Queer Family Holiday Rebel Cupcake Saturday December 7th
This is the fifth annual party I’ve thrown in NYC to celebrate queer families around the holiday season. In 2009 I did a Queer Family Holiday Party (part of the series of shows I produced in advance of getting my first monthly party, Rebel Cupcake). In 2010-2012 I did the monthly Rebel Cupcake in December. Now that Rebel Cupcake is no longer monthly I still wanted to have that holiday coming together spirit. This is an intentional event I do every year to cultivate and celebrate queer families of choice.
I’m very stoked to do things a little different this year–instead of a show I’m having INSTALLATIONS! Each installation artist is curating a specific holiday hybrid with BDSM. I was inspired by a leather family event I went to this summer that had a family photo booth. Why not do it in the holiday way?
Free Download of Kate Bornstein’s Hello Cruel World Lite
As part of the THX4SUPPORT hash tag project happening today on Twitter, I wanted to point readers to a resource I think is totally invaluable! Kate Bornstein, gender warrior and auntie to so many of us, provides this free pdf of the “Lite” version of her book Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws.
Head to this link for the free pdf download.
I just want to say about suicide that I’ve been there. I’ve thought that life wasn’t worth living anymore and gone to great lengths before to end it all. And I’m so grateful that each time I even started down that road that there was something by the grace of the goddess that got me to reconsider, or at least procrastinate about it long enough to decide not to. I’m so grateful.
A Great Way to Deal with Yucky Feelings: Emotional Freedom Technique aka Tapping
In advance of the #thx4support event on Thursday I wanted to talk about a tool that has been enormously helpful in my life to deal with yucky feelings(on Triggergiving, I mean Thanksgiving, or any other day),
This summer I worked with a woman whose work with lesbian survivors of sexual trauma involves using Emotional Freedom Technique, colloquially called “Tapping.” I had heard of it before but never really learned about it until Dawn told me about it. She walked me through the basic steps, and honestly it seems so simple it can’t possibly work. But, as my health coach Vic from Heart Beets Holistic said about Tapping, “The neuroscience is there. It really works.”
Thanksgiving Day Body Support
It’s hard to have a body at any old time of the year but especially given the trigger fest of eating and family and large meals and seeing people for the first time in a long time.
I was asked by Melissa A. Fabello of Everyday Feminism to be part of a Body Activist conglomerate on Twitter to provide support through a hash tag all day and evening on Thanksgiving!
I’ll be posting from the intersectionality of my work–about learning to love your body, being queer in the world, gender, and developing authenticity around family of origin.
All the information is below! Please signal boost!
Mix Festival in NYC Now through November 17th
You know how sometimes you ask the Universe to make your life magical beyond your wildest dreams and you have an evening that is clearly the answer to that?
You know how sometimes the most incredibly transformative things are, by their very nature, completely temporary?
Last night I found myself awash in unexpected magic when I headed to the Mix Festival. I went to a panel discussion about Race and the Colonial Impulse (which was also amazing) and Mix was the official after party so I figured I’d head there and get free admission. I never realized Mix was free if you didn’t go to the screenings! You can just wander in an experience the Mix Factory and all of its glory.
Mix is in its 26th year! I kept sending up prayers of thanks to my queer ancestors for making this whole shebang possible and wonder how it has stayed so underground?
I walked into the venue and it was so enormous–it looks like nothing on the outside and inside there are countless huge art installations. My friend Rachael Shannon’s amazing Brestival Vestibules are there, a huge dinosaur bone looking thing, several lounges full of pillows, and rooms and rooms of interactive, light-filled, video incorporating work so vast that in four hours I barely scratched the surface.
Ways I’m Embracing My Imperfect Meditation Practice
People are always going on and on about the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health benefits of a meditation practice. I’ve been working on becoming a gold star meditator in fits and starts for years. If my meditation practice had a star it would probably be glitter, shiny and a little distracting.
First of all, I’m a shitty, inconsistent meditator with a lot going on in my head. But I have noticed that since I’ve been attempting to meditate for three years, I am a lot calmer and better at it than I used to be. The trying is the important part. I don’t do it every day though I wish I did. I’ve assembled a few of my meditation tips to encourage other people to seek their inner peace even if they, too, are shitty, inconsistent meditators.
Mercury Retrograde Update About Fundraiser for QueerFatFemme.com
As though to put a cherry on the top of my Mercury Retrograde experience yesterday I woke up all set to write a post about meditation practice for my blog and I logged on to see that there was some kind of weird gray film over the site. I couldn’t navigate anywhere or do anything. I had been having trouble on the back end of my WordPress for awhile, even in spite of keeping my WordPress install up to date and updating my plugins. Some tinkering by a friend determined there was an ad trying to run over top of my website, spammers of some kind had hacked in through a back-end plugin and tried to drive traffic somewhere. I’m so sorry if any of you tried to read the site yesterday and ran into that, but there’s the mystery solved about what happened!
I feel very lucky that I was all up in my meditation practice so I was able to approach it calmly, figure out what I could do and what was out of my control, and let it go. I’m also grateful I listened to my friends and I’ve been doing a fundraiser to sustain the website, budgeting part of it for a back-end repair. I knew I’d have to get someone with some good WordPress know-how to get in there and clean out whatever virus or rotten code that was infecting my site but I didn’t think it would happen on such an emergency situation! So THANK YOU readers who have donated or signal boosted for my fundraising campaign because had this happened a month ago I don’t know if I would have been able to restore the site so quickly.
FEMME SEX WEEK: Femmes Behind the Sheets
People who are not Femme are often mystified by Femmes in this kind of reverent and beguiled way. There’s some good mystery in the classic Femme tropes that even I sometimes fall under the spell of (like, “How does she get her hair to look like that?” I wonder with stars in my eyes) but I have a tag on my blog about the secret lives of Femmes for a reason–to kind of take the intimidation factor down a couple of notches.
For FEMME SEX WEEK I wanted to talk about masturbation and desire in a way that kind of pulls back the sheets on what turns Femmes on. There’s no one way to be Femme (there’s, in fact, approximately 1,467,987 ways to be Femme) so obviously there’s no one kind of sex or fantasy that turns on all Femmes.
I’ve collected a sampling from some anonymous Femme sources, some I know personally, some are friends of friends, and I’ve put them together below. They represent a cross section of race, sexuality, body size, Femme presentation and gender, with about a fifteen year spread on age. From a Latina Hard Femme Switch to a Cis White Straight Femme.
FEMME SEX WEEK: My Experience with Getting Femme Visibility on the Streets
I’ve noticed over the last year or so that I have had an increase in my own queer visibility on the street. I tend to tweet about it whenever it happens because I’m usually alone and it’s so remarkable to be a Femme presenting person getting a dyke head nod or a wink on the street from a queer presenting person. It rules! It’s like that inner 20 year old in me who wore nothing but baggy Old Navy men’s clothing to appear more “andro” because I thought that’s what would get me attention from other queers is finally getting what she always wanted. To be seen.
I’m also an intrepid queer explorer so as soon as this visibility started happening to me I went into self-examination mode to determine what I was doing differently.
FEMME SEX WEEK: Excerpt from my Memoir for International Fisting Day
It may seem kind of flippant to have a whole day dedicated to fisting, but it’s actually born of the struggles Courtney has had as a pornographer getting distribution for films that involve fisting. Even though it’s a really common sex act, especially amongst queers, it is maligned in a list of potentially “obsene” and therefore possibly illegal sex acts. You can read more about fisting in pornography and Courtney’s activism around distribution of films in her State of the Fist address.
In terms of my contribution to the Fisting Day lexicon, I want to provide an excerpt from my memoir. It’s not yet published (I am very close to finishing the first draft and am looking for a publisher) but fisting featured prominently in a few stories I tell in the book and I spent a lot of time figuring out how to communicate the mechanics of fisting in this excerpt. Enjoy!
Introducing the Lesbian Love Guru
This summer I had the good fortune to meet Christine Dunn-Cunningham, better known as the Lesbian Love Guru. I was a little bit skeptical (that name is some big britches to fill!) so I settled in, Queer Oprah style, to ask her what she knew about lesbian relationships. I was really impressed with her advice! She had a lot of right-on perspective about how important it is to put work into your relationships.
She’s launching a new program called “Relationship Magic: How to Re-Ignite, Re-Invent, & Re-Define your relationship to create deeper connection, love, and passion!” Christine asked me to share the program with my readers. She’s going to be giving away 3 videos filled with things you can use to create fulfilling relationships no matter what relationship stage you’re in.
How to Make the Best Use of Your Wing Man / Person / Ma’am
Fannon and I had a great time anyway and a long conversation on the ride home about how to make the most effective use of a Wing Man. Fannon holds herself out to be a powerhouse Wing Man and I thought those tips might be a great resource for my readers who might be a little too shy to snare someone on their own. Or for readers who want to become better Wing People!
In this piece I’m using the term “Wing Man” as it is in the popular parlance, but I come to it from the perspective that all genders are magical and this term could easily be Wing Woman, Wing Wym, Wing Person, Wing GenderNonConformingIndividual, etc…
It’s also important to say up front this isn’t about tricking people or not being genuine. It’s about using your friends to help you get through social anxiety (that many more people have than you think) and your friends helping you be your best, most vibrant self in the face of the inevitable nerves when you’re around someone you find attractive!