Time Out New York's Big Gay Article
Feb. 6th, 2005 02:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rktTime Out New York February 3-9, 2005 issue has decided to tell us all about the gay. considering it's mainstreamedness, the article in question doesn't suck.
transcribed, with new-window-linkages (when possible); because i care.
What’s in a name?
In an era of transmen, hasbians, and genderqueers, the idea of “gayness” is being stretched, splintered and debated – and it’s not just about who’s sleeping with who.
By Beth Greenfield
Meet “Tatiana,” a 28-year-old event planner who lived the full-on dyke life for ten years. A femme beauty, she dated cute butches, threw popular downtown girl bashes, penned pieces about lesbian life in culture magazines and became so popular in New York’s gay nightlife scene that she was deemed a “celesbian.” But a few months ago, Tatiana fell for a man; he’s now her boyfriend.
Another New Yorker, 26-year-old administrative assistant Shana Scudder, dated boys as a teenager before coming out as a lesbian when she was 18. Today, she’s in a relationship with a man- a “transman,” or female-to-male transgender person. “I fell in love with him almost instantly, and his gender became irrelevant,” Scudder says.
Photographer Evan Schwartz, 22, used to be a lesbian, but he recently transitioned and became a transman. He dates lesbians – but he’s finding more and more that it’s straight women who are attracted to him, and he’s having trouble adjusting to that.
Or consider the young, streetwise dude who appears on the newest ipisode of the documentary series Taxicab Confessions: New York, New York (airing Sunday 5). Relaxing in the back of the cab with his sexy blond girlfriend, he reveals that she’s actually a transgender female – and adds, with gusto, that he doesn’t like men, only women.
So who’s queer? They’re all queer. Why? Because they say so.
In today’s world, sexual identity is becoming more self-created and less fixed. you can have sex within your gender or out of it or both – or reject the concept of gender altogether – and still count yourself as part of the mosaic known as “the gay community.” Gay culture is being shaped by a confluence of radical politics, the growing number of people electing to change gender, racial diversity and youthful open-mindedness. And it’s only getting more fluid and eclectic. Today’s “gay” is a lot more complicated than the televised images of simple man-man and woman-woman scenarios beamed into American living rooms in the period leading up to Election Day.
“There was a certain attraction at once, and I didn’t fight it,” recalls Tatiana (who didn’t want her real name used, in the interest of protecting her boyfriend’s privacy). She’s still very involved in the lesbian community, adding, “I consider myself queer.” Scudder basically does too, but explains, “If pushed to narrow that definition for myself, I would still say that I am a lesbian, because being a lesbian isn’t about who I’m dating – it’s who I am.”
Schwartz, whose gender transitioning photo show “Reclaiming Puberty” is currently on view at Williamsburg gallery Schroeder Romero, takes a similar stance. “I use queer for myself,” he says. “Just because I transitioned and I date women doesn’t mean I’m a straight man. It’s important to feel like a a part of ‘the community.’” And then there’s the guy in the taxi, whose transgender girlfriend says that she will “always be a man,” despite her surgeries. “People wouldn’t necessarily know that we’re a gay couple,” her boyfriend says. “But we are. We’re a gay couple.”
But how could this be if he only likes women? Paisley Currah, 41, executive director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the City University of New York and a female-to-male trans person, attempts an explanation. “In my mind, it all breaks down to straight and queer now,” he says. “Queer refers to ways of doing things, to shared values, to thinking about gender in more complicated ways. It’s not so much about a male body being with a male body and a female body being with a female body. Trans culture has kind of pushed those boundaries.”
Pop culture is starting to get hip to these new boundaries – or lack thereof. The F/X show Nip/Tuck’s first season, in 2003, included a shopper of a scenario: the night before he male-to-female sex-reassignment surgery, Sophia, already living as a woman, has a girls’ night out with Liz, a lesbian who works in her plastic surgeon’s office. They comfort each other about being lonely singles, fall into each other’s arms, kiss passionately – and spend the night together.
Showtime’s The L Word, by the end of its first season this past spring, had featured not only a male character who identifies as a lesbian, but a straight woman who was about to enter a relationship with a drag king. Then comes the buzz about The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, C.A. Tripp’s newly published tome that suggests Honest Abe may have been a bi guy. The film Kinsey explored the life of a definition-questioning man who was ahead of the curve. Tarnation, Jonathan caouette’s film-fest darling of a documentary, acknowledged his sexuality, but escaped the gay label by being more about relationships and mental illness. And the sexually polymorphous musicians in Scissor Sisters succeed in transcending their proud freak-flag origins through an adoring audience that couldn’t care less about whom they sleep with.
Even straight folk are riding the queer wave. “I’ve tried to write about how some people just can’t be defined,” says the Brooklyn-based novelist Jonathan Ames. His characters are placed all over the sexual map, and is a transgender-themed anthology that he edited, Sexual Metamorphosis, is due to be published this spring. Ames recalls a friend telling him, “You’re not gay, You’re not straight – you’re straightish.”
Who’s who
With each level of social equality the gay community gains, its voice is again reworked and expanded – causing confusion and some resentment, both outside and within. The scenario is not unlike the identity politics sparked by the ‘60s civil-rights movement, when the mainstream’s idea of a single black identity morphed into an ever-evolving collection of terminologies (black, Black, Afro-American, African-American, people of color. . .). It’s a natural result of rights and power: the confidence to step away from the simplistic, outsider understanding of your group and move toward a subtler, more accurate expression. “To say, “We are going to define who we are, and we are not going by your prescription of who we are’ – that speak volumes,” says Tokse Osubu, 44, executive director of the group Gay Men of African Descent (GMAD).
It may speak volumes about shifts in the gay-rights movement. Marisa Ragonese, founder of DITCH (Dykes International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, is concerned. “It’s really important that, while women break down barriers between man and women, we all acknowledge there is much work to be done before we live in this utopia where differences and power don’t exist,” she says. “In a lot of ways, queer has become meaningless if it can mean so many different things at once.”
Gay historian martin Duberman also has concerns about how the expanding definition of queer will affect activism – but only because he knows it could be a while before the gay-powers-that-be allow room for all the varying shades. “When queer came into use, I embraced it, thinking of it as an umbrella term to bring in people who are nonconformist in many ways,” he says. “But I did worry about how it would affect us politically if there are no clear-cut definitions, as the only parts of our political movement that seem to have clout are groups like the Human Rights Campaign, which sticks to the old binary.”
Paula Ettelbrick, executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission and a longtime LGBT civil-rights activist and attorney, is hopeful, insisting that the broadening of queer could be an asset to the gay-rights struggle. “Unless she turns into a real right-winger, once someone has been a lesbian, that sticks with them, and their perspective is not going to be that different,” she says.
Trishala Deb, 33, a program coordinator for the Audre Lorde Project community center in Brooklyn, sees it another way. “It’s not so much that identities are changing, but that the language is finally catching up,” she says. In fact, the gey lexicon became increasingly messy [see “Redefine your terms”, below not presently transcribed]. First, came the clinical label of homosexual. Then came gay, gay-and-lesbian, and then the all-inclusive lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender - LGBT for short. “I call it LGBTABCD,” jokes Carl Eden, a psychotherapist at the aptly named Identity House, where gay folks of every stripe go for individual and group therapy related to sexuality. “It’s so endless,” he says. “There are bisexual shifts all over the place.”
“There’s a political message with labels,” says Oscar Lopez, who works with youth groups at the Brooklyn-based People of Color in Crisis organization. “Whether it’s gay, queeror GLBT, you’re stating your place somewhere. And I know that gay and queer, for the community of color, is associated with white gay men.” The term same-gender-loving, adds Osubu, is a way to “speak about the sprituality that supports us as black people; to remember that this is not about sex, but about love.” The term down low or DL, meanwhile, is more about the sex itself. Using it implies that, while a man may want to have sex with another man, his primary, visible relationships are with women. “It’s become a way of disassociating yourself with being gay,” Lopez adds.
Limits have always been pushed, but those who do the pushing haven’t always been well received. Take Jan Clausen of Brooklyn, for example, whose bold essay about sleeping with a man, “My Interesting Condition,” was published in the now-defunct journal Outlook 15 years ago. Lesbians were outraged, and they flooded the magazine with angry letters. “it just drew a lot of ire,” Clausen, 54, recalls. “And it’s certainly my sense that people are less doctrinaire now.”
But Mattilda, a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore, editor of That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, sees the new queerness as a political response. “I think that as gay has become such a commodified identity – becoming more about product placement, the clothes you wear, the bars you go to and basically about being an unthreatening straight-friendly normality – queer has become more about confronting that and creating more all-encompassing reality.”
Red, who runs the Brooklyn sex party SPAM with Michael Wakefield (see “As you like it,” above not transcribed), explains the label more succinctly. “Queer is not heterosexual, which is basically [biological] man and woman,” she says. “Anything other than that, you’re queer.” Though Red, a 45-year-old butch woman, has a female partner, she recently had sex with a gay male friend at a fetish party in California. “We had this great experience,” Red says, adding that she’d have a go with a gay man again.
Women like Tatiana, long-identified lesbians who are now dating men (also known, a bit disdainfully, as “hasbians”), do seem ubiquitous of late. While the phenomenon is nothing new, anecdotal evidence points to a larger number who are willing to come out as man-lovers to lesbian friends, while sticking to a queer identity. And some contend that what made them open-minded to men in the first place was, ironically, the current blurring of gender lines. “How can somebody be queer and not sleep with someone of the same gender? It depends on how big you want queerness to be,” explains writer, filmmaker and activist Amber Hollibaugh. “You can say, ‘Throw open the doors. If you understand what you are and it fits in here, join us. If you don’t consider yourself straight, regardless of your body and who you sleep with, then come in.’”
***
transcribed, with new-window-linkages (when possible); because i care.
What’s in a name?
In an era of transmen, hasbians, and genderqueers, the idea of “gayness” is being stretched, splintered and debated – and it’s not just about who’s sleeping with who.
By Beth Greenfield
Meet “Tatiana,” a 28-year-old event planner who lived the full-on dyke life for ten years. A femme beauty, she dated cute butches, threw popular downtown girl bashes, penned pieces about lesbian life in culture magazines and became so popular in New York’s gay nightlife scene that she was deemed a “celesbian.” But a few months ago, Tatiana fell for a man; he’s now her boyfriend.
Another New Yorker, 26-year-old administrative assistant Shana Scudder, dated boys as a teenager before coming out as a lesbian when she was 18. Today, she’s in a relationship with a man- a “transman,” or female-to-male transgender person. “I fell in love with him almost instantly, and his gender became irrelevant,” Scudder says.
Photographer Evan Schwartz, 22, used to be a lesbian, but he recently transitioned and became a transman. He dates lesbians – but he’s finding more and more that it’s straight women who are attracted to him, and he’s having trouble adjusting to that.
Or consider the young, streetwise dude who appears on the newest ipisode of the documentary series Taxicab Confessions: New York, New York (airing Sunday 5). Relaxing in the back of the cab with his sexy blond girlfriend, he reveals that she’s actually a transgender female – and adds, with gusto, that he doesn’t like men, only women.
So who’s queer? They’re all queer. Why? Because they say so.
In today’s world, sexual identity is becoming more self-created and less fixed. you can have sex within your gender or out of it or both – or reject the concept of gender altogether – and still count yourself as part of the mosaic known as “the gay community.” Gay culture is being shaped by a confluence of radical politics, the growing number of people electing to change gender, racial diversity and youthful open-mindedness. And it’s only getting more fluid and eclectic. Today’s “gay” is a lot more complicated than the televised images of simple man-man and woman-woman scenarios beamed into American living rooms in the period leading up to Election Day.
“There was a certain attraction at once, and I didn’t fight it,” recalls Tatiana (who didn’t want her real name used, in the interest of protecting her boyfriend’s privacy). She’s still very involved in the lesbian community, adding, “I consider myself queer.” Scudder basically does too, but explains, “If pushed to narrow that definition for myself, I would still say that I am a lesbian, because being a lesbian isn’t about who I’m dating – it’s who I am.”
Schwartz, whose gender transitioning photo show “Reclaiming Puberty” is currently on view at Williamsburg gallery Schroeder Romero, takes a similar stance. “I use queer for myself,” he says. “Just because I transitioned and I date women doesn’t mean I’m a straight man. It’s important to feel like a a part of ‘the community.’” And then there’s the guy in the taxi, whose transgender girlfriend says that she will “always be a man,” despite her surgeries. “People wouldn’t necessarily know that we’re a gay couple,” her boyfriend says. “But we are. We’re a gay couple.”
But how could this be if he only likes women? Paisley Currah, 41, executive director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the City University of New York and a female-to-male trans person, attempts an explanation. “In my mind, it all breaks down to straight and queer now,” he says. “Queer refers to ways of doing things, to shared values, to thinking about gender in more complicated ways. It’s not so much about a male body being with a male body and a female body being with a female body. Trans culture has kind of pushed those boundaries.”
Pop culture is starting to get hip to these new boundaries – or lack thereof. The F/X show Nip/Tuck’s first season, in 2003, included a shopper of a scenario: the night before he male-to-female sex-reassignment surgery, Sophia, already living as a woman, has a girls’ night out with Liz, a lesbian who works in her plastic surgeon’s office. They comfort each other about being lonely singles, fall into each other’s arms, kiss passionately – and spend the night together.
Showtime’s The L Word, by the end of its first season this past spring, had featured not only a male character who identifies as a lesbian, but a straight woman who was about to enter a relationship with a drag king. Then comes the buzz about The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, C.A. Tripp’s newly published tome that suggests Honest Abe may have been a bi guy. The film Kinsey explored the life of a definition-questioning man who was ahead of the curve. Tarnation, Jonathan caouette’s film-fest darling of a documentary, acknowledged his sexuality, but escaped the gay label by being more about relationships and mental illness. And the sexually polymorphous musicians in Scissor Sisters succeed in transcending their proud freak-flag origins through an adoring audience that couldn’t care less about whom they sleep with.
Even straight folk are riding the queer wave. “I’ve tried to write about how some people just can’t be defined,” says the Brooklyn-based novelist Jonathan Ames. His characters are placed all over the sexual map, and is a transgender-themed anthology that he edited, Sexual Metamorphosis, is due to be published this spring. Ames recalls a friend telling him, “You’re not gay, You’re not straight – you’re straightish.”
Who’s who
With each level of social equality the gay community gains, its voice is again reworked and expanded – causing confusion and some resentment, both outside and within. The scenario is not unlike the identity politics sparked by the ‘60s civil-rights movement, when the mainstream’s idea of a single black identity morphed into an ever-evolving collection of terminologies (black, Black, Afro-American, African-American, people of color. . .). It’s a natural result of rights and power: the confidence to step away from the simplistic, outsider understanding of your group and move toward a subtler, more accurate expression. “To say, “We are going to define who we are, and we are not going by your prescription of who we are’ – that speak volumes,” says Tokse Osubu, 44, executive director of the group Gay Men of African Descent (GMAD).
It may speak volumes about shifts in the gay-rights movement. Marisa Ragonese, founder of DITCH (Dykes International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, is concerned. “It’s really important that, while women break down barriers between man and women, we all acknowledge there is much work to be done before we live in this utopia where differences and power don’t exist,” she says. “In a lot of ways, queer has become meaningless if it can mean so many different things at once.”
Gay historian martin Duberman also has concerns about how the expanding definition of queer will affect activism – but only because he knows it could be a while before the gay-powers-that-be allow room for all the varying shades. “When queer came into use, I embraced it, thinking of it as an umbrella term to bring in people who are nonconformist in many ways,” he says. “But I did worry about how it would affect us politically if there are no clear-cut definitions, as the only parts of our political movement that seem to have clout are groups like the Human Rights Campaign, which sticks to the old binary.”
Paula Ettelbrick, executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission and a longtime LGBT civil-rights activist and attorney, is hopeful, insisting that the broadening of queer could be an asset to the gay-rights struggle. “Unless she turns into a real right-winger, once someone has been a lesbian, that sticks with them, and their perspective is not going to be that different,” she says.
Trishala Deb, 33, a program coordinator for the Audre Lorde Project community center in Brooklyn, sees it another way. “It’s not so much that identities are changing, but that the language is finally catching up,” she says. In fact, the gey lexicon became increasingly messy [see “Redefine your terms”, below not presently transcribed]. First, came the clinical label of homosexual. Then came gay, gay-and-lesbian, and then the all-inclusive lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender - LGBT for short. “I call it LGBTABCD,” jokes Carl Eden, a psychotherapist at the aptly named Identity House, where gay folks of every stripe go for individual and group therapy related to sexuality. “It’s so endless,” he says. “There are bisexual shifts all over the place.”
“There’s a political message with labels,” says Oscar Lopez, who works with youth groups at the Brooklyn-based People of Color in Crisis organization. “Whether it’s gay, queeror GLBT, you’re stating your place somewhere. And I know that gay and queer, for the community of color, is associated with white gay men.” The term same-gender-loving, adds Osubu, is a way to “speak about the sprituality that supports us as black people; to remember that this is not about sex, but about love.” The term down low or DL, meanwhile, is more about the sex itself. Using it implies that, while a man may want to have sex with another man, his primary, visible relationships are with women. “It’s become a way of disassociating yourself with being gay,” Lopez adds.
Limits have always been pushed, but those who do the pushing haven’t always been well received. Take Jan Clausen of Brooklyn, for example, whose bold essay about sleeping with a man, “My Interesting Condition,” was published in the now-defunct journal Outlook 15 years ago. Lesbians were outraged, and they flooded the magazine with angry letters. “it just drew a lot of ire,” Clausen, 54, recalls. “And it’s certainly my sense that people are less doctrinaire now.”
But Mattilda, a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore, editor of That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, sees the new queerness as a political response. “I think that as gay has become such a commodified identity – becoming more about product placement, the clothes you wear, the bars you go to and basically about being an unthreatening straight-friendly normality – queer has become more about confronting that and creating more all-encompassing reality.”
Red, who runs the Brooklyn sex party SPAM with Michael Wakefield (see “As you like it,” above not transcribed), explains the label more succinctly. “Queer is not heterosexual, which is basically [biological] man and woman,” she says. “Anything other than that, you’re queer.” Though Red, a 45-year-old butch woman, has a female partner, she recently had sex with a gay male friend at a fetish party in California. “We had this great experience,” Red says, adding that she’d have a go with a gay man again.
Women like Tatiana, long-identified lesbians who are now dating men (also known, a bit disdainfully, as “hasbians”), do seem ubiquitous of late. While the phenomenon is nothing new, anecdotal evidence points to a larger number who are willing to come out as man-lovers to lesbian friends, while sticking to a queer identity. And some contend that what made them open-minded to men in the first place was, ironically, the current blurring of gender lines. “How can somebody be queer and not sleep with someone of the same gender? It depends on how big you want queerness to be,” explains writer, filmmaker and activist Amber Hollibaugh. “You can say, ‘Throw open the doors. If you understand what you are and it fits in here, join us. If you don’t consider yourself straight, regardless of your body and who you sleep with, then come in.’”
