Wicked Queer: The Boston LGBTQ Film Festival, Trans Program #1

As a programmer for Wicked Queer: The Boston LGBTQ Film Festival, it’s my great pleasure to curate short film programs of trans-themed movies. This year I put together 2. This week, I will blog about the first of them. I’ll follow up with comments about the second program next week.

Here are the films I’ve included, in program sequence:

Different: (2 min) narrative short, in French w/ subtitles.
A brief, narrated pace-setter, this film serves the purpose of a thematic overture for the whole program, encapsulating the issues that will come up throughout the set of films.

She: (14 min) Documentary, in English.
Often what attracts me to a documentary is the hit of personality I get from the film’s subjects. Tanesh Nutall, whom I grew to admire more and more over the course of the film, is an activist working in San Francisco. The first section of the film presents a view of her life there — her work, her relationships. In the second half of the film, we go with Tanesh to her family reunion in Rahway, NJ, a home she fled decades before to be able to transition her gender away from her conservative religious family. What kind of reception should she expect to receive?

In My Mother’s Closet: (13 min) narrative short, in English.
It’s a musical! There are a number of musicals in the festival this year, and I am proud to be presenting one as part of this sequence. A young woman invokes her mother’s strong presence in a phone conversation with a friend, whom she is trying to convince to come support a performance she is preparing to give.

Calamity: (23 min) narrative short, in French with subtitles.
Awkward, nearly to the point of horrifyingly so, but with a deft, light touch, this Belgian comedy caught my eye because of all of the strange visual juxtapositions and gags. It’s edgy stuff, but manages to give and preserve each of its characters’ dignity throughout. Note the role of Cléo/Calamity is played by François Maquet, a cis man. Generally, I avoid booking such films, but this one is so well done, I had to book it.

¿FAMILIA?: (15 min) narrative short, Spanish with subtitles.
A woman bears the burden of family in many different ways. Where Calamity has an almost sitcom-like feel, ¿FAMILIA? is gritty and carries notes of desperation. This familia is not on any picnic.

The Real Thing: (7 min) narrative short, in English
This film presents a nice twist on a very familiar current pop culture trope. Simple, sweet, and direct, I got the same heart warming feeling that the soldier’s homecoming trope has ceased to provide for me otherwise.

Umbrella: (16 min) documentary short, in English
Tells the story of four trans community activists/leaders. I found the inclusion of Mara Keisling, director of NCTE (National Center for Transgender Equality) exciting, as I’m familiar with her work. I hadn’t known the other three subjects of the film, but they are all compelling figures: inspiring and strong.

Pre-Drink (23 min) narrative short, French with subtitles
I’m so impressed with this film. Funny, sexy, emotional and intimate — it’s a stellar addition to our festival. The two actors give nuanced, engaging performances. Alex Trahan especially takes us to a place we haven’t seen before in filmed stories about trans folk. All through this film, we feel that underneath the snarky banter there is a world of feeling that never quite makes it to the surface.

This first program, which is entitled Family? will screen at the MFA on Saturday, March 31st at 1 PM. I hope to see you there!

Flaws and Forgiveness

What can we be forgiven for? What, specifically, is that line that, if it were to be crossed, there could be no redemption, ever? Kevin Spacey comes to mind in this regard. Evidently, he victimized under-aged boys, and did so for decades. People in the industry knew this about Spacey. Considered, until recently, one of the greatest actors of our time by many, a few knew him to be a monster: a predator. Can he ever find forgiveness? Can those who knew but never spoke be forgiven?

And what of Thomas Jefferson? What of many of the founding fathers, who owned slaves and/or stole the land of the indigenous people of this land often over their dead bodies. Look around, Americans. You live in the society Jefferson and his colleagues devised. Can our own founding fathers be forgiven? Since he’s been dead for 192 years now, Is Jefferson beyond the need for forgiveness? I wonder who that mercy might benefit, if given. Perhaps no one?

And what about me? What about you? What infractions against the general welfare might cause any of us be in need of forgiveness? Do we need forgiveness before we are found out? Or are we only sorry if we are caught? Should any of us be forgiven? What good is forgiveness? What payment to society in recompense for our transgressions is too extreme? At what point does the administration of supposed justice cross the line and become a crime in and of itself? Is revenge ever a good thing? Can it return us to balance, as it claims to intend?

Can we ever forgive ourselves? For whatever crimes, known or unknown, that we have on our spiritual ledgers, can we offer grace to our own troubled minds? Can we show ourselves mercy?

And having absolved ourselves, what shall we do then? Do we simply go on with our lives? Do we remember the cost of our transgressions? Do we deserve our own forgiveness? Will we disappoint even ourselves?

I have disappointed myself many times. Do I deserve forgiveness? I have trouble forgiving myself. In small dark nook in my heart, I have not yet done so. I see how not forgiving myself holds me back. But forgiving myself is very hard to do.

I want to believe them. They’re probably right. But it’s hard.

Can I forgive my betrayers? Can I forgive those who have deliberately wounded my dignity? Can I forgive those who have broken my heart? I want to. I am a romantic, a utopian. I want everyone to understand each other and be friends. But too often, I have been misunderstood. I must not be very good at explaining myself, or perhaps I am strange.

Because I can forgive almost anyone else, but I can never seem to forgive myself.

Writing Challenge: A Blog Post About Poop

Poop.
Human waste.
Brown-25.
Shit.

Everybody poops. Pooping is proof of life.

Poop is disgusting. It’s alive with bacteria. It stinks, powerfully. Poop is terrible. I do hope that you wash your hands after you poop, for your sake as well as mine.

I can count on the fingers of my left hand the number of serious conversations that I remember having about it. I am aware that this is because I have never had kids.

There are people who find poop funny. I’m not that person, and haven’t been since I was 6 or so. I’m not here to make poop jokes. I’m here to talk about this defining subject that hardly anyone ever talks about. There are people who find poop sexy. I am definitely not that girl. Human excreta is so not my thing. More power to you if it’s yours. I don’t judge.

Punk scourge GG Allin was into poop. He once got himself banned from a well-known rock venue in Cambridge, MA for pooping on stage. I have a friend who tells me GG used to eat a whole bar of Ex-Lax™ before a show. He also told me that GG went to the emergency room with blood poisoning more than once, because he would also cut himself as part of a show, and then roll around in his own excrement. I kind of liked GG’s first single, but… like I said: not my thing.

Is poop important? It would be difficult to answer that question in the affirmative. But it is, arguably, the single thing humans produce in greatest abundance. It’s been observed that (healthy) humans produce about an ounce of poop per day for each 10 pounds one weighs: a person weighing 160 pounds will produce almost a pound of the stuff every day. It should be fairly easy, then, to do the math for the estimated 7.4 billion people on the planet, if we consider 160 pounds to be the average weight of a human being.

The disposal of human waste is of great import, because of the very real dangers of not getting rid of it. 2.8 billion of us live in impoverished places where there is inadequate human waste disposal. This is of major concern for both humanitarian and world health reasons. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is working to develop technologies for processing human waste as close to the source as possible, which should considerably reduce the cost and difficulty of dealing with the amount of  human excreta produced in cities in poor countries where getting rid of feces and urine is most challenging and therefore most threatening to general human well-being.

75% of poop is water. What’s left is half bacteria and half undigested fat, fiber, and carbs.  It’s what’s left after virtually everything of value has been extracted from what we take in.

But poop is not entirely bereft of meaning. In a laboratory, scatologists can study feces and determine many things about the being who produced a particular sample, such as what it eats, where it’s been, whether it has certain health issues.

Poop can be a metaphor. In this blog post, though, it’s not being used as one: here, poop is just poop.

 

My Ten Favorite Book-Length Memoirs

I’ve only been reading memoirs with any sense of purpose for the last couple of years. I applied to the Lesley MFA program hoping to get into the fiction genre, but I also applied to their nonfiction genre track, “as a backup,” I thought at the time. It turns out that I am much better at nonfiction, which was pointed out to me at the time of my acceptance into that genre at Lesley. Looking over the two writing samples I sent in after the fact, I have to agree.

That doesn’t come out of nowhere. I learned much about writing from reading top-tier rock journalism, with the staff of the long-defunct Creem Magazine being my most essential teachers-by-example. Through a longstanding fascination with Native American history, I have also come to love the writing of Peter Matheisson, Mari Sandoz, and Dee Brown.

As a student of nonfiction, I have been given a number of great books to read by people who know the genre much better than I do. The majority of the titles on this list came from my teachers: one is by a teacher of mine. There are a few things here that I’ve found on my own. Every one of these books has taught me something about the craft of writing.

This list is not in any particular order.

  • All the Strange Hours by Loren Eisely
    A surprisingly lyrical, if dark, recounting of his life by the pre-eminent popular science writer of the 1960s.
  • Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
    Perceptive and harrowing, this coming of age story by a woman who lost half of her lower jaw to cancer while in her early teens offers no easy answers or pat endings.
  • Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick
    Elegantly written recounting of a woman’s complex relationship with her mother. It’s a model for anyone’s work in the area of memoir.
  • Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Cultures by Kyoko Mori
    Blunt and controversial story about the author’s conflicted relationship with her home country, her father, and her stepmother, and also tells of her self-discovery and new life in America.
  • She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan
    Important to me on many levels, I read it as I was beginning the process of my own transition. I recognized many things about myself in its pages. It gave me courage.
  • Violence Girl by Alice Bag
    This book thrives for me through Alice’s eye and fierce honesty, on its lens into the earliest days of the LA punk scene, and her upbringing in an East LA barrio. Uncompromising and powerful.
  • The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
    Memoir as queer theory tract. Iconoclastic and deeply felt excavation of a relationship, a life, and our culture.
  • Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
    One of the greatest voices of the twentieth century brings you into the trenches with him when he fought for the Anarchists (and against the Fascists) in the Spanish Civil War. Gorgeous and heartbreaking.
  • Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR’s Polio Haven by Susan Richards Shreve
    Written with vulnerability and honesty, this book captures the discomfort and self-destructive awkwardness of adolescence.
  • The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood by Helene Cooper
    Account of a privileged childhood lived in a land about to be plunged into a disastrous civil war that would change everything the author knew of the world.