The Tranny Pack. Gscene Magazine. June 2014

The Tranny Pack. Charlie Bauer PhD. Gscene Magazine. June 2014 

Fever rages in the US about Trans terminology on RuPaul's TV show, 'Drag Race.' Again, and I bleat on about this ad infinitum - it all comes down to the language. I mean to say - even the title is a direct association with macho culture. Now there's subversion at work.  

I say again, I can chose to say that I’m a dirty, stinkin,’ rotten, filthy homo (because I am). Jaysus - even my friends call me this. But if someone else called me it in the street? Hmmm. Well, I’ve realised by now that they only want a reaction from me, so I just shove my pudenda high and head off along my way. But sometimes it’s different. In that scream across the street, there’s usually a morsel of hatred. If you respond, then you open up the (usually violent) conversation that ensues. If you’re alone, vulnerable and/or off your face, it can get very nasty, very quickly.

Before the big homogenization of the LGBTQI… culture that happened as result of HIV and AIDS - in my hometown, at least, it was common for women to be referred to by gay men as ‘Fish’. I’m not getting into any prosaic reasons why this could be, other than to say it was yet another barrier in the breaking down the terminology of the closet.

And we’ve always reclaimed words, the fact that RuPaul chooses to do that in mainstream media is a debate within itself. The fact that a Black Trans person is up there and accepted within mainstream cultural media, surely goes somewhere to answering the visibility question. Misogyny towards Trans women exists and is still very real, but this is not that, so put down that claw-hammer for lord’s sake.

As you know, again old-fashioned of me, but I’m a big fan of contextualization. And Vaudeville. And RuPaul is modern Vaudeville. She’s that wonderful intertext between the mainstream and the street. That humor that surrounds us and is aimed back at ourselves, is only received from a point of privileged power. As a matter of note, take a look at the way Jewish humor works - the most sophisticated humor on the planet, yet never taken literally. Even an old goy like myself is in on those jokes. Whoops – I’ve mentioned it – humor – that dirty word, again.

RuPaul has only ever exploited RuPaul. RuPaul has not changed gender as she has become famous to gain a wider audience. RuPaul still isn’t compromising. The battles for Trans people to be here are hard fought and hard won and RuPaul had that same fight. A fight that was started when the, then lowest common denominators, - the drag queens and the whores - pushed back on June 29^th 1969 at The Stonewall Inn.

Granted, nothing has been helped by the freak show/drag show of daytime television but the community has not been put back by the mention of the word Tranny and She-male on American Telly, sorry, television. Granted, this terminology was generated within the heterosphere, but it has also been used as an internal tool by the ideological separatists in the name of everyone else within the acronym. No-doubt the same separatists that won’t consider self-identifications such as ‘Drag Queen’ or ‘Cross Dresser’ to be included within the Trans umbrella. But this rigidity about who is Trans and who is not fails everyone - Trans being a point of movement and not necessarily a final destination.

So, just to get this straight, lots of people are included within the capital T of the acronym. Gender bender/drag/occasional cross dresser. Straight boys who dress as women, aren’t ridiculing, subverting or kidding anyone, neither are they being disrespectful to the Trans (or female) community. And I’m sure what begins as fun soon changes into something altogether more liberating for some of these men. Anyone who expresses gender differences and fluidity are surely welcome here. Anyone, for whatever reasons and for whatever period of time. Sorry to all concerned but the closet is open for business.

In May 2012 I wrote an article about my meeting with Trans man in Invercargill on the southernmost tip of New Zealand. His partner was in the northern Island but he chose to stay in the frozen south. He told me about the Whakawahine (3^rd gender) within the Māori and Samoan cultures. Cultures who both respect and honor the Trans people within their communities where they stand alongside warriors.  In the west, the war paint is somewhat different.

I also remember an episode that took place in South Wales in the early hours of October 3^rd, 2009. Drunken Dean Gardener and Jason Fender taunted a pair of cross-dressed men who were walking along the street in wigs, short skirts and high heels. When bare-chested Gardener threw a punch, one of the men landed two lightning quick blows, rendering Gardener and Fender unconscious in under 30 seconds. The cross-dressers regained their composure, linked arms and wandered off again into the night.

The police were eventually called and all concerned were, of course, arrested including the cross-dressing cage fighters the straight boys chose to pick on that night.

The verdict? Gardner and Fender were tagged and given community orders as a result of their Trans-phobic aggression, while the cage fighters walked free. And nobody mentioned the fact they were dressed as, or identified themselves as women.

www.soundcloud.com/thewholeworld

Interview with Don Bachardy. Charlie Bauer PhD talks about love, Isherwood, praise of older men and love letters

The public cost of private health care. Gscene Magazine. May 2014

AIDS IS DEAD! Bauer. GScene Magazine. April 2014.

AIDS IS DEAD!

This is an unpaid advertisement

A great sadness is upon us.

It’s official. Aids is no more. It has no life. It means nothing. Zilch. A waste of time. The debate is over. Even the acronym needs a well-needed once-over. But it’s already too late. Who wants to know about this anymore? Who cares? We’re devastated.

Thank the lord above, we’ve now moved on from HIV and AIDS. The money just isn’t in it anymore. It’s a lousy investment. Like Detroit with cars, or the UK with higher education, the ass has well and truly fallen out of the industry.

I’m not suggesting that we, the drug companies, are placing anything else into the sexual activity market. God forbid. But we have a new buzz-word that we’re all really getting off on back here on campus. We click our fingers, wink and point to each other in the corridors; high five each other at the urinals, whispering the new name on everyone’s pension cheques – HEP C. Even the sound on the lips makes our grandkids bank account soar.

We’re not sorry about the HIV community – how could we be  - Hello! you sent our kids to summer camps and Ivy league universities for nearly thirty freekin’ years! Then you stupidly began to live, and we had to limit our store accounts and Lexus leases. But we’re not bitter. Although, I sometimes wonder why we should show you any sympathy when we actually saved your lives - yet you still talk about us so bad? But we know what forgiveness is. Here, we don’t believe in bitterness – it’s all just too negative. Sometimes it’s hard not to believe that we’re truly blessed.  

As with all new epidemics, we’re really excited about our new products. 

As with all new epidemics, we’re really excited about our new products.

I’m happy to say that, with the patent now securely in place, we look forward to the happy global proliferation of HEP C.

Unfortunately, as was not the case with HIV, we have a timeline on this one. I know - you can’t have everything! HIV was fantastic for us because nobody could see an eventual control or cure, and of course, when something heaven-sent like HIV happens, its time to install that new pool and grab a new car in anticipation of a LONG pay day. HIV was the ‘gift’ that just kept giving - you can imagine our office parties when those new figures were announced... but as we all know, good times don’t last forever.

OK, let’s not delay you any longer - here’s the deal.

What we’re offering is only a one-off deal. Yes, I know you only need to take the medicine once to clear HEP C, but our marketers tell us that you guys LOVE an offer in the middle of the recession! On top of that - this just gets better and better - we’ll give it to you at a cut price if you get tested NOW and order the medicine within the next month!

If not completely satisfied with our product, we will refund ALL yes ALL of your money, no questions asked. For a one-off payment of $49,990 we will deliver you from the evils of HEP C forever. Now isn’t that a small price to pay to keep fucking? We’re giving you a full $10 cash-back incentive on the price we’re charging per-person for the cure! Now who says we’re not fair!

As always there are drawbacks, at this point it’s only going to be rich white people who can access this medicine – I mean, we are a business after all – do the math! But there’s no need to despair - by the time the rest of our ever-growing HEP C community gets around to financing, after all of those nasty side-effects seep in over time -we’ll be doing the unimaginable. You ready? We’re step-financing ALL, yes ALL, of the medications needed for those long term side effects as HEP C develops. Now come on, you can’t get fairer than that! In other words, we’ll help you pay for the worsening illness until you can afford the cure! Christ, it’s no wonder we feel like god sometimes…

As a caring pharmaceutical company we believe strongly in assisting the poorest diasporas struggle through this awful, dreadful disease. And we don’t dangle carrots either– the cure is available to EVERYONE. Come on - you can’t say fairer than that!

Our success is based on our ongoing and passionate conversation with god. Why we have been chosen to be the earthly representatives of the sick and the lame we have no idea, but we feel truly privileged that we are. We know it’s a question that Jesus himself asked his own father on top of that chilly mountain. We can only thank goodness that we don’t have to die in order for everyone else to live in these times - we can take installments instead! How could we ever live with ourselves and call us a human interest corporation, otherwise!

When that dreadful Judas told Jesus to pull in the purse-strings and give to the poor, Jesus let him know the deal. ‘There will be poor always. Always struggling, ’ he said.

Well guess what? We are going to help the struggling poor with what we call, ‘The One Payment Step Closer to Thee’ plan. Thee, in this case is that all-important cure at the end of all your suffering. Next we’ll be raising the dead!

And because we operate from our own campus, it means that all you lepers will remain outside!

Just one trip to your GP or medical centre organizes all!

Now, you can’t say fairer than that!

Sochi Homo. Bauer. GScene Magazine. March 2014.

This statement was forwarded to be read out at the opening of the Winter Olympics at Sochi, 2014.

 Sochi Homo

Ask yourself - what really holds Queer culture back?

We do. We do because of our continuing lack of acceptance of the ‘normal’.

We just don’t trust the ‘normal’. More importantly, we may have nothing in our pockets, but we will never allow ourselves, at any point, to be just ‘normal’.

Equality is not sought by us, nor is it an end result. So, no gifts please - we want no acceptance - because it now seems that we’ve been right all along. What we are transcends the thousand barriers of race and class and gender because we're everywhere and always will be. And we haven’t worried ourselves to traverse those difficult situations, we’ve ran at them screaming. We’re the ones who have chosen to walk alone down those dark alleyways. And we’ve been granted no permission whenever it’s been sought.

We’ve come through reams of litigation and condemnation and will again and again and again. And we will still laugh in the face of any contrition, because we can’t promise not to do any of it again - to any of your judges – in fact, we will do it again, but next time it will be bigger and louder than the night sky in a hurricane.

And we’ll rise and fall and not worry because of the stars that surround us, our chosen families that flicker away and die all too soon. We refuse to count our blessings, be contrite and play tic-tac-toe on the steps of your churches. Or to be ‘strong’ again, when you’ve already decided not to listen.

“What we are, transcends the thousand barriers of race and class and gender because we’re everywhere and always will be…”

So, we don’t accept your acceptance, nor do we seek the breadth or creed of your forgiveness. Because we do not need forgiveness from anyone. That has to come from you, for yourselves. That has to come from the conscience of those who’ve beaten, ridiculed and chided us for thousands of years. Those who’ve denied us our real, dear families, those who’ve hijacked our deaths and begrudgingly complied with the normalcy of our new weddings. Ask yourselves; is this forgiveness? Should we lean on your one heart with the weight of millions who came before us and who stand alongside us right now?

I bring my pain with me to the table, a pain so great and long-lived that it still stirs the soul and the belly of my being. I bring on the faces of the young dead from my own past, the real warriors of a filthy bloody war we all went through together. And the women, who ran to the aid of their broken brothers and created a single voice that’s still screaming out today.

So, go with all your fabulous sins, my brothers and sisters, and real joy will be sure to follow you. I love those who run to that slippery edge in a game of kiss, dare and death. I love those who subvert the very sex that’s supposed to define them. I love those who love me back simply because of love itself and I love those who keep loving, when loving has long passed.

And those who know where normality ends and reality begins. The kids who put whatever they have into in a flimsy sack and find a way to leave their early families behind. And to falter over and over again and never stop faltering until they die, because those are the follies that make us. The mettle that binds us in every sea of no fucking hope. The glue that never separates us from the reality of our life and death experience. The fear that sometimes keeps us separate from each other, yet brings us together when the knives go down. The strength to draw from all history because we know that all history is really ours; that we’ve peppered the changes on those dull old maps and coloured the weave of every creative stroke. These changes made, because not to reminds us only of regret - that building stone of our lives that we’re never allowed to shed.

The pathways to our worlds remain open but shackled. The roads are still wide but populated less. But we have shown over and over the power of our steps and grown steadily - supported only by the very best. Can we really give away this life of ours - a history so rich within us all? Can we not falter and have to watch our backs at every life event, lest it be normalized and given the so-called protection of a society that has proved itself so wrong?

To sacrifice our otherness is to walk with passing strangers, to lose the trust we’ve known to share. Because that otherness is our only identity. It’s that one within a crowd that refuses to be accompanied, or the voice that will be heard - but only by a few. Will they kill it off with persecution again? Will they succeed in changing us into what they really think we are? Will they keep trying when they have failed so many, many times before?

It’s time to stop history, dead. What’s happened up until now happens no more. The door has been closed for the very last time. So, don’t rejoice or ‘permit’ us - we reject all of that. Instead, look to yourselves and in there, see who we are. Then, look out to the world and see who has made it glow for you.

Go on, we dare you - look out into the world.

The Death Issue. Gscene Magazine. Charlie Bauer Phd. February 2014

The Death Issue


"With my tears go into your loneliness, my brother. I love him who wants to create over and beyond himself, and thus perishes.” Thus spoke Zarathustra.

I’ve observed lots of queer happenings from various parts of the planet over the last two years. After I was drugged and shipped to New Zealand by my academic peers, I worked my way steadily towards the West Coast of North Americashire with the wildly changing queer landscape trailblazing behind me. I crossed oceans of rednecks and mountains of sliding prejudice and tried to document what I saw along the way. Even when I was in physical danger I never stopped once to think about the miracle that is supposedly my ‘life’.

I can see the middle-age mountain ahead. The one that queers of my age were not really supposed to - we weren’t actually supposed to survive. And it wasn’t just the AIDS crisis that flawed our confidence, it happened way before that. We never partied like it was never gonna end, we knew more than anyone that it was. In return it gave us a feeling of invincibility – at nineteen, with a head full of drugs, I danced on the slutbox at Heaven because I knew that I was going to die.

I never wanted a career and a pension back then and still don’t now. And I’ve no issues about my big exit because I’m a God-hater. However, I do think it’s sensible to make living wills and arrangements for our own deaths and here is why. I, we, have managed to push though so much crap and get to the point we are now by stealth, and we have remained in control of our own keeling boats for so long against the unnecessary tsunamis of heteroland that, if I snuff it tomorrow, I still need to have some element of control at the back-end.

“As a queer, I’ve been a coffin dodger since the age of seventeen, so death holds no power for me”

The other day, I thought back to when AIDS funerals were as popular as cable re-runs of Strictly. I remembered those final send offs hijacked by christian families reclaiming, so they thought, the darkened soul of the one lead astray by evil forces of homosexuality. That was, just before God absolved them of the sins we always called ‘virtues’. Those families who could never grasp why we saddos preferred to live in dumps like Hackney, Streatham, The Castro or Silver Lake rather than on the industrial outskirts of the towns where we were born and took it daily on the chin. Maybe, we were too busy running for the Nietzschean edge of the abyss quoted above, by creating ‘above ourselves’ and perishing, joyously, as a result.

At the AIDS funerals, I remember all those mohawks flattened by discreet hats, pierce holes freshly visible in noses, ears and cheeks - so as not to offend the family who took up the first two rows. The people who had little interest in the body before them but now, in a collective grief, could claim him as their own and sanitise away anything other than a perceived identity or history. This would be the first time those angry, now bereft, brothers would be shamed into crying. Later, as a result of their uncontrollable emotion they’d waltz in and take the houses, let the dogs free in a local park, sell the collateral and demonise the living partner for passing on such a heinous disease to their dear brother. All permissible by law.

There are still no words for the expressions on those families’ faces when in excess of a thousand mourning queers turned up and spilled out into the streets. There’s nothing as powerful as the emotional corrective of an extended family of queers to bring the matter home. 

“Who knew he was so... popular...”

There’s nothing quite like a full on Catholic burial, replete with liturgies about what ‘clean decent people’ the deceased were when the audience is comprised mainly of leather and piss club collectives and circuit party-ers. I’d want my own liturgy to mention those 15 gorgeous men I spent one single night with in a sauna, who meant more to me and my memory than every school friend I ever had. I want the parts of my life and the stuff I felt as ‘normal’ to be valued. And if you don’t want to hear it, then don’t bother going...
As a queer, I’ve been a coffin dodger since the age of seventeen, so death holds no power for me. There have been no days in my adult life when I have not been confronted with death, even if I haven’t recognised it. And for the people out there who may patronise us about how wonderful life is and how we must cherish all of it at all times, that if we don’t we must be somehow ‘depressed’ - here, take this pill...

I’m not depressed. I’m a realist and I’ve lived long enough to see both sides of the dying crap and it has zilch power. God forbid in a Christian way, our death is hijacked by the very people who caused it. But that doesn’t really matter - because we’ll be dead. However, and this isn’t narcissism, I don’t want that last image of myself to be one surrounded by sacred hearts and flowers or Virgin Marys in a chapel of rust. Throw me at the side of the road, chuck me in the Manchester ship canal. This isn’t me being disrespectful to my loved ones, it’s just me not sanctioning some weird process designed for the arrogance of the living. And I will not be packaged up in normativity when I am too incapacitated (okay - dead) to do anything about it. 


Click here for published version of this article

Gay = Shit. Bauer. GScene Magazine. January 2014.

Gay = Shit.

Anyone who knows my work also knows that I’m a stickler for all devious language and hidden context; of how the uber-right hide their meanings behind the agendas they so neatly posit in their language. And how claiming of the language first (e.g. pro-life) automatically makes everyone else the opposite (anti-life). What Shakespeare used to call a ‘jade’s trick’.


But should we actually use the word ‘Gay’ anymore?
It is the G of the LGBT acronym, after all. We have gay men and Lesbians. Trans can encompass an entire array of statuses, always fluid, because to be in a state of trans is exactly as it sounds, no matter where you are on the trans spectrum. Everyone represented under the LGBT umbrella is supposed to also be within Queer but queer ‘others’ are in there too. If we think of the globe being run by predominantly white straight men, anyone who isn’t the straight white male version, is therefore queer. This makes the numbers of queers far greater than that of straight white men, making queers the majority.

As you all know Homosexuality has been around longer than Heterosexuality.

Don’t believe me? Well, when the jolly Victorians needed a ‘label’ for low-life male fellators, they came up with the term Homosexual. Some time later they needed to come up with a term for ‘Everybody else’ and this is when heterosexuality was actually born - somewhere in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately for the world, this means that Homosexuality is older than Heterosexuality, but then - at the end of the day – it’s just labels.

As with our queer sexualities, we define ourselves as we see fit, so if I chose to call myself a sleazy cum-bucket faggot, that’s my choice.
And since context is everything, if we hear someone screaming about a bunch of low life faggots on a 1960’s newsreel we know what it really means. I have no problem referring to myself as a dirty stinking rotten filthy homo because at the end of the day, I’m really the only one who knows this is actually true. When anyone else says it, it becomes another label.

Gay icons are something entirely different. They are something we are collectively supposed to adore and consume. Madonna and Lady GaGa keep the argument going -just think of the revenue loss if they didn’t. In fact without ‘gay’ in their lexicon, these gals wouldn’t get another pay check. But this ‘Gay iconography’ isn’t me - so what happens if I don’t identify as that kind of gay. The fact is, quite a lot of my own ‘gay’ icons are actually straight. In fact, there are only small elements within my gay icons that actually speak to me - not the whole package.

So is it the ‘Gay’ industries that are worried that the very word ‘gay’ is being cheapened by a bunch of school kids? How are you going to sell a ‘gay lifestyle’ when you’re really selling a ‘crap lifestyle’ or whatever the new definition is. Answer – don’t sell a ‘gay’ life style in the first place. It’s a capitalist construct!

One of my favorite Gay Icons was a man called Vladimir Lenin. And just because he’s not in the back pages of certain magazines doesn’t mean to say he’s not a gay icon. In fact I challenge anyone whose ever seen his embalmed body in the Mausoleum in Red Square to tell me otherwise, I’ve seen some bad make-up jobs in my time, but this is real K-hole stuff. Now, Lenin famously said that Capitalism eats everything in its path, it consumes everything and then shits out its own version. Now, I don’t want to sound like the last commie standing but the organisers of Pride might benefit from some early 20th century political reading. Pride is about money and, since gay icons such as Madonna and the rest are also about money and consuming cultures before regurgitating them as their own, I think it’s a marriage made in heaven/hell.

Maybe it’s good for the LGBT acronym to fall. We’ve already left out intersex and a whole host of personal gender sexuality definitions, anyhow. The fact of the matter is that we’ve crammed ourselves in the same closet for so long as a matter of survival, we surely can’t expect the low-life underground boudoir to remain closed.
I think the greatest indicator of this failure is the silent ‘B’ and the bi-phobia that exists both within and outside of the LGBT barricades. Just like Victorian England where Lesbians were never even acknowledged, it leads us back to the fact that the word ‘Gay’ is a means of offence – a male insult thrown only at other males.

A few years ago I wrote an article about how I met Quentin Crisp when he was touring with his Evening with Quentin Crisp show and ended up in my hometown. Thirty people turned up of which I, still a schoolboy, was one. After the show I sat in the foyer with Quentin and talked. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was inadvertently asking him what the whole gay thing meant.

I’ve often wondered if he made it up there and then when he told me that GAY was actually a political term, something that carried a coded meaning. He told me that codes and metaphors were to become a new language for me within my new sexual identity - it was, after all, the coded language of my history. He told me that GAY actually stood for ‘Good As You’. Important words to a seventeen-year-old. So I’m calling for all Gay Pride events to now be named ‘Good As You festivals’ in honor of our dear Quentin.


Click on link below for published version:

Gay = Shit. Bauer. GScene Magazine. Jan 2014