For the first time in my adult life: a job I LOVE

I am very, very, extremely excited to say that starting today, I have a job that I love. In my final semester at TCNJ I interned with PhinLi Bookings, LLC, a talent agency which represents LGBTQ and Sex Positive artists, performers, and authors, and now I am working for them.  Since I am both writing a book and pursuing acting, with a full run of a play happening in May, I have been seeking a job that would provide some stability, but is flexible and part time.  I didn't dream that I'd not only get it, but that it'd be a place that I have already enjoyed working! Additionally, how I came to find PhinLi is one of those "isn't if funny how life works out?" stories.

Giovanni's Room photographed by uwishunu

It must've been about two years ago that Giovanni's Room was first having their fundraisers to rebuild a structural wall that cost over $50,000 to repair.  I happened to tweet a musing that it would be awesome if Kate Bornstein did a reading as a fundraiser for them.  Little did I expect that a few minutes later I'd get a reply from Kate saying that that sounded like something she'd be very excited to do, indeed!  I went and saw her perform at Hot Fest that summer.  She did a special piece that was coupled with  Sean Dorsey's stunning "Uncovered: The Diary Project," as a one-time pairing for the festival only.  There we met for the first time, and I also met Serpahin, one of the two women behind PhinLi.  Both Seraphin and Lisa came down to Kate's reading at Giovanni's Room that fall, and though I didn't know how at the time, I knew it'd be a lasting relationship.

If someone had told me then that I'd be working for them, but that it would take a few years to work out the details, I wouldn't have had the patience for that, though I might now.  However, I didn't know, and the details were all interwoven with everything else going on in my life.  I made the decision to go back to school in November of 2009, lost my job a few days later, and both got accepted to school and started interning with First Person Arts a few weeks later.  I don't know exactly how things came together in the summer of 2010 but I knew I needed an internship in the fall, PhinLi needed an intern, we got in touch, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Gender Queeries Logo by JAC Stringer

Since then I've met more of our talent than I had expected, including Johnny Blazes at the International Drag King Extravaganza (IDKE); Ivan Coyote, S. Bear Bergman, Jessica Halem, Sassafras Lowrey and Sinclair Sexsmith at Sideshow in NYC; and Kelli Dunham at an event co-hosted by Queer Memoir and First Person Arts.  In addition, I've been hankering to perform with a few (OK as many as possible) of the folks on our talent roster, and in fact, that's happening! On March 5th the Liberty City Kings are having our Vixens & Vagabonds Queer & Kinky Cabaret and The Gender Queeries are our guests!  They are a traveling troupe that include the aforementioned and immeasurably fabulous Johnny Blazes, Ignacio Rivera (also repped by PhinLi), and Midwest GenderQueer, who is not repped by us, but who've I've recommended to be at our next expansion, and whom I also met at IDKE.  I am so super stoked to perform with these amazing artists and be the MC for the show.

This Week in Fabulosity - Mean Little Deaf Queer (& Other Assorted Faggotry)

I was very joyful to get out of the house this weekend.  I was nearing a total meltdown with school, and frankly that didn't fully resolve until late last night when I cleared a thesis with a professor, realized I had plenty of time to write it, and calmed my raggedy over-achieving Virgo ass down.  But I digress.  This Saturday, my fabulous sex blogger flatmate Sarcastabitch reminded me that Giovanni's Room has having both an author reading and Holler, their (relatively) new open-mic night which I have attended previously.   Side note: Sarcastabitch is so intensely, delightfully, snarkily and brilliantly fabulous that she'll also be guest blogging for The Evil Slut Clique because her wit and swish cannot be contained to just one blog.

The evening started with Terry Galloway dramatically reading from her memoir "Mean Little Deaf Queer."  (Follow the link to buy the hardback from Giovanni's Room, or here to get it in paperback edition when that comes out shortly.)  She was pehomenal and an off-the-wall wonder.  She read/performed three excerpts.  The first was about meanness as a way of coping with deafness in her youth, and the second two about passing.  One was passing as less disabled to order to feel less an outsider, and the other about passing as more disabled than she really was in order to make sure she qualified for public assistance in getting new hearing aids. 

It was the latter that I found the most interesting of all, though both about passing made me think about behaviors in which we, whether queer, disabled, ethnic or racial minorities, etc., may take on a very affected behavior outside of us in order to demonstrate ourselves to be either "enough" or "not too much" of whatever it is we think we have to be for the audience we're currently performing for.  Performing different versions of ourselves and others is something that most or all of us do in adolescence or in college or other times in our life that are formative of our emotions and identities.  To see someone not only recall this in their own life but to recreate the performance for us was captivating and it begs the questions: "How does she perceive both her own disability, and that in the context of her larger identity?  How does she perceive her disability compared to others' disabilities?  What does this performance of disability tell us about her perceptions, and do they seem accurate either to us or to her in retrospect?"

Overall, Terry's reading and answering questions for the audience afterward was unwaveringly energetic and captivating; in addition it was, at turns, laugh-out-loud hilarious, cringe-worthy, sympathetic, tugging at our heart strings, and, in moments, cruel.  The title of the book, after all, is "Mean Little Deaf Queer."  In little more than an hour she took us on a real journey that certainly left me wanting more, and so I joyfully purchased the book and had it signed, and am glad to report that Beacon is already looking for Terry to write a sequel.  In this endeavor she has all of my best wishes, and I cannot wait to finish the first, and read the second when it comes out.

I've had so many things to say about Terry's fabulosity that I'll sum up the rest of the evening in a quick stream of consciousness: most  read from anthologies, I from GENDERqUEER, though one young man performed a monologue on performing queerness (performing identity = evening's theme) with great hilairty.  "I am a Christian Woman!" he exclaimed.  Delicious audience member with beautiful braided hair.  Delicious hummus afterward with some queer gals and one "butch tranny fag."  Baklava and coming out stories.  His fascinated: first as a dyke, then as a trans man who has a wifey, is queeer, is "down for the tranny cock" (as in, other trans men like himself), does not love cis-men's penises.  My cock barely bristled; not everybody can love it.  More than enough do and that's fine.  Strawberry-vanilla hookah and homemade baklavah.  Deliciousness abound.

Kisses,
Pistol

Inspiration via Koreanish

Alexander Chee is a novelist that I follow on Twitter, and who I recently got to meet when he was in Philly for  work.  When I made my Christmas wish list of books by queer authors for my Mom to buy me from Giovanni's Room, his debut novel Edinburgh was on the list, and is next on my "to read" list. (It was really exciting to support queer artists who I knew or that were recommended by PhinLi Bookings, who I love.)  I also follow Alex's blog Koreanish and really enjoyed  today's post.

What struck me was his discussion on the research that one must undertake to create authentic art, in his case a historical novel, a largely autobiographical novel, and a potential screen play.  Even the autobiographical novel required research because, as he writes, "You may think you know your home town, Annie Dillard used to say in class. But chances are you don’t. What is the main industry? When was it founded? The population? What are the plants, throughout the seasons? She was speaking of the importance of researching even memoir."  I felt like I was getting an artist to artist lesson here, and a reminder that our mentors need not be in the same room or even state as us, be speaking to us directly, or even know us.


This was particularly resonant with me because of the acting training which I just resumed with the start of a new class at the Ward Stduio.  The level of excellence and dedication expected of us is incomparable to anything I have experienced in life, and I am extremely grateful for it.  In our current class, Meisner Technique III, we are learning physical adjustments along with other text work.  These include everything from dialects, speech impediments and physical disability to realistically acting pain, drunkenness, or anything else that would require adjustment to our physicality in order to be truthfully expressed on film or on stage.  The expectation of our accent/dialect work is that we will unfailingly use primary source materials (or I'm sure immersion would be ideal if it were possible) in order to study and take on the accent, and that we will then use it 24/7 until we have mastered it.  At the bank, at work, talking to Grandmom on the phone, giving driving directions to strangers and while fucking.  All of the time. You do your research and you do your footwork and then (and only then) will you be the best artist you can be, writer, actor or otherwise.  I appreciate Alex's blog as one more reminder of the hard work constantly required to master one's craft.

Guest Blog - A Giovanni's Room Story

The following is a guest blog from The Phaggot.  He is a self described artist, writer, wine drinker, objector, citizen, homosexual, computer geek, activist, super hero, and grad student. Most importantly, a CUTE homosexual.  He does a lot of great work in Philadelphia, and I am very appreciative to him for sharing his story below:

I grew up in a poorer section of the great NorthEast corridor. Money in our family was spent frugally, better to feed the 7 kids then spend paychecks on any type of luxury. The VCR was a gift from an Uncle. Clothes were always hand-me-downs or Wal-Mart fresh. Our worn-out television was so old it bared the RCA logo. What few books we owned were dog-eared and smudged, passed down from father to son, to brother, to sister. Although our Encyclopedia was out-dated enough to talk about 48 states in the Union, we loved all our books.

My school system, while under-funded and under-appreciated in that rural American kind of way, did have an excellent set of librarians. These women (yes, they were all women) worked overtime to make sure books were available to all students. Classics, science fiction, romance, adventure and horror, they were all stacked on the shelves. For a voracious reader like me, this was heaven. I found inspiration in the stories of Hans Brinker, John Carter, Thomas Jefferson, James and His Giant Peach, and those four Little Women. What I didn’t find was was role-models or people who seemed like me. My school’s Dewey Decimal system didn’t extend as far as the Kinsey scale.

In my teen years, when my hourly rate at Dairy Queen allowed me some financial freedom, I was still in a sexual book bind. A small town in Maryland is still not a place a teen boy can find a Playgirl, much less any works of our great gay authors. Neither the Christian Light Bookstore or K-Mart’s book section carried any of the titles I needed.

At 17, I visited a girlfriend attending Drexel University. A born fag-hag, she had known far before me what my destiny was in life. After a long walk on South Street, we took a detour north. We ended up in the middle of Philadelphia’s Gayborhood.  Lacking a sophisticated fake ID and born with a non-stop babyface, my initiation into the world of big city homosexuality would have been cut short without the most important shopping moment of my life: Giovanni’s Room.

I didn’t buy much on my first visit; after all, I still shared a room with two brothers. There was only so much I could hide. Hefty purchases would be saved for later visits. But that wasn’t what made Giovanni’s Room special. The important thing was that Giovanni’s Room was THERE. It represented the first time I knew that there were other people like me out there, and that we were OKAY enough to have books about us! And while my parents had never said much positive about homosexuality, if anything at all, I did know that books meant something, something good and something important. I also knew, that a place devoted to our tales, catering to our fears and desires, and built upon our past and looking toward our future – that kind of place had to be for me.

Losing Giovanni’s room wouldn't just be a loss to your bookshelf. Not for me now, and certainly not for the old me either. While it’s a tremendous bookstore with shelves and shelves of delightful gay fun, that is not why we need Giovanni’s Room. This bookstore transcends retail; it’s a place that is pivotal to the gay community – to our people and culture. We Queers are not just drinkers, or activists, or networkers or marchers. We are not always going to congregate in the squares with signs, or on social media sites with secrets. Not all of us want to join, and some of us are shy. Some of us, either always or at different points in our life, need a place were words are on pages and ideas are in front of us. Were we can learn the news, exchange in the arts, and see a little tushie too.

Guest Blog - solidad decosta on her favorite queer books

The following blog is penned by solidad decosta, who graciously agreed to lend to her time and her voice to my efforts to keep Giovanni's Room open, and to bring you the best and brightest, latest and greatest in the queer worlds of art, activism and blogging.  (And it is a small queer world friends. I found solidad via twitter and she was one of the first people I reached out to for this series; recently I emailed PhinLi Bookings to see who amongst their talent might lend me their voices and lo and behold, they represent solidad!)  Follow the links to buy the books online from Giovanni's, and for items not in regular stock, they special order!  Without further ado:

Performer/author/musician solidad decosta is an uppity Portuguese woman who isn't afraid to claim her black Latina maternal ancestry. Equal parts street journalist, storyteller and crone-ta-be with Leo moon credentials, her work encompasses the why and where of life outside the boxes in a label obsessed world, and the what, when, who and how of everything else.


(One of) my current projects: A new collection of page poems called Dérive. “From personal-is-political sonnet cycles on the Paris suburb riots to minimalist excursions into the trials of being a renter, this work covers new territory while staying true to the direct, passionate tone that shines through her previous works.” It's available at my website – solidadrocks.com.


My favorites? There's so many. Here are four of them:

Kate Bornstein, My Gender Workbook. If you've ever wondered “why is it that gender doesn't seem to fit neat and tidy for me, like it's supposed to?,” this book is for you. Lots of process work, but in the sparkling, engaging, inviting style that is uniquely Kate's.


kari edwards, a day in the life of p. Difficult, amazing, transgressive prose. kari was an amazing writer and a stellar human being; you owe it to yourself to check out her work. Her book of poems Iduna is a great read as well. Special order from Giovanni's Room via ISBN: 978-1930068186.


Matthew Rottnek (Editor), Sissies and Tomboys. An engaging combination of personal narratives and critical theory, this is the best book I've read on gender non-conformativity and those who want to police it. If you want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes, a must-read.

Arlene Stein (Editor), Sisters, Sexperts, Queers. An amazing companion to Sissies and Tomboys, this book rocks my world in many ways, but what has stuck with me over the years is how patiently and insightfully it calls into question the faults in 2^nd wave feminism, from a queer/lesbian perspective. Special order from Giovanni's Room via ISBN: 978-0452268876.

Rafe on the importance of queer bookstores in his life

I met my Friend Rafe through Twitter and appropriate to our queer/nerd bond, first met him in person at Giovanni's Room.  When I first heard that they were in need of fund raising events I had no idea that a hopefull tweet about Kate Bornstein doing a reading for them would not only be read by her, but that plans would start being laid that same day.  It was several months later that Rafe and I connected in person at her reading there.  

He recently wrote a great blog about the importance of queer bookstores, and I'm hoping he'll later guest blog here with some other fantastic folks about their favorite LGBTQ reading materials.  Here's what he had to say:

Sometimes the queer bookstores are the only place a kid can go and find a book about other people who are the same kind of freak and weirdo. The same kind of queer. Sometimes a person struggles to find community, and can’t, but at least there are books. I was not a very good lesbian, ever, but I was damn glad to have Rubyfruit Jungle and The Revolution of Little Girls, People Like Us, and the ever-invaluable Dykes to Watch Out For series. Without being able to go to the queer bookstores in Denver, Albuquerque, and, yes, Washington DC during my late teens and early 20s, I don’t know what I would have done. And now, trying to find trans references… Yeah.  So help your independent stores.

Read the rest of the blog here.

Another One Bites the Dust - Queer Bookstores Fading Fast

I was extremely disappointed to read that Lambda Rising, a queer bookstore with two locations serving LGBTQ communities in Washington DC and Rehoboth Beach, DE, will be closing its doors.  This comes less than a year against the closing of the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in NYC, then the oldest independent queer bookstore in the nation.  However, this blog is not intended to be a lament, but rather a call to action.

Here in Philadelphia, we still have Giovanni's Room.  While I'm sure they were suffering due to the economy and the decline in print media just like everyone else, Giovanni's Room has been especially hard hit this year because they've had to replace a structural at a cost of over $50,000.  They continue to host a variety of fund raisers, but I intend to use this blog, other blogs, Twitter and our combined social networks to keep them open.  They have served the LGBTQ population of the Philadelphia region for decades and are one of the only independent, queer bookstores left on the East coast.  Here's how we're going to pitch in together:

1.  I'm going to post three books below that I really love, with links to purchase them directly from Giovanni's Room online.

2. I am asking all queer & ally bloggers, Twitterers, activists and artists to help me out and do the same.  Ideally, to reach the most people, I would like you to guest blog here and post a link it on your blog/Twitter.  We will have network overlap, but you'll also likely gain new audience posting here.  The format should be: A) Introduce yourself and a 2-3 sentence plug for your current show, project, your blog, whatever B) Your 3-5 favorite queer books, hyperlinked to be purchased directly online from Giovanni's Room.  Alternately, if it's not something they usually carry, link to their contact info and let the readers know that they can special order pretty much anything at all, even if it's not queer related!

3. Spread this blog and all the subsequent blogs in the series every way you can.  Email it to friends and family, put the books on your wish list if you are one of the many people celebrating an upcoming gift-giving winter holiday, tweet about it, etc.

Without further ado, here are my three recommendations.  In a nod to Twitter's #transtuesday, all three books are trans or genderqueer related.  Click on the titles to buy them online from Giovanni's Room!

1.  GENDERqUEER - This is a fantastic anthology edited by Joan Nestle, Clare Howell, and Riki Wilchins.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, this book was a huge stepping stone for me in understanding gender.  The arrangement of stories, essays and interviews represents a diverse culture within the genderqueer, transgender and transsexual communities and is a great place to start examining gender in small bites, as it were.

2. Girls will be Boys will be Girls will Be... - This delightful queer coloring book is appropriate for kids, adults and tribal elders aged 2 to 102 and was created by Jacinta Bunnell and Irit Reinheimer.  Along with a genderqueer short story, each page has one illustrated statement such as "Stanley Spends Superbowl Sunday Sewing Slacks," and "Enough about our forefathers, let's learn about some revolutionary women," with an (adorable) accompanying illustration. I cannot pick up this book without smiling.

3.  Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us - By Kate Bornstein, this is a staple of trans writing, and a great book on gender overall.  If you can put this one down without learning something new, congratulations, you must already have written your doctoral dissertation in post modern gender theory!  Pass go and collect $200!  In all seriousness, Kate is an outstanding author, performer and mentor.  You wouldn't be hard pressed to find people in the trans community who count this book as the first time they saw their reflection in someone else's experience, or even the thing that facilitated their transition.

If you are interested in writing a blog to help Giovanni's Room and are willing to cross-post here, please contact me. jrudyflesher[at]gmail[dot]com.

With love and hope for our community, and supporting the queer spaces that support us. xoxo

UPDATE: Want to share this on Twitter?  Simply copy and paste this text and tweet away: RT @njrugger45 Another one bites the dust. The demise of queer bookstores & how to save Giovanni's Room http://tinyurl.com/ygjcp6j