Queer. The word has many different meanings: Different. Odd. Strange. Out of place. We use queer to describe things that make us uncomfortable, things that don’t quite fit into the world as we have defined it. While many people, gay and straight, can and do accept much of what is lesbian and gay, there are some aspects of our lives that are controversial, that make people uncomfortable. There are certainly aspects to being gay that are difficult for many of us to understand and embrace. Curious is another definition of the word queer. And much of what is queer is also what piques our curiosity. This chapter is a nonthreatening look at both aspects of queer as it relates to the gay community, sort of a “Queer 101.”

“I think it’s okay that you’re gay, but why do you have to flaunt it?” is a comment most gay people have heard many times. Gay parades and marches are one way that gay and lesbian people make their presence felt publicly, and that makes many nongay people uncomfortable. It’s intellectually easy to accept that your cousin who lives in New Jersey is gay; it’s another thing when 200,000 gay people are marching through the center of town. But for those marching, there is no comparable experience. Having spent most of our lives in the minority, these events offer gay people a once-a-year opportunity to feel safe on the streets, surrounded by “our own kind.”

Gay or straight, the subject of sexuality also makes many people uncomfortable. People who challenge traditional conventions of gender—drag queens, leather dykes, bisexuals, transgendered people, lesbians into butch/femme—are all in some way toying with society’s long-held views of what makes a person masculine or feminine. These are hard concepts to get a handle on. At the same time, we are all curious about those whose identities are different from our own.

If the topic of sexuality makes people nervous, then the topic of sex can send them out the door. It’s hard for some people to accept, but, yes, Virginia, gay people do have sex. In the push to gain acceptance, discussions of sex are often neglected; forgotten is that for many of the Stonewall-era gay activists, “gay liberation” was seen in part as a movement for “sexual liberation.” For many gay and lesbian people, this is still primary. In this section we talk about many aspects of sex and the community, including leather, gay porn, and lesbian erotica.

Finally, despite the notion that gay and lesbian people are “just like everyone else,” we have developed our own styles and ways of dressing. These “codes,” along with the “gaydar” most gay people appear to have been born with, have evolved over time to help us find each other. Some of the icons, fashions, and symbols of our movement are found at the end of this chapter.

…As a Three-dollar Bill

The heart of queer is basic: It’s recognizing one’s own uniqueness in society and celebrating it. Queer is understanding that it is our differences that make life exciting, that allow us to grow as a community, that challenge us to better appreciate those around us. Queers understand that while it is sometimes difficult and frustrating, difference is an opportunity for progress, not simply a thing to “get over.” It is through the differences that we can discover our common ground, and create a safe place for everyone to express their opinions, passions, and concerns.

This seems to he something that the “gay-not-queer” crowd overlooks. They see difference as a problem to be solved or ignored. One of the arguments against recognition of lesbians and gay men has been that being gay is a “bedroom issue,” that is, that our sexuality has nothing to do with the larger political world. Difference, to gay-not-queers, is a bed-room issue, as if it has nothing to do with political struggle or even cooperation between communities in day-to-day life. They talk a lot about emphasizing similarities rather than focusing on difference, as if the two things are mutually exclusive. The “gay-not-queer” world pictures difference as five people screaming at each other in different languages, with no one listening to or understanding anyone else. Queer vision recognizes that only through listening to these different languages can we build a common vocabulary.

Being queer means being comfortable with having a spotlight, even a bull’s-eye, directly on one’s chest where it cannot be ignored. If you accept the responsibility of being queer, you can’t (and won’t) be stock for the soup in the fantasy “melting pot” of America. We’re queer as hell, and frankly, that’s a relief. We want to be different. We love being different—and it’s a privilege we’re not willing to give up. Not for “equal rights,” or “acceptance,” or to make being queer more palatable to the homophobic tongue.

And the reality is, even if some people don’t want to be “different,” we are different, because the heterosexual world, which holds the power, sees us as such. As long as one is gay, lesbian, bisexual, and/or transgendered, one is “queer.” Gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered people, and everything in between cannot afford to blend into anything.

Gay-not-queers seek to deny people they consider “controversial” access to our movement. Yet within the “gay and lesbian” community, there are bisexuals and transgendered people. Many queers are ostracized or made invisible by their biological families. How dare any gay man or lesbian propose that we kick out or conceal the members of our family who don’t easily fit under the arbitrary umbrella of gay/lesbian?

Being queer isn’t about eliminating our insecurities about difference but the hostility toward it. Queers recognize that while acceptance of difference is not always comfortable, it is a valuable tool through which we can enrich and strengthen ourselves both individually and as a community.

What’s in a Name?

I don’t think queer is a fundamentally bad word. Queer is a fine word to describe things that are odd, out of the ordinary, or strange. Queer also has a history and confrontational quality about it that makes it ideal for militant political slogans like “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,” and for the name of out-front groups like Queer Nation and Queer Action.

Two men take an out and proud walk together in New York City (1981). (Bettye Lane)

Some gay and lesbian people also find queer a fun and playful word to use among friends the same way they use fag and dyke. And I can hardly object to those homosexual men and women who choose to identify themselves as queer and align themselves with the latest wave of a forty-five-year old gay rights movement. But queer is not my word. Not because I’m an old fogey who can’t get with the new program and the latest language. Queer is not my word because it does not define who I am or represent what I believe in.

One of the claims I’ve heard made for queer is that it’s an inclusive word, embracing all kinds of people. It eliminates the need for naming a long list of groups to describe our movement, as in “gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, transvestite,” and so forth. But as a gay man, I’m not all those things. I’m a man who feels sexually attracted to people of the same gender.

As a gay man, I don’t want to be grouped under the all-encompassing umbrella of queer. I’m not even all that comfortable being grouped with bisexuals, let alone transsexuals, transvestites, and queer straights. Not because I have anything against these groups or don’t support their quests for equal rights, acceptance, and understanding—in fact, I do—but because we have different lives, face different challenges, and don’t necessarily share the same aspirations.

I have no desire to set myself apart from the main-stream or to carve a new path. Of course, as a gay man, I’m different from someone who grew up straight. And it’s important to recognize that difference and understand how that difference affects who I am. But I’d rather emphasize what I have in common with other people than focus on the differences. The last thing I want to do is institutionalize that difference by defining myself with a word and a political philosophy that set me outside the mainstream.

My approach to gay rights does not lead to revolutionary change in attitudes toward gay people, and it can be frustratingly slow. But it leads to the kind of evolutionary change that I believe will one day make it possible for gay men and lesbians to live without fear of rejection and discrimination, a day when we are no longer considered “the other” or “odd” or “queer.”

EXPLORING GENDER

From the moment a child is born, people begin asking, “Is it a boy or a girl?” That child is then raised to become a heterosexual woman or man. These two genders, which many people understand as set in stone as the only two genders, are determined in a variety of ways. From the time a child is born, society will aggressively regulate its journey toward a gendered self.

In the hospital, we can tell whether the child has a penis (which would indicate “boy”) or a vagina (which would indicate “girl”). The boy is wrapped in a blue swath, while the girl is wrapped in pink. These colors are the first step toward the social aspects of gender. But gender is much more than just biology. Once the child comes home from the hospital, parents and society begin training it to believe that girls are soft, emotional, and sensitive while boys are aggressive, tough, and rational. Girls are encouraged to desire lacy things and dolls and boys are supposed to like sports and trucks. As the child grows older, the rules of desire extend to sexual attraction, and boys are understood to be sexually attracted to girls and vice versa.

But many people fail to fall into these two genders, a strict two-piece set of “male” and “female” biology, behavior, and desire. For those people, these definitions are limitations, or, as JoAnn Loulan puts it, a “gender jail.” For those of us who grow up to be homosexual, bisexual, or transgendered, our journey toward a gendered self is a confusing and ambiguous road.

Loulan explains, “Many lesbians grow up identifying not as boys, but with boys. These girls want to do what the boys do and dress as the boys dress. And while these girls know that they aren’t actually boys, they only see two alternatives: male or female. If they are not girls, they must be boys. But they are not boys. From the time of that realization, as painful and alienating as it is, these young lesbians become gender outlaws. Residing in the netherlands of neither-nor, they begin to explore what it means to be something else entirely. In doing so, they create new genders.

Many gay and transgendered men also grow up with a sense of being a “neither-nor.” Some gay men respond to this ambiguity by attempting to diminish the difference between their sense of gendered self and the societal sense of “male.” They try to resolve the issue by accepting most of the “rules,” by being “masculine” and rational, but with a twist: They like to sleep with other men. As Loulan says, “The real issue of gender is about who has sex with who and how: who puts what appendage into what orifice.” Even while trying to accommodate the gender norms, these men inadvertently create yet another gender. Other gay men play with gender in a variety of ways, from drag to leather to hypermasculinity.

So what is gender? “Gender” is defined in Webster’s Dictionary as a colloquial or informal word used to describe one’s sex. But the words are anything but informal. The proscribed choices are two: “male” or “female.” Loulan says that this feminine/masculine paradigm literally stops us from being able to describe who we are: “What if, instead of two genders, there are more? What if there are endless ways of being female, and infinite ways of being male?”

The reality is that most people, including many lesbians and gay men, are threatened by the possible worlds Loulan’s questions suggest. Few things, after all, make people more uncomfortable than being unable to discern the gender of a person we’re talking with, either face-to-face or on the phone. It’s even more upsetting when men become women and women become men. Transsexuals are truly on the gender front lines. People hate transsexuals because they are confusing to those of us that feel we are safe within gender limits. Even in on-line computer conversations, one of the first things people want to know is: “Male or female?”

Perhaps, as Loulan says, “Homophobia can really be looked at as genderphobia.”

She continues, “Imagine a world in which you get to choose whatever you want to wear. You get to choose however you want to play, and what you do for work. You don’t worry about who you are having sex with or who you want to marry. All of the concerns about homosexuality, bisexuality, transsexuality, and heterosexuality are gone. A world where gender is seen as a combination of genetics, choice, and culture, and is ultimately irrelevant.”

Truly, love (and hate) is a many-gendered thing. In this section, we explore the idea that, within a galaxy of gendered selves, “male” and “female” are not the only stars. And to wonder, as Loulan does, whether “in our scramble to prove that we are women and men, we stumble right past our opportunity to claim more honest gender identities.” To do that, we may need to move beyond the discussion of male/female altogether.

Would You Still Be Gay…

…if you were of the other sex? That is, if you are a lesbian, would you be a gay man if you were a male? Conversely, if you are a gay man, do you think that you would be a lesbian if you were female? One of the editors ran across this discussion on Gaynet, one of the Internet gay bulletin boards. This thread had garnered more than thirty-five responses. Here are some of those responses:

If I were a woman I wouldn’t *be* me, so I can’t even attempt to guess at *anything* about this not-me female, much less her sexuality. Well, OK—I do think she’d wear *faaabulous* shoes, whatever *that* means.…

Ahah! A chance, once again, to tell the tale of an acquaintance of some years ago:

I was at a dance club in 1965 and this beautiful person walked in with some dykes. After ogling what I thought was a beautiful young man, I was politely informed that she was not. She was a mechanic and a lesbian (which immediately stirred my suppressed bi side).

I lost track of this person till a number of years later when I met *him* tending bar. Since he now had a rather nice moustache, I was puzzled. He told me of his gender problems since a very young age and his change from female to male. I (very stupidly) asked why he was tending bar in a gay bar and he said, “because I’m gay, of course.”

Over the years, we discussed many things, including intimacies of the operations (not that that matters). One of the things that we both discussed often was the curious fact that, as a woman, he enjoyed the company of women and as a male, males.

The sum of all this?? I somehow feel that homosexual is homosexual and has little to do with being transexual or with the person’s sex.

P.S. I *definitely* would be a lesbian if I were female. No question about that at all. I have pondered this question since the mid 60s and have often wished (I don’t know why) I *were* female just so I *could* be.

I honestly don’t know. I would think I would be attracted to men no matter what. I certainly know that, if I woke up female tomorrow (god forbid), I’d still be attracted to men. No doubt about that.

Trey/Nothing Wrong With Being Female, But I’m Happy To Be Male—Asheville, OR

About 25 years ago I figured out that if I had been born a man I would have been gay. While this might be due to a failure of imagination (I simply can’t imagine not finding men attractive) I suspect it is something deeper.

Hmm, this is a real brain twister. Well, I suppose I still wouldn’t be able to shop, or color coordinate my clothing, or know how to cook. So nothing would change.

I guess I’d have to do just what I do now. Even though I’d be a woman, I’d have to marry a gay man to cook, clean, tell me what to wear, and be there with a shoulder to cry on.

What fascinates me is that someone could actually think that sexual preference could actually change when gender changes.

Do you mean if I was born a man or I became a man? If I were to wake up tomorrow and *gasp* discovered I had a dick that was actually attached (perish the thought) I would still adore women lesbians in particular. (Though, I guess it would be hard to get a date in my circle of friends.) I would probably become a <insert favorite term for str8 man who hangs out with dykes>. I think that if I were born male I would be a str8 male.

But sitting here thinking about it, I wouldn’t want to be anything but a lesbian. I think, given a choice, I would choose duke every time.

If I had a sex change, and had the choice of having a straight man or a lesbian woman as a partner, I think I would he most unlikely to put tip with the sort of non-sense that straight men dish out in general (and not only to women). Call me a possible-worlds political lesbian, if you wish.

OGod yes, I *definitely* would be a lesbian if I were female. Anything rather than straight men (but I would be into strap-ons).

Myths/Realities of Bisexuality

Sexuality runs along a continuum. It is not a static “thing” but rather a process that can flow, changing throughout our lifetime. Bisexuality falls along this continuum. As Boston bisexual activist Robyn Ochs says, bisexuality is the “potential for being sexually and/or romantically involved with members of either gender.”

TRUTH: Bisexual people have a range of sexual behaviors. Some have multiple partners; some have one partner; some go through partnerless periods. Promiscuity is no more prevalent in the bisexual population than in other groups of people.

TRUTH: Bisexuals tend to favor either the same or the opposite sex, while recognizing their attraction to both genders.

TRUTH: Bisexual simply means the potential for involvement with either gender. This may mean sexually, emotionally, in reality, or fantasy. Some bisexual people may have concurrent lovers: others may relate to different genders at various time periods. Most bisexuals do not need to see both genders in order to feel fulfilled.

TRUTH: Bisexuality is a sexual orientation. It is independent of a lifestyle of monogamy or nonmonogamy. Bisexuals are as capable as anyone of making a long-term monogamous commitment to a partner they love. Bisexuals live a variety of lifestyles, as do gays and heterosexuals.

TRUTH: Bisexuality is a legitimate sexual orientation that incorporates gayness. Most bisexuals consider themselves part of the generic term “gay.” Many are quite active in the gay community, both socially and politically. Some of us use terms such as “bisexual lesbian” to increase our visibility on both issues.

TRUTH: Some people go through a transitional period of bisexuality on their way to adopting a lesbian/gay or heterosexual identity. For many others, bisexuality remains a long-term orientation. Indeed, we are finding that homosexuality may be a transitional phase in the coming-out process for bisexual people.

TRUTH: This myth legitimizes discrimination against bisexuals. The label “bisexual” simply refers to sexual orientation. It says nothing about sexual behavior. AIDS occurs in people of all sexual orientations. AIDS is contracted through unsafe sexual practices, shared needles, and contaminated blood transfusions. Sexual orientation does not “cause” AIDS.

TRUTH: It is natural for both bisexuals and gays to go through a period of confusion in the coming-out process. When you are an oppressed people and are constantly told that you don’t exist, confusion is an appropriate reaction until you come out to yourself and find a supportive environment.

MYTH: Bisexuals can hide in the heterosexual community when the going gets tough.

TRUTH: To “pass” for straight and deny your bisexuality is just as painful and damaging for a bisexual as it is for someone gay. Bisexuals are not heterosexual and we do not identify as heterosexual.

TRUTH: We are part of the generic definition of gay. Nongays lump us all together. Bisexuals have lost their jobs and suffer the same legal discrimination as other gays.

TRUTH: Women who are uncomfortable or confused about their same-sex attraction may use the bisexual label. True bisexuals acknowledge both their same-sex and opposite-sex attraction. Both bisexuals and gays are capable of going back into the closet. People who are unable to make commitments may use a person of either gender to leave a relationship.

It is important to remember that bisexual, gay, lesbian, and heterosexual are labels created by a homophobic, biphobic, heterosexist society to separate and alienate us from each other. We are all unique; we don’t fit into neat little categories. We sometimes need to use these labels for political reasons and to increase our visibilities. Our sexual esteem is facilitated by acknowledging and accepting the differences and seeing the beauty in our diversity.

Bisexuality: Beyond the Walls of Gender

I am bisexual. I am a lesbian. I am a bi-identified lesbian. I am a lesbian-identified bisexual. I am a lesbian who has sex with men. I am confused. I am all these things, given the day of the week and who wants to know.

A large part of this society’s social relation problem is its constant need to pigeonhole people. I thought I would escape that when I took refuge in the world of gay men and lesbians, who understand the repressive, limiting categories of the heterosexual world and would not impose their own. On the contrary. Gay men and lesbians have generated more categories among themselves than you can keep track of. Regarding bisexuality, however, the gay community often practices discrimination by omission. “Bisexuality” isn’t even considered a legitimate category; it’s some strange limbo between straight and gay that eventually has to dissolve into one or the other.

It’s as though the same school of thought on bisexuality exists among gay men and lesbians as exists among many heterosexuals toward gay men and lesbians—that our sexuality is a choice. I sense resentment from gay people who believe I can “pass” as straight and therefore have no claim to the gay community. Like people are saying, If you all can sleep with either men or women, why not just pick one, so you can either take your proper place among us, or be cast back into the abyss of heterosexuality?

If that’s the case, I’d rather be part of the queer community than the gay community. A distinct difference exists between the two. “Gay” is a sexuality, while “queer” is a sensibility. I know many gay people who are not queer. Queer is defined as outside the mainstream, anti-status quo, mentioning nothing about sexuality or emotionality. It is a willingness to be open to things that others shy away from, including but not exclusively same-gender sex. Even very hip straight people (emphasis on very) can have certain queer sensibilities, though they may never be gay. Gay men and lesbians who choose to embrace the outsider identity as a means of unity and empowerment ought to think about that. A friend of mine once said, “I don’t know what a queer is, but I know we’re not like everyone else.”

Westernized society has socialized us, straight and gay alike, to pair ourselves with genders, as opposed to personalities and spiritualities. We commit the fallacy of defining sexualities in terms of the sex act, because it is the easiest level to grasp. What is a woman who has sex with men but falls in love only with other women? What is a man who finds himself attracted to a male-to-female transsexual? The labels we attach reveal how we prioritize two definitions of sexuality: sex then emotion, or emotion then sex? The emotional and spiritual connections are often disregarded in place of who people have sex with. For me, bisexuality reaches beyond the physical, beyond the genital, where the walls of gender fade into the all-inclusive “human species.”

Modern Day Butch/Femme

While rooted in the past, butch/femme is not a thing of the past. Today, many lesbians are reclaiming their “butch” and “femme” selves and are finding that, among other things, these roles add an erotic dynamic to their relationships. But even the definition of butch/femme changes over time. And if we had fifteen words for genders, who knows how we would define our sexuality? So what is this thing called butch/femme?

The harder task comes in trying to define exactly what butch/femme is. Can straight women be butch? Can men be femme? Didn’t we all fight for years to eliminate rules (and roles) altogether? Does everyone fall into one category or the other?

Joan Nestle, who defines herself as “a femme who came out in the 1950s,” attempts in The Persistent Desire to define butch/femme:

In the most basic terms, butch-femme means a way of looking, loving, and living that can be expressed by individuals, couples, or a community.… Butch-femme relationships, as I experienced them, were complex erotic and social statements, not phony heterosexual replicas. They were filled deeply with the language of stance, dress, gesture, love, courage, and autonomy.

From a more recent perspective, here are two women on butch/femme from “Debate #1” in The Lesbian Erotic Dance by JoAnn Loulan:

Part of identifying as butch stems from a desire to defend, protect, and defy the traditional feminine stereotype. All of these verbs imply a reaction to the world. Being butch to me to a large degree means reacting to the world. A large part of identifying as femme stems from a desire to create, empathize, and become the woman (femininity and all) inside us. Therefore identifying as femme is more of an initial action—not passive at all.

There are also women who identify with one role and are perceived to be the other. These lesbians are often referred to as butchy/femmes or femmy/butches.

I was putting on a new toilet seat—should be easy, right—just two screws—of course not. So I’m under the toilet trying to get these goddamned fucking corroded screws loose. My young son is watching all this. I say, “It’s sure a bitch being butch.” He looks at me in confusion and says, “Mom. I thought your girlfriend was butch.”

Of course, for every lesbian who says she relates to the terms “butch” and “femme” there is another who claims “androgynous” as her self-description. And while self-definition is the most essential part of claiming our lesbian selves, even those who don’t identify themselves as butch or femme do have clear ideas about others. When Joanne Loulan talks to lesbians around the country, she will often get a woman to come on stage who says she is neither, and “let the audience decide.” And a roomful of lesbians, often 200 or more, who have never laid eyes on the woman, will always overwhelmingly choose one label or the other, before the woman has even opened her mouth.

The Transsexual Mythtique

Transsexuals are a diverse group. For some, it’s important to disconnect totally from their past and lead a new life, telling practically no one. And then there are those who consider themselves neither gender, or a blend, regardless of the degree of their physical transition. Just as it’s important to have one’s sexual orientation acknowledged and accepted by the outside world, it is appreciated when one addresses a transsexual and refers to him or her with the pronoun of the gender presented by that person.

MYTH: Transsexuals just need to learn to be comfortable with the bodies they were born into.

TRUTH: Many of us spend years in therapy trying to adjust to the bodies we’re in. Sometimes we try to hide traces of our transgender issues by overcompensating the behavior of our assigned gender. By the time we start taking steps to change our bodies, this is literally the last resort. Few people question getting a facelift or breast implants to make a person feel more comfortable, but when gender is involved there’s a double standard. Physical adjustments aside, learning how to live in a role for which we haven’t been trained is challenging. Imagine going to a foreign country where you don’t know the language but you’ve got to act as if you do.

TRUTH: I have come across many people who are confused about why a man would become a woman, but at the same time think they know why a woman would become a man. It is often assumed that it has to do with having access to the opportunities that men have, like getting a better job. Historically, when women “passed” as men, it’s possibly true that they wanted more opportunity, but has anyone considered that maybe they also felt their true gender identity was male? It takes a lot more than just wanting a better job to cross over and live in a new gender role.

MYTH: Transsexuals can’t deal with their true homosexuality, so they change gender to lead heterosexual lives.

TRUTH: Gender identity and sexual orientation are separate issues. About half of MTFs (male-to-females) end up as lesbians, and among FTMs, there are more and more now identifying themselves as bisexual or gay. Some MTFs were gay men and now find themselves interested in women, and there are quite a number of FTMs who were lesbians and now identify as gay men. When going through a gender change, sexuality can be very fluid, and you never really know how you’re going to turn out.

MYTH: There is an increasing number of FTMs because there is no room in the lesbian community to be “butch.”

TRUTH: I have never heard of any FTM who made his change because of acceptance—or lack of it—from an outside community. It’s what goes on inside, how one feels in one’s body, and whom one sees in the mirror.

TRUTH: “Have you had the operation yet.” is the classic “talk-show” line—as if you go to sleep a man, have an operation, and suddenly wake up as a woman. It takes about five years to get comfortable living as the new gender. Internally, the transition is ongoing. For most transsexuals the change really starts when they realize they need to change their body. The biggest changes are psychological. Within a three-month period, I had between fifty and seventy-five dreams about a gender change. Finally it sunk in that I needed to do something about it. Starting hormones triggers the most dramatic physical and emotional changes that take place during the first year. If you can imagine, your body has been receiving a certain set of signals for most of your life and then suddenly it starts getting a whole new set of messages. It takes time to shift gears. The next step might be surgery. Some transsexuals, for a variety of different reasons, don’t have surgery. For those of us who do, it might consist of a series of surgeries, (i.e., for FTMs, chest and then genital) several years apart.

MYTH: Masculinity and femininity can he expressed through whatever body one is in.

TRUTH: I often wonder why it is that we ascribe “male” to one set of behaviors and “female” to another. Ultimately I believe we have access to all of it. For transsexuals, however, it’s a visceral experience along with the compelling desire to change the body to more closely reflect the psyche. For some, it is absolutely necessary to transform completely on a physical level. For others, not. There are many possiblities and ways to express gender. I feel it’s important that we find what works for us as individuals and, at the same time, respect the choices that others make for themselves.

You’re Strange and We’re Wonderful

The Relationship Between the Gay/Lesbian and Transgender Communities

The alliance between the gay/lesbian and transgender communities is characterized by suspicion and misunderstanding on both sides. In many ways, it is the age-old story of an enfranchised group overlooking the needs of and actively excluding a less empowered group.

Of course, a considerable number of gay men and lesbians are sensitive toward transgendered persons and our plight. But others do not see and are often totally unaware of the larger transgender community, which is separate and distinct from the gay community. They don’t understand the diversity of the transgender community, and they certainly give little or no thought to the advantages of working together. Consequently, they rarely think of transgendered persons when affirming their own rights to serve in the military, to love whomever they please, and to work in discrimination-free settings.

But there is much more going on than mere indifference. There is a pervasive distrust of, antagonism toward, and even hatred of transgendered persons. A few gay men and lesbians seem determined to mandate us out of existence. They deliberately misuse pronouns, force transsexual persons out of gay and lesbian events, and on more than one occasion have been physically violent toward transsexual persons.

If the levels of understanding and attitudes of many gay men and lesbians toward transgendered persons can be characterized as ignorant, indifferent, embarrassed, or hostile, it becomes puzzling how and why the gay community has accepted transgender behavior to the extent that it has. Female impersonation is frequent at bars and parties, and many valued members of the community have gender presentations that vary far from the usual gender stereotypes. But acceptance of the idea of transgender is partial and sometimes grudging, resulting from ignorance by the gay/lesbian community that many in their community are transgendered.

This has resulted in what I call Gay Imperialism, in which the accomplishments and the very identities of transgendered persons are collapsed into the gay community. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is Billy Tipton.

Tipton was an accomplished jazz musician, a husband, and father of two adopted sons. After his death in 1989, it was revealed that he was biologically a woman. Marjorie Garber has written elegantly about Tipton in her book Vested Interests. She points out that the facts of Tipton’s life make no sense except when looked at in a transgendered light. His life was much more than a means to express himself via his music, and much more than a way to live a lesbian relationship. Neither his wife nor his sons were aware that he did not have male genitalia. He was a husband and a father to them and a man to his neighbors and fellow musicians; he was a woman only to the press and the gay/lesbian community, both of which claimed him and exploited him after he was conveniently dead.

Gay scholars have similarly exploited transgendered persons, even while specifically writing about them. In books about transgendered two-spirited American Indians, some scholars look at their subjects through gay-colored spectacles. It’s true that the sexual orientation of many and perhaps even most two-spirit people was to those of the same biological sex, but the two-spirit people are also, with equal if not greater profundity, transgendered. Gay scholars have interpreted two-spirit people from a gay perspective, even as heterosexual anthropologists have interpreted homosexual behavior in various cultures from their own point of view.

With its newly found voice, the transgender community will no longer tolerate such colonization by the gay community. People like Billy Tipton, Radclyffe Hall, and Joan of Arc are being reclaimed as transgendered—queer, but not gay. And it’s clear that it is a reclamation and not a revision, for they were stolen from the transgendered community. And make no mistake: The murmur of today will be a roar tomorrow.

The gay/lesbian and transgender communities have much to learn from each other. The transgender community is eager for discourse. It has much to learn about politics, self-discovery, and self-acceptance from the gay/lesbian community. And the gay/lesbian community must come to understand that the voices of transgendered persons will forever after be in their ears.

It’s a marvelous opportunity for both communities. Here’s hoping that the cannons will be pointed outward, toward those who would deny “queers”—all of them, transgendered or gay—the right to live, and not inward, toward those who are more like us than we care to think.

The Politics of Drag

The radical drag underground. The Wigstock generation. Drag post-moderne. Whatever it’s called, there is a new generation of drag performers who have no desire to coddle their audience with the umpteenth rendition of Marilyn. Spurred on by both homophobia and AIDSphobia, this drag is fresh, fierce, and fighting mad.

But not all drag performers see false eyelash to false eyelash on the activist power of donning a dress. There are those performers, both male and female, who use cross-gender guise to bring attention to their political forum and those who do it strictly for entertainment value.

While Atlanta drag performer Lurleen and Los Angeles drag Vaginal Creme Davis are out on the front lines, involved in groups such as ACT UP, and giving benefit performances for the fight against AIDS, others, such as John Epperson as Lypsinka, see their roles simply as entertainers.

“AIDS has forced gay people to think about who we are and what our relationship with straight society really is,” says the strawberry-blond Lurleen. “It’s hard to be an apolitical person these days. I’m no strident Marxist, but when there is a reactionary government in power, it’s kind of hard to get up onstage and lip-synch Barbra and then say, ’Drink up, everybody.’”

Lypsinka, who hopes to cross over from the stage into mainstream network television, disagrees. “Some people opt to do that [be political]. I don’t. I set out to entertain.”

The disagreements over style and form between Lypsinka, Lurleen, Vaginal Creme Davis, and legions of other drag queens—politics versus entertainment—are not new.

The Judy Garlands of the drag queen world became the unquestioned norm during the heady disco days of the 1970s and 1980s, when drag bars blossomed throughout the country. Although there were several drag troupes, such as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and the Cockettes in San Francisco, who maintained a high profile at parades and demonstrations, it was not until the late 1980s and the acceleration of the AIDS crisis that drag embraced a political message.

The late great Divine terrorizes and enthralls his 1978 audience at the Trocadero in San Francisco. (Dan Vicoletta)

Clearly, today’s drag artists have a lot more on their minds than tight wigs. “[Political] drag is absolutely, unquestionably experiencing a comeback,” claims Martin Worman, aka Philthee Ritz, one of the original members of the Cockettes. “The Cockettes didn’t have a dogma. Now drag has an edge and a conscience because of AIDS.”

“The difference between old-line drag and new drag is that those performers took themselves seriously,” continues Lurleen. “That’s tedious in any form of self-expression. What we do reflects the mentality of our generation. We approach serious causes with humor and react to what’s going on in our culture and society.”

The setting for this rebirth can probably be traced to the Pyramid Club in Manhattan’s East Village, where acts like the band Now Explosion and performers such as Hapi Phace, Tabboo!, and the late Ethyl Eichelberger honed their considerable talents in front of an audience that included New York’s intellectual and social elite.

“Now drag is about trying new things,” explains New York drag figurehead Lady Bunny. “It isn’t limited to lip-synching. There is a new generation of queers whose icons aren’t Barbra, Judy, and Eartha.” Instead, blaxploitation films, 1970s sitcoms, glitter-rock bands, or parodies of other drags are now de rigueur inspirations.

“Drag adds an element of fun to politics so that it’s not all Maoist uniforms and being glum and gray,” says the platform-heeled Lurleen. “Hopefully it makes thinking about politics more palatable.”

Lypsinka, whose lightning-paced lip-synch revue I Could Go On Lip-Synching! has had tremendous financial success on both coasts, says that although he has performed at AIDS and gay-related fund-raisers, he sees himself as “not political at all.”

“It’s easier to digest Lypsinka’s kind of performance,” explains self-styled “blacktress” Vaginal Creme Davis. “It’s safer, and people aren’t challenged. But when people see an African American in this feminized role, they realize that there’s a whole spectrum of being out there and that the black experience or the queer experience is not just limited to one aspect.”

Of course, drag performance is not strictly the domain of men. San Francisco is also home to Leigh Crow, whose character. Elvis Herselvis, puts an ironic spin on Elvis impersonators, discussing the King’s drug problem and making copious references to “little girls in white cotton panties.”

Shelly Mars’s male characters have a somewhat harder edge. The New York performer’s best-known character is Martin, a leering, cigar-chomping man in a baggy suit who performs a striptease and fondles his dick. By the end of the performance, Martin transforms into a woman and the idea comes full circle.

Mars’s newest male character, Peter, is a person with AIDS is ho is slightly psychotic from medication and dementia. Modeled after people she met through ACT UP and friends who have died of the disease, Peter elicits very powerful reactions from her audience.

“It’s a scary thing to do,” says Mars. “You never know what kind of response you are going to get. Some people think that since I am portraying an insane character, I am making fun of him or saying all people with AIDS are this way. That narrow-mindedness comes from their own denial.”

Beyond the politics and the divisions it engenders, there is a common thread running through the drag community: the desire to get audiences thinking about their own sexuality.

“We challenge gender roles,” explains Glennda Orgasm of the New York public-access cable program The Brenda and Glennda Show. “And even though it’s a campy parody, it goes beyond that. A lot of gay men are bothered by their own femininity. Like ‘I’m gay, but I’m not feminine. I’m not a fag. I’m a man, even though I like to suck cock.’ Seeing a drag queen confronts all those fears. That’s why we do drag.”

Leigh Crow, performer and drag king extraordinaire, as her alter-ego, Elvis Herselvis. (Rink Foto)

“I understand the objection to drag from gays within the system who are working on gay and lesbian issues that way,” says Lurleen, “and yet I think that’s wrong. The issue is diversity and tolerance for people who are different and not just people who are different ‘our way.’ All oppressed people have something in common and need to work together.”

Get Her!—Wisdom from Great Drag Queens

“I speak for the individual. For anyone out there who’s ever had a dream and has had to listen to ‘Honey, you can’t do that.’ ‘We don’t allow blacks here.’ ‘We don’t allow fags here.’ ‘We don’t allow women in this bar.’ I am a giant ‘Fuck you’ to bigotry. Buddha, Krishna, Jesus, and now RuPaul. I’m about the politics of the soul. I transcend the gay community. I speak to everyone with pain in their heart.”

“The cross-dressers, to put it bluntly, we’re the ones who had the balls to say, Look—I’m gay!”

“I kind of see drag queens as the suffragettes of the gay community.… I think the root of that problem really is various people saying, ‘I am ashamed of who I am and I don’t want anyone to remind me of what I am.’ ’Cause I can remember when I first came out of the closet, I hated camp men.”

“No matter what they say on Oprah or Donahue, I have never met a female impersonator who wasn’t gay. I met one guy who is married, but that’s a crock. I think those who are saying they are not and thinking that it will get them further are just wasting their time.”

—DRAG QUEEN POISON WATERS, 1992 QUEEN OF LA FEMME MAGNIFIQUE, THE WESTERN UNITED STATES PAGEANT TO FIND “THE MOST BEAUTIFUL FEMALE IMPERSONATOR”

Behind the Mask

For African American men, masculinity is a complicated issue: How do you define being a man in a society that doesn’t see you as one?

If you are homosexual as well, this issue is even more complex. All our cultural and social mores are based on heterosexual manhood. Furthermore, in the media—gay and straight—being gay is a white thing. I always believed, though, that I had society’s laws licked, that my being out challenged the notion that African Americans can’t be homosexual. It seemed so simple. But then I met Sydney.

Sydney is a six-foot-two, 225-pound nineteen-year-old with dimples for days, and Hershey’s chocolate skin. He is also a B-boy. That’s right—a ruffneck. There’s no such thing as a gay B-boy, you say? Sorry, but not all African American gay men walk the runway like RuPaul. Some of us appear on MTV and BET, rhymin’ and harmonizin’ up a storm. Of course, you can’t tell these home-boys are gay since they don’t “look” or “act” like it. Being banjie is the perfect disguise for an African American gay—or bisexual—male: Who would ever think that one of these hip-hop-lovin’, crazy crotch-grabbin’, droopy-jean-wearin’, forty-ounce-guzzlin’ brothers is a faggot? Yes, some wear a mask and wear it well.

But the mask slowly came off Sydney as he and I got to know each other, I was apprehensive at first. We have almost nothing in common (he worships Snoop Doggy Dogg; I love Rachelle Ferrell). He’s a bit too egotistical (he religiously wears a cap announcing I’M 2 SEXY 4 MYSELF). And he says the f word so much, you’d think it was his middle name. But a friend pushed me to give Sydney, who pursued me for two months after ringing up my groceries at the local supermarket, a chance. “You don’t know,” my friend argued. “He might surprise you.”

Well, he did. After a month Sydney and I became “a couple.” He’d drop by almost every day after school or work—sometimes with a rose or a bouquet of flowers—and I’d help him with his homework. We’d watch TV or play Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit (he’d usually win). Or we’d “max” in each other’s arms (which is a sight, since I’m six inches shorter and ninety pounds lighter) as he read me one of his poems (he wants to be a writer). Sometimes, though, he’d just cry on my shoulder—which he’d never do in front of his homies—because of the confusion he felt about his sexual orientation. He is a sweet, sensitive young man who, like most gay men, was brainwashed into believing he should be ashamed of who he is.

He was surprised when I told him his literary heroes—Langston Hughes and James Baldwin—were gay. He was shocked when I didn’t want to “get busy” with him on our first date. And he was even more bewildered when I refused to he “the woman” (as if his hand being attached to his penis 29–7 meant he was “the man”). Being around a gay man who respected himself and did not subscribe to a moronic machismo culture that brands women “bitches” and “hos” and homosexuals “punks” made him more comfortable talking about his sexuality. He let his guard down and let the real him come out.

As my relationship with Sydney blooms, I am filled with hope and love—but also anger. Our society’s warped ideas about masculinity have young men like him in limbo. Some commit suicide because they believe no one understands or cares; Sydney admitted he contemplated doing it once. Others adopt archaic sexual codes that force them to play roles. Sydney is beginning to see that acting “hard” doesn’t make him a real man, nor will it change who he is.

Through him I’ve learned that as long as there is heterosexism, it isn’t enough to open only my own closet door. I must make sure others know they can too, especially the next generation. If we don’t serve as role models for young lesbians and gays, who will? How can they value their true selves if they believe that wearing a mask will make their lives easier? As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once said. “Silence is betrayal.” And what bigger crime is there but to betray yourself?

DIRTY TALK

Lesbians and gay men have taken great pains to convince everyone, including ourselves, that our movement is not just about sex. Of course it isn’t. We have a thriving movement for civil rights, a myriad of cultural experiences and discoveries, and day-to-day life that goes on outside of our bedrooms. But sometimes we forget that, while our movement is not only about sex, sex is an integral part of our lives, our loves, and our political struggles.

AIDS has changed the ways we relate to our bodies and sex. For many gay men during the eighties, AIDS made sex terrifying, a forbidden pleasure that could mean death. Since that time, most of us have adjusted to sex in the era of AIDS, accepting responsibility for protecting ourselves and others. Still, though, far too many of us are ignoring the warnings and having unsafe sex. And since the onslaught of the epidemic, an entire generation of gay men and lesbians have come to sexual maturity.

Lesbians, too, have experienced a revolution in sexual thought and deed. During the eighties, lesbians came out of the closet about leather sex, S/M, dildos, and pornography. In addition, while methods of HIV transmission via lesbian sex are still hotly debated, lesbians are discovering latex, cellophane wrap, and other ways of decreasing the risk of AIDS.

Sex has become so serious. But what we are learning now as a people is that serious does not have to mean bad, nor does it have to mean we can’t have fun. Sex is a crucial part of our sexuality. This section explores several different ways in which sex, far from equaling death, equals laughter, liberation, and life.

Sex and Stonewall

As a gay man living an openly gay life before Stonewall, the effects of the Riots in my life were immediate. The excitement of insurrection was palpable; my friends and myself, already connected to progressive leftist political groups, were elated: this was our revolution. I began going to Gay Liberation Front meetings in Manhattan two weeks later (and am still going to political meetings twenty-five years later). I had understood that feminist writings had some meaning for me, but now I had a real, vibrant context for specifically gay political theorizing—a way to think and analyze how gay men lived their lives.

But more than any of this, Stonewall meant sex. It is not as though gay men did not have sex before the Riots; they did, and much of the sex was good, nurturing, exciting. But after Stonewall sex was different. Not only was there less guilt and less anxiety, but the promise of Stonewall was, in a very real way, the promise of sex: free sex, better sex, lots of sex, sex at home and sex in the streets. As Tony Kushner writes in Angels in America: Perestroika, sex after Stonewall was the “Praxis, True Praxis. True Theory married to Actual Life.” This sexual energy fueled the movement. It filled us with fervor and desire—not only for one another, but to change the world.

The advent of AIDS changed all that. Suddenly sex had become something that enslaved rather than liberated, something that was not only dirty but, in the original meaning of the word, dreadful. Once we’d realized that AIDS could be spread by sexual transmission—a process that took several years—it was clear that we had to change some of our behaviors. But behavior was not the only thing that began changing. Homophobic social critics began labeling all gay male sex as dangerous. Early safe-sex guidelines preyed upon gay men’s uncertainties and proscribed all kinds of behaviors—especially the more socially unacceptable activities such as S/M—as life-threatening. Promiscuity—whether safe or not—was condemned as unhealthy and regressive; monogamy was now to become the norm. Some gay psychologists proclaimed that AIDS would shift gay men’s behaviors from an “adolescent” stage of sleeping around to the more “mature” stage of monogamous coupledom. It was perhaps inevitable that early attempts to promote responsible behavior dovetailed with the most homophobic, anti-sex attitudes in our culture, and in many ways “safe sex” came to mean less sex, fewer partners, and less sexual experimentation. The sexual promises of Stonewall seemed to have ended, betrayed by reality and disease, fear and loathing.

But in recent years it has become clear that our more traditional ideas about safe-sex education have not been completely successful. Some have argued that they have, indeed, failed as we have seen gay male seroconversion rates in cities such as San Francisco once again rise. The political right has argued that this is because gay male sexuality is intrinsically disordered. Some AIDS educators have suggested that the epidemic has caused many gay men to have a death wish. Others have argued that it is simply human nature to act irresponsibly. I would like to posit another response.

The problem with our conceptualization of “safe sex” is—and has always been—that it did not value sex enough. Sexual desire has become something to fear and to contain. Sex with one person was better than sex with ten, sex at home was better than sex at the baths, sex with love was superior to sex for sex’s sake: Sex was being seen as a luxury, a bonus, to good health—not as a necessity for it. It’s no wonder that safe sex based upon these precepts would be a failure. It ignored the reality that sexuality is a powerful force in our lives, that desire itself can be nurturing, that sex—in any number of manifestations—is an affirmation of who we are as queers living in the world. Of course, we have to be responsible in our sexual behavior, but that is quite a different matter from restraining our sexual desire or curtailing our sexual lives because of fear or dread.

The promise of sex that Stonewall delivered in 1969 is still with us today and its message is as important—if not more important—than ever. If we are going to get through the AIDS crisis, if we are truly going to love and respect ourselves as gay men, if we are going to grow and thrive in this homophobic world we are going to have to learn—once again—how to love and embrace our sexuality in all of its forms, all of its desires, all of its manifestations. If we can begin doing this, the liberating promise of Stonewall will set us free again today.

A History of Sex-Positive Lesbian Erotica

The “second wave” of feminism brought with it a double-edged sword with respect to public attitudes about lesbian sexuality. On the one hand, feminists identified the sexual objectification of women as a weapon of sexism and worked to eradicate it. This fight took various forms, including attacking the pornography and advertising industries and criticizing the ways men are socialized to treat women as objects for their pleasure. Emergent lesbian culture during the 1970s and early 1980s rejected the traditional sex roles projected for women, and challenged the notion that sexual freedom was attainable for women in the decades following the so-called sexual revolution.

On the other hand, rejecting the ways women have been sexualized by the dominant culture did not automatically give women positive images of ourselves as sexual. For example, many of the fashions lesbians adopted kept us from appearing sexually available not only to men, but to each other as well. Carrying out the agenda of women’s liberation in our own sex lives was challenging.

Lesbian-feminists resisted being defined by the main-stream as primarily sexual beings. At the same time, lesbians were having sex and regarding those experiences as an integral part of lesbian identity. There was a tension among some lesbians between those who wanted more public representations of lesbian sexuality and those who argued that these representations perpetuated sexist oppression.

In response to the need for more explicit and radical forms of lesbian sexual expression, in the 1980s a “sex-positive” movement for lesbians emerged. In just a little over a decade, the United States and British lesbian communities have seen a burgeoning in the publication, production, and distribution of lesbian erotic materials, sexual performances by and for women, and stores or catalogues that sell “sex toys.”

Nowhere was this emergence of the sex-positive movement more prominent than in San Francisco. It started with a big bang in 1984, when Blush Productions created venues for live erotic dancing for women at places like the now defunct Baybrick Inn. In women-only, safe spaces—a radical change from the male-owned clubs attended primarily by men—evenings were marked by a fevered, ecstatic, tangibly sexual energy and excitement that was surely a first. The dancers and the audience spanned a range of lesbian identities—butch, femme, and everything in between—in all manner of attire from lace to leather, front uniform to street clothes.

Today the sex-positive community has as many diverse components and variations as one can imagine. Sex-positive describes lesbians who are reclaiming sexuality as an aspect of creative, spiritual, political, and loving expression long denied to women globally. Publications range from mild erotica and depictions of nudity to erotic stories and poems and videotapes of women’s fantasies by and for women. Groups range from women’s workshops on “Creative Explorations of Intimacy With Your Long-Term Lover” to “Tantric Sexuality for Lesbians” to “Bondage 101” and “Making Safe Sex Fun.”

Sexually explicit publications created by and for lesbians began to appear on the market during the 1980s. A pioneer in this field was the lesbian-feminist S/M organization Samois, which produced the forty-five-page booklet What Color Is Your Handkerchief? A Lesbian S/M Sexuality Reader in 1979, followed by Coming to Power in 1981. On Our Backs was first published in 1984, about the same time as Outrageous Women and Bad Attitude came out of the East Coast. The year 1985 hailed the first lesbian erotic video, Private Pleasures and Shadows, followed in 1986 by Erotic in Nature, a representation of quiet and sensual lesbian-lovemaking in the summer trees. In 1987, lesbian-made and sexually explicit videos began to proliferate, including Rites of Passion, by Annie Sprinkle and Veronica Vera, and Burlezk Live, a lesbian striptease filmed at one of the Baybrick cabarets. Since the early 1980s, there has been a rapid increase in the number of magazines and books with all varieties of pornography and erotica. Even sex clubs—establishments open only to members and guests, safe sex only, alcohol and drugs not permitted—and the occasional sex party have been available to women in San Francisco off and on since 1978.

Thanks to the pioneering work of lesbians—Susie Bright, JoAnn Loulan, and Pat Califia—writing about forms and expressions of lesbian sexuality, lesbians in the 1990s are exposed to a wider range of possible sexual personae. The increased visual and written representations of lesbians as sexual beings and a cultural atmosphere that values sexual discussion and experience are some of the great fruits of the struggle for sexual freedom.

Gay Male Porn—Look Back in Swagger

Gay porn is the gay community’s perennial ugly duckling. All the same, it’s the most popular fowl in many gay households—more common than even the Thanksgiving turkey. Hardcore gay pornography is watched by a very large number of gay men. Even a lifelong conscientious objector to filmed carnality is likely to have at least a passing familiarity with some of the icons of the medium. In gay circles, exchanging frank viewpoints on Jeff Styker’s money-making member beats idle chitchat about the weather most any old day.

There are three basic positions gay men tend to take when talking about the sex-vid biz. And please—no snappy comebacks to that statement that begins “the first is hanging upside down in a full-body harness …” if you don’t mind! The first and perhaps the most common school of opining goes something like this: “Gay porn is just plain tacky and an embarrassment to our community. The production values in those videos are so shoddy! Surely as a group we can do better than this…” The second goes more like “Porn is a worthy pastime—but artistically expendable. It’s something to be kept by the VCR and watched now and then—but not if Murphy Brown is on.”

Zak Spears (left) and Tyler Scott, from the 1993 Hot House production, On the Mark. (Hot House Entertainment)

The third is along the lines of “Porn is its own art form, a valuable cultural tool, and a lot of fun.” In just the past couple of years, a small but growing number of perhaps more academically inclined individuals have begun to scrutinize porn video with less concern for its current artistic shortcomings and more attention devoted to its cultural potential. Because when you strip away the prudishness and societal stereotypes with which many of us have been preconditioned into approaching the subject of pornography, it can be argued that by the very nature of its explicitness, gay porn is well suited to portraying what it is that defines us as a group: who we choose to love and the way we go about engineering it. Mainstream Hollywood movies can (and occasionally even have) depicted our lives with vibrancy and insight. But Hollywood can never get the entire picture.

In the nineties, gay porn has infiltrated the American cultural mainstream more than ever. Whether it’s gay performers speaking out candidly on any number of daytime talk shows or the naked lusciousness that is porn boy Joey Stefano popping up in Madonna’s highly publicized Sex book, gay porn has obviously made its presence known across a broad range of folks who, a decade ago, would hardly have admitted to stopping in a bookstore and perusing the jacket notes on a copy of The Joy of Gay Sex.

DAVE KINNICK’S TOP TEN LIST OF GAY XXX VIDEOS

Best Friends, 1985, TCS Studio. Directed by Mark Reynolds.

The Bigger the Better, 1984, Firstplace Video. Directed by Matt Sterling.

Carnival in Rio, 1989, Sarava Video. Directed by Kristen Bjorn.

Cousins, 1983, Laguna-Pacific Ltd. Directed by William Higgins.

Getting Even, 1986, Videomo/French Art. Directed by J. D. Cadinot

Honorable Discharge, 1993, All Worlds Video. Directed by Jerry Douglas.

Pleasure Beach, 1984, HIS Video. Directed by Arthur J. Bresnan, Jr.

Sizing Up, 1984, Huge Video. Directed by Matt Sterling.

Two Handfuls, 1986, Bijou Video. Directed by John Travis.

The Young & the Hung, 1985, Laguna-Pacific Ltd. Directed by William Higgins.

An episode of the hit Canadian comedy series The Kids in the Hall summed up the lively public debate on the subject of gay smut when openly gay troop member Scot Thompson in a monologue featuring his flip and flouncy “queen” character, Buddy Cole, said, “On the topic of ‘Freedom of Choice’… The idea of persecuting gay porn is redundant. Gay life is porn. Nobody’s being exploited. What you see up on that screen are the community standards.”

LEATHER AND LOVE

The gay and lesbian community is nothing if not complex. Millions of people with perhaps nothing more in common than an attraction to members of their own sex are lumped together as a community, wrongly assumed by many nongay people to have one set of shared values and goals. When it comes to sex, not everyone likes or wants the same thing. In the gay and lesbian world, there are a number of people, men and women, who find their identity and sexual fulfillment within the S/M and leather world.

Leather is about sex, costume, and erotic exploration. It is also about community, trust, and communication. The leather community has long taken care of its own; it was one of the first groups to insist that gay men and lesbians practice safe sex. Many early fund-raisers for AIDS causes were sponsored by the leather community, and among the responsibilities of the Mr. and Ms. International Leather titleholders each year is the promotion of AIDS and safe-sex awareness.

The Spiritual Side of Radical Sexuality

In the loose confederation of organizations, circles, causes, and individuals that make up the gay and lesbian community, few groups are more prone to misunderstanding by their fellow travelers than leatherfolk. The black-clad clan is as diverse as any other faction within the gay world, yet is narrowly viewed by many as a barely tolerable relic from homosexuality’s shadowing past.

Image-conscious critics see queers in black leather as a serious problem for a movement wanting to assimilate into society. The leather community’s confrontative public posture and its unapologetic advocacy of taboo erotic practices appear radical—even subversive—by mainstream standards. As a result, leatherfolk are often scapegoated by other gays as a reason for society’s dislike and distancing of homosexuals. Few such critics, however, would admit that the underlying reason for their prejudice toward the leather lifestyle is their own internalized homophobia and fear of difference. Leatherfolk, by their very nature, hold up a disquieting mirror.

What those outside the leather domain often fail to see is that through boldly exploring their bodies, many radical sensualists are nurturing spiritual growth within themselves. They’ve discovered that the S/M ritual helps to clear out the psychic basement, that deep inner place where troubling and fearful things are kept hidden. Long-held feelings of inferiority or low self-esteem, grief and loss, familial rejection and abandonment often come to the surface during S/M rituals. Rather than keep a tight lid on the psyche’s dark contents, these extreme sensual acts undo memories of the past and thus provide passage from the unconscious underworld to the aboveworld of self-realization and, ultimately, emotional healing.

Whether acknowledged or not, many urbanized gay men become attracted to radical sexuality because it offers some form of masculine initiation, the kind of rites of passage found in indigenous cultures around the world but usually lacking in their own. The process of masculine initiation traditionally begins with a rite of submission, followed by a period of containment, and then by a further rite of liberation—a psychological journey well known to leather practitioners.

“WHAT S/M MEANS TO ME”

Samois was a lesbian S/M support group that started is San Francisco in the late 1970s. For several years, the group produced a monthly newsletter, which included the advice column. “Ask Aunt Sadie.” The following is anonymous sample from this column, suggested to us for this book by Aunt Sadie herself.

Dear Aunt Sadie:

Here is “What S/M Means to Me” with gratuitous punishment, compliments of the Phantom Punster:

Sadism and Masochism

Sensual and Mutual (the basics)

Simply Magnificent

Sensory Memory

Sensual Magic

Sexual Magic

South of Market (San Francisco leather area)

Sex Maniac

Southern Methodist

Send Money

Sue Me

Service Manual

SM is the last word in feminiSM

Men, gay and straight, find their worth and define their manliness through trials of endurance. They must expose their limits, submit to fiery tests, in order to grow spiritually. It is the hero’s obligation to meet these rites of passage with faith intact, for they balance the eternal conflict between the claims of the ego and the soul. As any seasoned leatherman knows, one of the indispensable conditions of a successful S/M scene is the ability of the initiate to submit fully to the experience. A blackening must occur before any new light can dawn.

During the past decade, leatherfolk have been especially hard at work in strengthening the cultural ties that hind their community—in creating a new tribal identity. This collective effort has encompassed the preservation of the past (leathermen in major cities were among the first to fall from AIDS and also the first to rally against it), as well as a more profound articulation of radical sexuality’s spiritual implications—its potential for curing the wounds of the soul. For some leatherfolk, the definition of the term “S/M” has evolved in recent years from connoting sadomasochism, to implying sensuality and mutuality, to meaning “sex magic.” They see radical sexuality as an empowering, soul-making process—not the witless, pathological acting out of inner demons as some would claim.

Still, the idea that radical sexuality has spiritual value is a difficult one for most people to grasp. Even some leatherfolk reject the thought as well, confusing spirituality with religiosity and its condemning institutions. Few, however, would dismiss the transcendent moments of cathartic release they’ve experienced through intense erotic play. The enhanced physical, visual, and aural sensations of radical sex ritual allow for a transportation of self, or awareness of self, beyond normal even day references.

It is not unusual to find leatherfolk who are members of the clergy or the New Age movement, or who have explored psychoanalysis or various recovery programs—spiritually seeking individuals who are in some way seriously committed to personal and social change. By gaining the psychological insight made available to them through radical sexual practices, leatherfolk now stand among the gay community’s most consistently aware, socially responsible, and politically motivated members.

Truth Is an Absolute Essential

Since the late 1970s, lesbians have been actively engaged in sharing their experiences and knowledge about the leather scene with other interested women. Support groups and safe-sex play groups have formed from San Francisco to New York. In the following excerpt from Coming to Power, “Juicy Lucy” provides us some insight into the lesbian S/M world.

Gabrielle Antolovich, an Australian native currently residing in San Jose, after being crowned International Ms. Leather in 1990 (Rick Gerharter)

Truth is an absolute essential. To build valid trust requires some ability to risk and some common sense. Since S/M is consensual there’s always some talking, before and after, so that you both (or all) know what’s going on. It’s a lot easier to trust a dyke when you’ve told her what you don’t want so you know she won’t accidentally cross your boundaries. It’s important to agree on a safe word, something you could say that would automatically stop the action.… I’ve found that I use the safe word much more often because my emotional boundaries are being crossed rather than because my physical boundaries are being crossed. Again, everyone’s experience is unique to her.…

The main issues are to talk through it openly and make sure you agree, trust each other (and if you don’t trust her, either find someone else or examine your own blocks, whichever is relevant), agree on a safe word, and get all the pleasure and joy there is between you in that situation. S/M is basically about good times. It’s a part of who I am to analyze and have to understand everything … Ultimately I wouldn’t have been interested in S/M, whatever its healing value, if it hadn’t been such a good time.

LEATHER QUEENS AND KINGS

Chuck Renslow and Dom Orejudos, founders of the Mr. International Leather title and owners of Chicago’s famous Gold Coast Leather Bar, created the competition as an outgrowth of the Mr. Gold Coast contest, held in 1972. The first Mr. International Leather Contest was held in March 1979 in Chicago. Ten primarily local contestants competed for the title, with David Kloff of San Francisco winning. Nearly two decades later, crowds of thousands watch up to sixty contestants from around the world vie for the honor. Four days of activities surround what is referred to as the “Academy Awards of Leatherdom.”

In 1987, San Francisco began holding the Ms. International Leather competition. There were already contestants from all around the United States. Hundreds of leather dykes cheered Judy Tallwing McCarthy of Portland, Oregon, in her victory. The competition has continued to thrive in the years since.

Titleholders have been active in helping local organizations around the country raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight AIDS. In addition, both Mr. and Ms. International Leather have been aggressive in their promotion of safer sex and condom usage.

GAYSPEAK/GAYDRESS

From language to fashion, gay people use words and clothing to stake out a place, both within our community and in society at large. The combination of words and symbols we adopt allows each of us to express our own unique senses of self.

Language is often used to help us determine who we think we are. Some of us call ourselves “gay,” others use “queer”; some use “dyke,” others prefer “lesbian”; some find the term “faggot” offensive and some use it with pride—syndicated newspaper advice columnist Dan Savage prefers to be addressed as “Hey Faggot!” We’ve taken a look at some of the origins of these word issues.

While drag queens are the extreme example, all clothes make a statement. What we wear reflects not only the popular culture of the times in which we live, but also provides a way for us to claim our own identity, and to help us recognize other lesbians and gay men. Over the decades, these fashions, as well as the symbols and icons of the lesbian and gay cultural world, have continued to evolve. In this section, we’ve captured some of the more universal icons in mid-evolution and organized them by decade.

Gayspeak vs. Phobespeak

Gay people and homophobes are constantly struggling against one another to define the language of sexuality and politics. In the same way that the religious right uses “pro-life” (implying their opponents are “anti-life”) while reproductive rights activists use “pro-choice,” in an attempt to sway the media and public toward their causes, gay men and lesbians have a language that is often at odds with the language used by homophobes to describe the same thing. Below are some examples of “Gayspeak vs. Phobespeak”:

True Confessions of a Queer Banana

Names, the identities we give ourselves. Over the years, due to direct political action, and social and economic shifts, the words that we use to describe ourselves have been rescued from derogatory usage of the mainstream. We are dykes. We are queers. We are fags. Many of us have found strength, support, and love through our sexual identity. But we are by no means a homogeneous community. We are split by sexual practice, gender, politics, race, culture, class, food preferences.

I am a queer banana. I say this with a need to reclaim a definition that has haunted me since childhood. An insult, an accusation that one is in disguise, a traitor—yellow on the outside and white on the inside. I don’t see how watching The Brady Bunch or going to an Osmond Brothers concert could make me a traitor. I am of Japanese descent but I am third-generation Canadian.

Many of my Asian-American friends have other terms to define themselves. Nip-anese. Chink-ese. OY-IN (Outwardly Yellow, Inwardly Neutral). But somehow the term “queer banana” (or bana) is one that I feel most at home with. It is simple, direct, and visually striking.

How we decide to name ourselves and what term we end up feeling comfortable with is not without its problems. In a world of constant change and evolutionary wordplay, the real intent and meaning of these self-described names is sometimes lost. I call myself a “queer banana,” but I know how this can be used against me. I know how this term can be misinterpreted and how by naming my identity I am still open to misunderstanding. The context and history of this term are personal, and I would never use “queer banana” to describe someone else, I believe it is important to encourage the continual process of self-examination and self-definition. Today I may be a “queer banana” but tomorrow I may not be. But whichever way I decide to describe myself, the meaning will be one of my choosing and my design.

What’s in a Color?

—Judy Grahn’s first lover, quoted in Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds.

How did the colors purple and lavender come to be associated with lesbians and gay men? Judy Grahn, the poet and author, has done much research into the question and uncovered a number of interesting facts:

• Violets, which are related to pansies, were worn in England in the 1500s by men and women to indicate that they did not intend to marry.

• In Greek mythology, Narcissus scorned the love of women, fell in love with his own image, and eventually died. In his place grew a purple flower surrounded by white leaves (the narcissus).

• In another Greek myth, the maid Persephone, daughter of Demeter, was gathering flowers with twenty-three other young women, when she reached for a brilliant purple narcissus and the earth opened and she was swept into the spiritworld. She became a queen of the Underworld and lifelong companion to the crone goddess Hekate.

• The hyacinth is another purple flower named for the love between two men, the Greek sun god Apollo and the youth Hyacinthus, of whom Apollo was “passionately fond.”

• The Greek lesbian poet Sappho has been described as violet-haired. The fragments of her poetry that remain make seven references to the color purple, five to violets or violet-colored, and two to purple hyacinth.

• One hundred years after Sappho, purple appeared in a poem by the Greek poet Anacreon, in what is the oldest known poem to explicitly record the use of the word “Lesbian” as a reference to a woman who loves other women, and not just a resident of Lesbos.

• A name for one purple Greek dye from the ancient cities of Sidon and Tyre was Paideros, which also meant “boy-lover.”

• In medieval times, purple was worn by court jesters, wise men and women, astrologers, and soothsayers.

• The Yoruba religion of West Africa, known also as Macumba, worships a powerful trilogy of goddesses including Oya, who appears wearing men’s clothing and weapons and whose special color is purple.

• Native American tradition includes the Caddo Indian story of a gay shaman who had the bewitching powers of sorcerer; his life was protected by the presence of a purple spot on his left little finger.

• Another more contemporary theory is that lavender, which is created by combining pink and blue (the traditional colors used in American society for distinguishing girls and boys at birth), represents the merging of the male and female, and it is a perfect symbol for a group of people who do not fit traditional gender expectations.

HOW GAY IS GAY?

There are several theories about the origin of the word “gay.” Researcher John Boswell traces the use of the word as a noun back to the eleventh century. In his book Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, he writes that it comes from the Portuguese gai, which meant “love outside marriage” until its use focused to mean homosexual. Many writers believe, however, that the term was originally an adjective, as in “gay club,” and that its use as a noun emerged after World War II. Others theorize that the word derives from the Greek name Gaia, goddess of the earth.

Then there is the definition of gay seen on the Internet: “Gay is the feeling you get when all of the straight people leave the room.”

The origin of “lesbian” is clear: It derives from the name Lesbos, the small Greek island that was home to the famous woman-loving-woman poet Sappho.

Symbolically Queer—Gay and Lesbian Icons of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s

Being gay is so much more than sex—there are a gigantic number of people, places, and things that are quintessentially gay and lesbian. Here are just a few era-specific examples:

History of the Rainbow Flag

A highlight of the 1994 Stonewall 25 March in New York City was the thirty-foot wide and mile-long Rainbow Flag, carried by close to 10,000 people. Designed by flag expert Gilbert Baker out of thousands of pounds of material, the flag was the centerpiece of the “Raise the Rainbow” project.

Baker is credited as being the creator of the original Rainbow Flag. The artist proposed the design to the 1978 San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade organizing committee in response to their request for a symbol that could he used every year. Thirty volunteers hand-dyed and hand-stitched the two huge flags for the 1978 parade.

The first rainbow design had eight horizontal stripes, from top to bottom: hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun, green for serenity with nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit. For the 1979 parade, due to production constraints, hot pink and turquoise stripes were dropped and royal blue replaced the indigo stripe. Thus, the current six-striped flag (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet) was created and adopted.

Fashion Is Such a Drag—The Clothes We Wear

Lesbian and gay styles and fashions have changed a lot over the past thirty years. Here some of the popular looks from each decade:

If I Simply Wanted Status, I’d Wear Calvin Klein

I have never been a slave to fashion, so it was simply rash of me to think I could boldly wear my fireball-red FAG CLUB T-shirt in public and not be confronted. I had purchased the T-shirt in San Francisco without any hesitation whatsoever. In fact, I purchased two T-shirts: the red athletic T and the black crewneck, both bearing FAG CLUB prominently displayed in bold white letters stacked across the front. Mind you, the day I wore that T-shirt all over Washington. D.C., I was truly voguing. I was featuring heavy transgression in a town of government secrets, political intrigue, and kinky sex.

The confrontation did not occur downtown or on the bus or subway as I thought it might. I was in my neighborhood. Mr. Pleasant, when it happened. People I had encountered on the buses and downtown sidewalks didn’t challenge me. They were surprised by the T-shirt, as indicated by the number of double takes it received.

The red was tinted with a little orange and was very eye-catching in the summer sun. By the time I returned to Mt. Pleasant later that afternoon, I had completely forgotten I was wearing it. I had never flaunted my sexuality so immediately to so many. I had never communicated my sexual identity so intentionally as I did by choosing to wear that FAG CLUB T-shirt in public.

I needed to get a few things for dinner before going home, so I stopped at the supermarket a few blocks from my apartment. As the market doors swooshed behind me and I passed through the entrance turnstile, a young boy screamed out, “Look, everybody, there’s a faggot in the store!” You would have thought people were supposed to start diving to the floor.

I stopped only for an instant to look over my shoulder to see whom he was calling out. Seeing no one behind me, when I looked ahead again I realized everyone was looking at me. I then remembered I was wearing FAG CLUB emblazoned on my chest like the name Superhero.

I immediately stepped forward in full control of my location and my presence of mind. I know this scene must have looked very funny, but I was determined to keep my composure. There were little bursts of laughter here and there but nothing too serious. I glided down the aisles, completing my short grocery list and avoiding direct eye contact, until I reached the checkout line. The clerk looked at my T-shirt and smiled. I smiled back at her, then she turned and began ringing my groceries.

What with ripped jeans, black belts, a beaded necklace, a long-sleeve T-shirt, and a backwards baseball cap, these men sport the latest in gay fashions during the Gay Pride parade in 1993. (Rink Foto)

Just then, the young boy who had shouted “There’s a faggot in the store!” came up to me from the exit of the check-out line. He was a curly-haired, ten-year-old Black boy.

He continued approaching until he was standing beside me. I looked into his face and saw no fear, no hatred, no disgust.

“Did you get that in Washington?” he asked, pointing to my T-shirt. “My cousin would like one of those.”

He was not the least bit shy in telling me this. He looked me directly in the eye, waiting for my response.

“No, I didn’t get this in Washington,” I told him. “I got it in San Francisco. You can get them there.”

“I thought so,” he said. “I didn’t think you could get a T-shirt like that in D.C. I like it. See you!” Then he turned and left.

I stood there momentarily disarmed by his candor and only a little self-conscious about my interaction with him. How we appeared to the others watching us did not cross my mind. But then I thought, if I simply wanted status I could wear Calvin Klein and strike a pose. That’s safe.

The Minefield of Lesbian Fashion

Wrong,” Jackie said, shaking her head. We had just worked out. I was putting on my sneakers, white Nikes over black-and-white wool argyle socks.

“No dress socks with tennis shoes,” she said. “And your socks have to he lighter than your shoes. And with sports shoes, the socks have to be cotton.”

I sat frozen to the bench. Hadn’t I read years of Glamour magazine’s “Do’s and Don’t’s”? And hadn’t I winced at the photos of girls in the wrong coats, carrying the wrong bags, layering the wrong sweaters, those photos of slight girls on windy New York streets with black brick-like bars slapped over their faces to save them from what could only be acute embarrassment?

But here I was, a lesbian voted “Best Dressed” of the 1976 Senior Class of San Clemente High School, IN THE WRONG SOCKS.

I had slipped. The black-and-white photo—a black slash across my face—the caption: “Dress socks with sport shoes? DON’T.”

“But, Jackie,” I pleaded. “These are warm. And besides, they tie the white of the sneakers into the black of my jeans …”

“Forget it, girlfriend,” Jackie said like the New York dyke that she is. “Get yourself to the Gap.”

It’s treacherous. A constantly shifting battlefield demanding changing strategies and perspectives.

When I came out in the early eighties, I was living in Auckland, New Zealand. I dressed with care, having no one to ask, no cross reference. How I wished I was back in high school with the old gang so I would call a pal: What are you wearing? I was in my late-punk stage, long curly hair, a stripe of red—geranium red—over one temple. After many changes of clothes, I set this coif against a torn T-shirt that featured black bombers silhouetted against a paint-spattered backdrop. My miniskirt: red, black, and green. Finally, red pumps. Pointy, sixties retro. Inch-high heels. Lipstick to match. My roommates at the time—straight girls not unsympathetic to my experimentation—approved enthusiastically. “You look hot,” Julie said. (I should have been suspicious of such support.)

At our entrance it seemed as if everything stopped. Everyone turned and stared. My date (a misnomer, I soon found out) disappeared into the dark, and I was left standing against the wall feeling like I did in the seventh grade at my first dance when I had finally convinced my mother to let me shave my legs and wear “hose,” only to find the other girls in hip-hugger corduroy trousers.

So here I was again, the only one in a dress, not to mention makeup. The swarms of jeans-clad, sweatshirted, army-booted dykes circled with some disdain before a brave butch soul asked me to dance. Okay, sure we got together, but not for a few weeks and not until I had cut my hair, purchased black jeans, hightops, and a motorcycle jacket.

A year or so later, gals started wearing a spot of eye-liner—an especially nice complement to leather and studs—and pretty much all you saw on anyone was black highlighted by glints of metal. Not long after, I moved myself stateside, to San Francisco, where the range of lesbo fashion sent me reeling. I marched into my first dyke bar in black regalia only to find myself amidst—what? Straight girls? Nope, femmes! Beautiful Latina women in clothes from Macy’s and long fingernails—at least on most fingers… And a gang of softball dykes, who looked like they leapt out of an L.L. Bean catalogue. You even saw older gals in polyester pantsuits with butches in men’s trousers. Young punks in long underwear leashed—often literally—to girlfriends in little more than rags and safety pins. Gads! Anything was possible. What was a young dyke to do?

I’m not such a young dyke anymore, but still my fashion dilemmas haven’t been solved. And in some ways they get more complicated. I think the hows and whats of dyke dressing are always mitigated by bigger issues: Where do you live? How out are you? Do you want people to know you’re a dyke? Are you dressing as a dyke among dykes or a dyke among straights? Fashion has to do with political choices; what’s out or in has to do with one’s own out-ness or in-ness, and where the political climate is swaying.

My little town is so queer that many of these questions become twisted. Provincetown is a place where anyone can be anything and there is certainly one of everything. I can dress completely “straight” here—in fact, I now look more “mainstream” than I ever have, because no one assumes heterosexuality. Many of us locals have long hair, wear dresses and makeup. And when the gal turistas descend in droves, we’re always amazed at how “dykey” they look. Everywhere there are music festival T-shirts and Girbaud jeans and high-top sneakers. There are jock couples in matching neon shorts and schoolteachers from the Midwest in khaki safari pants. Is there anything wrong with a lesbo look? No. And I can guess that in their home-towns such dressing is a clue to others, an underground code. The short-back-and-sides haircut of the bus driver is a message to the short-back-and-sides secretary. But here in Queersville not much of this seems necessary.

My final digression: I have this unbelievable Polaroid picture dated on its curling edge July 1969. I was ten years old in this picture, taken at a summer camp carnival. I had decided I wanted to be “half-girl” and “half-boy” for the occasion. On the left side, I am a girl: I’ve got a skirt fastened on one leg and a pink polyester shell that shows just the bud of a breast. My long blond hair is wavy and loose, and the red lipstick is carefully portioned over half of each lip. On the other side I’ve done the boy thing: a black vest, tight jeans, a single cowboy boot, my hair slicked back tight against my head. Both sides of me, girl and boy, are grinning wide.

In some ways I’ve spanned both sides of that early view of what I now see as my nascent lesbianism. I do the boy thing, I do the girl thing, I even do the cowboy thing, But, according to Jackie, and I’m apt to trust her, I still wear the wrong socks.

STANDING OUT IN A CROWD

Most gay and lesbian people spend the majority of their time surrounded by nongay people—in the grocery store, at work, waiting for the bus. Gay pride marches and parades, which are both political endeavors and joyous celebrations, give lesbian and gay people an opportunity to be truly visible to each other and the nongay world.

Marches give gay people a way to publicly express the pride most of us try to feel on a daily basis. On the street, with thousands of other gay people, we can smile and sing, march and proclaim ourselves, and let ourselves feel joy in being gay.

Gay and lesbian parades also serve to remind the nongay population that we are an important, vital part of society, from the smallest midwestern town to the largest cities in the country.

Lesbians and gay men also feel safety and freedom walking down the street with thousands of other people just like us. For one day, we don’t have to look over our shoulders before we grab our lover’s hand or kiss our partner in public. We get to take up space, proclaim our politics and our love, and remind ourselves (and the public at large) that we deserve this freedom.

And most of all, marches are fun! When else do you get to cruise men and women openly, shout slogans at right-wing fanatics, and take over the whole damned street?

Why Have a Gay Pride Parade?

It was asked more in fun than with envy, more in joking than with malice, but it struck a chord with me. I had casually mentioned to a couple of my straight friends that the Gay Pride Parade was coming up and I was looking forward to it.

“What about Straight Pride Day?” the female of the couple asked with a grin.

“Every day is Straight Pride Day,” I answered, also grinning. “This culture celebrates it with gay abandon.” She laughed.

“Turn the television on,” I said. “There’s your parade.” We all laughed and went about our business, but the brief exchange kept coming back to me through the week. The more I thought about it, the more serious it became.

Why have a Gay Pride Parade? It’s a question many straight people might be asking. Gay people, I believe, inherently, intuitively know why we have a parade. We have a Gay Pride Parade because in 1969 a bunch of queers at the Stonewall Inn fought back. We have a Gay Pride Parade so that at least for one day in a year we can walk down the streets of where we live and show our numbers for all the world to see. We have a Gay Pride Parade to celebrate our defeat of The Closet, to have a day when we can proclaim, without reservation, who we are and who we love.

When straight people are prevented from marrying the people they choose to marry, precluded from enjoying tax benefits available to married people, then they should have a parade. When straight people are barred from serving their country in the military, then they should have a parade. When straight people are routinely fired from their jobs because of whom they love or live with, then they should have a parade. When straight people are blocked from holding sensitive jobs in the government merely because of their sexual orientation, then they should have a parade. When straight people are forbidden to raise their own children or adopt, then they should have a parade. When straight people are beaten, harassed, and shot at for holding hands in public then I’ll be marching there with them.

A man who lives in my neighborhood was shot on our street two years ago by a carload of young thugs because he was bidding a male companion farewell with an embrace. The Human Rights Commissioner of my city publicly intimated that the men were “asking for it” through engaging in “provocative behavior” by embracing to say good-bye. That’s why I’ll be at the Gay Pride Parade. Unless we stand together, march together, care together, no one will do it for us. We gay and lesbian people are on our own and we must depend on each other.

So when some well-meaning, or not so well-meaning, straight acquaintance of yours questions the need for a Gay Pride Parade, educate the poor soul. I’m picking up the phone to call my two friends now.

Where Do I Belong in this Parade, Anyway?

Deciding which contingent to march with at the annual gay pride parade in your city can be as difficult for many lesbians as deciding what to bring to the next potluck. Louise Rafkin has provided some helpful hints for the gals.

Lesbians in Limbo: I think this contingent has a huge potential, and could very well be one of the largest groups in the parade. We would, of course, have various limbo ropes with loud limbo music playing, and a large banner reading “How Low Can We Go?” Marchers would be expected to periodically try a little limbo-ing. What? You don’t remember how to limbo? Simple: Bend back at a precarious angle and waggle your hips mucho. Hop, hop, hop. This would be hard on the calves and tush, I’d imagine, but if those queens can sashay that strip in five-inch spikes, us gals should at least be able to dip our hips. Starting practicing now. There are several subsets to the Limbo group:

Relationship Limbo: For those gals who don’t know quite where they stand. Half in or half out? Are we lovers or are we friends? Break-up or break-through? And what about all the friends of these women? The ones who say to each other, “Are they really broken up or are they at it again?” Limbo-land definitely.

Career Limbo: I always watch the parade on the look-out for a career. There are all the helping groups, teachers, lawyers, lesbian and gay this-and-that-ers. You’d think I could have found a career by now. (I’ll admit: I was awfully tempted by firefighting—something about the ambience …) Anyway, I’m still considering dental hygiene and dog grooming (although I’m allergic), but in the meantime, I’m definitely in career limbo. I think this group should bring dress-up clothes for various professions, and while marching, we could swap horror stories about our old jobs while changing outfits and trying on new hats—so to speak. On to other groups…

Lesbian Homeowners: Yes, I might march with this group, although really I’ve only paid for a doorknob or two. This group could pull wagons filled with various do-it-yourself books—while simultaneously pulling their hair. Our clothes would be wet (from the floods) and paint-spattered, and several marchers could have bandages on their limbs from misusing “simple” home fix-it tools. Calculators and small bits of paper with various figures figured various ways (and then crossed over) could float from our pockets. On several occasions I’ve joined the Living Sober crowd, and its always been great. But this year as I watched them party-past, I thought of a new group:

Living Emotionally Sober: This might well be a smaller group than the Living Sober mass, and my pal Rita even thought it might be one of those groups you can only walk in for part of the parade—is anyone really emotionally sober for the length of time it takes to walk an entire parade route? We thought perhaps small, still emotionally sober children could carry the banner. Or perhaps—though the animal rights folks would never stand for it—dogs could lead this group. I’ve known some very emotionally sober dogs, but then, what about those Irish setters? Anyway, kids and canines aside, next year I hope to at least be in the group momentarily.…

Lesbians for the preservation of the California Desert Tortoise: Yes, my first love is tortoises. Rita suggested that I might march with my beloved pets next year, but then added that the parade perhaps already goes on too long. Perhaps me and my four-legged friends could start a day before.…

Co-Gay: This is an idea for a general section of the parade. My pal Babs offered this as a theme to encourage more straight folks to march. It also umbrellas all the dandy groups already marching, like Parents and Friends, etc. Also, a section for straight best friends who have to hear all your life’s dish and traumas.

Marching for Power: The Gay and Lesbian Marches on Washington and Stonewall 25

In 1979, more than 100,000 gay men and lesbians came to Washington, D.C., from around the country and around the world to take part in the first of several historic marches for lesbian and gay rights. Though well attended, there was little mainstream media coverage of the event, and the major news weeklies simply ignored it.

In 1987, gay people again took to the streets of the nation’s capital, in much greater numbers. The nearly half-a-million participants came from every state, as well as many countries. And while there was significant mainstream media coverage of the march in several mainstream newspapers, much of the national press, including the major weekly magazines, ignored the event.

Six years later, in April 1993, the hotels and hostels of Washington, D.C., and the surrounding areas were again booked as an estimated one million people came to march for gay, lesbian, and bisexual rights. Many gay people felt that after twelve years of Ronald Reagan and George Bush they finally had a friend in the White House in Bill Clinton. This time the media had caught on. CNN provided live coverage of all six hours of the march and the rally on the Mall. Both ABC and NBC broadcast their morning television shows live from Washington. Almost every major daily newspaper in the country headlined the march the following day. And the national weekly news magazines each devoted at least one major column in their Monday editions to the issues being addressed by the marchers.

art

Hundreds of thousands of gay people gathered in Washington, D.C., for the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. (Marc Geller)

The Stonewall 25 commemoration in June 1994 attracted an estimated total of 1.1 million people from eighty-four countries and all fifty states. Unfortunately, media coverage for Stonewall 25 was significantly less than that for the March on Washington the previous year.

Impressions of the March

Tom’s favorite sign in the march was a simple one saying “Gay Dentist.” My own sign said “Country Faggot” on one side, and on the other. “Homophobia and Nuclear Power—Two Things We Can Do Without.” My “Country Faggot” sign won me many smiles. A guy came over to me to shake my hand and confide that he was a “city faggot.” A few country dykes waved. I wasn’t the only one at the march concerned about nuclear power. The issue was mentioned several times by speakers, and one of the largest and prettiest banners was New York’s “Dykes Opposed to Nuclear Technology,” or DONT. It was fun running into my Vermont friends, Vicki, Lynn, and Jeremiah. I had just seen them at the big demonstration two weeks before in southern Vermont, where we protested the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.

My neighbor Denis had a sign saying “Sex Is Fun,” and he won many smiles with that one. The prize-winning T-shirt (which appeared in a UPI photo) said “I don’t molest children and I don’t do windows.”

I loved Robin Tyler. She was funny, radical, friendly, intelligent, prosex. Everyone (especially the dykes) laughed at Robin’s comments about the irony of gathering at the foot of the Washington Monument. Another favorite line from Robin Tyler’s rap was “Anita Bryant is to Christianity what painting by numbers is to art.”

When I First Saw Audre Lorde

I reclined on the grass among the sea of faces. We were all smiling. A good many of them were trying to spot people they knew. Once again I felt alone. I knew that few of them could really understand how isolating and threatening it is for a person of color to be so surrounded. But by now I was full of adrenaline that was shooting through us all and the joy that filled the air.

I relaxed, listening to speeches, scanning the crowd, simply taking everyone in. I saw black faces scattered in the groupings, but no one I knew. Until I spotted Audre Lorde. She was standing several yards away from me, tall above those seated on the ground. I’d been reading her work since the 1960s but had only seen her from a distance at readings. She was unmistakable, though—the brightly colored African-print cap on her head, her penetrating eyes. I started to wave, as if I really knew her, and continued to watch as she talked to someone sitting below her. Then she looked over and caught my gaze. She winked conspiratorially, as if she knew I needed to make that connection with another Black lesbian. The wink was both flirtatious and sisterly. It opened up a dialogue between us that lasted for more than a decade.

Gay, Gifted, and Black, There Ain’t No Turning Back

Suddenly, a feeling which seemed so contrary to everything this march was about struck me. I was feeling very much alone, and verb lonely. In the midst of hundreds of thousands of lesbians and gays, I was ensconced in solitude. I felt like I wanted to bring my late lover Marc back, wipe the Kaposi’s lesions from his face, breathe new life into his contaminated lungs, and see the optimism of his smile once again.…

A Black queen from Baltimore with a bandaged foot and a cane had joined me and my friends. He pointed out the men he wanted to duck, suck, fuck—without even the vaguest allusions to latex—in the middle of Jesse Jackson’s speech. I shushed him, wondering why he’d even come out (pardon the pun) and realized that, of course, it was because to him, this was the hottest cruising spot in the mid-Atlantic, and little else.

While Jesse encouraged us all to join together in a unified fight against the injustices of AIDS and lesbian/gay discrimination, I felt the absence of another’s arms, envisioned the static poses of so many who should have marched but opted to look on instead and listened to the Baltimore queen. Our challenge of consciousness raising is not limited to the heterosexually impaired, but extends into our own ranks as well. So come on.

Remembrances

At the Congressional Cemetery, the ashes of Harvey Milk were interred near the graves of Dolly Madison, Matthew Brady, John Phillip Sousa, and J. Edgar Hoover.

Along with Harvey’s ashes, his friends buried a photograph, a piece of his ponytail, and several other mementos. They joked that this was not a time capsule to be dug up at a later date.

Despite the humor, the interment was a solemn occasion, and many were moved to tears. Said activist Morris Knight of Los Angeles, “Never again will we allow members of our community to die in anonymity.… We will be there to say, ’Goodbye, brother. Goodbye sister.’”

On Sunday, by far the most moving aspect was the Names Quilt. The Washington Post, in a front-page article Saturday, called it “the emotional focal point; and most dramatic symbol of the march.” It certainly was that.

At sunset, beset by October’s bone-chilling winds, we retreated to the subway to shout a few final slogans and wave farewell to fellow marchers disappearing up the escalators.

The 1993 March on Washington

The train from New York to Washington on Friday evening was practically taken over by people going to the March. The few heterosexuals were keeping their heads low and were generally quite uncomfortable. I savored every minute of this rare reversal of roles. When we reached Washington, the train station was full of gay people. For someone like me who grew up in India loving trains and train stations, it was especially delightful. Can you imagine Victoria Terminus in Bombay suddenly becoming completely gay?

Most cheers were elicited by the gay soldiers who have become the new heroes of the movement because of the public and bitter fight going on to lift the ban on homosexuals serving in the armed forces. All twenty-five of us marched behind the SALGA (South Asian Lesbian & Gay Association) banner and were cheered all the way by onlookers. Our contingent was part of the larger Asian-Pacific Islander contingent, which chanted, “We are Queer, we are Asian, we are all across the nation.”

The Starting Gate

We just started walking — through P-FLAG, Kentucky, and the S/M Leather contingents, not knowing who was who until we got past them and turned around to read their placards. By the time we got to the starting gate and the group we were in at the moment started to move as a unit, we were with Colorado, so we stayed with them to the Mall. We screamed “SHAME!” at the few fundamentalist protesters. We listened to Martina and a host of other speakers, and by the time we were ready to go, we both felt truly empowered: We owe it to ourselves and each other to fight the status quo until we win our rights.

I wish I could say that I came home and came out in a big way: becoming an activist and anarchist, shucking my job, piercing my ears, wearing Doc Martens, and telling the Establishment to shove it. But I didn’t. I’m still in the same job, same suit and tie. But I’m continuing to come out in many smaller ways. I have gotten more involved in the community. My dates and relationships are no longer androgynous and anonymous—they’re now male and have names. Friends who are PWAs are no longer afflicted with some unknown or undiagnosed illness—they’re now fighting AIDS, and we discuss the symptoms and treatments openly and honestly. I have begun to pick my fights.

Stonewall 25—A Celebration

Yes, I went to the Stonewall commemoration and saw more queers in one place than I’d ever seen before. There had never been anything like this magnificent outpouring of pride and freedom. It was such a powerful demonstration of strength, so beautiful and liberating; we would never be turned back! It was 1970. And all the same could be said for Stonewall 25 in 1994.

In 1970, there were “only” 10,000 of us—but imagine 10,000 self-declared queers marching up Sixth Avenue in 1970!—a ragtag band of homo hippies, freaks, and radicals from the oddest fringe of society, carrying hand-made picket signs, announcing a year of networking and organizing, inviting others to join us in a new struggle. The media did their best to ignore us.

Now in 1994 we are over a million, celebrating a quarter century of accomplishments that in 1970 nobody expected we would live to see. The New York City Library displayed a wonderful history of the Gay Movement from Stonewall to today, announced by a great lavender triangle on a banner out front. Hotel marquees welcomed gay athletes and Stonewall marchers. Reporters from all over were eagerly interviewing participants. Gay Games, International Gay and Lesbian Association, Leather-S/M-Fetish Conference, a reunion of the Gay Liberation Front, religious services and dance parties—Queerness in all its varieties flourished beyond human reckoning.

Stonewall 25 Radical

Months before the events came to pass, stories were flying that both the Gay Games and Stonewall 25 were almost completely controlled, if not completely staffed, by rich, conservative white boys. One of them—who worked at the Gay Games, in fact—had fired a friend of mine, a Black lesbian, for what amounted to “insubordination.” And. in this year, when lesbians and gay men were to come to this city from all over the world, somebody had the colossally arrogant idea of holding three huge benefit dances aboard the U.S.S. Intrepid, a battleship from which 9,000 bombing runs were staged during the Viet Nam War. So I felt I had to find whatever radical aspect remained of Stonewall 25 and the Gay Games. I think what I’ve found this week, in terms of modern queer radicalism, is that Power concedes nothing without a really good marketing strategy.

All 1.1 million of us have somehow understood that we would be allowed—but only for a few days—to be visible, because we’ve essentially given society an image of us that it could trust. I reflect on how there’s really not much difference between the “commercial” and the “radical” queers, after all—except, of course, in political viewpoints; very little really shocks or outrages either side anymore—even the prospect of an oncoming police state. I think of what my friend Michael Bronski had said the day before in a panel on the Gay Liberation Front: “People keep asking, ’Isn’t it nice to see so many same-sex couples here, so many open queers?’ But He don’t ask why we can’t have this all the time.” Now that’s radical.

*Gayspeak*	*Phobespeak*
Lesbian and Gay Movement	Gay Agenda
Gay man	Sodomite
Gay men and lesbians	Perverts, Deviants
Queers	Queers
Gay people	Homosexuals
Equal rights	Special rights
White, heterosexual, procreative, dogmatically Christian, patriarchal ideology that seeks to legislate aggressive discrimination against single parents, women, people of color, and gay people	Family values
Sexuality	Gay lifestyle choice
Sex	Sodomy
People with AIDS	Plague victims
Feminist	Feminazi

Gay Male 1970s	Lesbian 1970s
Sylvester	double women’s symbol
San Francisco	labyris
discos	“ Woman-identified-woman”
Crisco	gym teachers
Charles Pierce	Sappho
amyl nitrate (poppers)	menstrual sponges
bathhouses	collectives
Casey Donovan	lesbian separatism
Bette Midler	Meg Christian
“Gay Is Good”	softball
Gay Male 1980s	Lesbian 1980s
“safe sex”	leatherdykes
Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence	Lily Tomlin
Boy George	tattoos
phone sex	Desert Hearts
Harvey Fierstein	On Our Backs
“Clean and Sober”	Tracy Chapman
j-o parties	Twelve-Step meetings
Madonna	Chi Club
“Silence = Death”	Olivia Cruises
radical faeries	Cagney and Lucey
Gay Male 1990s	Lesbian 1990s
“safer sex”	Sandra Bernhard
Queer Nation	Melissa Etheridge
Calvin Klein ads	Deneuve
virtual sex	riot grrls
pride paraphernalia	body piercing
Sandra Bernhard	strap-ons
body piercing	dental dams
sex clubs	butch/femme
RuPaul	Lesbian Avengers
Genre	Dorothy Allison

Gay Men 1970s	Lesbian 1970s
“clone” look	flannel shirts
tight, short cutoff jeans	one earring
flannel shirts	Birkenstocks
hanky codes	handkerchief tied around
tight muscle shirts	the neck
genderfuck	hiking boots
long hair, mustaches	overalls
one earring (right ear)	braless
Tony Llamas boots	men’s vests
crystals	crystals

Gay Men 1980s	Lesbian 1980s
Izod shirts	Crew shirts, collar up
khaki pants	ear cuffs
black leather jackets	black leather jackets
short, groomed hair	STLB hair
five o’clock shadow	(short top, long back)
Speedos	rattail with ribbons
tight running shorts	bolo ties
cable-knit sweaters	peroxide-blond hair
ACT UP T-shirts	running shoes
Levis 501s	sports Jacket
	(sleeves rolled up)
	lipstick
Gay Men 1990s	Lesbian 1990s
multiple body piercings	multiple body piercings
Gap clothes	wallet with chain attached
shaved head	shaved head
white T-shirts	white T-shirts
60s/70s secondhand clothes	overalls
shaved bodies	shaved legs
baggy jeans	baggy jeans
pride paraphernalia	pride paraphernalia
Calvin Klein underwear	Doc Martens
multiple tattoos	multiple tattoos