Author Archives: Jendi Reiter

Tranifesto Asks: Is It a Choice? So What?


Trans man Matt Kailey recently posted this timely and well-reasoned piece on his Tranifesto blog: “It’s Time to Lose ‘I Didn’t Choose’ (to be Transgender)”. Kailey writes that he gets tired of hearing GLBT folks defend themselves against social prejudice by saying “I didn’t choose to be this way”, as if their orientation or gender expression were some kind of disability. If being straight or gender-conforming feels preferable, that’s because of stigma and discrimination, not because there’s anything wrong with being different.

…Being trans, in and of itself, is not a curse. Neither is being gay or lesbian. It’s the society and the culture that decides whether such things are negative, positive, or neutral. If, as in some cultures, we were revered as powerful, knowledgeable, spiritual, and blessed human beings, would we wish that we weren’t trans? If our family was proud, if we were deemed as special — or even if we were just treated matter-of-factly — would we wish that we weren’t trans?

The “I didn’t choose to be this way” argument paints us as victims. It paints us as tragic figures with an external locus of control — life has done something to us. We have no control over it or over ourselves. We have no “choice.”

I understand the purpose of the argument, because, truly, none of us did choose to be transgender (or gay, lesbian, or bisexual). No one chooses to be straight or non-trans, either. But you don’t hear straight, non-trans people arguing that they didn’t choose to be that way. They don’t need this argument, because they have the power. We don’t. That power makes their particular existence the “right” way to be. We feel as though we have to make the “no choice” argument in order for those in power to accept us, to grant us our rights, and to quit killing us.

But I think there are better arguments — arguments about equality and dignity and human rights — that give us a stronger position and make us stronger as people. To say, “It wasn’t my choice” is to say, “I wouldn’t be this way if I could help it” — which is to say, “This is a bad way to be.”

But is it such a terrible way to be, or is it only terrible because of the way we are looked at and treated by society? Why is straight better? Why is non-trans better? We have been brainwashed into believing that this is so, and we have been brainwashed into believing that we are “less than,” so we have to come up with an argument that excuses our deficiency — and that argument is: “I didn’t choose.”

We come to the table as victims, we sit at the table as victims, and then we wonder why we have no power. It doesn’t matter whether I chose to be this way or not — what matters is that, by virtue of being a human being, I deserve the same rights as everyone else.
…


Read the follow-up post here. Excerpt:

…please remember that I am not saying that sexual orientation or gender identity is a choice. It’s not. What I am saying is that, in my opinion, the “I didn’t choose” argument causes us to relinquish our power. The “no choice” argument says that we are deficient — but it’s not our fault. It says that there are other ways to be that are better — but we can’t be them, because we are “like this.” It hands the power over to those with more “desirable” characteristics — characteristics that we are supposed to want … if we had the choice. And it diminishes the concept that all human beings are worthy, simply by virtue of being human. Some are not more equal than others.

If we say it enough, we might convince ourselves (and others) that nobody would choose to be us — not even us. And honestly, if given the choice, I would choose to be me.


I say “Amen!” to Tranifesto, because I believe that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and all other forms of prejudice arise from our unthinking acceptance of arbitrary value judgments about the differences between us. Transgender rights may seem like an obscure and low-priority fight to some people. But actually we have a lot to learn from people who occupy a liminal space. They are living proof of the unreality of the boundaries that oppress us.

In Memoriam: Rane Arroyo


The acclaimed poet Rane Arroyo died of a cerebral hemorrhage on May 7, at the age of 54. Arroyo taught creative writing at the University of Toledo. Read a tribute to him in the Toledo Free Press:

…“His death is a great tragedy and loss for poetry and Puerto Rican literature in the United States,” said Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, a Latino studies and Spanish professor at the University of Michigan.

Arroyo was a mentor to La Fountain-Stokes, who said Arroyo was very generous with his fellow writers and fellow poets. Arroyo visited La Fountain-Stokes’ classes for presentations.

“He was an incredibly funny and warm person who was gifted as an artist. He had an ability to translate his experiences as a gay man and a Latino from Chicago, and the experiences with his family and with his partner. He was able to translate all of that into poetry that was accessible and that was in the grade of the great American and English poets,” La Fountain-Stokes said.

La Fountain-Stokes said Arroyo used his poetry to share his experiences as a gay and Latino man in the United States and show that Latinos have something to say in American Literature.

“In the U.S,. where gay and Latino people have been looked down upon, his work is very pertinent for our political atmosphere,” he said.
…


Sample poems from his collection The Sky’s Weight (Cincinnati: Turning Point Books, 2009) are posted on the publisher’s website . They’ve kindly given me permission to reprint this poem:

Come Back, Blue Jay

Let the cats interrogate far birds
to be forgotten after the sun returns to

its black hole throne. Daylight keeps me
safe from forever. No one has quoted

joy in years and yes it hurts
to be so jauntily human. Look!

A bluejay: blue, sky blue, like sky.
Clouds are slow period marks

in a profound letter to Now.
Why do we ever feel unloved?

****
Update: Read a tribute to Arroyo by editor Gloria Mindock in the June 2010 Cervena Barva Press newsletter.

John Ollom’s Dance Troupe Merges Sex and Spirit


It’s June…the month of weddings for those who are legally allowed to do so…and also the month when Reiter’s Block becomes just a little bit gayer.

Our first Pride Month post features dancer-choreographer John Ollom, director of Prismatic Productions and Ollom Movement Art. Their new production, “M.U.D. (Men Under Dirt)”, fuses dance, music, and video to enact a man’s journey to spiritual wholeness. Through passionate struggle, the lead character discovers how to integrate the male and female elements within himself and embrace his sexuality. The work owes much to Jungian ideas of male and female archetypes and the shadow self.

We enjoyed a performance of “M.U.D.” at the Soulforce Anti-Heterosexism Conference last fall. (We got the R-rated version, undies on.) The gay entertainment blog Jed Central has posted a good review of the production that just closed in New York, plus an exclusive interview with John. I found these remarks especially insightful:

Jed Ryan: You have mentioned that gay male love, as opposed to gay male sexuality, is vastly under-explored in theater, cinema, etc. Why is that?

John Ollom: You asked me about love between men as a concept that is not portrayed in current film, dance or theatre. Our current society is so afraid to see love between men. It is getting comfortable seeing men fuck and fight and be objects of sexual desire, but to see men desiring each other’s touch and love is truly radical. That is why this work is so important. Look at “Brokeback Mountain” for example. I know homosexual men who hated that movie. There is so much internalized homophobia and self hatred, that only one scene shows them fucking. You do not see any love or tenderness or joy in their life. You only see pain and suffering. This is 2010. Have we not progressed since the films and theatre works in the 80’s when so many men tragically lost their lives to AIDS? Can we not see men loving each other and having no shame in this part of their life?

I have had two experiences in my career as a choreographer with an Artistic Director from a company (that will remain unnamed here) and a composer at a university. They were both terrified that I was showing men in love on stage. They begged me to “hide” or abstract my work. I refused. This caused my work to be cut from one venue. This was done by homosexual men. One of these men later wrote me and thanked me for showing me that he was a “homophobic” homosexual. I don’t think that shame and self hatred have to be a part of our collective experience. I think with HONESTY this work can reveal the male condition. This work can comment on how we as men are conditioned in this current society. I have had to look into other cultures that have revered the male-to-male relationship as a rite of passage to honor the phallus, the male comradery, but the male intimacy is still something that can only lie in the “shadows”. That is why “M.U.D.” is truly revolutionary. I think man to man love is truly the “shadow” of the film, theatre and dance industry. Men are insecure about their penis size, their lust for other men, their desire to love or be loved by men, regardless of sexual orientation. Audience feedback has also revealed that they highly appreciated my awareness in not being binary in the sexual expression of my bisexual character. There was an ambiguity and complexity to love and sex that was not oversimplified into “gay” or “straight” manifestations of one dimensional characters. Different types of love, lust and rage were shown on a spectrum of a complex human being.


I think John’s right that male-to-male intimacy and vulnerability are even more taboo, in our culture, than the actual sex. This probably comes from the culturally conditioned misconception that emotion is a weakness rather than a source of authenticity and power. The job of expressing emotion is outsourced to women, who are perceived as having less to lose because we’re not supposed to be dominant anyhow.

As an artist, I struggle to overcome that conditioning. Particularly in my fiction about gay men, I worry “do they sound too much like women?” when they express love instead of just sex. But everyone (not just men, or gay men) will be more free when those taboos are challenged.

Local readers take note: John will be teaching a movement workshop at Smith College in Northampton on August 7-14.

For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow…


The Massachusetts Cultural Council has just awarded me a 2010 fellowship in poetry! Read the press release here.

My application packet included poems from my chapbook Swallow (Amsterdam Press, 2009) and my forthcoming chapbook Barbie at 50 (Cervena Barva Press), as well as some uncollected work. The following prose-poem, included in that group, won the Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Prize from the literary journal Quarter After Eight, and was recently published in QAE issue #16. (This $200 prize is currently accepting entries through June 15.)

Possession

I collect packets of soup noodles. The last pages of books from the prison library. I am a collector of others’ facial expressions. If you’ve found it hard to move your eyebrows lately, that was probably me. I collect the different colors the day appears in. Soup noodles crackle. There are many colors that are called gray. Dawn light and potato soup and regulation wool socks. I would collect them all, except I have nowhere to store the soup. Cellophane wrappers crackle as if something more was in them than you could see through. Fire and footsteps. Even in here there are hobbies I have no time for. I do not collect rats. They have no numbers. Unlike us. Every rat is the same number, meaning, more than you can see. Rats do not have the patience to collect soup noodles. That is why they will temporarily be your friend, again and again. Rats shrink from the sound of crackling, like a teenage boy forced to read a nineteeth-century novel of manners. The Victorians were so unsure of themselves that they collected the hair of the dead. Wove it into fetishes of gray flower brooches. Because they didn’t know anymore whether the soul had another place to go home to. Rapping and tapping, the dead return to turn out their pocket litter, to prove themselves by the ticket stubs and cigarette butts their unique past collected. Proving they are made of paper and ash. Like the clipboard woman sent by the state to ask me to circle how I am feeling today. I feel like the number 4. She does not want any soup noodles. I have found that most people, when they hear the sound of crackling, remember their dream of being followed through a dark wood.

 

New Poem by Conway: “Screw”


My prison pen pal “Conway” has been reading Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays. In his latest letter, he observed that the use of colored emblems, the red and white roses, to represent sides in the Wars of the Roses reminded him of gang colors. There must be something very primal about the human impulse to divide society along color lines (whether skin color or clothing) and then believe that those arbitrary differences represent real value judgments — the natural order, so to speak.

In this recent poem, Conway examines another way that clothing both symbolizes and creates a power imbalance.

Screw

Grab hold your notice, do come too
bring along a ticket, per chance for speeding?
We’ve seen a summons before
been charged through a specific door
for a fine ignored that went to warrant
finally arrested, in a county jail congested.

So, we’ll have to sleep on a dirty floor
where time passes by, that never clicks
on an imaginary clock that forever ticks,
unless of course, someone pays for your bail;
cares enough perhaps, to spare those straps.

Only then, can we be dragged from beneath–
of it, (our bottomless pit)
where pancakes taste, like pigeon shit.

Naked jailbirds, feebly rubbed against another
gagged with expressionless restraint
scooched along corridors with voiceless complaint
where chains dragged in, in exploit, then bragged about
are limitless banes of committee.
Uninformed, disregarding humanity
lying to become wards of a ruthless city.

Accept this summons, now come along
it matters not, if you’ve done no wrong
or argued any specific reason

What is this? The time of day,
without a window, sun’s light to see.
What would you say, if you were cold;
Nakedly sold, told No way!
“You may not wear warm clothes today.”
What could you say, if you would but say,
“Stay those icy cold fingers of punishment.”
But, this chill is devised for our bones to feel
No more “Monty Hall let’s make a deal”
with those insulated halters.

We must oppose the foes who choose
to make up rules–
to strip us of our clothes (like the fooled Emperor)

If not, then take a ticket
come inside; Regardless
if you care not to take this ride
swearing enough to start a landslide
where the razor wire divides the road
The one our ancestors must all have strolled.
Some poor soul struggled with a tyrannical law
or fanatical persuasion, sanctified definition
of someone else’s screwed up vision;
dynamic rule of indecision.
Which door do you have for me?
I’ll pick one or two, not three
That’s not a lucky number for me.

We only pick, if we can pay the toll,
only then; someone else must refill the bowl.

Then, pick up another summons
eventually take this ride, come inside
as this penalty takes its time
your time, our time, or
time to fall asleep.

Blindly justice suffers this
because it missed the truth
then stole away our youth
finding out we’re already in, and
way too deep, too late
to disturb this butchered fate.

Another broken promise
where money makes the rule
this sticks like super glue, yoked
bound in solitude, to a matchless shoe
under the turning of the screw…

Theologian Patrick Cheng Rethinks Sin and Grace from a GLBT Perspective


Patrick S. Cheng is an ordained minister with the Metropolitan Community Churches and a professor of systematic theology at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, MA. He is also a religion columnist for the Huffington Post. I discovered his writings via the Other Sheep newsletter. In the opinion columns and scholarly articles on his website, Cheng draws the connection between a truly incarnational Christian theology and the healing of our oppressive legalism and dualism surrounding human sexuality.

As Richard Beck recently observed on his Experimental Theology blog, our current liturgical season of Pentecost celebrates an end to “othering” (viewing our fellow human beings as alien and subhuman). Beck writes, “The Kingdom is marked by its assault on Othering. Where Othering has vanished the Kingdom has come.”

Similarly, Cheng contends that the marriage of human and divine natures in Jesus ought to serve as a model for non-dualistic thinking about gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and other categories we use to divide and oppress one another. In his article “Rethinking Sin and Grace for LGBT People Today”, Cheng writes about four christological models and their parallels to the lives of gay and trans people, one of which is the “Hybrid Christ”:

Hybridity is a concept from postcolonial theory that describes the mixture of two things that leads to the creation of a third “hybrid” thing. For example, the experience of being a racial minority or an immigrant within the United States can be
described in terms of hybridity. In the case of Asian Americans, they are neither purely
“Asian” (because they live in the United States) nor are they purely “American” (because
they are of Asian descent). Rather, they are a third “hybrid” or “in-between” thing,
which ultimately challenges the binary and hierarchical nature of the original two
categories of “Asian” (outsider) and “American” (insider).

For me, the Hybrid Christ arises out of the theological understanding that Jesus
Christ is simultaneously divine and human in nature. He is neither purely one nor the
other. In the words of the Athanasian Creed, Jesus Christ is simultaneously both “God
and human,” and yet he is “not two, but one Christ.” As such, he is the ultimate hybrid
being. This hybrid nature is reflected in the double consciousness that is experienced by
many racial minorities in the United States such as Asian Americans, African Americans,
Latino/as, Native Americans, and others.

Marcella Althaus-Reid, the late lesbian theology professor from the United
Kingdom, wrote about the Hybrid Christ in her book Indecent Theology. Specifically,
Althaus-Reid wrote about the “Bi/Christ,” in which the bisexual Jesus challenges the
“heterosexual patterns of thought” of hierarchical and binary categories. Just as the
bisexual person challenges the heterosexual binaries of “male/female” and “straight/gay,”
the “Bi/Christ” challenges the either/or way of thinking with respect to theology (for
example, by deconstructing “poor” and “rich” as mutually exclusive categories in
liberation theology) and therefore can be understood as the Hybrid Christ.

Thus, a theology of the Hybrid Christ recognizes that Jesus Christ exists
simultaneously in both the human and divine worlds. This can be seen most clearly in
the post-resurrection narratives. As a resurrected person with a human body, Jesus Christ
is “in-both” worlds (that is, both human and divine), and yet he is also “in-between” both
worlds (that is, neither purely human nor purely divine). Although this can be a painful
experience — metaphorically speaking, Jesus Christ has no place to lay down his head —
his hybridity is what ultimately allows him to build a bridge between the human and
divine.

If the Hybrid Christ is defined as the One who is simultaneously both human and
divine, then sin — as what opposes the Hybrid Christ — is singularity, or the failure to
recognize the reality of existing in multiple worlds. For example, sin is failing to
recognize the complex reality of multiple identities within a single person, which in turn
silences the experiences of those individuals who exist at the intersections of race,
gender, sexual orientation, age, and other categories. As postcolonial theorists have
pointed out, this kind of singularity (for example, defining the “gay” community solely in
terms of sexual orientation and not taking into account race) results in the creation of a
number of “others” who are never fully part of the larger community and thus feel like
perpetual outsiders (for example, LGBT people of color).
…


Read the whole essay here.

Other notable writings on Cheng’s website include “Kuan Yin: Mirror of the Queer Asian Christ” and the Huffington Post article “‘Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin’ and Other Modern-Day Heresies”. An excerpt from the latter follows:

…I contend that people who advocate “love the sinner, hate the sin” with respect to LGBT people are actually the ones who are the modern-day heretics. In my view, these people are nothing more than contemporary versions of the gnostics who were condemned by the early Church. The gnostics, strongly influenced by Platonic philosophy, believed in a dualism of the spirit and flesh. That is, spirit was good, whereas flesh (indeed, all matter) was evil. For example, the heretical religious thinker Marcion (d. 160 C.E.) believed that the God of the Hebrew Scriptures was in fact evil because that “god” had engaged in the “evil” act of creation! (Even the great theologian Augustine of Hippo was a Manichaean dualist before his conversion to Christianity, and in some ways he never entirely gave up that world view. See, e.g., De Civitate Dei at 14.6.)

Traditional Christian theology, going at least as far back as Irenaeus in the second century C.E., has condemned such dualism because orthodox doctrine understands creation to be good and that God has created humanity in God’s own image and likeness. This is why we profess in the Nicene Creed that we believe in “one God” who is the creator of “all that is seen and unseen,” including the gift of human sexuality in all of its forms. And that is why the central revelation of Christianity involves the incarnation, or the goodness of the Word made flesh. Indeed, of all the possible ways of reconciling Godself to us, God chose to take on the form of human flesh. To paraphrase the Eastern Orthodox concept of divinization, God became human so that humans could become divine.

As such, I believe those Christians who “hate” LGBT sexualities and gender expressions while allegedly “loving” LGBT people are nothing more than modern-day gnostics. It is simply not possible to divorce one’s sexuality or gender expression — LGBT or otherwise — from one’s spiritual self, particularly if such sexualities and gender expressions are rooted in the love of God, the love of the other, and the love of the self.
…


This is why I still care about traditional Christology. It’s a justice issue. The liberal image of Jesus as a merely human role model still leaves in place the most fundamental dualism, the gap between God and man. Then we have nothing left to do but choose sides. Liberals choose compassion for neighbor while conservatives choose obedience to God. Neither rubric is adequate to deal with Othering, “the root cause of sin” (to quote Richard Beck’s post again).

In Jesus, as traditionally understood, God and neighbor are one.

Monday Non-Random Song: Edith Piaf, “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien”


I’m giving up self-pity for Pentecost.

Non, rien de rien,
Non, je ne regrette rien,
Ni le bien qu’on m’a fait,
Ni le mal, tout ça m’est bien égal.

Non, rien de rien,
Non, je ne regrette rien,
C’est payé, balayé, oublié,
Je me fous du passé.

Avec mes souvenirs, j’ai allumé le feu,
Mes chagrins, mes plaisirs, je n’ai plus besoin d’eux,
Balayées les amours, avec leurs trémolos,
Balayées pour toujours, je repars à zéro

Non, rien de rien,
Non, je ne regrette rien,
Ni le bien qu’on m’a fait,
Ni le mal, tout ça m’est bien égal.

Non, rien de rien,
Non, je ne regrette rien,
Car ma vie car mes joies,
Aujourd’hui, ça commence avec toi.


(Lyrics courtesy of www.elyrics.net) />

You Gotta Give ‘Em Hope


Today, May 22, would have been the 80th birthday of civil rights leader Harvey Milk . Milk made history as the first openly gay candidate
elected to public office in California. He served only 11 months on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors before his assassination in 1978. His passion for justice extended beyond his own community, to the struggles of all disenfranchised people, as this clip from his famous “Hope” speech shows:



Thursday Random Song: Archie Watkins, “He Will Remember Me”


This song brought tears to my eyes when I heard it on XM Radio’s southern gospel station, Enlighten 34. Like many people, perhaps especially those whose passions and self-worth are bound up with intellectual pursuits, I dread the possibility of losing my mind with age. Archie Watkins’ ballad was a comforting reminder that the meaning and destiny of my life are in God’s hands, not mine.



Read the lyrics to this song and others on Watkins’ “Pouring Out Blessings” CD on his website . Watkins was a founding member of The Inspirations, whose Southern Gospel
Treasury collection is one of my very favorite CDs in any genre. Buy it
on Amazon here .

Catholic Elementary Schools Expel Children of Lesbian Parents


It was widely reported this week that a Catholic elementary school in the Boston area withdrew its offer of admission to a third-grader upon discovering that his parents were lesbians. St. Paul Elementary in Hingham said the couple’s relationship was “in discord” with church teaching, and that teachers would not be able to answer the child’s questions about family life because they could not condone the values he was taught at home.

A similar incident occurred in March when the Sacred Heart of Jesus preschool in Boulder, Colorado expelled the child of another lesbian couple, with the approval of the Denver archdiocese.

I am a happily married heterosexual woman. I’ve achieved a stable home life in spite of the secrecy and shame I experienced as a child in a closeted family, not because of it. It makes me sick to see the proclamations on the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops website about “strengthening marriage and family life”. The USCCB makes it a “priority goal to Strengthen Marriage” (capital letters in the original). But what are these schools’ actions really teaching?

I remember what I learned, very early, as the daughter of two women who experienced employment discrimination and family ostracism for their relationship. Though I attended school in gay-friendly Greenwich Village and Brooklyn Heights, my parents still insisted I be discreet (and if necessary, deceptive) in case the truth got back to their non-affirming neighborhood and workplaces.

Every innocent question from other kids or teachers was a minefield for me, since I had to pretend that my two mothers didn’t live together, or that they were just friends. It was one reason we hardly ever invited people to our house. I had a painfully scrupulous personality as a child, and hated lying. As an introvert, I was also pretty bad at it. I wasn’t free to engage in ordinary small talk about family life without facing the awful choice between disloyalty and dishonesty–on top of which, I knew I was only making a fool of myself by denying what was obvious to outsiders.

Self-consciousness. Fear of getting close to people. Internal taboos against confiding in anyone about problems in your home. Such are the lessons a child learns in her parents’ closet.

Are these the relationship patterns that will produce happy marriages, heterosexual or otherwise, for gay couples’ children? I don’t think so.

Jesus came to bring us grace and forgiveness so we could love one another. He said, “The truth will set you free.” That’s the only foundation of a healthy marriage and family life. 

Visit the Human Rights Campaign website to send a protest message to the USCCB.