from the disabled and burn babies' prams for firewood. But a year ago Nick Clegg seemed to promise a new kind of politics - seemed to be the personification of Britain's own 'Obama moment' - only to throw it all away for a shot at power, turning his back on the hope he represented and everything he told us he believes in.

So in a similar way, as angry as I am with Peter Kay I find myself angrier at Channel 4 when I read that said channel - which, just last week, to general acclaim from the trans community, signed the Trans Media Watch Memorandum of Understanding - is planning to repeat the very programme in which Kay first aired his transphobic caricature, Geraldine. Yes: on March 26th, a grand total of twelve days after signing the MoU, Channel 4 plans to air a programme featuring a character and a performer universally reviled by trans people.

Let's remind ourselves what Channel 4 committed themselves to do by signing the Memorandum. The Memorandum has four principle aims: to eliminate transphobia in the media, to end the provision of misinformation about transgender issues in the media, to increase positive, well-informed representations of trans people in the media, and to ensure that trans people working in or with the media are treated with the same respect as cis people in equivalent positions.

The relevant principles transgressed by 'Peter Kay's Britain's Got the Pop Factor And Oh For God's Sake Stop the Title We Got the Joke Ten Words Ago You Unfunny Buffoon' are principles two and three. Kay's caricature 'Geraldine' is nothing but misinformation about trans people; and this laughable transface mockery is far from a 'positive' or 'well-informed' representation. So why are Channel 4 doing this?

The only inference I can make from this scheduling decision is that they just don't care. And that in fact they never did. Channel 4 were happy to use Trans Media Watch's good intentions as a way to score a little good publicity (though notably less keen to trumpet their decision on their news programming - a reticence to show solidarity with trans people in the mainstream media thankfully not shared by others, such as the New Statesman's David Allen Green), but when it comes down to it, doing the right thing by one of the most vulnerable groups in society means nothing for Channel 4 compared to the cheap ratings pop a rerun of Kay's godawful talent show spoof will garner in the wake of his charidee single with Susan Boyle.

Should this really surprise us? This is the same channel that broadcast an episode of The IT Crowd which featured, as its comic climax, a cis man beating a trans woman unconscious; the same channel which broadcast Frankie Boyle making rape jokes involving a disabled child. This is the channel which only did something about the Big Brother racism scandal when rioters in India began burning contestants in effigy.

Fine words are all very well, but Channel 4 have shown again and again that they only do what's right when people put pressure on them to do so. Perhaps this is what Channel 4's head of creative diversity, Stuart Cosgrove was alluding to when he said that Trans Media Watch needed to feel free to 'shaft us' now and again (as reported by Chrisine Burns at Just Plain Sense).

Sadly, it isn't people like Cosgrove who wind up getting shafted, but trans people, again and again, when cis people act as if we don't really matter to them, as if we're not as important as profits or ratings or their own smug peace of mind. We may be a minority, but I'm sick to the back teeth of being betrayed by people and organisations I admire.

That's why I've started a petition to ask Channel 4 to live up to their promises and not air Peter Kay's transphobic comedy special again. Please sign, and send a message to Channel 4 that fine words and big parties are not enough: that we expect to see them act on the promises they've made, and that we'll judge the extent to which they really value and respect trans voices by their actions, not their PR.

Faithless Bodies

2011-03-20T16:08:00.000-07:00

One of the things that really hurts about negative portrayals of trans people, particularly those that are made in the name of lowest common denominator 'humour' or just plain old mean-spiritedness, is that they're something we have to deal with on top of the problems the trans experience brings with it already. Two links I've seen recently have really brought this home to me again, in a way that moved me and made me think a lot about my relationship to my body.

The first was CN Lester's heartbreaking post about the relationship which s/he, as a trans singer, has with hir own body. As a classically trained singer, Lester finds hirself in a position where s/he feels s/he cannot take testosterone due to the effects it would have on hir vocal range. As a result, s/he finds hirself estranged from hir body, regarding it, well, as an 'it', an entity separate from hir self, an entity s/he has to work and negotiate with to achieve her ends. I've had this experience as well: the constant little ways in which my body won't do what I want it to; the moments when I think, no, that isn't me, that doesn't look like me, do I look like that? And the pain that brings.

The only way to stop that pain is to try and take measures to make your body align more with your sense of self. For example, recently, after deciding I'd finally had enough of the constant nightmare shaving was for me, I opted to start undergoing laser treatment to permanently remove my facial hair. And that has been great: I already have less of a five o'clock shadow after just one session. I would recommend it to anyone.

But when you're young, you have fewer tools available to you, and you can use less healthy methods to try and express the gender you feel. I was reminded of that by a line in another post about trans issues I read this weekend, on Questioning Transphobia:

'For example, I have seen several cis women assume that trans girls as children and teenagers interacted with images of the beauty ideal (models on magazine covers, for example) just like cis boys do, and don’t realize that this ideal really does have an impact on us and on our self-image, and that combined with body/gender dysphoria is one of the many reasons we can be suicidal. I know multiple trans women who pre-transition developed eating disorders in hopes of developing a more female appearance.'

The emphasis there is mine, and the reason is that that was my experience as a teenager. During my late teens, I became anorexic and bulimic (yes, I know you wouldn't think it to look at me now, thank you...) and that eating disorder was intimately related to my gender issues. I used to look at pictures of girls in 'lad-mags' and the third page of the Daily Star (I know, I know...) and note the way their hips jutted out at an angle...then I would feel my own hipbone, rubbing my hand on it and trying to decide if it was as visible as theirs. I used to watch Gladiators on a Saturday night and obsessively compare my weight to that of the female stars. I was overjoyed, once, to find that I weighed less than Panther and Lightning; though I never managed to get to the point where I was lighter than Jet or Nightshade. Probably just as well; getting down to their weight would've killed me.

What does all this have to do with stuff like transphobic comedians and conferences, you might ask? Well, it's simple enough: this pain is what we are already dealing with. We don't need anymore. Some of you may be aware of a meme doing the rounds on Tumblr about bullying, the essence of which is that people who get mocked for their supposed 'imperfections' are often struggling with things which their tormentors can't conceive of. As trans people we struggle with mental health issues, addictions, eating disorders, and all manner of troubles as a result of the dysphoria between the gender assigned to us by society and that which we feel ourselves to be. So having people drag up as caricatures of ourselves to get cheap laughs, or writing newspaper articles which call into question our bodily integrity - our right to bring our bodies closer to our selves - really does not help.

I want to end this post with two things. The first is Criminally Fragile, a poem I wrote last year which represented a real breakthrough for me, as the first time I'd been able to write something which worked about where my head was at during those mixed-up teenage years, and which is one of the poems I've written about of which I'm most proud; and, secondly, a song which got me through that dark period, and which I was reminded of today, reading CN Lester's link: 'Salva Mea', by Faithless.

How can I change the world, when I can't even change myself? I plan on doing both, to be honest. I do what I do in the hope that, in the future, some young trans kid like me won't have to worry about changing the world on top of everything else.

Comic Relief's Garlic Bread-heads Need to Show Some Damn Respect

2011-03-17T05:50:00.000-07:00

First, the good news. This Monday, UK broadcaster Channel Four signed up to a historic memorandum of understanding with Transmediawatch, pledging to handle trans issues sensitively and respectfully. I can only welcome something like this, given the amount of times on this blog that I've raged against disrespectful and insensitive coverage of trans issues in the media. Trans Media Watch are to be commended for their excellent work in getting Channel 4 on board, and I look forward to seeing the new approach in action on that channel.

Sadly, however, it would seem that one of Channel 4's competitors, ITV, literally didn't get the memo. Because, in the same week that 4 made this historic step in trans representation, it was announced that next week, ITV's lunchtime ratings hit, Loose Women (note to American readers - basically a British version of The View) announced that they would feature their first 'transsexual' panelist. Who would it be? Roz Kaveney? Natacha Kennedy? Well, both those girls are a bit intellectual, a bit too removed from the celebrity, Heat magazine world for Loose Cis Women...maybe Dana International would be more their speed?

Alas, no. Because it turns out the 'first trans panellist' on Loose Cis Women will not be any of these women, will in fact not be a trans woman at all, but will be...washed-up funnyman Peter Kay trotting out his tired old caricature of trans womanhood, Geraldine McQueen. But don't worry! It's all in aid of Comic Relief - because Kay is releasing this year's annoying Comic Relief novelty single as a collaboration with Susan Boyle. That makes it okay, right?

Well, no, not really. In fact frankly it makes me wonder what Comic Relief are playing at. In 2007, they literally wheeled Kay out, for another 'comedy' duet with his fellow bigoted 'comedian' (and previous target of this blog) Matt Lucas, this time making fun of disabled people with their 'hilarious' wheelchair-user caricatures Brian Potter & Andy Pipkin. And now here we are again, with Kay given free reign to mock some of the most vulnerable people in society - people Comic Relief ostensibly sets out to help.

It does make you wonder who Comic Relief exists for, doesn't it? Is it really about the charidee, mate, or does it exist to boost the careers of pointless, desperate, laughter-hungry failed humans like Kay and Lucas? What's Kay done on telly lately, besides those rubbish John Smith adverts? Well, he showed up looking off his face on the One Show...and that's about it, really. I know he's doing a series of shows at the O2 arena because he's now too up his arse to tour like a proper stand-up - and let's face it, sod the charities, that's what Kay is doing this single and his run on Loose Cis Women to promote. So why are Comic Relief indulging him with all this free publicity?

It's a legitimate question because, even leaving aside his transphobia, Kay is disliked by many in the comedy world. Channel 4 had to compensate an innocent man from Kay's hometown after one of Kay's shows apparently slandered him; he screwed collaborators Dave Spikey and Neil Fitzmaurice out of the credit for Phoenix Nights, the show which brought him to peoples' attention; he rubbished a routine by Noel Fielding - a comedian who, at his worst, is ten times more interesting than Kay - purely to court the affections of a single heckler in the room.

Anecdotally, people talk of him tightening mike stands as much as possible when he comperes shows, just so the acts who follow have to start their set fighting to get the microphone to their height; of other comedians refusing to speak to him backstage lest he steal their gags; and of him introducing performers by saying 'don't worry if the next act's shit, I'll be back on in a minute'. His autohagiography was so badly-written and contained so much chip-on-the-shoulder score-settling that sales for its sequel tanked so badly it was cited as a factor in the decline of the UK book industry; and his 'ecological' approach to DVD releases - endlessly, cynically recycling the same old material - has became an old, unfunny joke - much like the ones that litter his routines. Little wonder that, when he appeared to receive an 'outstanding achievement' award at the 2009 British Comedy Awards (I suppose spinning twenty minutes worth of stand-up material into a ten year career is some kind of achievement), the assembled comedians pointedly refused to give him the usual standing ovation.

Peter Kay used to tell jokes. Now he is one. When the laughs he could get by endlessly repeating the phrase 'garlic bread' dried up, he did what far too many rubbish comedians do and went to the endless well of transphobic gags. So far, so par for the course: regular readers will know transphobia in comedy is no rarity, and in fact this blog has gradually turned into a kind of Trans Comedy Watch, so often have I been forced to lay into yet another pointless funnyman for spreading prejudice with a liar's smile on his face; but what is special about this case is the support Comic Relief are giving Kay, and the platform they are giving him to ponce about doing his hateful caricature of a trans woman.

Trans women are one of the most vulnerable groups in society worldwide, as this blog and many, many others have documented time and again. Comic Relief claims that it exists to help the most vulnerable in Britain and throughout the world. That is a laudable aim. But it sits uneasily with providing a platform for a turgid little man like Kay to mock those very vulnerable people it claims to support. I had hoped they'd learned their lesson after the disgusting ableism of the Kay/Lucas video. Clearly they haven't.

This Friday, Comic Relief will squat on the Friday night schedules in its usual bloated manner, interspersing variety turns and almost-funny skits with tug-on-the-heartstrings real-life bits and asking, again and again, for our money. The money they raise does a lot of good. But let's be brutally honest: there are lots of other charities out there, and I can and do donate to those charities. I do charity gigs and I use my poetry to engage in activist causes as often as I can. I'm no Scrooge: I believe in standing up for the vulnerable and using my money to help them improve their lot in whatever way they can.

I'm a charitable person. But this Red Nose Day, Comic Relief will not see one red cent of my hard-earned cash, and they won't see any again until they stop allowing their shindig to be hijacked by hateful, transphobic 'comedians' like Peter Kay. Because transphobia is just not funny. Ever.

...because the bad things never went away

2011-03-13T15:13:00.000-07:00

Microaggressions. A word I mentioned on here the other night, which led me to looking up the brilliant microaggressions blog on tumblr, which in turn led me to this brilliant blog about the kind of microaggressions trans people encounter on a pretty much daily basis. It's a concept - like cisgender, and kyriarchy - with which I think people should be much more familiar.

Which makes it more galling that today has been another day of having to deal with aggression and othering from a very familiar source.

Julie Bindel, like the trans toilets topic, seems to be an issue that one has to deal with on a regular basis as a trans activist. However much we make clear, again and again, how much of a transphobic bigot she is, people keep inviting her to give out with her views on trans people as if she's some kind of expert - whether it's the Guardian, Standpoint magazine, Queer Question Time or, most recently, The Royal College of Psychiatrists, who have invited Bindel along as the only non-psychologist to attend a conference on, allegedly, 'the most recent academic, clinical and contemporary thinking on transgender issues'.

Quite why Bindel has been invited, given this brief, is something of a mystery. She isn't an academic. She isn't a clinician. And, far from being 'contemporary', her views on trans issues are rooted in an outmoded, second-wave feminism with which fewer and fewer women - cis or trans - identify today.

Bindel has in the past written a fawning obituary for Mary Daly, calling her 'the world's first feminist philosopher' (take that, Mary Wollstonecraft!) but glossing over her racism, and her genocidal views that we should leave only ten per cent of the men on earth alive. That is quite some evil. Reducing a population by ten per cent is called decimation. I don't even know what the word for reducing a population to ten per cent is, besides genocide. Even the Nazis only managed to kill about 67% of Europe's Jewish population. Daly dreamed about genocide on a scale beyond even Hitler. But, to Bindel, she's a stand-up gal.

When it came to cis men, Daly's genocidal dreams were on a hiding to nothing. When it came to trans women, however, Daly was much more successful, as her apt pupil, Janice Raymond, with her views about 'morally mandating [trans people] out of existence', was able to influence US policy to ensure that federal and state governments would not fund surgeries for indigent and imprisoned trans people. I referred in my last post to the suffering of Rebekah Brewis, who is not receiving adequate help with her transition from the Oregon authorities, in whose mental health system she is currently incarcerated. Janice Raymond is a big part of the reason why; and Mary Daly is a big part of why Janice Raymond thought the way she did.

And now we have Bindel trying to carry on Daly and Raymond's work by addressing the Royal College of Psychiatrists about trans issues - issues she has no experience of. Issues she has, in fact, been dismissive of. And yet of all the people outside psychology they could ask, the Royal College of Psychiatrists has asked her to be the one who lectures to them on trans issues. Would the RCP ask Fred Phelps to be the only non-psychiatrist to lecture them on gay issues? Would they listen calmly to a lecture on Islam by Geert Wilders? Or would they rightly refuse to give a platform of academic respectability to bigotry?

It is exactly that kind of respectability which allowing Bindel to speak at this conference confers on her views. And by bestowing such respectability on her, the Royal College of Psychiatrists are delivering a clear message that they do not care about trans people. They are legitimising the transphobic views that drive the kind of aggression described by Asher Bauer in his blog above. They are conferring legitimacy on discrimination against trans people in healthcare, in housing, in employment, and in the streets where, year after year, trans people lose their lives to the violence bigots like Bindel enable.

As clinicians, the RCP are subject to the medical principle of primum non nocere - 'first do no harm'. By giving their imprimatur to Bindel, they cause harm to one of the most vulnerable groups in society. It's fortunate for them, I suppose, that they can prescribe tranquilisers - because if I was doing what they're doing, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night.

Back

2011-03-11T19:09:00.000-08:00

It's two in the morning and I'm awake. Don't rush to comfort me. This is actually a good thing.

It's a good thing because the reason I'm awake is a burning need to write. To get something down. To express something I haven't felt in a long time. Anger. And that I feel angry is a good thing, because for far too long I've felt, if not exactly depressed, then certainly worn-out. Beaten down. Burnt out.

It started with a little local difficulty at work. I won't go into details here - this blog has always prided itself on being as unspecific as possible about where I toil to earn my handful of scraps from the capitalist table. Confidentiality is one reason for this, but another, very important reason, is universality. I believe the problems I encounter at work - the problems most of us encounter in the warped work culture of the kyriarchy - are pretty much the same anywhere. When I blog about some aspect of work, it isn't because I want to have a dig at a particular employer: it's because I'm painfully aware that the issues I deal with at work are the same or very similar to the issues others deal with. It's an entire culture we're dealing with, a sickness that has metastasized through the entire body politic: and I need to describe the symptoms of that sickness in a way that's as depersonalised as possible. It can never be fully depersonalised, because suffering under such a sick system wounds me, as it wounds so many others, as it causes such a terrible psychic cost to our society as a whole; but adopting a 'no names, no pack drill' position allows me to sidestep the accusations of sour grapes that would doubtless be forthcoming if I were to get more specific, while at the same time allowing what I say to resonate with others. And the fact that it does resonate - that the responses I get when I write a poem like, say, Employer of the Year or Collude to Exclude, are expressions of weary familiarity rather than shocked incomprehension - rather suggests that this is a universal experience I'm writing about. Yemaya knows I wish it wasn't.

So, reader, you will understand why I don't wish to dwell on the problems at work that started off my downturn. After a certain point they became immaterial anyway. If it wasn't work it might well have been something else: certainly the kyriarchy showed no inclination to soften up during my own period of relative inactivity. Trans women were still being murdered, and misgendered in newspaper headlines. Disabled people were still subject to the vilest witch-hunt we've seen in politics in recent times. The Coalition still seemed hell-bent on turning Britain into a third-world nation to satisfy their big financial backers. All was fucked, all was fucked, and all manner of things would be fucked. But I lacked the anger to effectively deal with this. I was, as I say, burnt out. Like many of us from time to time, I felt as if I was repeating the same things over and over, banging my head against a wall and achieving nothing beyond throwing up the tiniest scattering of brick-dust and giving myself a concussion.

In that kind of headspace it can be hard to see the signs of hope. I saw the news finally start paying attention to groups like UK Uncut and The Broken of Britain; I saw Transmediawatch make progress signing media organisations up to a Memorandum of Understanding about trans representation; I watched as the peoples of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya did the impossible and stood up to their oppressive, western-backed elites. Intellectually, I could see that progress was being made; emotionally, it failed to register. I would see a story and think 'I should blog about that' or 'there might be a poem to be made about this' but beyond a sluggish recognition of that fact, I couldn't stir myself much further. Just this week, for example, I found myself moved by the plight of Rebekah Brewis, a trans woman being brutally treated by the Oregon authorities, whose case I learned about on the eve of International Women's Day, of all times, and thought that here was something I needed to speak out about, and here was a time when it mattered to say such things. But it didn't happen because, still, I lacked the fire.

To be fair, I was partly to blame for this lack. I had planned, during my week off in January, to take some time to simply relax. However, the discovery of a cheap rail ticket offer in a local paper set me off planning to do a gig in London, and then - since I had the week off - to do a bunch of other gigs elsewhere to take advantage of the situation. At a time when I should have been replenishing my strength, I pushed myself to my final reserves, desperate not to waste time, to get out there and get my message heard. And I'm glad I did, because I enjoyed those gigs and, without going to London, I'd never have encountered the brilliant work of Anna Chen, but the net result of all that gigging, all those late nights and long train rides, was that when I returned to my day job I was running on less than empty. I needed time out. I needed space to think. I needed to sleep in late and spend whole days doing nothing more strenuous than taking a shower and putting a DVD in the machine. I needed to fucking relax.

Fortunately, this past week, I've had that time. Another week off work coincided with a friend being away for a week and needing someone to look after her cats. This gave me the opportunity to take time off away from work, away from my parents and - because I couldn't travel - away from gigging. It was, in fact, a way to force myself to relax. I could go out during the day - and I have, to attend a fantastic gig by local women poets for International Women's Day, and to check out the John Martin exhibition at the Laing Art Gallery, to acquire nice things using a money-off voucher for the Body Shop and to mark what seem the first tentative stirrings of spring by buying and drinking my first bottle of Rose of the year - but I had to be in by the evening to feed the kittehs. Wild nights were out of the question.

So, for a week, I've been forced to chill. And, tonight, my friend came back. And, lying in bed, I found myself turning things over in my head. Thinking about things like the March for the Alternative later this month. Thinking about what I'd say at the gigs I have lined up next month, when I'll have longer sets to work with and more time to make my points. Thinking about the government, reflecting on stories my friend had told me from the union conference she'd been on, pondering cases like that of Rebekah Brewis, mentioned above, and the shameful reporting of the changes to clothing regulations for trans women that I've seen in the papers this week, and the efforts I've made, and continue to make, to shift my own gender presentation to an identity with which I feel more comfortable, and the microaggressions (and, lets be frank, risk of macro-aggressions) I have to deal with as a result.

And suddenly I didn't feel burned-out. I didn't feel beaten-down. I didn't feel tired and weak and useless. I didn't feel spent. I felt a whirl of emotions racing through my brain. I felt a desire to engage with those emotions properly again. I felt my fingers twitch to touch the keyboard. I felt my synapses trying on sentences for size. I felt - for the first time in months - angry. And anger, as John Lydon once pointed out, is an energy.

So. I am angry. I am shouty. I am ranty. And I am going to be ranting about a lot more things on here in the weeks and months to come. If you're reading this and you like that - and I'm going to assume, if you've been reading this for a while, that you do - I'd like to bid you hello again. If you're new to this blog, I'd just like to bid you hello. And if you don't like the thought of being ranted at by an angry, poor, left-of-centre trans poet? Well, you could probably stand to learn the most of anyone from this blog but, y'know, if the thought of acknowledging the opinion of someone who lacks your privilege really makes your guts churn and your eyes bleed? The back button is your friend, chum. Jog right on.

Death joined us for a drink

2011-02-10T15:23:00.000-08:00

Death found us that day,
in the pub as we drank
and someone broke the news of your collision.

Death pulled up a stool and joined the conversation.

Death listened, caught the hollowness
behind the jokes, the catching laughter.

Death saw the silences lengthen,
said nothing to fill them. Death did not
whisper in our ears, did not
remind us he was there.

He didn't need to.

He sat and watched
as glasses emptied,
listened to the bell ring

the dry snap
of the jackets we shrugged on,
followed each of us back
down our separate roads home.

* * *

I was going to blog about the launch of By Grand Central Station We Sat Down and Wept tonight, but when I got back home I was told by my mother that the doctors treating my grandmother, who has suffered for a long time with a narrow heart valve which is causing blood to pool in the heart, have concluded that her condition cannot be cured. She is dying, and it is now only a matter of time.

This blog has been quiet for a while. It may be quiet somewhat longer.

I should be drinking a toast to absent friends...instead of these comedians.

2011-02-02T16:04:00.000-08:00

Whenever I do the kind of performance that comes along rarely in poetry, the sort of gig where I have the audience in the palm of my hand, where the bits between poems flow easily and I get to display the kind of crowd-pleasing cool that puts people in mind of Dean Martin during his heyday, I always find myself on edge afterwards. Jumpy. Disturbed. Because I know there's a chance someone from the audience will wind up talking to me and will utter the phrase I most dread:

'Mate, why are you wasting your time on this poetry crap? You're really good, you should be a comedian!'

And then, because I'm a good girl, I smile politely and say 'thanks' with what I hope is just the right note of self-deprecation, but inside I am desperate to say: 'NO! No, I do not want to be a fucking comedian! I hate comedians! I despise most of the fuckers! If a virus wiped out 95% of the comedians in the world overnight then as long as it neglected to infect the few of them I can stand to have a drink with, I would isolate that virus and shake it by the dominant allele! Fuck comedians! Fuck comedy! If I wanted to be a comedian I wouldn't have been a fucking poet, would I, you bloody INANULON! Piss off!'

A somewhat extreme position, you might think, but it's one I've arrived at through long observation of the similarly extreme position which most comedians have taken towards people like me. Time after time in this blog, I've detailed the way comedians such as David Letterman, Stephen Fry, Graham Linehan, Sean Lock, Lucas & Walliams, and even Stewart Lee, have all, in the past, chosen to make trans people the punchlines of their jokes. As this blog has outline again and again, jokes like these have a body count, best evidenced by the names added to the Transgender Day of Remembrance list year after year.

When you treat an entire group of people as a joke, you legitimise the idea that they don't matter. When you pander to the hatred that makes peoples' lives unbearable, you legitimise that hatred. And, ultimately, you tell those who want to kill trans people that actually, it's okay. That we aren't fully human and, anyway, if you find out we're trans, then it's only understandable if you freak out and batter us to death. Jokes!

Recently I was watching a stand-up comedy show on the BBC and I saw something which gave me a little bit of hope. One of the turns on the show made a naff joke about his wife 'having a penis'. And what was amazing was that every joke he'd been telling before this point had been getting good, round laughs, but when he drew from the transphobia well, his laugh flattened. There were a few titters here and there and maybe a couple of belly laughs, but the thick, full, rounded laughs that most of the audience had been giving him had faded away to nothing. And I thought about this conversation we've all been having, online, in the arts, in politics and in the wider culture, and how more and more voices - of which this blog is one - have been slowly chipping away at the notion that people are punchlines - whether those people are trans, disabled, poor, gay, lesbian, bisexual, black, fat, whatever: and I thought, well, thank fuck for that. We're having an impact. We're starting to break through.

Sadly, we are not yet having enough of an impact to stop America's flagship comedy show from behaving like a bunch of transphobic douchebags (problematic reporting flag: 'transgenders' used as noun).

Look at the picture at the top of that article and you see everything that sickens me about most comedians, and the reason why I'm ashamed to be associated with them. Look at the face: the smug, cis, caucasian face. I have no idea which smug, piece-of-shit 'comic' that face belongs to, and I care even less. All I do know is that that's the kind of face I got sick of seeing at school: the face of a scumbag enjoying the pleasure of mocking people who don't have the privilege he has simply for lacking that privilege, safe in the knowledge there won't be any comeback, and he can get away with it.

I have no desire to be associated with that kind of vileness. I have no desire to be a comedian while that kind of arrogant, bullying crap is the public face of comedy. I'm a poet, and I'm proud of it, because it's a calling that demands a higher standard than the cheap laugh and the slap on the back, and because I want to live in a culture that demands high standards. That demands better, for everyone outside the charmed circle of privilege.

Demand better: let NBC know we won't let them turn people into punchlines any longer. Flatten the laugh; wipe the smirk from the privileged faces. Sign the petition.

Tour Report

2011-01-23T14:15:00.000-08:00

Whew, what a week! I've been chilling out with my friend Michelle for the weekend after spending the earlier part of the week on yet another teeny-tiny tour of gigs around the North East and in London.

This time last week I was sitting round a low table on the fifth floor of Norham House in Newcastle, sharing some fantastic vegetarian soup with a group of people from Apples & Snakes North East and people from the local theatre community after the performance section of the inaugural Newcastle scratch club. At one in the morning some of us were still there, drinking wine and hanging out at the back of the building, looking onto the husk of the old Odeon cinema and discussing future plans. Scratch club was a good gig for me both professionally and personally, and I'll be going to the next one, and the next, and the next. I really think it'll help me develop my performance and take things to the next level. And there was great stuff at the gig from Amina Marix Evans, Jennie Pascoe, Poetry Jack and a whole load of other cool people.

Monday saw me visit the Lamplight Open Mic in Stanley. An excellent set from me at this gig was only marred by the fact that I had to leave before seeing the second half in order to get home to Washington at a decent time by bus. But what I did see included brilliant work by Jules Clare, Steve Urwin, Mark Speeding, Jaene Davies and many others. Another good gig.

If it was Tuesday it must have been Middlesbrough for a quick open mike spot at the Electric Kool-Aid Cabaret of the Spoken Word in Blu Basement. This was more of an opportunity to check out the venue and the gig, and it was impressive, to say the least. It was also good to catch a performance by WN Herbert, Andy Croft and Paul Summers, the last gig of their Three Men on the Metro tour, and Paul's last gig before he leaves for Australia. They were all great and you really should get their book.

I didn't sleep very much on Tuesday night, and then on Wednesday I needed to be up and about early for a train ride to London, where I planned to read at Jawdance, an Apples & Snakes open mike night at Rich Mix, a fantastic arts venue in Bethnal Green. This was one of the biggest stages I've ever been on and I was kind of intimidated by the size of the crowd and the slickness of the gig, which had a long list of guest spots, poetry films and even resident artists drawing everyone who performed in addition to the open mike stuff. However, the compere for the evening made a monumentally shit joke near the start of the night which relied on a whiff of dog-whistle transphobia for its punchline and I surfed through my performance on a wave of mutilation thereafter. It must have worked, I guess, because reaction to my short set was uniformly positive. Amazing how popular getting on stage, snarling and staring at the crowd like some kind of make-up-wearing old testament prophet will make you. Fortunately the night was saved by a great performance from the magnificent Anna Chen, who I urge you all to check out. She's great.

And to be honest the night needed saving, because I was going back to literally one of the worst hotels in London. The County Hotel, Bloomsbury. Look it up. Let's just say I figured it probably wasn't the hotel for me when I noticed reception was being manned by a German skinhead. Put it this way: when I got back to the hotel, Highlander was on and when I was watching the scenes in that horrific fucking bad-days-of-New-York flophouse that the Kurgan stays in I was thinking 'actually, that's not that bad. And to make matters worse, London under Boris Johnson seems to have became some kind of Mormon township where even hotel bars close at eleven pm and off-licences close even earlier. I had to go back to a room in the shittiest hotel in the world, and I didn't even have booze to make things better. If I hadn't had a decent chat with Helen G from Bird of Paradox at the gig, and seen Anna's set, I would have had one of the shittiest nights of my life despite the gig.

Fortunately morning came soon enough and I shambled, on maybe three hours' sleep, to King's Cross to get a train back to Newcastle - a city where it is a lot easier to get drinks after midnight than our nation's capital. Overall it was a good tour, and there are more gigs lined up - the rescheduled launch of At Grand Central Station We Sat Down and Wept, on February 8th at Centurion, a spot at the Black Light Engine Room in Middlesbrough on Feb 25th, more Scratch Club fun...there's lots coming up. More soon.

New Stuff 2

2011-01-11T12:32:00.000-08:00

Alarm Clock Briton

I sit by the harbour
and I wake in bed cursing the moment
when I realised I could set any tune on my phone
as my alarm clock noise, and my own laziness

for never changing it after
our summer trip to Whitby,
where we ate breakfast in the Caedmon Cafe,
poky, basic, vaguely disappointing
(so appropriately named after a poet),

wondering if Raoul Moat would be shot
or Shakineh Astani would be stoned,
lying in a four-poster bed,
in a courtyard hotel, with sun
streaming in through the nets,
and Julianne Regan singing Martha’s Harbour
seemed perfect to wake up to there,

but now, on working mornings in the winter depths,
dark outside and cold beneath the duvet,
Julianne’s voice has become the soundtrack
to my oppression, a reminder that I am
a galley slave, my love,
in the trireme of late capitalism,
and the nearest thing to freedom
is a fumble for the snooze button
and ten minutes of half-sleep wondering
if I’ll have time to shower or shave,

deciding to do neither, fuck it, take an extra ten
then drag my filthy self to work,
this isn’t BO, this is olfactory terrorism,
propaganda of the smell,
and I hope that it gets up your executive nose
as much as your anal timekeeping rules
are a pain in my arse,

and I somehow make it to the bus stop,
start reading my tweets in the queue,
and find that fucking dickhead, Clegg,
is saying how much he admires
alarm-clock-fucking-Britain?

What does that Westminster posh-boy know
about the hopelessness of waking in the dark
before another day of toiling for a boss
that you think is a twat,
every minute of the working day
a betrayal of all your ideals,
a punch in the face from a pair of brass knuckles
sculpted to form the word compromise?

Probably quite a lot actually,
but a deaf guy in a Chilean mine
could hear the dog-whistle he’s making,
same as that crap about curtains closed all day,
demonise the disabled, the unemployed,
the casualties of a neoliberal war
on the idea of universal human dignity,
the notion that you can be worth something
other than a salary, an arsehole’s idea of Sparta,

where you can throw people out to die
and still be the hero, turning beings into burdens,
and we all know where that leads,
the first Nazi posters showed ‘cripples’, not Jews,
and I wonder how far Alarm Clock Britain really is
from Kinder-Kirche-Kuche-land,
and I wonder who the next group will be
in Nick’s purely-rhetorical crosshairs:
trans people who cost the NHS less
than it takes to lance one boil on Thatcher’s arse,
old people who’ll be told that Dignitas
is the only way to ease the 'pension time-bomb'
that’s ticking like the clock that Clegg’s so fond of?
Asian men or long-haired ex-English teachers
with a ‘creepy’ taste for poetry?

And the Nescafe turns sour in my stomach,
I gag to keep my bolted cornflakes down,
and I hate that scheming right-wing scum
are trying to say that getting out of bed
puts me on their side somehow,
when it’s only rage against their fucking world
that stops me staying on my arse forever,
and I realise that I have to change my tune
Julianne’s acoustic melodies will have to be replaced,
and tomorrow morning, I vow that I’ll wake
to a voice shouting Fuck you,
I won’t do what you tell me.

* * *
Nick Clegg can kiss my fucking snooze button.

New Stuff 1

2011-01-10T14:58:00.000-08:00

Traüme

Surprised how slim you looked, how young,
red cotton briefs that made you look like Sybil Starr,
my room the way it was, the bed half-broken.
I lay, my body rhymed, at last, with yours,

though clothed: the same smooth legs,
same swelling breasts, the same receiving void
between the legs, the origin of worlds,
here, at the end, yours given, mine achieved.

I felt you shaking in my sleep and cried
then, as you came around, I wiped my eyes.
You looked at me and barely said it’s time.
All I could say, at last your daughter, was goodbye.

* * *

The musician Paul Heaton fell out with pro-Labour pop music initiative Red Wedge when they refused to endorse his demand that the British music industry be nationalised. I kind of have the same feeling about poetry: I think the government should pay all poets a modest living wage as a kind of insurance policy for the spiritual welfare of the nation. Partly this is because I genuinely feel it would do some good, but partly this is because, if I was paid to be a poet, then after writing poems like this one I could take some flexitime, go home and nurse myself with comfort food and feelgood movies for the rest of the day, instead of having to go into my quote unquote 'real' job and toil in the macro-geometry of the corporate Archon for seven hours after having to confront something literally traumatic.

Traume is German for 'dream', and this poem is based on a particularly heartbreaking dream I had this morning. In the dream, I was a girl, meaning, I guess, that I'd transitioned fully. The woman lying in my old bed with me was my mother and, just so you have all the facts in before you page Dr Freud, she was dying. It was a horrible dream, and what gave it a particular horror was the thought that here I was, finally a real girl, as it were, but all I got to say was goodbye, as the final line has it. Fucking heartrending.

So the logical thing to do with that as a poet is write something based on it. Writing as magic: binding the demon, making something beautiful out of the pain so it works for you instead of against you. Whatever. This is my effort at such. I'm not entirely happy with it ('swelling' breasts, particularly), and would welcome suggestions for improvement.

(As to explaining who Sybil Starr is, I did attempt a rather long explanation but it quickly got off-topic and turned [as most conversations with me generally will] into a vituperative attack on the scientific validity of the theories of Sigmund Freud. Suffice to say that she's the kind of girl who'd be very popular with the narratrix of NSFW, though, if you do intend to google her, you should be aware that quite a lot of Ms Starr's work is itself NSFW. I'm not really sure how an allusion to a female wrestler called Sybil, of all things, wound up working its way into such an already strange dream, but there it is, as Francis Bacon used to say. Odd place, the subconscious.)

(On a related note, the phrase 'the origin of worlds' is, of course, a reference to this similarly NSFW piece by Gustave Courbet.)

IT LIVES!

2011-01-09T13:50:00.000-08:00

Hello. Yes, I've been away for a bit. I didn't plan to be, but a combination of work stress, christmas busy-ness and what, if it wasn't actually swine flu, I can only assume to have been some kind of weaponised rhinovirus, kept me away from blogging for a while. Plus, sometimes it's nice to take a little time off, y'know? It helps you come back refreshed.

Something else I plan to start back up soon is my writing, and performing. Again, these took a back seat for a while, but starting later this month I plan to get things moving.

On Monday 17th, I'll be doing a spot at the open mic at the Lamplight Arts Centre in Stanley. I read at one of their slams late last year, and am looking forward to having a bit of space in which to breathe with a set this time, rather than the do-one-poem-and-off rush of slam performance. I am also quite pleased that, because I have the day off after this gig, I should theoretically be able to sleep off the absurdly long journey back from Stanley that it involves (usually involving having to get a bus to Newcastle to get back to Washington - an absurd state of affairs, especially as the bus to Newcastle takes an hour). If all else fails, given that I have the day off, I shall just sleep in a skip and come home on tuesday when the buses are keeping a sensible timetable and going to Washington directly.

Then on Tuesday it's a trip down to Middlesbrough for the Electric Kool-Aid Cabaret of the Spoken Word. I've been wanting to go to this since I ended my last mini-tour in October by performing in Middlesbrough, and was ticked off to miss the November gig featuring Degna Stone. I will be going down to Middlesbrough this time, but will need to be back in Newcastle by early the next morning to take advantage of a cheap tickets offer which will enable me to read at one of two open mikes happening in London on the 19th: either Touch Me I'm Sick, hosted by the guys from Vintage Poison, who I was impressed by on my last gig in London; or possibly the Apples & Snakes organised Jawdance, depending on who can fit me in. Then it's another early start (required by the cheap ticket deal) to get back to Newcastle on the Thursday, at which point I will stop manically running about gigging and actually be able to indulge in the rock & roll lifestyle people expect me to enjoy.

Before all this, however, I'll be going to a 'scratch club' night in Newcastle occurring under the aegis of Apples & Snakes North East. Basically this is a night where you can experiment and try out new work. Obviously this entails actually having new work to try out, which is what this week will mainly involve. I'll be doing some kind of writing exercise every day, and will post the preliminary results, and a description of the process I arrived at them by, on here...hopefully Sunday will give me more of a chance to work them up, and maybe some will even be presentable enough to take on tour with me! Who knows? Well, not me, but I need to get back into a writing routine somehow, and this is as good an excuse as any. See you tomorrow, then.

'There's so much projection it's in cinemascope...'

2010-12-14T12:36:00.000-08:00

Still alive. No thanks to the Scum publishing transphobic crap about trans people being treated with respect in prison. But in a way I should thank Britain's favourite semi-pornographic chip-wrapper, because thinking about the ridiculous, chip-on-the-shoulder way this story has been reported threw something into relief for me about privilege, and how easy it is to tell what the privileged secretly think about themselves.

To sum the story up: new prison search guidelines mean that trans women - like cis women - will now be exempt from humiliating 'squat' searches, and trans men and women will have the right to request a search be carried out by a warden of their experiential gender, rather than that assigned to them at birth. Sensible, fair, and wholly in line with the progressive view of trans equality: treat trans people as members of the gender they feel themselves to be. Not a big ask, not a hard position to live up to. You'd think.

So what the hell are the Sun getting at with this attack? I was musing on this this morning, half-awake and without the benefit of my first coffee, and somehow the whole issue got mixed-up in my head with the general tone of reporting on prison issues - something much in the press lately, as one of the few Tories I like, beer-drinking jazz-afficionado Ken Clarke, has dared to suggest that maybe, just maybe, locking up increasing swathes of our population might not be the way to go. And something about the way the right-wing press report on prisons occurred to me: they always, always, go on about how 'soft' and 'easy' it is in prison. Endless articles, editorials and columns sermonize on what a cushy life lags have inside, how they get Nintendo consoles and food and colour TV in their cells etc, and how prisons are like holiday camps these days and what's the deterrent eh, I ask you...

But it seems perfectly obvious to me what the deterrent is. The deterrent is being in prison. Being deprived of liberty. Anyone with a modicum of nous can get this. Look: I'm sitting at a computer right now typing this blog. But, if I wished, right now, I could leave the table, switch off the computer (and the radio on the sideboard), and go haring off to the local pub, where I could sit skolling back neat bourbon until my fucking face fell off. I'm not going to, but I could.

Whereas if I were in prison, I couldn't do this. I probably couldn't even type this right now - access to computers is restricted in prisons. Sure, maybe I would have a Wii in my cell, but if I'm cooped up in that cell twenty-something hours a day, that doesn't look like as much of a home comfort (though on the plus side I could probably get enough practice in that I might finally be able to beat that ginger bitch Kathryn who keeps whupping my ass at Wii Boxing. But I digress).

Prison sucks because you lose your freedom, and no amount of trinkets can make up for that. Now multiply that suckage by being trans, and you can see how horrific being trans and in prison could be. Imagine you're a cis woman and the law says you have to squat down and submit to being searched, humiliatingly, by a man. Now imagine you're a trans woman in the same situation. There's no difference - except that as a trans woman you have to deal with this crap on top of all the other prejudice and systemic failure you deal with every day. Insults. Violence. Threatened or actual sexual assault. And on top of this the systemically sanctioned violation of being examined by someone not of your gender. It's a horrific situation, and fair play to the prison authorities for recognising that in at least this small way.

The Sun doesn't see it like that, though. Because to the Sun, the trans women are getting away with something. They're getting special treatment.

We see this a lot in right-wing scare stories, don't we? This idea that minorities receive 'special treatment'. It lies behind the never-ending 'Winterval' bollocks, clinicaly dissected by Kevin Arscott, that Christmas is being 'banned' because it offends Muslims - who get special treatment because we don't try to ban their festivals, do we? It's the idea behind the war on benefit claimants - disabled people get special treatment because they don't have to work (even though many can't), single mothers get special treatment because they get housing (when what would we rather do? Throw women with children on the street?). And it's the idea behind the similar war on trans people - the idea that being able to use a shower or washroom that minimises your chance of being raped or beaten is somehow a special privilege.

In reality the only special privileges are those of the white, able-bodied, cis majority. But the mindset of the privileged can never accept that this is privilege, and bought unfairly. So any attempt to put things right - affirmative action programmes, diversity policies, new search guidelines - is sneered at as being an attempt to grant privileges to groups rather than an attempt to redress the effects of an already-extant privilege which disadvantages said groups. And the reason for this is that the privileged person knows on some level that they are privileged, and they fear the removal of this privilege. So they project it onto the Other. The Others are the privileged ones. And us? We're the real victims mate, yerrr, victims of all this 'politically correct' bollocks, innit...

In Freudian psychology (which is mostly just a load of old shite but did bequeath one or two useful ideas) this is called projection. You dissociate from something distasteful about yourself and project it onto someone else. They're doing it. Not you. Them.

You see this with a lot of other things privileged people say about marginalised folks too.

To hear many able-bodied people say it, you'd think disabled people are dishonest and lazy. But what's lazier - battling every day against a condition which makes it near-impossible to function, or not bothering to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people because you can't be arsed? What's more dishonest - hoping that you'll look disabled enough to convince some ignorant, vile little ATOS inquisitor that you deserve the benefits that keep you alive, or deliberately lying about how disabled someone is to get them off benefits and into low-paid 'workfare' schemes which deprive genuinely able-bodied people of minimum-wage employment?

To hear many cis people say it, trans people are 'confused' or 'dishonest' about their gender. But what's more confused - knowing that you're a girl, and dressing, looking and acting in a way that fits with that identity - or releasing ridiculous 'surveys' which equate 'manliness' with the consumption of grilled-cheese snackage (trigger warning: I think Mark Simpson's article, linked to there, veers dangerously close to body-policing at points, but I still think he makes an excellent general observation that manliness has became equated too much with consumption in our society)? What's more dishonest - accepting who you are in spite of pain and prejudice, or creating a bully culture in which young men (and women) learn to repress their emotions and any expression of gender-variance is policed with violence, because you don't feel comfortable with who you are?

And of course, to hear a lot of white people say it, black people are criminals - but what's a bigger crime, possession of marijuana or...well, you could take your pick, really. Slave trade? Imperialist colonisation of indigenous peoples throughout the world? The British 'famine relief' camps in India which served a smaller calorific ration to inmates than Dachau? Or my personal favourite, the absolutely criminal punishment which Haiti has had to suffer - and continues to suffer - for being the only country to demonstrate what Noam Chomsky calls 'successful defiance' against the European (and later American) colonising powers through history's most successful slave revolt?

It's all projection, pure and simple. The next time you hear some privileged person telling you exactly what's wrong with 'scroungers', 'muzzies', 'trannies', 'queers', 'darkies', or whatever, take a moment - before you rip their face off and shove it down their arrogant throats - to listen between the lines of what they say. They aren't telling you what other people are like. They're telling you their deepest darkest secrets. They're telling you what keeps them awake, sweating with guilt, through the night.

They're telling you about themselves.

Under Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow

2010-12-04T15:17:00.000-08:00

Not a lot of posts this week but worry not, Virtual Amherst has not been deluged under the white stuff, I've just been busy with other things.

I wrote a new poem this week, which you can read on my Write Out Loud blog. It's yet more political shoutiness but hey, these are the times we live in.

I have also started a Tumblr as a companion piece to this blog. Photos have been much on my mind lately, and so I've been paging through my Facebook albums, and noticed something quite amusing about how I looked during my short-haired days, and why I shouldn't have been so surprised that having to wear a box-fresh dress shirt and braces for a party last week ironically made me look more femme than my normal androgynous wardrobe.

That's yer lot now, I'm enjoying a weekend off after the travails of trying to get into (and home from) work in this arctic weather, putting my feet up, drinking a pinotage, watching TNA for the first time in a while, and not being entirely surprised that, nine years after the Monday Night Wars, Vince Russo still believes that a run-in is the default ending for a wrestling match. In booking terms, this is the equivalent of me still ending every poem I wrote

with a dangling line as a kind of incredibly wanky coda.

He'll never get anywhere as a writer if he keeps repeating himself like that.

I watched the news today, oh boy...

2010-11-27T13:12:00.000-08:00

...and I saw a lot of nonsense about how two streets in London have been closed to traffic the better to facilitate the annual orgy of rampant consumerism with which we traditionally celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. All this on Buy Nothing Day too. Who says the arse-licking corporate media don't have a sense of irony?

Curious by its absence from the media, however, has been news of the ongoing student occupations of many major universities in protest at the coalition's assault on the right to higher education and their wider cuts agenda. The suppression of free speech can take many forms - one of them is ignorance and concentration on the trivial.

So against the silence of the media - who, as we've seen elsewhere on this blog, can be bothered to take an interest in the affairs of marginalised people when it suits them - I figured I might use this blog to link to all the occupations currently going on. Universities currently occupied are:

Newcastle

The University of West England, Bristol

Manchester Metropolitan University

The School of Oriental and African Studies

Edinburgh University

Sheffield University

Many other universities have been occupied, but students have either been evicted by riot police or forced out using siege tactics like denying them access to toilet facilities. A good list of all places where occupations have been in effect is the Solidaritree graphic on the Occupied Oxford site, and there's also a good list down the side of the Newcastle blog. And the UCL occupation, which is in many ways the flagship occupation now, goes from strength to strength, attracting messages and gestures of support from figures like Billy Bragg, Richard Herring and the mighty Noam Chomsky.

All these protests are peaceful, all these protests are ongoing and all are being carried out not by mobs but by students concerned about a government that is actively trying to destroy their future and that of their relatives. They are protesting against a society where corporations like Vodafone can get away with having their tax bills declared null and void, where the bankers who caused the crisis carry on paying each other massive bonuses with no reprisals from the government, where the young are invoked as a reason why 'we need to tackle the deficit now' - and are then made to pay for the deficit anyway as the government removes their right to education.

But because no-one has smashed a window, dropped a fire extinguisher or attacked a suspiciously-positioned police van, the media have refused to cover these ongoing gestures of resistance to kyriarchy. The revolution may well not be televised. But with Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere, it almost doesn't matter. The mainstream media refusing to cover a story isn't the kiss of death anymore. In a variation of the Streisand Effect, even suppression by ignorance doesn't make the story go away. All it does is make it more transparent whose interests the media really serves, hastening the media and the kyriarchal regime's decline into irrelevance.

The truth will out, always. And truth will be spoken to power, no matter how much those in power hate it. Power may try to suppress; power may try to ignore; power may try to punish, with riot police and other kinds of sanction: it doesn't matter. As I put it in my poem Class? War?, published in the Emergency Verse anthology - and which I used to finish my recent, well-received set at the inaugural WordJazz event - 'what we deserve, we will demand; you won't deny us.'

I finished that gig on Thursday by saying 'fight the power', which sounded a little odd in my girly little voice (I'm not exactly Zack de la Rocha, after all), but seemed like the only suitable way to finish in these turbulent times. A strange, jarring way for a poet who looks like a Primark Antony Hegarty , and identifies most strongly as a writer with an ancient Amherst poetess with one of history's most famous cases of the vapours, to end a set, but then, I suppose, these are strange times.

So...y'know, fight the power, yeah?

The PEN is mightier

2010-11-26T13:39:00.000-08:00

A little over a year ago I took what turned out to be one of the defining steps in my journey to where I am today as a writer. I accepted an invitation from Anthony Gormley's 'One and Other' project to do an hour on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. I themed my hour around an interactive poetry experiment on freedom of expression which didn't quite come off on the night, but which I later got the chance to do right at Newcastle Library for their Human Rights Day Celebration last December. My back-up plan was to do an hours' worth of material (a pretty scary prospect in a scene where performances usually last about twenty minutes at most), and it was in the preparation of this material that I came to the realisations about myself that have been the driving force behind this blog since.

But there was another motive behind my performance that night, and it was to raise money for International PEN, a fine charity which provides support to writers who have been wrongly imprisoned for the crime of producing work which the authorities find subversive.

Punishing a writer for expressing themselves is a ridiculous and cowardly act which should be beneath the dignity of the pettiest of tyrants, but it happens all over the world far too often. This Guardian article came to my attention recently, marking PEN's Day of the Imprisoned Writer and making me feel a little guilty for not having referenced PEN very much in the year and a bit since I got the customers at the bookshop where I worked to contribute to my plinth fund for them.

Free expression is something I've been thinking of these past few days, because we've seen how our new Coalition masters respond to it: by sending riot police on horseback to attack defenceless children.

So this is where we are as a society. Any dissent from the neoliberal concensus and the corporate interests it serves is savagely punished - even if the dissenters are the young people politicians blandly enthuse about as 'our future'. And oddly enough they're right, about that part.

The students and schoolchildren who protested this week are the future of this country in spite of all the mockery pampered newspaper columnists have directed at them. They represent the first strike back on behalf of all those marginalised and disenfranchised by this government and the kyriarchal interests it serves. These young people are the ones the Daily Mail warned you about, and they won't be the first.

A culture which fears dissent, a culture which attacks its own children, is a culture that is doomed. But the fault lines which cracked open this week have been present for a long time. They have been present in this culture's attitude to race, to disability, to gender. They have been present in every lie a middle-manager ever told for advancement, every slur hurled from a moving car whose drivers thought a pedestrian looked either insufficiently feminine (or too feminine if they happen to be male-bodied), every heartless little laugh issuing from the beer-swollen bellies of a gang of cosseted cis caucasian males when they watch their Little Britain DVDs. Our culture has been sick for a long time. These kids are the first sign of our culture beginning to recover. The fact that so little about what really happened at the protests has appeared in the mainstream media is a sign that there are many people in positions of power and influence who have a vested interest in keeping us sick. As well they might: like many in positions of authority throughout this society, they owe their 'success' to the sickness.

But the young are the future. Just as the other marginalised people are the future. We are, to borrow Camus' phrase about Africa, 'those shining lands where so much strength is still untouched.'

So much strength - because our eyes truly see the sickness at the heart of this world, and we refuse to turn away. So much strength - because we deal with attacks from the privileged every day. So much strength - because every day we survive horror which would break them if they had to live through it just once. And we don't just survive: we find joy and colour and real laughter and love in the midst of it. We make music, literature and art of unflinching beauty and truth. We live, truly, in a way which the sick, authoritarian masters of this culture could never really understand because it can't fit on a spreadsheet. Strength of this kind cannot be overcome. It can be repressed for a time, but the repressed will always return. Histories, like ancient ruins, are the fictions of empire. While everything forgotten hangs in dark dreams of the past, ever threatening to return.

This week the past tried to fight the future. The world of authority and submission and hierarchy - of kyriarchy - which is slowly passing from the earth, tried to abort the new world yearning to be born with truncheons, fists and lies. It failed. And it will keep failing. And there will be more protests, more marches, more occupations and more creative forms of direct action and protest and dissent, and more and more marginalised people making a noise to drown out the echo chamber of the right-wing press. More and more of us telling our stories, dreaming our dreams, until those stories, those dreams and the life and love and good real anger we put into them redraw the boundaries of this world forever.

Every society in the past which fears dissent as much as ours has fallen. Ours will too. The question is, where will you be on the day when it falls? Weeping in your bunker or dancing in the ruins?

Today's homework assignments for new readers: read Anna Funder's Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, and watch the film The Lives of Others. Think.

Oh, and you could do a lot worse than pick up a copy of one of International PEN's anthologies like Free Expression is No Offence. You'll read a lot of good stuff and contribute to the protection of one of the most important human rights. After all, if you're reading a blog like this, I figure free speech has to be something you consider important, right?

Words and all that Jazz

2010-11-23T12:13:00.000-08:00

Hello again, you wonderful flibertigibbets, you, and a great big special tacklehug of a hello to any of those lovely new readers I mentioned in yesterday's post. If you're still reading it means you weren't scared off by all that talk of privilege and how, shockingly, able-bodied white guys with penises they were born with and are happy with are not, pace the British tabloid press and Talksport radio, 'duh reel victums, innit?' and have actually got it pretty easy. Well done you! You've taken your first step into a larger world, as that smug patriarchal git Alec Guinness once said in a film he did only for the money.

[Personally I'm more of a fan of Samuel L Jackson's performance as Mace Windu myself; after all, he killed Boba Fett's dad! Though that fact brings with it the terrifying thought that while we know SLJ will do anything for money (Jumper is proof of that), Temuera Morrison, who played Jango Fett, and has a less-populated CV than Jackson's, may actually have thought that in episode two he was making art, poor love. But I digress.]

New and old readers of this blog alike may be interested to know that I will be reading (most definitely for art) at the inaugural Wordjazz event at Citizens House, Consett, tomorrow, along with Jenni Pascoe, Steve Urwin and Ira Lightman, among others. It promises to be an excellent night. Things kick off at 7:30pm. So, as always, if you're reading this and you're in the area, do come down, especially if you're new to Wrestling Emily - it really would be delightful to see you!

Anyway, that's almost all for now. However, in keeping with this blog's newfound devotion to the Big Society and my dogged desire to educate my followers, I would recommend new readers check out the wonderful film-length interview The Mindscape of Alan Moore, Diamanda Galas' fierce double-album Deifixiones: Will and Testament, and Osip Mandelstam's 'Stalin Epigram.' Class dismissed.

Hello, you! Let's talk about privilege, shall we?

2010-11-22T15:25:00.000-08:00

It seems, from reading my blog stats and other news that's came to my attention, as if this blog may recently have enjoyed something of an increase in reader numbers. Of course, in the great ocean of blogging these are little more than tiny droplets, but it's still nice to know how many of you lovely people are out there reading. Still, an increase in readers brings with it the responsibility of bringing said readers up to speed on what's going down.

It occurred to me that it might be worth doing a few introductory posts to allow these fresh and fragrant darlings the chance to understand exactly why I do go on so about the things I talk about herein. So settle in new readers, because today we're going to talk about the big one, the issue without which Wrestling Emily would be nothing more than a chronicle of the adventures of a slightly socially inept poet with a fondness for mascara and the films of Patrick Keiller. I speak, of course, of that most important issue in modern activism, privilege.

Privilege is one of those words which often gets misunderstood by the average, non-ofay cat when one describes another person - or even said cat themselves - as 'privileged', because the average person assumes that when I say 'person x is privileged' what I mean is 'person x lives in a giant castle made of Aztec gold and commands an army of zombie servants who constantly do their bidding.' This is, of course, a category error. Being wealthy is a form of privilege - and certainly, in a society as economically unequal as ours, an important one - but it isn't the only form of privilege by a long shot.

Privilege literally translates as 'private law' (you see, new readers? Not only do you get the ranting of a marginalised person, you get fascinating Latin trivia too! I'm too good to you, really I am.). A privileged group is a group which operates by a different set of laws to the rest of society - a law that exists for their benefit and to others' disadvantage. Of course, as a supposedly democratic society we theoretically no longer have laws which operate to advantage one group over another - though if you actually believe that, dear reader, I suggest that you pay a visit to an impoverished, largely black inner city area of London and ask some of the young men how they feel when they see a policeman. You may well be astonished to find that, unlike you, they do not immediately wonder whether they should ask him the time.

The fact is that there are shedloads of privileges which make it easier for some groups in our society to succeed than others. The classic work on privilege is 'Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack' by Peggy Mcintosh, which explores White Privilege - the vast and invisible network of privileges which accrue to caucasian people purely by virtue of our pallid complexion. And I say 'our' because I will willingly cop to the fact that I have caucasian privilege. I may lose out on the axes in a lot of other areas, but I do have the Great White Advantage. This even modifies how badly I feel the effects of other areas in which I'm not privileged: as a nonbinary trans person, I lose out in a lot of ways - but as a Caucasian trans person rather than a trans woman of colour, I have a much lower risk of being murdered or being forced to engage in survival sex work. White Privilege is one of the reasons I get really annoyed when white people accuse people from other races of 'playing the race card' - because white people, without realising it, play the race card every single day and get away with it.

Are you white, new readers? My sympathies. I am too. And I know how hard it can be to acknowledge the privilege you get just because you have a lack of melanin pigmentation. Deal with it. I do. Robert Jensen did too. Let his example school you.

We touched above on another form of privilege - cis privilege. Sorry. Am I going too fast for you? I forget how hard it can be to come to grips with all these strange new words. Of course that itself is another aspect of many forms of privilege - you assume you already know everything and thus resent it when marginalised people start talking about things about which you have never heard. But anyway: cis is essentially the opposite of trans, when it comes to gender. A cis person is someone whose gender identity is in accordance with the gender assigned to them at birth. And while it may not be immediately obvious to you - it often isn't - the fact is that being comfortable in your assigned gender identity brings with it a whole load of privileges. Check them out.

Hopefully you're getting the point at this stage. There are, as the Native American character in Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josie Wales might put it, 'all kindsa privileges' (and if you're a quick study you'll have twigged that there's a problem with the Native American character in that film, in that he is the creation of a writer with white privilege - the character is never given an inner life, he only exists to explain the mystical significance of Eastwood's character to Sondra Locke. And if you're a really, really quick study you'll also realise that the fact that a Mystical Native American is required to explained the mysteries of Outlaw Manhood to Sondra is an equally problematic example of male privilege - this is called mansplaining, and is a topic to which we shall return in later blogs which cater to you, the new reader).

White people have privilege over black people, men have privilege over women, straight people have privilege over gay people, cis people have privilege over trans people, abled people have privilege over disabled people - there are, indeed, many kinds of privilege and they all intersect. The new reader may at this point be suspicious that this blog is moving in the direction of political correctness - and I would not disabuse said reader of this opinion, because I don't think there is anything wrong with political correctness. As Stewart Lee has pointed out, all political correctness consists of is 'treating people fairly'. What a sickening idea.

The vast and interlocking tapestry of privilege is called the Kyriarchy by those of us who strive to dismantle it and create a world in which its toxic effects will not ruin life for generations the way it has so far. Kyriarchy is a word invented by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, who realised that the traditional feminist characterisation of society as a patriarchy simplified things too much by reducing things to a (cis) male/female binary.

You should care about kyriarchy because it's a web in which all of us are caught. Unless I've badly misjudged my new readers and this blog is now being followed by Donald Trump, I'm going to assume that you, like me, benefit from some axes of privilege while losing out on others. So what's the right thing to do about this kind of tapestry of evil?

That depends. It depends on whether all you care about is your own advancement or you genuinely want to make a fairer world. If all you're interested in is advancing your own shallow interests, then you'd follow the 'kiss up, kick down' strategy: kowtow to people above you in the kyriarchal pyramid, while ruthlessly suppressing those below you to curry favour with your superiors and show off your aggressive, dominant kyrio-cojones. But that way doesn't work in the long run. The annals of Greek tragedy and the crime columns of tabloid newspapers are full of people who have licked the ass above and kicked the ass below until they reached some supposedly comfortable point in the hierarchy, only to have it brutally taken out from under them by someone who lacked their advantages. Remember the end of Carlito's Way, where Al Pacino survives the climactic shootout only to be murdered out of the blue by John Leguizamo's character? That's the logical end-point of that strategy. But there is another way.

The path to making a fairer world is no less risky and a lot less comfortable than the path of mud-wrestling the marginalised for relative advantage. You'll face bigger obstacles, greater hardship, more humiliating losses and ultimately run a greater risk of dying early than the kiss-up, kick-down scum. But you have one advantage. And that is that, because you yourself are opposing the web in which everyone else is trapped, you show that, in the ancient activist proverb, another world is possible. You show that we don't have to buy in to a never-ending battle royale in which no-one ever ultimately wins. You show that it's possible to imagine a world where, pace Marcus Aurelius, life is more like dancing than wrestling. And, even if the worst happens, if you lose out on your position in a hierarchy - if you die - then you don't lose or die like Al P in Carlito's Way; you lose or die like Alec Guinness playing Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: if your enemies kill you, they make you more powerful than they can possibly imagine; because the fact they've had to kill you shows that the one thing they fear more than anything else is someone who doesn't fit into their sad little world. And that example, and that reminder of what they truly fear, serves as an inspiration to the rebels who'll come after you; and eventually, through your taking a stand, a better world might be created and, in the immortal words of Bill Hicks, something like heaven might dawn.

It's up to you really, readers. Maybe, as my analytics tell me, you googled this site using the disturbing phrase 'women pee after wrestling' and stuck around because you were trying to work out if I could possibly be for real; maybe you saw me at a gig, explaining why I apparently switch genders in poems describing my adolescent years, and were intrigued enough to look me up; maybe you encountered me in some other, more everyday context, and something about me intrigued you enough that you decided to go looking for my online presence. Who knows? All I know is you're reading this, you haven't been here since the get-go and, like those who have, it's time for you to make the choice. Do you want your actions to drive the world further to the brink; or do you want to join me in trying, in our fumbling and ineffective way, to make a better world?

The choice is yours. I hope you make the right one.

TDOR 2010

2010-11-20T13:21:00.000-08:00

Black background on the blog today to mark the 2010 Trans Day of Remembrance.

In my last post I mentioned 'The Smiling Animal at His Appointed Hour', a poem I'd written about the murder of Andrea Waddell. But it could just as easily have been about the hundreds of other trans women who are murdered every year, just as she was. . And it would be nice to say that those victims are murdered only by the people who commit the immediate violence against them, but that would be a comforting lie. Trans people - overwhelmingly trans women - are subject to such violence because of a system that discriminates against them, disadvantages them and makes them outcasts.

Andrea Waddell was murdered by a client she met as a sex worker. But she became a sex worker because, despite her being a Durham University graduate, employers rejected her from other jobs. If the transphobes who rejected her hadn't done so, she wouldn't have been murdered that night. Like all the victims of anti-trans violence, Andrea's murder was as much the fault of everyone who discriminated against her because of her trans status as it was of the cis man who murdered her.

This is why I get so angry with scumbag 'comedians' who make transphobic jokes or venal little newspaper bastards who write dehumanising, misogynistic reports about trans women. That kind of behaviour legitimises the discrimination and exclusion that create a climate in which so many trans women are murdered. Those jokes, those reports and that attitude have a body count.

Today is the day we remember all those who have died as a result of that ignorance. You can find out more here and find a list of the dead from the past year here.

Enough.

Is....crackle is...is this thing on?

2010-11-18T15:54:00.000-08:00

Forgive my absence, darlings, but some kind of internet outage has left Stately Fish Manor without broadband for the past couple of days. To compound the problem, yesterday night my Blackberry died and for the past eighteen hours I have been forced to use the browser on my Kindle, which may be a great device for reading (and purchasing [and driving yourself deeper into penury each day by purchasing]) e-books, but which felt marginally worse for browsing Twitter and Gmail than it would have been were I to try and browse those same social networking sites by using the green screen PCs I first learned to use e-mail on at Northumbria Uni in 1996.The Kindle browser sucks, basically, and frankly I deserve counselling or medication or a massage for having had to suffer through using it. Jeff Bezos can lick my bits.

Anyway. The bitch is back. And the bitch will be reading at Newcastle's glamorous Centurion Bar on the 6th of December at the launch for By Grand Central Station We Sat Down and Wept, the new anthology of poems inspired by the writing of Elizabeth Smart which is being published by Red Squirrel Press. My poem 'The Smiling Animal at His Appointed Hour', which is about the murder of Andrea Waddell, will appear in the anthology. A small press poetry anthology isn't exactly the cenotaph, but I feel proud to have gotten a small acknowledgement of the injustice of Andrea's murder down for posterity, especially this close to the Transgender Day of Remembrance. It isn't much. It isn't enough. But it's something.

He was some kind of a man. And then she was some kind of a woman. Then he was some kind of a man again. What else can you say about people?

2010-11-09T15:34:00.000-08:00

Well, if they're Charles Kane, you can say that they're frankly the most ridiculous waste of column inches since...well, the last piece of transphobic, misogynistic bullshit the Mail foisted on its readers.

Who is this Charles Kane? Sadly, he doesn't seem to be being played by Orson Welles (who played his near-namesake Charles Foster in Citizen Kane, his most famous film - and whose later film Touch of Evil provides the quote I've paraphrased for the title of this post). Instead, he seems to be played by the kind of publicity-hungry right-wing anger-parasite we usually see getting their faces in the paper with a 'Christians are the real victims' story. It seems that Charles used to be one Sam Hashimi then, in 1987, he underwent gender reassignment surgery to become Samantha Kane, before deciding that the life of a woman wasn't for him and deciding to transition back and become Chuck K.

So far, fair enough. I'm genderqueer. I like fluidity and mercuriality and messing with the binary and girls who are boys who like boys to be girls who do girls like they're boys et cetera et cetera. Trouble is, Charlie-boy has made a classic logical error - from his own particular experience he has generalised that trans people are 'in my opinion, completely deluded' and deduces from this extensively-researched position that the NHS should not assist trans people in transitioning. And, as A Very Public Sociologist observes, he has form for this.

Basically, Kane appears to be a stooge for the Mail's hatred of trans people (a subset of its hatred of anything different). It must be tremendously nice for both him and the paper: they get to spread their message of hate and he gets to be photographed making love to the camera with his pretty young trophy wife. But it's tremendously hurtful and dangerous for trans people at a time when the APA is considering harmful changes to the DSM-V entry on Gender Identity Disorder, and Britain is in the grip of a government with a deep vein of hostility to LGBTIQ people.

I've been racking my brains all night to try and work out who Charles Kane reminds me of. It's not the main character in Orson Welles' greatest film, as it turns out. He actually reminds me of Glyph, the character from Alan Moore's The Ballad of Halo Jones who undergoes a series of sex change operations but is never ultimately satisfied and eventually becomes pretty much genderless. I like Glyph (obviously), and I always feel a bit sad at the end of the episode in which ze tells hir story. You see, because people find it hard to perceive a character who has no gender, Glyph inhabits a sort of Somebody Else's Problem Field which means that people tend not to notice hir - a field temporarily interrupted when the perceptive Halo does notice hir but, by the time ze finishes, even Halo and her friend Toy have stopped listening to hir and are ignoring hir again.

In Glyph's story, that's a sad ending. But if everyone stopped listening to Charles Kane and the poisonous , half-baked narrative about trans people that he endorses, I wouldn't mind one teeny tiny bit.

Scrape, Scrape, Scrape the Shame (or the gender-variant person's fear of the five o'clock shadow)

2010-11-02T15:14:00.000-07:00

I hate shaving. I cannot stand it. It's an embuggerance. Faffing around with scrubs, razors, shaving oil, styptic pencils and aftershave balm, going both ways with the blade, cutting the same bloody spots on my chin every time. Kate Bornstein, in My Gender Workbook, refers to it as 'scraping the face', and it's a pretty good description.

As a genderqueer person, though, I find shaving an essential ordeal in maintaining my androgynous look. There's only so much you can do with mascara, nail polish, clothes and accessories if you have more stubble going on than Ralph Fiennes' character from Strange Days.

But it isn't just a matter of how I look to other people. I find shaving regularly to be necessary for my own mental well-being. The hairier I am, the worse I feel (this applies to other parts of my body than my face as well: I often shave or otherwise remove the hair from my arms because I hate being able to see forests of forearm fur. In fact, as soon as this blog is put to bed I shall be off to shave them again, and I find myself taking regular breaks from this to tweeze out particularly annoying follicles.) It bugs me.

To paraphrase Jane Siberry, however, I can't shave all the time. For one thing, my facial hair goes through cycles of growth. Thankfully, I don't generally need to shave every day, in fact it tends to take two days after a shave before the hair is shaveable again. But this isn't the same as spending two days walking around clean-shaven. All the time between shaves the stubble, the shadow, is growing, underneath the fingertips with which I obsessively feel my cheekbones, underneath the eyes I can feel on me. Sometimes, if I leave it for a third day, I feel like crap, like some horrible bearded trucker shambling around with stubble you could use to sand down wood.

But sometimes I wind up having to leave it for three days. There isn't time; I haven't got the energy. Whatever. Things slide. And it's at times like these, when the thought that I should shave really preys on me, that I'm at my lowest ebb. My confidence drops. My sense of my own attractiveness plummets. I feel like crap.

And I'm not even trying to properly pass, for heaven's sake (though, to be honest, it would feel more as if I was trying to pass if I wore a lumberjack shirt and started challenging people to arm-wrestle). Yes, I like confusing people; yes, it was cool to get called 'Annette' by a caller on the phone to work yesterday, and yes, it felt good to be sized up by a fierce-looking butch at the bus stop this morning; but the stakes for a genderqueer like me are not as high as they are for a trans woman going through her gender transition. For someone like that, having stubble is likely to be mortifying; and for anyone dealing with such a woman to bring that stubble to the attention of others, to dwell on it, would be an act so vile and mean-spirited that it could only be the province of absolute scum.

Which is why I am seriously pissed-off with two separate reports from the mainstream press today. First, that Blackshirt-endorsing rag the Daily Mail decided to refer to trans woman Nina Kanagasingham - who seems to have caused the death of another trans woman, successful human rights lawyer Sonia Burgess, in what may, for all we know, have been a genuinely horrible accident - as 'Unshaven Nina Kanasingham, 34' in a report which displays so much misgendering and prurient thigh-rubbing under the guise of moralising over Sonia's supposed work as an 'escort' that it merits a severe trigger warning; and then we also have this piece, fisked by Helen at Bird of Paradox, in which the reporter thinks that Mikki Nicholson's 'hint of stubble' is germane to her victory in a Scrabble contest (do scroll down to the end of that report by the way, for one of the best conclusions to a blogpost I've read in ages).

I cannot fathom what - beyond a grotesque sense of arrogance as a result of cis privilege, and a desire to pander to the lowest denominator of humanity which has caused them to forego their last inch of integrity as both journalists and human beings - makes these people think it is perfectly acceptable to describe these women, people who are in a marginalised group, during a fragile enough time already, now stressed out even more by external events - one through triumph, one through tragedy - as 'stubbled', 'unshaven' caricatures. But I know how it makes me feel. It makes me feel sick, and disgusted, and ashamed to live in a country where thoughtless, insulting crap like this gets published.

But I don't want to end this piece on such a sour note. Instead, please read this thoughtful obituary for Sonia Burgess by Stephen Whittle. Some of us care, some of us won't put up with this kind of transphobic crap from the mainstream media anymore, and we will succeed in the end. Because we have to put up with this crap and survive, and that means we have a strength that the kind of slime who obsess over the stubble on the face of a trans woman, whether in the dock or on a podium, will never understand.

Bisexuality for Colonels: a Telegraph Guide

2010-10-31T10:33:00.000-07:00

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that I have a low opinion of the alleged British 'newspaper' The Daily Telegraph. Aside from a peculiar blip when it, inexplicably, was the paper which broke the MPs' expenses scandal early in 2009, the 'Torygraph', as people call it, is usually derided as 'the paper for retired Colonels', constantly serving up a diet of misinformation and right-wing vitriol.

When we last encountered the Torygraph in this blog, they were engaged in whipping up ill-informed hatred against the Trade Unions, with a biased report on the cost of 'facility time' which just happened to coincide with David Cameron announcing plans to cut the public sector. This week, as Cameron plans to fill Margaret Thatcher's shoes and excite certain old guard Tories by 'getting tough with Europe', his loyal supporters at the upper-class chip-wrapper of choice have clearly decided they need a good old 'Brussells gravy train' story to get their teeth into, to show how Those Bureaucrats At The EU are Wasting Your Hard-Earned Tax Money.

And what are they wasting it on? Those damned queers, of course! You can practically hear the Colonels spluttering into their kedgeree (got a taste for it in India, don'tchaknow, last days of the Raj, MEEEEEEHHHH) at the thought that the European Commission has spent a whopping one-hundred-and-twenty-four thousand pounds on a 'gay activists conference'. How dare they! Did we fight Hitler so that gay people could live their lives free of hatred and intolerance? The very idea!

Like all the best right-wing scare stories, this one starts unravelling almost from the first paragraph. First of all, as we learn early in the article, this is not just a 'gay activists conference', it's for bisexual, trans and intersex activists too. This is important because the Telegraph has already shown its hand, and the degree to which it is ignorant of LGBTIQ communities, by subsuming all these disparate identities under the 'gay' label.

Recently at work I took a survey which had the usual 'diversity' section tagged on the end. This section didn't have a category for gender identity, but instead stuck 'transgender' in as a single option tacked onto the end of a question about...sexual orientation. This pretty much gave the game away about the surveyors' real commitment to diversity: they were sort of aware that trans people existed, and they had an idea that they would have to include a trans box for people to tick...but they hadn't gone to the trouble of educating themselves - because if they had, I dunno, looked for five minutes at the wikipedia article on trans gender identities, they would have seen in the second paragraph that trans is not a discrete sexual orientation of its own, but that trans people can be gay, straight, poly, pan, bi or asexual. But they couldn't be bothered to educate themselves. 'Stick a 'transgender' box on the end of the question about poofters, Ron,' says the lazy survey maker, 'I know we're both normal an' that, but we gotta do stuff like this to keep the bloody politically correct brigade happy.'

It's the same deal with the Torygraph and their headline writers. If you've been following the recent furore over Stonewall, you'll be aware that the LGBTIQ community is one in which there are divisions and issues of controversy. But none of this matters to the Torygraph. They subsume the entire range of LGBTIQ identities into the catch-all 'gay' category. Remember: these are people who call themselves journalists. Their job is to convey information about the world to their reading public. So when they indulge themselves in a little sloppy thinking about LGBTIQ people, that ignorance and arrogance gets passed on to their readership. But the Telegraph isn't really that bothered about this, because the Telegraph doesn't really care about gay, bi or trans people. It just wants to use them as cannon fodder in its assault on the EU.

If they don't care a lot about gay, bi or trans people, they care about intersex people even less. You can tell that by their disgusting use of scare quotes around the word 'intersex' itself. With those deceitful little punctuation marks, the Telegraph is telling its readers that all this 'intersex' business is just made-up nonsense. A little over a year after intersex issues exploded into the mainstream media because of the IOC's disgraceful treatment of Caster Semenya, the Telegraph is implying to its readers that intersex people don't exist. I can't imagine how it must feel to be an intersex person reading a paragraph like that. Not only do you have to deal with being marginalised since birth, now a major UK newspaper is denying the validity of your experiences - of your existence - and saying that a conference that attempts to deal with your experience (along with those of other marginalised groups) is a waste of money on 'politically correct twaddle'.

It isn't the paper saying this, you understand: they're just summarising the words of critics like Philip Davies MP. Who he, you ask, dear reader? Well, from what I can gather, Philip Davies is a time-wasting little creep who, rather than representing his constituents in Shipley, prefers to spend his time harassing Trevor Philips with meaningless letters, telling Muslims to 'fuck off', and acting as a rent-a-gob for a whole host of right-wing pressure groups like the Taxpayers Aliance, and the Campaign Against Political Correctness. Wee Phil - a man so odious that fellow Tory John Bercow referred to him as a 'troglodyte' over his opposition to equality legislation, and who also allegedly likes to let rich men steal food from the mouths of babies in the third world - turns out to be the son of Peter Davies, who gave us all so much amusement when he was comprehensively schooled by a local radio DJ about how ill-thought-out his plans to shut down Doncaster Pride were. Clearly, all Davies fils yearns to do with his right-wing demagoguery is impress daddy dearest. How pathetic.

And how much more pathetic of the Torygraph to wheel out this kind of rent-a-quote to comment on this story in the first place. Again, their reliance on him as a source shows their intent to distort the story from the start. By flagging up Davies' position as an MP - and not informing the reader of his past ridiculous, obsessive behaviour - they present him as a figure of authority expressing a view, rather than the odd and rather odious little man he is.

Perhaps the biggest sign of how biased and twisted the article is, however, is its pearl-clutching horror at the lavishness of spending a whopping £124k on a conference. £124,000! What an unthinkable figure! Except it's not, really. From speaking to people I know involved with Trade Unions, and contacts on Twitter, the general feeling is that paying only £124k to organise a conference actually represents tremendous value - especially given that 200 delegates will be attending, and it lasts five days. Despite what the Torygraph are trying to imply, this is a lot more than just a big nosh-up and a few workshops.I talked to someone attending a one-day conference for a local organisation where hotel costs alone will come to £15000 in total for a hundred delegates. Multiply that by five days and the cost becomes £75000. Double that to allow for 200 delegates and you get £150K - which is £26,000 more than the ILGA conference, and remember this is just for accommodation - the real costs would be far higher. Frankly, £124k for a conference is a bargain. But again, the Torygraph don't want to set the costs in context - they want to scare their readers with a big, huge, expensive-sounding number which is being wasted, frittered away I tell you, on a conference for a bunch of pinko commie sexual deviants.

Now, £124k is a big number. But I'm pretty sure - and I can't be sure of this, I only got a B at GCSE maths - that SIX BILLION POUNDS is a much bigger number. This number, of course, was the amount of the tax bill that HMRC recently let mobile phone company Vodafone off without paying, leading to protests around the UK yesterday. Protests which - along with the original story - I can find no mention of on the Telegraph website. Funny that.

So the Torygraph is ignoring a real story about broad-based opposition to the unfairness of Coalition cuts, and instead trying to foment manufactured anger about a conference in Europe which actually won't cost a great deal of money in order to placate the Europhobic wing of the Conservative party. But that isn't all they're doing. The effect of their article is to reinforce the bigotry and prejudice which says that LGBTIQ people don't deserve even this relatively small sum of money to be spent on our concerns. That we shouldn't have our voices heard, or our views taken into account. That we don't matter - and, in the case of intersex people, don't exist.

This is a vile, inhuman, twisted piece of propaganda which doesn't deserve to be dignified with the label of journalism. To my mind, it isn't far removed from hate-speech. The Telegraph should be ashamed of themselves for printing it - but I doubt they will be. Privilege, after all, means never having to say you're sorry - even when you bloody well should be.

Stonewall: Captured?

2010-10-28T16:06:00.000-07:00

Next Thursday, I'll be performing as part of the Finnish poet and artist Anna Puhakka's 'Tales Told at Dusk' event at The Bridge Hotel, Newcastle. And I'm looking forward to it, because Anna is an amazing person, and I'm always glad to have a gig...but I had been toying with hopping a train to the Smoke and attending the Why the Silence? protests against the Stonewall awards instead...at least until Stonewall, after being shouted at, browbeaten, and protested against on the web for ages, finally agreed to do what its actual members wanted and support same-sex marriage.

This decision comes hard on the heels of Stonewall nominating Bill Leckie, a transphobic journo who has been criticised by Stonewall Scotland, for an award - and then swiftly being forced to withdraw his nomination after a storm of protests by trans groups; and producing an 'educational' film for children in schools designed to prevent LGBT bullying and which yet says, with a straight face, that 'tranny is short for transgender' - an assertion akin to arguing that the N-word is 'informal slang to describe a person of Afro-Carribean origin'.

How did it come to this? How have we reached a situation where the progressive wing of LGBT activism is protesting against Stonewall, and not side-by-side with them? Part of the explanation for that may lie in the fact that many cis gay people have followed an assimilationist 'we're just like you!' strategy in the last two decades, but despite that I know that I, and, I'd guess, a lot of other gender-variant people, can say that I know a lot of cis gay folks who are more inclusive and radical on trans issues in their sleep than Stonewall are at their most on point. I think there's a more worrying explanation for why Stonewall has became more and more conservative (and more and more removed from the orginal spirit of the Stonewall riots, at which, let's not forget, trans people were front and centre).

There is a phenomenon known to people who study the intersection of politics and business as regulatory capture. It occurs when a regulatory agency begins to make decisions in the interests of the industry it supposedly regulates, and stops acting as a check on the practices of that industry. It's one reason why the Western economies are now in such a terrific mess: the agencies who were meant to regulate the markets wound up being seduced by the 'masters of the universe' whose powers they were meant to keep in check, and so the hedge funds, the banks and the rest of the financial industry were able to get away with what amounts to economic murder.

Now. Here's an interesting thing. Have a look at the Stonewall site, and in particular the list of 'Corporate Partners' whose names scroll along the bottom. Seem familiar? Yep: banks, financial companies, insurance firms...Exactly the same kind of companies involved in the regulatory capture of the financial watchdogs. These people are the experts when it comes to subverting outside agencies to their own ends.

I would suggest that Stonewall's increasing conservatism, and its refusal to walk the walk when it comes to trans issues (a refusal which extends to Stonewall stubbornly referring to itself only as a gay, lesbian and bi organisation, when just about every other gay group has at least added a 'T' to the end of its acronym, if nothing else), is the result of a desire on their part not to alienate these powerful sponsors. We can actually see this in the justification Ben Summerskill gave when he originally said he would not be 'jumped into' support for gay marriage - he believes introducing it would be 'too expensive.' This is not the argument of someone who believes he is fighting for a noble cause. This is the argument of a CEO who fears his shareholders will revolt if he damages their bottom line. And those 'shareholders' - who include people like JP Morgan, Barclays, Aviva and American Express - are, it seems to me, not exactly groups whose interests are best served by genuinely trying to dismantle the kyriarchy.

It looks, now, as if there won't be as much of a protest as there would have been on November 4th, now that Stonewall have given in and decided they will support the right of cis gays to get married after all. I still hope there's some level of protest, because the transphobia which their 'educational' film displays is something they still need to do something about. But I have to confess that, now I think about it, it would perhaps be more interesting to actually go to the awards themselves. Not to witness the orgy of backslapping and congratulation - or even to pour a bucket of champagne over some of those 'corporate partners' in a Chumbawamba-style act of protest - but to see Ben Summerskill's face up close. And, in particular, to look in his eyes.

Because I can't help but feel that those eyes are the eyes of a man who's beginning to realise that he may have compromised too much on the ideals that made him an activist in the first place. A man who knows he may have to choose between pandering to the corporations whose money supports his £90,000 a year salary, and making his organisation a joke in the process, or standing up for real equality (including equality for trans people), and running the risk of alienating those corporations and being forced to live a slightly less lavish lifestyle. And a man who only realises, now, with dawning horror, that it's the big salary and the life of not rocking the boat that exerts the greater pull.

A man, in short, who has been captured.

Politics Is Not Actually Wrestling...

2010-10-26T14:25:00.000-07:00

...despite the silliness in my previous posts. A point which many might not think worth making, but which seems to have been lost on the crowd of Tea Party supporters who, in this video, decide to express their commitment to the ideals of America's Founding Fathers by beating up an innocent young woman.

This, it need hardly be said, is the action of a pack of scum. What makes it worse is that it turns out one of the people involved is a co-ordinator for Tea Party candidate Rand Paul's campaign. And it turns out this piece of across-the-pondlife was following the examples of some primate higher up the chain of command who jokes about liberals getting 'curb-stomped' (and I have to say, I always thought the word was 'kerb'...then again, these right-wing arseholes have never been great at the spelling).

The most worrying thing about this is that there are scum in this country who are trying to export this kind of politics to the UK. Today we've seen reports of US-style 'Christians' intimidating vulnerable women at abortion clinics; and, surprise, surprise, the nearest thing Britain has to a Tea Party Candidate, self-confessed liar Nadine Dorries, has ~~written~~ clagged together a simpering blogpost in support of these creeps.

I don't like the Tories, as anyone who's read this blog for any length of time will attest. But compared to Dorries, even someone like Michael Gove or George Osborne comes off well. The Tories may be lying about the justification for their cuts, but at least they don't lie about their lying by saying that when they were lying they were lying about lying in a forum which is only about 70% true anyway...and then expect you to take their views about a woman's bodily autonomy any more seriously than a man in a psychedelic kilt farting the national anthem through a kazoo.

What I'm saying is, most of the Tories respect us enough to try and run at least a half-decent con on us. Dorries genuinely believes we're naive enough that we'll fall for anything she says - and also believes that ignoring her critics proves that she's won the argument. Or, hey, if that doesn't work, she can always accuse people of stalking her.

I will cheerfully admit that every time I hear Margaret Thatcher has been admitted to hospital, I make a mental note to run out, get some champagne, and put it on ice; but Dorries and her ilk are a more virulent contagion than Thatcher ever was. And whatever side of the issues you come down on, it's a contagion we have to stop in its tracks. Because as much as we might sometimes want to knock our opponents' heads together none of us wants to knock their heads into the kerb. And that's the way it ought to stay.

The Self-destruction of Nick Robinson

2010-10-25T14:49:00.000-07:00

Further to yesterday's post comparing the operation of the Coalition to that of a wrestling promotion, it suddenly occurred to me that one of the Tories' pet journalists is beginning to display behaviour remarkably similar to that of one of the WWE's most troubled stars.

Don't believe me? Well, take a look at this classic example of former WWE champion the Ultimate Warrior on one of his trademark rampages around the backstage area.

Now, compare this video of former Young Conservative (and chief cheerleader in Dave Cameron's personal media Spirit Squad) Nick Robinson hulking out and destroying a peace protester's sign.

Now, alright, you may argue that, compared to the one-man rage-tsunami that is Warrior, Robinson's anger-gasm is kind of insipid and pointless, but that just shows you that the bland ecstasy induced by finally seeing your whey-faced poster-boy standing at the despatch box and repeatedly wittering on about the deficit will always be a poor substitute for the white-hot intensity brought on by years of steroid abuse and a rabid, sub-Nietzchean philosophy. The difference is one not of kind but of degree.

However, now that Robinson has opted to work the 'ranting scenery-destroyer' gimmick, he's going to have to try hard to stay in contention, especially now that political journalists with a much better workrate, such as Jo Coburn, are coming up the ranks by using the devious tactic of not allowing privilege-monger Michael Gove to mansplain all over them. I therefore suggest that, if Robinson wants to keep his spot, he shows up for his next piece-to-camera in neon face-paint, refers to everyone watching as 'all the little Robbiors out there', and repeatedly calls the anchor in the studio 'Mean Gene' regardless of whoever they may in fact be.

The baby-oil's in your court, Nick...

The Politics of the Heel Turn: or, Nasty Nick and the Kayfabe Coalition

2010-10-24T14:00:00.000-07:00

2010 has been a strange year for British politics. Perhaps the biggest shock of all is the speed with which Nick Clegg went from being the British Obama to being, essentially, a stooge for a government which, as we learned from the Spending Review this week, wants to cut housing benefit for the under-35s, throw people off disability benefit left, right and centre, make life harder for women and old people, condemn young trans people to even more years in the closet than they put up with at the moment, deprive people in care homes of mobility aids, kick thousands of public sector workers out of their jobs and generally reduce Britain to a condition of neo-Dickensian misery (I suppose we should be thankful that Henry Mayhew's guide to the kind of world in which we'll all soon live has been reissued).

Many people were shocked by this change in Clegg's persona - none more so, I imagine, than the quartet of bright, breezy, cheerful young Lib Dem girls who I saw perform an impromptu 'I agree with Nick!' song and dance routine at Newcastle's Greys Monument in the week after the first televised election debate. I have to admit that I was less shocked than many people were by the speed with which Clegg dropped his principles at the promise of a ministerial limo, largely because, growing up in the 1990s, I had a ready-made model which I could apply to the situation. I've written before about my affection for the garish pesudosport that is professional wrestling. And in wrestling, the transformation in Clegg's character would be what's referred to as a heel-turn.

Profesional wrestling is a narrative form with a very odd attitude to continuity. Week-to-week continuity is important, but continuity in the longer term is subject to near-Stalinist levels of revision. The longer a character has been a heel or a face, the less chance there is that their previous status will be referred to. It is simply the case that they have always been 'one of the bad guys'. Through constant repetition, a narrative is generated that the fans buy into, and booing the dastardly villain becomes as easy as it was to cheer for them six months ago, when they were the crowd-pleasing hero.

Interestingly enough, the way the coalition have approached the economy has pretty much followed the same process by which professional wrestling creates its alternate reality. In much the same way as the WWE pretends that it was never called anything else, that Madusa Miceli wasn't the same person as Alundra Blayze, or that there exists a specific place called 'Parts Unknown' (whose inhabitants have an unusual fondness for face-paint and heavy metal; if it did exist, it sounds like it would actually be kind of cool), so we've been spoon-fed a series of egregious lies by the Coalition (whose name actually even sounds like a heel wrestling stable, albeit a slightly crap one; I'd have more respect for our new overlords if they took a leaf straight out of the WWE's book and started calling themselves the Corporate Ministry).

We've been told Labour left the country with an unbelievable deficit - in fact, before the recession, we had the 2nd lowest level of debt of any of the G7 countries.

We've been told that George Osborne's savage cuts to the benefits system are needed to wipe out '£5bn of benefit fraud'. In fact, benefit fraud costs only £1bn.

We've been told that desperate measures of the kind announced by Osborne are needed to save the economy. In fact, economists all over the world believe the Coalition is on the wrong course, and statistics show that these measures will plunge us ever deeper into recession.

There are more - many more - myths about the deficit, the cuts and the economy which the Coalition want us to swallow as uncritically as the marks at a wrestling match who will chant 'U-S-A!' during a match between a Candian face and a Mexican heel, but fortunately there are sites like Liberal Conspiracy, who have posted a handy myth-busting guide to the economic arguments here, and there are a host of blogs regularly deconstructing the lies told by the Tories' friends in the media. The point I want to make is that, while I enjoy suspending my disbelief if all it involves is a bunch of people jumping around in silly spandex outfits, when it comes to politics I would rather see a little more focus on what one of George Bush's aides (disparagingly) referred to as the 'reality-based community.'

Alternatively, if we are going to live in a world where our politicians treat us like a bunch of marks, then I demand that, during the next Prime Minister's Question Time, someone runs in and hits a hurricanrana on David Cameron. We may as well get some entertainment out of this bullshit.

We're Number One, So Why Try Harder?

2010-10-18T16:49:00.000-07:00

It would seem that I myself am greatly privileged in a way I did not expect, because apparently, according to the kind of bullshit survey that occassionally makes the local papers, the place where I work is the best place to work in my entire region.

Hmmm. Well, I suppose these things are a matter of opinion, and I suppose for the (privileged) majority, a workplace like mine is pretty good; but personally, there are a lot of aspects of the place that make me, personally, more than a little uncomfortable. But I have my generous hat on right now, and I'm going to assume these things are more a result of the bullshit work culture that currently prevails in this country, rather than failings specific to my place of work.

Who knows? Your workplace may well have won some award or other in its own region. Hell, it at least has to have Investors in People status, right? Although, in my experience, any company that doesn't actively dismember its employees can get that one, and even if dismembering did occur they could probably scrape through as long as they only did it to a certain percentage of staff and made sure it was done in a caring way. Put it this way: I've worked in some shitholes, and they all had Investors in People status. Go figure.

Whatever awards your place of ~~incarceration~~ work has under its belt, you can bet it touts them proudly, because endless self-cheerleading is one of the more nauseating features of the modern business culture, from the executives repeating their affirmations to each other as they brush their teeth in the morning to the press releases explaining breathlessly how Fuckthepoor.com (a division of PlanetRape Incorporated) is proud to give something back to the community by sponsoring the First Annual Bjorn Lomborg Greenwashing Prize. If you want a thorough overview of how this relentless positivity has fucked everything up, I can't recommend the sobering wisdom of Barbara Ehrenreich's Smile or Die enough.

But if you want a quicker, more bracing hit of cynicism to go with your morning cornflakes before you head off to the salt mines of late capitalism, you could always check out the new entry on my Write Out Loud blog.

Planet of the Arseholes (Part the Second)

2010-10-17T15:30:00.000-07:00

One of the classic defences used by privileged people when called out on the ways they abuse that privilege is the 'reverse prejudice' move. This basically attempts to argue that, by criticising a privileged group, you are actually discriminating against that privileged group. Criticise white people and you'll find yourself accused of reverse racism; criticise men and you'll get accused of reverse sexism - and so on and so on, world without end, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. You're doing nothing of the kind, of course: racism and sexism are large-scale structural systems which privilege one gender or race over all others, and as such cannot be 'reversed' in any meaningful way. But this doesn't stop people in privileged groups from inventing new ways in which they're discriminated against.

I've seen some Christians - who are, as any fule kno, the real victims - claim, with their bare faces hanging out, that they are the victims of 'Christophobia', presumably because they're jealous that those naughty Islamics get to have a special word, and they want to muscle in on the action. Of course, any intelligent examination of the evidence reveals that this 'Christophobia' stuff is nonsense: in Britain, Christianity is the state religion, and the only religion whose Bishops get to vote in the House of Lords; in America, these supposedly-persecuted Christians have wealthy mega-churches and a vast, active and millitant political lobby; and the Vatican, which increasingly loves to pose as the victim of gangs of anti-Catholic bullies, is usually on the receiving end of criticism not for its belief in the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary or the miracle of transsubstantiation, but for its policies on birth control in the developing world, and the footling matter of covering up an institutionalised culture of child-rape for half a century.

Recently, m'colleague Helen from Bird of Paradox had a bit of trouble over her (entirely justified) response to having her identity erased in an article about the death of American trans woman Stacy Blahnik Lee. The upshot of all this was that despite protesting about something which she had every right to be angry about, she was accused of, and I quote 'spread[ing] cisphobia in trans spaces'.

Because yes, that's right: now there's apparently a thing called cisphobia! And all us naughty, naughty activists who remember what the 'T' in LGBT stands for are apparently to blame for spreading this nasty contagion. Oh, who will defend them, these poor cis people? Who will stand up and protect these disadvantaged, embattled, beleaguered mites who make up a mere ninety-odd percent of the population?

As you can probably tell, I think 'cisphobia', as a concept, is as nonsensical as 'Christophobia', 'reverse racism' and all the other 'you're just as bad in the other direction!' bollocks which the perennial 'real victims' are forever trotting out. Speaking as a genderqueer person I have to say that I don't hate cis people - and even Helen, who, God knows, has reason enough to do so, doesn't either (she says she doesn't trust cis people - but it's worth remembering that, when trusting cis people can, and often does, get trans people killed, this is a healthy and realistic attitude, not a product of bigotry).

If I hated every cis person I met because they were cis, I would be dead by now, because my blood pressure would have gone through the roof from the rage a long, long time ago. For any trans person, cis people will be the vast majority of the people you deal with all day, every day. There will be some you will hate, yes; but most of those people you will feel at best indifferent about; perhaps a few of them, you'll even like. The idea that trans people feel prejudiced toward and discriminate against cis people is laughable, and is a complete failure to understand the issues confronting trans people who, too often, have to deal with a world full of people who at best ignore us, and at worst feel they have a right to kill us just for existing.

In her fine book Whipping Girl, Julia Serrano repeats the point made by bell hooks that privileged people only truly understand what it's like to be privileged, and can't understand the world of a marginalised person; whereas people on the margins understand both what it means to be marginalised and what it means to be privileged, because every day they see the ways in which the lives of the privileged are safer, more accepted and better off than their own. And there is no more telling illustration of the difference between the privileged and the marginalised than the insulting attempt, by those who have privilege, to claim that having their failings pointed out from time to time is exactly the same as the prejudice marginalised people face all their lives.

Transphobia means that, if you're a trans person, you have a higher risk of unemployment, a higher risk of being homeless, a higher risk of being subject to domestic abuse, sexual assault and murder.

Cisphobia? 'Cisphobia' means that if you're cis you might be made to feel a little bit bad about all the privileges you enjoy for having an experiential gender identity which matches the gender you were assigned at birth.

Exactly the same. Obviously.

(Edit, 20/10/10: Blog corrected to remove a couple of ableist words/phrases that had slipped past my internal quality control process [curtsy to Lilith von Fraumench for that] and also to correct Stacy Blahnik Lee's name, the third part of which - along with the rest of her identity - seems to have been lost in the MSM reports of her death [and thanks to @metalmujer on Twitter for alerting me to this error]. My excuse for the name thing, crappy as it is, is that I don't check out TransGriot, whose author was the only person who did get the name right, as often as I should because the browser on my mobile phone tends to mangle the crap out of it in a way that makes it unreadable, and so I missed the post giving Stacy's full name (hey, I did say it was a rubbish excuse). My excuse for the original ableism in this piece is simpler: I didn't consider the words in question to be ableist, as a result of my own abled privilege, and so I'm glad Lilith pointed them out. Although in doing so, I am sure I am giving in, in my cowardly liberal way, to reverse ableism, because of course it's the abled people who are the real victims, innit, guv?)

Planet of the Arseholes (Part the First)

2010-10-17T08:18:00.000-07:00

If you've followed this blog for a while, you'll know I have a pretty big problem with the kyriarchy. I hate pretty much anyone in a position of authority which they didn't, and don't, earn. And how do you earn a position of authority? You earn it by ensuring that you're worthy of it. You earn it by showing you deserve it. You earn it by not being an arsehole with your authority. You earn it by being a decent human being.

Of course, being a decent human being seems to be pretty damn hard for a lot of people. Especially those in positions of authority. Most people in these positions can't resist the temptation to abuse them, and in the process prove themselves unworthy of the position they're in. They enjoy the benefits of authority without doing anything to deserve it; they enjoy privilege.

The latest privileged idiot to prove himself unworthy of the authority invested in him by his money and the adulation of a society of idiots is one Duncan Bannatyne. If you live in the UK, you will have been painfully aware of this smug, ugly, pathetic, self-publicising little man for far too long. Bannatyne runs a chain of overpriced health clubs catering to pathetic narcissists, and has a second 'job' appearing on the charmless and deeply naff BBC TV programme 'Dragons' Den' in which he and a trio of similarly miserable-looking twits in suits sit in judgement on ordinary men and women who have came up with inventions for which they seek funding. It's a kind of variant of the X-Factor/Britain's Got Talent format, only the judges have even less charisma than Piers Morgan, which is some achievement. The whole programme is narrated in tones of breathless adoration for the dragons' bulging bank balances by Evan Davis, a man who used to be a serious business journalist before he became an ego-fluffer for these corporate idiots.

You can probably tell it's a show of which I'm not a fan. That's because I get sick of the pathetic, sycophantic adoration our society bestows on so-called 'entrepreneurs'. So they've made a pile of money in business? So what? We should adore them for being more successful at exploiting the labour of their staff than people who've made less? Stuff that. The usual defence offered by the grunting, forelock-tugging idiots who do adore these people is that they've 'came from nothing' and 'made something of themselves', to which I say: if you believe that, I have a lovely bridge I can sell you at an absolute song. Most 'self-made' men are anything but: they owe their positions to an invisible network of privileges which people never take into account. For one thing, they usually are men; they're always cis, they tend to be straight (and most of the few who are gay tend to be gay men); they're able-bodied and usually don't suffer mental illness (or if they do they don't talk about it); most of them are caucasian; and they all tend to have the sort of swaggering, cocksure, one-of-the-boys confidence which business culture - mistakenly, as I've pointed out before - regards as a prerequisite for success. Show me any self-made man and I'll show you a list of ways as long as your arm in which kyriarchy and privilege helped the lucky bastard get to where he is.

Now, some people in positions of authority are self-aware enough to be conscious of this on some level, are self-deprecating and even humble about it, and try to behave with a bit of class towards people who haven't had their luck. Not so Bannatyne. This Friday, a young woman made an innocent joke about Bannatyne on Twitter, and Bannatyne's reaction was to threaten to sue her, then unleash his legion of moronic fans, some of whom called her such delightful things as 'blonde slag cunt' and threatened to kill her. More details of the event can be seen here.

Bannatyne's attempts to position himself as a 'victim' of 'bullies and haters' are laughable: here is a man who has vast reserves of wealth, who is adored by millions (millions of idiots admittedly, but those idiots have disposable income), and who has a variety of media platforms in which his every brainfart is treated as if it's an outpouring of genius, threatening to use his wealth and the courts to silence someone for making a joke - then refusing to intervene when his acolytes begin a hate campaign against the woman he's persecuting? Bitch, please. The victim here is the woman who made the tweet, who has had to put up with vicious abuse and threats all weekend, while Bannatyne sheds crocodile tears about 'protecting my family' while pleasuring himself in front of the mirror with yet another ivory-handled backscratcher.

A lot of people say that deference is no longer a feature of British culture. When they say this, they're referring to the culture of deferring to authority figures from the old-fashioned upper classes who reached their simultaneous zenith and nadir with the likes of Sir Alec Douglas-Home. But many privileged people in society still expect deference as a right from those they see as 'below' them. I've seen this close-up when I've dared to criticise the transphobia of privileged cis people, and we saw exactly the same type of behaviour from Bannatyne this Friday and, indeed, over the course of the weekend. These people are happy to tell the less-privileged that they just have to buck up their ideas, knuckle down and take it - sometimes with horrific consequences, as Ian Birrell pointed out in yesterday's Guardian - but as soon as you challenge them, it suddenly becomes the most important thing in the world that they have been offended, and how dare you say such a thing to them - just as Bannatyne was blind to the offensive and intimidating way he blundered into his exchange with the woman on Twitter, and yet was hypersensitive to the offence this had caused him and which he imagined it might possibly cause his family.

This kind of behaviour, of course, creates a climate in which people feel afraid to make jokes because they are afraid it might offend people. And weirdly, Duncan Bannatyne was keen to say this was a Very Bad Thing in the context of the Equality Act (and my bringing this up should in no way be construed as support for that act - as I've pointed out before, its effect on trans people is likely to be very negative): and yet as soon as he's on the receiving end of a little light-hearted banter, he threatens to take the person responsible for court. And why? Because the Equality Act (generally) protects people who lack privilege; and in Bannatyne's moral universe it ought to be okay to joke about such people. But joking about people with privilege? In Bannatyne's universe, that's unthinkable - as Karl Webster at The Ugly Truth points out hilariously.

In summary: Duncan Bannatyne is an arsehole and has proved himself comprehensively to be an arsehole, and a load of even more pathetic arseholes who worship Bannatyne proved themselves to be arseholes as well. Fortunately, the internet makes it more and more easy to point at and mock these people for the arseholes that they are. And by crikey do they hate it. But they're just going to have to toughen up and take their lumps - because if they really earned their authority, they wouldn't be in this situation.

Poetry Tour: Track Listing

2010-10-08T14:58:00.000-07:00

For those wanting to see the poems I performed during the recent tour...

Tension (performed at all gigs)
What are you afraid to say? (performed at King's Cross & Middlesbrough)
Eggshells (performed at all gigs)
The secrets, almost silent, that we sang (performed at King's Cross only)
A short course in suicide writing (performed at Covent Garden, Hebden Bridge, & Middlesbrough)
NSFW (performed at Hebden Bridge only)
On looking back into the mosh pit (performed at Middlesbrough only)

Enjoy!

Fear and Loathing on the Calder and the Tees: from London to Middlesbrough via Hebden Bridge, in the company of drunken poets and a motley crue of lesbians

2010-10-08T14:08:00.000-07:00

Reader, I am sorry. I am sordid. I am cheap. I am a tease. For I ended the last post with the tantalising phrase 'what could possibly go wrong?' suggesting, of course, that something terrible was on the point of occurring. A come-uppance, perhaps, for my smugness following my Covent Garden triumph. Alas, this was not to be. I may as well tell you that my Hebden Bridge gig, under the auspices of Write Out Loud, was as much of a success as my second London gig. Some jeopardy was involved, though, as, on arrival in Hebden Bridge, I found myself held hostage by a gang of notorious lesbians...

As a fan of Alison Bechdel's brilliant graphic memoir Fun Home, I had long coveted a copy of The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, the only UK collection (to my imperfect knowledge) of her syndicated comic strip following, in that turgid soap-opera phrase, 'the lives and loves' of a group of lesbians, gay guys, guydykes, trans dykes, trans guys und so weiter in a city which may or may not be Minneapolis. And so, while in London, pootling about on my second day, I found myself in Foyles bookshop. I had mainly decided to go for a coffee in their excellent jazz cafe, but I was consumed with guilt over my purchase of a Kindle, which, many of my book trade friends had told me, was tantamount to me sticking a knife in their hearts. I resolved to show my commitment to the bound codex by purchasing some books at this cathedral of the UK book trade - and besides, the Kindle is not well-served for graphic novels, so a trip to that section of the bookshop seemed the best bet.

It was a toss-up between Dykes and the new, hardcover edition of the Morrison/Quitely Batman and Robin series, and I would probably have got both if Foyles' ridiculously well-stocked LGBTQ section hadn't had a copy of Julia Serrano's Whipping Girl, but in the end I found hanging out with some lesbians more appealing than spending time with a guy in a leather batsuit. Almost too appealing, in fact, because, after making myself a cafetiere of the Taylor's of Harrogate coffee so thoughtfully provided by the landlady of the apartment I'd rented in Hebden Bridge, I found myself devouring page after page of Bechdel's strips, unable to tear myself away. There is a lot to be said for the one-page strip in graphic terms: it's incredibly moreish and, because of the built-in need for cliffhangers, the temptation to say 'I'll just read one more, and then go out' is almost impossible to resist.

Resist I did, however, and I did a fine job at Write Out Loud's regular gig at the Hole in the Wall. I did the tried-and-tested trio of 'Tension', 'Eggshells' and 'Suicide', and, during the second half - when everyone is invited back to perform another single poem - I did 'NSFW', a poem about sex and sado-masochism which caused a bit of a stir. It needn't be said that, of course, I'm the girl in the poem, but in fact it did need saying to one audience member who kept referring to it as the 'schoolgirl-strangling' poem while simultaneously saying how much she'd enjoyed it. Huh. Some people are always looking for an entirely different sense of transgression in your work than the kind that you're trying to convey, I guess.

Speaking of transgression, I drank a lot more than I'd intended to at the Hebden Bridge gig, and was very hungover when I departed for Leeds the next day. I knew that some Middlesbrough poets were planning a National Poetry Day event at the Writers' Block in their town, and was keen to go, but wasn't sure a ticket from Leeds to Middlesbrough would fit within the budget for my trip. As it happened it did, so I buggered off there and read at this excellent, free-form event organised by PA Morbid, was pleasantly surprised when the Crow King Andy Willoughby, who I knew from my Hydrogen Jukebox days, swung by, and generally had a nice old time there and at one of the local hostelries afterwards. Oddly, for an incredibly scary man, Andy has an ability to set you at your ease, and, even though I didn't know any of the other poets there (which made me feel impossibly old), I found myself talking to them like an old friend (I suppose I might grudgingly admit that two plastic cups of wine and three pints of Kronenbourg may have helped here...). Anyway, Andy and co saw me off onto a train from Middlesbrough to Newcastle, but not before entreating me to send poems for various magazines and presses, come back for other gigs etc etc. It was all quite wonderful, and sustained me very well during the bum-breaking 90-minute train ride back to Newcastle on a knackered old pacer that seemed hell-bent on stopping at every butt-fuck of a town between the Tees and the Tyne.

And so I got home, went to bed, and slept in until 1pm today. Sorry readers. I know it's not the end of Easy Rider, is it? Still, count yourself lucky it's not the neverending end of the Lord of the Rings films, or the end of the Sopranos, I mean what the hell was that, finishing up in mid-sent-

Fear and Loathing in Camden and Covent Garden: a Savage Tale of Minibar Booze, Audience Combat, and Grim Temperature Fatigue in the Deep Bowels of London

2010-10-08T12:59:00.000-07:00

Well, the mini-tour is over, and I can report that it went brilliantly! The first night at RAW Poetry in King's Cross was a good if unremarkable gig. The second London gig at the Poetry Cafe was much better, enlivened not just by the presence of Helen from Bird of Paradox but by a much bigger, better, more poetry-focused crowd - for my money, RAW suffered from the bar having a clear divide between people there for the poetry night and the normal bar regulars, so there was a sense of having to fight the room quite a bit during the gig. I managed this, largely because 'Eggshells', the second poem in my set, is a pretty heavy piece which essentially bludgeons the audience into submission. But even I was frustrated in my attempts to end the set on a high with 'The secrets, almost silent, that we sang', precisely because there was still too much cordite in the air from the previous piece. I went off to respectable applause (even from some of the disgruntled regulars), but with the knowledge that there was more I could have done.

Later, back at the hotel room, over a bag of Minstrels from the Tesco Express and an overpriced bottle of Stella from the minibar, I dissected this. I had been reading Stephen Fry's new memoir on the Kindle earlier that day, and fry reports a meeting he and Hugh Laurie had with his agent during which they were asked who they most admired, so he would have a sense of how to model their careers. This seemed like a useful gedankenexperiment from the artistic point-of-view though, not having an agent, I was forced to put the question to myself. The obvious answer, tragic though it is, is that I have always, as an artist, wanted to be like Tori Amos. I cannot help this. At gigs and events where I talk to cooler, savvier types, I mention Cohen, Dylan, Bowie etc, but the fact is that what I really, in my heart of hearts, want to be is a kooky little elf-maiden who sings songs about pain and voodoo and faeries and being in the wrong band with a tear in your hand. Tori was the first contemporary musician and songwriter who really marked me, who spoke to me (prior to hearing Under the Pink I was the sort of horrible little prig for whom it was classical music all the way, I'm ashamed to say), I was hers before I was anyone else's, and hers I shall remain. Despite my occassional brutal immersion in the soundworlds of Diamanda Galas or Nick Cave, deep down I have always been and will proudly remain an ear with feet, and so it seemed to me that it was time to think about how Tori would have played the gig I'd just done.

I thought about Little Earthquakes. Said album contains some of Tori's most heartbreaking numbers, but it would be unlistenable without the leavening influence of more humourous ditties like 'Leather' and 'The Happy Phantom'. I leafed through my folders. Did I have something that might fit that bill? As it happened, I did: a poem called 'A Short Course in Suicide Writing' that, while staying in a dark area, deals with its subject matter with levity and wit, and would fulfil the task of what ritual magicians call 'banishing with laughter', in that it would lighten the mood after 'Eggshells' and leave people feeling better.

Well, I tried this at Covent Garden and - even though I didn't finish 'Suicide' due to Poetry Unplugged's rigorous 'five minutes max' set rule - I went down a storm. Many people came up to me afterwards asking when I would next read in London, including the fantastic and clearly insane genius Kevin Reinhardt of Vintage Poison, and one woman who told me in very cross tones that the fact I didn't actually live in London was no excuse, and that if that was the only thing stopping me I had better jolly well sort that out. Helen and I were even stalked on our way to the Tube by another performer that night who expressed similar sentiments. All of these enquiries I dealt with using the wit, grace and aplomb which are typical of me, i.e. I mainly repeated the words 'er', 'um' and 'well', giggled, looked down at the floor, said 'thank you' and 'oh, now' and tried as hard as possible to divert the conversation back onto the subject of their work and how much I liked it. Still, even I, in my diffident way, could see that I had, to use a particularly modern, urban form of litotes, not sucked.

I was not alone in falling foul of the five-minute rule, incidentally. Another fine poet whose work was cut off just as it was getting interesting was the wonderful Sabrina Gilbert, who finished her set with a poem about sex which was, ahem, prematurely concluded, and who cannily turned this to her advantage by informing the audience that they could hear the end of it on one of the two CDs she had brought with her, 'The Family Album' ('As in,' she informed the gasping audience, 'music for makin' families...'). I of course bought the other CD she had brought with her, because (a) *koff* I have no wish to be thought of as prurient *koff* and, (b) I had been tremendously impressed with a poem Sabrina had read about Darfur, and she told me that the other CD had more of her political stuff on it. Her work really is amazing, and she reads it with the level of professionalism you often find in American, hip-hop-influenced poets, and which I wish to Godess more poets from other backgrounds would employ. You really should go and check her out, she's awesome.

(I would also recommend that, if you are in London, you attend an event at the Poetry Cafe, which is a fine venue, but with this proviso: the basement in the cafe, where the events are held, gets very hot very quickly, and after about two or three hours any event there turns into a grim endurance trial for the audience and, I imagine, the performer. I was lucky enough to go on during the first half, but as audience alone for the second I have to admit that I often found I couldn't applaud as much as I wanted to, purely due to fatigue from the overpowering heat. Helen avers, and I agree with her, that a key focus of the Poetry Society's fundraising in future should be getting some decent air-conditioning installed in the basement. I realise this may be a difficult one to get past a lot of poets, many of whom are very right-on when it comes to environmental issues: but I predict once they are told it may mean louder applause towards the end of the night, they'll fall into line. The whores.)

And so, after bidding goodbye to Helen at Gloucester Road tube station, grabbing a six-pack of Heineken from the Tesco Express for roughly what it would cost me to have a single bottle from the mini-bar, ordering some room-service nachos and sitting down to watch The Best of Rudetube (perfect post-gig entertainment: a programme entirely composed of silly clips off the internet, demanding absolutely nothing of the attention span) on the telly, I congratulated myself on a successful assault on the Capital. Tomorrow I would play Hebden Bridge, a tiny little town in the North of England. What could possibly go wrong?

Only Built for Hyper Linx (this joke TM & (c) pretty much whatever actual day http was invented)

2010-10-01T14:01:00.000-07:00

Trying to keep the blog ticking over prior to next week's busy travelling, during which I will probably be Twitter only. So it's time for that standby of the blog world, the links roundup.

First, via Helen at Bird of Paradox, disturbing reports of Transphobic attacks being carried out at the 3rd European Transgender Council. A reminder that even in progressive places like Sweden, you still get cisfail. And of course I'm sure there's no connection between these racist, transphobic knuckle-draggers feeling emboldened to throw eggs and the recent increased profile of the far-right Sweden 'Democrats'. This is yet another reason why you have to oppose right-wing bollocks wherever you come across it, even - especially - when that right-wing bollocks is wearing a respectable suits and talking to you in a reasonable and patrician voice about how cuts are necessary and we're all in this together.

Or indeed putting together badly-written blogposts in a pathetic attempt to slander people who oppose your policies, as Tory MP and oxygen-thief without portfolio Nadine Dorries tried to do this week. Dorries' juvenile dig at disabled Tweeter Humphrey Cushion, which Dorries launched on her delightfully retro blog (designed in the style of a rubbish turn-of-the-millenium geocities page), helped along with an underhanded little assist from inexplicably-popular right-wing life-fail Paul 'I masturbate wearing a Guy Fawkes mask' Staines, has so far had the effect of...getting the Talented Ms Cushion a shedload more followers and causing Dorries to be pulled from tonight's Newsnight, presumably on the grounds that anyone who thinks that's a good blog design is clearly incapable of reasoned discussion and probably shouldn't be allowed near electrical equipment for reasons of health and safety. Fine work there by the Dorries/Staines tag team, who on this showing are the worst male/female combination since Dusty Rhodes and Sapphire. Great work, guys!

In happier news, it was lovely to see that my friend Angela Readman has had a story accepted by Metazen: read it, it's good. Then buy her books, because they're even better.

Finally, while trying to motivate myself to get on with preparations for the Cheap Date Poetry Tour, I youtubed John Adams' classic piece 'A Short Ride in a Fast machine', and uncovered a number of versions of it, most notably two intriguing animations, and a nice bit of speeded-up video of Paris. Interesting in particular to see how each of these different pieces handles the unusually slow part of the piece, that brief pause in which it gathers strength for its final assault and its final leap into musical hyperspace.

And speaking of brief pauses to gather strength, today has been mine. I probably shan't be in touch with you again until I manage some breathless blogging at the end of next week's exertions, so until then, goodbye my dears *curtsies, waves, accepts bouquets* Until then, mwah! x

KSM Exit 75, drinking, vagrancy, and visiting That London

2010-09-29T12:07:00.000-07:00

Still alive. Still here. Just. Mum got ill again, and family drama led to me spending a rather fraught and self-pitying night at the Angel View Inn, Gateshead (nice place, lovely staff, great food, but given the circs a place I never want to go to again), then decamping, after a long day of literally bumming around Newcastle, back to Michelle's place. I'm getting kind of sick of all this to-ing and fro-ing, though, so today I did something I've been meaning to get around to for ages: I got a form from the local Housing Office, to register my interest in moving into what we used to call a council house before corporations like Gentoo got in on the act. Soon, perhaps, you will experience me blogging from the freezing cold of my own personal Bedsit Hell. Exciting!

It's not all Morrissey-esque misery, though. After my day of experimental homelessness in the Toon, I went to the long-awaited Borders reunion drinking session at Tilly's theatre bar. A fine night in a fine venue and, after we decamped to the equally fine Bodega, a great deal of fantastic conversation was had on topics as diverse as the foibles of customers, the most disgusting things found behind bookshelves, and my role, as head of the Psychology & Social Sciences section (incorporating Erotica & Sexuality) as the Pornographer of Gateshead. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...so that was a ray of sunshine in an otherwise depressing weekend.

Another ray of sunshine is my upcoming visit to That London to do some poetry gigs, which is happening next week. I'll be reading at RAW Poetry in King's Cross on Monday the 4th; Poetry Unplugged at Covent Garden's Poetry Cafe on Tuesday the 5th; then it's up to Hebden Bridge for Write Out Loud's own 'read-around' session on Wednesday the 6th, before finishing up in Middlesbrough for the Black Light Engine Room's National Poetry Day extravaganza. It's a tornado of troubadouring which I'm privately referring to as the Cheap Date Poetry Tour, largely due to the fact that I am having to do it on as close to no budget as possible (and the fact that I will sleep with random members of the audience in return for a drink, obviously). And after which I will probably sleep right through for the remaining three days of my officially-sanctioned week's holiday...

Now we are 33

2010-09-21T12:50:00.000-07:00

I had a pretty good birthday, really. Michelle chipped in to help me buy a futuristic and exciting Kindle device, at exactly the same time as the Kindle precipitated all-out-fucking-war in the book world (it's things like that which make me miss the book trade: sure, the job I'm in now pays better and this means I have more time to attend to my own literary activities but nothing, nothing, beats that sense of being one of the grunts on the ground in a bookshop, facing the 'it's cheaper at Asda!' barbarians at the gates on a daily basis, scrabbling desperately to shore up the collapsing edifice that is the printed, bound codex and bitching about it every single second you can spare from shelving and sorting and shaking your head at the mess, the fucking mess, those animals make of the toilet...but I digress); we went to a fantastic Mexican restaurant, and the pictures, and the pub (not all in the same day, mind you), plus I ate a lot of chocolate and nachos and cake, oh my!

One of the main features of the weekend was that I got waxed for the first time. At the risk of sounding overly macho (an ever-present risk on this testosterone-soaked slice of the web, I'm sure you'll agree), I have to wonder what people are on about when they say it's incredibly painful. For me, the main issue seemed to be the fact that it tickled when the wax was applied in certain areas, which was slightly embarassing. I'm willing to admit, though, that this may be because, as the nice lady from Jesmond Beauty Clinic informed me, I actually have (well, had, in the waxed areas - grin, grin) quite fine, not-exactly-manly body hair, which comes off quite easily. I suppose if one were possessed of a thick, George 'The Animal' Steele style mat of follicles, one might find the experience more tortuous. But I have to say I rather enjoyed it. So nah.

And thence to the Lamplight Arts Centre in Stanley for the first Lamplight Poetry Slam of the new season. Hosted by Steve Urwin and James Oates, the slam was deservedly won by Jenni Pascoe, but featured fine work from Jeff Price, Alfie Crow, Poetry Jack, and many more, including myself. I'm proud of my own contribution, not only because I scored a personal best by getting through to the third round (well, okay, the first round was a warm-up round so doesn't strictly count; but reaching the second round of a slam is still better than I've done in like, ever), but also because I read pieces I've been afraid of reading for a long time, and I read them well. Let's face it, I'm highly unlikely to ever win a slam with my material (an awful lot of my stuff is genderqueer misery, and what lighter stuff there is in my set tends to be about S&M - I'm kind of a niche interest), but the challenge I set myself with this gig was that I should memorise the poems I planned to do and concentrate not just on reading them from behind the comfort of a file of plastic wallets, but on performing them. And that I think I achieved in spades. My second round poem, 'Eggshells', held the room so strongly that you could have heard a pin drop while I was reading: it was a real Little Earthquakes moment. Follow-up poem 'NSFW' also went over well (James even contending it was his favourite poem of the night), but it didn't have the shock power of the earlier poem and, as I say, I was up against a strong field. And hey, I went out in the same round as Jeff and Jack, so there's no shame in that.

All in all, the fact that I made such a good showing is a good omen for the London gigs coming up. After which - well, who knows? It might be nice to take some downtime from performing and get on with writing new stuff; then again there are a few other intriguing offers I've been made so...we'll see. Yes *steeples fingers* we shall see, indeed...moo hoo ha ha!

Ahem.

A blogpost that smells mainly of toast and is comprised principally of disappointment

2010-09-14T13:55:00.000-07:00

Regular readers of this blog will know of my enjoyment of the comedic work of genuine, certfied laughter-genius Stewart Lee. Lee - who recently gained notoriety through his campaign to get the Piss-Weak Lager Comedy God Award to be given to Japanese performance-art troupe Frank Chickens - is a breath of fresh air in a world composed of 'comedians' like Michael 'it's funny isn't it how, hmmmm, things happen, yes, itsfunnyisn'tit, yes' Mcintyre, Peter 'catchphrase regurgitator' Kay, or Sean 'genuinely vile human being' Lock. His work is dark, bitter, twisted and, at its best, becomes a kind of meta-comedy, breaking through some kind of wall beyond even the fourth and trapping the audience in a recursive awareness of how twisted the jokes are even as they laugh at them. A challenging comedian like that is worth ten Russell Howards. However horrible the image of ten Russell Howards bounding towards you, hilariously going 'hello!' in a silly voice and waving in a laugh-a-second impression of someone with learning disabilities, might be.

That last sentence is my homage to one of the key tropes in Lee's comedy - the moment when he will skewer another performer's schtick with pin-point precision. Because I'm not a professional comedian, my example tends towards the needlessly brutal and vicious - Lee's versions of this trick can be subtler and even affectionate (my favourite, despite my love of Izzard's work, is his brilliant line 'I'll improvise, like Eddie Izzard...pretends to do.' [in fairness to Lee, he has explained that he genuinely admires Izzard for his ability to make what are obviously meticulously-planned moments in his set appear to be improvised on the spot]).

If you've read this far, and you're familiar with the way entries of this sort on my blog tend to work, you'll be expecting a similar skewering of Lee himself at this point. What has he done, Adam? Has he by any chance said something transphobic, insulting and generally offensive? Well, kind of, yes. And, frankly, I'm baffled.

You see, I've been reading Lee's otherwise excellent book, 'How I Escaped My Certain Fate' today, and, during the otherwise funny introduction (it is actually a very good book except in the respect I'm going to have a go at. I'm hoping both those 'otherwises' will make that seem clear), Lee comes out with this line, apropos of his description of an alternative comedy promoter discovering Lee had been educated at Oxford:

'"But you're not like those wankers, are you?" he added with all the desparation of a disappointed sex tourist who has just discovered his beautiful Thai prostitute has a penis, and is wondering whether just to try and make the best of it.'

Now as a writer I can see why Lee has gone for this line. He needs a simile for someone discovering a secret about another person, and he also needs one that fits with his carefully-crafted 'edgy' comic persona. Superficially, it seems to fit the bill. But when we subject it to the kind of deep comic analysis which is often the hallmark of Lee's own act, we find it's actually kind of unpalatable.

The problem with this seemingly throwaway line is the implicit assumptions it contains. There are three main assumptions buried in this joke, all of them problematic.

1) Trans people are prostitutes. The basic trans woman joke is essentially a variant on this line. Man goes to prostitute. Man discovers prostitute is trans. Hilarity ensues! Well. Not really. Very often what ensues is the sex worker involved being attacked violently and possibly murdered. Some versions of the joke even imply that this violence is deserved (and to be fair, the 'disappointed sex tourist' in Lee's gag at least doesn't do that). But leaving even that aside - even if suddenly punters stopped being violent to trans sex workers - one of the implicit assumptions in a joke of this kind is that the only place you are liable to find a trans person is a red light district. While it's true that many trans women often go into sex work due to the persistent and often unacknowledged discrimination they face in 'conventional' employment, there are trans people in all walks of life. There are trans poets, journalists, architects, scientists, broadcasters and, indeed, comedians. This implicit association with the sex industry contributes to a widespread perception of trans people as being somehow sleazy which becomes both a self-fulfilling prophecy and also a contributing factor to problematic point two...

2) Trans people are (often exotic) others. Notice that the prostitute in the above scenario is, of course, Thai. There is something definitely very odd and a bit sleazy about this, on the part of Lee and the whole 'Bangkok chickboys' tone of this conversation in the culture. It smacks simultaneously of Orientalism and transmisogyny. It's a fairly toxic combo: it contributes to the belief in our culture that trans people are not like us. Which is a ludicrous notion. Trans people are a small segment of the population, but you find them in any population, caucasian, black, hispanic, asian, south asian...attitudes to trans people differ from culture to culture (some countries are much more welcoming to trans people than others), but trans people are to be found everywhere. Not all of them are flawless 'oriental' beauties (and indeed it should be noted that not all 'oriental' people are flawless beauties either): there are dumpy white trans people, athletic black trans people, skinny Irish trans people, and all sorts of combinations. One even encounters overweight non-binary trans people with pale skin who find it impossible to tan and fight an ongoing battle against their body and facial hair with an ever-expanding arsenal of depilatory creams, razors, waxing and tweezers. You know, as a hypothetical example. Actually scratch that, I'm talking about myself there, because to do otherwise is to play into the hands of problematic assumption three...

3) Trans status is a shameful secret. Oh NOES! The prostitute was really a MAN! What a horrible dark secret! What a disappointment! Oh the womanity! Oh, bollocks, more like. Is it really Stewart Lee making this joke? This tired old piece-of-shit joke we'd be more likely to expect from some hack like Letterman or Lock? For Venus Castina's sake, being trans is nothing to be ashamed of. It's only the twisted assumptions of cis society which regards it as such, and that is in no small part due to the previous assumptions listed above. And jokes like this, which - while seemingly inconsequential - reinforce those assumptions, do not help to solve the problem.

In fact, I'll go further. Jokes like this have a body count. Read that link. Every second day the murder of a trans person is reported. The true casualty figures, as always in this sort of crime, are probably far higher.

This is why I'm deeply, sorely disappointed in Stewart Lee. I don't think there's any malice in his line. I think he genuinely hasn't thought about it. And in a way, that makes it worse. Because, having followed his work as I have, I know he genuinely does think very carefully about his art, and that he generally comes at things from a sensibility rooted in the alternative comedy of the 80s. It's just a shame - a damn shame - that, for this one throwaway line, this one moment, he slackened that focus.

It is an otherwise good book. Lee is, I think, one of the good guys, and his thoughts on comedy and the construction of a stage act are required reading for any performer. But I wish he'd thought a little more when he was writing them.

We Will Never Forget (because the networks won't let us)

2010-09-11T15:23:00.000-07:00

Another 9/11 anniversary, another deluge of programmes about the disaster that changed the world (that's 'changed the world' in the sense of 'caused the US government and radical Islam to follow geopolitical strategies they had already substantially committed themselves to' but let's let that pass).

What I find myself thinking about, though, is: were there these levels of hyper-commemoration around other major dates? During the second world war, there weren't massive commemorations in Britain of the declaration of war on the 3rd of September 1939. During Vietnam, the Gulf of Tonkin incident wasn't marked with a slew of documentaries every year. Even other 'world-changing' events like the assassination of John F Kennedy weren't marked with special docs every year thereafter.

It might be argued that the hyper-commemoration of September 11 2001 is a result of the prevalence of 24-hour-rolling news and the internet. The internet made everyone feel a part of what was going on. I first found out about the attack on the World Trade Centre by checking the BBC website after rumours began going around the office. In this respect I was ahead of the traditional press: I later found out from an ex-girlfriend who studied journalism that the local paper she worked on had to find out about the events from the guy who ran the shop downstairs: their office had no internet connection. This was the old days, remember, you kids with your Twitter and your Facebook and your bloody Youtube. In our office we thought the Thorn Tree Forum on the Lonely Planet Website was crazy futuristic cyber-nonsense, for heaven's sake.

The rolling news both ensured that people heard about the initial attack, and that it was endlessly recycled through a search for talking heads to commentate, new footage of what happened, new graphics to explain what might happen next, contextual pieces about the history of Afghanistan, etc, etc. 9/11 was the first disaster of the new media age. The only comparably mediated event, the death of Princess Diana on 31 August 2001, occurred just prior to the mass-penetration of peoples' lives by the internet. By the time of September 11th 2001, pretty much everybody in the developed countries either was able to access the net by themselves, knew someone else who could, or had access to public internet facilities in a library or cyber-cafe (I remember going to London for a Diamanda Galas concert a little over a week after the attack: one of the first things I did, once I'd stowed my backpack at the fleabag hotel where I was staying, was to find an internet cafe in Covent Garden where I could grab a cup of bad coffee and find out whether Bush had decided to blow up the world while I was on the train); and big media, at least, armed with broadband at a time when the rest of us were still usually wrestling with dial-up connections, were well-placed to intercept, interpret and analyse the information streaming in from around the globe.

All that information, all that footage, all those interviews, all those graphics, and all the weird little facts and factoids and vile conspiracy theories which circulated after the event, were just waiting to be cannibalised and recontextured and consumed again in an endless orgy of mediophagy which began a year later and has continued every year since. We have reached a point, this year, where the older 9/11 documentaries are shown in the days leading up to the anniversary itself, because the schedules need to be kept clear for the new documentaries which will present yet another angle on the story.

The media loves a story about the media, and in a sense, the story of 9/11 is a story about the media: about the images of suffering, the stories of heroism, above all about that haunting image of the two towers, one smoking, one intact, and then the sudden, insidious shadow of the second plane sliding in, the explosion, and all hell breaking loose, in a moment which was described by many - showing the highly-mediated nature of the event - as like a scene from a disaster movie.

None of this detracts from the suffering of those involved. In fact, considering the degree to which their suffering and their stories were feasted on by the media should serve as a kick in the arse to make us think much more strongly about the trauma those people underwent. No matter how many documentaries we film, no matter how many new and exclusive interviews we see (tonight's star turns are Condoleeza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld: perhaps next year we may get to see Dick Cheney, assuming he hasn't had yet another heart attack by then), we will not be able to understand what those who lost loved ones on that day went through.

You can never truly understand another person's grief. You can empathise with it, based on your own experience of loss; but you can never truly penetrate to the heart of another person's pain (and this goes double for all the self-styled Buddhas out there who see the suffering of others as an opportunity to show off their awesome listening skills and their grade 2 qualification in Neuro-Linguistic Programming). Grief is raw. Grief is red. Grief is unforgiving and unrelenting and it sneaks up on you when you least expect it and floors you like a concrete sucker punch. Everyone's grief, like everyone's love, like everyone's fingerprints, is unique.

And this is what worries me about the hyper-commemoration of 9/11. It lulls us into the belief that we can understand what people on that day went through. More than the original media storm, the retelling of these stories makes us believe that their stories are ours. They encourage us to identify with pain with which we have no right to identify. And that has very dangerous consequences.

There is something disturbing about a culture which still, almost a decade after a traumatic event, endlessly replays and reconstitutes that event for people who were involved in it only at third hand. The survivors of 9/11 have every right to tell their stories. And they deserve to have those stories recorded. But there is something disturbing about our appetite to hear those stories ourselves again and again, without setting them in their larger historical and political context. It's interesting that none of the 9/11 documentaries I've seen have asked the question of whether we have learned anything since the events of that day. Where are the documentaries on mainstream television about the other 9/11, for instance? When will a documentary move beyond the stories of heroism and consider how those who gave their lives were posthumously betrayed when their stories were co-opted into support of the Project for a New American Century and its neoconservative agenda?

Stories are important. But telling a story over and over without moving beyond it is obsessive behaviour. At some point you need to stop telling and start analysing. Maybe next year will be the 9/11 when we do that as a culture. Until then, it's something we can all do as individuals. And the more we do that, and the more of us who do do that, the less likely another 9/11 becomes. Peace is the way.

Charlie and the Big Bad Book-burning Bigot

2010-09-11T02:42:00.000-07:00

So today's big question is: will he or won't he? I'm talking, of course, about 'Pastor' Terry Jones and his ridiculuous and inflammatory plan to burn copies of the Qu'ran on a shitty plot of land owned by one of the ill-educated weirdos from his micro-church.

Whether or not this Terry Jones - who, as someone on Twitter pointed out, is very much a naughty boy rather than the Messiah - succeeds in carrying out his little auto da fe, there can be little doubt that he's already succeeded in getting his ugly face, 'cockduster' moustache and all, all over the media.

What are we to make of Pastor Jones? What opinion of him should we form? Talking heads have thrashed it out for most of the week, but it occurred to me that no-one had thought to ask the ultimate arbiters of morality, the oompah-loompahs from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the Gene Wilder version, obviously).

So I did. And so it is with great pleasure that this blog is able to host the Pastor Terry Jones oompah-loompah song. Take it away little fellas...

'Oompah-loompah doompaty-do,
I've got another puzzle for you:
about an insignificant speck,
who spends his time watching too much Glenn Beck:

what are we to make of this sad little man,
who tells everyone that he'll burn the Qu'ran?
Is he the start of a new right-wing trend,
or is he just a chuffing bell-end?'

Chorus: 'He's a chuffing bell-end, he's a chuffing bell-end...'

'Oompah-loompah doompaty-spank,
burning Qu'rans is a right load of wank!'

So there you are. They seem a bit more foul-mouthed than normal these days, I have to say. I think they're still kind of bitter about Deep Roy getting their gig in the remake. Still, their hearts are in the right place.

(Curtsy to @vivmondo over on Twitter for the picture of Pastor Jones' startling chimp-related confession.)

Major Misunderstanding Makes War on the Poor

2010-09-05T08:14:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, I'm talking to a friend who works for a teaching union. Said friend tells me about an interesting call a friend of hers had received. The call was from the right-wing UK broadsheet the Daily Telegraph. At that time, the Telegraph - or the Torygraph, as many on the left call it - was riding high after exposing the MPs' expenses scandal, which - although many MPs from the opposition benches had also fiddled the system - inevitably hit the Labour government harder.

The man from the Telegraph had been asking about facility time allocations made by the Local Authority my union friend worked for. Facility time is something you may not know about. It's basically a system by which members of staff who are also union officials are able to work full-time on their union activities. The system is paid for by the unions, who pay to provide staff to cover for the officials while they go about their union work.

The system is paid for by the unions. Got that? The salaries of these workers - when they work in the public sector - are paid for by taxes - but the unions recompense the employers out of their own budgets. Facility time is paid for by the unions, to provide a vital service to union members, to ensure that practices and procedures at work are fair and conform to the correct legislation. Unions aren't bolshy, Citizen Smith operations - they're a vital check on employers, who make sure they treat their staff fairly. If you think a check like that isn't necessary, I would like to know which time tunnel you used to arrive here from the late middle ages, so I can kick you back down it to your world of feudal servitude.

Anyway. The Torygraph were snooping around trying to find out how much facility time various organisations were granting. My hunch was they planned to extend the MP's expenses furore to council level, giving their story a new angle and allowing them to run with it for a while longer. This would boost circulation and keep the Torygraph at the head of the news agenda - an odd position for it to occupy as, prior to the expenses scandal, the paper had pretty much been a joke, mocked for its fawning celebrity coverage and tendency to try and cover any story in such a way that it could be illustrated by a picture of a leggy upper class caucasian girl who (usually) would be surnamed Hurley or Goldsmith.

At the time I worked in a bookshop which sold newspapers, so was able to keep abreast of what the tabs and the broadsheets were covering without having to shell out any of my (limited) cash. I braced myself for a classic Telegraph 'retired colonel' piece all about bolshy unions and YOUR HARD-EARNED TAXES being used to pay for them and blah blah Tory fishcakes. And waited.

And waited. And waited.

And had actually almost forgotten about that little piece of info I'd been given until today, when the Torygraph suddenly decided to reveal all this information they'd been sitting on in this nasty litle article.

This delay in publishing is not an accident. In fact, it reveals something rather unnerving about the Coalition's agenda. We've been told that the public sector cuts being touted by the like of George Osborne are merely necessary because of the economic situation. We're told that these cuts have to be more swingeing than even the Tories promised before the election because it turns out the economy is in an even more parlous state than anybody realised. But as my little conversation six months ago reveals, the Telegraph have had this story in the bag for a looooong time, and they're only choosing to go with it now. Why is that?

It's because there is nothing necessary about these cuts. This is ideological. This, however much the Tories may deny it, is class war. Weakening the public sector is about making the vast bulk of ordinary people even more powerless to resist being placed on lower wages, being subject to discrimination by prejudiced employers, or being forced into poverty because their benefits have been cut. The unions, rightly, are campaigning to protect the public sector, and so protect the interests of ordinary people throughout the country. The Telegraph have sat on this story so they can use it as ammunition against the unions in this ideologically-driven war on the poor. And the fact that they sat on the information for six months shows that this war was being planned long before the election - at the very time that David Cameron was promising not to bring in swingeing public sector cuts.

The Telegraph will try to dress this up as a public interest investigation. But if that's really the case, why didn't they strike when the iron was hot - when the issue of expenses abuse was high on the agenda, and people were hungry for stories of corruption in high places? Because the Telegraph don't really care about the public - unless by 'public' you mean that tiny fraction of the body politic able to pay for a seat at one of David Cameron's dodgy dinner clubs. If the expenses scandal had been uncovered under this government, the Telegraph wouldn't have pursued it nearly as aggressively (indeed, the Telegraph have lagged far behind other broadsheets in covering metgate, a story with massive public interest implications which also happens to be massively damaging to the Tory party). The Torygraph deserves its nickname, because it's a propaganda organ of the Tory party - and their latest 'revelations' about facility time are disgusting, biased and sleazy - even for a propaganda rag. Frankly, I preferred the Telegraph when all its journalists were interested in looking up was Liz Hurley's skirt.

There Goes the Government

2010-09-04T10:26:00.000-07:00

Just popping in quickly to let readers know that Emergency Verse, Alan Morrison's anthology of anti-coalition poetry, is now available to download for £2.99 from The Recusant poetry site. Among many other fantastic contributions from the likes of Andy Croft, Michaels Rosen & Horovitz, John O'Donoghue, Keith Armstrong, Tom Kelly and Anne Babson (who contributes my personal favourite piece in the book, 'Recitative: Then Shall the Eyes of the Blind'), Emergency Verse features my rabble-rousing little poem 'Class? War?', which I wrote in a massive fit of pique during the week Nick Clegg turned out to be a total Lando and the first pictures of the lily-white new cabinet began to appear in the press.

I do urge you to buy Emergency Verse, not just because I'm in it but because it's a damn fine anthology, and I wish it wasn't just an e-book but an actual paperback I could shove into peoples' hands with an injunction to read. There aren't many good things you can buy these days for just shy of three quid (even a pint of decent lager costs more): so why not shell out for 300+ pages of good, angry poetry?

Toilet Talk Take Two

2010-08-29T11:53:00.000-07:00

When you choose to advocate for a particular cause, there are certain things, certain issues, certain tropes, that you find yourself having to deal with again and again. If your beat involves taking on racist tabloid pricks like Richard Littlejohn and his ilk, you will constantly be having to explain that 'some of my best friends are black people' is not a valid defence. When you deal with bad science, you will have to explain the difference between correlation and causation until you're blue in the face. Set yourself against the lies of lying liars like the Taxpayers' Alliance or Migrationwatch, and you'll develop a near-supernatural ability to skewer bad sets of statistics.

If you deal with trans issues, the thing which crops up as often as the Riddler in the 60s Batman series - and is about 200 times as irritating - is the toilet thing. Every now and again, some right-wing, kyriarchal fuck decides to spread the toxic meme that allowing trans people to use the correct toilets will be a green light for any rapist to pull on an unconvincing frightwig and run wild in the ladies' loos like Molestozilla. The fact that this has never fucking happened - that there are, in fact, a number of reasons why it would actually be kind of impossible - never really bothers these people. They run with it because it allows them to trot out the old tropes about trans people being deceptive, not 'real' men or women, perverted, etc etc. It allows them to spread the fear for their own twisted advantage. It allows them to divide and conquer and, because the people they have to crawl over are some of the most vulnerable people in society, they figure they can do it with little chance of reprisal.

I set down my thoughts about all this a while ago, and now, after legal blogger Jack of Kent has ruminated on the issue - leading to some interesting and insightful comments - Natacha Kennedy has also outlined an interesting theoretical perspective on why many people obsess over this issue on her own blog, Uncommon Sense.

What it comes down to, in the end, is that, as always, it's the kyriarchy, stupid. And as Little Light points out, we have to fight the kyriarchy because, basically, the people who support it have already decided they're at war with us. And one of the ways we take on the kyriarchy and its supoorters is by explaining why the 'toilet argument' is bullshit: and we'll do it all again the next time it comes up, same bat-time, same bat-channel. C'est la guerre.

The OTHER Announcement

2010-08-29T06:22:00.000-07:00

Readers of this blog may recall me hinting in the last blog, announcing the imminent publication of By Grand Central Station We Sat Down and Wept in October, that I would be up to something else during October as well.

What that something is is taking a trip down to London for a little bit of sightseeing and to do a couple of spots at two open mike nights in the Great Wen: Raw Poetry at the Central Station pub, Wharfedale Road, on Monday 4th of October, and Poetry Unplugged at the Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden on Tuesday the 5th. I will then be heading up to Hebden Bridge to take part in the monthly Write Out-Loud Read-around at the Hole in the Wall. The London gigs are about having a go at performing somewhere where people aren't familiar with my stuff; Hebden Bridge is about that too, but I've also been keen to do something under the WoL aegis since someone introduced me to their site a while ago. I really can't recommend it enough: it's a fantastic way to find out about gigs or places that are looking for submissions. I wouldn't be able to plan these gigs in London without it. So I figured if I was going to do a bunch of gigs outside the North East, I should try and fit in one of their own events. So I did.

Anyway, that's what I'm planning for October. If you're in the area for any of the gigs, do please come along. I'll probably post a reminder nearer the time. And I imagine there will be a veritable stream of tweeting from both locations for your shallow entertainment. In the meantime I have a rather needy cat to attend to so it's au revoir for now...

A Quickie

2010-08-27T15:03:00.000-07:00

Just popping by swiftly to inform you all that I have heard from poet and publisher Kevin Cadwallender that his forthcoming anthology of poems inspired by Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept - which features my poem 'The Smiling Animal at his Appointed Hour' - is due to be published sometime in October. I'll have more news - including details of how and where to purchase the book which, aside from me, will feature work by loads more really fine versifiers - closer to the time.

I do have some other news regarding my poetry-related activities in October, but I'll say more about that later. Important to take a drip-feed approach to the publicity thing...

(the anthology is called By Grand Central Station We Sat Down and Wept, by the way, but you probably figured that out)

Hot Sex Action (there isn't any)

2010-08-24T13:06:00.000-07:00

It snuck up on me this morning that it's over a year since my wife and I split up. It then occurred to me that it's been even longer since the last time I had sex with anyone. Which is, y'know, kind of a shame because, to be honest, I'm pretty sure that last time is going to turn out to be, well, the last time.

I know it sounds slightly mawkish to say so here (and in fact I had been toying with submitting this to Arwyn's series Naked Pictures of Faceless People over at Raising My Boychick until I thought no, sod it), but I've been feeling increasingly that I'm fundamentally not ready for a relationship with someone else that goes beyond friendship (although to be honest, when you don't conform to normal gender standards, have a bad case of social phobia and tend towards bouts of misery if not abject depression, just making friends on its own is hard enough). A serious relationship would entail entirely too much. Too much opening up, too much letting people in, too much exposing the vulnerable parts of myself to someone while giving them the kind of access that means they can really, really hurt you.

It's ironic that the prospect of opening up in this area should be so frightening, because I'm only beginning to get used to how liberating it is in my writing. As I've written recently, it's only at the last couple of gigs I've done that I've started to do some of the poems I've written, but always feared to read. And I've found that to be an incredibly powerful experience: it makes me feel more honest as a writer and, strangely, more connected with my audience - probably because they get to see the real me, rather than the front I put on for so many years. It feels good to tell the truth in public.

But as liberating as that can be, I worry that opening up in private will be too much of a high-stakes gamble. On the page, on a stage, there are rules and limitations. If it's just you and someone else, alone...No. Too much risk. And too many practicalities to be negotiated. It sometimes seems to me that explaining to someone what I want out of a sexual relationship would simply take too much bloody time to explain. Heck, some days (this is one of them: can you tell?) I'm not even sure I can explain it to myself. Factor in a similar amount of time coming to understand what a partner wants, where their lines of desire intersect with mine, and what things to keep off-limits...who needs all that meshugah?

And so you get used to it: the terror of potentially romantic interaction; the pain of seeing people that you think you'd be so right with when you know that in all probability you're wrong, and that's a mistake you can't afford; the fact that you will spend your life watching other people enjoy a happiness you'll never feel again. You get used to it, and you hope that one day you can even make your peace with it, and you work as hard as you damn well can on making sure you never let the experience turn you into some horrible, shrivelled up old puritan arsehole who hates the thought of anybody having fun.

Oh, I don't know. In the grand scheme of things 'not being able to have the sex' doesn't really figure in the top 100 in a world where you can have your house blasted to shit by people who will then give you a pamphlet about Jebus; and it isn't as if there aren't many, many pleasures in life besides the old thirty seconds of squelching noises (I'm listening to one of the most orgasmic non-sex-related things I've ever experienced, John Adams' 'A Short Ride in a Fast Machine' even as I'm typing this). Besides, given the way my life keeps twisting itself into odd new shapes at the moment, for all we know next week will find me desperately trying to type out a blog entry using only my big toe, while being thrown brutally around some kind of sex-dungeon by a posse of Amazon Love Titans. Hope, as they say, springs eternal; though on the other hand, hope can be crueller than resignation. And , on that vaguely Soviet note, goodnight for now. My next blog entry will be more of the usual ranting, I'm sure. I just felt a need to get this off my chest. You can make up your own joke about me doing that in the absence of someone wanting to get on it.

Why do the spacemen always have guns?

2010-08-22T15:56:00.000-07:00

Lazy day today, mainly spent watching old episodes of Babylon 5 with a friend. FX seem to be running the series on permanent loop, which can be disorienting. Last time I saw any of it, I caught a snatch of an episode from the disappointing last season. This time, we were lucky enough to come across a bunch of eps from the end of Season 4, the whole 'liberation-of-Earth' thing, which was much more enjoyable, even if I did find myself trying to remember whether or not this occurs before or after the defeat of the Shadows, but it set me thinking about an odd thing about sci-fi TV shows. Specifically, why are so many about the millitary?

Think about it. There are a few exceptions - Firefly, Dr Who, etc - but most sci-fi TV shows tend to concentrate on the adventures of some millitary or quasi-millitary organisation. Star Trek is obviously the big boy among this bunch, and an interesting exampe in that the Federation try very hard to come off as a kind of intergalactic peace corps but, essentially, they're a great big space-navy: uniforms, heavily-armed warships, culture of obeying-the-captain (which becomes vital to the plot in First Contact) - they can go on about the Klingons being a weird warrior-race but they aren't fooling anyone: the Federation are at least as heavily-millitarised as the funny-forehead brigade, maybe even more so: the Federation are all about the discipline, whereas whenever the Klingons appear they always seem to be more like crazy space pirates (with a healthy interest in BDSM if what little we ever see of Klingon mating rituals is anything to go by). At least the Klingons know how to have fun.

There are very few civilians in the Star Trek shows...Deep Space Nine has a few but, with the exception of Quark the barman and Garrack the tailor, they tend to stay in the background (and the extent to which Garrack is actually a civilian is debatable... he's technically retired from espionage but...) Voyager pulled an interesting variation by making terrorists as well as boy scouts part of the crew, but non-state-actors are a far cry from your run-of-the-mill civvie.

Babylon 5 does have civilians, and indeed many of the main characters fluctuate between employment in the armed services, politics and more shady lines of work; but the main thrust of the plot is a massive Manichaean war between good and evil, fought with starships and PPGs.

Perhaps the most successful sci-fi series of recent times, the Battlestar Galactica remake, does manage to strike a good balance between civillian and millitary affairs, largely because that balance - the way you manage to keep all the elements of a civil society going in conditions of near-total war - is one of the main drivers of the series in terms of plot.

The point is that all three of these series, to whatever degree they balance millitary and civilian elements, feature a large millitary component - and that is even more bizarre when you consider that, generally, in most non-sci-fi shows that concentrate on millitary themes don't succeed. Most mainstream TV-shows tend to be either comedies, soaps, or police procedurals: all genres which, with a few exceptions, tend not to work in a sci-fi context on TV. It actually annoys me that there has never been a properly successful TV sci-fi crime series (don't talk to me about fucking BUGS), perhaps because two of my favourite sci-fi films are Blade Runner and Strange Days - two films which, while they take place in a futuristic sci-fi context, are basically films noir.

I'm not really sure if there's a massive point to this, except to say that...well, why? Why is it that we can have a variety of sci-fi concepts on the big screen, but most small screen sci-fi tends to be millitary space opera? Why does it mostly have to involve spaceships, for god's sake? There isn't a single spaceship in Strange Days and it's still - despite being set in a 1999-era world which has virtual reality which runs off fucking minidiscs - one of the best sci-fi flicks I've ever seen. But TV sci-fi needs to have spaceships, space navies, intergalactic wars...even Doctor Who very often degenerates into Big Spaceship War storylines. Why can't we have a sci-fi detective series? Why can't we have a sci-fi soap? I'd watch a sci-fi soap. The elements of most of the sci-fi TV shows I've enjoyed are the soapy ones: Ivanova's lesbian relationship in B5; the odd-couple friendships between G'Kar and Londo in that series, and Odo and Quark in DS9; the general organic sense of a community growing, living, adjusting, finding its way.

Let's face it, Quark's bar and the Zocolo are basically the Queen Vic: why can't we have a sci-fi show that does away with all the COSMIC WAR bollocks and just deals with normal people, in the future, getting on with things, getting into situations and getting out of them? You can still have futuristic technology; you can still have aliens; hell, you can still have spaceships - 'The Ballad of Halo Jones', one of the soapiest (and best) sci-fi comics of all time, set it's entire second series on a spaceship - except that said ship was a cruise liner, not a warship - so a whole range of issues regarding class, race, age, love, and the human/robot thing (a major sci-fi theme) - could be explored without anyone having to point a raygun at someone else for the very future of humanity.

Well, of course, Alan Moore could get away with that in Halo Jones - that was a comic. No-one's gonna commit to watching one hour of teevee sci-fi a week unless there are space battles, explosions, a massive conspiracy and threats to the very future of reality itself every fucking week. Right?

Well, I don't know. I mean, I would. And I don't think I'm that atypical. So in all the hours and all the channels available...why isn't that niche being filled?

'Between violence and silently seething, between my fist and my Polyanna flower...'

2010-08-16T12:08:00.000-07:00

First things first. Check out the magnificent Laurie Penny's newest blog over at the equally magisterial New Statesman website.

Next, familiarise yourself with the points about status made in this Wired Article about the effects of stress on the human immune system and life expectancy (curtsy in the direction of Lilith von Fraumench, who first brought said story to my attention on Twitter.

Next, equip yourself with a copy of Mind Bombs by Garrick Alder, a book I heartily recommend for a variety of reasons, one of which is this gem of a fact based on a survey by Mary Shaw of Bristol University:

'The suicide rate is higher in deprived areas than in prosperous ones. For some inexplicable reason, the poor seem to suffer from fatal depression...Herefordshire reported only four suicides between 1991 and 1996, compared to 208 in Manchester during the same period.'

The facts are in and the facts are these: kyriarchy kills. Wherever there are disparities in status, those inequalities make the people on the receiving end sicker, weaker, and fatally miserable. They shorten lives either through the slow attrition of stress effects on the nervous and immune systems, or by making it more likely that someone will be pushed to the point where they see no other option but to kill themselves.

Conversely, more equal societies save lives - a fact amply demonstrated by The Spirit Level, a book which, by an astonishing coincidence, has came under sustained attack by right-wing demagogues just at the precise moment when a government that seems hell-bent on increasing inequality to Victorian levels is fucking the country without benefit of butter.

I'm going to say this: the only reason you could possibly have for opposing greater equality (and here I'm not talking merely about equality between economic classes but between abled and disabled people, people of different ethnicities, people of differing gender identities, sexualities, etc etc), given the fatal consequences of an unequal system, is that you're doing alright from it. Other people may be dying but hey, you're alright, Jack (a phrase which was often used by right-wing moralists to bash union members in the fifties - how bitterly amusing that modern exponents of the attitude are exactly the type who huffed and puffed when it was poorer people who were doing okay). And if that's your attitude, then I find you morally and, frankly, physically repugnant.

And I'm brutally aware that I do okay from this system. I'm white, I'm reasonably able-bodied (though mentally often crippled by low self-esteem, depression, social phobia, and a history of self-harm and eating disorders), and, while I might occassionally court harassment for my genderqueer antics, I run nothing like the kind of horiffic risks faced by trans women, or a lot of cis women for that matter. But I am trying, in my own way, to make a more equal system; and I'm not engaged in defending the tapestry of fuckery just because, from where I'm standing, it looks kinda pretty.

The kyriarchy kills. If you defend it, you have blood on your hands. And more and more people are realising that, and getting sick of suffering at your bloodstained fingers.

You know what happens next.

'What goes up must come down, all that swims can also drown...'

2010-08-15T15:13:00.000-07:00

And so to the Trent House, Newcastle, for my second appearance at Jibba Jabba, that bar's new spoken word night. Jibba Jabba is shaping up to be a good venue, attracting a decent crowd and striking a nice balance between newcomers and regular performers. I'm not sure which of those categories I fall into at the moment: I wasn't sure if I was going to perform last night - having planned to go just to discuss dropping some books off for a charity regular JJ attendee Amina Marix Evans works with - but planned a set anyway just in case.

In the event this turned out to be a good strategy as I wound up performing third in the set. I like performing fairly early (for one thing it gives you the chance to relax with a couple of post-performance beverages instead of spending the whole night sober, jittery, and waiting to go on) but I worry about going on first - I'm not the most cheerful of poets, and I worry that sending me on to plough through my tragic tales of gender-incongruity might kill off the room. Equally, the last spot is tough, because you need to provide the exclamation mark to the evening. Inadvertently I wound up doing just that last week at Cellar Door in Durham, and, given that I was in a rage after the cisfail that had been waved in our faces earlier in the evening, it was a weird kind of ending. So it was nice to nestle comfortably in among everyone else's performances, where I could do my thing without too much worry.

I was still kind of worried though. Not only was I doing 'Criminally Fragile' for the second time ever, I also decided to challenge myself by reading 'NSFW' a sort of sister poem to Fragile which is about...well, it's about sex, and desire, and particularly the experience of having desires that are kind of kinky. I figure if I'm going to start performing stuff about my gender identity more openly, I may as well come out and admit to being a bit of a pervy little bitch as well.

Or at least that's what I told myself. I was still bricking it when I got up. Why not junk the planned set? Just do some funny, silly stuff, set people at their ease, don't take risks. On the other hand I'd pretty much outed myself, gig-wise, a week ago, so...

Reader, I read the kinky sex poem. I did the set exactly as planned. And I wasn't shunned or stoned or anathemised by papal decree. In fact, the poems seemed to go over quite well. It still took a while to decompress after coming off-stage (those post-gig drinks came in very handy) and making it back from the gig through the stag-and-hen apocalypse that is Newcastle on a Saturday night was the usual exercise in pure fucking terror, but overall it turned out to be a good night. Particularly because - once I was over my nerves - there were fine sets from Jake Campbell, Jeff Potts, Radikal Queen and many other excellent local poets to enjoy, plus excellent material from co-hosts Karl Thompson and especially Jenni Pascoe, who actually performed and compered in spite of having a bad attack of labyrinthitis.

So Jibba Jabba is shaping up to be a rather excellent night, even when I'm not airing my dirty lingerie in public. Do get along to the next event if you can. As to moi, it's looking like the next time I'm going to be getting my words out will be at the next of Steve Urwin's poetry slams at the Lamplight Arts Centre in Stanley, which won't be until the 21st of September. So in the meantime, fans of the pissed-off ranting which results from the usual blend of boredom and sheer teeth-grinding frustration with the kyriarchy which powers this blog will, doubtless, have much to look forward to. As to what I have to look forward to...well, I'm wondering about that more and more. But that's another entry, for another day.

Be Advised!

2010-08-08T11:20:00.000-07:00

Okay. I'm going to lay down a little truth about writing poetry here. A point that is often overlooked, but is very important. It is not the kind of thing that necessarily makes one popular with other writers - writers being a somewhat narcissistic breed - but I feel it needs saying. You may want to sit back for this one.

If you are going to write a poem about something, do some fucking research on it first.

This goes double if the poem you are writing is about the experience of someone from a marginalised group.

Because there is nothing worse than being at a gig, hearing someone say 'And now - Transsexual Builder!' and then cringing as you hear some well-meaning but fundamentally ignorant cis person publicly fumble their way through a poem which manages to be partly a decent stab at imagining what it might be like to experience harrassment and abuse from people for not conforming to gender expectations, but then arses it all up by constantly referring to the rather complex procedure of gender reassignment surgery as 'having your willy chopped off.'

This kind of mistake has never been easier to avoid, people. You see, there is a magic machine called the internet, on which is stored the sum total of human knowledge, and a sizeable proportion of the sum total of funny cat pictures. Finding out the truth about what surgical treatment for gender incongruence involves might, in the past, have required you to wade through long and complex tomes in university libraries, but now, a mere few minutes' googling will provide you with all the information you need. You don't even have to have your own computer - you can get down the library and use the PCs there. Admittedly you will have to have the guts to be seen in public looking up information about GRS ops - but if you haven't got the basic writer's courage (and professionalism) to research your goddam material you shouldn't be writing anyway.

And it should not be the responsibility of gender-incongruent people to educate your privileged ass on the things you should be researching yourself in order to be a decent fucking writer, but because I am a helpful little Willow Rosenberg tribute act, sit back, strap in, and join me for a thrilling whirligig ride through the incredible world of knowing what the fuck you are talking about.

The two most common forms of gender reassignment surgery are phalloplasty, the creation of a penis, performed on trans men who undergo surgery, and vaginoplasty (NB: link NSFW if you work somewhere that doesn't like vaginas), the construction of a vagina, performed on some trans women who undergo surgery. The latter of these procedures does not involve something as simple as 'chopping off a willy.' It is in fact a mystery to me how any adult human, with a basic understanding of how plastic surgery works in general, could imagine this is all that's involved. What, do you imagine it functions as a straight swap? Do you think trans women have their bits removed, and those bits are then put in a sling and carried, by the magical gender reassignment stork, to the nearest trans man's place of residence? 'Look, darling, a penis was left on our doorstep in the middle of the night! Now we can fuck!' Jesus wept.

Like most plastic surgeries, gender reassignment surgery involves the repurposing of the existing tissue. It would be a fucking incredibly wasteful procedure if it didn't. A few moments' thought and a layperson's understanding of the basics of plastic surgery would lead one to realise how obvious this is. A few minutes' googling, as pointed out above, would actually help you find out what's what. But hey, who cares about that when you've thought up soooo many funny little rhymes about people having their willies chopped off? Oh, and that hilarious bit at the end of your poem about the leftover bits of willy being used to make Big Macs? Ha ha ha ha ha ha that's not funny either, you big pathetic failed human you. You stay classy, there.

(Note: I am not a doctor, nor do I play one on television. When I'm talking about the surgeries involved in gender-reassignment here, I'm simplifying a vast and complicated body of knowledge. There are other procedures involved beyond these two basic ones, there is the whole business of hormones, which I haven't even gone into, there's the fact that not all trans people choose to have surgery on their genitals - there's a massive, massive load of other issues, procedures, and aftercare stuff involved. But you know how you can find out about all that stuff? Google. Or whichever search engine you prefer to use. The internet exists. It is your friend. Use it.)

(Other note: aside from 'Transsexual Builder' and a similarly witless poem based on the oh-so-relevant Cher vehicle 'Mask', the gig was okay. In fact, listening to the douchery kind of spurred me on to finally get around to reading Criminally Fragile, which I've been wussing out of reading at gigs for aaaaages. It is not 'all good', though. I came this close to walking out, but figured an alternative view was needed. Ooooh, look at me being all brave and that. Yeah, right.

Welcome to the Occupation

2010-08-02T12:02:00.000-07:00

Here is a picture I took at Newcastle's Star and Shadow Cinema during their recent seaon of gender non-conforming films and events:

I was very impressed to see signs like this, not least because earlier this year the politics of bathroom use were very much on my mind. I was proud to be involved with the Katrina Harte campaign, especially on the night when, waiting for the bus after another day at work, I got a Facebook message from one of the organisers confirming that the pub which had refused her access to the proper toilets were going to give in and let her use the ladies', after our campaign of letter-writing, contacting MPs, setting up a Facebook group, and generally causing a ruckus.

Ensuring that trans women are able to use the toilets which accord with their gender-identity is not some right-on, theoretical thing. It can, literally, be a matter of life and death. Make a trans woman use the male toilets and you're exposing her to potential abuse and violence from cis male toilet users who - let's be honest - are not the most enlightened and pacific people at the best of times, never mind when they've got three pints of cooking lager inside them. Having a trans-only toilet would be just as bad: you're essentially outing someone in public who might otherwise have 'passed', again exposing them to potential violence from users of your premises.

I can understand this and I'm assuming, dear reader, that you do too. So it boils my piss to find that the people responsible for implementing the Equality Act 2010 either can't grasp this point or don't give a fuck, as Helen from Bird of Paradox points out.

I feared that the Coalition government would roll back some of the great progressive pieces of legislation introduced under Labour, including the Gender Recognition Act 2004. It never occurred to me that they'd do it using a piece of legislation crafted by the very 'progressive' administration they'd replaced.

Right now, I honestly feel as if they ran a game on us. We spent so much time during the election focusing on issues like the Tories being in bed with people like Philippa Stroud, and Christopher Grayling's opinions on the bed-and-breakfast trade, and feeling that if we could just get the Tories to commit to honouring Labour's equalities programme, we'd have held their fucking feet to the fire. But all the time, at the heart of the very policy we were trying to have honoured, the bomb was ticking away. The transphobes, the radfems, the family values mob, the sort of scum who write that trans people should be 'morally mandated out of existence' were going to get their special little wish...in a piece of legislation which purports to be about equality.

Now, in the name of equality, it will be legal for businesses to exclude trans people from the right facilities. It will be legal to bar them from employment on the grounds that their presence might offend cis people. The 'equality' act will force trans women out of the public sphere, even more than they already are. The 'equality' act will force them out of legitimate work, into the murky demi-monde of the sex trade, where they can work alone, from their own homes, where they won't have to go out and face a world that can now, legally, exclude them without facing any sanction.

And where they can be picked off and murdered by scum.

An 'equality' act which disenfranchises a whole group of people, legitimises prejudice against them, and increases the likelihood of their being prey to harassment, intimidation and violence, isn't worthy of the name. Please, if you're reading this and truly believe in real equality, do everything you can to ensure that these provisions of the act are repealed as soon as possible.

'...from the skyscraper, the world turns out of sight.'

2010-08-01T12:06:00.000-07:00

Having ragged on the papers a little in my last post, I suppose in the interests of fairness I ought to highlight a more worthwhile journalistic endeavour, already mentioned in passing below: namely, the Independent on Sunday's latest annual Pink List, the list of the most influential LGB (no T sadly, which we'll get to very shortly) people in British life.

Generally I support the idea of the Pink List. I think it could stand to have, well, some trans people in it somewhere; but I could be persuaded that, if we're talking about influence, it's a sad fact that trans people in British life don't have a lot of that (if it were otherwise, then maybe David Cameron would have said more about the ongoing campaign of murder and harassment against trans people in Turkey during his recent visit to that country). And I'm very happy to see Gareth Thomas topped the list, along with Mary Portas: I think it's important for young gay men to have strong role models, and I wish more sportsmen (and women) in general would come out of the closet (actually I'm also really pleased Mary Portas came in first as well, though this is mainly just due to wishing I was her girlfriend). I think a list like this highlights the increasing visibility of LGB people in society, and that's a good thing. But. There is always, always, a but with these things. So I'm just going to come out and say it:

Why in the name of all that is holy is Julie fucking Bindel on the list? Admittedly she came in at 98, a mere hop-skip-n-jump away from X-Factor warbler Joe McElderry and expenses-fiddler David Laws, but I contend that her being on the list at all is an insult and actually undermines all the good work the list does.

Gareth Thomas himself has written eloquently on his Twitter feed that he would like his being awarded the top spot to stand as an example to other people like him that they can feel comfortable in their own skin. Julie Bindel, who is allowed to share the same list with him, has written articles which are almost deliberately designed to make trans people as far from comfortable in their own skin as possible. From her contention that all trans women are just gay men in denial (because we all know lesbian trans women don't exist, right?) to her sick joke that a world populated entirely by trans men and women would be like a remake of Grease, Bindel has engaged in the kind of prejudice and distortion that legitimises negative attitudes to trans people in exactly the same way the homophobic language discussed below legitimises anti-gay prejudice (you could argue that Bindel's ilk actually contribute more to anti-gay violence, as an awful lot of homophobic violence is directed at gay men who don't conform to standard male gender norms).

In that sense, perhaps, you might say that she does have influence, though it's a malign kind of power, and far from the positivity the Pink List aims to celebrate. But even if they were absolutely desperate to put Bindel in their supplement, the perfect chance was there in the attached 'Rogue's Gallery', a list of gay men and women who, while out of the closet, aren't exactly putting the hours in as ambassadors for tolerance. The Rogue's Gallery rightly includes people like nemesis of reason David 'women can't write history' Starkey, and Elton John (for accepting rather more than thirty pieces of silver to play Rush Limbaugh's wedding)...and also has a go at Sam Fox, because...well, because Sam Fox's last record was a little bad.

So, yeah. I set out to write a positive post about the Pink List here because, in general terms, I think it's a good thing. But, as happy as I am for Gareth and Mary, I really can't stand by and allow people to compile a list in which they apparently believe that making a shit record is a crime, but helping to legitimise a climate in which one of the most vulnerable minorities in society face violence and intimidation on a daily basis is no bar to inclusion.

'Goodnight silver star, goodnight angel eyes...'

2010-08-01T11:19:00.000-07:00

I always feel a little ambiguous about taking the 'what I did yesterday' approach to blogging. For one thing, it seems to me that it intrudes a bit too obviously into the kind of territory better covered by Twitter; for another, I think it incumbent on bloggers to give a certain amount of bang for their (metaphorical) buck. True, I follow quite a few blogs by established writers which do simply give the reader an insight into the mundane details of their lives; but the reason for that is those writers are already people whose work I follow in other fields. Finding out what a novelist or poet I like is up to when they're not writing the books I buy is an easter egg, not the main point of my following them. I'm under no illusion that this blog is in a similarly comfortable position: anyone reading these words is presumably here because they like the blog itself, so I feel honour-bound to give them something more than an update on my activities when they come here.

Having said all that, I'm going through one of those phases in my writing life when my urge to stay in and write long complex posts, or labour away at poems for hours, goes into abeyance, and I instead revel in the opportunity to get out of the house and either perform myself or watch other people. My writing always seems to function in this in-out cycle: stay at home, internalise, brood, produce; then get out, talk, mingle, share. Of course, because I am actually going out more, and spending less time brooding, this means, I suppose, that the kind of lengthy, impassioned rants which readers are used to tend not to get written. On the other hand, given the all-encompassing nature of the kyriarchy, it's inevitably the case that if I myself can't get it together to skewer the injustices, I'll always be able to point you in the direction of people who can. Time, then, for another edition of that perenially popular feature, The Week in FAIL.

The biggest and most noteworthy FAIL of the week came from Sunday Times columnist and occassional baboon-murderer AA Gill, who demonstrated his trademark wit and savoir-faire by referring to horse-racing pundit and lesbian Clare Balding as a 'dyke on a bike.' Balding, not unreasonably, took offence at this legitimisation of a rather hateful slur, and complained: whereupon she received a staggeringly ill-mannered and boorish reply from Sunday Times editor John Witherow saying, essentially, that because Balding hadn't been lucky enough to have been born straight, she should basically shut up and take her lumps. At which point Balding decided to go public and allow everyone to see the hatefulness of Witheredcock's response for themselves (I'm sure Witherow won't mind my little jape with his surname. What with him having such a bang-on sense of humour and all. Oh, and having a penis so tiny and shrivelled it looks like a sun-dried tomato that's been left to go off on the windowsill of a house by the sewage works over the course of a particularly torrid summer. Still, serve him right for not having a privileged status, eh?)

Witherow's defence of Gill's unthinking homophobia suggests to me that, whatever David Cameron might say in his foreword to the Independent on Sunday's new Pink List (of which more in a coming post), there are sections of the right in this country who feel empowered, now that an essentially Tory government is in charge again, to behave towards those who lack their privileges with a staggering lack of basic decency and cloak it as a bold stand in defence of the misunderstood white male and Jeremy Clarkson's god-given right to wear badly-fitting trousers and have shit hair. One swallow doesn't make a summer, it's true; but then, as the Tabloid Watch blog points out, Gill's gaffe forms part of an ongoing trend of legitimising name-calling towards LGBTQ people in the media.

Despite what people like Witherednob might say, this is not about political correctness. It is not just an academic matter, and it is not about creating 'non-jobs' in council diversity departments. This stuff matters because it affects people at street level, and makes their lives a misery. The most moving thing I read this weekend was this blog from Helen at Bird of Paradox, about the suffering caused by being referred to as a 'tranny' and dehumanised as an 'it' rather than a real person, by a couple of people who probably eagerly lap up the Sun's homophobic headlines. If I had the power to do so I'd like to get those fuckwits, and the pricks who come up with headlines like 'Bender it like Beckham' and think calling Louie Spence 'Louise' is the height of sophisticated wit, into a very small room and bang their heads repeatedly against a stone slab engraved with Helen's words:

'It’s happened to me so often that it’s gone beyond being just upsetting. It fucking hurts. It hurts like hell. It makes me want to lock myself in the house and never leave it again. It makes me wish I lived somewhere I never had to interact with another cis person ever again. Increasingly it feeds my gathering depression and yes, I’ll say it: it makes me wish I was dead.'

There you have it, laid out in black and white. I doubt if Jeremy Clarkson goes home after yet another joke about his bad fashion choices and feels like locking himself in one of his big shiny penis substitutes, running a plastic pipe from the injection-moulded exhaust, turning on the powerful V6 engine and going from consciousness to cadaverdom in less than sixty seconds. But that's precisely because at the end of the day Clarkson can go home to a big house full of ridiculous overgrown boys' toys, to a relationship that is accepted by society, and to a world where he is the majority, and where any abuse he receives in the streets is hardly going to make a dent. But for those who lack Clarkson's privileged status, every slur is like a bullet, a reminder that you do not belong, that you are not in the majority, that there will always be people who hold you to a misogynistic ideal of femininity or a heteronormative form of masculinity; that there are people out there who will try to kill you because you don't conform; that, worse, there are people who won't give a shit; and, worst of all, there are people who will defend the people who make you feel this way because it's just a joke, innit?

My primary school teacher used to say that it isn't a joke if you're the only one who's laughing. It used to amaze me that an awful lot of people in the media still don't understand that. These days, it only disappoints me. And it makes me think that maybe, just maybe, the death of the English newspaper and the kind of professional scum who make a living writing for it might not be such an awful thing.

King Solomon's Mines, Exit Seventy-Five

2010-07-27T14:53:00.000-07:00

Just a quick scrawl to remind you that I am still here, dear readers, and to point you in the direction of a few links if nothing else...

Firstly, I would like to direct your attention to The Recusant, who are soliciting material for 'Emergency Verse', an anthology of poetry in opposition to the Coalition's assault on pretty much everything that makes Britain worth living in. I've had a piece accepted for it, and am in the company of eighty poets, including counterculture legend Michael Horovitz, former children's laureate Michael Rosen and all-around genius Andy Croft, but editor Alan Morrison is keen to get the number of contributors up to a nice round century. '100 Poets Oppose Coalition Cuts' would make a pretty good headlione. So, get your writing hats on and send some stuff in!

Other big-ups should go to the sites I found out about the Recusant anthology from: Todd Swift's fine poetry blog Eyewear and the astonishingly comprehensive online writer's resource Write Out Loud which, if you're a writer of any sort, should totally be in your bookmarks.

In gadding-about social butterfly news, I will be going to Cellar Door Poetry in Durham on the 7th of August, and will probably be reading, either in one of the guaranteed slots or during the open floor period at the end. I like going to new poetry nights because I think they need to be supported. After an oddly fallow period the number of poetry and spoken word venues in the Newcastle/Durham area are bouncing back, which is to be welcomed and also assisted.

Also in going-out news, I am attending Washington Arts Centre for a special preview of Saturday Live poet Kate Fox's forthcoming Edinburgh festival show Fox News this coming Saturday, July 31st. I do recommend you catch this show: Kate is not only an incredible poet but she is actually one of the best comedians I've seen ever...and you know the high standards I have when it comes to comedians....

And now, having proved that I haven't vanished since last Friday, I shall sleep. Bonne nuit!

Queers and History

2010-07-16T15:00:00.000-07:00

One of the things I miss about working at Borders is having to make themed displays of books. This is always a fun part of the job, because you get to indulge your creativity. You have to come up with a unifying theme, something that will allow you to pull together a bunch of disparate books from your department, and you have to design the layout of the books in the display in such a way that it's visually appealing to the reader. It helps to do this if you have a very strong, immediately-apparent theme, and if you can 'anchor' the display on a book with a powerful, arresting cover.

Someone at Washington Library clearly has much display-fu, because when I visited there this Thursday, I came across an excellent LGBT-themed display (possibly in anticipation of Newcastle Pride? ) which was anchored around this book, and its particularly-arresting cover:

Queers in History, by Keith Stern, claims to be, you'll observe, 'THE comprehensive encyclopedia of historical gays, lesbians and bisexuals'in that picture. Obviously somewhere between the publication of the first hardcover edition and the paperback my library had in stock, someone must have pointed out that Mr Stern had done the usual cis gay thing of completely forgetting the existence of trans people, and the paperback (and the Kindle edition on Amazon) have had the title altered so that it now boasts of being 'the comprehensive encyclopedia of historical gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders.'

Now, first of all, I have something of an aesthetic problem with 'transgenders' being elided as one word and used as a single collective noun. I would no more refer to people as 'transgenders' than I would 'gays': I would say gay people, trans people etc. But I note that Stern is being equally reductionist about gays as well, by reducing them to their sexuality. So, meh, I thought, I'll give it a go. So I picked it up, checked it out, went home, read the harmless-enough foreword from Sir Ian Magnet-Gandalf, then moved onto Stern's own introduction. At which point my hackles began to rise, not - yet - because of cis-centrism and gaywashing, but because of something which appalls me on a pretty much equal basis: crappy scholarship.

On the second page of his 'comprehensive' history, Stern throws his suitability to helm such a project pretty massively into question, making the blanket assertion that:

'Most mainstream historians consider the sexuality of historical individuals to be meaningless, because the notion of a gay identity is a modern construct. They think if, in the past, two men or two women claimed to be united in a bond of love, they must have meant it in a friendly, non-sexual way. If those same-sex couples actually were having sex, historians would have us believe they didn't think of themselves as being romantically in love.'

Dem those dastardly 'mainstream historians!' Dem them! It needn't be said that actual historical research on sexuality is more complex than that, and that Stern is begging the question here to a pretty phenomenal extent. It isn't that historians are actively out to suppress the secret truth about gayness in history: it's that it is next to impossible to prove that same-sex love in past societies can be mapped exactly on to what we understand by 'gay' identity. The homosexual culture of ancient Greece, with its iron-clad distinction between the passive and the active roles, and the differing degree of respect accorded to each, is patently not identical to the more inclusive, egalitarian gay culture of today, any more than the medieval concept of dynastic inter-marriage explains the mooning mutual adoration of the Twilight saga's Bella and Edward.

Stern's project, though, is to convince us that being gay has meant the same thing at all points in history. And so Stern informs us that the medieval Saint Aethelred, who wrote tenderly of male 'companionship' was 'forced to choose between his love of God and his lust for boys' (this is far from Stern's cheesiest line, mind you: that honour must go to the entry on Alexander the Great, which begins 'Alexander conquered most of the known world. He also conquered the young eunuchs Bagoas and Medius.' Saucy!). Stern is able to provide a source for his assertion that Aethelred was gay, which is unusual in a book whose author openly admits to using Wikipedia for fact-checking in his acknowledgements (remember that: we'll come back to it later). Unfortunately the source he cites is problematic: John Boswell (and yes, I am using Wikipedia; it's late at night and I'm pushed for time), a lifelong catholic who really was torn between religious devotion and his own sexual desires, had a vested interest in proving the medieval church had tolerated homosexual desire, and this led him to the scholarly imposture of his book Same Sex Unions in Pre-modern Europe, whose question-begging and misuse of sources were comprehensively outlined in a devastating review by Daniel Mendelsohn - oddly, one famous gay man who isn't included in Stern's 'comprehensive' encyclopedia, perhaps because pointing people in Mendelsohn's direction might lead to some readers finding out that the 'controversy' which surrounded Boswell's book was more complex than simply yet more censorship from those nasty old 'mainstream historians.'

Mendlesohn's exclusion is surprising because, as a well-to-do caucasian cis gay man, he's pretty much Stern's target audience. What's less surprising is the glaring omission from this 'comprehensive' encyclopedia of many historically important trans people. You might think that, given his interest in queers and history, Stern might deign to mention trans historian Jan Morris, but you'd be wrong, Professor. Perhaps Lili Elbe, one of the first women to receive gender-reassignment surgery, might be worthy of a mention? Nope. What about the Chevalier D'Eon, whose gender was such a matter of dispute that a betting pool was ran about it on the London Stock Exchange? Surely the Chevalier deserves to be included in a 'comprehensive' list of historical 'transgenders'? What about Patrick Califia, Chaz Bono, Buck Angel - or indeed any trans men, for that matter? Even Brandon Teena doesn't get a mention, which means that Stern's 'comprehensive' history is less well-informed on the subject of trans men than most people with a Film Four subscription.

Or indeed, of a blogger who can be bothered to spend five minutes looking up names on Wikipedia. Ironically, Stern's words of praise for the online encyclopedia are proved more right by his own book than anything he says in his introduction. If you want a truly comprehensive database of queer people in history from across the gender spectrum, don't bother with this cissupremacist, biased, myopic, badly-researched gazeteer of gay: just get online.