Grey's Anatomy Gets Even Gayer

Isaiah Washington, the Dr. Benton--make that Burke--character of Grey's Anatomy, reportedly called T.R. Knight, who plays Dr. O'Malley, a "faggot" in an on-set fight. Knight is, in fact, gay. Washington denies using the word, but Knight claims "everybody heard it." It reminds me of the time a girl on my soccer team called someone on the opposing team "dyke" because she was playing rough. You can't just throw these words out like you would "asshole" or "bitch." It's not the same thing. (I toy with the idea of finding an equally troubling name to call the name-caller to illustrate the point. I wouldn't go there with Washington, but it does sort of beg the question as to how he could delude himself into thinking slinging epithets is OK.)

I'm not sure the exchange is newsworthy enough to qualify for A.P. coverage (not to mention Knight's appearance on the Ellen DeRidiculous show). After all, this kind of name-calling happens every day. But I am perturbed that the gay actor has been type-cast as a no-balls loser nicknamed "Bambi" (or is that the no-balls loser doctor in Scrubs?)?

On the Causes of Lesbianism in the Feminine Female

A common theory regarding the causes of lesbianism, particularly in otherwise "pretty" girls, is that some negative experience with men has sent them into a rebellious tailspin, or that having sex with women is the only thing they can handle. If the "women" they have sex with look suspiciously like men, that only adds to the evidence against their genuine lesbian identity.

I would like to counter with another theory. Femmes turn to lesbianism because they are sick of looking for guys with huge dicks which they can keep up long enough to truly indulge their lady friend. I have developed this theory based on my own experiences with femmes. Show them a dildo which falls within the parameters of average penis-size (about 5.5 inches long and 4.75 inches around) and they look at you like you're stupid. That's about as small a dildo as you can find. My lady friends and I generally start with something about 6.5 inches long and 5.5 inches around, but within a month or so, they express interest in something bigger, like this—which is easily bigger than 95 percent of men's penises. This makes femmes' statistical chances of finding the right lesbian for them at least as great as those of finding the right man, since lesbians make up at least 4 percent of the biologically female population. Add to that that dykes can keep it up literally forever and that only a statistically negligent percentage of us are afraid to go down, and well, there you have it.

While I'm on the topic of femme identity, I feel I must express my confusion about femmes' frustration with what they perceive as their invisibility. I understand that straight people must constantly be reminded, and that men continue to approach femmes even after they've been told (often with a "confession" that they "find it really hot"). That part sucks, I'm sure.

The part I don't get is that femmes often say butches and transmen mistake them for straight. It's not like the femme-lovers among us don't know that sometimes femme dykes look straight. So if we see a girl we like, we make the effort to suss it out. All it takes is the tiniest bit of flirting and voilà. (If you don't know how to flirt, I'm sorry, you have no business being a butch-loving femme—that's the unspoken deal, girlie girls plant the seed, and dudes take the risk of saying it out loud. )

I've met most of the femmes I know in explicitly queer settings—dyke clubs, dating sites, parties. But even if you're a femme who's not "on the scene" enough to have lots of face time in such settings, surely you have a few friends who are dykes. Those friends, in turn, each have a few friends who are dykes. And dykes like to gossip, so it won't be long before a big chunk of the community knows you like the bois--or the ladies, as the case may be.

And finally, there are those little signals to send off. Your attitude. A leather bracelet or a studded belt. A coded T-shirt or a foxy tattoo. All of these options make me wonder if the femmes who complain most about being invisible in the dyke community are completely devoid of sexual energy and personal style. Is that just wrong? Chime in, femmes.

In Which the True Biological Difference Between Men and Women Is Revealed

Marga Gomez made a joke at the Castro Street Fair that was so obvious it wasn't even funny. She said the Women for Women section of Craigslist should be renamed Women Fight Women. Here we are in the largest lesbian population in the nation (The Gay Atlas is the first place I've seen lesbian populations studied separately from gay male populations), and the personals site has at least as much in-fighting as it does date-seeking. Butches are gross. Transmen have no business in the Women for Women section. Bi women have no business there either. Of the few ads that are actually posted by someone in hopes of finding a date, I'd say 70 percent of them are people looking to date, not just have a one-time sexual encounter.

Now go to the Men for Men section, and you will find brief posts requesting specific sexual acts, often at specific times or locations. And often, you'll find a cock shot. As in, like what you see?

Is this evidence that men are innately, biologically different from women? It's hard to deny that possibility. There is the cultural argument that men are taught to value their desire more than women. The other cultural argument that springs to mind—that women need to fear for their safety more than men—doesn't hold water for same-sex encounters.

Do gay men really have more social approval for their desire than dykes, who have often (though not always) mutinied against the social limitations on women? I would argue that they do indeed. It's a complicated issue, but I think homophobia is stronger against men because most men, in the cockles of their balls, know that, in a pinch at least, they would have sex with another man. And I'd venture that a lot of straight men—and god knows this transman—are jealous of the easy access that gay men have to sex, for which Craigslist can serve as Exhibit A. Meanwhile, lesbians can't overthrow 20-some years of being taught to suppress and mistrust their desires by just waving a Magic Wand. Although they do try, repeatedly.

But there's another difference between the Men for Men ads and the Women for Women ads. PNP, or party 'n' play. It means crystal meth will be part of the encounter.

Drugs decrease inhibitions. Many dykes I know would love to be able to have sex on the fly the way gay men do, but they worry about being able to get it up for someone they've never met. I wrote in a previous post that I desire more like a man than like a woman. The caveat is, there has to be some energy between me and a potential sexual partner, and you can't determine that over the internet. There's also the issue of your would-be partner's ability to let go of their inhibitions, and sometimes dykes aren't able to do that. Anonymous sex should be fun athletically, rather than emotionally. When I have looked into anonymous sex (I won't say if I've done it or not), it has been with butches or FTMs because they seem more likely to be able to provide that.

Men are able to objectify sex partners in a way that women generally can't—it doesn't matter if a guy is ugly if he has a nice cock, or if he's a douche if he's good looking. That skill makes anonymous sex much easier. Maybe it's the macho athleticism specifically of (trans)man on (trans)man sex that makes it good for anonymous play. But, then again, I'm pretty sure I could get it up for a good-looking girlie girl, even one who was completely brain-dead, if I had crystal meth coursing through my veins. So is crystal meth the biological difference between biomen and biowomen?

If this were Sex and the City, we would cut to me typing, and by the end of the episode I would have an easy, heart-warming answer. But this is not so easy or heart warming. Gay men engage in self-destructive sexual behavior, and too many dykes still have trouble enjoying sex. And even thoroughly sex-positive dykes still wish they could have more sex in the bathroom.

Bulldagger in a China Shop

Being a bulldagger in the workplace is a lot like being a bull in a china shop. After working for years outside conventional office spaces, I hadn’t realized how, by refuting mainstream, middle-class assumptions, the alternative worldview I’d come to hold was actually a point-by-point rejection of the way you need to act in an office. (My office is cooler than most, but it’s still got fluorescent lighting and a cubicle city.)

You're wearing that to work?

First and foremost, to fit in at the office, you need to look middle class: The office is the cathedral of the middle-class. The less style you have, the better. The goal is not to be so individual that people have to confront the raw fact that you have a background and a personality that you embody even at work. (This is the limit on our tolerance of difference: It’s OK to be gay or black, it’s just not OK to act gay or black, because that makes mainstream folks realize that they, too, are just a sub-culture.)

The best way to show that you fit in is to opt for clothes from the Gap, preferably khaki, or for preppy classics like wool sweaters and corduroys. The worst way is to wear vintage clothes. Vintage is the essence of alternative culture: You buy from a separate market, and you don’t spend all of your disposable income buying things—new couch, new leather jacket, new dishes, tsotchkes by Pottery Barn. Vintage clothes look great on the street, but in the fluorescent light of the office—where most people don’t recognize the look you’re going for anyway—they just look poor. And poor says, you don’t belong here. The other half of butch fashion is working class uniform chic. Also not a good way to remind your bosses that you're not, in fact, the janitor and that you would like to be considered for that exciting new editorial position. Butch fashion is, overall, a good way to put your name at the top of the layoffs list. Which is likely why butch dykes make, on average, much less than femme dykes (preliminary data, according to the Williams Institute).

That's just inappropriate.

I've spent years finding a way to be my brainy self and my butch self at the same time. San Francisco is, as far as I can tell, the only place where there are enough butches to make the project more viable than, say, being a vegetarian polar bear. Because I work at a progressive publication, I've actually found a job where I think both parts of me should be of professional use. However, I've found that, on the surface personality level, my brainy butch balancing act relies on mixing advanced vocabulary with obscenity. For example, "That is just so fucking disingenuous!" I get away with my profanities at my present job, barely, but I can't get away with my irreverent references to sex and sexuality.

In queer culture, including GLBT nonprofits, it's pretty normal to talk about sex (sans details) and make sexual jokes. Sexual jokes are not acceptable in the straight workplace, and your coworkers let you know by giving you that pinched-mouth, eye-rolling look that says "What you're saying isn't refreshingly naughty, it's frighteningly beyond help." Suddenly your hip, smart, progressive coworker is looking and acting a lot like a church mom. And yet, the straighter the environment, the more I feel the need to say something that marks me as queer; it's hard to do that without being sexual in some way.

Advancing the homosexual agenda

Of course, butches also face the same hurdles that other minorities do. If you're the only woman on the board, you don't want to focus too much on women's issues for fear of being dismissed as a stereotype. Likewise, if you're the only dyke—which is always the case everywhere but San Francisco, and often the case here, too—you risk ghettoizing yourself if you talk about queer issues. I'm a journalist, though, and I think the media is doing a terrible job of covering queer issues despite the fact that the culture is obsessed with queers. I think there should be some way of harnassing queer sensibility as well as simply covering GLBT issues. I have opted to make comedy out of my efforts in that direction at my current job by announcing pretty regularly that I'm a mole, there to advance the homosexual agenda. (Do we have an agenda? Because if we do, we're even worse than the Democrats at advancing it.)

Even at a publication where people are by and large not homophobic, it's hard to get gay issues covered. Gays make up just 4 to 9 percent of the population. So when I proposed a graph looking at how being mainstream pays—men earn more than women, straight men earn more than gay men, married heterosexuals earn more than cohabitating heterosexuals, and preliminary data suggests that gender normative queers earn more than gender deviant ones—the greatest interest was in the comparison between the two kinds of heterosexuals. The concern was legitimate in its way: Most readers are heterosexual and middle class. Facts about other groups aren't as interesting to them about facts about themselves. Yet, the idea that they have pruned their personalities to fit in the workaday world is not an idea that they can capture; they can't see the forest for the trees.

In which I impersonate that feminist who has no sense of humor

And even well-meaning non-homophobic coworkers occasionally fail to see that gay jokes simply aren't funny. Most homophobia, at least of the quotidian variety as opposed to the getting-tied-to-the-stake-and-lit-on-fire variety, comes in the form of jokes. Often the humor behind the telling is meant to be something like "of course I don't really believe it, but you've got to admit it's funny." Larry David, with his endless "not that there's anything wrong with that" shtick, is the worst at this. If there's nothing wrong or titillating about queer sexuality, why are we talking about it ad infinitum?

Now, if I were to point out either of the previous two points to my coworkers, I call the phenomenon that would ensue "Hell hath no fury like privilege called out."

We’re all getting drinks after work.

There are a lot of really great straight people out there. Just do not put them all in a room together! They start to speak another language. Suddenly, the smart, powerful, feminist women I work with reveal that they, too, love to talk about clothes. Words I don't understand occur about 2.3 times per sentence. My coworkers don't understand why I never get drinks with them, but that's why. The one time I tried, I was introduced to the word cougar, and learned that my young male coworkers were so easily impressed by the mere sight of a pair of boobs, that they almost went home with said cougars. (This brings out the "boys, let me tell you how it's done" side of me, which I think ultimately doesn't help advance the homosexual agenda.) The 35-and-up crowd, which is technically my age group, busies themselves talking almost exclusively about real estate. (People who spend their days keeping their personalities to a minimum in tiny office cubicles compensate for it on the weekends. They sprawl out in enormous vehicles and take to the open road. They head to the largest store they can find, with the biggest things: Home Depot. There they buy things to fix up their homes, to personalize the one space they can.) I have nothing to contribute to the real estate conversation, because being butch and middle class eerily resembles being a vegetarian polar bear—I keep looking for the foliage.

Just a quick note to let you know I do my research: The Human Rights Campaign has done a study of employment realities for GLBT people. They find that everything is peachy, and getting peachier every day. But their survey is voluntary and there are only a few states with discrimination laws covering sexuality, much less gender performance, so HRC has only a carrot to use. Read between the lines, though. HRC sent the survey to more than 1,500 companies. 446 responded; 203 prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity.

Trannydyke Shrugged

I never cease to be amazed at how many people express earnest concern that butch/femme dynamics and FTMs reaffirm normative gender roles. Admit it, dear reader, you've been worried that Gender 3.0 is doing the Man's work.

The criticism of masculine identification comes from many directions. There are lesbians on Craigslist (I'm a dyke looking for someone else who looks like a dyke; I'm not interested in butch/femme), old-school feminists and crunchymen.

As for old-school feminists, read Dorothy Allison and others. I don't have the energy to go through it again (although, unfortunately, lots of young lesbians seem perfectly willing to recreate 70s politics again and again).

It's hard for me to understand why some lesbians of my generation get so outraged by butch/femme. Butches and femmes single-handedly created lesbian culture. They fought at Stonewall, literally. But nothing is better than theorizing about what you don't understand. And because I don't know any butches or femmes who judge and criticize lesbians who identify as andro or resist gender categorization altogether, my theory is this:

(1) Lesbians who don't find butch/femme hot are irritated that it takes up so much of their cruising space. There is a scarcity problem in lesbian culture, so their concern would be perfectly understandable if they would just be honest about it. But butches and femmes are actually minorities in the lesbian world, so why all the tweeners feel like an oppressed majority is perhaps the subject of another post.

(2) Some lesbians who resist categorization do so because they're really not clear on who they are. The presence of butch/femme dynamics has created a language of gender in the lesbian community—not just butch and femme, but tomboy femme, femme-of-center, soft butch, faggy butch, andro, lipstick lesbian and so on—with which fluency is expected, so these uncertain lesbians feel pressured to define themselves and get grouchy.

Now crunchymen are, in my experience, some of the worst, most insidious sexists out there. They don't clean up after themselves; they have a creepy sense of entitlement and inflated self-importance that they will never admit has to do with their gender. And they accuse me of reifying gender norms.

Let's imagine for a moment that I do just that. I believe I deserve special treatment because I identify as male. How far do they think I'd get with that? Do they think bosses and cops will bow down before my grubby tranny self? Because they don't. Cops treat me like any freak who needs to be controlled: Wear Lesbian Avengers shirt; get arrested. Bosses pretty much treat me like a girl, who, like any girl, has no right to take herself so seriously. But then they justify their sexism by claiming to think of me as a man—and one who, obviously, reaffirms normative gender roles. And just so we're clear that I don't subscribe to normative gender roles, let me make explicit that women bosses are every bit as bad about this as men. And lesbian bosses can be the worst, because they feel a little castrated.

But if I did hold pretty conventional views of masculinity and femininity, why should I take the fall for those norms? I mean, wouldn't it be more productive to take one's complaints to centers of power like the military and the boardroom? Is one lone trannydyke doing more to affirm gender norms than to break them down? And why do I have to explain what I think masculinity is and why I think I'm more masculine than feminine before people will accept my choice to identify as male?

That's like asking someone to define the meaning of life before giving them a birth certificate.