Category Archives: Homophobia

Get thee hence to the Straight Path

There’s some new anti-homo Christian propaganda out with the charming title “It’s Not Gay.” It shows former gays talking about the men living the the twilight world, and the unsavory side of homosexual life that gets sanitized from the press. I should be angry, but I find it pathetic, and I feel sorry for the x-gays losing the chance to have fulfilling sex by easing on down the Straight and Narrow. But I admit, I had to crack up at this review:

“This is the a very good video. I ordered this and my son had a girl friend the next day. I couldn’t believe it. I love the part in the movie of the former gays. I wonder if they are still on the straight path?”

I wish I had a girlfriend tomorrow. Boyfriends are too easy to get, they’re not a challenge at all. It’s like the difference of getting into grad school compared to getting into community college. It’s late, my metaphors are falling apart.

I’m applying to the Toronto thing tomorrow, I was really good about it. The last time I was applying and missed the deadline I was hole punching in a frantic and running around shrieking. This time I just had to print stuff out and fill out the form again. However, I did hit a snag when I went to package it all up. My support material walked away. Two unassuming VHS tapes just decided to bugger off. I’ve been tripping over them since October, but now that I’m ready to actually use them, they’re awol. Support material isn’t supposed to do that to me. Support material is supposed to listen to my needs!

Anyway, I still need to get this in Xpress post tomorrow at lunch, but it’s late and I’m giving up the hunt until the morning when they will be in their places with sunshiny faces.

My tattoos are at the itchy part, aaaaahhhh! I keep scratching them without meaning to. Most of the scabby has already fallen off, it’s just those last bits that are just hanging on, I can see a couple places that might need touch ups, but they look pretty good. I can’t see my neck one very well though.

Neglectful Me

There are a few things I need to blog about in the next few days. I have to take Judith Halberstam to task about something she said about queer youth, but I have to finish reading the essay before I go ahead, obviously. I wanted to talk about feminist transphobia and the tyranny of white based feminism, mostly due to some nasty ass blogger wars between some really HATEFUL white feminists and feminists of colour who seem to be going up to bat for transgendered people (and some are trans), but just reading all the threads seems to be taking up to 72 hours, and I have editing to do this week. I also really really need to say some stuff about Saddam’s execution, because I think it’s going to define the next year in Iraq and the events which will unfold. All I’ll say now is that watching that crap happen, I was just thinking “Oh wow, that was a REALLY bad idea you guys.”

Mostly what I’ve been neglecting is this incredibly scary news story going around. In short, nazi american scientists have been experimenting on homosexual rams and have come fairly close to altering their sexual orientation. And among the crowd of highly visible ‘mo’s, the only one who has come forward publically to take this to task and call it what it is, genocide, is Martina Navratilova. Why isn’t Rosie saying something instead of bashing Asians with her ching chong talk? Why is Ellen just sitting back and interviewing blatantly closeted homos? It boggles the mind.

So yes, genocide. Ironically I was talking about this with my mum and she said the world would end before it mattered that genocide towards queers was happening. I told her she wouldn’t say the same thing if Aboriginals were being carted off to death camps.

Apparently they are hoping to make a patch for pregnant women to wear which will keep them from having a gay kid. Ugh. It’s so disgusting, and yet of course no one will think it’s wrong, because eugenics doesn’t matter when queers are involved. Incidentally eugenics is also societally approved for mentally ill people.

I’m not sure WHY it is so hard to get people to understand eugenics. Because it has science behind it, people are more assuaged than if you see a line of queers standing against a wall in front of a firing squad. Eugenics seems more palatable. Who will miss the life of a minority if that life never has a chance to happen? I could also get into eugenics about the mentally ill, which my family supports incidentally, but I’m not going to go into that in this post.

If they really do insist on making a No Gay patch, is must be possible for them to make a No Heterosexual patch. I don’t think either is a good idea, but it would make an interesting movement to demand a method of eradicating heterosexuality in children if you so desired. If they’re really not homophobic, I expect my No Het patch to be readily available on the market in five years when I may have children.

I hope more dialogue and action happens around this. Here’s the story from PageOneQ.

The Butch Jobseeker

As long as I’m talking about butch experience that other people, even femmes, completely fail to recognize, I thought I would talk about the personal economic impact of having a butch identity. Also I was inspired by a blog from Cameron at Gender 3.0 (which you can find under the surf with me section here).

There are some people of colour who sneer at queer rights activists because we can hide, while their difference is obvious (which is a stupid idea because I’m a POC and I’m not obvious). Okay, maybe some queers can hide, but not fuckin’ many. And especially not butches. And being butch is not a fashion decision, believe it or not. I don’t stand in front of my dresser pondering on whether to go with something girly in the extreme or my standard boy clothes (jeans, t shirt, bunnyhug, sneakers). Even when I do girl drag I still feel completely butch and miss having belt loops to stick my thumbs in.

I do, however, spend a loooong time trying to decide on my clothes for job interviews. Everybody does this, but not with the same issues as a butch woman. I have to balance my identity with corporate expectations of gender normativity, and no matter how carefully I choose my clothes, I fail the gender normative test every goddamn time. And I can so tell. The employer can be all excited about my qualifications but as soon as my butch self walks into the office for the interview, it’s over. And not only that, but both s/he and I know it’s over and for what reason, but we still go through the motions. They ask a few questions just to make me feel like I’m being considered, and then it’s over, shake hands, we’ll call you, and an hour of my time is wasted and I leave feeling humilated and without any method of redress.

So yeah, hard time finding jobs. The ones I do get are usually with people who know me. Sometimes butch dykes will tell each other where the few employers are in town that are dyke friendly. If this degrading job discrimination wasn’t bad enough, most people in my life (who are not butch) pester me about when I’m going to find a job, as if it’s in my control, like I can just walk into an office and say “I’m here, I will be working out of that corner office with the windows, thanks!” I’ll mumble something about being butch and that making it difficult to find work, but they don’t accept that as an explanation, because they don’t see butchphobia because they don’t know how to recognize it.

I always had a theory that being butch hinders my employment options, but I didn’t feel backed up in my theory until Cameron from Gender 3.0 said there are studies which show butch women have lower average income than femmes. It blows that whole theory out of the water that butch women are pretending to be men to access male privilege. Tell me honestly how many mainstream people treat butch women with the same esteem as bio men. And while femmes have a lot of struggles for sure, being gender normative is a huge privilege that I will never have. I had one girlfriend who totally recognized the privilege she had being high femme, which was nice, but not many other queer women recognize it. I can see it when I talk to femme friends who are job hunting, they end up with new jobs at a much more frequent rate than I, they get more interviews, better pay, better treatment. They don’t have someone go cold when they go for the interview.

Now I’m trying to keep myself steadily working on my own film career, which in some ways is good, some ways not so good. I’m still butch, still talking about being genderqueer in my films, even if I’m not saying it out loud. And I’m not entirely convinced yet that Telefilm is going to give me a million dollars to make a film about a butch woman in a psych ward. In fact, I keep getting turned down by various places when I pitch this freakin’ film. And if I won’t get funding for this, I’m dubious that I will get funded for a film about hunting down a white murderer of aboriginal women and having an extended beheading scene at the end. But who knows, maybe I will end up with like, six screenplays and one day people will be less discriminatory and someone will actually want to produce them.

Or maybe they will end up dusty in an attic, I will die penniless and alone, and fifty years hence some feminist will unearth my manuscripts and call me a forgotten genius and I’ll end up in some art history text. Poor Thirza. She was too many things too many people hate and no one ever knew what an awesome story teller she is.

And what will I do for a living? Call centres? Dear lord, someone enforce laws against discriminating on someone based on gender, and I mean all genders, not just Men and Women.