It's not a bad thing, not by far. Fag hags are grrrrrreat! Some of my best friends are fag hags. But even so, there is kind of a silly stigma attached to the identity, so much so that I don't even want to bother refuting it point-by-point. Fag hags, just like any other identity along this sex/gender/affinity spectrum which our GIBLT movement has revealed, can be incredibly emotionally healthy people, and we serve a crucial political purpose beyond that of keeping our faggots well dressed.

"Emotionally healthy," you ask, "when she hangs out with guys who have no sexual interest in her?"

Let's pretend we're all queer feminists for a moment. First of all, women are more than sexual objects, right? And the ideology of heterosexual dominance - heterosexism - basically tells us that there isn't room for anything that ain't straight, and we hate that. As for the sexual interest, well - being a fag hag, I know that the difference between straight and gay is sometimes only a six pack. I've seen it with my own blue-mascaraed eyes.

It troubles me, by the way, that there isn't a good term for our boy counterparts; you know, the guys whose girlfriend always leave them for women. It's about time those guys stopped feeling shitty about themselves as well.

According to some website, the unfortunate male equivalent term is "dyke tyke." I'm starting up a collection, as of this column, to get the folks that name colors in catalogs to come up with better names for our sub-communities, and I'm gonna start with this "dyke tyke" term. (And I know you "dyke tykes" know what I'm talking about, right? It's already hard enough-there's no need to further the embarrassment by infantilizing you. Send along your donations c/o Rahne's Nomenclature Renovation Project.)

If it weren't for the tyranny of monogamy, I'm certain that none of this would be a problem anyway. Under monogamy, all of us, hags and tykes alike, are often made to look pathetic because we seem to be pursuing relationships which will never bear children, backyard barbecues, white picket fences, or mutual funds. What's worse, we are often made to feel pathetic by our extended queer families!

I no longer have any patience for this. If we are going to have a progressive GIBLT movement, we really need to expand our borders a bit more. In fact, I think we need to expand our borders until they don't even look like borders any longer.

Here's why: It's the mid-'90s and I'm busy trying to be a professional queer, right? There's this really sweet tranny guy who is, unbeknownst to me, a little sprung on me. So he swings by the local community center, of which I'm the president, and asks me out. And at that time, I wasn't getting anything from anyone-or so I thought, and mostly because I was trying so hard to be a Lesbian. So I shut him down. I tried to be nice, and thankfully he still talks to me, but I hurt him. He'd spent so much time trying to be a dyke, and it wasn't working for him. So he tried something else that worked better. The last thing he would have expected from another tranny-and reasonably so-is to have the rigid borders rebuilt. But I did it, and I lost the opportunity to be in a loving relationship at a time when I could have really used one.

Of course, we are all very protective of ourselves and the identities that we hold dear. It only makes sense, because each of us has had to struggle to be who we are. But the fact is that none of us living created the term "homosexuality." We didn't create "queer," or "gay," or "lesbian." These are terms that we have each discovered and applied to ourselves, and each time a new one of Us comes along, we slightly alter what that identity means. This is how it should be. This is what keeps our movement vital. There is no question that we need to be able to bond closely in our identity categories, but these categories are going to constantly shift. None of us own this movement, but it's always the loudest voices that get heard the most clearly.

So it's time that we get heard, and by we I mean everyone who struggles against the heterosexist norm, including us trannygirl fag hags.

Sex, Etc.

I realized in last month's column that I forgot to mention that Onan was a biblical figure who was killed by god for spilling his seed on the ground, which is the King James way of saying "masturbating." Every time I heard about Onan's alleged crime of self-abuse, my Sunday School teachers conveniently left out the fact that Onan jerked off because he refused god's command to fuck his dead brother's wife and get her pregnant (Genesis 38:8-9). That wacky, mosaic law god-ya never know what he's gonna do next.

By the time the 19th-century sexologists came around, the term "Onanism" became synonymous with masturbation (and don't you love how it sounds like an ideology?). Some dictionaries also include a definition of "self-pollution," which is interesting considering that Onan dumped his load on the ground. I mean, what if all that semen had worked its way into the ground water? Eeewwww!

According to Good Vibrations, last month was National Masturbation Month. I didn't know this when I wrote last month's column, mostly because I'd been spending a lot of time by myself, thinking about what to write. If you forgot to celebrate, remember, it's never too late.