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The Revolution Starts At Home : Confronting Partner Abuse in Activist Communities

Interview with Rae Spoon

Photo credit: JJ Levine

via Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme.

Rae Spoon is a transgendered indie-folk musician living in Montreal. He tours in Canada, the USA, Europe and Australia. Rae has released five solo albums, and was nominated for the Polaris Prize in 2009. He is currently working on a book of short stories about growing up in Alberta.

“Femme Cowboy,” Rae’s piece for Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme, “is an account of my gender identity from my childhood as a Pentecostal to the realization that I am most comfortable being perceived as a femme trans man.”

What made you want to be part of this anthology?

It’s a huge honour to be included in this anthology with great queer writers and role models. I felt like I really wanted to write about my experience of butch and femme as a trans person, and it was the perfect forum for that.

If you could give your younger self one book to read, what would it be?

Anything but Christian teen novels… but seriously I wish I had read Stone Butch Blues as a teenager. I think it would have helped me make better sense of Alberta.

If you could say one thing to future butches and femmes, what would it be?

I would say that it’s great to see the butch femme community evolving and growing stronger. I would stress the importance of making room for everyone in the spectrum of butch/femme identities regardless of gender and sexuality.

Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation (coming out in August 2010)

# 1 on my holiday reading list...

The Creamsickle By Rhiannon Argo.

Excerpt:

"Everyone calls our house "The Creamsickle" because it looks like an orange Popsicle that has been dropped in the dirt a few times, since it's painted a splotchy orange with a white trim that's splattered with pigeon shit. Cruzer likes to also insist that the house especially deserves the cream part of the name because of its long-standing reputation as a queer bachelor pad. The house had been passed around and handed down like a good dirty joke, revolutionaries trampled its floors for twenty years, a slew of hippy fags and fairies lived there in the late eighties, and the grunge lesbians overran it all through the nineties."