Would you be like this ravenous-for-blood audience? Is this the position into which you’d put trans women? (See 1m33s)

My recent emergence as a Hollywood cabaret singer and performer seems to have stirred up some members of the rapidly aging 1970′s/80′s stealth trans community who (understandably for the time) made denying their transition into a sacrosanct religion. Most members of the trans community are basically supportive, when and if they think of me at all. But apparently some have too much time on their hands, now that their “sexy” days are long behind them, and ditching dialup has put all my YouTube videos at their fingertips. How they manage their own histories is one thing, but criticizing my choices warrants a response.

Let’s be clear… My journey of self discovery had its start in the gay community. I was an artistic, feminine child who quickly learned to hide any allegiance with females or sexual interest in males. A stint in the military as a young adult gave me the confidence to begin discovering who I really was, and my only resource afterward was a huge gay nightclub and theatre. I was taken in by incredibly talented entertainers and eventually given a job that allowed me to indulge my performance skills AND get paid a living wage while being encouraged to become as feminine and womanly as possible. It was ideal.

My internet and media presence is obviously visibly inclusive of my trans history. In my daily life, walking around the city or having lunch with friends, I do not make an issue of my transition and I believe that most people around me have no idea that I ever transitioned. If a stranger asks me whether or not I’m trans, and there’s no value in discussing it, I will simply tell them to fuck off. Not because I deny that I had to transition my physical body into alignment with my soul, but because I don’t feel like discussing it on the street with a moron.

(Click CONTINUE READING to see the note that came in, and my response)
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How exciting! “Bad Questions: The Director’s Cut”, my sassy improvised comedy video telling rude people how I feel about their questions, has reached over 1,000,000 views! Combined with the original, longer cut’s 300,000 views the concept has 1,300,000+ views! Not bad for a transsexual topic. What really kicked it off was YouTube’s surprising decision to contact me and put it on the front page of the site as a promoted video, but actually a huge portion of views have come from just viral spread throughout the community. Thank you, Cal-pals!

Originally just a list of questions here on my site that I had gathered over years of dealing with the public, one evening I decided to slap some Coty Airspun powder on my face, paint my eyes and lips, slip into a vintage 1970′s thrift store dress in Oxblood, have two fingers of Lagavulin and improv away based on the list sitting in my lap. Since then, “Bad Questions” has been translated into French, played for groups at community centers and even shown in college classrooms, far exceeding any expectations I ever had for it. One just never knows what will become of an evening’s work!

In celebration of the 1 million mark, here’s a little essay I’ve been sending out to people who write to me about the video, usually to express anger at my tone and claim that “curiosity is normal”. In a nutshell, I respond that the tone is comedic and I agree that everyone is curious about unusual people but that curiosity is not a license to ask rude questions. Look it up, dum dum!

Bad Questions?

Thanks for watching the video and sending such well-considered letters. I want to respond because I appreciate your insight and effort, but this shouldn’t be considered a formal interview. My ideas about this are continually evolving, largely in response to the continuing behavior of outsiders and my efforts to secure a place of personal strength and self-preservation. This letter will express some strong feelings, but I want to say that I am not expressing any negative statements toward you and appreciate your thoughtfulness in writing.

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The Bell Witch House, Photo by : kelly : on Flickr

All the Pretty Little Horses by calpernia

Yesterday I realized that I am not afraid of the Bell Witch any more.
In this month of October, as every year, my thoughts often turn back to the gorgeous Autumns of my Tennessee childhood. Every horizon back home was a fringe of trees, and as the leaves began to turn orange and red and gold, those colors became the peripheral background to our Fall routines: Hog killing at Uncle JC’s farm, hiking with the school Ecology Club, walking the endless fields to find this or that creek to hunt crawdads.

Being someone with an attuned interest in weirdness, the supernatural and folklore, I particularly enjoyed the rare ghost stories told by uncles and grandfathers at our occasional big group suppers, just before we all went into the living room or porch to play Bluegrass gospel together and sip sweet iced tea. (The same family suppers and gettogethers from which I was banned forever somewhere around 1994) There was a story about an enormous rotted log that my Uncle M came upon in the woods one pitch black fall night, the inside hollowed out and dripping with phosphorescent slug-riddled fungus. He told how there seemed to be a sound echoing from inside it, and when he leaned in close he could hear the soft hopeless wailing of little children coming up from somewhere deep underground. My skin prickled and my ears almost popped, it sent such a thrill of horror through my guts. “How terrible, how nightmarish it must have been for those children to be trapped who knows where, under the cold damp earth below that rotting log!” I thought over and over.

But the most horrifying, the most believed story that everyone told in Tennessee was the story of the Bell Witch.

One such haunting is the legend of the so-called “Bell Witch,” a sinister entity that tormented a pioneer family on Tennessee’s early frontier between 1817 and 1821. Unlike the blockbuster films and many other ghost stories, the “Bell Witch” haunting involved real people and is substantiated by eyewitness accounts, affidavits, and manuscripts penned by those who experienced the haunting first hand.  This distinction led Dr. Nandor Fodor, a noted researcher and psychologist, to label the Bell Witch legend as “America’s Greatest Ghost Story.”

From the image of a lifeless body hanging from a tree, to the apparition of a pale-faced woman and three children in a field, “Kate” was all-knowing, all-powerful, and the personification of evil. She helped children in danger and nursed John Bell’s wife when she was sick; however, her two missions were to destroy Elizabeth Bell’s engagement and to kill John Bell. She accomplished both. Generations later, many descendants of those who were involved are STILL reluctant to discuss the legend. And even today, unexplainable things happen on and near what was once the Bell farm.

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