The Bathroom Thing - now with stuff written on it!

I've been mucking about with annotations in YouTube...so 'The Bathroom Thing' now has both a title *and* a credit to the RVT at the end for letting me use their toilets to shoot my guerilla poetry video. It'd be nice to go back there sometime and get it filmed professionally, with someone else holding the camera etc - though the RVT toilets *are* kinda cramped. What about it - do readers know of any toilets roomy enough to film in?

I wrote a poem for you, Ru

There's a poem I do at gigs, 25/5/13. It's named after the day the EDL marched through Newcastle last year, and based on my experience of having to walk past a bunch of hooting, flag-waving racists on my way to get the Metro to an IPL appointment in Sunderland that day. It ends with the t-slur, a word that's been discussed a lot lately, and it ends with that word because I was suddenly struck by a parallel between my experience and that of, of all people, Muhammad Ali. You see, walking past the fascists, I realised those who chucked the t-slur at me had all been white, British people - the supposedly salt-of-the-Earth sorts who were even claiming to have an LGBT division in order to defend me from rampant Islamic transphobia. And yet - no Muslim I'd encountered had ever called me 'tranny'. Just as Muhammad Ali, decades earlier, observed he wouldn't fight in Vietnam because, as he put it, 'no Viet Cong ever called me nigger.' It's a line I quote in the poem - on the page. When I do it at gigs, I end that line with a dignified beat's silence. It's clear to the audience what word is meant to be used - the quote itself is pretty well-known, and to make it really clear the preceding line ends with the word 'triggers' - but it's a word I can't bring myself to say on stage. Why? Because it isn't. My. Word. 

Understand: what I'm not doing here is saying tranny and nigger are equivalent words. Nor am I saying my struggle as a trans woman is identical to Ali's struggle as a black man during the civil rights era. What I am saying is I can't bring myself to say the n-word on stage because I know that word has been the cause of a vast amount of pain to people whose experiences I can never fully comprehend, and I do not want to be a further source of that pain, even in a poem which is clearly taking a very firm stand against racist thuggery and in favour of multiculturalism and the celebration of difference. I could handwave it, I could say it's acceptable because 'I'm not racist', I could say my intent is positive, I could accuse people who object to the word's use of 'language-policing', I could ask them why they're focusing on my use of the n-word when real racists (not like nice little non-racist old me) are going around invading mosques and abusing people they consider 'immigrants' - heck, I could probably find half a dozen Genuine Black People who would happily tell you it wasn't racist of me to say the n-word and anyone who says otherwise is just 'dividing the community'. But I don't. 

Why? Because whatever spurious justification I came up with for saying the word - and whatever justification I came up with would be spurious - I myself would not be able to look in the mirror again knowing I'd used the same word that, as Dean Atta movingly points out, was 'one of the last words Stephen Lawrence heard, so don't tell me it's a reclaimed word'.

Don't tell me 'tranny' is a reclaimed word either. It isn't a reclaimed word when I use it at the end of that poem. It's one of the last words CeCe McDonald had shouted at her before she was attacked. You know CeCe's name because there was a global campaign against her unjust imprisonment for defending herself against a transphobic and racist attack. But do you know Crain Conaway's name? Do you know Deoni Jones' name? Do you know the names of Rosita Hidalgo, Coko Williams, Tyrell Jackson, Paige Clay, Brandy Martell, Lorena Escalera, Tracy Johnson, Tiffany Gooden, Deja Jones, Kendall Hampton, or Kyra Cordova? No. Why should you? I can reel off that list because I do it at just about every gig I do, when I perform the poem I wrote about CeCe, 'Letter to a Minnesota Prison'. Those are the names from the hundreds on the Transgender Day of Remembrance list I restricted myself to using in that poem: only the murders in 2012, just the (North) American names. Want to take a wild guess as to the last word they heard before they were murdered?

Evidently RuPaul can look himself in the mirror after using that word. Probably sleeps like a baby too. He certainly throws his toys out of the pram like one when people dare to call him out on his language choices. But the cynic in me wonders what might disturb his sleep. Because the weird thing is, before Ru went on-air for an interview and tried to paint himself as the victim in all of this, things seemed to be calming down. Logo had deleted the transmisogynist (and, let's face it, just straight up misogynist) 'Female or She-male' segment that was the catalyst for all this to start with; Alaska Thunderfuck had apologised for the vile skit he filmed mocking Parker Molloy for her criticism of said segment; there was a sense things might calm down, the trans and drag communities might get over ourselves and focus on what we had in common. There was even, in Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst, a new drag icon who said positive, respectful things about trans women even as she iterated that she wasn't one herself. Peace was, it seemed, breaking out. 

But there was just one problem: the new mood was happening without RuPaul Charles being the centre of attention, and that would never do. So Ru went on the radio, it all kicked off again, and here we all are tearing strips off each other while that narcissist basks in the chaos. 

Well, Ru, you can rest easy, because I wrote a poem about you, too. In fact, I even quoted you in it. It's called Bitch, get stronger. Enjoy. 

Bitch Get Stronger: a poem in response to RuPaul

When you say I play the victim card,
you show me your whole hand: show that,
like all bullies, you see victim status
as a weapon you can wield to further torment.

When you say 'Bitch, get stronger!'
you tell me you envy our strength.
Bitch, even weakened by oestrogen, 
I could snap you with just one shrug of my arm:

but such muscle as I muster is
the least strength that is in me.
You, sybaritic, sycophant-surrounded,
cry victim when a segment gets deleted,

when your network bars your lips
from hurling slurs that you have no right
to reclaim. I have no entourage.
I walk and work alone, and draw the world's eyes

to the victimhood of those who
suffer far worse than I do:
on the streets, on benefits,
doing the work of survival

at the end of phonelines, 
looking into webcams,
in flats rented from landlords who,
they hope, won't pry; in prison,

military, immigration or civilian,
adult jail before they'll have the right
to buy a drink without the chance
of being carded. Suck mimosa

through your straw and tell me what
Jane Doe or Chelsea Manning, Fallon Fox or Chloie Jonsson,
have to do to get as strong as your
strung-out and skinny ass?

We're waiting. Well, we were:
we'll wait no longer.
Next time you think about throwing out slurs,
bit- no. NO slurs. Be better. Be STRONGER.

NaPoWriMo Catch-up: Fait Accompli

I left the books behind today:
a coward's way of telling, but a
start, a quiet declaration
of intent, a footprint
left deliberately in snow.
Soon you will know:

no need to ask or tell,
or sit amazed to find you so incurious
about my lipstick and foundation. 
At the least, no need to phrase it
in a big, dramatic way.
A minor-key enquiry - you've read them?

A reply which will be all I need to know:
the signs of thumbing on the cheaply-printed pages
which will tell me they've been skimmed
as sure as tracks sing sagas to the hunter,
as curtains strangely shut provide
a signal to the spy.

NaPoWriMo Catch-up: Bloody Noxious Politics

Your bulldog's badly photoshopped,
your soldiers are all thugs
with medals for the Battle of Hoth
blu-tacced to their jugs;

your priest's a skinny Simon Beale
playing Reverend Bantheburqa; 
your leader loiters in a field,
an agricultural lurker,

inspecting sheep's ethnicity
by feeling their equipment,
and reduced to begging that we
watch a cartoon on your website

which looks like it was knocked up
by Rolf Harris on remand:
it's the election broadcasting
equivalent of spam,

and bizarrely predicated
on a mystifying basis:
that Nigel Farage, basically, 
just isn't PROPERLY racist!

NaPoWriMo Catch-up: I heard the Leader speak about the poor

Sign on every day. Become a spectacle
for the self-righteous to masturbate
their sense of amour-propre over.
A hanging without broadsides
or the last words from the scaffold.

Wear a uniform. But not too much of one:
we want to see your unqualified muscles,
laugh at the folds that your skin has developed
from months eating poverty food.
So, no cloth then: tattoos will suffice.

After all, we have skyscrapers 
to erect, floorspace to let.
Our troops must be supported
to fight wars against those countries
whose aristocracies don't purchase
real estate in our capital city.
The banks who make donations to our Party
must remain going concerns.

This is the Law of Recovery:
no pittance without penance,
no gruel without abasement.
No butter...no butter without guns.

NaPoWriMo Catch-up: Avant-garde and topical

Nigel                           Farage's
name rhymes             with 'garage'.
It doesn't rhyme with            'bellend'
- but poetry doesn't              HAVE
to rhyme
so you can call him a               cockwomble        too.