watch this, Mugabe

My close friend Todd made a documentary chronicling the world’s first all-transgender gospel choir, “The Believers.” (sneak peek). He and his crew have been through a lot with The Little Film That Could, including first being denied permission to use the traditional gospel songs because of the identity of the people performing them in the film. Loads of legal fees and post-production bills later, the film is starting to get out there, including with its broadcast premiere on LOGO TV this Saturday, August 11. (Watch it, record it!)

This morning he was notified that the film had been accepted into the Zimbabwe International Film Festival: spectacular, shocking news. This a film about a group in which, as one of the choir members, supa’star Bobbie Jean Baker, puts it: “everybody who now lives as a woman was born a man, and everyone who now lives as a man was born a woman.”

Homosexuality is not only taboo in Zimbabwe, it’s illegal. In 2006 they updated their existing sodomy law with a sexual deviancy law, which deems any actions perceived as homosexual a criminal offense, including kissing, hugging, and holding hands. At the country’s independence day celebration in 1995, Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe said: “It degrades human dignity. It’s unnatural, and there is no question ever of allowing these people to behave worse than dogs and pigs. If dogs and pigs do not do it, why must human beings?. … We will never allow it here. If you see people parading themselves as Lesbians and Gays, arrest them and hand them over to the police!”

“The Believers” assumes a fair amount of familiarity with fluid gender boundaries—Todd refused to make a Trans-issues-101 film out of the choir’s story—so the film pushes the envelope even here in the relatively queered U.S. of A. I can’t wait to hear what it accomplishes in Zimbabwe. I just wish it was a safe enough environment for Todd and his partner Jim to travel there themselves to see.

The illustration, by the way, is the flag of Zimbabwe, with a modest modification on my part. Enjoy, Mr. Mugabe. Dickhead.

the freighted one

At first I refused to engage with him.
“I don’t have the qualifications,” I told him.
He said he wanted to try something different. Like I was a flavor of ice cream he hadn’t had before.
Vanilla.
He said he felt like he needed to have a real relationship, not something based on the extreme sex alone.
“Can you enjoy sex if it’s not like that?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
His honesty turned me on.
We kissed for weeks, him plunging into my mouth like if he just got enough momentum it might work out.

I told him I’d decided I wanted him to spend the night, so he did. We didn’t have sex. Partly because I still felt awkward about not having the expertise I’ve heard about his former lovers having, and partly for reasons I’m sure he held but didn’t voice.
“How’s this going for you?” I asked afterwards.
“I’m thinking it all through very intently,” is what I think he said. When someone tells me something that stimulates a strong emotional response in me like horror or shame or upset, I have a hard time catching the actual words.

He has zero capacity for telling me what I want to hear. I think I need that. I’ve been a sucker for people who tell me what I want to hear. I prefer it if it’s their raw umbilically-attached truth, but even if it comes from their read on me I’ll fall for it. If they’re bothering to read me it must mean they’re focused on me, and it’s the pinpointed focus, like the sun through a magnifying glass, that has made me catch fire. Like him, I want to try something different.

He told me he had had wild fantasies about me, pictured me mounting him with a strap-on. I wondered if he thought that fantasy stemmed solely from his bent mind. I wondered if he remembered the half-hour before I’d gotten up, him still mostly asleep, when I’d sunk my belly into his back and wrapped my arms around him, ground my pelvis into his ass, and with my hands in the soft hairless dips below his hipbones brought him back towards me. Pushed into him, felt him push back. Lazy, not enough friction to start an outright fire, but comforting, delicious. I’d taken a shower and had let him sleep another hour.

“That doesn’t seem entirely foreign to me,” I said. “I could imagine doing that.”
But he protested, told me it couldn’t just be something I’d do just to please him. “It doesn’t work that way,” he asserted.
As if he knows what works. As if any of us do.
“Regardless, we’ll be friends, right?”
I said it pre-emptively. He nodded.