#jay.pdf

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favorite poems from zine "They Will Never Erase Us" by rocothorpe

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excerpts from "Fucking Trans Women" by Mira Bellweather

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"Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain" by Declan Kavanagh (2017)

In all honesty, I have been thinking about the relationship between effeminacy and power for quite some time, perhaps twenty or so years. One of my earliest and clearest memories is being told that I spoke "like a girl." I was seven, maybe eight years old. This unsolicited commentary came from other children, and from some adults; it hinged on their perception that I was "like a girl" in many ways but that I was still definitely a boy and should behave as such. I didn't. For one thing, I did not think there was anything wrong with being "girly." I still don't. Underneath the pain caused by these repeated encounters, I remained curious about the problem of effeminacy, which was always their problem, not mine.

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pspsps transmasc femmes come get ur juice

(femme specific talk begins at page 8, and again at page 15. other pages discuss intersectionality and queer studies.)

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historical descriptions of femme gay men from "Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 To The Present" by Neil Miller

Boys, usually known as "pansies," are seen with makeup; heavy mascara, rouge and lipstick. In high-pitched voices, these exhibitionists smirk indecent suggestions at each other.

The Webster Hall dances did not mark the first time that men dressed in women's clothing appeared in public in lower Manhattan. As Chauncey documents, certain working class bars on the Bowery at the turn of the century catered to "fairies"—a term that Chauncey uses to describe effeminate men who characterized themselves not so much by their sexual orientation than by the gender role they assumed. Bars like the Slide on Bleeker Street and Paresis hall in Cooper Square were quite notorious as "fairy" hangouts. In an 1890 publication called Vices of a Big City, the slide was described as "the lowest and most disgusting place. The place is filled nightly with from one hundred to three hundred people, most of whom are males, but unworthy the name of men. They are effeminate, degraded, and addicted to vices which are inhuman and unnatural." Clearly, some of this early "fairy" subculture survived into the Webster Hall dances.

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“Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain” by Declan Kavanagh (2017)

"There are a particular Gang of Sodomitical Wretches in this Town, who call themselves the Mollies, and are so far degenerated from all masculine Deportment, or manly Exercises, that they rather fancy themselves Women, imitating all the little vanities that Custom has reconcil'd to the Female Sex, affecting to Speak, Walk, Tattle, Curtsy, Cry, Scold, and to mimick all Manner of Effeminacy, that ever has fallen within their several observations; not omitting the Indecencies of lewd Women, that they may tempt one another by such immodest Freedoms to commit those odious Bestialities, that ought for ever to be without a Name." -Edward Ward, A Compleat and Humorous Account of All the Remarkable Clubs and Societies in the Cities of London and Westminster - In documenting this culture, Ward promotes as much as he denounces, with his exposition of club life showcasing the pleasures as well as the moral hazards of urban clubs. However, at times the presentation of club life is more firmly couched in a vocabulary of disgust and moral panic, with the description of the effeminate Mollies providing one such notable instance. As Chris Mounsey points out, it is unclear whether Ward's "discomfiture" is genuine or more to do with the fact that he is "trying to hide his actual participation in [Molly] practices behind pretended disgust." Although Ward's description of the Molly house is a slight and unstable passage on which to build readings of the eighteenth-century queer subject, the entry has nonetheless been widely cited by scholars since the emergence of lesbian and gay historical studies. The first scholarly analysis of eighteenth-century effeminacy is to be found in historical writings based on early lesbian and gay studies published in the aftermath of the gay liberation movement of the 1970s. This analysis offered the persecuted Molly as a historical figure for a movement that sought to redress the discrimination experienced by modern gay men. - Moreover, their type of effeminate sexual excess is most problematic for its almost sublime refusal of description: "those odious Bestialities, that ought for ever to be without a Name." description of the Molly club is important for its explicit conflation of effeminacy with the sodomitical; in designating some club men to be Mollies, Ward names and fixes same-sex desire even as he negates the Molly's queer affect by stating that this desire among men ought to remain nameless. In spite of this rhetorical maneuver, Ward affirms male effeminacy as code for sodomitical lust, thus expanding, but also anchoring, the terms of signification for the effeminate. Previously considered to be a moral failure, the effeminate man was now also the suspect sodomite. As Anthony Fletcher argues, having been long associated with “unmanly weakness, softness, delicacy and self-indulgence," effeminacy's exclusive association with homoeroticism only occurred when sodomitical vice began to be understood in gendered terms. Yet, the homoerotic potential of men's relations with each other-sodomitical sex-is exactly what remains obscured in Ward's description of the effeminate Mollies.

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"Mansex defines masculinity. It is healthy, fearfully so. Those who recognize mansex for what it is and who practice it freely hold a precious gift of knowledge. Mansex is esoteric."

-Max Exander, Mandate magazine, September 1982, page 32