Check Your Titties At The Door...

but pick them off the floor first.

So here's the thing I'll admit: since the icy hands of menopause grabbed me and has never let go, my sleep patterns changed and now I have a habit of waking up around 2 am and being up about a half hour. I've learned not to get out of bed but I also know I won't fall right back to sleep. So I usually grab my iphone and log into a couple of blogs and read what's going on.

It ain't pretty.

One of the blogs I check out is Mr. Teddy Pig. Teddy is a pretty sane voice although he can be a little reactive. He is a gay man, openly HIV+, a lover of m/m romance. And he's been furiously watching while authors of m/m romance are being outed for *gasp* not being who they say they are.

Now it gets pretty confusing from here. There is one author who claimed to be a gay man but is actually a woman who claims now to be transexual. He's been the lightening rod because he has written of his experiences as a gay man and well, he isn't one.

But there are other trans writers and adrogynous writers and writer's who claim to ride unicorns and fart rainbows. And they're being attacked/questioned/doubted about their identities by, well, apparently other authors of m/m romance.

Wait a minute. I'm sorry. What? Who died and made them the gender identity police?

And may I just state for the record that the internet is the place to find porn, viruses and people claiming to be who they aren't. I had a wonderful night a long time ago with someone who kept claiming to be Carrie Fisher. She was so pissed off that I didn't believe her but as I pointed out, Carrie Fisher would never use Princess Leia as her online name. She's much too clever for that. So shame on the faker.

By the way, I didn't insist the online CF prove who she was by showing me a picture of the abuse scars that Debbie Reynolds routinely left after burning her with cigaretttes. I'm not that kind of girl.

So I've spent the last couple of nights reading different blogs and different people with different reactions to this whole mess. I've read two writers say that they feel so harassed that they have decided to stop writing m/m romance. I've read people support the authors and people tear them down.

I was going to make a joke about Carolyn and I proving we really are old farts and therefore the saggy boobs and grey hair and all as proof. But the truth is that this really isn't funny. And I'm going to say something very serious here.

The issue the detractors claim is appropriation. A woman claiming to be a gay man is appropriating from all gay men their experience and pains. A white person claiming to be black appropriates the racist experience. My claiming to be 27 appropriaes perky breasts. (Okay, I couldn't help myself.)

Well the people out there "outing" other people are appropriating other human being's privacy. They are using high handed politically correct speech for the simple reason that they want final approval of who is allowed to write in the genre they have appropriated.

Nobody should have to answer to anyone else about their identity. To claim appropriation is to negate a person's experiences: to negate a person's existance in the life they've lived.

I saw someone on a blog comment that she was afraid to write non-white fictional characters because she didn't want to appropriate.

Oh grow the fuck up. And while you're at it, grow some balls.

Who I am and what my life is, is nobody's damn business but mine. Who I pretend to be on the big old anonymous internet is my business too. And while we're at it: this is fucking small press fiction writers you damned bottom feeders! These aren't politicians, Oprah couch sitting mega authors or even the local pastor. These are fiction writers who chose to present behind the green curtain where the steam is rising.

But but but...

Nobody reading these words I'm currently writing knows the life I've lived. Nobody knows what I've experienced, what my dreams or fantasies are or how my mind or body works. You want to look at me and see a fat, middle-aged woman with bad knees you're going to miss a hell of a lot of years of my life. Years spent fucking pretty men, years spent working in the AIDs community, years spent as a musical theater fanatic, as a rape survivor, as a single mother, as a foul mouthed bossy bitch.

You don't know me. Not really. So who the fuck has the right to define who I am?