Good Vibrations Magazine

Greetings from lovely Madison, Wisconsin, where my partner Robert and I are visiting Good Vibrations’ wonderful sister store, A Woman’s Touch. Next I’m going to Minneapolis, where I’m reading at Dreamhaven on the 5th and performing at The Playwright’s Center on the 6th. After that — on June 10 and 11 — I’ll be in Toronto, visiting Come As You Are for a reading and a workshop based on the new video Bend Over Boyfriend. CAYA is our only sister store in Canada and it’s also a co-op!

This time around I’m reading from my newest book, The Leather Daddy and the Femme, which is my first novel. It grew out of a set of stories I wrote several years ago, “After the Light Changed,” and “The Next Morning,” in which the story’s protagonist, bisexual cross-dresser Miranda, follows a gay leatherman home — and doesn’t get thrown out of bed. Instead, they go on to have a series of erotic adventures. (I’ll be home in San Francisco reading from the book later this month — please come visit on June 23, 8 pm, at our Valencia Street store.)

My midwestern trips are scheduled at this time of year not because I like to flirt with tornados — I prefer my thrill-seeking behavior on the tamer side, I confess — but because last week Chicago hosted the US’s largest bookselling convention, Book Expo America. I signed both my new books (Sex Spoken Here, too) for a line of booksellers and readers. But my big news at BEA this year was that my book PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions about Gender and Sexuality (which came out last fall, and which I co-edited with Lawrence Schimel) was up for not one but three awards. It had been nominated in the Sexuality categories of the Small Press Book Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award, and in the Transgender category of the Lambda Literary Awards (Lammys, for short).

So for the first time I attended the Lammys, which honor mostly books by gay and lesbian authors. It was a fancy sit-down dinner-cum-awards ceremony with several hundred in attendance, hosted by lesbian comedian Kate Clinton and gay comedian Scott Thompson — both of whom have new books out. Many literary lights from the gay/lesbian communities were present — the Lammy is an important award in the queer community.

I felt somewhat awkward about PoMoSexuals being up for an award in the Transgender category. It is by no means a book principally about trans issues — rather, it’s an anthology by and about a variety of people who don’t fit into the binary systems of male/female, gay/straight this society uses to identify people. There are transpeople, bisexuals, lesbians who derive erotic inspiration from gay men, gay men who find their own community too rigid, and many more people who don’t color inside the lines, sex-and-gender-wise. There is no Bisexuality category at the Lammys, nor a “Pansexual” one. My ambivalence came from very much wanting to win the Lammy, but not wanting to win it in place of a transgendered person. That just wouldn’t have felt appropriate.

Fortunately, when our category was announced, there was a tie — PoMoSexuals won, but it shared the Lammy with Daphne Scholinksi’s amazing book The Last Time I Wore A Dress, which documents her experience of being incarcerated in a treatment facility as a teen because she wasn’t feminine enough. This didn’t happen in the 50s, either — it was just a few years ago. Sharing the award with her is actually a greater honor than it would have been to get it alone — the two books powerfully complement each other when it comes to inspiring readers to think about rigid categories and their effects on people’s lives.

As many of you know, I lived for a decade within the lesbian and gay community, staying silent about my bisexuality because if I was too open, I wouldn’t fit in anymore. Now, of course, I believe that we make space for ourselves precisely by being open about the realities of our lives and desires. It’s especially meaningful to me that the lesbian and gay literary community honored PoMoSexuals, which is in some respects a (loving) challenge to that still quite gender-segregated community. In which category do you suppose they would nominate my novel if they wanted to honor it? It’s got bisexuals, leather daddies, dykes, sex workers, transgendered people, cross-dressers, dominatrices, and “straight” guys who like she-males. No one category (except maybe my favorite Freudian phrase, “polymorphously perverse”) would fit all that.

But that’s the point of PoMoSexuals: that many of us don’t live binary lives. Love, sex, and self-image aren’t always either/or — in fact, in these times of gender role reassessment, they rarely are. This is just as relevant to the gay/lesbian communities as to the larger society: more so, really, since so many people who don’t fit the exclusively heterosexual, pink-is-for-girls-and-blue-is-for-boys mold look to gays and lesbians for support and community. They’re shocked to find that isn’t always immediately forthcoming. But we all grew up in a society that wants us to believe there are only two genders, that we must pick one, and that they are invariably opposites. That’s not true, and no one knows it better than transgendered people, bisexuals, intersexuals, and others whose lives contradict either/or ways of thinking. I’m very pleased that, in giving a Lammy to PoMoSexuals, the Lambda Literary Foundation honored those voices.