Alas, a Blog | Feminist, anti-racist, pro-fat, plus whatever else we feel like talking about.

Half of us are about to collide rudely with reality. I hope it’s not my half.

Posted on November 5, 2012 by Ampersand

All the Democrats and lefties I know are pretty confident that Obama will win the election on Tuesday, just from watching the polls.

At the same time, many Republicans seem awfully confident that Romney will win. My friend Jack at Ethics Alarms, in comments, wrote:

[Obama’s not] going to be elected to a second term. […] I am sure. I have my own formula and parameters, just like Nate Silver. The difference is that I know what I’m talking about.

I’m pretty certain that Jack, in fact, knows a lot less about probability and polling than Nate Silver does. But Jack would presumably feel certain I’m wrong.

Jack’s view is shared by many on the right. Check out this reader poll at Battleground Watch (click on “view results”), or look at what folks like Michael Barone, George Will and Dick Morris are saying.

If Romney wins in a close race, that won’t blow my mind. But if he wins by a landslide, as some conservatives are predicting….

Anyhow, feel free to use this thread to discuss anything elections-related.

UPDATE: Ted Frank has the best argument for thinking that the polls are overstating Obama’s chances, that I’ve seen.

And at Ethics Alarms, Jack explains why he thinks Romney has it in the bag: It all comes down to Strong! Leadership! My response: Oy.

Posted in Elections and politics | 57 Comments

Portland Opera’s “Don Giovanni”

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Ampersand

Portland Opera has a delightful habit of inviting a bunch of Portland-area cartoonists, including me, to come watch dress rehearsals and post drawings of what we see. So on Monday (which was my birthday, so that worked out nicely), I got to see their imported-from-NYC production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. This was a modernist production, which meant 1930s costumes, minimalist sets, a gray and black and white color scheme, and lots of surprisingly explicit gropes during the sexy bits.

So here’s what I drew. You can click on any of these pictures to see them embiggified.

First, some stuff I drew in my sketchbook while I was watching the dress rehearsal:

Second, the cast of Peanuts perform Don Giovanni:

And finally, an illustration I did. Since the costumes for this production mostly seemed to be from the 1930s, I tried to draw this in the style of a cartoonist from the 1930s.

If you want to see what other cartoonists did, the best bet is to follow the #pdxgiovanni hashtag on Twitter. But here are some links (in no particular order):

Becky Hawkins (who drew me, by the way! Also herself and Lucy Bellwood.)
Mike Russell
Lucy Bellwood
Adrian Wallace
Matthew Grisby
Joelle Jones [1] [2]

That’s the ones I could find as of this moment, but I’m sure there will be more at that #pdxgiovanni hashtag.

Oh, I nearly forgot! If you’re in Portland and want to see the show, “Don Giovanni” will be playing Nov. 2, 4, 8 and 10 at the Keller Auditorium. You can get half-price tickets for the Thursday, Nov. 8 performance at this link if you use the password MOZART.

And finally, in case you want to check ’em out, links to my past Portland Opera posts: Candide | L’heure espagnole and L’enfant et les sortilèges | Turandot | Hansel and Gretel

Posted in Cartooning & comics | 3 Comments

Acer Commercial Fights Sexist Objectification By Deploying Anti-Fat Bigotry. Yay?

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Ampersand

Kelsey Wallace at Bitch Magazine is right, this Acer computer commercial starring Megan Fox is refreshing for its lack of sexist objectification of Fox. Too bad for the stock comedy “fat nerdy guy who can’t handle talking to women” character. The bit where Fatty Fat Fatty shakes hands with Fox and then refuses to let go is especially choice, because it’s so important to remind America that fat guys aren’t just social incompetents; we’re also sexual harassers.

(P.S. I’m also a little bugged that that Fox is all “Free the Lobsters!” at the restaurant at the start of the commercial but doesn’t mind sentient, speaking dolphins being locked up in tanks.)

Posted in Fat, fat and more fat | 2 Comments

The First Poems I Ever Published

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

I was at my mother’s on Sunday, before Sandy hit New York, helping her clean out her attic because she’s moving to New Jersey and she wants to take with her as little as possible of the stuff that she’s accumulated during the 70-some-odd years of her life. We found things like a picture of her and her date to her senior prom. I asked her who he was, but I’ve forgotten his name. She went with him, she said, because George, the man who would eventually become my stepfather and the father of my sisters, had broken up with her. (Why she married my father first and not George is a whole other story.) We also found decades worth of Heavy Metal magazine that my mother subscribed to and even the velvet drapes she had hanging in her bedroom more than thirty years ago when we lived in Floral Park. For me, though, the most significant thing that we found was the copy of Mirrors of the Wistful Dreamer that my mother had bought in 1980 when Sal St. John Buttaci of New Worlds Unlimited accepted two of my poems publication. In my memory, Buttaci and his publishing company had been of a piece with the scam artists–I don’t remember that publisher’s name–that a couple of years later also accepted my poems, asked me to pay a fee so that the poems could be published (which I did; I was very naive about these things back then) and then sent me a copy of a book without my poems in it. My mother, though, reminded me that I was wrong. New Worlds Unlimited was, in fact, a legitimate poetry publisher. Indeed Mr. Buttaci is still active. His blog has not been updated since last year, but he was interviewed on Blog Talk Radio in May of this year, when he also gave a reading at the Princeton Public Library.

I was very happy to be proven wrong, and I was pleasantly surprised, when I looked, to find out that Mirrors of the Wistful Dreamer is actually for sale on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble and that there are some libraries around the country that have it on their shelves. More than how excited I was when I got Mr. Buttaci’s acceptance letter in the mail–boy, I wish I still had a copy of that–I remember how validating it was to see my work in print. The poems he accepted are absolutely the work of an eighteen-year-old, but when I read them now, more than thirty years later, I can see in them the seeds of the poet I would become. At the time, in imitation of e. e. cummings, I numbered my poems, instead of giving them titles:

39

In the Beginning
when God created
Everything,
He forgot
perfekshon.

///

49

If I send you a poem
on butterfly wings,
ensnare it not
in your net of reason,
let it enter the flower of your soul
that you might live,
not merely survive–

If I send you a poem
on wings of song,
please, let it sing.

Poem 39, cutely profound and ironic as it tries to be, reminds me of another poem I wrote in my eighteenth year, but of which I no longer have a copy. In this poem, which was written in rhymed couplets, I imagined a post-nuclear world in which the God of the Torah decides to come to earth to comfort the survivors and to mourn with them everything that has been lost. The survivors, however, turn God away. “You weren’t there when we needed you,” they tell him, “and so we don’t need your sorrow now.”

I was very proud of this poem, both because it showed some mastery of the couplet form and because it said something that I thought was important politically. The possibility of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was not far from anyone’s mind at the time, and I was also struggling with some pretty serious spiritual and philosophical questions like, “How could God have allowed the Shoah to happen?” So I showed the poem to my AP English teacher, Mr. Giglio, along with some of my other work. In fact, I think I gave him my entire notebook of poetry to read. His response was that I ought not to write poetry about religion, that perhaps I ought not to write poetry at all. I’d be better off, he said, sticking to essays and literary criticism. (I didn’t know it at the time, but if the stories I’ve been told are true, Mr. Giglio had tried and failed to enter the priesthood.)

Happily, I was smart enough to recognize that Mr. Giglio was responding to the content of my poem as if it were a claim to a truth about his god, not the poem itself as a vehicle for exploring an emotional and intellectual experience–which is kind of what poem 49 is about, though I would never have been able to say it this way at the time. So, ignoring his advice, I kept writing; and I think my work has followed the trajectory set for it in the poem he rejected, and in these two poems that Sal St. John Buttaci published, engaging with large social, cultural and political issues, while at the same time insisting that poetry is art, not propaganda. In any event, I am happy to have Mirrors of the Wistful Dreamer in my possession once again.

Cross-posted.

Posted in Writing | 2 Comments

Pournelle’s Iron Law Of Bureaucracy, FEMA, and Republican Incompetence

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Ampersand

In another thread, Ron – I suspect with tongue in cheek – quoted Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

In every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

Charles, responding in that thread, made a good point:

FEMA under Bush and Obama is a nice example of the way in which this sort of blind, stupid disbelief in the effectiveness of government at providing public services is a self-fulfilling prophecy rather than any sort of Iron Rule. Put people in charge at the highest level who believe that government is just an ideological and patronage tool, and you get “Heck of a Job” Brownie. Put people in charge of government who believe that government can serve the public good, and you get a well organized machine providing critical life saving services.

Kevin Drum, thinking along similar lines, writes “At a deep ideological level, Republicans believe that federal bureaucracies are inherently inept, so when Republicans occupy the White House they have no interest in making the federal bureaucracy work.” Illustrating his point, Drum provides a recent history of FEMA’s leadership:

George H.W. Bush: Appoints Wallace Stickney, head of New Hampshire’s Department of Transportation, as head of FEMA. Stickney is a hapless choice and the agency is rapidly driven into the ditch: “Because FEMA had 10 times the proportion of political appointees of most other government agencies, the poorly chosen Bush appointees had a profound effect on the performance of the agency.”

Bill Clinton: Appoints James Lee Witt, former head of the Arkansas Office of Emergency Services, as head of FEMA. The agency is reborn as a professional operation: “As amazing as it sounds, Witt was the first FEMA head who came to the position with direct experience in emergency management….On Witt’s recommendation, Clinton filled most of the FEMA jobs reserved for political appointees with persons who had previous experience in natural disasters and intergovernmental relations.”

George W. Bush: Appoints Joe Allbaugh, his 2000 campaign manager, as head of FEMA. Allbaugh explains that his role is to downsize FEMA and privatize its functions: “Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level. We must restore the predominant role of State and local response to most disasters.” Once again, the agency goes downhill: “[Allbaugh] showed little interest in its work or in the missions pursued by the departed Witt….Those of us in the business of dealing with emergencies find ourselves with no national leadership and no mentors. We are being forced to fend for ourselves.”

Allbaugh quits after only two years and George W. Bush downgrades FEMA from a cabinet-level agency and appoints Allbaugh’s deputy, Michael Brown, former Commissioner of Judges and Stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association, as FEMA’s head. A former employer, Stephen Jones, is gobsmacked when he hears about it: “Brown was pleasant enough, if a bit opportunistic, Jones said, but he did not put enough time and energy into his job. ‘He would have been better suited to be a small city or county lawyer,’ he said.”

Barack Obama: Appoints Craig Fugate, Florida’s state emergency management director, as head of FEMA. Fugate immediately revives FEMA, receiving widespread praise for the agency’s handling of the devastating tornadoes that ripped across seven Southern states last year: “Under Fugate’s leadership, an unimaginable natural disaster literally has paved the way for a textbook lesson in FEMA crisis management….Once the laughingstock of the federal bureaucracy after the bumbling, dithering tenure of director Michael Brown, FEMA under Fugate prepares for the worst and hopes for the best rather than the other way around.”

Some Republicans are objecting to Sandy being “politicized.” But how the Federal government responds to disaster is a legitimate policy issue, and it seems disingenuous at best for Republicans to claim that it’s wrong to discuss a policy question at a time when that question is most relevant. From the New York Times:

Over the last two years, Congressional Republicans have forced a 43 percent reduction in the primary FEMA grants that pay for disaster preparedness. Representatives Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and other House Republicans have repeatedly tried to refuse FEMA’s budget requests when disasters are more expensive than predicted, or have demanded that other valuable programs be cut to pay for them. The Ryan budget, which Mr. Romney praised as “an excellent piece of work,” would result in severe cutbacks to the agency, as would the Republican-instigated sequester, which would cut disaster relief by 8.2 percent on top of earlier reductions.

Romney himself, of course, endorsed privatizing disaster response when he was asked about FEMA funding during a primary debate:

Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further, and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.

That’s an inane and irresponsible position to take (and one, unsurprisingly, Romney has walked back a bit this week). But that’s pretty much the best thinking available in the Republican party at this time – it’s not as if any of the other leading contenders for the GOP presidential nomination were any better. Anti-government and anti-tax ideologues rule the GOP; and if you’re not allowed to question that all taxes are evil and all tax cuts are good, it follows that all government spending is wasted and all service cuts beneficial, regardless of the reality.

The cuts to FEMA are even more irresponsible when you consider that Republicans have stood strongly against any policies to mitigate or reduce the effects of global warming (Mitt Romney openly mocks the idea of trying to address rising sea levels). And at the highest levels of the GOP, many still doubt that global warming is real, or caused by human activity.

But the reality that Republicans refuse to face is, global warming is real. And global warming makes events like Sandy both more likely and more destructive. We not only have to stop cutting FEMA’s budget, we need to raise it to higher than ever before, because we are going to be facing more weather disasters than before. The first step in addressing any problem is admitting that the problem exists; unfortunately, the GOP is incapable of taking that first step, and Republican voters are not at all inclined to hold their leadership’s feet to the fire.

Of course, the Democrats have hardly covered themselves with glory; Obama’s budget calls for a 2% FEMA cut, and Democrats have been frightened of talking about global warming at all. But at least Democrats don’t have an ideology that embraces failure and incompetence as inevitable. I’m sure that FEMA will make some mistakes in its response to Sandy – given the scope of operations and the thousands of decisions that have to be made quickly, mistakes are inevitable. But I’m confident that Craig Fugate is someone who has the background needed to make those decisions and minimize the errors, and that he’s not approaching his job with the belief that FEMA cannot be run well and probably shouldn’t exist at all.

If John McCain had won the 2008 election, some crony of his with zero background in disaster management would now be stumbling around and making excuses for his inaction in front of the cameras. Is there any reason to believe we’d be better off with that person than we are with Craig Fugate?

Posted in Elections and politics, Environmental issues | 3 Comments

Blog Hop! Blog Hop!

Posted on October 30, 2012 by Ampersand

I’ve been asked by poet and my “Alas” co-blogger Richard Jeffrey Newman to participate in a Blog Hop in order to introduce new authors to new readers. If you’ve come here from the link posted on Richard’s blog, welcome! If you’re a regular reader of mine or came upon my blog by chance, this is an opportunity for you to get know something about my new graphic novel, and to check out some writers and cartoonists who might be new to you by following the links at the end of the post. They are all fine creators whose work I would highly recommend. Again, special thanks to Richard Newman, from whom I swiped most of the text in this intro paragraph.

Ten Interview Questions for The Next Great Read

Q: What is the ~~working~~ title of your book?
A: Hereville: How Mirka Met a Meteorite. It’s a new book just hitting stores (including online stores like Amazon) this week.

Q: Where did the idea come from for the book?
A: This is a sequel to my earlier book, Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword. So I already knew most of the characters and the setting before I began work on this book. The books are about Mirka, who I describe as “yet another monster-fighting Orthodox Jewish 11-year-old girl.” For this book’s story, I did a variation on the old “evil twin” storyline, although in this case the twin isn’t evil so much as self-centered. The idea was to confront Mirka with someone who is in many ways her idealized version of herself – strong, fast, not worrying about what others think of her — and to let the story grow from there.

Q: What genre does your book fall under?
A: All-ages fantasy. Also, I should mention that it’s a “graphic novel,” aka a comic book.

Q: Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
A: Geez. You know, I’ve never tried to answer this question before. If I could use a time machine, so I could hire kid actors who have since grown up, I might cast Abigail Breslin as Mirka, or maybe Chloe Moretz. Or the 11-year-old ~~Kirsten Dunst~~ Kristin Bell. I have no idea if any of these kid actors are Jewish, though. To play the grown-ups, my fantasy cast might be Jennifer Jason Leigh or maybe Dianne Wiest to play the Witch, Stephen Fry or John Lithgow to play the Troll, and Allison Janney to play Fruma.

Q: What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
A: Eleven-year-old wanna-be hero Mirka saves her town from a meteorite, but finds herself stuck with an identical twin who’s better at everything than she is.

Q: Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
A: This book is published by Abrams. My agent is Judy Hanson.

Q: How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
A: Writing the script for the comic took me three months, or eight months, depending on if you count I spent writing stories that ultimately were not used. Then it took me nine or ten months to draw it.

Q: What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
A: In their review of this book, Horn Book compared it to Raina Telgemeier’s books Smile and Drama and Vera Brosgol’s Anya’s Ghost. I am very happy to be listed in company like that!

Q: Who or What inspired you to write this book?
A: All the Hereville books are, in part, heavily disguised autobiographies. The first Hereville book was about wanting to be a cartoonist but not knowing how to get started. This book, the second one, is about starting to realize your ambitions but realizing that it’s never as simple or satisfying as you’ve imagined.

Q: What else about your book might piqué the reader’s interest?
A: I think a lot of people are initially tickled by the concept of a fantasy-adventure novel in which the main character is an 11-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl being raised in an Orthodox community. But what makes it worth reading, I hope, is that the Judaism in the books isn’t a gimmick or exoticized; it’s the setting in which the characters’ live their lives. I try and present the cultural aspects in as non-exotic and matter-of-fact a way as I can, and I think readers appreciate that.

Also, there are some exciting action sequences. Or I hope they’re exciting, anyway.

Here are the writers and cartoonists whose work you can check out next:

Watch out for their “Blog Hop” interviews on November 7th. And also, check out Clarice Thorne’s Blog Hop post, right now!

Posted in Hereville | 7 Comments

Men And Women Can Be Friends, But Can Studies On Cross-Gender Friendship Be Honestly Reported?

Posted on October 28, 2012 by Ampersand

Andrew Sullivan links to this Scientific American article, entitled “Men and Women Can’t Be ‘Just Friends’.” Adrian Ward, the author of the article, probably didn’t write that headline, but it’s a fair summary of his article:

The results suggest large gender differences in how men and women experience opposite-sex friendships. Men were much more attracted to their female friends than vice versa. Men were also more likely than women to think that their opposite-sex friends were attracted to them—a clearly misguided belief. In fact, men’s estimates of how attractive they were to their female friends had virtually nothing to do with how these women actually felt, and almost everything to do with how the men themselves felt—basically, males assumed that any romantic attraction they experienced was mutual, and were blind to the actual level of romantic interest felt by their female friends. Women, too, were blind to the mindset of their opposite-sex friends; because females generally were not attracted to their male friends, they assumed that this lack of attraction was mutual. As a result, men consistently overestimated the level of attraction felt by their female friends and women consistently underestimated the level of attraction felt by their male friends.

So the study must have found huge differences between men and women, right?

Well, let’s take a look at what Ward didn’t report: the numbers (pdf link). First, Ward reports that “men were much more attracted to their female friends than vice versa.” The study authors asked their subjects ((The sample for this part of the study consisted of an unrepresentative sample of 88 heterosexual students at the University of Wisconsin, all fulfilling a “course research participation requirement,” race not reported but I’d bet a comic book they were nearly all white. For a later part of the study, involving adults age 27-52, subjects were recruited by asking the students from the earlier part of the study for names and addresses of older friends and relatives. 80% of the participants in the second half of the study were from just a couple of states in the Midwest, nearly all were married, and once again race was unreported but…)) to rate their attraction on a scale from 1 (“not at all attracted”) to 9 (“extremely attracted,”) with 5 defined as “moderately attracted.” Here’s what they found:

The average report for women was 4, versus 5 for men. Ward could have more accurately reported that men’s and women’s average responses were “almost alike.”

Now let’s check out the differences between reported and perceived attractions. Using the same nine-point scale:

Again, there is a difference here, but contrary to Ward’s reporting that difference is modest. Men perceived their female friends as slightly less than moderately attracted to them (4.5), when those female friends were in fact… slightly less than moderately attracted to them (4). Women perceived their male friends as slightly less than moderately attracted (4.5), when those male friends were in fact moderately attracted (5). On average, women slightly underestimated attraction and men slightly overestimated attraction, but on average both women and men were only a half-point off the mark, and the differences between estimates and reality fell within the margin of error.

There is one graph in the study showing a large difference between the sexes, which is on the question of if people see sexual attraction to an opposite-sex friend as a cost or a benefit of the friendship.

All study participants were asked to list up to ten ways that their “cross-sex friendships enhanced their lives or were beneficial to them,” and up to ten ways “cross-sex friendships complicated their lives or were costly to them.” Although both men and women were more likely to list attraction as a disadvantage, there was a notable difference in the percentages — women were much more likely to list attraction as a disadvantage.

There was also a notable similarity – the majority of respondents, male or female, didn’t list attraction as either a cost or a benefit.

Ward opened his article by asking “Can heterosexual men and women ever be just friends?” This study did address that question. Of the college-aged respondents, 98% of men and 97% of women said that they had opposite-sex friends. Among the respondents age 27-52, 86% of men and 88% of women reported having opposite-sex friends.

In other words, the overwhelming majority of both men and women reported that they have opposite-sex friends. Strangely enough, Ward didn’t find that result worth reporting.

Posted in Feminism, sexism, etc | 29 Comments

On Changing My Name

Posted on October 28, 2012 by Grace Annam

So as part of my transition I’ll be changing my name, as trans people generally do when we transition. The timing is a bit particular, so I’m filling out the paperwork now, even though I won’t mail it to the probate court for awhile yet. The plan is to mail it the day my transition becomes public. About a month later, in theory, I appear before a judge, who grants the name change.

I’m not mailing this application until Avalanche Day (as I have come to think of it). I appear routinely in local courts as part of my job, and I don’t want a court clerk to read the application and say to someone who knows me, “Hey, why is [insert my current name here] changing his name to ‘Grace’?” I’m mailing the application no later than Avalanche Day because I want that name change as soon as possible; every time I testify I have to swear or affirm that I am telling the truth, and then the first part of my testimony is to give my name.

I know my name is Grace. You know my name is Grace. Many of my friends know my name is Grace. My wife knows my name is Grace – she’s the one who gave me my name, and has called me by it for years. But the legal world thinks my name is something else, and even though I am telling the truth in saying that my name is Grace, if I use anything but my legal moniker on the stand, there’s an excellent chance that someone will weaponize that act of integrity and try to use it against me, or against my agency.

I do NOT want to be in the position of presenting as female and having to give, on the stand, a name my society codes as male – which, unfortunately, is true of my legal name. But the timing is tight. I want that name change to go through without a hitch. I emphatically DO NOT WANT to have to appeal a denial, and have the process drag out. Other aspects of my transition hinge on a smooth change of legal name. Until I have the legal change, I cannot change my name in most other places, including my driver’s license and my medical records.

This shouldn’t be a problem, right? People change their names all the time. Some people change them to some pretty strange things. They give various reasons, among which: their current name is mispronounced too much; there is a dispute with the family which shares their name; they dislike their current name; they feel that the new name represents them better. What could be simpler?

On the application form in my state of residence, after you confirm that you are not a felon or changing your name for a fraudulent reason, there is a space for you to explain your reason: two little lines. They can’t be expecting me to be terribly elaborate in two little lines. What to write?

Clearly, and foremost, I must be truthful. Integrity is the bedrock of my profession, and a personal value whatever I do for work.

Next, I don’t want to raise flags which might prompt the judge to reject the name change, as Judge Graves, in Oklahoma, did recently to two trans women.

(What’s the power in a name? I had to search hard for two news sources which referred to the women in question as women, because I wasn’t going to link to a source which did it wrong. The Oklahoma media have almost universally referred to them as “transsexual men”, in ignorance or defiance of accepted journalistic standards – which tweaks me every time I see it, and I’m sure it’s salt in their wounds for the women involved.)

I don’t think that this is likely; I live in New England, not Oklahoma. But it’s possible, and I worry about it.

I can easily give a truthful answer which does not mention that I am transsexual:

The new name is more consonant with my sense of identity than the old one.

I like the new name better.

The new name reflects and represents a personal milestone.

My wife gave me this nickname and after over twenty years of marriage we want to celebrate our continued union by making it my legal name.

These are all true. They are accurate. They don’t tell it all, but probably no reason which anyone gives ever tells it all; they are all summaries. They have to be.

And if something which amounts to “because I want to” is good enough for anyone else, it should be good enough for me, right?

Maybe. Opinions vary.

I put this question to some friends of mine who are also trans cops. Universally, they have told me to disclose that I am transsexual. “You don’t want the court to suspect you of misrepresenting yourself.” They offer concise examples (some phrasing mixed and matched so that I am not directly quoting any one person):

I am transitioning from male to female gender, as part of treatment in accordance with medical standards of care. I would like my name to be consistent with my gender identity.

I am changing my gender from M to F and respectfully request that the court change my name to match my gender.

Name change to match new gender and new appearance.

I am transitioning from male to female. Therefore, I am seeking to change my name from (this) to (that) to better reflect my identity, privately and publicly.

Okay, that’s fine, except that it gives the judge the opportunity to vapor-lock over something they find weird and possibly offensive.

I balk at the different standard: Any Tom, Dick or Harry can write “Because I want to”, or words which mean the same thing, on those lines and a judge will sign off on it. But because I am transsexual, I may be held to a different standard and must expose myself to greater scrutiny and a possible legal battle. And, well-intentioned, experienced people tell me there is enough chance that I will be held to a different standard that I should just do it myself, in advance. It’s galling. This is probably one of those “work twice as hard to be thought half as good” things which women have endured for millenia and which trans people therefore and also endure. And I’ll probably follow the advice of the people who have blazed the trail before me, so that no judge and no attorney can accuse me of impropriety, or hint at it.

But it sticks in my craw.

Grace

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Jackson Heights Poetry Festival is Profiled in The New York Times

Posted on October 27, 2012 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

Lloyd Robson reads for JHPF in October. Photo by Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times

I don’t particularly like the title, “Poets Gather in Exile, in Queens,” because I certainly don’t think of myself, as a writer or in any other way, as living in exile because I make my home in Queens, NY, but I like the article very much.

It’s funny how these things happen. I took over Jackson Heights Poetry Festival and its First Tuesdays reading series in June of this year and started hosting the series in September. K C Trommer was our first reader and it was a lovely evening, most especially because we got some nice press coverage on DNAinfo. Paul DeBenedetto, the reporter who wrote that story, was so taken with the evening that he did a profile of one of the poets who read, Norman Stock, whose first book of poems, Buying Breakfast for My Kamikaze Pilot, won the 1994 Peregrine Smith Poetry Series. (Norman’s second book is called Pickled Dreams Naked.) John Leland of The New York Times read DeBenedetto’s profile of Stock and contacted me to see if there might be a story about a developing community of writer’s in Queens. John came down to our October reading, at which Lloyd Robson was the featured reader, met some of the writers who attended, and “Poets Gather in Exile” was the result.

What I like best about the article is the way it captures the sense of a building and burgeoning community of writers, which is, for me, the most important function that First Tuesdays can serve:

For Mr. Goodrich and Ms. [Honor] Molloy, the exiles from Brooklyn, the monthly reading could not compensate for what they had lost — what they had moved to New York to be a part of. Ms. Molloy used to spend free hours toiling in the Brooklyn Writers Space; wherever she walked there were other writers, who would tell her about their readings and offer to come to hers. “I feel like an expatriate,” she said, “like I lost my country.”

And yet.

Was it really so injurious for a writer to be away from what Mr. Goodrich called the “designer organic tapioca shops” or “hipsters with double-wide strollers”? In two months, they had found a good wine shop, a dry cleaner, a grocery. They had run into a newly arrived actor they knew; another day they ran into the poet K C Trommer, with whom Ms. Molloy used to work at Simon & Schuster and who was also a newcomer to the neighborhood. They had met Mr. Feldstein, who told them about the reading series.

“It all starts to fall together,” Mr. Goodrich said.

I also–I can’t help it–like the picture that Michael Kirby Smith got of me:

I hope you’ll go read the whole piece, and I hope you’ll come to next month’s reading, with Luis H. Francia, on November 13th.

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