Do men who have sex with horses deserve our sympathy? A podcast interview with the director of a movie about animal love -- "Zoo."
As everyone who writes about the Tribeca Film Festival has observed for the past six years, it isn’t easy to describe or define New York’s spring movie extravaganza — which has now spread, bloblike, all over Manhattan and bears only a nominal relationship to the downtown neighborhood of its birth — except to say that it’s big and getting bigger. This year the growth is more a question of ambition (and ticket price) than absolute size; Tribeca will screen 157 feature films, an egregious number but slightly below last year’s total.
Tribeca sometimes seems like the film-fest equivalent of the endlessly protean product in that old “Saturday Night Live” commercial, the one that was a floor wax and a dessert topping. This year’s Tribeca event is a significant post-Sundance indie marketplace and a massive hype event for the release of “Spider-Man 3″ — and a rapid-fire showcase for numerous off-the-radar documentaries and foreign films as well. I suggested last year that Tribeca honchos Jane Rosenthal and Robert De Niro hoped to displace Lincoln Center’s New York Film Festival, both as Gotham’s dominant movie showcase and as a social-cultural event. (That goal has been half-accomplished.) Now I realize I was underestimating them.
“We should become, if not the dominant festival, then one of the great festivals of all time,” Tribeca co-founder Craig Hatkoff (Rosenthal’s husband) recently told Gregg Goldstein of the Hollywood Reporter. In the same article, Rosenthal makes it clear that she sees Tribeca’s competition as Sundance, Berlin, Cannes and Toronto, the four biggest events in world cinema. That’s some chutzpah for a festival that was founded in 2002 on a shoestring budget, has no permanent home base and has reportedly run in the red every year (Goldstein pegs annual losses at about $1 million). But, hell, you don’t get ahead in New York by being polite and restrained. Part of the NYFF’s problem — at least in terms of image — is that it’s attached to an über-civilized high-culture universe that seems a little less relevant every year.
Maybe a thoroughly obnoxious scale of ambition is the only one that makes sense for Tribeca. Why shouldn’t New York, the world capital of obnoxious ambition, have the biggest, starfuckingest, most artistically ambitious and most expensive film festival in the world? (Most of this year’s Tribeca tickets cost $18, up 50 percent from last year.) If that’s the goal, I have three words of advice for Rosenthal, De Niro, festival director Peter Scarlet, et al.: Show better movies.
Tribeca has become a first-rate showcase for documentaries — last year, “Jesus Camp,” “The Bridge” and “Jonestown” all premiered there — but its record with narrative features is mixed, if not worse than that. No festival this large, especially when it lacks (so far) the cachet of the big four, can avoid shoveling some crap onto the screen. But this one has shoveled more than its share of unfinished, half-baked and never-shoulda-been-made titles, and like other people in the business I’ve grown cynical about the value of a Tribeca premiere. More than 100 films will receive a world or North American premiere at this year’s festival, each one attended by a microsecond of hype, and then most of them will disappear back into the deep underbrush of Undistributed Film Limbo, never to surface again.
Of course the programmers aren’t going to take my advice, since the business plan for Tribeca evidently calls for being big-ass at all costs. I have to admit that it may be working: The lineup has gotten a little stronger every year, and this year’s package of films seems full of intriguing possibilities. I’ll break it down more in dispatches from the festival over the next several days. But first, let’s turn to the most controversial film to premiere at Sundance this year (now being hurried into theaters), along with the latest enigmatic study of violence and its aftermath from the terrific Australian director Ray Lawrence.
“Zoo”: Dances with horses, or defending the indefensible
I recently overheard another film critic discussing Robinson Devor’s documentary “Zoo,” which she defined as “pro-bestiality.” As subsequently became clear, she hadn’t seen it. I can understand anybody’s reluctance to engage with the issues raised in “Zoo,” a lovely, subdued film, washed in midnight blue, that flirts with the outer edges of documentary reconstruction and poetic license — and is certain to make you uncomfortable. But much of the outraged response to “Zoo,” almost all of it from people who haven’t seen the film (I heard a lot of this myself, after covering it at Sundance), is based on willful ignorance and incomprehension.
Devor and his co-writer, Charles Mudede, set out to explore the infamous story of “Mr. Hands,” the Seattle man who died of internal injuries in July 2005 after having sex with an Arabian stallion at a remote ranch near Enumclaw, Wash. (Although he is never named in the film, Mr. Hands has been identified in media reports as Kenneth Pinyan, a divorced aerospace engineer.) The ranch in question was apparently a center for a small group of men who enjoyed, not to put too fine a point on it, being on the receiving end of anal intercourse with a horse. (At the time, there was no law to prevent this in Washington, and the animals were reportedly well cared for.) Tabloid reporters and shock jocks had picked the story clean of salacious details by the time they got there, so the filmmakers ultimately decided to penetrate (as it were) the hidden world of zoophilia, which doesn’t simply signify bestiality but love of animals, whether erotic or platonic or both.
As Mudede said in a discussion after the film’s Sundance premiere, “Zoo” morphed into a kind of thought experiment: “If someone can go there physically — be there under that horse,” he said, “then I should be able to go there mentally.” To many people’s evident discomfiture, the film allows several of Mr. Hands’ fellow “zoos” (it’s what they call themselves, as others might say they are gay or straight) to present their side of the story in extensive personal monologues. They seem mostly like lonely middle-aged men, poorly adjusted to human society, who know perfectly well that their conduct, or orientation, or whatever it is, is profoundly repellent to most people.
To listen to a podcast of the interview, click here.
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There’s no sexual conduct in the film, although a brief flash of a bestiality video (possibly one of those seized on the ranch) can be glimpsed in one scene. Devor illustrates his interviews with languorous, half-dramatized re-creations of life on the ranch, using non-speaking actors to play Mr. Hands and his friends (since most of his interview subjects declined to appear on camera). Is the film pro-bestiality? No. It doesn’t take a position on bestiality. It does not moralize or tell you what to think, which in the eyes of some critics may amount to the same thing. (See also the idiotic mini-tempest over the alleged moral relativism of Paul Verhoeven’s “Black Book.”)
Janet Malcolm once wrote that the only thing journalism can do is raise questions about who is good and who is bad; it can never answer them. I’m not sure “Zoo” is a great film, but it is a morally significant one, precisely because it invites us to suspend judgment (however briefly) and consider that guys who like to get slammed by horses are people too, with complicated life histories and motivations we hadn’t thought about. For reasons I won’t pretend to understand, it might almost be more difficult to raise such issues about a zoophile than about a Nazi death-camp guard or a child molester. As Manohla Dargis observed in her New York Times review, as a society we imprison and kill millions of animals for our own purposes. Is cajoling or coercing one of them into a sexual act worse than that?
I met Robinson Devor toward the end of a long, icy day of moviegoing at Sundance. We grabbed a couple of cups of tea in the cozy Park City condo rented by THINKFilm (his distributor), and talked about the reception for “Zoo” so far, and the murky moral issues that lie beneath it. You can hear a full audio recording of this interview here.
Obviously the story of Mr. Hands, or Kenneth Pinyan, and the way he died, was sensational. What made you think there was a film in it, and especially a film that’s so unsensational in its approach?
Of course there was a lot of laughter and a lot of outrage. Laws were changed because of this. It became a political discourse. [Washington's state Legislature finally passed a law against sex with animals, which had not previously been illegal. The men involved in this case were never charged with anything except trespassing.] But there was a big hole in the story. We got such a clear impression that everybody wanted this case to go away. There was no discussion of who this man was, who these people were, and what they thought about having sex with animals. The challenge was to find that other side of the story, and see the world through the eyes of those people.
Your title, “Zoo,” is actually the word these people use to describe themselves.
That’s right. The technical or medical term is zoophilia, and they call themselves “zoos.” Bestiality would be all the way to a 10, so to speak. Just the sexual aspect. On the other end of the scale would be a form of zoophilia which is more emotional and not necessarily purely sexual.
A lot of people are going to say you’re apologizing for these guys, or justifying them. You’re hearing that already here at Sundance, although hardly anybody has seen the film.
Yes, I got that before anybody had seen the film, and that’s classic. I expect that. I don’t have a problem with that. If the film seems sympathetic to these men, that’s because they shared something with me, and I feel a responsibility to present it in a way that is fair to them. If it seems biased towards them, that’s because their stories weren’t heard initially. The arguments against them and what they do have already been heard in the media. This movie is maybe an adjunct to what we’ve already heard about why it’s wrong, why it’s abnormal, why it’s illegal. This is a companion piece to all those arguments.
How did you get them to trust you? I can’t imagine that if I was into sex with animals I’d want to talk to a documentary filmmaker about it.
It was a difficult thing. I don’t think that many of them wanted to talk to me, and it took a long time. They couldn’t believe I wasn’t including people who were going to make a mockery of them, that I wasn’t going to include police officers and politicians. But as it happened, I didn’t think that was appropriate, and I suppose it must have been comforting to them to realize that their stories and their thoughts were going to come through. And they do, I believe. Everything important that those men shared with me is in the film.
A lot of people are going to view this as a case of animal abuse. Now, these men clearly and specifically deny that.
That’s correct. The horse rescuers and other authorities have reported that these animals were in perfect physical condition. They were well cared for and not neglected in any way. But the issue of abuse is a difficult one, and I kind of step away from that and let people in the audience talk about it. I don’t disagree with some of the things that people may say: That animals are innocent, for example. The question of whether an animal can really consent to something like this is a difficult thing. Then again, I’ve seen footage of animals having sex with people, where they look as if they’re totally exercising free choice. There are instances of animals in the wild who have been sexually aggressive with human beings. It doesn’t blow my mind that that could happen. What’s interesting is that somebody would act on it.
But the issue of abuse is complicated. There has to be a lot more psychological and medical study involved before we reach a firm conclusion, I feel. How is this behavior formed in an animal? What kind of conditioning is involved? I try not to be judgmental in this movie. I’m just letting these men speak.
One of the radio hosts who talked a lot about this — I think it may have been Rush Limbaugh — made the argument that when you’re talking about the specific acts we’re talking about here, how can it happen without consent?
[Laughter.] The animal is 2,000 pounds of pure muscle.
But that may not address all the underlying philosophical questions.
Right. You know, there’s this line in the movie, I think it’s from Coyote [the on-screen handle of one of Devor's interviewees]. These guys have had a lot of time to think about this, so I value what they say. He says, “I don’t think a stallion cares if there’s a filly underneath him or a human.” I’m not sure I can totally get my head around that. He talks about the male drive, the need to reproduce, and certainly stallions are studded out, put through a lot of purely sexual acts. But you have to look at how they’re put through those acts, and who’s doing it.
Nearly all of your film is shot on different locations than the action occurred, and a lot of it involves actors. It’s more like a reconstruction or an illustration than a pure documentary.
I would say that there are alternate modes of journalism, different ways to tell a story. As a writer, anytime you describe something you’re calling upon your own descriptive powers. That’s not unlike the translation here. I’m hearing something that someone says and filming my impression of that. Things are always shifting around a bit.
For instance, John Paulsen, who is an excellent actor, has the very difficult job of playing Mr. Hands. We didn’t want the actor to inhabit the reality of who this person was, because this is a documentary film. We wanted to let him try to inhabit the soul of who this person could have been. I think we had to have proxies because of the cards we were dealt. We had audio commentary and two people who didn’t want to be on camera. We had to create a visual narrative and move the story.
I’ve seen other re-creations that seemed very false, so we had some little rules. We didn’t let the actors speak when you have another person’s real voice there. It’s a difficult challenge for the actors, but I think it was necessary. It’s not acting in a traditional sense, with lines and scenes. They’re just trying to embody some essence of who these people are.
One of the key figures in your film is Jenny Edwards, a professional horse rescuer who wound up caring for some of these horses after they were seized. Clearly she totally disapproves of having sex with animals. But towards the end of this film she talks about learning more and more about what was going on with these guys. I believe she says that she comes right to the edge of understanding it. Is that where you want your audience to be?
I think that’s fair. Here’s someone who’s clearly in the horse community, who has the ability and open-mindedness to think it through and to possibly, almost, comprehend it. Even the zoos would say it’s just too far out there for anybody to accept and to get their heads around. I don’t expect people to approve of these guys. But if you come out feeling a little sympathy for them, I’m glad. That was the point.
“Zoo” is now playing in New York and opens May 4 in Los Angeles, with a wider release to follow.
“Jindabyne”: A dead woman in a beautiful river equals a fishing trip ruined and a town torn apart
When Ray Lawrence’s haunting, almost existential, inside-out murder mystery “Lantana” appeared in 2001, it literally seemed like a movie from out of nowhere. Australian cinema had been quiet and not terribly ambitious in the years before that, and Lawrence himself seemed like a ghost from the past. (His only previous film, “Bliss,” had been released in 1985.) By his standards, making another film just five years later is a burst of frenetic activity.
Lawrence’s “Jindabyne,” which premiered at Cannes last spring, has much of the same mysterious magic. Like “Lantana,” it’s a relationship movie — specifically, a movie about the perils and pitfalls of marriage — that takes advantage of Australia’s distinctive scenery and sunshine, and that comes artfully draped in the trappings of a thriller. If you can speak of a Lawrence formula after just two pictures, it involves a couple of intriguing actors with Hollywood credentials (Barbara Hershey and Anthony LaPaglia in “Lantana”; Laura Linney and Gabriel Byrne here) in a domestic situation that grows ever darker and more enigmatic.
Adapted by Beatrix Christian from the Raymond Carver short story “So Much Water So Close to Home” (also the basis for one of the segments in Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts”), “Jindabyne” revolves a group of working-class men from the eponymous resort town in the mountains of New South Wales. Under the leadership of garage mechanic Stewart (Byrne), a local-hero type who was once a championship sports-car driver, these guys separate from their wives and girlfriends for a long-running annual ritual, a fishing trip deep into the wilderness, with no women invited.
Except that one is already there. Floating in their beloved river, the men find a dead girl of 20 or so, dressed only in underwear. She has clearly been murdered (and we know more about what has befallen her than they do). For reasons that are partly ambiguous and partly as clear as day — the trout are jumping, the weather is magnificent, the girl is beyond help — the men remain on the river for two more days, and don’t report the discovery until they get back to their car and can make a phone call. (No, smart guy, there’s no cell service out there.)
Tabloid and TV reporters jump on the case, partly because the girl was of aboriginal heritage and ethnic tensions in Jindabyne are already high, and the men become pariahs in their hometown. (The racial element does not exist in the Carver story.) Stewart’s American-born wife, Claire (Linney), becomes obsessed with the case, seeking closure with the young woman’s family (who don’t want her around). You don’t get the sense that Stewart and Claire had the most communicative marriage of all time (his nosy Irish mother, marvelously played by Betty Lucas, acts as the go-between), but the unsolved mystery of the fishing-trip-gone-wrong threatens to rip it apart, along with the rest of downscale Jindabyne society.
There are moments when the racial undercurrent of “Jindabyne” begins to gum up the narrative and overwhelm Lawrence’s subtle, compassionate and even spiritual treatment of these people and this place. But I wish one-tenth of the films I saw were made with this much craft and integrity, this much intuitive understanding of where to put the camera, how much of the story to explain in words (not much) and how much to trust his outstanding cast to carry the film with their voices, faces and bodies.
When Lawrence called me from his home in Australia, he cheerfully announced, “It’s tomorrow here.” He reported fine mid-morning autumn weather, while it was still the previous night (and spring) in New York.
How would you characterize the relationship of this film to the Carver short story? It’s different in many ways.
When I first started reading Carver, it was an inspiration in terms of characters and context and subtext. I always loved this story, and thought it would be a wonderful thing to try to make a film out of. But after Altman did “Short Cuts,” I thought, well, that’s it. I’m never going to do that one.
Still, it stuck with me. The question of that unique moral dilemma. The men in Carver’s story are different from the men in “Jindabyne,” but the basic manner in which they react to the wives is the same. It’s the thing I’ve always been interested in: the male-female thing. The differences and the conflicts, and how they stay together.
So what is the unique moral dilemma?
It’s the question of responsibility. You know, Carver once said that he saw a man on an airplane, several rows ahead of him — he couldn’t see his face — take off his wedding ring and slip it in his pocket. He said, “That’s all I need.” That was a big inspiration to me.
Then, when we decided to make the young woman an aboriginal, the story suddenly took off. There were a whole lot of things to work with, and we just went with it.
There’s a spiritual aspect to this story that we shouldn’t give away. But let’s say there are shots that seem to be point-of-view shots, but they’re not from any living person who’s actually there.
Yes, it’s a ghost story. In aboriginal culture, the highest point in the landscape is the spiritual center, and these are the highest mountains in Australia, even if they’re pretty small by your standards.
This film is partly about things that haunt you from the past. What haunts Claire’s character, and what haunts the men. On a bigger scale there’s what haunts our country, the way we treated the aboriginal people.
There is a murder in this film, but it’s not really a murder mystery.
I didn’t want it to be a murder mystery. I don’t have anything against genre films but I don’t seem to make them. I wanted everybody to know who did the murder straight away, and it’s important that he never gets caught. Evil is just a part of life; it’s always with us. Those point-of-view shots are to set up the idea that we are always being watched. You can read into that what you like, but it’s something that we live with.
So why don’t the men report the dead girl for three days? It would have been pretty easy to do the right thing.
I wanted to make the film with enough room for people to have opinions other than mine. But if you’re asking me, it’s nothing too complicated. It’s a beautiful day, one of them goes off to have a quick flick and catches a beautiful fish. Let’s call it the lure of their original intentions.
You’ve become known for shooting almost every scene in one take. Actors love you for that, I suppose. Why is that important?
I want to get to the truth of every scene, and get to the heart of it as quickly as possible. So I tell the cast, let’s not do a load of takes. Let’s do very few takes and if we get it in one, that’s fine. They’re all theater actors, and when they go on stage they’re doing one take for two hours. It can be scary for them at first, because that’s not the way that films are usually done. But it’s not as if I invented this. Laura Linney told me that Clint Eastwood works in a similar way.
It’s about giving the actors the freedom to know that their choices are precious and I won’t ask them to keep making them and making them. I think a lot of the paraphernalia of making films just gets in the way. Ken Loach said he hates to see crew members sitting around in baseball caps just out of the shot. It’s off-putting and distracting, and I try to get rid of as much of that stuff as I can. If I could get rid of the camera, I would.
“Jindabyne” opens April 27 in New York and Los Angeles, with wider release to follow.
Occupy Valentine’s Day
From a "Parks and Rec"-inspired holiday to Quirkyalone Day, the "romantic-industrial complex" is under attack
(Credit: CLM via Shutterstock/Salon)
A man and a woman are lying in bed under the covers, both of them beaming. She’s holding a handwritten sign that reads in part, “F–k a dozen roses.”
It’s one of several photos on the website Occupy Valentine’s Day, which applies the ethos of the anti-Wall Street movement to the consumerism of cupid’s holiday — and it’s just the latest attempt at creating an alternative celebration. “I think we need a new and different type of analysis around relationships,” says Samhita Mukhopadhyay, the site’s creator and author of “Outdated: Why Dating Is Ruining Your Love Life.” “This is not about being anti-love, but instead anti the unfair structures that force us to love a certain way.”
A big part of that is that the “romantic-industrial complex that nets billions of dollars from Valentine’s Day and weddings, and it needs you to ‘buy into’ outdated ideas of love and marriage,” she wrote in a recent Op-Ed for the Nation. “The more you express your love through candies, chocolates, diamonds, rentals and registries, the more the RIC makes!” (Indeed, it’s estimated that consumers will spend roughly $17.6 billion on cards, chocolates, flowers, jewelry and the like this Feb. 14.) But instead of just trashing V-Day — or VD (i.e., venereal disease) Day, as its biggest haters like to call it — she wants to honor “the different ways we engage in loving relationships.”
A less political alternative is one introduced by everyone’s favorite fictional mid-level bureaucrat, Leslie Knope of NBC’s “Parks and Recreation.” She celebrates “Galentine’s Day” every Feb. 13 by getting together with her lady friends for a brunch of her signature dish, whipped-cream with a side of waffle, to celebrate female friendship. Leslie doles out quirky gifts (sculptures of everyone’s spirit animal or mosaics of their faces made out of crushed diet soda cans, for example). She compares the celebration to Lilith Fair — “minus the angst and plus frittatas.”
Granted, Galentine’s Day started as a comedy punch line, but the concept was popular enough in the real world that this year NBC put together a guide on how to create your own Galentine’s Brunch. Bon Appetit even cooked up a special waffle recipe for the occasion. It’s also inspired DIY-ers to make Galentine’s Day e-cards and re-create some of Leslie’s more memorable gifts, like crochet flower pens.
Of course, “Parks and Recreation” didn’t invent the idea of single friends getting together on Valentine’s Day — that’s no doubt been around as long as the holiday itself — it just popularized a cute term for it. Let’s not forget the gender-inclusive Palentine’s Day, Singles Awareness Day or the concept of having a friendly “anti-valentine.” Greeting card companies are increasingly cashing in on anti-Valentine’s Day card for friends, including — gasp! — Hallmark itself.
A similarly heartwarming option is Quirkyalone Day, founded by Sasha Cagen, author of “Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics,” a book about people who “prefer being single to dating for the sake of being in a relationship.” She tells me, “I’m not against Valentine’s Day, but I have never been particularly inspired by it. The aim of International Quirkyalone Day is to offer a fresh alternative where you get to create your own day free of all cliches.” It’s an excuse to “celebrate yourself and your whole life,” she says, and that can manifest in a number of different ways: “take a long walk alone (leave behind your cell phone), buy yourself daisies, start a neglected creative project, buy yourself hot lingerie, get a massage, host a dinner party.”
Of course, not all Valentine’s Day alternatives are so charmingly earnest. Anti-V-Day events across the country call on bitter singles to bring a photo of their ex to put through a paper-shredder or pin to a dart board, or exact some other form of questionable revenge. And make no mistake, while it’s nowhere near a $16 billion industry, there is a market for Cupid-hating goods — from cards reading “Love stinks” to T-shirts featuring upside-down hearts to candy hearts with sayings like, “U left seat up” and “Dog is cuter.” The social network game Farmville even has virtual anti-Valentine’s Day items for purchase, like a barbed heart and a black flower. The truth is this isn’t anything new: Long before there were pithy e-cards, there were Victorian-era vinegar valentines, insulting cards sent to one’s enemies.
Why has the holiday generated such cynicism and, sometimes, downright hatred? Cagen says, “Valentine’s Day has this way of making people feel bad, whether they are single or in a relationship. If you are single, you feel left out. If you are dating or in a relationship, you feel pressure and expectation to have a romantic evening.” She’s all for “a pure celebration of love in all its forms,” but “the problem is when we narrow that definition of love to a romantic connection.” Cagen explains, “Almost 50 percent of American adults are single, so people are bound to feel left out. It’s sort of like a Thanksgiving that only 50 percent of the population feels invited to.”
Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More Tracy Clark-Flory
Porn’s taboo transsexual stars
"T-girls" are fighting for respect in the adult biz. What does it mean for the general acceptance of trans women?
Brittany St. Jordan, a 28-year-old leggy redhead in a plunging gold number, was all dressed up with somewhere to go: the Adult Video News Awards, the so-called “Oscars for the porn industry.” But she ended up standing in line for three hours waiting to walk the red carpet, as other female performers were sent ahead. When she finally got her turn, event organizers directed her away from interviews with the press.
St. Jordan had an idea of why: Unlike the ladies who were sent right in, she’s a transsexual woman.
After the night was over, having lost in the Best Transsexual Performer category, St. Jordan took to the Web to protest her treatment. Her story inspired Kelly Pierce, a female trans performer who didn’t attend the ceremony, to write a lengthy blog post titled “AVN’s Inequality & Segregation Needs to Stop!” Soon, industry blogs and message boards picked up on the controversy.
It was an explosion of long-building resentment over their treatment within the industry. Beyond the red carpet delay this year, which AVN says was not limited to transsexual performers, the company has never allowed the Transsexual Performer of the Year award to be presented on stage. Instead, it has been announced on a JumboTron as the audience starts to filter out of the auditorium. As one star told me, “We’re the black sheep.”
That is despite the genre’s tremendous popularity: “T-girl sites are the fourth most popular category of adult Web site,” according to “A Billion Wicked Thoughts,” a book that crunches the numbers behind Internet porn. (Although female-to-male transsexual stars are on the rise in queer porn, what we’re talking about here are trans women — more specifically, people assigned as male at birth who have transitioned to being female but still have a penis.) There are more frequent Web searches for this genre — often through terms like “shemale” and “chicks with dicks” — than for basic X-rated categories like “butts” or “blowjobs.” Authors Sai Gaddam and Ogi Ogas found that the genre’s average viewer is a straight-identified male (and, based on their analysis, passing curiosity doesn’t explain its popularity).
After St. Jordan’s outcry gathered virtual steam, AVN called a meeting last week with a handful of concerned trans women. On Tuesday, the company published a press release announcing that the transsexual winner would be announced on stage in the future. AVN also promised to allow more trans performers to walk the red carpet and talk to the press, and to present awards during the ceremony.
St. Jordan, who says she put her career on the line by speaking out, is thrilled. “Whether or not I ever get nominated again or get invited to anything with AVN again, the fact that the Transsexual Performer of the Year will be on stage and seen by everybody? That’s huge.” Tomcat, director of Kink.com’s TS Seduction site, agrees: “Not sharing the stage with Ts performers has allowed the majority of non-trans performers to dismiss them as outsiders and perpetuated discrimination against a group who should be equally praised for the work they do and the revenue they generate for the industry.”
While AVN’s decision marks serious progress, St. Jordan says that recent commentary on industry message boards reveals just how far there is to go. “Some of the hate and ignorance that came spewing from people was unbelievable, and this was people in, or associated with, the industry. You saw where a lot of people stood.”
Not that it wasn’t already apparent. There’s a huge stigma against mainstream straight stars working with transsexual female performers — they’re stereotyped as gay and therefore at higher risk for transmitting HIV. Tomcat, a trans man, told me in an email, “I still encounter many non-trans performers who will not work with [female] Ts performers because they consider [them] to be more of a STI risk to do a scene with — this is bullshit. In a industry where everyone is tested and everyone makes choices, the same risks are present regardless of gender identity.”
It perhaps goes without saying that the marketing of transsexual porn is often problematic. “People still search for Ts porn using ‘shemale,’” Tomcat says. “To me, this is like searching online for a cab company by typing in ‘stagecoach.’ It’s an antiquated term that is ignorant, incorrect and no longer OK to use.”
Some performers, like Wendy Williams, aren’t so concerned about the lingo. “I don’t live in a utopia, it’s what it is,” she says with her Southern lilt (she’s from Eastern Kentucky). “I’m not trying to be a transsexual activist.” Plus, “It’s a porn term that describes a genre. That way, some country, straight-ass guy in the corner is going to understand,” says Williams. “You say ‘transsexual’ and they’re confused, you say ‘shemale’ and they know what that is.”
A major struggle for the transsexual female niche is to get recognition within the straight side of the business as opposed to the gay side. “This is one of my biggest pet peeves, when I go into a store to do research to see if they’re carrying my DVDs or product lines and you have the transsexual stuff mixed in with the gay stuff,” says Williams. “Putting it next to ‘Harry Men Volume 1,’ it’s just not a good idea,” she says, since the vast majority of their fans identify as hetero. “My gay friends squeal at the idea of having sex with anything but a masculine male — the breasts and all that is just a huge turnoff.”
For most fans of transsexual porn, the genre is just one of many categories that they’re interested in. “A Billion Wicked Thoughts” argues that T-girl porn has such a significant straight male following because it combines the key sexual cue of female anatomy with that other fixture of heterosexual porn: a big, hard cock. Madison Montag, a nominee for Transsexual Performer of the Year, says, “They get tired of just the same old thing. Transsexuals are more feminine, they’re like hyper-feminine. To me, it’s kind of get the best of both worlds.”
The mis-categorization of Ts female porn has been painfully evident at the AVN awards in the past, Williams says: Buck Angel, the first recognized FTM trans performer, won the Best Transsexual Performer award in 2007. “It was a huge scandal in our community,” she says. “How do you judge his porn against our porn? His fan base is totally different. That’s just one example of how ignorant the porn community is.” (In an aside, she mentions the scene she filmed with him in 2005: “Actually, Buck was the very first, quote, vagina I had ever been in.”)
Many female transsexuals feel like they’re rejected from both the straight and gay world. “Even if you go into the [gay] clubs, transsexuals and drag queens are primarily there for entertainment,” says Williams. “It’s not really inclusive. We’re kind of in limbo, we’re in between both worlds.” In the straight world, men are often timid about revealing their interest in the genre. Most sales happen online, says Williams, who has a line of signature toys, including a $240 cyberskin mold of her ass. She says, “We’re the taboo, and where does taboo usually happen? Behind closed doors.”
Then again, Pierce, a blond with pixy features, says that when she signed autographs in a booth at the AVN Expo in 2008, she was allowed in the “female section” and had a line longer than some non-trans girls. “They were kind of upset with me,” she laughs.
In terms of fans’ willingness to announce their interest in public, it all has to do with a performer’s “passability,” according to Pierce: “Some men feel like they’re more straight if they’re attracted to more feminine looking transsexuals who bottom” — because topping is seen as masculine. Passability is also a factor in how girls are treated within the industry, she says: “If you look like a woman, they’re more accepting of you. And if you don’t look like a woman, they’re less accepting.”
Montag, a 19-year-old, doe-eyed brunette who calls me “sweetie,” says she got stellar treatment at this year’s AVN awards — she rubbed elbows with Ron Jeremy on the red carpet and scored a seat in the second row — and attributes it in part to her passability. “I’m very young. I’m only 5’1″ and 81 pounds. I’m very petite.” She adds, “I started hormone therapy earlier than other girls.”
St. Jordan agrees: “When it comes down to it,” she says matter-of-factly, “this is business, and it’s a beauty contest every day.”
Williams, who is 6-feet-tall with red, va-va-voom hair, says the pressure to pass as a porn star is even greater than in everyday life. Normally, she says, “I pull my hair up into ponytail and throw on some lip gloss and people just think I’m a tall girl with big boobs.” On camera, everything is different: “You need to seem extremely feminine, but if you want to seem feminine, then you need to be on hormones — but if you’re on hormones, you can’t stay hard and come, and if you can’t stay hard and come, you’re a bad performer.” On top of that, she says, the same viewers who expect this expensive nipped and tucked aesthetic “want to pirate my videos and not sign up for my website and have it for free.”
The irony is that many female trans performers get into the sex industry to pay for their transitions. Well, that and because it can be difficult to get a job anywhere else: “I interviewed for a job that I should have got,” says Williams about her pre-porn days, “and the guy told me, ‘I just don’t know how the cohesion in the office would be if people knew that you were a transsexual woman.’” Things have improved in the decade since then, but the same issues persist: “I couldn’t get a job, not even at Burger King,” says Montag, who lives in a small town in Texas where “people get beat up just for being punk and emo.”
She may be sexually outgoing on the Internet, but it’s not so in real life. Montag says she gets far more action on-screen and doesn’t pursue men in real life, for fear of them having a bad reaction to the discovery that she’s trans. Instead, she sticks to the Web: “[You get] a better reaction and it’s safer, too,” she explains. “It’s not like they’re gonna beat you and leave you in a cornfield to die.”
Courtney Trouble, a queer porn star and director who has worked with many trans performers, hopes that porn might actually help reduce transphobia in society at large. “Porn, while seemingly a private, frivolous luxury, has the immense power to gently create an awareness for trans issues in the audience,” she says. “If porn can create a change in the minds of people outside the industry, that’s where the real rewards are.”
Tobi Hill-Meyer, director of “Doing It Ourselves: The Trans Women Porn Project,” left the mainstream business “to create an alternative that allowed trans women to be represented the way each performer wanted to see herself represented,” she says. “I had to leave the mainstream industry in order to accomplish that, but I’ve seen a similar thing happening within it. More and more performers are speaking out about changes they’d like to see and setting up their own websites or productions.” Trouble believes that independently produced porn will do away with terms like “shemale,” “tranny” and “chick with a dick.”
Others predict transsexual porn will explode within mainstream straight porn. That’s in part because “so many transsexual stars are transitioning younger and getting more beautiful,” says Pierce. But she adds, “Sexuality in general is becoming more open-minded and the new generation is really pushing the limits on sexuality, and I think it’s going to push the transsexual market.”
St. Jordan agrees: “I think there’s gonna be some great crossover stuff real soon, within the next year or so,” she says. That means transsexuals performing not only with non-trans girls but also with straight male performers. This is partly because of growing acceptance and interest on the part of porn viewers, and partly because the up and coming generation of young performers have increasingly liberal attitudes. She says, “As new minds and ideas are coming into the industry, there are more people willing and open to work with us.”
Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More Tracy Clark-Flory
“House” gets asexuality wrong
In a TV first, the Fox drama introduces asexual characters -- only to blame their identity on a medical condition
(Credit: Fox)
Last week’s episode of “House” marked the first time a major TV network featured self-identified asexual characters. But the asexuality community isn’t exactly celebrating this breakthrough; in fact, many are petitioning Fox executives in outrage.
That’s because the episode ends — spoiler alert! — with the revelation that the characters aren’t asexual after all.
When the show’s cantankerous lead, Dr. Gregory House, learns that his colleague has a female patient who identifies as asexual, and is married to an “asexual” man, he bets him $100 that he can find “a medical reason why she doesn’t want to have sex.” Through his signature unethical approach, House manages to run some tests on the husband under the guise of administering a flu shot. He finds that the man has a pituitary tumor that’s killing his sex drive. Then comes the ultimate reveal: The wife — or “giant pool of algae,” as House calls her — is just pretending to be asexual to make her husband happy.
David Jay, founder of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), tells me the show’s treatment was “disturbing but not unexpected.” Not only does the episode assert “that asexuality is problematic and pathological,” he says, but it also tells people who actually accept asexuality as a valid sexual orientation — an acceptance Jay has long fought for — that “they’re wrong.”
OK, so it’s a popular network TV show, and a medical-mystery drama at that: The bar for nuance and sensitivity is set pretty low. It’s also medically possible for a pituitary tumor to cause a lack of sexual desire — but it certainly isn’t the norm among the 1 percent of the population estimated to be asexual. (Although, asexuality as a whole is underresearched and poorly understood.)
The petition, which urges Fox execs to reconsider future portrayals of asexuals, argues, “The episode encourages viewers to meet asexuality with skepticism rather than acceptance, to probe asexual people for causes of our ‘condition’ rather than to accept us as a part of the natural spectrum of human sexual diversity.”
Asexuals hardly need to be investigated by “sexuals,” says Jay. “If someone identifies as asexual, chances are they’ve already done a lot of deep self-reflection and analysis to come to that,” and that can include the possibility of a pituitary tumor, a hormonal imbalance or past sexual trauma. “There’s such a strong message that there’s something wrong with you if you don’t like sex, it’s very hard for people to accept this about themselves,” he says. “It’s hard to be on that journey in an honest way and to be avoiding something. [Asexuality’s] not an easy out.” It’s not like “you identify as asexual and then you’re done trying to understand yourself,” Jay explains.
As for the wife on “House” who faked her asexuality to please her husband? Jay’s not buying that either. He has several asexual friends who have been in relationships with sexual people for years; and each couple finds a way to make it work, whether it’s non-monogamy or negotiating sexual interaction within the relationship — kinda like in relationships between sexuals! Believe it or not, he says, such arrangements are not uncommon in the asexual community, and he says they work “because of really good, honest communication,” not because one partner is lying to the other. But that does make for better TV.
Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More Tracy Clark-Flory
I’m fixated on my wife’s past
After 25 years of marriage, a man finds himself suddenly obsessing about his partner's sexual history
(Credit: brushingup via Shutterstock)
Help! I’ve been married for nearly 25 years, and I can’t stop obsessing over my wife’s past sexual history.
When we first started seeing each other, she was married, I was married and we were both having affairs with other people. She told me in very exquisite detail about many — if not all — of her sexual adventures (many of them extramarital with married men). She went into great detail about how affairs started, when, where, the type of sex performed (oral/anal) with each man. Her sexual experience was far greater than mine.
I have asked her in recent months to recount what she told me 25 years ago about her sexual experiences. Not only will she not discuss it and gets angry about it, she now claims that she never did any of those things. Well, of course, I have some proof that she did many.
My question is why can’t I stop obsessing over her past sexual conquests (and that’s what they were — she seduced primarily married men), and why is she now denying and refusing to discuss her past?
I feel for your wife, man. You’re interrogating her about her sexual past after a quarter-century of marriage. There should be a statute of limitations on such things.
There must be a reason why this suddenly matters to you now. M. Gary Neuman, a therapist and author of “Connect to Love,” senses “some guilt or fear of the ‘what goes around comes around’ karma.” He says, “Maybe you now feel doomed to struggle since this relationship began through inappropriate behavior,” and adds: “It’s never too late to apologize to those you may have hurt in the past. Do what you need to in order to feel freer moving forward and allowing yourself to enjoy your marriage to the max.”
Listen to the man. He’s been on “Oprah,” yo.
Therapist Charles Foster, co-author of “I Love You but I Don’t Trust You,” says there are a couple of possible interpretations of what’s going on here. It could be that “after 25 years, their sex lives — so clearly in need of spicing up from the beginning — are developing rigor mortis, and his re-opening this can of worms is the best way he knows how to wake things up in bed.” Or maybe “for some reason, trust issues have reared their ugly head.”
Is your wife giving you new reason to mistrust her — based on her current behavior, as opposed to things she did when she was a young seductress? If not, this might be less about your wife’s actual trustworthiness than obsessive thinking.
Foster has little patience for this: “Come on, what is it you really want? Better sex? More closeness? More trust? Any of these could make you happy,” he says. “But satisfying your obsession will only stimulate the very itch that’s making you miserable.” Instead, he suggests that you “focus on your real needs, and work with your partner to get them met, and keep telling yourself that your obsession is just a sinkhole of misery.”
On a similar note, Diana Kirschner, author of “Sealing the Deal: The Love Mentor’s Guide to Lasting Love,” suggests that you start by simply listening to each other: Sit down and give each other 10 minutes to talk uninterrupted about whatever is on your mind. Instead of talking about past exploits, try talking about “sexual longings or fantasies you have right now and especially how you would like to act them out with each other.” She says, “Build a whole new relationship now that is so satisfying, the past just doesn’t matter.”
Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More Tracy Clark-Flory
The invention of the heterosexual
The history of straightness is much shorter than you'd think. An expert explains its origins
A detail from the cover of "Straight"
If you met Hanne Blank and her partner on the street, you might have a lot of trouble classifying them. While Blank looks like a feminine woman, her partner is extremely androgynous, with little to no facial hair and a fine smooth complexion. Hanne’s partner is neither fully male, nor fully female; he was born with an unconventional set of chromosomes, XXY, that provide him with both male genitalia and feminine characteristics. As a result, Blank’s partner has been mistaken for a gay woman, a straight man, a transman — and their relationship has been classified as gay, straight and everything in between.
Blank mentions her personal story at the beginning of her provocative new history of heterosexuality, “Straight,” as a way of illustrating just how artificial our notions of “straightness” really are. In her book, Blank, a writer and historian who has written extensively about sexuality and culture, looks at the ways in which social trends and the rise of psychiatry conspired to create this new category in the late 19th and early 20th century. Along the way, she examines the changing definition of marriage, which evolved from a businesslike agreement into a romantic union centered around love, and how social Darwinist ideas shaped the divisions between gay and straight. With her eye-opening book, Blank tactfully deconstructs a facet of modern sexuality that most of us take for granted.
Salon spoke to Blank over the phone about the origins of heterosexuality, the evolution of marriage and why the rise of the “bromance” is a very good thing.
Men and woman have been having sex for as long as there have been humans. So how can we talk about there being a “history” of heterosexuality?
We can talk about there being a history of heterosexuality in the same way that we can talk about there being a history of religions. People have been praying to God for a really long time too, and yet the ways people relate to the divine have specific histories. They come from particular places, they take particular trajectories, there are particular texts, and individuals that are important in them. There are events, names, places, dates. It’s really very similar.
So where does the term “heterosexual” come from?
“Heterosexual” was actually coined in a letter at the same time as the word “homosexual,” [in the mid-19thcentury], by an Austro-Hungarian journalist named Károly Mária Kertbeny. He created these words as part of his response to a piece of Prussian legislation that made same-sex erotic behavior illegal, even in cases where the identical act performed by a man and a woman would be considered legal. And he was one of a couple of people who did a lot of writing and campaigning and pamphleteering to try to change legal opinion on that matter. He coined the words “heterosexual” and “homosexual” in a really very clever bid to try to equalize same-sex and different-sex. His intent was to suggest that there are these two categories in which human beings could be sexual, that they were not part of a hierarchy, that they were just two different flavors of the same thing.
But the term took quite a while to catch on. How did it spread?
Thanks to psychiatrists in the 1880s and 1890s — a part of the medical profession that was deeply unscientific at that time. It meant that somebody with a medical degree and all of the authority it brings could stand up and start making value judgments using specialized medical vocabulary and pass it off as authoritative, and basically unquestionable.
Psychiatry is responsible for creating the heterosexual in largely the same way that it is responsible for creating the various categories of sexual deviance that we are familiar with and recognize and define ourselves in opposition to. The period lasting from the late Victorian era to the first 20 or 30 years of the 20th century was a time of tremendous socioeconomic change, and people desperately wanted to give themselves a valid identity in this new world order. One of the ways people did that was establish themselves as sexually normative. And it wasn’t the people who were running around thinking, “Oh, I’m a man and I like to sleep with other men, that makes me different,” who were creating this groundswell of change; it was the other people, the men who were running around going, “I’m not a degenerate, I don’t want to sleep with other men, I am this thing over here that is normative and acceptable and good and not pathological and right, that’s what I am. That’s what I need people to understand about me, because I need people to understand that I am a valid person and I need to be taken seriously.”
This also has to do with the popularity of social Darwinism at the time.
Social Darwinism comes into play in a big way. It became important to prove that you were part of the solution and not part of the problem in this pell-mell, hurly-burly, crazy new social order [of the late 1800s and early 20th century].
So how did this change in terminology play itself out in the real world?
I actually talked to my grandmother about this. My grandmother is 88 and she came to consciousness in a world that didn’t have heterosexuals in it, where nobody knew that word, and certainly nobody used it to refer to themselves. And she associates this change with Freud, whom she’s never read but whom she’s heard a lot about. So there was this sort of culture-wide game of telephone, if you will, in which these authoritative medicalized ideas coming from very rarefied circles trickled down into the larger culture. I think that for people of my grandmother’s generation particularly, heterosexual simply became a synecdoche for normal. And that’s certainly the way Freud talks about it, that you know, you attain heterosexuality. There’s this process of attaining normality. When you manage to develop yourself, or to become developed, in the proper way, in an appropriate way, in the way that Freud says you’re supposed to, what you end up with is a heterosexual.
In his book “Gay New York,” George Chauncey writes about the flip side of this, how previous to the invention of “homosexuality,” men’s sexualities were much more fluid. Do you think that’s the case?
Oh, absolutely. When you start operating on the principle that you indeed can divide people into sheep and goats, then there’s also the idea that you must divide people into sheep and goats and there are certain boundaries that cannot be crossed without reclassifying.
As you point out in the book, for much of human history, marriage had absolutely nothing to do with sexuality or sex.
It’s more that marriage didn’t have a lot to do with desire. Marriage has always had to do with sex, and the ability to have marital sex and preferably procreate has always been central to marriage. But what was not so important was whether or not you necessarily wanted to have sex with that person. It was your duty, it was paying the marriage debt, and you were gonna do it, by golly, but this was a co-worker, this a partner in business enterprise — not a person you chose to satisfy your own personal whims and desires with. If you happen to also like them and think that they were swell or pretty or handsome then that’s great. But that’s not what you were in it for.
And now everything has changed, because we now prioritize attraction, desire, love, romance, over the strictly economic and community-building aspects of marriage. We live in a culture now where we find it very odd when women don’t support themselves, if somebody chooses to be a stay-at-home mother. That is a huge change, and that’s a huge change just in my lifetime. I’m in my early 40s and I know that when I was a very small child those discussions were not happening in the same way. The economic and legal enfranchisement of women has gone hand-in-hand with both women’s and men’s ability to choose marriage partners based on their own desire, desires for sex, love, companionship, all of those things, and to put that first.
How do the successes of the women’s movement impact our concept of heterosexuality?
I think that referring to it as the success of the women’s movement is a little bit of a misnomer because there’ve been multiple women’s movements, and also because it’s not entirely to be credited to or blamed on organized feminism. There’s been a lot of other enfranchisement of women that’s gone on as well that has actually been not identifiably feminist, but definitely comes out of a very 18thcentury spirit of egalitarianism. But in general I think that equal rights egalitarianism has had an enormous amount to do with changing heterosexuality. Simply because once you give women and men equal or nearly equal rights to their own economic autonomy, political autonomy, social autonomy, you change the playing field, you change the dependency relationship.
Over the last decade, there’s been a lot of science arguing that there are physical differences between gay people and straight people, in their brains and even the direction of their hair whirls. You’re skeptical of this research. Why?
I question their validity primarily because nobody has established or in fact attempted to establish that there is a canonical straight body. And if you don’t have characterized control, you can bet your bottom dollar I am not going to believe your hypothesis. It’s really that simple.
All of this research that is purporting to look for physiological material differences between gay bodies and straight bodies: What are they comparing it to? Their assumption that they know magically what a heterosexual body is? When no one has actually established what that is. That’s bad science.
OK. Then do you think it’s possible to establish what a heterosexual body looks like?
Well, you know, if you’re going to stipulate that it’s possible to establish what a non-heterosexual body is, it better damn well be possible to find out what a heterosexual body is. And if one of those things is not possible, then, chances are, the other is not either.
I’m quite attached to my identity as a gay man — and, to be honest, I would feel a little troubled having my category taken away from me.
See, that’s the thing, no one is going to take that away from you. No one can take that away from you. The only thing they can take away from you is the illusion that this is not something that is constructed. And that’s very, very different. Just because something is constructed as a social category, doesn’t mean that it’s not enormously meaningful. It doesn’t mean that we haven’t built a whole damn civilization on it. Doesn’t mean that we don’t live our daily lives on it, doesn’t mean that we don’t use it all the time every time we’re walking down the street. This is real. It’s stuff that has physical manifestations in the real world. But that does not mean that it is organic.
Or innate.
Or inevitable.
But these categories have also been very practical. Gay rights wouldn’t be imaginable without them.
Well, you know, minority politics has been a lot easier to sell than to just say, “Being human ought to get you human dignity,” full stop. If you can pin down the difference, if you can make the difference the salient issue, it somehow makes it easier for people to stomach the fact that they can’t go out and just beat people over the head. I don’t know why that is. I find it intensely frustrating.
Do you think the success of the gay rights movement is helping broaden our ideas of sexuality?
I think that it is having an interesting effect of making the boundaries of the categories more permeable. Simply because we now have this doxa [omnipresent acknowledgement] of gayness in our culture where we believe that gayness is a thing, we believe that it exists, we believe that we know what it looks like, we believe that we know what it acts like, and therefore, when we see it, we’re actually very likely to say, “Hey, that over there, that looks really gay,” regardless of whether or not that person may be, in fact, gay.
Those boundaries are becoming more porous. The term “bromance” cracks me up, but it is also promising. For the past hundred years or so, a lot of men have found it very difficult to express affection and love for other men without having it assumed that that love is necessarily sexual. And now we’re actually coming around to a place where at least some people, some of the time, are able to avail themselves of a category in which they can say, “Oh, OK, here’s a way that men can be affectionate toward each other and one another and love one another and we don’t have to assume that we know more about it than that.” I think that that adds something to the conversation.
Women, in particular, seem to be eschewing the traditional between binaries of gay and straight these days, at least in pop culture. The same thing doesn’t seem to be true of men.
There’s a reason for that. Every queer woman I know — and I’m a queer woman — understands intuitively that a lot of people don’t consider what two women do together sexually as sex. It’s a whole lot easier to fly under the radar when what you’re doing is not something that a lot of people are even going to consider as sex.
But men, for various other cultural reasons also seem to be more attached to categories. It functions partly as a sort of safety mechanism.
I think there is a lot of safety in categories. And there’s a hell of a lot of safety in a binary. When you can just say, you know, anything that is not this is automatically that. You know, it frees up a lot of spare time.
I have a number of friends who are negotiating the reverse of this, in that they for a long time identified as lesbians and have now started dating transmen and now have to negotiate the awkwardness of being in what ostensibly looks like a heterosexual relationship. I’ve been around several friends who, when they mention their boyfriend in a queer setting, reflexively say, “Oh, but he’s trans.”
And I think that really points as well to the fact that these are constructed categories. This is about your subjectivity, it’s about your allegiance, it’s about where your social networks are, it’s about the kinds of cultural priorities that you embrace and that you endorse. This is not just what gets you hard or what gets you wet. This is not just about what kinds of sex you have, or the congenital configurations of the people you have sex with. It’s very much about what cultures you participate in. What cultures you ally yourself with, you know, whose flag you fly.
It’s interesting that transgender men and women could marry their partners long before gay people could get married, even though they are probably far more despised by conservatives in this country, simply because they fit into this heterosexual idea of marriage.
Although, that’s not uniformly true and there have been cases, like Littleton v. Prange in Texas — which still to this day breaks my heart — where jurisdictions refused to uphold the legality of marriage or partnerships involving a trans person, because they basically take the stance that you can’t change genetics and this is person was never a whatever. And therefore the marriage is not valid. So it does cut both ways. I do think that the issue of gay marriage is a very interesting one to look at in the context of the history of sexuality, because what I think it testifies to is not so much the tendency that non-heterosexuality has to destabilize heterosexual culture, but the incredible depth of the investment that our culture and our government have in regulating the kinds of relationships that people have in their lives.
Page 1 of 395 in Sex
Obama Continues to Box In His Opposition 
A Valentine to Older Love 
The things I carry 
When I lost the ability to type 
Pop art, the beaded edition 
The beautiful banality of high school 
The unemployed meet MacArthur’s tanks 
Demi’s last night out 
One day you’re in 
Pitch and catch 
Whip-it 
