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.

“An Open Letter to Kate Bornstein” by Quinnae (at Questioning Transphobia).

Follow Up for Kate, by Tobi Hill-Meyer.

I am probably late in the game in my linkage, as these have been making the internet rounds. But if you haven’t seen these pieces yet: They are smart and fierce, and very much worth a read.

Friendlies,

Holy wow, I can’t believe it’s May! And I can’t believe my National Queer Arts Fest shows are less than a month away! I am very excited to invite you to Sex Workers’ Writing Workshop next week, and I’m even more thrilled to invite you to “REBEL GIRL: a riot grrrl nostalgia show” and “Girl Talk” a cis & trans woman dialogue” (co-curated with the fabulous Julia Serano!) for NQAF.

Links to brownpapertickets for the two shows are available after the cut. I’d strongly recommend buying tickets early — these shows were *really popular* last year, and it is likely they will sell out.

See you at my workshops & see you at my shows! And please spread the word!

xox,
Gina

—-

Sex Workers’ Writing Workshop
May: Tuesday, May 11th, 6-8pm
June: Tuesday, June 8th, 6-8pm
Center for Sex & Culture, 1519 Mission Street, San Francisco (cross street 11th — it’s the building with the pink awning)
Sliding scale $10-$20 (more if you can, less if you can’t, **nobody turned away** — if you’re broke you should still come write with us!)
Workshop facilitated by Gina de Vries

This is a writing workshop for current and former sex workers to share their writing and get honest, non-judgmental feedback. Workshop participants are not obligated to write exclusively about sex work, but writing about work in the sex industry (as well as writing about other topics) will be welcomed. This is a place where people can write and share about their sex work experiences without having to censor themselves or explain every detail. Beginning writers are encouraged to attend along with more seasoned wordsmiths.

Sex Workers’ Writing Workshop is all-genders. We define the term “sex worker” broadly, as people who have exchanged erotic labor for money/food/shelter, including but not limited to:
+Street and Survival Sex Workers
+Escorts and Personal Companions
+Sensual Massage and Sensual Body Work Providers
+BDSM workers; pro-dommes, subs, and switches
+Adult Film Actors; Porn Models and Performers; Nude Models; Cam Girls and Boys
+Exotic Dancers; Strippers; and Peep Show Workers
+Phone Sex Operators
+And many other Sex Workers and Adult Entertainers!
(If we’re forgetting your area of the industry in this definition, tell us!)

**Email questions, volunteer inquiries, etc, to queershoulder@gmail.com.
**If wheelchair access is needed, please contact mail@sexandculture.org in advance of workshop.
**Please refrain from wearing scented products to ensure that workshop members with chemical sensitivities can attend!

————————

NATIONAL QUEER ARTS FEST 2010:

REBEL GIRL: a riot grrrl nostalgia show
Thursday, June 3, 2010
8:00pm
African American Art & Culture Complex, San Francisco
762 Fulton Street
Tickets: $12-$20
Buy Tickets On-line!: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/110826
More info here: http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/QFest10/SFinX.html

Riot grrrl was a youth and punk-oriented radical sociopolitical movement that captivated the hearts, minds, raging hormones, and feminist rage of many queer and trans teen girls in the early and mid-nineties. Join the National Queer Arts Festival and San Francisco in Exile for a Riot Grrrl Revival — where you can once again dress in your leopard print thrift store finery, scrawl SLUT across your midriff, toss that Huggy Bear 7” on the turntable, and make a fanzine extolling the virtues of veganism and vibrators. It’s Revolution Grrrl-Style, Now! — with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Past and present zinestars and grrrl revolutionaries will wax nostalgic about the old days, and let you know what they’ve been up to recently. Zines and cupcakes will be available for purchase.

CAST BIOS:

Meliza Banales aka Missy Fuego writes books, sews clothes, and makes movies. She has toured with Sister Spit: The Next Generation and Body Heat: The Femme Porn Tour. She is currently working on a spoken-word album with Crunks Not Dead Records and another collection of short stories, Life Is Wonderful, People Are Terrific. She makes art in San Francisco.

Gina de Vries cut her artistic and political teeth on riot grrrl in the mid-nineties. She’s also a queer femme Paisan pervert, and a writer, performer, and activist with a long history doing political organizing in queer and trans communities. Gina’s writing has appeared dozens of places, from the academic to the pornographic – recent publications include Issue #4 of Bound to Struggle: Where Kink and Radical Politics Meet, Girl Crush, and The Revolution Starts at Home. Gina has performed, taught, and lectured everywhere from chapels to leatherbar backrooms, and recent university appearances include Reed College, Yale University, and Harvard University. She is the founder and facilitator of Sex Workers’ Writing Workshop, a writing class for current and former sex workers at San Francisco’s Center for Sex & Culture (where she also serves on the Advisory Board), and the head curator of San Francisco in Exile, a performance series showcasing San Francisco’s best up-and-coming queer underground artists. Gina is currently pursuing her MFA in Fiction Writing at San Francisco State University. She likes glitter, the color fuchsia, leopard print, and political discussion as foreplay. Find out more at queershoulder.tumblr.com.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a Worcester raised, Toronto matured, Oakland-based queer Sri Lankan writer, performer and teacher. She is the 2009-10 Artist in Residence at UC Berkeley’s June Jordan Poetry for the People program and the co-founder and co-artistic director of Mangos With Chili, North America’s only touring cabaret of queer and trans people of color performing artists. She is a 2009 commissioned performer with Sins Invalid, the national performance organization of queer people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. Her one woman show, Grown Woman Show, has toured nationally, including performances at the National Queer Arts Festival, Swarthmore College, Yale University, Reed College and McGill University. The author of Consensual Genocide, her writing has appeared in the anthologies Yes Means Yes, Visible: A Femmethology, Homelands, Colonize This, We Don’t Need Another Wave, Bitchfest, Without a Net, Dangerous Families, Brazen Femme, Femme and A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over The World. She is finishing her second book of poetry, Love Cake, and her first memoir, Dirty River and is happy about the forthcoming publication of The Revolution Starts At Home: Transforming Abuse Through Community Accountability, which she co-edited with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani, by South End Press in 2010. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, focusing on creative nonfiction and community-based teaching by writers of color.

Billie Rain is a fierce warrior lioness and old school riot grrrl who spends most of hir time horizontal and then creates bad-ass work as a filmmaker and author.

In 1992, Durt Vs. Angela Chase sprang fully formed from the forehead of Kathy Acker, in the form of a zine titled JIGSAW KILL. Eighteen years later they turned into a band.

Girl Talk: A Cis and Trans Woman Dialogue
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
7:30pm
S.F. LGBT Community Center - Ceremonial Room
1800 Market Street
Tickets: $12-$20
Buy Tickets On-line!: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/111553
More info here: http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/QFest10/GirlTalk.html

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 a 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.

CAST BIOS:

D. Rita Alfonso teaches LGBT and Queer Studies at UC Berkeley, and offers LGBT seminars to the queer public under the rubric of www.LGBTStudies.ning.com. Photography is another of her passions, and you will often see her about town documenting queer and trans events and performers; her photography can be found at dralfonsophotography.com.

Daughter and granddaughter of anarchist feminists, Danielle Askini is a feisty high femme hailing from all over. A queer activist since the womb, Danielle grew up doing battle with big boys—and winning. As a Trans activist Danielle has focused her work on creating safe schools, depathologizing trans and femme identities, and liberating health care for all people. Her writings have included “Social Work or Sex Work?” a critical examination of class inequality in social work education, and “Gender Refugee” a chapbook of poems and essays on gender transition and migration. She is fluent in Dutch and working hard on Swedish. Stockholm is her second home.

Meliza Bañales aka Missy Fuego writes books, sews clothes, and makes movies. She has toured with Sister Spit: The Next Generation and Body Heat: The Femme Porn Tour. She is currently working on a spoken-word album with Crunks Not Dead Records and another collection of short stories, Life Is Wonderful, People Are Terrific. She makes art in San Francisco.

Annie Danger is a fierce and fearsome performer. Raised in the desert by a pack of drag queen werewolves who were themselves a litter produced by Leigh Bowery, Marina Abramovic, and Andy Kaufman, Ms. Danger wants nothing more than your allegiance to the tenets of your own thoughtful ethics and a sturdy but flexible sense of humor. She is a transsexual woman who lives and loves in the San Francisco Bay area mostly. You can find out more at: www.anniedanger.webs.com

Ryka Aoki de la Cruz is a poet, performer, and composer who has been honored by the California State Senate for creating Trans/Giving, LA’s only art/performance series dedicated to trans, genderqueer, and intersex artists. Ryka’s long poem “Sometimes Too Hot the Eye of Heaven Shines” has won RADAR Productions’ first Eli Coppola Memorial Chapbook Contest, and is forthcoming from Inconvenient Press. Her current project is Trans Office Hours, which matches trans-identified professors with trans-identified students entering or re-entering college. Ryka has a third-degree black belt in Kodokan Judo and is a professor of English at Santa Monica College.

Gina de Vries is a queer femme cissexual woman, a Paisan ex-Catholic pervert, and a writer, performer, and activist with a long history doing political organizing in and with queer and trans communities. As an activist, she is especially interested in the intersections of intersex, trans, reproductive justice, sex worker, multi-cultural, cross-class, and disability activism; and using art, writing, and performance as political tools. Gina’s writing has appeared dozens of places, from the academic to the pornographic – recent publications include Issue #4 of Bound to Struggle: Where Kink and Radical Politics Meet, Girl Crush, and The Revolution Starts at Home. Gina has performed, taught, and lectured everywhere from chapels to leatherbar backrooms, and recent university appearances include Reed College, Yale University, and Harvard University. She is the founder and facilitator of Sex Workers’ Writing Workshop, a writing class for current and former sex workers at San Francisco’s Center for Sex & Culture (where she also serves on the Advisory Board). And, she’s currently pursuing her MFA in Fiction Writing at San Francisco State University. She likes glitter, the color fuchsia, leopard print, and political discussion as foreplay. Find out more at queershoulder.tumblr.com.

Zarah Ersoff is a queer musicologist, Southern dyke, teacher and activist. She divides her time in academia between exposing college students to the pleasures of camp, codes and concealment in LGBT popular music, and writing about the relationship between same-sex desire and colonialism in 19th-century French music. Originally from Winston-Salem, NC (illustrious home of Krispy Kreme donuts and Camel cigarettes), she now enjoys living richly without riches in Los Angeles with her lovely and talented partner Lauren Steely.

Julia Serano is an Oakland-based writer, performer and trans activist. She is the author of Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Seal Press, 2007), 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 BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine, 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, Clamor, Kitchen Sink, make/shift, other, LiP and Transgender Tapestry), and have been used as teaching materials in gender studies, queer studies, psychology and human sexuality courses in colleges across North America. For more information about all of her creative endeavors, check out www.juliaserano.com.

E. Rose Sims, a Filipina-Ashkenazic mixed-class trans dyke mestiza, is a writer, religion scholar, medic, and survivor from rural Oregon. Dedicated to the projects of media justice, radical love, and community building, she writes online as “little light” at http://takingsteps.blogspot.com and elsewhere, serves on the advisory board of the Allied Media Conference in Detroit, and was a charter member of the Speak! Radical Women of Color Media Collective. She has recently performed with such diverse organizations as Detroit’s Allied Media Project, Seattle’s TumbleMe Productions, the National Queer Arts Festival, and the Bay’s own Mangos With Chili. Her writing has found its way everywhere from law school classrooms and academic conferences to bathroom mirrors and protest marches. Rose is currently busy being in good stories and getting preachy in Portland, Oregon, and is moving down to the East Bay this fall; she carries a pen, her ancestors, and the mismatched ID of a citizen of the borderlands with her at all times.

***This event received a Creating Queer Community Commission from Queer Cultural Center funded through the San Francisco Foundation.***

“I have a Movement Crush on you, and you, and you, and…”

En route to Boston, updating from the Peter Pan bus w/free wireless, still riding high from CLPP. I have a Hott Hott Movement Crush on alla you. Thanks to everyone who made it so great, esp. Jos & Lilianna for KICKING ASS with me on the Trans Feminism panel, Melissa for being the best conference roomie evar, & everyone who busted a move on the dance floor Saturday night. 

Also, Local Burgers + rum root beer floats + Doctor Who w/my favorite linguist last night was a great & relaxing way to say good-bye to W. Mass. The Doctor’s new companion is a sex worker! Amazing!

Beantown, remember to come to my & Rachel’s Trans Feminism workshop at Harvard tomorrow, and to my writing workshop at Toni’s on Weds night. (Details here!)

Also, big big BIG congratulations to my brilliant & sexy ex Tobi for winning a Feminist Porn Award for “Doing It Ourselves: The Trans Women Porn Project”! (Again — I’m so proud to be in this movie.)

“Doing It Ourselves: The Trans Women Porn Project” is out out out (be forewarned, it’s porn)!!!

From the cover:
Doing It Ourselves is a hot collection of trans women and their partners of all genders engaging in sex the way they want to be represented.  Starting with a group of trans women who are tired of the way that they have seen trans women portrayed in porn, this film tells the story of its own creation when they decide to, well, do it themselves.

Doing It Ourselves is a project that means a lot to me. In the interest of full disclosure: Tobi and I are exes, and we filmed our scene together in the first blush of our relationship. We were very much in love, so the movie has big emotional significance for me, just in terms of it being a kind of time capsule of our relationship.

But working on Doing It Ourselves was also a coming together of sexuality and politics for me. This movie is such a breath of fresh air in a porn world that is dominated by unrealistic and offensive representations of trans women. I am so unbelievably proud of my brilliant ex for having the chutzpah & tenacity to make her dream a reality. And I am so unbelievably proud to have a scene in this film.