Labyrinth

Dawn is painting crimson on the fingers and the faces of the thunderheads that roil overhead. I rush past the dry brush on the outskirts of Phoenix, every leaf is wide open to the giant pelting wet scattered gifts of life that will slake the thirst of unseen tortoises, iguanas, ants, and birds.

I leave the roar of the highway as soon as I can, determined to cross the river where the pace of life is slower. I want to contemplate the fact that this mud flat was once a river so large that it led early explorers to think that the land we have now divided into Baja California, Mexico and American California was an island. An island inhabited by lesbians, BTW, but that is another story…

I greedily inhale the biting herbal smell of ozone mixed with dry brush and it triggers my desire to be with you, to hold you and kiss you and stroke your face. I want to bury my nose in your collar and feel your cool white linen shirt against my cheek. I want to take your tang like a shot of liquor, “Yeah, gimme a hit of ozone and dust with a butch back." I feel my desire localize. I feel you across the miles.

The spinning of the wheels is an hypnotic remedy for my want, each bump in the road signals, like a clock striking the hour, the passage of an interval of time. Like the marks that indicate minutes on a clock face, telephone poles tick by one at a time, fence posts point out tenths of seconds, and the white lines are the nanoseconds between us. Adventuress I, I suss out the clues to your whereabouts, for that is my destination. Falling upon the yellow line, I cleverly follow it as if it is a thread in the labyrinth of desert always leading me homeward.

The peaks rise around me, narrowing the distance between us, pushing me, if I stay my final course, to your arms, your touch, your love. I can smell you now, one molecule in a hundred billion delivered by jet stream to my receptors. Now the way is clear and in my mind I see you in the yard with your arms and heart wide open.

Mmmm…let’s have a special intimate supper and celebrate tonite!!

Transmen and the Smell of T in the Morning

In May 2005 an article about pheromonal attraction and repulsion in relation to sexual orientation appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA. Jonathan Silver neatly summed up the findings of Ivanka Savic and her research team from Stockholm, Sweden in Journal Watch Psychiatry July 21, 2005

"The activated areas [of the brain] demonstrate a common pathway of sexual hypothalamic response for HoM [homosexual men] and HeW [heterosexual women], but this may not indicate differential hypothalamic development in HoM and HeM [heterosexual men]. The authors note other possible interpretations — e.g., an association that has developed between sex and AND [4,16-androstadien-3-one] in HeW and HoM, and between sex and EST [estra-1,3,5(10),16-tetraen-3-ol] in HeM."

So, it appears that whether the cause of the attraction for gay men and straight women to the smell of what some believe to be male human sex pheromone is a socio-cultural or biological affinity, the correspondence seems to have been demonstrated.

One year later in May 2006, Savic and her team are back publishing their findings about the response of HoW [homosexual women] and HeW to EST and AND. What they found is that these two groups of women respond differently, HeW seem to have a hypothalamic response to AND, but the HoW found the smell downright irritating.

I don’t take these findings to be conclusive about AND, EST or T, for several reasons. First, the sample size was tiny, tiny, tiny – only a few dozen people were tested in either study. Also, the researchers did not use T in the study they used AND and EST. There are also real potential problems with the interpretation of PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans that map the use of glucose as an indicator of brain activity; the significance of any findings is always limited by the original rigor of the study and the ability of the researchers to refrain from over or under working the raw data.

Those reservations aside, the results fit nicely with my personal experience and the anecdotal evidence of friends. Despite my personal distaste for the odor of T, it seems reasonable that verifying the autonomic brain response to human sex pheromones (if we can agree what those are) may take us a long way in understanding if and how sexual orientation is demonstrated in the human brain.

Apparently our sense of smell registers how people perform gender, as well. This would explain why Transmen, I mean those who are using hormones for therapy, so often report that their favorite hangout no longer feels so welcoming to them. They say they just slowly start to feel like outsiders, even though the HoW patrons at the bar or coffee shop know the history of the Transman involved and they are still good friends.

If the results of the study are correct and lesbians are repelled by the smell of T in the morning, then Transmen have, without their knowing it, internalized a barrier between themselves and the community that supported their effort to end their cognitive dissonance caused by gender dysphoria.

Transmen as a group are some of the sweetest people I have ever met, the souls of human compassion and warmth. Many, I know, though they are post-op, still remember their lesbian history and will always be queer.

If indeed these male hormones do irritate HoW, then we are in for a rude awakening in this community…and everyone is going to suffer, especially the Transmen who felt so very strongly that their course of action (hormone and operative therapies) is the one that will make this life tolerable for them.

I wonder if the doctors tell Transmen that there is evidence that after treatment with T, people will relate to them differently, that their smell will begin to irritate their former friends and lovers…and not to be perplexed when that happens. Will HoW not want to date or engage in relationships with them? Will they have to go to HeW, who respond more favorably to AND, to find love?

Stay tuned for more…

The Femme 2006 Cabaret Review

A friend of mine described the scene at the Saturday Night Cabaret at the Femme 2006 conference, held last weekend in San Francisco. After watching the performances from the balcony, she said, "All you could see was the top of people's heads and cleavage... lot's and lot's of lots and lots of cleavage. I've never seen so much cleavage in one place and time. It was astounding, truly astounding!" After Friday night's performances we were eager to sample more - femmes seemed to want to strut their stuff in front of other femmes and their allies...and plenty of folks were ready and willing to accommodate them!!

The Cabaret, put together by producer, writer, artist, and activist extraordinaire Krista Smith (aka Kentucky Fried Woman/Mrs. Miller), brought down the house again and again. Enlisting the talents of the Snow White and Rose Red diva duo of local favorite Erika (aka "the good one" Bubblinsugare) Rawlins and international Mistress of the Dark Rosie Lugosi the Vampire Queen as co-mistresses of ceremony was a brilliant move, they kept the pace lively and their antics encouraged the crowd to, ahem, beg for more.

And the crew, OMG, the crew made magic happen -- efficient, friendly, hard-working and the best allies this group of performers could have ever wished for.

Some stand out favorites were the over-the-top all-the-way-to fabulous -- Simone de la Getto, oh, and the Amazing Grace and the Flower Bois with their soooo adorable hand-made leaf mitts, and the Twilight Vixen Review, and the Miracle Whips, and Foxy Locks aka Kelly Carey who was a founding member of the Queen Bees, and Darrah de jour, and María Cristina Rangel aka Cherry Galette, and others I never saw before and don't want to insult by getting their names wrong...but ooooh, all of those tassels, the blue feather fans moving in hypnotic synchrony, and the bathing caps, and sparkly glittering adornments, and stiletto heels, and poetry, and rebellion, and intellect, and up-speaking feminine call to our desire and power, and all of that cleavage...did I mention the tassels...did I mention the power???

What was so impressive about all of these women is that they are in full possession of their sexuality and desire. There were no smarmy het men using them to build fantasy encounters that substituted for a pathetic, lonely reality. These women celebrate the power of woman-centered sexuality, reveling in the transgressive shove against a heterosexist society that marginalizes women's control of their own sexuality at every opportunity.

These women are real Patriots, the kind of dissenting, self-empowering radicals that have always been the ones to lead the masses out of oppression. They are the Patriots for they are the ones who articulate the problems of class, age, race, and gender, and call on the forces of liberation and love to heal and feed the world-weary souls of the oppressed and marginalized. I am proud to stand with them.

Special thanks to the sexy, gallant, charming, and sparkling T 'n' T. Ya just gotta love those old school butches...

The Language of the Hand Fan

My "Great-aunt" Judy married Great-granddaddy Armstrong after his wife Susan, my mother’s grandmother, on the distaff side, died at the age of fifty-eight. When I was thirteen, my mother showed me a fan that had come down to her from her Aunt Judy. I remembered seeing that fan when I was much younger and I was excited to see it again.

Great-aunt Judy was something of a Southern Belle in the grand sense of the word. Although she didn’t come from money, she was as petite as Scarlet O’Hara wanted to be. Under five-feet tall, in her entire life, I don’t think her waist was ever more than seventeen inches around. When I was in first grade, I was nearly as big as she was.

When I was little we went to Florida to visit the old folks every Christmas; they had abandoned the snowy, cold winters of Ohio. Once I remember seeing a pair of Great-aunt Judy’s shoes sitting on the edge of the bathtub. I was so shocked that I climbed into the tub to put my bare foot along side of them; my six-year old foot was as big as her shoe.

Great-aunt Judy was from an old Southern family and she lived to be ninety-eight years old. I remember listening to her tell about watching the famous July 3rd 1870 steamboat race between the Robert E. Lee and the Belle of the Natchez. She prided herself on her southern cultivation and one of the things that she prized among all things was an ivory, silk, and lace fan that she had from her youth. When she died, the fan was passed to my grandmother and when she died to my mother. Finally, the fan that my mother showed me when I was thirteen, fell to me when I was forty five.

It is a monster by comparison to the fans available in modern gift shops. Fully opened it is a whopping twenty-eight inches wide and sixteen inches tall. The loop, to which a wrist strap may be attached, as well as the blades and guards, are carved from ivory. Mother-of-pearl capped rivets secure the pin that holds the guards and blades together.

Once a thin veil of blue or violet silk fabric called the mount covered the upper two-thirds of the blades. It had been hand-painted with small bouquets of flowers and was trimmed with handmade lace. The mount is tattered beyond repair; over time the silk has been weakened by the acids deposited long ago by Great-aunt Judy’s hands as she fluttered, flipped, and folded the fan in a series of precise and determined motions that expressed excitement, anger, fondness, impatience, and a thousand other nuances of feeling. Maybe she had that fan with her on the day when she watched the Natches race the Robert E. Lee.

When I first saw the fan, when I was five years old, Great-aunt Judy sat on the edge of her bed and went through a few of the moves she had used as a young woman in the mid-to-late 1800s. She unfolded the fan and its width was probably half her mature adult height; when she pulled up her feet and hid behind it, it seemed huge enough to cover her, although that was really an illusion she created through positioning.

She sat upright and paused as if about to begin a complicated dance step. She fluttered the fan as if to cool herself and then violently snapped it shut with her right had and slapped it into the palm of her left. She gave me a pointed look and said, “Displeasure.” I shrank in my skin. But quickly she made me smile again when she open it with a flick of her wrist, peeked out from behind it, winked at me and said, “Pleasure.”

She folded the fan and laid it across her heart and said, “I love you;” she reached across her chest and put the folded fan against the left side of her face and said, “Go away.” Then she turned slightly, spun the fan in her right hand at the level of her hip and said, “I am not married.” Finally, she gently dropped the fan flat onto the carpet and said, “I am interested in getting to know you better.”

I was sitting on the carpet and when I dived for the fan, she cautioned me away from it and lovingly picked it up. Before she put it away she let me hold it, it was so cool in my hands. I could feel the strength of the guards and the flexibility of the blades and I could catch the slightest hint of violets and lilacs when the breeze from the silk flowed past me. The next moment, it was gone from my hands and was laid away, out-of-bounds, in a deep dresser drawer.

Now I think about that fan and it brings up different things for me. Now it is still a talisman to my past but I am now sufficiently mature to see it as a representation of oppression and grief. Few African-American women my age, who are the descendants of slaves, probably have any such fond memories of an ivory fan that belonged to a Southern belle from the Antibellum South when slavery had been officially abolished, and everyone except the freed slaves and their children was benefiting from the change. Freed slaves were beaten, raped, murdered and exploited in a hundred ways in the mayhem that followed the end of the Civil War; for them the oppression did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation.

How, then, can this fan, made from the tusks of an elephant, not also represent and remind us of the violent oppression and personal pain that millions of slaves and their descendants suffered? We need to shoulder and own the knowledge that this fan is more than a reminder of a "gay old time" enjoyed in some fantasy bucolic, by-gone days. We need to include the less-than-pleasant and embarrasing associations in the larger context in which we view that beautifully-crafted fan.

On the subject of fan semiotics check out Academy for the Instruction in the Use of the Fan by Joseph Addison. It gave me a little insight into why I was so easily emotionally manipulated by that fan. Imagine the power of all that wind!!

http://www.ideco.com/fans/language.htm speaks a different dialect of the language of fans than did my Great-aunt Judy, but apparently the mother tongue is still alive and well.

Oh! Here comes my boi. Excuse me while I drop the fan hye got me at the gift shop at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco...