kontextmaschine:

Assorted Genderweird Memories

• Being in a ballet class around like second grade, being very angry that the boys were expected to wear black shoes while the girls got to wear pink

(In retrospect this was yuppie YMCA “enrichment” stuff and I would have responded better to a traditional ballet education that demanded superhuman perfection through physical suffering and the constant belittling of every flaw)

• Being in a hotel room after a day of the New Jersey Renaissance Kingdom with my first gf who kinda fucked me up and her friends (the fat & bawdy one, the short freckled “some college” Pinkie Pie type redhead one), letting them do me up in bodice and dress and makeup and take pictures with one of those disposable cameras

• Being really into The Babysitters Club and like, Seventeen magazine

oh! Also, to mix items 1 and 3 at some point I read some of like a Babysitters Club for like three or four years older about a bunch of girls in ballet training, does anyone else remember this? I def. remember the term “bunheads” but don’t know if there’s any connection to the 2010s show, this woulda been mid-1990s

Oh, another one:

• when I decided to make a mostly-autobiographical webzine in like 10th grade, one of the articles was a review of Amy Sohn’s Run Catch Kiss? In LA I later learned a lot of the “chick lit” boom was gay men writing under female pseudonyms, we repped one. I mean I guess SATC was peak gay-men-as-chick-lit.