I am so sorry to tell you that it's really hard to find copies of my book Hello, Cruel World.
Last night, I wanted to get buy a couple of couple of copies for friends. I'm watching my budget, so I went to Amazon, who carries the book at the lowest price. I found out that the book is not currently available. Amazon says it might ship in anywhere from one to four months. I tried to buy it someplace else, and this is what I found:
Barnes & Noble is carrying the book and say it's in stock… cost is 30% more than Amazon
I found about 20 copies atwww.abe.com. 8 copies are available at cost. 9 copies are available from US$ 26 to US$ 60.
11 copies of the book are available on eBay. 5 are reasonably priced, the rest range from $47 to $122.
Borders says it's on back order, and will ship in 1 to 4 weeks.
My literary agent, Malaga Baldi, and I are working with my publisher, Seven Stories Press to fix this. They publish some magnificent titles, and I'm honored to be part of their stable. But the economy is the economy, and I'm told that it looks like the book will go into it's 4th printing and back on the shelves sometime in the first week of October. In the meantime…
The book is available at many school and public libraries.
There are also many LGBTQetc centers who keep a copy of the book on hand.
Hello, Cruel World is available as an ebook. It's easy to find. I hate it. It looks ugly. But it's cheap, and all the words and most of the pictures made it into the electronic editions.
You can find great tips from me and a whole slew of teens, freaks, and other outlaws by searching the Twitter hashtag #stayalive. I'm sorry, but you will need to set up a Twitter account to search it. But, then you can contribute #stayalive suggestions of your own. Instant interactivity, plus everyone wins and gets to stay alive.
Again, my most sincere apologies for allowing this to go un-noticed. I'll do the best I can to make reasonably priced copies of the book available again as soon as possible. In the meantime, if you know where there's a stash of these books, please post a link in the comments section of this blog. Thanks.
I'm deep-deep-deep in the writing-writing-writing of my memoir, but I wanted to let you know I'm still thinking about you and wanted you to enjoy some fun writing I did a few months ago. Women, Action & The Media asked me to contribute something for their benefit auction. I decided that for the highest bidder, I'd pornographize their favorite fairy tale and cast them in whatever roles they liked. Well, a lovely lesbo couple took the high bid, and asked me to re-write The Tale of The Sleeping Beauty. I spent some time speaking with the winning bidder—she wanted the story as an anniversary present for her partner. This was back in April, and I've heard that both Rachel and Tania enjoyed the story a great deal. So, here it is in PDF format, ready to download for your summer reading enjoyment.
My BFF and co-author of Nearly Roadkill, Caitlin Sullivan (the two of us in this photo at the Seattle Public Library) just sent me this quote from Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet.
Damn, I keep wrestling with this stuff and some people are just so frakking eloquent about it. Read it and weep for joy that we're not alone in our freakdom, not by a long shot.
big love,
Auntie Kate
—————-
“For a long while I have believed – this is perhaps my version of Sir Darius Xerxes Cama’s belief in a fourth function of outsideness – that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world semi-detached, if you like, without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; that there may even be millions, billions of such souls, as many non-belongers as belongers, perhaps; that, in sum, the phenomenon may be as “natural” a manifestation of human nature as its opposite, but one that has been mostly frustrated, throughout human history, by lack of opportunity. And not only by that: for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainly, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers’ seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks. What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or a movie theatre, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveller, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.”
Ogod, this is my first post in months. Sorry. I live my life like that, coming and going. It's very Holly Golightly. No, really. Read the book. She's in your life one day, she's gone the next. Poof!
Well, I'm back. I've been writing, just not for the blog. BUT… I'm proud of this review I just did for the film, Ticked Off Trannies With Knives.Here's da link, over at out.com.
I'm much more in touch on Twitter, and I'm diving into the memoir so there's a slim likelihood of more blog posts until the summer's over, when the book is due at the printer. ::gulp::
Okay, here I go poof again. And yes, I sleep with an eye mask and Cat.
Happy holidaze. Right this minute, I'm on the home stretch for writing the first draft of my memoir, Kate Bornstein Is A Queer And Pleasant Danger. This is an image I made to remind myself to write from my heart. I figure that if you're reading this, you're a writer too. You write books or a blog, articles, journals, FaceBook updates, email, tweets—whatever—you write.
So, here's my holidaze card for the writer you are. If you click on the image, it'll open into a full-sized mini-poster, 8 inches by 10 inches, at a high enough resolution to print. I figure the more that all of us write from our hearts, the better off the intertubes will be for our writing.
Happy holidaze, dearest hearts, with love and respect from
To the leaders, membership, and supporters of The Human Rights Campaign, The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and state-wide groups supporting marriage equality as your primary goal,
Hello. I'm Kate Bornstein, and I've got a great deal to say to you, so you deserve to know more about me: I write books about postmodern gender theory and alternatives to suicide for teens, freaks and other outlaws. I'm a feminist, a Taoist, a sadomasochist, a femme, a nerd, a transperson, a Jew, and a tattooed lady. I'm a certified Post Traumatic Stress Disorder survivor. I'm a chronic over-eater who's been diagnosed with anorexia. I'm sober, but I'm not always clean. I've got piercings in body parts I wasn't born with. I'm also an elder in the community you claim to represent, and it is with great sorrow that I must write: you have not been representing us.
.
Let's talk about a love that unites more people than have ever before been united by love. Let's defend some real equality.
The other day, New York State's lesbian and gay bid for marriage equality went down in flames, enough flames to make people cry. Thousands of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender people and their allies spent a lot of money and heart-filled hours of work to legalize marriage equality, with little to show for it. That sucks, and I think the reason it didn't work is it's because marriage equality is an incorrect priority for the LGBTQetc communities.
Marriage equality—as it's being pushed for now—is wasting resources that would be better deployed to save some lives. There are several major flaws with marriage equality as a priority for our people:
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Marriage as it's practiced in the USA is unconstitutional… if you listen to Thomas Jerfferson's interpretation of separation of church and state. The way it stands now, if you're an ordained leader in a recognized religion, the US government gives you a package of 1500-1700 civil rights that only you can hand out to people. And you get to bestow or withhold these civil rights from any American citizen you choose, regardless of that citizen's constitutionally-granted rights. The government has no constitutional right to hand that judgment call over to a religious body.
Marriage equality—as it's being fought for now by lesbian and gay leaders who claim they're speaking for some majority of LGBTQetc people—will wind up being more marriage inequality. Single parents, many of whom are women of color, will not get the 1500-1700 rights they need to better and more easily raise their children. Nor will many other households made up of any combination of people who love each other and their children.
When lesbian and gay community leaders whip up the community to fight for the right to marry, it's a further expression of America's institutionalized greed in that it benefits only its demographic constituency. There's no reaching out beyond sexuality and gender expression to benefit people who aren't just like us, and honestly… that is so 20th Century identity politics.
Marriage is a privileging institution. It has privileged, and continues to privilege people along lines of not only religion, sexuality and gender, but also along the oppressive vectors of race, class, age, looks, ability, citizenship, family status, and language. Seeking to grab oneself a piece of the marriage-rights pie does little if anything at all for the oppression caused by the institution of marriage itself to many more people than sex and gender outlaws.
The fight for "marriage equality" is simply not the highest priority for a movement based in sexuality and gender. By simple triage, the most widespread criminality against people whose identities are based in sex and gender is violence against women. Women still make up the single-most oppressed identity in the world, followed closely by kids who are determined to be freaky for any reason whatsoever.
Lesbian and gay leaders must cease being self-obssessed and take into account the very real damage that's perpetrated on people who are more than simply lesbian women and/or gay men, more than bisexual or transgender even. Assuming a good-hearted but misplaced motivation for all the work done on behalf of fighting for marriage equality, it's time to stop fighting on that front as a first priority of the LGBTQetc movement. It's time to do some triage and base our priorities on a) who needs the most help and b) what battlefront will bring us the most allies.
I'm asking that you to fight on behalf of change for someone besides yourself. Please. I promise the rewards of doing that will revisit you threefold. Who needs the most help is easy: women. To lesbian and gay leaders, I ask you to ally yourselves with the centuries-old feminist movements and their current incarnations. You want to get a bill passed through Congress? Take another run at the Equal Rights Amendment. Unlike gay marriage, the ERA stands a better chance of making it into law, given the Obama Administration and our loosely Democratic majority in congress.
Stopping the violence against women and freaky children, and backing another run at the ERA have got the good chance of creating national front, lots of allies. On the home front of sex and gender, there's plenty of room for change that doesn't require millions of dollars and thousands of hours.
Looking into the community of people who base their lives on sexuality and gender, there's a lot of door-opening to do. Beyond L, G, B and T, there's also Q for queer and Q for questioning. There's an S for sadomasochists, an I for intersex, an F for feminists, and another F for furries. Our community is additionally composed of sex educators, sex workers, adult entertainers, pornographers, men who have sex with men, women who have sex with women, and asexuals who have sex in whatever manner they define their asexuality. You want to create some real change? Make room for genderqueers, polyamorists, radical faeries, butches, femmes, drag queens, drag king, and other dragfuck royalty too fabulous to describe in this short letter.
There are more and more people to add to this ever-growing list of communities whom you must own as family and represent in your activism. You cannot afford—politically, economically, or morally—to leave out a single person who bases a large part of their identity on being sex positive or in any way a proponent of gender anarchy.
That's what I have to say to you. That and thank you for the good hearts you've clearly demonstrated in your activism. I'm asking you to open your hearts further is all.
You're welcome to leave comments on this blog, but the best way to engage me in a conversation or recruit me to help is to contact me through Twitter. I look forward to talking with you, and I hope we can work together on the terms I've outlined above.
I meet many eloquent people on Twitter. I just loves my twibe. One of them, @ShamanOfHedon, maintains a kick-ass blog that bears subscribing to. I admired her take on the film, Ticked Off Trannies With Knives. And I am LOVING her take-down of internecine trans-tribal warfare.
Yes—believe it or not—there are some trans people who despise other trans people, purely for the kind of trans people they are. And yes of course this sort of internal hierarchal transphobia has been going on for a long time. Well, Shaman of Hedon exposes a nest of that hatred on Shaman's latest blog. It got me all fired up, so I wrote the following comment (which is way longer than a blog comment should be, so I'm posting it here.)
**************
Wow, Shaman. You sure do manage to ferret out some of the juiciest cuts of our sprawling trans culture's carcass. Firstly, thanks for your eloquence and passion. It's a satisfying kick-ass response to the soul-less vitriol spewed by Miss Josephine, who believes she is more of a "real" woman and a better transperson than YOU.
But heck, there are still a LOT of people in the world who think that Hispanic, African-American, and Asian people are not "real" people like Caucasians. Those scary racial bigots use *science* to justify their claims. Well that's what I think you've unmasked here, oh far-seeing Shaman: a trans sub-culture that uses science to "prove" their ultimately self-directed bigotry. Here's their mission statement:
TS-SI is dedicated to the acceptance, medical treatment, and legal protection of individuals correcting the misalignment of their brains and their anatomical sex, while supporting their transition into society.
I've been checking out TS-SI's website for people who believe there's a both a biological imperative and a cultural classist mandate for real gender, real humanity. The only good trannies—the better ones, anyway, for the TS-SI mindset holds as self-evident that we're all diseased—are the trannies who comply with both the biological and classist imperatives.
The TS-SI website is SMART. There's all sorts of political ramifications to the science they believe in. In fact, it's so smart that I bet ya can't read all the words in the headlines of their home page without using a dictionary. Smart = educated = well-monied = so much more to lose = more frantic to defend the ground they stand on.
So it's boiling down to class again. Poor things. No, I mean it. They haven't been able to find the sustaining joy of breaking free of biological and classist imperatives. They've opted for the life-sucking security of class superiority.
OK, so the class argument for "real" gender can easily be torn apart by compassion. But I still don't get the science argument. Really, not being snarky here. Aren't all our different organs and body structures based in the same bio-goo? Sure, the bio-goo shifts and recombines over time into mostly male and mostly female, but it's still the same goo. It's like the argument about when is a fetus a human being. Well, you can start measuring life at any time. Ditto biological gender.
I think the important thing to keep in mind is that while yes, of course there are two major biological genders, that life itself goes well beyond just that—and it's life itself that has yet to be respected by the majority of people on the planet.
Once again, Shaman, I bow to your wisdom, passion, and eloquence.
kiss kiss
Your Doting Aunt Kate
(who begs you to forgive her for using the t-word. I just had to, I was on a rant.)
Twibe: What r some of the most important things u want 2 know abt a new person in yr life? (whether a love/sex interest or not).
By day's end I got a whole slew of answers and I think they're important enough to share with you.
kiss kiss
Kate
@danseparc: I want to know zir dreams, zir view of the world, zir passions, zir joys, and zir sorrows. What inspires zir to DO-FEEL-LOVE.
@queerfatfemme: Their reputation for being an ethical member of our community. Have been burned in life & love by people w/ a scorched path.
@whateversusan: I'd want to know what a person loves, I think… and what they remember. But I'm so bad with people, I don't know
@eugenetapdance: I need to know that they're kind and that they don't believe in being willfully ignorant.
@gnesbitt: i would want to know how open-minded they are, and whether they have a positive attitude about the world in general
@Wylddelirium: That they have a hungry sense of curiosity, a drive for adventure, a developed sense of ethics, and is kind to most.
@AmalgamGlass: are they honest with me & themselves.
@glitterbomber: I want to know if they act more out of compassion than anger cause that's the soof person for me.
@Mollena: I need to know that 1) they are compassionate 2 …they can listen, and *hear* me. 3) …they love red velvet cake.
@AliceSinAerie: I want to know if they have a sense of humor, integrity & what they enjoy in life
@scoutout: Whadda I wanna know bout nu person? Do people I respect respect them? (aka are they changing the world?) If so, cool.
@steph_infection: Can I trust them? (And that's not always easy to figure out, sadly.)
@lilithvf1998: I'd want to know how they perceive the world and what makes them feel alive. People are boring outside of these nuances. 🙂
@adamfishpoet: it's old-fashioned, I know, but I always like to make sure they're not armed. srsly, I always check that ppl are smart & have a sense of humour.
@kwalsham: I'm with @firefaunx – how they react to/treat those society deems inferior
@jaymgates: I want to know if they are willing to take their life into their own hands and make their own dreams come true.
@sandykidd: Do they read for pleasure? I can connect with almost everyone who loves to read. Bonus question: Love science? Lol
@LuciaBlowPop: the more i know the better in almost every circumstance
@ammre: what is important to them. That shows where their motivation in life is
@polerin: If they laugh, and if I'll have too keep my mouth shut (about social/political issues)
@NJrugger45: want to know are they compassionate, do they care abt social justice, what do they read, who do they call family?
@firefaunx: how they treat animals and old people, mostly.
@SheIsAnarchy003: i want to know their level of tolerance, meaning i can be tough to love sometimes and i need to know if they are patient. i also need to know what their police record looks like..haha
I'm out on the road, and I haven't been doing much blogging. I've been writing, but I've been writing for other folks. Here are some links to some new pieces:
My SciFi/Fantasy self goes freewheeling in an interview for Crossed Genres magazine, where I answer questions about alternate universes, and which of 'em I'd like to live in.
I've recently completed a non-stop four day visit to Philadelphia as "visiting scholar," guest of the Pennsylvania State Higher Education Women's Coalition. Six colleges and universities in three days. On the fourth day, I was to deliver a keynote address to the Women's Consortium's annual shindig being held at West Chester University. I wrote the address the night before I delivered it at the Consortium's luncheon (pictured here), so the talk was about as close to extemporaneous as I allow myself to get while I'm out speaking. I promised my Twitter twibe that I'd post it here if it worked. It worked, so here are my notes for that talk.
The book is available at many school and public libraries. 
