Racism. We are not cured of it.
And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say “nigger” in public, that’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t overnight completely erase everything that happened two to three hundred years prior.
W. KAMAU BELL
I think white people are shortchanging their community. Everybody has a community. My dad is from Alabama. I go to Alabama every year and hang out there. You can feel the community, and there’s pride in the community, and sometimes that comes with a Confederate flag, but not all the time. There’s a sense of “We are this thing and we define ourselves through our community,” that just I think starts to not happen so much in urban environments. I just think that white people are shortchanging themselves. Have some white pride, as I say.
Marc
Be careful with that. There’s a small jump from white pride to white power.
Kamau
Yeah, but I feel like white pride has been taken by bad white people. There’s got to be good things to be proud about when you’re white. There’s got to be. The same way there’s a black nationalism that is “get some guns and start taking out some white fools,” and then there’s the black nationalism that’s like “get an Afro pick with a fist on it.” That literally makes me feel better to be black.
It’s by degree and direction. In America, I can’t speak for the world, things move in a more progressive direction in general. This is the nature of evolution. We’re talking about gay marriage now daily, we weren’t ready to talk about gay people fifty years ago. This stuff is all inevitable. People are always going to pursue more freedoms and the freedom to be who they are. Get past the gay thing, because gender is coming next.
LAURA JANE GRACE—MUSICIAN
I would have this experience of extreme dysphoria and then, like, bingeing and purging, being like, “No. I’m going to be a man. This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to pretend I do not feel this way.” I’m living two separate lives. I’m married, I now have a kid, we bought a house and I don’t know who I am.
I fell in love and I didn’t want to fall in love, but I fell in love. It was more that like I fell in love and ignored really being totally honest probably about who I was. Just like suppress, suppress, but that made me more and more unhappy, especially as I’m kind of pushed into fitting this cis-normative lifestyle of husband, wife, kid, cars in the garage.
Yeah, and then I’m like, “Oh my fucking God.” The walls felt like they were coming in more and more. I probably didn’t hear the word “transgender” until I was like maybe even twenty-six or twenty-seven.
I didn’t understand myself. It’s not like I was carrying around full knowledge of “This is who I am and I have to hide this from everybody.” It was like, “Oh my God. I have all these feelings that are tearing me apart inside and I don’t know how to reconcile them with life and what I’m doing and who I am. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this.” The idea of transitioning was a far-off concept that I’d only ever maybe heard about once or twice.
I dealt with these feelings to the point where I was like, “This isn’t going away.” The idea of whatever that meant of coming out with the way I felt and saying, “Look. I’m transgender or I’m a transsexual. This is the way I feel. I want to transition. I don’t know what that means, but I want to transition.” I mean, the level of information out there was like “YouTube testimonial videos,” you know? Like, a couple fucking lo-fi Web sites that point you in directions, and I was living in LA at the time, staying up late watching these testimonial videos and it’s like, “Okay, I think you can get on hormones. There’s doctors that can do surgeries.” I don’t fucking know where to turn to.
I just came out to my wife and said, “I’m a transsexual. I want to transition.” She didn’t know what that meant.
You’re in this stupid fucking high-stress situation where you’re like, “Okay, I got to go into some shitty department store to buy clothes that I don’t even want to wear really because it’s not my style, but this is the only way I can fucking relax and really express this fucking way I feel. To calm this tension that I feel inside of me because otherwise I’m going to fucking snap on someone and just lose it.”
You feel like you’re almost having an affair and you are hiding something and it’s like, “Why can’t I just fucking be who I am whenever I want to be who I am?” By owning it, I’ve been able to feel a lot more comfortable and confident in a “fuck you” way, in a punk rock way. When you’re hiding it you feel shameful and that in turn makes you feel defensive and closed off as opposed to being open about and just being out there and being like, “Look, I am who I am. You may not fully understand that and I don’t really care, but I am who I am and I have a right to be here. I have a right to shop in this store. I have a right to do whatever I want and don’t have to explain it to you or justify it to you. I’m just going to do it, and if you have a problem, it’s your problem.”
Hope you can deal with that problem.
LENA DUNHAM—ACTOR, WRITER, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER
A lot of people thought that the world had equalized itself. We’ve gotten where we need to go. We’re good. It’s behind us. It isn’t, and I feel anger and frustration every day, some of it intellectual and some of it very visceral about the way women and women’s stories are handled in the industry in which I’ve chosen to make myself a part.
I feel like by announcing that’s a concern of yours and by making it clear that’s where your passions lie, you are pushing the ball forward and encouraging other women to also announce themselves when it would be so easy to feel like you were the bummer at the party.
I think so many women are self-conscious because they love men and they’re friends with men and they don’t understand. “Does feminism mean that I have to be angry at all men? Does feminism mean that I have to distance myself from the guys in my life or fight back?” I’m like, “No. Feminism means that you have to take the space that you feel that you’re comfortable in.”
JONATHAN AMES—WRITER, ACTOR
Maybe men are getting weaker and weaker, all this estrogen in the water. Maybe a weakening of the male is a good thing, since men are so destructive. I mean, they’re good at building highways, but they’re also good at blowing up highways. I guess, what I’ve been moving toward would be greater parameters for masculinity or maleness. I don’t think I’ll achieve them in my life.