Kate Bornstein was described in the program for Fresh Meat as an elder. (She said, “If I’m an elder, that means I get to say things like, ‘I’m very proud of my children.’”) The piece she read was called XX: Reflections on My Twentieth Birthday, and it was all about how she’s a young woman now, and also an old man. She talked about coming to San Francisco when she was a two-year-old girl and a forty-year-old man. She talked about how wonderful this city is, how the queer community here is like nowhere else, and how amazing it is to be at this festival for queer and trans performance on its fifth anniversary weekend.
No matter how cynical I feel, she wins me over every time.
I first encountered Kate through Gender Outlaw, which I found at Barnes and Noble. The GLBT section was all of sixteen books long, and half of that was gladiator porn. I’d encountered references to transpeople before, in To Wong Foo, Stonewall, in a few anthologies here and there, and in the late lamented Anything That Moves magazine. (I was mostly looking for graphic depictions of sex.) I tossed everything on the to-do pile and pretended that there was no such thing as transgender, at least as a potential factor in my own life.
Gender Outlaw was the first book I couldn’t ignore.* That’s an amazing accomplishment on Kate’s part, given how skilled I was at filtering. Maybe it was because of its brevity. Maybe I picked it up at precisely the right time, and Conundrum or Stone Butch Blues or even Sex Slaves of the Empire would have worked just as well. I think that at least part of the reason Gender Outlaw spoke so clearly to me is the charming, disarming generosity of Kate Bornstein’s voice.
I know I’m probably going to sound like one of those people who talks about how nice Oprah is in real life, but, well. There are a few people I’ve met in my young life whom I have really admired and liked. They haven’t been queer for the most part, or come from any particular place. What they do share is a genuine interest in and love of diversity. Not just tolerance, mind you, but preference. “Wow, you think about things in a completely different way! You’ve come to completely different conclusions! You have completely different needs and desires! We disagree! That’s so cool!” Kate Bornstein seems happiest when she is encountering something she’s never thought about before, something new.
The other thing I love about her is that she has my back. She just published Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks & Other Outlaws. She wants to make sure that the freaks stick around.
*For too many years, anyway.
Similar Posts:
- Jesus Mocked by piny September 11, 2006
She’s one I haven’t got around to reading yet.
I’ve really wanted to recommend Gender Outlaw to my family for all of that generosity of tone and for all of the ways I love what she had to say to me when I was first coming out.
…that said, I’ve been awfully nervous that the BDSM and internet-sex portions toward the end would put them off the whole thing.
You could give them excerpts?
I’ve read exactly none of her work, but after hearing her on Saturday, it’s all on my reserve list at the library. She’s just so warm, if that makes any sense – like, I wanted to go up and hug her after she read, although I felt certain that might freak her out.
Oh bother, I can’t tell if I’ve screwed up the pronouns. Kate’s website uses she, ze, her, and hir, but not quite interchangeably. Does anyone have an opinion on what’s correct?
I think that Kate’s somewhere in between transwoman and genderqueer; I don’t think it matters which you use.
That’s My Gender Workbook, right? It’s the one with the instant-message miniplay.
There’s “Hoowahyoo?”on her website. Might be a good starting-place. I sympathize, though. I’d love to take my parents to Fresh Meat, but…not with the nekkid rapper or the strippers, no sir.
ExCUSE me? What the heck night did you go, all the rappers when I went kept their clothing on.
Mind you, the strippers did nothing of the sort. Woo!
It was just the one guy wearing nothing but an apron, really.
Huh. You’d think it would be difficult to completely miss someone wearing only an apron, but that would appear to be what I did.
Really? Huh. And we were there on the same night. He danced around in it–facing backstage–a little bit, too.
On Friday?
Ah! No. I was there on Saturday. You said something about seeing Kate Bornstein on Saturday, so I assumed. But I shouldn’t have, because she was at a bunch of Bay Area events last week.
Oooops, I got my days confused – I saw her at Fresh Meat on Friday. Glad to know I didn’t completely hallucinate clothing onto the rappers!