Transgender Remembrance Day is a day when we remember all the transgender / t* people who have fallen because of transphobia hate crimes.

Gwen Smith runs the Transgender Day of Remembrance website

In a country that touts diversity, in a school system where guidance counselors advise on the virtues of knowing that one thing one wants to do with the rest of one’s life, it’s remarkable how those who step forward and voice that very sentiment sometimes get snuffed out.

For all my friends on the extremities of this great country, always remember this: no matter how bad you feel you’re getting it, there’s still some 40 states in between where girls like us have got it worse. Imagine being in a small town in say, Wyoming or Iowa and not having any place or person to go to. Meditate on that loneliness.

Let’s give our best to them and NEVER ignore them online. Even if they want to say hi, you should always make the time.

I could go on, but in accordance with tradition, it’s a moment of silence that is fitting.

While I’m aware that the continuum of the arts are historically known to thrive on the retelling of previously established conventions, there are artists who break skillfully from mere imitation, using identifiable imagery to root viewers in tradition while launching off into new exploratory paths. In poststructural culture however, many artists today are simply lazy, relying solely on a vacuous form of flattery that grew out of identical digital reproduction.

I’ve always had a great disdain for lipsyncing. I understand it’s almost religion in drag circles, but using a written song and someone’s voice to express oneself is not expression, it’s appropriation. I would rather a performer fail magnificently in using her own voice, than succeed artificially on the backs of canned ghosts.

I think I too may be getting a little bit lazy, carrying the practice of appropriation into my trans identity. I don’t want to get on the soapbox when I should be taking a bath: I bask in the 1950s persona of the stay-at-home housewife combined with Levin’s Stepford Wives. The saving grace is that instead of mere reiteration, the superimposition of three invented identities (50s housewife, Stepford Wife, my trans* state) opens up a gateway to exponential possibilities.

Though transgender activists will surely argue that transgender identity is NOT an invention, I look at it from a purely biological perspective. To get the operation is to revise history. Since I plan never to do that, it now becomes a 50s housewife, A Stepford Wife, and an untempered, non-hormonalized, male “ingredient” hidden within the labyrinthine folds of lace and ribbons.

Just as Marcel DuChamp utilized the incongruence of an industrial urinal in an art exhibit to propel 19th century art into modern art, I think the harrowing blur of femininity and masculinity in a trans* girl is a lifeforce that can possibly scrutinize the facade of traditional feminine behavior, propelling it into new directions of a modern allure for womanhood.

Everywhere I go in public, I catch these glances from men who want to know if I am creating a new genre, improvising on known, familiar format. The answer is YES. The established genetic code is still there, but the new artform awakens a new appreciation in them that may have been asleep all these years.

The gift of art to a viewer is to introduce a new way of looking at the same old thing.

This is a strength that trans girls should consider embracing, and not be too quick to discard. After all, the modern genetic girl (whose validation tg’s covet so preciously) - curses like a truck driver, carry on at top volume, behave brusquely, beat each other to a bloody pulp on youtube, and are at wits end when asked to boil an egg.

That sounds more like an average dude if you ask me.

Jorge-Luis Borges

My beloved Argentinian poet, author, and director of the Argentinian library, this gentle man spins beautiful verses that are simultaneously stately, humane, sentimental (writing from memory as Borges lost his vision in old age and had to dictate poems to his wife Maria Kodama). Many believe that Borges’s vista of infinity and his concept of the endless library forsaw the advent of the internet. No one person has inspired me more than JLB to be worldly, encyclopedic, and humble.

Audrey Hepburn

Of course, in all of Hepburn’s movies, I always adored her pre-glamor, everyday person state (Greenwich Village’s Jo Stockton in Funny Face, the chauffer’s daughter in Sabrina). Daughter of Dutch Baroness Ella van Heemstra in real life, this gal’s easy graciousness came from true royalty where her Hollywood contemporaries had to marry into it. It was only this year that I found out that Hepburn had a funny thing about food. That endeared me more to her and I must admit, relieved me greatly as I was starting to develop a funny thing about food trying to get to Audrey’s weight.

George Bernard Shaw

My first literary love. I laughed loud at Shaw’s understated humor and conversational wit in his numerous plays. Long before I even knew the true meaning of feminism, Shaw’s Shavian ethics already promoted egalitarian ideals featuring strong outspoken female characters (Lady Warren’s Profession, Major Barbara). Though it’s true that Shaw nearly got a heart attack upon seeing how My Fair Lady eviscerated his original play Pygmalion, his diverse interests, spanning 30 volumes of works from political observations, art criticism, music performance reviews to wonderful plays and novels, ultimately formed the well-rounded person I aspire to be.

Andre Tarkovski

I fell asleep three times when watching my first Tarkovski movie Sacrifice. My boyfriend fell asleep even before the opening credits stopped rolling in Nostalghia. Still, the master Russian portraitist of the human figure has created an entire oeuvre in his filmography asking the lifelong questions, “why are we here?” and how the mystery of creation propels the lifeforce. Mirror (”Zerkalo”) remains the one movie I will bring to a desert island, seeing that everyone normally shipwrecks with a working dvd player and a portable generator.

Bill Evans

Jazz pianist of the 50s-70s whose introversion became inversely proportional to an increasingly profound beauty in his ballads, Bill Evans grew up in a town less than a few miles from my home. No jazz pianist in the modern day can play a passage that hasn’t somehow been influence by Bill Evans. In my teenage years You Must Believe In Spring was the album my youthful heart ached to. When asked to elect my prom song in high school, I excitedly piped out “Seascape, from Bill Evans’s I Will Say Goodbye! But of course!” A tumbleweed blew across the classroom, crickets chirped…even in the morning.

Glenn Gould

Pianist and Canada’s favorite eccentric son, Gould brought Bach back to the masses in his 50s rendition of the Goldberg Variations. Modernizing Bach’s Fugue, Gould used multiple speaking voices as a contrapuntal device. A fan of Barbara Streisand and electronic recording devices, Gould forecast MIDI technology by predicting a time in the future where audio components will have individual adjustments to control the pitch, attack, and volume of each instrument in a composition.

Malcolm X

Often portrayed by the media as a fanatic hatemonger, Malcom X actually did wonderful things for the black community in the 60s, bringing self respect back to a disenfranchised national identity. X’s sometimes harsh but always crisp pronouncements of the way things really were are constructions of sheer beauty. If knowledge can set you free, then Malcolm X was the model liberator. When he came back from Mecca - after seeing people of all races pray together side by side and in peace - his approach completely shifted into one of inclusion. Had he not been assassinated, Malcolm’s Camelot would, in my opinion, far outshined that of JFK’s.

Clifford Coffin

Above John French and Norm Parkinson, Clifford Coffin is my all time favorite fashion photographer. An American whose excellence in his work for Vogue Magazine in the 50s is only slowly beginning to gain reknown. His portraits of my all time favorite fashion supermodel Nancy Berg, are one to behold.

Carson McCullers

I voraciously read everything this Southern Gothic author wrote the moment I finished the Heart Is A Lonely Hunter. McCullers’ voice is that of an older sister; wise, open, curious, and queer. Imagined my fascination when I heard McCullers wanted to be a concert pianist and wedded to the music of Bach. A kindred spirit (in my estimation).

Ike No Taiga

18th century calligrapher and eccentric artist, this Japanese master of the brush created works integrating Japanese, Chinese and Korean culture alongside with his wife Tokuyama Gyokuran. The pair of aesthetes lived in squalor, living only to create objects of beauty. His works are regarded as National Treasures. An exhibit of the pair’s works were shown in Philadelphia Museum of Art last year. Gorgeously sumptuous. To see it is to understand the importance of living in the presence of beauty on a daily basis.

Werner Herzog (director)

Filmmaker, adventurer, cultural conservationist, part-time madman, what more could one ask for? Herzog believes indigenous cultures are quickly eroding, and is doing every thing he can in his power to preserve the few that are left.

Paul Little / Max Hardcore (imprisoned pornographer)

Full-time madman, charged with obscenity and known for alluding to “references” that lurk deep in the minds of the respectable middle class bourgeoisie. One hundred years from now, scholars will discuss the art of Max Hardcore the way we now discuss the works of Balthus and the nightmarish late years of Francisco Goya. Max should stick around long enough for virtual filmmaking to be realized. Real actors should not be in most of Max’s movies.

Camille Paglia (cultural commentator, alleged motormouth, and author of the superb book Sexual Personae)

Hunkered down in a women’s college in the 90s, the voice and writings of Camille Paglia saved me from the victimhood Kool-Aid that was served in the post-feminist era. Paglia, with nothing more than her pen has single-handedly and simultaneously liberated women, restored masculinity to men, and brought the joy back into sex!

Helen B Andelin
The Mormon author who wrote Fascinating Womanhood in response to Friedan’s Feminine Mystique. My all time favorite book, I treat Fascinating Womanhood pretty much as a secular bible. Paglia would totally beat me up for saying that.

Les Stroud (Survivor man)
Host of the show Survivorman, where survivor skills are actually tested in the wild, and not at the *cough* Sheraton, like the other Discovery guy. I think Les would be lots of fun to hang out with. He’s a pretty good musician too.

John McLaughlin (from the McLaughlin Group)
Because I have already met my favorite guitar hero John McLaughlin. In a lawsuit Linda Dean alleged that the Washington McLaughlin told her he “needed a lot of sex” and “would take care of every material desire” she had, and that he fondled her “intimately and against her will.” That sounds like something out of a Bon Scott AC/DC song. And coming from a conservative Washington bulldog, it doubly rocks! Of course, that won’t be the reason why it would be fun to hang out with shouting John McLaughlin, but…it can’t hurt.

Amanda Plummer (actress)
My favorite actress and one of the most underrated in movies. Known for playing characters on film, Plummer reserves her serious roles for the stage, doing everything from Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey to Shaw’s Pygmalion.

John Waters (Director, actor)

By now, it should be obvious that I think criminals are the life of any party. But no party would be complete without the one and only. The man who needs no introduction, John Waters, absolutely Divine!

Ann Coulter (Proven motormouth, Christian crusader and bomber of brown people)
Me and Ann Coulter having a conversation, assuming she doesn’t implode instantly, would sound like a Sam Beckett play read in reverse.

Jose Mestre (Guy from Portugal)
Assuming he is still alive, I would love nothing more than to go visit the Man without a Face. Aside from just wanting to say hi, I would love to hear him talk about everything else that he never got a chance to. When he says “My face is ugly, but my heart is not,” my ears become my heart.

Thinking about Jose Mestre (The Man Without a Face) always makes me reassess the concept of beauty. Do we have a threshold when we say “beauty is in the eye of the beholder?” How far can each of us go in the name of “inner beauty,” and when push comes to shove, would inner beauty really tip the balance on the scale when outer beauty is the counterweight? Looking at the brutality of bloggers’ comments concerning Mestre, it’s apparent that we won’t go very far at all.

I look at it another way: Jose Mestre makes me dispense all the tedious baggage of physical beauty - nothing but a societal construct at best. Without such distractions, I am able to focus on the search for beauty inside a fellow like Mestre. It really wouldn’t bother me at all to be around such a person 24/7.

What would bother me would be the stares.

The German filmmaker Michael Haneke (Caché, Funny Games, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance) once mentioned that American films continue the tradition of 19th century storytelling, while Europeans have come to distrust an approach they have seen manipulated by Nazi Germany during World War II. Camille Paglia also groups transsexuals, transvestites, and drag queens into shamans who exorcises secret longings of our culture. When I combine the two, what I come up with is a deconstruction of the thinly veiled facades we accept as civility and femininity.

People who don’t pass as normal (or recognizable genetic women, in our case) can easily see through the narrow confines of what the gawking public considers worthy of their inattention. Just as trans women have come to grasp the essential ingredients in a superficial femininity, we have also gained an understanding of just how little it takes to gain superficial acceptance. Cut your hair, wear dull clothes, grunt a bit about sports…Voila! “You’re an OK guy in my book.”

Armed with this knowledge then, how does one deal with the lack of civility in the general public? How does one manage each day getting from Point A to Point B when one’s Adam’s Apple clearly precedes one’s reputation? Aside from personal safety, I think the important thing to remember is that we human beings -despite our big brains and intellectual capacity - are essentially lab rats. We have patent Pavlovian conditioned responses to patent Pavlovian conditioned stimuli.

As a world traveler, I can only add that I have come to view power of words (ie. the audible insult) and language itself as a facade. When I didn’t understand a passing comment in Turkish from a group of locals in Istanbul, or Portuguese issued from Brazilian kids in Rio de Janeiro, I felt I was wearing a coat of Teflon where a vicious retort has as much teeth as a warm greeting.

In English-speaking areas however, I believe the most important tool we have is anticipation and preparation. If you are prepared for the worst case scenario- even when you know you look like a Hollywood movie star in the mirror before leaving your home- you will never be disappointed should that untoward moment arrive. I think heroes of resilience such as Jose Mestre and Mandy Sellars should be looked at by the trans* community as role models. If they can get up out of bed each day, go out there and deal with the same people we have to put up with, we can only trudge humbly behind.

It takes more than powdered foundation to get past the transparent public.

You need to anchor deep down into the bedrock.

People often vote for what they can get out of a candidate. Since you are at my website, I am going to assume you have some interest in GLBT issues - primarily transgender topics, even though to date, the gallery, has not contained any transgender topics.

For what politicians’ promises, panderings, and words are worth, I guess an analogy to the lesser of two evils is statement vs. silence, a vote versus a non-vote, Absolut vs. O’Doul’s. You have someone who promises to do something, or another person who doesn’t address it at all. Fine by me either way. Read and educate yourselves before you hit the polls. But whatever you do, VOTE!

Barrack Obama:

Sen. Barack Obama co-sponsored the Matthew Shepard Act (federal anti-hate crimes law) and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. When asked if he supports transgender inclusion, Obama said, “Absolutely. The transgendered community has to be protected. I just don’t have any tolerance for that sort of intolerance. And I think we need to legislate aggressively to protect them.”

from Presidential Hopefuls Sound Off on Gay Rights

Expand Hate Crimes Statutes
In 2004, crimes against LGBT Americans constituted the third-highest category of hate crime reported. Obama co-sponsored legislation to expand federal hate crimes law to include crimes perpetrated because of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Fight Workplace Discrimination and Promote Rights
Obama believes the Employment Non-Discrimination Act should be expanded to include sexual orientation and gender identity. Obama sponsored legislation in the Illinois State Senate that would ban employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

from Adobe PDF of Obama’s Campaign Statement

And Obama’s open letter concerning the GLBT at the Bilerico Project in Nov, 2007, addressing the appearance of Donnie McClurkin at one of his events. (read the comments!) Barack Obama: A Call for Full Equality

+++++++++++

John McCain:

Senator McCain opposes passage of the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act. [13] When the vote came up in the Senate, he cast a deciding vote against it. The measure failed by a 49-50 vote, with Senator McCain voting no.

Senator McCain voted three times against expanding the federal hate crimes law to include sexual orientation — in 2000, 2002 and 2004. [15] His position is the same position held by the ultraconservative groups and the religious right who opposed the bill as well as that held by President Bush. The White House, in a veto threat, called the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act — which would have added sexual orientation to the federal hate crimes law — “unnecessary.”

Asked by a student what he would do on “LGBT” issues and on “workers’ rights,” Senator McCain paused, seemingly confused by the question. Someone in the crowd
shouted out “lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.” “I had not heard that phrase before,” said Senator McCain of the abbreviation.

from
Senator John McCain: A Record of Opposing the Interests of GLBT Americans

It’s unfair to compare the two considering the age gap, though McCain hasn’t really changed that much in appearance. In terms of physical attractiveness, Obama is obviously more attractive physically.

However, my gauge for measuring attractiveness or sexiness in a man is based less on physical than ideological. Don’t get me wrong, I love almost everything Obama promises to do and what Democrats stand for. But for me, what makes a man attractive and sexy is his ability to stand up for what he believes in, speak his mind, regardless of peer pressure or popular approval. Obama strikes me as someone who will distance himself from anyone or event that will impede his way to the top or mar his reputation.

I always laugh at those guys who play heels (the bad guys) in wrestling. Walking down the ramp and having 30,000 people booing at you, chanting for your head on a stick. I once asked a date if he would be self-conscious of being seen with me on the streets (I’m 6 ft), to which he replied, “who cares what people think, they can go f*** themselves.” (That’s New York City High Society talking btw)

I was so dazzled I started unbuttoning my skirt right on the spot.

McCain would stand by me if we were together and teenage gangbangers were coming up the street. Obama, on the other hand, would probably consult a percentage pie chart of GLBT and transgender votes in his targeted demographics, and based on that, totally duck into a deli and leave me standing on the sidewalk alone.

I feel all the cool, trendy, Hollywood hipsters are chanting against McCain right now. Obama’s got a lot of free passes from the media and he’s been able to buy approval with mystery donations, so he’s definitely the “in” guy: all the young hip Hollywood crowd is behind Obama.

Does any of this visibly affect McCain? No. He sticks to his guns and even shows support for Bush (urrghh!) at the RNC despite his advisors telling him it’ll be suicide to do so. In a similar move, when all Obama’s advisors demand that Bill Clinton refrain from talking about the economic boom during his presidency (it’ll take the focus away from Obama) when he stumped for Barack at the Dem convention, Clinton said something like: “Dude, I’m the OG Bubba and I’ll say whatever I want to say.” Now that’s a real man!

I don’t always have to support what someone stands for, but I will ALWAYS salute him for standing up for what he believes in.

McCain has marched to the beat of his own drums, and that’s Über-sexy!

You can have all the physical proof of the goods in the world, but if you can’t back it up, you’re just another lame pretty boy to me.

Petit at some 1360 feet up in the skies on 1974, World Trade Center

Long-time friends of mine will tell you that as a child, one of the very first things I asked to visit on my first day in New York City was the World Trade Center. I have the pictures to prove it (at the age of 9). With twice the fervor I had when I got to Cologne Cathedral in Germany at 6, I begged and pleaded my entire family to walk up to the very edge of the Twin Towers where I can gaze up the corner edge in disbelief.

It’s true that there continues to be many architects and armchair aesthetes who frown upon the minimalism of Minoru Yamasaki, a Japanese architect who was chosen to design the Twin Towers in the 60s. Not only do the Twin Towers pay homage to the gothic tradition among Manhattan’s skyscraper alumni - Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building - it weds both the past (the soaring vaults and naves of European cathedrals) to the future (dehumanized aspirations of the mechanized era). It’s two gorgeous monoliths of silver (my favorite color): think of Kubrick’s Space Odyssey 2001 monoliths as shimmering mirrors that terminate in gothic vaults after 110 floors.

In the same way as the music of Philip Glass, Philip Corner, and Steve Reich open gateways within mirrors, the minimalism of the Twin Towers were visual meditations on the ecstasy of repetition. For years since 9/11, I have been trying to elaborate on just what it was that made the Twin Towers my favorite building in Manhattan.

If you look at my favorite cathedral, The Cologne Cathedral, and then the WTC, you’d conclude I was a size queen even at the age of 6. Happily, someone has come to my rescue regarding my two beloved towers: Philippe Petit, who walked across the Twin Towers in 1974 is captured in a documentary that will be coming out on dvd on Dec 2008.

In the meantime, his book To Reach the Clouds: My High Wire Walk Between the Twin Towers is an absolute delight. Petit put into words the wonder one feels at the endless soaring towers of the World Trade Center. To this day, my latent image of Yamasaki’s work remains in the void. One of the most emotional photographs in Petit’s book is a shot of New Yorker’s gawking upwards from the street in awe.

When I watch the events of 9/11 and the violence of the passenger planes crashing into the towers, my disbelief and shock is assaulted by the intense hatred man and his religion is capable of. The beautiful shot of the first time New Yorkers looked up at the Twin Towers in disbelief restores, for me, the intense inspiration man and his art is capable of.

I guess the thing that kept me away from A Love Story for decades was a piece of advice given to me by an English teacher when I was in my impressionable years: “Never use death as a dramatic device. Continuing on with life always has the possibilities of being infinitely more tragic.”

The other thing that prevented me from watching it was the impression I was going to have to sit through Andy Williams’s drippy vocalized version of the main theme.

I finally got around to watching it, based on a piece of information that overrode the previous two in importance. A phrase that is of utmost importance to the meaning of my existence: “There’s an awful lot of plaid in this movie“.

And to my somber delight, the movie had neither Andy Williams, nor the use of death as the main dramatic device. I’m amazed at how poorly Ali McGraw’s sweetness comes across in still photographs. Don’t get me wrong: I love big bushy dark eyebrows. I just thought she was a tad plain, judging from the movie posters. To my surprise, she’s adorably charming in motion. I can see why teenagers and teen fashion magazines continue to use Jennifer Cavalleri in their style lexicon. If you just go by the pictures, you’d be doing yourself a great disservice.

Now I finally understood how one night, my parents left home excitedly for the cinema while I sat on the floor playing with my stuff animals. A few hours later, they re-entered from outside, silently sad, with little to say to each other.

The movie has not aged in the least bit. Let’s all pray and hope Gwyneth and Hollywood doesn’t try to remake this one. All good things that are made to age well should be left alone.

Finally, a gallery update. I have been away at Asheville, North Carolina. Yes, I was there during the frightful gas shortage, where people were coming to fisticuffs at gas stations. Luckily I was nowhere near those meanies.

Anyway, here is one of my favorite outfits. Only to be worn in the presence of a man after the knot has been tied. All the great Titus 2 Bible teachings will be practiced (”they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands…to be obedient to their own masters, to be well pleasing in all things, not answering back.”)

Our family is Presbyterian, and I was raised as such, but I’m not a very religious person. Although I am looking for a good copy of the King James Bible and the English Standard Version for my library. The two can bookend and gang up on Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great.

The price of a wandering curiosity is that there’s often too much in-fighting on my bookshelves. That’s why I have removed my favorite books to a separate shelf. You know: Obey Him, The Submissive Wife, Fascinating Womanhood, Good Wives, Urban Japanese Housewives, The Pleasure is All Mine, and Pink Think.

My gentle readers know I do not advocate any of these dangerous activities for any woman other than myself. I think women in our society today should be free to pursue whatever goals they chose. If you want to be vice-president or you want to be a stay at home mom, well that’s just peachy. Friends who have met my father - when he was around - will tell you he was a nice, open-minded, liberal fella as well. I guess that’s why the whole traditional ultraconservative male fascinates me so much. For me, the guys who take charge, order for both of us at restaurants, have the opinions, make the decisions, and is the No.1 Kingpin and breadwinner has always made me swoon. (Not to be misread as BDSM masters, which I have no interest in whatsoever).

Take Aubrey Andelin’s advice in Man of Velvet and Steel:

Women must return to their homes and serve their men. They are thinking too much of what they want to do rather than what they ought to do.

The man who allows his wife to hold the reins is also to blame and has failed in his leadership. He must, if he is a man, overpower her and regain his position as head of the household.

She is dependent on his understanding, his unselfishness, and consideration. She is dependent on his cooperation in reaching her objectives. He holds power over her, over everything she holds near and dear. Every desire of her heart is tied to him and his rule over her. When a woman marries, she puts her faith and trust in her husband. She gives up her freedom and moves into his camp.

Can you say swoon, swoon, and swoon?!