Here I Am Composing A Burlesque

So, here's a night that's steadily become more and more familiar to me as I've gotten older and stayed in college. Tomorrow I put my ass on a plane and head back to the good, old college, this time around for my senior year. And man, much as thought finding myself a senior in high school was a trip and a half, being a senior in college is about a thousand times more intense. The realization that I'm rapidly coming up on true adulthood is enough to make me want to throw up in my mouth.

I'm the kind of person who still wears Batman boxers for Christ's sake. Surely that has to disqualify me from responsibility and shit. Given the choice, I would spend most of my days watching reruns of Gargoyles and eating cereal from tupperware.

I remember being an eighteen year old trying to fit as many years of life into suitcases. It was so hard back then to sort through all the things I owned and decide what I needed to take and what I could leave behind. The essentials were easy (obviously I was taking my jeans and my undies), but it was the knick knacks and detritus and the stuff that was hard. I think, in a way, we can be described as the sum of the little things that are important enough to keep near.

Three years later, it's weird to realize that I can fit everything that's important to me in one big duffel bag and one small duffel bag. There's a even the annual pile of stuff since deemed unnecessary that now belongs to my sister. Tee shirts I haven't worn and jeans that I've outgrown. Right now the big, heavy, ugly pink bag is packed and what's left are the odds and ends that go in the small one. It's a weird realization.

I want cuddle this vlog to my bosom.

Charles is one of the most awesome people I've discovered on my forays into the trans internet-sphere. The vlog he and Red (another awesome transwoman vlogger), 2 Hot Transsexuals Finally Give Some Answers, has become one of my standard links to anyone who asks those kind of questions.

GODDAMN RIGHT PROP 8 IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL.

Most beautiful words I've read all day.

Honestly, I think this trans thing is becoming more of a rebellion teen fad than anything else. It makes me sad for those who are truly feeling the stress of knowing that they are in the wrong bodies. They are misrepresented AND undermined now.

Whoo, boy.

This is actually an attitude that I've seen crop up a couple times in the past couple months in the trans/queer circles that I frequent. And every single time I stumble over these little transphobic gems, they make me want to go punch a wall. There's literally no way to make these kind of blanket policing statements about "fake" transpeople without being a transphobic ass, because the core of them is belief without reason that people are lying about their genders and that you (in the general sense) know better than they.

The thing is, I cannot imagine a single reason for anyone to pretend to be LGBTQAI when they're not. Seriously? What kind of possible social, economic, or legal benefits would someone be seeking in pretending to be queer? I don't buy it.

This crap reenforces a problem that already exists in the trans community of creating arbitrary standards of transness. You must be this dysphoric to be trans. You must have known from this age to be trans. You must be a manly man or a womanly woman to be trans. And if you fail at any of these bullshit markers, then obviously you're just confused and faking and need to get the hell over yourself. All these standards do is tell people that they're wrong, that artificial benchmarks better know their genders than they do. And, as a community, trans people need to knock this shit off.

You know, just as a suggestion, maybe it's not that all these teens are jumping on the trans bangwagon. Maybe it's that we've reached a place where more and more teens feel comfortable talking about their genders at a young age. Maybe we've reached a place where the information is getting out there to teens so they can do something about it at a younger age. Maybe a perceived increase in people identifying as trans and transitioning instead of being a sign of STUPID TEEN REBELLION is actually a goddamn sign that trans people have the information and resources at their disposal to deal with the gender. Maybe, just maybe, it could be seen as a good thing for all those trans kids who might have otherwise spent years trying to figure out why they felt wrong in their bodies.

No? Yeah, of course. It's way more likely that all these teens are pretending to be trans as a way to rebel.

There's a post up at feministe, shorter, cuter, more honest people, talking about the expectations that exist of a division between adults only and child friendly spaces and how there is no right to childfree spaces. I read it with my head cocked and a frown on my face, through I couldn't articulate for certain why. Fortunately, there's another post at Order of the Gash, ageism and me, that very well sums up the big issue I had with regards to framing children as an oppressed class on par with people of color, queer people, disable people, etc.

The Littlest Gay London Street Tough

I do this thing whenever I watch a movie that I particularly liked that also features an ensemble cast where I go searching for every fucking minute any of the involved actors have ever been on film. Post-Inception, this manifested as getting my grubby hands on copies of 10 Things I Hate About You, Mysterious Skin, Brick, and Stop-Loss because of Joseph Gordon-Levitt. I downloaded that one episode of That 70's Show he was in where he played the Buddy, the gay friend with the great car. I sat through two entire fucking hours of G.I. Joe for five minutes of him in army blues and another viewing of Latter Days. (I hate that movie so intensely. So. Intensely.)

After I ran out of JGL movies to plow through, two things happened. One, I realized I'd already seen everything with Ellen Page and two, someone, somewhere said something about Tom Hardy playing Gay Bob in a Guy Ritchie movie. Now, I'm not a particularly huge fan of Guy Ritchie (Sherlock Holmes notwithstanding), but I walked out of Inception as a fan of Tom Hardy's mouth and I am always a fan of queer characters. There was only one thing to do and that was to get my hands on a copy of Rocknrolla.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm an American kid hailing from smack dab in the fucking middle of the country in a town with an actual population of cowboys, where people say y'all unironically. And Rocknrolla is intensely British, to the point where I almost turned the subtitles on because there were points where I was convinced that the characters had stopped speaking English.

But I actually did really enjoy it. I am total sucker for movies with that dirty, gritty feel to it, especially when there are working class characters. I recognize those people from my life in a way that I don't usually, with the drinking and smoking and swearing and bad life choices. Plus, the soundtrack was fucking awesome and the one guaranteed way to make me like even the shittiest movie is to get a great soundtrack going on.

But hey, for the purposes of this, Tom Hardy was indeed there playing Bob, who was the youngest, littlest, blondest, and dare I say, oddly twinkiest little street tough I have ever seen. And it was actually really great. There is very little that will get me to like queer characters more than them having a sense of humor about their sexualities and being little shits about it, particularly when it's done in the service of making non-queers uncomfortable.

The one scene that most stuck out to me with Bob was the scene in the car with One Two, in which Bob thinks he's going to jail for five years in the morning, One Two tries to cheer him up with a promise of escorts, and Bob comes out.

I've been mulling over in my head a lot since I finished the movie what it was exactly about the scene that I liked so much. Because One Two's reaction isn't instantly positive and supportive; he's actually a real fucker about it, pulling out the usual stops that Bob can't be gay, because he's handsome and because he's a ladykiller and because if he was gay One Two would know, goddamnit. And he almost instantly comes around and apologizes, but if you've ever come out, you know that nothing is going to stick so much as that first immediate reaction that comes from the gut.

And despite this, I still rewatched that scene four times because it seemed so completely and totally real to me.

I think the honest answer is because of recognition again. Man, I have been in that seat with Bob way too many times before, listening to someone freak their shit out because they never thought of me as One Of Those People and it fucks with their world perception. There's a brutal honesty in One Two's immediate reaction and there's an honesty in his apologizing for it immediately afterward. The sense that he loved Bob was there and raw and that shit happens when people disconnect between who they think you are and who you really are.

What really made the whole thing for me was Bob's reaction, which managed to cut a little bit closer to home than it seemed at the time. He's not furious and he's not sobbing in agony, he treats it like he made a mistake. He was resigned more than anything else, and disappointed and apologetic and that screwy mess of emotions is way too fucking familiar.

And aside from the car scene, there were a bunch of other moments that worked for me. Bob flirting with the lawyer dude was fucking hilarious and anyone who thinks otherwise has clearly never been macked on by an older person. The little exchange with, "I'm going to bed" "Can I come with?" made me actually love Bob a little because I seriously fucking love people who go out of their way to make their friends squirm. It's one of my favorite things.

So yeah, Rocknrolla. I hope the card before the credits wasn't fucking around about their being a sequel. Because if Bob is there, I'm there.