How to make life more worth living when you're a teen, a freak, or any other kind of outlaw. I've been a lot of all of those, and I managed to stay alive. The whole story is in my memoir, "A Queer and Pleasant Danger: the true story of a nice Jewish boy who joins the Church of Scientology, and leaves 12 years later to become the lovely lady she is today."
Bring Kate to Your Town
Bring Kate to Your Town
To bring Kate to your school or town for a performance, workshop, lecture, or all of the above, please send an email to the following address. PLEASE do not use this email for personal correspondence. It will not be answered. This address is only for booking touring engagements: katebornstein at earthlink dot net. Twitter is still the best way to reach Kate for any personal reason.
I've been working on a new version of my touring workshop. This one's called:
World Peace
through Gender Anarchy & Sex Positivity
I tried out early versions of the workshop at both the Queer Arts Festival in Vancouver, and at a recent tour at Hampshire College. I'll be honing and developing the piece over the next couple of seasons' touring. Here's one of the slides I'm using. I told folks at Hampshire that I'd post this online for their reference. I'm trying to contextualize the gender binary as one of many spaces of cultural regulation that more or less pass for binaries in the world. The workshop points toward building a coalition of the margins, with both sexuality & gender activists playing an equal role at the coalition table. This is nothing written in stone. It's just a theory, which means it could be a great big fat lie. But I don't think it is. Comments welcome.
xoxo
Auntie Kate
(click on the image to see full-size. feel free to copy & print.)
The gender workbook update is written and laid out in a final draft—everything but the acknowledgements. Since this is a crowdsourced book, I've thanked YOU in the dedication—yep, it's dedicated to twibe. Now, I'm asking for your input one last time: who deserves thanks?
You helped teach me, so now I want to know who taught you, because I want to thank them properly too. Please leave a SHORT comment here, or better yet tweet me with names of people—they can be friends, professors, parents, siblings, novelists, pornographers, SciFi show, storytellers, mentors, alive, dead, or in some other state of existence we don't know about yet. Angels, saints, and demons count. So do friendly faeries, elves, hobbits and so on. Who helped you on your sex and gender journeys?
Wow. It's all done except for this.
SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
So, please: let me know who I should be thanking for the awesomeness that is YOUR fabulous sexuality and gender. Clock is ticking. Deadline for thank you's is noon (EDT) tomoro, Saturday, July 7. If you tweet your answer, please use the hashtag #MNGW (My New Gender Workbook).
I tired posting this review to amazon.com but the internet machine got in the way of me posting it there. So I'm writing it here, because this is a great fucking book. I mean that in every great sense of the words.
Sex advice books can be problematic for many reasons and this book avoids most if not all of the common problems, and so it's a winner.First off, sex advice is generationally problematic. Old people and young people have different views of sex. Most times, these views conflict.
Mother/Daughter Sex Advice solves this problem neatly by making all the advice an intergenerational conversation. How cool is that?!
Many sex advice books are limited in their scope of what sex means. Both Aretha and Susie are far beyond limits when it comes to sex. No matter your gender or sexuality, if it turns you on—or if you thought it might turn you on—it's probably in this book. I read with joy as all sorts of wonderful topics were playfully and intelligently discussed: erectile dysfunction, body image, even the taste of semen--and so much more--are all discussed with flair, gentle good humor and kindness by the two authors. The book never gets bogged down in serious discussions of sex, using long words. At several points in the read, I found myself laughing out loud. Now that's how to talk about sex!
And because the book is written as a conversation, the reader never feels targeted or spoken at. Instead, we are participants in a sweet, funny conversation between mom and daughter. In short it's everything your mom never told you about sex, and everything your daughter will never tell you about sex.
Maybe you've read my book, Hello Cruel World—it's about how to make yourself a life more worth living. Well, great sex is a great way to make life more worth living, and if you liked my book, you're gonna love this one. It's a sex advice book for the rest of us, whether we're a mom, a daughter, or both--whether we're a father, a son, or any combination of the above. Highly recommended.
Currently, the book is available for Kindle, and you can get your copy right here. Have fun with it. I did!
My memoir hits the shelves on Tuesday, May 1st, and I am SO DARNED EXCITED FOR YOU TO READ THIS BOOK! Before I sat down to write the first draft, I got myself a tattoo on the back of my left hand. It says "I must not tell lies." So, A Queer and Pleasant Danger is the truth of me. It's not theory or stagecraft, it's just me. The book is dedicated to my daughter and grandchildren—all of whom are currently members in good standing of the Church of Scientology. Since I've been excommunicated from that cult/religion, no one who's a Scientologist in good standing with the established church is allowed to speak with me.
So, that makes this book the biggest truth of me I've ever written—in hopes that my daughter and grandchildren may one day break free and have a look. But you can read it, too. If you're reading this blog, you're interested in me and/or my work, and for that I'm grateful. Well, this memoir will give you a better look at the roots of all my academic and political words. I hope it makes you laugh. And I 'm sorry—really I am—but parts of the story will likely make you cry. I try to make up for that with pages that leave you gasping out loud.
"A Queer and Pleasant Danger is a brave, funny, edgy, and enlightening new memoir. I loved it and learned from it. Kate Bornstein shares her fascinating journey—through gender, Scientology, and more—and it was a thrill to tag along on the ride. This book is unbelievably powerful and affecting. If Kate Bornstein didn't exist, we would have to invent her. But luckily for queers, straights, gender outlaws, and general readers, Bornstein is out and out there."
— Dan Savage, author, columnist, and architect of the "It Gets Better Project"
“I read A Queer and Pleasant Danger over four nights in a bathtub and bed and was totally transported to Kate Bornstein’s world. Kate boldly lets us look under the hood of her own transformations as Jew, Scientologist, boy, girl, Buddhist and parent, leaving us with a richer understanding of the true identity underneath: human. A Queer and Pleasant Danger is a page turner, making sweet love to the paradoxes we all face."
— Amanda Palmer, musician and co-founder of The Dresden Dolls
"To me, Kate Bornstein is like a mythological figure or a historical literary character such as Orlando or Candide who, by illustrating her struggles, shows the rest of us how to live. This book is destined to become a classic."
— Mx Justin Vivian Bond, author of Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels
"Kate Bornstein's journey from moon-eyed Scientologist to queer icon is harrowing, heartbreaking, and amazing. This narrative is surely not for the squeamish. And yet, in the story of a sea-dog named Al who became a trans goddess named Kate, we see the messy, unsettling, inspiring struggle of a lady trying—and at last succeeding—to let her own soul be known. Disturbing and wondrous."
— Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of She's Not There and I'm Looking Through You
This blog is part of a series I'm writing while I'm updating the fifteen year old "My Gender Workbook" for Routledge Press. I'm asking for your voice to be included in the spiffy new version, because you are so much more than the first version of the book could have predicted. Every couple of days, I'll be posting a new question for you to ponder. If the question tickles your fancy, by all means please speak to it. For more about this update, check out the original blog. Thanks for your help.
I'm trying to break down sexuality into its component parts. If you're reading this blog, you know that sexuality is more than the gender of your partner(s). And if you've been reading my twibe's tweets about asexuality, you know that sexuality doesn't always include sex. So, what are the components?
Here's what I've come up with so far. I'm asking for your input: besides the following factors (in varying degrees in different people), what else is a component of a person's sexuality?
INTEREST IN SEX
BODY PARTS, CONFIGURATIONS, & IMAGE
GENDER ASSIGNMENT, IDENTITY & EXPRESSION
SENSATION
EROTIC/EROGENOUS ENHANCEMENTS & TOYS
LOCATION & TIMING
PERCEPTION & COMMUNICATION
DEBGREES OF CONSENT
TRUST, VULNERABILITY, PRIVACY & INTIMACY
CONFIDENCE & POWER DYNAMICS
SAFETY
LOVE & ROMANCE
PARTNERING
COMMUNITY, SOCIAL SKILLS, & INTERACTION
COMFORT & RISK
WHIMSY, FANTASY, FLIRTATION & PLAYFULNESS
MORALITY
INTELLIGENCE, SPRITUALITY & WISDOM
HUMOR & COMEDY
EMPATHY & RESPECT
COMPATIBILITY *
* I'm tying compatibility to placing varying degrees of importance upon perceived gender, race, age, class, religion, sexuality, looks, ability, mental health, family/ reproductive status, language, habitat, citizenship, political ideology, and humanity.
So... what else goes into defining a person's sexuality? The first draft of My New Gender Workbook is coming into the home stretch. Looking forward to your comments and tweets!
kiss kiss
Auntie Kate
Reminder: You can answer in the comments section of this blog, but Twitter is the very best way to respond. Response length, wherever you do it, is maximum 280 characters, two tweels. Your tweets do NOT have to be addressed to me, but DO remember to put the hashtag #MNGW on ALL your tweets about this or any other gender-y thing that might pop into your adorable li'l head.
