2009

It’s nearing the end of the first decade of this millenium, and what better time now than to reflect on this year (and possibly years gone by).

I started this blog back in July. It was an opportunity to say and vent the feelings, perceptions and stories that I felt I couldn’t share anywhere else. However, London Girl has become a lot more than that.

You see, I thought I would just write and that would be it. I didn’t actually think I would learn from myself, or that I would revisit my old ramblings and gain insight. Yet I have. I’ve actually documented something quite special and powerful here – and at the time I didn’t even realise it.

This however, has been a long time coming. Let’s rewind a few years. 2004/5 – that’s a good year.

I was about fourteen/fifteen, and I became aware that I had feelings for my best friend of the time. She is straight – and I was ashamed. I’d always harboured feelings, and inclinations about my gayness, but I was never, ever comfortable about it. I was always worried and scared – scared that I would be outcasted, that my life would reach a new hell, one far worse than the one I was living in. More importantly, I was scared that one day I would pluck up the courage to do something about this crush I had.

It was at that point where I made a crucial decision – one which it wasn’t until this year that I have been able to begin to reverse. I would cease all communication with this friend. It was easier to not speak to her, and pretend that I hate her, that to maintain such a close friendship whilst not being able to be with her. Thus, for four years I didn’t speak to her.

Following our weird break-up, I maintained my “hetero” appearance. Well, I was crap at it… But I would hesitate and act out dislike when other female friends insisted on groping my arse or boobs (apparently they are gropable!) – in order to portray this fake image of myself. I wouldn’t get drunk in case I revealed something I didn’t want to be let-loose, and I lied to my friends and family.

Then comes 2009. Many have claimed that this year has been terrible; things have happened, or it’s not been as exciting as previous years – and coupled with the economic crisis which currently looms over us, things don’t seem to be improving that much. I would have to disagree though.

This year for me has been a year of great and enourmous change. I started off the year (posting on my public blog) about how I am shrouded in secrecy, and how I never, ever feel at ease. Everything I say and do is just a facade; and I can’t write openly, I can’t express myself because I feel so bottled up. It was a horrible feeling – one which I never want to have to return to. I wasn’t myself – I was a reflection of a distorted image. It was dangerous.

Then I came out. It was a rather slow, and in some ways – painful – experience. It wasn’t painful because anything bad happened as a consequence, but it was painful in that for the first time I felt internally happy. It was painful because I had to break down all of those wall and barriers which for so long harboured my true self – the one that for many years I couldn’t come to accept or admit.

I am however, extremely lucky to know the people I do. They’re a great bunch – and yes I do moan about them – but if it wasn’t for my friends, I don’t honestly think I would be in the position that I am now. Okay, I’m still hopelessly single; but they’ve given me the strength, understanding and freedom to be who I wanted to be. In the past I surrounded myself with the wrong sort. Y’know who I mean – the opinionated, the close-minded, and non-obliging people of the world. Thoroughly heterosexual, and more often than not – right-wing. They were good friends to me, but they weren’t supportive, nor were they open-minded. They couldn’t see past there own view or take on the world – and that only made things worse for me.

I now feel comfortable to be who I am. To be the person who I think as far back as I can remember, I always knew I was. I don’t feel ashamed any more.

Yet, I’ve gained all of this in just eight or nine months.

That is why 2009 has been a good year. Okay, my Summer was all-in-all, rubbish. My AS grades weren’t particularly wonderful either; and things aren’t exactly brilliant with home-life either… But for once I want to celebrate the positives of a year, instead of harnessing on all of the bad.

This year has been so life-changing. I’ve met knew people, I’ve found support, I’ve opened my mind. Even this time last year, if I were to count all of the people who I fancied or liked, it wouldn’t extend beyond five. Now that I am accepting, and more open… Well that number has greatly increased.

I know I still have some way to go. I need to overcome my mind, and I need to embrace who I want – or at least embark on a stronger mission to find someone I can call my own. But I’ve paved the foundations to make this possible. I’m out of the closet, I’m free, and I’m happy. But also, I can see the beauty in life and in people more readily than I previously had done.

So to everyone out there, I wish you a Happy New Year. I hope that this past year has been good for you too, and I wish that you too can focus on the positives that make all of our lives worthwhile. I hope that whatever problems, issues and personal missions you face, that you can overcome them, and learn to accept that our indivuality is the essence of mankind. Embrace who and what you are, and fear not being that person.

I would love to hear your stories of 2009, and so I’ve set up an anonymous posting form. Just type whatever you want in the box (absolutely anything), and all replies (unless you’ve elected otherwise) will be posted on a new page called FormSpring. Please post whatever you want here; it’s completely anonymous – think of it as telling a secret to a stranger!

x

[Via http://londongirlblog.wordpress.com]

The Bigger Picture

So several hundred years ago Europeans decided to spread Christianity to subsaharan Africa and now the fruits of their labor and being born by gays through out the continent. A lot of newsprint has been spent on the upcoming Ugandan “kill teh gays” bill and how we and other developed countries should cut off aid due to that. Yet it’s also worth noting that a large swath of the Middle East already executes homosexuals and that doesn’t stop us from giving them huge amounts of cash.

If pictures are worth a thousand words then this map, from World Focus, should be worth at least a few brief news articles. Yet I doubt you’ll be seeing anyone pointing out that all the outrage focused on Uganda recently could just as easily be aimed at Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan or Somalia or Pakistan – all of whom receive foreign aid.

Cross-posted at Can’t Win For Losing

[Via http://queermerced.com]

One More Time....For 2009

It’s the last installment of the hottest, gay, 18+ dance party in the valley for 2009 this Wednesday. Come out and start celebrating the new decade early and enjoy a packed dancefloor, drink specials and that awesome vibe that you can only get at Integration. This week we’ll also have some guest DJ’s in the house as I (DJ Binx) will be celebrating my birthday with all of you.

Come early to avoid the line. See you there!

[Via http://queerfresno.com]

Archbishop of York attacks Uganda's anti-gay bill

From http://seattletimes.nwsource.com:

A top Anglican cleric who was born in Uganda spoke out Thursday against a proposed law in his native country that would impose the death penalty on some gays.

Archbishop of York John Sentamu – who along with the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is one of the global fellowship’s most senior priests – condemned the anti-gay law now being considered by the East African nation’s parliament.

“I’m opposed to the death sentence. I’m also not happy when you describe people in the kind of language you find in this … bill,” he told BBC radio.

Although Sentamu seemed to suggest he was the first to attack the proposed law, Williams has also spoken out against it, telling The Daily Telegraph earlier this month that it was “shocking in its severity.”

“Apart from invoking the death penalty, it makes pastoral care impossible – it seeks to turn pastors into informers,” he told the paper in an interview published Dec. 12.

The issue of homosexuality has triggered a debate that has divided the global 77 million-strong Anglican fellowship, including in the United States, where it has splintered the Episcopal Church.

In Thursday’s interview, Sentamu chose his words carefully, restating the content of a 2004 Anglican statement that condemned “the victimization or diminishment of human beings whose affections happen to be ordered towards people of the same sex.”

African churches have been at the forefront of the Anglican backlash against the blessings given to gay marriages and the ordination of gay bishops in the West. Uganda, whose population is nearly 40 percent Anglican, has become a rallying point for conservatives, with some U.S. Episcopal denominations switching their allegiance to the Church of Uganda following the 2003 ordination of openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson.

Sentamu said he and Williams had been in touch with his Anglican colleagues in Africa about the proposed law, which has aroused a storm of indignation worldwide. It is expected to go before parliament in the new year.

The bill would mandate a death sentence for sexually active gays living with HIV or in cases of same-sex rape. Anyone convicted of a homosexual act would face life imprisonment.

Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni will not try to block the bill, his spokesman Tamale Mirundi said Thursday, although he did say the president would attempt to convince his National Resistance Movement Party, which has a majority in parliament, to not support it.

“President Museveni cannot block the anti-gays bill,” Mirundi said, saying that if he did so “he will have become a dictator.”

[Via http://nealbinnyc.wordpress.com]

Cab Ride in 300 Words

Jaden led me by the hand outside to get a cab. We both slid into the back seat. I told the driver the name of the hotel, never taking my eyes from beautiful Jaden. She leaned over to kiss my mouth. Her lip gloss tasted sweet on my tongue. Without a glace towards the cab driver in the front, Jaden got on her knees on the back seat, swinging her leg over to straddle me. Her breasts were right in my face. I could smell the aroma of her conditioner as she flipped her long auburn hair behind her shoulder. Her hands moved behind my neck. Without thinking I slid both of my hands behind her smooth thighs and up under her dress. She sat down, bringing my hands to her bare ass. Jaden was not wearing any panties.

My eyes moved from her gorgeous breasts, barely contained by the neckline of her dress, up to her eyes. There I saw a twinkle of mischief that was blinked into rolling pleasure by her eyelids as I slid my middle finger down the middle of her ass, hooking it neatly into her already wet pussy. Keeping quiet for the driver, Jaden’s tongue snuck out to caress her lips. My finger stroked her wetness all the way to her clit and dipped inside her in turn. She gasped audibly as the driver of the cab applied the brakes, causing my finger to enter her to the knuckle. I felt her contract once wetly around my digit, then she was sliding off of me and out of the cab door. We had arrived at the hotel.

[Via http://chelseaquestion.wordpress.com]

Surely you Jest

Caught me because the little girl guarding my heart fell asleep.

Sneaky you.

So attached. So soon?

Don’t play games with me.

I’ve heard it all before. Even said it a few times.

So soon?

I don’t want to believe you.

But I don’t have that nostalgic feeling of terrible things to come.

So it’s an opopanax that I welcome with an open heart. Or did I mean arms?

Atleast, when you stab me in those, it’ll heal quicker and less painfully.

According to you, it shouldn’t hurt at all.

“It won’t even sting,” you assure me.

Why?

Because the feeling’s mutual you say.

But, do you fabricate?

Only time will tell.

[Via http://teejayc.wordpress.com]

Expose

Some of the transgender who attack us seem to think the women here and elsewhere who oppose the transgender lie are engaging in some kind of old-school activism. They want to believe that we are forming some competing movement, or other such nonsense. They like to apply labels like HBS or Taliban, create a faux fight between two arbitrary sides, shout and demean, and basically engage in the sort of politicking that they believe to have been responsible for their “success” in the 90’s. Of course they are wrong.

I basically have two aims with regard to the transgender business. One, I want to provide an alternative viewpoint to the TG dogma that confronts new transitioners as they begin their healing process. The sooner they clear that toxic mess, the sooner they can get through the process. The voice of real women who have come before you telling you that your senses are right about the TG and to stay away from them is a huge help.

In addition to speeding the process in the initial stages of transition, and assuaging guilt for believing your own senses about the sexual fetishists, by exposing the truth I hope to rob the transgender of new recruits. Not recruits from women like us, because we generally know the score and leave of our own accord. But recruits from “gender” philosophy such as the genderqueer who want to use it to challenge society’s rules. If they can see who their so-called allies really are, they may think twice about their priorities and allegiances. The truth is very ugly.

The vast majority of the TG are simply heterosexual transvestite men. And transvestism is tied closely with other, possibly more troublesome sexual behavior. What sets the “full time” transvestite apart from the garden variety crossdresser is that the sexual fetish they both share is that, for whatever reason, in the “transgender” transvestite it gets out of control. The reasons behind this are a subject that needs to be studied if these people are going to be helped.

In a past post I wrote about how I hoped for more research into GID, but not because I believe in “gender problems”. Nobody has “gender problems” as such. People like Ron Gold wrote his famous post on this, and indeed everyone in larger society understands this instinctively. So do the transgenders, in fact, and that is why they twist philosophy and turn logic on its head. Gender itself is merely shorthand for a variety of social phenomena; it can hardly be disordered.

The first myth that must be exposed is that surgery creates a transsexual. There are plenty of transvestites who get surgery, and in fact they make up the bulk of the “transsexuals” among the TG. The goal of this sleight-of-hand is to a) excuse their behavior and b) provide a path for the transvestite to live “full time as a woman”. In other words, ready access to their drug of choice. Getting surgery is how the “transgender transvestite” actualizes their fetish and makes it permanent and inescapable. I have to thank an anonymous source for explaining this aspect of the rather puzzling motivations of the “transgender transsexual”. I’m sure more detailed discoveries will be found as researchers delve into the mysteries surrounding fetish and exhibitionism in neurology.

I also believe it will be found that GID, at is called by puzzled researchers, is an amalgam of other already recognized problems, with the veneer of gender laid over the top. It has been suggested to me that the sexual high that transvestites receive from exposing themselves to the public in women’s clothing is like an addiction. And like any addict, they rage and fume when their drug is taken away, hence their attacks on women like us. It is not because we expose them for being men in dresses that they hate us. They do that to themselves all the time- but on their schedule. They want the control of where and when to do the “Gotcha!” moment and bask in the sexual glow, and anyone who would stand in the way of that must be destroyed.

That is why they rage against those who tell the truth about them. That is why they threaten to write an “expose”, their tried-and-true weapon against us- the threat to ruin our lives by trying to “out” us to our communities and destroy our womanhood.

The fact that they are willing to commit this act which, in their own parlance, puts us at risk for violence and death, simply for continued access to their sexual thrill is despicable. It illustrates perfectly just how unbalanced and aggressive they really are. How selfish. How male.

I and the other women here are no stranger to male violence. Cat has written quite a bit about her experiences with these people. And every woman who ever lived has felt the impact of male aggression in their lives, some with horrifying directness. That is why I write these things and put myself at risk in the face of these all too real threats against me. I care about women like me, who have gone through so much just to survive. We few who know the truth must stand up to the men who would abuse us.

We must tell them they cannot, they will not, silence our voices.

[Via http://ariablue.wordpress.com]