yonmei

08:05 am: Still too hot
If you wonder where I was yesterday, I was in Glasgow, having a prolonged meeting for work purposes, and then as it was already 1pm I stayed on till 4pm to see Before Stonewall at the Gallery of Modern Art. Which was quite fascinating - the weeks leading up to Stonewall, as told by a drag queen who was one of the habituees of the Stonewall Inn.

I had been in two minds whether to stay on for the panel discussion afterwards or head back to Edinburgh and perhaps score a two for one, if I got there in time to see Jesus of Montreal at the MCC Church, but the film had brought so many ideas to mind that I thought I'd stay.

Which meant I got to chat with a young Muslim who's just starting an organisation for LGBT Muslims in Scotland, and with a South African called Paul with whom I had a very funny exchange "My family's more screwed up than yours!" over the "refreshments" (white wine, cheap juice, packets of crisps, a couple of plates of grapes and cherries - it looks like they had either no budget for this event or about £10 worth of budget and used the leftover wine and juice from the exhibition launch last week) between 5:30 and 6 - and then headed into a boring non-discussion in which three panellists and a.n.other explained to us why they were there, and what they thought about the issue of LGBT identity, and allowed 20 minutes or so at the end for the audience to ask questions. There wasn't really much time for ideas.

I also got to exchange greetings with the curator, who remembered me as the visitor last week who'd pointed out that the Mapplethorpe isn't the only picture of a sex act in the exhibition: there is also the picture of two women's hands making love to each other in almost Escherish closeness. He was very nice about it and thanked me - "you were quite right, I'll remember that for future tours". But oh dear, the discussion was pants.

Reminded me though, of how things are changing: that more and more younger LGBT people do not give a damn about identifying themselves at such, any more than the straight kids do. We really are working ourselves out of a job. There are kids growing up in Edinburgh and Glasgow today who have no notion, not only that it used to be against the law for two men to have sex, but that it used to be perfectly legal to fire someone from their job for being lesbian or gay. Not now but in fifteen to twenty years, when these kids are teachers and nurses and lawyers and construction workers and secretaries and doctors and parents - maybe it really won't be a big deal. At all.

I got online briefly yesterday in a tapas bar where I drank sangria and nibbled bread and worked a bit, but I had other things to do on my limited connectivity than journal. Sorry.

It's still way too hot. It's already 16 degrees and it's only twenty past eight: yesterday it was 22 degrees. It's Scotland. We're not built for this.



Tags: being queer, glasgow, weather

10:14 pm: Zulu said Fred
1. What is your greatest ambition 1) for today, 2) for the month, 3) for the year?

1.1 For today: to compile the email bulletin. 1.2 For June or for July? I could be perverse and say June, which would be the same as for today, wouldn't it? For July: to launch my new website effectively, and to finish writing the latest fanfic. Or I'll get killed. 1.3 To get my photoblogging back on line and to cope with work without losing track of home.

2. You can change one law. What is it, and what does it become?

I would amend the 1975 Marriage Act so that same-sex couples could get married. Oh, that's awfully serious. I would change the Hollywood Law that makes it impossible to have two women talking to each other about plot stuff instead of teh menz, and so from now on all films and TV series would pass the Bechdel Test. Is that too frivolous? I think I want to repeal the law of gravity, so that we can all fly whenever we want to.

3. What's your favourite website to visit?

I wondered how to answer this one. xkcd because it always makes me smile? www.guardian.co.uk because I habitually turn to it for news? insanejournal.com or redbubble or feministsf - the blog for obvious reasons?

No, I think in all honesty it's much simpler than that: www.google.com. Sorry.

4. What's something you are or have been fannish about, and how would you pimp it?

Depends what it was. If Blake's 7, probably start with fanfic, and move on to episodes only when actually begged to do so. If Star Trek, probably begin and end with fanfic, plus maybe carefully selected bits of episodes that are genuinely OK, mostly because Spock and McCoy are gazing into each other's eyes. If ST:tng, I'd probably try to start off with "Chain of Command", because that's certainly what hooked me, or possibly just all the Picard/Q episodes. Especially the one where Q licks Picard's ear. Or the one where Q and Picard are tucked up naked in bed together. If The Professionals, same technique as for B7. If MacGyver, make them watch the Murdoc episodes until sufficiently convinced this is the primary pairing, then introduce them to the sincere yet limited M/M fanfic. If M*A*S*H... well, who could fail to melt at the thought of Hawkeye/Mulcahy? They're just too adorable.

5. Beanie caps: height of fashion, or accessory disaster?

Disaster. That was easy.

You know the rules: if you want to be interviewed, ask me!




Tags: bechdel, being queer, blake's 7, fanfic, fred, m*a*s*h, redbubble, star trek

12:03 am: Pride tomorrow
Wish for me that I should wake up bright, energised, and figuring out where I put my digital camera from the last time I used it...




Tags: being queer, pride, sheepish

09:49 am: I'm packed and we're leaving Plockton
I don't really have words to say how wonderful the ceremony was yesterday. But at the dinner, afterwards, one of their oldest friends (I mean in age: chronologically, I'm one of their oldest friends, having known RiK for 25 years...) got up and made a short speech about how privileged we all felt to have been invited and to have been there, and then we all toasted them, and it was... well again: no words.

I fell in love with Plockton. I want to come back. If I go downstairs now and pay, I have an hour or more before we actually have to leave which I can spend wandering around and taking more photographs, so I'm going to do that. And we're going to Skye too, today.

Next time I'm going to pack walking shoes and work off these magnificent breakfasts and dinners in walking.



Tags: being queer, films, friendship

02:42 pm: Plockton is pretty
We had a long trip up by car, with stops in Perth (to collect wedding favours), in Dalwhinnie (which is twinned with Las Vegas, according to the sign at the pub where we stopped - where we had a very nice lunch, but saw no gamblers or white tigers), and in someplace I don't remember the name of because for two hours of winding hilly road I was feeling increasingly carsick and I didn't care where we were, or indeed appreciate how lovely the castle was, until I had breathed some fresh air and had a cup of tea and a cheese scone. But on the way out of the castle tea shop, I looked out over the sea loch at the castle and the hills and said in a bemused voice to the woman next to me, "It really is lovely, isn't it?" feeling a bit like Tommy Lee Jones in MiB where he confesses to Will Smith that the stars are beautiful, though he hasn't looked at them in years. Anyway. We got to Plockton and checked in and I found I had a room to myself (which I hadn't been sure about, because when they were booking us in January, I'd been asked if I minded sharing and of course I'd said No) and a nice bathroom just a few steps away, and a complimentary towelling dressing-gown to take those few steps.

So I wandered around Plockton, which is tiny and pretty, for an hour or so, and then came back to our hotel and we all had dinner*, which was lovely. My friends' friends are also lovely: it's very nice to meet them all. (I admitted to two separate people who asked, since everyone else present was thespian to some degree or another, that my sole connection with the stage was the O-Level Drama I did back when I was 15, and the drama group I belonged to for a year after that: I had met RiK when we were both in the same gay youth group, in 1984. Nobody seems to be prejudiced against non-thespians, though, which is nice.)

A sound night's sleep, followed by a lovely breakfast** - the food here is glorious, a focus on seafood, but there are enough vegetarian options to keep me happy for a longer stay! - and another wander round Plockton in the rain. I'd discovered this morning I could get online via the Plockton Inn's wifi, though T-Mobile has let me down. Then I went back to my room, packed up the half-bottle of wine I'd bought last night and not nearly finished, went down to the fish bar and ordered a vegeburger and chips, and took this and my wine up to a bench overlooking the sea and the houses, and ate and drank wine and admired the view and read The Guardian, and it was really very perfect. (The friends are lovely, but one can have too much togetherness, you know.) It's five past three. Time for another half hour or so wandering Plockton and taking more photos, then I need to come back here and dress for the ceremony.

I am very disappointed to hear that the Californian Supreme Court has decided that a majority vote in California can take a civil right away from the minority - I mean of course the freedom to marry, which has been established in the US as a civil right necessary to the orderly pursuit of happiness since 1967. I'm very glad and relieved, though, that they didn't decide to forcibly divorce the thousands of couples who had got married - and hope things will change for the better by 2010, if not before.

But I'd like to promote to your attention a petition to the UK Government (and ask you to sign it, if you're a UK citizen) to amend the Civil Partnership Act so that same-sex couples who want to register their partnership at a religious ceremony can do so.

*Grilled vegetables in pitta bread, followed by vegetarian haggis with clapshot (mashed neeps and tatties) and followed by Crannachan ice-cream. I'd ordered a bottle of very nice Merlot, thinking I'd share, but everyone else at my table was on gin-and-tonics or beer.

**Muesli with dried fruit salad, orange juice, coffee, brown toast, scrambled eggs which tasted like the eggs had been laid this morning, baked beans and a grilled tomato, more coffee, oatcakes.




Tags: being queer, breakfast is a good meal, eating some delicious food, evil american politics, ice-cream, just my life really, seeing friends, travel, wine

11:26 pm: Yay fruity civil partnership!
I am going to the civil partnership of one of my oldest friends, to his partner of 15 years, next week - and they've organised it up in the Highlands, in Ross-shire, not that far from Skye. In fact, we're going there on a day-trip the day after the partnership ceremony, which is happening on a boat.

All of which is very exciting and happy-making and totally wonderful, of course - except for the problem about: What do I do about a gift? Obviously, the pair of them having been living together for years and years and years, housewarming-style presents would be inappropriate. As would any presents which they'd have the problem of shifting back to Edinburgh. So...

...I bought them a fruit basket. A big fruit basket. I actually spent quite a while putting together The Perfect Fruit Basket (easy-eating fruit, oatcakes, cheese, fudge, nuts) only to discover that the company wouldn't deliver that day. Nor would the next company. Which it finally occurred to me was because of the Spring Bank Holiday in England and Wales on the Monday. So I found a company in Scotland, British Bouquets, and they do a spectacular-looking fruit hamper with cheese and oatcakes, to which I added a box of seashell chocolates. Whee. Sorted.

(Also, I am still not sufficiently over the change in the law - not just the Civil Partnership Act but the legislation that makes discrimination illegal: it was an extra fillip of satisfaction to e-mail the hotel that I wanted to send a civil partnership gift and could they put it in the couple's room, and to get a nice message back from the hotel manager saying they'd be delighted. (There have been a couple of extremely nasty incidents in the Highlands of gay men being literally turned away from guest houses: and a bunch more reported of hotel and guest house staff just being plain mean and rude, though not actually denying a same-sex couple a room/a double bed.) Obviously my friends wouldn't have picked a hotel to stay in where that would happen - they've stayed in that area before - but I'm still getting oh this is cool grins over it.)





Tags: *bounce*, being queer, friendship, fruity smells

11:40 am: Charles Emerson Winchester the Third
David Ogden Stiers just came out. Whee!

Tags: being queer, m*a*s*h

02:24 pm: On lies, liars, and lying
Everybody lies.

It's one of my favourite lines from House, because, well, it's true. Attempting to speak with absolute honesty, without concealment or disguise or misdirection, is both difficult and also generally unrewarding. And it's also usually very dull.

When my mum asks me to come round to dinner on Tuesday night, and I say "Sorry, I have something else on that night" when what I plan to do is go to the gym, have a lovely basic one-dish meal for my tea, and veg out on the couch watching the West Wing (or House), this is both a lie and not a lie. Rigorously interpreted it is not a lie because I do have something else I plan to do which I do not want to set aside for a three-course dinner in a dusty muddled house where I spend most of the evening thinking carefully about what I can and cannot say. Rigorously interpreted in the other direction, it is a lie because I know perfectly well my parents assume "something else on" means I'm going out to meet friends, or have a meeting I need to attend, or some other fixed appointment. But this kind of lie is simple next to something like the response required to:

"Are you having a good time?"
"How do you like my cooking?"
"What do you think of my story?"
"Is this a good look for me?"
"Did you have a good Christmas?"

(My mum's best friend asked me once "Did you have a good Christmas?" and I replied with unthinking honesty "It's over" which she was extremely disconcerted by.)

There is unfettered honesty. There are social lies. There are big honkin' lies you tell because you must. ("I like working here and I trust and respect the management of this company." - "I enjoyed spending a whole day with my co-workers doing non-competitive games and other teambuilding activities." - "It's not you, it's me." - "I am so sorry I shan't be able to attend your party next week.")

( cut for length )

Tags: being queer, germany, memories

06:23 pm: Remembering Kaija Seifert
Today I went to a seminar for employers and service providers to discuss how best to oppose transphobia and anti-trans discrimination.

It was a good day, and I hope a productive one.

It ended with two people, Jo Clifford, whose name used to be John Clifford, a Scottish playwright, who got up and talked passionately about the wonderful changes since she was a 15-year-old who knew she was a boy who wanted to be a girl and didn't have a name for what that was: and Nick Laird, who works for Fair for All NHS, talking about his experience as a trans man - Nick is younger than Jo, and came out/grew up/transitioned in a more supportive environment, but still had those moments.

I was thinking, as you do, about gender identity: Nick told a story about a small boy - an utterly innocent small boy - asking him, back when he was living as an uncomfortable teenage girl who knew she wanted to transition - "Are you a boy or a girl?" and Nick not knowing what to answer, and finally answering with what his birth certificate said then, and how he was living then: "I'm a girl." And the wee boy asking, in all innocence "Are you sure?"

( Read more... )

Tags: being queer, feminism, hair hair hair, i am an angry feminist, kaija seifert

01:29 pm: These things happen here
Do you understand where you are?

A blogpost about a family reunion in a small Southern town in 1993. You really need to read it, and the comment thread. It's about the Jena 6, who are being targetted in 2007 for being "uppity blacks" by outraged whites: but also about a Klan attack on a bunch of uppity black kids in 1993.

It reminds me of an offhand comment by a straight friend who went to see Brokeback Mountain and was shocked to realize that it was happening in her time - 1963 to 1983. I interpreted her reaction as shock: she expressed it as disbelief. Although she makes much of having "lots of gay friends", she's not much for LGBT activism: her reaction to Brokeback Mountain was the disbelief that this could happen now. I would imagine she's rationalised away as happening elsewhere - in the strange, primitive parts of the US, she thinks, gay men marry women and carry on covert relationships and find out that their partner died by a letter returned with "deceased" on the envelope... it doesn't happen in the here-and-now.

My first attempt at being out at work was 1995. The reaction from my senior manager scared me back into the closet again for another three years: when I came out again, a colleague used his knowledge of my sexual orientation to attack me in a work dispute. I never spoke about this to any of my straight friends: including, of course, the woman who didn't believe Brokeback Mountain could happen in the here-and-now. Trying to talk about it would have required too much explanation: whereas I don't know a single queer person who wouldn't have understood why the senior manager's reaction was scary, or how a straight male colleague can react to knowledge that someone who supervises his work is a lesbian.

Tags: angry queer, being queer, brokeback mountain, evil american politics

03:06 pm: It's Scotland, it's June, it should be RAINING
Or snowing.

It's hot. Hot hot hot.

I went to a history of LGBT cartooning event in the City Art Centre at lunchtime, with Kate Charlesworth and David Shenton, and it was fab, but I was sitting in the hot room trying desperately not to go to sleep, because it was fab but I was hot. And somewhat stressed.

I want to go lie in the sun somewhere and go to sleep, but I have a meeting this afternoon at four I have to go to: I suppose I shall go have an iced latte instead.

Tags: being queer, weather

08:51 pm: Half a lifetime...
I am thirty-eight, nearly thirty-nine.

( when I was eighteen )

( ...and today )

Tags: angry queer, being queer, evil british politics, sometimes i love my job

06:10 pm: V is for Vendetta, and Vegetarian, and...
( This may not be work-safe - I'm just saying )

Tags: being queer, vegan recipes, weird stuff

12:11 pm: Who makes me angriest, right now?
From this BBC story it seems that the wording that so annoyed me this morning was from BBC Scotland's political editor, Brian Taylor - a man who damned well ought to know that it's not a question of "those who say Scots Law is different".

But on the whole, I think I'm angriest at Jack McConnell, who has proved himself to be a political coward and a fool. With a side-order of rage at Mike Rumbles, who says that allowing same-sex couples equal rights with mixed-sex couples is "gesture politics".

We will fight this. Not merely because the Westminster proposal is homophobic, heterophobic, and transphobic: but because Jack McConnell should learn that he has responsibilities towards LGBT people in Scotland too, that he cannot duck out of by gesturing helplessly at Westminster and whimpering about how the Catholic Church isnae gonnae like this. (He's really afraid of the Daily Record, too.) And because, whatever Brian Taylor may think, Scots marriage law is substantially different from English marriage law, and no matter what, the legislation affecting Scotland is going to have to be written in Scotland. It would be ludicrous to then have to ship it down to Westminster to have it bolted on to the England/Wales act.

Tags: being queer, scottish politics

08:29 am: Bloody BBC
Just overheard the BBC newsreader announcing that Westminster is going to move on the registration of partnership for same-sex couples in England and Wales (backed by a nice shot of two happy smiling couples coming up the stairs) and then she added that: (paraphrased) "Westminster may also be asked to rule on this for the whole of the UK, but expect a fight [shot of the Scottish Parliament] from those who say that Scottish law on property and marriage is different, and deserves different treatment."

Excuse me?

Scottish law is different. It's not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of fact. There are a lot of issues around Westminster passing registration-of-partnership law for Scotland as well as for England and Wales, but "those who say that Scottish law on property and marriage is different" will be found on both sides of the fight.

Bah. Stupid BBC.

Tags: being queer, scottish politics

04:42 pm: Awww....
Scott and Marc, up a tree, K I S S I N G....

Tags: being queer