- My vote for the most supportive and entertaining on-line group worldwide would definitely go to STWTTF.... the best bunch of people around! Recently celebrating its third anniversary, the Star Trek Women's Terrorist Task Force [alias Gender Issues In Science Fiction ] is indeed a force to be reckoned with. This list could devised the cure for all known ills, has power over good and evil, and contains professors, writers, poets, musicians par excellence. With enough technical experts to run the world's computer systems single handed, its combined wit faster than a speeding exocet, [and the killing power of ten disturbed mother tigers only when called for], this group could rule the world any day it chose... but just let us get finished analysing this episode of Babylon 5 first....
- Some of the best writing from this group is only to be enjoyed in its day to day interaction - but browse thru' some of the best of the published work here
Apart from my piles of books acquired during the course of my degree, which I'm still getting through, though I admit with more pleasure now than when speed-reading to meet deadlines [this is why they call it 'reading' for a degree - because your booklists could last you the rest of your life?], my interests are technology, science fiction - especially Anne McCaffrey & Babylon 5,cats, I'm a secret Archers fan... yes folks, I confessed online to shedding tears while listening to every repeat of the death of John Archer! Hell, one of my earliest memories is listening to the repeat of Grace Archer's death... that programme probably has an awful lot to answer for!
Musical taste ?
Summed up as Virgin radio's original playlist, with a little pink added. As a child, I moved house so many times that I can usually accurately tell you the year of any hit of the late 50s and 60s not through any great feat of memory but because I can remember where we were living when it was playing. I'm sure there's a piece of research to be done on how the adverse affects of a childhood spent in army garrison towns can be mitigated thru exposure to music... but I found working thru countless deadlines while at Cambridge, that Virgin brought back a lot of memories... that, together with a dozen CDs got me thru to my finals...
What I choose to listen to, when I'm sitting working on a deadline at 3am are various Tom Robinson CDs, plus Janis Ian, Sheryl Crow, kd lang, Loudon Wainwright III, Neil Young [unplugged], Tina Turner, Joan Armatrading...
But what if you measure musical preferences by who I'd put my hand in my pocket and pay to see play in a month when the clients have been slower than usual in paying... Tom Robinson comes top of the list!
Why?
Well, it isn't only that there are few role-models for those of us of mature years [alias Agéd Crones] who are out there as queer or gay [rather than bi] yet who happen to be in relationships with members of the opposite sex...And after all, he has been out there very vocally for all us Diverse Folks since the days when it wasn't even fashionable to be queer... let alone bisexual...
It's also because of the feeling you get picking up yet one more compilation as you're wandering spitting mad 'round HMV in a break from jury service with a particularly patronising judge on the bench, and Tom's a voice of sanity... or realising the verses of Glad to be Gay on compilations keep you in touch with your own Queerstory... and of course the guy gives you musically everything from punk, jazz, country [ yes, really], rock, as well as one of the most enjoyable & educational live shows you could ever take your 13 year old son to see [as I did many years back]. With lyrics some of which you can too painfully identify with, others laugh with... [I snuck 'Law and Order' into a Radio Medway country music programme in 79 ...well, it *sounded* authentic C&W! ] Some you spent your wild youth getting drunk to, then later nostalged over at the Cambridge Folk Festival, and of course, there's your first Pride.... And for me the *only* song I can find the chords for on a guitar is still Too Good To Be True!
What else do I do?
Apart from spending an awful lot of time in front of a screen? Anything which can be loosely defined as a craft - so: not just writing, or animating gifs for presentations, but also embroidery, silk painting, Photoshop, creating huge fluffy mohair sweaters, web, papercraft, weaving, glass painting, fundraising, jewelry making, cookery.... with an awful lot of etceteras on the end!
Family?
I have a son, Daniel, who's 24 & just returned from Toronto having graduated in Philosophy summer 96, and is now working in London. I love him dearly, even though as two Aquarians together we're too opinionated to comfortably share the same physical space for long!
We've one cat (Gemma) who's got the best pedigree in the household, and one rabbit Sophie.
Life history?
I'm far less attached to it than I once was: one key fact which I've only been willing to share publicly is that I'm an incest survivor.
In 1989, I was finally able to yell back at my drunken and abusive parent, and I look on this as probably the most important step I took in becoming my own person... in that I'm not the quietest of mortals, I realise that if it took me over twenty years to turn around and fight back, then there's probably some value in sharing the difference doing this made in my life. However, the piece I'm writing who's work-in-progress title is Recovery is just that - very much a work in progress.
Although I define myself as gay, my sexuality has nothing to do with being abused: my first sexual experience was with another girl, long before the abuse started. I've zero tolerance for those claiming that False Memory Syndrome accounts for a lot of alleged incident: when you get abused late into your teens, you don't need a therapist to unearth memories, you're stuck with them and they can run your life till you find your own way of dealing with them. For me, that involved finally cutting off all contact with my father.
I've also survived and continue to survive heterosexual marriage! This is not to say that I regard either of these as being necessarily negative states: I've been successful in some areas in the past because I was brought up in a family where only visible success [ passing exams, coming first, being outstanding ] counted. It becomes hard addiction to kick - it takes you a long time to learn that one more piece of paper isn't going to do it: getting a scholarship at Cambridge was probably the only thing left for me to do - and so I did it. This translates well in any race for promotion in the real world... especially if professional exams are involved - but it can wreck relationships. However, it takes a strong relationship in the present to enable you to positively stand up to what this also may have done to your attitude to family, marriage and relationships in general.
- More links coming, particularly to friends of all sexualities, who have produced the sort of website this aspires to be [eventually].
For those desperate for intellectual content...a little gem for you:
- Z is the letter of mutilation: phonetically, Z stings like a chastising lash, an avenging insect; graphically, cast slantwise by the hand across the blank regularity of the page, amid the curvs of the alphabet, like an oblique and illicit blade, it cuts, slashes, or, as we say in French, zebras; from a Balzacian viewpoint, this Z (which appears in Balzac's name) is the letter of deviation..; finally..Z is..the initial of castration, so that by this orthographical error committed in the middle of his name, in the center of his body, Sarrasine [in Balzac's Sarrasine] receives the..Z in its true sense - the wound of deficiency. Further, S and Z are in relation of graphological iversion: the same letter seen from the other side of the mirror: Sarrasine contemplates..his own castration. Hence the slash (/) confronting the S of SarraSine and the Z..has a panic function: it is the slash of censure, the surface of the mirror, the wall of hallucination, the verge of antithesis, the abstraction of limit, the obliquity of the signifier, the index of the paradigm, hence of meaning. [R.Barthes (1974) S/Z Basil Blackwell,Oxford]
Thanks for dropping by...
Franni
opus cabaret
This month's Interesting (Gay-ish) Link
© 1998 Franni Vincent
Page last updated: 1 June 1998
