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Come by the Tom of Finland Foundation Library on July 22 to participate in our second wikipedia editathon! The library will provide access to a unique collection for reference purposes, to edit and create queer/LGBTQIA wikipedia content. We are currently looking for experienced wikipedia editors willing to volunteer to assist new users and/or teach an editing workshop. All folks welcomed; BYO machine (laptop, tablet, smart phone, ipad, etc.). 1:00 – 5:00 pm July 22, 2012 Tom of Finland Foundation Library TOM House 1421 Laveta Terrace Los Angeles, California 90026

On Middle Age

My mother died of femininity. I told her that I would say this about her. She had said, “Will you write a book about me?” and I asked if she wanted me to. She said “Yes. I want you to say how I left the world a better place because I had you!” I said I thought that was a bad idea: people would think it was an excuse to write about me. She said, “Can you think of another topic?” I offered this phrase about femininity, and explained why. My brother-in-law thought that it would be better to say that my mother died from vanity rather than from femininity. I can see why he would prefer that story; it’s interesting to see how a label shifts the implication.

In her late teens she took up smoking, because it was sold as a weight-reduction aid. When she died she had aggressive stage 4 lung cancer. In her teens she started wearing high heels, to enhance the back arch and ass-to-calves posture whose strut transforms the whole body to a sexual tableau, shifting between teetering and stillness. Later, she had an abortion and on the way out tripped down the stairs in those heels, hurting her back permanently. Decades later, selling dresses at Bloomingdale’s, she was forced to carry, by her estimate, 500 lbs. of clothes each day. Shop girls, you know, are forced to dress like their customers. They have to do this to show that they understand the appropriate universe of taste, even while working like mules in that same universe, carrying to their ladies stacks of hanging things and having to reorganize what their ladies left behind on the dressing room floor. She liked this job, because she liked being known as having good taste.

These tasks threw her back out anew, and the result of this was an overconsumption of painkillers that ultimately blew out her kidneys. She had to go onto dialysis: she died three days after turning off her dialysis. In the meantime, more comically, she had two fingers partly amputated because her nails got infected by a “French wrap” gone wrong, and she was too ashamed to tell anyone about it, numbing the pain of infection with Anbesol, which she had also used for many years to avoid going to the dentist. This is not the half of it: ok, maybe it’s half.

Even the notion of Flickr as an archive—as the place where you store all your photos as a backup—is becoming increasingly quaint as Dropbox, Microsoft, Google, Box.net, Amazon, Apple, and a host of others scramble to serve online gigs to our hungry desktops.

The site that once had the best social tools, the most vibrant userbase, and toppest-notch storage is rapidly passing into the irrelevance of abandonment. Its once bustling community now feels like an exurban neighborhood rocked by a housing crisis. Yards gone to seed. Rusting bikes in the front yard. Tattered flags. At address, after address, after address, no one is home.

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