Dina’s Diner 12/12/22

CONVENTIONAL THINKING

A long-distance friend of mine recently attended an event called Diva Las Vegas. She’s been there before and recommends it as a good event in the fun capital of the world. It got me to thinking about the so-called crossdresser conventions that seemed especially popular in the 1990s.

A group photo from Diva Las Vegas.

Diva Las Vegas uses the tagline “A Vacation Not a Convention” to capture its free-form nature. Most of the organized transgender/crossdresser gatherings have an agenda of meetings, seminars, and demonstrations along with social activities and entertainments for the attendees. Diva Las Vegas has a less rigid structure to encourage socializing and going out in Sin City with your new girlfriends. You might think that with the greater visibility of trans issues and all the informal networking facilitated by the internet that the trans/crossdresser conventions — aside from DVL — would be numerous. That doesn’t seem to be the case.

In the aforementioned 1990s annual regional crossdressing events included Fantasia Fair (now known as Trans Week), Paradise in the Poconos (later rebranded to Beauty and the Beach), Southern Comfort, Lake Erie Gala, something called Be-All, and the annual International Foundation for Gender Education (IFGE) convention. And those were just the east coast gatherings I remember. I’m sure the Midwest and West Coast had their regional events as well. To be sure, some events are either still around or have come on more recently (Keystone Conference was created in the 2000s).

When I tried to follow Google hits on some of the events it led to old websites and stale information from years ago. Other than feelings of nostalgia I don’t mourn the decline of these events or the organizations that sponsored them. The internet has filled in a lot of the educational function of groups and large gatherings. Judging by the plethora of crossdressers on various internet pages, clubs, and photo sharing sites there are plenty of us out there. Let’s all get together sometime.

A PICTURE IS WORTH. . .

Art by Jenifer Prince.

The Huffington Post website had an interesting feature about an artist creating lesbian-themed art. It was headlined This Artist is Giving Lesbian Couples the Retro Pinup Treatment. It appeared on the sites Queer Voices section on November 30, 2022.

The artist in question is Jenifer Prince. She has dozens of pieces posted on her Pinterest pages. The works are in the style of graphic novels or magazine illustrations of the mid-twentieth century. According to the article, “Prince likes to describe her work as ‘lesbian and Sapphic storytelling in a vintage-inspired aesthetic, especially comics and pulp illustrations.’”

The article reported, “Given how rare it is to see old images of queer couples happily existing in private and public spaces, Prince looks at her work as a quiet form of activism. “In my work, I want to show that lesbians and bisexual women have always existed. Our love stories have always existed, even though they were erased from history. I believe illustrating with this vintage-inspired aesthetic helps to combat the erasure of our existence in history,” she said. “That’s why I like to draw positive and often wholesome stories.” Prince draws inspiration from unearthed photos of lesbian and gay couples (“I like imagining the story behind them; it makes me wonder how many queer stories from the past are waiting to be told,” she said).”

The HuffPost used several of Prince’s works in their reporting. They are romantic, evocative of private moments, tender moments shared by women. Prince’s work is more subtle than the artwork used for covers of pulp lesbian erotica that was published in the 1950s and ’60s. Those works — while beautiful and arousing — are more suggestive and accompany book titles that abandoned subtlety.

As she told the HuffPost, by using the retro aesthetic in her art (for example a vignette reminiscent of the film A League of Their Own) it puts sapphic couples into the history of that period and avoids the tawdriness of more contemporary depictions. I think she is particularly successful in creating an untold story surrounding her subjects that the viewer can fill in themselves. Take a look at her Pinterest and see if you can spin your own storyline for some of the women in love there.

AN INTERNATIONAL LADY OF MYSTERY AND CELEBRITY

Lear modeled for the cover of the 1973 Roxy Music For Your Pleasure album..

While I was doing a Diner item about successful trans women that appeared in last month’s offering, I came across the name Amanda Lear. It turns out she has quite a story. Part of that story is something we’ve seen in other early trans celebrities.

First the good stuff. Most of this I culled from the Wikipedia page for Amanda (which is quite long and well footnoted, by the way). The Wiki entry includes this snippet from a profile of Amanda that appeared in the British publication The Guardian: “Lear’s background remains a mystery. She has variously let it be known that her mother was English or French or Vietnamese or Chinese, and that her father was English, Russian, French or Indonesian. She may have been born in Hanoi in 1939, or Hong Kong in either 1941 or 1946. Once she said she was from Transylvania. And to this day, it is a matter of conjecture as to whether she was born a boy or a girl.” Her birth year and age is likewise up for debate as the Wiki entry reads, “Most sources claim 18 June 1939 or 18 November 1939 to be her birth date. Her birth year, though, has variously been given as 1941, 1946, and 1950. During a 2010 interview with French newspaper Libération, Lear presented her identity card to the journalist, and it read: “born 18 November 1950 in Saigon”. This date, however, appears to be a fabrication, as public records show that she began university in September 1964, and that she married in December 1965.”

Long before the contemporary acceptance (at least somewhat acceptance) of transgender people, muddling one’s personal history, gender, or sexual orientation was not unusual for trans folks (or gay folks) trying to make a life for themselves. Whatever her origin story is, Amanda certainly led a colorful, interesting, and celebrated life.

Amanda Lear in 2012.

Without going into all the detail, Amanda was a fashion model in the mid-’60s to mid-’70s; a very successful European disco recording artist in the mid-’70s to early ’80s; an erstwhile drag performer in the 1950s with the celebrated trans legend April Ashley: a girlfriend of David Bowie, Brian Jones, and Bryan Ferry; and longtime (sixteen years) muse of surrealist artist Salvador Dali. By the 1990s to the present, Amanda has been a television personality, actress, playwright, and returned to recording and even runway modeling.

The Wikipedia entry is a good read and provides links to some of the people and projects Amanda was involved with. A single line entry claims that the Absolutely Fabulous character of Patsy (played by Joanna Lumley) was based in part on Amanda Lear. There is a resemblance to be sure. Amanda Lear is still with us at age 83 or somewhere south of that depending which birth date you choose. Long may she wave.

GRANNIES AND OTHER SENIOR TOPICS

Okay, so I am a card-carrying senior citizen and I want to know where all these hot grannies doing porn are? When I was finally old enough to get admission to porn theaters (in the late 1970s), a forty-something porn star was unusual. Now internet sites are filled with older women — and I mean older — not just forty — or even fifty-something women — doing professional or amateur porn photos and videos.

A thoroughly modern granny.

The same can be said of online crossdressers. An online survey of video and photographic evidence of our favorite hobby reflects the demographics of the baby boom also. Sixty may be the new fifty — but seventy is just the new fifty-two judging by some of what’s out there. I fear some of the younger readers may be cringing at the thought but, wait, one doesn’t just stop this after an arbitrary birthday.

I also stumbled across a memorial for a crossdresser who passed away this summer. It was written by her family and this is part of what they wrote: “Vanessa was many things to many people, for us she was our biological father. We unfortunately did not get the opportunity to know Vanessa’s real story. We sadly did not find out who she truly was until after her passing. It is devastating to say the least, we wish that we were able to tell her that we accept her wholeheartedly as her true self. Vanessa was fashionable, witty and loved by many. Her passing was an absolute shock to us but the biggest hurt was she never knew how proud her daughters would have been of her and how we would have been inspired by her journey of transition.” That is a helluva tribute by her loved ones.

I also saw something about a group referred to as elder orphans, defined as: “someone who is aging alone with no family available to address their care-giving needs. More than 1 in 5 Americans older than 65 are — or are at risk of becoming — elder orphans. And 23 percent of boomers will eventually be without family caretakers, according to Maria Torroella Carney, who has studied the issue and is chief of geriatric and palliative medicine at Northwell Health of Great Neck, N.Y. Those figures don’t include the countless parents whose adult children are not available or able, for various reasons, to assist them.”

It’s something I think about myself. What will people make of all the accoutrements, photographs, magazines, online presences, etc., etc. that I might leave behind? I can only hope it is as warm a tribute as Vanessa’s family gave to her.

END TIMES

The New York Times carried an article inspired by a new book titled Butts: A Backstory. The article appeared in the paper’s Style section on November 28 2022. The author is Heather Radke and her book surveys the history of posteriors and what they say about world culture at various points in history.

The Times article says, “Ms. Radke catalogs freak shows in 19th-century London, visits natural history museums in Paris and attends drag performances in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens. She writes about the importance of famous derrières on stars of the past and present, such as Josephine Baker or Jennifer Lopez, arguing that the shape of their behinds influenced what men desired and what women aspired to. She also makes the case that the fascination with those women’s shapes reflected the changing demographics and culture of 1920s Paris and 1990s America.” The author also told the Times she was encouraged to continue with her book project after people questioned her about its viability. “The reaction I get a lot is, can you really write a whole book on that?” she said. “It feels like it’s not worth taking seriously, which suggests there’s something there worth exploring.”

JLo shows posterior power.

We seem to be living in an age of butt obsession. Ms. Radke said that butts have been “a fixation in contemporary culture for over a decade.” Jennifer Lopez, Kim Kardashian, Nicki Minaj, and others brought behinds to the forefront. Remember the twerking craze? Brazilian butt lifts, the prevalence of anal sex porn, even the redesigned skimpy Hooters shorts all point to the recent ascendance of the bottom-most.

One interesting tidbit from the article was this: “For Greek or ancient people,” she said, “a good butt was associated with men.” Well, perhaps. But for us crossdressers, a man’s butt is not really the ideal shape to which we aspire. The buttocks and hips — like breasts — are different for men and women. The voluptuous curvature of a beautiful behind is not easily replicated. Even genetic women in the 18th and 19th centuries used the bustle to exaggerate the curve of a generously proportioned derriere.

We crossdressers have taken on a daunting task: cosmetizing our faces, wearing wigs, squeezing into smaller women’s shoes, creating boobs, and then we turn around and look in the mirror and — what? Now we need to get a bigger ass? It just never, uh, ends.

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Tags: crossdressing, featured, news, opinion, Transgender

Category: crossdressing, Transgender Fun & Entertainment