HillBuzz

Here’s an article we’re somewhat reluctant to write because we don’t want to police the comments it will garner…and the flames it will fuel in the cultural wars that sometimes overwhelm things we report just because we find them interesting.  Any time we talk about LGBTQ issues, we get the most hateful remarks in the spam filters…and not from the far-Right as you would think.  It’s the Left that brings the hate every time, Alinsky-style, in spades. 

One of the strangest attacks we personally get is from people who act like we’re claiming to be experts on something.  Never in the history of our posts have we ever claimed to be experts.  We’re a pack of amateurs around here and have always said so:  we’re just guys who live in Boystown who came together during Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign and became friends as a result, and this site began as a way of sharing articles amongst ourselves and our friends to bypass the time it would take to email everyone each article on its own.  

We have no idea how all the rest of you found us over time, and started reading what we post here, but we still largely write the content here the same we way did back in February 2008:  to post interesting things we think our friends would like to read or hear about, all centered on our anecdotal experience in Boystown here in Chicago. 

The key word is anecdotal.  

As in, things that happen to us. 

Things we think about. 

Things we hear in the course of our day. 

Things we can report because we were there and witnessed them ourselves. 

Well, this past week we had two encounters that truly got us all thinking and talking as a group…and we still don’t know what to make about either of them, but will say they dramatically changed the way we think about sexuality and gender.  The only thing that comes close to the shaking our beliefs had is the day we, individually, all learned there was no Santa Claus.  Our little grade school brains tried to process that, knowing our beliefs in the holidays would never be the same, wondering how we ever managed to think the things we did before, grasping for explanations and racing to catchup with the new reality of things. 

Sugar plum confused in the egg noggins, to randomly carry the holiday theme. 

The first encounter happened while carrying out our friend Lionel’s volunteering duties.  Lionel Baxter is a dear friend who passed on this summer, who volunteered the majority of his free time helping mainly the AIDS afflicted with household chores and the like.  But, one friend of Lionel’s is a blind HIV- lesbian named Carole who gave us permission to talk about her here (because we’d never have done it otherwise).

Lionel used to take Carole shopping so that she would not be ripped off at the less reputable stores around town (which happened to have the better prices…if she was able to bargain and barter like everyone else, and not be taken advantage of).  He was her “Seeing-Eye Lionel”, as Carole called him, and would inspect merchandise, tell her what color things were (so they would match), and deal with all the salespeople when they stepped out of line and looked like they’d try to pull a fast one (and, we hate to say this, but that seems to happen A LOT, evenin 2009, in a great city like Chicago).

Carole’s been blind since birth.  ”Green”, “blue”, “red”, and the rest of the color spectrum have no meaning to her, though she long ago learned the abstracts of color theory, what goes together and what does not, and how she should dress to not get any unwanted stares or attention from “the sighted”.

Carole actually associates colors with foods…so “green” is the crispness of green peppers and other veggies…blue is cool and deep like a lake or breezy sky…red is hot and jarring like fire.  So, Lionel would describe the emotional pull and visceral sense of things, like telling Carole a vase has “all sorts of shapes painted on it that clash with other shapes and has a volatile energy to it like fire” whereas another piece of art “is soothing and tranquil like a stream and goes with other things harmoniously”.

All very zen, all very feeling based with no visuals.

As we tried to be Carole’s poor subsitutes for Lionel, a true life angel undercover if ever there was one, we showed her various pieces of clothing, shoes, and kitchen ware as she picked out different things she needed and tried to get an idea of things using only her senses of smell, touch, hearing, and taste.

While going over some vases, Carole described one as being like the breasts of a beautiful woman, and then talked a little about an old girlfriend that reminded her of.

We told Carole we had never thought about people being blind since birth…and being gay.

Admit it, it’s a thought you’ve probably never had too…because “the sighted”, like us, take our vision for granted.  We certainly can’t speak for everyone and aren’t experts on blindness or sexuality (hence that anecdotal emphasis again), but when we look at a man we are drawn to the boxiness of his features and shape…to the square of his jaw and the broadness of his shoulders…the sleeker, the more chiseled and boxy, the more visually appealing to guys who aren’t attracted to curves (or the women who round them).

Sight is our primary sexual sense, we realized.  A guy’s looks aren’t the most important thing about him by far, but it’s that initial bit that makes us attracted to him…and that, in general, engages our sexuality.

For Carole, who is blind, her sexuality has never in her life been triggered by what someone looks like.  She’s not gay because she enjoys looking at women more than men.  She’s not gay because women stimulate the visual part of her brain and draw her to them.  

Not being physiologists, neurologists, or the like, we can’t be as articulate here as we’d like, but we find this fascinating.  Someone who is blind, like Carole, can indeed be gay without ever knowing what a man or woman really looks like, so all that cultural conditioning we all get visually never takes hold in her.  She’s not driven by the body image on magazines because she can’t see them.  She’s not motivated by the current definitions of beauty or gender because she’s not aware of them.  

And she still chooses women over men.

For other reasons…how they smell, how they feel, how they sound, how they relate to her.  Hundreds of more differences that, to us, seem to exist in realms far removed from choice.  We can see a red apple and a green apple and choose the red apple because we find it more appealing.  Carole could hold both apples and not be able to tell the difference visually, but still choose the one she wants for other reasons far different than our immediate first choice (of sight).

We’ve never read any articles on the sexuality of the lifelong blind but would love to explore this further if anyone out there has any great sources and links for us.

The other interesting encounter we had this week involved gender and sexuality themselves, when we ran into our good friend Jim at Sidetracks this last Thursday during comedy night.  Right after they finished playing the HILARIOUS “Literal Version of Total Eclipse of the Heart” (…it started out as Hogwarts now it’s Lord of the Flies), Jim came up to us and asked if we’d gotten the invites to “his party”.  We’ve been working so hard and have been so broke the last few months that we’ve not gone out much, so we told him we had no idea what party he was throwing…so Jim went to the bar and brought back some fliers.  

We’d actually seen the fliers around town at various LGBTQ shops and the Center on Halsted but had no idea whatsoever the event was for THAT Jim or what the event even was, because it was so cryptic to us.  The party Jim was talking about was advertised as “Masculinity: A Fundraiser to Complete Jim’s Transition”…and had a very well-designed graphic of a rugged, cowboy type with text superimposed talking about helping to raise funds to help complete Jim’s transition and get him the last surgery he needed, with all sorts of great local acts headlining for the cause.  

We kept thinking it was a man transitioning into a woman with a sex change…because, like many in the LGBTQ community, we’ve never given much thought to the “T” (or, to be honest, the “Q” or the “B” or even the “L” in that, focusing only on our own realm in the Boystown “G”), and aside from Hedwig and TransAmerica had few encounters with the transgendered culturally, let alone in our own community.  

There are Drag Kings who perform at various clubs around town, but they don’t get as much attention as the Miss Foozies or Cyon Flares or Taj Mahals of Boystown…fabulous and attention-getting man-to-woman drag performers all. But the Drag Kings work just as hard in their own art, but with much less recognition (and respect).  We’ll be the first to admit our guilt on that, too.

We can’t honestly say we’ve ever seen an interview with a female-to-male transgendered person or given any thought at all to what they go through.

So maybe it’s no wonder we didn’t have a clue in Hell into what the “Masculinity” flier was about.  

And we had even less of a clue that our friend Jim, who we’ve know for two years, was born a woman and has been living as a gay man for the last few years.  Never, ever in our lives would we have guessed that.  

Jim has so much guts for coming out and revealing all of this…and it was a big step for him that he agonized over for a year.  Since everyone knew him as a man, he had a lot to lose by saying he’d been born a woman and still needed the surgery to remove his breasts and ease a lot of the pain he had from taking the male hormones while still having female anatomy.  He also had to find the extreme courage to weather all the questions that bubble and burble in and from people when they find out he’s female-to-male transgendered, all centered on replacing the vagina with a penis, and how that’s done.  

Jim was really upfront with us and said the surgeries are all so expensive that he’s not going to go there, but that he just wants to have his breasts removed for various health reasons.  Hence the November 3rd Masculinity fundraiser at Sidetracks, where Jim’s hosting an event to raise what he needs to get his procedures done.

That all in itself is a lot for most people to take in and process, but it gets even more confusing when it dawns on people that Jim was born female and has never been attracted to women.  Jim, at a young age, was a tomboy who knew he was a boy in a girl’s body. Later, he realized he was attracted to gay, not straight men, and that he wanted to date men but not be in a heterosexual relationship — instead wanting to be a male sexually attracted and involved with other males.

We’ve told about a dozen straight friends about Jim’s fundraiser asking them to help support the event, and every last one of them had smoke coming out of their ears trying to process what Jim’s doing.

“So, she never liked girls and always liked boys.  So she’s not gay.  But she wants to be a man, but still keep dating men, and that would make her gay.  But she’ll still have a vagina and not a penis, so when she has sex with a man she’ll still be in a woman’s body having sex with a penis, which is the definition of heterosexual sex.  So, what the heck is going on here?”.

Honestly, we’re in uncharted waters here in our understanding of the differences between sexuality and gender identity and how they interlink and complement one another. Jim is gender-male, genitals-female, sexuality-gay. There’s no black and white, no chocolate and vanilla, two-clearcut choices here…there’s a pink area, strawberry scoop, Neapolitan mix in play that none of us have ever considered.  Jim’s body is female.  His brain is wired male…and his inner identity sees itself as male.  His sexuality is male-male attraction, even if his body retains its female genitals (which cost and current technological limits interfere with in terms of remedy).

This is an article from us that abruptly ends right about now because we’re still processing the concepts Jim’s experience introduced to us.  We’re getting everyone we know to attend Jim’s event to support him, while deciding amongst ourselves we really need to educate ourselves on Trans-issues more.  To be honest, it’s kind of like learning Mandarin Chinese…nothing looks familiar and we don’t know the right terms or tools to have a decent discussion.  We’re totally lost, and a little embarrassed we never knew something so important about a guy we really like, respect, and love hanging out with.  

Jim’s one of our Sidetracks buddies who we run into typically only on Showtunes or Comedy nights, when we need to sing and act stupid and laugh to get away a bit.  And here he was, struggling with something, and we never caught on or saw anything that could have given us a clue.  

Sexuality and gender are areas that we need to read up more on, to get a better picture of the human condition across all spectrums. It feels a lot like spending most of our time in Boystown forgetting Chinatown, Wicker Park, the Loop, Greektown, and all the other distinct areas of Chicago exist too.  There is much, much more out there than what we in our limited anecdotal experiences encounter every day.

And we welcome any further light any of you out there can shed on any of this.

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Because you asked…here’s that “Literal Version Total Eclipse of the Heart”, too.  Hilarious.