Roz Kaveney, gay people in dollhouses, fascists are losers

I have given myself this reading project of some old trans books, but I have to tell you that this is also a thrilling time for new trans books and art. I finally had a chance this month to read Tourmaline’s Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson, which I picked up from the shelf at my local library. I can’t stop thinking about this book, Marsha P. Johnson’s life, and the incredible history that Tourmaline has given us all. As I’ve learned about Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera over the years, so much of what I encountered came directly or indirectly through Tourmaline’s work. This book is a monumental contribution to trans culture, and it gives us many tools and insights at this pivotal, dangerous time. I hope everyone is able to check it out.

My friends have also been buzzing about Dream a Little Dream of Me, the art show featuring Gage Spex and Lina Bradford that uses their doll collections to celebrate their iconic contributions to New York City nightlife and trans culture (up this summer at Salma Sarriedine). If you missed the show, you can still get in the dollhouse with Bradford’s delightful talkshow, or by catching any of Gage’s performances and events.

I also hope to soon catch a showing of Sam Feder’s new documentary Heightened Scrutiny, which follows Chase Strangio and the ACLU legal fight for trans rights within the context of our aggressively anti-trans media. Feder’s previous film Disclosure is unforgettable, I learned so much! I hear Heightened Scrutiny is just as great. It’s playing the festival circuit now.

Trans culture is truly thriving. I see this in my local communities, my chosen family, and across national and global stages. Oh, Mary! What a time to love gay transsexuals.

It’s been exciting to pick up Marsha as I return to Roz Kaveney’s Tiny Pieces of Skull: Or, a Lesson in Manners. It’s a novel of trans bar life in the late seventies, set in London and Chicago and written a decade later, although the novel didn’t find a publisher until 2014 (it was rejected in part for being “cold, heartless, and amoral,” which it is not at all). Like all great trans writing, it is born from trans life and rich with our stories. Another thrill– to read writers like Kaveney over decades. I look at her Bluesky account often to read her new poems and to get updates on the terf-y frenzy in the UK.

The novel, Kaveney tells us in an author’s note, is more or less autobiographical. It features Annabelle, a London writer newly navigating the literary scene as a trans woman, who follows a more experienced trans woman, Natasha, to Chicago. Their sometimes contentious friendship forms the heart of the story, reflected and refracted through a complex social world of other trans women and their lovers. The characters all exist in their own myths, appearing through gossip and stories that the other women circulate. They are stylish outlaws, and the lines between sister, rival, friend, and lover all blur over the course of the novel and a series of hardships and dangers that punctuate Annabelle’s new Chicago life.

The novel (somewhat like a Torrey Peters story) is concerned with the messy, tragicomic ways that trans women nurture and fail one another, but it is also a story about its particular moment in trans life and time. In this case, that includes many scenes in bars and sex clubs. Gay and trans bars have captured the attention of some of our best writers, among them Red Jordan Arobateau and Leslie Feinberg. While sometimes offering refuge and employment, these same bars, along with the street, are places where trans people have remained especially vulnerable to violence from johns, racist owners, cops, and strangers. In Tiny Pieces of Skull, ongoing harassment from police officers inevitably gives way, in one harrowing moment, to a man who pretends to be a cop assaulting Annabelle. “You could tell the police from the criminal psychopaths only because some of the former had the grace to wear uniforms,” she notes. The scene reminds me of the expansion today of the secret police under ICE, which has left us all more vulnerable to assaults by the cops and by pretenders. The damage of criminalization is never limited to the violence inflected directly by police, nor to the targeted populations.

So often lately I think of our beloved Cecilia Gentili’s incredible legacy. She and the DecrimNY coalition she helped found have played a critical role in the fight against the criminalization of trans people, sex workers, and immigrants, including as part of the successful push for the 2020 repeal of New York’s “walking while trans law.” Marsha notes the imporance of this repeal, and reminds me that these recent political victories are also extensions of Marsha P. Johnson’s impact, her work continuing across generations and ongoing movements.

As unprecedented as today’s fascist attacks are, it is striking to me that the goal is to return us to this anti-gay, anti-trans status quota that dominated so very recently, and that has persisted in many places. Thankfully, our ways of resisting and thriving also persist.

‘Well, pardon me, hon,’ said Alexandra. ‘I’m sure that’s what’s best for you if you think it is. You can trust me, anyways; and I don’t mind us going round as a pair for a while, anytime you want. I mean, you’re fit to be seen with. I’m glad you listened, finally, about the eyebrows; it’s an improvement. If you ever feel like hunting as a pair that’s okay, too. Two bitches can be safe, right; it’s not just you that doesn’t feel safe getting laid without someone riding shotgun. And if we ever go down to the Chatterbox… The Chatterbox is full of malice and loveliness, but if you are careful, or have a friend to watch out for you, it can be a good place to get your meat. I am just so wholly glad that right now it’s no longer the place where I have to go to get my bread as well.’

It is not long after this scene that Annabelle does indeed find her way to the Chatterbox.

Fascism drains our spirits and exhausts us with its blunt cruelty. This is by design. With no reserves, it is much harder to fight back. As way of resistance, we sustain life when we insist on joy and beauty in seemingly dire circumstances. Tiny Pieces of Skull is good at this, quick-witted and peppered with gallows humor. The story moves quickly, barely taking time to process its more confronting scenes, but still finding a quip or a joke and noting just the right detail. And while there is nothing fun about oppression, Annabelle and the other sisters still enjoy themselves. They banter cleverly, and collect funds for each other after setbacks, and look “sickeningly self-indulgent and tragic with an evening skyline behind her.”

Transsexual life, persevering in the dollhouses far away from the literary scene that Annabelle flees, is joyous. This is right and true to what I know, that even when it all falls to shit, by being a transsexual with the transsexuals, you have still won. They cannot defeat us.

And sometimes, you really do win! I think of how Marsha celebrates Marsha P. Johnson as an artist, performer, and fashion icon, as well as activist and revolutionary, aspects of her legacy that are always entwined. Learning more about her prolific acting career in the chapter “Marsha, the Downtown Performer” was an inspiring thrill, and I loved being transported to New York’s gay underground theater scene in the 70s, thriving right there alongside the fabled bars. “Whenever she performed,” Tourmaline notes, “Marsha would get standing ovations as soon as she walked on stage.” Just remembering her performance of Jimmy Camicia’s poem “Soul” is enough to make me smile and keep going.

(And recalling Pat Califia cruising the dyke bars in San Francisco--what a time for trans nightlife this was!)

Today, we have the fascists to laugh at, and they sure do make it easy. What losers! Trump can’t seem to open his mouth without saying something worthy of ridicule. Wonderfully, every time you laugh at them, you take some of their power away. When I am discouraged, I sometimes rally my spirits with videos online of people berating ICE agents on the street and driving them off, successfully shutting down their raids. This heartens me as I prepare with friends for the raids to eventually expand into my region. Similarly, the Tesla Takedown protests have been a laugh riot. These are shitty times, but transsexuals and our friends are full of life. We are cool, interesting, fun, sexy, and powerful, while the fascists are butt-hurt whiners with tacky fashion.

They have seized power and implemented an authoritarian state, but still, they are weak and easily defeated. Just look at all we have done already, and with so much less than we have today.

‘Anyway, what else could I have done?’
‘Nothing, kid. That’s the shame; nor could the hospital when they needed consent. Silly bitch should have known better than have real next of kin on her ID, given what they thought of her. In the end she must’ve had a death wish. We all have, I guess; that’s why I deal and why you hustle. I mean, we don’t have to, not really, do we? Some of the others, maybe, but not two smart cookies like us. We could be in grad school or something.’
‘I was in grad school,’ said Annabelle. ‘And it didn’t suit.’
‘That was then and it wasn’t really you, was it? Different now, surely?’
‘That could be a problem too, you know. Names on degrees and all of that, and problems with references.’
‘You worry too much, Annabelle; there are a lot of people who aren’t cool, but there’s always a way round things if you look for it.’

The establishment institutions continue to trip over themselves to abandon us and perform fealty to Trump. Brown University, for one, has not only acquiesced to the regime and banned trans people from sports as demanded, but gone further in excluding us from public university life altogether. Pete Buttigieg has joined many other Democrats in deciding to take up the right’s anti-trans talking points regarding sports, racing to concede. Meanwhile, the fascists continue to use gay and trans people and sex workers as bludgeoning tools in expanding their power. The UK's so-called Online Safety Act has rapidly expanded the number of websites and payment processors that require ID verification and face scans, while in Florida, the authoritarian Attorney General recently demanded that a restaurant hand over their guest list, employee information, security recordings, and other sensitive data after hosting a pride event.

I wouldn’t know about half of this except for the work of independent trans journalists like Alejandra Caraballo.

It is disheartening to look at this enthusiastic abandonment, but less so if I remember that the establishment was never actually behind us (at best, they begrudgingly agreed to pretend). What else could we have done? Maybe nothing, kid--protests and actions often fail at their immediate goals. But it’s also true that there’s a way round things if you look for it, and that it’s life-giving when we get together with other people to resist and build a better world. Really, it’s the only thing to do.

Everything that trans people have gained, we have done for each other and by building solidarity with other movements for liberation. How joyful that is! Even when we are total bitches to each other, like some of the sisters in Tiny Pieces of Skull, it is still so joyful.

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Stray thoughts:

It’s difficult to not make homophobic jokes about Buttigieg’s name. It's already basically Peter Butt-Butt! We’re about the same age and sometimes I pretend he is an evil, alternative-reality version of myself.

I bet he doesn’t even go to gay bars.

I went to my local small town gay bar last weekend. It doesn’t open until nine, which means I am staying up late anytime I go there. There are only ever a handful of people at the bar so early, if anyone. But I chat with the bartender and hear about all the big midnight crowds I missed, and it makes me so happy. This place feels like an authentic gay bar to me because it is also used by swingers and criminals who aren’t necessarily gay, but who have figured out that gay people have a good time. The décor is vintage from the bar’s early decades in the eighties and nineties, too. Sexy! They had on flashing lights and blaring music, and I tried to play this card game called Set with my friends, but the game is all about visual pattern recognition and our senses were overwhelmed. Nonetheless, I felt rejuvenated and full of life just from going and drinking a soda water.