The
Last Subverisve!
Well, here we are: at the end of yet another
era. Sometimes my life seems not so much made up of moments as a continuous chain of
monumental transitions. This time, I'm calling an end to a pet project for which I have
devoted innumerable hours and countless sleepless nights. Yep, after five years as its
publisher and editor, I'm bringing this issue of "The Subversive" out for its
final curtain call.
Why? Good question! To answer that, I need
to recount why I started "The Subversive" in the first place. In 1989, I began a
personal transition from male to female. At that time, there was no general access to the
internet, and BBS systems were few and far between. I had signed up for an online service
called "Q-link", which was designed for users of the old Commodor 64 computer,
and was, in fact, the direct ancestor of what ultimately evolved into America Online.
I met a few gender people there, but at 300
baud and with the clunky communications system, I decided to seek greener pastures and
switched to Prodigy as soon as it became available. In those days, one could not speak of
gender issues in a public forum without having one's membership cancelled summarily. So,
in seeking information and support of my journey, I left a "coded" message on
Prodigy with a few buzz words that might get me in contact with others on the same path.
In fact, the plan worked well, and I met a number of other gender folk, each looking for a
deeper understanding of themselves and their world.
At that time, I was working in the film
industry as a writer/director/editor. So, being the creative type, it was quite natural
that I should begin to consider the need for some form of multimedia communication to keep
our little community of four or five people in touch. My solution was an email newsletter
for which I wrote articles about my experiences and edited and published articles by
others as well. I called the newsletter, "The Subversive". Why? I just liked the
notion of an "underground" that worked for change in the shadows to which we
were relegated by society.
There were severe limitations, however, to
what one could do in the email. For one thing, Prodigy limited its message size at that
time to about 2K of information! As more and more people began to contribute material to
"The Subversive", it grew to the point I had to send everyone three messages
just to get everything to them. What was worse, Prodigy didn't have any capacity for
mailing lists, so each and every person on my list had to have the newsletter sent
individually, one by one!
Well, that's about the time America online
was picking up steam. I heard they allowed messages up to 32K! And better still, they had
a system for mailing lists where you could send a single message to scores of people all
at once! So, I left prodigy and joined AOL instead.
Once I signed on, I found AOL to be so large
and diverse compared to Prodigy, that I figured a gender community was already well
installed there. I gave up any plans for continuing "The Subversive" and went
looking for the community so I could just be a part of something as a member rather than a
leader for a change. Problem was, there wasn't any!
Oh, I found the Gay/Lesbian community
alright. They were high-profile and even had their own forum and "keyword" for
instant access! But mention of ANYTHING pertaining to gender was absolutely and completely
absent! I was amazed. I couldn't believe that in a community so large as AOL, there wasn't
a single public message from anyone regarding gender issues. Being the self-motivated
type, I decided to remedy that. If I couldn't be a member, I'd just have to start a group
of my own! So there!
The first thing I did was post a notice in
the Mental Health area, the Human Sexuality area, and the Gay/Lesbian area announcing a
meeting for gender people in a private room called, of all things, "Gender".
Private rooms: that was a concept Prodigy didn't have and didn't even consider for a
couple more years.
The first meeting brought in three people. I
was thrilled! It may not sound like much, but with all the technical and political
difficulties on Prodigy, this was a piece of cake! Our first item of business was to set
up a regular weekly meeting time in Private Room, "Gender". Through our original
members, word spread quickly, and all those folk who had been yearning for a place to find
support and information came out of the shadows where they had been hiding. Within weeks,
we were regularly maxing out the room's limitation of 24 people, and interest was high.
Once again, I saw the need for a newsletter
to keep the group informed. So, I started another email publication, this time called, The
Gender News, so as to differentiate it from anyone who knew the old "Subversive"
on Prodigy. With the larger message size and mailing list capability, The Gender News
helped bind the embryonic gender community on AOL together.
About this time, the Gay/Lesbian community
was seeking to expand its position on AOL. They noted our popular meeting and offered us
use of their conference room once a week which would hold twice the number of people we
could currently handle. This worked for us in allowing continued growth, and also for them
in giving them more presence to use as leverage in getting additional resources from AOL
(like disk space, keywords, and more conference rooms.)
Some of the members of our little group were
quite vocal in opposing the move, as they felt they did not want to be so closely
associated with gays, as they were heterosexual crossdressers who were proud of their
sexual preferences. Although I respected their feelings, I always found this quite
amusing: that of all the cross-dressers in the group, these few could wear women's clothes
and then be prejudicial against associating with gays (lest they be labeled so
themselves!)
It was about this time I first began to
realize just how much difference there really was between transsexuals and crossdressers.
I won't go into details here, but suffice it to say that I have found them to be two
completely different species. In fact, I have a LOT of trouble relating to
crossdressers - not that I don't like them, but just that I can't really appreciate where
they are coming from.
It was at this point I had to make a
decision to create an all transsexual group, or to try and hold the divergent special
interests together for the sake of a stronger community. I chose the later, though I
didn't not know at the time just how much stress and strain that would put on me!
I began hosting a weekly meeting the
Gay/Lesbian Community Forum which replaced our earlier private room meeting. By being in
an official conference room, we gained tacit approval by AOL itself, though we still could
not even use the words "crossdresser" or "transsexual" in a public
room!
In this oppressive atmosphere, it was a
constant effort to nurture the young community. I fought hard for our own keyword
("Gender"), our own space on the Gay/Lesbian bulletin boards, and ultimately for
our own Forum, which we could design according to our specific needs.
About this time, even the new conference
room began to max out at 48! I was doing two hours every Sunday evening as host of the
meeting, dealing with people's tender feelings, trying to be supportive and caring,
insightful and witty - trying to help the group grow and feel good about itself, while
doing a little song and dance to accommodate my desires as an artist and performer as well.
What a strange, heady, mix that was! To be the consummate wit and entertainer, even while
serving as a therapist and mother to several hundred needy people! I really got off on it,
and lost myself for a brief while when I began to see myself as a star, rather than a
servent of the people, as it were.
I was going bats personally! The strain was
so great at work (trying to develop a whole new theory of story on a timetable) and at
home, trying to hold my family together, do justice to my young son and daughter, and to
work out a new relationship with Mary, that I had something of a breakdown. I walked into
Chris's office and quite my job. I called up Mary and told here I was never coming home. I
wanted to go to Arizona and be a waitress. Fortunately (I think) they talked me out of it,
and I ended up taking a week's paid vacation and then going back on a four day schedule
instead of five. It was then that I decided to cut The Gender News down from a weekly to a
monthly so that the stress and pressure of cranking out the publication would be less as
well. I also decided to rename it "The Subversive", after my old publication on
Prodigy.
Why did I want to rename it? I was following
my path through transition, living full time, having surgery, and trying to get on with my
life. I didn't want to be known only for gender issues, but as a creative artist, I wanted
to express all sides of myself in an accurately balanced fashion. After all, I felt
transition was something to go through, not somewhere to live. So, I renamed the
publication, "The Subversive", which more or less described how I saw myself
functioning as an artist and philosopher in society.
The Subversive was growing too. My email
list was almost up to 200! But since even AOL couldn't accommodate more than 75 names or so
on a list, I had to send the same issue out three times. In those days, 1200 baud modems
were the max, and the issues were expanding to over 100K, once a month. Also, connections
were unreliable, as was the AOL software, so I often spent a quarter of an hour trying to
upload to one third of the list, only to have the system hang right at the end. It was
driving me crazy! I finally called an end to the email subscriptions, and simply uploaded
the file to our new gender bulletin board.
Still, with work and family and Subversive
and Conference hosting, the pressure had slowed but was beginning to build toward another
eruption. Recognizing this, I decided to step down as leader of the America Online Gender
Group, and turn it over to others who were still going through transition and could better
relate to the needs of the community. So, I called a "Constitutional Convention"
in which the organization and ground rules for the AOLGG were codified. This allowed me to
leave without guilt, as I was not abandoning the community, but laying a foundation and
then giving the blueprints to another construction company. At least, that's how I felt
about it: one last noble effort before moving on.
Quite frankly, I wanted out! My baby had
grown up and was eating me alive. It was voracious. If that was the only job I had, it
would have been enough. But, with all my other responsibilities and interests, coupled
with my desire to get past all that and move on with my life, well, it only made sense to
back off.
I backed WAY off. I didn't even drop into
the community except for a couple of times during the whole next year. Even today, almost
three years later, I've only been back a half dozen times, other than to continue to
upload text versions of "The Subvesive".
"Text Versions": that's important
to this story of why I'm ending publication. From its first appearance on Prodigy as email
through its stint as "The Gender News", and ultimately as a subscription and
then uploaded files on AOL, "The Subversive" had always been a text-only
publication. This wasn't by choice. As an artist, I would have LOVED to explore multimedia
in "The Subversive", but the technology simply didn't exist in those days. I did
my best to incorporate poems and such, but as for my music, video, and graphics, well
there was nothing I could do.
Then, along comes this thing called the
World Wide Web. Suddenly, I'm presented with the capability to publish ALL of my artistic
creations for all the world to see! I'm stoked. I start to research. It takes six months
before any server in the country makes space available to non-commercial interests. But,
this is the beginning, and no HTML editors exist, no instructions about how to do it. A
Web browser comes out on Prodigy, but still nothing on AOL. So, I go back to Prodigy as a
second service, and see what the web has to offer. I download all kinds of files about
HTML and teach myself the basics. I contact the server company and set up an account -
then hack through a jungle of technical requirements I don't understand at all. But
finally, after three weeks of staying up all night, working all day, then returning home
to web work all night again, I managed to get my first page up on the Web. I cried.
First thing I did was set up a home page.
For the longest time, I grieved over whether or not I wanted to make my past writings for
the gender community available publicly. I was trying so hard to be accepted as the
co-creator of a story theory and to put my past IN the past. But my sense of conscience urged
me to share work I knew could benefit others, and my ego refused to let me hold back what
is probably the best writing I will ever do, since it came from so deep inside my angst.
Finally, I relented and created a parallel
web site just for gender things. You could get from the gender site to my
"public" site, but not the other way 'round. This way I could keep one foot in
the closet.
For the gender pages, it was a natural thing
to give "The Subversive" a face-lift, adding backgrounds, colored text, and so
on. Intrigued by the possibilities, I began to see "The Subversive" as a means
of introducing new work. I figured if I kept enough gender stuff in each issue, I could
get away with presenting some Story Theory, some Mental Relativity, and even some songs and
pictures. Heck, I had a following from my writings, and that constituted something of a
captive audience. They had to put up with my art in order to get more gender stuff.
So, new issues of "The Subversive"
began to drift further and further away from a gender-centric publication to a
one-woman
show, much like a painter might have, or like an album put out by a composer. In fact,
after just a few new issues, the only gender thing remaining was each new installment of
my diary, which (since it is published about four years after each entry is written) is
still concerned with my gender identity way back when.
Since gender was such a small part of my new
work, I thought the balance was just about right to be truthful, yet representative of who
I am today. So, with gritted teeth, I put a link to "the Subversive right on my
public home page. Man, did I worry about that! As it turns out, however, reader response
is very positive, and in truth, 90% of those who visit my home page arrive at it from my
gender page anyway. Oh, I don't have anything against being popular with the gender
community, but I would also like to find a little critical acclaim from the general public
as well. Just the artist in me seeking approval.
Buoyed by the response, I took another
plunge and added a link to my entire gender site, effectively merging the two. I felt a
little uneasy about this, since the amount of material I had written for the community was
quite a bit more than the new, creative material I had recently been publishing. So, I
worked very hard to equalize that by converting my huge backlog of artistic endeavors into
HTML format and posting it as quickly as possible. To attract people to this material, I
added a "What's New" feature linked to my home page, my gender page, and
"The Subversive" main page.
At first, I introduced my new work all at
once in "The Subversive", then doled it out, item by item in "What's
New". This was fine for a while, but then I began to get impatient with how long it
took each new issue to come out, thereby delaying the presentation of my work on my
site. Finally, I decided to first post each new item to "What's New", THEN
publish the work as a collection of my recent material in new issues of "The
Subversive".
This created two problems: One, "The
Subversive" was now redundant, as there was nothing really new appearing in it. Two,
"The Subversive" was always built around my diary entry, but now, I might have
several diary entries published close together without enough new material to form a
"Subversive". Or, I might go for so long between the publication of diary
entries that "The Subversive would be too large with all the other material it would
have to contain.
It was at this point I realized that I
didn't even LIKE doing "The Subversive" anymore. Time that I might spend working
on new projects had to go into formatting old material, just to present it in that
publication. I was feeling under all sorts of pressure and obligation to my readers to get
the next issue out. I even hired someone to help handle the formatting and to edit the
thing, but the time it took me to supervise was almost as much as to do it myself.
That brings us pretty much up to date.
"The Subversive" was born in another technological age. It served as a medium of
communication to a community I have outgrown. It functioned as a forum for personal
expression until a better forum came along. It did it's job, it touched many lives, and
enriched my considerably. What better time to call an end to it's impressive and
worthwhile run: at the height of it's prime, and with the biggest, most ambitious issue
ever.
I will continue to post all my new material
to "What's New". AFter it appears there, it will also be integrated into the
appropriate category on my web site as well. Currently, I have over twenty meg of
information on my web site, representing more than 250 web pages or original material.
This to me constitutes the body of work I have sought to present since the beginning of my
career. It is all that I was and all that I am, weighted an balanced to reflect both the
journey and the current destination.
That destination will change slightly, every
time I add another page to my site. And who knows, perhaps ever once and a while a new
issue of "The Subversive" might pop up, just to gather some of the bits and
pieces together as a means of saying, "This is what it looks like from here."
In closing, I want to thank all of you who
have been with me from the start, as well as those who have just discovered "The
Subversive" and are only beginning to delve into the earlier issues. It is you for
whom I create. An artist is nothing without her audience. I look forward to presenting
many more years of new endeavors, in this and other as of yet uninvented media.
For now, join me from time to time in "Melanie's World" as a gateway to everything I've
published, arranged like the lands in a theme park, where you can explore as deeply as you
like, or sample a taste of many different perspectives.
You have been and continue to be a wonderful
audience.
Thank you.
Melanie Anne
