Drag Queens & Trans Women, Bisexual Warriors, Technicolor Straights
Prism & Pen Weekly — December 4, 2022
by James Finn
P&P writers submitted such great stories this week that my Sunday task of highlighting three is impossible. My Editor’s Picks are never meant as a statement on worth anyway, but this week I simply choose three essays that speak to me of similar themes in different ways. See if you agree! Then please dig for gold in all our offerings; this week at Prism & Pen is all about writing riches.
For the pure pleasure of moving, finely crafted creative nonfiction, do please scroll down for a stunning first submission by Remy J. Alan 🏳️🌈✒️.
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— Editor’s Picks —
The Biggest Threat to The Patriarchy: Trans Women and Drag Queens
The rise of venomous and unforgiving targeting of trans women and drag queens is not just another aspect of escalating culture wars in our society. It is not just the culture war du jour. This is different. This has far deeper roots, and not just historically but psychologically.
The Heterosexual Myth: Finding Ourselves in Our Bisexual Past
The power of over one thousand years of lies and heterosexual mythology tied to hellfire and damnation is not to be underestimated.
The extensively bisexual lives of ancient Etruscans, Celts, Greeks, and Romans are inconceivable to non-gay men today who have long been conditioned to believe that such lives existed only out of corruption and evil. If so, the ancient Chinese and Japanese were equally culpable, along with indigenous peoples worldwide.
Technicolor Straight People: Rewatching “Pleasantville” with Modern Gay Eyes
As a kid, I related to this movie because I’m an artist. Jeff Daniels’ character wants to be a painter, and when he starts painting vibrant multi-colored murals on the soda-shop window or the side of a building, everyone is scandalized and the town council tries to ban him from doing his work.
But what I didn’t understand as a kid was just how much my outrage at systemic oppression is rooted in my queerness. Since queer people have long expressed themselves through art and performance, most oppressive systems that want to censor art really want to censor sexual liberty.
— Essays and Creative Nonfiction —
Transgender Microaggressions and Microabrasions
Whether in or out, transgender individuals carry their own “first aid” kit in order to survive. It is filled with ways to stop the pain, vent the hurt and heal yet again from the inflicted wound. Everyone has their own band aids and salves. They can include supportive friends and family, therapists, other transgender people, online support groups or just taking a moment to breath in and out and regain your perspective.
Actress Candace Cameron Bure Wants to Keep LGBTQ People Out of Movies
What I’m getting from all of this is that Bure and Abbott don’t even want queer people to exist in a fictional made-for-TV movie world, let alone the real one.
Queer people and queer marriage are not “a trend” or in any way untraditional, abnormal, or out of the ordinary; our media needs to reflect that.
We saw Don’t Say Gay become law in Florida earlier this year, basically prohibiting any discussion or acknowledgment of queer people in schools. Now we’re taking it a step further with what I would term “don’t show gay” — where conservative Christians freak out when they see a gay couple in a TV commercial or a lighthearted Christmas movie and call for a boycott.
The Club Q Shooting: When Tragedy Becomes a Trope
Like others who were more personally connected to a shooting, I was in a daze all week. Living in Denver, I know plenty of people who frequent the two queer bars in Colorado Springs. Even though my friends weren’t at Club Q that night, they could have been. Having frequented the queer bars in Denver makes the shooting in the Springs all the more real to me. There’s not that much distance between Colorado Springs and Denver.
Our collective shock and anger should lead queer people, and our straight allies, to action. We should rise up and vote out the people who are perpetuating this cycle of violence and nurturing the worst American values.
Trans People Do Not “Hold All the Power in Society”
One of the more ludicrous ideas that we see from the right, especially in relation to the ongoing trans panic, is the idea that trans people hold all the power in society. We’ve seen this idea from Matt Walsh in his “What is a Woman?” documentary, and it’s propagated widely in conservative circles even from low-level grifters like Seth Dillon.
It should come as no surprise that conservatives have a subliterate understanding of power and how it works.
N.C. United Methodists Leave Church in HUGE Win for LGBTQ People
A bunch of North Carolina congregations just left (disaffiliated from) the United Methodist Church, the second-largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. As a child sitting through fierce anti-gay sermons in the American South, agonizing because I knew the preacher was ranting about me, I could never have imagined the events that are shaking the United Methodist Church today.
Headlines this week are misleading if you don’t understand what’s going on, so let’s dive in and talk about why fewer children will have to live through what I did.
The State of Trans Healthcare in the UK is Putting Lives at Risk
Being a trans person parked on an NHS waiting list for gender-affirming care can feel like being stuck in some kind of hellish gender purgatory.
I know, because I’m one of them.
As of 2020 there were 13,500 people waiting for a first appointment with an NHS gender clinic in the UK — a number which has likely risen since then.
Four and a half years: that’s how long I’ll have waited before I get my first appointment with my nearest NHS gender clinic in August 2025.
Any Queer Rep is Too Much for Conservatives
When Candace Cameron Bure reacted to those calling her a bigot by calling them all a bunch of haters, I wasn’t in the least surprised. Disappointed, but not surprised. This knee-jerk defensiveness on the part of conservative Christians when they are called out on their hateful behaviour has become common.
In response to the horrific tragedy at Club Q in Colorado Springs, someone vandalized the headquarters of Focus on Family in the same city. Focus is known for their anti-LGBTQ+ stance and statements, and many LGBTQ+ people drew a line from such bigotry directly to the violence: cause and effect.
Exvangelical Gay Author Reflects on Blasphemy, Health, and Insomnia
You wouldn’t be so nervous if you had Jesus, my grandmother says in my head. She passed away a few years ago, but I still hear her voice almost every day. She was a beautiful, loving woman, unerringly kind when she met my partner. Of course, I introduced him as my “friend,” but I think she knew. She did live in the World a long time, after all.
In the World, but not of it. I’ve been out of the church for well over half my life, but it still lives rent-free with me every day. Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
An unwanted memory of my young self in our small South Carolina church bubbles up from where I thought I had it safely buried.
A Trans Woman Walks Into A Country Bar…
I got to the bar a couple of minutes past eight, and the parking lot was packed. I parked in the north forty and made my way to the show. I will say that going home had crossed my mind. I had never been out at night since my transition, and had never gone into a bar alone. To put it mildly, I was scared straight, and the weed was not helping calm my nerves. I walked the quarter mile or so to the door and went inside. There was standing room only. No turning back now.
This World AIDS Day, I Remember a Sweet Friend and His Life’s Meaning
Then, when the covid-19 pandemic struck, I started to write Brad’s story.
I felt compelled, because … what if I died of covid? What if nobody else but me remembered Brad? What if I could use my fiction-writing chops to bring Brad back to life as best I could? I plunged myself into research, to refresh my memory of events I knew we’d been at together, and to help reconstruct events that happened outside my presence.
After Brad passed, I had spent time grieving and connecting with his mother and his best childhood friend. So I was able to combine some of their memories with stories Brad told me — about his childhood and getting driven from home for being gay, and about his eventual reconciliation with his family.
Perceived Contradiction of Faith and Gayness: Will This Pain Ever Leave?
The pain I carry is malicious. It waits in ambush, until I’m feeling good about my life and my job. Then it springs forth, rending my heart and spirit like an axe splitting wood.
<crack!>
The pain is not physical. It is emotional, mental, spiritual. It comes from the perceived contradiction of my Christian faith and my sexuality. I live and work in an environment where many hold that contradiction to be true. They believe one cannot be in a gay relationship and follow the way of Christ at the same time.
Can I be a woman and not be a female?
Given that I am an adult and according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, I am female, then according to them I am a woman.
“Not so fast!” yell the gender nitpickers: “You don’t don’t get off so easily. Show me your eggs or you can’t go to the ladies room!”
People love categories. It simplifies their life and makes judging people and things easier.
World AIDS Day and Building a Road Towards Progress
For some people, even those belonging to communities who were the most deeply impacted by this disease at the peak, a day of commemoration for AIDS might be beginning to seem… historical. After all, we have HIV prevention medicine in the form of PrEP and being diagnosed with it is “no longer a death sentence.” Unfortunately, despite my earnest desire to be able to mark this day as a sobering reminder of the past and only the past, this simply isn’t the reality
Late Life Transgender Archaeology
It took three years of emotionally exhaustive digging for facts in a world filled with misleading lies and then soulfully scraping through the hard and soft layers of my life to find the signs of my existence. Even then I needed professionals to finally help me decipher the twisted hieroglyphics of my socialized life to finally find me.
I am a transgender woman. I have been buried for over 60 years by a society that refused to believe that I existed.
A Trumpet Call to Explore Your Gender Identity
This article is a departure from my typical philosophical and scientific musings. Instead, I intend to pledge to Medium to take action, and I invite you to take action along with me. I made an error in a previous article that inspired me to create a new Discord community for exploring gender identity. Further information about the community is found below, and I’d like to discuss what led me to believe that it is necessary.
— Memoir —
Slammed: a Memoir
While surprising his parents with a Christmas visit, John remembers the health crises that claimed the life of his little brother and almost claimed another brother. Will memories of overcoming help him overcome meth?
As I sat with my parents at their kitchen table having devoured a most delicious prime rib dinner, I tried to take it all in. Their history, our history, my history.
HIV. Meth.
These were not acts of God …
As I hugged my parents goodbye and began my journey back to New York, more and more the only thing on my mind was the first glorious slam I was going to have after two long months of not using.
Read: Family Struggles Help Me Face My Meth Addiction
— Fiction Series —
The Salt Fork Murders
David Wade Chambers and Court Atchinson
Do you enjoy satisfying but unexpected conclusions to murder mysteries and police procedurals? The Salt Forks Murders doesn’t strictly fit either genre, but it is quite satisfying. In this final chapter, the authors tie up loose ends … then leave readers gasping.
And while this is end of the The Salt Fork Murders, it is not the end of the Prairie Death Tales project. More coming soon!
When the lamp flickered, McLaren quickly reached for the sack of supplies. The rotten canvas shredded in his hand, and a squirming, writhing tangle of coils spilled out, slithering slowly away in every direction. He heard hissing, then the rattles.
He backed away, pressing himself against the massive door. The light winked out, and he began to scream.
Read Chapter 18: Somewhere Safe To Sea
That’s all for Prism & Pen this week, except to ask readers and writers what our prompt should be for the coming two weeks. What shall we focus on as the holidays approach?
I’ll leave the answer to y’all if you’ll leave me ideas in the comments section.
See you next Sunday!
Jim
