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Stories and Essays |
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Movie Reviews (from my alter-ego's site) Stories |
When I was still coming
to terms with my femme self, I bought a lot of transvestite porno magazines.
Most of them were terrible, featuring out of date contact ads and crummy
pictures. The "girls" in them weren't all that attractive, either.
Some of them featured short stories of a particularly hard-hearted variety.
One of the magazines I bought had an ad for
Sandy Thomas Publications, describing them as "a welcome relief from
the rock hard genre." Curious, I sent away for some of them. They arrived
quicker than expected (Sandy has always given me good service) and I was
enraptured, for a time. Soon, I was buying The Reluctant Press titles, too. This
came to a head after I met my then-downstairs neighbor, a nice girl who
happened to be a professional dominatrix. One of her clients was getting
rid of his collection of trans-oriented material, including just about every
book ever published by Sandy Thomas, The Reluctant Press, and Empathy Press.
Did I want them? she asked. Sure, I said.
A couple of months later, I got my first home computer and access to the internet. My bookmarks were soon clogged with story sites. Little did I realize just how much TG fiction there was out there, and how little art there was to it. Over time, I have become very disenchanted with TG slash fiction. These days, I find it interesting from an anthropological point of view as practically the only cultural imprint left by the transgendered speaking for themselves, but it's not very interesting to a third party, given that it is almost universally informed by the sexual urges of crossdressers rather than any real impulse towards the deeper truths we find in an actual literature (or, for that matter, any actual reality). More than that, I've become very uncomfortable with the misogyny, homophobia, racism, and self-loathing I find in most TG fiction. If even the lowest of cultural artifacts inform us about the mindset of its creators, what does this say about the transgendered? Eventually, I wanted to avert my gaze. At some point, I decided to try my own hand at it. My first story, The Clothes Make the Man, was posted on Fictionmania in December of 1999. My second, The New Neighbor, followed in April of 2000. The response to these stories was tremendous and it functioned as a kind of validation for me for a time, in much the same way as the online TG population occasionally uses photographs as emotional currency. I make no bones about the fact that there's an erotic or pornographic undertone to these stories. Only the first one really conforms to the conventions of the TG slash story--including the ridiculous role of women as enablers. The last one conforms the least, in part because it is explicitly homosexual in its conception. Looking back on these stories a decade after the fact makes me wince a little, and I have to resist the urge to take them down completely. But even so, there's something in the back of my mind that wants to take another stab at it, knowing the pitfalls, to see if I can produce something artful enough to satisfy myself. Frankly, though, if you want to read more of what I write about transgender issues, visit my blog. Christianne's Bookshelf Here are some books that have helped me make heads or tails of this crazy life. Some are fiction--I first encountered the idea of transsexuality as a real possibility in the science fiction of Robert Heinlein (not one of his best books, truth to tell, but interesting as all get-out) and John Varley, so they're listed here, too. We'll see how this goes. This is a work in progress, as usual. The Amazon links support this site, so if you're interested in any of these, please buy through my links. Thank you for your support.
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