Sunday, October 31, 2010

The Click List

The Click List: Top 10 Videos is a countdown show on LOGO featuring music videos by LGBT artists. The majority of the videos are quite difficult to watch. They are pretty over-the-top in a DIY sort of way in that the quality of the videos and sets are very amature with overly dramatic lipsyncing and magnified movements. The music is pretty bad, most of which consist of lyrics about (homo)sexuality and are backed by techno/club beats. My feelings toward this show are quite ambivalent. However, based on my first experience I can say that I am fairly disappointed in the fact that all of the videos on the list are by presumably gay men with the inclusion of the occasional transwoman. Anyway, here's one of the more intriguing videos on the list.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Antony interview (excerpt)

GROSS: I’d like to talk with you a little bit about gender. You describe yourself as transgender. What does that mean to you?

HEGARTY: Well, you know, it’s pretty simple. I don’t identify as a man. I identify as transgender, you know? I mean, it’s a pretty typical phenomenon. There’s probably transgender people in most families, somewhere around the line. Usually exhibits…

(Soundbite of laughter)

HEGARTY: Its symptoms, like, by the age of five or something, you know that your alignment is subtly or very overtly different than the kids that may be around you. I always aligned more with my mother and my mother’s side. And my pursuits and interests as a really young kid were more creative and always leaning more toward the feminine side as opposed to towards the masculine side of activities. So, it’s really as simple as that, you know? I made a choice to, sort of, really spell it out for people, especially since I’m not someone that is transitioned to—towards anything, really. I’m just sort of in a process of embracing myself as a transgender person and presenting myself, you know, as I am…

GROSS: You mean as opposed to having a sex-change operation to surgically alter yourself?

HEGARTY: No, not necessarily. That’s not what I meant. But you know, it could be more subtle than that. You know, I mean, I think people tend to be really obsessed with transgender people’s physical configurations. But transgender is a condition of the spirit, you know? There’s something very reductive that tends to occur in perceiving transgender people and even gay people, in that society tends to want to reduce them, in almost a crude way, around an obsession with their sexuality or even their genital configuration, which has—there’s a kind of a cruelty to that, when, in fact, what we are dealing with is people whose spirits are different.

And it’s much more subtle and there’s a lot more potential there within each of those children and within each of those adults that remains unacknowledged and sometimes even unexplored, because people, even individuals, fall victim to society’s impression of them or society’s reduction of them. And what you tend to notice about a transgender kid, you know, they’re usually the ones that are kind of dancing by themselves in a little circle of light, and they see colors more brightly, and they’re very sensitive to the feelings of kids, other kids, and adults around them. And my suggestion is that they have a little gift inside their hearts that could be a real asset within the family. And I think that’s true of gay kids, too, you know?