Forgive me for posting the full article. I’ve lost the link.

FEMME FADE OUT

Femmes are out of fashion.

So posits my friend Coya, and I wonder if she might be right.

When she says “out of fashion” she means that feminine lesbians are now being marginalized in a new way. The gold standard, of course, has long been butch. Since I came out 13 years ago most lesbians try to be butch, especially when they first come out.

Some women were just always tomboys and the lesbian community welcomes them the way they are. But even women who love lace and frills often try out butchness. Partly I think that’s because being butch, even for a little while, is a good way to shake off the many chains that women wear. It’s a good way to learn that you don’t have to be vulnerable to be valuable,
that you don’t have to be pretty to be attractive, that you can be smart and strong and loud and women will not only be OK with that but they’ll want to sleep with you.

Also, short hair, a boyish way of walking, an eschewing of make-up, jewelry and high heels, makes us more recognizable to each other, and so it is not surprising that single lesbians might aim to proclaim their lesbianism as loudly as possible.

But for the first time that Coya or I can remember, not only don’t most younger lesbians want to be femmes but they don’t want to date them, either.

The butch-femme dynamic is all but dead for women under 30. I’m not crying about that. I myself always felt trapped when I was the femme half of a butch-femme couple. It’s not easy being the one who is always expected to be weaker, more emotionally savvy, less able to protect herself, more easily moved to tears. It was hard to keep my temper when women called me “Bambi” or compared me to various porn stars just because I happen to be well endowed.

These things are cyclical, of course. Another friend who came of age in the androgynous 1980s says she was horrified when she returned to Chicago to find butch-femme couples dominating the lesbian scene. It seemed to her an aping of heterosexual conventions, a trend that bought into the idea that only masculine people could be paired with feminine ones.

Yet with the demise of the butch-femme couple comes the general idea that femmes aren’t dating material.

Young women who once called themselves butch now call themselves tranny bois — and these tranny bois are mostly dating each other. This is interesting and I wonder why.

Are femmes not trangressive enough in our new gender queer era? Are they not playful enough with gender roles? Are tranny bois and androgynous lesbians worried that femmes are a trap that would force them into more traditional butch roles? Or is it really that young lesbians are simply not attracted to women who are feminine?

Coya says every time she brings her theory up, her friends shake their heads. They point to the rise of burlesque in Chicago. They point to the femme girls who coo over the Chicago Kings on stage. Clearly, they say, lesbians think curvy women, femme women, are beautiful. Clearly they are admired and desired. Look at how they cheer when they take their clothes
off!

But Coya says that this is not at all the same, and I agree with her. In both burlesque and drag king shows, femme lesbians are merely there as foils to heighten the masculinity of other lesbians.

No, when it comes to curvy, feminine women, lesbians may preach acceptance. We may pay lip service to it. After all, we have been acculturated to accept all body types, at least theoretically. We celebrate thin women, boyish women, curvy women, chubby women, stocky women, butch women, femme women, androgynous women. Every woman’s body, every woman’s gender identity, is OK with us.

Only it’s not. Neither Coya nor I are immune from this general social pressure. Coya, a self-described femme, prefers boyish women. I tend to date more androgynous women — usually women with boyish bodies who wear lipstick, or who slide easily between femme-ish and butch-ish. Think Alice on “The L Word.” Or really, any of the women of “The L Word,” who are too butch to be femme and too femme to be butch.

We might say that any woman’s body is OK with us but what we say is not who we date. We might have an aesthetic that says that curvy women are beautiful, but we are attracted to women who don’t have curves or who play them down. The gender queer contingent of the lesbian community are our current taste-makers — where they go, so go we all.

I myself have often dismissed women as potential dates by saying to my friends, “Nope, she’s too femme for me.” I look for a kind of toughness that I associate with being butch. But that’s just a lesbian cultural thing, because I could just as easily find toughness in a dominant femme, if I were looking for the right signals in the right places.

Femmes, I’m sure, will come back into fashion some day. But until they do, I wonder if our community will continue to make room for all the ways we express gender.

- - - - -

Jennifer Vanasco is an award-winning, syndicated columnist.
Email her at vanasco@chicagofreepress.com

We’ve lost Sue’s post on Jennifer Vanasco’s FEMME FADE OUT, which sucks! I know I enjoyed it, and I hope most of you did get to read it during the short time it was up.

I want to re-visit FEMME FADE OUT and share my reaction to it. Honestly, I was angry after three sentences. As soon as I watched the word femme turn into feminine lesbian I wanted to stop reading (but I did make it through the whole thing). It wasn’t because of the lesbian label either. Shockingly enough (to me, at least), I think I may be more comfortable with simply being called a lesbian than a feminine one. In fact, you can call me a carpet muncher if you must but I really do wish you’d stay away from feminine lesbian, especially if you see feminine lesbian and femme being one in the same.

Feminine lesbian puts me under a large umbrella. It puts me with women whose gender expression and sexual orientation match mine without giving regard to our desires. It places me with girly couples that lingerie shop together (for each other!). It puts me with women who “love all women.” I do not love all women. If fact, I love very few. I’m more than a little picky and if I don’t feel your butch will balance my femme, I’ll move right on. My gender orientation is an important part of me. Placing me with all feminine lesbians is insulting. It makes me even more invisible. Who would have thought that was possible?

It’s obvious that Jennifer Vanasco isn’t a femme from this piece. I don’t even know what she’s talking about when she goes into feeling trapped when she was the femme in a butch-femme couple. Maybe I just don’t understand the when I was a femme part. It’s not a part in a play. You don’t become a femme because you are with a butch and then it’s over when that relationship ends.

Near the end of FEMME FADE OUT, she discusses the characters in “The L Word” and women who slide between butch and femme or butch-ish and femme-ish. Again, I’m lost. Is her view on identity all about looks or clothes? That’s not what my identity is about. What am I missing? What’s butch-ish and femme-ish?

I will say she’s dead on with one thing. On femmes not being dating material, I agree that is the opinion of the majority of the lesbian community. Lucky for me, I don’t want to be with the majority of the lesbian community.

SEATTLE, WA: FTM 2005: A Gender Odyssey is a national conference for masculine-identified people who were assigned female gender at birth. It is place for us to gather together, share our lives, speak our truths, learn from one another, and celebrate our communities. This conference offers workshops addressing the practical aspects of trans lives, including: legal issues; intersections of race and gender;coming out to family and friends; transitioning at work; hormones and surgery; and dating, sex, and relationships. Accompanying events include a vendor fair, art exhibit, cabaret, all-ages dance, and much more.

Now in its third year, Gender Odyssey is expanding and moving! In order to accommodate our growing numbers, we will schedule a third full day of programming and relocate to the Washington State Convention and Trade Center. Most workshops and panels offered at this conference are selected from our attendees’ own programming submissions. In addition to other topics, we invite workshop proposals to address the issues of the older and/or post-transitioned FTM and the complex needs of families.

Gender Odyssey is pleased to have Kate Bornstein as our keynote speaker. Kate is a high femme, transsexual dyke performance artist, author, playwright, and social activist. The focus of Kate’s work has been locating and vigorously promoting common ground among outsiders of all sex and gender variations. She is the author of the groundbreaking books, Gender Outlaw and My Gender Workbook. Her current work includes a new solo show, “Kate Bornstein Is a Queer and Pleasant Danger” and a new book in the works, Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Teen Suicide.

This conference is also open to anyone interested in the topics to be covered. Whether you are new to thinking about your gender, well established in your chosen gender, FTM, trans, gender queer, MTF, part of an these communities because of the people you love, or simply questioning the role of gender in your life, FTM 2005: A Gender Odyssey is open to you.

FTM 2005 takes place September 2nd-5th, 2005 in Seattle, WA.

For more info, visit www.transconference.org.

ROCHESTER, N.Y., April 26 /PRNewswire/ — According to a recent nationwide survey, gay, lesbian and bisexual (GLB) adults who are online are more likely to book hotel reservations through online portals than heterosexual online adults. While fully 35 percent of heterosexual respondents said they don’t book travel online, fewer than one in five (18%) GLB respondents said they did not.

About one-half (52%) of GLB respondents were likely to visit Travelocity.com when making hotel reservations, compared to 40 percent of non-gay respondents. Gay and non-gay use of Expedia.com did not vary much (45 percent of GLBs said they are likely to visit Expedia.com compared with 40% of non-gays). Forty-six percent of GLB respondents are likely to visit Orbitz.com compared to 33 percent of non-gays.

Click here to read the entire press release.

Also, I just recently read a blog post titled Online Marketing - Orbitz and Go! (dated April 17, 2005) at Examining the Virtual Closet that’s worth a look for anyone interested in finance and marketing.

A lot of us have already heard of On the Down Low: A Journey Into the Lives of “Straight” Black Men Who Sleep with Men, but I never heard of Beyond the Down Low: Sex, Lies, and Denial in Black America until I read the interview with Keith Boykin below at seattlepi.com. And so I thought I’d share.

It seems down low behavior isn’t so cut and dried. Is it purely self-defined?

K.B.: No, I don’t think it’s purely self-defined … It’s actually a little bit more complicated than people realize.

When it comes to sexual orientation, is self-definition important? For example, if a man enjoys sex with both genders, does it matter that he rejects the bisexual label, given that he is one?

I don’t know that it matters that much as long as the man is honest with himself. … But there are three things to consider here — orientation, identity and behavior. For example, my orientation may be homosexual, my identity may be heterosexual and my behavior might be bisexual, and those things don’t have to be consistent.

Are rates of HIV increasing rapidly in the black community as a result of the down low?

There is a great deal of hype and hysteria, and we have no evidence that the down low is responsible for the rates of HIV in the black community. … Of the 7,000 black women in 2003 who had AIDS, 118 said that they had sex with a bisexual man. That’s less than 2 percent.

But if the down low were truly effective, how would they know if the men were bisexual?

Right. We don’t really know who is or isn’t on the down low. … There were almost 14,000 black men, twice as many as black women, who had AIDS (in 2003). If all these men were on the down low, we’d have much higher rates among women. There’s no research that has been done about the down low in a clinical setting. Also, the HIV/AIDS rates are not increasing in African Americans — they’re down 6 percent in the previous four years.

What is your message about the down low?

First, that we have to keep away from the hype. It’s a distraction from the real issues. It’s not new, it’s not just the black thing, and it’s not just a gay thing. The issue is how we can prevent the spread of the epidemic. … We have to understand that the down low distracts us from other personal actions … we’re not talking about needle exchange programs … we’re not talking about condoms in prisons … we’re not talking about health insurance for the 45 million Americans who do not have it, for the one out of five African Americans who don’t have health insurance. How do you encourage people to get tested for HIV if they don’t have insurance to treat HIV? It can cost $15,000 a year for medications and treatments. There are larger issues that are being swept under the rug or ignored as we’re hyping too much on the down low.

Were you surprised at the explosion of response to what you had to say, given that as you yourself stated, the down low had been the subject of media reports for several years before your book came out?

Yeah. I think it’s a really sexy topic. It appeals to so many people. It’s a mysterious group of men engaging in a clandestine sexual behavior … and women have reasons to be fearful of these men. I think the media hype is a troubling racist construction, a black male pathology. It demonizes black men as predators and black women as being diseased and undesirable, creating a battle of the sexes between black men and black women.

How do you feel about being the face of the down low?

I’m not. I think J.L. King (whose controversial down low book is what Boykin is disputing) is the poster boy for the down low. I’m the voice that’s challenging what he’s saying. He wrote a book, with no facts, no figures and he managed to scare a large percentage of the population … and it’s disturbing and disgusting to me that it came from a black man. … So if being the face of the down low means I’m someone who is explaining or refuting a lot of the misinformation, then I have no problem with that at all.

What else ya got for me? This:

*“Risk that more children will become homosexual through learned behavior”
*Gay civil unions become legal
*Adviser to Tory leader attacks gay sex laws
*The Marriage Debate Goes Multicultural
*Bill to legalize gay marriage clears first legislative hurdle
*Gates says Microsoft may reconsider its stance on gay rights bill
*Instant Message Puts Man At Gay Murder Scene
*City-County Council Rejects Sexual-Orientation Ordinance
*Former banker files gay discrimination claim
*Group visits LU to speak on behalf of gay students

As promised, I caught up with the Tranny Roadshow last night here in Richmond. When I first heard about the tour coming to Richmond, I was surprised (red state, Sextravaganza controversy and all) but after arriving at the trippy Nancy Raygun it all began to make a lot more sense. The crowd was mostly a younger, artsy crowd with a good mix of vcu students to round it out. I took some photos in the hopes that my editing skills would cancel out bad club lighting, but trust me - it didn’t, so I’m saving everyone the embarrassment.

Pronoun Pro opened the show with a kicking set to start things rolling. The next chunk of the show was dedicated to spoken word artists, including Red, Kelly Shortandqueer and our original hot boy, Reich (whose Australian accent is worth catching in and of itself). Baltimore artist and Richmond native Grady Challis stole the show, however, with his tour through Tranny Land piece. The multimedia piece pulled a rave review from the audience.

Zinester Jamez Terry was quick to capitalize on the crowd’s enthusiasm and shared stories that kept the crowd laughing and engaged. Unfortunately, we could only stay long enough to catch Citizen Rahne’s opening number, but since I’m queen link, you can visit her here and see for yourself why we’re really, really sorry we missed the breakfast song - her new cd is available at the show.

Sextravaganza, a health fair that will take place on Monday at George Mason University, is a one-day event aimed at educating students about sex. Sponsored by a pro-choice group, the event will have fifteen booths with information on abstinence, condoms, self-help exams, and sexual orientation.

I don’t know if it’s the fact that the fair is sponsored by a pro-choice group, or because it brings awareness to topics other than abstinence, but Virginia State Sen. Ken Cuccinelli isn’t happy.

Some excerpts from Make Way For ‘Sextravaganza’ at nbc4.com:

“They’re pushing a pro-sex agenda and an anything goes agenda,” Cuccinelli said. “And that’s what this Sextravaganza is all about.”

“You can’t have safe homosexual sex. There is no such thing and yet one of the sponsoring groups is the homosexual group on campus,” he said.

From Science Daily:

DURHAM, N.C., April 20 (UPI) — A deadly fungus that mates only with members of the same sex is still able to reproduce, report Duke University Medical Center researchers in North Carolina.

Infection by Cryptococcus neoformans can kill humans and a better understanding of how the fungus spreads might help counter its lethal power.

In fungus, sexual identity is determined by so-called “mating type loci,” genes arranged contiguously, but which typically do not span an entire chromosome. C. neoformans has two mating types.

Researchers found that, in C. neoformans, members of the same “sex” type can mate and produce offspring. The ability may help the fungus spread even if the balance between the sexes is off.

“The findings suggest for the first time that the fungus has developed a novel type of sexual cycle, allowing sexual reproduction between members of the same mating type,” said Dr. Joseph Heitman, one of the study investigators.

“That ability might confer an advantage for the fungus because patients infected with it predominantly harbor a single mating type, reducing the possibility of normal fungal sexual reproduction,” Heitman said.

A description of the findings appears in the April 21 issue of Nature.

Copyright 2005 by United Press International. All Rights Reserved.

I’m pretty set on not becoming a mother (at this time, anyway), but if a woman got me pregnant I’d be keeping that baby.

The Rocket Man is ready to become the marrying man.

Elton John and longtime partner David Furnish plan to wed in a civil ceremony in England after gay civil partnerships become legal on Dec. 5, a spokesman for the singer said Monday.

read more

What else ya got for me? This:

*Officials block gay film festival
*Swedish Gay Couple Win Discrimination Suit
*Lesbians in court win over kiss
*Mormon, gay advocates compromise on Hawaii housing discrimination bill

From Boston IMC:

Tuesday, April 26, 7 PM, Hauser Hall 104

How does the law define man and woman? What are the implications for people who do not fit neatly in those categories or who go from one to the other? How are transgender people treated with respect to marriage, discrimination, sex-segregated systems like prisons and shelters, etc.?

Presented by Cole Thaler, an expert in transgender law who recently accepted the position of transgender rights attorney with Lambda Legal.

Free food.

For more information:
contact Noah, nlewis (AT ) law.harvard.edu

Former Beatles manager Brian Epstein engaged in homosexual acts with one member of the legendary band - the gay pop mogul’s ex-aide claims in a sensational new book.

Joanne Peterson is working on ‘There’s a Beatle in my closet’, which will expose “revelations of intimacy” with at least one of the Fab Four, but she refuses to reveal which member.

read more

I’m sure I’ll be getting back to this after the book’s release.

Does anyone know why Amazon already has the book listed, but as out of print?