Film courtesy of Syndicate of Human Image Traffickers.

All but her belly buried in the floor;
And the lewd trounce of a final muted beat!
We flee her spasm through a fleshless door…
Then you, the burlesque of our lust — and faith,
Lug us back lifeward — bone by infant bone.
— Hart Crane, “National Winter Garden,” (1930)

“Jo Boobs” Weldon is Headmistress of The New York School of Burlesque, whose home at The Slipper Room is just a few blocks from where Lydia Thompson’s “London Blondes” brought burlesque to America and a stone’s throw from where Minsky’s original National Winter Garden made burlesque part of the American vernacular. Minsky’s notoriously established Gypsy Rose Lee as an icon synonymous with striptease, and launched the careers of Abbott and Costello, Phil Silvers and Robert Alda before being closed in the name of public morality.

Houston Street Burlesque by Mabel Dwight (1928)

Is burlesque – a word which refers to turning things upside down – still able to subvert morals and mores? In a popular culture where the use of sexuality to sell consumer goods is banal, pornography of nearly every stripe is freely and instantly available, and sympathetic gay and lesbian characters are commonplace, is the self-conscious performance of gender merely campy fun or does it still have a liberating capacity? Can sex work, titillation, gender play and masturbation undermine heterosexual monogamy? Whose moralities and identities might they challenge?

Catherine MacKinnon argues that sexualized depictions of women in patriarchal societies reinforce misogyny to the point of constituting a form of violence. Do sexualized performances by women lead to their individual and collective debasement? Is stripping a phenomenon where women who appeal most to men are degraded whereas burlesque liberates women who stand outside the norms of beauty as prescribed by male desire? Considering stripping and prostitution, I ask whether everyone sells their bodies at every job? Further, when men pay a high premium to be with a woman or just to look at one, whose body is exploited? More specifically, does it make sense to import 20th century standards of judgment to a 21st century United States whose educational system produces more female post-graduates than male and whose career women earn 94.2% of the income of their male counterparts? Despite shifts in income and status, why do so few straight males study burlesque or work as strippers?

Jo Boobs and I met at the basement headquarters of her school on the coldest evening in recent years to explore questions of gender, activism, and whether she and her ilk are gender traitors or gender busters. She even stripped down to fighting gear for an intimate performance caught by our unblinking digital eyeball. (See above!) In June 2010, Jo will publish The Pocket Book of Burlesque (with a forward by Margaret Cho), a volume whose slender design can slip under the inspector’s prying gaze. The New York School of Burlesque is in sympathetic affiliation with Miss Indigo Blue’s Academy of Burlesque in Seattle and Michelle L’Amour’s Burlesque Finishing School in Chicago as well as programs in Washington, D.C and elsewhere. When will someone open a campus in Tehran?

COILHOUSE: How does burlesque differ from stripping?
JO BOOBS: To understand the difference, look at it from the audience’s point of view. If someone goes to a strip joint, they usually go in whenever they want, they pick the performer they want, they negotiate how they interact with them, they interact one-on-one, and they leave. When they go to a burlesque show, the show starts at a [predetermined] time, they pay a cover (not the performers), they watch the show, there isn’t usually any one-on-one interaction, and they leave when the performance is over.

OH HOLY NIGHT SHIT:

“Merry Christmas, Queens!”

Just in case you missed it, here’s some lively footage shot by the LGBT activists who crashed Hiram Monserrate‘s Christmas party in Queens on Dec 22. Quote du jour: “Hiram believes marriage should be between one man, one woman and a broken bottle.” YOW.

Tensions have been running extremely high in NYC since several Democratic senators shocked gay civil rights supporters by ensuring the rejection of a bill to legalize same sex marriage. The final vote was 38 to 24.

Understandably, proponents of the bill have been feeling an extra bit of ire toward Monserrate. Convicted of misdemeanor assault charges in October for assaulting his girlfriend (allegedly with a piece of broken glass), the Queens lawmaker had initially voiced support for the bill, but later changed his vote to nay. “Meanwhile he wants to marry his girlfriend and he wants Sen. Ruben Diaz, who has been raging against gay people in New York forever, and who is an ordained minister, to marry him.” (via)

Gay activist Jon-Marc McDonald at a rally for marriage equality in New York City on December 3, 2009.

Watch to the end to see the protesters being congenially escorted out of the building (“thank you very much, brother, appreciate it, have a good evening!”), where they questioned Monserrate’s openly gay chief of staff, Wayne Mahlke, who replied that he did not share the senator’s views.

Via Feministe.

On December 10th (International Human Rights Day), Filipina activist Sass Rogando Sasot spoke passionately about transgender rights before an assembly of the United Nations. Her speech, titled “Reclaiming the Lucidity of Our Hearts”, addresses the need for vastly improved acceptance, support and protection of transgender citizens worldwide.

Her entire presentation is very moving, but about 8 minutes into this clip, something shifts in Sasot’s voice and delivery. What began as an engaging speech swiftly transforms into something far more urgent, immediate, and beautiful:

Is our right to life, to dignified existence, to liberty, and pursuit of happiness subservient to gender norms? This doesn’t need a complicated answer. You want to be born, to live, and die with dignity – so do we! You want the freedom to express the uniqueness of the life force within you – so do we! You want to live with authenticity – so do we!

Now is the time that we realize that diversity does not diminish our humanity; that respecting diversity does not make us less human; that understanding and accepting our differences does not make us cruel. And in fact, history has shown us that denying and rejecting human variability is the one that has lead us to inflict indignity upon indignity towards each other.

We are human beings of transgender experience. We are your children, your partners, your friends, your siblings, your students, your teachers, your workers, your citizens.

Let our lives delight in the same freedom of expression that you enjoy as you manifest to the outside world your unique and graceful selves.

Mabuhay, Ms. Sasot. Kinship.

The full transcript of her speech –reproduced at Rainbow Bloggers Phillipines with permission to repost– can be found below the jump.

We are going to get right into it because you and I both know that there are copies to be made and collated A.S.A.P. As in As Soon As Possible. As in by 10 minutes ago.

The Naked Lunch is a mess of a novel which, I suppose, was the point. William S. Burroughs’s most famous work, made possible by the cut-up technique he championed* was decried as pornographic when it was published in Paris in 1959. It wasn’t published in the U.S. until 1962 where an obscenity trial was held for it and it was banned by courts in Boston, though the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned that ban in 1966. What The Naked Lunch is about is hard to say. There is a man named William Lee. He is an Agent. There are strange, far off places with names like Interzone and Freeland. There is a lot of sex of many varieties, centipedes, drugs, pedophilia, and Mugwumps. Somewhere in all this is satire. Mostly, it is nonsense.

And yet, it is interesting nonsense which is the key to its enduring legacy and the reason that David Cronenberg decided to make a movie out of it in 1991 starring Peter Weller, pulling an excellent Burroughs imitation. Also mixed in there are Ian Holm, Judy Davis and a crazed cameo by Roy Scheider. Naked Lunch does its best to make some kind of narrative out of Uncle Bill’s series of vignettes by filling in many of the gaps with snippets taken from Burroughs’s life, meaning we get to meet fellow Beat writers Alan Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac in the forms of Bill’s friends Martin and Hank. It also features the infamous “William Tell routine” which resulted in Burroughs shooting and killing his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer Burroughs née Adams, in 1951 for which he would spend 13 days in jail and eventually receive a suspended 2 year sentence, in absentia.

Luckily, the novel contains a plethora of just the kind of body horror material that so appealed to Cronenberg before 2002’s Spider. Fluids, orifices, and gruesome transformations are in gleeful abundance and the end result is a film that keeps the hallucinatory vision of the novel while adding a narrative anchor to keep it from completely floating away. Also, it helped to insure that, should one ever have to name a foreign rent-boy for their novel, short story, movie, whatever, it will always be Kiki. Always.

*This is not true, as pointed out by Ben Morris in the comments. While it is considered part of Burroughs’s cut-up period it was not produced using this method, a method Burroughs became acquainted with only after the publication of “The Naked Lunch”, meaning that Burroughs required no special technique to write a confusing mess of a book.

I met Larkin Grimm in the springtime: she and her band came over to my house for tea and stir-fry one sleepy afternoon during SXSW last March, after playing the Leafy Green showcase at Emo’s with Vetiver, Sleepy Sun and Kid Congo Powers. The next day, we bravely explored the chaotic, throng-clogged streets of downtown Austin, in search of late night Thai food and transcendent musical experiences. Luckily, we found both, and got to know each other during the hunt.

Photo by Ports Bishop.

Larkin Grimm is an elegant warrior, strong and tall and crowned with unruly ringlets. Her eyes change color, and her calm gaze penetrates even the most fortified defenses with a chthonic wisdom far beyond her 26 years.

Her legendary upbringing tends to precede her: she was raised in Memphis, Tennessee by devotees of the religious cult The Holy Order Of MANS. When she was six years old, her family moved to the Blue Ridge region of Georgia, where, as one of five children of folk musicians, she found herself largely left to her own devices. She was a wild mountain witch child who dropped out of public school at age ten, yet went on to attend Yale to study painting and sculpture. Nomadic by nature, she has rambled all over the world, learning healing arts in Thailand and engaging with entheogens with a shaman in the Alaskan wilderness. She taught herself how to sing and play music during these mind-expanding journeys, locked in dark rooms and deep in the woods, possessed by spirits. She recorded two experimental albums, Harpoon and The Last Tree, both of which were improvisational and intensely cathartic works.

The enchanting Larkin Grimm sings by the side of a lake. Shot and edited by Bow Jones.

After corresponding for years, Michael Gira (of Swans and Angels of Light) signed Larkin to his own Young God label, and was instrumental in the birth of her latest album, Parplar. In her own words regarding their time working together, “…he has this great ability to make me feel comfortable being my flamboyantly perverse Mary Poppins self, and the songs I’ve written under his whip are probably the best I’ve ever come up with, so I am super grateful for this time in my life.” Gira’s appraisal of Larkin captures her aptly:

Larkin is a magic woman. She lives in the mountains in north Georgia. She collects bones, smooth stones, and she casts spells. She worships the moon. She is very beautiful, and her voice is like the passionate cry of a beast heard echoing across the mountains just after a tremendous thunder storm, when the air is alive with electricity. I don’t consider her folk though — she is pre-folk, even pre-music. She is the sound of the eternal mother and the wrath of all women. She goes barefoot everywhere, and her feet are leathery and filthy. She wears jewels, glitter, and glistening insects in her hair. She’s great!

In a time when our culture seems to openly scorn –but secretly craves– magic, Larkin Grimm is an unashamed and forthright power to be reckoned with.

Photographer unknown.

Coilhouse: Listening to your first two albums (Harpoon and The Last Tree), I get the impression that there was something of a strange sea-change in both your music, and your mode of self-expression, kicking off with Parplar. It’s an incredibly powerful album, and it’s clear that you ventured to some fantastic other-worlds while making it. What was that process like? I’ve read that you recorded the album in a haunted mansion: did the ghosts put their two cents in?
Larkin: Well, my first album was incredibly strange. I was still thinking of myself as a visual artist and a noise musician at the time. I had no interest in songwriting back then. There were some elements of folk that came through, though, and on the second album I tried to explore my folk roots a bit, but still avoided song structure. The big change came when I met Michael Gira and we blew each other’s minds and there was a lot of excitement in our exchange of musical ideas. Michael would force me to sit down and listen to these tunes by Bob Dylan and Neil Young and The Beatles, all bands I avoided like the plague before.

Interview continues after the jump.

In the wake of the California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Proposition 8, banning gay marriage, I found this 2004 documentary by Rosa von Praunheim about gay men in Germany who belong to ultra right-wing, nationalist organizations interesting, if only for the dichotomy it seems to represent. It may boggle the mind to imagine someone who, as a member of an oppressed group or subculture, would choose to associate with a group who champions a way of thinking that is so diametrically opposed to that individual’s well-being; a way of thinking that went so far as to sanction their extermination. That they themselves don’t appear to see this conflict of interests is strange, but that they would not sympathize with the groups that they speak against may strike one as stranger.

It is, I think, a blind spot for many of the more liberal minded of us. The quest for equality, as noble and necessary as it is, will always have a less savory side; for while we are all indeed the same regardless of skin color, or belief, or sexual orientation, we can also fear the same way, and hate the same way, and discriminate the same way. It seems that for many — many more than should be — equality does not apply to everyone and just because they deserve the same rights and privileges as “everyone else”, doesn’t mean there aren’t those lower on the totem pole who don’t deserve the same; those who can still remain quantified as “other”.

It is, perhaps, a cynical take on human nature but one that bears some truth. Hopefully in time it, like Prop 8, will be nothing but a sad and embarrassing memory.

[via poeTV]

Here is one of the holy grails of interviews, with visionary writer Kathy Acker quizzing the legendary William Burroughs.

They talk about many things: Word as Virus, Scientology, Jesus and the legion of apocryphal stories that followed Burroughs around like carrion crows. This took place in the late ’80s, and both had less than a decade to live, passing away within a few months of each other in 1997. We will not see their like again.

A particularly telling moment, at least to my eyes, comes early on when Burroughs talks about the power of “shotgun” methods — the cut-up method in writing or a spray blast in painting — that introduce a random factor. Yet at the same time, they don’t take away the importance of “careful brushwork.”

It’s an important point: it illustrates how false the line between inspiration and discipline is. Acker and Burroughs grasped that instinctually and their works put the lie to that division. I think many people wrongly draw the lesson from both that simply spewing up one’s subconscious visions makes for good writing or art, while missing the considerable craft they put into honing those thoughts into glistening brain-gems.

Lessons aside, the prime pleasure in watching this interview comes from witnessing two keenly unique minds in a fascinating conversation. The rest is below the jump. Enjoy.

Today is IDAHO, 2009. On this date not too long ago (1992), homosexuality was finally removed from the International Classification of Diseases of the World Health Organization (WHO). This year, in a gesture of pride and solidarity, hundreds of folks from 48 countries across six continents around the world participated in a video message produced by the Parisian IDAHO committee in conjunction with the Hong Kong-based site, Gays.com.

“Participants submitted videos in all of the world’s key languages, including Afrikaans, Arabic, Cantonese, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Tamil and even American Sign Language.”

Unfortunately, you can’t actually watch the video (or anything else) on the official Gays.com site right now because they’re experiencing a big ol’ DDoS attack that hit the site approximately 48 hours ago, shortly before various global IDAHO celebrations were set to begin. Coincidence? Um, no. Gays.com spokesperson Kenneth Tan, who spoke to Pitch Engine earlier today, says that “this is a well-timed, well-orchestrated assault by a large botnet with tens of thousands of PCs sending requests to our site. Engineers with our Internet Service Provider remarked they have never seen an attack of this intensity before.”

Okay, who else is getting REALLY effin’ sick of irony? Thankfully, Gays.com has been able to upload and share the video on many other sites. Ooo! AND… via Calpernia Addams’ Twitter, I just found out that (with a nod to the weekend’s worldwide IDAHO celebrations) France has just become the first country in the world to officially depathologize transexualism as a mental illness. Woot!

Two steps back, three steps forward. Let’s keep on dancing, shall we?

Issue 01 contributor/photographer Taslimur and Ash

Last Thursday, Coilhouse staff photographer Allan Amato threw a crossdressing party at his studio/loft. For various reasons we ourselves couldn’t make it, and now that we’re seeing the party photos from that night, we’re twice as sad that we weren’t there. To me, these spontaneous, messy party photos are just as powerful as Allan’s most pristine, carefully-composed fashion masterpieces. This series, intended to be only a private gallery for the party attendees until I begged him to let me post it here, is honestly one of my favorite things that Allan’s ever done.

Click after the cut for lots and lots more photos. I identified people where I could, but wasn’t sure of everyone’s name. If you were there, identify yourself in the comments!

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue: there’s a bit of everything on the “queer” Flickr set, which focuses heavily on vintage images of the gay movement. Gwen at Sociological Images makes some interesting observations about the 1970s protest image shown above:

Given that since the anti-gay-marriage Prop 8 passed in California in November, many people have argued that a) the African American community is particularly homophobic and voted against the bill (so it’s Black people’s fault Prop 8 passed) or b) gay rights organizations have failed to reach out to the African American community and win their support (so it’s elitist gay people’s fault Prop 8 passed), both positions that imply that gay rights and African Americans are at odds, I found this photo from Philadelphia (in 1972) particularly striking as a reminder that African Americans often did and do support gay rights, and the gay rights movement has often actively included them… oh yeah, and also there are gay Black people.

There’s some fantasy mixed in with reality in this Flickr set, too. The set owner tacks amusing observations onto a 1918 Navy recruitment poster, digs up some lurid pulp covers and includes a lot of maybe-queer vintage portraits side-by-side with ones that are undeniably genuine. The set’s a wealth of information, too. The photos are lovingly annotated, so that you can branch off and start learning more. We’re introduced to photographer Grace Moon, dancer Alvin Ailey, comedian Wanda Sykes, and many more. There are hundreds of sets like this all over the web, and I can’t say what drew me to this one in particular enough to blog about it. But I think it’s the warmth. There are so many images here of people who look genuinely happy to be together, a glowing tenderness that runs through almost all the images collected here. At the end of the week – after that horrible “Storm is Coming” anti-gay marriage ad here in the states, and the recent reports of a wave of homophobia-driven murders in Iraq – it’s important to remember that the fight is far from over.