(See spaceykate’s original post here.)

My own feelings about the Human Rights Campaign live somewhere between squick and rage, honestly. Put jokingly, this largely has to do with my having the memory of an elephant and my Moon in Scorpio. I remember things, and I hella hold grudges. ;)

Put more seriously: As an activist, I have been working with people and communities and organizations that have had horrific interactions with the HRC since about 1996.

I still remember (and I will never fucking forget) when Elizabeth Birch (who was the Executive Director of the HRC in 1998) referred to Carmen Vasquez as:
1) “you and your kind,” and
2) “a maggot in a barrel of rice”
in an OPEN LETTER. This is pretty well-documented and public. (I have print-outs of both Vasquez and Birch’s letters in a box in my parents’ basement, actually. I should probably dig them up.)

Birch did this because Vasquez dared to bring up:
1) race and racism in the LGBT community in general, and
2) the intense racism in the HRC’s choice to back Al D’Amato’s* candidacy in New York.

And, just, like, C’MON. For a middle-class white woman to refer to a working-class Latina activist as “a maggot,” as “you and your people,” just… It is all, simply put, fucking UGLY.

I was 15 at the time that I was watching this from the queer organizing sidelines. I saw it for the racist bullshit that it was. I was also working with a lot of older queer activists who really knew what they were doing, and who schooled me well. And I remember, very clearly, just having this moment of “God. No. No. No, this is not right. No, this is not about the larger queer community. No, this is not about supporting the people who need it the most. No, I can never support anything this organization does. At least not unless they make some serious amends to the communities they’ve hurt.”

And that hasn’t happened. So.

*More info here, especially: “HRC’s endorsement of New York Republican Al D’Amato in his 1998 campaign for re-election to the U.S. Senate brought more criticism. HRC defended the endorsement because of D’Amato’s support for ENDA and repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. However, many liberal LGBT leaders did not welcome D’Amato’s many conservative stances, including his opposition to affirmative action and abortion rights.[53]”

So the amazing Reina has a beautiful blog that I encourage all of you to check out. Recently, she’s been posting a lot of archival & historical interviews & articles about Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and S.T.A.R. (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries). This history is vitally important to know and to remember.

And I know we live in the internet age of FAST! FAST! FAST!, but I’d encourage you, as much as possible, to read this blog like you’d read a book you were savoring. Sit the hell down in a comfy chair, pour yourself a cup of tea or coffee. Take your time. Let the words sink in.

Above all, don’t skim it! This work matters way too much for skimming.

I am pleased as punch to announce this year’s Girl Talk cast. Please spread the word, and come to the show on March 29th!

Girl Talk: A Trans & Cis Woman Dialogue
Thursday, March 29th, 2012
7:00pm - 10:00pm
San Francisco LGBT Community Center - Rainbow Room
1800 Market Street between Octavia & Laguna
Tickets: $12-$20 (no one turned away)
WEB: http://queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/HealthyC/girlTalk12.html
BUY TIX HERE: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/223538 (We strongly recommend that you get tickets in advance — we sold out very fast last year.)
FACEBOOK INVITE: http://www.facebook.com/events/217563091671401/

Curated by Gina de Vries, Elena Rose, and Julia Serano.
Generously supported by the Queer Cultural Center Healthy Communities program.

Queer cisgender women and queer transgender women are allies, friends, support systems, lovers, and partners to each other. Trans and cis women are allies to each other every day — from activism that includes everything from Take Back the Night to Camp Trans; to supporting each other in having “othered” bodies in a world that is obsessed with idealized body types; to loving, having sex, and building family with each other in a world that wants us to disappear.

Girl Talk is an annual spoken word show fostering and promoting dialogue about these relationships. Trans and cis women will read about their relationships of all kinds – sexual and romantic, chosen and blood family, friendships, support networks, activist alliances. Join us for a night of stories about sex, bodies, feminism, activism, challenging exclusion in masculine-centric dyke spaces, dating and breaking up, finding each other, and finding love and family.

Performer Bios

Charlie Anders hosts and organizes the award-winning Writers With Drinks reading series in San Francisco, which was namechecked in Armistead Maupin’s latest Tales of the City novel. She’s had stories in Best Lesbian Erotica 2010, Sex For America: Politically Inspired Erotica, Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2009 and 2011, and Tor.com. She co-founded other magazine: the magazine for people who defy categories, and currently blogs at io9. She won the 2010 Emperor Norton Award for “extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason.”

Dominika Bednarska is a postdoctoral fellow at U.C. Berkeley, where she completed her PhD in English and Disability Studies.  Her writing has appeared in Wordgathering, The Bellevue Literary Review, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, The Culture of Efficiency: Technology in Everyday Life, What I Want From You: An Anthology of East Bay Lesbian Poets, Ghosting Atoms, and Cripping Femme. She is currently working on expanding and revising her solo show, My Body Love Story, that will be performed this spring and summer. For more information, go to dominikabednarskaspeaks.blogspot.com or become a fan on Facebook.

Gina de Vries founded and co-curates “Girl Talk” with Elena Rose and Julia Serano. She’s thrilled that the show is still going strong after 4 years. Gina has taught Sex Workers’ Writing Workshop since 2008, and you can find her work anthologized all over, from the San Francisco Bay Guardian to Coming & Crying. A graduate of Hampshire College, Gina is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts in Fiction Writing and Master’s in English at San Francisco State University. The Record, her experimental fiction novel about sex, adolescence, music, San Francisco, and growing up queer, should be hitting bookstores in 2013. Find out a whole lot more at ginadevries.com. Twitter: @queershoulder. Tumblr: queershoulder.

DavEnd is a tenderhearted, genderqueer, costume designing, accordion wielding songwriter, performing artist and designer based in San Francisco. Ms. End has released two studio albums (How To Hold Your Own Hand, Fruits Commonly Mistaken For Vegetables) and for the past 5 years, has been touring extensively in the U.S., performing at queer teen centers, festivals, colleges, theatres and backyards. DavEnd’s current project, Fabulous Artistic Guys Get Overtly Traumatized Sometimes: The Musical!,brings together the worlds of music and radical performance art in a theatrical extravaganza, exploring the effects of heterosexism and street harassment on the development of queer identity.  

Thea Hillman is a mother, writer, and performer. Her book of poetry and fiction “Depending on the Light,” was published in 2001. Her Lambda award-winning memoir, “Intersex: For Lack of a Better Word” came out in 2008 and is taught at universities around the country.

Nomy Lamm is a writer, musician, performance artist and voice teacher.   Her band, nomy lamm & THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD, is a flexible platform for collaboration with everyone and everything, including other musicians, artists, poets, puppeteers, spectators, and the moon.  She performs regularly with Sins Invalid, creating musical dreamworld performance art about disability, sexuality and social justice.  She is currently working on her MFA thesis, a collection of short stories called “515 Clues,” and writes an advice column for Make/Shift magazine called “Dear Nomy.”

Emily Manuel is a Greek-Australian becoming-Jewish writer, blogger, editor, sometime academic, musician, partner, mother to four cats, and beekeeper.  She found a bee and she kept it - that’s the first rule of beekeeping.  She is editor-in-chief at Global Comment magazine, and her work has also appeared at Questioning Transphobia, Tiger Beatdown, Billboard magazine, Bitch magazine, and many others.  She has a PhD in English from Murdoch University in Australia gathering dust in the corner.

Elena Rose, a Filipina-Ashkenazic mixed-class trans dyke mestiza, rode stories out of rural Oregon and hasn’t stopped making words since.  In her second year co-curating “Girl Talk” and fourth as a performer, she writes online as “Little Light,” travels the country as a preacher and poet, and has dedicated herself to the work of radical love, queer theology, and justice for those who live at the edges.  Her work has turned up everywhere from college classrooms to bathroom mirrors to protest marches, in magazines including Aorta and Make/Shift, and on the acclaimed spoken-word album It Is Better to Speak!  Rose is currently finishing her first book, Mountain of Myrrh, forthcoming from Dinah Press, and attends seminary in Northern California, where she resides with her wife and a small but well-loved pomegranate tree.

Julia Serano is an Oakland, California-based writer, performer and activist. She is the author of Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, a collection of personal essays that reveal how misogyny frames popular assumptions about femininity and shapes many of the myths and misconceptions people have about transsexual women. Julia’s other writings have appeared in anthologies (including Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, Word Warriors: 30 Leaders in the Women’s Spoken Word Movement and Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape), in feminist, queer, pop culture and literary magazines and websites (such as Bitch, AlterNet.org, Out, Feministing.com, and make/shift), and have been used as teaching materials in gender studies, queer studies, psychology and human sexuality courses in colleges across North America.  juliaserano.com.

Jos Truitt is a Boston native and recent transplant to San Francisco. She joined the team at Feministing.com in July 2009 and became an Editor in August 2011. Jos attended Hampshire College where she coordinated the school’s annual national reproductive justice conference. After college she worked in the reproductive health, rights and justice movements in Washington, DC. Jos has spoken and trained at numerous national conferences and college campuses about trans issues, reproductive justice, blogging, feminism, and grassroots organizing. Jos is currently pursuing an MFA in Printmaking at San Francisco Art Institute.

Pidge Vera is a mixed-race queer femme writer, performer and choreographer, living an awesome and strangely grown up life in Oakland, CA. Her interests and activist work include, but are not limited to: self-care, feminism, sexual assault and interpersonal violence prevention and advocacy, storytelling, dance, queers, femmes, fashion, baking killer peanut-butter cookies, and passionate karaoke performances. She is currently adapting her research thesis on eating disorders, narrative construction, and embodied practice into a book, and will talk about it at length if you let her. Pidge resides with her wife and Cleis, the littlest of pomegranate trees.