P'town Is Burning

Participants: Ariadne Kane, Exec. Dir., Outreach Institute; Mariette Pathy Allen, author & photographer; Jennie Livingston, Director Paris Is Burning and JoAnn Roberts, author & publisher

At the 1991 Fantasia Fair, the Outreach Institute and the Provincetown Art Association sponsored a special screening of Jennie Livingston's critically acclaimed film, Paris Is Burning.
The film is a documentary on "Voguing" and the Drag Balls in New York's Harlem. Many of the people in the film are stereotypical "drag queens," while some are unquestionably transsexuals. There are also a great number of individuals who "dress up" but do not crossdress. We see "soldiers," "Wall Street brokers," and "college students" among the female impersonators.
Following the film, the audience participated in a Q&A period with a panel consisting of Jennie Livingston, the film's producer/director; Ari Kane, Executive Director of the Outreach Institute; Mariette Pathy Allen, photographer and author of Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them; and JoAnn Roberts, author, editor and publisher of this magazine.
The discussion took place on Monday evening, October 21, 1991.


Opening Remarks

Rhoda Rossmore: Welcome to the Provincetown Art Association. I don't know if you're aware of this, but Jennie Livingston, the producer and director of Paris Is Burning, was a former fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center here in Provincetown. So we thank her. Now Chris Busa will be the moderator.
Chris Busa: We have about 40 minutes to discuss crossdressing, transvestism, transsexualism, transgenderism and androgyny. (Audience Laughs.) What you saw on the film is a completely different subculture than what transpires in Provincetown and Fantasia Fair. I'm sure Ari (Kane) will draw some distinctions. I think Jennie, with her experience in New York will be able to, I don't know if she'll catch the FanFair Follies, but if you compare the FanFair Follies, which is later in the week, to the events in this film, there's a radical difference that I hope they'll discuss a little bit. It largely has to do with the difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality.
JoAnn Roberts, who is a writer and a Ph.D., and who is no longer pursuing a career in aerospace, is now full-time publishing material for the crossdressing community. She has a new magazine called International TranScript.
Mariette Pathy Allen, who we all know from her photographs and now her book, is a still photographer, and while her experiences are somewhat different than Jennie's, we'll see what she has to say about the film as well.
One of the comments I thought would be good to turn over to the panelists as they answer questions from the audience after they make a brief statement , is to discuss the idea that crossdressing may be an artform. And, perhaps that's why we're here at the Art Association and why we ran four articles in Provincetown Art this year with gender issues in painting and lifestyle.
Ari has a kind of prophecy for the 21st century that we'll all be kind of androgynous, and that might be very healthy since masculinity and femininity are really cultural manifestations at some basic level. The biological aspects, that won't change, we'll remain male and female but how we manifest that may look very, very different.
I think the best thing is to ask each panelist to make a statement and then turn it over to questions from the audience. So, I'll turn it over to Jennie.
Jennie Livingston: First of all, I'm really delighted to be here. I've lived in Provincetown on a couple of occasions and I love it here. So, I'm honored and delighted to be here.
Since Chris has brought up a certain kind of topic, I think it's really impossible to generalize about why people want to change gender, or dress like another gender, or imitate the stereotypes of their given gender, or defy those stereotypes. But I really agree with what Chris said about gender being a culturally determined thing and not biologically determined. And I think it is important to examine that in terms of how other people are treated and in terms of how other people behave, but more importantly in terms of how we feel about ourselves in the world.
Ari Kane: I would concur in the sense that gender is a social construct, although there is some evidence that lead us to believe there are predispositions for some of the behaviors that we see, particularly among males, since it is males that we see want to shift more abruptly than the female in this particular species. However, it is the cultural manifestation and the socio-economic factors that really are the principle determinants in what kind of expression people would like to show to the rest of the world. Also, another factor that I think is important is private gender expression. It has to do with sensuality. It has to do with feeling, with intimacy and that's not so easily showable among the American male, regardless of ethnic or cultural background, In general, we find the American male distances himself early, for various reasons, from really getting into intimacy and relating totally to other people. This is one way we can access it (intimacy) by changing our expression of gender so that it gives us the possibility of expressing things that we'd like to express but perhaps are not expressible in the gender roles related to our biology. I'm a strong believer that we need to have as many forms as possible to give ourselves some breathing room in a very restrictive and rigid gender role system.
Mariette Allen: Now that you've said everything there is to say. The problem is we're all in agreement here.
Jennie: I disagree (laughter).
Mariette: I think the only thing I can add to that is the issue we go over and over; what's sex and what's gender? I think that that's what striking about your film. I've been to these balls a number of years ago and I thought they were most democratic and beautiful events. There was a place for everybody. The focus of the film went over and over about these being gay people. I kept thinking, "Wait a moment. They don't necessarily know whether it's a sexual orientation or a gender role preference." Sometimes the two seem to flood together and if you don't know, it's something that you want to explore. Most of the community that I'm more familiar with, the focus is forever on gender roles and there's a great fear and anxiety about sexual orientation.
Then you come to Provincetown and here's the other side again, and it's over and over fascinating. So, depending on which audience you're with the focus is either on sex or gender, both of which are equally important or valid. It's not that one is right and one is wrong. I think what's important for people to know is that there's so many choices, that one doesn't determine the other and that nothing has to be frightening.
Most people don't even know what you mean when you say "gender." It's a mental state, a way of seeing yourself. It's a self-visualization. I think we need to be more careful about defining these things and having a sense of not defining from rigidity but defining from the point of view of increasing understanding.
JoAnn Roberts: So I guess it's my turn. As a parent with two teenage children who know that I'm a crossdresser, I've been very open with them about gender roles and I've also had the opportunity to observe them and their friends in how they interact socially on the basis of gender. I'm seeing shifts already in this new generation of kids in how they interact socially and there's major changes, especially in dating patterns, from when I was a teenager. So, it's been interesting from my perspective as a crossdresser who swaps gender roles to watch this social dynamic going on sort of naturally.
Question: Why is it that some partners, wives have complete understanding of their husbands as crossdressers and some women have no understanding? Can these attitudes be changed?
JoAnn: Let me answer the last part first. Yes, attitudes can change, but they can go in both directions. You can have a partner who starts out to be very accepting and by inappropriate behavior drive that person toward non-acceptance. You can also take a partner with a lot of love, a lot of patience, a lot of understanding, a lot of nurturing and it is possible to bring them around to at least a partially accepting attitude. The attitude they start out with, and I think Ari will agree with me, depends a lot on that individual's self-esteem to begin with, and their own self-image. If you have a partner who is well-grounded in who they are, crossdressing is not threatening to them. But, like most women are socialized in our culture, if they don't have a good grounding in themselves, and they define themselves by who their partner is, then if their partner is a crossdresser, then there's something wrong with them.
I think that's why you get this vast difference in how partners deal with crossdressing in a spouse.
Ari: A lot also depends on how open and honest you, as a crossdresser, are with your partner. In many cases, this is such a difficult behavior to describe and share with somebody you love, for fear of being rejected, that you fail to tell your spouse or future wife about this behavior. Then, fifteen years later, if it becomes known, it's looked at as a kind of deception. Since, most people believe that in love and intimacy there are no secrets, this becomes a real threat to the whole relationship. So now you try to patch it up and hopefully you can at least get detente, that is somebody who'll say, "Well I'm willing to listen and maybe learn a little bit about this." But emotionally, it's extremely hard after so many years of marriage, not to know this secret is part of your significant other's life pattern.
Jennie: I certainly know that crossdressing and other gender behavior is not the same as being gay, I'm a lesbian and I can say that having seen my family's reaction to my lesbianism and certainly my friends reactions to their lesbian sexuality, the reaction is the same. I think what you were saying about security, you know if the parent finds out that a kid is lesbian or gay, and they're pretty secure about how they brought up that kid, they may have a funny reaction at first, but then they'll know, "Well, I didn't do anything [to cause this]."
In other cases where the parent is an insecure person, they freak out, say, "What did I do?" and turn against the kid because they essentially are insecure with their own actions. I think mainstream society has a lot of difficulty with people who break gender rules and break sex rules, and that goes for straight women who are free with their sexuality. People freak out at that too. It's very difficult for people.
Mariette: The issue of when children come into the picture, that complicates the whole thing. What do you do then. That's been one of the focuses over the years; how does the family re-orient itself or recreate itself with gender issues in their lives. We're on the threshold of a lot of experiments and a lot of new kinds of families are developing. I really want to see where this goes.
Question: I'm wondering. Many of the scenes from the film sort of mirror image a social dynamic in the crossdressing community that you may not be aware of. People [crossdressers] who come from conservative, or remote rural areas may automatically assume they are homosexuals because being transgendered, the population doesn't have any way to deal with it except to say, "Well, you're gay," and they accept that.
Jennie: I don't accept that. The Paris Is Burning subculture really is a gay subculture. I guess it is possible that there is an African-American person who wants to do crossgender and they don't see anything [like it] in the African-American community. Everybody I met really identifies with the gay culture and a gay sexuality.
What I did find was that generationally, in terms of sex-change, the older generation felt like, "I would never do that. I'm comfortable as I am. It's just something I wouldn't do." And the younger generation felt like surgery was very important. I think that partially has to do with improvements in the surgery and partially has to do with the fact that people like Dorian and Pepper came of age in the 60's, when being a wild, free individual was great. And people like Venus or Octavia came of age in the 80's, which is a time when "fitting-in," and being Dynasty and being Dallas, being rich and being this and that was it, and it seemed more important to be that, rather than live a "fabulous, expressive" life, which was more au currant in the 60's.
Question: Ari, I heard you say that men crossing over to women happens more, but that's not altogether my experience. I would appreciate the panel addressing that question. I see a large number of women crossing over to "men," both as transvestites and transsexuals.
Ari: What I mean is that the way of expressing it [gender shifts] seems to be more obvious [in men] and I emphasize "seems." If a man decides to make an appearance as a "femme" or as a woman, that's much more obvious than a female who decides to wear hip-boots and sloppy-joe shirt and all the other stuff. She could still be a demure male and no one would ever see the difference unless one looks at the anatomy, which is always so well camouflaged. These women don't wear bras and if they have small breasts, you couldn't tell the difference. That's not to say that they don't want to express a masculine gender form, but the expression is what I'm thinking of and that's what I don't see as obvious in the females becoming men as the males becoming more feminine, or "femme," by the convention of using clothes and that sort of thing.
Mariette: Are you talking statistically, because emotionally I can see that women have made great strides in the past few years. Ari: We're talking about the superficial. Wearing the clothes may seem to be a badge of femininity for some males. It may be more than that for other males. But, for women, the motivation is somewhat different. In my experience, there is a need to express power and that power manifests itself in wearing pants, as opposed to wearing a skirt. That's a symbol of power for this culture, or a symbol of power.
Men are in power. They wear pants. They don't wear skirts unless they're crossdressers.
JoAnn: I think it goes a little farther than that. Women have a lot of freedom of expression in the kind of clothes they wear and the choice of the clothes they wear. You can see women who dress masculine, but what you don't see are females who go as far as crossdressers do in attempting to put on a moustache, or sideburns, or a temporary beard. You don't see women crossdressing like you see men crossdressing. So, I think your point is well taken. There are a lot more males crossing the gender line than females; it's because they [females] get a lot more freedom of expression that men aren't allowed.
Questioner: If I understand this correctly, what I heard you saw was: as a male in our society, dressing as woman enables you to develop certain feminine characteristics of nurturing, loving, gentleness and allows you to express those things. I've only met crossdressers in Provincetown, if I went to where you live and I met you in your three-piece suit, would you still be as lovely and gentle and open?
Jennie: A lot of the people that I know who change gender… it's not just loving and nurturing, it's cattiness, bitchiness, a certain kind of female competitiveness. These are qualities that are just not allowed to men, so not all of them...
Questioner: The butchest person in my family when I was growing up was my mother and she dressed like all of you. (laughter) So my impression of you is that you all look like strong...
JoAnn: Your mother had hair like this? (More audience laughter)
Questioner: I'm trying to get an impression of your other life, when you don't come to Provincetown.
Ari: Let me try to expand on that. The notion that we come across is that we're all endowed with a unique set of attributes and I classify those as gender attributes. The culture has gone further by saying there's a set of those attributes, or there are subsets of those attributes such as gentle, nurturing and loving, or powerful, aggressive, independent and risk taking. We all have a combination of those that are unique, sort of an imprint. In my practice, one of the things I'm always struck by is how when I do an exercise with a client, particularly a male, he will construct a set of attributes that really profile his basic persona. Some of that may be nurturing, and some may be cattiness, and some may be also be aggressiveness, and some may be willingness to take risks and so forth. Some of that requires a certain kind of prop, or a visual expression and clothes represent that in this culture. Obviously, I'm making a statement tonight my the kind of clothing I'm wearing. Earlier today I was making another kind of statement by the activity I was doing and my sisters here will attest that I was not dressed earlier as I am tonight. So, for me, a lot of this gender appearance, or feminine appearance, is related to my function and also to my attitude. One is, in some ways, I fell more open and expressive about things I have never really learned to do well in my masculine gender role. And I figured out that if I can't do them in my masculine role, and I still want to do them, I might choose a gender alternative. My alternative is to present myself as a woman and then I can do things that usually I have found restricted in the culture.
So, nuturance for me in either role is one of those qualities I can do in either role, but I can't really hug like I can hug in this role [feminine], when I'm a man, especially in a suit.
Questioner: You can have your cake and eat it too. In Paris Is Burning, here are these kids saying that they needed to create another culture in order to survive because they can't survive the culture that's there. It saddens me to think men can't go beyond that and still be men and be loving and role models for kids.
Ari: I'd go beyond that and instead of just saying "man" or "woman" say "human being" because this culture has expunged some of the human qualities in all of us to try and bring us to a more generalized socio-economic plane which they can manage. There's a political statement to be made with that. I'm just talking from my own personal world, my own historical perspective. I've seen thousands of crossdressers also talk about that in various ways.
Jennie: It's also very much part of a process whereby gay rights does one thing… well, Gloria Steinem wrote an essay that I thought was ignorant where she talks about transsexuals and what they were doing was really reactionary because if we had a free society then they could just be free to be feminine, etc.
Well, that's great but we don't and if a man's born feeling he has the wrong body from age three and that's what he needs to feel fulfilled, it seems to me she, anyone, should have compassion for that, or feeling for that. Hopefully, it's all part of a process whereby certain people doing certain things move towards a human goal so that somewhere in the 25th century we can say, "Ha, ha! Wasn't it funny there was gender in the 20th century."
Question: You started to talk a little bit about the socio-economic issues. There is a glaring difference between the people in Paris Is Burning and the community here. That one seems poor and this one seems not to be. Can you talk about what that might mean?
JoAnn: One of the things I've become sensitized to is what appears to be a lack of minorities within what we call the gender community and the gender community are those of us who have enough disposable income to be able to come to things like Fantasia Fair. I'm part of a relatively large support group in Philadelphia. We have about 350 members, yet very few are minorities in our support group and it's not because we're not open to them. I've been thinking about it and I'm wondering if it isn't something that has to do with the culture of large inner cities. I think Emily was hinting at that. When minorities grow up in these inner cities and they show a tendency toward transgendered behavior they get pushed off into the gay community. They must be gay if they do that.
I feel this has something to do with the concept of "macho" in Hispanic and Black communities. They get shoved out into the gay community and they grow up in that gay culture. That's different from my experience because I kept it quiet. I didn't show my crossdressing tendencies. I kept it to myself until I was in my thirties.
Mariette: Jennie, I wanted to ask you... I had this fantasy every time I saw the film. I wanted to bring Pepper Labeija here. I was thinking, what if a selection of the people from Paris came to this event for the full nine days and attended the seminars and workshops. I wonder if a certain percentage of them would suddenly have a new thought, "Gee, well maybe there is some other aspect that I haven't explored."
Questioner: What's the difference between their world and this world? For Paris Is Burning and Labeija, what would this community show them that they're lacking?
Mariette: It would go both ways. I think this community could learn a great deal from them. I also think they can be confronted with some new thoughts too.
Jennie: No, actually what I'm saying in terms of Pepper, a very specific example, Pepper is gay, likes boys, has always liked boys, but Pepper has a long term affair with a masculine lesbian. They walk down the street, she very masculine and he very feminine, so no one would pick on them, and they have these two kids, which she raises.
There's this amazing conversation that takes place in a wonderful Debbie Eisenberg story, I don't know if you're familiar with her work. There's this girl who goes out on a date. She's white and the guy is Cuban and he says, "I have this cousin who's a crossdresser and he dresses up in women's clothing. He's not gay. He just really likes it."
Now, I don't know if this is someone she knew, but I would guess there are people like that in the minority community that don't go into the gay subculture because they don't feel attracted to it.
JoAnn: Where I was coming from is, I've met a lot of transsexuals that grew up in what would be called a gay community or gay culture and they really want nothing more than to go on and have surgery, and as the two were talking about in the film, living a normal life; getting married, having a heterosexual relationship with a male and having kids. I've met a lot of people like that who are minorities and it's just a different experience from the rest of the people that I've met in this community.
Question: I want to ask Mariette and Jennie about working closely with these people in the pictures and the film, how did it change their view of themselves?
Mariette: What a good question! Well, I've been involved with this now for 14 years and I've lost all objectivity at this point. However, if I strain to bring myself back to when I first encountered this; I came to the first Fair about 1980 or '81. At that time I wore cowboy boots and I looked pretty androgynous myself.
Ten years ago these people dressed in a much more exaggerated way than they do now. I was rather shocked. I thought, "Oh my goodness. This is what we've tried to get away from all these years and here I'm confronting this."
I thought the people were interesting, and at the same time I thought they were grotesque in a way. I thought everybody's makeup was the wrong color. It was kind of horrifying.
My first Fantasia Fair I put myself in a phone booth, closed the doors and stayed there for a few hours to watch this passing fantasy go by. I thought, "Are you here or aren't you here? If you're here, then you've got to step out of this phone booth and you're going to come to terms with this and see what these people have to offer."
That's when I started to come to the understanding of what's sex and what's gender. Why is this interesting to me? What do I get out of it? How come I'm still here? What am I doing when I'm lifting my camera. What am I doing when I'm speaking to people. What is it actually that I'm trying to find out about myself? That's really what I've been on a search for all these years, why am I here?
My search really has to do with what is the essence, what is the nature of masculinity and femininity. Is there an essential difference? Are we basically all humans who have picked up certain characteristics and put them together like a kaleidoscope of some kind? Which is what I tend to believe.
So, I feel like I'm forever fighting this thing. There's a pile of masculine traits over here. This is a pile of feminine traits over here. This person is gay. This person is straight. I think it's a lot of hogwash. If you ask me personally, I think basically everyone's bisexual and have made preferences one way or the other, or in different times in their lives have gone one way or the other. But, this is a personal choice.
One of the things I've learned from this is that your anatomy does not have to determine your sexual orientation or your gender role. (Applause.)
Jennie: In 1982, I was here during Fantasia Fair. I was a student of photography and I was taking a lot of pictures. So I was hanging out in a bar and I met this guy who was a crossdresser who was coming on to me. I was really freaked out because I was really attracted to him, at that point I didn't define myself as gay or straight, but I was really upset because it was like, "I'm really attracted to him. But is it because he really looks like a woman or is it because I'm straight and he's a man! Ahhh!" I ran.
Mariette: You were in my phone booth with me. (laughter)
Jennie: Exactly. From that point onward, I've come as an individual to identify with the gay culture and gay sexuality, but I feel much as you do, personally oppressed by gender. Not that I didn't want to be a woman, but I felt that a penis is privilege in this culture. I didn't want a penis, but I did want the privilege.
On the other hand, I didn't want the kind of oppressiveness that often goes with getting privilege, either the emotional constrictions or the kinds of power trips that people who are in power must learn to play to keep their power.
It seems that exploring gender, like exploring race, like exploring the class system, which I think are issues all in Paris Is Burning, are very important in understanding where our culture is going and whether or not we're going to save the earth. Because if we don't understand how we create these power structures, then the structures themselves will overwhelm us.

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