I was going to wait to do this until I hit my four year anniversary of blogging. This blog actually started out as something completely different, but I erased that one because I was crazy.
The Horrors Of Personals Fitting my identity into the little check boxes of online personal ads.
Butch-Femme Misconceptions In which I blow away percieved notions of butchness by talking about being pounded with big dildos and my penchant for frilly lacy girly undergarments.
I've Heard The Crabs Screaming The ethics of eating crab, Thirza gets squeamy about killing things, and a terrible rumour about vegans and placenta munching.
Message From A Scraling Yucca Mountain, sacred First Nations site and now Nuclear Waste Storage facility.
Survival Tactics How to stay unscathed by the stigma of mental illness. Ironically after the incident in question happened I did get in trouble at my workplace for having a disability. I later quit. I'm still in the process of getting a human rights complaint together, but people I know keep dying and stuff.
Youtube and Me, Happy Times My favorite Youtube videos including French and Saunders, Margaret Cho, and Peaches w/ Iggy Pop.
Thank God For The Library All the books I read on my holiday road trip, a pic of me at Arches smoking a clove cigarette, and the indignity of taking poop to a cute girl.
C'mon and Drug Me Up My best friend Margaret's mental health bedside manner, dealing with The Snuffits, and by the way, I am still looking for a contingent to do an action of peeing on Ewan Cameron's grave. In fact, I should get a list together of people's graves I intend to piss on.
HK119 HK119! HK119!! HK119!!! I still don't have this cd, eeeehn! I love HK119!
Killer Condom This is my favorite movie and I don't have it either! Okay, obviously I have some internet shopping to do.
Hell in a Handbag Blogger drama, what's a "good" feminist and why do you get to say what a feminist is? Fuck off with sticking me in your fucking ghettos, and why oh why are we all supposed to hate Courtney Love?
Medical Marijuana and My Mood Disorders Thoughts on the debate around psychiatric illness and the use of medical marijuana. By the way, I tried to join a Yahoo group for medical marijuana users and they wouldn't let me because I identified as bipolar. Dorkasses.
The Hottest Biracial Bitches Musing on biracial identity, and wondering about it's link to my penchant for hot bisexual women. Living beyond binaries is sexy dammit.
What the Fuck Is That? UFO Sighting This was a goddamn true story and it STILL scares the shit out of me. I have no idea what I saw that night, but it looked like something was coming from another dimension.
I was going to list some of my favorite December posts, but they're right down there. The only thing that needs reiterating is: Nicole, YOU REALLY need to find another merkin. Yours is way too high maintenance just for some sham het love!
2006 was an okay year I guess, for me personally. Some good stuff happened, and some bad stuff happened, there was a death in the family, I had to quit a job that was making me sick, I got two animal friends, someone kissed me, I got into Transmediale, but not into Berlinale. Two books came out that talked about my work. I got to know my family again. I left a mice infested slum apartment back in Vancouver. I did enough mushrooms to trip out. I got a couple more body mods. I finally see the allure of marriage and children. I'm learning to self-reference and I trust my standards and values a lot more. I saw a UFO, and was terrorized by a knocking ghost, and have spent time in the company of a poltergeist AGAIN because once wasn't enough apparently. I finished my screenplay, yeah, that's a big deal, even if it's not a final draft yet. I'm adjusting to using the internet to do most of my interacting with like minded people since I live in SASKATOON!!! Aaaaaah! I live in Saskatoon!!! Oh bugger, I've had to nurse the links on this post back to health THREE TIMES!! I think that's a hint I should just hit publish already.
Happy New Year!
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Kidman needs a better merkin
And that's all I'm going to say about that.
Straight people Parties
Eeeenh! I ended up at a straight person party last night, I mean UBER straight, as in a flood of spritzheads came tumbling out of a clown car and then chattered very loudly for a very long time about nothingness. I'm not sure how straight people do it, but they can have like, a two hour conversation about NOTHING! What the hell? It's kind of amazing to watch, if dreadfully boring.
I have a new favorite film magazine. It used to be Filmmaker, which is a really good magazine, but with a specific way of looking at film, more of a how was it made, why did you write it this way kind of approach. I used to get a magazine from Kodak that was quite excellent in it's own funny way. It was like "Oooh, House of Flying Daggers was shot with a 55mm lens and on 800T film," kind of thing. Which is good in it's own way, if you're shopping around for the perfect speed of film to get a certain look. Actually I should get Kodak to send me that again. And then I was into Res, because it was more about digital film and video culture and a bit hipper, and the layout was spectacular, but it only comes out four times a year. Creative Screenwriting is okay. But CineAction, that is my new favorite. It's not all "this is a 400 speed film" or "he wrote the entire script sitting on the toilet" or anything, it's actually a critical look at films. This issue analyzes V for Vendetta, examines the work of Michael Moore, and links pedophile hysteria with a Post 9/11 world as seen in Palindromes.
We got my dog a shock collar for his barking, but it's not working, I think it's not on properly.
I also recently got a double issue of Social Text composed of queer theory essays including the amazing Judith Halberstam writing about White Masculine Gay Male Shame. I love Judith Halberstam. I used to have Female Masculinity and it was my favorite book about being butch, but my mom's cat peed on it and no one can save it now. So in the garbage it went while I cried and cried.
Sometimes when I'm around very young people I feel like a pervert with a corrupting influence. I don't know why. Maybe because they are young straight vanilla people and I am very much not.
I bought out the lesbian vampire erotica at McNally Robinson. I'm surprised there's actually a decent queer section in Saskatoon. When I was a teenager I had to get the bookstores to order in all my lesbian erotica. And a book with me in there is on the shelves. Even a picture!
I got a nice artist fee from being part of a DVD collection of video art by women which is being marketed to universities. Which is why I could afford the freakin' EXPENSIVE E bra.
Oh man, I'm trying to watch Party Monster, but jesus christ it annoys me. I haven't been this annoyed with a film since the last time my deadbeat cousin crashed our livingroom and spent 72 hours watching every boy film on the movie channels. I nearly hit him in the head with a remote control and whacked him around with a broom. Male entitlement pisses me off. Anyway, I'm going to start watching Art School Confidential instead, Party Monster may remain forever unwatched.
Friday, December 29, 2006
E!!!!???
You know those shows that people like Oprah do, where they fit a whole bunch of women for bra's and they all come out in new bras going wow, I'm an A cup, I'm a DD cup! and whatever. Well, my mum took me to get fitted today and I'm an E cup!!! Holy fuck, I never thought that would happen. I thought I was a C cup, or maybe a D, but I never ever thought I could be an E!
Anyway, I have a really nice sexy bra now that cost way more than I usually pay. It fits like a glove. A boob glove. I love having breasts, even if I am mannish. I hope someone sleeps with me because I just want to show off the bra.
I did mushrooms a couple nights ago and holy fuck was I fucked up. At one point I was saying "Yeah, the things I hate most are the squids, they can fuck off, what did they ever do for us except bob around and shit. They're good in calamari though. Hey, do I exist? Wow, this floor feels cool. And everything is like glue. Check out this lip balm!" Our poor friend Preston was REALLY fucked up and just doing the same thing for forty five minutes, shaking, and passing out. Turns out he accidentally took SIX grams of mushrooms. And then I thought someone was cute and then found out they're in HIGH SCHOOL!!! Yeah, I felt way beyond being a cougar. I would fuck a nineteen year old, but beyond that I get nervous.
I have a tattoo appointment in a few days! Hurrah! I'm getting three of the tattoos I wanted done in the same session. My biohazard tattoo and my two nautical stars on my forearms. I know I'll be all "oweeya!" after, but it's okay. I love tattoos, and even the whole process of subjecting myself to extended periods of pain is fun in a "look at me and my pain threshold" butchy macho kind of way. Now I just have to end up with enough money to do my Virgin of Guadalupe and my jaguar spots.
I have no idea what I will do for New Years. Try to find someone who wants to see my bra? I don't know. Get drunk and do drugs for sure. I'm looking into moving into a housing co-op out in Sutherland. For non-Saskatoon folks, Sutherland used to be a small town until it got absorbed in Saskatoon sprawl. It is also where a murdered skeleton was found recently dating back to the 1920's. Okay, murdered woman, you can't murder a skeleton. She turned into a skeleton. And she was thrown in a well, so apparently her soft tissues turned into wax. Ew.
E is for Ew.
It's also for Exciting, and Erotic!
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
It doesn't matter, because I'm burnt
Cream Pan and I share the same secret.
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
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.
Trying to get out of being stone
Stones are interesting things. People ignore them all the time, or kick them around, or use them to hurt people. They don't think about how old a stone is, or that it's alive and has it's own soul. Once in a while I meet a stone that wants to go traveling with me. I like it when that happens, they're good company. You just carry them around until they let you know they're ready to sit someplace for a while, maybe back where you found them, maybe somewhere new. Stones deserve to be respected, they have feelings like anything else.
Same with people who turn stone. I suppose it's a term for post traumatic stress disorder that is specific to the lesbian community. I know femmes can be stone too, but mostly I only know the subjective experience of being a stone butch. I think a lot of butches can wind up being stone. It's a process, I started going stone early, and then shit just accumulated until I am where I am today.
Stone butches are probably the ones you most hate, if you're butch phobic. We're the ones that seem hard and cold and suspicious. It's not that we're really like that, it's just that we learn after enough pain that in order to survive you have to keep from showing emotions. Even if someone is hurting you all over again, you just go away and try to maintain this impervious exterior. Getting diagnosed with a mood disorder put the final nail in the coffin of expressing emotions. I mean, when your emotions are considered pathological and grounds to be incarcerated in an abusive prison, you don't often express them unless you know for a fact the person you're with isn't going to toss you into the psychiatric hoosegow.
I don't like being stone. I doubt anyone does. There are a lot of different ways to be stone. The commonality between all types is a fear/avoidance thing about being touched, specifically due to triggers. Touch is supposed to be the most important thing for the mental well being of a person, but being stone shuts a lot of that out. Some people can touch me though, without me cringing or shrugging them off or slapping the shit out of them. Not many, and I really have to trust them, and you'd be surprised who I don't trust in my life.
Coming out of the hospital I could feel myself going into the most intense type of stone anyone could be in. I sometimes wonder if a touch or a hug or just someone acknowledging I went through extreme emotional torture would have stopped the process. It's really curious. Unfortunately the majority of my friends roundly rejected me after I got released, so I guess we will never know.
It's sad, I guess I feel like parts of me have died every time I've gone more and more stone. Maybe they have, they've changed me anyway. Or maybe those parts just went somewhere deep inside until it's safe to come out. I dissociate a lot. I don't know if I have DID, but I know it happens. When it does it feels like going to a dark quiet spot in the back of me, kind of like hiding under a bed. And then auto pilot takes over. I don't know if people can see it from the outside, who ever auto pilot is she knows me really well and can pull off pretending to be me. I can watch her talking or experiencing something but I'm completely disconnected from her. When she's having a conversation it feels like listening from underwater, and I have terrible recall of what was said. And then sometimes I dissociate and it takes auto pilot a while to kick in, which I would think would look like an obvious glitch but I don't think people are perceptive enough to recognize it.
I'm lucky in that I'm not completely stone, there are some people I trust, and there is at least one person right now I feel safe being close to. It's kind of a relief to know I can express and receive physical affection. In fact, it's the first time I've been touched lovingly since I left the psych ward. It feels like coming home to myself. I think people who aren't stone can't understand the feelings involved. I guess it's just that after all of that stuff happened, it's amazing to be recognized as a sexual desirable person who needs to be held and kissed and coyly flirted with. It's not something just anybody can do with me, for sure. I wasn't sure anybody would do it with me actually, which is really scary. I hate to say I need a woman to be saved, but it's true that getting out of being stone means finding someone who's touch is actually desired, and usually that's a lover. I don't know that this person will ever be my lover, but she can touch me and I don't cringe or feel weird or anything, I just feel like I did before shit happened to me.
I don't know how else to explain being stone. But there's a song by Evanescence that describes it perfectly.
Saturday, December 23, 2006
A Message From AIM Just In Time For Christmas
I'm sleepy, but I wanted to throw this statement from AIM on my blog for something to consider when you go to movies over the holidays. I don't normally support NOT seeing a movie just because it's problematic, but in this case I would advise people to wait until it's on video or tv, just because paying to see it makes the capitalist system justify racism. Yeah, so no Apocalypto.
**************
Holocaust Denial In America December 19th 2007 David Duke, in a Holocaust conference in Tehran, was big news in America as he accepted an invitation by the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In Duke’s speech, he said the purpose of the conference was“ to offer free speech for the world’s most repressed idea, Holocaust revisionism…and the condemnation of the shameful imprisonment of European scholars and academics who simply dare to state their opinions of historical events that occurred over 60 years ago.” Duke went on to say “ I as a former American elected official will be condemned by the Zionist influenced press in America for coming here in peace and friendship to a nation that they hate: the nation of Iran.” Overwhelmingly, the media in America condemned the Tehran gathering and labeled it the “Holocaust Denial Conference” but on the question of the many other Holocausts, the American media remain stunningly silent. For indigenous people, Holocaust Denial in America is nothing new. Revisionist history is nothing new, but rather it is big business supported and financed by multi-nationals like Walt Disney and Hollywood A-list actors like Mel Gibson. They will not go to jail for distorting history or justifying the slaughter of Mayans. They will make millions of dollars in their revisionist movie, Apocalypto. Mel Gibson’s version of Mayan history is based on the lies of Spanish conquistadors and men like Bishop Diego de Landa, the Franciscan monk who, on July 12, 1562, burned hundreds of Mayan codices and over 5000 Mayan “cult” images. He later tried to justify his crimes, his Inquisition and torture of Mayan people by stating he had found evidence of human sacrifice. The real savages, the Spanish Conquistadors, hacked off the limbs of Mayans for not bringing in enough gold and silver ransoms. They justified their savage crimes by deliberate lies depicting the Mayans, Incas and Aztecs as sub humans who sacrificed humans to the sun god. In this movie Mel Gibson does the same thing. He depicts the Mayans as sub-human, grotesquely violent, and incapable of compassion. The American Indian Movement condemns Apocalypto as revisionist history, in the same vein as Rambo, John Wayne westerns, and hate inciting movies such as G.I. Jane.
The historical evidence of the slaughter of Jewish people in the Nazi death camps of World War II is irrefutable. Any movie or documentary that denies that evidence should be roundly condemned and censored. No movie should profit from justifying the killing of Jewish people in the Nazi death camps. The American Indian Movement supports the Jewish people in seeking justice for their Holocaust and the recovery of gold and other valuables stolen from the Jewish people during that Holocaust. The American Indian Movement condemns Walt Disney Inc and Mel Gibson for profiting from the distortion and revisionist history in the Holocaust of the Mayan people. The American Indian Movement urges world governments to initiate recovery of all stolen gold and silver taken from the Mayan, Inca and Aztec people. AIM condemns the piracy of so called “Spanish” doubloons recovered from sunken ships and calls for all recovered gold and silver to be returned to the rightful indigenous owners. AIM further condemns the Catholic Church and its institutions for unrepentant theft of Mayan, Inca and Aztec gold and silver, which is hoarded in Christian idols in Europe. AIM urges nations worldwide not to stop there, but to demand that the United States restore to the rightful owners the more than $14 billion of gold stolen from the Black Hills in South Dakota, to the Dakota people. The American Indian Movement acknowledges and thanks the small groups of activists and supporters who have protested the movie Apocalypto and condemns this movie as an act of greedy profiteering, of revisionist history and justification of the slaughter of indigenous peoples. To our indigenous brothers and sisters in Central and South America who continue to struggle with intense poverty deriving from entrenched colonist policies, we offer our support and apologize for this outrage of a movie which is being pushed, financed and supported by Holocaust Denial in America.
Written by Chief Terrance Nelson, Roseau River Anishinabe First Nation, American Indian Movement Board Member Telephone # 204-782-4827, email chieftnelson@rrafn.com Approved by American Indian Movement for general distribution
Friday, December 22, 2006
A different kind of child abuse
There's a scene in the excellent movie Boogie Nights that always makes me cry. It's when the future Dirk Diggler comes home after being wooed by the porn director and is confronted by his mother. She tells him his girlfriend is a whore, he'll never amount to anything, and when he starts getting ready to run away screams that he owns nothing, everything is hers, and proceeds to destroy his possessions.
I didn't have something exactly like this happen to me, but pretty close.
Even since I moved out of the house, I've been on a pretty long journey to figure out why I turned out feeling so depressed, suicidal, fucked up, etc. I started unravelling parts of my life and examining them. I had to name certain things that happened to me, which was really difficult. One of these was the fact that I suffered a lot of emotional abuse as a child. People often don't know what emotional abuse is, or the insideous long term effects it has on a person. The only childhood abuse that gets any validation is sexual or physical abuse. I actually think the abuse I went through as a child is what kicked off my long struggle with depression.
With Christmas coming up I'm remembering a common past time among my mom, uncles, and auntie. All the cousins would be sitting around trying to be happy when one would be singled out for a prolonged ridiculing until they were on the verge of tears. It was bad enough to be abused like that by a group of adults who should know better, but to do it in front of our other cousins made it even more humiliating. Eventually when we had Christmas gatherings, the cousins were just really quiet, sneaking away to socialize with each other then coming back and trying to be as invisible as possible to avoid the annual ridiculing. It wouldn't work, some kid would be trying to learn to be an individual and have different hair, or unconventional clothes, or piercings, and they would get picked on pretty severely. I'm actually surprised no one flipped out and started wailing on an abuser.
I had a lot of various kinds of emotional abuse happen to me, like being made to feel ugly, being "teased" until I cried and then being told I was too sensitive or that they were only joking. The worst though was when my mom decided I was out of line or was mad at me for some reason. She would ignore me, sometimes for a week at a time. She'd go to her room and not answer when I tried to talk to her, she would sit around in the living room and pretend I wasn't there, we had completely silent dinners. I would be reduced to writing notes to her and pushing them under the door, and trying to decide between running away or committing suicide. As you can imagine, this all did lead me to have a very suicidal childhood. I didn't hear of this happening to others until a friend of mine talked about being abused the same way. Both of us were children of single parents, so as you can imagine, being ostracised from the love of the only parent around was pretty shattering to a child. I only had my pets for a constant source of love, and even then they were used in this sick cycle of abuse, she would either threaten to have them put down or to take them away from me.
My only real outlet for talking about my feelings was writing my daily diary entries, which she routinely read and ridiculed me about. As an adult when I started writing in online diaries in order to reach out and connect with people dealing with the same issues as me, she also read my diary and defended her actions when I would get angry by saying if I was writing a diary on the internet it meant anyone could read it, including her. Nevermind that I was writing anonymously and dealing with some pretty heavy issues like her abuse ("you always write about hating your mother"), my sexual assault, various revelations about my sexual interests, trying to do healing.
It was hard enough being abused at home, but school wasn't any better. Being an abused kid automatically makes you a target for bullying, so I had a pretty shitty school life. I hated school, but I didn't like home either. I was one of those kids who wandered around alone a lot. Suicide was an escape hatch, I didn't like my world and I was a kid with no options except to quit life and hope to god there was something on the other side. Later in high school I even seriously considered becoming emancipated.
I didn't really start healing from my abusive childhood until I left home and found friends I could talk to about these things, cry with, listen to their stories, read about toxic families. I never felt safe confronting my mom about my childhood until I went manic, and then she threw me on a plane back to Montreal and helped get me committed. As you can imagine, I never felt safe confronting her about it again. And in a way, I know it won't make a difference. She'll never see her behaviour towards me as abusive, she'll deny certain things happened, she'll ridicule me for letting it bother me so much.
Recently she told me she was depressed so I had to be nice to her. I didn't know what to say. I would like to be nice to her, but then I see certain things she still does that just fills me with anger now instead of sadness. Ever since I started dating as a teen she's started a long campaign of hating everyone I love and trying to turn me against them. It's really depressing. One older friend told me she was probably jealous that she would lose my love if I had a sweetheart. But it's getting to the point where I feel like one day she's going to make me choose between whatever woman I love and her, and I know I won't choose her.
The one good thing is that the people in my generation, except for the ones who have become lifelong alcoholics, are pretty cognizant of how we were all treated as kids. We talk about it and try to figure out ways to heal or just to avoid continuing the cycle when we're parents. We try to avoid the long standing grudges that are rampant in my parent's generation. I know we won't be perfect, even I notice myself doing the dreaded silent treatment at times, and I always feel ashamed and try to cut it out.
Maybe the hardest thing about dealing with my past is being saddled with the Crazy label. I was Crazy when I confronted my parents about abuse and neglect, and now that I have a history of hospitalization I know I'm vulnerable to being hospitalized again for stepping out of line or pissing someone off or just going through an emotional moment of healing around events of my past. Anytime I talk about my feelings I'm asked if I took my medication, and when I fly off the handle (something common to abuse survivors and people with rape-related PTSD) I'm accused of being a terrible broken bipolar person. My view of the world is consistently invalidated by the diagnosis given to me by people who know nothing of TLE, abuse survivors, rape survivors, or people suffering PTSD.
And I'm tired of not talking about this just because I'm worried it will hurt my family. They weren't worried about hurting me. I would hope they would take this information and become more loving, compassionate people with insight into their actions, but I know it will probably be taken as an affront to their parenting skills and me just being mean.
What really made me realize what my abuse was, was when I dated an emotional abuser. She was charming, everyone thought she was amazing, but she was undermining me, invalidating me, taking me to parties with people I didn't know and then abandoning me, and then eventually telling me I was a horrible lover. She even went so far as to bite me so hard I was trying to punch her head to get her away and ended up with nerve damage in my neck. Luckily I was seeing the emergency suicide counsellor I saw for two years and she helped me see that I had an abusive lover and it wasn't my fault. I started learning about emotional abuse and seeing how it impacted my childhood.
Once I was talking to a friend who was an incest survivor about my abusive childhood and I was trying to say it wasn't as bad as somethings that happened to kids. He told me not to minimize my abuse, it doesn't matter what happened or didn't happen, if I ended up with bruises or not, it was still abuse and it still had a major impact on who I became. In fact, studies have concluded that of all the types of child abuse, emotional abuse is the worst.
I don't want to live in a rut caused by abuse, it sucks ass. I want to grow as a person and be capable of love without fucked up shit accompanying it. I think I am. My closest friends tend to be people who have also been abused in various ways, whether they name it or not. I wish my parents could get out of their own rut of abusive patterns. I know they're only repeating the cycle laid out by their own parents, but I don't think repeating cycles should be condoned.
This Christmas my wish is that families respect and love their children. I hope that parents realize they simply have the role of responsibly raising an individual who is not their possession and with whom they cannot dictate their life path. I hope that parents encourage their kids to pursue their dreams, even if those dreams seem unorthodox or foolhardy. I hope that at Christmas dinner, someone will engage a small kid in a conversation that doesn't invalidate or ridicule them, a conversation that will make them feel they can be expressive and respected.
Imagine if kids weren't abused how different life would be. I think most societal problems can be linked back to the formative years of all of us.
Being a dyke I've been intimately involved with sex workers both as lovers, friends, and colleagues. I think straight people get surprised by the link between sex workers and the lesbian community. The fact is, a high percentage of female sex workers are queer. I not only know sex workers, I was one for a very very very brief time. It was phone sex, it was terribly boring and silly. I pretended to have an orgasm while watching t.v., and then I quit when a foot fetishist kept asking for me, just because he talked and talked for a REALLY long time. I did, however, come really close several times to doing street based sex work. In that case, it wasn't because I actively chose that kind of work, it would have been survival sex work. I lived in grinding poverty for several years in Vancouver, I often had no food, I skipped on my rent several times, I ran up bills I couldn't pay, I had a very difficult time being hired for work, mainly for being a butch woman. Sometimes I had no phone. I wasn't going to do sex work for drugs, I just want to go eat at least one meal in a day. And through all that I still self funded a video art practice.
God, let me say again, I have only ever gotten one grant in my entire career. I honestly don't know where this idea that I'm getting tons of money for being an Indian comes from.
So yeah, sex work. My family helped me out some, but they did the guilt trip thing, and I never told them about wandering along the strolls wondering about getting into the next car that stopped for me.
I had a girlfriend who started doing sex work again while we dated. Friends were really fucked up about the whole thing. They thought she was some kind of low life (she was going to university), they felt bad for me dating her (no way, she was cute and sweet!), and one friend even asked me if I was jealous for her doing sex work. I had to laugh at that one. I didn't really care that she was having sex for money, my only concern about her was the very real possibility of being assaulted on the job.
Some people say that the dangers sex workers face is exactly why it should be eliminated and more aggressively prosecuted. I think this is problematic, because it pushes sex work even farther on the margins. People who do Shame The Johns campaigns and push sex workers out of neighborhoods put these women into even more unsafe places, like industrial areas where there's more isolation. The more prostitution is criminalized, the easier it is for predators to prey on women. Even filing a rape report if you're in the biz becomes a humiliating venture where cops refuse to believe a sex worker can be raped.
If people are serious about keeping vulnerable women from doing sex work out of survival, they need to look at the bigger picture. The minimum wage should be raised, women's labour should be more respected and improved, and for sure butch women and other marginalized people need to have more job opportunities. Consider how many transwomen end up in the sex work biz.
And there are sex workers who like their jobs, as much as people hate to consider. Some women I know have certain clients who are their favorites, there's a certain level of intimacy that happens that while it is not romantic, falls under a category of therapy. While there are assholes out there, there are also a lot of johns who are genuinely just looking for some closeness and release which they may not get for certain reasons like age, disability, the recent death of a wife, etc.
I remember one time I went to visit my girlfriend when she switched from the streets to a massage parlour. We were hanging around talking with her coworker when a client came in. The coworker started laughing and said "Oh my god, what if a client came in and picked Thirza!"
Basically, I think that feminists pathologizing sex workers are misogynist and classist, and that the battle for sex worker rights should not be allowed to be dampened by women who infantilize the people doing these jobs.
Another thing, when people say sex work shouldn't exist because it is demeaning, they should consider other jobs poor people often do which are equally demeaning. Outbound call centre work, McDonalds, Production Assistants, all of those are demeaning jobs which have a demoralizing effect on their workforce.
Sex, Romance, and Disability
Once I was asking my friend Ariel if I was being foolish by including my psychiatric diagnosis in some online personals. She said the best thing, "It's an asshole filter!" It's true. As much as I feel my romantic possibilities have been severely limited by having a diagnosed psychiatric disability, I also feel like I don't want to be involved with someone who thinks I'm an idiot or will chase them down the hall with a knife. I could go on and on about the lack of compassion many people feel towards all of us with disabilities or chronic health problems, but it won't change the fact that they are assholes missing out on hotties. And it won't change the fact that at some point in their lives, without exception, they will be in the exact same situation as me.
It was pretty hard to be in my mid twenties dealing with psychiatric issues on my own and being treated weirdly, and definitely not being viewed as a sexual person at all. I think most mid twenties folks run away from someone they think is going to be too "high maintenence." I think older people do too. I'm kind of glad I didn't have a girlfriend when I went nuts, just because it would have crushed me to get dumped when I got released from the hospital.
So I haven't had a really nice girlfriend since I went crazy, I haven't had any at all in fact. But I also haven't been involved with anyone abusive, which happened to me before. In fact, yucky girls have pretty much left me alone. So maybe the asshole filter does work.
The issue of being crazy and being into BDSM is also fraught with it's own conundrums. The motto "Safe, Sane, and Consensual" takes on a whole new meaning. Can someone who is certifiably insane still engage in the sexual practice they're used to? I say yes. Being bipolar involves long stretches of sanity, in fact, I'm sane far more often than I am insane. I'm sure some players would disagree with my continued desire to engage in BDSM activities, but those are probably the same people who if they were vanilla would be scared of me chasing them around with a knife. In fact, having a psychiatric disability has lead me to be extremely sensitive and cautious with my emotional limits and my levels of trust. I probably have more insight into my own emotional safety in certain scenes, particularily humiliation/degradation scenes. I also have a really clear picture of my possible triggers, and have already come up with ways to get around and past it. For instance, I know I'm going to have a really really hard time with bondage. On the other hand I know if I have a long detailed conversation about what I need to get through my first post hospital bondage scenes, I'll probably be able to have fun with it again.
Yeah, I guess having a disability of any kind means some (or a lot) of people don't want to date us, but on the other hand the people who do are more likely to be people who are able to have serious long term relationships. And that's really the only kind of person I want to be involved with.
Ridiculing Bloggers
I admit, sometimes I do laugh at jokes disparaging bloggers. But at the same time, I think they're an entirely valuable medium, I'm thinking of the vast groups of marginalized people talking about their lives and issues. Events are reported which never make the news, such as Iraqi's who are blogging in Arabic and translating it to English. Blogs take up the slack where the mainstream media fails horrendously. I mean, one person owns nearly every paper in Canada, and they control reporting on Palestine/Israeli conflicts with a sympathetic bent towards Israelis. Reporters have failed miserably to ask the important questions, and Canadian reporters especially have restrictions on breaking certain important stories. I mean, if a Canadian journalist ended up with a CSIS document about aliens working in tandem with the Canadian government, we wouldn't hear about it, they'd just give it back to CSIS.
It wouldn't be so bad if the mainstream media wasn't on this prolonged idealogical war against bloggers by making fun of us all the time as basement pasty losers talking about how many pimples we squeezed today. Obviously if they're so invested in ridiculing us then they're severely threatened by blogging. Take this lengthy diatribe on the downfall of civilization as caused by blogging.
I don't always talk newsy stuff, but sometimes I do. Sometimes I can tell you stuff no one else knows or can talk about safely. Sometimes I just talk about my family or my animals. Sometimes I rant on the state of the Canadian Art World. Sometimes I talk about race and sexuality. Sometimes I talk film and media. It's not following a definite theme or adhering to any kind of standard, but it's still relevant. Same with all the other blogs I read. For instance, the news isn't going to report on a transman being sexually assaulted when using the women's restroom, but a blog will. You won't hear the daily life of a family living in Bagdad on CNN but you will in a blog.
So basically, blogs are for people who's voices aren't heard. And that's why the media hates us.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Early Christmas Present
I guess five days early isn't so bad. My big present this christmas is a cross country ski package with fancy skis boots and poles. I haven't tried them out yet, because I got all tired after work and slept and then we had to go buy presents. MORE PRESENTS. I bought 30.00 of candy. I actually bought it for a diabetic and now I have to think of someone else to give it to.
I haven't cross country skied in years, at least thirteen years. I used to be really adept at it, terribly fast, able to go up and down hills. I once ended up on a black diamond trail when I was fourteen, I didn't realize it was black diamond but it was suddenly really fucking hard with twists and turns and hills and steep slopes and I thought I was going to die halfway through. Then I finally stumbled back with my dazed dog to the cabin. He spent the rest of the night eating balls of packed snow out from between his paws.
The one embarrassing thing that sucks is when you take a spill and end up with a tangle of skis and poles and legs, all at terrible angles.
I found out it's the best aerobic workout there is. I had no idea. It's really fun, I could hardly think of it as exercise. So meditative. Even if you ski with someone it's just not feasible to natter at each other. Anyway, I need some kind of winter sport because I hate just sitting around feeling lazy. And skating freaks me out because every time I go out on the rink I end up skating past a blood splot and get all woozy.
Beheading Holofernes
I didn't get into Berlin. Bah! I'm applying to Outfest next, who actually likes me, but I'm not sure if they will take me. The deadline is at the end of January. Toronto's deadline is in the middle of January. And I need a grant soon to work on something, but I don't want a bunch of money to make a short. I know, maybe that is bad. But maybe I also just want to keep writing.
I do have an idea for a story that is REALLY dark, creepy, and terribly violent, with the climactic scene referencing Judith Beheading Holofernes by Artemesia Gentileschi. There's also a scene where a woman comes screaming out of the bushes with a knife in her head. People are going to think I'm seriously fucked. It's a take on missing/murdered Aboriginal women, but with an I Spit On Your Grave approach to it. Hence the Gentileschi reference. No cutesy funny Thirza, I'm sorry, it will happen again someday. If this doesn't creep you out, the film I want to do after this WILL end up giving you nightmares.
Anyway, for those who haven't seen Judith Beheading Holofernes, here it is:
There are some who say this painting was created to deal with Artemesia's rape by Tassi, who offered to marry her so that she would not have a damaged reputation or be considered damaged goods. When she charged him with rape she was tortured to make sure she was telling the truth. Tassi was a serial rapist and had also raped his sister. Oh, go google it, it's an interesting story. Anyway, he was found guilty but got a slap on the wrist. Some things never change. Artemesia went on to have a running theme in her work of rape as seen from a female perspective. Of course this was all buggered up in a film made about her where Tassi is her passionate lover who mentors her in painting. That's fucked up, ugh, I could go on and on about the sickness of a filmmaker who would glorify and romantize rape even admist copious evidence of Artemesia's thoughts on Tassi. ANYWAY, as you can see, she painted Judith being totally unafraid and determined to behead Holofernes, which was a far cry from other Judith paintings where she turns her head away to avoid seeing the horrors of being an assassin. And this is a good example of why therapy as art is relevant.
This was probably my favorite painting in Art History. If it's not Baroque, don't fix it. Oh never mind, that's a terrible joke.
I don't know if it will get funded. Native women beheading a white man on screen might push too many people's buttons, even though Native women are killed on screen all the time. It would be such an excellent image though. So yeah, I want to write that story while I wait for funding on my other film's production to come through. I would apply to the Canada Council for production funds, but sadly 60 000 is not nearly enough. A screenwriting grant on the other hand would give me a year to write this next script. A year of writing, what a dream!
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Log of a Creative Process
Make coffee. Realize milk is spoiled. Drink coffee black. Sit down at computer. Drum fingers. Write two sentences then erase in a fit of pique. Hit edit undo in case sentences turn out to be useful later (they aren't).
Read disturbing news items. End up playing iSketch for an hour.
Drum fingers. Write same letter over and over. Get frusterated and pound keyboard. Go make coffee. Remember as it's percolating that there is still no milk.
Tell characters that they're fucking around and pissing you off.
Write blog entry. This is easier. Hit publish. Go back to script. Drum fingers some more. Oh joy, you have to go pee. Read magazine and forget you're sitting on the toilet.
Lunch. Eat some bananas and leftover casserole. Get grumpy at poverty and lack of a variety of comestibles.
Play with dog.
Spend half an hour reading online articles about writers block.
Write something terribly revealing, cry, then save to journal and vow never to read it again.
Chase away roommate coming up to you and yammering on about there being only one roll of toilet paper in the house and wanting you to pay more for the toilet paper because you pee too much. Yell "I'm in the middle of a creative process!" Be mocked.
Go for walk, start laughing at your own jokes and creeping out passerby. Characters start babbling. Go back to computer and write ten pages. Be shocked when you find one of your characters going awol and doing their own thing. Yell "Cut it out!" and get strange looks from roommates.
Think about horribly dramatic traumatic climax, jot down a few words about it, remind self to write scene tomorrow, even though you won't because you feel guilty doing that to your characters.
Get tut tutted for having a trashy office area with food wrappers every where.
Spend rest of evening watching reality television and wondering why independent film isn't respected as much as it should be.
Thank you Saskatchewan Readers!
I do get some interesting repeat readers like the folks at UCR, someone in Germany, people drifting by from Iran, Saudia Arabia, Norway, Taiwan, etc. Someone in Barcelona likes me. Vancouver hardly ever/never visits me, which is sad because most of my friends are there, but makes sense because most of my friends don't really care about me. Montreal comes by and I know who it is, which makes it fun because then I can write things she and I can talk about later. But the majority of my readers come from Saskatchewan. Mostly Saskatoon, followed by Prince Albert, Pasqua, Vanscoy, and Regina. So I feel like I must say Hello Saskatchewan and thank you for reading me, even though I go on terrible tirades about the province I call home. It's nice to know folks from around here actually care about what I have to say. As the joke goes: Saskatchewan, hard to pronounce, easy to draw.
Monday, December 18, 2006
Although "Funbags" and "Maidenhead" pisses me off . . .
Cunt is probably my favorite word for female anatomy. It's such a contentious word, and yet to me it just sounds sexy. Unless you call me that while throwing a beer on me or something, in which case I'll call you a cunt back and add a few more words. I have no qualms about cunt. I could say cunt all day.
Cunt cunt cunt.
Some people try to make cunt into a cutesy word that ends up sounding terrible, like "coochie" or "cooter" or "Cho Cha" or any other ridiculous derivative that usually ends up getting used in the letters page of Club. There's nothing worse than trying to have a pornography assisted orgasm and reading a dumb word like Coochie.
I think what I like the most about Cunt is that it's not trying to be cute or sweet or non threatening. A cunt knows what it wants, it's aggressive and demanding and shameless. Everyone I've been seriously involved with has been able to use the word cunt in the sexy hot way it should always be used.
*Starstruck*
I always giggle a bit when someone says they never get starstruck no matter who's around at a particular time. I firmly believe everyone has at least ONE person that makes them amazed and act funny around. I've even had people be starstruck around me, which makes me totally shy and embarrassed. The funniest was the morning I was having my usual coffee at the cafe across from my apartment, I liked going there because they had a plethora of magazines to read and enough counterspace to read the Georgia Straight while also eating a panini sandwich. I was minding my own business when a woman suddenly looked at me and said "You're famous!" I said "No I'm not." "Yes, you are! I've seen you somewhere, where was it?" She might have been referring to the one Georgia Straight article talking about me and several other Vancouver aboriginal filmmakers. Other times I've been introduced to people and they're all "ooh, the famous Thirza Cuthand." I'm only mildly famous and only with people who go to film festivals. Sometimes I try to pick someone up and then suddenly they hear my name (there aren't many Thirza's) and start talking queer film, sigh! My friend Cease told me a great starstruck story about our friend Paul. It seems they were staying with Fairuza Balk while on their great American road trip. They were taking this whole crashing with a movie star thing in stride until Paul saw a photo on Fairuza's fridge of her standing next to someone who looked familiar. "Who is that?" he asked Cease. "That's Shelley Winters." "Oh my God!"
I was going to put a picture of Shelley Winters here but I have a hard on for Fairuza so to hell with her.
I have been star struck myself on many occasions. The first time was when I skipped Art History Class to go with some friends to Kate Bornstein's talk at the SFU bookstore. Kate was talking about the destruction of gender and people's ability to recreate themselves as whatever they wanted and then used my hair and ambiguous gender as an example of what she was talking about. My hair was blue and yellow at the time in my favorite dye pattern that looks like a sunrise. Anyway, I immediatelyturned pink because even though I often had weird hair I preferred being a wallflower. Then she seemed to want to save me by saying it didn't mean she wanted to sleep with me, which made me go even more pink.
Kate Bornstein: Inspirer of Pinkness
My next starstruck moment has a really boring ending. I saw Annie Sprinkle at the San Francisco queer festival, Frameline, while we were both speaking at a conference. She smiled at me and I was terrified and ran like the wind. I wish I hadn't done that.
"Brave Sir Thirza ran away." "I didn't!" "Bravely ran away, away."
Just after I got dumped out of the hospital I went to a retrospective of my work down at the University of California at Riverside. A guy was there who looked totally familiar, and he also seemed totally sweet and approachable. I struck up a conversation and discovered I was talking to James Duvall, who played Dark in Nowhere, which happens to be my favorite film. He also got his dick cut off by skinheads in The Doom Generation, was killed in May, and played the role of Frank the Rabbit in Donnie Darko. He was probably the most fun "star" I've hung out with, we had beers and joked about different things and talked about the profession of acting and then he offered to be in my movies. He's a nice guy, I like him. I'd definitely work with him.
James Duvall/Dark being dominated in Nowhere
All of this culminated in my most star struck moment to date. It was my BFA grad and I had to sit through a long boring ceremony EXCEPT Sally Potter was there getting an honorary degree. Sally Potter directed the one film I watched OVER and OVER during high school, Orlando, with Tilda Swinton. In my media studies class I wrote a paper on "The Gaze" in Orlando, which was probably my best paper ever because after that I got lazy. Sally Potter did a great thank you for her degree where she proudly proclaimed that she never went to school and she didn't think people should feel they had to get an advanced degree. After the ceremony I was hanging out with my Mom and friends and Mom pushed me towards Sally Potter and told me to tell her how much I liked her film. So I did, I felt very shy, she was most gracious and congratulated me on my film degree.
Sally Potter's Orlando
Shyness and being starstruck, it goes both ways. One night in Montreal me and two Finnish girls met the beloved Julie Doucet at a group show she was in. She is most well known for her comic Dirty Plotte, which we all loved. I think we just looked like the most unusual tiny fan club and it turns out Julie Doucet is terribly terribly shy. Which leaves me with my last statement. Celebrities, no matter how they are famous or what they do, have a persona which is completely different from who they really are. I can be all radical and running around with no clothes and talking about sex, but in real life I'm too shy to ask for a kiss, have unwillingly ended up with a career of celibacy, and only run around naked with the blinds drawn unless I'm terribly drunk. So don't assume anything about a famous person's character until you meet them, and if they suck, well, you can always watch them on television or read their work.
Another Industrial Update and Katamari
Well, I've mostly stopped sleeping on it, which I did a few times just because I forgot and was asleep when I flipped over. It doesn't hurt anymore when it's not being tormented, and the top of my ear has gone back to having a normal sensation instead of the weird thing it was doing before, alternating between being numb and being crabby and painful. I can wiggle it without hurting, and I can actually slide the barbell back and forth without wincing or drawing blood. I have bonked it a few times when I'm just running my hands through my hair or whatever, a cute girl keeps laughing at me every time we're hanging out and I squeal after touching my ear, it makes it very hard to look suave.
The only issue I'm having with it now is a bump by the piercing on the edge of my ear. It's not painful, it's just a bump, and pretty common with cartilage piercings from what I understand. I want it to go away, just because I don't want a weird bumpy ear and because I have no idea if those things contribute to ear collapse. I've heard I'm supposed to put crushed advil in water on the bump and it will miraculously fade away. So hopefully that will work. Aside from that I think it's tremendous, and anyone who wants an industrial should get one.
I should also give you my review of We Love Katamari. I went to Futureshop this weekend and bought a Playstation 2, a newer version which is roughly the same size as a composition notebook with the blobby black and white pattern, and only slightly thicker. The playstation was on sale, but the fancy ass vibrating controllers were not, nor was the memory card. I'm not going to tell you how much it cost because I don't want to be mocked for buying a system I only want to play two games on.
Oh yeah, back to We Love Katamari.
Well, I didn't have high hopes for it, I guess I was too much in love with Katamari Damacy to expect more genius. But amazingly We Love Katamari exceeds the original in rolling fun. The plot is a little weaker, you don't have to remake the entire solar system, just throw a few stars and planets in the air to make life nicer. But the graphics are even cooler, the Prince has some wacky cousins that run around, and the music is really good and changes more than in the original depending on what level you're in. Also the ongoing story when levels are reached is a really cute one about the King of the Cosmos when he was a boy and his adversarial relationship with his father. Plus there's a two player game, but I haven't found my second player. I keep running upstairs yelling "Mum! Mum! Come play Katamari with me!" but she never comes.
So I guess I'll say We Love Katamari is definitely worth it, I'm already starting to get addicted.
I love non-violent video games, I must find more.
Pimp My ______
Pimping is the new rage. From what I gather it seems to be shorthand for "I'm going to make this thing ridiculously fancy." Like cars, computers, and from a link I saw even my own email account. Of course, what pimping really means is running a stable of underprivilleged women doing sex work. I've yet to meet a high class well paid sex worker who's felt that they had the freedom to choose sex work, working under a pimp. I have met a lot of minority women, street involved youth, and child sex workers having a pimp.
I don't think people really understand what a pimp does. I'm not even going to pretend I know everything a pimp does, but I did get a brief description of working for a pimp from an old roommate. People think it's just a woman going up to some guy, saying she'll work for him, and then quitting whenever she feels like it. You can offer to work for a pimp, but if you want to quit you have to save up enough money to buy yourself out, and on the low end of buying yourself out it costs $3000.00. I know they take you shopping for sex worker clothes, and I was at a bus stop when a pimp dropped off his two sex workers who seemed to be doing their first night. I think there might be some protection involved, but not much. Abuse definitely happens between a pimp and a sex worker.
I've never seen these blinged out pimps either. A friend saw one with a gold mercedes, but generally they seem to just be average low lifes fuelling drug addictions. I'm sure there's exceptions like everything.
I guess what I'm wondering is why we're so set on glorifying the capitalist exploitation of women and comparing it to consumer excess and fancy hub caps. We don't have shows called things like "Sex Worker My Ride" or links saying "Turn your email account into a sex worker!" I don't normally say sex workers are exploited by the way, because I don't really believe that, but working for a pimp is exploitative.
And besides all of that, "pimp" is just a dumb word. It's bookended by p's and has an i and an m in between, what a silly silly word.
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Queer Parenting
I guess I'm at the age where my biological clock starts ticking. So far I've gotten away with pretending not to hear it. Shows like Nanny 911 and being around squalling babies on public transport turn me off from the idea just enough to breathe a sigh of relief. But then it kind of comes back.
Truthfully, I already have been a parent. My sister is severely developmentally delayed (I don't know why they use the delayed word, my sister's never going to catch up okay?) and my mum was a single parent. So there were lots of times I had to look after my sister. Maybe that's why I don't want to raise a tiny kid, I know how much work is really involved.
But I still do like the idea of parenting.
And then there's this firm belief I have that more queer teenagers need a safe home if they get kicked out or have to run away or whatever. I don't want to start a whole shelter, but I'm thinking it would be nice to parent a queer teenager, or two, or three. I mean, god, I lived through that, I'm sure I'd make a great parent for someone in that situation. I'd even home school them if they were having a hard time at school with bullies or whatever.
So now I'm looking around at how to become a long term foster parent. It's kind of an interesting process. They're especially looking for people willing to parent teenagers, and Aboriginal families. I'd rather devote my parenting skills to someone who could otherwise fall through the cracks.
Anyway, it's piqued my curiousity.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Lesbians And Gay Men Fucking: The Queer Community Secret
Well, an open secret really. Other queers know but we don't tell straight people because it's too confusing for them. It drives bisexuals crazy because they think we're closeted bi's. I'm sure that's true some of the time. But I also think it's just a common past time between opposite sex homos. Being butch I've had a bunch of cute gay boys have crushes on me over the years and try to get it on. Sometimes we do. Sometimes we just flirt. If you want to have sex with gay men, become a lesbian. I'm serious. It's never going to be so serious that someone falls in love with someone who can't reciprocate, but it's still going to be a lot of fun. Sometimes ongoing relationships develop that baffle everyone. Sometimes we do it just because we're both into leather and there isn't anyone handy at the moment, or a hot Daddy Boy thing springs up. Sometimes we do it because we feel like having a heterosexual experiment. And sometimes it happens just because our genders are somehow complimentary in a very queer way.
Plus homos are much more inventive about sex. It's not all about sticking it in, there's different stuff going on. Gay men are just infinitely sexier than straight men, look at how many straight women fall for their gay friends. And lesbians make pretty good opposite sex partners for gay men because we know how to work having a dick and aren't going to try and "change him". I have a friend I used to romp with a little bit, never all the way but he made several suggestive come on lines about being butt fucked by me and he let me watch him piss. Ironically whenever femmes would try to get down and dirty with him he would get shocked and run away. I think he just had a hard on for butch women.
It's definitely an interesting and curious phenomenon. Currently I have two huge crushes on some gay friends of mine, both of whom flame out in this totally adorable way. I know one of them I'm going to be getting down with, which should be entertaining. If I had a kid I would want one of them to be the sperm donor and have a father role if he wanted it.
On a side note I hate it when lesbians are unscrupulous towards their sperm donors. I've seen dykes either date a boy and dump him as soon as she's knocked up (Sperm hunters I call them). I've also seen dykes have kids and cut out the donor from engaging in parenting even when the man's all excited about being a dad, especially if he's gay. That's just mean and cruel. I think the cutest queer families are when a lesbian and a gay couple jointly care for a child. It's sometimes funny to see a little girl or boy toddling around with four, five, or even six parents. The whole thing about children of same sex couples being deprived of having both a male and a female role model is rubbish.
Next to "Funbags" . . .
"Maidenhead" is the other female anatomy terminology I loathe, it is totally like, Shakespearian virgin porn. I can't believe something as ridiculous as a hymen is so valued in our society. IT'S JUST A PIECE OF SKIN! And tons of girls lose it on their lonesome, it's not always going to be there just because someone hasn't had sex yet. How come there isn't an equivalent male virgin term either? Like "Unenclosed man pole" or "soon to be sullied boy junk."
Plus, I don't understand the fetish for virgins. I guess it's some kind of prowess thing, or maybe just a secretly handy way of mitigating performance anxiety by knowing you won't be compared to anyone. You'll always be the best lover someone ever had if you're the ONLY lover someone ever had.
A sense of responsibility
I have insider information on what really happened to the missing women which is now being entirely pinned on Pickton. Pickton was involved, I'm not at all implying he is innocent, far from it. I found out what really happened about four years ago, just as I was going crazy. It was so shocking that I actually wouldn't be surprised if it was one of the triggers which lead to my manic episode. I didn't know what to do with this information, and I have a source who knows where files of documents outlining the events are held. A group of people were closely working with the one good cop on the force who was leaking information. I think they stopped because there was a serious threat of being murdered.
It's a tricky story to break and I don't know how to do it. If I tell you what I know I have no proof to back it up because I'm not the person holding those documents (and I don't know where or who that person is either for safety reasons, though if I had to find them I could). I don't live in Vancouver anymore, so I feel slightly safer from the possibility of being murdered to cover up the truth.
I think I figured out how to explain this without getting in to shit. I'm just going to tell you a story from when I lived in the Downtown Eastside.
I was walking along Hastings one day with a friend when we came across a poster carefully being preserved behind the glass of a business. I don't remember the exact wording but the gist of it went like this.
"I am a survivor of the events going on at the Pickton Farm. I was abducted and taken to a club whose members contained Vancouver police and several high level government officals including Ujahl Dosangh. They told me they were going to do what they did to my friends and rape and kill me while filming it. This is a snuff film ring being aided and covered up by the government. I have no one I can go to to report what is going on and I am still in danger."
Obviously she escaped, whoever she was. And obviously there are a number of people living in the Downtown Eastside who know what is going on. There are people who want to classify these atrocities as the work of one demented serial killer, when in fact from the rumours I hear it is the work of a cult committing genocide directed at Aboriginal women and children. For twenty years this has been going on before anything finally happened. Maybe they decided they had to dump Pickton as a fall guy and find another way to continue murdering aboriginal people for entertainment (and this is entertaining to these people).
For my own safety I will now do my disclaimer: I have not seen these documents but I heard this exact story three years before I came across this poster. I have nothing to do with any undercover group of people working to somehow bring this information to light, I could not tell you where or who they are because I simply don't know. If you need me to prove it I can't but I might be able to connect you with people who could. I am not invested in destroying the reputations of government officials or the Vancouver police force. I do not want this post to be referred to as irrefutable proof, if you must link to this post refer to it as a plausible conspiracy theory.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
We're all a little Kogepan some days
A girlfriend of mine turned me on to Kogepan, we used to go strolling through Sanrio based stores in Vancouver's Chinatown so she could buy Kogepan related items. This is Kogepan:
Kogepan was supposed to be a high quality elite red bean bun but got burnt during his birth when he fell back into the oven and was forgotten in there for thirty minutes. Depressed and despondent because no one wanted to buy him, he went on a smoking and drinking binge (milk is like beer to him) until he hit bottom and went back to the bakery of his birth to prostelyze on the meaning of life.
Some of us who have been through some harsh moments in life can completely relate to the feelings of a little burnt bun, especially his struggle to understand his place in the world and deal with a society which has little care for a burnt bean bun. Anyone who has been marked by difference or a traumatic life changing event can understand the life of a Kogepan.
Here is his premiere:
Kogepan meets his drinking buddy, another Burnt Bun:
Kogepan traumatizes young pretty bread and then teaches the meaning of life. Then he gets them drunk:
There are ten Kogepan episodes in total, and probably you can find all of them on YouTube. If you're having a rough day, watch some Kogepan!
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Little Pine Christmas Dinner
My whole family trooped down to the Ramada the other day for our reservations Christmas Dinner. Someone really under estimated the number of Little Pine band members living in Saskatoon, because they had only five stressed out staff attending to the needs of over 200 people, all of whom are related to me in various ways. They kept having to bring more tables out, if you walked by the kitchen you could hear white people screaming in hysteria. So much for the vanishing race theory.
The elders were served first, so a bunch of folks in my generation lined up to make up plates for their grandparents. I was assigned to Gramma. I had no idea what she wanted, so I just took a bit of everything. I started to realize this was a really bad idea when her plate became a mound of various side dishes and room for the turkey, potatoes, and cranberry sauce turned into a small section the size of a playing card. Poor Gramma, I think it intimidated her but she spent a whole hour eating every single bite. Never under estimate a New Brunswick Scots woman.
One of the platters they were using tuned out the be a square mirror they just took off the wall.
They say there's no such thing as a free lunch. That was kind of the case here. We did get a nice dinner, but we also had to listen to an hour of announcements about the progress of our Treaty Land Entitlement, the development of an urban Little Pine reserve here in Saskatoon, our financial situation with regards to our oil, gas, cattle, and casino investments. Someone stood up and told a very long story about the Little Pine baseball team and the one time in history we won a game. The highlight was when they told us we were getting a $75 Christmas bonus this year. There was practically a standing ovation.
Someone was stationed in the corner giving out treaty cards, but there was a run on them and then they ran out of Polaroid film.
People kept coming by shaking our hands and talking to my Grampa in Cree. It was always "This is so and so, his father is Grampa's cousin," or things like that. Everyone had some convoluted way of being related. My uncle's on the band council so people kept talking to him about band politics or complaining to him about various things and telling him to change it.
I got to sit with my Auntie Pauline, which was nice, we told jokes. She's Christopher's mom, so it was nice to see her be able to just relax and laugh for a while. Everyone in the family is feeling pretty protective of her, Uncle Doug, and our cousins. People always think my dad is my Uncle Doug, I guess because they don't often come across people who take on their mother's last name.
My Dad is from Gordons reservation. I have never been there, but I hear they have a bigfoot in the area.
Valproic Acid Toxicity, Oh Crumbs!
I called my nurse back finally about whatever she wanted to talk about. I was paranoid I was dying. I was kind of right about that. It turns out my Valproic Acid levels are terribly high and I'm heading into toxicity. Among the fun things that could happen to me are respiratory failure, coronary events, renal failure, coma, seizures, etc etc etc. Fuck me. Soooo, I'm going down to 1000mg a day instead of 1500mg. I thought this might happen because Lamictal ups Epival levels. And it also explains why I've felt kind of fucked recently. For one thing I'm starting to get totally nauseous and not being able to eat properly. I can't sleep. I'm crabby as hell and I keep being mean to my mom. I feel tired and just generally run down.
Oh the joys of early onset of toxicity. Lucky for me in about three days of a lower dosage I should be fine. It's 3:00. I'm at work. I'm confused and unable to concentrate. At least I know why now. Poop. I'm in one of those weird transitional states at the moment because I'm going through a long ongoing med change, Lamictal is going to be replacing my antidepressant, I'm down to 10mg of Celexa and I'm scared of stopping it because SSRI withdrawals are physically painful and fuck you up for a week. My last Cree class is tonight but I think I have to skip it because I really do feel like shit. Not even shit, like if shit took a shit. I need to sleep. I tried to call mom to come pick me up but she wasn't around. Sadness! I have no bus fare either.
It's weird being a chemically altered human being. According to Donna Haraway this makes me a cyborg. I kind of like that, Cyborg Thirza. Resistence is Futile. I will adapt.
Monday, December 11, 2006
Give Me Life, Give Me Pain, Give Me Myself Again
**** !!!! This blog contains triggers specific to sexual assault survivors, if you need a support person or safe place please find one before reading. If you need to skip this blog there is some cuter lighter fare after this post. If you know me but don't want to know this part of me please stop reading. !!!! ****
I have over 70 Tori Amos songs on my iPod. That means every 6th song that comes up is a Tori Amos song on shuffle. Sometimes it will be a run of Tori Amos songs. I first got turned on to her in high school when Cornflake Girl came out. Maybe it came out earlier but I didn't buy the album until high school. Whatever. I continued to buy every album that came out since then. My favorite songs currently are Little Earthquakes, I Can't See New York, Marys of The Sea, and Original Sinsuality. I love Icicle because I had never heard a song about a little girl discovering masturbation before and it's so adorable, it reminds me of my childhood explorations. When my younger cousin Christopher died in an industrial accident this summer I listened to 1000 Oceans on repeat for hours and cried.
For some reason I have left Me and A Gun on my iPod, even though I can't listen to it. It's a great song, I'm not all "Bleh, don't tell me your rape story, art isn't for therapy!" I'm more like "I don't want to think about my rape story right now." If I listen to it I just start bawling. But I keep it, because, because I'm not sure. Sometimes I just feel better knowing I can hear it if I want, that it exists, that it's out there.
I remember being freaked out about the possibility of one day being raped. I knew statistically it had a high probability of happening, and I was scared as hell of what it would be like to carry around that kind of trauma. And yeah, it happened. It was the fifth time I ever had anything sexual happen to me and it did fuck me up, until I met a really sweet girl who helped me heal, but I'll get to her in a bit.
I'm not going to tell you the specific details of the event. You don't need to know the date, the number of assailants, the genders of the assailants, the number of hours it went on for, what particular acts happened, or anything else like that. In fact if you ask me for the facts I won't give them to you, even if you're my best friend in the world. The only person I completely explained it to was a friend who also had a fairly similar assault and we were both supporting each other in the aftermath. I told very few people, partially because a lot of acquaintances knew the assailants and I didn't feel safe disclosing the event. I did not go to the police and file a report, because I know that as an Aboriginal woman my charges would be dropped and I'll just have told some white guy about the worst night of my life for no reason.
I will tell you what happened after. I went back to my apartment in the early early morning, I think I walked home from downtown, or maybe I waited somewhere until the first buses started running again. I felt exhausted and dirty and I just wanted to sleep. I got into my apartment and it was like jamais vu. I didn't feel like it belonged to me anymore, this apartment belonged to someone more innocent, someone who hadn't been through that night, someone who puttered around learning to be a grownup and only worrying about trying to find storage space in a 300sq ft apartment. I went into the bathroom and had a bath, the longest hottest bath of my life. I used a ridiculous amount of soap and I probably shampooed and conditioned about four times. And after all that I still didn't feel clean. Any sexual assault survivor will tell you this part of the story too, it's just this automatic response we have immediately after.
It was morning but it just felt like the second half of a really long day. I crawled into bed and curled up in a ball and went to sleep. I don't think I cried, but I might have. The sun coming through the windows was beautiful, but it didn't make me feel anything. I was just numb.
I was celibate for a year after wards until my next lover, who turned out to be abusive and fucked me up more about my sexuality.
I was celibate for another year after that until I met the sweet girl who I'll now tell you about. I'd actually met her when I first moved to Vancouver and I always had my eye on her, she was a super cutie and a Vancougar celebrity. It made sense for us to be together because I was a Vancougar celebrity too, at least in our particular subculture. We had a sweet summer romance. She was the kind of femme who thought nothing of necking in broad daylight at Scotiabank cashstops. Thinking back on it now I think we also clicked because we hurt the same way. We were both stone sometimes, I was really stone in the beginning actually, but she was safe enough to get silly and sexy and slappy. We said I love you a lot, because it was true.
What totally impressed me was that she took it in stride that I still had a fairly limited sexual history. She was patient and made sure I knew what she needed or wanted. She had fun doing things to me no one else had. She liked cuddling and being sweet and adorable and sometimes she would be bouncing up and down on the bed giggling in the morning yet could still do the bossy scary persona for those particular games perverts play. She's still the only one I did breath play with, which shows you how much I trusted her.
Anyway, one day we were lounging around in bed and I don't remember what we were talking about but I disclosed what happened. She said "oh," in this way, I don't know how to explain it. It was this one little word that had so much meaning in it. And she just held me and I cried and there was so much going on in this exchange of wordless communication about it. I healed so much in that one moment. I think because I finally told someone who was intimately involved with me. It wouldn't have been the same at all if she was a friend or other platonic individual, it had to be someone I felt safe enough to be sexual with for that moment to happen. She was the best lover to disclose to. She just handled it so perfectly.
It was really nice to spend a few years after that cathartic moment with my girlfriend to be freed of rape trauma. It didn't bother me as much, it still made me sad to think about but it wasn't interfering with my sexuality anymore. And then I got traumatized about it again, only in a much more intense way. I spent six weeks in a Montreal psych ward, yes we all know this, I talk about it a lot, I rage about it a lot, but people don't know the number one reason I hated the experience, hated the hospital, hated the people who sent me there, and spent three years after wards wanting to die.
It was a mixed ward. I was really pissed about this fact, because during my time there I spent every single day in the company of a patient who kept wanting to rape me. I tried to talk to staff about this problem only to be brushed off all the time as a silly paranoid loon. He got moved to another ward and I was relieved, until I was moved to the same ward, a tiny yellow affair for people who are dangerous or wanting to snuff it. (I was the latter) I think the only way I survived was by attaching myself to tough dudes who basically protected me. I had some female friends too, but I mostly spent time around guys who were benevolent and protective of me. They kept falling in love with me, but whatever.
There was one other triggering event which totally shocked me. It was my first night there, well, the first night I wasn't handcuffed, restrained, and in chemical restraints. I was falling asleep when suddenly two orderlies just walked into my room with a flashlight and made me take a pill which turned out to be a meltable Zyprexa (because you can't tongue it if it melts immediately). I was appalled that they would disregard something so obviously triggering to sexual assault survivors, especially for those people who were abused as children.
And then there was the four point restraints trigger, yeah, that was fucked too.
So essentially I still carry a lot of rape trauma with me. And ironically now it's because I was put in a place that was supposed to "heal" me. I'm pretty sure I'm healing from the "healing" now, I'm doing a lot better than the first year After The Psych Ward. It's bizarre, people expected me to come out of there and be cheery and grateful and "fixed", and then were confused when I walked around like an angry zombie and screamed every time someone grabbed my wrist or suddenly touched or grabbed me.
But I still remember the lover who was there for me when I disclosed, I never really got to thank her. She probably was the main reason I have a healthy happy attitude about sex again.
The last time she and I had sex we listened to a Tori Amos album, From The Choirgirl Hotel. She was a boy, and it was really great. I didn't know it would be the last time, I doubt she did either, but it was a nice note to go out on.
Tori Amos inspires me, and probably a lot of other survivors, because she's spoken about her experience and yet has not let it define who she is. She shows survivors that there is life after rape, that people can heal, and that they can still find/create and be beauty afterwards.
She cofounded RAINN, Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network. She is also the inspiration for the survivor run site Welcome To Barbados.
Maybe you're wondering why I'm talking about this here. I guess I'm just tired of feeling secretive about it, because that implies shame and I don't want to feel ashamed of myself. Those other fuckers can feel ashamed. I also recently read someone accused of rape who reclassified it as a grey area misunderstanding, and as someone who was a victim of what some might try to call a "grey area misunderstanding" I can honestly tell you rape has no fucking grey area.
I was going to post a video of Me and A Gun or Little Earthquakes, but Hey Jupiter seemed to fit better.
Sunday, December 10, 2006
I'm going to bed
But I came across some funny shit this evening so I'll drop some of it off here.
Peaches new video "The Boys Wanna Be Her"
Ten Things I hate About Commandments
And finally my current favorite sacreligious comic from marriedatsea.com
I had a weird night last night where I couldn't really sleep, one of those thinking too much nights. Then I had some fuckin' WEIRD dreams!
First I dreamt I was hanging out with some gay men and suddenly I was having anal sex and I was all "Holy shit! I'm having anal for the first time!" And then I was "Holy shit, this is amazing!" And then it was all "Oh fuck, is he wearing a condom? He had better be wearing a condom. I don't think he is. Woah that was nice. Oh shit, what do I do? Should I risk it this one time? He hasn't come yet, if he pulls out will it be okay? I don't want this to stop, oh what a quandry!" I'm hazy as to the particulars of my gender in my dream. I think I was a boy, but I don't know if I was a bio boy or a trans boy.
Then I was in Montreal and I was a visiting artist, and all these beautiful femme women kept doing these sly pick up lines with me. But I swear to fucking god, it was the exact same line all the time, and they were saying them in front of each other, it was like they were all scheduling in a sex session with me before I left town. I think I even ordered a drink with some francophone name that was especially for slutty visiting anglos.
A side note, how come Montreal is the epicentre of beautiful femmes? Paris is the same. And it's not that all the femmes are Montreal natives, it's like there's some femme magnet pulling them there. Kind of like Vancouver is the butch epicentre of Canada. I heard it had something to do with French feminism, but I don't really believe Luce Irigaray is what convinced gorgeous women to converge on Montreal and Paris.
And then suddenly I was in snowy mountains all dressed in guard gear with some other guy and we saw a plane go over head and started talking about the goddamn Americans and what they were doing to the world when I glanced up and saw a mushroom cloud. I sat up and yelled "They're bombing us!" and my friend said "What the hell are you doing, get down!" and he jumped on top of me and held me to the ground while nuke charges started heading down the hill towards us. Boom boom boom boom and just when I was wondering how much it would hurt I felt this intense heat and then the sensation of being dematerialized. It felt so real that I woke up right away and tried to figure out if I was dead.
The anal sex part felt real too but I didn't wake up to see if there was really a dick up my butt.
Saturday, December 09, 2006
Child Sexuality (or: Thirza's Vagina Shot)
This is something I've thought about for a long time, especially when I was making teenage lesbian videos and the fucking Alberta government outed me in high school because I was supposedly making a child porn recruiting video. Whatever. Then I was still thinking about it when I was nineteen only with the additional issue of chasing older lesbians who were running away for fear of the pedophile label attaching itself to them. But mostly I wanted to talk about teenagers wanting to fuck and why the hell is that wrong? Thus came "Untouchable."
So I went as far as I could for someone with no sexual partner at the time and flashed my pierced vulva for the camera in what has become the one defining image people remember when they think of my work.
Why? It's just a vag. Honestly, I think compositionally I've come up with more lush lyrical imagery. It's practically at the point where it's Thirza's Vagina Shot, like you could write a queer videos of the 90's essay on it. In fact someone did.
Then I tried to stick the final nail in the "queer youth" coffin with "Helpless Maiden Makes An 'I' Statement" where I juxtaposed a break up monologue with Disney Witch footage. On one angle it was a commentary on BDSM relationships, on another it was about sexualized images in children's entertainment.
I got into shit for my early work, mostly because I was young and talking about the homosex. I was considered an anomaly in the queer community for coming out at fourteen. Shit, now we have queers coming out when they're nine. The queer community has to do outreach to these folks, even at risk of being called pedophiles. I don't mean slippery dick outreach, I mean having safehouses for youth who are running away from homophobic homes, and alternative schools for queers (there are some but not enough).
But child sexuality of all types is criminalized in our society, ironically under the guise of protecting children. I will get to why I think that is a fallacy in a moment.
Currently an issue of Blackflash is coming out where yours truly did a small artwork for (it's a postcard, send it to your friends!) and it was the Sex/Love issue. One of the articles was about Child Sexuality and featured artwork from luminary folks such as Robert Mapplethorpe. Work which could be found in various galleries around the world. I was going to post a link to it here but probably because of child porn laws on the internet no one can publish it online anymore. It was of a little girl where you could see up her skirt. Nothing ultra provocative, nothing more scandalous than any pics most people have of themselves as children (yes, remember all your bathtub pictures you hide from your friends!). In fact, Diva magazine caught up with the little girl now all grown up (and a lesbian btw) who says it's her favorite photo of herself as a child.
ANYWAY, Blackflash was set to publish when all the publishers got snippy and refused to reprint the images. Everyone was upset, including myself when I heard. I have in fact had the vice squad run off with my videos to inspect them for child porn (yes, police have seen the vag shot image which has defined my career). There was some rabble rousing, but I think in the end everyone felt pretty powerless to put up a fight. I mean, how long did the Eli Langer case drag on?
Child Porn laws always sound like a good idea on paper, but when new parents are being dragged away from the local one hour photo store for taking pictures of the twins having a bath, you start to notice how the lines are blurry.
I knew it was going to happen, but it didn't make me less sad. A thirteen year old girl had sex with a twelve year old boy, and currently they are trying to decide how to try her since by law she is both a perpetrator and a victim. Her boyfriend is also considered guilty of being a sex crime perpetrator. People would say "Dear lord, she was thirteen! That's too young these kids nowadays blah blah blah." Actually, if you get people drunk/stoned and ask them when they lost their virginity, you'd be surprised how many will say a number between seven and thirteen. And not just people in my age group either, I know people much older than me who lost it at a really young age.
I'm not going to debate when the "proper" age to lose one's virginity is, truth be told I felt a bit long in the tooth when I lost mine. But the fact is kids are doing sexual things and then turning pink and saying "nothing" when you ask them what they're doing. I mean, under the law this girl's being prosecuted, a kid can be charged for MASTURBATING! I'm serious. That means I was a criminal for 11 years of my life!!!
"Protecting" children, doesn't. It criminalizes natural child behaviour. It criminalizes art work. It criminalizes child sexuality at a time when children are just naturally going about their sexual development. It keeps kids from being able to learn about safe and healthy sexuality, or even engaging with communities they belong to, namely the Queer community. Sexual predators hunting children still get around it. They don't have to go ogle the local exhibition of Mapplethorpe or Langer, they can just hop on Myspace and write up a bogus profile. They can just wander back and forth along a playground. They can just offer to babysit to help out a frazzled single mother.
People always support laws "protecting" children, until they get caught in a loophole.
Now I really must go and have a shower and wash this famous vulva of mine.
(This is me at nineteen in Untouchable, my vulva is lower down, as is the fashion.)
