What do I look like?

Oct 15, 2007 12:56


Originally published at Disjunction. You can comment here or there.

Ego searches turn up the most interesting things some times. While comparing results among various search engines, I turned up a link to a PDF file that contained a quote from me. A quote about being a RuPaul fan. People that know me pretty well know my whole RuPaul web site history (RuPaul’s House of Love), and they’ve also been shown my quote in My Gender Workbook where I talk about having my orientation questioned because of my RuPaul fandom.

But I’ll tell you what… I never expected that my little quote would become part of an actual activity.

Check out page 13 of this PDF for something called Kaahini. That section of the document starts out with this exercise:

What follows are quotes from people who have had experience of being and living outside gender stereotypes. An exercise you can do with them is to copy them on to separate pieces of paper and get different people to read them out. After one is read out discuss as a group who the person who wrote it might be, what they might look like, what they might wear. You could create characters from them. Gauge what people’s initial reaction is to the quote and does that reaction change after people have role played the characters? Did people feel comfortable being someone who is exploring gender in a different way?

Who might I be? Just a guy that grew up in an environment of intolerance who one day saw a RuPaul video and said, “That chick is hot!” moments before realizing that said chick was not a chick. After that, I was mesmerized by the fact that, for just a second there, I would have totally done a guy just because he looked like a woman. I guess most people would react violently to that realization or just do a “Crying Game” vomit scene, but I thought it was awesome. It wasn’t until some years later with the then upcoming release of RuPaul’s autobiography (”Lettin’ It All Hang Out”) that I launched RuPaul’s House of Love and started seriously considering gender issues.

That consideration resulted in conversations with closeted teens, other drag queens, Xaviera Hollander (no joke), and Kate Bornstein. The quote attributed to me was penned while Bornstein and I discussed the animosity between the transgender community and drag queens. She asked for permission to include it in “My Gender Workbook”, and I gladly consented.

So, getting back to this exercise… I hope that some of the people involved in it looked me up. They might have been interested to find a very boring guy at the origin of that quote. Somebody who can’t bother to shave on a daily basis, wears jeans and black t-shirts as often as possible, is a devoted husband and father, and yes, was a former webmaster/designer for the likes of RuPaul and Frank Marino.

It’s interesting that very little progress has been made on the acceptance of transgenderism since I gave my quote. I’m not saying I expected my paltry thought to change the world, just that I expected the world to change on its own a bit since then. About a week ago, there was a news site carrying the story that a male Microsoftie was undergoing transition. They were making a pretty big deal of it as an item of spectacle, which was odd to me since I had gotten over the awkwardness of that topic a long time ago.

I suppose there’s a larger question of whether or not transgenderism should be supported, but I have a pretty concrete answer to that. As long as the chick is hot, who cares?

et cetera

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