something queer going on

1) Today I filed for a legal name change, which I've been meaning to do since, oh, late 2019. Covid restrictions messed up the plan for a while, but after that it was just my own indecisiveness and procrastination. But now the thing is done. Sort of--I have to have a hearing before a judge to grant it, but that's just pro forma. So pro forma that when they gave me the forms to fill out, they specifically said that under "Reason" I could just put "personal." Which I did.

In the end, I took the cautious/cowardly way out regarding my new name: I picked names readable as gender-neutral rather than clearly masculine. I'm not worried about problems with my job or my health care, but I am worried about housing, since protection from housing discrimination for trans people doesn't exist on a federal level as far as I know, and anyway Trump + his Supreme Court lackeys will try to roll back such anti-discrimination measures as exist. (I'm morbidly curious to see what will happen with Bostock, which protects LGBTQ+ people from employment discrimination, and which was just decided in 2020. One of the judges in the majority was Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, not because he cares about queer people but because his legal thinking is heavily focused on the text of the law, in contrast to Kavanaugh and Barrett whose legal thinking focuses on what goals Trump and/or the Federalist Society are trying to achieve. Not that Gorsuch has gone against the pack much lately.)


2) I need to change the gender marker on my driver's license, but I'm not sure whether to go with M or X. In some ways I prefer X, because in principle I think putting people's gender on identity documents is almost as weird and gross as putting race on them was. On the other hand, X will quite literally mark a person as gender-noncomforming in some way. On the third hand, I kind of feel like, well, some of us have to take some risks. I neither like nor am good at taking risks, but I'm also in a relatively safe position, and An Old to boot, and thus in a better position to take some minor risks for the sake of not rolling over and playing dead.


3) In other news, I saw Conclave today. IMO it's a very well-acted and mostly well-made film with a naive and ridiculous premise.


4) I recently read Dragon's Winter and Dragon's Treasure by Elizabeth A. Lynn, who's probably best known (at least in these fannish parts) for The Dancers of Arun. Didn't love the dragon books, didn't hate them. The story feels deeply unfinished (as in, was supposed to be a trilogy but the last bit never got written) and surprisingly conventional in all kinds of ways. Not least, sadly, the handling of queerness and queer relationships. It's a bit weird and depressing that Lynn was bolder about this in the late 1970s than she was 20 years later.

There is probably a tale to be told about how a (relative) plethora of queer sff in the 1970s/1980s just kind of faded away from the 1990s until relatively recently. I get the sense that a lot of the Kids These Days think there was no queer sff until, like, Gideon the Ninth or something.


5) Tomorrow begins a long workweek that will not end until Thanksgiving. Wish me luck.

Just a heads-up to everybody that transandnonbinary is reviving after some years of quiet. I'm an admin there, though to be honest I had completely forgotten about it and it's virgosplaining who has taken the initiative to start it up again.

These are not good times for NB and trans folks, either online or in the wider world. transandnonbinary is a community by and for us, where we can talk about our issues and share our joys and fears without being piled on by fascists.

Cis allies are welcome too.

Might as well. Under the cut because some of this might be TMI. I've skipped a few questions that I didn't want to answer.

( Click here if you wish )

From the question-a-day meme:

August 15: If you were to open up any sort of shop or store, what type of shop would you open?

I'm going to interpret "shop" more broadly as "business."

I've often thought, over the last year, that there is both a need and a market niche for a gym (with swimming pool!)* for trans people.

It would be open to everyone, of course (I think that's the law) but marketed to the whole queer community, and with its facilities and policies designed for the safety and comfort of trans folks. Changing areas and showers with privacy, for one thing; a sliding-scale fee (many queer people, especially queer people who aren't white cis gay men, are poor); staff who are preferably queer and trans themselves, or if not, knowledgeable and thoroughly trained; and strict and strictly enforced policies against harassment and creepiness (including cruising and "scene-ness"--there are plenty of gay gyms that cater to that).

(*Because swimming suits are typically very revealing, swimming is a special problem for trans people. Recently a post went around trans Twitter asking, "What would you do if all cis people disappeared for a day?" "Go swimming" was a common answer.)

It would explicitly take the position that all bodies are good bodies: trans bodies are good, fat bodies are good, disabled bodies are good, BIPOC bodies are good, old bodies are good. Because, as mentioned above, while there are gay gyms, they are very much gyms for young-ish conventionally-attractive white cis able-bodied gay men with money.

Attached to the gym would be a nice coffee and tea shop, with baked goods and light meals such as soups and sandwiches. It would have plenty of comfortable seating, and music that's not too loud for conversation. It would have a community room where people could hold meetings. It would be a friendly place for queer kids and other folks not well served by queer bars and nightclubs to gather. It would stay open late, and provided they weren't bothering anyone, people could sit there as long as they needed to for the price of a cup of coffee. (Many queer people are homeless. A lot of them are kids.)

I don't know how it would make any money, but I think in this dream I am a rich philanthropist anyway, because I certainly don't have the capital to open a business in real life!

Please send me a show in which everyone is lesbian, gay, or bi. Not a show like Queer As Folk or The L Word that's specifically about a queer community, but an ordinary show that's about space adventures or pirates or demon fighters or cops or lawyers or boring white suburban middle-class couples. Just, all of them are LGB (some of them could be T, too, because that would be awesome, but they're also L, or G, or B). No straight people. Even the incidental characters with just one or two lines have to be wearing a Pride button or something.

A show like that might, just possibly, begin to make up for all the shows (even now) without any queer characters, or the ones where the queer characters are speedily killed off, or the ones that queerbait and then say "Nope, these characters are straight," or the ones that have an unspoken quota system for queer characters so there can only be so many.

I eagerly await your response in this matter.

Sincerely,

Me

I just watched the first part of Man in an Orange Shirt, one of the shows the BBC produced for its Gay Britannia celebration, and it was wrenching. It's about two men who fall in love just after the Second World War, but one of them is engaged to be married, and everything plays out just as you'd expect. *sigh* I guess it's important for people to know queer history, and to understand that homophobia and criminalization wrecked lives, but . . . I would also like to see representation of the unwrecked lives, of the ways queer men found to resist and even to be happy.

I think the second part is going to be happier, but that's set in the present, and as such it doesn't speak to me as much.

Should've been more cautious, because I'm not really in a good emotional state for stories of heartbreak.

tl;dr still waiting for the Second World War era love story between two men that has a happy ending.

Actor Imran Khan answers questions about gay issues. Some of this is specific to India and Indian law, but a lot of it is applicable anywhere. Also, it's hilarious.

The announcement of the Twelfth Doctor's casting has again led to dismay for people who would like the next Doctor to be a woman.

I have to confess that I've always been a little uncomfortable with the assertion that if the Doctor regenerated as female it would be no big deal to the Doctor. On a Watsonian and also a personal level, I have doubts. These doubts have nothing to do with the solid Doyleist real-world reasons (feminism, basically) why a female Doctor would be a good thing. I acknowledge and agree with those reasons.

My qualms, as I said, are Watsonian and personal. They're to do with the Doctor as a character, which is to say as a fictional person for whom we assume a fictional subjectivity, and with my own experience of gender.

( Click here to read more. )

Oh my god, Jeremy Irons, what the fuck is wrong with you? Were you high? Or are you actually just that stupid and bigoted?

Dude, you were Charles in Brideshead Revisited! You've played Antonio in The Merchant of Venice! You are, for heaven's sake, an actor! Surely you know actual queer people who would like to marry their actual partners because THEY LOVE THEM and they want the legal protections afforded to married people. As opposed to men marrying their own sons as a tax dodge--just like how heterosexual marriage means men can marry their daughters for inheritance reasons. Happens all the time!

*headdesk*

For my own sanity as a fan, I usually try not to find out too much about actors, musicians, etc. whose work I like. I wish they wouldn't make that compartmentalization harder for me by blatantly showing their bigoted asses for the world to see.

(Yes, it's another post about my POW obsession. I don't know if this will be of interest to anyone but me and halotolerant, but I do think that the POW experience and the Second World War in general are important and very very neglected topics in queer history.)

One of the frustrating things about the few existing histories of POW life during the Second World War is their almost-universal tendency to ignore or outright deny that POWs ever had sexual or romantic relationships with each other. There was no privacy in the camps, these books say. The prisoners were too hungry to think about sex. Homosexuality was too widely disapproved of for such things to be happening.

Sometimes these histories support their claims with, typically, excerpts from published or otherwise "official" POW memoirs. Considering that sex between men was a criminal offense in Britain until 1967, and in most of the U.S. for much longer, and also considering the heavy social stigma, these memoirists would have every reason to deny POW homosexuality (a fact not taken into account in any secondary history I've seen). Furthermore, a lot of the history books are contradictory, on the one hand quoting POW sources (such as chaplains) fretting about the prevalence of homosexuality, then claiming its extreme rarity on the other.

And every single history that I've seen has ignored primary-source evidence that male-male sex (sometimes pseudo-heterosexual with one man adopting a "female" social and sexual role, but oftentimes not)¹ was widespread. And this evidence isn't hidden: Paul Fussell, in the context of a general book about soldiers' attitudes, beliefs, social lives, etc. during the Second World War, quotes from a published book about the Bataan Death March and Japanese-run POW camps, which mentions that male-male relationships were so common that one of the camp doctors set up a "marital relations clinic" to help prevent domestic problems.

And then there's Gordon Westwood's Society and the Homosexual, published in 1952, which includes a whole (short) chapter focusing mostly on POW homosexuality. It's based on interviews with ex-POWs, and Westwood argues strongly and I think convincingly that most men who were POWs for any substantial length of time had sex with other POWs at some point, often eventually having many sexual partners and/or forming loving relationships.

Since Westwood's book is little known and hard to get hold of (thanks heavens for Interlibrary Loan!), I've typed up most of the chapter to share. It's under the cut.

( click here to read; includes a rather wonderful love story )