Beyond Visibility: Femme Day of Action in Montreal will be a series of events for queer folks on a self-identified femme/inine spectrum to come together in conversation, coalition, and celebration of *all* the parts of ourselves and our many communities. We aim to illuminate the cultural, political and artistic work of all participating individuals and groups; to create and hold space to ally with and learn from each other; and discuss ways to align organizing to ensure that femme communities grow as generative, intersectional sites of gender justice. We are organizing in solidarity with the events that are happening as part of the Femme Week of Action (January 15-21).

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FRIDAY, January 20: FEMME DAY OF ACTION KICK-OFF PARTY // FEMMEDJS/BURLESQUE/DRAG AT THE ROYAL PHOENIX! (5788 St-Laurent, coin Bernard)

See the event page for more details: http://www.facebook.com/events/327430900610921/

Suggested donation: 3-5$ at the door, pay-what-you-can, no one turned away. Donations will help support this years’ Femme Day of Action!

SHOW STARTS AT 11:00PM

EARLY DRAG & BURLESQUE PERFORMANCE FEATURING KITTY VON DYKE & LADY JOSEPHINE // LATE DANCE PARTY FEATURING FIVE HOTT FEMME DJS!

DJ Gussy Feels // homobody feelings on the dance-floor
DJ Cuir Theory
DJ Deyonce // bootyshakinasslickin’dirtygrindin’ beats.
DJ Priscilla Pleasant // all girls&queers hip hop hour
DJ Itgetsbetter // pussy-centric low bounce hard grind

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SATURDAY, January 21: FEMME DAY OF ACTION at the 2110 Centre for Gender Advocacy *This space is ACCESSIBLE* (1500 de Maisonneuve West, Suite 404, Guy-Concordia Metro)

**FREE!!!**

12-2: BRUNCH – Femmes and friends, meet and mingle over fabulous vegetarian food! (In the 2110 Centre Lounge)

2-4: SKILLSHARE/WORKSHOPS -
- DANCE/BURLESQUE/BODY POSITIVE WORKSHOP (Time TBA/In the 2110 Centre Lounge)
- MENTAL HEALTH (Time TBA, in the 2110 Centre Board Room)
- NAIL ART (Location/Time TBA)
- YOGA (2:00-3:30 in the QPIRG lounge, 2 floors down in the same building, Suite 204)
- WRITING WORKSHOP ON FEMME IDENTITY (Time TBA/In the 2110 Centre Board Room. This workshop is for femme/inine-identified people of any gender and will also have an ongoing component throughout the day.
(Workshop/Skillshare descriptions coming soon!)

4-6: GROUP DISCUSSION FOR SELF-IDENTIFIED FEMMES AND FEMININE QUEER PEOPLE OF ANY GENDER – Come and talk about your experiences of femme in/visibility, femmephobia, femme-positive body image, getting dressed, coming out, having sex, being loud, proud, and fabulous! The discussion will be held in the 2110 Centre Lounge.

8-11: PERFORMANCE/OPEN MIC NIGHT (in the 2110 lounge) – FEMMES RANT, RAVE, DANCE, BURLESQUE, EMOTE! POETRY, PROSE, PERFORMANCE ART, ETC! Femmes of any gender & any genre graciously invited to perform!

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**CALLOUT FOR FEMME/ININE-IDENTIFIED PERFORMERS FOR THE FEMME DAY OF ACTION!**

We are seeking femme/inine-identified performers of any gender and any genre for a performance night on Saturday, January 21!

*DANCERS*BURLESQUE*DRAG*LITERARY*PERFORMANCE ART*ETC*

The purpose of this callout & of this performance night is to invite self-defined queer folks on femme/inine spectrums to get together to share your art & expression [femme-related and otherwise]; to spark conversations, build alliances, celebrate queer femme/ininity and each other, and have fun!

**CALLOUT FOR SKILLSHARE*

We are also seeking femme/inine-identified people to lead skillshares and/or workshops and /or discussions in the afternoon on Saturday January 21!

SOME IDEAS:
*ZINE-MAKING*DIY SEX TOYS*HOW TO CHANGE A BIKE-TIRE*SHARE YOUR SKILLS!!!*

*We encourage people of colour, trans people, people with disabilities, and people from other marginalized communities to participate!*

****If you’d like to get involved send a message to one of our hosts! Please include your email address, what skills/talents you’d like to share/perform, and any accommodations for equipment or access-needs you may require.****

Comment here if you’re ready to read her beads!

 

I’m a boot-wearin femme and a glitter-packin bear and I’m
just the kind of man that’ll make you stare cause my
wit is vicious and my cookin is delicious and I’m
not even sorry that you’re missin out on all of this cause
you couldn’t handle this, I’m too hot for your britches and I
know I blow your mind just by existin and I
devour your little binaries like it was nothing
gimme more I’m still hungry and

I, I, I, I spy you with your scientist eyes all
trying to pin me down but I’m
too big for your boxes too mythical for your books and I
hear your dirty looks and I see your whispers sayin
these hips too wide and this voice too high for a guy
try me, test me, go ahead and keep on talkin shit if you wanna see an angry fuckin
fairy

I spent about 15 minutes putting on makeup after my shower this morning. Because I’ve been sick for over two months, some of which was spent only able to get from bed to chair and most of which which was spent not being able to walk further than the pharmacy on the corner, because I felt grotty and tired, because I have a turquoise t-shirt with a squid on it and that is awesome, because I need a haircut SO BADLY, because I spent time last night sorting out all my makeup and how it’s stored, because I wanted to.

And I was scared, going out. I always am. On the “being a bloke wearing makeup” front, and because of the possibility that it’d get me misread as female. [...] It felt like with one eye I could see what I wanted to see, and with the other all I could see was acne scars and prednisone rash and double chin and out-of-control hair and so on. Too old and pudgy to be the pretty-androgynous-boy-in-makeup, too short and ambiguous (and pudgy) to be the unquestionably-male-bearded-dude-in-makeup.

I felt sick and anxious.  But fuck it, I needed my Red Bull.  Do not get between me and caffeine.  And I also felt happy at the same time, because I like playing with shiny things, pretty colours, changing my appearance.  I like, finally, after a lifetime of hate and ambiguity towards it, wearing makeup.

And my squid shirt was pretty rad.

So I went out.

Read the rest: ManUp Makeup: And sometimes, people surprise you

When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.

– Adrienne Rich

This is relevant to my current situation.

I think my biggest problem is being young and beautiful. It’s my biggest problem because I’ve never been young and beautiful. Oh, I’ve been beautiful, and God knows I’ve been young, but never the twain have met.
– Arnold (Harvey Fierstein), Torch Song Trilogy

I suppose the other big thing that’s happening in my life is that I’m about to turn thirty. It’s funny — in a community that privileges youth and beauty so much, I feel very good about turning thirty.

In comparison, I was scared shitless of turning 25 — I felt my shelf life was expiring, that I was never going to find a boyfriend, etc., etc. I think part of it was that, since my appearance was never much valued (although that could have been worse; see previously mentioned list of privileges), I felt as though youth was my only asset, and I was inexorably losing it; in a gay world that values young men as the buff, butch, hairless twink, I had spent my young years as a nonbuff, nonbutch, nonhairless nontwink and was now losing my last opportunity to possibly become it and be loved, or at least desired.

Since then, mercifully, I’ve come much more into my own. Part of it, of course, has been simply gradually feeling better in my own skin, accepting myself for who I am, having more confidence in my character, all that good stuff. However, another part, amusingly, has been finding myself attracted to other guys who look like me. People attracted to the same gender are in an odd situation, with the same people constituting both our rivals and our dating pool, and we can both envy and resent the people we desire on a very immediate level. However, the upside to this is that we can also come to see how what we would formerly have considered flaws can be sexy and desirable on that same immediate level.

So it’s been for me. Finding myself hot for other guys with hair and a gut has made it so that I — this used to be unthinkable — can see myself naked in a mirror and go, “Christ, boy, you are cuuute.“

As that’s gone on, I’ve found that at the same time I have had less trouble seeing my body as a femme body. Of course it’s a femme body — it’s my body, and I’m a femme; this is the body that I am femme with. I will not put off expressing my femmeness “until” I am a completely different shape from my own.

Interestingly, this has gone on in parallel with a slowly emerging interest in bearhood. I’ve been frequenting some apps for bears, and the results have been… gratifying. I can’t say I’m engaging in long, searching conversations about my identity with these folks, and admittedly I usually dress down (a bit), but I’m not exactly butching it up either. (And hey, if I were, so what? It’s attractive on me. As is the beard I grew. )

I haven’t gone to any bear events yet. It occurred to me that I’ve been scared of bears mostly out of fear that they won’t like femme guys, but so what? It’s not like the rest of the community is so awesome on that score anyway. I’ll keep you posted.

I’ve started a new academic career, in a field related to gender and sexual orientation. Much to my chagrin, many of the professors are coming at it from a place of a huge amount of unexamined straight and cis privilege and centrism, that really keeps them from perceiving a big part of their field.

It’s very frustrating.I’m accustomed (and this is in no small degree thanks to my own privileges) to not spending much time at all with people who put their cissexism and heterosexism on me; normally I can just leave the situation, or tell the person off without much fear of the consequences. It’s strange to me to be choosing to put myself in the firing line, and a big part of the first month or so has been managing that stress and finding ways to use the anger to refine my analysis of what’s going on.

Part of what makes me angry is that a lot of my colleagues are coming into university fresh out of cégep, while I’m coming off of fourteen years out in the queer community and a background in queer/trans activism, so I feel frustrated that they’re having a lot of prejudices reinforced with the academic imprimatur. I feel like I have a duty to take on everything they’re receiving in class, for fear of what they’ll take into the post-academic world and how they’ll put it on the people in my community.

And yet I don’t want to be ‘that guy’ — turning them off by being overly vocal, rather than successfully calling things into question — nor do I want to throw my (white, cissexual, male, enabled) weight around and take up too much space. On a grimmer note, I also don’t want to sabotage myself. This field is very political, in the sense of office politics, and I don’t know what kind of drama I’d be starting and if it would be counterproductive.

It’s not all bad. Some other professors are quite aware of the ways in which what they have to teach is problematic; they’re encouraging us to call it into question. One even commented that she thought she and I made ‘a good team,’ and she’s allowing me to create a zine as a resource to bring trans people’s words to the other students. I’ve also gotten some support from other students, especially other ones coming to the program with a certain amount of background and baggage.

The field is one I believe strongly in. I’ve had a burst of ambition that I am very unaccustomed to, and I feel determined to ride it out into a new career in which I can help my community. And I knew I was going to have to confront a lot of institutionalized prejudice and centrism and erasure.

But it’s haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaard >.<

I’m a politically active young person and I’ve spent a lot of time at events similar to the ones that the young people were at — the young people he massacred for being committed to left-wing electoral politics, for having the commitment and drive to engage in democracy. So many dead all at once, and the news that he particularly targeted nonwhite people as he rampaged.

I was so badly shaken by that. I thought of the remarkable, committed, brilliant, passionate and compassionate young people I’ve worked alongside, the future of politics in this country. I thought: if I had been Norwegian (and slightly younger today), I might well have been attending the event. That might well have been me cowering, frantically turning off my cell phone so it couldn’t give me away, praying I might not be seen and not knowing if the person I’d been debating with, strategizing with, organizing with, eating with, laughing with, an hour ago, was alive or dead.

That could be me, numbly moving forward, trying to deal with that grief and anguish, and months from now when I could again face even the idea of any sort of political action, trying to do it without the friends and colleagues who had surrounded and inspired me.

After I was done being overwhelmed by that feeling, other things came to mind. There’s the awful racism of how the initial reports played out — pundits ready to pontificate about how terrible it was that Al Qaeda had pulled another attack when of course it turned out to be a home-grown far-right Eurabia-believing clash-of-civilizations cultural-racist middle-class male with a hate-on for Muslim people, immigrants, and multiculturalism, not coincidentally much like what the pundits had just been enabling and audience-targeting. Not a trace of apology, let alone any recognition of that particular anti-irony.

Of course as soon as that became clear, he instantly metamorphosed into “a lunatic,” neatly othering him with the power of ableism (it’s inconceivable that teaching hatred should have done this! After all, hatred never leads to violence! Wait, he must be crazy, okay we don’t have to think about it thank god, was worried there for a second) and also nicely emphasizing how if he happened to be Muslim, the idea that he was “a lone nut” wouldn’t occur to anyone even for a second even if true. Oh, and further stigmatizing actual mentally ill people into the bargain (who are of course more likely by a couple orders of magnitude to be the victims of violence than perpetrators.)

[ETA: I had already written this when I was handed an excellent example of this kind of thinking -- amazingly enough, by none other than Boris Johnson.]

(As a footnote and because this is still Femme Guy!, I note that one of the things he complains about in his manifesto is the evil P.C. forces of multiculturalism promoting female empowerment, reducing the white birthrate, and “feminizing” European boys. Surreally, one of the specific complaints under the last heading is boys being taught to knit. Which, as a friend points out, is among other things woefully ignorant of the history of European knitting.)

I should say I’ve actually seen a fair amount of good coverage of the attacks, the killer’s motives, the danger of right-wing xenophobia. And I was heartened and inspired by Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg’s words: “The answer to the attacks must be more democracy and more openness.” Indeed, I can only hope that’s what we see.

But I’m concerned — we have a tendency to ignore right-wing political violence as being something other than “terrorism,” for example in the case of violence against abortion providers and their facilities in the U.S. (Of course, as soon as a left-wing protester breaks a window, everyone in, or near, the protest is a hooligan and should be rushed by the police, kettled, beaten, held in makeshift prisons for days, denied their constitutional rights, have their artificial limbs confiscated, etc., etc.)

Maybe we can finally focus attention on right-wing political terrorism, its pervasiveness, its roots in punditocracy and false populism. But of course it won’t bring those seventy-six people (good gods, seventy-six, in a country with fewer people than Toronto) back.

Those of us around at that time will remember the disgust directed at Jack from Will and Grace. Before him there was Jody of Soap, Harvey Fierstein and Scott Capurro’s characters in Mrs. Doubtfire, and Robin Williams and Nathan Lane’s characters in The Birdcage. Conversely, any gay character who isn’t femme is lauded for breaking stereotypes (as if masculinity weren’t itself a stereotype of men).

The reductio ad absurdum came when the boys of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy were accused of incarnating gay stereotypes. One of them in particular (I forget which one) reacted with irritation, because he wasn’t asked to portray any stereotype at all, but was simply being himself. Attacks on Johnny Weir have cut out the middleman altogether: he’s not even an actor – he’s an athlete – but he’s accused of perpetuating a stereotype just by existing and being famous while femme. (Interestingly, this was before he was ever out as gay — who’s perpetuating a stereotype now?)

I’ve never felt that this was a coincidence. After all, there were a lot of more harmful stereotypes to take on: gay men as tragic figures who always ended up dead by the end of the picture, or gay men as serial killers, for example, both of which were amply documented in the classic The Celluloid Closet. There was a reason why our community spent so much time and energy inveighing against the portrayal of, in the end, a harmless difference as opposed to depictions of misery and criminality: effeminacy is viscerally hated, both by straights and by queer men. (A more ample post on the latter subject will come later.)

It would be easy to dismiss this whole go-round as just yet more femme-hating posturing on the part of some assimilationist macho queers. And I think that’s true part of the time, especially when people in the public eye are attacked for being themselves, or characters in queer-created media are attacked for accurately portraying people in our community.

But it remains the case that in many situations, the characters are stereotypical. They’re not created as an honest portrayal of a real human being. Their effeminacy isn’t a character trait, it’s shorthand for Hello, here is a gay man. In many cases, the character’s effeminacy and/or his thus-depicted homosexuality is simply being played for laughs. Or (especially in recent years) as fan-service for nonqueer female fans. (More on this later too.)

It’s right to condemn stereotypical portrayals. Even where the subject matter of the stereotype is harmless, such portrayals make it clear that privileged characters get to be fully fledged human beings with characters and motivations while oppressed characters are tokens at best and scenery at worst. The writer has not bothered to actually get to know any queer men, in this case, to the extent of being able to portray us in any reasonable way.

How can we understand this in a way that allows us to fight off all stereotyped portrayals, without trashing either real-life femme men or fully rounded, honestly portrayed femme male characters? I was musing about this, and I think the right way to conceptualize it is as a form of cultural appropriation.

Cultural appropriation takes place when a privileged group takes elements of an oppressed culture and uses them as it sees fit, without regard to their importance in the oppressed culture, often deforming them beyond recognition or distorting reality to the point of making the appropriated cultural practice take the place of the authentic one.

The existence of femme men, and the use of femme postures as a signifier for homosexuality even by queer men who aren’t usually femme, is an element found in our culture, and has been for ages. It belongs to queer men’s culture, even the culture of queer men who aren’t femme themselves. And naturally, when skilled queer artists portray femme men, the result is often beautiful and honest. (Some of my favourites are those in Harvey Fierstein’s various plays, most famously Arnold in Torch Song Trilogy, and those in Robert Patrick’s dramatic cycle Untold Decades.) We exist and we are entitled to be depicted in culture.

But when people who aren’t queer men use aspects of queer men’s femme presentations (often grossly distorted – the ridiculous and transmisogynistic conflation of femme and female transsexuality in the character of Jody in the 1970s sitcom Soap comes to mind) to mock queer men in general (including femme ones), I think we can speak of them appropriating this from our culture, and using our own heritage to attack us.

Sadly, the lives of us queer femme men are used by a misogynist, transmisogynist, cissexist, and heterosexist society as weapons with which to attack queers in general. The fault does not lie with us, but with the overculture misusing images of our lives as it misuses images of the lives of so many, in order to perpetuate all these abuses.

The sin is not depicting a phenomenon – queer men who are femme – that really exists. The sin is appropriating images of femme queer men, distorting our realities to their own ends, and often using us as a weapon against our own community. This allows us to say why the portrayals are offensive without trashing real-life femme men and their sensitive and accurate depictions in works of art.

[Update: Edited to correct gender pronouns and name. Note that the article originally linked to does not use the correct pronouns and name. See also this excellent article. f.g.]