leger

In years past, this week would be the week Facebook got quiet and furious: that is, some people were quietly hanging out in Michigan and the rest of us were furious about it. If you've been a part of feminist/lesbian creative/social spaces in the last few decades, it's not unlikely that you've been a part of organizations that actively and intentionally excluded trans women from participating at some point. (Not just MichFest, lots of other ones, too: I'm looking at you WOW!)

Today, even without explicit gender-based bans on certain kinds of people, trans women's representation and participation in literary and artistic communities is still much lower than even trans men's representation and participation. Even in places where there are LOTS of trans men, like the Lambda Literary Retreat, there is still 0 or 1 trans woman. (Lambda in particular has never accepted more than 1 trans woman at a time, out of 50 or 60 writers, even though there are always a gaggle of trans men.) I have to conclude that this is at least partly a result of decades of normalizing their exclusion in lots and lots of cultural institutions, not that trans women are naturally less talented or creative than trans men.

While I do spend a lot of time just bitching about things, I also try to spend time making them better. So, this summer, I'm helping to organize a major summer writing workshop, with an educational experience at the level of any of the major writer retreats/conferences like Lambda, Tin House, etc, just for trans women. We originally planned to accommodate 10 people, but we go so many applications that we expanded it and now we're hosting 26 people, who will be studying for one week in Brooklyn with Sarah Schulman and Casey Plett. Best of all: we're doing everything we can to make this workshop financially accessible to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. The low tuition ($300 vs. $1-2k at other retreats) is sliding scale to zero, lots of folks are stepping up to offering free housing to writers for the week, and anyone who needs it is getting travel paid for our of our budget.

WE NEED YOUR HELP TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN. WE NEED YOUR DOLLARS SO WE CAN BUY PRINTER PAPER AND BUS FARE.

We're up over 50% now--every donation makes a difference!--and even if you can't donate today, please SHARE and ask your friends to donate, especially if you have the sort of friends who believe that creative opportunities should be available to trans women, too.

I am a writer today in large part because I had access to nurturing feminist, lesbian creative spaces as a young person, spaces like the Midwest Women's Music Festival and then WOW Cafe Theater, spaces that explicitly excluded trans women from participating at some point in their history. (I never went to MichFest but I would have if I hadn't already been in NYC.) If I seem passionate about providing opportunities for trans women artists, it's only because I realize that my education was provided at their expense, and I feel a moral duty to attempt to help correct that. Please, if you can, join me:

Donate here: http://topsidepress.com/shop/the-workshop-summer-2016/

Find out more here: http://topsidepress.com/workshop/

The fundraiser: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/glbtqia-poets-portrait Artist’s website: http://andresclements.com/

from: Tom Léger <[email protected]> to: Je'anna Clements <[email protected]>, Cat Fitzpatrick <[email protected]>

Hi Je'anna,

You wrote to me requesting my input, and my input you shall have.

The transgender literary community is home to, and in conversation with, a great number of talented transgender visual artists. I can assure you that if my colleagues and I were to celebrate any transgender poets by creating a portrait of them, none of us would select your husband:) to produce it.

I do not want to vote in your fundraiser and I definitely do not want to use the images or good names of any poets I know to encourage innocent people to pay for the privilege of participating in this preposterous enterprise.

This project is not "historic," nor is it a "tribute" to anyone, except perhaps your husband:), whose art, I hear, is a wonderful investment. More accurate words to describe the project include: transparent, opportunistic, ignorant, and more than a little pathetic.

The vast majority of the transgender poets, writers, and artists that I know and have worked with over the last 15 years are living in or close to poverty. They are shut out of nearly every mainstream publication opportunity. Small presses that publish transgender poetry books, magazines and journals, all operate without institutional support, thoroughly absent of grant funding, and rely completely on the founders' too-shallow pockets and the thin dimes we manage to, on occasion, panhandle from our literally dozens of supporters.

That we would collude with you and your heterosexual, cisgender husband:) to purloin from the pockets of our friends the two-thousand American dollars he demands for his time and the "processing power" (this is a joke, right?) required to run his copy of Adobe Photoshop™, so that eventually humankind on planet Earth can experience the whole galaxy of diverse and dynamic transgender poets reduced to a single, blurry, composite digital portrait, is a sick dystopian fantasy I only want to experience in a piece of artfully-crafted transgender speculative fiction. And even then, I would probably tell the writer:

Rewrite, please! The antagonist must have at least some likable qualities in order to keep your reader's attention.

I think that you'll find that the transgender literary community as a whole to be remarkably savvy, more than a little sensitive to matters of artistic representation, and generally unamused with commercial exploitation masquerading as inclusion.

Good luck

Tom

On Monday, May 2, 2016, Je'anna Clements <[email protected]> wrote:

Dear Topside Editors

Requesting your input to GLBTQIA Poets Fine Art Tribute - Three Composite Portraits

I found [REDACTED INNOCENT PERSON] online, who kindly pointed me in your direction. I think it important that trans poets have a presence in this work, but I'm finding very little information online. Let me explain in detail:

I am currently coordinating an Indiegogo campaign for established artist (and my husband : )) Andre S Clements, to create three digital composite portraits celebrating the poets of the LGBTQIA community.

His portraits, already proven as genuine art-world investment pieces on public auction and official collections, are created by overlaying multiple images, and aligning them to create a synergistic whole. A unique “composite character” emerges.

As a queer-identified bi woman whose every intimate relationship has revolved around poetry in one way or another, I’m excited to see the collective face of the poets who have impacted GLBTQIA lives.

It is important to him and to me, that these portraits are as community co-authored, relevant, and meaningful as possible. Rather than myself or Andre selecting poets to include, the LGBTQIA community is invited to vote for their favorite poets - and each poet included will have a visual presence proportional to the number of votes they get.

Due to the work involved in integrating each poet and their differential weighting, we are charging the public $10 to vote, in order to fund the considerable time and digital processing power necessary for the portraits.

However, we are inviting bona fide organisations with informed awareness of the relative influence of different poets on our GLBTQIA reality, to send us 25 (free) votes to help shape the portraits. This could be one vote each for 25 different poets, or 5 votes each for 5 different poets, or whatever you feel will be in the best interests of this historic tribute.

Our rule of thumb is that all poets with 5 or more votes overall, will be included.

Are you able to send us some votes for published Trans poets?

We would also like a suggestion/vote from you as to the subject/criteria of the third portrait.

The first two portraits will be Lesbian Identified Poets, and Gay Male Identified Poets. Should the third be Transgender Poets, or should we rather assign it to Pre-20th Century GLBTQIA poets, Black Lesbian Poets…? We’ve literally come up with more than twenty ideas ourselves, and we’d like to find out what the community considers important. Of course if we raise enough and there’s a strong enough motivation, he might even do a fourth portrait.

In your opinion, are there enough published trans poets to justify a composite portrait, or has that time not yet come?

If you are able to help, please send your votes by return email, no later than the 20th of May 2016, clearly indicating which poets you recommend for which portrait, and also a link to your preferred online image of each recommended poet.

It would also be wonderful if you could spread the word - we’ve kept the funding goal as low as humanly possible, so this can happen, but the more people who get involved, the more representative and meaningful, and historically valid, this tribute will be.

Please also let us know if you would like to refer any other organisations you feel are sufficiently on the GLBTQIA poetry pulse to receive free votes.

With many thanks and much excitement

(Originally posted here on Facebook on 10/7/2015) So, Chantal Akerman's death makes me have to think, once again, about queer suicide. Suicide is a public act. The pain may have been private, but the death is a fact. I have never understood the desire to hide a suicide, it's an opportunity to get real. Lying about it is so unproductive.

Being a queer New Yorker of a certain age, I have been exposed to many suicides, and here we have one of the greatest artists of our time...and it's implicating. Lets face it. If someone so gifted, and so realized, and so recognized and so revered cannot bear her own life, it is threatening to the rest of us. And therefore worth thinking through.

Of course she had all kinds of issues around her mother, her mother's suffering, her mother's "survival", perhaps a relationship of dependency that made connecting, supporting and relying on other adults as equals too difficult. I don't really know, but we all have these weaknesses of history: personal ones, and many people in the world now suffer from the historical cataclysm of someone else's violent supremacy ideology. It is common to be on the receiving end of political cruelty.

Yet, whenever someone commits suicide - even if it is historical, biological, inevitable and unstoppable, it still feels like a failure of community.

There are people who commit suicide on impulse, and if we had just returned that phone call…It is not about guilt or blame, but more about learning how to live that requires us to think this through.

It is a skill to allow another person to suffer, to grieve, to be in repetitive pain, to need to talk about the same problem more times than we want them to. But sometimes that refusal to listen and be present is really about our own anxieties masquerading as their deficiencies. Really, it's no skin off our backs to be uncomfortable and listen when someone really needs to connect. We act like it's a big deal, but actually it's not. Why punish someone because they are already upset?

Sometimes people kill themselves because the situation is unbearable as it is, and sometimes we can help them change it. Sometimes we can intervene, sometimes our presence is the change.

Sometimes it is our cruelties that provoke suicide in others: Being cold, shunning, group shunning, refusing to communicate, refusing to face and deal with conflict. Or even refusing to intervene or "get involved" because we just don't want to be bothered with facing ourselves in the way necessary to change. You never know how much your tiny little self-righteous power play is going to devastate someone else. You can blame them for not being able to tolerate you. But they still can't.

And sometimes people commit suicide because of long-term deterioration or long -standing problems. Addictions that can't be shaken. They see things as insurmountable, or unchangeable when they are not. Or they can't adjust to the situations that ARE in fact unchangeable. I think it is better to tell someone honestly that they are caught up in distorted thinking, when they are. It is more loving to have the complex, difficult conversations than to pretend everything is fine.

But, it is so important to combine this honesty with company. One of the lowest things one person can do to another it to say "You need help" and then shun them. That is the evil combination. If we think someone needs help, we need to help them.

Sometimes a person's life can be saved by dropping petty cruelties. Or by inviting them over for breakfast. Or by picking up the phone and saying "How are you really?" Or going over there and watching TV together, even if they are in bad shape. Or doing it twenty days in a row. Yeah, it's a lot of time.

Saying, "You are over-reacting and I am going to sit here with you, with those feelings" can be a life saver.

And sometimes none of this will make a difference and they will still take their own life. And sometimes it will make all the difference in the world. And sometimes we just can't know if there was a way to help.

Julie and I dated a long time ago—she was the first woman I dated after I transitioned, come to think of it. she’d just graduated from Smith and I had one more semester at NYU. we felt very mature then, I think, just starting out in the city: working full-time day jobs, producing plays at night, scratching out lives as ambitious young artists.

our first date was set for August 14th, 2003—the date of the big NYC blackout, really just the first of many times we would be interrupted by catastrophes out of our control.

she was an actress, and around that time she was performing in a play called David’s Redhaired Death, and I don’t remember a thing about the play but I do remember watching it night after night, unable to take my eyes off her. there is nothing like falling in love with a woman by watching her totally fucking kill it on stage. julie was (and is still) a wonderful actress: funny and smart and soulful.  

she got cast in three of my plays, and I learned so much about my job as a playwright from her actor’s instincts. she stole every scene we wrote her into. I’ll never understand how people who don’t make art ever fall in love.

our early twenties were ham-fisted years, and we carelessly wounded each other countless times. still awkwardly learning to be a man, I could not figure out that she really liked me and I uttered cringe-worthy phrases that still rattle around in my head. she rightly found me rude, and told me so, and I learned, and she was patient.

one day i asked her out on a date to a cat show (oh baby tom what in the world were you thinking?) and then promptly completely forgot about it. that weekend she ended up at madison square garden, early on a Saturday morning, all alone. she forgave me. oh, the debts we owe our early lovers; one doubts they can ever be repaid.

there weren’t many of us in those days, so I was the first trans man in her life and I know she stumbled sometimes, too. she wasn’t perfect, but today I prefer to remember her as if she had been.

even though we’d coupled up with other people, by the summer of 2004 we ended up working for the same non-profit, wobbling around each other in an eccentric orbit. each morning i’d ride my bike from the east village apartment i shared with my girlfriend—a different but no less brilliant actress—down the path along the east river and through the fulton fish market to our office on williams street. I’d stop by Julie’s desk each morning and she’d inspect my pants for fish guts—the market was fragrant and effusive and flecks of seafood perpetually covered my bike and stained my ankles—and then she’d calmly spray me down with febreze from my belt to my shoes.

at lunch we sometimes walked across the street to wendy’s and ordered from the dollar menu— $1.08 (including tax) for a cheeseburger was godsend when it was getting close to payday. once in a while after work we’d elope to city hall park and make out for a few furtive minutes before returning home to our lovers.

she’d moved in with her new beau, a trans guy she’d met at one of our cast parties. he was a bit older than us, short and cranky, with thick dark hair and tightly knit brow. he was mean and controlling and I didn’t care for him and he hated me. i suppose he suspected the truth about our relationship.

finally Julie’s guilt got the better of her and one day after work we headed east down fulton instead of west to the park, and she took me into the Met grocery store and bought a turnip.  we walked together to the subway, me pushing my bike and her beside me with her taproot. when we got to the entrance, she looked me in the eye and put the turnip in my hand and turned to get on the train.

"Hey, what’s this for?" I called after her.

"Just take it!" she yelled at me, not turning around.

"I don’t want a goddamned turnip!" I yelled back, but she was already through the turnstile. I don’t remember for sure, but I probably thought to myself: actors are so weird.

That night I pinged her on AIM. She was tempdiaries because upon graduation she had conceived of a clever plan to write about her experiences temping as a paralegal around New York City and turn them into a blog or book or theater piece. I was leger215 because I am profoundly boring.

leger215: what the hell is with this turnip tempdiaries: don’t worry about it leger215: julie seriously

we went back and forth like this for a while but I just wouldn’t take a turnip with no explanation. she finally relented: it was some pagan spell or some sort witchy trick.

leger215: for what? tempdiaries: it’s so you’ll stop being in love with me

and you know what? it worked. for a while.

she stayed with that short jerky guy and for a while we went our separate ways. i quit my job at our office to go back to finish my final semester at NYU and then went on to start an MFA program. she stayed on there for a while. the jerky guy got jerkier, and he started slapping her around, I think, but she wasn’t ever too specific with me. a couple years passed.

after a particularly bad fight she rang me up. I was single now, a half a dozen girlfriends come and gone since I’d seen her. I don’t know if it was her idea or mine to get out of town for the weekend but we made a plan to go up to Northampton. I picked her up at a subway stop not near her apartment and even though it was still only March I lowered the roof of my Mustang convertible, because of course that is what I drove (oh baby tom, what in the world were you thinking?) and we took off to visit her alma matter.

here’s where I admit that this was 2006 and before I had any friends—any—who were trans women and so Smith still existed in the zeitgeist as holy ground. I hadn’t been to campus since a tour in the autumn my senior year in high school. had I attended, I would have met Julie years earlier. this trip, I think, was a chance to recapture a romantic teenage dream we silently shared.

I have no idea why, but I shot a bunch of video that weekend, even though I had no way of knowing it would be the last time we’d ever be together like that. she showed me the campus and the town and we pretended to be a couple. I was a cardboard cut out of a boy and she was a cardboard cut out of a girl and we held hands on the street. at night, in a small room at a quaint New England inn, we had rough, romantic, screaming sex one last time.

I forgot about the footage for over a year. by then, I was in a relationship with a boyfriend who would later break up with me by kicking me in the face half a dozen times while I sat crying on the sidewalk on 21st street at seventh avenue. Julie was still with the jerk. when I found the video of our trip to Northampton all the memories came flooding back. it felt as though I’d loved her forever. I spent an afternoon cutting it together with some schlocky gimmicks, set it to a patti smith song, posted it to youtube, and sent her the link. she was charmed by the video, but she couldn’t meet me for coffee, the jerk wouldn’t like it one bit. my boyfriend didn’t appreciate the video either, and I all but forgot it existed until today.

watching the video now, it’s so clear how in love with her i was: it’s obvious to me in a way that it wasn’t then. it was a boyish, impetuous love. I suppose my love for her was simple because our relationship had never been. we had only romance, never routine. seeing her in the video reminds me of how young we both were, though we had no idea. only my voice makes an appearance, I’m so young I laugh in near-giggle, and I slur my words with a child’s lazy annunciation. we were so beautiful and we had no idea. we still thought that the only people who could truly love us were people who also hated us. we had no idea. (oh baby tom what in the world were you thinking?)