event

Can you believe it’s been a whole year since The Emmys 2009? Well, it hasn’t been, actually. This year The Emmys are like three weeks early for reasons relating somehow to football. Regardless, the theme of this year’s Emmys is “radical liberal homosexuals control Hollywood, duh!” and the proof is in the pudding: if you want to earn an Emmy, you need to have gay people in your show. Also: HOLY CRAP THAT’S A LOT OF WHITE PEOPLE. I mean look at the white white whitey white whiteymcwhiterson faces! WAY TO GO TELEVISION, for Chrissake DIVERSIFY YOURSELF.

Watch The Emmys with us! Below you’ll find a periodically updated post reflecting the actions of the Emmy Awards ‘as they happen’ but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a live-blog, because we don’t care THAT much.

We’re pretty sure AfterEllen stuffed the ballot box because all the ladies that gay ladies who like straight ladies liked were nominated, like everyone from 30 Rock. I don’t like straight girls because I don’t want to like people who don’t like me back. Does anyone else feel that way?

Oh hay Jane Lynch what’s up?

Best Comedy Series:

30 Rock, NBC – Dorothy Snarker and DJ Carlytron love this show, so it must be about gay people.
Curb Your Enthusiasm, HBO – Didn’t know this was still on the air, who cares NEXT.
Glee, Fox – Singing, dancing, homosexual characters, homosexual actors, we’ve been through this.
WIN! Modern Family, ABC – Actual gay couple with child.
Nurse Jackie, Showtime – Written by LESBIANS, has gay people.
The Office, NBC – Oscar is gay, Michael Scott has nothing against gay people.

Best Drama Series:

Breaking Bad,  AMC – What the hell is this show even about? Idk.
Dexter, Showtime – Stars David Fisher from Six Feet Under, who was gay.
The Good Wife, CBS
Lost, ABC
WIN! Mad Men, AMC – I hear the people like this show.

Variety, Music or Comedy Series:

–>All of the nominees in this category work for the gay agenda.

The Colbert Report, Comedy Central
WIN! The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, Comedy Central
Real Time With Bill Maher, HBO
Saturday Night Live, NBC
The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien, NBC

Actor in a Comedy Series

WIN! Jim Parsons, The Big Bang Theory
Tony Shalhoub, Monk
Steve Carell, The Office
Alec Baldwin, 30 Rock
Matthew Morrison, Glee
Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm

Actress in a Comedy Series

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, The New Adventures Of Old Christine – Wanda Sykes is on this show and Wanda Sykes is gay.
Lea Michele, Glee – I’m not saying that she’s gay or anything, because she definitely is not. But I’m just saying that she has had experiences. Don’t repeat this, b/c I’m going to have to delete it.
WIN! Edie Falco, Nurse Jackie - Nurse Jackie is written by a lesbian, so it’s basically a lesbian brain winning.
Tina Fey, 30 Rock - GGWLSG (Gay Girls Who Like Straight Girls) LOVE Tina Fey with a fervor and passion which, to be honest, I have never quite understood.
Toni Collette, United States Of Tara – Gay alter, gay son.
Amy Poehler, Parks and Recreation – GGWLSG (Gay Girls Who Like Straight Girls) LOVE Amy Poehler.

Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series:

WIN! Jane Lynch, Glee
Julie Bowen, Modern Family
Kristin Wiig, Saturday Night Live
Jane Krakowski, 30 Rock
Sofia Vergara, Modern Family
Holland Taylor, Two And A Half Men – If she wins this, we’ll all know she’s really winning for her role as Helena Peabody in The L Word.

Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series:

[This is possibly the gayest group of nominated persons in the history of gayness, which as we all know, is the history of humanity. I know John Cyrer isn't technically gay, but as I've said a million times before, Duckie and my Mom are basically twins and my Mom is a lesbian.]

Chris Colfer, Glee
Neil Patrick Harris, How I Met Your Mother
WIN! Eric Stonestreet, Modern Family
Ty Burrell, Modern Family
Jon Cryer, Two And A Half Men

Supporting Actress in a Drama Series

Rose Byrne, Damages
Sharon Gless, Burn Notice
WIN! Archie Panjabi, The Good Wife
Christine Baranski, The Good Wife
Christina Hendricks, Mad Men
Elisabeth Moss, Mad Men

This opening number is probably giving a lot of you emotional tremors because it combines Betty White, the entire cast of Glee, Sue Sylvester, that Tina Fey woman again, and other people on television programs.

Here’s a photo:

Eric Stonestreet plays a gay person on Modern Family but is not gay in real life, which is like playing a retarded person in a TV show or movie. Gilbert Grape Award. It’s really hard to act gay, they have to touch each other! He won an Emmy.

laneia: things that will never be funny: twitter jokes

Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd won an Emmy for writinga show that features two gay people and an adopted baby.

riese: it’s too bad lindsay lohan isn’t there
laneia: i was just thinking that?

JANE LYNCH WHO IS GAY won an Emmy for being in a show called Glee which has gay people in it, and she thanked her gay wife. I feel like this post will be good for SEO.

The Gilmore Girl’s Mom bombed a gay joke with Chandler Bing, and then a bunch of gay jokes happened in a row, too fast for us to know if they were offensive or not. UPDATE: Laneia liked it. Then Ryan Murphy won something for Glee and thanked his boyfriend which makes this the second gay partner thanked of the night.

Some more gay jokes, some more sex jokes, and people who are super grateful, it’s like Oliver Twist or something.

Mad Men wins something. Also Top Chef won something. Cutest Ashley Merriman? I like singing and dancing.

I think they are trying to be cool by telling ‘self-referential jokes’ and being ‘deprecating’ and ‘snarky’ and also using the words ‘gay’ and ‘sex’ is often as possible. I guess that’s kinda what this website does. I hope we pull it off better than they do.

Things have continued to happen: that actress who looks like Julia Roberts read words from a scroll of paper. She wears reading glasses and has a professional facial expression.

A video montage reminded us that not only are these people good looking, but they also gave money to charity following natural disasters.

There was a musical montage where Jimmy Fallon, dressed as Elton John meets Barbie Dream House meets Perez Hilton, sang an ode, I believe, to Law & Order.

‘What? Law and Order is cancelled?’ I said to Laneia.

‘We talked about this already.’ She said.

‘Oh,’ I said.

Later on in the program, Ricky Gervais, a cherub humorous man from The Office UK, addresses the audience about a lack of backstage alcohol. He makes a few good jokes and then gives everybody a beer. The attractive men & women in the few front rows eagerly accept cold bottles from cheery usher/servers in white waistcoats.

One of the awards goes to an award show. Not this one, but the Tonys. So what happened was an award show gave an award to another award show.

Another theme of the program was “people behind the scenes have feelings.” People we’ve never heard of as well as some famous-looking people answer questions about studio memos and childhood dreams.

‘I don’t like awards shows,’ Laneia says. “I don’t understand. it’s like, they’re giving out their own awards. it’s not like getting an award from your teacher. A teacher is relatively unbiased. but this is like, from your peers. Like ‘best dressed.’ I was awarded ‘best dressed’ in high school and do you know why? Because a group of 5-8 girls got together one weekend and decided who would win what, so everyone important would be included in the superlatives in the yearbook. and then they told ppl who to vote for, and they did.’

‘These dresses are more expensive,’ I say.

I wonder to myself, ‘I wish The Real L Word was on.’

Later, I think: ‘I wonder how many people will want to sell for Avon tomorrow.’ I decide to wait to call Avon until everyone else has already tried it and quit. I’m not a quitter.

Juliana Marguelis says television is important because we look to it when we want to know what has happened. I look to it when I want to see people act out stories. Everyone is cheering for George Clooney because he made a lot of money and gave it to people who deserve it, which is nice.

Time goes on. We age, and seasons pass. Summer blends into winter and becomes spring, in that order.

This show is the worst show ever, this is like pre-schoolers picking National Merit Scholars. What happened. Do they realize it’s ten pm, and now ‘the cast of true blood’ has to compete with ‘True Blood’ and ‘the cast of Mad Men’ has to compete with Mad Men?

I think Jim (the one who married Pam) decided to pretend he couldn’t read, rather than read the line he was being fed.

As time went on, we found ourselves loosing interest in the program. We asked ourselves if perhaps the reason marijuana might be legalized in California this year is because it will encourage people to sit through programs like this one whereas they ordinarily might get up and do something else. But the only competition here is SANDWICH. And SANDWICH JUST WON Y’ALL! HAPPY SUNDAY!

UPDATE: Apparently after we left to go do arts & crafts because we’ve been working pretty much nonstop this weekend, other things happened. This included:

- Angela Chase won an award for something we didn’t see

- Mad Men won Best Drama, but everyone was watching Mad Men so they missed the big reveal, also I think it has a gay character.

- Modern Family won Best Comedy, it also has gay people in it, therefore gay people have won.

For some, being femme can feel synonymous with being alone or unseen; exploited by the wrong people and under-appreciated by your own.  Femme is roaming the streets with eyes and gait and lace and garters suggesting “I’m one of you” to everyone when only a precious few see her for who she truly is. Femme manages to stay beautifully, resiliently afloat in a world where she is told, as Kate Bornstein eloquently said in her keynote address last Saturday at the Femme2010: No Restrictions conference in Oakland, “sexy is evil and cute is dumb.”

Earlier this year – in February, to be exact – I answered a call from FemmeCon for new members to help organize the 2010 event. The call said they needed more femmes of color, more moms, and more folks with experience running events. I am very much all of those things. “I have an obligation here,” I thought, and the next thing I knew I was a full-fledged programming committee member and, just as suddenly, had agreed to run a workshop on femme blogging and social media with the delightful Bevin Branlandingham of FemmeCast and Queer Fat Femme.

I really had no idea what I was getting into. I’d heard of the conference before but had never attended; joining the programming committee was a perfect primer as I got to sift through the initial batch of workshop proposals that would eventually be selected for the program. We had six months to make shit happen whilst balancing work and family and sex and education and our 84,000 other homo-centric obligations and activist causes.

Those six months whirred by until it was very late on Thursday night of last week — less than twelve hours before my presentation was scheduled — and I was in the back of a town car, zigzagging across San Francisco with greasy pizza in a box dinner and freshly-printed copies of my materials on the backseat next to me, trying not to vomit as I’d just realized that the room I was presenting in seats, like, 84,000 queers. HOLY SHIT.

The next day, heavily-caffeinated, I talked myself off the ledge of nervousness and found myself in a hall to direct my workshop with around two dozen incredible femmes and femme allies. Among them was keynote speaker Kate Bornstein - whose heart as is as big as her tongue is sharp, quick, brutally honest, and laced with words arranged more beautifully than your own heart can bear – and folks from far-flung locations such as as Philadelphia, Madison, Portland, and Maine.

I quickly made the decision to clamber off the big stage down to the folks in the audience, because it was just ridiculous not to (partly due to it being more conducive to actual dialogue and partly because I don’t like being up on big stages all by my lonesome). It was a great group – smart, and candid – so we focused on the pressing issues around privacy, anonymity, and how to be most effective across myriad social media avenues without feeling overwhelmed. We covered the DIY aspects of blogging as well as the more abstract ideas of what it means to create and participate in the blogosphere as femme.

When it ended, I felt relieved and triumphant and very happy to get immediate, positive feedback from those who had attended. It was definitely a luxury to tuck my workshop away so bright and early, so that I could relax and spend the rest of the weekend completely focused on the remainder of the conference.

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Here’s a list of the fantastic workshops I attended, in case you’re curious:

Country-Western Two-Step Workshop
Chiara Manodori and Haley Ausserer

Quit Fucking Taking Us For Granted: How to Survive the Movement as a Femme
Savanna Kilner

Queer Femme Porn Panel
Dylan Ryan, Courtney Trouble, Judy Minx

Femme Mamas
Celestina Pearl/Dana Rosenberg

Femme2010 Short Film Festival

Strap-On Satisfaction: A Femme’s Guide to Giving & Receiving Pleasure
Greta Carey

Tips for a World Class Marriage/Relationship
Molly McKay, Davina Kotulski

I’m not going to get into the meat and bones of each workshop; I’m not going to lie or sugarcoat my own personal experience at #femme2010 (the conference had an official hashtag on Twitter, and reading the tweet history is kind of an awesome experience all on its own). It was extremely well-done and  left me exhausted at the end of each day (or night, as it were), longing to be tucked in at home with my wife and my kid and my pups, wrapped up in the soothing comfort of the familiar, even though all I had to cross to get to them was a silly little bridge – not states or discrimination or perhaps worst of all, a closet.

Here’s the thing.

At FemmeCon, for one utopian weekend, femme is everywhere you look and it’s undeniable and good and presumed. You look around and the air is literally thick with finely-milled, shimmering glitter. Strangers say “cute shoes” and it’s not just another inane misinterpretation – it’s community, and what’s more, that stranger is about to blow your mind on a panel at the next workshop or during an impromptu conversation over brunch or between sessions.

You have no idea that in the next 24 hours you’ll become fast friends with a girl you’ve really enjoyed watching in hot indie lesbian porn for years.  You have no idea that you’ll meet a professor who uses your blog to teach her class on LGBT studies, or that you’ll be climbing into Lynn Breedlove’s little femme-mobile to get to and fro when your shoes and/or alcohol consumption won’t cut it.

You’ll find yourself in a random hotel room amidst piles of pretty shoes and an overflowing cabinet of much-needed snacks and booze.

You’ll find yourself two-stepping with lots and lots of different girls, all smiling shyly and murmuring “slow-slow, quick-quick” and giggling at the “sweetheart position.” You will lead or follow, but you will have to pick one or the other.

You’ll spend way too much money on irresistible wares handcrafted by other femmes, and then you’ll want to spend more.

You’ll find yourself nursing last night’s hangover over toast and marmalade and the life stories of people you’ve only just met – and you’ll find yourself telling your own for the first time in a good, long while.

You’ll find yourself screaming “FINGERBANG!” at a poetry reading, of all things. And then, a few heartbeats later, you’ll find yourself crying. A little. (Typical. Ha. Blame Missy Fuego.)

You’ll be handed brand spanking new, high-quality dildos and harnesses scot-free and you’ll have sexy lesbian porn stars autograph the newly-purchased porn in which they star.

You will steal away from all of this for a quiet moment of reflection and be thankful for the incredible art that permits you to do so gracefully.

You’re just not prepared for that kind of awesome until you see for yourself how much momentum can be built on the strong and lovely backs of femmes of all stripes for days and weeks and months and it’s finally happening right before your eyes, and the very first thing you do on a Sunday morning is watch a hot femme fuck a hot dyke on a hot bike going 50mph on a foggy San Francisco highway in a short femme film.

And you thank the powers that be that this. is. your. life.

Fit for a Femme and Queer Fat Femme and Puppy

Sure, FemmeCon is flawed. At the closing remarks on Sunday, the steering committee took responsibility for the conference’s lack of diversity and pledged to recruit more transgendered femmes, elderly femmes, more femmes of color and of varying classes for the 2012 conference. There were a few technical and scheduling glitches on the organizing side, and questionable haircuts on the attendee side. Alas, I was learning and evolving constantly, humbly. It was sobering, but in a way that flooded me with lasting wonder and inspiration.

I have always prided myself on being an open-minded person. This past weekend I learned that being open-minded only gets you as far as what you know or what you may think you know, but being sincerely open-hearted? Well, my dearest darlings, I hate to sound trite, but that will give you the world.

Day Three of my Lollapalooza Adventure was supposed to begin early with the Miniature Tigers at 11:30 a.m. Needless to say, that plan fell through pretty quickly. I’ll just have to watch them on Youtube or something. Anyway, when we finally rolled up to Lolla that afternoon, we saw this dude:

The day before, there were guys with signs reading “women shouldn’t be allowed to vote.” Personally, I feel that protesters are a barometer for how fun something will be.

Is there a dude with a signboard outside? Could be a good time.

Is there are giant group of really angry people yelling about how your souls will burn in hell? It’s probably gonna be a really awesome time!

Sunday was a rapid-fire day. I saw the most bands that day, so this recap is heavy on the photos, light on the detail.

The first band we saw that day was Hockey.

I found them on iTunes randomly a few months ago, and really liked their album. A lot of shirtless bros liked it, too, judging by the crowd. The lead singer seemed a bit full of himself, but their set was nice, so I’ll let it slide.

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Day two of Lollapalooza had arguably the best lineup of the whole weekend. I had been pumped about this day for weeks, and it was as fun as I expected. My fest-mates Christina and Emily (see their sexybacks in the photo below) and I showed up at the park around 2 p.m. to start our day.

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The first thing I noticed when I walked into Lollapalooza Friday afternoon was the distinct smell I have dubbed “festival stench.” It’s a combination of mud, sweat, tobacco, marijuana, and vomit. Gross, I know, but it brought back a flood of Bonnaroo memories, which was kind of comforting.

Lolla is dirtier than this photo would suggest

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